Mark Warner

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Madam President, first of all, I want to thank my friend, the Senator from Minnesota, Ms. Klobuchar, for her leadership and passion on this issue. This shouldn't be that hard. I know we addressed some of the legislation she has talked about, and also earlier Senator Blumenthal came to the floor as well. I think the theme you are going to hear from all three of us is that while we may have made some progress, the truth is, we are simply not doing enough to secure our election infrastructure. There is a series of bills that I think are common sense and, if they got to the floor, would get 75 votes and maybe even more. Over the past few weeks, I have come to the floor a couple of times to try to move by unanimous consent my legislation known as the FIRE Act. I am not going to do that this morning, but I do want to highlight this bill as one more example of commonsense, bipartisan election security legislation that unfortunately is not getting its chance to be debated on the floor of the Senate. The FIRE Act would simply require Presidential campaigns to do the right thing and report offers of foreign assistance--offers which are already spelled out as illegal--to the FBI. Anyone who says it does anything else, such as limiting contacts with the foreign press or limiting contact with foreign diplomats--somebody said it might eliminate communications with Dreamers--is just flat wrong. If there are ways to improve the bipartisan legislation, I am wide open to that. I don't know how anyone could be against the idea of putting our country over narrow interests or putting our national security concerns over political advantage. In fact, a new poll last week found that 87 percent of Americans support this idea. The same poll found that an extraordinarily large majority of Americans believe that it is wrong for campaigns to accept foreign assistance and that Congress should pass legislation to secure our elections. Unfortunately, in the nearly 3 years since we uncovered Russia's attack on our democracy, this body has not held a single vote on stand- alone legislation to protect our election security. It is true that we did approve some additional funding to secure the 2018 midterm elections, and I commend the folks at DHS for the job they did. I am proud of that. But we would be making an enormous mistake if we simply patted ourselves on the back and said that because the Russians or others didn't launch a full-frontal attack in 2018, we are safe on a going-forward basis. Please, don't take my word for it. Let's look at what Special Prosecutor Bob Mueller said last week. He said that the Russians are continuing to attack virtually every day. The bipartisan Intelligence Committee election security report said that we have made progress, but there is more that needs to be done. Christopher Wray, the Director of the FBI, in recent testimony said this is an ongoing challenge. Dan Coats, for whom I have enormous respect and feel it is unfortunate that he left the position of Director of National Intelligence--and maybe he left because he was willing to continue to speak truth to power--said that our election security system is not secure enough. Even Gina Haspel, the Director of the CIA, has continued to point out that Russia and other foreign influences are trying to attack our democracy. Candidly, it has been a little bit disappointing that some of my colleagues are trying to turn this into a partisan issue. Securing our democracy is not a Democratic or Republican issue. The absurdity of that is like saying: Well, maybe we should think about protecting our power grid as a partisan issue. We know and have seen evidence of foreign efforts to try to interfere with our power grid. Well, the country steps up and puts security measures in place. Shouldn't we expect the same kind of attention and commonsense approach when we see those same foreign adversaries attack our election infrastructure? I think we do need to take that kind of step and move forward. Senator Klobuchar already made mention of some of this legislation, and I know my friend the Senator from Georgia is here, so I will try to wrap up. There was a broad bipartisan group of Senators in the last Congress who introduced the Secure Elections Act--something I was proud to be part of. That bipartisan bill would have provided the additional resources for State and local election officials while still preserving local control of elections. What that legislation would have done was simply say that if local or State election officials want additional help from the Federal Government, they have to meet some basic, de minimis standards. We have to make sure that every polling station in America has a paper ballot backup. We have to make sure that there is appropriate auditing of how we do in our election systems. I wish the bill would have done more and gone up the food chain to the three private companies that control 90 percent of all of our voter files. Maybe that could be action we could take in the future. If those voter files were hacked into, they wouldn't have to change the vote totals; they simply would have to move people from one voting precinct to another to create chaos on election day. Senator Klobuchar also mentioned legislation that she, Senator Graham, and I worked on, a bipartisan bill to prevent disinformation-- particularly on the internet--called the Honest Ads Act. It would require the same disclosure rules for political ads on Facebook that are already in place for television, radio, and newsprint. I am proud to be a cosponsor of another bipartisan bill called the DETER Act, sponsored by Senator Rubio and Senator Van Hollen. They are absolutely right in saying that we need to put in place automatic consequences if Russia or other nations use their 2016 playbook once again to try to interfere in our 2020 elections. Let's warn our adversaries that there will be consequences if they once again try to interfere in our election process. These are just a few of the largely bipartisan ideas with regard to protecting the United States against foreign attacks on our election systems. I am sure there would be suggestions on how we can improve this legislation. That is fine. That is what we are here to do. Let's debate, vote, and add amendments. What we should not do is simply pretend this threat is going away. We should not simply assume that because we improved in 2018, we are safe in 2020. We should recognize that local and State election officials need the kind of assistance, paper ballot backup, and the same responsibility that Federal campaign officials in Presidential campaigns ought to have--an affirmative duty to report. Political ads that pop up on Facebook ought to have the same kind of legal requirements that ads on television have. I don't think this is too much to ask. I think the overwhelming majority of Americans expect us to do our job on this issue. I hope when the Senate reconvenes in September that maybe people can be refreshed by their voters back in their home States, because I am sure that when you go to whatever State and visit with folks and talk about election security, they will say to the Congress and Senate: Do your job and pass commonsense legislation. Let's make sure our election security is absolutely as safe as it can be as we move into the 2020 elections. I yield the floor.

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I was unavoidably absent on Tuesday, July 30, 2019, for rollcall votes 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, and 251 due to a commitment in Williamsburg, VA, related to the events surrounding the 400th commemorative session of the Virginia General Assembly. Had I been present I would have voted nay on confirmation for Sean D. Jordan, of Texas, to be U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Texas--rollcall vote 241, PN205; nay on motion to invoke cloture: Mark T. Pittman to be U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas--rollcall vote 242, PN207; nay on motion to invoke cloture: Jeffery Vincent Brown, of Texas, to be U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Texas--rollcall vote 243, PN510; nay on motion to invoke cloture: Brantley Starr, of Texas, to be United States District Judge for the Northern District of Texas--rollcall vote 244, PN512; yea on motion to invoke cloture: Stephanie L. Haines, of Pennsylvania, to be United States District Judge for the Western District of Pennsylvania--rollcall vote 245, PN453; yea on motion to invoke cloture: Ada E. Brown to be U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas--rollcall vote 246, PN524; yea on motion to invoke cloture: Steven D. Grimberg, of Georgia, to be United States District Judge for the Northern District of Georgia--rollcall vote 247, PN566; nay on motion to invoke cloture on Jason K. Pulliam, of Texas, to be United States District Judge for the Western District of Texas-- rollcall vote 248, PN454; yea on motion to invoke cloture on Martha Maria Pacold, of Illinois, to be United States District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois--rollcall vote 249, PN780; yea on motion to invoke cloture on Steven C. Seeger, of Illinois, to be United States District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois--rollcall vote 250, PN782; and nay on motion to invoke cloture on William Shaw Stickman IV, of Pennsylvania, to be United States District Judge for the Western District of Pennsylvania--rollcall vote 251, PN727.

Mr. WARNER

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

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, in a moment, I will ask unanimous consent for the Senate to take up and pass legislation I have introduced to help protect our democracy from foreign interference. Earlier today, Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified that the Russian Government's efforts to undermine our elections are ``among the most serious challenges to our democracy''--a challenge he says that ``deserves the attention of every American.'' Mr. Mueller's testimony should serve as a warning to every Member of this body about what could happen in 2020--literally, in our next election--if we fail to act. When asked if he thought that Russia would attack our democracy again in 2020, Mr. Mueller said: ``They're doing it as we sit here.'' Think about that for a moment. The special prosecutor spent 2\1/2\ years looking into Russian intervention in our elections in 2016 and says not only are they going to do it, but they are doing it as we sit here. If this were just coming from the special prosecutor, some folks might be willing to dismiss it, but this is exactly the same message we heard earlier this week from FBI Director Wray. It is a message that all of us have heard, and being on the Intelligence Committee, I have heard repeatedly from Director of National Intelligence Coats, and we have heard this, as well, from other leaders of law enforcement and our intelligence community. Again, I point out that the leaders who have sounded the alarm about the ongoing Russian threat to our elections were all appointed by this President. Unfortunately, in the nearly 3 years since we uncovered Russia's attack on our democracy, this body has not held a single vote on stand- alone legislation to protect our elections. I am not here to relitigate the 2016 election or, for that matter, to second-guess the special counsel's findings. This is more a question of how we defend our democracy on a going-forward basis. The reason we need to do this--amongst a host of reasons--is that just a month ago, the President of the United States sat in the Oval Office, and by dismissing this threat, effectively gave Russia the green light to interfere in future elections. Since then, unfortunately, my Republican colleagues have done nothing to prevent further future attempts at undermining our democracy. Let me be clear. If a foreign adversary tries to offer assistance to your campaign, your response should not be thank you; your response should be a moral obligation to tell the FBI. Mr. Mueller, the former FBI Director and inarguably the straightest arrow in public service, said as much this afternoon. So if the President or other members of his family or his campaign can't be trusted to do the right thing and report their foreign contacts and foreign offers of assistance to their political activities, then we need to make it a legal requirement. That is what my legislation, the FIRE Act, is all about. The FIRE Act is a simple, narrowly targeted bill. All it does is make sure that attempts to interfere in future Presidential elections are promptly reported to the FBI and the FEC. Let me be clear. The FIRE Act is not about prohibiting innocent contacts or the exercise of First Amendment rights. Contrary to some of the mistaken rhetoric we have heard, it does not require the reporting of contacts with foreign journalists or with Dreamers or of official meetings with foreign governments. It is simply about preserving Americans' trust in our democratic process. If a candidate is receiving or welcoming help from the Kremlin or its spy services, I think the American people should have a right to know before they head to the polls. Consequently, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Rules and Administration be discharged from further consideration of S. 2242, the FIRE Act; that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. WARNER

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

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Rules Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 1562 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the Warner substitute at the desk be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I am deeply disappointed that the majority has rejected this request before I can even lay out why I think it is needed. My request was to take up and pass the filed S. 1562, as amended. This legislation is pretty simple, even for this body. It would require that any Presidential campaign that receives offers of assistance from an agent of a foreign government have an obligation to report that offer of assistance to law enforcement--specifically the FBI. Remember, our laws already prohibit campaign assistance from foreign governments. Let's take a moment and see how we got here. I am going to lay out a little bit of history, and then I am going to ask the minority leader to make a couple of comments, and then I will come back and finish my statement. Before I turn it over to the minority leader, let me refresh my colleagues on the other side and others as to how we got here. In 2016, Russia and its agents intervened in our Presidential election--breaking into personal files, attempting to hack into our voting system, and using Facebook and Twitter to create fake accounts to splinter our country. During the campaign, then-Candidate Trump publicly called on Russia-- that if they had any damaging information on then-Candidate Clinton, they should release it. Remarkably, that very same day was the first day Russia started to dribble out its damaging information. The unanimous consensus of the entire American intelligence community, the Mueller investigation, and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, of which I am proud to be vice chairman--all have stated that Russia massively intervened in our elections, and they did so in an attempt to help then-Candidate Trump and hurt Candidate Clinton. President Trump's own FBI Director and his Director of National Intelligence have said that Russia or others will likely be back in 2020 because their tactics in 2016 were both cheap and effective. We are now 17 months before the 2020 election. I personally believe we are not prepared. This body needs to take up bipartisan election security legislation to ensure there is a paper ballot trail after all the voting in America so Americans can have trust that the integrity of their votes will be counted. We need to work together--I know there are many working on this issue--to put some guardrails on our social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google so they are not as easily manipulated by foreign agents to create fake accounts. Unfortunately, this White House and this President still don't seem to appreciate the seriousness of the threat. Mr. Trump continues to undermine the Mueller report. As a matter of fact, it has been reported that he won't even convene a Cabinet meeting on election security. His Homeland Security Secretary was told not to have that meeting because it might offend the President. Against the advice of his own FBI Director, who said just in the last 2 weeks--he said yesterday--even in a world where we have gotten used to outrageous statements coming from the White House, he said yesterday that he might not report and he would maybe even welcome Russia or China or other bad actors if they again offered him assistance in the next campaign. I yield the floor.

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I thank my friend, the Senator from New York, the minority leader, and I agree with him. This is really unfortunate timing. I can't imagine--I always thought that in today's political environment, you always think yesterday's could be the greatest outrage, but the fact that yesterday, the President of the United States said--after all that we have gone through in the last 2\1/2\ years, after all of the evidence of Russian intervention has been out and vetted, after 140 contacts between Russian officials and folks affiliated with the Trump campaign or Trump business operations, you would think there would be a sense of some level of moral obligation, even if we are not backward-looking, to say that on a going-forward basis, we ought to make clear that if any foreign power tries to intervene again in an election, the least we can do is ask for a requirement to report it to law enforcement. (Mr. CRAMER assumed the Chair.) I heard yesterday the President went on and kind of said: Oh, it is no big thing; everybody does it. No, Mr. President, everybody doesn't do it. The Presiding Officer who just left the chair--I have no question in my mind that if a foreign power tried to intervene in his campaign, he would report it to law enforcement. All evidence in the past of attempted foreign intervention--candidates stepped up--it didn't matter which party--and did the right thing and reported it to law enforcement. One of my colleagues on the other side said that they don't want to relitigate 2016. There will be other times and places to further litigate whatever happened in 2016. In terms of today, I don't want to, either. I just want to make sure that we are safe from foreign intervention in 2020. What is remarkable is that we now live in a world post-9/11 that dramatically changed things for a whole host of us. We have a whole series of new--appropriately so--security at our airports. The mantra at our airports that TSA and Homeland Security always try to promote is ``If you see something, say something.'' It is not an undue burden, I think, on the traveling public, and because of that involvement, I think the airports are safer. Shouldn't we have the same de minimis standard to protect the integrity of our election system? If you see something, say something. All my legislation is requiring is this: If there is indication that agents of foreign governments are trying to intervene in our elections, tell law enforcement. Tell the FBI. I tried to draft my legislation in ways to make sure it wouldn't involve any of our activities in an official sense. It wouldn't involve dealings at Embassy parties, and it wouldn't involve contacts in the normal course. I would say to my friends on the other side, if there are ways to improve this legislation to make sure we can reach agreement on what I have to believe is common agreement here--that we don't want foreign governments intervening in our Presidential elections--I am wide open as to how we can change this to make it better. But to say, in the face of this President's own FBI Director, who has said it would be important that the FBI have this information about foreign intervention, and then to have the man sitting in the White House saying that his own FBI Director is wrong--I would ask my colleagues, do you agree with Christopher Wray, the FBI Director, about the importance of law enforcement seeing the evidence of foreign intervention, or do you believe it is not a big thing? Now I am anxious to hear a response from my colleagues. I know there may be questions such as, what about the Steele dossier? That was somewhat of a foreign intervention, Mark. What about the Steele dossier? Well, that was reported to the FBI. It was given to the FBI in the summer of 2016. If there are ways we can make sure on a going-forward basis that any of those foreign-based activities are appropriately reported to law enforcement, let's have at it. But to say that we don't think this is important enough or that somehow this issue of the integrity of our election system shouldn't be debated or shouldn't be taken up to put protections in place is frankly astonishing. It is astonishing to me as well that 17 months out from the next election, we have a White House where there is no one in charge of election security. We are 17 months out from the next election, and we have let sit fallow bipartisan election security legislation that would ensure that there is that paper trail and there is that ability to audit the actions after the fact so we can make sure Americans have faith in the integrity of the election system. It is pretty remarkable that we are 17 months out from the next election and 3 weeks after we saw manipulation of a video of the Speaker of the House--that clearly was manipulated--that spread a false impression around the country and around the world, and we don't have common agreement on some basic rules of the road so that social media is not manipulated again in 2020 the way it was in 2016. We only need to look at how social media manipulation leads to hate and bloodshed in India and Burma and countries around the world. Not taking action on these items is the height of irresponsibility. This most basic of all requirements simply says: If you see something, say something. If there is foreign intervention, tell the FBI. Let them make the judgment. Why would anyone say that is not necessary when we have seen the recent history in our country, and for that matter, we have seen the same tactics Russia has used in America used in the Brexit vote and in the French Presidential elections? Again, I go back to Director of National Intelligence Coats, who said they will be back, and FBI Director Wray, who said they will be back, and they need this information. I hope that maybe after the weekend, my colleagues on the other side will reconsider and take up this issue. I will close with this: I just can't imagine--and I know some of my colleagues on the other side have already started to speak out, and I appreciate that. I appreciate their speaking out at a time when there is huge fear of the White House and this President's willingness to take vendettas out against anyone who raises a voice in opposition. Think for a moment. Think for just a moment about what Donald Trump said yesterday from the Oval Office. A President's words from the Oval Office still carry weight. The President of the United States said: Well, everybody does this. So he would take a look at assistance that might come from Russia or China or some other adversary nation. My goodness gracious. The modern father of the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, must be spinning in his grave. Again, Mr. President, I am not here to relitigate 2016. I am here to make sure that we do our job, that we honor that oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I don't know about you, but I would call the actions of Russia over the last few years the actions of a foreign enemy. We also have an obligation to make sure we protect the integrity of our election system. So let's take off the Republican and Democratic hats for a few minutes, and let's go ahead and pass election security legislation. Let's go ahead and put some basic guardrails around social media so we are not manipulated in future elections. Let's make sure we go ahead and put an obligation on all Presidential campaigns going forward that if they see evidence of foreign intervention, they report it appropriately to the FBI and law enforcement. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I hope to reserve the right, if my colleague from Tennessee is going to respond to my comments, to have a chance to respond to her comments as well.

Mr. WARNER. I see the Senator from the Finance Committee is here. I will not take but a couple of moments. I appreciate the comments of the Senator from Tennessee. She agrees we ought to make sure there is not foreign intervention in our elections. That ought to be a fairly easy thing to agree to. I want to point out that her reading of my legislation is not accurate. The only thing that would have to be reported is if an agent of a foreign government or foreign national offered something that was already prohibited, not a foreign national wanting to volunteer on a campaign. We already laid out prohibited activities that violate the law. The only action reported would be those actions that are prohibited. Again, I will take my colleague at her word. If there are ways to improve on this legislation, I am wide open for business. I think in past elections, she is right. She ran for Governor. My friend from Iowa has run for a lot of elections. I think most of us in this Chamber would never think about taking help from a foreign government. If there are ways to work better, I welcome it. We are only here having this discussion and debate because, in a lot of ways, the rules of the game changed in 2016. A foreign power, Russia, caught our government, our political system, and our companies totally off guard. They hacked into the Democratic National Committee's individuals' personal accounts. I would remind the Presiding Officer of the very day then-Candidate Trump said on national television during the campaign: If the Russians have dirt on Hillary, bring it on. It was the very first day the intelligence community, the Mueller report, and our bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee found out that the Russians actually took him at his word and started releasing information to him that day. I think the integrity of our election system is terribly important. Russians tried to penetrate 50 States and got into 21 of them. I think they could have changed totals if they wanted to. They chose not to that year. We have done better in 2018, but I think we can even do more and, again, only for States that want to take additional Federal assistance. That has been the working arrangement with our colleagues from the other side. I know very few folks who wouldn't say that with the ability to have systems hacked into--that are as much different today than it was 20 years ago--having that paper trail after the fact makes a lot of sense. Let's agree to work on that. We have this whole new beast of social media companies out there that provide a lot of good, but we have seen in repeated ways that they can be manipulated. What we saw in 2016 is going to pale in comparison with the advent of deepfake and other serious incidents. We got caught off guard. We should not be caught off guard in 2020. I filed this legislation a month ago because I thought we needed to be absolutely clear going forward. The reason for the immediacy of this legislation proposed, and why it is so necessary, is because the President of the United States, yesterday, from the Oval Office, said that everybody in politics takes input from foreign governments. He left everybody with that impression. I don't. I absolutely believe the Senator from Iowa doesn't. He said, even after all that has happened in the last 2\1/2\ years, that if Russia or China or other countries intervene again, he might take that information, take that assistance again. Our country is better than that. Our democracy is more important than a willingness to be traded away for the short-term political gain of being in cahoots with a foreign power. I am not saying that has happened, but, boy oh boy, what an invitation we made yesterday to folks, as the Senator from Tennessee just indicated, who don't wish us well. If there are ways to improve on this legislation, I am wide open for that, but if we don't put in place an obligation that is up-to-date and a moral obligation that I think we have all honored, if we don't put in place a legal obligation to make sure that if you see evidence of foreign intervention, you report it, then shame on us. I will close with this. We do it at the airport--you see something, say something. Shouldn't we have at least those same standards, in terms of protection of our critical democracy, going forward? I yield the floor.

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I rise in celebration of Public Service Recognition Week, a time to honor public servants at all levels of government for their dedication and outstanding service to this Nation. Since 2010, I have taken to the Senate floor to honor our particularly noteworthy government employees--a tradition that was first begun by my good friend Senator Ted Kaufman. Today and during this week, I would like to continue this tradition by highlighting the contributions of three Virginians who have worked tirelessly to improve the functioning of our government and advance America's interests at home and abroad.

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago, after almost 2 years, Special Counsel Mueller filed his report with the Attorney General. The Attorney General sent us a short letter that summarized the major findings of the report. A summary is not going to cut it. The Attorney General's own letter discusses the vast extent of the special counsel's investigation. It mentions over 500 witness interviews, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 230 orders for communications records, almost 50 orders for pen registers, and actually 13 requests to foreign governments. This was an extraordinarily extensive investigation that yielded a rich collection of facts about Russia's attack on our democracy. The American people deserve to see the results so that they can judge the facts for themselves. We know from court filings, news reports, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's own investigations that the Russians attempted to influence the Trump campaign in many ways. At least 17 individuals in the Trump orbit had over 100 publicly released contacts with Russian officials or intermediaries. Yet, with all of those 100 contacts during the midst of a campaign, somehow not one of those individuals--even those contacted with explicit offers of assistance from a hostile government--called the FBI to report those offers. The Attorney General's four-page summary of this sprawling investigation--a summary that according to press reports may not even accurately reflect the Mueller report--focuses almost exclusively on the criminal portion of the Mueller probe and barely mentions the special counsel's counterintelligence investigation into these contacts. The Senate Intelligence Committee--with the only bipartisan counterintelligence investigation still standing--has documented extensive efforts by the Russians to reach out to those around then- Candidate Trump. Here are a few examples: We have documented in the public domain Candidate Trump's efforts to negotiate a business deal to build what was going to be called the largest building in all of Russia. He negotiated that deal throughout the whole primary process. According to his attorney Mr. Giuliani, it may have been negotiated all the way through the election. The deal itself may not have violated any laws. Yet, frankly, I think, if I were a Republican primary voter, I would have liked to have known that my potential Presidential candidate was still trying to do a deal with Vladimir Putin's government. In our investigation, we also had exposed ongoing communications between the President's campaign chairman, Mr. Manafort, and Konstantin Kilimnik, who has ties with both Russian intelligence and oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Our committee has made multiple criminal referrals to the special prosecutor based on what we have learned and witnesses' efforts to lie to us and to obstruct our investigation. This is what a counterintelligence investigation is all about. We need to fully understand what the Russians were trying to do, and we need to be able to warn future campaigns and candidates about the lengths to which hostile governments will go and the new tools they will use to undermine our democracy. I believe we cannot make that full guidance to future campaigns without there being a full release of this report. Some observers have said that the report cannot be released without its jeopardizing sources and methods. Let me be clear. As vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, no one is more sensitive to those concerns than am I, but the resolution that we have specifically states that the report should be released to the public in accordance with the law. Clearly, sources and methods would not be released under this standard, nor would grand jury information. What we are talking about here is basic transparency. Let's make sure the full Mueller report is released to Congress, including the underlying documents and intelligence. Then let's make sure the American people see as much of this report as possible and as soon as possible. Let's do it in a bipartisan way to protect sources and methods. Unanimous Consent Request--H. Con. Res. 24 Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that as in legislative session, the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H. Con. Res. 24, expressing the sense of Congress that the report of Special Counsel Mueller should be made available to the public and to Congress, and which is at the desk; further, that the concurrent resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. WARNER. In reserving the right to object, I would simply point out to my colleague from Kentucky that the intelligence community, in its January 2017 report, reached a unanimous conclusion. That conclusion was that Russia massively interfered in our elections. Russia did it in the form of hacking into personal information and releasing it subjectively, and Russia did it in terms of at least touching the electoral systems in 21 of our States in ways that, frankly, found a great deal of vulnerabilities. Russia also did it in ways that manipulated social media that, quite honestly, caught our Intelligence Committee and the social media companies off guard. Our Intelligence Committee spent a year in its review of the conclusions of the intelligence community, and in January of 2018, it unanimously agreed that the intelligence community's findings were correct--that the Russians interfered and that they did it on behalf of one candidate, Mr. Trump, against another candidate, Mrs. Clinton. For those reasons, I respectfully object to the request of my colleague from Kentucky.

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, in closing, I hope we can move past this. The President himself has called for the release of the report. In a rare stroke of unanimity, the House voted 420 to 0. I think many in this body would like to move beyond this issue. The only way we are going to be able to move beyond this is to get this report released, to get it out to the American public, and to let those of us who are charged with the intelligence community's responsibilities see all of the report, including the underlying documents. I hope we can get to that point. I yield the floor.

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I appreciate the bipartisan conversation that is going on with the chair, and I hope more of that will go on. That really is a little bit of why I rise today, because I hope and pray that if there--while we have many legitimate policy differences in this body, one thing we ought to have absolute, complete agreement on is that the United States of America cannot afford another government shutdown. The last shutdown, which President Trump was so proud to initiate, cost our economy--and this is the lowest estimate we could find so we don't look like we are overstating--an estimated $6 billion. The truth is, that number hardly reflects the human cost of this self-inflicted disaster our country was led into. A recent survey found that 62 percent of Federal workers depleted most or all of their emergency savings, 42 percent of Federal workers took on debt to pay bills or other expenses, and 25 percent tapped their retirement accounts. If you tap your IRA, you pay tax penalties, and you get none of that reimbursed. Listen to this: 25 percent of our Federal workers who were the victims of this shutdown--25 percent of our Federal workers, during this shutdown, had to visit a food bank. If you work for the United States of America, the greatest Nation in the world, and you are asked to show up to work without pay, you should not have to visit a food bank. I spent most of my career in the private sector, and I am proud of those activities, but I know very few folks who work for any of my companies who would have continued to show up day in and day out to do their jobs if they were going for 35 days without pay--and 35 days without pay where, frankly, you had some Members of the so-called board, the Congress, who showed no appreciation at all for their suffering and many who said they didn't mind if that shutdown continued indefinitely. Those fellow Americans are Federal workers, contractors, private businesses that support Federal installations or the campground outside the Shenandoah National Park or the restaurant outside Petersburg National Battlefield--not just Federal employees, folks in the private sector as well endured tremendous hardship because the President decided to use their livelihoods as a bargaining chip. That can't happen again. While I want to always try to be optimistic and appreciate the bipartisan agreement that has been reached by the budget negotiators, unfortunately, we find ourselves in the same spot right now-- potentially just days away from another Trump shutdown. The President said he is not happy, but he won't say whether he will sign the bipartisan deal that came from the conference committee. Let's be clear. The uncertainty itself is having a negative impact on the operation of the Federal Government and costing taxpayer dollars each and every day that this cloud hangs over the government. Agencies are already interrupting investigations and canceling trainings and meetings. They are being forced to act as if the government will once again be shut down at the end of this week. This is just plain mismanagement of government by the Trump administration. It is another example of the disrespect this White House has shown to our Federal workforce. In Virginia, over the past few weeks, Senator Kaine and I have spent a lot of time listening to Federal workers. We heard from Federal workers who had to pull their kids out of daycare and send them away to relatives because they couldn't meet those daycare expenses if they weren't getting paid and folks who missed student loan payments or literally had to choose between their medications and paying rent. Now, these workers have started to receive some of their backpay, and many of them have not received all of their backpay from the shutdown. The truth is, those Federal workers who drew down their savings or incurred a tax penalty from taking money from their IRA or who took an advance on their credit card are not made whole by receiving backpay because they have incurred penalties that will never be made up, beyond the psychic damage that is taking place with their families. But even if we accept that most of the Federal workers will ultimately get their backpay, that is not the case for thousands of Federal contractors in Virginia and around the country. Quite honestly, the nightmare is not over. The President's decision to finally reopen the government didn't magically undo 35 days of missed pay. Unfortunately, no one from the White House could be bothered to meet with any of these folks, whether it be Federal workers or contractors who were hurt by this government shutdown. If they had, they would know how much pain this President's shutdown continues to inflict on Federal contractors, particularly low- and middle-income workers. I spent the last couple of months, the last month and a half listening to these folks describe the anxiety of not knowing when their next paycheck will come or if it will come at all. Sometimes when we think about Federal contractors, we think about high-priced folks, many of whom do a good job working for our government, many in my State. Sometimes that is the image of a Federal contractor. I wonder if most of the Members of this body realize that the people who clean the toilets at the Smithsonian or serve the food at the cafeteria in the Smithsonian are Federal contractors, and for the 35 days of the government shutdown--they have no recourse at this moment in time. They are struggling as we speak, and they will continue to struggle if Congress doesn't take advantage of this opportunity--if we get this deal signed by Friday and keep the government open--to make good on our commitment to those contractors as well. If we end up with the alternative and the government shuts down again, these folks' lives--at least their economic lives--will be in jeopardy. A number of small businesses--women-owned businesses, minority businesses, veteran-owned businesses--that tried, through this last 35- day shutdown, to keep their workers on payroll had to take that money out of their business pockets to try to make ends meet. But after a couple of weeks, a lot of them couldn't afford to do that. Those businesses have shut down. Years and in certain cases decades of work down the drain, not because they did something that was mismanagement, not because they did something that was irresponsible, not because they weren't providing the taxpayers with the full value of their work, but because we here in Congress and the White House couldn't come to a common agreement on the most basic responsibility of government, which is to keep the doors open and the lights on. I held a roundtable recently with a contractor in Springfield, VA. A contractor there named Barbara told me she is behind on her rent and had to take her granddaughter out of daycare because she can't pay the bills. Now, she is glad she is back at work, but that 35 days with no pay--unless we rectify that with this deal that may come to pass before the weekend, she is still left in the cold. Another at that same roundtable told me she had to choose between food and medicine. A couple of weeks ago, I met a contractor named John, an Afghanistan veteran, who was picking up groceries at the food bank in Arlington because the shutdown wiped out his savings. We had some press, but John didn't want to go on camera. He was a little bit embarrassed that he had to pick up food at the food bank. This is someone who is a veteran. This is someone who continued to serve in terms of protecting the country. Thirty-five days without pay. With the status quo--he will never get those lost earnings back if we don't rectify that this week. Another contractor named Joseph, who works as a custodian at the Department of the Interior, told me this: We work just as hard as anyone else. We need our backpay so we can catch up on our bills and survive. The remarkable thing is, for some of these janitors and custodial workers, on buildings that were open, they had to continue to work and still don't get backpay. One of the most heartbreaking things was listening to these contractors talk about the shame--the shame of being treated as if their work does not have value. The truth is, these folks take pride in their work because they love their country. That same contractor, Joseph, says he thinks of the building he cleans as the President's house, and he works hard because he wants to make it shine every day. What a disgrace that this government can't even honor his service with back wages so that he can pay his bills and get his personal finances in order. Many other contractors take pride in their work because it represents their independence. Over 45,000 disabled Americans work as Federal contractors through the AbilityOne Program. I know this program is very successful in Delaware. The Senator from Delaware will speak on it shortly. I have met contractors who are double amputees, veterans with PTSD, and folks with physical and intellectual disabilities. They are able to live normal lives and contribute to society because of these Federal contractor jobs. For many of them, these jobs are more than about pay. It is about respect. It is about being valued and part of a community, part of a team at the offices they work in. They suffer more than just about anyone when their lifeline--that source of income, independence, and dignity--is cut off because of a government shutdown. I will close with something a Federal contractor named Constance told me last week. Even though she and her team of custodians still face tremendous financial hardship, she told me that she remains hopeful. She is hopeful because she and her coworkers are now back to work, and she is hopeful because people in this Chamber are finally starting to listen to folks like her. I share her hope that the Senate will have the decency and the basic humanity to make sure, one, that we don't close down this government come Friday, and two, that when we come to this deal, we take that moment--and I see colleagues from both sides of the aisle. We have gotten the CBO score. It is scored to make sure the backpay for the contractors, with an emphasis toward low-income contractors, under $50,000--the cost would be at $1 billion. That is the CBO score. We ought to make sure that these people's lives--that the work they do is valued. I hope, as we have this bipartisan deal to avoid the shutdown, that we can also make it right for the folks who oftentimes many of us don't see--who clean the buildings, serve the food, many folks from the disabled community--who rely upon us to do the right thing. Congress should pass this backpay for Federal contractors legislation. The President should sign it, and if the President doesn't, the Congress should override his veto. Let's make sure, as we did with Federal workers, that they will always be assured that they will get their backpay. Let's make sure that contractors get that same decency. It is time to do the right thing. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WARNER

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

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. First of all, Madam President, I want to thank my colleague from West Virginia, Senator Capito, for her comments. I know shortly we are going to hear from the Senator from Pennsylvania. We heard from the Senator from Ohio. This is sometimes hard for me to say as a former Governor of Virginia to a former Governor of West Virginia, but I want particularly those who are following this issue to know that no one in this body has fought for miners harder, longer, more passionately, more consistently than Joe Manchin. It was only through his repeated efforts--and this man is like a dog with a bone in his mouth who will not let it go. At times he is stiff in the spine with folks on this side of the aisle when they wanted to say: Well, maybe no. We ought to move to something else. He has come back and back and back again. So I am honored to stand with him one more time. Let me again say that it is with some challenge that someone from the Commonwealth of Virginia has to say these many nice things about somebody from West Virginia, but the folks in the Gallery ought to know there has been no one who has been a better advocate for miners than the Senator from West Virginia. I don't think there is a Member of the Senate--I know at least on this side of the aisle--who has not heard at least a half dozen times about the promises Harry Truman made to the miners in 1946 and how it is our obligation to keep that word and to keep that promise. The Senator from West Virginia has indicated why this is timely. Again, it is because we have the challenges around the pension fund. We have other challenges, but we have a crisis right now. We talked about Westmoreland--the Westmoreland bankruptcy, 1,200 miners, 500 of those live in Virginia. If we can't get a solution on this deal right now on the American Miners Act, then a lot of those miners and their families are going to go bankrupt because their day of reckoning is already upon us. I want to echo what the Senator from West Virginia said to urge the majority leader and, for that matter, the minority leader that there is a way--if we do the rational, sensible thing and not shut down the government on Friday, we ought to take advantage of making sure the American Miners Act is part of that provision. I can think of nothing better, as we go into the work period, than to try to give miners some certainty. Let me just mention one other item that the American Miners Act had, and that is the strengthening of the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund. This is also an issue that, if we don't get it resolved, the amount of contributions that go into that trust fund will drop in half. I don't think many folks realize--and I think this is particularly the case in West Virginia and Southwest Virginia--black lung is still a real, enormous medical challenge. As a matter of fact, we have now seen growth in large populations in my State, and I know in West Virginia, as well, of advanced black lung cases called complicated black lung, which has an even more devastating effect. If this trust fund is cut in half, based upon legislation that took place at the end of calendar year 2018, the ability of the trust fund to meet the needs of these miners and their families, who are still hard hit by a debilitating disease--we are not going to be able to give them, again, the high-quality care they deserve. It is way past time to fix this problem. Let's take that step. We have one of these large pieces of legislation, hopefully, that the President will not decide to veto, that we will get through. Wouldn't it be--I ask the Senator from West Virginia this before I cede to the Senator from Pennsylvania, but sometimes, with these giant bills, strange things pop out at the end of the day, and you kind of wonder how they got in. Wouldn't it be great if, on this mini giant bill, one of the things that popped out might be the promised relief for our miners in terms of healthcare and their pensions? This is something I believe, we, as a country, owe to the miners--back, yes, to President Truman's promise in 1946. I stand with all of my colleagues on this issue. I particularly thank, again, my friend the Senator from West Virginia for his great leadership and his willingness to stand tall time and again. Let's see if we can get it done this time. With that, Madam President, I yield to the Senator from West Virginia.

Mr. WARNER. Right, all we have to try to do with the trust fund is to get it back to the status quo.

Mr. WARNER

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

Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I rise today to oppose the nomination of William Barr to be the Attorney General, a nomination that the Senate will be taking up later today. I have a number of concerns about the nominee on policy grounds. I echo what my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee have said about Mr. Barr's troubling record on important issues affecting Americans' constitutional freedoms. He has advocated for harsh, mandatory minimum sentences, as well as the President's Muslim ban. I also have serious concerns about his past statements about LGBTQ equality and the role of government in women's reproductive healthcare. As one telling example, he testified in his 1991 confirmation hearing that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overruled. On all of these issues, this nominee, I believe, is out of step with the views of the vast majority of the American public, but for me, this nomination and my objection to this nomination is not simply an objection based on policy grounds, nor is it a question of Mr. Barr's experience. As a former Attorney General, Mr. Barr has long been well respected within the legal community, but, frankly, the nominee for our Nation's highest law enforcement position must be measured by more than his resume. Instead, for me, particularly at this moment in time, this is a question of Mr. Barr's fidelity to our Constitution. I find Mr. Barr's actions in the months leading up to his nomination to be deeply disturbing. As a result, I have serious doubts about this nominee's independence and willingness to stand up for rule of law. Last June, Mr. Barr wrote a secret, unsolicited memo attacking Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into potential obstruction of justice by the President. Mr. Barr then took this unsolicited memo and passed it on to administration officials. We all know what happened afterward. In November, President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions after months of public abuse over Attorney General Sessions' unwillingness to rein in or kneecap the Mueller investigation. For a temporary replacement, he chose Matt Whitaker, whom we have seen recently in his testimony over on the House side and whose primary qualification to be Acting Attorney General appears to have been an op- ed he wrote decrying the scope of the Mueller probe. With Mr. Barr's nomination, it has become again clear--and we heard it again in some of the President's comments last night in El Paso-- that the President's major concern in choosing a new Attorney General will be to choose someone who will shield him from the special counsel's investigation. To me, Mr. Barr's unsolicited memo looks much like a job application to try to appeal to the President on those qualifications. The President has reportedly dangled the possibility of pardoning potential witnesses in this special counsel's investigation. In Mr. Barr, the President has a nominee who has been outspoken about his expansive views of the appropriate use of pardon powers. Let's be very clear. Any attempt by this President to pardon himself, his family, or key witnesses in the Mueller or the Southern District of New York investigation would represent an abuse of power that would require a response by Congress. Special Counsel Mueller's investigation, as we already have seen from the record, has led to numerous indictments and convictions--convictions that even include the President's own campaign chairman from the 2016 campaign. While we have no idea when the Mueller investigation will finish, we must make sure that the Mueller investigation remains free from political interference until it gets to the truth. Then, we need to ensure that its findings must be released to Congress and the American public. Under our constitutional system, no one is above the law, not even the President. We need an Attorney General willing to vigorously defend that principle. Consequently, I will oppose the nomination of Mr. Barr and urge my colleagues to consider the same. Thank you, Madam President. I yield the floor. I suggested absence of a quorum.

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, let me first of all echo the comments of my friend, the Senator from Tennessee. We will never fully know what was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, but I do believe that under the leadership of the Senator from Alaska 16 of us came to the floor yesterday and made these comments, with Senators on the Republican side saying: Please, let's reopen the government, and Senators on the Democratic side, like myself, saying: I am open to increasing the dollar amount on border security. After the Presiding Officer's comments, I rise to welcome the news that sanity has prevailed--at least temporarily. After 35 painful days, we are finally poised to reopen the government and pay our hard-working Federal employees. It is not a moment too soon because under normal circumstances, today is supposed to be a Federal payday, but this morning, thousands of Federal employees went to work one more day knowing full well they would not be getting the paychecks they earned. Thousands more have been furloughed, waiting for the President and my colleagues to come to their senses to let us reopen the government. For the last 35 days, 800,000 Federal workers have been held hostage through no fault of their own. Frankly, that is just scratching the surface of this destructive shutdown. That number of 800,000 doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of Federal contractors who are not getting paid. I know I have talked to my friend the Senator from Alaska and appealed to the common sense and good sense of the Presiding Officer. We have some legislation that may not be perfect but would look at trying to make at least partially whole those low-paid Federal contractors--folks under $50,000--who, if we don't find a way to take care of them, will come out of this--more than 1 month of their annual salary--with nothing at all to show for it. We also know--and the Senator from Alaska raised this issue with me-- that even if we were to move toward low-salaried contractors, the solution that we announced today and that hopefully will be signed later today really will do nothing to take care of the small businesses whose customers were furloughed or working without pay. I am thinking about the Senator from Alaska, who had the powerful picture on the floor of the brewery in Kodiak, AK. I copied her efforts and went to Port City Brewery in Alexandria--I believe it was yesterday--where not only were they down dramatically in terms of customers, but they had five new brews they were trying to bring to market, and none of those were approved. The truth is, the damage to those folks in the private sector is done, and I am not sure there is much we can do to rectify it. Candidly, thinking about here locally, there is no way we can undo the harm to the food truck owners--some have had their food trucks repossessed--who sit outside the Smithsonian waiting for the tourists to come. Those losses are permanent, as they are in my State and the Presiding Officer's State for those restaurants and campgrounds that are outside the Great Smoky Mountains or outside the Shenandoah Valley. As a matter of fact, there is no way we are going to be able to make whole the contractor who told me he was closing his doors and laying off 72 workers because he just couldn't meet the payroll during the shutdown. Frankly, it is too late for the President or any of us to help those folks. The only thing we can do now is to end the shutdown, get the Federal workers and contractors back to work, and try our darnedest to make sure this never happens again. We also need to make sure those folks get backpay. Again, I would especially urge that we take a hard look at making sure those low-wage contractors, who are suffering so badly right now, get an opportunity to get their backpay as well. I am cosponsoring legislation sponsored by the Senator from Minnesota, and I hope all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will look at that legislation. By reopening the government temporarily, we now finally have the opportunity to take a timeout and give both parties the space to negotiate a compromise. We are clearly not there yet, but there is room for common ground. Over the weekend, the President proposed additional funding for screening vehicles and cargo coming across the border at points of entry. The DEA says this is how the majority of illegal drugs come into our country. It is something we can work on together. If the White House wants to seriously discuss providing real, long-term security for Dreamers and TPS recipients, let's have that conversation as well. I think we can do it, but it will take time. In the meantime, let's make sure the President signs today the legislation that will allow our Federal employees and contractors to get back to work. Before I close, I want to take a moment for self-reflection on what has happened over the last 35 days. In many ways, we are right back to where we were in December, right back to where we were when this body nearly unanimously passed legislation that would have prevented this stupid crisis. For 35 days, this body has refused to fill its role as a part and coequal branch of government. We can't let that happen again. I hope the White House will take some lessons from this crisis as well. They can start by realizing that no one wins a shutdown. If you shut down the government, the only thing we know for a fact is that the American people lose. I hope the President will also realize that you need to empower those around you to help make a deal. The Vice President came to the Senate with a deal in mid-December. I don't think he even left Capitol Hill before the President basically took back the Vice President's deal. Senator Graham proposed almost exactly this deal that we came to 3 weeks ago, but unfortunately, again, the President cut off his good friend at that point. It is my hope that in the coming weeks, we can have a good-faith negotiation where both sides have an opportunity to come out ahead. Imagine that--a win-win proposition coming out of the Halls of Congress. But to do that, we have to have enough of the stunts and the political tit-for-tat that we have seen over the past few weeks. In a moment of optimism, if there is anything good that can come from this shutdown, let's make it the last time that a President or a Congress uses shutting down the government as a negotiating tactic. I have legislation, and it took some hard work to come up with the acronym, but the legislation is called the Stop STUPIDITY Act. That will make sure that Congress and the White House are the only ones who suffer when the Congress and the White House can't come to a funding agreement. Maybe the particulars of that legislation can change, or maybe even responsible Members like the Presiding Officer would think we don't need to put into law something called the Stop the STUPIDITY Act, so I am open to changing the name. But the final language in any deal that comes out 3 weeks from now should put strong provisions and strong penalties in place to prevent this tactic from being used by either party or any White House or Congress in the future. In my mind, perhaps the best and easiest way to do that would be--and I know there is Republican legislation on this--to continue to fund government. In my idea, it would say that the only people who would actually be the victims of a shutdown going forward would be the Congress and our staff and the White House and its staff. A little bit of common sense tells me that we wouldn't be here 35 days into this shutdown if all our staff were experiencing the same kind of shortfall and economic distress that 800,000 of our fellow Federal workers experienced. The truth is, our Federal workers need to get those paychecks. The truth is, our country can't afford another self-inflicted disaster. Let's go ahead and get that CR passed. Let's go ahead and sit down and negotiate in good faith on border security. Most importantly, let's make sure we are never back in this circumstance again. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I appreciate my friend, the Senator from Maryland, yielding time. I appreciate the fact that this may be the first time, at least in the last few weeks, where a group of Senators from both sides of the aisle are actually coming together to find agreement--not to score ``gotcha'' points but to find agreement. I promised the Senator I would be very brief. It is clear this government shutdown needs to come to an end. My hope would be that as we move toward that conclusion, we will also look at the issues revolving around, particularly, low-paid Federal contractors who will get no relief when the government reopens. I also hope we can work together. I have legislation called the Stop STUPIDITY Act. It is a good name. It may need further amendments that would try to prohibit future shutdowns being used by either party on a going-forward basis. What I think we need to do, and I think other colleagues will acknowledge this, is let's take a 3-week, short- term CR. Let's consider the President's proposal. Let me be clear. The President is watching. This Senator will commit to good-faith negotiations. This Senator will commit to supporting increased border security beyond what we just voted on in the so-called Democratic proposal. I hope the President will take that kind of commitment for increased border security as a good-faith effort and will be responsive so we can get this government reopened on a short-term basis and that the kind of horror stories we all can recount about our workers, contractors, and oftentimes private businesses that surround those Federal installations--that will see no relief--can actually get their operations back open. I thank my friend, the Senator from Maryland, for granting me this time. I thank the Senator from Alaska for leadership on her time. Let's see if this eight can go forth and multiply so, before this weekend is over, we can get our workforce back to work doing the people's business. I yield back to the Senator from Maryland.

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Yes, Madam President.

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Madam President, let me thank the Senator from Alaska for her comments and my dear friend from Virginia for his comments. I am going to somewhat echo what has already been said, but what I don't understand--and for those who are listening or viewing, the four of us and many others on both sides of the aisle have been working in good faith to try to say: How do we get out of this? The question I have is--I wonder if all of our colleagues have actually gone out and sat with Federal workers or folks who are affected. How could anyone sit with anyone who is affected by this self-imposed personal, financial, and economic disaster and not say: Let's not talk about money; let's get the government reopened. We can figure this out, but let's get this government reopened. I will recount some similar stories, and I appreciated the Alaska stories of the Coast Guard in Kodiak. In Virginia, we have a major Coast Guard facility down at Hampton Roads. But, as the Senator from Alaska has mentioned, it is not just Federal employees; it is contractors and private businesses and a host of other folks. The Presiding Officer is part of the group who has been trying to say: How do we get to yes? How do we get to reopen? Maybe we can renew our efforts and urge all of our colleagues. Many of them have gone home, but I hope they will sit down and have these kinds of sessions. I don't know how anybody can look at people who are out of work and without pay due to nothing they have done individually and not say that no matter who is winning the inside-the-beltway battle of the day, we owe it to them to get this government reopened. Madam President, I rise today out of deep frustration with the administration's treatment of Federal workers during this government shutdown. I will come back to this again, but I wish--I wish there were some indication that the President, the Vice President, or any of his top advisers would actually go out and do a listening session with Federal workers. That doesn't seem to be too much to ask. I want them to look those Coast Guard spouses or those TSA employees or those air traffic controllers in the eye and tell them why they are being held hostage on an issue that, frankly, has nothing to do with their work as public servants. We are now on day 29 of what I call the President's shutdown--the longest shutdown in U.S. history. In many ways, we are creating the legacy of this administration, a legacy that--the President claimed in mid-December that he was ``proud'' to have initiated the shutdown that is plunging so many Americans' lives into chaos. More than 800,000 Federal workers have missed a paycheck, and that number, I think the Senator from Alaska has alluded to and the Senator from Virginia has alluded to, is actually a fraction of the folks who are actually being affected. That doesn't count the countless contractors--I will come back to that in a moment--or the host of businesses, like the brewery in Kodiak. They are not Federal workers. They are absolutely being affected, and let's recognize that. Even when we are reopened and those Coast Guard workers are paid back, that brewery is never going to make back its lost revenue. The President has found time for an Oval Office address, he has found time for a trip to the border, and he has found time for a tit-for-tat with Speaker Pelosi, but what he has not found time for--or, for that matter, anybody else in the White House--is to sit down with the Federal workers who are being affected, and I believe that is a national disgrace. Again, I appreciate the Presiding Officer and your colleagues listening. I know you have made efforts, and you are continuing to work with other colleagues on both sides of the aisle to try to hopefully find some sense in this disaster, but the truth is, people's time is running out. Over the last couple weeks, Senator Kaine and I have heard from so many Virginia families who are shouldering the burden from this shutdown. I wanted to share some of the stories. The Senator from Alaska told a story about a 13-year-old who couldn't cash a Christmas check. At least for me--I can't speak for Senator Kaine--the most compelling story, heartbreaking story--and I am going to tell a number of them, but this is the one I have kept coming back to. Senator Kaine and I, with the press, had a series of Federal workers tell their stories. One of the Federal workers didn't want to come and do it on camera, but he came up and talked to Senator Kaine and me afterward. He was a relatively young guy, about 35. He was a veteran. He was an air traffic controller. He has now gone 4-plus weeks without a paycheck. His wife had served in the Air Force in an intel capacity and was suffering from pretty significant PTSD. Because he hadn't had a paycheck, he couldn't pay the $90 copayment for his wife to continue to see her psychiatrist and continue to pay for her drug treatment. Not unlike the story the Senator from Alaska told, he said he has his wife to take care of and their two kids, a 4- and 5-year- old. The 4- and 5-year-old kids came to their parents and brought their piggy banks and said: Mom and dad, can we give you what we have in our piggy banks to help our family? This is the United States of America. These are two veterans. We say we honor their service. This is somebody who is still going to work and working overtime without pay to keep our air safe. This shouldn't be. A few days earlier, we met with other workers. A young father whom we met works with the Department of Justice. He brought his 7-week-old daughter to this session. He said when his daughter was born, he wanted to make sure he could get his daughter on his Federal insurance plan. That is his right. But the person who was supposed to submit the form to the insurance company had been furloughed. He went to the doctor and his infant daughter had an illness and had to get a prescription. He didn't have the money to pay for the prescription, and his daughter wasn't registered on his insurance company, not because of any fault he had made. He wasn't able to pay for the insurance. In this case, thank God, the insurance company actually worked with him, and they brought extra proof and went through other hoops, and he was able to get the medicine. How many other young families are going through that same stress right now? Eric, a Federal law enforcement agent and father of three, wrote me an email this week. He said missing a paycheck caused ``a tremendous amount of strain'' on his family. This is a law enforcement officer. Eric said he had some money saved up in a rainy day fund, but he continued to tell me, in terms of his rainy day fund: It's raining extremely hard right now. At some point, I am going to have to make some tough decisions to ensure that my family has a roof over its head and food on the table. Unfortunately, a lot of the employees Senator Kaine and I have been talking to don't have that rainy-day fund. One of the things I think we all knew, maybe intellectually--and we have all seen the statistics--is that half of Americans couldn't afford an unexpected $400 bill without going into financial ruin. We are seeing that play out right now--again, not because somebody has been mismanaging their funds, but because they expected if they worked for the United States of America and if they were willing to continue to do that work, they would get paid. We are now into this crisis 29 days, and if we think we have seen the stuff hit the fan so far, wait until this coming Thursday when families go through that second pay period where, adding insult to injury, they get a paycheck that says zero, or in the case of one air traffic controller, a penny, as you get into the new month when all their bills come due. Yesterday, I volunteered at a food bank in Arlington where Federal contractors and furloughed workers were coming because their families were running out of money. Some of these folks came up to me and said: I viewed myself always as middle class. I have been working for the Federal Government for double-digit years. They felt an enormous amount of shame to come to the food bank. You shouldn't feel shame to come to the food bank, but their appeal was to get the government reopened. The President, who has never worked for a paycheck in his life, says he can relate. He says he is sure that the Federal workers ``will make adjustments.'' This is the very same President who has not had the common decency to sit down with any Federal workers and listen to their stories. Here is what some of those adjustments look like. Lisa in Arlington wrote me an email that says: I am forced to look for multiple part-time jobs to make ends meet and my savings will soon run out. Creditors and landlords have only so much patience with us. Another worker whom Senator Kaine and I met on Thursday broke down crying when she said how hard it was for her to send her infant child away up for a week to 10 days to stay with relatives because her mom, who had been taking care of that child, had to go up and deal with her own personal business, and she couldn't afford daycare. That is dispiriting and disheartening. The Presiding Officer has already pointed out the problem in terms of recruitment and retention. Those people who are actually trying to serve others now suddenly see their livelihoods in jeopardy through no fault of their own. The truth is that this shutdown is having a devastating effect--not only on the short-term morale but on the long-term morale of all our Federal workforce. The fact is, since we have already agreed to pay them when we reopen, why shouldn't we at least go ahead and, even if we are shut down, pay these Federal workers come Thursday so they don't have to incur additional pain and suffering? I commend so many of us, particularly my friend the Senator from Virginia, along with Senator Cardin, who led the effort so that we are giving Federal workers backpay when we reopen. Backpay alone doesn't make up for the hurt if you had to draw down from your IRA and have a tax penalty. It doesn't make you whole if you have taken an advance against your credit card and you have to pay those fees in paying those dollars back. It doesn't make you whole, as the Presiding Officer indicated, if you get dinged on your credit rating or if you are in the process of trying to get a security clearance and that security clearance is withheld because it appears you have bad credit, not because you did anything wrong but because the Congress and the President can't agree on how to pay you when you are still asked to do your job. The number of current Federal employees who are eligible for retirement is supposed to be about 30 percent over the next few years. How many of those Federal employees, whom we have trained and worked with and who bring enormous expertise, are not going to wait until they have to retire but actually say: I am going to get out of this job now. The last thing we need to do is further undermine the competitiveness of our Federal workforce. The Presiding Officer made this point and Senator Kaine has made this point that it is not just the Federal employees, but Federal contractors. I heard from one Federal contractor from Ashburn who says the shutdown has ``rocked the financial stability of my family.'' You see folks in the Gallery. We probably have a few more tourists than we might normally have on a Saturday because the Smithsonian shut down. I heard from someone who is in leadership in the Smithsonian, begging me, saying those folks who work at the Smithsonian, on one level, may get reimbursed, but all the folks who pick up the trash, clean the bathrooms, and serve the cafeteria food are all contractors. They are not direct employees of the Federal workforce. So even when we reopen, even when the Federal workforce gets reimbursed, they are out. This is one of the things Senator Kaine and I have been working on, and I hope the Presiding Officer will look at this, and I hope some of our other colleagues who want to work toward a solution will work on this. It is complicated. In all the previous shutdowns, we never found a way to reimburse contractors. We have a piece of legislation that may not be perfect, but it says that for those workers who make less than $50,000, we ought to find a way to make sure they get reimbursed and, then, for those above, some small percentage. If not, these folks will never be made whole. Again, think about some of the tourists. Normally, there are a whole lot of food trucks surrounding the Smithsonian and elsewhere around downtown. We heard from a number of those folks as well. They can't continue because if the Smithsonians aren't open, the tourists aren't coming. If you have taken out a loan to buy a food truck to try to employ a few folks, once that business is shut down, once your loan is pulled, once you lose that truck--even when we come to a solution--they can't reopen. Again, I know it is unprecedented. We have not looked at Federal contractors in the past, but at least for the folks in low or moderate incomes who cannot make back the 29 days of pay--Lord knows that we listen to the President who says he doesn't mind if it is weeks, months or even years--I hope we find a way to somehow make them whole. We have also seen small businesses. In Virginia, we have disproportionately a lot of small contractor businesses. A small business owner and contractor in Arlington wrote me and said: My disabled-veteran-owned small business will have to shut its door after serving the Federal Government for the last 2 decades. . . . I am going to have to put 72 families out of work because our reserves aren't big enough to support the payroll expenses of $35,000-$40,000 per day during this political impasse. It doesn't take a lot of math to figure out that if you are closed roughly 30 days, you are talking about over a million dollars in payroll that this veteran-owned small business can't meet. When they reopen, there is no guarantee that this business comes back. It is not just the small businesses that actually serve the government. It is the brewery in Kodiak. It is the restaurants around the battlefields in Richmond, near Senator Kaine's home. It is some of the campgrounds that surround the Shenandoah National Park in our Commonwealth. I think there may be a number of our colleagues who maybe don't have the same concentration that Alaska or Virginia or Maine has. If they think this problem hasn't gotten to them and isn't spreading like the plague, it will come to their States as well. Why do we have to put all of these families and our economy through this kind of turmoil? Senator Kaine and I have worked really hard recently. Those of us who live in the national capital area know the Metro is an important way we commute. The Metro has had its share of problems the last couple of years. Actually, in a good-news story, Virginia, DC, and Maryland came together and ponied up more resources so Metro could make some of the improvements--safety improvements and operating improvements--trying to improve quality of service for our Federal workforce and for tourists in our Nation's Capital. Every day--every weekday--that the Federal Government is shut down, Metro loses $400,000 in lost fares per day. Metro can't get a break. Where is that money going to rematerialize from? I am not sure we are going to appropriate millions of additional dollars. We have had debates before, but if there has ever been one that the American public has a right to be frustrated with in terms of the shutdown--historically, the longest shutdown ever--it is this one. The President says he wants money for a border wall--a border wall that he promised the American people was going to be paid for by Mexico, a border wall for which he says that before he will reopen government, give him $5 billion. I think it is up to almost $5.9 billion. There are some arguments that now it is up to $7 billion or $8 billion. The truth is--and let me be clear--if the President and his White House allies are listening, this Senator is willing to look at any reasonable investment in additional border security, but it ought to be done in a way in which we are not holding these hundreds of thousands of families and--literally, indirectly--millions of Americans hostage. Rule No. 101 of hostage taking is you don't not negotiate with the hostage taker. You don't reward a bully. As I think some of my colleagues on the other side have at least acknowledged privately, if we allow this tactic to work today, it will be reused in April when we have the debt ceiling, and it will be reused at the end of the fiscal year when the next year's appropriations are due. Again, I hope the people of good will will also try to see if we can commit to putting enough of a poison pill in place so that this tactic can never, ever be used again by any Congress or any President without inflicting some damage, frankly, on the legislative branch and on the office of the White House. That is part of the remarkable thing. Our offices--and I say this to the good folks who work for us in Congress-- are not feeling any of the pain. The White House staff is not feeling any of the pain. I do wonder, as the President starts to selectively decide based on one's ability to lobby and promote, who is going to come back and what will get reopened. Frankly, I am more than a little disappointed, while it is important that mortgages get processed, that he has decided to bring back certain folks to process mortgages and certain folks in the Department of Agriculture to process farmers' loans and that they have, suddenly, mysteriously, found some money in the State Department to reopen part of the State Department. I would love to see that same priority for the folks who process food stamps. I wonder what kind of Federal buildings we will go into where the toilets haven't been cleaned and the trash hasn't been taken out and the food services haven't been provided. I say to the White House that we will negotiate, that we will work through this process. Some of us have even said--and I know the Chair has been part of this effort--that we will put it through regular order. We will consider his proposal in a reasonable way, but let's do it with the government open and with people getting paid. I thank my friend Senator Kaine from Virginia. I know and acknowledge, as somebody who actually lives only 20 minutes away in Virginia, that it is a little bit easier for me than being a Senator from Alaska or a Senator from a host of other places around the country, but I think it is proper and right that we are here today, and I will be back this coming week to continue to raise this point. When we heard from some Federal workers that Congress was taking a break for another 10 days when they were supposed to reach another pay period but that they were going to make it goose eggs and when they have the beginning of February looming when their rents and mortgages and tuition bills will be due, I thought it was appropriate. I thank him for forcing us to be back here to continue to raise these issues. The last point I want to make is that I think we owe a huge debt to our Federal workers--the TSA, the air traffic controllers, the Coast Guard, and, for that matter, the folks who process food stamps and the lady we saw who was supposed to investigate chemical spills who is desperate to get to Houston where there was a spill 10 days ago, but they still haven't been able to investigate. Without pay, whether you are furloughed or, in many cases, are being asked to work overtime without pay, they are still showing up. They are still being asked to commute to work--some from a distance--as has been mentioned by the Presiding Officer. If you put a bill on a credit card that has your name on it, your credit rating is at risk. Whether you are a prison guard and have to commute an hour and a half in your car and may not have money for gas, you are still finding a way to show up for work. As somebody who worked longer in the private sector than I have in the public sector, I wonder how many folks who work in the private sector--if you work for Facebook or Google or if you work for Ford or Northrop Grumman--would continue to show up week after week after week without pay or how many folks in the private sector would show up and work overtime without pay and still perform. In a moment in which I was looking straight at the press pool that was with me yesterday at the Arlington food bank, I asked all of the press folks--when the cameras were off--how many of them would show up tomorrow if they had gone 4 or 5 weeks--with no end in sight--without any payment. The press was supposed to cover this, but there was not a single reporter or camera person who didn't at least acknowledge to me--and I wish we had had it all on tape--that, no, they wouldn't be showing up to their jobs. For those of us who are policymakers or who are, candidly, visitors in the gallery, sometimes it is easy--and there have been politicians who have made careers out of this--to trash Federal employees. I think it is wrong. I think it is disgraceful. I think now, more than ever, we owe them a debt of gratitude. I know there are at least reports of people at airports and others who have said thank you or who have tried to slip somebody food or something else. The remarkable thing is, because of our rules that in conventional times are appropriate, we can't even, in many cases, give additional compensation to these Federal workers, but we can give them a personal thanks. My hope would be, in going forward, for a commitment from folks on both sides of the aisle to think twice before we come to the floor of this Senate and berate and degrade Federal workers. I would hope, on a going-forward basis, when we get the government reopened, we could find a bipartisan way to actually make sure that what this Senate passed in terms of a relatively meager 1.9-percent Federal pay raise increase for this year would override this administration's spiteful Executive order that tries to take away that pay raise. If not--maybe not next week but the next time this happens--I don't know if those TSA workers will show up. I don't know if those air traffic controllers will keep working. I don't know if those Coast Guard employees will still sign up for service in places as remote as Kodiak, AK. We have it within our power to end this. If the President of the United States will not end this, we have a bill that is at the desk that 96 of us agreed to in mid-December when there was not this crisis. Now, when we hear these stories--when we hear of this pain--if the President will not act, then the Senate must act and put that legislation on the President's desk. Let him choose to not, simply, postulate but to then make a decision as to whether he will sign or veto it. I thank the Presiding Officer. I know that she and others will be back. Part of the burden on the majority is of showing up to that presiding space. We, as the Virginia Senators, disproportionately had that opportunity during these kinds of circumstances. Regarding her stories, the Senator from Virginia's stories, the Senator from Maine's stories, and our other colleagues' as well, I hope that the White House is listening and that we can find that common agreement to get this government reopened and demonstrate to the workers, the contractors, and the folks who depend upon the Federal Government that we value their service and that never ever again will they have to be put through this kind of tragedy. I yield the floor.

Mr. WARNER

Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I rise today to express my support for S.J. Res. 2, a resolution of disapproval on lifting sanctions against the energy and aluminum companies En+, RUSAL, and EuroSibEnergo. To start from the beginning, the United States of America has had very good reasons for sanctioning Oleg Deripaska. There are a number of significant national security risks at play. That is why repeatedly-- not just in the current administration but in prior administrations-- this individual has been denied a visa and why he has been personally sanctioned by the Treasury Department. As a matter of fact, the Treasury press release announcing the sanctions noted that Deripaska ``has been investigated for money laundering, has been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering.'' These are not the qualifications of someone who should get relief from the United States. I appreciate the fact that his company, RUSAL, has an enormous effect upon the aluminum markets. I appreciate the efforts the Treasury Department has tried to make in restricting his control. But any businessperson knows that if you take an ownership position from 70 percent to 45 percent, and even with the voting power of 35 percent, you still control a company, particularly when this company was founded and the management team was all created by Mr. Deripaska. As we see continuing challenges coming out of the Russian Government, as we see continued efforts of Mr. Deripaska, being one of Vladimir Putin's closest allies and closest cronies, we would send absolutely the wrong signal if we in this body were to remove these sanctions. I know my friend the Senator from Texas wants to speak in a moment. I simply want to refer to the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Chairman Burr, who has frequently pointed out that Deripaska and his associates have come up a number of times in our Senate Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation. All those facts can't be laid out here right now, but I strongly urge my colleagues to vote in favor of this resolution that will come up later today, that we don't send a signal that we are open for business with individuals who have the reputation of Oleg Deripaska, and that we maintain the sanctions on both him and his company, RUSAL. I yield the floor to my friend the Senator from Texas.