U.S. Trade (Executive Calendar)
Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about export strategies, collaboration, and American principles.
Madam President, no one likes to be left behind. I know somewhere people think there is this, ``I win, you lose,'' mentality. But what happened to ``let's grow the pie'' instead of just hoarding a few pieces that are left. Growth, not contraction, is the right solution.
The world is more connected, not necessarily just because of globalization. We are now more connected because of technology, and nothing we are doing is going to stop that. The speed of information is empowering anyone with an internet connection aided by the brain of an AI app to get answers and ideas hundreds of times faster than ever before.
Do we need new principles for the information age? Rules the world and we should strive to adhere to? I definitely agree that the answer is yes.
But, Madam President, I thought we were for capitalism.
Yes, capitalism in the information age needs better rules so markets aren't distorted because markets need to be properly policed and they aren't right now. And I believe that the U.S. should aggressively define the rules in the information age.
I believe in a technology NATO--a model of key democracies and key sophisticated technology countries, defining the rules of the information age and telling anybody who wants to follow that, we will give you a discount on our technology, instead of those who are advocating to buy from people who have a government backdoor. Or even in today's analogy, where you allow somebody to have a government backdoor to your technology.
Madam President, capitalism is still the largest, smartest export America wants to export. We want open markets, and we want more people to sell to 95 percent of consumers who live outside the United States.
Now, it is clear not all the world community is down with capitalism, especially places like China or North Korea. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to advocate for it.
What has U.S. advocacy for capitalism done to grow and stabilize the world? I would say immeasurable, immeasurable, immeasurable, immeasurable progress. In fact, the period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s is considered one of the greatest eras of economic expansion in world history. In the U.S., gross domestic product increased from $228 billion to just under $1.7 trillion in 1975. So whether it was Germany, Japan, South Korea--we have brought about a world economy because the shiny American dream was worth chasing. So whether
The impacts of the U.S. economy can't be ignored, but to out compete our adversaries, we need coalitions, not go-it-alone strategies.
Why do we fear this if we think our principles are correct? But somehow, the current administration thinks that we have been hurt more than we have been helped in this global equation, and they want us to believe that somehow there is a win-win situation on tariffs that they can deliver on.
The American people are demanding leadership here in Washington. They want us to work together. They want us to have the best interest of the country at hand. My guess is they think that on a global basis, too. I know my farmers do. Farmers, always the big potential loser in a trade war, want us to work out better economic opportunities for their future. But there are those in this administration who think we can close our borders, chill trade with tariffs, and somehow make time stand still.
Well, I got news for people, the information age has blown a hole in that theory, even if there was justification for the time stand still theory before the information age. You just cannot drop anchor in the middle of this storm. You need to get to a stable harbor and create an opportunity for the future. And trade, Madam President, not only grows economic opportunity, it helps change culture, and there are some cultures that are worth affecting.
It is better to have a job than be attracted to join a terrorist organization. It is better to create economic stability than fueling poverty and migration. And tariffs are a distortion of markets. Tariffs mean we disagree. It very rarely means the disagreement will be resolved quickly. It usually means people will retaliate, and the escalation of that retaliation will hurt consumers so much so that eventually someone will blink.
The payers in this dispute, though, are never the government leaders. No, it is the workers who lose their job. It is the family that pay higher costs. It is the community that loses their economic activity and tax revenue. And that is why it is so important in this day and age that we talk more about the three Cs: collaboration, coalitions, and capacity building.
Capacity building gives us the ability to accelerate innovation. Trust me, one thing I know about traveling in my State--I am sure it is true in other places, too--innovation is not only in the DNA of Americans, it is the history of our country. Whether electricity, aviation, or the internet, credit goes to the United States of America for innovation and inventing future economic opportunities, not just for us, but for the entire world.
But now, we are in an innovation race defined by AI and quantum. And according to the World Economic Forum, the U.S. generative AI may increase gross domestic product between $2 and $4 trillion per decade. Boston Consulting estimates that quantum computing could generate $850 billion in annual revenue by 2040.
So are we going to focus on those things? Winning the races? Or are we going to allow a contraction that hurts everyone?
Obviously, going all in on AI and quantum can help ensure that our country maintains both economic and military advantages, but we definitely have to collaborate with like-minded nations who also want to grow AI and set the rules, if you want to beat China's ultimate Belt and Road Initiative--DeepSeek.
So what do we do about the domestic impacts of trade? Well, I can tell you some sure dont's right away. You don't abolish the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program, designed to protect impacted workers from trade, which is what has happened with the other side of the aisle. We need to be intentionally upskilling workers to help them in impacted sectors. I have met and talked to so many Americans. They are smart, talented, hard-working, striving, and they only ask for one thing: opportunity.
If you bet on them, they will do the rest. I often think of two major shifts in workforce policy in the United States. World War II, where we didn't have a workforce, and the women showed up in the factories and delivered production. And when the men returned from World War II, and everybody wondered what the economy of the future would be, and we gave them the GI Bill, and they created it.
So we don't cut workforce training. We invest in 2-year skill training programs at our high schools. We make sure that we turn to apprenticeships. We return to the skilling of the jobs that are needed today. You also don't cut export programs like the State Trade Expansion Program (STEP) or the Export-Import Bank.
But what do you do? Well, let's go back to those three Cs: collaboration, coalition building, and capacity building.
We will bring more high-wage manufacturing jobs back to the United States, fostering the investment landscape by continuing on the path of the CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, those have put real investments in the United States of America and have started us on the path towards growing the middle class again. But we need to continue to invest in science.
We need a robust R&D tax policy for inventors and manufacturers, and we need to help our manufacturers with capital investment, equipment modernizations, to help them with their factories. I have seen this in places like Madison, ME, or Longview, WA, where we helped revitalize a longstanding paper industry into new opportunities for the future.
So how do we deal with China? Well, they aren't playing by the rules. They are manipulating and flooding markets, but I guarantee you that just a fear of China is not the answer, and solutions like collaboration and coalition building are critical, particularly in the information age. China does have the largest gross domestic product, about 19 percent of global GDP.
In the global economy, the U.S. represents about 15 percent. But if the United States works to create markets with like-minded partners like Japan, Europe, and the UK and builds a coalition of like-minded democracies grounded in the rule of law, we can flip the script and have a market representing 34 percent of global GDP.
And if we take the next step and expand coalitions to include partners like Canada, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and India, then we are looking at a market that, instead of China's 19 percent accounts for almost half, 47 percent of global GDP.
So why aren't we focusing on that economic opportunity? A lot of people say, Well, that is not the America of today, but I am pretty sure Ben Franklin, about the time he was focusing on electricity, also went to France and helped to build a coalition essential for the founding and continuation of our country. So don't tell me it is not in our DNA to do this. There is so much more we could and should do working with our allies.
Obviously, I mentioned a few--research and development in artificial intelligence, commercializing quantum, scaling, safe, affordable fusion technology. And there are many Members of Congress who were working on these bipartisan ideas. But we have to remain competitive, and we cannot allow this debate about tariffs to take us off our historical course as a nation.
As I mentioned, we mapped out how to get investment in the United States of America, and now, we need to follow that with the training and skilling of American workers. As the AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Microsoft President Brad Smith at a recent meeting in Seattle agreed, we need to train and skill 500,000 electricians for the United States. Why can't we here agree and accelerate that? I am not even sure we can agree on the acceleration of air traffic controllers, and we have every reason to get that done.
Last week, I spoke about additional investments the United States needs to make in Panama, Latin America, and others to link and modernize bilateral agreements that help us counter China. And as I mentioned, I believe in an aggressive EXIM Bank investment to counter China's Belt and Road Initiative.
Free trade agreements are a way for us, not tariffs, to gain the leverage we want. South Asia could play an important role in this coalition building,
How will we know that strategy works? Well, I suggest we will know when we are growing the middle class in the United States of America again. The bills we have passed in investing and allowing us to innovate faster are on their way to doing that. Let us not have a trade war disrupt that and dismantle what has been history after history lesson of economic success of this Nation, fighting for open markets, capital opportunities, and investing in the ingenuity of America.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Trump Executive Orders (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President, last week, I came to the floor to talk about the chaos that has been created by the announced proposed freeze on Federal funding and loans. I want to share a few stories about what I have seen and heard since I spoke on the floor last week.
Sharpsburg is near my home town of Springfield, IL. It has a water system in Christian County. It is in phase 3 of construction of a rural water project. It contains 18 miles of pipeline providing water to 50 new rural customers. The work is underway. The project is nearly complete, and it will be in jeopardy if there is a freeze permitted to take effect.
What does it mean? It means that these 50 homes and families will be without clean, safe, and affordable water. That is unacceptable.
The freeze also means that scientists at universities across the State are worried about their jobs and research. Parents of children with disabilities are worried about losing resources for their kids. Adults are worried about losing access to healthcare and social services.
Since then, not one but two judges have issued temporary restraining orders blocking President Trump's measure. As of yesterday evening, that pause has been extended.
But let me remind you: This freeze is unconstitutional. The Constitution gives the power to Congress, not to the President--the power of the purse--and the President has no legal authority to withhold funding that was signed into law for Americans on a bipartisan basis.
In the 1970s, former President Nixon tried to impound or withhold funding appropriated by Congress, and, in response, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, or the ICA. The ICA is still the law of the land, and it prohibits Presidents from withholding funds unless Congress approves the decision through outlined procedures.
But consider this: The current administration, apparently, does not care. The President and his people are ignoring the law, creating chaos in hopes that amidst the confusion, some part of his power grab will stick. He is testing the limits of how much he can chip away at our system of checks and balances.
There are reports that unelected Elon Musk and his ``government efficiency team'' now have access to the payment systems of the U.S. Treasury, which is essentially the checkbook of the entire Federal Government. Elon Musk tweeted to say he is planning to cut $4 billion in Federal spending every single day from now to September 30--$4 billion a day.
I am appalled to see so many of my Senate Republican colleagues falling in line as President Trump and Mr. Musk attempt to strip Congress of our constitutional authorities and cause this kind of pain to our constituents. I am disappointed to see so many of my Republican colleagues vote to advance the nomination of President Trump's pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought. If this funding stunt is any indication, he is not fit to run that office.
The damage from the freeze extends beyond our shores. Bipartisan, congressionally appropriated funds to provide lifesaving humanitarian aid and freedom in places like Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea have been ground to a halt. For example, programs like PEPFAR, started by President George W. Bush--and I give him credit for that--with the support of the evangelical community and its partner, the Global Fund, have dramatically curtailed the AIDS epidemic ravaging parts of the world. The program has saved more than 25 million lives. It has been so effective that some have forgotten just how devastating AIDS happened to be in that part of the world, killing more than 2 million a year globally and leaving 14 million--14 million--orphans in sub-Saharan Africa.
Further, USAID clean water and sanitation programs have provided more than 70 million people with first-time sustainable access to clean water in the last decade--programs that have a 6-to-1 return in dollars saved in health, economic, and educational returns.
Low-cost vaccination programs eradicated smallpox and almost eradicated polio from the face of the Earth--something that was unimaginable just a generation ago. Food grown by American farmers helps save millions of lives when war and natural disasters strike. Gutting such programs puts innocent lives and American influence across the globe at risk. It is senseless, counterproductive, ill-informed, and increases the likelihood of costlier interventions that don't respect borders, including pandemics, war, and failed states.
The United States cannot and should not stand alone in the world. We are a global leader, and we have an obligation to continue to act like it.
But over the weekend, in what sounded like a dystopian story from an otherworldly dictatorship, the Trump administration and Elon Musk tried to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development without congressional approval. Try to imagine that disgraceful scene, as one of the world's richest men gleefully guts programs for some of the world's poorest people.
And don't be fooled--this isn't about reform, and the U.S. budget deficit won't be solved by gutting USAID. The foreign assistance budget is only 1 percent of our Federal spending--a small, powerful investment that is not only the right thing to do but the smart thing to do to prevent conflict and famine and failed states as well as to build alliances and friends around the world. Gutting such programs is a betrayal of American values.
Already, nations like China sense a strategic opportunity under President Trump. When these programs go away, the Chinese will step in.
Are Republicans going to roll over and cede congressional power on these bipartisan programs? I sincerely hope not.
There is a lot at stake in the first few weeks of this new administration. I want to give the President a chance to show his values, but so far, I have to tell you, there is a lot of disappointment. This temporary freeze hurt a lot of innocent people, and this notion now of shutting down USAID--I can't imagine Elon Musk would have it on his conscience that so many helpless people would lose the basics of life for his budget plan. He wasn't elected to anything, and I think we should return to the Constitution, which still guides us today and should.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, today, we find ourselves in a pivotal moment in American history, and millions of Americans, by their actions or lack of action, will determine the future of our country for decades.
In my view, the Trump administration is moving this country very aggressively into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multibillionaires. The Trump administration is moving this country very aggressively into an authoritarian society, where the rule of law and our Constitution are being ignored and undermined in order to give more power to the White House and the billionaires who now control our government. The Trump administration is moving this country very rapidly toward a kleptocracy, where the function of government is not to serve the needs of ordinary people but to enrich those who are in power.
Mr. President, I think that today is a very good day to recall what one of our great Presidents said at Gettysburg in November of 1863. Looking out at a battlefield where thousands of Union soldiers had just sacrificed their lives in the defense of freedom and the ending of slavery, Abraham Lincoln famously stated:
The soldiers did--
The great task remaining before us.
And this is how he concluded--
``Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth''--I fear very much that under President Trump we are not seeing a ``government of the people, by the people, for the people,'' but rather a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, and for the billionaire class.
And what is really interesting is that none of this is happening behind closed doors. It is not being done in secret. It is right out there for everybody to see.
Several weeks ago, Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term as President. Standing right behind him were the three richest men in America: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Combined, these three men are worth $920 billion. These three men own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, 170 million people--three guys, 170 million people. And I should point out--and this should tell you exactly where we are going as a nation--these three men, the wealthiest three in America, have become some $232 billion richer since Trump was elected, a few weeks ago--three guys, $232 billion richer since Trump was elected.
This is how an oligarchic system works. Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world and now a key part of the Trump administration, spent over $277 million to get Trump elected. In other words, within a corrupt campaign finance system, which allows billionaires to spend as much as they want, he helped buy the election for Mr. Trump.
Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the second and third wealthiest people in our country, both kicked a million dollars each into Trump's inauguration fund. And let us remember that Mr. Bezos who, among other things, owns the Washington Post, rescinded the endorsement of that paper for Kamala Harris just before the election.
Mr. Bezos was showing early on that he was willing to bend the knee for Donald Trump. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, agreed to settle a lawsuit with Trump for $25 million.
These three multibillionaires are working with Trump for one very simple reason: They understand that Trump's policies are designed to make the very wealthiest people in this country even richer.
Since Trump's election, Mr. Musk has become $154 billion richer--not bad in a couple of weeks' time. He earned a great investment. He only spent a couple of hundred million on the election, and now he is $154 billion richer.
Mr. Bezos has become $35 billion richer, and Mr. Zuckerberg has become $43 billion richer.
I am concerned not only about the growing movement toward oligarchy in this country, but I am deeply worried that, under the leadership of President Trump, we are moving rapidly toward authoritarianism.
All over this country, people are alarmed and shocked by what they have seen in the last several weeks.
Just a few examples--just a few: Last week, President Trump attempted to suspend all Federal grants and loans, in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution and Federal law.
As every third grader in America knows--or I hope knows--the power of the purse in the United States belongs to Congress, not the President. Yes, the President can recommend legislation to Congress. The President can veto legislation Congress has passed. But he does not have the power to unilaterally terminate funding and legislation that has been passed by the U.S. Congress. That is a dangerous and blatantly unconstitutional act.
And I should add that Trump's blocking of Federal funding would have had a horrific impact on millions of Americans who utilize programs like Medicaid, Head Start, community health centers, Meals on Wheels, homeless veterans programs, and many, many other initiatives. Tens of millions of Americans, including some of the most vulnerable in our country, were impacted by that decision.
But that is not all.
A few days ago, Trump fired 17 inspectors general, independent government watchdogs that were created by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal to prevent the abuse of power by the executive branch.
Last week, President Trump fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board, and in so doing, effectively neutered the only Federal Agency in America with the authority to hold corporations accountable for illegal union busting and to protect the constitutional right of millions of workers who want to join unions in order to earn better wages, working conditions, and benefits. Not only is that move blatantly illegal, it is exactly what Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, and Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, have been fighting for months. They don't like unions, and what Mr. Trump has given them is the opportunity to make it much, much harder for workers to organize in their companies.
President Trump also illegally fired members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the only independent Commission in our country that protects workers against discrimination in the workforce.
Further, and what should upset every American--no matter whether you are conservative, moderate, or progressive--is that, in direct violation of the Constitution and Federal law, Trump is intimidating the media, with lawsuits against ABC, CBS, Meta, and the Des Moines Register. His FCC is now threatening to investigate PBS and NPR. What Trump is essentially saying to every media outlet in America: If you say or do anything that is critical of me, that displeases me, you may be subject to a lawsuit or a Federal investigation.
If that is not a direct attack on the First Amendment, on the U.S. Constitution, and on free speech in our country, I don't know what is.
But that is not all.
Elon Musk and his unelected minions at DOGE have forced out officials at the Treasury Department and illegally shut down USAID, a program which, among other things, helps feed and provide medical help to starving and desperate children all over the world.
Presidents, much less unelected billionaires, do not have the unilateral right to shut down Federal Agencies established by Congress.
And when we talk about the very dangerous movement toward authoritarianism that we are seeing in this country now, let us not forget Trump's pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists who injured 174 police officers right here, right outside this floor. Even worse, not only did he pardon those people, but Trump is undermining the FBI by actually investigating the agents there who helped bring these violent criminals to justice. Imagine that, pardoning the people who broke the law and investigating the people who upheld the law. That is not what America is supposed to be about.
And under Trump we are rapidly moving toward a kleptocracy as well. Just before the President was inaugurated, he and his wife launched their own cryptocurrency coins, giving them the potential to earn many billions of dollars.
If Wall Street CEOs tried to bribe the President with a bag full of money, that would be illegal; that is against the law. But now they don't have to do that. Today, if a multibillionaire or the head of a foreign country wants to curry favor with the President, all they have to do is buy his cryptocurrency coins; and when they do that, they are directly enriching Mr. Trump.
So the question that millions of Americans are asking is, given the move toward oligarchy, given the move toward authoritarianism, given the movement toward kleptocracy, where do we go from here? What should we, as Americans, be doing?
Let me tell you what I think and what most Americans think; and that is, instead of moving toward an economy which is designed to benefit the very richest people in our country, we have got to create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just for Mr. Musk or Mr. Bezos or Mr. Zuckerberg.
At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, we have never had more income and wealth inequality than we have had right now. It is beyond stupidity to provide more tax breaks to the very richest people in our country and then to pay for those tax breaks by cutting back on Medicaid and other programs desperately needed by working families all across this country. That is what we should not be doing.
But let me take a moment to tell you what we should be doing. At a time when 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured in our broken healthcare system, we have got to do what every other major country on Earth does, and that is guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right, not a privilege. That is what we have got to do.
At a time when one out of four Americans cannot afford the outrageously high prices that the pharmaceutical industry charges, we have got to end the absurdity of the American people paying by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We have got to cut the cost of medicine in this country in half, making it comparable with what the rest of the world is paying.
The Federal minimum wage today is $7.25 an hour. That is a starvation wage. While 60 percent of our people--60 percent of Americans--live paycheck to paycheck, we must raise that minimum wage to a living wage, at least $17 an hour. If you work 40 hours a week in the richest country on Earth, you should not be living in poverty.
Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos want to make it harder for workers to join unions. Well, we have got to do exactly the opposite: Make it easier for workers to join unions by passing the PRO Act.
At a time when we need the best educated workforce in the world, we need to have the best public schools in the world, and, among other things, that means we need to substantially raise teachers' salaries. We need to attract the best and the brightest young people into education, and we do that, among other things, by making sure that no teacher in America earns less than $60,000 a year. We also radically reform our broken childcare system so the little kids in this country get the quality care they need and the workers there are adequately compensated.
All over this country, from Vermont to L.A., we have a major housing crisis, and it is not just the 800,000 Americans who are homeless; it is millions of working families who are spending 40, 50, or 60 percent of their limited incomes on housing.
Instead of spending almost $1 trillion a year on a wasteful and bloated Pentagon budget, we have to build millions of units of low- income and affordable housing. When we do that, we put large numbers of American workers to work at good-paying, union jobs.
I have heard time and again from Mr. Trump's supporters that the President won the election and he has been given this huge mandate-- just an overwhelming mandate--to do whatever he wants. Well, no President has the right to move us to oligarchy or authoritarianism or kleptocracy. But more important, let's not forget that while Trump did win this election, he actually received 4 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020 when Biden won the election.
So here we are. Where do we go? What do we do? I think now is the time for the American people to come together, to not allow those who want to divide us up by the color of our skin or our sexual orientation or where we were born--that is what they want to do. They want to divide us up. Now is the time for us to come together like never before and make certain we do not move toward oligarchy, make certain we do not move toward authoritarianism or a kleptocracy.
Most important, in the richest country in the history of the world, we must understand that we have the capability of providing a decent life for all of our people. We can do that when we stand together and we don't let folks divide us.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
Tariffs (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President, I am happy to be on the floor this afternoon with my colleague from New England, Senator Welch from Vermont. We are neighboring States that have been spooning for a very long time. But we are here today to talk about a very serious issue, and that is the tariffs that President Trump is talking about imposing on goods from Canada and Mexico and the impact that will have on Americans.
On Saturday, President Trump announced a 25-percent tariff, which would be a tax on imported goods from Canada and Mexico; and a 10- percent tariff, which would amount to a tax on imported energy from Canada and on all goods for China--so 10 percent on all goods for China and 10 percent on energy for Canada.
He has also threatened universal tariffs on all countries. Thankfully, the tariffs that he announced on Canada and Mexico appear to have been delayed for a month, but the tariff taxes on China are now in effect. Even though many of these tariff taxes were delayed, they are still scheduled to go into effect next month, and they have created unnecessary panic and uncertainty among businesses and families across the country and in New Hampshire.
I want to point out in the beginning, very clearly, that it is not foreign countries who pay these tariff taxes. It is Americans who pay these tariff taxes. These are tariff taxes on imported goods, meaning that the person or company who is importing the good will be footing the bill. And these costs will be passed on to American consumers and businesses.
You don't have to take my word for it. Best Buy's CEO said:
And Walmart's CFO said:
Columbia Sportswear's CEO said about tariffs:
If we look at the cost of just the tariff taxes that were originally announced on Saturday, those would raise costs for the average American household by more than $1,200 a year. If we get into a trade war, with increasingly high tariffs on both sides--and that is what appears could be happening with China--those costs will go up even more.
President Trump campaigned on a promise to lower prices for everything. The tariffs that he is talking about would have the exact opposite effect.
I am glad the administration and the President listened to reason. He delayed the start of these tariffs. But I hope we don't have to be back here in a few weeks making this case again.
I want to make sure that people understand what these tariff taxes will do and highlight some of the areas where Americans would be directly affected.
First is energy. America imports more oil and gas from Canada than any other product. In New Hampshire, more than half of the gas in people's cars comes from Canada. These tariff taxes would make gas prices go up, and they
President Trump's new 10 percent tariff tax on energy from Canada would also directly raise the cost of keeping warm for Granite Staters during the coldest months of this year. In New Hampshire, our No. 1 import from Canada is heating oil, and nearly a quarter of a million households in New Hampshire--that is about 40 percent of our households; more than Vermont, I think--rely on fuel oil to heat their homes. We are the second highest State in the Nation, next to Maine, that relies on No. 2 heating oil to heat our homes. Another 100,000 Granite Staters rely on propane, and about 30,000 homes use wood.
So that is about 60 percent of New Hampshire that relies on delivered fuel to stay warm. Much of that is coming from Canada. The average home in New Hampshire on heating oil uses about 600 gallons in a winter. And for older, draftier homes--and, sadly, we have a lot of those in New Hampshire, those who are further up north--families may be using upward of 1,000 gallons a winter. And with temperatures dipping as low as 20 below zero in the State in recent weeks, heating oil is a real necessity.
My constituents are already getting notices. I don't know, Senator Welch, if the same is true of your constituents, but I bet it is. They are saying those notices tell them their costs are going to go up if these tariffs go into effect.
On Sunday, I heard from Derek in Sandwich, NH, who received a letter from his heating supplier, Irving Oil, that informed him that his bill for heating oil would be going up.
The letter stated:
The letter went on to describe that the tariff costs will be added to the price that he pays, even though he already has a contract.
Derek wrote to me:
It is a real hardship.
On Inauguration Day, this year, heating oil cost an average of $3.93 a gallon in New Hampshire. Tacking an ill-advised 10-percent tariff tax on heating oil from Canada could mean about $150 to $250 more for many in New Hampshire just to keep warm through the winter. And while for Elon Musk and his billionaire friends and the billionaire friends of the President $150 to $250 may not sound like a lot in a winter, there are a lot of people in New Hampshire for whom $150 to $250 is the difference between staying warm and being cold in the winter.
Let me also be clear: We don't use gas and heating oil from Canada because we don't produce it here in the United States. We do it because it makes logistical and economic sense, because in New England, we are at the end of the pipelines that are coming from Texas and the South.
The United States produces more oil than any other country in the history of the world. That was true during the last 3 years of the first Trump administration. It was true for the last four years of the Biden administration. But for New Hampshire, the St. John refinery in Canada simply provides us the closest, lowest cost supply. And, by the way, that refinery sources as much as half of its crude oil from the United States. So it is helping oil producers in the United States send their oil to the refinery, and we get it back in New Hampshire and New England.
President Trump campaigned on cutting energy prices in half. Reckless tariffs on Canada and Mexico would make those prices higher, not lower. New Hampshire families shouldn't be punished for what the Wall Street Journal has just called ``The Dumbest Trade War in History.''
That is not all. These tariff taxes will affect groceries because the United States imports 38 percent of our fresh vegetables, 60 percent of our fresh fruit, and more than 99 percent of the coffee that we drink. If we take all these together, Americans could be seeing an extra $200 a year on their grocery bills because of the Trump tariff tax. That doesn't include the longer term impact of taxes on farm equipment or fertilizer. America imports about 85 percent of the potash fertilizer we use, and much of that comes from Canada.
We already have record-high prices for coffee and eggs--if you can find eggs. Some groceries stores are sold out. One of the things that just happened in the last week is that because of the stop-work order that President Trump put on our services that we provide overseas to track bird flu, we are no longer tracking the bird flu that has helped drive up the cost of eggs. So it could get worse, and we are not even going to know about it until we see those prices reflected at the grocery store.
Any new 25 percent tariff tax on these imports would make our food more expensive at a time when families are already stretching and straining their household budgets.
Tariffs sometimes get talked about as a way to support American manufacturers, but that also misses the mark. Half of the products the United States imports are either raw materials or intermediate components, and that means the parts we make into cars or electronics. All of these inputs would get more expensive for American manufacturers, which is only going to make it harder for them to compete internationally.
One of the messages I hear regularly from businesses is that uncertainty is one of the hardest things for them to deal with. One example of this is a call I got 2 weeks ago from a small business owner in New Hampshire who sells specialized agricultural equipment both in the United States and overseas. This is a family business with five employees. His father founded it 50 years ago. He reached out specifically because he is worried about what tariffs on the components he buys from Canada could do to his business. For the specialized equipment that he needs, there aren't a lot of manufacturers out there. So he reached out to my office asking if he was going to have to pay $5,000 more in costs for each of the machines he sells.
He took over this business just a couple of years ago, and he has been working to invest to modernize it and expand. Now he has to worry about whether he can try to grow the business, whether he might face new foreign competition, or even if he can pay out bonuses or give raises to his employees. He can't even be certain what kind of pricing schedule he should send out for the year because his costs could go up $5,000 next month.
Last week, I heard from another small business, Granite State Packing. It is a startup meat processing company that is only 2 years old. They started just 2 years ago, and they already have 10 employees.
Last year, they actually got $1.6 million in a grant from USDA to expand their operations. That is going to allow them to double their workforce. In order to expand, they placed an order for $500,000 in new equipment because the specialized equipment they use isn't made in the United States.
Now, depending on how and when these tariffs go into effect and when their equipment might get delivered, they could be looking at a bill-- an increased bill--for $125,000. That is going to affect whether they can follow through on the expansion, whether they can actually add the staff they want to add, and they don't have any way of knowing if they are going to face an unexpected $125,000 bill because President Trump and this administration haven't made up their minds what they are going to do about these tariffs.
Over the weekend, I had another business owner from C&J Bus Lines. They run a great bus line from the seacoast of New Hampshire to Boston. The owner told me that they have ordered seven buses from Quebec, new buses. They are made in Quebec. These tariffs would add $150,000 to the cost of each bus. Between that and the higher fuel costs they would pay, they could be looking at $1.3 million more in added costs this year because of the Trump tariff tax.
No small business can easily just absorb a 25-percent price increase, nor can they plan on how to grow their business and keep providing good-paying jobs with this kind of uncertainty.
Make no mistake, I am glad the administration delayed these tariffs. I hope they understand how this action
Let me finally just talk about the housing impacts because New Hampshire has an affordable housing crisis. These tariffs would make that worse.
Lumber makes up about 15 percent of the cost of building a house, and a lot of building materials, in addition to lumber, are imported. The National Association of Homebuilders wrote in part that ``imposing additional tariffs on these imports will . . . ultimately be passed on to home buyers in the form of increased housing prices.'' That means that this 25 percent tariff tax would directly add to the cost of building a home at a time when too many Granite Staters and too many Americans across the country already can't afford housing.
We shouldn't pretend that American tariffs are going to go unanswered. Other countries are going to retaliate. Getting into a tit- for-tat trade war is not going to help working Americans pay their bills.
Families across New Hampshire and America are worried about the high cost of housing, about the cost of groceries, and about what it costs to heat their homes. Business owners are similarly worried about costs or unexpected expenses. I am hearing regularly from them about the impact of the uncertainty on their ability to grow their businesses because of these tariffs.
President Trump promised during his campaign to ``lower the price of everything,'' but instead of doing something to lower costs, what he is doing now, what his administration is doing, is planning to add a 25- percent tariff tax to countless imports from Canada and Mexico, and they have already added a 10-percent tariff tax on goods coming in from China.
Again, while this was delayed at the last minute, this would raise costs for everything from groceries, to housing, to energy. It would disproportionately hit lower income families.
I am glad for the delay--I don't want people to misunderstand that-- but how is a business or a family supposed to plan when they don't know if important costs like gas or heating or groceries are going to spike any day?
I want to finish by reading a quote here. The quote says:
That is a quote from Scott Bessent, the new Treasury Secretary who just got confirmed, when he wrote to his investors just a year ago. I happen to agree with what he said then, but unfortunately the administration he just joined seems to be willing to risk more inflation.
These sweeping tariff tax increases would hurt American families, businesses, and workers. I am glad the taxes on goods from Canada and Mexico were delayed. I hope this administration can provide everyone with certainty that they won't go into effect next month.
I yield to my colleague from Vermont.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, everything my colleague, the senior Senator from New Hampshire, said about New Hampshire and about how people are really struggling to pay their bills, the cost of rent, the cost of housing, home heating fuel in the winter, which has been brutal, groceries--that is totally the same situation for families in Vermont, and it is around the country. I can't add, really, to the recitation of the practical consequences that this has on businesses and on Vermont families beyond what Senator Shaheen said.
But it really mystifies Vermonters. People come up to me, and they say, ``Peter, seriously, this is going to increase our grocery prices. This is going to mean lumber is more expensive. This is going to mean home heating fuel''--and we rely on Canadian gas probably more than you do--but also home heating fuel. ``This is going to raise our prices.'' And that 150 bucks to 200 bucks you are talking about--that is real money.
They just are mystified that we would, through the President, increase their monthly bills. And for what reason?
You know, I want to talk a little bit about that. New Hampshire and Vermont--we mostly get along, but we are rivals in hockey and other things. But we both have incredibly close relationships with Canada. They are our friends. We have a library in Derby, VT, that is half in Vermont and half in Canada, and our kids are going back and forth to play hockey. That is just on a very personal level, the affection that we have for Canada and they have for us. They come down and ski on our mountains. They come down and visit, and we go up there.
There is an element of ``Peter, what is going on? National security is the reason you are doing this? Is there a threat from Canada to our national security? We know there isn't.''
So this is an arbitrary decision that is made by the President, in my view, abusing authority that Congress gave him to use tariffs if there is, in fact, a national security threat, which all of us in a commonsense way would think might be something from a military threat or it might be from the coercive economic policies we face from China. There is a legitimate case there for national security. But Canada has been in the trenches with us in every war we have had. They have been by our side. They are our friends.
You know, that is another thing people say: Peter, you don't treat your friends this way. You just don't do that.
So I had a concern about what the impact was on Vermont, and instead of me speculating about it, what we did is invited some Vermonters who had businesses and some Vermont families to come and tell us what is going to happen if we have these tariffs. Let me tell you some of what they said.
We met in Saint Albans, which is a few miles from the Canadian border. I asked these businesses: Just tell us what happens.
First of all, there was nobody from these businesses who said that the cost of this tariff would not be passed on to the consumer, all right? Common sense. It is like somehow, if there is a 25-percent increase in cost, the business can just eat it, when we know, especially our small businesses, they are operating on the margin. They are doing every single thing they can to make their product competitive and affordable for the people they are serving. These are really, really good people who are totally committed to the communities they are in. Every one of them said that whatever the cost of the tariff is, that is going to be passed on to the consumer--not that they like to do that, but they have to pay their own bills. It is just reality.
The second thing they talked about was the uncertainty that occurs for businesses. One business was talking about how, when these tariffs go in--by the way, we have some history with this from the last Trump administration. There was supposedly a tariff, but if you knew the back entrance into the White House and could make a connection with somebody who had influence, you could get an exemption. So you get this terrible situation--which is not going to be available, by the way, for our Vermont fuel dealers or our Vermont homebuilders. If you knew somebody, you somehow got out of the tariff. And there was no guidance about how these tariffs would have been rolled out, so there was an enormous opportunity for special treatment to be given.
But even then, there is the complexity of this. For instance, one manufacturer was talking about if you got a certain kind of aluminum, it was subject to the tariff, but if you got an ever so slightly different definition of aluminum, you wouldn't be subject to the tariff. So you have a whole production process that has been using aluminum A that would be subject to a tariff, and if you go to aluminum B--if you can find it--it won't be subject to a tariff. If you got a square panel, it would be subject; if it was rectangular, it wouldn't. I mean, this is truly bizarre because there is no common sense in this at all.
So I keep asking the question: Why? Why are we doing this? Why are we inflicting this complexity on our businesses? Why are we inflicting this cost on our consumers and on our businesses? And there is no justification for it at all.
So let me go through some of the stories:
Garret Hirchak at Manufacturing Solutions--they do precision machining.
This company has been in business for 29 years, and it employs 275 people. That is a big deal in our State of Vermont--a big deal. Why mess with him? Why?
Rock Gaulin at H2O Innovation--they make--we have better maple syrup than New Hampshire, I am sorry to say, and definitely better than Canada. They make the equipment that is used in maple syrup production, and this is going to increase their costs and threaten jobs.
And it really does threaten jobs, OK. And then, if you lose a market, by the way, then it is hard to get it back. So this company that might face this huge increase in the cost of aluminum to manufacture its product could lose market share and not be able to claw their way back.
Mike Tetreault from Poulin Grain: Poulin Grain is a great Franklin County, family-run--actually Northeast Kingdom, too--family-run grain dealer. They have been around for generations. And they have kept--they are a huge contribution to keeping our dairy farms going. They import organic grain, a huge market in Vermont. Their products are heavy to transport--think of corn and canola and oats--so they need to buy nearby, and they buy from Canada. And importantly, it is 30 to 40 percent of what they buy. And these tariffs could cost them about $10 million.
And it is just like the fuel dealers. They have got a contract, but they honor their customers. They can't eat $10 million. It just can't be done.
So the Poulin family is really worried about the costs rising for farmers, who are on the thinnest of thin margins. And nobody works harder than our dairy farmers. That is hard work. But it is so important to us in the State of Vermont, that we give them every chance to succeed when they are facing tough odds every day.
And why in the world would an act of the President of the United States add to the burden these dairy farmers already face when they are trying to hang on? It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Mike also said something that is really important: The unknown and uncertainty is very difficult.
There seems to be a point of view in the Trump administration--the President, I will be candid--that he thinks chaos is a good negotiating tool. I will leave it to others to decide their view on that, but if the chaos creates this uncertainty for the Poulin Grain Company, for the dairy farmers in Franklin County, for a family that is hoping they can build a house and they thought they had a price, for a family that is struggling to pay for groceries at the end of the month, that uncertainty is really an infliction of distress. It is unfair.
And to create uncertainty in everyday people who are trying to live in their community, do a good job for the people that they serve; families that are trying to make their contribution in the community and keep the well-being of their family together, and they are on a tight margin--it is cruel to inflict unnecessary uncertainty.
The people from Vermont, the people from New Hampshire--and I think this is true around the country--they are OK with facing hard and grim circumstances, and they will grit their way through it. And they will take care of their kids, and they will take care of their community. They will be generous.
But--you know what--when the hardship that is something they have to deal with is a hardship that has been arbitrarily inflicted upon them by authorities or powers in Washington--in this case, the President-- and, in my view, totally improper invocation of so-called national security with our biggest ally, Canada, then they start to wonder. That makes the burden even more and more difficult.
So another person was there, Sarah Mearhoff, who was a representative of the General Contractors of Vermont. And they do all the building. They have been incredible with the infrastructure challenges we have had after Tropical Storm Irene--that was a while ago--and then the floods that we had in July of 2023 and then again in July of 2024.
The cost of raw materials is already very expensive. And she quoted one of her members--Kevin Moyer from Vermont Frames--saying:
So I keep asking myself: Why are we doing this to folks who are so essential to the well-being of the communities that we represent?
And, by the way, you have got two border State Senators here. And we have a lot in common, but everything we have said applies to similar businesses in every single State in the country. So this is not a Republican or Democrat deal. These tariffs are going to cost our families--our families that the Presiding Officer represents, that the senior Senator from New Hampshire represents, and that I represent--it is going to cost them more money. And for what? What are we getting in return?
So I, too, am very relieved, actually, on behalf of the people of Vermont and the people in New Hampshire and the people of this country, that there has been a temporary pause in these tariffs, but the uncertainty goes on. There will be no more justification 30 days from now to impose these tariff taxes on Vermonters and on New Hampshirites than there is today. And today, there is no justification. In 30 days, there will be no justification.
And I would call on the President to get real in accepting the consequences to everyday families, to small businesses. These aren't billionaires. These are really hard-working people in Vermont and in New Hampshire, and they just, rightly, don't understand this.
So, yes, it is good the tariffs have been suspended. It is really bad that they were ever threatened to be imposed. They will never do any good when there is a bogus reason--so-called national security--and a real abuse of that authority by the President, to invoke that with respect to our closest ally and neighbor in the trenches with our soldiers in every war we have been in.
So I just urge President Trump to do the right thing here. He can be tough. He can pursue his policies. But the first principle that every one of us in public office should respect is that we do no harm to the people we represent by the policies we advocate.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Usaid (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President, over the past 2 weeks, political operatives in the administration of President Trump and Elon Musk have shown the American people and the world that they plan to destroy as much of the professional workforce in the executive Agencies as they can get away with.
Whether it is illegal--and it is--or unconstitutional--and it is--is of no concern. Inspectors general and career civil servants who have served the American people for decades--some for their entire professional lives--are being summarily removed without any due process at all--due process they are legally entitled to.
They are being replaced with Musk-approved partisans who have little, if any, government experience or little, if any, substantive knowledge. They do have a qualification, and that is total loyalty to the President.
On top of Mr. Musk's list of Agencies to eliminate in the United States is the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, as we know it. That has been the subject of a ferocious attack by Mr. Musk.
That Agency is one that not many Americans know about but which fulfills a vital mission. It has a relatively small budget--less than 1 percent of the total Federal budget--and it has a large responsibility to support humanitarian, economic development, and governance programs in more than 100 countries.
Whatever ``savings'' Elon Musk might obtain from cutting USAID would have no appreciable impact in
Mr. Musk--and, by the way, for all his brilliance, he has no government experience himself--he called USAID a ``criminal organization.'' Dozens of USAID's dedicated senior officials, including the Office of the General Counsel, were purged. That has not happened before. That has not happened before in this country. And over the weekend, Musk called USAID ``evil'' and a ``viper's nest of radical- left marxists who hate America.''
Others in the administration have accused USAID personnel of insubordination and acting against American interests without producing any evidence to back that up, reminiscent of the McCarthy era: Make the accusation, destroy the reputation, and move on. That is a serious question, and we should--each of us--be asking the implications of this language.
I find Mr. Musk's accusations appalling. I know they are factually baseless, and, frankly, I find them despicable. It is also curious because, in 2022, his company Starlink received millions of dollars from USAID for Starlink's operation in Ukraine, not to mention the incredible amount of taxpayer subsidies that helped Tesla become the major company that it is. Mr. Musk--he is a billionaire, as we know-- has no reluctance to take taxpayer funds from USAID. None. He took money from USAID. It was a good organization when the money was coming to him to help us in Ukraine, but now he is calling it a criminal organization.
And I doubt that he knows what 99 percent of USAID employees do or the positive impact they have on the lives of people around the world and on U.S. national security--the obligation all of us have as Members of the U.S. Senate. I wonder if he has ever met or has ever spoken to anyone who works at any of the 60 overseas missions or seen with his own eyes what USAID does in countries like Indonesia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Mozambique, Ghana, or Guatemala, just to name a few, where the lives of countless people really do benefit from USAID.
And being billionaires, President Trump and Elon Musk may not be aware that fully 1 billion people in the world live on less than $1 a day. They may not be aware that the lives of hundreds of millions of people, especially children, are threatened by diseases that can be prevented or cured with drugs that cost only a few pennies.
Or maybe Mr. Musk is not aware that the life of every American is threatened by the spread of infectious diseases. We saw that with COVID, and there is other diseases out there where what we do elsewhere protects the health and safety of people right here at home.
Or maybe Mr. Musk isn't concerned that the Earth's tropical forests and endangered species are being decimated by illegal miners, loggers, and wildlife traffickers, who are often in collusion with local police and transnational criminal organizations, to feed, by the way, China's insatiable demand for minerals, timber, and wildlife--consequences to the environment be damned. USAID works with local governments and organizations to protect forests in South and Central America, central Africa, and in Indonesia, and to train wildlife rangers to combat poaching and trafficking.
It may make absolutely no difference to Mr. Musk, as it clearly doesn't to President Trump, that the rising acidity of the oceans and plastic pollution are destroying what remains of the world's coral reefs and marine species at the bottom of the food chain, due to the burning of fossil fuels. And USAID works to protect marine ecosystems and support reduction of fossil fuels, carbon emissions, and reduced plastic waste.
Government corruption, repression, and impunity may not be a priority in other countries for President Trump and Elon Musk to take on, even though they are major causes of the poverty in the world, political instability and violence, narcotics trafficking and migration in our own hemisphere. So what happens in these countries makes a difference in what happens here, especially with respect to immigration.
And these are just a few of the many complex global problems that USAID personnel work to address every day--every single day--partnering with foreign governments and thousands of nongovernmental organizations. Those are real people; they are doing real work, even though they aren't CEOs. They are doing their best to address poverty, environmental degradation, corruption in governance.
It is affecting nongovernmental organizations, contractors, and institutions of higher education in Vermont, this attack on USAID. These are Vermont organizations that have a long history of implementing USAID humanitarian and development programs. I will mention a few. World Learning, Tetra Tech/ARD, Resonance, and the Vermont Afghan Alliance are examples; they are being decimated as a result of this order.
Suddenly, out of the blue, without even an hour's notice, these organizations and others were forced to shut down programs and lay off staff with no idea of what comes next. Many of their employees are working overseas where they are stranded without even the ability to have funds to pay for flights home. That is how sudden it was. And unlike Mr. Musk, they don't have their own private jets.
This sends a message to the people of those countries that the United States can't be relied on; it is pretty cruel to create that uncertainty, that confusion, and then that desperation.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, like any Federal Agency, is not perfect, and any time there is talk of reform coming from your side of the aisle or ours, I am all ears, because anything we can do to make what we have work better, we all have an obligation to do our part.
But USAID was established by an act of Congress more than 25 years ago, and constitutionally, no President and no unelected billionaire can unlawfully shut a congressionally authorized Agency down. There is no authority to do that, and we shouldn't stand by and essentially abdicate our article I authority and cede the capacity to a President to pick and choose among Agencies, legally authorized by the Congress, as to whether he will destroy it or continue it.
You know, some folks have said that shutting down USAID is part of the President's plan to reduce the national debt; it isn't. You know, I think the President cares a lot less about the national debt--it went up by more than $7 trillion to pay for tax cuts, and eliminating the USAID would make no dent in that at all.
Some have said that we need to better align USAID's programs with the policies of the State Department. That is something that is worth discussing, and I would have some confidence in Secretary Rubio taking a serious look at how that can be done.
But that is already being done, by and large. Diplomacy is the job of the State Department. It is not the same as development, which is what the USAID does. And you don't shut an Agency down, freeze billions of dollars in authorized programs, silence or remove entirely the senior staff, and lock thousands of employees out of their offices. I mean, this is unbelievable. They locked the door, so people show up for work and they can't get in. And you do that without any notice before having any discussion. This is the difference between disruption, that can be good, and destruction, which is terrible.
And I believe that it is our job as Senators to speak up in defense of the civil service, the foreign service, their families, USAID's autonomy, and the foreign assistance programs that Republicans and Democrats have strongly supported for generations, programs that have been the building blocks of U.S. security partnerships and alliances around the world that we depend on to prevent conflict, respond to humanitarian disasters, and by the way, create markets for U.S. exports and counter the malign influence of our adversaries.
As my colleague, the senior Senator from South Carolina, has said year after year when speaking about USAID:
He has been a consistent defender of USAID's workforce and budget, as have many other Republican Members of Congress, leaders of the U.S. business community, and senior military officers who understand that diplomacy
It wasn't long ago that Secretary Rubio--then our colleague Senator Rubio--praised USAID's work in global health, in aiding victims of natural disasters, in supporting Venezuelans who were persecuted by that dreadful Maduro. Until Elon Musk decided that it is ``time for [USAID] to die''--really said that, ``time for [USAID] to die''--USAID previously had always received bipartisan support.
This is no time for the Congress of the United States, the U.S. Senate, to stand by passively while an Agency that plays a unique, indispensable role in protecting the interests and the influence, the security and the reputation of the United States around the world is decapitated and dismantled. Those responsible for this self-inflicted disaster have no respect for the law, no respect for the will of Congress, and no respect for the thousands of truly patriotic public servants who have devoted their lives to defending the interests of the United States and presenting a positive face of America in some of the world's most dangerous places.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.
Nomination of Pamela Bondi (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President, shortly, Senate Republicans will confirm the nomination of Pam Bondi to serve as Attorney General and lead the Department of Justice in the new administration.
Yesterday, I came to the Senate floor to discuss the Trump administration's decision to purge Department of Justice officials and warned that Ms. Bondi's record suggests that she will aid in this effort to pack the Department of Justice with loyalists seeking retribution against President Trump's political rivals.
Since the Watergate era, there has been bipartisan support for the principle that the Department of Justice investigations and prosecutions must be independent from the White House. Over the years, both Republicans and Democrats have asked many individuals seeking the office of Attorney General one basic question: Will you be willing to tell the President no?
Given that Ms. Bondi, when speaking about President Trump's criminal indictments, threatened ``the prosecutors will be prosecuted, and the investigators will be investigated,'' I have serious doubts about her willingness to really say no to this President.
This concern is even more pressing because, over the last 16 days, the Trump administration has purged dozens of senior career law enforcement officials at the Department of Justice and at the FBI. This purge has been particularly focused on dedicated, nonpartisan prosecutors and investigators working in the National Security Division and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
On its first day, the Trump administration removed or reassigned as many as 20 experienced professionals with invaluable national security expertise, without any comparable replacements, including the veteran career Deputy Assistant Attorneys General in the National Security Division. These are men and women we have entrusted with the responsibility to keep America safe. They were summarily dismissed by this new President just days into his administration. Those who have been reassigned are reportedly being put in roles concerning immigration enforcement, for which they have little expertise.
We had a hearing this morning about fentanyl and talked about some 70,000 Americans each year losing their lives to this terrible drug. We are all concerned and expressed it at this hearing. But some of the very people who are working in drug enforcement are going to be removed and put into mass deportation of immigrants.
We have said over and over again that if the President is setting out to do what he promised he would do, he
Since that warning, dozens more senior officials have been removed. At the FBI, at least six FBI Executive Assistant Directors, or EADs, have been removed, including the EADs who oversee the National Security Branch, Intelligence Branch, and the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch. The Trump administration has also removed special agents in charge of at least four major field offices and the Assistant Director of the Washington Field Office.
The Acting Attorney General has also issued a memo firing dozens of career DOJ prosecutors, stating:
The Trump administration has even asked line attorneys and agents to retire, resign, or be fired simply for handling tasks linked to the investigation of President Trump or prosecution of his misconduct.
The Acting FBI Director informed the entire FBI workforce that he was reviewing the files of ``all current and former FBI personnel assigned at any time to investigations and/or prosecutions'' relating to January 6 and unrelated terrorism cases.
Mr. President, if you are a student of history, you know that when the communists took over the Soviet Union, one of the things that they gloried in doing was rewriting history, trying to make the bad chapters, the embarrassing chapters, the sad chapters different so that future generations never were really quite sure what happened. That is exactly what is going on with January 6, 2021.
Despite the graphic video evidence of what happened on that day when this insurrectionist mob tried to take control of this Capitol and stop the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joseph Biden--despite the clear evidence to the contrary, they continue to believe that this is a hoax, that somehow these were just tourists coming by the Capitol. Those of us who were there, those of us who remember the danger that was brought by these mobsters and thugs, know that is a lie.
Now they are going through the Department of Justice and saying: If you were involved in prosecuting any of these people who beat up on the policemen in this building, tore down the structures, broke the windows; if you were involved in any prosecution involving them, you are not welcome at the Department of Justice.
They want to rewrite history. They want future generations to believe the lie that they have perpetrated about what happened on that day. Those of us who were there will never forget what actually did happen.
The interim U.S. attorney for DC also ordered an internal review of staff handling cases relating to January 6, moved to dismiss all pending charges against those defendants, and has already fired dozens of prosecutors and investigators who worked those cases.
The people who were spared by the pardon of Donald Trump include individuals who are dangerous. One had a record of 38 convictions for crimes, and they are now back out on the street.
Over the past weekend, thousands of FBI personnel across the country were told to complete a questionnaire that asked a series of questions about their involvement in the prosecution and investigation of January 6.
This shameless partisan retribution is only the beginning. It has been reported that future FBI Director Kash Patel, if he is chosen by the Senate, will be guided by an advisory committee composed of solely partisan political operators, including an associate of Elon Musk's. Elon Musk. Who elected him? By what authority does he have any voice in the administration of our government? Why should he or his minions have access to the private records of American citizens? It is happening.
These actions will cripple FBI field offices and U.S. attorneys offices across the country by increasing the caseload for the remaining agents, dramatically slowing down critical investigations and prosecutions.
The Trump Department of Justice is taking this partisanship beyond the President's personal grievances, as many as there may be. They are already dropping criminal investigations against the President's allies, such as Congressman Andy Ogles. They also have begun systemically stripping the Department of Justice of vital, substantive expertise by reducing personnel from the law and policy sections of various divisions, such as the Environment and Natural Resources Division, which pursues polluters who poison our communities.
As America faces a heightened threat landscape, these shocking removals and reassignments of hundreds of employees deprive the Department of Justice and FBI of experienced leadership and decades of experience fighting violent crime, espionage, and terrorism.
For years, my Republican colleagues claimed they ``back the blue'' and accused Democrats of being soft on crime. We heard it over and over and over. But now, as President Trump is gutting our Nation's law enforcement Agencies and putting our national security at risk, my Republican colleagues do not complain. They are nowhere to be found.
Instead of condemning these actions, they will likely come to the Senate floor tonight and confirm an individual to lead the Department of Justice who is in lockstep with this policy of President Trump and was chosen for the role specifically because she is loyal. More than anything else, she is loyal.
I urge my colleagues to consider what a danger President Trump and Pam Bondi present to this Nation. I will oppose her confirmation and hope my colleagues will do the same.
I will also say letters went out today asking for further hearings on Kash Patel. I have been reading his response to the questions for the record--QFR--and I can tell you, they raise more questions than they answer. He has an attitude. To think this man will be in charge of 38,000 FBI agents and personnel, 400 field offices across the Nation and around the world, is going to have the authority to investigate those whom he chooses, is a frightening thing. His message in politics is ``get even.''
I read his book. It is called ``Government Gangsters.'' This book, in specific detail, talks about his view of politics. He has a long list of grievances, political and personal, and he plans to get even. That is not the kind of person we need in charge of the FBI. He has no experience to point to of any significance which qualifies him for this job.
We have had many Directors of the FBI chosen for long periods of time because of our change in the law. We now have a 10-year period of service for the Director of the FBI, and we also do our best to make sure they are apolitical since they bridge various administrations, not just one or two. That is part of the law, and that is the reason we did it.
Now we are going to put a man in that position who has no experience, no background, and a political chip on his shoulder. I am afraid that is just a recipe for disaster.
I urge my colleagues to think twice about Pam Bondi and Kash Patel. This is not what we should expect or want from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, I believe that the Attorney General may, in fact, be the most important position in a President's Cabinet, and if it is not the most important, it certainly is the most difficult.
Whoever is our Attorney General is a person that serves all of us. They have two clients. They have the President who appointed her or him and they have the Constitution.
Let me be clear that I have no objections to any President, including President Trump, appointing someone that the President is close to. President Kennedy appointed his brother. I do have a problem with any President seeing the job of Attorney General to be the person who runs ``my Justice Department,'' and that is how President Trump has characterized it--``my Justice Department.''
So we have this dilemma with respect to coming to a conclusion on the use of the responsibility that the Senate as an institution has for the advice and consent of a Cabinet member.
I start from the orientation that a President should be able to pick his team and that we should take up nominations and move on them, vote on them expeditiously. My orientation is that the President is entitled to the benefit of the doubt but not to a blank check.
What is also difficult for me with respect to this appointment is that, in my view, Pam Bondi is accomplished and competent and qualified. I have great respect for her work as a county prosecutor in Florida, and I have great respect for her work as attorney general in the State of Florida. I have great respect for the fact that, as a woman, she made that decision to run for attorney general and had to overcome pretty significant odds in order to win that position.
I also remember, Mr. Ranking Member, that she had great testimony from people whom she worked with, and I think both you and I have a great deal of respect for folks who have a leadership position and treat their subordinates with great respect and have their affection and confidence, and that came through in the testimony of people who have worked with Ms. Bondi.
My grave concern is really about President Trump and what he is clearly demanding of the person, whoever it is--and now it is Ms. Bondi--what the President is demanding, and that clearly is a loyalty oath to him as opposed to a demand for straightforward, candid advice, including, if the President is asking something to be done, like the prosecution of a political adversary, that the answer, Mr. President, has to be no. That is what the President is demanding. We can argue on both sides about whether that is the case, but the evidence is overwhelming.
The question that I have asked a number of nominees, including Mr. Patel and including Ms. Bondi, is, Who won the 2020 election? It is pretty clear that the President's team, in preparing folks for that inevitable question, came up with an acceptable answer. The acceptable answer is that President Biden was the President; President Biden was certified. No one could just say the straightforward: President Biden won.
In the closest election in our history, Bush v. Gore, after the Supreme Court made its decision, not only did Al Gore accept the outcome, but Democrats did, Americans did. That was pre-January 6 when we all relied on the guardrail in the Constitution that there would be a commitment to a peaceful transfer of power and that there would be renunciation of violence as a means of persuasion in the outcome of an election.
January 6 did change that. There was an attack on the Capitol. Many of us were here. That was inspired by President Trump. He invited people to come: ``It will be wild.''
It was provoked because the President used the enormous authority he had and the enormous credibility he had with people who supported him to begin peddling the ``Stop the Steal'' narrative; the election was stolen.
President Trump has never, ever given up on that. As far as he is concerned, he says to every person and every audience: That election is stolen.
People who were going to work in his administration, in a vetting process, had to answer that question in the way that was acceptable to then-duly elected President Trump. That is not acceptable to me. It is not acceptable.
President Biden won. President Trump won this last election. I didn't vote for him, but I can say it. I can acknowledge it and do the best I can as a member of the minority party.
But we now have a President who is now allowing a person to have a dual loyalty to him, yes, and to the Constitution, to make it clear for that person who is nominated for a law enforcement position, that they accept his narrative of what happened in 2020. It is really dangerous, in my view, for our country.
The President has gone on, much to my regret, intensifying that concern that many of us have as to whether there will be an adherence to the rule of law.
In an extraordinary first 2 weeks, the President has gone on--it is my opinion, but a lot of courts support it--a rampage of illegality. It is a serious threat to our country.
Let me start with the impoundment--you know, basic civics. The article I branch--that is the U.S. Senate and U.S. House--has authority over appropriations and spending. The executive can propose, and we can consider, an appropriations request. The President can reject an appropriations bill that Congress passes with a veto. But what the President can't do is pick and choose where he feels like spending or just disregarding the appropriations passed by the Congress of the United States. And he is doing that.
The impoundment is patently illegal, not even close. And what is clear to me is the President doesn't care if the impoundment causes enough havoc that affected agencies will either be destroyed or severely damaged.
Let me give a couple of examples. When that impoundment notice went out, Wells River Community Health Center in Vermont--it provides healthcare to really poor Vermonters, and they do an incredible job. They have a cash balance that allows them to stay in business from 0 to 5 days. That is it. The impoundment notice comes in, literally, they show up to work, and it says: You shut down. You can't open up tomorrow.
Those folks running that organization don't have the money to pay the salaries of anyone: the doctors, the receptionists, the medical providers.
We see what is happening at USAID: ``We are shutting you down.'' The doors are locked. People show up for work; they can't get in. That is illegal and unconstitutional, as I see it.
The administration, the President, has made a clear decision that he doesn't care. He is not going to worry about the niceties. Things that restrained Republican and Democratic Presidents before; namely, adherence to the law and recognition of their responsibility to preserve a tool that has been a safeguard for our democracy through both Republican and Democratic administrations, those rules don't apply to him.
Then we have seen that he has delegated authority to a nonelected billionaire--Mr. Musk--and told him, basically, to go wild with the Federal Government; do what you want; go where you want. And in one of the most astonishing things, they sent over--Musk sent over five kids. One of them is 19; he can't drink in Vermont--and four early-20-year- old folks. They marched in and the Treasury Secretary, basically, of the United States--the successor to Alexander Hamilton--a man I respect, by the way, Mr. Bessent, and the person who ran the payment system, and said: ``We are in charge.'' That is basically what they did.
Then they got access to the computers, which means they have your Social Security Number and mine. They have information about our taxes. Every individual in this country, their privacy has now been put in jeopardy.
Just think if this were the private sector. Let's say you are Jamie Dimon, and you run a major financial institution, J.P. Morgan, and five kids show up at your bank. They say: Hey, Mr. Musk sent us. Give us access to the computers.
And they have access to all the individual information, company information, of the folks who work with J.P. Morgan. That is what happened.
It is not really apparent to all the American people what is happening. It is the folks who are directly impacted by this, the folks at USAID who don't have a job, the folks at Wells River Clinic who are operating on the tightest of margins who have suffered and don't know whether they will be able to keep the lights on. It is the woman, the mom, who had, finally, after months and months of trying, a dental appointment through Medicaid--they had it canceled arbitrarily and abruptly. Those individuals are feeling it, and this is going to ripple out to more and more Americans seeing what is happening.
We need an Attorney General who will share my shock at a President acting in such a lawless way.
The fact is, frankly, I don't think President Trump ever in the world would place a value on having an Attorney General who is willing to tell him: Mr. President, no, you can't get appointed unless you pass the test. And the test was on full display both with Mr. Patel and Ms. Bondi in their inability to answer the basic question: Who won the 2020 election?
My concern is not that they ``get the answer right.'' My concern is that they
The President is not looking for anyone other than someone who is going to give him the fealty that he demands when these questions arise.
What we are seeing with the President in these first 2 weeks of his term is that there is no restraint. The rule of law is for suckers. He is going to break things, and whatever damage is done is not his problem.
The problem is, there are a lot of really innocent good Americans who are being affected by this: doctors and nurses, moms whose children get Medicaid help, lawyers who dedicated their career to civil rights or environmental protection.
There is a cruelty with the way in which the President has acted. It is almost a casual cruelty that just doesn't matter. So I am looking for some confidence that the checks and balances that are required, that we can build up.
Frankly, there is a major question that we face as a U.S. Senator and each of us as an individual Senator. I believe, at least to exercise our judgment--we won't agree, necessarily, and we may come to a different judgment about how best we can do what I think each of us is required to do, and that is to protect the institutional responsibility of the U.S. Senate to be an independent, separate branch of government and to adhere to the importance of the separation of powers, and that this institution has a fundamental responsibility to the American people to be a check and balance.
There are 100 of us here, and we may have 100 different opinions as to when it is that we should say no, but my hope is that every single one of us will accept that it is our responsibility to make that judgment and not just passively submit to whatever action the President is sending our way.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, I sit on the Judiciary Committee and was present for the confirmation hearing of Pam Bondi in her quest to be Attorney General of the United States.
I have to say that there is a lot to admire. She had been a competent prosecutor for many years. She was the twice-elected attorney general of a major State. And she said a lot of the right things about independence of the Department and rule of law.
What I couldn't get over was how things changed when she got to a topic that would have been sensitive to Donald Trump--something that would have gotten Donald Trump all twitchy. When she hit those topics, it was like, watching the plane fly into the Bermuda Triangle and all the navs and coms go crazy.
She couldn't say obvious things--things like: Did President Biden win the 2020 election? That is an easy answer: Yes, he did, sir--or ma'am. Super simple. When she can't say that, that is a sign.
When she told us that there had been a peaceful transfer of power--a roomful of Senators who have had to flee this Chamber because of the violence of January 6 and go and shelter in a secret location, and she had to tell us that there had been a peaceful transfer of power. Again, haywire.
No predication, she said. She couldn't say there was no predication to go after somebody like Liz Cheney or Jack Smith. Predication is the key to being able to opening a case like that. The predication is pretty apparent--or its lack is pretty apparent, and she could not agree that there was no predication to open a case.
Last, she pretended that the candidate for FBI did not have an enemies list. He had an enemies list. He published his enemies list. He said that the people on his enemies list were criminals. He said that now it is time to go on the manhunt for the enemies that he identified on the enemies list. So when she can't state the obvious, it causes real concern.
It causes real concern because of the lawlessness this administration has already demonstrated in the first 2 weeks.
She got a lot of questions about pardons: Would she support violent offenders in the January 6 attack on the Capitol being pardoned? We were chastised for having asked such questions by our Republican colleagues who said: You know, you are asking her ridiculous hypotheticals. That will never happen. Jim Jordan: Oh, that wouldn't happen. The President would never do that. Over and over again, Republicans said: Oh, that would never happen. Well, what happened? He pardoned the violent offenders.
In fact, some of them are already up to no good again. We have got some arrested for assaulting police officers. We had some shot in a violent confrontation with police officers. This is just in the 2 weeks since their pardons. And, here, soliciting a minor. That is the quality of people that the President was willing to pardon. So those pardons are another signal about a very strange and dangerous time that President Trump is taking us into.
As my colleague from Vermont just mentioned, we have got these little characters--I call them the muskrats--running around in Treasury, running around over at USAID, getting into systems where they have no business, where apparently they are not just able to get into the payment systems for Social Security and things like that--tax refunds, whatever--but they can actually manipulate the systems and they can leave backdoors so that Elon Musk can continue to access that data even after this raid by his little muskrats is over.
We don't know the details of what they have done, but there are probably a great number of laws, including privacy laws, that they are violating by running around without proper authorization through these enormous accounting databases. And of course the billionaires that helped bring Trump to office live off data. Now they have access to one of the biggest datasets in the world. Do you think they are going to be responsible about that? I sure don't.
Right now in Rhode Island, funds are frozen, and people can't get straight answers about how they will ever get access to funding that has been duly appropriated, authorized, and obligated. The freeze of those funds by the President is now in violation of not one but two court orders.
So the lawlessness is apparent, whether it is the muskrats running around in Treasury looking at everybody's files or whether it is court orders being patently violated or whether it is violent offenders being pardoned so they can go out and solicit minors again.
I mean, the whole thing really calls for probity and good judgment and adherence to constitutional norms from an Attorney General, and when she can't answer as simple a question as ``Did President Biden win the 2020 election?'' my alarms go off. And they particularly go off when we get to her FBI Director, Kash Patel. She suggested she would be able to rein him in. I have my doubts.
He made completely preposterous explanations of how his enemies list wasn't an enemies list, even though he had called those people ``criminals'' and that there would be a ``manhunt'' for them. He denied having a role with the J6 Choir, which was a singing group of violent attackers from January 6, and he had taken credit for producing their recording but pretended he didn't know that they were January 6 violent attackers.
He assured us that FBI agents would be protected against political retribution, which was beginning as he testified and which is going on at the Department right now--massive, unprecedented political retribution.
He won't tell us what he told a grand jury in proceedings in which he pled the Fifth Amendment. Well, if you plead the Fifth and then you go into a civil proceeding, your having pled the Fifth is something that the civil attorney can use against you. It is called the adverse inference. A jury can draw the conclusion that the testimony that you would have given had you not asserted your Fifth Amendment privilege would be harmful to your case. They are legally available to reach that conclusion. A judge will instruct them that they may reach that conclusion.
Here we are in the Judiciary Committee, and we can't get an answer from this guy about his grand jury testimony. We know he pled the Fifth. And, what, are we not supposed to take the adverse inference that a regular jury would take from pleading the Fifth? It is a mess.
This guy Patel went into a court in Colorado to testify for Trump. How did
OK. So I used to be a U.S. attorney, and we used to take FBI agents and we would put them into court to make cases. If an FBI agent working for me had gotten that kind of a response from a Rhode Island district judge--that he was not credible, that he was giving testimony that was illogical, that he could not be believed--there would be repercussions. We would need to see if that was a Giglio disclosure problem for this person. We would need to understand why this FBI agent couldn't be trusted by a Federal judge.
This isn't just an agent; this is the guy who wants to run the FBI. So to trust Pam Bondi to rein in a character like this who has ``virtually no experience that would qualify him'' to lead the FBI, says former Attorney General Bill Barr; who has ideas that are ludicrous--``absolutely unqualified for this job,'' ``untrustworthy,'' ``an absolute disgrace to . . . even consider him''; a guy who ran on his website, ``Kash Patel retruthed,'' imagery of him chain-sawing his enemies list people--this is actually a video clip. We can't play it here, but it is a video clip of him chain-sawing through his enemies list, and he thought that was cool to retruth.
That is the kind of person we are dealing with. Pam Bondi is going to be able to restrain him? Not if she can't even say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
This was his last comment. He said I had misquoted him. To the press:
Like he didn't win it.
That is what is coming to the Department of Justice. The FBI is in danger of being turned into the political enforcement weapon of this President, who is already breaking the law over and over again in just the last 2 weeks. And a woman who cannot say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election I believe is not going to be able to restrain this kind of misbehavior, let alone the kind of misbehavior we are seeing out of the Oval Office.
So regretfully--because there was a lot to like about Ms. Bondi-- regretfully, I cannot possibly vote to confirm her.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Mr. President, in examining all of the President's Cabinet nominees, I am focused on two things: their fitness and their qualifications for the positions to which they are nominated, including their ability and willingness to put loyalty to the Constitution above loyalty to the President.
This independence is critically important for the Attorney General, our Nation's highest law enforcement officer. The Attorney General oversees thousands of career prosecutors in all 50 States, trying cases based not on politics but on facts.
However, Pam Bondi's record, her statements in her confirmation hearing, and her responses to questions for the record make clear she does not have the requisite independence to lead the Department of Justice.
In her confirmation hearing, Ms. Bondi shows she had trouble differentiating fact from fiction where her loyalty to President Trump might come into question.
Rather than attempting to assuage my concerns--concerns shared by many of my colleagues; you just heard from one of my colleagues just previous to myself--Ms. Bondi failed to provide clear and convincing answers to the following questions: whether President Biden won the 2020 election, whether she agreed with the President's characterization of January 6 felons as ``hostages'' and ``patriots,'' whether she would make good on her promise to ``prosecute the prosecutors'' and ``investigate the investigators'' by using the DOJ to go after the President's perceived political enemies.
I also asked her in writing, for the record, how she would resolve a conflict between a request from President Trump and her duty to the Constitution. Ms. Bondi provided no response, and she left the answer blank. This refusal to even try to answer the question told me a lot.
We have already seen in the 2 weeks since President Trump took office that he does not believe the rule of law applies to him. He issued an unconstitutional order on birthright citizenship. He put an illegal hold on all Federal funds. He fired or pushed aside scores of senior career FBI officials and Federal prosecutors.
Most egregiously, he issued a blanket pardon for more than 1,500 criminals convicted for their roles in the January 6 insurrection. Not content to stop at pardoning those who assaulted police officers, now he is compiling lists of FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors who did their jobs by working on January 6 cases to which they were assigned. This could be thousands of civil servants whom Donald Trump is apparently planning to punish to exact retribution.
Make no mistake, by focusing DOJ and the FBI inward on themselves instead of outward on the many threats against our country, President Trump is making our Nation less safe and sowing fear and chaos in the DOJ. When we suffer an attack, a hack, or a rise in crime, President Trump will try to blame everybody else, but he will be responsible.
As Senator Durbin so accurately put it, Donald Trump sees the DOJ as his personal law firm, but the DOJ and the Attorney General work for the people, not for the President. Any President but especially this President needs an Attorney General who will tell him when his actions break the law. What is more, the American public deserves an Attorney General who will put the law first and refuse an illegal order from the President. Ms. Bondi will not be that person. She will be yet another ``yes'' woman doing whatever the President wants her to do. The law, the Constitution, and our country will suffer the consequences.
For these reasons, I urge my colleagues to vote no.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, colleagues, I, too, rise today to oppose President Trump's nomination of Pamela Bondi to serve as Attorney General of the United States.
And I don't do it lightly.
After evaluating her record, as well as her testimony before the Judiciary Committee, it has sadly become clear to me that Ms. Bondi is either unwilling or unable to put her duty to the Constitution of the United States and her duty to the American people above her loyalty to President Trump. With a President now in office who has proven his complete disregard for the rule of law on numerous occasions, Pam Bondi is simply unfit to serve as our Nation's chief law enforcement officer.
Time and again, we have seen Ms. Bondi more than willing to go on national television and push President Trump's lies about the results of a free and fair election. Despite the facts, despite overwhelming evidence, she has chosen to lie to the American people in defense of Donald Trump.
Now, as I shared in committee during the confirmation hearing this very issue, offering her an opportunity to withdraw those statements that she made back in 2020, reminding my colleagues and anybody watching that the danger of her refusal isn't just that she is sticking to some political talking points--in fact, when it comes to the integrity of our elections, lies have become threats to our democracy, threats to voters, and threats to election workers who dedicate themselves to administering our free and fair elections.
To this day, she refuses to state the simple truth that Donald Trump lost in 2020. Colleagues, consider the fact that these same lies have led to her associate Rudy Giuliani being disbarred. Think about that contrast. Rudy Giuliani lied, and he is being disbarred for those actions. Pam Bondi--same lies--refuses to take them back, and now you want her to be the top law enforcement officer for the United States of America?
It is this very behavior that actually endears her to President Trump, and it
I mean, just look at President Trump's activities in the first couple of weeks in office. From his first day on the job--day one of his second term--he issued around 1,500 pardons for January 6 insurrectionists and commuted the sentences of 14 of his supporters, including those convicted of violence against police officers.
Let me say it again: The first day in office, Trump freed convicted violent criminals who pepper-sprayed and beat Capitol Police officers-- so much for ``Back the Blue.''
President Trump's appointees then proceeded to fire career Department of Justice lawyers involved in investigating and prosecuting him for his role in the January 6 insurrection and for his improper handling of classified documents. Now, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia has already promised to investigate the prosecutors who helped put violent insurrectionists behind bars.
None of this comes as a surprise. Before she was even selected, before the nomination was official, Ms. Bondi had already publicly promised to investigate the investigators, to prosecute the prosecutors.
And just this past Sunday, President Trump's Department of Justice demanded specific FBI staff fill out a questionnaire sharing what involvement they had in the January 6 cases. This is a tough environment for any Attorney General to walk into and to act independently, let alone someone who has already shown blind loyalty to President Trump over the rule of law.
But these past few weeks, I was struck most by the fact that, despite her having practiced law for decades, despite the fact that she served once as the attorney general for the State of Florida, Ms. Bondi was somehow unfamiliar with the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and, specifically, its citizenship clause.
It shouldn't have come as a surprise. We talked about it in my office the day before the hearing. I let her know I was going to be asking her about it during the hearing. And when I gave her an opportunity during the hearing to discuss it, she simply refused to answer my questions, and now we know why.
In his very first day back in office, President Trump issued a blatantly unconstitutional Executive order seeking to strip birthright citizenship from American citizens--citizens born here in the United States.
Now, someone who still needs to study birthright citizenship surely won't be a champion in defending it. And I point that out because that is what Ms. Bondi said in response to my question that she would ``study'' it.
Think about that, colleagues. The top law enforcement officer in the United States needed to study the Constitution?
The American people need and deserve to be able to trust that the Department of Justice is enacting the law fairly, neutrally, and free from political interference. We need and deserve an Attorney General who will speak truth to power; push back against illegal, immoral, and unethical requests; someone who can be a credible messenger to the American people in a time of crisis; and someone who will defend not only the American people but the proud public servants who work within the Department and who are being purged in not a Saturday night massacre or a Monday massacre but a January massacre by President Trump.
To my colleagues today, I ask this: Do you believe Ms. Bondi will fight against retribution or enact it? Do you believe she will stand up to the administration's chaos or further enable it?
Colleagues, I don't believe Ms. Bondi is up to the task, and for that reason, I will oppose her nomination, and I urge all of you to join me.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, just over 8 years ago, Donald Trump assumed the Office of the Presidency for the first time. He began that administration with at least a few people of independence and stature, people that had enough of a respect for themselves and the rule of law that, when they were asked to do things that violated the law, their oath, or their own sense of decency, they said no or resigned--people like Defense Secretary Mattis, who wrote in his resignation letter:
Treating allies with respect; being clear-eyed about malign actors; advancing an international order conducive to our national security, prosperity, and values; the solidarity of our alliances--these didn't use to be novel ideas. They didn't used to be controversial ideas. What Secretary Mattis said about an ``international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity, and values'' may also be applied to a domestic order that is respectful of our Agencies and institutions, our norms and values.
Not everyone in Trump's first administration was like Secretary Mattis. Some took much longer to realize that the President's demand for loyalty to him be placed above all else was incompatible with their own oath of office. Attorney General Bill Barr, once so desperate for a job in the Trump administration that he wrote a lengthy job application castigating an investigation he knew little about, found, ultimately, that there were lines even he could not cross, like lying about the election.
Others still, like Kash Patel, seemed never to find a demand by the President too taxing of their own moral code to raise an objection, but rather viewed any questionable order as a means of advancement.
The question we face with the nomination of Pam Bondi is, What will she do when, inevitably, she is put to the test by a President who feels unbound by law or propriety?
Her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee tells us that she will not pass the test. When asked about whether the President lost the 2020 election, she could not answer. When asked whether she would preserve evidence gathered in the January 6 investigation, she could not agree to do so. When asked about potential pardons of violent criminals who attacked police on January 6, she indignantly assured us that she would review all pardon cases on a case by case basis--a promise breached by the President so soon thereafter that her words seemed still to hang in the air.
If she could not assert her independence now, before Congress, before taking office, what hope can we have that she will do so when put to the test by the President?
When asked about this, too, she demurred: That is a hypothetical.
But it wasn't then, and it isn't now. The President has already pardoned hundreds of violent criminals. He has already issued Executive orders that violate the law and Constitution.
Would Pam Bondi have objected to the firing of inspectors general? Do any of us believe that she would?
The President has issued an Executive order attempting to amend the Constitution. A Federal judge struck down this order as presenting perhaps the simplest constitutional question he had ever heard. Could we have expected Pam Bondi to defend it? Sadly, yes.
The President issued an Executive order freezing and illegally impounding congressionally appropriated funds. Would she have uttered a word of protest? Certainly not.
Dozens of top prosecutors have already been fired, by the Department of Justice, who did their lawful duty investigating the rioters who attacked police. Would she have resigned in protest?
She has witnessed this Saturday night massacre and still wants the job. So, plainly, the answer is no.
She is no Elliot Richardson. Top-ranking FBI agents have been fired. Questionnaires have gone out to identify the hundreds--perhaps thousands--of agents who were involved in the legitimate prosecution of these felons. Would she have defended these FBI
Donald Trump only took the oath of office a mere 2 weeks ago--with an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, to faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, to faithfully execute the laws of this country that Congress passed and funded. Each day, it seems he has found new ways to bend and break those laws, to put in power unelected billionaires and political cronies to dismantle Agencies, take control of payment systems, and exact political retribution.
One after another, each of his nominees, asked whether they would oppose such conduct, has claimed that they won't engage in hypotheticals, claimed that there was simply no way the President would take these actions, stated that what the President promised to do during the campaign simply wouldn't happen. But it is happening. It has happened. His campaign of retribution is happening. His empowering of a shadow President is happening. His dismantling of congressionally approved Departments is happening.
We cannot afford an Attorney General who believes their role is to defend him rather than the American people and the democracy we have inherited from our Founders--this big, bold, brave, and improbable experiment in self-governance. We need an Attorney General with a backbone of steel, with a stature to say no, whose purpose is to enforce the laws against any lawbreaker, including the President of the United States. That person is not Pam Bondi.
Senator Rufus Choate, who once walked these halls and served in this body, reminded us nearly 200 years ago that we have built no temple but the Capitol, that we consult no common oracle but the Constitution. And what does that oracle tell us? I think maybe simply this: We have been given the most brilliant Constitution ever devised to constrain the worst impulses of human nature, but even that brilliant document will not protect us if we do not inhabit positions of great responsibility with people worthy of them, with people who view our system of checks and balances not as a weakness to overcome or to overrun but as a source of strength, who view the domestic order they produce, to borrow Secretary Mattis's words from a different context, as ``most conducive to our security, prosperity and values.''
We need an Attorney General who will stand strong when the President seeks to turn this Capitol into a rubberstamp for unconstitutional and unlawful actions, when the President seeks to empower the likes of Elon Musk to ignore laws that Congress has passed and Departments that Congress has funded, when the President ignores our allies and emboldens our enemies, when the President targets those in government who did their job to investigate crimes and malfeasance and does so to exact vengeance. Vengeance. Apart from self-aggrandizement and self- enrichment, the President's only motivation--vengeance.
Donald Trump is hoping that in the chaos of his Executive orders, of oligarchs marauding through the Agencies of government, of tariffs that turn on and off like a blinking light, that we will get lost and in getting lost, be lost. We must not be.
His actions will get worse. They will. With a congressional majority that empowers him, with appointees that embolden him, he himself will only grow more emboldened in return. His unconscionable and unconstitutional actions will multiply, and when that happens, will Pam Bondi take up her role, her duty, as the people's lawyer or will she serve as the President's lawyer as she has done before? Will Pam Bondi say no to the President's unlawful actions? no to purges of perceived political enemies? no to investigations of career officials? because if she will not say no, if she cannot say no, it is up to us today to say no. No to this nomination. No to Pam Bondi. It is up to us.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, as my colleague Senator Schiff from California has just so powerfully stated, we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis--a crisis that would have been unimaginable just weeks ago, a crisis that involves a President disobeying the law.
Now, Presidents in the past have disobeyed the law. They have sought to test the boundaries of their power, and the courts have blocked them. But never has a President violated so many significant laws and the Constitution so rapidly, so repeatedly, that we are, as Senator Schiff said, lost in the chaos. And it falls to the arbiters of law-- our courts--but it is also incumbent on the enforcers of the law.
Any of us who have served in the Department of Justice--I was U.S. attorney for Connecticut for 4\1/2\ years--knows that the most important decisions that any prosecutor, any law enforcer makes is whether to uphold the rule of law and sometimes say no to an FBI agent who is too enthusiastic about a case and wants to indict someone who could not be convicted, a public official who is close personally or politically and has overstepped their powers or ethics. To be fair, independent, objective, to be completely impartial, and to uphold the rule of law is the first duty of anyone in the U.S. Department of Justice.
I have more than respect, I have reverence for the Department of Justice, and that is why I am so deeply disappointed that we are here tonight for the nomination of Pam Bondi.
The Attorney General of the United States of America is supposed to be the people's lawyer, not the President's. Donald Trump has said he wants the Attorney General to be his Roy Cohn, his fixer, his personal attorney.
Well, Ms. Bondi said she would be the people's lawyer, but that claim is betrayed by almost everything else she said and, most importantly, what she would not say.
Here is what she would not say. She would not say that she would say no to the President when he asked her to do something illegal or immoral. She dodged that question. She would not say that she was wrong for spreading lies about fraud and cheating in Pennsylvania during the 2020 election. She dodged that question, too. She would not say that President Biden won the 2020 election or that President Trump lost. She ducked it.
Now, the issue of whether President Trump asked his Attorney General to do something illegal or immoral is not a hypothetical. It is not abstruse or abstract. It is real. We know it is real because every one of his past Attorneys General ran afoul of Donald Trump because they would not do something illegal or immoral--our colleague Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr. No matter how good their intention, nobody can talk Donald Trump out of what he wants to do, and the law is no concern, nor is the lawyer. He will get lawyers to do whatever he wants, and Pam Bondi was reassuring--very reassuring--to one person--Donald Trump--when she dodged those questions because what he wants is a loyalist, a sycophant, an acolyte, and he wants a puppet to do his bidding.
The American people need a lawyer at this moment in history, at this point of constitutional crisis, who will truly speak truth to power. We use that phrase all the time, ``speak truth to power,'' but in this instance, it is the essence of what an Attorney General has to do at this moment in our history. And Donald Trump doesn't want to hear the truth. As much power as he has, he wants to hear an Attorney General tell him: Fine to go ahead. You have the green light.
If Pam Bondi thinks she won't face that same dilemma that Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions did and every other lawyer who has worked for Donald Trump has faced, she is either delusional or disingenuous--delusional or disingenuous. For me, both are disqualifying for this job. And she can't even pass that low bar of saying she could say no. Her answer is: Oh, well, he would never do anything like that. He is my friend.
As we are here tonight, the Trump Justice Department is reported to be preparing to purge hundreds or even thousands of FBI agents or other personnel in the Department of Justice for nothing more than doing their jobs. These agents were assigned to criminal cases involving Donald Trump. They didn't leap forward. They didn't volunteer. They were assigned, and, like FBI agents do, they took the assignment. Now they will pay a price in their careers unjustly, unfairly, and unwisely
We have heard also that assistant U.S. attorneys are being reassigned from drug cases and terrorism cases so that they can do immigration. We are hearing that career civil servants must be loyal to Donald Trump in this Department of Justice--well, to Donald Trump and to them.
We all know something fundamental in this body--that we swear an oath. The lowliest private in the U.S. Army or the Navy or the Marine Corps or the Air Force takes an oath. They raise their right hand, just as we do. Anybody in the Cabinet takes that oath, and they swear allegiance, but it isn't to the President, and it isn't to the government; it is to the Constitution. That is what is at risk here. That is what Pam Bondi cannot do in good conscience if she is confirmed because her allegiance will be to Donald Trump.
The purge of agents and the reassignment and retribution of others not only damages morale, the effectiveness of the Department of Justice, it undermines the rule of law.
The Attorney General--perhaps chief among Presidential appointees--is responsible for making good on the constitutional promise that no man or no woman is above the law, that we have no king in the United States. We are no longer a monarchy. We can no longer ask a billionaire to rummage through the files of the Department of Treasury that have information about the Presiding Officer and every one of us who serves in this body and almost every American because we all pay taxes; we all have Social Security; we get tax refunds. Veterans get disability benefits. Almost anything the U.S. Government does creates a record in the Treasury Department, and all that information is being read and scanned and now collected. That is the news of the day.
More bad news about Elon Musk. Who is going to stop Elon Musk when he is doing something illegal and immoral? It won't be Pam Bondi because she is Donald Trump's lawyer. That is a real and present danger for every one of us in this country.
After I was U.S. attorney in Connecticut--I was the attorney general of my State for 20 years. In that job, also, I took an oath to the Constitution of the United States as a State official, as well as to the constitution of the State of Connecticut. It isn't an abstract notion; it is what we all do. If she is confirmed, maybe Pam Bondi will be able to raise her right hand and recite after whoever is administering the oath, but it will not be an oath she is capable of keeping.
And so on this critically important vote for our country, I don't think there is a Cabinet officer more important at this moment in our history. I urge my colleagues to say no to this nomination.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
