Terminating the National Emergency Declared to Impose Global Tariffs
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, S.J. Res. 49 is discharged and the clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
Thereupon, the committee was discharged and the Senate proceeded to consider the joint resolution.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there will now be 6 hours of debate only, equally divided between the leaders or their designees.
The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. President, yesterday marked 100 days since Donald Trump was sworn in as President. It happened right down that hallway. He promised a golden age for America. He has not delivered that golden age. In fact, in that 100 days, all he has delivered is chaos and destruction.
Consumer confidence is plummeting, and today we learned that our economy is shrinking. This is all a totally self-inflicted, Trump- inflicted wound on America and American families.
That is here at home. On the world stage, Candidate Trump promised to be the great peacemaker, to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza on day one, but he has nothing to show for that other than distrust from our allies and smiles from our adversaries. He has thrown the Ukrainian people under the bus, and in Gaza, the hostages have not been released, and we are witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe.
Over the last 100 days, Donald Trump has embarked on a lawbreaking spree that has torn up our Constitution, torn apart our government, and torn down our economy.
Over 200 lawsuits have been filed in Federal courts around the country because we are watching this President break laws on every front, on everything from his illegal freezing and impoundments of taxpayer funds for important public programs that benefit communities all over the country, to his illegal firing of patriotic Federal employees, including many veterans who provide critical public services, to letting Elon Musk loose on Federal Government programs with a chain saw--not to make government more efficient but to rig government for the already rich and powerful like Elon Musk at the expense of everybody else.
President Trump has also been abusing his authority to create tariff chaos that has sent consumer confidence plummeting, badly damaging our economy. He is violating the First Amendment by cracking down on students at colleges and universities for their exercise of free speech and right to assemble and also violating another vital constitutional provision: the constitutional right to due process for those who live in America.
It is a staggering amount of lawbreaking in just 100 days. That is why all of us should fight back--in the courts, in this Congress, and in communities all over America.
We know that the American people don't like what they are seeing, what they are experiencing. They are rising up in communities all over America to voice their disapproval with President Trump's performance. They are giving him a big fat F for the first 100 days--total, miserable, failure.
The only people who don't seem to get it are some of our Republican colleagues here in the Congress who apparently live in constant fear of being on the wrong end of a tweet from Donald Trump or Elon Musk and want to look the other way in the face of this massive lawbreaking and ripping up of the Constitution.
So I want to take a little inventory, just a small sampling of the actions of this lawless President. I want to cover four categories: his violations of constitutional due process rights; his violation of First Amendment rights; his illegal withholding and impoundment and freezing of public funds that benefit communities all over America; and fourth, exceeding his authorities, claiming emergency powers that he doesn't have in the area of tariffs, making sham claims to justify his tariff chaos that is sabotaging our economy as we speak.
I want to start with Trump's violations of the constitutional right of due process--a bedrock American principle.
As we speak, President Trump is violating the due process of many, many individuals, including the rights of a man by the name of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was snatched off the streets of Maryland and illegally shipped to one of the most notorious prisons in Latin America, called CECOT. As I have repeatedly said, this case is not about one man alone. It is about all of us. I am not vouching for Mr. Abrego Garcia, but I am vouching for his constitutional right to due process--because, if Donald Trump can ignore court orders and trample over the rights of one man, he threatens the rights of everyone who lives in the United States of America.
Mr. Abrego Garcia had legal status in the United States. He lived in Maryland with his family. He had a work permit. He was an apprentice with the sheet metal workers, SMART Local 100, where he worked full- time to help support his family. He was driving in his car with his 5- year-old autistic son when he was pulled over by Federal agents. He was taken to some facility in Baltimore where he asked to make a phone call to let folks know what was happening. He was denied the opportunity to make that phone call.
He was then shipped to the State of Texas. From there, his feet were shackled. He was handcuffed. He was put in a plane where he couldn't see out the windows, and he didn't know where he was going, and he landed in El Salvador and was taken to one of the most notorious prisons in our hemisphere, a place reserved for the worst of the worst, for terrorists.
Now here is the thing: There was a standing court order not to deport him to El Salvador because doing so could put his life in jeopardy from gangs. Indeed, the Trump administration admitted in Federal court that Abrego Garcia was wrongfully seized and shipped to this prison in El Salvador. But instead of fixing the problem they admitted to in court, what did they do? They punished the lawyer who told the truth in court.
And now the Trump administration is ignoring orders from the Federal district court, the Fourth District Court of Appeals, and a 9-to- nothing order from the Supreme Court. We don't get 9-to-nothing decisions out of the Supreme Court very often. But that is what all those courts ordered the Trump administration to do with respect to facilitating the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia, to facilitate his return.
This is not just trampling over his rights. And, again, I want to emphasize: If you allow the President to trample over the rights of one person, you do threaten the rights of everybody who lives in America.
That is why yesterday I wrote to President Trump about this case, and I am going to read that letter to the Senate so no one can say they don't know what is going on in this matter.
Here is what I wrote in that letter:
This is the interview he had with Time magazine just a short while ago.
That is the President of El Salvador--
I went on to write this:
Again, referring to my discussion with the Vice President of El Salvador--
I think they were probably his own private cameras. I don't know, but they were rolling to record the conversation.
And then I write:
I quoted him again--
Meaning the ball is in America's court, and he used that expression multiple times during our conversation.
I went on to tell President Trump that the Vice President of El Salvador:
Again, this is what the Vice President of El Salvador told me and what I reported to President Trump in this letter.
I went on in my letter to President Trump to say:
And I am continuing to report this to the President of the United States.
And the Vice President of El Salvador ``made it clear that they did not review the file of Mr. Abrego Garcia.''
He went on to say--this is the Vice President of El Salvador:
So I continued to report on this conversation in my letter to President Trump, and I said:
Referring to the President of the United States--
And I pointed out to President Trump that ``Your Administration illegally took Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador in a plane, and Attorney General Bondi has said the United States could send a plane to pick him up. And the U.S. government can certainly provide him with the papers necessary to return.''
I went on in my letter to President Trump to say this:
I went on to write to President Trump that:
I went on to write to the President--I think this is important.
Referring to President Trump--
I am going to take a little departure here. I don't know if my colleagues witnessed the interview that President Trump had with an ABC reporter, Mr. Moran, yesterday, but it is all over social media because it turned out that, you know, President Trump had taken a picture of what was Abrego Garcia's fingers, and he had superimposed--or someone in the administration put an ``MS-13,'' written that on. That had been photoshopped or otherwise falsely there. Apparently, no one informed the President of this, or he just decided to pretend he didn't know.
In this interview, he said: He had MS-13 on his knuckles, tattooed. The reporter said: That was photoshopped. And Trump's response was to the reporter: Terry, they are giving you a big break of a lifetime. I picked you, but you are not being very nice.
Well, my point here, again, is whatever evidence there may be, the proper form to submit it is in the courts of the United States. And at least today, judges in those cases have made clear that the declaration has not relied on such evidence.
I went on in my letter to President Trump to say this:
I then, in this letter, cite Judge Harvie Wilkinson, who wrote on behalf of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit the following. I am going to quote him, and I have this in my letter to President Trump:
I should point out that Judge Wilkinson was a Reagan administration appointee and this was a unanimous opinion of the three-court panel.
I went on in my letter to President Trump to say:
I close with this paragraph in my letter to the President:
That was my letter to President Trump. I haven't heard anything back from them, and they continue to violate the Supreme Court orders.
You know, colleagues, Members can look the other way but cannot deny the fact that this is happening as we speak today. I would urge every Senator to recognize the threat to everybody's rights under the Constitution.
Now I want to turn to another area of lawbreaking--constitutional violations being committed by the Trump administration because not only are they violating the due process clause of the Constitution in the Abrego Garcia case and others, but they are also tearing up the First Amendment and trampling over free speech rights of individuals in America, especially students on college and university campuses but many others as well.
The Trump administration and Secretary Rubio apparently think the First Amendment is like an a la carte menu. In other words, they seem to believe that the U.S. government can punish those who engage in speech that they don't like. That is not how it works. They don't get to cherry-pick speech under the First Amendment and use governmental power, state power, to sanction those who disagree with their points of view.
But that is exactly what they are doing in cases like those of Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, and Mohsen Mahdawi. Mohsen Mahdawi was illegally snatched as he was taking his citizenship test in the State of Vermont.
I want to read one of the questions that is on the U.S. citizenship test. It is important that everybody recognize what we ask those who are working to become citizens to understand. Question 6 on the citizenship test reads:
And under it there are a number of things, but the first one on there is speech. The second one on there is assembly--speech and assembly. I think members of the Trump administration need to take a refresher course, the kind we ask citizens to take in this country because, apparently, President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary Rubio, and others would like to cross that question right off the citizenship test.
We observed recently, when Vice President Vance took an overseas trip, that he lectured some of our European allies like the UK and Germany about freedom of speech. He said that they had too many limits on freedom of speech; that they were curtailing freedom of speech for people who lived in their countries, but here at home, they are tearing up the First Amendment of the Constitution. Apparently, here at home for the Trump administration, freedom of speech exists only for those who agree with their point of view.
Mr. President, you know that our colleague who served with us, Senator Rubio, used to take to this Senate floor regularly to talk about an American foreign policy based on democracy, based on human rights, based on freedom of religion, and, yes, based on freedom of speech and suppression around the world, telling other countries that it was wrong to have the governments lock them up for expressing their points of view. And yet now in their home, Secretary of State Rubio is trashing freedom of speech. He is ripping up the First Amendment of the Constitution, and it is shameful. The American people should not stand for it because if you rip up the First Amendment for some people, you threaten it for everybody who lives in the United States of America.
I was fortunate to grow up in a Foreign Service family. We sort of went back and forth between the United States and other countries. I was proud to be from a family that represented the United States overseas. We are far from perfect, and we have a lot of work to do to live up to the principles that we say we stand for around the world. But one of the things we do--or used to do--is stand up as a beacon for human rights and freedom of speech. That is no longer happening. You can't say you want everybody else around the world to live up to that principle when you are violating it right here at home.
Now Secretary Rubio has doubled way back into a McCarthy-era statute from what was called the McCarran-Walter Act. That was a law passed at the height of the McCarthy era, and he is using that to claim that these students represent a threat to the foreign policy of the United States.
It is pretty pathetic that students expressing their views represent a threat to the foreign policy of the United States. We have students of all different faiths who are protesting the war in Gaza and advocating for Palestinian rights. Others may agree or strongly disagree with what they say, but to claim that they somehow represent a threat to the foreign policy of the United States is ridiculous. It is so clearly being used as a ruse to deny their First Amendment freedom of
Donald Trump's lawbreaking doesn't end with his efforts to tear up the constitutional rights of due process and the First Amendment. He is also tearing up article I of the Constitution by illegally freezing, withholding, and impounding funds for important public purposes--funds that have been appropriated by the Congress and signed into law.
The Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars of investments to support public services in communities all over America. The latest count is they are holding up about $430 billion that was appropriated by the Congress.
You know, just this morning, we had a hearing in the Senate Appropriations Committee about the Trump administration's freezing and cutting of funds for NIH, the National Institutes of Health. There was lots of powerful testimony from witnesses, including from a mom who was there with her daughter who had suffered through childhood cancer. And because of past research at NIH, her daughter's cancer was, thankfully, in remission, gone away. But she was there--the mother was there--to say she wants other families who have kids with cancer to have the same opportunities and that those opportunities only exist if we continue to do research into lifesaving cures and treatments. And yet, the Trump administration is sowing chaos at NIH and has frozen some clinical trials.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk and his DOGE cronies are taking a chain saw to the Federal Government and are destroying the ability of the Federal Government to deliver reliable services to the American people, like the damage they are doing at the Social Security Administration. First they say there is no more phone service, use the internet. People couldn't get through on the internet. Go to the local Social Security offices. We are closing the local Social Security offices, and, by the way, we are also firing thousands of people so there won't be anyone in those local offices. And then they say: Oh, well, maybe we better turn the phones on again.
This isn't about government efficiency. This is about rigging the government for people like Elon Musk at the expense of everybody else.
This is an issue that should concern every Member of Congress because it is a direct attack on article I, and it is an attack on the American people and their rights to have these investments made when their elected officials direct them to be made on their behalf.
And yet, just yesterday, the head of the Government Accountability Office, as we know by GAO, testified before a Senate appropriations subcommittee that the Trump administration was stonewalling GAO's efforts to investigate this illegal withholding of funds. Gene Dodaro, who is the Comptroller General, testified that the Office of Management and Budget ``has not been responsive'' to GAO's questions about the freezing of billions of dollars in funding Congress had already approved.
Now, this is not the first time we have seen a Trump administration violating the Impoundment Control Act. The last time President Trump was in office, he illegally withheld funds that the Congress had appropriated for helping the people of Ukraine, and he refused to spend those funds--Donald Trump did.
So, back at the time, I wrote a letter to the GAO, asking them to investigate that withholding to see if it violated the Impoundment Control Act. That is a statute of the United States of America. In that case, the GAO found that, yes, the Trump administration--the first round--had illegally withheld those funds. It was an illegal impoundment. So that is what we are seeing right now, and they are not even working too hard to show that they are violating the Impoundment Control Act.
When the head of OMB--the Office of Management and Budget--Russ Vought, was before the Senate Budget Committee for his nomination, at his confirmation hearing, I asked him about the Impoundment Control Act, and I asked him about the past violations of the Impoundment Control Act because, guess what, he also was the head of OMB at the time of the earlier violation, and Russ Vought is back at it again as the head of OMB. So when I asked him about the Impoundment Control Act at his hearing, I got this answer. I asked him about President Trump and the Impoundment Control Act. Here was his answer at the hearing:
My response to him:
This dance went on and on, and never did he commit to comply with the Impoundment Control Act.
So that is what we are witnessing right now--a violation of the Impoundment Control Act.
We, the Senate, were supposed to get the Trump administration's spending plans for the remainder of fiscal year 2025 a few days ago. For many Agencies, we haven't seen them yet. So we don't know what they say their plans are, but we do know that, as of now, they are withholding about $430 billion of appropriated funds.
Finally, I want to talk about another area where Donald Trump is violating the law to the detriment of our economy, and that is in the area of tariffs.
Now, Presidents, of course, have some authority to apply tariffs, and I have supported targeted tariffs in the past for strategic purposes. But a number of small businesses around the country and others have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration for their illegal use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
I see the ranking member of the Finance Committee on the floor here, and he has spoken to this many times, and I want to thank him for his leadership.
I do want to read directly from the complaint that has been filed because the complaint--and this is one.
Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to counter external emergencies, not to grant Presidents a blank check to write domestic economic policy.
They go on to point out that, yes, we have a fentanyl crisis in America--all of us agree with that--but using this statute, which is for economic emergencies, and using the statute in the way the Trump administration is doing is a gross violation of the President's legal authority.
As we can see by the downturn in the economy--we just learned that we are seeing the economy contract; we are seeing consumer confidence plunge--President Trump's illegal use of that statute is causing incredible economic pain across the country.
So I want to end with this: When you see this kind of massive lawbreaking going on--violations of the due process clause, violations of the First Amendment, violations of article I and the Impoundment Control Act--I mean, you can just take a marker through the Constitution and cross out those provisions, right? The 14th Amendment--cross it out. The First Amendment--cross it out. Cross out article I. That is what everybody in this body who is not standing up to the President is complicit in right now.
What bullies do--and make no mistake, President Trump is a bully. What they do is they try to pick on people they think are weak. If the rest of us don't stand up for the rights of those people, then it is a very fast and slippery slope to losing the rights of everybody who lives in America.
So I hope that, as we review this first 100 days and the massive lawbreaking that is going on and the tearing up of the Constitution and the tearing apart of the government and the tearing down of our economy, we will all wake up because the American people are waking up. They understand what is going on, and they don't like what they see. So we had better do our jobs here in the U.S. Senate, and I hope, starting today, all 100 Senators will begin to do exactly that.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. President, yesterday did indeed mark the 100th day of President Trump's second term, and I think, if you were to pick four words that really describe his first 100 days, it would be promises were made, and promises are being kept. That is precisely what he has done.
If you want to go through some of these, let's start at the southern border.
Under President Biden, criminals, terrorists, and traffickers were flowing across that border, but because President Trump on day one took Executive action to secure that border, illegal crossings are at their lowest level in decades. This is something the American people wanted to see done.
In March, those crossings were down 95 percent from the last administration. I understand that this past weekend, they had the lowest number ever--a 99-percent reduction. They had three people who were apprehended.
When you look at deportations, the Trump administration has already removed more than 100,000 criminal illegal aliens. This number has included suspected terrorists, members of violent gangs like MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, and we know that more of those deportations are going to take place.
President Trump is fulfilling the promise he made to make this Nation safe again, to make our communities safe again, and to get these violent gangs and criminals off our streets.
Now, even though these efforts have been very successful and are widely supported by the American people, we have seen some powerful institutions in our country try to block the will of the people and what they wanted to see done. This includes some of our Nation's social media companies. According to reports, Facebook is allowing a black market to thrive on its platform where illegal aliens can buy ride share and delivery driver accounts from credentialed users. In effect, what this black market does is help illegals avoid background checks and be able to work in our country illegally using someone else's name and credentials.
This is not something that is a new problem. Last year, I led a probe into the account security of food delivery services after we had received reports that showed illegal aliens were buying access to the accounts of legitimate users. Thankfully, companies like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub implemented stronger driver verification processes after we began this investigation, but Facebook's black market really helps illegals to bypass those protections.
There is one Facebook group that has been out there, and here is the name of it: ``UBER ACCOUNT FOR RENT WORLDWIDE.'' This account tallied 22,000 members who bought and sold delivery credentials.
While the social media platform has taken that specific group down, what we did find is there are now 80 similar groups that are active on Facebook.
This black market not only runs afoul of the law, but it also poses a serious public safety threat, especially for women, children, and the elderly. Just in February--and this is a case in point--there was a lady in Massachusetts. She was allegedly raped after ordering an Uber Eats delivery to her home. The app indicated that a woman would be delivering her order. Instead, an illegal alien with horrific intentions is who showed up on her doorstep.
Last week, I sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, demanding answers about what his company is doing to eliminate this black market from Facebook. He has until May 6 to respond to the questions.
I will continue to press this issue of accountability and public safety with the big tech giants.
While President Trump has worked to secure our border and our communities, he has also focused on making our economy stronger than ever before. In the last 100 days, he has slashed Democrats' far-left regulations, has unleashed American energy production, and has secured trillions of dollars in investment to support American workers and industry.
Now, in Tennessee, we have seen some of the benefits of that, and we have seen millions of dollars in investments. The candy company Charms is investing nearly $100 million to expand its production plant and distribution center in Covington, TN. Mount Juliet was included in a $700 million nationwide investment by Schneider Electric to boost domestic manufacturing and energy infrastructure. Electronics company ABB is investing $80 million in Selmer, TN, to expand manufacturing and to create new jobs.
Later today, I am going to be joining President Trump at the White House as he welcomes many CEOs of these companies that are making these investments in our Nation.
As the President works to usher in a new golden age, we are already seeing incredible results.
In March, our economy added 228,000 jobs, beating expectations by almost 100,000 jobs.
That same month, falling energy costs pushed inflation down to 2.4 percent. That is tied with the lowest inflation rate since February 2021. That was 1 month after President Biden took office and ushered in the worst inflation crisis since the 1970s.
President Trump and my Republican colleagues believe that Americans should have more money in their pocketbooks, not less, which is why we are working to extend the President's 2017 tax cuts. These tax cuts delivered historic growth for the economy, and if we fail to extend them, families and businesses will face the largest tax hike in history. It would be a $4 trillion tax hike.
That is why, earlier this month, Republicans in Congress passed a budget resolution that will enable us to extend these expiring cuts. At the same time, we are advancing other tax priorities that are championed by the President, including his proposal to cut taxes on Social Security.
By taxing Social Security, the Federal Government is taxing a tax. It makes no sense. Social Security recipients have paid into this program for decades. They deserve the full sum of their Social Security income. However, nearly 66 percent of retirees are paying taxes on their Social Security benefits because Bidenflation pushed seniors' benefits into higher income brackets.
To address this, I have introduced the RETIREES First Act. It would lower the tax burden on Social Security benefits for seniors by raising the provisional income threshold from $25,000 to $34,000 for single filers and from $32,000 to $68,000 for married filers.
In effect, this legislation would eliminate income taxes for many of our Nation's retirees, leaving them with more money in their paychecks.
As we work on these tax provisions and more, I am looking forward to working with President Trump to deliver relief for hard-working Tennesseans and, indeed, all Americans.
We are the greatest Nation on Earth, and with strong leadership back in the White House, we can get this Nation back on track.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic leader.
Mr. President, later this afternoon, Senators Wyden, Kaine, and I will force a vote here in the Senate to put an end to Donald Trump's stupid and reckless trade war. I thank Senators Wyden and Kaine for their leadership on this issue.
We will have now more than 3 hours of debate on it, and that begins now.
Our resolution presents Republicans with a choice: stand with Donald Trump or stand with American families hurt by his trade war. The dismal GDP numbers today should be a wake-up call to Republican Senators now more than ever.
Four Republicans joined us last time to pass a resolution blocking tariffs on Canada because they knew how bad those tariffs were for people back home. Many more Republicans should join us today as the disastrous economic consequences of Trump's reckless trade war gets worse every single day.
If the Senate passes this bill, Speaker Johnson and House Republicans should immediately drop their opposition or else they will be complicit in pushing America into a recession.
One thing is clear, Donald Trump's tariffs have been a total failure. Instead of isolating China, Donald Trump's tariffs are isolating us. Instead of spurring American manufacturing, Trump's tariffs are raising costs and driving us into a recession.
There is no strategy with Trump's tariffs, only chaos. One day, Donald Trump says yes to tariffs; the next day, no to tariffs; one day, tariffs on this country; the next day, tariffs on that country. Even Donald Trump's own policy advisers are struggling to explain his flip- flopping.
The only thing Donald Trump's tariffs have succeeded in is raising the
I have talked to business owners in New York. I was in Suffolk County at Tandy's, a well-known dress seller there. Her costs are going up 30 percent because of tariffs, and she is faced with two awful choices: raise prices or lay off employees. And she doesn't want to do either.
Small businesses, medium businesses, big businesses--they are all frozen because they don't know what Donald Trump will do next. They can't plan for the future. Their costs are rising. They can't hire new workers. It is happening all over America.
Senate Republicans know deep down that Donald Trump's tariffs are awful for their States. So today they have to choose: Stick with Trump, or stand with your States and the people of America.
I thank my colleague and yield to the Senator from Oregon, the ranking member of Finance, who has done such a great job on this issue.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, before he leaves the floor, I just want to thank Leader Schumer for all the help. We are going to be focused today on something that really matters to people, and I thank him.
Mr. President, we are beginning, as you can tell, to discuss the resolution to repeal the global tariff emergency.
As is becoming routine under this President, Americans were greeted with grim economic news this morning. After 3 years of strong growth and rising job numbers, the U.S. economy actually shrank in the first 3 months of 2025. The trade deficit hit a record $162 billion. The United States added only half as many jobs this month as expected.
A major culprit is unquestionably Donald Trump and his senseless global tariffs. If this continues to be our tariff policy, every major economist and forecaster is, unfortunately, predicting recession, job losses, and the misery that was all over our news feeds this morning.
The U.S. Senate cannot be an idle spectator in the tariff madness. The Congress has the power to set tariffs and regulate global trade, and Members can vote today--not do something in a month or some other time--but Members can vote today to put an end to Trump's global tariffs and the economic disaster they are creating.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump slapped new 10 percent taxes on nearly everything Americans buy from overseas, 125 percent tariffs on nearly everything from China, and he promises even higher taxes in July on products from nearly five dozen countries. That is just the latest plan.
I think we all understand goldfish have memories that last longer than Donald Trump's tariff promises. Before these global tariffs, there was the on-again, off-again trade war with China and Mexico; tariffs on steel, aluminum, and cars; and ad hoc exemptions for things like electronics and fertilizer. When the public outcry was so great, Donald Trump had to backtrack.
Donald Trump imposed his global tariffs by declaring an economic emergency under a law call IEEPA. No President has ever imposed tariffs under this law. In my view, Trump's actions clearly go beyond what the law allows, which is why Senators Shaheen, Kaine, and I have offered a bill to make it clear that this law does not allow the President to issue tariffs.
Members can vote today to repeal the so-called emergency Trump declared and end the harmful global tariffs.
Now, I am going to talk for just a few minutes with respect to taking stock of the economic carnage that Donald Trump's trade chaos has already inflicted on our country. We are going to examine the administration's own claims about what their plan is and make the case for why every Member of this body should vote to assert the powers of Congress to trade and to end the tariffs, and they should do it no matter their party or which State they represent.
I already mentioned the shocking economic news this morning. By every single forecast, by every measure, Donald Trump's self-defeating tariffs are actively making Americans poorer, and they are doing it now and for years to come.
Economic growth, gone. Inflation, rising. Unemployment projections, up again.
Experts estimate Trump's tariffs will cost average families about $4,000 a year. Many products from China won't even be available soon, and that is thanks to the tariffs. For the products that are still available, prices are going up--a fact that Donald Trump flails about trying to hide.
When Amazon was rumored to list the impacts of tariffs on prices, Donald Trump threw a fit, reportedly threatening Jeff Bezos and calling it a hostile act. God forbid that Americans actually know what the real costs of his tariffs are.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump and Republicans are charging ahead with plans to go forward with their tax bill, which features more bailouts for billionaires, paid for by kicking millions of people off their health insurance and gutting programs that kids and families rely on to stay safe and healthy.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, puts higher taxes on groceries, clothes, and cars for working families, while he puts his extra time in to pass tax cuts for the wealthy. That is his agenda.
My state knows how Donald Trump's tariff chaos is already hurting real people, and we know how it is drying up markets for ``red, white, and blue'' products. About one in five jobs in Oregon depends on trade, and the trade jobs often pay better.
Speaking with small businesses and workers all over Oregon--I did it just last week--every single one warned of damage from tariffs, and soon.
Bob's Red Mill, for example, sells delicious flour and grains, mostly made from wheat and other crops in Oregon. But some of their ingredients--like coconut or tapioca, which just aren't grown here-- come from outside the country. The cost of those products goes up because of tariffs.
Worse, foreign markets for Bob's goods are drying out. That is because other countries put their own tariffs on Bob's flour and other Oregon ag products in retaliation for Trump's aimless war.
Oregon grass seed growers estimate that about half of their exports-- nearly $200 million in sales--are being canceled, thanks to the global tariffs.
Donald Trump and his advisers claim there is nothing to worry about. They say the economists and the pundits are overreacting, and everything is going according to plan. Secretary Bessent is on cable news so often, trying to calm investors, that it is a wonder that he has got any time to do a bit of negotiating.
But, as usual, it is not clear at all what the plan is, what their tariffs are supposed to accomplish, or when, if ever, American families and workers will see the relief.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump claimed he would have 200 deals completed within 3 or 4 weeks. Then he said: No, that is ``physically impossible'' to have all of the meetings needed to seal the deals. He should have thought of that before he started a trade war against the entire world.
Now, he claimed that he was already negotiating with China to lower tariffs and calm trade tensions, but China and Secretary Bessent said that talks have not even started.
This weekend, the Agriculture Secretary said 100 countries had reached out to start trade talks, and almost at the same time, Secretary Bessent said there are actually 18 so-called priority countries, and those talks would take about 90 days.
If nobody in this administration can even agree on what is happening right now, how can they negotiate smart trade deals with nearly every nation on Earth?
Anonymous White House aides continue to say that Donald Trump is working to deescalate his trade war, but Donald Trump doesn't sound like he is willing to admit he got it wrong. He told Time magazine that if tariffs are at 20 percent or even 50 percent a year from now, that would be a ``total victory.'' So, once again, no one can tell what his administration wants or what the end game is.
I believe it is hard to see how any foreign country right now would make concessions to Donald Trump. That is because he has proven himself to be both untrustworthy and incapable of sticking to a position on tariffs for more than a few weeks at a time.
One foreign diplomat told the press that countries are worried that any
Donald Trump has trashed America's credibility.
He hasn't just made it unlikely for his administration to get a good deal for American workers. My view is he has hurt every future president who wants to strike a good trade deal.
The best way to restore our Nation's good name is for Congress to step in and assert, finally, our constitutional authority over trade.
Article I, section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress power ``To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations'' and ``To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.'' In other words, this is our job. It is not always pretty, but Congress can provide stability and certainty on trade that last beyond a single President's administration.
This body has already signaled bipartisan support for reversing pointless tariffs. We did that when we passed Senator Kaine's bill to end the tariffs on Canada. Today, the Senate can take another powerful step--a powerful step in the right direction--by voting to repeal the global tariffs on a bipartisan basis.
I would just close by saying: Listen to your constituents. Listen to what you are hearing from home, because what I heard was, overwhelmingly, Oregonians and the people I ran into in airports and the like said it is time to bring some certainty and predictability back to making these urgently needed trade policies.
I urge this body to vote for jobs and prosperity rather than unending trade conflict that leaves our country as a loser. I urge every Senator to support this crucial resolution.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, I want to support everything that my colleague, the ranking member of the Finance Committee, just said about these tariffs.
I want to make two points about the tariffs--one, the tariffs themselves, and then second, the congressional failure to assert its own authority on policies that it has the constitutional responsibility for when our failure results in economic pain and insecurity for the American people.
First of all, the tariffs. When the history of this decision is written, President Trump's imposition of these wild and reckless tariffs is going to be seen as one of the greatest economic blunders in a century. It is that bad.
What is happening in Vermont is happening in every State across this country. First of all, these tariffs are a tax. Second, they are paid for by consumers, by manufacturers, and by producers. Third, it is having a negative impact on trade and on our economy already. Today's information about the gross domestic product shrinkage is evidence in and of itself.
In Vermont, Trump's tariffs are estimated to cost Vermont households more than $1 billion. More than 18,000 Vermonters work in industries that are targeted by retaliatory tariffs, but virtually every Vermonter is going to be impacted by increased costs--inflation--as a result of the tariffs.
As an example, food, fuel, energy--all of these things are going to be impacted and really affect people in their day-to-day and month-to- month budgets.
We get a lot of our electricity, a lot of our home heating fuel, and a lot of our petroleum from Canada, especially in the northern part of our State. Those costs are going to be increased, especially with the expected retaliatory tariffs that are imposed on us by countries subject to the arbitrary action of President Trump.
Farmers are really hit hard. Most of our farmers in Vermont import their fertilizer from Canada. There is about a 25-percent increase that they are going to be paying. And these are farmers, as the Presiding Officer knows, that operate on the thinnest of margins in the most uncertain of activities, subject to weather and price fluctuations and so many other things that make our farmers courageous entrepreneurs. But why add 25 percent to the cost of fertilizer when that input cost is already so high? It is mind-boggling to think that this is a voluntary action by the President.
Canada, by the way, happens to be our biggest trading partner, and 34 States have Canada as their major trading partner. In these tariffs--in Canada, we are a 2.1 billion import partner with Canada--20 percent tariff. China--a lot of input from China that our manufacturers use--54 percent tariff, plus who knows how many more tariffs depending on the day and how President Trump feels when he wakes up. Trinidad and Tobago: 81 million, 10 percent tariff. Germany: 75 million. Mexico: 77 million.
Very frustratingly for all of us, the sweeping global tariff order unnecessarily increases prices and taxes on countries that have trade surpluses with America.
I recently heard from a Vermonter who imports coffee and has a niche business that has become extremely successful. The tariffs on Colombia have resulted in this: A container that cost $700 last month--that container now costs $13,000. How do you deal with that? A hit to the margin is--no business can absorb that.
Vermont is also home to one of two businesses in the world that produce these unique snow globes, and they have been in business for 25 years. It is a modest business, but it is one that was created by a Vermont entrepreneur, and it has been really successful. They are going to have to close their doors at the end of the summer with these increased tariffs, basically, on China.
A second point that I think is relevant to these tariffs is the arbitrariness of their implementation and the arbitrariness of how and who is affected. We have a situation where we supposedly have these tariffs on China. Apple Computer, quite understandably, was upset. It was going to increase the cost of iPhones. Well, no problem. Tim Cook was at the inauguration, sitting on the throne of honor, and he had the telephone number, made the call, and the tariffs on iPhones vanished.
You know that snow globe manufacturer that I mentioned from Vermont? She does not have Howard Lutnick's phone number. She does not have Scott Bessent's phone number. She does not have President Trump's phone number. She is out of luck.
So now, with these tariffs and the way they are being implemented without any congressional engagement whatsoever, we are turning our economy from one where it is based on a good product, really good service, where you compete in the marketplace and if your product is better and your service is better, you succeed, to an economy that is more based on access. Do you know Lutnick? Do you know Bessent? Do you know the President?
Oh, and by the way, if you contributed a couple million dollars to the inauguration, you probably do know them and they give out the phone number.
That is absolutely outrageous. People work hard. They produce a good product. They give good service. Shouldn't they be entitled to the reward for the labor that they have done; whereas, what we are seeing now is that if you are connected, you can be rewarded regardless of how good your product is or how lousy your service is. That is offensive-- and should be--to every single one of us here, and that is absolutely what is happening in the White House.
Another thing is there is a casual disregard for how hard it is for everyday families in the Presiding Officer's State and mine and in the ranking member's State to pay the bills because inflation has been here. Instead of arguing about who is at fault for that, let's solve the problem, not aggravate the problem. And these tariffs aggravate the problem. There is absolutely no denying that. This is just the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.
Another element of this is, what is the purpose of these tariffs? President Trump won't give a clear answer. It is to make us rich. They will pay; we won't. It is to bring manufacturing back here. Or it is to punish folks that he deems unworthy. It depends on the day, and it depends on who is asking. So there is no coherent rationale connected to the imposition of this enormous economic pain and cost increase that is being imposed on American businesses and American consumers.
The other question here that is profoundly important for this institution--every single one of us is proud to be a Member of the U.S. Senate, and I think our pride is about our pride in the Constitution as citizens where, under the Constitution, this Congress plays a role as a coequal branch of government. And I think every single one of us here is wary of the accumulation of excessive power in any one person or in any one institution.
Congress has steadily over the years been ceding much of its responsibility and authority to the executive branch. There is no authority greater than the power to tax, and that is why, in the Constitution, the power to impose tariffs resides in the House of Representatives and the Senate. And shouldn't it be that way? Because in the imposition of the tax, there has to be a decision that--in asking our citizens, who we represent, to turn over hard-earned money to the government, we have to be able to justify the purpose for which those funds are being expended.
By allowing the President to take over, in effect, the taxing authority that occurs when the tariff is imposed, we have ceded that responsibility to him or that authority to him, and we have abandoned our responsibility to look our constituents in the eye if and when we say a tax should be imposed. None of us like to do that, but a government has to collect revenues for the common good. We have delegated that authority to the President, and it is wrong of us to do that.
So we can have different views about whether there should be a tariff or what the rate should be, but we have a collective responsibility to do everything we can to maintain the constitutional structure of three independent branches of government, each a counterweight to the other. That is not just an abstract concept; that is the wisdom that has served us well for well over 200 years, that those checks and balances give all our citizens an opportunity to have a seat at the table when major decisions about their lives and their futures are being made.
So that is why this decision that we are about to make is not just about the tariffs. It is not just about, in my view, how recklessly they are being applied and imposed. It is not just about how they infect our economy with corruption, where it is who you know rather than how hard you work that is going to get you ahead. It is about the basic structure of our constitutional order, and every single one of us has the responsibility to protect that because that is not about us. It is not about who we represent. It is about how our country can operate with a democratic system where every single person, through their representatives, has a seat at the table.
So I urge all of us to take a look at what our constitutional responsibility is. Whether we agree or not on so many different issues of vital concern to the future of this country, we each have a responsibility to act in a way that protects the constitutional system. That means that we exercise authority over tariffs; we don't give that away to an executive branch decision.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, as the American people can clearly see, President Trump's new tariffs have become a massive tax hike on consumers--a tax on the food we eat, a tax on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, every cup of coffee we have in the morning.
These rising costs are not just hurting consumers, actually; they are hurting American businesses and our workforce too. We are already seeing the impact. It is not a hypothetical.
I call your attention to my home State, the great State of California, home to two of the largest ports in the Nation in southern California alone, the neighboring Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, that truly power our Nation's economy.
It is not an exaggeration. The Port of Los Angeles, which is the largest port in the United States, expects imports to drop by 35 percent in just 2 weeks' time, as Trump's tariffs and his manufactured chaos bring global trade to a halt. The Port of Long Beach is expecting similar declines.
Take a minute to think about the magnitude of that drop in cargo volume. That decline, at the end of the day, will mean empty shelves and higher prices.
The over $300 billion in cargo coming through what we know as the San Pedro Bay port complex is tied to nearly 1 million jobs in the region alone and 2.7 million jobs across the country. That is nearly one job for every four containers.
When the richest President in history decides on his own, unlawfully, to haphazardly apply an across-the-board tax on goods--because that is what these tariffs are--the goods-moving industry is going to take a hit. It will mean fewer jobs for port workers, for truckers, and for communities across the country. It will mean more Americans out of work.
While the western port communities may be the first to feel the pain, it won't be long before the effects of these tariffs reach the east coast and the gulf coast.
As I mentioned, this isn't just bad news for American consumers who rely on imports. It is also bad news for U.S. farmers and businesses that rely on the export of goods to other countries.
Trump's tariffs are already damaging important supply chains in ways that will be difficult and very expensive to reverse. And, in the meantime, China and others are all too happy to fill in the void.
I just had a group of growers from California in my office, just yesterday, and they were sharing with me their very specific experiences--fears--that are playing out. You see, U.S. companies, not just agricultural companies, depend on markets in China and elsewhere in Asia, India, and Europe for sales, for profits that they can, in turn, invest in their own companies and hire more employees.
Now, when those markets are shut off to them and those countries respond to these unnecessary tariff wars provoked by President Trump, they don't stop consuming. Whether it is fruit, vegetables, electronics, or otherwise, they just find somewhere else to get it. When those other countries, those other markets, find a replacement for their supply, they are not going to give it up in 2 months, maybe, if Donald Trump wakes up in a better mood and sees the error of his ways when it comes to these tariffs--because there is that deadline, right? We are in a 90-day postponement of a lot of these tariffs, but we don't know what is coming on day 91.
Tariffs are imposed. Tariffs are not imposed. More significant tariffs are imposed. I hope it has nothing to do with his poll numbers because the American public will continue to feel more pain.
My point is this. Other markets and consumers abroad who have purchased from the United States are going to purchase elsewhere, and they are not going to revert immediately back, even if we get the President to make the right decision in the next couple of months.
Now, like I said, Americans are already feeling the pain. It is going to get worse. Just this morning, the Commerce Department reported our Nation's gross domestic product for the first quarter. The results: Our quarterly GDP declined by 0.3 percent. It wasn't a reduction in growth. It was a decline of 0.3 percent in his first 100 days alone.
Donald Trump's reckless policies actually shrank the American economy. Is that what he bragged about? Is that what he campaigned on? Is that what people voted for?
This shrinking of the economy, by the way, follows 3 years of robust growth of our economy under President Biden. I don't think our Republican colleagues will recognize that, but it is true. The numbers do not lie.
So 100 days of chaos, increased costs, and corruption are shrinking our economy. To my Republican colleagues: Are you hearing this? Are you listening? Are you prepared to act?
American businesses are going to be forced to take on some of these higher costs for materials, to cut back on production, to try to make ends meet, to delay investment. That is the opposite of what we need. We need more investment, not to delay or postpone investment because of tariff uncertainty. And, certainly, they are going to raise prices, because, again, when American companies have to import, it is American companies that pay the tariffs. It is not other countries, as the President
Meanwhile, the world is moving on without us, as I explained a minute ago.
So let's be clear about the stakes of what we are debating today: A vote against this resolution is a vote to maintain Trump's tariffs that are so clearly devastating our economy already. It will move us closer to a recession solely of Trump's doing. You can't blame it on anybody else. And it is a vote against the American worker, a vote against the American economy, a vote against American competitiveness. Is that what you want to go back and tell your constituents?
Colleagues, I urge you to listen to your constituents, to small businesses in our respective States, the State and local governments. It is not too late to turn back.
Support this resolution.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. President, President Trump took a strong American economy and broke it in less than 100 days.
Right now, Republican Senators are at a crossroads. Will they vote to stop Trump's chaotic tariffs and save our economy, or will they continue bending the knee to Donald Trump? That is the vote that we are forcing tonight.
When he ran for office, Donald Trump promised, over and over and over, that he would lower costs on day one. Those were his words: Lower costs on day one. In fact, he said after he was elected that it was one of the main reasons that he won. But as soon as the election was over, he ignored that promise.
Instead of working to lower costs on day one, he has decided to start the dumbest trade war in U.S. history, which is already increasing costs for American households and damaging our economy.
So let's take a step back and talk about what has happened since Trump started this trade war.
The stock market took the biggest plunge since the early days of the pandemic, sinking millions of Americans' retirement accounts. Businesses have begun hiking prices and laying off workers. Americans are worried that they won't be able to survive a cratering economy. And, just today, Americans woke up to the news that Donald Trump single-handedly shrunk our economy in 3 months and raised the cost of their groceries.
The warning lights are all flashing red. We have seen this before, but this time our economy is teetering on the edge not because of a mortgage meltdown or a one-in-a-century virus but because of one man alone: the President of the United States.
Unless we reverse course quickly, many economists believe that a recession is inevitable. And like in all recessions, the pain will fall hardest on working families. Many Americans will face the one-two punch of job losses on top of overwhelming debt burdens. A cascade of defaults and foreclosures and personal bankruptcies could follow.
With so many indications that American families are in serious trouble, our government should be throwing them a lifeline. Instead, President Trump is throwing them an anchor, while he carves out exceptions for a few well-connected billionaires who have bent the knee.
This is the moment for Congress to step up. And where are the Senate Republicans? Watching? Waiting? Hoping it doesn't get worse? Hoping that maybe somebody else will step up?
Well, I am here to say: It is up to us in the U.S. Senate. No one else is coming to save us. We are the ones who have to act.
If Republicans care about the American people, they will vote yes on our resolution today and turn off the fake emergency that Donald Trump is using to impose his on-again, off-again red-light, green-light tariffs--the tariffs that are pushing our economy off a cliff.
Let me repeat: Congress can end this economic threat today. All we need are some Republican Senators to join us to vote down the President's abuse of emergency authorities.
Unless we take action now, millions of people will lose their jobs, families will be destroyed, and our economy will take years to recover. But this time, it will be the President of the United States who destroyed our economy, and it will be congressional Republicans who helped him do it because they didn't have the spine to stand up to Donald Trump.
So I say to my Republican colleagues: Let's get this done. You have a choice. You can either continue to enable Donald Trump's tariff chaos, or you could actually stand up for our constituents. It is truly that simple.
The chaos and corruption of Trump's first 100 days can be curbed. The President is no King, and he only has as much power as Congress is willing to let him keep.
It is time for us--Democrats, Republicans, and Independents--to step up and head off a crisis before millions more American families are hurt. We have the power. We just need the courage to use it.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
Mr. President, the Constitution of the United States puts two powers clearly--clearly--within the hands of Congress: the power to tax and the power to conduct trade policy, including the imposition of tariffs. These are powers for Congress, not the Executive. But President Trump finds Congress an inconvenience, and he has decided to take both of these powers onto his own shoulders by imposing a national sales tax--that is what his global tariff regime is--without any vote in Congress, purely on his own say-so, and to engage every nation in the world in a trade war on his own say-so without involving Congress.
President Trump has said in the past: ``I alone can fix it,'' and we know that that statement is false. No one alone can fix the big challenges facing our Nation. But I think if he were to say, ``I alone can break it,'' the results of the last 100 days would have proven him correct.
President Trump, on Inauguration Day, inherited the strongest economy on the planet Earth--not a perfect economy but the strongest economy, the envy of other industrialized nations. That is what he had just 100 days ago. And we know this morning that strong economy, which was growing for 3 years at a very solid pace, is now contracting.
It is not only the contraction of the economy, it is chaos in the stock market; it is declining consumer confidence; it is projections of recession by Federal Reserve districts and major economists.
All of this is happening because Donald Trump has pursued a three- step strategy of his own: massive layoffs of employees, contrary to congressionally passed appropriations bills, massive slashing of Federal spending programs, including those relied upon by everyday Americans in contravention of congressionally appropriated spending bills, and the waging of a tariff war against the entire planet.
And as my colleagues have said, it is a tariff war that gets announced and then suspended and then delayed and then announced again and then exceptions might be granted if we like you or not. It is chaos.
Last week, I traveled around the Commonwealth of Virginia, and I talked to businesses everywhere in my State. And they talked about the layoffs and they talked about the spending cuts and they talked about the tariffs and they added those three together and said what those three add up to is chaos--the chaos of unpredictability.
Many businesses told me that they want to make investments. They want to make investments to grow their businesses in Virginia, but they are unwilling to make a decision to invest as long as the rules of the road are chaotic and up in the air.
Businesses that import natural products to turn into finished products have to pay a tariff on the import. Businesses who sell their product abroad are losing markets as nations put retaliatory tariffs on the United States. And so these businesses are pausing their investment decisions.
Businesses in Virginia that are connected to multinational businesses are saying that their headquarters are deciding, well, we can invest in the United States or we can invest in another country. It is not wise to invest in the United States when everything is so chaotic.
Let's be clear, and I spoke about this with my colleagues when I talked
And the analysis, as this chart shows, of who the tariffs raise taxes on, like every other form of sales tax, tariffs are regressive. They hit lower income people the most. The average tax change as a share of income if the Trump tariffs are implemented, it is essentially on the poorest 20 percent of the American population, the equivalent to an additional 6.2 percent sales tax. For the next wealthiest quintile up, it is a 5.5-percent increase on the sales tax. For the next, it is 5.0, all the way up to the richest 1 percent will see their effective sales tax rate go up by 1.7 percent. This is a sales tax on everyone in the country, but it is a sales tax that, as all sales taxes do, fall hardest on those who can least afford it.
The new sales tax is affecting retirees particularly. So from NBC News:
We have a Social Security system that is a good foundation for retirement so long as this administration doesn't mess it up, but it is not sufficient for retirement. And what you need for a dignified retirement is Social Security plus private savings, in most people's case, 401(k)s. The turmoil in the market driven by tariff uncertainty is hammering retirees more than just about any other group of people in this country.
The new sales tax is also a drag on economic growth--we saw this in the announcement this morning--but not just economic growth in the United States. I am on the Armed Services Committee, and I had a chance to go visit 2 weeks ago with the new government, incoming government in Germany.
Germany is a great ally. More U.S. troops are on the ground in Germany than any nation other than Japan outside the United States. We are security partners in Ukraine and in European security generally. The new German Government was just elected, the Chancellor will be installed in the first week in May with a mandate to restore the German economy, which has been in the doldrums since about 2019.
And as I talked to German leaders, military leaders and leaders in the civilian government, they said this is going to be the most pro- American, pro-transatlantic Chancellor you will have seen for a very long time, but he is coming in with a powerful mandate to grow the German economy so that we can be even better security partners, so that we can work better together on the manufacture of the F-35 and to help Ukraine in its defense.
But the Trump tariffs are standing directly in the way of this new, pro-American government being able to achieve what they need to be able to achieve. And that is why the IMF said that the Trump tariffs, this new sales tax, will be a drag not just on U.S. economic growth but on global economic growth.
This is a story from less than a week ago. U.S. manufacturing was already slowing before the GDP numbers came out today. A larger share of manufacturers are reporting declines in new orders rather than increases. Some of those declines are driven because of the price effect of tariffs, the price effect of retaliatory tariffs, but some are also being driven by the uncertainty.
There is a chaos penalty on the economy. When you are not sure what is going to happen, you slow your investments, and that is why you see a decline in manufacturing.
The Trump new sales tax, again, as proof from Reuters, ``Trump tariffs would harm all involved, U.S. trade partners say.''
This is not just something that is hurting everyday Americans--those are those to whom we have a responsibility in this body, but this is affecting the global economy in a way that is shocking.
And China, Japan, South Korea--a company from South Korea just announced a huge investment in Virginia yesterday in the clean energy space. Japan and South Korea, especially, are countries that do a lot of foreign direct investment in the United States. Japan and South Korea are two of our strongest partners, but even they are responding in a hostile way to U.S. tariffs. In fact, you see China, Japan, and South Korea starting to cooperate together to ward off some of the negative economic effects of U.S. tariffs. The last thing we want to do is encourage Japan and South Korea to work closer with China. We want Japan and South Korea to work closer with the United States. But the Trump tariffs are chasing allies into the arms of adversaries. How foolish is that?
And then we end up with the chaos argument that my colleagues had mentioned before. From the New York Times last week: ``With Only Bad Options, Businesses Scramble for a Tariff Chaos Playbook.''
A tariff chaos playbook.
When the cost of your imports is going up, when your export market is shrinking, when you don't know what the end of the story will be, the options that you have are very murky. Businesses want to have predictability. They want to be able to look into a crystal ball, and if they don't completely know the future, they want to be able to make enough of a prediction about the economic climate that would justify sizable investments.
And in a time of chaos, those investments are not going to be made, and that raises the danger that this first quarter economic contraction will be followed by another, which would be the textbook definition of a recession.
So how did we get here? From an economy on Inauguration Day that was the strongest in the world, when President Trump stood 50 yards from here and said it was a golden age, to an economy that has nothing but red lights and question marks all over it, we got here because one individual decided to bypass Congress and take both the taxing power and the trade power into his own hands without a debate, without committee hearings, without deliberation, without considering what the people thought about the plan, and that one man and his decisions have taken a chain saw to the American economy.
We must turn this around, and the good news is the Senate has the ability to turn it around. When the Congress passed the IEEPA law decades ago, it recognized the potential that an Executive can overuse the emergency power, and that is why Congress did something rare in IEEPA. They gave the power even to a single Senator, even to a single Senator in the minority party to say: Wait a minute, Mr. President, you have declared an emergency and, guess what, you are wrong. And even at the request of a single Senator, this body is put on the board to have to declare whether we own the policies of the President, this Trump madness, or whether we disown it and urge him to take a different path.
All the economic trends are pointing in the same direction. We should take a different path on the economy before this gets worse. The vote we will have later today gives the Senate, the greatest deliberative body in the world, the chance to stand up and say: Let's take a different path.
I thank my colleagues for their work together on this important resolution and urge a favorable vote on the resolution that we will have later today.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. President, you know, there was an old-fashioned conservative principle that believed that less taxes were better than more taxes; that if you taxed something, you got less of it, so that if you place a new tax on trade, you will get less trade.
There was also this idea that you didn't do taxation without representation. That idea goes not only back to our American Revolution, it goes back to the English civil war as well.
It goes back to probably Magna Carta. I mean, for hundreds of years the English were arguing of the supremacy of Parliament, that Parliament would be able to have the power over the King. So when we were leading up to the Revolution, the cry from James Otis was, ``Taxation without representation is tyranny.''
These were the words of James Otis, but they still ring true today. It should not come as a surprise that in a country founded on a tax revolt, one person
Our Constitution forbids taxes from being enacted without the approval of Congress, and yet here we are.
An emergency has been declared, as the Senator from Virginia remarked, everywhere. There is an emergency everywhere. Sounds like an emergency everywhere is really an emergency nowhere. But despite the constitutional restraints or constraints on executive power, Americans have now been ordered to pay higher taxes in the form of tariffs but without the consent of Congress.
The tariffs we discuss today are global tariffs. Just about every country in the world is subjected to at least a 10-percent tariff, to say nothing of the dozens of countries whose imports will be taxed at a much higher rate.
Congress didn't debate these tariffs. Congress didn't vote to enact these tariffs. The tariffs are simply imposed by Presidential fiat, by proclamation.
Government by one person who assumes all power by asserting a so- called emergency is the antithesis of constitutional government. It was Montesquieu that our Founding Fathers looked to in setting up the separation of powers.
And Montesquieu said that when you unite the legislative power with the executive power in the body of one person, that no liberty can exist. They worried about this. They fretted about it. They worried about having too much power with the President, and so they severely constricted the power of the Presidency. They said the President couldn't take us to war; only Congress could. They said the President couldn't spend money; only Congress could. They said the President couldn't tax people; only Congress could.
These were the very bedrock and still are the very bedrock of our constitutional principles. Yet, people--particularly on my side--are looking away and saying: Oh, whatever. We will just let the President do whatever.
Look, I supported President Trump. I still support President Trump on many things. But I am not for a country run by emergencies. Even if the person was doing what I wanted and was, you know, making every day my birthday, I would not be for that unless we deliberated upon that. There are constitutional processes that are incredibly important.
The Constitution doesn't allow the President of the United States to be the sole decider. Even the President must abide by the proper limits of Executive power.
Thankfully, our Constitution does more than merely hope that our Chief Executive will remain within the confines of the Constitution; our Constitution explicitly limits the power of the Presidency. Our Founders led a rebellion against a King precisely over this. They went to great lengths to circumscribe and limit the power of the Presidency.
Devoted as they were to the preservation of individual liberty, the Founders divided power among three branches of government. But more importantly, those three branches were to check and balance each other to prevent one branch from accumulating too much power.
Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that the Constitution was to pit ambition against ambition. The natural ambition of men and women to accumulate power was to be checked by other branches of people who would say: You can't have that power. It is our power.
That pitting of ambition back and forth was to constrain government. It was to constrain government from running away and power from being run away with one person.
The Founding Fathers empowered Congress with tools to ensure that the liberties of the people would not be threatened by one-person rule. The Founders would not be surprised that the Executive would attempt to aggrandize power at the expense of the legislature. They would have expected it. Indeed, they did expect it. But they would be surprised-- the Founders would be shocked that Congress would voluntarily and recklessly and fecklessly give up their power to the Presidency, to submit to emergency rule. The Founders would not have expected the House of Representatives to become so craven as to refuse to even allow a vote on ending the emergency.
The law says that the vote we will have is mandatory. It is privileged. The Senate will adhere to the law.
The House will not have a vote. The House, in its haste to give away its power to tax, actually passed a rule to prevent a mandatory vote on ending the emergencies. They prevent it because the rule says that days no longer exist. They declared that legislative days will not exist despite the legislature continuing to meet each day.
The House has essentially ruled that days are not days and they are not to be counted as days until such time as the House again agrees to allow days to be counted as days. Does that sound absurd? Absolutely. It is absurd. It is craven. It is cowardice at its best, and it is dishonest because a rule of the House is preventing a law from being obeyed. I didn't know we could pass a rule to prevent a law from being obeyed.
When the emergency powers were granted to the President in 1966, the Emergencies Act was meant to constrain the Republic. We were already worried about too many emergencies. Many on my side have actually cosponsored bills that say emergencies should automatically end unless affirmatively approved by Congress. Many of those people now are looking the other way. They are looking the other way and saying: Well, it is our President now.
I had a reform of the Emergencies Act under the previous President, a Democrat. I had the same bill under a Republican. This should not be a partisan issue.
The Founders would not have expected the upper chamber, the Senate, to let the novel use of a statute traditionally used to sanction adversaries to become used for tariffs to tax American people and to let it go unchallenged. This is not constitutionalism; this is cowardice.
Our system of government cannot work when Congress abdicates its legislative authority. Madison said we would pit ambition against ambition, but what if we have Presidential ambition and we have congressional acquiescence? we have congressional timidity? we have congressional nonentity, choosing to become a nonentity, not participate, do whatever you want? It is a recipe for disaster. Madison and those of the revolutionary generation would have expected Members of Congress to jealously guard their authority from the imperial pretensions of the Chief Executive.
To endorse governance by emergency rule is to fail to live up to what the Constitution demands of us, and failure to do our constitutional duty is an invitation to further emergency rule.
I know some Republicans like the idea of taxing trade, but what if there is a next President who is a Democrat who says: By emergency rule, I decree there will be no gasoline-using cars. We will have only electric cars.
That is what we are preparing ourselves for. Every distortion of the checks and balances of powers gets worse. Every time a party changes hands, they say: Well, you guys did this, so we are going to leapfrog and do this. And it goes back and forth until the individual citizen knows nothing other than the loss of liberty.
Even President Trump didn't try to argue that this law called IEEPA, which is normally used for sanctions--he didn't act upon it in his first term. He makes a claim today, though, likely because the appropriate trade laws on the books require months to be implemented, and he can't wait. And the Republicans go along, and they say: Emergency? No problem. Constitution? What? Constitution? Forget about it.
Members of his political party will stand by his assertion. Some may cast their actions today as an exercise of party loyalty. Some may even be praised by Pennsylvania Avenue. But for those who care to listen closely, within that praise will be heard a touch of disdain.
It is no secret that Congress lacks the fortitude to stand up for its prerogatives, and this is bipartisan. Presidents in both parties routinely exceed their power because they know that Congress has weakened itself to such an extent that it cannot challenge and will not challenge Executive overreach.
Congress delegates its legislative authority to the President so that the
But I don't want to let off both parties on this. The powers that have been given to the President over trade have been given to the President by Congress over many decades. Congress acquiesced. Congress said: Here. We don't want to deal with it. You can have it.
Congress today can scarcely be bothered to even consider individual appropriations bills. By consistently waiting until the last second to pass a massive funding bill and threaten a government shutdown, the leadership deprives Congress of what Madison called its most complete and effectual weapon: the power of the purse.
We just put it all in one bill, and then they say: If you don't for it, you are for shutting the government down.
You can't shut the government down, so you have to vote for the massive bill, which includes more pork than you can probably ever imagine.
Congress has--unique among the three branches--unilaterally disarmed and demonstrated itself unable and unwilling to check the Executive.
If Americans are to live under this emergency rule, it will not be because the President sought too much power; it will be because Congress let it happen.
If Americans are to live in a country where the President alone decides what is to be taxed, at what rate, and for how long, it will be because Congress is too feeble to stand up for the interests and bank accounts of the people.
If Americans live in a country where their elected representatives in the legislature cannot or will not speak for them, it will be because those representatives silenced themselves. They gave in. They did not stand up and do their duty.
We can show the people that the constitutional principle of the separation of powers still means something and that we can successfully challenge the Presidential attempt to raise taxes without the consent of Congress.
Tariffs are taxes, plain and simple. Tariffs don't punish foreign governments; they punish American families. When we tax imports, we raise the price of everything from groceries, to smartphones, to washing machines, to just about every conceivable product.
Voters in the last election indicated they were fed up with high prices. Every time Americans went to the grocery store, they were reminded that inflation and putting food on their family's table was more difficult and left them with less money for other necessities.
Many pundits say the 2024 election hinged on promises to reduce inflation and lower taxes. Does it make any sense to impose a tax on imports that will make all Americans worse off? Shouldn't we learn from our success?
We should ask ourselves a fundamental question: Is trade good? Well, trade is simply capitalism. Trade never occurs unless you want a product more than you want your money. Has anyone ever made a trade, a voluntary trade, where you thought you were being ripped off? No. You buy stuff only because you think you are making a good deal.
Those who say that, oh, no, we are being ripped off--it is a fallacy. It asserts that one of the parties must necessarily lose or be taken advantage of. The argument belies a fundamental misunderstanding of trade. By definition, every voluntary trade is mutually beneficial.
Trade is good. That isn't an opinion; it is a fact. For at least the last 50 years, as trade rises, so does wealth. And people say the middle class has gotten smaller? Slightly but only because it moved to the upper class.
These tariffs will make Americans poorer, and they will make the defenders of those tariffs pay. Tariffs bring us closer to the day when the people are ruled by a czar of industrial policy. When that day comes, we will wish we had defended the Constitution when we still had the power to do so.
We cannot afford to stand idly by while the constitutional principle of the separation of powers is eviscerated. Legislators who stand aside and abdicate the power to tax will one day rue the accumulation of power in the office of one person.
I stand against this emergency, I stand against these tariffs, and I stand against shredding the Constitution.
I have no animus towards the President. I voted for him and support his administration.
I come to the floor today not because I want to but because I am compelled to. I love my country and the principles upon which it is founded. The oath I took upon taking this office is to the Constitution of the United States and not to any person or faction.
I want to preserve the divisions of power that protect us and our children from the rule of one person. That is why I will today vote to end this emergency. I will vote to reclaim the taxation power of Congress, where the Constitution properly places it, and I urge the Members of my party to do the same.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
Mr. President, I rise today to speak in opposition to the resolution. Before I get into my prepared remarks, let me just make it clear. What we are doing here today is following a law, IEEPA, which gave authority to the President of the United States to declare an emergency and gave Congress the authority to reject that declaration of the emergency by a vote in Congress.
The President has declared that emergency under the authority of that law, and this resolution has been brought to reject the declaration of that emergency. That is what we are debating today, and that is what the vote in Congress is about.
I appreciate that many of us in this Chamber have heard from constituents concerned about the economic impact of the tariffs. All of us are watching this issue closely and working with the administration to find ways to minimize its impact on Americans.
We should also be working with the administration to address a shared objective: more opportunities for Americans in foreign markets and an end to discriminatory practices in foreign markets against Americans, against our farmers, and against our businesses.
The President's decision to pause the full reciprocal tariffs for 90 days, other than for China, was a prudent move in that respect. It helped mitigate the impact. It discouraged retaliation but also continued the serious negotiations by our trading partners to address longstanding trading barriers faced by Americans in foreign markets.
I don't believe there is anybody in Congress who would deny that for decades, nations around the globe have put unjustified tariffs on American producers, on American products. We should not undermine these negotiations by the President at this critical juncture. The administration has shared that serious negotiations are proceeding with 18 countries at a minimum now and with more to follow shortly.
In the coming weeks, the U.S. Trade Representative will meet with the Senate advisory group on negotiations and the Finance Committee to discuss these negotiations in detail. I encourage my colleagues to trust the President, at least until they have had the opportunity to hear from his trade team about their efforts.
As the White House recently argued in its statement of administrative policy, this resolution, if we passed it, would signal to U.S. trading partners that they can continue to discriminate against U.S. exports with impunity and would signal that the United States is not serious about addressing structural imbalances in the global economy and the conditions giving rise to the threat to U.S. national security and economy.
Disapproving this emergency will undercut the serious negotiations that are underway, which are also yielding results. For example, India has already suspended its digital services tax on U.S. companies. The President is a good negotiator, and he deserves more time and our support.
Ending these negotiations at their inception benefits only one actor: China. China will see its full reciprocal tariff limited immediately without offering any concessions to addressing longstanding, bipartisan grievances. Moreover, China will benefit because its trade negotiations will continue, while ours will sputter out.
For these reasons, I encourage my colleagues to vote in opposition to this resolution.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.
Mr. President, I rise today on the 100th day as a U.S. Senator--in fact, Florida's newest U.S. Senator--to urge my colleagues to support H.J. Res. 75, a Congressional Review Act resolution to rescind burdensome energy efficiency requirements on commercial refrigerators and freezers that were imposed by the Biden-Harris administration at the 11th hour just before President Trump's inauguration.
The Biden-Harris administration, as we all know, in many of these agenda-driven regulations pushed out of Agencies, was a disaster for American families, businesses, and industries across our Nation. Their reckless regulatory agenda prioritized Green New Deal virtue signaling over good fiscal stewardship and the interests of the American people by exposing manufacturers and other stakeholders in our industries to regulatory uncertainty and forcing American families to shoulder the burden.
As Florida's attorney general, I was proud many times to lead the fight against regulations that made no sense and were driven by partisan, unelected bureaucrats by filing challenges against these regulations in court.
While it is regrettable that the Biden-Harris administration ignored our concerns and the complaints by Floridians and, instead, forced these harmful regulations into our States and into our industries in the waning hours of their administration, I am proud to now be here in the Senate to help continue the fight against these sprawling, harmful, nonsensical policies that were pushed by these Agencies at the very, very last minute of the Biden administration.
If this regulation were allowed to remain on the books, Biden's shortsighted harmful energy standard would force commercial fridge and freezer manufacturers to discontinue product lines and close factories in the U.S. The results would be layoffs and open the door for other foreign competitors to step in instead of those here in our own country.
Food producers, distributors, wholesalers, grocery stores, consumers would be severely impacted by a sudden unavailability of these commercial-scale appliances at the center of America's food supply chains. That would expose yet another critical supply chain risk associated with foreign dependence and this would be a disaster.
We need to focus right now on prioritizing American businesses, reducing costs for American people, and we need to be focused on opening factories in America, not closing them, especially for such critical products as these that allow for large-scale food distribution and storage.
The government should be making it easier to plan and establish food distribution chains rather than undermining them with harmful regulatory uncertainty.
We saw time and time again in the last administration the attempt to force costly and burdensome regulations onto the American people and businesses in an effort to advance a partisan ``green new scam'' agenda. The effects of prices on American families and businesses were devastating.
I firmly believe Biden bureaucrats gave no thought to the effects, jumped right in. And the motto became, frankly: Above everything else, politics first, Americans last. I am proud to take this fight head-on to ensure that Americans are not shouldering the cost of the last administration's regulatory state.
I would like to thank Congressman Craig Goldman of Texas for leading this effort in the House, and I urge my colleagues in the Senate to vote for this resolution. I look forward to the legislation heading to the President's desk to become law.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. President, I am here today to defend the standards for our appliances that save energy, that cut climate emissions. They reduce costs for American families and businesses. Yet Trump and his Republican allies are attacking these commonsense appliance efficiency standards.
This morning's vote overturned the Department of Energy's updated energy labeling rule that would have made it easier for appliance manufacturers to test, to certify, and to label their products in a way that consumers can understand.
Energy labels are like food nutrition labels but for your electricity bill. They empower consumers to choose cheaper, more efficient appliances. They drive competition. They create certainty. They help the American people make informed choices and avoid confusion.
The rule that Republicans overturned was not a ban. It was not a mandate. The rule didn't even change underlying efficiency standards. This vote comes after two additional votes earlier this month where Republicans repealed the Department of Energy's updated efficiency standards for gas-fired water heaters and walk-in coolers and freezers.
Let's be clear: These votes are not about appliance freedom. They are about fossil fuel fascism. This is about corporate lobbyists putting profits over people and destroying decades of bipartisan energy efficiency progress. Having the information to make an informed decision about your appliance that your family wants to buy is about choice--your choice. Not Big Oil's choice, not Big Gas's choice--your choice.
Here is the information. Make up your mind. Do you want one that is more efficient? There it is right in the middle of Best Buy, right there in the middle of the store. Pick that one.
Donald Trump's ridiculous culture war against energy-efficient appliances is a war against saving families money. The more efficient the appliance, the less money people pay in their electricity bill. The fact is that Federal appliance efficiency standards are one of the most successful climate and consumer savings programs in American history. And these standards have been around for decades.
Back in 1987, I wrote the law. I am the author of the law that gave the Department of Energy the authority to set binding energy standards for appliances in America, which are supposed to be updated every 6 years. That is my law. It was signed into law as the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act.
Now, I am going to be honest with you, Ronald Reagan vetoed it the first time because the oil and gas industry wanted him to veto it. And that law ultimately did pass, and it covered 13 major appliances-- kitchen refrigerators, dryers, air conditioners, and, yes, commercial refrigerators. And since then, the number of appliances has more than quadrupled.
Here is the way you should think about it. We need big electrical generating facilities all across the country. Everyone knows right now that AI is now going to be a huge drain on all of the electricity that we have in our country. So how do we handle that problem? Well, one of the ways of handling that problem is to say that refrigerators have to be more efficient in the amount of electricity which they consume. Light bulbs have to be more efficient. Air conditioning has to be more efficient.
For example, in Texas, in the summer, 80 percent of peak demand for electricity is air conditioning. So if you increase the efficiency by a third in air conditioners, you are dramatically reducing the need to have to build more electrical generating facilities in the country. Or maybe there is more electricity left over for the AI industry if you are working in a way that is trying to maximize American ingenuity. That is who we are. We make things that are smarter.
Now, a lot of people--I would say the natural gas and oil industry at the top of the list--they don't want there to be progress. Why is that? Because the less efficient something is, the more energy, the more electricity that has to be consumed. That is their profit. But what does it do? It says to the consumer: You have to pay more for more electricity. It says that you cannot have new options that make it possible for you to ensure that your family has the most modern, the most efficient air conditioning or lighting or refrigeration or stoves.
No, we are going to lock you into 10-years-ago technology. We are going to lock you into 20-years-ago technology. That is a dream for the oil and gas industry--a dream. But for the consumer, no, they are the big loser because what
Former President Biden updated more than two dozen standards that have been delayed under the first Trump administration on behalf of the oil and gas industry. These updates were estimated to save households nearly $1 trillion annually over 30 years and save the average family at least $100 per year in lower utility bills. They were also estimated to cut approximately 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon emissions over 30 years. That is the equivalent of taking over 18 million gasoline- powered automobiles off the road each year for 30 years.
That is bad, by the way. That is bad for the oil and gas industry, with fewer greenhouse gases going up, and less oil and gas being consumed. All of that is part of a very bad equation for the oil and gas industry, but it is catastrophic for families. It is catastrophic for our planet that the industries are allowed to dictate policies here on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
These appliance standards have also driven progress in States like Massachusetts, where strong State-level appliance efficiency programs are projected to cut energy costs by $13 million each year by 2044 for families and small businesses, while fighting climate change. Let's not forget that these rules have support from industry, but now they are the target of political theater out here on the Senate floor.
It is not too late to act. We have one more appliance efficiency Congressional Review Act vote ahead of us. This is why I am urging my colleagues to vote no to overturn the Department of Energy's efficiency standards for commercial refrigerators and freezers.
These standards update the minimum efficiency levels for new refrigerators and freezers at restaurants, grocery stores, and convenience stores that run 24/7, 365 days a year. This rule alone--the one we are going to vote on--would save businesses up to $4.6 billion over 30 years. These are savings that restaurants and grocery stores could pass on to their customers. And if you have ever worked in a kitchen, you know the importance of reliability and cost savings.
Eliminating this rule would only inject further uncertainty into the market, punish forward-thinking manufacturers, and raise prices on the very businesses--especially small businesses--we say that we want to support. Energy efficiency isn't just an environmental solution; it is an economic one. It cuts costs for renters, for seniors, for small businesses, for schools, and municipal buildings.
Make no mistake about it. Eliminating these standards is climate sabotage. Overturning even a few of them jeopardizes that future. It locks in dirty fossil fuel use. It worsens pollution in frontline communities that are already burdened by asthma, heat, and high energy bills. We cannot slam the brakes on progress just for fossil fuel profits.
A vote on this next resolution to overturn the updated standards for refrigerators and freezers is a vote against lower bills, against climate progress, and against consumer choice. We need to be investing in the future, not resurrecting the past.
When my mother got disappointed in me when I was a boy--when I was 10 years old--my mother would just say: Eddy, you have to learn how to work smarter, not harder. Otherwise, your father and I are going to donate your brain to Harvard Medical School as a completely unused human organ.
Ah, and what did she mean? She meant that you just had to be smarter and think the problem through.
That is what energy efficiency is. It is working smarter, not harder. It is making the refrigerator, it is making the air conditioner, and it is making everything that we use more efficient so we need less electricity, because that is all our nuclear powerplants, our coal- burning plants, and wind and solar are. They are just ways of providing electricity for the air-conditioning, for the lighting, and for the heating. That is all it is. If we make it 25 percent more efficient, then, all of a sudden, we need 25 percent less electricity which is being generated and 25 percent less pollution that goes up into the air and into the lungs of the children in our Nation. That is what we are debating here today.
Once again, the Republicans are going to side with the oil and gas industry, and they are going to say: America can't figure out how to improve the efficiency of appliances in our Nation.
That is what they are saying, but they are also saying the same thing about our automobiles: No, we can't figure out how to make them more efficient.
That is what they are saying about wind and solar: No, we can't figure out how to deploy it in our country as an alternative to oil and gas.
By the way, the story always comes back to that one issue--oil and gas and their money inside of this system--but the price is being paid by consumers who have to pay higher bills, and it is going to be a price that is paid by our planet, as it gets more and more dangerously hotter.
My mother would always say that the planet is running a fever, and there are no emergency rooms for planets. That is where we are. It is the young generation who is leading us. It is the young generation who is saying: You must do something about climate change.
It is the young generation who is saying: We must figure out a way of reducing this pollution that we are sending up into the atmosphere.
Once again, the Republicans are bringing up another bill on the floor of the U.S. Senate that is going to dramatically increase pollution, and that is going into the lungs of every child, of every pregnant mother in our country, and it is absolutely irresponsible and absolutely unnecessary, except for the role that the oil and gas industry plays in the politics of the Republican Party.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, I rise today with a number of my colleagues. I will speak for the next, probably, hour-plus on the topic of election integrity and the seemingly constant attacks on our election integrity by Donald Trump and our Republican colleagues.
I am joined by a number of my friends and colleagues in our remarks here for the next block. Senator Welch will be speaking next, our colleague from Vermont, and then Senator Blumenthal, Senator Merkley, Leader Schumer, Senator Klobuchar, and Senator Bennet. And it will be wrapped up with my partner in organizing this group of Senators, Senator Reed, who is not only the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee but is the ranking member of the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing funding for this space.
I rise today, with my colleagues, out of grave concern for the future of our democracy.
I currently serve as the ranking member of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. I also, as many of you know, am the former secretary of state for the State of California. So I have seen firsthand, not just through the last 4 years but for the last 8, 9 years, the growing threats to our democracy and the threats to the public confidence in our elections.
Sadly, the truth in the year 2025 is that it is not just foreign actors who are trying to undermine our elections and the people's confidence in the elections. It is also so many Republican officials here at home, not just in the Capitol but in statehouses across America--but, yes, even here in the Capitol.
I think of the old horror movie where the person on the phone would say that the call is coming from inside the house. In State legislatures, in the Capitol, and in the Oval Office, radical Republicans are working hard--actively working hard--to make it harder for eligible Americans to exercise their constitutional right to vote. We see it in the endless lies and conspiracy theories about massive voter fraud. We see it in the new barriers being erected that would make it harder for eligible Americans to simply register to vote. And we see it in the Trump administration's firing of the hard-working and dedicated security officials who are tasked with protecting our elections.
So, yes, over the next hour, with my Democratic colleagues, we will peel
In Rochester Hills, MI, Republican clerk Tina Barton worked hard to help administer and uphold a free and fair election in 2020. But for her dedication and hard work and professionalism, 1 week after the 2020 election, Tina received an anonymous phone call--not a phone call thanking her for her service but a phone call threatening her life. The voice on the other end threatened to come after her family, to hold a knife to her throat, and to kill her.
As shocking as threats like that may be, Tina represents just one-- one in every three election workers who has reported receiving threats, harassment, and abuse. So, for Tina and so many others, that harassment grew worse with every lie spread by the Trump campaign about a so- called stolen election, with threats against election officials continuing in subsequent elections.
There was no stolen election. That is a farce. But for those selfless election workers, Donald Trump hasn't even tried to lower the temperature of political rhetoric or combat the disinformation that leads to the threats and harassment. Instead, he has, actually, actively made it worse for those who are administering elections. Think of the election workers and all of the volunteers who work polling places to help our elections in our democracy thrive. He has made it worse for voters. He has fired Federal workers who combat election misinformation and disinformation.
Why would he and his administration and Republicans in Congress who support him want to make it easier for people to interfere with our elections?
I am at a loss. I am at a loss for an answer. What I do know is that, by failing to counter, by failing to elevate the truth, Republicans in Congress have become complicit as they just sit back instead of pushing back.
Believe it or not, there was a time, not that long ago, when even Republicans had the moral courage to speak out against Trump's attacks on our democracy.
I do think back a few years to my days as the California secretary of state when, during the first Trump administration, he created a commission to investigate these unfounded claims of ``voter fraud''-- without evidence, baseless claims--but for him, it was important enough to set up a commission to investigate and uncover the truth. The commission set out to collect sensitive, private voter information from every State, demanding that States hand over not just the names of every voter on the voter rolls but their dates of birth, their voting history, their Social Security information, and more.
It was a blatant power grab, long before Elon Musk started tapping into Federal servers, by the way. It was a blatant power grab which was responded to: 44 States, both Republican and Democratic, said no. Republican and Democratic elections officials throughout the country joined together to reject Donald Trump's demands under his first term. Even in Mississippi--hardly a woke, Democratic bastion, folks--even in Mississippi, then-Secretary of State and now-Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, was outraged. He was so offended by the power grab that he responded to the White House's request with ``Go jump in the Gulf of Mexico,'' saying, ``Mississippi is a great state to launch from.'' Good for him.
So you can imagine my disappointment when, fast-forward to this past March, Trump announced yet another anti-voter Executive order that would empower DOGE to access sensitive voter data--very reminiscent of the request from that first term but now on steroids.
And what did so many of our Republican colleagues here in the Senate and the House of Representatives say? Nothing.
But it is not just that the Republicans have gone silent, they have actually become Trump's enablers here in Congress by forgoing their responsibility to serve as a check and balance on the executive branch.
Any day now here in the Senate, we could see Republicans take up the SAVE Act--the measure that recently passed the House of Representatives, a bill that, I should say, scapegoats immigrants simply to justify new barriers to voter registration. Not only is that wrong, it is un-American. And, again, it is based on a lie.
I bring to this body my 6 years of experience administering elections not just in any State but the most populous State in the Nation, with the largest number and the most diverse number of voters in the Nation. I understand the complexities of both keeping our elections free and fair but also secure. And I am happy to take time to meet with any of you to walk you through the security measures that are in place to ensure the integrity of our elections.
I can tell you this, in case you didn't know already: It is already a crime for noncitizens to vote in our elections. To propose it as a new law is misleading. It is already against the law. And, by the way, it is also extremely, extremely rare.
But if our Republican colleagues were to have their way, American citizens--American citizens--would feel the impacts of the SAVE Act, from the Active-Duty servicemember who has to move for a new deployment and has to work so much harder than they should have to, to update their registration with the new address at the local elections office, which could be hours and hours from the base where they are assigned, to think of a married woman who chose to change her last name when she got married, and now the name listed on the birth certificate and the name on their ID no longer match. They will have some explaining to do and hurdles to jump over simply to register to vote.
These are just two small examples that impact millions and millions of Americans, should the SAVE Act pass.
And if you make it harder to register, guess what, you have made it harder for eligible citizens to vote. That would be the result of the SAVE Act.
Here in the Senate, I want people to know that together with my Senate Democratic colleagues, I will do whatever it takes to kill this bill, to stop it from passing, to keep it even from coming up, if we can, because we owe it to our constituents to fight every Executive order that undermines our democracy and to keep demanding answers on the firing of Federal workers entrusted with safeguarding our elections.
So over the course of the next hour, Senate Democrats will lay down a marker. We will stand strong against the rising tide of attacks on our democracy. And I will keep leading the fight to stop this cynical and dangerous bill and to stop Trump and Republicans' attempts to undermine our voting rights.
I yield the floor to my next colleague.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, first of all, I want to thank the senior Senator from California not just for his leadership on protecting the voting rights of all citizens in this country but for his work as the California Secretary of State, where he gained a nationwide reputation for running free and fair elections.
Senator Padilla, thank you so much for your work there, and thank you so much for your leadership here.
I want to stand here in solidarity with my colleagues to push back, oppose, denounce President Trump's March 25 Executive order, which claims to preserve the integrity of U.S. elections. It does no such thing. And, by the way, the idea that the President, who spent years denying the outcome of the election he lost gives him absolutely no credibility when he is speaking about his commitment to free and fair elections.
Like my colleagues--all of us--I am committed to safeguarding the security of our elections and working with anyone and everyone in the Chamber to advance that objective. All of us revere the right of citizens to make the decision about who their leaders are.
Unfortunately, many of our colleagues in the House, Republicans in the House, have fought to gut the election security grants our States depend on. I say that--usually, these are not partisan issues on voting, but it is turning into that. And we are seeing a one-sided, one-party approach, particularly out of the House, that goes to the
At the same time, despite the political violence at home and rising tensions abroad, the Trump administration has taken an ax to CISA. As we know, that is the Agency that works to curb emerging cyber security threats. And that threat, those threats, are a threat to the election integrity that is so essential to the well-being of our democracy.
The Executive order makes an assumption that noncitizen voting is a problem. The assertion that noncitizens are voting is alarming. Fortunately, it is not true. Also, Federal law already bars noncitizens from voting in congressional and Presidential elections.
So this is not a question of whether there is some backdoor effort on the part of one party to allow noncitizens to vote. It can't be done. It is illegal now. This Executive order would not change that.
Study after study has also shown that the rate of noncitizen voting is incredibly small, almost too small to measure--roughly 0.0001 percent, according to a reliable estimate. Obviously, that error is so small that it is hard to measure and would not have any material impact on our elections.
If you don't believe me, ask folks over at the libertarian Cato Institute, a very conservative organization. They have labeled President Trump's claims about noncitizen voting as ``bogus''--their word, not mine.
The order of the President also raises significant constitutional issues. The Constitution entrusts our States--and in the case of certain core rules of conduct, Congress--with the authority to regulate elections, not the Executive.
The Executive order President Trump has signed flips that framework and purports to vest the President with expansive new powers that he does not have--not just him but any chief executive.
It attempts to enact through Executive fiat what the Trump administration seemingly believes it cannot achieve through the legislative process, through an act of Congress; namely, Senate consideration of the SAVE Act, many provisions of which are contained in the President's Executive order.
I ask my colleagues to join me in focusing our attention on the very real problems that confront our Nation and are pushing back against the Trump administration's usurpation of the Senate's constitutional prerogatives.
President Trump is attacking the right to vote with respect to dismantling of the Department of Justice organization of attorneys who are being punished for their efforts to protect that right to a vote. That organization within the Justice Department is being actively dismantled.
And the President has currently used the Department of Justice as a tool to enact his--my view--very extreme policy positions, and that includes the Civil Rights Division at the Department whose mission includes protecting the right to vote.
According to press reports, all career supervisors in the voting rights section have been reassigned to other positions completely outside their areas of expertise. In other words, it is about destroying the Civil Rights Division.
The Assistant Attorney General, Harmeet Dhillon, surely, at the direction of the White House, is punishing career attorneys. This is outrageous.
Also, reportedly, political appointees at the Department of Justice have ordered the dismissal of all active cases and the closing of all active investigations by this section.
Our Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice has a revered history for standing up for the rights of all citizens and their constitutional rights to be enforced and protected, and that brazen attack on the Civil Rights Division will leave it totally unable--as the President, apparently, prefers--to defend the democratic right of our citizens to vote.
I urge my colleagues to oppose the President's Executive order.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, of all the thrills of living in a democracy, none is more meaningful than walking into a voting booth and casting a ballot. I can remember the first time I did it when I came of age.
I can remember, always--and I see it again and again and again--new citizens walking out of the courtroom after the naturalization ceremony, with their certificates of citizenship in their hands and handing it to the League of Women Voters person who is doing voter registrations. It is the thrill of their lifetime to be registered.
Of all the rights we have, voting is perhaps the most meaningful and the most practiced. It is foundational to all the others. It is the way we preserve the others. And that is why the fight for voting rights-- and blood has been spilled in the effort to secure it--is a storied bedrock of our American history.
And, now, again--as there has been throughout our history--there are efforts to suppress that right for political reasons, for political gain. That is what we have in the SAVE Act, an effort to erect obstacles and to require documentation that, very simply, Americans-- many of them--don't have.
This measure is a solution--supposed solution--in search of a problem. There is no widespread voter fraud. Undocumented people, noncitizens, almost never try to vote. And I am using the word ``almost'' because I am tempted to say ``never.'' But, of course, you can't rule out a negative. You can't prove it.
But the fact of the matter is, widespread voter fraud, even significant voter fraud by noncitizens, is an imaginary, delusional issue. Some 21 million U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote don't have the requisite documentation that would be required under the SAVE Act. To solve the delusional nonproblem, the SAVE Act would deprive real citizens of the real right to vote--21 million of them. Married women, younger voters, voters of color--they are the ones who are going to be impacted. I don't know how they would vote in Connecticut or elsewhere, but they have a right to vote, and we should not be fooled by this wolf in sheep's clothing, a measure that masquerades as preserving democracy.
We should not let our voter rolls be purged by a measure that has false pretenses. We must protect the right of every eligible citizen to vote. The best way to do it is to say no to this bill, and I ask my Republican colleagues to join me in saying no because this issue is larger than any one of us.
I hear again and again and again from my constituents in Connecticut about their concern that the right to vote may be restricted. I say to the people of Connecticut right here and now: I will fight this bill because it is wrong, because it eviscerates voting rights, and because it threatens our democracy.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, our Constitution starts out with the three words ``We the People,'' and they are written in supersize font to tell you that that is what the core of our democracy is all about-- or, as Lincoln so well summarized, government of, by, and for the people.
There are several things essential to make this happen: the freedom of speech, for one; the freedom of assembly, for another. But perhaps nothing encapsulates the opportunity of a citizen to participate in the direction of their own country more than the ballot box, more than the right and opportunity to vote.
Yet that sacred opportunity at the heart of our Constitution is under assault because there seems to be one party that has decided it is about suppressing citizens' rights rather than empowering and honoring citizens' opportunity to participate in our government. And they have this bill that is all about voter suppression.
Well, we have gone through some serious voter suppression. Some of it was written into our original Constitution. Despite the lofty goals, we didn't allow people of color to vote; we didn't allow women to vote; we didn't allow Native Americans to vote; we didn't allow the enslaved to vote. But we have worked toward that lofty vision that we knew was right.
We remedied slavery, ending it in 1865 with the 13th Amendment. We passed the 15th Amendment to ensure the right to vote shall not be denied by race or color or previous servitude. And
After the Civil War, reconstruction collapsed in about 1877. There was kind of an evil deal that was worked out all over the election of Rutherford Hayes. And that ended reconstruction; and, quickly, a series of measures were passed by States to suppress the opportunity of Black Americans to vote in the South. These included poll taxes; they included literacy tests; they included civics exams--rigged so that only White Americans could pass. But we remedied that situation. We took it on. It took a long time, unfortunately.
In the 1960s, Members of this Chamber and Members of the Chamber down the hall said we are ready to end that discrimination that we knew all along was wrong, those barriers erected for citizens to vote.
But now we have one party, the Republican Party, which was founded on the vision of ending slavery, that wants to suppress the vote of Americans once again. That is incredible. But we are going to stop that bill.
My own State has pioneered the ability to vote by mail, and that provision has spread across the country to States like Utah, a red State. Blue States, red States are saying this makes sense because it ends the corruption on election day where officials stop people from voting by relocating the voting booths to a new location, by putting equipment in there that malfunctions, by understaffing it, by putting out false information about where the voting will be held.
Vote-by-mail ended all of that corruption on election day, utilized so often to stop people from voting who lived in the inner city, who lived in poorer communities, who lived in communities of color--a modern-day version of the suppression that followed the collapse of reconstruction. We stopped it, and blue and red States have adopted those reforms.
But the SAVE Act is about going the other direction. What a name--the SAVE Act--as if it is saving something important as opposed to destroying the opportunity to vote.
So we will absolutely not let our colleagues across the aisle take us backwards to voter suppression.
Under the SAVE Act rules, my mother would likely not have been able to vote. The most common documents to prove citizenship are a birth certificate or a passport. And when my mother married my father, she changed her last name from Collins to Merkley. My mother never had a passport. She couldn't have used a passport. Her name was different than that on her birth certificate. Betty Lou Collins became Betty Lou Merkley. And Republicans want to stop women across the country from voting once again because their name doesn't match their birth certificate. That is pretty extraordinary.
More than half of Americans today who don't have a passport--my mother would have been in that category. She wouldn't have been able to register to vote.
Let's not go backward into the realm of voter suppression. Let's go forward into full voter empowerment. If you believe in this Constitution, then honor it; don't put it in the wood chipper.
Folks today are able to register in a variety of ways. Some say: Well, isn't this opening the possibility that noncitizens are voting? The answer is no. That is not happening.
The Secretary of State of Georgia, in 2022, led a massive examination of the history of voting in Georgia, and the Secretary of State says he could not find a single noncitizen that had cast a ballot in Georgia in 25 years. So don't tell me that your so-called reform is about integrity at the ballot place. We know what it is about. It is about manipulating the vote on election day to stop people from voting, and we are not going to let that happen.
In another case, the Brennan Center examined, in 2016, the behavior of 23 million voters, and they found it was roughly equal to the risk of being struck by lightning that a noncitizen would vote. And we know that in some cases where those have happened--I mean, it is so rare--it has happened because the bureaucracy screwed up and sent them a ballot when they weren't supposed to.
So let's be clear. Our journey toward the vision of citizen empowerment in voting has been imperfect. It has been long. It has been slow. It has seen setbacks like after the collapse of reconstruction. But we have worked steadily toward that vision, that ideal that every citizen should have that full opportunity to participate in the direction of their Nation.
So should the SAVE Act ever be brought to this floor, which itself would be a massive corruption of our responsibility as U.S. Senators, I am voting hell no, and everyone else should as well.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues in standing up for the right to vote and the critical need to ensure that that right is protected.
I want to thank Ranking Members Padilla and Reed for their leadership on this issue and in organizing this floor block. Senator Padilla, a former Secretary of State himself, understands to a core how important the right to vote is.
The right to vote is sacred to our democracy. It secures all of our freedoms. As Congressman John Lewis once said, voting is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect Union.
But in recent years, from the January 6 insurrection--I just came from a spotlight hearing in which Officer Dunn and in which former prosecutors were speaking out about their work on that day. I remember that day because, at 3:30 in the morning, it was Senator Blunt and Vice President Pence and I that were here on our own in this very Chamber and made that walk, which in the morning had been a big celebration of our democracy; but this time we were walking over broken glass, we were walking by marble pillars spray-painted with racist vulgarities. But we made that walk, and our democracy prevailed.
But in one of President Trump's first acts, he pardoned the violent offenders who had struck police officers, who had injured over 100 police officers. That is what he did.
And from that January 6 insurrection to dangerous rhetoric and baseless election conspiracies, to other actions taken by this administration over the past 100 days, we have seen unprecedented attacks on the freedom to vote and our democracy.
Nowhere are these attacks more clear than at the Department of Justice. The Justice Department was founded in 1870 with the very purpose to enforce civil rights. This includes voting rights guaranteed by the 15th Amendment. And since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Division has been responsible for enforcing that law.
Today, the work to protect voting rights is as urgent as ever. In 2023 alone, over 19 States enacted laws to restrict access to voting and to make it more difficult to vote.
In the words of Senator Warnock, what is happening is simple: Some people don't want some people to vote.
Yet what are the words that are inscribed at the Justice Department over its entrance?
Department of Justice officials would like us to believe that the fight for equal rights and the fight for voting rights is already over. In fact, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights has said that the Voting Rights Act ``was once necessary to push back on Jim Crow laws.''
At her hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee, I asked her if she will enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court of the United States, a conservative Supreme Court, just reaffirmed 2 years ago. She didn't answer the question.
It is clear why she didn't answer--because she never planned on enforcing it. In fact, it has been reported that the Department's lawyers in the voting rights section have been directed to dismiss active voting cases.
But they are not stopping--this administration--at forcing attorneys to dismiss cases. Justice Department officials have also removed all of the senior civil servants--civil servants--in the Civil Rights Division. That has had a ripple effect, as you can imagine, causing a mass exodus of experienced attorneys from the Division. And rather than try to stop the loss of talent,
Well, I don't think that is fine. The people who have endured voter discrimination don't think it is fine. Those of us who have been active in this area, who have heard the stories, as I did when I was Rules chair and held a field hearing in Georgia--the story of the veteran who had signed up to serve and there was no waiting line, and when he comes home to this country and he wants to vote, he finds out that there is a waiting line in the hot Sun for hours; he finds out that his vote in one location, which he figures out, for the primary is different from where he votes in the general and then is different from where he votes in the runoff. That is a system designed to make it harder to vote.
In the election for Senator Warnock, suddenly they took down Saturday voting when there are only a few weekends between the general election and the runoff.
Then there were the people in camo standing to intimidate voters in lines in Arizona.
The stories go on and on.
In Harris County in Texas, they had one voting dropoff box in a county the size of my entire State when it comes to population.
So, no, I don't think it is just fine.
It is not just at the Department of Justice that we see an assault on voting. President Trump also issued an Executive order to overhaul our Nation's elections.
As a Federal judge recently made clear, the President has claimed power over our elections that the Constitution does not give him.
If implemented, the order could disenfranchise millions of citizens, including millions of women who changed their last names after getting married, as would the legislation that my colleagues have just highlighted. I heard Senator Merkley discussing the problems with this bill.
It would make it harder for men and women in uniform serving overseas to vote, and it would compromise--this Executive order--sensitive, personal data, giving Elon Musk access to private information about citizens, contained in voter files in every State.
Instead of creating barriers to the ballot box, we should be protecting access to the polls. That is why we intend to reintroduce a bill that I led, the Freedom to Vote Act--something that we negotiated over months and months and months. This legislation would set national standards to ensure that all eligible Americans can vote in the way that works best for them, regardless of their ZIP Code. That is why I also strongly support the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore and strengthen key portions of the Voting Rights Act.
But there are things that all of us should be able to agree on, like ensuring that State and local governments have reliable Federal support and funding to maintain election infrastructure--something that Senator Blunt and I, when he was chair of the Rules Committee and when he was ranking on the Rules Committee, agreed on, and I know Senator Padilla is carrying on that torch; that we must, in our local election offices, keep pace with new technology; that we must combat cyber security threats.
I think about Chris Krebs, someone who I respect very much, who was in charge of the Division of the government that makes sure elections are protected from cyber attacks.
After the election in 2016, after that election, he declared it safe. The Attorney General for the United States at the time for Donald Trump, Bill Barr, echoed his words and said it was safe. Then the President just decided at the time--President Donald Trump, in his first term--to fire Chris Krebs.
But that wasn't even enough for this President. He comes back just a few weeks ago and says he is going to investigate Chris Krebs. Why? Because this civil servant had the audacity to declare our election safe and correct, which it was, after spending his time in government working to make sure that it was and that Russians and other countries that wanted to do us harm would not influence our election.
We also should be able to stand by our election workers, including volunteers, who face a barrage of threats and intimidation. We have heard the testimony--so many us--of those who were threatened, of those who were told--election workers just doing their jobs--that their head would be on a stake.
Mr. President, Congressman Lewis never stopped working for our democracy. While we are seeing daily assaults on our democracy, it is our duty to never give up hope and to continue to fight for what Congressman Lewis aptly called ``one of the most important blessings of our democracy,'' and that is our Nation's right to vote.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
Mr. President, first, I want to thank Senators Padilla and Reed for holding the floor on such a vital issue to our country, our democracy, and who we are as a people. I thank Senators Klobuchar and Bennet for participating as well and all the others who did as well.
Well, we know that free and fair elections are the very wellspring of American democracy. When you ask people around the world ``What is great about America?'' this is one of the first things they say: ``They have elections, real elections, free elections.''
But unfortunately--deeply unfortunately--no administration has come closer to destroying that wellspring than the Trump administration. Donald Trump and Republicans are putting our elections in a vice grip-- Executive orders from the President on one end and dangerous legislation from Congress on the other. They don't understand the sacredness of elections and keeping them fair. The kind of legislation, the kind of Executive orders which are so jaundiced, so slanted on the side of one party, are the antithesis of democracy.
On the one side, Donald Trump recently issued an Executive order that would coerce States to prevent millions of Americans from voting. On the other, Republicans in Congress are pushing the SAVE Act--one of the most destructive, dangerous voter-suppression bills in recent memory. It is very reminiscent of Jim Crow. That is what Republicans want to do--they want to not only restore Jim Crow in the South; they want to have Jim Crow spread from one end of this country to the other.
It will not happen. It will not happen.
Let me be clear. I will not let this noxious bill, the SAVE Act, become law. Every Senate Democrat, every single one of us, is united against it. They need 60 votes. The SAVE Act is dead on arrival.
I would like to say it louder so my friends in the House and the rightwing over here can hear: The SAVE Act is dead on arrival.
Democrats and Americans see this bill for what it is--a nasty, vicious attack on our democracy.
The SAVE Act reads more like a how-to guide for voter suppression rather than a serious attempt to secure our elections. The SAVE Act would make easy methods of voter registration--like online registration, registration by mail, and registration drives--a thing of the past.
Massive purges would inevitably remove many American citizens from the voter rolls, and it is already wholly unnecessary. Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in Federal elections. It is done with one purpose in mind: voter suppression.
What they have in mind is they think those that vote Democratic are less likely to vote than Republicans if this passes. It is trying to slant the elections away from free and fair.
Every single State already prohibits noncitizens from voting in State elections. So Republicans are trying to strip our democracy down to its studs, all to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
Under the SAVE Act, if you want to register to vote or if you want to simply update your registration, it would be harder than it is right now because on top of your ID card, you will need to provide either your passport, birth certificate, or citizenship certificate.
So if you are one of the 50 percent of Americans without a passport or one of the 21 million American citizens who don't have access to your birth or citizenship certificate, Republicans wants to make it harder--not easier, harder--for you to vote.
If you are one of the 69 million Americans who changed your name after you got married and your certificates don't
It is one unnecessary hurdle after another.
We know the SAVE Act is not about securing our elections. It is about suppressing voters. It is about making it harder to vote and easier to cheat. It is despicable. It is damaging--beyond damaging. It goes against the very foundations of our democracy.
Democrats will never, never allow the SAVE Act to become law.
I once again thank my colleague from Rhode Island for sponsoring this act.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.
Mr. President, I, too, am here on the floor today to oppose the SAVE Act.
Today, Americans register to vote in a variety of ways, typically set by each State in this country, but Federal law requires that Americans attest to citizenship under penalty of perjury.
In Colorado, you can register online; you can register in person; you can register through the mail. It can be as easy as providing your Social Security number and signature, which every American has, through the secretary of state's website.
Alternatively, the SAVE Act would change that by requiring that all American citizens, whether registering for the first time or updating their registration, to present proof of citizenship in person, largely in the form of a passport or a birth certificate. In other words, government issued driver's licenses and military and Tribal identifications would not satisfy the bill's requirements.
The SAVE Act would severely restrict online voter registration and mail-in registration and eliminate voter registration drives altogether. It would make it harder or even impossible for up to 69 million married American women who have changed their names, because their last name doesn't match the one on their birth certificate.
Meanwhile, half of Americans don't even have a passport. How are they going to register under this law? They can't.
Over 60 million Americans who live in rural areas--now they are going to have to drive miles and miles and miles, hours out of their way, to stand in line at a local election agency.
The SAVE Act does nothing to make it easier to cast a ballot; it only succeeds in making it harder for Americans to register to vote and to exercise their rights.
This is not theoretical. Kansas tried to implement its own State- level SAVE Act in 2013, with disastrous results. The law blocked over 30,000 potential registrants in just 2 years--about 12 percent of all voter registrations during the period. State officials acknowledged in court that over 99 percent of affected voters were U.S. citizens.
Now, even Kansas's Republican secretary of state, who championed the bill when he was a State legislator, has warned against it, saying:
I would say so. About 12 percent of the people who tried to register couldn't.
Compare those 30,000 Kansans who attempted to register and were denied to the 30 people--30 people--the 30 noncitizens who reportedly voted in the 2016 election nationwide. That is about 0.0001 percent of all votes cast.
If there ever was one, this is a solution in search of a problem, and the only solution doesn't even work. It only makes it harder for law- abiding Americans to register to vote or patriotic Americans to register to vote.
Perhaps it would be better if this bill were modeled after the system that we have in Colorado.
We have set the gold standard in my State. It is a system that actually encourages people to vote in a fraud-free system. In Colorado, we are the first State in America to complete a risk-limiting audit, the gold standard for verifying the integrity of election results to begin with, and it entails counting and comparing a representative sample of ballots to the reported result.
To prevent hacking, none of our voting machines are attached to the internet. We require county clerks to use two-factor authentication to access voter databases.
And once a vote is cast, a bipartisan team of election judges in each county checks every signature against the copy in the database for any discrepancies.
All election officials and judges with access to the tabulation process must pass a Colorado Bureau of Investigation background check. Colorado has spent years implementing top-tier cyber security measures and audits to prevent hackers from interfering with our electoral process.
We have one of the most secure election systems of any State in the country, and because Coloradans have trust in our gold standard system, we have some of the highest voter turnout in America. That is the model we should be using across the country, in my view. Instead of wasting time and taxpayer dollars on the SAVE Act, Congress should be implementing Colorado's practices all across the country.
I yield the floor to my colleague from Rhode Island. Thank you very much for his leadership in bringing the Nation's attention to this issue today.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, I rise today alongside my colleagues to speak out against the attack on a fundamental right of every American citizen: the right to vote.
I want to thank Senator Padilla for leading this important effort. The progress, the prosperity, and success of our Nation, both as an economic power and as an inspiration for freedom-loving people everywhere, has been aided by our efforts to tear down the obstacles that prevent citizens from voting.
Today, the President and, seemingly, too many of my Republican colleagues want to throw that progress away. At the President's urgings, they appear to believe that it is OK to turn their backs on the work, the advocacy, and the sacrifice of women like Susan B. Anthony who worked so zealously for the right of women to vote, and men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and thousands of Americans who dedicated themselves to opening the voting booths to all Americans.
Indeed, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are now advancing policies that could disqualify tens of millions of Americans from voting in elections. If adopted, these policies will make it harder for low-income individuals, the elderly, women, and even U.S. servicemembers deployed overseas to cast a ballot. Now, that is very ironic.
These men and women in uniform are in dangerous locations to protect our fundamental rights, perhaps the most fundamental right is to vote, and yet this legislation would impair their ability to exercise that right.
Election integrity is essential to our democracy. That is why Democrats vigorously support Federal funding and Federal anti-cyber interference in our elections.
But what isn't essential is breaking a system that successfully prevents fraud and replacing it with one that makes it less likely that American citizens can exercise their constitutional right to vote.
Yet that appears to be the Republican plan. Indeed, through a brazen, illegal, and unconstitutional Executive order, the Trump administration is attempting to mandate that every State change how it operates its elections. Its starkest proposal is to throw out State rules about voter identification requirements and require what is effectively a national ID--while ignoring current law that already makes it a serious crime for a noncitizen to vote.
They have introduced the so-called SAVE Act, which recently passed the House of Representatives. It attempts to codify the President's dubious Executive order.
Now, I can see people saying: Well, what is the big deal about making someone show ID? Well, like many catchy sales pitches, this policy is really a bunch of ``gotchas'' that will stand between millions of voters and the ballot box.
According to the Brennan Center, more than 9 percent of voting-age American citizens, 21 million people, don't have proof of citizenship-- typically a birth certificate or a passport--readily available to show as they try to vote.
And 4 million Americans don't have these documents available at all-- perhaps they were lost, destroyed, or stolen--and these Americans could be prevented from voting.
Women who change their names after getting married, and that is 69 million Americans, will not be able to use a birth certificate alone to establish their citizenship, and they might not be able to vote.
Americans could use a passport to satisfy the Trump policy, but according to the State Department, only half of Americans have a passport. And it will set you back $165 to get one just so you can exercise your constitutionally protected right to vote.
By the way, I wonder if that could be considered a poll tax, which was outlawed through our Constitution, and we have to respect our Constitution. We all take an oath to do that.
The Trump policy allows citizens to use a REAL ID ``that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States,'' but that is a false promise.
As 15 secretaries of state recently wrote: REAL IDs do not indicate citizenship status. Even if the Federal laws for REAL ID were amended, the nearly 140 million REAL IDs that have been issued over the last decade could not be used as proof of citizenship. And these are the experts on elections, the secretaries of state of our 50 States.
Now, some people may still think it is easy to get these documents or register to vote in person, but if you don't have the money to spare to get the proper documents, if you are elderly or disabled or can't easily get to your townhall, what are you to do? Faced with these barriers, they may just give up and not vote at all, which I believe is the ultimate objective of this legislation.
Voter suppression is the way, I believe, that President Trump and others believe they can succeed at the polls. What the Constitution and the spirit of America suggests and what countless generations of American servicemen have fought for is access to the polls for all and enthusiastic voting by American citizens.
And what about the servicemembers who are just deployed overseas and didn't have time to register? How does that young American report in person--because that is what this says, in person--to establish his or her citizenship?
According to military and veterans service organizations, registration methods used for decades by millions of American civilians and uniformed servicemembers abroad ``would likely become impossible under the SAVE Act.''
We will send them to war, but we won't let them vote. Trump's policy would also impose unfunded mandates on States. According to the Rhode Island secretary of state who is one of the most, I think, effective secretaries of state in the country, the State government would need to change its voter registration systems and forms. It may need to purchase new voting machines and equipment, and it would need to pursue a significant public outreach campaign to educate voters about changes in the law.
But the SAVE Act provides zero dollars to cover these costs. States and localities will need to cover this unfunded mandate.
Well, why is the Trump administration imposing these costs and interfering with Americans' fundamental rights as citizens to vote? They claim it is to combat noncitizen voting, but this legislation isn't necessary to do that.
The United States Constitution, the Rhode Island constitution, and Rhode Island State law explicitly state that only U.S. citizens are allowed to vote. Under Federal law, it is a felony for non-U.S. citizens to vote. These laws are enforced, and they are a significant deterrent.
An exhaustive study by the Brennan Center found that at least 30 cases of noncitizen voting were referred for investigation or prosecution during the 2016 election. Trump's Department of Justice in his first term indicted 19 people. The law was enforced, but the objectives of this law are trivial compared to the millions of Americans who must have the right to vote.
Now, those 19 should not have voted, but it is 19 votes out of 129 million cast. And as my colleague from Colorado pointed out, a better mathematician than I, that is a fractional portion of the American public.
And make no mistake, they would suffer the consequences if they did vote illegally, these noncitizens. But we do not need a complete overhaul of our election systems and to strip millions of American citizens of voting rights in order to combat a problem that nonpartisan election experts tell us is already addressed by current law.
The real reasons for this policy are to support Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, even though he lost by roughly 7 million votes, to sow mistrust in our government, to deter people from voting. This is all in service of President Trump's insatiable desire for power and his insatiable ego.
Efforts by his enablers to discourage absentee voting have already disenfranchised servicemembers. In North Carolina, Republicans have sought to cancel 65,000 votes in a judicial election--an estimated 2,000 to 8,000 of which were military and overseas voters.
We are on the brink of exporting this injustice nationwide on a much greater scale. Senator Padilla is right to sound the alarm about this, and I am proud to join him. We want to help our fellow citizens participate in our elections because only their participation will ensure that the government is truly accountable to the people it represents. And as the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee that handles election funding, I hope my colleagues will join me in restoring funding for election security grants to the States to the total of $75 million. If you are serious about election fraud, then give the secretaries of state the resources to ensure that ineligible voters do not cast their vote.
Defunding them is an invitation for abuse. This isn't, nor should it be, a partisan endeavor. Democrats and Republicans shouldn't be afraid to face the voters, all voters, and compete on the basis of our ideas and aspirations.
Trump's Executive order and the SAVE Act show that he has a different agenda, consolidating power for himself, not the people, through dissuading and deterring American citizens from casting their vote, one of the most fundamental values that generations of American service men and women have given their lives to protect, and I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will understand that.
I yield the floor to the distinguished Senator from Washington.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, over the past month, we have seen a wave of righteous outrage across the country in response to President Trump's completely lawless move to disappear hundreds of people to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador, without even the barest semblance of due process.
And as I join my colleagues in calling for the Trump administration to abide by the Supreme Court ruling and facilitate the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia--a man they said in court was sent to El Salvador by mistake--I have to emphasize that his case is one of many where Trump has completely shredded our norms and laws.
In addition to Garcia, Trump sent off some 200 people, including innocent people who were in our country legally, to a foreign prison without any due process whatsoever, and they did it all on the basis of some arrangement negotiated in secret and paid for with millions of taxpayer dollars.
What we do know is that many of these people were sent there without any criminal conviction. The administration actually admitted that. In their own court filing, the Trump administration acknowledged that many of these people have no criminal records in the United States, and yet all of these people have now been imprisoned in a foreign country with no end date in sight.
Unconstitutional doesn't even begin to cover that.
There are so many questions--basic questions--about this that we all should be demanding answers to. At the barest, smallest, slimmest minimum--and I mean as a starting point--the administration must release more details about this secret agreement where it is paying El Salvador with our taxpayer dollars to imprison people without a trial-- details like:
Most of the details we do have are from reporting, and news reports say the deal was only for El Salvador to take convicted criminals. So why did Trump send people with no criminal record?
And, importantly, where in the world is this money coming from? Does anyone here remember voting to pass a single dollar in appropriations to fund a torture prison in El Salvador? Because I sure don't, and the last I checked, Congress has the power of the purse.
Do you know what else we don't know? We still don't know the names of everyone they did this to. Think about that. We don't have their names. That information should be released immediately--today--because there are families who still have no confirmation where their loved ones are. And the only list we have right now was not even released by the administration. It was reported by the press. Some families only learned their son was gone, their husband was gone, their father was gone through photos of them being marched into a torture prison. This is the first, last, and only update we have had on just about all of those people.
We do not know if they are alive. We don't know if they are being treated decently. We don't even know if they have been moved. Even their lawyers can't reach them.
Here is what we do know, though: There are many names on the El Salvador list of people who were here legally who had no criminal record. That seems to be getting lost in the debate for some of my Republican colleagues. This is not about any one case or any one person. It is about a lawless system for the President to deny due process. And when you cut out due process, you put innocent people in harm's way.
I heard one of my Republican colleagues say last week:
Well, I ask him now, and I ask everyone now, to pay attention to the full picture because, of course, you won't see a pattern if you just look at one case and you ignore the many, many others.
There is the case of Andry Hernandez Romero. He is a barber who came here legally. He has no criminal record.
There is the case of Arturo Suarez Trejo. He is a musician. He came here legally. He has no criminal record.
There is the case of Merwil Gutierrez, who--you guessed it--came here legally. No criminal record. In fact, he was apparently grabbed by mistake. One officer reportedly said: No, he is not the one. And another said: Take him away anyway.
Trump sent them all to a maximum security prison in El Salvador with no trial--disappeared. They have no contact with their lawyer, no contact with family. We do not know if they are alive, and they don't know if anyone is even advocating for them--how hopeless that must feel, how dark.
So is that enough of a pattern for my Republican colleagues? Do you still need more? Because there is also Jerce Reyes Barrios. He is a soccer player. He came here legally. Again, no criminal record.
There is Gustavo Aguilera, a food delivery driver. Legally here, no criminal record.
Or Anyelo Sarabia--here legally, no criminal record.
I mean, how many more before my colleagues can actually admit this is a pattern? How many people have to be disappeared with no due process before it becomes a problem?
Because, for me, one is too many, and the pattern isn't even over yet.
Trump was reportedly ready to disappear even more people to El Salvador before the Supreme Court put its foot down. In this latest round, the Trump administration was preparing to disappear a man who came here legally and had no record, except a traffic violation. Another was a young man accused of being a gang member because of a photo with a toy water gun. That is the level of so-called evidence that gets you locked away in a foreign torture prison under President Trump.
And I will keep saying it. Most of the people they disappeared have no criminal records, and many were even here legally.
They came here for a better life, and Trump disappeared them based on nothing more than tattoos that say ``mom'' and ``dad,'' or that celebrate soccer teams or a daughter's birth or autism awareness.
And I realize I keep hammering home that many of these people are not criminals and that many of these people came here legally. But I do want to remind my colleagues that this question is not whether someone who has vanished to El Salvador without a trace is good or bad. The question is whether everyone in this country, including American citizens, have the rights they were promised in our Constitution? At the end of the day, it is not about who these people are; it is about who we are--whether we are a country of due process or not, a country of laws or not.
Trump has said where he stands. He literally said: We don't have time to give them due process.
If the Trump administration thinks that someone is a criminal, if they are really bad and dangerous, prove it in court. Prove it. Just simply prove it. It shouldn't be hard. That is how this works. Everyone in this country understands that. You can't just say: Criminals don't get due process when due process is how you determine who is a criminal in the first place.
I mean, in the case of one person they sent to El Salvador, not only did the government's file against him show no criminal record, but it also got his name wrong several times and used two different identification numbers. Those are pretty major errors to make when you are locking someone away, the kind of errors that due process helps to avoid.
That is not some theory. We are seeing it happen in another case right now. There is a couple that Trump is saying is part of a gang. But instead of just disappearing them with no trial to speak of, the administration was forced to prove it--to prove it in court. And do you know what happened? The government failed. The judge found the government's claims completely and wholly unsubstantiated and ordered the couple to be released.
That just goes to show, if we ignore our laws, if we tear down the guardrails that saved that couple, it is not criminals who pay the price; it is innocent people, because due process protects them too.
Due process allows us to confirm whether people are lawfully present. Due process lets us confirm whether Trump is about to send them to a foreign prison. Due process lets us confirm whether people are guilty, instead of going off how they look or what tattoo they may have. And at the end of the day, due process means they get an actual determination of guilt or innocence, instead of getting disappeared with a question mark.
But no one here was told they are facing x years in a foreign prison. There is no end date in El Salvador because there was no sentence, because there was no trial. There was just Trump ignoring our laws, ignoring our courts, and sending people to gulags to rot and die and never be heard from again.
How can anyone ignore that outrageous breach of our laws, of our values?
And as a coequal branch of this government, I want to impress upon my colleagues: It is not just due process that is getting trampled here; it is basic checks and balances.
Trump is imprisoning these people under the Alien Enemies Act. He is using a war power. We are not at war. Everyone here should know that. After all, Congress--we--have to vote to declare war.
I remember every war vote we have taken in my time here in Congress, and I can tell you there has never been a vote on this so-called war Trump declared all on his own.
As if that weren't enough, earlier this month, the National Intelligence Council--the National Intelligence Council--determined that Venezuela is not directing an invasion by gangs. That directly undercut what Trump claimed when he announced his illegal end run around Congress.
Here is the simple question for everyone. There is no invasion. There is no
But add on top of that that Trump has reached some secret, multimillion-dollar deal to pay El Salvador to imprison these people without a trial.
I am vice chair of the Appropriations Committee. I can tell you, we did not include a single cent, not one penny, for running torture prisons in El Salvador in our last funding bill.
Congress has the power of the purse, but Trump is picking our pockets to fund his own personal gulag.
And, by the way, while we talk about checks and balances, let's not forget how the Trump administration is arresting judges. His allies and advisers are attacking judges publicly and calling to impeach those who disagree with him.
And, of course, Trump is blatantly ignoring the courts. And worse than that, the White House is in open defiance of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court wrote: The administration must facilitate Mr. Garcia's release.
The White House wrote that he is never coming back.
The Supreme Court wrote: People being targeted under the Alien Enemies Act must have a reasonable opportunity to file for habeas corpus.
The Trump administration said: No. We will give them 12 hours.
Foreign policy is not an end run around the courts or the Constitution. The President cannot just be given unilateral authority to cut completely unethical deals with foreign nations.
What happens when a President negotiates in secret to have his political rivals detained abroad? Is that allowed? Can he argue the courts can't require him to call such a deal off? Or maybe he just denies it and says any agreements are state secrets. Does that work?
If President Trump said he would pay El Salvador $6 million to assassinate his rivals, I think we would all agree that that is blatantly unconstitutional. And if the court said he had to facilitate the reversal of that deal, and he said, ``Well, it is a sovereign nation; I can't stop them from assassinating anyone,'' I think we would all have a huge problem with that.
So do we want to say that is wrong now, or are we going to have to wait until he tries it?
What are we waiting for? We cannot just all stand by silently as the President pries open a Pandora's box that is altogether unprecedented and that poses a direct threat to our Republic. And let's cut through this BS where Trump and El Salvador are both trying to pretend there is no way to facilitate the return of people sent there wrongly.
Here is the thing: El Salvador has already sent back people that Trump tried to disappear. El Salvador immediately sent back a Nicaraguan individual, and they sent back women--yes, Trump tried to disappear women to their all-male torture prison in El Salvador. If anyone wants to try and pretend this was some careful vetting process, please explain that to me.
It is not like El Salvador can't send people back. They have already done that.
The administration should be making clear, one, these people were wrongly sent, and, two, that as with others wrongly sent, they need to be returned.
Though I want to keep in mind, of course, that ``wrongly sent'' is still kind of an understatement. The reality is, these people were completely denied due process. The reality is, President Trump is not just disappearing these people to El Salvador, he is disappearing our most basic constitutional rights, and he is doing it in plain sight, not just in El Salvador either, right here in America.
His immigration crackdown is upturning lives and overturning some of our most basic values like freedom of speech. We have people who are here legally who are being detained and threatened with deportation, not for any crime, not for any violence, but for speech, for protest, for things as simple, as fundamental, as writing an op-ed the administration disagreed with--in America, the land of the free and the land of free speech.
Is dissent the bar for deportation now? Is that what this country has come to? What next? How far does Trump's new standard apply? Can you get deported for saying we shouldn't invade Canada? Can you get detained for an op-ed saying Greenland is not going to be a State? Are you going to have legal status revoked for admitting Biden won the 2020 election? Because this seems outrageous, but it seems perfectly in line with Trump's new policy which amounts to ``disagree with the President, your rights are gone.'' That is fundamentally un-American.
And beyond people who are being targeted for protest, there are thousands of students in this country that Trump is trying to push out over minor issues: fishing citations, jaywalking, speeding tickets, even charges that were dismissed. So far, some 1,800 foreign students are having their visas revoked with little to no explanation, to say nothing of due process. And that includes students in Washington State, my home State, at U-Dub, Gonzaga, Shoreline Community College where I once worked, my alma mater, WSU, and more. It is not clear whether these students have done anything wrong, and it is not clear, in some cases, what exactly they are supposed to do next because when the administration can't revoke visas, it has been trying to remove students' records, something courts have already ruled against.
One of the judges really put it best. I want to read this and quote it to you:
The point seems to be, if we can't deport you, we can scare and confuse you. And to add even more confusion, DOJ announced they were reversing course on some of this only to then say they are still working on a plan to push out all these students.
By the way, we are only still scratching the surface of just how inhumane Trump's immigration crackdown has become. Trump is slashing funds to ensure 26,000 migrant kids have legal assistance, meaning more 4-year-olds are being marched in front of immigration judges expected to make their own legal case with a plushy toy.
Trump is also trying to mass cancel protected status for people who came here who were fleeing harsh conditions and dictators. Trump is sending Christian refugees and women back to live under the Taliban where they will face near-certain persecution.
Trump is sending ICE officials to elementary schools where they tried to gain access by lying about having permission from parents to speak with their kids. ICE officials are arresting people with maximum violence and lawlessness, showing up without judicial warrants, since the Trump administration says it is fine to storm into some someone's house without one; showing up in masks, grabbing people off the streets without any badge or identification to distinguish them from a kidnapper; whisking people away in unmarked cars and even smashing windshields.
Back in my home State of Washington, I heard from folks who saw that firsthand.
Last month, ICE aggressively detained Lelo, a farmworker in my State. And it appears he may have even been targeted because of his advocacy for better working conditions for his fellow farmworkers. They are still denying him bond despite no criminal charges.
I spoke with his wife last week who watched in horror as they arrested her husband shortly after he dropped her off at work. She told me through tears about how officers broke his window and pushed him against the car and how Lelo wants to be free so he can take care of his brothers and sisters and work so they can study. He wants to continue doing his work with the community and with the union. And they are working right now to try to get bond, something I strongly support.
This is not someone with a dangerous record. It is someone with a record of hard work and trying to make his community better.
Skagit County is known for its agricultural industry. That industry does not survive without the immigrant farmworkers who help power that local economy, period. More than that, we
Last week, I met with farmworkers there who told me there have been days they have been afraid to go to work because an unmarked vehicle was seen in their neighborhood. They are absolutely terrified of being grabbed off the street by ICE and locked up with no semblance of due process regardless of their legal status.
And this situation is not unique to Skagit County or even to my State. It is happening across the country. Let's not forget, Trump is trying to deport a cancer researcher to Russia where she fears retaliation for protesting the war in Ukraine. Sending her away would both put her in danger and completely upend groundbreaking cancer research. Her colleagues say her role is irreplaceable.
But it is not just cancer research. Trump also deported a little girl--a U.S. citizen--who was on her way to get cancer treatment. She was with her mother, an undocumented immigrant who was forced to choose being separated from her 10-year-old daughter or being sent away together. What an unthinkable choice to force on a mother. What an unthinkable thing to do to a child, a citizen--a citizen--who is fighting cancer.
And Trump has done that twice. That is right--twice. He has deported a mother along with a kid who is fighting cancer--a kid, by the way, who is an American citizen.
He is doing that without giving these parents any meaningful time to talk to a lawyer or a spouse or to figure out what is best for that child. We know that because Trump deported another U.S. citizen last week. That is right, another one. Trump deported a 2-year-old, an American citizen. They refused to tell this kid's father where his wife and kid were being held. They refused to let him talk to his wife for more than a minute. They even forced him to hang up the phone when he tried to give his wife their lawyer's number. And then, as the judge put it, they seem to have ``deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.''
Now we are hearing about a family in Oklahoma--U.S. citizens who recently moved in who had their home raided by ICE. A mom and her daughters were forced out of their house in the rain in underwear. ICE agents seized their phones, their laptops, even their life savings, and didn't leave so much as a number they could call to get their stuff back. That happened to U.S. citizens who did nothing but move into a new house.
These horror stories underscore something important--Trump's cruel war on immigrants is hurting American citizens too. U.S. citizens are having their spouses ripped away. Even servicemembers are seeing their families targeted. They are having their parents ripped away. They are having their lives turned upside down.
Let's not forget, U.S. citizens are even being detained by this administration. We have several instances now where American citizens have been caught up in Trump's immigration crackdown. American citizens have been detained and wrongly locked up, even after someone showed them their birth certificates--even for days.
Let's keep in mind, if you are a citizen who is mistakenly detained and you are being denied due process and you can't reach someone to show them your birth certificate, how are you supposed to get released? What if you are put on the next plane for El Salvador before you get a chance to set the record straight?
Let's not pretend that is farfetched, not when citizens have already been mistakenly detained, not when the government has already admitted it sent some people to El Salvador by mistake, not when Trump has already disappeared some people who were here legally and many people who had no criminal record with no due process and not when Trump has already said he wants to send U.S. citizens to El Salvador prisons. He was caught on mic telling the President of El Salvador he needs to build more jails, telling him the ``homegrowns'' are next.
What happens when you get sent there, and you can't contact a lawyer? These are serious questions. What happens? Because if there is nothing we can do for the people there now, what precedent does that set for the people that are sent there next?
Mr. President, I have been speaking for a while and posed a lot of questions. I hope my colleagues think about this carefully. I am going to wrap it up, but I want to end with just one more. Where will Republicans draw the line because we are well past the bounds of law, and we are well past the bounds of basic humanity.
So I hope more of my colleagues will join me saying enough is enough and demanding transparency, accountability, and justice from the Trump administration.
That starts with some very basic things. First, accurate up-to-date information on the names of people who are being detained and then deported from ICE facilities across the country, including, by the way, the Northwest ICE Detention Center in Tacoma, so their loved ones and community members can at least know where they are.
And we need a clear list of every person who was disappeared to El Salvador, along with what evidence, if any, the government has as well as the full terms of whatever agreement the Trump administration has negotiated with El Salvador's dictator.
But it doesn't stop there. We need to see clear, good-faith efforts to abide by court orders and to bring back everyone wrongfully, unjustly sent to a foreign prison. We need to have lines of communication so these people can talk to their lawyers or talk to their loved ones and let us know they are OK. And we need due process with evidence, with judges, and a meaningful opportunity for people to present a defense.
Let's be clear, we are not saying everyone is innocent. We are saying no more than what the Constitution says, no more than what the courts have said time and again: Everyone in the United States of America gets due process.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
Mr. President, I rise today to engage in this great debate that is raging across our country. Turn on the TV, read the newspapers, or open your phone, and you will be overwhelmed by the back-and-forths over tariffs, trade deficits, prices, and markets.
We hear the talking heads say that America simply can't afford President Trump's insistence on more favorable trade policies. We hear much less about whether America can afford to continue down the road we have traveled these past 30 years.
That is not a question that people in this city are asking. For many, it is not a question that appears to have occurred to them at all. The debates right now are about the future and how President Trump's policies will shape it. That is good. These are important debates that we should have. But, today, I rise because I want to speak about the past.
I am speaking as an American but, in particular, as a proud Missourian, a boy from Bridgeton. My folks--they weren't wealthy. My grandfather was an infantryman in World War II and returned from the war with an eighth grade education and some money he won playing craps on the Queen Elizabeth on his way home. All of his children worked in his butcher shop growing up. Later, I remember seeing my dad work 7 days a week on the midnight shift to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. He worked hard and lived honestly. And, just one generation later, look where we are.
What a remarkable story about my life--I suppose it is a remarkable story--but the truth is, it is just how unremarkable it really is in this country. That was the everyday magic of America--a country where lives like ours were not just possible but common. It was who we were.
America built the modern world. Our country was forged by pilgrims, pioneers, settlers, and explorers--men whose dreams were too big for the low horizons of the Old World. Our ancestors settled a new continent, tamed a frontier, raised up a great civilization from the wilderness, and planted our flag on the Moon. It was American genius that connected the world, first
But, over the last few decades, the people in power squandered that inheritance. They sent our children and our wealth overseas to defend the borders of distant nations while throwing open our own borders to a tidal wave of mass migration here at home. They shipped the good- paying, middle-class American jobs that once were the backbone of our economy to places like Mexico and China, transforming once prosperous towns and cities into hollow shells of their former selves, often defined by addiction and death. All the while, in the forgotten corners of this land, the men and women who built this country have suffered in silence. They watch in quiet despair as their towns crumble into disrepair, their way of life disappears, and the country they love slips away from them.
The political ideal of a republic is self-reliance. As our Founding Fathers understood, the art of self-government is about people's ability to rely on themselves. There was always trade, of course--this is a natural and good privilege of productive surplus economies--but in a republic, there was also trade between sovereign, self-sufficient communities. The citizen of the classical republic had no need for cheap trinkets, fashion, and sweatshops halfway across the globe. He and his neighbors were the ones building their homes, growing their own food, and when necessary, taking up arms to provide for their own defense. People who depend on others for essential things cannot rule themselves, and if they cannot rule themselves, they cannot keep a republic.
Yes, times have changed. The economy of today is altogether different than the economy our ancestors knew, but that is no excuse for standing by as our home becomes a dumping ground for cheap Chinese goods. Are we really still a sovereign people today? Our independence and our sovereignty are not commodities to be sold on the global market. We can't and won't make everything here, but we must recover the will and the ability to make the vital necessities of our national life. Our country now depends on foreign imports for most of those necessities.
By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, more Americans now work in government than in manufacturing. Nearly half of our cars, more than 60 percent of our machine tools, 80 percent of our pharmaceuticals, and nearly 90 percent of the semiconductor chips we need for everything from phones to fighter jets are foreign made. That is why the crisis that confronts us today is not merely economic. It is about communism and slave labor versus freedom. It is about who will win the 21st century. The stakes are high. It is about the survival of our civilization. It is about the kind of Nation and people we are and will be: one that creates and builds or one that simply consumes.
In this city, we tend to speak of big, sweeping abstractions--jobs, wages, deficits, growth. We talk as if these things are numbers and graphs. We forget that every job lost to China and every factory moved to Mexico belongs to a real, flesh-and-blood American, with a life and a family and a home. Each and every data point is a fellow citizen, a neighbor, a son or daughter of this great Republic. Since NAFTA, 90,000--90,000--factories in our country have closed. Think about that and what it means to those families. For the people who benefited, this was just an abstract externality. For the workers, the heartland Americans, it was everything. I know these people. These are my people--these are our people--and for too long, they have walked alone. There is no memorial for their sacrifice, no national outpouring of grief for their loss, no powerful interest group to represent them in the halls of power.
Let me tell you what 30 years of so-called free and fair trade has meant for the folks where I am from.
In the 1990s, our political class embraced a new line of thinking: that America could become more prosperous by opening all trade barriers regardless of how other countries treated us. The result was swift and devastating. By 2004, according to some estimates, Missouri had lost well over 31,000 jobs to foreign trade. By 2010, our trade deficit with Mexico had cost us 12,600 Missouri jobs. By 2013, we had shipped 44,200 Missouri jobs off to China. By 2018, Missouri had lost more than 90,000 jobs in manufacturing alone--over 25 percent of our industrial base.
Until a few decades ago, southeast Missouri was a national hub for garment and shoe manufacturing. In the 1970s, southeast Missouri was home to as many as 90--90--shoe plants. The last shoe factory from that era closed for good in 2005. It had begun as a five-story, 92,000-foot international shoe plant in Cape Girardeau, nicknamed ``the Pride of Southeast Missouri.'' At one point, it employed 1,200 workers, but cheaper imports from low-wage countries began to flood the market, and by 1990, the old factory was razed and replaced with a one-story plant of, roughly, 300 to 500 workers. By 2001, that had dwindled down to just 50.
Here is what one former employee told a local paper after the plant closed for good:
Tri-Con Industries, which makes car seat parts, shuttered its factory in Cape Girardeau, too, and moved its production to Mexico. That was another 200 jobs gone.
There are patriotic shoe companies that still want to build in America. Belleville Boots took over a factory in Carthage, MO, in 2020. There are businesses that still love America, and they want to build on the generations of skilled craftsman in places like southeast Missouri, but for decades, our political class has rigged the rules to punish rather than help companies that put America first. This pattern repeats again and again and in every industry.
Up until the end of the 20th century, Missouri still had a major electronics assembly operation. Zenith Electronics--the last major American TV maker--had a large assembly plant in Springfield, MO. It had been in operation since just after World War II, and at one point, it employed 3,300 Missourians; but those jobs, too, had started moving to Mexico in the late 1990s. In October of 1991, Zenith shut down its plant and shipped its operation down to Mexico, taking out 1,500 Missouri jobs in one blow. In Springfield, the average worker made between 5 and 10 bucks an hour. Down in Mexico, it was just 83 cents.
The high priests of the global economy tell us that this is merely creative destruction and that other, better industries will arise to take their place of the ones that were lost. It is true that some of the workers in Springfield went on to find new jobs, but they were often much worse than the ones that they had before. Five years after Zenith shut down, laid-off workers saw an average pay cut of more than 10 percent. More than half of them had held multiple jobs since being laid off, two-thirds of them with worse benefits. Even the workers who enrolled in job retraining programs fared no better than the ones who didn't.
``Those people had worked there for 20 or 25 years,'' one laid-off worker recalled. ``They were at the top end of the pay scales, and there weren't any more TV repairman jobs out there.''
Toastmaster is a household name. Well, they were headquartered in Missouri, and they made their stuff in Missouri, too, with factories in small towns all across our State; but as we welcomed China into the world economy, Toastmaster began to feel the squeeze of cheap Asian imports. By 2001, every Toastmaster plant in our State was gone, shipping hundreds of jobs from rural mid-Missouri to China. The last one to go, in the town of Macon--near where I went to school--had been in operation since the 1950s. All that remained was a toxic waste cleanup site for the 5,500 people in the town it left behind. Although Toastmaster continued production in certain areas of the United States, Missouri wasn't so fortunate.
Boonville, a town where my grandmother went to high school, was another place that lost a Toastmaster factory. In 2011, the town of about 8,000 people lost its modular home manufacturing factory to the housing crisis too. In 2012, its bread factory filed for bankruptcy. In 2013, Nordyne, which manufactured air and heating products, announced it would be moving production from Boonville to--guess where--Mexico, taking out another 250 jobs.
``From a moral standpoint, it was kicking somebody while they were already down,'' the head of the local chamber of commerce said as he talked to a local newspaper.
This is not the distant past, folks. This is the reality that millions and millions of our fellow Americans in Missouri and across the country live this very day.
Haldex, a brake manufacturer, packed up and left for Mexico in 2020, eliminating the last 154 jobs left at the facility in the suburbs of Kansas City. Layoffs began 2 weeks before Christmas. They will save millions of dollars a year paying Mexican workers a fraction of what they paid back home.
I will tell you one more story from the Bootheel in Missouri.
For decades, the Noranda Aluminum smelter there was a lifeline employer for the folks in New Madrid, Marston, and surrounding communities. These were good, decent, hard-working, salt-of-the-Earth folks. I visited with them. The smelter was the engine for their way of life, but in 2016, Noranda filed for bankruptcy and shut down. Why? Because China's cheap, state-subsidized aluminum had flooded the market, causing global aluminum prices to plunge. In New Madrid--a town of less than 3,000 people--about 1,000 people had gone to find new jobs, usually at much lower pay. The county government went in the red. Local police and ambulance budgets were cut. The local school district lost a $3.1 million tax payment, which forced their own layoffs and saw a 10-percent drop in enrollment as families left the area.
People lost homes, the mayor of New Madrid said. People got divorced. An American town, filled with American families, left for dead by their own country. What did we do to our own people?
This is not to say that Missourians don't want fair exchange, one where they can trade and grow with the rest of the world, but the ``free trade'' that transpired was not free trade at all.
The double-edged tragedy of the system is that not all these companies wanted to leave. Some--perhaps many--wanted desperately to stay. These people were their neighbors, their friends, their family.
But over the past three decades, we punished the companies that were loyal to America while rewarding the ones that weren't. The businesses that were eager to offshore got big bonuses at the American workers' expense. The businesses that wanted to stay here found themselves struggling to stay alive in conditions where they couldn't compete.
Now, some might argue that Americans don't want to make shoes anymore, but we did a generation ago. The American workers of that age knew that there was something meaningful in creating and producing.
Today, we have been taken by the idea that our social status is not what we build or create but what we can afford to buy or consume. It is going to take generations to reverse this thinking. The post-war order has given birth to a shallow morality of materialism that measures values strictly in terms of consumption. This is a poisonous new idea, utterly alien to the traditional American way of life.
Our trade policy, like our foreign policy, failed to adapt to the new reality of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The consequences were nothing short of devastating.
At the dawn of the 1990s, as America looked forward to the new millennium, the architects of globalism beamed about the promise of the open society--a world without barriers or borders where all nations and cultures and economies would meld into one global economic zone.
Thirty years on, what do we have to show for it? At home, our factories and the towns that once sustained them lie in ruin, razed by the ruthless logic of the new global economy and cost-efficiency. The Americans who once worked there were replaced by foreign labor overseas. The Americans who once held on were now being replaced by foreign labor here at home. Their children will graduate into a workforce where nearly 1 in 10 workers doesn't even speak their own language.
The twin horsemen of globalism--unprotected trade and unprotected borders--have been a catastrophe for our civilization. But, in many ways, I don't blame the illegal immigrant who wants to come here in search of work, but we do have a country of laws, and there are consequences. I don't blame the factory laborer in Vietnam who takes the job that once belonged to an American. Do you know who I blame? The people in power who allowed them to do it.
I blame the corporate bosses, the special interests, and, yes, the politicians who sold our country out for a seat at the table of the globalist banquet.
I blame the ideologues of the status quo, the international elites, the so-called citizens of the world who see our country as a global economic zone, a giant shopping mall with an airport attached.
I blame the people in cities like this one, who seem to have forgotten the men and women in towns like Boonville and New Madrid or their brothers and sisters, because ``American'' is not just a box you check on a tax form but a sacred responsibility that binds us to one another, an unbroken chain between our past and our future.
I do not know what the future holds, but I do know what the past has meant. I know that something has to change and that President Trump is the first politician in a generation to even care enough to try.
The 77 million ``deplorables'' who cast their lot with Donald Trump last November were the forgotten Americans--the blue-collar patriots, the conservatives of the heart, miners, mechanics, tradesmen, and farmers; men and women who worked with their hands, grew our food, built our homes, and drilled our fuel, whose labor powered our country, whose taxes sustained our government, and whose children served and sacrificed in our wars. They stand with this President because he stood with them when no one else would.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 5 minutes, followed by Senators Wyden and Schumer for up to 1 minute each.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I rise today in support of my friend from Utah, Senator Curtis, and his Congressional Review Act resolution to overturn the final rule of the Biden Environmental Protection Agency's review of final rule reclassification of major sources as area sources.
This misguided rule would remove a major incentive for dozens of industries to reduce emissions. It would further saddle American energy producers and manufacturers with regulatory costs and burdens and, simply put, operates under a premise that is purely unfair.
Under this rule, once you classify as a major source, you are always considered a major source even though--you would even be prohibited from ever achieving an ``area source'' status again even if your emissions output decreased below the applicable threshold. This tells American manufacturing and energy leaders that no matter what you do, you will always operate under the strictest regulatory standard available. We should instead provide incentives for industries to lower their emissions and keep alive the option of returning to an area source once emissions are reduced.
Over the last 20 years, no other country has reduced its emissions like the United States, and we do not need overly restrictive regulations to continue this.
Giving our private sector the ability to innovate on a sensible timeline is a different approach than the inflexible, top-down mandate that became accustom over the past 4 years.
The good news is, every Member of this Chamber now has the opportunity to right this wrong and reinstate the rule in place before that, which allowed for reclassification of these sources.
The former rule, which was put into place by President Trump's first administration, encourages industries to take proactive steps to reduce emissions without increasing regulatory burdens. The results during President Trump's first term were overwhelmingly clear: Source reclassification reduces hazardous air pollution in our communities.
We need to take every opportunity available to rightsize regulatory requirements prohibiting our ability to revitalize American manufacturing and achieve energy dominance, while taking steps that reduce emissions through innovative technologies that I have advocated for alongside my colleagues across both aisles of this Chamber.
We need to remember that our manufacturing, energy, and environmental policies do not need to be at odds with one another. A robust manufacturing sector, energy reliability, and a clean environment are not mutually exclusive.
I am proud to join in this effort alongside Senator Curtis, my colleague on the Environment and Public Works Committee. This is an opportunity to return to commonsense environmental policy, and I encourage my colleagues to join us in supporting this resolution.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 1 minute to conclude, and Senator Schumer will ask for an additional minute as well, and we would wrap up. But I ask unanimous consent to speak for 1 minute.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. That order has been granted.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Senators, the devastating economic news we got this morning should be enough for Senators to vote yes tonight.
The only winner from the tariffs is China, which is scooping up markets and allies Donald Trump has left in the dust.
Senators, vote yes. Reclaim American trade policy, and end its outsourcing to Donald Trump.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The minority leader.
Mr. President, this resolution presents Republicans with a choice: Stand with Donald Trump or stand with American families hurt by the trade war.
The dismal GDP numbers today should be a wake-up call to Republican Senators now more than ever. Donald Trump is doing with the economy and tariffs what he did with his own business: Drive them under. It is terrible.
We hope that Republicans will join us because the devastation of the tariffs is apparent. Families are paying more. IRAs are going down. The country is on the edge of a recession because businesses are paralyzed.
The only solution: Pass our legislation, have Johnson pass it in the House, and tell President Trump his tariff policies are chaotic and plain dumb.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the clerk will read the title of the joint resolution for the third time.
The joint resolution was ordered to be engrossed for a third reading and was read the third time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The joint resolution having been read the third time, the question is, Shall the joint resolution pass?
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. McConnell).
I announce that the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) is necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 49, nays 49, as follows:
The joint resolution (S.J. Res. 49) was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.
And I move to table the motion to reconsider.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. McConnell).
I announce that the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) is necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 49, nays 49, as follows:
(Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.)
The VICE PRESIDENT. On this vote, the yeas are 49, the nays are 49.
The Senate being evenly divided, the Vice President votes in the affirmative. The motion to table is agreed to.
The motion was agreed to.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
