Legislative Session
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the Senate will resume consideration of the House message to accompany H.R. 6644, which the clerk will report.
The senior assistant executive clerk read as follows:
Pending:
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority leader is recognized.
Mr. President, this week, the Senate takes a big step forward on an issue that is important to many Americans, and that is homeownership.
Whether you read about it in the news or hear about it in conversation with friends and family members, most people know that the dream of homeownership is out of reach for too many people in our country. Limited housing supply and burdensome regulations have contributed to higher prices, and many Americans are simply being priced out of the housing market. That is a problem, and it is a problem we aim to address with the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act tackles some of the causes of the higher prices that are preventing too many Americans from realizing the dream of homeownership.
As much as 25 percent of the cost of building a new single-family home comes from regulations. That figure rises to 40 percent for multifamily construction. As you can imagine, that contributes quite a bit to the price that Americans pay for that home.
So this bill cuts unnecessary redtape that is delaying construction and driving up prices. For example, it removes the outdated chassis requirement for manufactured housing, which will not only reduce the cost of manufactured homes but allow for more innovation in manufactured home design.
And then there are the costs and delays associated with the environmental review process. This bill enables State, local, and Tribal governments to streamline environmental reviews. It rightsizes the NEPA process and exempts certain rural housing projects from these extensive and often burdensome reviews, and it directs the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the USDA to coordinate joint environmental reviews for housing projects funded by both Agencies. It should go without saying that if it is one project, there should be one review.
And because Federal regulations are only one layer of the costs and burdens placed on new home construction, this bill also encourages local governments to reform zoning laws to encourage home construction.
Lifting regulatory burdens will do a lot to bring down housing prices and encourage more construction, but it is not the only aspect of encouraging homeownership. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act also takes meaningful steps to support financing the purchase of a new home. It lifts regulatory burdens on community banks and credit unions to ensure that these local lending institutions can be focused on people rather than paperwork, and it tailors regulations for smaller and new financial institutions, which will help increase competition that benefits the American people.
This bill is the result of years of hard work by many of our colleagues, as well as months of negotiations with our colleagues in the House. They have worked tirelessly to produce a bill that addresses some of the barriers to homeownership in this country.
I am grateful for the work of Senators Rounds and Ricketts to support housing in rural areas, for Senators Moreno and Hagerty's contributions to the financial institutions component of this bill, and for Senators Kennedy and Crapo's efforts to support work at the local level to build more housing.
Thanks to all of their hard work and that of many others, this bill is almost across the finish line. But no one has been more committed to the success of this legislation than Chairman Tim Scott, and I am especially grateful to Chairman Scott for his leadership in getting this landmark bill on a path to becoming law very soon.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a significant bill to make life more affordable for hard-working Americans, and it is just the latest item on Republicans' agenda to address the cost of living.
Last year, Republicans passed the Working Families Tax Cut, another landmark bill which cut taxes for lower and middle-income Americans. This year, these hard-working people saw larger tax refunds and larger paychecks, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of them put some of that money away to save for their dream of buying a home--a dream that the ROAD to Housing Act will help put within their reach.
Plus, the Working Families Tax Cut provisions like immediate, 100 percent expensing for investments are also contributing to addressing housing shortages by making it easier for builders to--well--build.
Our legislation gave a boost to affordable housing construction as well.
As one realtor in Sioux Falls wrote last year:
A recent poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans see housing affordability as a major issue, and they want to see Congress address it. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act does just that. I am proud that it garners support from a similarly overwhelming majority here in the Senate, and I expect it will in the House as well.
I look forward to getting this bill through Congress in short order, sending it to the President's desk, and delivering another major win for the American people.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant executive clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Democratic leader is recognized.
Mr. President, well, everyone who bought Trump's book ``The Art of the Deal'' ought to ask him for a refund because what Trump has done in Iran is the ``art of the disaster.''
The United States is worse off because of Trump's incompetence, his ego, his inability to listen to facts. Iran took Trump to the cleaners with this so-called understanding.
Iran doesn't have to cut off support for its terrorist proxies. Iran doesn't have to give up ballistic missile production. Iran doesn't have to make any hard commitments on its nuclear program now, and there is no guarantee they make any in 60 days. But Iran does get to rake in billions of dollars in oil sales, hundreds of billions in reconstruction aid, and God knows how much more in potential fees Trump may let it impose on ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Not to mention the benefits Iran will get from the sanction relief that Trump has promised with no idea of what he will get in return.
Again, Iran took Trump to the cleaners. In Iran, ``the art of the deal'' has turned into the ``art of disaster.''
If Trump wants to send hundreds of billions of dollars to Iran, then he will need to do it with Republican votes because I will tell you, Democrats certainly won't be helping Trump send $300 billion to Iran.
Are my colleagues on the other side of the aisle prepared to send Iran $300 billion when economic needs are so severe here at home? But that is what Trump wants them to do.
Now, back in 2015, Trump said that America's ``deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don't win anymore!''
Trump is eating these words on a silver platter served up by Iran. Again, in 2015 he said the ``deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don't win anymore!''
He is eating those words now because those apply so aptly to the deal that he just announced, so-called understanding, with Iran. He is eating those words on a silver platter served up by Iran.
Even members of the Trump administration seem to be trying to put some distance between themselves and this so-called understanding, telling the public not to read too far into the text and that there are secret deals in the works. Well, I will tell you right now, Trump needs to reveal any secret deals to Congress and the public immediately. He has got to do it right away.
If the secret deals are anywhere near as bad as the understanding we have seen, we need to know about them.
This war needs to end permanently. Americans need to know how Trump plans to do it. Crucially, Americans are wondering what they got out of this war because Trump's blunder has left our country worse off by every measure. Thirteen Americans have been killed and hundreds more wounded. The Iranian regime is richer and more radical than before Trump's war. Iran has greater control over the Strait of Hormuz than before the war began.
Gas prices are still much higher than before the war, with families having paid hundreds of dollars extra to fill up their tanks these past few months.
The cost of everything from groceries to basic household necessities are higher than before the war as well. Trump's so-called understanding is the culmination and representation of his ruinous strategy in Iran since day one and his inability to govern in general.
In Iran and in so much else he does, Trump leads by whim, by ego, by greed. His strategy doesn't work in the time of peace, and it certainly doesn't work in the time of war.
He is about the most incompetent President we have ever seen. In Iran, as in everything, the American people pay the price for Trump's incompetence.
So as I have been saying for months, it is long past time that Trump end this war, which never should have started in the first place.
Mr. President, on FISA, Trump has made it clear beyond a shadow of a
Trump has lobbed a grenade into Jay Clayton's nomination. Insisted on making his personal fixer, his own attack dog, Bill Pulte, the Acting DNI. And he is demanding to tie FISA to the extreme SAVE Act to attack Americans' voting rights.
Trump is so hell-bent on taking away Americans' voting rights that he is willing to put them in danger to do it. Trump would rather have our intelligence community go after his political opponents than protect the American people.
Can Trump get any more reckless?
Make no mistake, Donald Trump is holding America's national security hostage for his own political gain. Republicans can point fingers at Democrats all they want, but Trump has himself owned up to blocking FISA.
Here is what he said, this is Donald Trump:
Trump will own any and all consequences that come from his undermining America's intelligence community and our national security.
Mr. President, finally on housing, Donald Trump may show Americans how government should not function, but our bipartisan housing bill shows Americans how we should govern. The housing shortage in the United States is nothing less than an existential threat to the American dream.
The fact that Democrats and Republicans were able to come together on the ROAD to Housing at a time of such division shows just how dire America's housing crisis is today.
Americans feel financially stuck as renting and buying a home keeps getting more and more expensive and more and more out of reach. One of the most effective ways to meaningfully lower housing costs for Americans is to build more, build faster, and build everywhere.
The ROAD to Housing is a crucial first step toward ending the affordability crisis and ensuring Americans don't have to break the bank to keep a roof over their head.
The legislation starts to tackle the zoning and permitting bottlenecks that have slowed construction from one end of this country to the other. The bill supports new manufactured and modular housing that makes building cheaper, faster, and easier.
It also advances the effort to convert blighted buildings into new housing.
Crucially, ROAD to Housing makes sure institutional investors don't squeeze American families out of buying a home.
Now, let's make no mistake about it--ROAD to Housing isn't the end of the road; it is just the start.
Congratulations to Senator Warren for her leadership on this bill and to all my colleagues, both Democrat and Republican, who supported it. I am pleased we have seized this opportunity to come up with a reasonable, bipartisan solution to help the American people-- opportunities that have become few and far between thanks to the chaos coming out of the White House.
This is how Americans want Congress to govern.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority whip.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to waive the mandatory quorum call with respect to the cloture motion with respect to the House message to accompany H.R. 6644.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I come to the floor today to say that Republicans believe Americans who work hard and who play by the rules deserve to have a good life.
Republicans passed the Working Families Tax Cut law to promote the American dream.
Americans deserve to keep more of what they earn. The Working Families Tax Cut law put more money into their pockets. It means financial relief not just tomorrow but today.
Over 60 million Americans benefited from at least 1 of the Republicans' new tax cuts. Tax refunds were supersized this year. The Department of Treasury has confirmed that 97 percent of Americans received a tax cut this year. They went on to point out that the people who benefited the most were Americans earning less than $200,000 a year. Republicans cut taxes for working families all across America. Families can use the money however they want. They can use it to pay down debt, to cover everyday expenses, or to save for the future.
Every single Democrat in this Chamber--every single one of them-- voted against the Working Families Tax Cut law. Democrats instead voted to raise taxes by $4 trillion. Had Democrats gotten their way, everything would cost much more.
Democrats talk about affordability; Republicans delivered. We delivered more money into the pockets, the purses, and the paychecks of the American people. For most Americans, this money is for their families, not for the government.
At the State of the Union, Americans heard the story of a mother who homeschools two children during the day, and in the evening, she goes out and waits tables. Her husband operates heavy machinery, and he works a lot of overtime. The Working Families Tax Cut law was written for families like theirs. The family is going to take home an extra $5,000 this year. Why? Well, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and the expanded child tax credit--all three of those advantages passed in the Working Families Tax Cut law.
The Working Families Tax Cut law helps families today, and it builds more opportunities for families tomorrow. And this is only the beginning. This week, the Senate is going to move to address the cost of housing.
Buying a home in America costs too much. Building a home in America takes too long. Everyone from President of the United States to the mayor of New York City agrees housing is too expensive. Americans who want to buy a home worry they won't ever be able to afford a home. That must change.
Today, the median age of first-time home buyers is 38 years old. Young Americans should not have to wait nearly four decades to buy their first home.
A headline from USA TODAY illustrates the problem. It says: ``Why is housing so expensive? There simply aren't enough homes.'' Supply and demand.
Well, then, what is the reason there aren't enough homes? The reason is burdensome government regulations.
Regulations account for a quarter of the cost of a new home. This is the cost of applying for zoning permits from the local government, the county government, and even the State government. It causes delays and money expense. There is the cost of studies on environmental impact and on the impact on traffic. There is the cost of energy efficiency mandates for home appliances. Then there is the cost of Federal workplace regulations.
Of course, there is the cost of delay created by all of these problems, all of these regulations, many of which are duplicative. By some estimates, regulators add an extra $130,000 to the cost of a home.
Fortunately, we have on the floor this week a solution to unlock the American dream. It is called the ROAD to Housing Act. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has led the effort.
This bipartisan bill includes dozens of Member-driven policies. It is going to increase the supply of housing, it will lower the cost of housing, and it will expand the ability of families to own a home. It does all of this the right way without imposing one-size-fits-all Washington mandates.
The American dream should not be regulated out of reach; it should be within reach for every American willing to work for it. And the Senate is ready to get the ROAD to Housing Act signed into law.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Mr. President, I ask for consent for 10 minutes prior to the scheduled vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I rise today as the Senate takes the next important step toward passage of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.
This legislation is probably the most important bill Congress has passed in decades to lower housing costs and boost the construction of homes for Americans.
We all know that without a safe, comfortable, affordable place to live, nothing in your life works--not your job, not your family, not your education, not your health. Our homes are a source of stability and comfort and dignity, and they give us the freedom and the opportunity to build the lives we want to live.
Today in America, people are trying to figure out how to afford their lives and how to hold it together as prices skyrocket and paychecks aren't keeping up. Millions of people in big cities and small towns and rural communities that we all represent stretch to pay their mortgage or make their rent payment. And the American dream of owning your own home? It feels like a pipe dream to working families. I hear from young Minnesotans who tell me they can't even imagine a future where they own their own home.
So why is this happening? There are simply more people who need a place to live than there are houses that people can afford to rent or buy. And affordable places to live for people working in low-wage jobs, for veterans, or for folks living on a fixed income? We don't have nearly enough places for these people to live.
The result is that the cost of housing is soaring higher and higher. Over 22 million people in this country are paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent, which means that they don't have enough money for the other necessities in their lives. Over 12 million people pay more than half of their income on rent. In Minnesota alone, there is a shortage of 100,000 affordable homes.
Home ownership, as we have heard today, is increasingly out of reach. Mortgage payments are roughly 40 percent higher than they were in 1990, and that is even after adjusting for inflation. And in the past few years, the median home price has reached $400,000.
So all of this is why the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will make such a difference. This bill will boost housing supply by cutting redtape and empowering local governments to make it easier and less expensive to build good places for people to live. It creates incentives for cities and towns to build more housing. It removes regulatory barriers to help streamline environmental review and to speed up construction and make it less expensive. It strengthens existing programs that help local communities address their housing and infrastructure needs--especially when it comes to natural disasters.
This bill also takes several important steps to promote high-quality modular and manufactured housing, including doing away with outdated chassis requirements for manufactured homes that add thousands of dollars in costs but no value. And thanks to the important work of Senator Cortez Masto, this bill will also help preserve and upgrade manufactured home communities.
Very importantly, this bill cracks down on large institutional investors who swoop in, make all-cash offers on homes, and then buy up single-family homes as investments and rent them back to people for a profit. Out-of-State landlords have gobbled up homes, leaving properties in disrepair, tenants in the lurch, and jacking up the rent.
For the first time, in this bill, we are banning big private investors from buying up the American dream of home ownership, because homes should be for people, not corporations.
But I want to focus for a minute on reforms in this bill to the Rural Housing Service to preserve over 400,000 very affordable homes in rural communities. This has been a project I have been working on for quite a few years, and I am so excited that it is included in this big bill.
You know, I began working on this issue when I first came to the Senate over 8 years ago, and people in Minnesota were telling me that they couldn't find an affordable place to live. Businesses were telling me that housing shortages were making it impossible for them to recruit talent to their communities. Mayors told me that the housing shortage was hurting the vitality of their communities. Homebuilders were telling me it was too complex and expensive to build new homes.
In 2018, Senator Shaheen and I went to work, and we figured out how the USDA could do a better job of preserving affordable rural housing.
Then, starting in 2022, when I became chair of the Housing Subcommittee, Senator Mike Rounds and I started to hold hearings that dug into the challenges that faced the Rural Housing Service at the USDA.
The Rural Housing Service--a lot of people probably haven't heard of it, but it has played a vital role across the country for decades in helping to finance very affordable places for people to live in rural communities. We are talking about elders living on a fixed income who want to stay in the places where they raised their families. We are talking about people living with disabilities and working families, folks working in low-wage jobs that can't afford a place to live.
Many of these properties built through the Rural Housing Service were built in the 1960s with the help of Federal mortgages to finance them, and often, they are literally the only affordable place to call home in many rural communities.
Today, all these years later, many of these homes are in disrepair, and the Rural Housing Service is in desperate need of reform and modernization. So Senator Mike Rounds and I got to work. Our bill, the Rural Housing Service Reform Act, makes simple, commonsense improvements.
We cut redtape to make it easier for nonprofits to assume the mortgages of these properties when the private sector can't manage them anymore and then go ahead and fix them up and preserve them for low- income renters for years to come.
It simplifies the foreclosure process to save the government money and protect tenants so that properties can be transferred to new owners.
It gives the Rural Housing Service more capacity to work with local banks on financing and helps them to modernize their computer systems.
Here is what all this work can look like. Last August, I visited the Maplewood Apartments in Saint Peter, MN, which is a small and wonderful community in southern Minnesota. Maplewood needed a lot of TLC to be a decent place for people to live, and so local nonprofits and public partners joined together to fix it up.
I had a chance to see what this place meant for its residents and one resident in particular, Lisa Gallegos, who welcomed me to her new home in Maplewood. Lisa told me about how in her apartment she finally had the space to be able to focus on her life instead of worrying each month about how she would make rent.
I have visited so many of these properties and heard from so many of these residents about how important this is.
So this bill, our Rural Housing Service Reform Act, which will be included in the larger ROAD to Housing Act, will recreate the success in Saint Peter across the country, and 400,000 apartments and homes in rural communities will remain available, high quality, and affordable.
I especially want to thank Mike Rounds, my colleague from South Dakota, for being such an excellent partner and friend in this work.
I want to thank Senator Shaheen for her work on preserving rural housing.
I also want to thank the many advocates who helped us put this bill together. This has been a yearslong labor of love, and with the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, we are going to get it done.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will do a lot of good. Of course, there is always more work to do. There will be more work to make it possible so that, every day, every American will have a home that they can afford, but this bill is an incredible step forward.
I want to again thank Senator Scott and Senator Warren and their staffs for their creativity and diligence and optimism to put this bill together at a time when Congress needs more bipartisan work.
I also appreciate Representatives Waters and Hill for their partnerships with the Senate to get this bill done.
Passing the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will improve people's lives and help them afford a decent place to live, and that is well worth our effort.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair
The bill clerk read as follows:
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the mandatory quorum call under rule XXII has been waived.
The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 6644, a bill to increase the supply of housing in America, and for other purposes, with amendment No. 5823, offered by the Senator from South Dakota, Mr. Thune, shall be brought to a close?
The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk called the roll.
The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Hoeven) and the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. McConnell).
Further, if present and voting: the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Hoeven) would have voted ``yea.''
I announce that the Senator from Maryland (Ms. Alsobrooks), the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from Delaware (Ms. Blunt Rochester), the Senator from Illinois (Ms. Duckworth), the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Durbin), and the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Kelly) are necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 84, nays 8, as follows:
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. On this vote, the yeas are 84, the nays are 8.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn having voted in the affirmative, cloture on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment with an amendment numbered 5823 is agreed to.
The motion was agreed to.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Missouri.
Declaration of Independence Reaffirmation Act of 2026
Mr. President, on July 4, 1776, 56 men crossed a line from which there was no return. These men knew the King they defied. They knew the empire would come for them. They knew the prisons that could hold them and the gallows that could take them. They had wives, children, homes, names, property, and honor. They signed anyway. They made a bold declaration to the world that had never been made before. It was, in fact, revolutionary.
Our rights come from God. Government rests on consent. Citizens are not subjects. America is a nation. Those truths made America possible, and every generation that inherits America must decide whether or not those truths still command it. That is why I rise today in support of repassing the Declaration of Independence.
The declaration is America's birth certificate. It is the first great act of an American union. It is the character of a free people. It is the public oath by which 13 Colonies became one American nation. It presupposes America is one people, and that matters because a people is more than a population. A people has memory. A people has duties. A people receives an inheritance and decides whether to defend it.
The declaration is the public oath of a people who knew it had received an inheritance and would have to defend it. It is an oath of liberty under God. It is an oath of self-government under law. It is an oath of one people bound across generations, accountable to the Creator, responsible for the Republic, and charged to carry freedom forward. That oath still binds us. That errand has not expired.
America's deepest crisis is a loss of memory. We do not lack experts; we lack fathers. We do not lack managers; we lack patriots. We do not need more people trained to administer decline. We need citizens formed to love and defend the good.
The Constitution can divide power. It cannot supply virtue. That is why the declaration still matters. It tells every King, every court, every Agency, every President, every Congress, and every officeholder the same exact thing: Your power is borrowed. Your authority is limited. Your office exists to serve a people whose rights you did not create and cannot erase.
A Congress that forgets the declaration forgets why Congress has power at all. The truths of the declaration entered history through flesh-and-blood men--men with names, men with families, men with property, reputations, and everything to lose.
Adams saw the break before others would name it. Jefferson gave cause its words. Franklin faced danger with wisdom and wit. Hancock signed with a boldness that made caution look small.
They were men in danger. They acted when delay would have been easy. They acted when fear could have been dressed up as prudence. They acted because the hour had arrived.
Heroes see that line. Then they cross it. The first American heroes chose sacred honor over safe submission. They acted when the safe men counseled waiting.
Heroes do not wait for permission from the powerful. Heroes do not ask whether courage is fashionable. Heroes do not poll cowardice before obeying duty. Liberty was won by men who risked everything. America was born from courage, conviction, duty, and faith in almighty God.
The oldest lie in politics says that the many exist for the few. The declaration broke that lie. Once they signed, the words had to travel. A declaration made in the name of people had to reach the people. Then the declaration moved. Copies went out on a rider. They entered churches, courthouses, taverns, army camps, town squares, and homes. The declaration belonged to the people before it belonged to the archives.
Americans had to hear they were free. They had to hear what freedom would require. One of those copies reached George Washington in New York, where he was preparing to face the empire the signers had defied. He had it read aloud to the army. His men already knew what they were fighting for. They had left their farms, their shops, their families, and their homes because they knew liberty was worth the cost.
But now Congress has spoken for the country. Now their cause had been declared before the world. The British were coming. The army was raw, exposed, and outmatched. So Washington put the words before his men. He let them hear from the voice of their own Congress that they were no longer fighting for grievances; they were fighting for a nation of their own.
At Valley Forge, men endured because liberty demanded endurance. They endured because their children deserved more than submission. They
Patrick Henry said it best when he gave his countrymen the choice every free people eventually faces:
The same fire moved beyond the army. It entered the life of the people. It traveled wherever Americans carried the sense and cause of liberty. It moved from hand to hand, from town to town, from father to son, from battlefield to courthouse, from pulpit to schoolhouse. Then it moved west.
As the American people moved west, the Declaration moved with them. It moved into river towns, frontier trails, farms, churches, courthouses, and homes.
I come from the great State of Missouri. In Missouri, we know the Declaration did not stay on the Atlantic coast. It moved through St. Louis and Jefferson City. It moved with Lewis and Clark. It moved with Daniel Boone and the frontier families who cut homes out of the wilderness. It moved with farmers and soldiers and preachers, rivermen, mothers, fathers, shopkeepers, builders, and pioneers.
It inspired the naming of Missouri towns like Liberty, Independence, and Defiance. Missouri is what the Declaration looks like when it walks west and builds a country.
America was made by people like that, a nation that builds, a nation that discovers, a nation that dares, a nation that refuses to live on its knees.
Our ancestors did not fight, bleed, freeze, build, plant, sail, preach, settle, invent, and die so their descendants could be taught to apologize for existing. That inheritance now rests in our hands, and too many powerful voices in this country teach the next generation to receive it with suspicion instead of gratitude.
We are done being ashamed of America.
We love our country. We honor the men that built it. We give thanks for the inheritance they placed in our hands, and we intend to keep it. America 250 is a time to remember that inheritance and renew national pride.
We can see the damage in the numbers. A generation ago, American pride was nearly universal. After 9/11, more than 90 percent of Americans said they were proud to be an American. Today, Gallup puts that number at 58 percent. PRRI puts it at 51 percent.
On the left, the collapse is even sharper. Gallup found that only 36 percent of Democrats are extremely or very proud to be an American. I take no pleasure in saying that. PRRI puts Democrat pride at 31 percent. Only 28 percent of Democrats say they are proud of America's 250-year history. Only 11 percent say America is the greatest country in the world. Only 27 percent plan to display the American flag this Fourth of July.
That is a national forgetting made visible. Elite culture gives that damage a vocabulary. A recent essay in the New Yorker Magazine set out to answer the question: Is national pride worth trying to salvage? It asks: Is patriotism problematic?
The most revealing line in that essay is its claim that patriotic education means learning to forget. No serious country--no serious country--can survive that kind of contempt for gratitude.
America does not need historical amnesia; America needs honest memory, memory of sin and sacrifice, failure in correction, courage in renewal, fathers and sons, graves and glory, memories strong enough to produce citizens.
That phrase reveals the deeper fight. A fight over patriotism is a fight over memory. Memory matters. A people that forget its heroes will soon be ruled by men who despise them.
A nation that sneers at its fathers will leave its children orphans. A republic that mocks sacrifice will produce citizens unworthy of freedom. The dead, the living, and the unborn are joined in one chain of obligation; we receive before we create, we owe before we choose, we hand down what we did not make.
That is why citizenship is not just paperwork. That is why borders matter. That is why children matter. That is why memory matters. That is why the Declaration matters.
Memory carries authority with it. A people that remembers its inheritance also remembers its right to govern. The Declaration says the people are sovereign; no king, no queen, the people.
The modern regime says the people are a problem to be managed. That is the fight. A great nation needs men who can say what is true. The old founding is enough. The question is whether we are enough for it.
Calvin Coolidge gave that truth its anniversary form 100 years ago. He said:
And that is final. No real progress moves beyond those truths. Every movement away from them leads us backwards.
Coolidge said that in America's 150th. We stand at the threshold of her 250th. America 250 cannot become a fireworks show arranged by people embarrassed by their country. A nation cannot celebrate its birthday while forgetting why it was born in the first place.
America 250 should tell the country one thing: The founding was good, the Declaration is true, and the American people still have the right to govern themselves. The American people are real. The American flag is not a symbol of shame. The American Nation is not an administrative unit.
Our Republic is the greatest inheritance ever placed in the hands of a free people. We should act like it. We should speak like it. We should teach like it. We should govern like it. That is why Congress should act. That is why the Declaration should be spoken again from the center of American government.
America is the country of Washington's army and Jefferson's pen, of Adams' fire and Franklin's wit, of Hancock's signature and Henry's thunder, of Lexington and Concord, of the Delaware crossing, of Valley Forge, of river towns and frontier trails, of farms and factories, of steeples and courthouses, of soldiers and sheriffs, of mothers and fathers, of sons and daughters who deserve a country of their own.
America lives because real people--real people--carried a real inheritance across real farms, frontiers, battlefields, churches, courthouses, and graves. This is America: a nation, a people, a place, a bold declaration, a grand experiment, an inheritance, a duty, a country with a soul.
That country is now in our hands. We were asked to prove that the blood, labor, prayer, sacrifice, and courage of those who came before us were not wasted on a generation too timid to say what is true.
Let Congress repass the Declaration of Independence. Let the American people hear it again. Let the children of this Republic learn that they are heirs to heroes.
Let the enemies of this Republic learn that Americans still know who they are, and let this generation take its place in the long line of patriots who understood that freedom is inherited only when it is fought for.
Mr. President, not withstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 4828, which is at the desk.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the bill by title.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the bill.
I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The bill (S. 4828) was ordered to be engrossed for a third reading, was read the third time, and passed as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
Father's Day (Executive Session)
Mr. President, I have come to this floor many times to be able to talk about a lot of serious policy issues, to be able to walk through all different kinds of tax policy, energy policy, immigration policy. We have worked through a lot of different issues on this floor, and I have had the opportunity to be able to speak on a lot of issues.
I don't often take time just to be able to pause and talk about a cultural issue. I want to do that today.
This weekend, the Nation will pause and celebrate Father's Day. Now, this will be the 116th year of celebrating Father's Day in America; the 54th year since it was officially recognized as an official Federal holiday.
It is kind of a big deal. Every human being on Earth has a mom and a dad. You may or may not know them, but it does take two to tango, they say, and every single person does have a mom and a dad.
There are a lot of dads that are separated, and there is a lot of disjointedness. What we are watching in culture is culture pushing back on men, to challenge men to be better dads. I applaud a good thing that is happening in culture with that.
We are literally seeing the statistics on this. The numbers on it bear out. Literally in this generation of dads right now, they are three times more likely to spend more time with their kids than the dads during the 1960s.
It is an interesting shift that is happening. We have fewer dads out there, but the dads that are there in America are looking at their kids and saying: I want to spend more time with them.
Good. We need more engaged dads. Quite frankly, being a dad is a courageous job and a challenging job but exceptionally important. And it is not just being a breadwinner, it is not just being a disciplinarian, it is just being there for their child.
I first want to say happy Father's Day to my own dad, but I also want to be able to challenge all dads that are out there to turn to your kids and to rededicate again, not just this weekend, but to rededicate again to actually spending more time with your kids because healthy families are the most basic building block of culture.
I have said it to people over and over again: Healthy families make healthy communities, make a healthy nation.
And when I hear people complain about the status of where we are as a nation, I have to tell you, the first place that I look are dads and to say how are dads doing because dads will define a tremendous amount of the strength of our Nation and the strength of our culture.
If dads back away from their families, families get weaker, communities get weaker, the Nation gets weaker.
If dads are engaged with their kids and with their families, the Nation gets stronger, communities get stronger.
Now, it is not just me speaking on this; I mean, you can go to any statistic that you want to be able to go to. The research out there for youth and adult offenders, between--depending on a State and a place-- between 70 percent and 85 percent of incarcerated individuals do not have a dad in their life. They came from fatherless homes.
Around 85 percent of the abortions that happen in our country, year to year, happen with a single mom when no dad is around and no man is around--85 percent. That is a woman who is making an incredibly difficult decision to take the life of the child, often because she is afraid she will not have the resources or the support to be able to support this child, and so she makes this decision to take the life of a child instead.
I have a friend of mine that often says behind every abortion is an irresponsible man. Dads, dads are important.
Now, it is not something we can legislate, though I would tell you there are initiatives that are out there. Right now there is fatherhood.gov if people want to go to that site that encourages ideas for dads. It is not just up for Father's Day, it is up all the time. And people can go to fatherhood.org. Right now, the Ad Council is running an ad campaign across the entire country that just is called ``Be a Good Dad Today.''
That is cultural encouragement on these things. But there are also things that we are working on as well: marriage penalty, for instance, in our tax law. If there are areas of our tax law that actually give you greater benefit not being married than married, those things need to be fixed. And there are several of those.
The Brookings Institute for years has asked the most basic question: How does someone rise out of poverty? If someone is born in poverty, how do they rise out of poverty? For years, they have done this study, and the same three things rise up over and over again every time they do this study: if you graduate high school, if you have a job of any type, and if you wait until after marriage to have children. If those three things are true, 97 percent chance you rise out of poverty.
That is someone making good decisions, and it allows the next generation to also be successful as well. That is just good tax policy to be able to incentivize ways that we can keep families together and to encourage families in that way.
The Trump administration has also made some changes to be able to encourage more dads to make alimony payments; if there is a divorce that happens and a child is there, for the dad to make sure he is providing alimony.
It is incredibly important to that woman, that mom, that is raising those kids to still have the financial support and for that dad to still show his financial support, I hope, as well as his love and encouragement to those kids. The Trump administration is now saying if a dad is not paying child support, they can't get a passport, and if a dad is not paying child support, they can have their tax refund, if they are getting that, withheld. Good for them to be able to encourage that man to be able to be responsible as well.
But, ultimately, you can't legislate being a good dad. That is a decision that a man makes. Now, I would tell you, I have talked to men, and they have said: Hey, I didn't have a man in my life and so it is tough to be able to learn how to do that.
I have talked to plenty of folks in churches and in communities and friends and neighbors that are just encouraging other dads to be able to be a better dad. It is a good gift to the next generation to be able to do that.
I will tell you this, pure and simple: Every child needs a mom. Every child needs a dad. There is no substitute. Many people in this body know I am a former youth pastor, and I would have parents that came up to me all the time and say: You are such an influence on my child for teaching and role modeling. And I would say that is very kind, but there is no influence that is a bigger influence on a child than their mom and dad. The path of their life will be set by their mom or dad.
So dads should not think it is somebody else's responsibility; it is theirs. If the next generation is going to be patriotic, if the next generation is going to love God, if the next generation is going to make good decisions, if the next generation is going to have a hard work ethic, if the next generation is going to learn to be kind, if the next generation is going to stand up for what is right, it is going to be because a dad invested that into that child's life.
So if you want to see the Nation stronger, dads engage. That is what is going to make the Nation stronger. Every child needs a guide, a role model. They need to see the courage and kindness and strength of a dad.
They need more than just dad jokes. They need a dad present. That is what makes the biggest difference.
Could I just say from my own context, the Scripture is full of conversations challenging dads to love their children, and, quite frankly, children to honor their parents. Let me just give you a couple of them.
In Malachi 4:6.
It says: The role of the Prophet Elijah was to turn the heart of the fathers back to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers lest there be a curse on the land.
What a clear statement: to turn the hearts of the fathers back to their children and the children to their father; if not, there is a curse on the land.
And how about this one? Just a simple challenge from Paul, who, interestingly enough, was not a dad but was somebody that understood the importance there. Paul in Ephesians 6:4. It says: Fathers don't exasperate your children. Don't just push them, push them, push them.
But instead he said: Bring them up in the training and the admonition of the Lord.
It is a very clear statement to dads to say don't just yell at your kids; train them on how to be able to love God and love people, train them up in the right way because if you want a church and community and a family to be better, dads need to be engaged with their kids.
So happy Father's Day to my dad, happy Father's Day to all the dads that are out there. And if I can make just the most simple cultural challenge, if we really want a stronger nation, there is no vote that we will take in this body today that will make the Nation stronger than just dads loving their kids and spending time with them and helping them know how to be able to walk with God and live a patriotic life and serve their family and community. There is no vote we will take that will help our Nation more than that.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.
Insider Trading (Executive Session)
Mr. President, Americans don't appear to agree on very much these days, but there is at least one thing on which the American people can agree; it is this thing that brings the American people together. Our citizens, no matter their politics, don't trust their leaders.
The list of institutions that Americans have lost faith in is long. We know this. We also know that Congress is at the bottom. In fact, over 80 percent of Americans disapprove of the job we are doing in this building.
The legislative branch is the foundation of representative government. It is urgent, it is essential that we earn the trust of the American people back.
You see, we are charged with putting the interests of our constituents over our own interests. We are their voice. And yet many of the people we represent believe we are failing to honor that basic commitment.
It is no wonder many are losing faith, losing trust. We are their voice. A faith in government has eroded over decades. There are many causes. A lot of fingers can be pointed. There is plenty of blame to go around.
And we know that the task of restoring trust is going to be a long- term project. But I am here today to argue that there is an immediate step that we need to take to restore a measure of trust in this institution, and it is imminently achievable.
We can prevent its Members from using their positions of public trust to enrich themselves, to enrich their families, by banning stock trading among Members of Congress.
You see, as lawmakers, we write and pass bills that significantly impact the market. We do it on a daily basis. We sit on committees of jurisdiction that oversee entire sectors of America's economy. We have access to briefings and updates on a regular basis that provide nonpublic market information.
There is little to prohibit Members of Congress from using such privileged information to guide their personal selection of stocks.
In fact, in the last two decades, Members have made trades conspicuously timed around market-moving events, events shaped by information they had access to or legislation that they helped advance. Of course, this creates a direct conflict of interest between public duty and personal financial interest. And it is also a troubling double standard.
Most people say isn't insider trading a Federal crime for all Americans? And it is, but when it comes to Members of Congress trading on information gained through public service, enforcement is quite rare and very difficult to police.
So it is no wonder many Americans are convinced that the market is rigged for a privileged set of citizens who can manipulate it for their gain.
Now, to be fair, in 2012, Congress made some headway in addressing this unfairness. They passed the STOCK Act. This law, get this, mandates that lawmakers report stock trades over $1,000 within 30 days of the transaction. But the enforcement mechanism and initial fine of a mere $200 is virtually toothless.
So, the underlying problem remains, and it should not. Today, roughly 200 Members of Congress own shares in publicly traded companies.
Many of them, most of them, are good people. They are ethical people. They came here for all the right reasons, and many have not lost their way. And among those 200 Members, many sit on committees that craft policy for and conduct oversight on the very industries in which they invest.
In an era of deep partisanship, most Americans--no matter their political beliefs, their party, their underlying ideology, the geography in which they live, their gender, their age--they see this as a problem. How much of a problem?
Well, according to a survey conducted by the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy, 86 percent of our population supports a prohibition on congressional stock trading.
There aren't many issues like this. In a divided America, this could unify America. Our Congress could be unified by exercising the will of the American people and banning Members of Congress from trading stocks.
What do Republicans say? Mr. President, 87 percent of Republicans think this is a problem, think we should ban Members of Congress from trading stocks. You go across the country, almost 9 out of 10 Republicans you talk to will say we should do it.
And why have we not? What about Democrats? Mr. President, 87--88 percent, rather, of Democrats, almost 9 out of 10. Independents--81 percent.
So, listen, there are two bills that we already have. I don't need to draft a new bill. Let's recognize our colleagues' handiwork and get something important done.
Two bills that would accomplish this in the U.S. Senate: The first bill, the Stop Insider Trading Act, would just prevent Members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from trading individual stocks, and it would strengthen disclosure and enforcement requirements. And unlike current law, the bill would impose meaningful financial penalties for violations. Under this bill, lawmakers who fail to comply with the law's mandates would be fined the greater of $2,000--probably still not enough but enough maybe to get it passed through the Senate; we can increase it later--be fined the greater of $2,000 or 10 percent of the investment value, plus the forfeiture of any net gain realized from the sale.
The second bill, the Restore Trust in Congress Act, would prohibit Members of Congress from trading individual stock. It would establish guidelines for Members to divest existing holdings within a defined period. It would also empower congressional ethics offices to enforce compliance through meaningful penalties.
Now, look, there is no easy or quick way to restore complete trust in Congress, faith in this essential institution of democratic government. But prohibiting Members of Congress from leveraging their positions of public trust for personal enrichment would go a long way. I think most Americans would acknowledge that it would be a meaningful step toward that goal.
Passing these bills will ensure stock trading comes to an end in Congress and help restore trust in us, those who
So I just ask my colleagues: Let us be beyond reproach. Let us avoid all appearances of impropriety. Let us not disappoint the American people again. It is time to ban Members of Congress from trading stock.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
Iran (Executive Session)
Mr. President, last night, I read the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran. I read it twice. And for what it is worth, here is my conclusion: I think we ought to give peace a chance. And that is all I am saying today. You are entitled to your opinion, but all I am saying today is I think we ought to give peace a chance.
I have--all week long, even before the memorandum came out--I have heard all the speculation about the agreement, the rank speculation. I have listened to people say: Well, I don't like this, and I don't like that; or this is in it and it shouldn't be and this isn't in it and it should be; and if we do this, this is going to happen.
And it is all rank speculation. The people offering these points of view, to which they are entitled, they are not clairvoyant. They are not any more clairvoyant than I am. Just like me, they have to wait for the future, like everybody else.
Here is what I see in the document. The only certainty, the only practical, real consequence of this document is that for 60 days America has removed its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. And for 60 days, Iran has removed its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which means ships containing oil and natural gas and fertilizer can go back and forth just like they were before the conflict started.
The other practical consequence is that Iran will be able to start selling its oil again for 60 days.
The other thing that we are certain of is that, as a result of this agreement, the price of oil is going down. And as a result of that, the price of gasoline is going down.
And as a result of the Strait of Hormuz being opened, the price of fertilizer, for example, and other commodities that go back and forth through the Strait of Hormuz are coming down, and that is a good thing.
And that is all we know. That is all--that is the only practical consequence of this document.
Now, in the document, Iran says that it is willing to negotiate for 60 days to get rid of its fissile material that it can use to make a nuclear weapon, including, but not limited to, its centrifuges that it uses to enrich the uranium.
And in the document, Iran says: We are willing to renounce our desire to have a nuclear weapon.
And in the document, Iran says: For 60 days, we are willing to negotiate some sort of inspection protocol so that the world can go in and make sure that Iran is telling the truth.
They have got 60 days to do it--not 160, not a year. They have got 60 days. And President Trump has said if they don't do it, I think his expression was: I'll start dropping bombs on their head again.
That is the other thing that we know. Now, this might be a good time to say that--as I have said all week and as I have said in another context before--I trust the Iranian Government like I trust gas station sushi.
The Iranian Government--not the Iranian people--the Iranian Government are a bunch of religious nuts. Their religion tells them that if you--if you and I or anybody--don't agree with all the tenets of their religion, that they want to kill you and hurt you the entire time you are dying.
As far as I am concerned, if your religion tells you, in order to be devout, you have to kill somebody, you probably ought to get another religion.
My experience with the Iranian Government--not the Iranian people--is that they lie like they breathe. They lie like fish swim. They learned to lie before they could--before they learned to talk.
But you know what, they have got 60 days to prove otherwise. Sixty days--not 160, not a year. They have got 60 days to prove otherwise. And if they don't prove it, the bombing is going to start again.
I heard President Trump say it last night, big as Dallas, right there on television: They got 60 days. And if they don't do it, if they are jacking me around, I am going to start bombing again.
The other thing that I am certain of today is that Iran is immeasurably weaker than it was a year ago, than it was before the United States and Israel bombed their nuclear facilities last June, and before the conflict that we have watched transpire over the last couple of months--immeasurably weaker.
There are whole swathes of Iran that look like the aftermath of a bar brawl. There are entire regions in Iran that look like something out of ``Mad Max'' 4. We have bombed the living bejesus out of them. We haven't destroyed all their missiles, but we have destroyed a bunch of them. We have destroyed their weapons production factories. We have destroyed their entire navy. We have destroyed a lot of their drones. We have just given them a curb stomping. Hated to do it, but we did what we have to do.
The private sector--Iran has got--I don't know how anybody is eating or living in Iran. They have got 70 percent inflation, huge unemployment.
In Iran today--and I regret this, but it had to be done. In Iran today, its public and private sectors are held together with spit and duct tape, and all the President has done is said: OK. For 60 days, I am going to give peace a chance and give you a chance to do what you say you are going to do.
It is 60 days. That is it. I hope it works out, but I have my doubts. The President is taking a big risk here, and he has been roundly criticized by my Democratic friends, which I don't really get.
You know, since the conflict started, my Democratic colleagues have been offering bill after bill after bill to stop the conflict and to take the authority away from the executive branch and prosecute. I don't know how many bills it has been--a squillion. It has been bill after bill after bill. They haven't passed. But now that the President has done it, the Democrats are unhappy.
I was reading the New York Times this morning. I mean, they are just bashing this agreement which they have been asking for. Now, I don't mean any disrespect, but I discount what is in the New York Times because I know the folks running the New York Times, and the folks running the New York Times hate Republicans as much as the Devil loves sin. The New York Times and the people running the New York Times would endorse a dead armadillo over a live Republican if the dead armadillo had a ``D'' behind its name. That is just the way it is. I get it. They are entitled to their opinion. The New York Times has been called many things--some good, some bad--but they have never been called unbiased. That is just a fact that goes with the turf. Once again, this is America--you are entitled to your opinion.
But I wanted to come down this morning to say that I think we ought to give peace a chance. I think we ought to give peace a chance. It is only 60 days, and we are just going to have to trust the President on this one. We will know soon, and I hope it works. I hope our giving peace a chance makes peace possible.
My work here is done. I can see myself out.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Unanimous Consent Request: S. Res. 554 (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President, I think it is virtually undisputed, among people who are not on fossil fuel's payroll, that climate change is real. Earlier this year, I came to the floor, and I asked my colleagues if they could all agree on that simple, scientific fact. Well, unfortunately, they could not.
So I came back. I returned to the floor in hopes that my Republican colleagues could, at least, agree to some of the simple truths that make up the bigger picture of climate change. I asked if we could agree, for instance, that sea levels are rising due to carbon emissions--again, essentially zero dispute on that fact in the scientific community--but Republicans objected.
I asked if we could agree that oceans are warming. Oceans are warming by multiple zettajoules. That is a number with 21 zeros behind it. It is a massive, massive measured scientific fact. And yet Republicans sent someone to the floor to object.
Again, there is essentially no nonfossil fuel-funded science disputing any of this. And I have to put the fossil fuel-funded science in air quotes because it is not real science. It is just designed to look like science and tell a lie in scientific vocabulary.
So if the environmental realities are too much for the Senate to acknowledge, perhaps my colleagues will at least recognize the economic threats that are emerging.
So here is today's simple truth: Climate change is driving up the cost of homeowners insurance. Can we agree on that?
Well, let me break down why we should agree on that. Climate change drives extreme weather disasters, including hurricanes and floods and wildfires. Disasters like those destroy homes and destroy infrastructure, and all that destruction carries a heavy cost.
Before the Trump administration stopped the practice in 2025, NOAA-- the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--actually used to track the costs of this destruction every year. Thanks to NOAA, we have all this data going back that shows that climate disasters and climate costs have been increasing--quite dramatically, actually.
This chart draws on NOAA data from before 2025 and other aggregated data since that, and it shows that the increase in climate change- driven weather has been very notable between 1980 and today--from here up to here.
Costs of the disasters spike in particular years, depending on the type of disasters and where the impacts occurred. Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Irma made 2017--here, that--the costliest year on record. But setting aside the spikes, the average cost is steadily increasing, along with the frequency of disasters.
And these costs fall first where? On the insurance companies.
In 2023, insurers lost money in 18 of 50 States. That is an increase from 12 States 5 years previously and 8 States in 2013--8 to 12 to 18. The losses to insurers are also increasing.
To offset these climate-driven losses, insurance companies raised their premiums. And, sure enough, from 2013 to 2022, home insurance premiums more than doubled, rising to be over 20 percent of mortgage payments, on average.
When a family starts with a pretty big payment like their home insurance payment and it then doubles, that is a big hit to the family's finances.
We know this increase isn't just inflation because insurance premiums are increasing 40 percent faster than inflation. We know that this cost increase is driven by climate change, and we know it because the numbers don't lie. You can look at the areas with the highest climate risk, and you see that the cost increases most in those counties, the ones at most risk from climate change. The largest increases in insurance rates between 2014 and 2023 happened in the highest climate risk areas--obvious and true.
In high-risk States like Florida and Louisiana, premiums are estimated to average more than $14,000 and $11,000 respectively. That is not by accident. That is because those low-lying States are being hammered by increasingly violent and wet storms and hurricanes, combined with rising sea levels. Both phenomena are driven by climate change.
Higher home insurance means less money to spend on household essentials like groceries and gas, which are already more expensive than ever.
But higher insurance rates are not actually a family's worst-case scenario. The worst-case home insurance scenario for a family is nonrenewal. More and more, in high climate risk counties across the country, insurance companies, unwilling to take on this additional risk, are refusing to insure homes at all. This is a nightmare for homeowners.
First of all, you have the enormous hassle of having to go out and find new insurance, which probably costs more and is worse. But also, most lenders won't approve a mortgage unless the borrower also purchases insurance. And if the home is uninsurable, guess what. The home is unmortgageable, and an unmortgageable home is almost inevitably an unsellable home.
When you lose your insurance, lenders may also force place a new home insurance policy on you to replace the policy that was canceled. Force- placed insurance obviously protects first the lender's interest, not the homeowner's property, and it almost always costs much, much more, and it covers less. And it is added to the mortgage payment, and that can be a huge financial blow to a family.
All of this added cost and risk means that climate change is dragging down home equity value, undermining the primary driver of wealth appreciation for America's middle class, and, by the way, reducing property tax revenue for things like schools and public safety and basic services provided by local government.
The bottom line here is that climate risk has moved from the science department to the economics department, and it has landed hard in home insurance, and Americans are paying the price.
So as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged, and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 554; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Wyoming.
Mr. President, reserving the right to object, this resolution asks us to accept, without scrutiny, that correlation equals causation.
It is true that premiums are rising, but this Senate deserves an honest accounting of why. Replacement costs are up because Biden-era climate regulations drove up the price of lumber, appliances, and labor--regulations the Trump administration is now working to unwind because of the damage they did.
When it costs more to build a home, it costs more to insure one. That is not a climate story. It is a policy failure story.
If we are serious about lower premiums, the answer is simple: Build more homes that people can afford.
Every regulation that makes construction more expensive means fewer homes are built. Constrained supply drives up values, and higher home values mean higher premiums. That is not a partisan talking point. That is economics.
We don't need more climate mandates. We need more housing. And we can start by getting the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act to the President's desk.
The resolution being offered today offers us a bumper sticker. American homeowners deserve real solutions.
With that, Mr. President, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The objection is heard.
The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, I would just point out briefly in response to my distinguished colleague that an entire industry understands that climate risk is driving homeowners insurance.
The home insurance industry is actually under both a business model requirement and a fiduciary legal obligation to do its very, very best to predict risk, figure out what is driving that risk, and act accordingly.
For that reason, we had the president of Aon testify in the Budget Committee about how climate risk is damaging insurance markets. We have an editorial by a board member of the biggest insurance company in the world, Allianz. We have warnings from the risk manager--former risk manager--of Goldman Sachs. We have warnings from the former head of the Bank of England, now the Prime Minister of Canada. We have warnings from the Home Mortgage Association. We have warnings from the international Financial Stability Board.
There is an enormous amount of very solid and responsible data that comes not out of the environmental community but out of the financial community warning about the looming great climate insurance collapse. And if we refuse to pay attention to it, we will fail in our duties.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Hawaii.
Farm Bill (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President, I want to talk about a real crisis in America that we are not talking enough about. We have a farm crisis going on in the United States of America. It is facing our entire country. It is facing our rural areas, and it is facing some of the most noble Americans in our country who are part of a great tradition and a great heritage that is vital to all Americans.
We are in the midst of a farm crisis, and we are in the midst of a nutrition crisis. And despite the need for Congress to step up to this moment, to meet this crisis, and pass a bold farm bill, it is not happening right now.
Since we passed our last farm bill in 2018, we have lost over 150,000 farms--most of them small farms. That is an average of 51 farms we have lost every single day for the past 8 years. And the farmers who have managed to hang on are telling me that the economics of farming simply do not work for them anymore, and they fear that we are on the brink of another 1980s-type of farm crisis.
I am hearing more and more now from farmers about the reality that most of them have to seek off-farm employment just to be able to keep their families afloat.
Now, this trend has been going on for years. It is a trend that we saw under Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents. It demands a bipartisan response. I know the policies of this administration, though, are making the situation worse for farmers--not better. They are acting as an incendiary to this horrible fire.
We see this President's reckless tariff policies have driven up costs for farmers; President Trump's reckless war in Iran, which closed the Strait of Hormuz, drove up costs for our farmers; USDA's decision to cancel critical programs that farmers were relying upon such as local food purchasing programs for schools and food banks--these are all things that have severely hurt our farmers. USDA's staffing cuts and field office closures have further injured our farmers, and I could go on with that list.
But the heart of this problem that our farmers are facing, the heart of the problem is the massive amount of corporate concentration that has taken place in our food system over many decades as both Republican and Democratic administrations stopped enforcing our Federal anti-trust laws.
Farmers are now being squeezed by monopolies on all sides. A handful of companies now control the inputs that farmers need like seeds and fertilizers and drive up those prices. And at the same time, farmers now have very few buyers for their products, and so they are not being paid a fair price for their crops and for their animals.
Back in 2018, as I worked on my first farm bill here in the Senate, I went on a tour to meet with farmers--not just in New Jersey but also in Missouri, Illinois, and Kansas. Some of the farmers I met with were Democrats and some Republicans, but what I heard consistently from all of them was that our current farm system was not working for farmers.
Farmers and ranchers told me about how decades ago they would have many buyers competing and bidding up the price for their livestock, but now, today, they often only had one buyer who was able to dictate a low purchase price undercutting them as they made more profit.
I heard heart-wrenching stories about farmers whose land has been in their families for many generations but were now on the verge of losing their farm.
Farmers told me about how the current system was created to keep farmers growing commodity crops like corn and soy for animal feed rather than healthy foods to feed their communities they cared about because nearly all of our farm bill subsidies and safety net programs are designed to benefit big farmers growing a handful of commodity crops but not to support the farmers that grow the food that people eat like fruits and vegetables.
And these farmers were right. While our Federal dietary guidelines tell us that 50 percent of our diet should consist of fruits and vegetables, less than 10 percent of our farm bill agricultural subsidies actually go to farmers that grow fruits and vegetables.
And that has led us to the second crisis I mentioned: The nutrition crisis in the United States of America.
Diet-related chronic disease is now the No. 1 killer of Americans. Every single day in America, 2,700 people die from diet-related diseases. That is nearly a million Americans dead every year from what we eat.
Half of adults are now prediabetic or diabetic--one in four of our teenagers are. Half the children alive in this country today are projected to be obese by the time they are 35. Cancer rates in young people are climbing. Dementia rates across our country are climbing. And a chorus of doctors and researchers are now tying this explosion of diet-related diseases directly to the ultraprocessed foods Americans are eating every single day.
And so what our farmers need right now--and what all Americans need-- is for Democrats and Republicans to come together and pass a much bolder bipartisan farm bill that provides immediate assistance to our farmers--the assistance that they desperately need.
We are losing farmers every day, and this body and the House and the President are not rising to meet this crisis.
Farmers are wondering: Who is fighting for us? We need to show them that we are--in concrete policies that address their issues, that address this farm crisis, and for the millions of Americans suffering from preventable diseases that affects the nutrition crisis too.
Farmers in America--our fellow Americans that farm--need a farm bill that provides substantial emergency financial assistance to all of our struggling farmers--and especially our specialty crop farmers who have so far been shortchanged in this administration.
Farmers need a farm bill that puts more money into conservation programs and begins to reform those programs to better serve farmers and help them diversify their farms.
And farmers need a farm bill that makes other policy changes to help our farmers and ranchers--policy changes like restoring mandatory country-of-origin labeling, reforming our Federal checkoff programs that are so broken, strengthening the Packers and Stockyards Act to protect our farmers and ranchers from abuses by big meatpacking companies creating a real farm safety net for specialty crop farmers in America.
Farmers need a bold farm bill that reinstates funding for healthy food purchases from our local farmers for schools and food banks.
Farmers need a bold farm bill that scales up programs like SNAP Double Bucks that purchase fresh fruits and vegetables from small farmers and gets those healthy foods to families that are participating in the SNAP program.
Not only would a bold farm bill like that be a lifeline to our farmers, but it would be an example of using food as medicine and provide healing--healing--to Americans suffering from diabetes and other diet-related diseases.
But unfortunately, how did the House of Representatives--the Republican-led House respond in this moment? Well, they passed a farm bill that fails to meet this crisis, that fails to lead when
The Senate now has to do better. Democrats and Republicans in this Chamber must come together. We must put aside poison pills such as Prop 12 preemption and pesticide preemption and negotiate a bold farm bill that helps our farmers and families and meets this crisis that has been growing and growing and growing.
And at a time when we are seeing President Trump's policies causing food crisis to increase at an alarming rate, that bold farm bill must reverse the destructive Republican SNAP cuts that already left nearly 1 million of our children today going to bed hungry.
I hope that we rise to this occasion in the Senate. I hope that we are a nation that knows our fundamental health and well-being rely on American farmers. They protect our heritage. They are stewards of our land. They are the hope for a better, healthier future.
Let's stand together, join together, and be bold, be strong, and bring about a better deal--a new deal--for our farmers.
Iran (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President and to all here, I rise today to speak about the breaking news that the President has entered into a memorandum of understanding with Iran to end the war he started on February 28.
The news has included a release from the White House of a memorandum of understanding with Iran about the end to the war. We in the Senate have not been briefed on this. We have received news accounts from journalists that have the terms of the memorandum. But the White House has confirmed that those terms are accurately reported.
So I want to rise today and take some time to analyze the memorandum, what we know about it but also what we don't know about it since there are some agreements that are still needing to be forthcoming in the next 60 days.
First, I want to tell everyone how we got here. The United States and Iran have been engaged in a back-and-forth sort of war attrition against each other since about the 1950s. The sad reality is we were friends; we were allies in World War II. The Iranian people loved the United States because the United States helped guarantee their independent sovereignty and borders at a conference in Tehran that took place in the middle of World War II.
But for some reason that is just so tragic to contemplate, the United States decided to topple the democratic elected Government of Iran in 1953 and install a dictatorship over the Iranian people. That then led to intense resentment of the United States.
When the Iranian people overthrew the dictatorship in 1979, those who took control of Iran were hardliners. They hated the United States because of this 26-year dictatorship that they suffered under. And since that moment in 1979, it has been back and forth between our two nations.
Iran invaded our Embassy, violating international law, and held dozens of Americans hostage for 400-plus days. The United States funded Iraq to wage a war against Iran in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed.
Iran funded proxy terror groups that bombed the U.S. Marine barracks and Embassy in Beirut, killing hundreds of Americans. The United States shot down an Iranian commercial aircraft in 1989, killing nearly 300 Iranian civilians.
The United States invaded both of Iran's next door neighbors to topple their governments. Iran then funded proxy groups to attack U.S. soldiers in their region.
We have been back and forth, the United States and Iran, sadly-- beginning as friends--since the 1953 decision of the United States to topple the Iranian Government. If more war with Iran were the answer, we would have found it a long time ago.
So I took to the floor of the Senate immediately after the President started this war to say the war was illegal because he had not consulted with Congress before waging it, the war was foolish because 25 years of war in the Middle East should have taught us something, and the war was likely to lead to very, very significant negative consequences for the United States. That has, in fact, happened. Fourteen U.S. troops have lost their lives. We have spent probably already in excess of $50 billion in taxpayer money to prosecute this war, and we have a huge bill still to pay, both to reconstitute infrastructure that Iran has attacked in the region and replenish munition stocks that have been depleted. Thousands of civilians in Iran, including schoolchildren, have been killed during this campaign.
I am very thankful that we found an off-ramp to this war. Even though the war was illegal and stupid and foolish and destructive, finding an off-ramp is a good thing. So I am happy that the administration has negotiated an end to the war, and I pray that the negotiation and the end to the war will hold.
But I want to remind everybody who is paying attention to this that there was a different path, and it was a path of diplomacy.
President Obama, in his first term--but it really began more in his second term--determined that 50 years of hostilities between the United States and Iran was just too much and we needed to find a path forward in the relationship.
We don't have a magic wand to wave to make the Iranian Government a good government, a nondictatorial government, we can't affect completely how Iran treats its people, but we can start to find some path to start building some kind of a relationship after war being a constant essentially since 1953.
And so President Obama and his team, especially Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz, worked over the course of many years to find an Iranian nuclear deal to control Iran's nuclear ambitions.
That deal, the runup to the deal was announced in late 2013, and between 2013 and 2015, when the deal was finalized, the administration briefed us repeatedly--I am on the Foreign Relations Committee, I am on the Armed Services Committee--from the very announcement that ``we are going to try to find a deal'' to the deal being finalized 2 years later, dozens of dozens of briefings with administration officials, visits to the region to talk to nations in the region, allied nations, European nations about the deal and, finally, the deal was done.
And that deal controlled Iran's nuclear ambitions peacefully, without a single bomb being dropped, without a single school being destroyed, without a single schoolchild being killed--the United States in our best tradition. In our best tradition, we are a diplomatic nation.
Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel Prize for helping broker the end of the Russo-Japanese war, and since then many Nobel Prizes have gone to Americans, American leaders, not just Presidents but diplomats like Ralph Bunche and others for putting the United States forward as a diplomatic nation, and that nuclear deal with Iran, though not perfect--few deals are perfect--and though not covering all aspects of Iranian bad behavior, finally, got the United States and Iran in the same room where they could communicate and hopefully find a path to get out of a state of back-and-forth war that essentially had been constant since 1953.
When Donald Trump became President in 2017, he said he wanted to destroy the Obama nuclear deal. I am convinced the President didn't understand the deal. I am convinced he wanted to destroy the deal for one reason, President Barack Obama, who is opening his Presidential library in Chicago today.
Donald Trump wanted to destroy it because President Barack Obama had done it. That was the only thing he understood about the deal, and that was all he needed to know about the deal.
And so he set out to do what no American President had ever done. The United States has never backed out of
President Trump was told by his first Secretary of Defense Gen. Jim Mattis, courageous Marine general: Don't back out of this deal. Don't back out of the deal. His own Secretary of Defense.
President Trump was told by his first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: Don't back out of this deal. Don't back out of it. President Trump's top two National Security Advisors told him: Maintain the deal. He ignored them. He ignored them.
I visited allies throughout the region and around the world. They said this deal is working. Iran is complying with it. Iran is not magically transformed into a working democracy or a nation that respects human rights, but we have controlled their nuclear program. And we have other tools to control other aspects of their bad behavior that we are free to use. Don't get out of this deal.
But President Trump tore up the deal. He tore up the deal early into his first-term Presidency, despite all the advice that he shouldn't. Many of us in the Senate said: If you tear up this deal and make diplomacy impossible, you will make war inevitable. American troops are likely to die if you destroy diplomacy.
And that has now proven to be true. We told President Trump something else: If you take a nuclear deal that is working and tear it up, North Korea will back away from the table in nuclear negotiations because why would they agree to enter into a nuclear agreement with the United States if the United States would just walk out of a deal that was working?
And we have essentially been correct in that because there has been no meaningful forward progress on nuclear negotiations with North Korea since Donald Trump made the foolish decision to tear up that deal.
The reasons they asserted for tearing up the deal were very vague at the time: It doesn't go far enough. Obama was a disaster. The deal was a disaster.
His officials would come before the committees, and we would ask them basic questions about the deal. I remember once asking a Trump national security nominee who was trashing the deal: Have you even read the first page of this deal? Tell me what is on the first page of the deal--on the first page. The official could not.
All they knew is we have got to get rid of this because President Obama did it, and this Nation and the region have suffered as a result. And, OK, so now, now we have a new deal announced by President Trump, this memorandum of understanding.
And what I want to do for the next few minutes is compare the deal that Donald Trump tore up with the memorandum of understanding that he has just announced.
Let's start with the most important thing, what I call the forever promise. Both Presidents Obama and Trump wanted a forever promise that Iran would not get nuclear weapons. That was kind of like the headline. Other things are really important details, but both have said Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon.
Let me read from page 1 of the JCPOA, the deal that President Obama and his administration negotiated. Page 1:
That is a forever promise.
``[U]nder no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons.''
Donald Trump tore up a forever promise. What is the language in the memorandum that has just been announced? It is point 8 of the memorandum.
Now, you might read these things and say: Well, they are basically the same, but notice the difference in the language.
In the JCPOA, ``[U]nder no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons.'' The reference is to today, but it is to the infinite future, ever, under no circumstances, any weapons. All of that language is out in point 8 in the memorandum.
An English teacher can tell us whether those two phrases mean the same thing, but the JCPOA language talks about ``forever,'' and the Trump MOU does not.
Why did Donald Trump tear up the forever promise? Why did Donald Trump prefer going to war than getting a forever promise to avoid war and save lives and save taxpayer money?
Now, the deal and the JCPOA have other terms as well, and I want to walk through them with you. I am walking through terms.
On the left, you see the JCPOA. This is the deal that the Obama administration negotiated in 2015. And the MOU refers to the 14-point memorandum that was released yesterday by the Trump administration.
Limitation on centrifuges that used to enrich uranium: The JCPOA had significant limitations on centrifuges; the MOU has none.
Now, to be fair, the MOU says we are going to continue to negotiate for 60 days, and that period can be extended by mutual agreement, but the deal that Donald Trump tore up had limitations on centrifuges and the memorandum that he signed at Versailles yesterday does not.
How about limitations on enrichment? Centrifuges are just machines that are designed to enrich uranium, but what about actual limitations on the enrichment of uranium?
Well, the JCPOA, negotiated over the course of many years, had significant limits on Iran enriching uranium. The memorandum of understanding, who knows? There are no limits in the memorandum. There is an agreement to keep talking for the next 60 days or potentially to extend it, but as of now, this MOU contains no limitations on the enrichment of uranium.
How about limitations on research? Research into nuclear weapons is a key component of any nuclear program, to do the research to know how to convert enriched uranium into a weapon and a weapon that can be delivered via some system to impose damage on military and civilian targets.
The JCPOA that Donald Trump tore up, the forever promise that he tore up, had very significant limitations on Iran doing nuclear research. The memorandum of understanding has no limitations.
Now, it may be that there will be agreements about limitations in the next 60 days, but as of now, there are none.
How about the destruction of uranium? When the JCPOA was done, Iran had a stockpile of enriched uranium, so even if you limit enrichment, well, what do you do with the stockpile? What do you do with the stockpile of uranium that can be used for a nuclear weapon? In the JCPOA, Iran agreed to destroy its stockpile of enriched uranium, and that meant that when Donald Trump became President, Iran had precisely zero kilograms of enriched uranium.
Well, what does the memorandum that Donald Trump has put before us, that he signed at Versailles, what does it say about uranium destruction? It does not compel uranium destruction. It is not even a question mark like we don't know for the next 60 days.
What the MOU says about enriched uranium is that Iran agrees to downblend its enriched uranium. And what that means is, you take uranium that has been enriched to a high percentage of 60 percent or north that is much more able to quickly be converted into weapons grade, and then you dilute it backward, downblending it backward with the addition of nonuranium materials so that the enrichment level is lower, but they haven't agreed to destroy it. And there is a problem with that. Anybody who downblends uranium can then spin it back up to the enriched level.
And so, in this particular area, it is not even a question mark what the MOU does. What the MOU requires is not the destruction of the enriched uranium but a downblending of the uranium that can be reconstituted to weapons grade. Why would we have accepted that?
Finally, one of the most important parts of any agreement with Iran is inspections because just because somebody says they are going to do something, you don't know that they are going to do something. They might lie. And Iran has lied and Iran has cheated and other nations have, too, when it comes to their nuclear programs.
There is a famous example. The United States many, many decades ago got into a nuclear agreement with North Korea, and North Korea hid activities. And so the international agency that monitors nuclear weaponry and material around the world, the International Atomic Energy Agency based in Vienna, they had already developed an inspection protocol that North Korea was following, but they were end running it by hiding stuff. And so the IAEA had to develop something called the additional protocol that means we have to do these additional steps to make sure we catch cheating.
The JCPOA mandated the most intrusive inspections of the world for Iran--the normal protocol of inspections, but Iran also agreed in the JCPOA, as a forever promise, this did not have an expiration date on it, to allow the more intrusive inspections mandated under the additional protocol written by the IAEA, precisely to catch nations that would be prone to cheat.
Well, what about the MOU and inspections? We don't know. We are going to agree to talk for the next 60 days or maybe longer, but the MOU has no guarantee about inspecting the Iranian regime's nuclear activities, a regime that has cheated in the past and will cheat again if we don't have a significant inspection regime.
So the forever deal that Donald Trump tore up had all of these provisions in it. And by tearing up the forever promise, he put us on a path that one day was going to lead to war and the death of American troops.
And what have we gotten in return? We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. And we will get uranium downblending, not uranium destruction.
All right. Let's keep looking at this comparison.
Sanctions--there are numerous sanctions against Iran, and there are basically three kinds of sanctions. There are sanctions that are imposed by Congress. There are sanctions that are imposed by the Executive--the President. And there are sanctions that are imposed by the United Nations, international sanctions--three kinds of sanctions.
Iran, in giving up any nuclear program, wants relief from sanctions. Those sanctions have punished the Iranian economy. And I give applause to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. If we had not done sanctions legislation, Iran wouldn't be at the table right now. So this is something that Congress can take some credit in.
What did the JCPOA do with respect to sanctions? Under the JCPOA, Iran was relieved from nuclear sanctions with snapback upon violation. So if Iran violated any of the terms of the nuclear deal, the sanctions were still on the books, and they would snap back.
But get this. On the JCPOA, it specifically said that nonnuclear sanctions remain. They are not frozen. They are not eliminated. They are not waived. They remain in place because the United States and the international community have sanctions against Iran for its ballistic missile program and we have sanctions against Iran for gross human rights violations and we have sanctions against Iran for terrorism and funding proxies in the region.
And the JCPOA that we did in 2015 said: Listen, we will give you relief from nuclear sanctions, but we are not giving you relief from all these other sanctions. We are going to keep using them against you until you correct the other bad behavior that you are engaged in. Pretty good deal. Pretty good deal.
And that was why Secretaries Mattis and Tillerson told President Trump: Don't tear up the deal. Maintain the deal on the nuclear program and keep using--because it is working--and keep using all the sanctions against Iran for all their other bad behavior. So keep the deal and then keep the pressure on. You can do both, and you will improve Iranian behavior.
But Donald Trump tore up the forever deal. And what did we get instead in the memorandum of understanding? The point that deals with sanctions says the United States will move to terminate all sanctions: nuclear, nonnuclear, congressional, executive, international. It will get the U.N. to drop international sanctions. The MOU says the United States will not impose further sanctions, giving up so much more leverage than was given in the JCPOA.
Why would we give relief from sanctions against the missile program or against human rights abuses to get a nuclear deal? Why not just give relief from nuclear sanctions? But the MOU suggests it is complete sanctions relief for Iran.
Let's talk about some things that Iran gets in addition to sanctions relief. In a couple of these areas, the JCPOA and the MOU are somewhat the same.
How about Iranian assets? Iran has a lot of assets around the world in banks and bank accounts, and they have been frozen in connection with the sanctions policy--hundreds of billions of dollars of Iran's money that they cannot use.
Both the JCPOA and the MOU suggest that Iranian assets should be unfrozen with some time and, you know, testing along the way, but there are basically some similarities between the two agreements in the unfreezing of Iranian assets. How about Iranian oil? That is one of the main features of their economy, the sanctions of a blockade of Iran being able to sell oil.
Both the JCPOA and the memorandum have basically said Iran should be able to sell their oil. Again, this could be phased, but both are similar kind of in the concept that Iran should be able to sell oil just like the United States sells oil and other nations sell oil.
How about this little tricky issue: payments to Iran? In addition to releasing assets, which isn't really a payment--it is just letting them use their own money--in addition to oil, which is not really a payment--it is just letting them use their own oil--what about payments to Iran?
The JCPOA had a payment to Iran that many criticized heavily. It was a $1.7 billion payment. Why did the United States pay that money to Iran in the JCPOA? It was the repayment of a debt.
Iran had paid the United States for weapons right before the revolution in 1979, and the United States never delivered the weapons. And so $1.7 billion in the JCPOA was the United States paying in 2015-- repaying the debt that Iran had given us money, and we hadn't given them the weapons--with interest. And so, yes, there was a $1.7 billion repayment of the debt.
How does it compare to the MOU? Well, if you don't like $1.7 billion, I am going to tell you this: You are not going to like $300 billion. The MOU says the United States and regional partners will do a--at least--at least--$300 billion reconstruction fund in Iran to help them rebuild what we bombed since February 27.
I was here on the floor and heard a lot of my colleagues complain about this $1.7 billion repayment of a debt. I am very interested what they think about a guaranteed reparations fund whereby the United States and other nations will work to put $300 billion into rebuilding the Iranian economy.
Getting near the end here. How about this? How about the engagement of other countries in trying to craft a diplomatic deal? The JCPOA was crafted by a group called the P5+1. It was every permanent member--P5-- P for ``permanent''--every permanent member of the U.N. Security Council--and that is--let's see--France, U.K., United States, China, Russia, plus one--Germany. Germany was not a permanent member of the Security Council.
And it was the six nations, and it is an interesting six. We are not around the table much with China and Russia these days. We are often not trying to do something with them; we are often checked off against them. But on this issue, these adversaries had the same interest we had. They did not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
Russia borders with Iran. There has been a history of some challenges there. China wants to limit the number of nations in the nuclear club. And so they were glad to join us, and the negotiation took place with all of these allies around the table.
What about the MOU? Who was engaged as allies in the United States in negotiating this agreement? Nobody. The greatest Nation in the world with the greatest set of alliances--NATO and the Quad, AUKUS and all these nations--who did Donald Trump include in negotiating this deal? No one.
He talked to Israel about it. They are furious about the deal. He didn't talk
You started this war without even talking to us, and now you expect us to come in?
None of our allies--and the United States is chief in the world in having the best network of alliances. Donald Trump not only wouldn't consult with Congress--and I am used to that--he wouldn't even consult with our allies, and he wouldn't even bring to the table these nations that had been our adversaries who also don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
Look, if you go into a war without a plan, without a rationale, without the support of Congress, without the support of the American people, and without the support of allies, what are the odds that it is not going to go the way you want?
How about a dispute resolution mechanism? Like, you do a deal, and one side thinks the other side is cheating. Well, the JCPOA had one. All the parties to the deal could say Iran is cheating and file a complaint with the International Atomic Energy Agency that was doing the inspections, and there was a mechanism for figuring out who was cheating and who wasn't.
And so, for example, if Iran was found cheating on its nuclear obligation, say, with the destruction of enriched uranium, the sanctions could snap back, or there could be other consequences.
What about a dispute resolution under the MOU? There is none. Donald Trump was asked about this. What about a--well, we will just start dropping bombs on their heads again.
That is not a dispute resolution mechanism. That is just, like: Well, let's just go back to war--maybe more American troops at risk, maybe more damage done to the economy, maybe people paying more at the gas pump.
Hopefully in the discussions over the next 60 days, which could be extended by mutual consent, there will be a dispute resolution mechanism, but there is not one now.
What about the Strait of Hormuz? Critical chokepoint for petroleum and other aspects of the global economy. Under President Obama and under the JCPOA, the strait was never closed. They remained open to global commerce, not only for Iran, but other nations too. President Trump's war led to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, to enormous economic damage to America and the world.
And, yes, as part of the MOU, Iran has agreed that the strait will be opened. Better that they should never have been closed than that you have to do a deal and give up a lot to get them to reopen.
Let's talk about one other thing about the Strait of Hormuz. This one was an unusual provision of the MOU: future control of the Strait of Hormuz--future control of the Strait of Hormuz.
The MOU says that Iran and Oman will administer traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, will develop a plan to do so, and the plan has to be in accord with international law.
The United States has never said that before, acknowledged the power, acknowledged the right of Iran to be the administrator of the Strait of Hormuz. The JCPOA certainly didn't recognize Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, but the memorandum of understanding does.
And I believe that poses very, very severe risk of continued chokepoints in the strait in ways that can harm global commerce and ultimately harm American families.
All right. So that is my assessment of the comparison of the JCPOA and the MOU. The JCPOA had an ironclad forever promise about no nuclear weapons ever, not any, under any circumstances ever.
Donald Trump tore that up, and he got a watered-down promise that might also be a forever promise, but it is certainly watered down from what was in the JCPOA.
And then you see in all these areas the limitations that the JCPOA had to cement that forever promise. The MOU doesn't have it.
You see the United States giving up on sanctions for nonnuclear activity--international sanctions, congressional sanctions--and the JCPOA didn't give that up.
And you see the United States agreeing for the first time that Iran and Oman will have the right, the role, to administer traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
So let's compare. Let's compare the forever deal that Donald Trump tore up, that led us to an illegal and foolish war, to the memorandum that he just announced yesterday.
It ain't hard. It is not hard. Giving a lot more to get a lot less, that is what the MOU is when you compare it to the forever deal that Donald Trump tore up.
One of the 14 servicemembers who died was from Virginia--Robert Marzan--who was a senior warrant officer in the Army. He was in his 50s. He was very close to retirement--Spotsylvania County, which is about an hour south of here, deployed all over the world in his role.
He died early in that attack on the position in Kuwait. Because we didn't really let allies know what we were doing, when Iran started firing at United States' positions in nations like Kuwait, we weren't ready for it. And Robert Marzan was one of the people killed right at the start of this war, right about the same time as all those schoolkids in Iran were killed, when we mistakenly bombed a school.
When you make a mistake in something like this, people lose their lives who shouldn't: troops, children, innocent bystanders. Our military is the best in the world, and when it comes to operations, they perform the best in the world. The only problem they ever get into is when they are subjected to decisions by civilian leaders who are stupid.
Most agree now that the Vietnam war was a huge disaster. It wasn't a disaster because our troops didn't do well. Our troops did great. They served honorably. But for some reason, our civilian leadership decided to take over the failed French colonial project in Southeast Asia and step into France's shoes, when we had never done that before, and inherited a war we had no business being in. I think the number of deaths in the Vietnam war was about 56,000 U.S. troops because civilian leaders made a stupid decision.
In Iraq, our troops performed bravely. They performed heroically. I was the Governor of Virginia, and I went to an awful lot of deployments and a lot of homecomings. I went to the wakes, and I went to the funerals of Virginians who were Active Duty or in the Reserves, and many were in the Virginia National Guard. They performed heroically and ably, but they were undermined by stupid decisions by a national leadership that persuaded Congress in 2002 that we needed to go to war because Iran had weapons of mass destruction when they didn't. All the after studies suggested that that intel was false. We went to war because civilian leaders sent our kids into war under false pretenses, and so many never came home. In Iraq and Afghanistan together, there were 14,000 deaths and more than 60,000 injuries--so many in Iraq. We never should have been there to begin with except leaders made horrible decisions.
I believe the history of this Iran war is going to be written, and the history is going to start with a decision to tear up a forever diplomatic deal; to walk away from diplomacy, which is something the United States never should do; that when we tore up the deal--and Iran said: Fine. We can enrich again. Fine. We can have centrifuges again, and we can have uranium again--that the tearing up of that deal was essentially lighting the spark that led to an unnecessary war and to unnecessary death.
An off ramp to an illegal and stupid war is still something to be applauded. My prayer is that this holds. As weak as it is compared to what we had and as tragic as it is that we have incurred the losses we have incurred because we decided to walk away from diplomacy, I hope it holds. I hope it holds and we put behind us needless U.S. wars in the Middle East and we invest those billions of dollars on our own people and in our own schools and in our own healthcare system instead of foolishly waging unnecessary and illegal wars far from home.
I come from the most, I think, military State in the country. We have Active Duty, Guard, Reserve, DOD civilian, DOD contractor, military families. Virginia's map is a map of American
But what my military families ask me is: Make sure we have the tools to do the job, but don't ask us to do a stupid job. Don't order our best and brightest--don't order our kids--to do foolish missions based on inadequate deliberation without a clear plan or rationale or without allies or without consulting with Congress and with the American public.
We will hear a lot about this deal, I am sure, in the days to come because under a bill that I authored with some colleagues back in 2015, the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, this memorandum has to be submitted to Congress for a review. So I am sure we will hear a lot more about it on the floor.
I have spent some time digging deeply back into the JCPOA--I was very involved in it at the time--and digging into this MOU, and I will just conclude with this conclusion: We gave an awful lot more to get an awful lot less than what we had and foolishly destroyed when President Trump walked out of the diplomatic deal that was working.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
