Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, first, I would like to talk about the unfortunate news we heard from General Motors.

Yesterday, General Motors announced it was closing five factories and laying off 15,000 workers. The news is a gut punch to workers in Ohio, Michigan, and Maryland. Our hearts go out to them and their families. Many of these people have labored for decades, and many in their families have worked at GM. I know this from our GM plants in New York. To lose your job when you have put so much into it, only to wake up in the morning and say, ``my job is to make the best car possible,'' is a gut punch and worse.

We need to do more--a lot more--to encourage investments in American jobs, in American infrastructure, and to bring back manufacturing. What we don't need is more rhetoric from the President, who has made a whole lot of promises but who has, unfortunately, failed to deliver for these workers.

Here is what President Trump said last year about manufacturing jobs in Ohio:

They're all coming back. . . . Don't move. Don't sell your house. . . . We're going to fill those factories up or rip them down and build new ones.

Here is what else he said:

If I am elected, you won't lose one plant. . . . You're going to have jobs again. You won't lose one plant. I promise you that.

President Trump promised people in the campaign that we would not lose one plant. A lot of people voted for him for that reason. Guess where he said we would not lose one plant. Guess where President Trump promised the people we would not lose one auto plant--in Warren, MI. It is one of the plants that is now slated to close. The words are a painful reminder of just how bankrupt many of President Trump's promises turn out to be.

Do you remember Carrier? The President swept into office and promised that Carrier would stay open, thanks to him. He had done a big rally, and 6 months later, Carrier had laid off hundreds of workers in Indiana and had moved its positions to Mexico.

This is what the President does. He makes big, bold, impossible promises without having much care for the results. Instead of overpromising, the President should roll up his sleeves and work with GM to prevent it from cutting jobs.

The American taxpayer has supported GM through tough times. Last year, the Republicans handed GM a windfall of $150 million in its tax bill so GM could bring back money from overseas. It said it would do it and employ people. Well, it is bringing back money from overseas, but it is not employing people. That is what American companies are doing. GM pocketed the tax break we gave it and is closing up shop anyway-- with nary a word from the President until after the fact.

I see my friend from Illinois here. We Democrats believe you don't give tax breaks to big companies unless they do something for their workers--not stock buybacks, but employ people, train people, pay them good wages, give family leave. The President gives corporate America-- wealthy, big corporations--just what they wish but does nothing to protect workers, except to talk a lot.

So I would ask my friends in New York State and throughout the Midwest and throughout America--working families, the kind of people I came from: When are you going to understand that this man sells you a bill of goods? that this President talks a good game but never delivers on his promises? That is what Americans and working Americans, in particular, should understand about President Trump.

The awful closings from yesterday are terrible. They are a sad symbol of a President who has failed the American working people and given them a lot of hot air and no real gains. Corporate America--the wealthy--are doing great. Working people--average Americans, people who sweat--get nothing. They are losing jobs.

We need more from this Congress than another tax cut for the wealthy, and the American worker needs more from President Trump than empty rhetoric. Just yesterday, he said: Well, there will be new plants. How many people are going to believe that? He has been saying that for 2 years.

Climate Change

Mr. President, last week, the Trump administration released an important report on climate change that warned of dire consequences by 2050--of devastating storms, hundreds of billions of dollars of damage, a massive drain on the economy. The fact that this administration released the report on Black Friday is wrong. It is an obvious attempt to bury the findings. But guess what. Even though he released them on the Friday after Thanksgiving, those findings were not buried. They were on the front page of every newspaper. Then, of course, while his own administration issued a very strong report on climate change, he said: ``I don't believe it.''

I have said it before, and I will say it again: President Trump and the Republican Party are like ostriches when it comes to climate change. They bury their heads in the sand as the world changes and as more and more of America and American workers are put in danger.

The Trump administration itself has reported on how devastating the costs of their policies will be for future generations of Americans. This report is going to live on day after day, month after month, and year after year. This is not a 1-day story. This is conclusive evidence by the President's own administration of how bad climate change will be for incomes, for families, for workers, for farmers, and for cities. They can't run away from it anymore. It is about time they face the reality and work with us to do something before it is too late.

This report will be in the news again and again and again. It will bolster those who are going to court to prevent the administration from undoing many of the things the previous administration did on climate change.

It is a turning point--a very significant turning point--in the war, which it is, to keep our globe from getting far too hot for everybody's comfort.

Nomination of Thomas Farr

Mr. President, on the pending judicial nomination of Thomas Farr for a seat in the Eastern District of North Carolina, in his legal career, Mr. Farr has repeatedly defended efforts by North Carolina's Republicans to undermine voting rights generally and disenfranchise African-American voters specifically.

This man was chief cook and bottle washer of the State that probably did more to prevent people, and particularly minorities, from voting than any other State. It is so bad that the discriminatory congressional maps, drawn by the Republican legislature, which Mr. Farr defended, were struck down by the very conservative Supreme Court.

Mr. Farr defended North Carolina's absurdly restrictive voter ID law, also passed by the conservative Republican State legislature, and they tailored their election laws to disadvantage African-American voters after requesting race-specific data on voting practices. The law was one of five changes to registration and voting, all of which--all of which--disproportionately affected African Americans. That wasn't a coincidence; that was designed.

Mr. Farr called the provisions, which a Federal judge said ``targeted African-Americans with surgical precision,'' a minor inconvenience.

Finally, Mr. Farr was a lawyer for the reelection campaign of Senator Jesse Helms and may well have had preknowledge of a mailer sent overwhelmingly to Black voters, with the purpose of intimidating them from voting.

Partisan affiliation, my friends, should not matter in this debate. Voting rights are sacred. It is part of our soil in which the tree of democracy is nurtured. It shouldn't be a Democratic issue or Republican issue. Taking away the voting rights of Americans, of whatever race, creed, color, party, or region is a despicable act. It cuts against the very thing that generations of soldiers have died for--the right of democracy, the right to vote.

Every Senator here, including our Republican friends, should be disturbed by the fact that Mr. Farr has been involved, often directly, in multiple attempts to disenfranchise minority voters.

What sticks in the craw is, we are voting on Mr. Farr only because Republican Senators--when we Democrats were in the majority and still respected the blue slip, they blocked two nominees, both African American, both women, to represent a jurisdiction that is 27 percent African American and doesn't have a single African American judge, even though one-quarter of the people are African American. I don't care what the ideology is here. Then, adding insult to injury, they are putting on the bench someone who would disenfranchise people, particularly people of color. It is a disgrace.

This morning I called Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum, both of whom were hurt by attempts to limit voting rights, and they issued the following statement together:

When it comes to the trifecta of voter disenfranchisement-- voter suppression, racial gerrymandering, and restriction of voting rights--Thomas Farr is, sadly, one of the most experienced election lawyers in the country. . . . Thomas Farr's record of hostility and disregard for fundamental civil rights disqualifies him for a lifetime appointment that will allow him to codify his discriminatory ideology into law.

I couldn't agree more. I urge my Republican colleagues to see the better part of reason, to let, as Abraham Lincoln said--and we all know what he did--the better angels of their nature appeal to them, not just the political machine that says: This guy helped us get elected. Even if he took away voting rights of people, let's put him in.

One more point, the great Chief Justice John Roberts, who told us he would call balls and strikes, allowed a lot of this to happen when he authored the Shelby decision, which took away protections against horrible things that Mr. Farr helped perpetrate. He said there wasn't much discrimination anymore. Well, clearly there is. Nineteen States have rolled back voting rights since Shelby. Mr. Roberts tries to portray himself as a middle-of-the-road, call-the-balls-and-strikes person, but in his decisions he is very far from that, and that is why people see the courts as so political.

Violence

Mr. President, one final point on rightwing violence. I apologize to my colleagues who are waiting, and it will be a brief point when I can find it. I want to comment on a report by the Washington Post yesterday on extremist violence. The report found that ``over the past decade, attackers motivated by rightwing political ideologies have committed dozens of shootings, bombings and other acts of violence''--this is their language--``far more than any other category of domestic extremist.''

We all abhor violence, whatever its origin--I have spoken out against it--but the conclusion of this report should put an end to the Republican fearmongering, President Trump's fearmongering, about the so-called Democratic mobs.

The hard questions need not be put first to Democrats; hard questions need to be asked of President Trump. There is a question that looms: Is President Trump's rhetoric encouraging rightwing violence that we have seen in the past few years the No. 1 cause of domestic violence? That question needs to be answered.

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