Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. What a stunning indictment of the Attorney General, whose principal job in all of this was to make sure--to make sure--that he wasn't mischaracterizing or spinning results. This letter shows what an awful, awful Attorney General Mr. Barr has been so far. I will have more to say on this later. Infrastructure

Mr. President, on infrastructure, yesterday Speaker Pelosi and I had a productive meeting with President Trump at the White House on the topic of infrastructure. We all agreed on the need to invest substantial resources in infrastructure. We all agreed on the need to modernize and rebuild our roads, bridges, highways, and also our schools, our housing, and our power grids, and there was a specific conversation about the need to invest in expanding broadband to underserved communities.

We told the President we needed labor protections, we needed a green bill, and we needed to see that minorities, women, and veterans got their fair share when contracts were let out.

It was a good discussion, but there is more to be decided. So what we agreed was that we would have another discussion in which the administration will present proposals for how to pay for the bill.

Let's face it, the reason we haven't gotten far in infrastructure is that the administration has come up with no way for pay-fors. We Democrats put in a $1 trillion plan--not $2 trillion--but we paid for all of it. We used tax breaks on the wealthy and the powerful who got huge, huge benefits recently to pay for it. That may not be the way the President wants to pay for it, but we want to know how he would because last time he came up with a bill that had virtually no real pay-fors-- public-private partnerships, which even he discredits.

The bottom line is simple. We will get an infrastructure bill if the President will come up with pay-fors, and then we can put ours forward--we have already--and see if we can come to an agreement.

Seven or eight people at the meeting all told the President that we will not get a bill done unless he comes up with pay-fors. He agreed. He said: I will. He said: I will take some heat from some of my fellow Republicans, but I will do it. We will be waiting. We will be waiting.

At the White House, I made it explicitly clear that in an effort to pay for infrastructure, the administration must not take the Tax Code and make it any more regressive than it already is. I prefer to make it more progressive. To tell the wealthy that they are getting a huge tax break and then to tell the middle-class, working people that they are paying for the bulk of this is totally unfair and unacceptable to this Member.

The President said he would come up with pay-fors, but this morning I was disappointed. I saw both the Acting Chief of Staff, Mr. Mulvaney, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board mock the effort we are trying to make to rebuild the Nation's infrastructure. Their criticism? Too much spending, the deficit is too high, and we can't find revenue. Funny that we didn't hear those same criticisms when the Republicans in Congress were jamming through a partisan, unpaid-for $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest of Americans. That doesn't have to be paid for, but our roads and bridges do. We are willing to pay for both, although I am not willing to pay for any big tax cuts on the wealthy that didn't pass with a single Democratic vote. I hope, for the good of the country and for the need of infrastructure--we know when we build infrastructure, America grows, and jobs are created. So we hope Mr. Mulvaney and the Wall Street Journal editorial board will rethink their knee-jerk partisan reactions.

Let's face it. Mulvaney is different. He was with the President. He supported the tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal editorial board believes it is OK to increase the deficit to reduce tax cuts on the wealthy but not OK when you are building infrastructure. Ninety-five percent of all Americans don't agree with that. Let's hope Donald Trump doesn't follow their ministrations.

The bottom line is, we hope to hear from the White House in several weeks, one way or the other.

Mr. President, what are your pay-fors? We want to know, and the American people want to know. Right now it is the biggest barrier to preventing us from getting an infrastructure bill.

Climate Change

Mr. President, finally, on climate change, over the past few months, I have been asking Leader McConnell and my Republican colleagues three simple questions on climate: Do they agree that climate change is real; do they believe it is caused by humans; and do they believe we should take significant action? It seems that after repeating those questions over and over again, we have finally gotten some results.

Yesterday the New York Times said in an article that some Senate Republicans, ``in a switch,'' are starting to cite climate change as the reason for some of their policy suggestions, be they support nuclear energy or carbon capture research. That is a first.

The fact that we have been asking our Republican colleagues the question: Do you believe in climate change, and now the fact that they feel compelled to say yes, even though we don't agree with their solutions--which we may not--is progress. It is not enough progress, given that the globe is at stake, but at least it is a step forward, and we haven't seen any steps come out of our Republican friends in a long time.

Hopefully, our Republican friends are finally coming around to realizing that climate change is real and caused by humans. Maybe they are looking at poll numbers and realizing that calling climate change a hoax looks as crazy as it sounds. Maybe they are seeing the changes in their own States with the climate. Whatever the reason, it is at least a little bit of progress--and we will have to take whatever little bit we can get from our normally intransigent Republican friends on this issue--and we welcome it.

That said, the types of policies my Republican colleagues talk about when they talk about climate do a disservice to the term ``low-hanging fruit.'' Of course, I welcome smart and sensible solutions from anywhere in this Chamber, but there is a difference between getting serious on climate change and just mouthing the words or coming up with solutions that don't really solve the problem.

Some of my colleagues have called for funding for more research on carbon capture, and that is a good idea. It should be part of any plan, but in the face of an existential threat of our time, if they support carbon capture but don't go bigger, don't advocate more solutions than that, they are not doing close to enough of what we need. We must go bolder. We must grapple with the central challenge--reducing carbon emissions as quickly as possible. The good news is, we can do that with affordable and reliable technologies that exist today.

We have waited far too long to address the climate crisis in a serious way. We now need to act in a way that matches the urgency and scale of this challenge. My Republican colleagues on the other side of the aisle mocked the Green New Deal, but the growing youth movement leading the fight for the Green New Deal understands something that I think most Americans do: We must think big, bold, and fast, and that we can create jobs and economic opportunity for working families in this transition. We welcome the glimmer, the little, small green sprouts of progress, whatever we can get.

Our Republican friends are starting to answer our pointed questions on climate change, but now the next step is, they have to think bigger and talk to the leader about pursuing real legislation instead of just partisan stunts.

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