Motion to Discharge

Floor Speech

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Mr. SULLIVAN. Madam President, it is Thursday, and it is usually the day I get to come down to the Senate floor. Usually, the Senate is kind of wrapping up things; we are still pretty busy right now. But it is the day I love to come down to the Senate floor and talk about somebody in my State, the great State of Alaska, who is making a difference either for their community, for their State, for the country; you name it. We call this person the Alaskan of the Week.

We have done it a lot. I usually like to give a little bit of an update. The pages typically really like this time of the week because we get to tell stories about Alaska, about the adventure of Alaska, but also about--typically, a little update about what is happening in the State.

Right now, we are in a bit of a cold snap pretty much throughout the State. We are getting a lot of snow throughout the State. We have seen some record low temperatures all across Alaska, from Homer, King Salmon, Bethel.

Monday in Fairbanks--so this is not even into December yet--it was 26 below zero. They are tough in Fairbanks, very tough. You get down to 50, 60 below in Fairbanks.

My wife is from Fairbanks. She is a wonderful volunteer for this organization called Covenant House. They did their annual ``Sleep Out.'' It is a homeless shelter for teenage youth. This was in Anchorage just a couple of weeks ago. It was 15 below for the ``Sleep Out.'' You get a cardboard box and say: Good luck. So, boy, she is tough.

Alaskans across the State are rugged, tough, individualistic, and we bond all the more for it. We are in it together when it is that cold. And it frequently is. And like one big community, one of the many things that brings us together--actually, one of the many things that brings Americans together--is bonding over sports: local sports, State sports, national sports, and your local newspaper as it relates to sports reporting. It is actually a universal instinct.

One of our most famous Supreme Court Justices, Earl Warren, said it best:

I always turn to the sports section first [in the morning]. The sports page records people's accomplishments. The front page [usually] has nothing but [people's] failures.

I am not sure that is always true, but it is a good anecdote in terms of what binds us with regard to sports.

You know, over the holidays, in particular, everybody in America watches great football, other sports activities. I had a good chat over lunch today with Coach Tuberville about the really incredible Alabama Auburn game that just happened last week.

But sports is also the place in our local papers where we see the names of our children, our loved ones, our neighbors, our friends. In fact, it might just be the only time their names appear in the paper at all, when you think about it.

So our Alaskan of the Week this week is somebody who knows sports and sportswriting in Alaska better than anybody. We are talking about Beth Bragg, who recently retired after 35 years as a sportswriter for the Anchorage Daily News. She understood all of these attributes about sportswriting better than anybody.

During her 35 years at the paper, Beth always told cub reporters there was one rule they must always follow, no matter what. She said: Even if the person's name is something like Cindy Jones, ask that person for the spelling. It might be the only time their name appears in the paper, and it is very important that name is spelled correctly.

Now, let me talk about Beth, about her reporting and about her work and how it has added to our communities across the great State of Alaska.

Beth grew up in Billings, MT. Her father worked for the Billings Gazette. And she, too, while still in high school, joined the paper as a sports clerk so this is in her blood.

Now, it wasn't so much that she was crazy about sports back then, but it was a job, a good job. And then she said she began, bit by bit, to fall in love with newspapers and sports reporting. She liked the irreverence, the strict deadlines, the energy.

Importantly--and it is almost counterintuitive--covering sports allows more fun in the writing, the opportunity as a writer to take a little bit more in terms of chances and to be more creative than maybe on other beats. And throughout the years, Beth has brought so much of this kind of creativity, so much heart to her stories.

Without looking at a byline in Alaska, you always knew when you were reading a Beth Bragg story. So, in 1986, when she was 27 years old, she came to Alaska to write for the Anchorage Daily News. That is our State's biggest paper. She thought she would stay for a few years, then move on. Her dream was to cover professional sports, maybe even Major League Baseball in a city that has got a Major League Baseball team, but as the years progressed, she stayed in Alaska. She fell in love with Alaska, and her ambitions as a sportswriter changed. But, in some ways, they got even bigger.

She discovered that, in her words, ``the real reward, and the real challenge, is to find stories that resonate with everyone. And you don't have to be at the Super Bowl to do that.''

In fact, Beth said she found more interesting, more unique stories to cover in Alaska than probably anywhere else.

Now, we don't have big-time professional sports teams in the great State of Alaska, but we do have sports, loads of sports. And just like so much about Alaska, we have expanded the meaning of what it means to partake in sports.

Let's take one very famous sport in Alaska, the Iditarod--the famous 800- mile sled dog race--as one big example. There is also heli-skiing, ice climbing, curling, and snowboarding. It didn't get its start in Alaska, but it reached its apex in Valdez, for those who participated in that incredible sport.

Beth is likely one of the few, if only, reporters in the country who reported on this incredible sport in Alaska at 3 a.m., seal-skinning. Yes, that is a sport. It goes along with the ear pull and other sports in terms of competition at the World Eskimo Indian Olympics, which are incredible to go to and watch in Alaska--great athletes, by the way.

She covered seal skinning, the competition. At 3 a.m. she was tired, but the excitement and the smell of the seals--first frozen, then thawed for the competition--kept her wide awake.

We may not have professional sports teams, but we certainly have athletic stars galore in Alaska. For 35 years, Beth has written about these stars and some of the toughest athletes anywhere in the world. Let me give you a couple examples.

She wrote about athletes running Mount Marathon. Now, I gave an ``Alaskan of the Week'' speech several months ago about Mount Marathon. It is what Outside magazine calls ``the toughest 5K on the planet''-- straight up a mountain and straight back down. We always do it on July 4 in Seward.

She wrote about the Alaska Wilderness Classic, the 150-or-so-mile ``secret race'' up mountains and across rivers in the Alaskan wilderness. Here are the rules of the Alaska Wilderness Classic: No outside support, nothing human-powered, leave no trace, and rescue is up to the racer. Pretty tough. Pretty tough.

She wrote about the Arctic Man, another incredible Alaska event that has been described as one of the world's toughest downhill ski races and an exciting snow machine race, all combined together. You want to see something amazing? Go to the Arctic Man.

She has written about swimming heats and cross-country track and field matches; skiing, lots of stories about skiing in Alaska; ice hockey; high school football; basketball games; and, as I mentioned, the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, with the ear pull and the blanket toss.

She wrote a great story about a mother and son literally tied by rope together for 2 weeks climbing Denali, North America's tallest peak, in Alaska.

There was a story about a sled dog that was cut loose and ran away from her Iditarod sled dog pack. Miraculously, this dog found her way home to her kennel through mountain ranges and hundreds of miles of tundra in the dead of an Alaskan winter. Pretty amazing.

She wrote a great story about an event I attended this past June, an inspiring USA Patriots-Amputee Softball Team event where almost every player on that team were some of our greatest American heroes. Almost all of them had lost a limb--all of them had lost a limb, mostly in combat.

Always at the center of Beth's stories are the people, even when those people are sled dogs. She has written about their victories; their struggles; their heart for the game, for their teams, for their communities, for their State, for their country, and for life itself.

Thinking back on her long career, a few events stay with her. She talked a lot about what it was like to watch Alaskans compete in the Olympics, four of which she attended--Olympic Games.

Now, we are a huge State. I talk about that a lot. We have a pretty small population relative to other States--730,000 people. But Alaska is really good in terms of Olympic athletes. We punch way above our weight, sending some of the top American athletes to especially the Winter Olympics but also the Summer Olympics.

Beth remembers, for example, the electricity in the Olympic stadium in Norway in 1994 when a little-known Alaskan named Tommy Moe shocked the world by winning the gold in the downhill and then, 4 days later, a silver, becoming the first American skier ever to win two medals at the same Olympics.

She remembers writing stories about the legendary and beloved cross- country skier from Alaska Kikkan Randall when Kikkan was just 13 years old. Then, like so many Alaskans, Beth swelled with pride and cried when Kikkan Randall won the gold in 2018.

Beth said she also cried just this summer when 17-year-old Lydia Jacoby from Seward, AK, shocked the world by winning the gold medal in Tokyo this summer in the 100-meter breaststroke. Remember that? Seward, AK, doesn't even have an Olympic-size swimming pool. And I will say, Lydia Jacoby is the only person in U.S. history to be Alaskan of the Week in the U.S. Senate twice. That is unbelievable.

Of course, there are heartbreaks, too--the losses, the illnesses, the injuries, and sometimes the deaths--all of which Beth has handled with the utmost sensitivity. Because she was at it for so long and has so much history with Alaskan athletes, she understood something about them that a new reporter might not. It takes a certain kind of grit to be an athlete in Alaska, to wake up at 6 a.m. and head off into the dark, subzero weather to train. It takes a certain kind of grit to travel outside of Alaska for competitions, often thousands of miles away from your home, to get noticed. As Beth said, ``You have to work hard to make it big'' in Alaska. As a result, she thinks Alaska athletes have a sense of home in a way a lot of other athletes don't.

As I said, Beth recently retired. She is going to clean her home; maybe travel some; of course, watch some sports, as a fan now, not as a reporter. She leaves behind a great legacy, thousands of stories charting some of our State's greatest moments in athletics, times when we all cheered and cried and came together to support the best of our people and competition and grit and determination--the reason Americans across the country love sports so much.

So, Beth, thank you for your great job. Congrats on an incredibly stellar career, and, of course--I am sure one of your biggest honors ever--congratulations on being our Alaskan of the Week. John Kerry

Madam President, we are working on the NDAA. Is anyone watching what is happening on the Senate floor right now? It has been stalled in terms of amendments, and it has been stalled, reportedly, because of an amendment--a simple amendment that I think the vast majority of Americans would agree on--that Senator Rubio is trying to get a vote on.

But, as there are with so many stories in the last 6 months, there is something about the climate envoy John Kerry, who keeps coming into different stories, and he is in this story as well. He seems to show up everywhere, always when somebody in this administration is doing something to undermine American interests. There is something about John Kerry.

Let me give you the latest. Senator Rubio is trying to move forward with regard to an amendment on his bill, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. It is essentially a pretty simple bill. Human rights communities agree with it. I think everybody in the Senate agrees with it. It, in essence, just says that we shouldn't be importing solar panels and other products made in China that are produced with forced labor or slave labor. What American wouldn't agree with that? What American wouldn't agree with that? I think every Senator agrees with that. But evidently there is one American who disagrees with that.

Here is an article today from the Free Beacon that talks about senior Biden officials are worried that this bill stopping slave labor products from China coming into America will undermine ``the White House's climate agenda'' and, unfortunately, ``limit solar panel imports from China.''

Presidential climate envoy John Kerry, among others, has been lobbying House members against the bill.

Wow. Wow. That is remarkable. Why would he do that? Why would he do that? Someone needs to ask John Kerry that. That is just one example. Something about John Kerry--always in the mix undermining American interests.

This is an article from the Washington Post just about a month ago: ``In advance of climate summit, tension among Biden aides on China policy.'' In essence, it said John Kerry was in Beijing--a very dangerous proposition, by the way; you want to talk about selling out American interests-- and he was begging the Chinese to cooperate on climate change, but they said they are not going to commence--I am reading from the Washington Post--cooperation until the United States tones it down on human rights, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and trade.

So the Chinese are saying: Hey, we are not going to do anything on climate, John Kerry, unless you go tell the President to tone it down on Hong Kong, Taiwan, human rights--slave labor, probably. Dutifully, John Kerry came back to DC and delivered the message. It is all in the Washington Post right here, October 25.

To their credit, Jake Sullivan and others were pretty furious, according to this article, about John Kerry undermining U.S. interests. But, hey, there he goes again. Remarkable. I mean, whose side is this guy on?

Let me give you another example. One of the great things that have happened in America over the last two decades is this incredible revolution in terms of American energy. For decades, it has been the bipartisan policy of every administration--pretty much every Senator-- for America to become energy independent. Until the Biden administration came into office, we have achieved that. Again, every administration since World War II, Democratic or Republican: Being energy-independent would be good for us.

One of the ways we have done this is this incredible revolution in the production of American natural gas. It has made us the leader in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions in the world, by far. Since 2005 to present, the United States has reduced emissions by almost 15 percent--more than any other major economy in the world. China's emissions have gone like this.

So you would think the export of American LNG all around the world, which is happening, would be great for our workers--it is; great for our national security--it is; and really good for the environment--it is. In fact, we are even exporting to India and China. That will help them reduce emissions. This is a win, win, win, win, win.

So imagine my surprise when I met with foreign officials--I won't name them--who have said to me: John Kerry is telling us in our country, in Asia and in Europe, don't buy American natural gas.

What?

Don't buy American natural gas.

Why?

I don't know.

But there he goes again, undermining U.S. interests, undermining American workers, and, by the way, undermining the global environment on that one. If you don't buy American natural gas, you are going to be producing coal in China.

This is what I have heard.

And then let me give you one more. I came on the floor several months ago, only about 5 months ago, and called for the resignation of John Kerry after the interview of his friend the Foreign Minister of Iran, the largest state sponsor of terrorism, Foreign Minister Zarif, who was recorded in an interview that was leaked that said John Kerry told him a couple years ago, when Zarif was the Iranian Foreign Minister, about covert Israeli actions against Israeli interests in Syria.

Now, think about that. According to news reports, Zarif is heard saying--and we all heard the video--``It was former US. . . . Secretary John Kerry who told me Israel had launched more than 200 attacks on Iranian forces in Syria,'' selling out and betraying our biggest ally in the Middle East, Israel.

There is something about John Kerry, and every time that guy goes on a mission, you can be assured that American national security interests are being undermined. So here is a Christmas present I think the whole country would benefit from. For the good of this country, this former Secretary of State, former U.S. Senator, needs to ride off into the sunset in his private jet and retire, or resign, or maybe the President can just fire him. We don't need him to undermine American interests anymore.

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