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Floor Speech
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I ask that it be in order to make the same request with respect to Calendar No. 550, Max Veckich to be the Federal Maritime Commissioner for a term expiring June 30, 2026.
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I think my colleague knows darn well the President of the United States has been doing something about this. That is why he used his leadership to make sure that we made major infrastructure investment so we could move products. That is why he has gotten the ports to work 24 hours to move product more expeditiously.
That is why he has been focused on all of the infrastructure needs in moving our country forward and continuing to deal with chokepoints, whether they are on the highways, our ports, or our rail system.
My colleague knows, too, that the Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Commerce--whom I am sure he has talked to--are working very diligently on this. I am sure they are willing to talk to him.
There is no secret here. There is the administration and a bipartisan group of people who are working together to try to solve these issues, but there are those on the other side of the aisle, probably those who didn't support the infrastructure investment, who also don't support having people spend the money and make the investments.
I am going to yield to my colleagues who are also here to try to move some of these important nominees to make this investment work in the United States.
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, my colleague from Montana is making some great points in this debate.
I can't emphasize this enough to my colleague from Florida, a member of our committee. He knows how hard we have all worked on these. He knows how bipartisan this effort was. He knows that he is not joined by a bunch of other colleagues here tonight, you know, in making these objections. It is because they want these nominees. They voted for them.
To come from a State like mine, where one in four jobs is related to trade, it is all about infrastructure. It is about our ports, our airports, our railroads, our roads. It is about getting the products from Montana out to the Pacific and to those destinations. It is all about making this infrastructure investment, and we finally have a President who is willing to put everything on the line to get us back to making an infrastructure investment that is more than 1 percent of GDP and who is smart enough to know that those ports and everything else are not going to function well and that we are not going to be competitive with Canada or with South America or with other places if we don't make this investment.
Well, now we have made it. We have made the investment. Now, we just need the people to execute on it, and our colleague doesn't want those individuals to be part of this process. He is not ready for them.
Everybody gets frustrated with the position of an administration. Everybody wants to hear from a nominee. I have called nominees. You would think that some of those people might call me, but, no, I have had to pick up the phone and call them and say: Here is what my concern is. Where are you going to be on this issue? What are you going to do about this problem?
Did I have everything guaranteed? Did I have every policy that I wanted to see for that nominee? No, but I picked up the phone and got the commitment that I needed to see things through and get things moving.
So, now, the fact that we have these nominees who continue to be held, as my colleague said, by a minority of the minority because they don't want to see the infrastructure investments that we have already voted on put in place is just really holding up government. It is just holding it up.
I think the President deserves to have his nominees. We deserve to get to vote on them. We deserve to give the President of the United States our opinion, but we also deserve to have these nominees voted on and not held in this process so that the government--so the actual functioning of the infrastructure bill--can't be implemented even though the majority of the Senate voted that way.
468, Mohsin Raza Syed, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Secretary of Transportation.
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, my colleague knows very well that, just yesterday, the Deputy Secretaries of Commerce, Transportation, and Agriculture met with--and it may have been on a Zoom call or on the phone--Senators to talk about exactly what is going on to help work on the supply chain. The Senator knows very well. Now, he may not have liked exactly what he heard in the outcome, but there are no harder working people than the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of Transportation in implementing the things that need to be implemented to keep our country moving.
The problem, I think, is that the Senator from Florida may not understand that there is a huge upside. We just had a hearing yesterday with all of the airlines, and we acted on the Payroll Support Program. The end result of that has been a big boon to our economy because they were there and in place to capture the upside when the vaccines worked and the flying public returned. So we, the United States of America, have outdone Europe and Asia and Canada. Basically, the upside is having our air transportation system now back up to 90 percent of capacity. We did that because we acted. We made an investment, and the investment is paying off, and it kept a workforce that otherwise would have been on unemployment benefits.
So this administration is working. This administration is working, and it needs people to help them implement the bill we just passed. The administration has been working with major ports to have night and weekend cargo operations. It has been working with companies to improve the transparency of logistics and pricing. It has been working with shippers to get the cargo and containers in and out of the ports faster.
He is urging some of the largest shippers--Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Samsung, FedEx, and UPS--to commit to moving cargo during off- peak hours and making those commitments.
Two major railroads--Union Pacific and BNSF--have announced that they will create new incentives for cargo owners to move cargo on the weekends.
CMA CGM--one of the largest carriers--has begun providing $100 discounts on the containers if they are picked up immediately, which is helping move them off the docks. One of the problems is that empty containers have been left on the docks, and this has caused congestion at the ports. So the administration has worked with these carriers to help incent people who have been part of the shipping system to get that product off of the docks. We have begun to see positive results from this.
This month, the CEOs of the major retailers told President Biden that the supply chain conditions have begun to show signs of improvement. This is from the major retailers.
As to the issues that we are focusing on here, we are talking to two people who are out fixing the problem. The Senator had a chance to talk to their Deputies about this. These are people who are definitely available to be talked to about this problem. Yet they are asking us to continue to have a workforce.
469, Victoria Marie Baecher Wassmer, of the District of Columbia, to be Chief Financial Officer, Department of Transportation.
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, these nominees we are talking about are nominees who are literally just the people who are going to help get these things done within the Agencies. The Senator is basically denying people the ability to have analysis, to talk about competition, to talk about the effective strategies that we need to put in place.
The Commerce Committee has had three hearings on the supply chain. In fact, we had some fabulous testimony, starting in--I think it was-- February or March, about the supply chain. It was a fabulous panel of experts, and it was about the complexity of what was happening to the supply chain and what our problems were going to be.
The one thing that is clear is that this isn't an issue for just COVID; that this isn't an issue for just this administration; and that this isn't an issue even for the next, you know, few years. This is an issue about the fact that, in the world economy in 2019, prior to the pandemic, something miraculous happened: The majority of the population of the world reached middle class. That meant the majority of people outside the United States was going to be a huge market opportunity for our goods and our products. It is a huge economic opportunity that 95 percent of consumers are outside the United States. That means we have to get things to those markets cost-effectively and competitively.
For us in Seattle, the Port of Seattle has to compete with the Port of Vancouver. The Port of Vancouver and the infrastructure of--Canada has made all sorts of infrastructure investment all across Canada with rail and port investment so that they can have the state of the art and so that it can be cheaper to ship through Canada than the United States. The same thing is happening in South America and other parts of the world. This is about who is going to reach the Asian market and how fast they are going to reach the Asian market.
The infrastructure investment was critical. It was critical to making sure that our railroads worked, that our ports worked, that our motor carriers had the right people and had the right safety. This was, literally, upgrading our infrastructure that had been ignored-- basically kept on life support--for so long, and now, we have a President and a bipartisan group of people who are going to make the investment. So the fact that those Agencies now need people--even the next nominee we are talking about--it is just literally about making investments so that they can figure out the strategy and the strategy moving forward on these individuals.
I don't understand why so many of these nominees my colleague has to object to because these nominees are individuals who are part of our infrastructure investment and, in this case, are part of where we are with the Department of Commerce in understanding what is even happening in the supply chain and what we also want to do.
355, Grant T. Harris, of California, to be an Assistant Secretary of Commerce.
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President.
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Ms. CANTWELL. We are here on whatever today is--December 16. We are here, you know, as Congress careens toward trying to get some work done before we break for the holiday season.
I am sure that my colleague knows very well where the administration is on getting its nominees. We are not even the only committee that is out here on a weekly basis complaining about the number of nominees who are not allowed to serve. Even though they come out of committee with bipartisan support, they are not being allowed to be taken up and acted upon.
We have had people out here from the Foreign Affairs Committee. We have had nominees. We have had various committees--the HELP Committee. So we are just here now talking about the Transportation Committee.
So, yes, we have a minority within the minority that doesn't want the administration to have the nominees it needs to get things done. In this case, it is infrastructure. The importance of that is that the majority of people voted for infrastructure. The majority of people have voted for these nominees, and these nominees deserve to get in their place so that individuals can do their work.
If the Senator from Florida doesn't want to support--didn't want to support the infrastructure bill, doesn't believe that it was done just like he would do it, I would ask him to consider the fact that his colleagues, the majority of whom did support it, are now going to be delayed in getting those resources out the door.
Now, maybe that is what he wants. Maybe he is playing a game of the calendar. He is just hoping that those nominees won't ever get into these spots, that it will take forever for us to get these programs implemented. Our economy can't wait for that. Our economy and the investments that we all decided to make can't wait for this kind of gamesmanship. The small businesses that my colleague from Montana talked about can't wait for that gamesmanship.
I guarantee you those Secretaries will be in front of the Commerce Committee in the new year at some point in time. I guarantee it. That is what happens around here. I am pretty sure they will be asked these questions. I am sure they are asked these questions every single day. I am pretty sure they would take a call from my colleague tonight or tomorrow. I am pretty sure they would have the input from him that he would want to give in these situations.
But this is an issue about whether you are for the infrastructure investment and whether you are for making that a reality by having the people whom it takes to implement it. And if you don't have CFOs, if you don't have the Administrators of the Agencies, if you don't have the people who are targeted to do the investment, I am not sure how you can do it.
One of those nominees, Arun Venkataraman, currently serves as a counselor to the Secretary of Commerce on trade and international matters. He has more than 20 years of experience in working on these issues and is somebody who could benefit us in this analysis of the challenges that we are facing to get our products into these markets and get them into these markets quickly.
586, Arun Venkataraman to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Director General of the United States and Foreign Commercial Service.
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President.
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I think we have had a good discussion of exactly what these individuals--the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of Transportation--have been doing. They have been making their deputies available for conversations about supply chains. We have had supply chain hearings. We will continue to address this issue. I am pretty sure they will take his phone call.
I am pretty sure that the reason we are out here is because when the other side of the aisle holds up so many nominees, there are only so many cloture motions that you can file. But I guess we will be here this weekend, and we will find out exactly how many cloture motions and how long it will take to continue to get these nominees.
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