Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the Department of Energy Relating to ``Energy Conservation Program for Appliance Standards: Certification Requirements, Labeling Requirements, and Enforcement Provisions for Certain Consumer Products and Commercial Equipment''

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, we are closing things out here till midnight, but I do want to thank my colleague from Oregon for his passion for this country.

We all do dream of that world where, in fact, the people in this country can once more have a say in what is happening; that we do not have this chaos that is actually not what they bought into.

I just came back from a 19-county trip across my State, and people came up to me all the time and said: You know, I voted for you, and I voted for Donald Trump. But I voted for him because I thought he was going to bring costs down. That is not what is happening right now. Or I thought he was going to do something about housing because we don't have enough housing in rural Minnesota. Or I thought he was going to do something about childcare.

They actually, understandably, thought it because it was the stuff that he talked about in the campaign. But that is not what has happened in these first 100 days. In fact, what do we have? We have got costs are up; ask anyone in the grocery aisles. Corruption is up; look at the budget being proposed, $50 million in tax cuts for millionaires. And, yes, chaos is up.

Sadly, retirement savings are down. When you look at what has been happening with the market, we haven't seen this kind of decline in the first 100 days--I don't think it has been since Richard Nixon that we have seen this kind of a drop.

So in his campaign, the President promised ``to lower prices on day one.'' Instead, Americans are paying more today than we did on January 20. And then you look at the tariff taxes: $4,000, $4,000 per family, $200 of that an increase in groceries. That is what it is; it is a tariff tax.

At the pharmacy, prescription drugs will cost Americans an extra $70 a year, and clothing prices will soar more than $900 a year.

Look, Elon Musk is going to be able to afford that. Millionaires, billionaires, OK, they can afford this doubling of certain prescriptions. They can afford things going up at the grocery store. Agriculture prices going up like they were--they can afford that. But regular people, people who aren't in the Trump Cabinet, can't afford that.

When you talk to people out there--I am not talking about activists, as much as I am excited that they are showing up at things. I am just talking about people that maybe have never even gone to a townhall meeting before.

I had one case where a farmer was sitting next to a woman who had one of the signs that said ``This is not normal.'' She is right, it is not normal, but he didn't know what that meant.

He said to her: I am normal. What do you mean?

She said: No, it is not normal.

Well, he wasn't an activist. He was just someone that is worried that his whole life's work is going to go to waste because he is a soybean farmer, and that market is going to dry up where he sells his soybeans in China because, guess what, they are going to look to buy from Brazil.

People are worried about costs and their own families. They are worried about healthcare access and the impact of Trump's tariff taxes on the economy; people who live on fixed incomes, and suddenly those costs are ballooning or they saved in a 401(k) or some other retirement savings, and that has gone down to where they didn't expect it. Then they try to call Social Security to figure out what they are going to get or they are getting or they have a spouse who died.

One man who I met with--I could not believe his story. He has worked with Social Security before. His wife died in January after a long illness, and he emailed, and they asked for his fingerprint. He couldn't do that online, but he kept emailing. Then he called. Then he finally had to drive into Brainerd, MN, to get to the office. Then he finally ended up having to call our office, and we figured it out for him. That is happening now.

I think about the businesswoman Beth Benike from southern Minnesota. She is an Army veteran and the owner of a little company called Busy Baby and this year's Minnesota Small Business Person of the Year. She is feeling really good about that. She has a business where she gets mats for highchairs so these little babies can't throw things over. Many of us who are moms remember that. All of a sudden, in come those tariffs.

So some big businesses and their CEOs have a red carpet to the White House. You know, Tim Cook--I am glad he saved his phones. But he is able to make a call to the President at any time, and he can go in there. Beth Benike at Busy Baby doesn't know the President's number. She can't just waltz in there. She can't just go and make a call and make sure that they are going to take care and make an exemption for her Busy Baby gear.

Maybe the other ones got to go to that special, secret investment meeting at J.P. Morgan with the Treasury Secretary. That soybean farmer at the townhall meeting was not invited to that meeting. The owner of Busy Baby was not invited to that meeting. So they don't actually know. Maybe they revealed what countries are close to trade agreements.

Today, the Commerce Secretary claimed he has an agreement with a secret country--his words--secret agreement. But my constituents who are living on the margin, who, maybe because of input costs for their business or their farms or their ranches or because of a weather event for farmers or because of avian flu for some of our poultry producers-- they are just on the edge. They are on the edge, and they just barely make it every year or maybe one year, they have a really good year.

But these tariffs for them came out of nowhere. They actually never would have believed that this would have been going on as long as it has.

You know, one of the problems is that even if it gets fixed, a lot of those markets may not come back because we have become undependable to other countries.

If we continue along this path, as we have already seen--the farmers told me: Sometimes, because we need consistency, we figure out what crop we are going to plant, what seeds we are going to plant. But we are really not sure. It is a guess for us now because we don't know about soybeans with China or ethanol--40 percent goes to Canada. But we don't know which ones we are going to get the trade agreement with.

They need consistency.

So what happens when they don't have that consistency? Well, they freeze their investments. They don't buy new stock. They kind of keep what they have. Who loses out? Customers will lose out, yes, but the people that work there lose out. They start laying people off. That is what you are seeing. There are more announcements today about laying people off.

The supply chains get messed up. They don't know--one of my major manufacturers, about 20 percent of their parts come from China, but they employ nearly 10,000 people in America, and they put stuff together. They don't know which parts are going to be available or not because they probably don't get them directly from one company. They don't get them directly from China; they get them from someone in the middle who doesn't know if they are going to get them. There is an incredibly complex supply chain in this country.

We learned during the pandemic the hard way, the sad way, what happens when that supply chain gets messed up. If just one thing is missing, a piece of a part that goes on some furniture manufactured in North Carolina, but they need some parts from somewhere else, then you can't have it at the room and board in Minneapolis. That is what got messed up during that time with the supply chains.

Those were the simplest examples.

When you have this intricate supply chain, as leaders of this country, when we take out things like tariffs, we do it in a targeted fashion, but we also do it in a smart way, and the best way to do it is with trade agreements.

One of the things that always confused me about the President going after Canada the way he has--we congratulate Prime Minister Carney, who just won his election. One of the things that really confused me about these attacks on one of our biggest allies, the incredible country of Canada--the attack of calling it our 51st State--it was this country, Canada, that fought alongside our soldiers in two world wars; it was this country, Canada, that was there as the first ones on the ground outside of America after 9/11; it was this country, Canada, that, on their Embassy, had draped for years, when others sometimes didn't even want to admit they were America's friend, ``friend, ally, partner.'' That is the country you are going to mess around with?

In my State, it is the top trading partner, and it actually eclipses the next three added together. This is the State--my State--that is the fourth biggest ag-exporting State in the country, that has multiple Fortune 500 companies but also has very successful small- and medium- size businesses.

So that is the messing around and the chaos we are talking about. That creates a situation where some of our best friends who love coming to America for vacations--they will go to Minnesota to go fishing even though they have a lot of lakes in Canada. They will go to Vegas. They will go to our national parks. They will go to New York City. They will go to see one of their Canadian hockey teams play an American hockey team. But do you know what is happening now? They are not just booing at those hockey games. What is happening now is they are canceling their trips, so they are not coming at all. It is viewed as a sign of patriotism because of what President Trump has been saying about the people in their country. They are predicting a 70-percent reduction in Canadians coming to America.

I was just up in a small town on the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. They have already seen like 15 percent down in just 1 month in border crossings. Average tourists, when they visit from another country, spend $4,000 in our country. That is going to restaurants-- waitresses, waiters, jobs, chefs. That is money spent on going to small community theaters or going to the Mall of America in Bloomington, MN. That has a huge number, in normal--normal--conditions, of Canadian visitors.

That is the mess just with one country. I could use similar examples with Mexico--40 percent of corn to Mexico. I could use examples from some of our best allies--Japan, South Korea, Europe--countries that have stood with us through thick and thin. But just slap a tariff on it, and say it is paused but keep it in place. What is this going to do to, yes, our national security but also to our relations with the rest of the world?

That is why, when you see these public opinion polls, two-thirds of Americans say they don't like these tariffs or tariff taxes across the board--so many polls in the last week assessing these 100 days. Americans say they don't like the way Donald Trump has handled this economy--nearly two-thirds of them say that. His approval rating is down to lower than any President in the last 80 years since they started to do polling. People have noticed. It is their livelihoods.

Unfortunately--I would love to tell them: Hey, that is going to turn around tomorrow. They have these secret deals. They are going to negotiate.

I don't actually believe that anymore. I never really did.

But then to compound everything, you have this billionaire budget going on. To pay for these tax cuts--I think it is $37 trillion total in 30 years, but when you take out the tax cuts for people making under $400,000--some of the ones that I strongly support--when you take those out, you are left with about $25 trillion. You have $25 trillion added debt in those 30 years.

What is it all about? How are we going to find ways they think will pay for these tax cuts for these millionaires and billionaires? Well, why not do it on the backs of working Americans? Because that is the proposal from over in the House, where they have suggested hundreds of millions of dollars--something like $800 billion--$800 billion. And the way they have done it, the Congressional Budget Office has looked at it, and they say the only way this will work is if you make reductions to Medicaid. Eighty million Americans are on Medicaid. In my State, one out of two people in nursing homes is on Medicaid. One out of five people overall in our State is on Medicaid for their healthcare.

One constituent from Mora, MN, told me that Medicaid helps her afford a direct-support professional for one of her daughters who has a complex developmental disability. You have people who are in nursing homes.

This is what is interesting about this. It is not just our seniors who are on Medicaid; it is our family members. When my dad got sick late in his life--he lived into his nineties--he was in a nursing home. I knew exactly the day his savings were going to run out. We calculated it because we knew that the place he was staying didn't take Medicaid. I knew the exact day, the exact week, the exact month we were going to move him. We were going to move him to Catholic Charities. They said they would take him. It was about a year after he died that that date hit, but I knew that date. So many families know exactly what I am talking about. That is real--if we start messing around with Medicaid-- the effect that is going to have on families.

Then there is food assistance, which is big-time on the chopping block. I think the farm bill estimates for the Senate bill would be about $1 billion down, but in the House, it is $230 billion. Food assistance for 42 million Americans, including 16 million children, 8 million seniors, and 1 million veterans is on the chopping block.

If you cut that in this reconciliation bill, if that gets cut under the Trump budget and it gets transferred to the States--Texas alone-- let's say you have 20 percent. That is a number that was thrown out in the House. Texas would have to take out of the State budget over $1 billion. This is in part because of the escalating costs of groceries-- $18 billion overall for the Nation.

When we talk about costs being up, we talk about real people, not just what is happening with Wall Street and the shock it meant to the market and the stocks going down. It is real people and their livelihoods.

What else is up? Chaos is up. Yes, the billionaires' budget is cruel, but so is the chaos that people are experiencing every day.

Social Security--I used that one example already. They proposed stopping phone service on a number of Social Security claims. There was so much pushback from AARP and seniors, I heard that they rolled it back some, but it still does not allow the phone answerers for certain things.

I mentioned the widower, the 79-year-old from Crosslake who couldn't get the Social Security benefits after his wife died. That is unacceptable.

They have also attacked food safety inspections, cutting medical research out there, of course, when all those probationary employees were fired and then, of course, brought back because of court orders because this wasn't legal, because we in Congress, Democrats and Republicans--a Republican-run House and a Democratic-run Senate--had actually authorized that money and put a budget together that passed the Congress and was signed into law.

Servicemembers, classified battle plans on unclassified Signal chats, releasing the address of a secret CIA facility, sharing the names of 200 CIA officers in an unclassified email, planning to lay off 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs--that will, of course, increase wait times. You can't decimate this. You could--as a CEO would do, you could go in there and say: OK. How can I do more with less? Where do I want to move employees? What are my important priorities?

That is not what happened. DOGE came in there and did this before most of those Cabinet members were even in.

When our soldiers sign up to serve, when people in this country want to serve our country, there is not a waiting line; and when they come home to the United States of America and they need their benefits, they need a job, they need healthcare, they need a place to live, there should never be a waiting line in the United States of America.

But no amount of chaos has blinded Americans to this issue of corruption. There have been attacks on the rule of law, attacks on our Constitution, attacks on our system of checks and balances. Of course, as I have discussed before, one of the President's first acts was to pardon those who attacked law enforcement heroes, who defended our democracy and the Capitol on January 6. He has used our justice system to reward friends and punish who he considers his enemies. I have multiple examples of this.

I think of one guy Chris Krebs, who was running the Agency that made sure that our cyber was safe, that our elections were safe. He did this during the last Trump administration, and he did a good job. He worked with the military, and he came out of this and said after that election that, in fact, it was a safe election. It was exactly what Bill Barr, President Trump's Attorney General at the time, said--that it was safe. This made the President mad. He fired Chris Krebs. All of a sudden, just in the last month, he mentions Chris Krebs again--the guy who had the audacity to make sure that our elections were not broken into by a foreign country, that we didn't have data stolen--and he says he should be investigated.

Or how about the taking away of security clearances on people whom he doesn't like? Or how about just deciding ``this university I am going to go after, not this one. I will go after that one. I will go after that one.'' One of the things I have seen that I believe we didn't see at the beginning of all of this that is worth noting is more and more other universities that aren't being targeted have come together, all signing a letter saying: No. This isn't right. Or law firms, the ones who aren't being targeted, saying: Wait a minute. This isn't the rule of law. You should be able to represent clients even if they are people you don't agree with.

I have been at law firms. I know what this is like. I may not agree with every client that our law firm represented. And I have also been in politics. I might not like a story that was written about me. I might not like what has happened in a certain race, but I don't go after the media and say that they are enemies of the state, which is what the President's FBI Director did.

The President has also--as you know, while the administration has agreed with some court orders--OK. Great. It is important for probably most of them--they just pick out ones they are not going to agree with here and there. That is not how the law works.

Access to personal financial data that was given to Elon Musk and illegally firing independent watchdogs from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to inspectors general, to the FTC. Why would you fire the very people who are rooting out the waste and fraud that you claim you want to root out? In 2023 alone--I will use the example of the FTC--the FTC returned more than $330 million to consumers who lost money from scams and deceptive business practices.

We always had a Commission and Commissioners from both parties. They didn't always agree on everything, but it was actually a functioning Agency. They are actually the ones who are bringing that case against Meta right now, which was supported by both Republican and Democratic Commissioners. Unfortunately, the President fired the two Democratic Commissioners illegally. They are contesting it, but that happened.

Another example: Since it was established just 14 years ago, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has returned more than $21 billion to Americans. Why would you want to get rid of that? President Trump is attacking these consumer watchdogs while giving Musk deals and while giving tax breaks and tariff exemptions to those who just happen to have a connection to be able to get them.

This is not what the American people voted for. The American people might disagree greatly on issues, but they did not vote for costs going up. That is for certain. They wanted costs to go down. They did not vote for someone who is engaging in: Hey, I am going to get rid of this person because I don't like him. I am going to cut off this grant because I don't like it. I don't like this program, even though Congress authorized it. Even though it is illegal to stop it, I am going to try.

They didn't vote for that, and they certainly didn't vote for this chaos. Life is hard enough right now without having this chaos.

So what is happening? The courts and the Congress are constituents. That is what is happening. So when you look at these court cases across the country, there have been over 200 so far. There have been over 100 instances where judges--and this is really important to know that there are major cases handled by judges appointed by President Trump himself where those judges said: No. This is wrong. Under our laws, this is wrong and under our Constitution.

There have been cases by Bush judges and, yes, Reagan judges, including a very recent one by Judge Wilkinson, who is a revered conservative judge on the circuit court, who upheld the district court's decision and said the district court judge had done the right thing under the law when it came to the wrongful deportation of a man who they have now admitted was a mistake. They have made very clear that he shouldn't have been deported, that it was a mistake. Then when they tell him that they should, in fact, remedy their mistake by bringing him back and U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen actually went to the country to get his constituent and was able to meet with him, it became very clear they could get that guy who was mistakenly deported back. That is called when you follow the law and you do the right thing, because, in America, the President is not King. The law is King.

How else do we hold them accountable? Congress. We are holding people accountable when we do oversight hearings, but now we just avoid it. We hold them accountable when we have votes, just like had happened on the Canada tariff bill that Senators Kaine and Warner and I put forward. It basically said the President didn't have the authority to say there was an emergency at the Canadian border, because there wasn't. Four of our Republican colleagues stood up--Senators Collins and Murkowski, whose States border with Canada, and then Senator Rand Paul and Senator Mitch McConnell, in Kentucky, which does a lot of ag. I know they have a lot of soybeans; they have a lot of exports; they also have bourbon that was being taken off the shelves, Kentucky bourbon, in the country of Canada. They understand that that is really hitting their constituents in a big way, and they stood up when it came to tariffs. It passed. Now it is sitting over there in the House of Representatives in the Speaker's freezer somewhere next to the frozen peas. I don't know, but nothing is happening right now on that, and it should, because we should actually have votes on this. Then if the President wants to veto it, go ahead. Then we could override his veto if people stood up, and this madness would stop about the Canadian tariffs. We could go back. We are not saying we don't negotiate things. Negotiate them in the reauthorization of the USMCA, which was one of the President's crown jewels when he negotiated that. I supported it. But why not do it that way instead of rubberstamping everything that he does?

We are also doing this with our constituents by our side, and this means, to me, yes, some of the loudest voices in the room with the big townhalls and people at the microphone. Someone I ran into the other day who was not used to politics called them open mic events. Yeah, those are happening, but what is more important to me is some of the smaller ones in small towns of 1,000 people, in rural towns, with people showing up from local businesses, with people showing up from the Farmers Union, from the Farm Bureau, with people explaining what is going on in their lives in a real way, people telling the stories of trying to call Social Security. Or the two women I met who are in the middle of cancer trials that have been incredibly successful, and no one gave them a chance to live at the University of Minnesota, and they went through this cancer trial, and now they don't know what is going to happen because, while some of those cuts were put off, when you start threatening the universities, when you start threatening the funding that makes those cancer trials possible, when you have so much chaos and you want people to leave and you gave them all these buyouts and you say: Please go away, they are going to find other jobs, especially people in the medical profession where we know it is hard to keep people because they have other opportunities.

That word ``opportunity'' is really what people ask me about. What do you think we are not talking about enough when it comes to this chaos? You know, maybe we are not talking enough about what is going on in the world. I think people are starting to do that. But I think what people are not talking enough about is this opportunity that we are squandering away because of the mapping of the human genome.

Because of the investments Democrats and Republicans made together the last 11 years, every year we have increased funding to NIH--this incredible development of personalized medicine. So when you find out you have cancer, they can better figure out what your treatment should be and try to use the least invasive procedure possible, as happened to me, so that you can get through this with the breast cancer, with a lumpectomy, and you can get through it with just 5 days of radiation. You can be back at work that night. You may be a little tired, but you can.

That never would have happened 20 years ago. I don't know if I would even have been standing here. But because we invested as a country in the technology and in the work that had to be done, we are where we are, and now we are on the cusp, thanks to that mapping of the human genome, the personalized medicine, all the information we are gathering, and, yes, AI, if done and used professionally and ethically. We are on the cusp of leading the world again when it comes to curing rare diseases and when it comes to the next great big thing.

But that is not going to happen if we suddenly pull back, and people start quitting all of our research facilities and go do their clinical trials in other countries because it is more dependable, which is what is happening right now. That is not going to happen if FDA inspectors-- which it is very hard to get these doctors and medical professionals who can look at medical devices and make a decision. That is not all going to happen if they start leaving because of the negativity coming from the White House about their work, because of the forced departures, because the incentives put in place cannot keep them there, which is what we should be doing rather than incentivizing them to leave.

On the day of the inauguration, I had the opportunity to speak for, like, 4 minutes, and I picked every word really carefully. I knew it was an important event. I knew what my role was--I would have done it no matter who won--but on that day, I made three points, and I think they are still more relevant than ever. I wanted to pick three things that I thought would stand the test of time.

The first was that, before this and certainly now, our democracy has been a hot mess. There is a mess of division, and I think it has gotten much worse. But it is our job as citizens, especially as elected Representatives, to be the ``shelter from the storm,'' to quote Bob Dylan, a great Minnesotan. A shelter from the storm--that is what our democracy should be: a place where people civilly debate things and come up with a compromise and get through all this, and it is still on all of us, especially in the U.S. Senate--what has been called the world's great deliberative body--to do that.

The second thing: In America, the inauguration is not held in a gilded palace. It is not held in an executive office building. It is held in the ``People's House.'' It is held in the Congress for a reason because we have three equal branches of government. That means we have a court that decides the law. That means we have a Congress that should be able to show its weight. And all of these Representatives, duly elected in each State and each congressional district over in the House--and show its authority on behalf of the people whom we represent. That means taking on these tariffs and votes. That means making sure this is a fair budget for the people of this country.

And the third and final thing that I believe will stand the test of time is, remember that day in the Rotunda and there were all those powerful billionaires in that room and there were also the people's representatives in that room, but the thing that we had in common, from a freshman Member of the House of Representatives to the President of the United States that day, is the power did not come from within that room; the power came from outside of that room, from the people.

So what you are seeing right now in the form of, yes, townhalls, also in the form of rallies, yes, but also in the form of regular people writing our offices, burning up the phone lines, showing up at events, talking to you at a grocery store, talking to you on Main Street, and they are saying: This is not OK, Senator; this is not OK, Representative; I need you to do something about it. That is the power of the people from outside this building. That is the power of the people who gave us the honor of serving in this building.

So as we look at these first 100 days of this chaos, of these costs going up, of the retirement funds going down, we still have to remember why we are here. So instead of throwing our hands up in the air, either side, and saying: Oh, what can I do? This is our moment in the U.S. Senate to stand up, our moment to stand up on tariffs, our moment to stand up on this budget. All we need is, like, four Republicans in the House of Representatives to stand up and say ``enough is enough'' and listen to their constituents instead of rubberstamping what this President wants. This is truly our moment to do that.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source