Terminating the National Emergency Declared with Respect to Energy

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I ask the Chair to execute the order of September 17, 2025, with respect to S.J. Res. 71.

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise to begin a discussion that we will have over the course of the next couple of hours about this Senate joint resolution--a privileged motion pending before the Senate that I filed, together with Senator Heinrich, to terminate a Presidential declaration of an energy emergency that he issued on his first day in office.

The President took a number of actions on his first day in office, and obviously the one that got the most attention was the fact of his inauguration and the celebrations about that. There were other actions that were taken--the pardon of the January 6 criminal convicts and other pardons of individuals, including one notorious drug trafficker.

But there was also an action that was taken that did not get attention immediately, but I started to pay attention to it a few days after the inauguration. That was President Trump's use of the National Emergencies Act and a related statute known as IEEPA to declare national emergencies in the United States. The IEEPA statute is broadly worded. It allows a President to declare an emergency when there is a significant and unusual challenge to the United States that stems primarily from a source outside the United States' shores.

The President has used the NEA to declare an energy emergency. He has used IEEPA to declare tariffs on virtually every nation in the world.

And he has also used the statute in other ways.

I was puzzled by the President's determination that America, in January of 2025, was in an energy emergency because I went back and checked and found that the United States, at the beginning of the Trump administration, was producing more energy than at any time in the history of the United States. Where is the emergency? We were producing more oil, gas, and coal than at any time in the history of the United States. Where is the emergency?

Even more exciting to me because of its tremendous acceleration, we were producing more alternative energy--low-carbon energy, geothermal, wind, solar--than at any time in the history of the United States.

We have seen this in Virginia. To give you an example, when I came into the Senate, Virginia was deep in the bottom half in this country in solar deployment. Now we are in the top 10. Offshore wind was nowhere in the United States. Now we are nearing completion of an offshore wind farm off the shores of Virginia Beach, VA, and we will be the leaders in the Nation and begin producing components that can help us lead in the world when it comes offshore wind.

So where is the emergency? I look through the President's declaration and can see nothing suggesting that the United States was in an energy emergency. But you declare an emergency for a reason, and the emergency was declared not because there was an emergency but because there was something the President wanted to do. As you read down in the emergency declaration, you found what the President wanted to do was allow a bypass of environmental regulations for energy projects. That is what he wanted to do, and he declared a sham emergency in order to do that.

I found it further interesting as I read--well, what is the definition of energy projects that are getting a bypass around environmental regulations? It was not all energy projects. It was oil and gas and coal but not wind, not solar, not hydropower, not geothermal.

Sometimes, I hear folks say they are for an all-of-the-above energy policy. President Trump is embracing an all-of-the-below energy policy. If it is not a fossil fuel under the Earth, it will not be prioritized by this administration.

That was the President's action on day one. There is an energy emergency, and we need an easy-pass lane for fossil fuel projects, but we are going to make it hard for alternative energy projects.

So I dusted off the statute, IEEPA, and found that a single Senator, even in the minority party, can challenge a Presidential declaration of emergency and be guaranteed a privileged vote on the Senate floor within a set period of time, a prompt vote on a simple majority that cannot be filibustered, and that is what we are doing today.

In fact, you can challenge a Presidential emergency every 6 months. I challenged the President's energy emergency with Senator Heinrich in March, and it was a partisan vote.

Democrats said: There is no such emergency; it is a sham.

Republicans said: We are sticking with President Trump.

Senator Heinrich and I issued a warning on the floor in March. We said: You are going to see higher energy costs because of what President Trump is doing, and you are going to see jobs lost because of what President Trump is doing. Energy costs will go up because the cancelation of clean energy projects will constrict the supply of energy at a time when the demand is increasing, and the natural economic reaction when you constrict supply at a time of increasing demand is that people are going to pay more for household energy.

We were not convincing then. Maybe people didn't believe that our prediction would come to pass, but 6 months later, we are renewing the challenge. We are here to say that what we said on the floor last spring has happened, and we are seeing dramatic increases in the price of energy for American consumers and businesses and the slashing of American jobs so that Donald Trump can give an easy pass to the fossil fuel industry.

It took a while for these effects to come to pass, but by the time we got to the debate over the reconciliation bill here in this body in late June and early July, it was pretty clear that the only energy emergency was our President. President Trump is the energy emergency.

We were debating the spending law, the reconciliation bill, and I am just going to go through some of the headlines.

NPR:

Power prices are expected to soar under the new tax cut and spending law.

Why would they soar? Because that tax cut and spending law reduced all kinds of production and investment tax credits for clean energy projects, making those projects unable to work. Demand is going up. If you constrict supply, prices are going to soar. That was the prediction in July.

Other articles from the same time:

The Trump megabill gives the oil industry everything it wants and ends key support to solar and wind.

Most of the power that has been added to the grid in the United States in the last couple of years has been solar and wind. It is cheap; it is native; it is clean; it is sustainable; it works. It is bringing people's costs down, but Donald Trump's megabill gives the oil industry what it wants by dropping support for solar and wind. That was from CNBC in July.

The story about how this was to benefit Big Oil was revealed earlier in February, shortly after the emergency order went into effect, in The Guardian:

How Trump is targeting wind and solar energy--and delighting big oil.

This was all laid out. There is no emergency other than the President himself. This is nothing but a giveaway to the oil and gas interests.

Shortly after the passage of the reconciliation bill:

EPA plans to end a program that makes solar power available to low-income Americans.

Why don't we punish low-income Americans and make their energy costs go up? Why don't we do that? I mean, it is shameful for that thought to cross your mind, much less for you to do it, but that is what the reconciliation bill and the Trump energy emergency put into motion: punishing low-income Americans by making it more difficult for them to access what is now one of the cheapest forms of energy.

Oh, yes, there was a prediction. We predicted it on the floor in March that electricity prices were going to go up, and then others, when the bill passed, predicted it, but by July 24, it wasn't just a prediction.

Newsweek:

Electricity prices are soaring under Donald Trump.

Inflation is too high because of tariffs and other chaotic economic moves on food, on building supplies, on healthcare, on pharmaceuticals, but the energy inflation is higher now than the general inflation rate because of Donald Trump's policies.

Here is a chart that is one that got some selfish attention from me:

How much Trump's Big Beautiful Bill could raise electricity costs over the next 10 years.

By a State's monthly bills, in Virginia, it is $250 a month. Other States are listed as $480 in Texas and $350 in Iowa. We see the prices already going up. It is happening just as predicted.

In mid-August, The Guardian says:

Trump's tariffs and green energy rollbacks push household electricity bills up by 10 percent.

This is much faster than the core inflation rate, which is going up. So now, energy inflation is outstripping the rest of inflation, and it is particularly hard for low-income households.

Then, finally, just last month, CNN Business:

Trump vowed to halve electricity prices, but they are rising twice as fast as inflation.

Electricity prices--that monthly bill that households pay together with their mortgage or their rent, together with food, together with healthcare--all of these are going up. We have a President who promised, when he ran for office, to deal with the costs of living, the costs to live. What we see is a short attention span focusing on sending troops into American cities and on political prosecutions and on the firing of career prosecutors in Virginia and all kinds of distractions. And the thing he promised the American public he would do--bring down costs--he is not doing.

The only energy emergency in the United States today is Donald Trump, and that is why I am pressing the Senate to vote. Do you want to listen to your constituents? Do you want to decrease energy costs? Do you want to give constituents the ability to have energy that is less costly and that is also cleaner or do you want to just do what Donald Trump says and embrace a sham energy emergency to give an easy pass lane to oil and gas to bypass environmental regulations?

This timing today is bad and good. It is propitious or disastrous. Last night, the administration announced that they were canceling billions and billions of dollars of clean energy projects all over this country in every State--in Virginia, in Missouri--all over the Nation: billions of dollars of projects that hire people, thousands of jobs lost. The projects that are being canceled are going to continue this trend of--at a time of great demand and growth--data centers and all kinds of uses for AI that, through searches, require more energy than what we were doing a couple of years ago.

That demand is growing. In Virginia, we see it all the time, especially with a profusion of data centers. As the demand is growing, if we are cutting off energy projects and constricting supply, we are only going to accelerate the increases.

President Trump has canceled 20 energy projects in Virginia since he became President: an offshore wind staging project in Portsmouth, an offshore wind logistics project in Norfolk, a project dealing with electric vehicles in southwest Virginia, an electric vehicle infrastructure apprenticeship program and workforce training program in Northern Virginia--20 projects.

Here is one in Appalachia, VA: a project that would be implemented by the Virginia Department of Energy, which is part of the Virginia State government. We currently have a Republican Governor. This is an allocation of grant funds to the Youngkin administration's Virginia Department of Energy so they can do carbon capture and storage.

This is a way to take current coal technologies and make them cleaner and more useful--canceled; enhancing energy resilience--canceled; hydrogen deployment--canceled; reducing data center load impacts-- canceled; methane reduction--canceled; other projects to do carbon capture and storage--canceled.

The President has canceled 20 projects just in Virginia, totaling $540 million, and costing us thousands of jobs, including jobs in some very important parts of the State that have struggled with unemployment, like Appalachia.

Many of these projects were announced by our Governor. Our Republican Governor announced these projects with pride--economic development and manufacturing in some hard-hit parts of Virginia--because of tax credits that are available to American innovators so that we not only do the right thing by the Virginia economy but lead the world in the development of innovative and clean energy technology. This was canceled by Donald Trump.

So the prediction--and I make predictions that turn out not to be true. I do have to acknowledge that. I have often made predictions that have turned out not to be true. But on the floor of this body 6 months ago, I said, if this energy emergency is not terminated, we will see energy prices spike, and we will see American jobs lost. I get it that sometimes people might not want to vote on a bill based on a prediction. I could be wrong. It is happening, and it is not just happening in Virginia. It is happening in every State in this country, with energy inflation up and jobs being lost.

We can end it here. That is why the privileged motion is available to even a single Senator. The privileged motions--and there are many different kinds of privileged motions. In fact, we will be arguing about another one later tonight dealing with Presidential war powers. All privileged motions kind of fit into the ZIP Code of enabling a Senator to challenge potential overreach by the Executive. They are very much, kind of, in the framework of the checks and balances. Executives have power, but the legislature should have power as well, and the legislature should have the ability to challenge overreach by an Executive.

In this instance, the declaration of an energy emergency, when we are producing more energy than we ever have in our history, as a way to give oil and gas an easy pass lane to avoid environmental regulation is making our environment worse, our costs higher, and our economy weaker.

So, when we finish this debate on the floor tonight, I will ask my colleagues to support the resolution to terminate this fake emergency and restore to American consumers the ability to afford their energy costs.

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, my colleague from Idaho's emotional speech notwithstanding, this is not about hating a President; it is about loving a Constitution. It is about loving a Constitution.

The resolution that my colleague Senator Schiff has filed, which I gladly cosponsored, does not say there cannot be military action against terrorists or cartels or drug traffickers. It just says that the United States should not be at war without a vote of Congress, the United States should not be at war against groups on a secret list prepared by one individual who is unwilling to share it with Congress and with the American public.

My colleague said that we should put a resolution on the floor thanking the President. I have an idea for my Republican colleagues: put a resolution on the floor declaring war against narcotraffickers. Why haven't they done that? That is what the Constitution says they should do. They are so strong in their belief that we should be at war with narcotraffickers, why haven't they put a resolution before this body to say we should be at war with cartels and narcotraffickers?

There are two reasons: They know it would fail, even in a Republican Senate. And second, they are afraid to vote on that resolution because they know their constituents are tired of wars and don't want Congress declaring more wars and treating serious law enforcement problems as challenges for the U.S. military.

I strongly support the resolution my colleague has filed.

When President Trump announced in August that he might undertake this action, Senator Schiff and I conferred with other Senators. And when the first strike was taken on the 4th of September, we wrote a letter to the President, as the article I branch charged with the power of declaring war, asking him a basic series of questions: Give us the evidence that these boats were actually carrying narcotics. Give us the legal rationale for striking them without coming to Congress. If you knew where they were enough to strike them, you could have interdicted them. Why did you choose to strike them and not interdict them? We hear that drugs are now at the bottom of the sea.

If you interdict a ship and you seize drugs, you get evidence, you get individuals that you interrogate, and you build cases against the higher-ups in the narcotrafficking ring. When you destroy a boat, you don't get the evidence; you can't build the case.

And we asked: Why not interdict? Why strike rather than interdict? These were questions that Congress has a right to know the answer and the American public has a right to know the answer. And we asked the President: Give us answers to these questions in 7 days--not unreasonable.

We have yet to get answers to these questions. The administration believes it does not have to justify these actions to Congress, it does not have to tell us the evidence about the narcotics content of these boats, it does not have to give us a clear legal rationale, it does not have to explain the decision to strike rather than to interdict.

When you ask the basic questions and you are not given answers, you get suspicious that the answers are not forthcoming because there aren't good answers to the questions that we asked.

We did have a followup hearing, the Armed Services Committee, in the secure facility last week. And I can't really talk about what was said there, but I can sure talk about what wasn't said there. No answer to the question of ``Why not interdict?'' It was asked over and over and over again, and aside from asserting that ``we have the ability to do what we did,'' they could not provide an answer about interdiction.

They could not provide clear evidence that all of those boats actually had narcotics on them, even though they knew we would be asking that question.

And so, to the legal rationale, all they said was ``the President has an article II ability to undertake these actions.'' Saying ``I can do whatever I want under article II'' is not an answer, and that is no legal rationale, but it is essentially what the President is saying: I can put groups on a list--and we understand it is many groups and their affiliates--and not tell Congress and not tell the American public, and I get to make the decision about whether the Nation goes to war.

That is not what our Constitution says.

My colleague Senator Schiff is talking about the Constitution, so I won't belabor it. But there are a couple of points that I do want to stress because there is nothing more important in the Constitution than the power to declare war.

The Founders who wrote the Constitution in 1787 debated this topic extensively, and they recognized the reality in the world at the time: Decisions about war were made by the Executive, King, Monarch, Emperor, Czar, Pope. It was made by the Executive.

The Framers of the Constitution in 1787 were dealing with leadership that included the first President of the United States, George Washington, the greatest general that has ever been President of the United States. They revered George Washington.

But when they had to make a decision about who declared war, they said: Even George Washington--even George Washington--is not smart enough to carry that sole decision on his shoulders to make war. So they decided to do something almost completely contrary to the whole flow of human history, and they invested the power to declare war in the legislative branch, in Congress.

And my colleague read Madison's exchange as the principal drafter of the provision with Jefferson, many years later, about why they had done it. They wanted, with studied care, to vest the question of war in the legislative branch.

It is not only in the Constitution, it is in the Constitution for a reason. And here is the reason: A decision about war puts troops in harm's way, puts troops in a position where they may be injured or killed; they may see their best friends injured or killed; they could come home with physical injuries or mental injuries that could affect the remainder of their lives.

The Constitution of the United States, in a somewhat unique way, requires congressional approval for war so that there is a consensus of the Nation, after a full debate in view of the American public and a vote, that the war is in the national interest.

If a President goes off unilaterally without getting Congress on board, then we are asking people to risk their lives with no national consensus that the mission is worth it. Could there be a grosser example of public immorality than to order troops into harm's way where they could be killed and their lives and their families affected for the rest of their lives without a national consensus that this is a mission worth you risking your life?

That is why that provision is so sacred in the article I branch, and that is why even George Washington was not entrusted by the Framers of the Constitution to make a decision like this on his own.

I will finish where I started. This is not about dissatisfaction with President Trump. I filed similar resolutions, as my colleague from Idaho knows, when President Obama was President. I came into the Senate in 2013 with an absolute obsession because of the military nature of my State, because one of my kids is a marine--with an absolute obsession that the Nation should never go to war--never--without a debate in Congress that the American people can see, can learn from, and a political consensus that the war is worth it.

Yes, there is an exception for defense or imminent attack. That has been understood as part of the Presidential power of Commander in Chief since the very first days of this Republic.

But even in that instance, it was foreseen that Congress would come in and have a debate and agree or not with whether they blessed the mission or not. Letting a single individual take us to war based on a secret list that he won't even reveal to the public and to Congress sets such a dangerous precedent.

And if my colleagues, as they have stated, believe we should be at war in the Caribbean or at war with nations in the Americas or with the narcotraffickers, they have had the ability the entire time to bring a resolution before us and have that debate in front of the American public. I have a feeling that debate would produce some positive votes if it were limited enough, but to allow a President to do it by secret without Congress having the guts to have the debate and vote about whether the war is worthwhile is contrary to everything this country stands for, to the oath we take.

I would urge folks to support my colleague's resolution.
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