Decades later, women’s access to mifepristone once again hangs in the balance. Tomorrow on Tuesday, March 26, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that centers around the anti-abortion movement’s crusade to severely restrict access to mifepristone nationwide, even in states where abortion is legal.

On the facts, the case against the anti-abortion plaintiffs is far stronger than long ago in 1990 when George Herbert Walker Bush was president and “Home Alone” was a hit movie.

Back then, the anti-abortion activists and exceptionally hostile lawmakers were papering the countryside with lies about the drug’s safety. Their efforts worked at first, but eventually science prevailed. After a rigorous FDA drug approval process, women across the United States have used mifepristone safely since 2000.

The case for mifepristone’s safety has only been strengthened by another two decades of data and scientific evidence. No “junk science” allowed here. The medication is used safely in more than half of abortions across the United States. In fact, it’s safer than Tylenol.

Despite this mountain of evidence, Circuit and District courts packed with right-wing judges hand-picked by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell were sympathetic to the “junk science” arguments anti-abortion crusaders brought to their courtrooms. And now their bogus case will be heard by the same Supreme Court that turned back the clock on women’s fundamental freedoms by throwing the landmark Roe v. Wade case in the trash can. No judge should be playing doctor from the bench just like no politician should be inserting themselves into exam rooms.

Women across America are already suffering from the chilling effects of this anti-science movement after the Dobbs decision. Virtually every week, news headlines surface of women forced to almost bleed to death or become septic before they get the care they need to stay alive. This is why Congress must pass Roe v. Wade protections into black-letter law so women can get the care they need and doctors can do their jobs using the best medical evidence without fear of political interference.

For the name of sound medicine and justice, the safety of mifepristone must be left to the scientists at FDA. The life-threatening complications faced by women will only get worse if the science on mifepristone is again sacrificed for politics.

Georgia’s train wreck of an election showed nearly every way that Election Day can go wrong: Start with a base of shoddy electronic election equipment and a system that was unprepared for a surge in mail-in ballots. Add a failure in leadership from state election officials, who had no contingency plans for extremely predictable COVID-related complications. And top it all off with Republicans’ usual affinity for ensuring that Black voters and other people of color face huge hurdles to get to the ballot box.

There is no indication that pandemic consequences are going to evaporate any time soon. Election experts are already warning there is little time left to prevent chaos in November. But if Congress and states move immediately, it is possible to prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from differing political philosophies from being disenfranchised by the indifference and incompetence of their elected leaders. Democrats in the House of Representatives have repeatedly passed comprehensive election reforms and funding, but these efforts run into Republican obstruction every single time.

There is plenty of criticism to go around, but there’s no question Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump bear the lion’s share of the responsibility: Senator McConnell, for refusing to even allow a vote on election funding and reforms on the Senate floor, in line with his decades-long quest to make voting more difficult, and Trump for spreading rampant lies about voting by mail, even while he mails his own ballots to vote in Florida.

I’ve been sounding the alarm for what feels like ages. First with my Resilient Elections Act and then my bill with Senator Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act. Congress needs to pass legislation that ensures every American has a chance to vote during this pandemic. It will take a rapid booster shot of federal funding, and clear guidance so states are prepared for election day, and don’t waste taxpayer money on outdated, insecure equipment.

But if Congress doesn’t act, states can do their part to conduct more successful elections.

First, prepare aggressively for a huge increase in mail-in ballots. Purchase the equipment, train workers and adjust state laws as necessary NOW, instead of waiting for the fall and then scrambling to catch up. One practical step, is instead of requiring voters to request absentee ballots and creating piles of paperwork for overwhelmed county elections officials, states should automatically mail every eligible voter a ballot this fall. Streamlining the process as much as possible will make it less likely voters get lost in red tape.

States can also learn from places like Oregon, Colorado and Utah that already vote by mail. In Oregon, state law allows counties to begin counting ballots one week before the deadline. But they can’t release any results until after 8 p.m. on the day of the election. Starting the count sooner means the final tally can be announced with less delay.

Second, be ready for COVID-related staffing shortages. According to reports, one Georgia county didn’t process absentee ballot applications for a week or more as a result of staffing shortfalls, while worker no-shows were a major problem at Election Day polling sites as well. This shouldn’t have been a surprise — 60 percent of poll workers nationwide are over the age of 60, and are at higher risk from COVID-19.

States need to prepare accordingly for older workers who stay home. My bill with Senator Klobuchar calls on states to recruit younger adults to serve as poll workers. Other governors called in the National Guard to count ballots and staff polling stations. The bottom line is, there must be a plan.

Even with all of these contingencies in place, election experts are warning that that final results could be delayed in many jurisdictions — possibly even by days. Americans need to be prepared for a slower-than-normal count. Elections officials are already working to set expectations, but the press needs to make sure it doesn’t credit bad-faith accusations from politicians who seek to use delays to spread conspiracy theories and undermine faith in our election results.

Our government needs fresh solutions to the huge challenges facing our country — unprecedented unemployment, unaffordable housing costs, inaccessible health care and unacceptable inequity, to name a few. A prerequisite to gaining the faith of the people for these solutions is free and fair elections where every eligible American can cast a ballot. If Americans see a repeat of what happened in Georgia across the country, many will rightfully question whether the results — and by extension, the government itself — are truly legitimate.

This wildfire season there is an added, deadly challenge: an historic global pandemic. COVID-19 coupled with catastrophic wildfires adds up to a prescription for major problems to our public health and our rural jobs.

That is why I, and ten other Western Senators, are asking the Forest Service the tough questions to get to the bottom of what the agency is doing to protect the health and safety of communities and firefighters heading into this wildfire season. It’s hard to fight fires and maintain safe social distance at big fire camps. Our firefighters are essential workers who need personal protective equipment and new strategies to protect from exposure to COVID-19 this season. They also deserve increased benefits, including health insurance and workers compensation, to make sure they have access to care and resources as they put their lives on the line day in and day out.

Being prepared for this year, even with the best efforts of the Forest Service, is not enough. The investment to prepare our lands and restore our watersheds has never been more needed. Congress must make well-targeted investments in wildfire prevention and resiliency efforts in a way that will be transformative, make wildfires less severe and make restored lands and watersheds the norm, not the exception.

High levels of drought and early warm temperatures sound the alarm that this wildfire season will bring unprecedented challenges. Wildfire smoke in a normal year is dangerous alone to the public health. This year, however, people who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 — especially those with compromised respiratory systems — will be at even greater risk. And because smoke doesn’t respect city limits, everybody faces the impacts of wildfire smoke. It drifts from rural communities into town after town, and even into big cities.

To address these issues I introduced the 21st Century Conservation Corps for Our Health and Our Jobs Act to make sure Congress isn’t just blowing smoke at these challenges. Prioritizing the timely completion of hazardous fuel and thinning treatments by tackling the projects that are shovel ready, and already environmentally reviewed, would significantly reduce the risk of wildfire smoke this season. In Oregon alone, there is a 2.5 million acre backlog of hazardous fuel treatments. And that’s just in Oregon. To prevent the severity of wildfire, the Forest Service needs to work through the backlog of projects in my home state and nationwide.

Congress also needs to provide more funding for other Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management efforts designed to increase the pace and scale of forest health and prevent smoke risk. My bill would accomplish all of this while also making sure all federal agencies with land management responsibilities have the resources and support they need to protect the health and safety of those doing this essential work.

An added goal of wildfire prevention and land and watershed restoration work: support rural economies that have been hit especially hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis quickly brought the outdoor economy to a halt. Many forest workers, despite their essential work, were laid off and others, like outfitters and guides who rely on tourism and outdoor recreation, cannot work during their busy season.

The outfitters and guides do not fit squarely with any of the current COVID-19 relief programs. On top of that, many employ seasonal workers. Outfitters and guides in my state have told me they want to keep their employees on the payroll, but it’s a tough task with no season or income to keep their businesses going. My 21st Century Conservation Corps for Our Health and Our Jobs Act would provide immediate relief for outfitters and guides so they aren’t forced to shut down and can continue to pay their seasonal workers as the COVID-19 crisis continues into the summer. This means when the time comes to safely reopen, they will be there. They will have survived to usher us back into the woods and streams and onto the rivers.

As we look ahead to when it’s safe for Americans to get back to work, there will be a serious need for jobs to replace those we lost and enhance the ones we were able to save. Building on the existing network of Service and Conservation Corps across the United States, the legislation I’m proposing invests in programs that will increase job training and hiring specifically for jobs in the woods and on our watersheds. This will not only provide jobs in a desperate time of need, but it also will help to restore our public lands and watersheds and achieve other critical conservation efforts.

Heading into summer, it’s clear the public health threat of wildfires and COVID-19’s economic devastation to tourism and recreation will pack a potent punch in rural America and everywhere. But the 21st Century Conservation Corps for Our Health and Our Jobs Act allows America to punch back and win this fight.

M. President, the Republican Leader is reportedly on the verge of “going nuclear” to speed through the confirmation of more right-wing nominees. He says Democrats are guilty of extreme, unprecedented obstruction. And so he claims his hand has been forced, and that’s why he needs to force this change to Senate rules.

Here in the real world, however, the facts tell a different story. So today I want to lay out a few key points as to why this is the wrong way to go.

When you look at the numbers, you see the Republican Leader’s argument is a fantasy. Let’s look at judges, and let’s compare the Trump administration to the Obama administration.

The Obama administration started with 53 judicial vacancies. The Trump administration started with 112. That increase didn’t occur because a whole lot of judges qualified for Social Security and quit sometime in 2016. It’s because Republicans blocked nominees for years at a time, and they kept those seats open. Senate Republicans even blocked their own judicial selections during the previous administration.

Only 22 judicial nominees were confirmed in the final two years of the Obama presidency — the fewest in a Congress since Harry Truman was president. In 2015 and 2016, the Judiciary Committee considered only five circuit court nominees. It considered that many in December 2017 alone.

There were nearly twice as many circuit court judges confirmed in the first two years of the Trump administration as there were in President Obama’s entire first term. Nominees are moving nearly twice as quickly under this president.

Republicans even blew up the century-old bipartisan practice of seeking input from senators on judicial nominees from their home states. It’s based on using what are known as “blue slips” to consent to a hearing and markup of the nominations. Let’s recall, it’s a tradition Republicans fought to protect when a Democrat was president and they were in the Senate minority. Under this president, they threw the blue slip tradition out.

Republicans are also moving nominees in huge batches and at paces that prevent a serious debate on their qualifications. A few months ago the Judiciary Committee held a markup and voted out 46 nominees — including 44 judicial nominees. That had never been done before. It’s a real head-scratcher how that meets any reasonable standard of advice and consent.

The way my colleagues on the other side talk about this issue, you’d think Democrats delayed every nomination for as long as possible. That’s not remotely true.

And setting judges aside, what about executive branch nominees? The president and his advisors will tell you right out in the open — they don’t want to nominate anybody! They’ve chosen to leave those positions vacant! That’s not Democratic obstruction at all.

I’m the Ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee. Our committee has zero nominees ready for a committee vote. It’s not because anybody is blocking them. It’s because the Trump administration seems uninterested in putting nominees forward. Our committee has done its job.

So colleagues, you cannot look at the record on nominees over the last two years — particularly on judges — and conclude that Democrats have broken the Senate. It’s just not true — and I believe my colleagues on the other side know it.

When they want to go nuclear and change the rules, they tell horror stories about Democratic obstruction. But it’s a totally different story when they prefer to tout their record on nominations.

Let’s hear from Republicans — from the president on down.

Here’s the president himself, tweeting in late 2017: “Judges at a record clip! Our courts are rapidly changing…”

Again, the president at a rally last year: “We have the best judges. We put on a tremendous amount of great federal district court judges. We’ll be setting records. We are setting records. Appeals court judges. A Supreme Court judge — fantastic.”

The vice president in March 2018: “the president … set a record for the most court of appeal judges confirmed in the first year of an administration in American history.”

Leader McConnell in 2018 spoke about all the confirmed judges, “including a record number of circuit court judges for a president’s first year.”

More recently, he said, “We confirmed every circuit judge. We’ve now done 29 circuit judges. That’s a record for this quick in any administration in history.”

After November’s elections, when Democrats won control of the House, Leader McConnell said, “I think we’ll have probably more time for nominations in the next Congress than we’ve had in this one, because the areas of legislative agreement will be more limited between a Democratic House and a Republican Senate … I don’t think we’ll have any trouble finding time to do nominations.”

He said, “We intend to keep confirming as many as we possibly can for as long as we’re in a position to do it.”

So M. President, my colleagues on the other side can’t have it both ways.

I’ll close on this. I will not apologize for opposing nominees who are unqualified, corrupt, or way outside the mainstream.

I opposed the nomination of Ryan Bounds to the Ninth Circuit because he concealed hateful writings from the bipartisan selection committee that vetted his candidacy.

I opposed Neomi Rao because she also had put extreme views in writing, and those views are closely mirrored in the work she’s done as a Trump appointee attacking protections for women’s health, for sexual assault victims, and for vulnerable communities across the country.

I opposed the nomination of Thomas Farr because he ruthlessly attacked the voting rights of people of color.

I opposed the nomination of Tom Price to lead HHS because he was as corrupt as they come, and he was laser-focused on taking away people’s health care.

I opposed the nomination of Steven Mnuchin to be Treasury Secretary, because I believe a history of profiting off the financial suffering of millions of Americans ought to be disqualifying for that job.

The list goes on. Multiple members of the Trump cabinet have resigned under an ethical cloud. The rule change the Republican Leader is pushing will rush through even more unqualified and corrupt nominees at the sub-cabinet level.

Here’s the bottom line. All the doomsday talk about Democratic obstruction forcing the Republican Leader’s hand is totally out of touch with reality. The Trump administration will find more support among Democrats when they pick better nominees. That’s the truth.

Instead, the nuclear option Leader McConnell is set to trigger this week is a strategy to go in the opposite direction. It’ll make it easier to rush unqualified, corrupt and extreme Trump nominees through the Senate before anybody notices. I’m going to oppose this change, and I urge more of my colleagues on the other side to do the same.

That brings me to the topic I want to focus on today, which is Mr. Barr’s dangerous views on surveillance and his contempt for surveillance laws and the Fourth Amendment. This is not a partisan issue. There is a bipartisan coalition in the Congress that has fought to protect the privacy and constitutional rights of Americans. But Mr. Barr’s views, once I have laid them out today, should frighten every member of this body. Because what Mr. Barr has said is that, whether Congress supports broader or narrower surveillance authorities and regardless of whether Congress votes for more checks and balances and oversight, it doesn’t matter. Because Mr. Barr has made it crystal clear that the president can do what he wants.

This nominee poses a unique threat to the rule of law and the Fourth Amendment. His long-held views, which presumably he will put into practice if he is confirmed, threaten the very notion that Congress or the courts have any say on who in America gets spied on. If he is confirmed as attorney general, Mr. Barr could take us back, and not just twelve years to an era of warrantless wiretapping. As Mr. Barr himself has made clear, he would take us back forty years, to an era before the Church Committee when neither Congress nor the courts had any role at all in checking or overseeing an abusive, out-of-control government.

Back before the reforms of the 1970s, the government committed one horrific abuse after another. It spied on hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans. It spied on activists. It spied on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It spied on Congress. When these abuses came to light, Congress acted by passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which established a secret court to issue warrants against spies and terrorists.

Unfortunately, the government violated the law when it implemented its warrantless wiretapping program in 2001. The program included warrantless collection of the content of private communications, including through warrantless targeting of phone numbers and email addresses of people here in the United States. The program also included the bulk collection of telephone and email records of enormous numbers of innocent, law-abiding Americans. All of this occurred, in secret, without warrants or any court oversight at all. And almost no one in Congress, not even the members of the intelligence committees, knew about it.

The secrecy didn’t even end when the bulk phone and email record programs were moved under FISA. The Obama Administration, just like the Bush Administration, kept this abusive program, and the secret legal interpretations behind it, from the American people, even lying about it in public testimony.

How did these abusive and illegal programs get their start? With secret determinations made at the Department of Justice that the law didn’t matter and that the President can do what he wants.

And that brings me back to William Barr.

Mr. Barr’s dangerous views on executive power have been consistent throughout his career, from his writings at the Department of Justice in the late 1980s to the present. But in October 2003, he laid out in public testimony his position that the president is not accountable to surveillance laws and that the president enjoys giant loopholes in the Fourth Amendment. 6 October 2003 was shortly after Congress had passed the PATRIOT Act, legislation that many in Congress have come to view as granting too much authority with too little oversight. But from Mr. Barr’s perspective, the PATRIOT was too constraining. And that’s not even the most troubling part of his testimony. Right up front, he asked himself the question of whether the law was adequate to fight terrorism. And here’s what he said. He said he wasn’t worried about the law because — and this is a direct quote — “the critical legal powers are granted directly by the Constitution itself, not by Congressional enactments.” In other words, William Barr’s view of surveillance is that the laws passed by Congress do not matter. If the President wants to violate those laws, it is Mr. Barr’s position that he can somehow claim some constitutional authority to do so.

Here’s another direct quote from Mr. Barr’s testimony. Talking about laws going back to the 1970s, he said: “Numerous statutes were passed, such as FISA, that purported to supplant Presidential discretion with Congressionally crafted schemes whereby judges become the arbiter of national security decisions.”

Let’s unpack that sentence. From Mr. Barr’s perspective, decades of laws passed by the U.S. Congress are nothing but schemes. Schemes. He’s talking about FISA, which is the fundamental framework of checks and balances that Congress has relied on for four decades to ensure congressional and judicial oversight of surveillance. And he’s talking about every modification of FISA, from the PATRIOT Act, to Section 702, which Congress reauthorized last year, to the USA FREEDOM 8 Act, which was intended to stop the collection of millions of innocent Americans’ phone records. Whatever you think of these statutes, they are how Congress determines the extent of the government’s surveillance powers and exercises its responsibility to protect the rights of Americans. They are not mere “schemes.”

Worse still, it is William Barr’s contention that all those laws only purport to have any effect. The President, says Mr. Barr, has the discretion to ignore them. By definition, this is an argument in favor of tyranny. This is as dangerous a position as I have heard in congressional testimony. It is very similar to the language that was concocted in the Department of Justice to justify warrantless wiretapping. And it is coming from the man who might be attorney general of the United States.

Mr. Barr is correct that FISA gives judges some say in when the government can spy on Americans. It is a secret system that greatly advantages the government and almost always precludes challenges from those being spied on. FISA has been abused through secret interpretations of law. But FISA does involve judges considering the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans. And that’s where Mr. Barr objects.

Based on his own testimony, it is clear that Mr. Barr has fundamental problems with the Fourth Amendment, or at least its application to anything that the President might unilaterally decide involves national security. He believes that if the government determines that there is a threat, there’s no need to ask a judge for a warrant.

The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures unless there is a probable cause warrant. That’s what the Constitution says. But William Barr has found two giant loopholes in the Fourth Amendment. First, he insists that if the government decides that a foreigner in the United States is — and this is a quote from Mr. Barr — “apparently acting as a terrorist” — then he or she is not one of the “people, ” and the government can just throw out the Fourth Amendment. And, second, Mr. Barr argues that, so long as the government says there is a threat, a warrantless search is not unreasonable and the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment simply doesn’t apply.

At the core of Mr. Barr’s philosophy is that no one — not Congress and certainly not judges — has any business assessing the government’s assertions about threats. Here is another direct quote from Mr. Barr — these are “assessments judges are not competent to make or responsible for making under the Constitution.”

Mr. President, for forty years, the judges of the FISA court have been making these determinations. But, from Mr. Barr’s perspective, the courts are not competent to decide who gets spied on; only the president gets to decide.

Some might ask whether Mr. Barr has had a change of heart, particularly since Congress has passed additional surveillance authorities in the years since his testimony. I hope he is asked whether he now believes that spying on Americans and people in the United States has to be consistent with the laws passed by Congress. But his 2003 testimony suggests that even the sweeping new laws that have passed wouldn’t satisfy him.

A little over a decade ago, Congress created Section 702 of FISA, which allows for warrantless spying on foreigners overseas. I have had serious concerns about the number of innocent Americans whose communications are swept up under 702 collection. But at least the targets of the surveillance are overseas. Mr. Barr, though, would go much further — in his testimony, he called for the warrantless targeting of people inside the United States. According to Mr. Barr, there are individuals right here in the United States who have no Fourth Amendment rights.

Then there is the collection of business records — sensitive information about Americans that are in the possession of a third party. That’s your purchases. It’s who you are communicating with. It’s where you are located at any time of the day. Mr. 13 Barr believes that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to any records held by a company or other third party, no matter how sensitive that information is. This view was recently rejected by the Supreme Court, which held that the Fourth Amendment did apply to government’s collection of location data from wireless carriers. Yesterday, Mr. Barr said he had not read that Supreme Court decision, which I find deeply troubling.

The government’s collection of business records is authorized by Section 215 of FISA, which was part of the PATRIOT Act. There are serious concerns about Section 215. It was abused for years to carry out a secret program that swept up the phone records of millions of innocent, law-abiding Americans. Even after the USA FREEDOM Act, which was intended to end bulk collection, it has been used to collect hundreds of millions of phone records. And all the government needs to collect these 14 records is to show the FISA Court that the records are relevant to an investigation. There is no requirement for a probable cause warrant.

Section 215 sunsets this year, so Congress will have a debate about whether these authorities are too broad or whether there is a need for more checks and balances. But today we are talking about the dangerous views of William Barr. And what Mr. Barr believes is that the government shouldn’t have any court oversight at all when it comes to collecting these records on Americans. He thinks that government should just unilaterally issue a subpoena and collect those records with no oversight whatsoever.

The foundation of Mr. Barr’s beliefs when it comes to surveillance is that the president can do what he wants whenever 15 he decides that national security is at stake. What would that mean if Mr. Barr were confirmed as Donald Trump’s attorney general? The president is right now openly considering declaring that he has emergency powers to override the will of the Congress, and he is doing this while relying on a baseless assertion that there is a national security crisis. Until he was fact-checked, he was making wild claims about terrorists coming over the border. He also regularly calls journalists “enemies of the people” and calls for investigations of his political enemies. I would oppose the nomination of anyone with William Barr’s views on executive power regardless of who was president, but the immediate threat right now is too serious to ignore.

Donald Trump has also openly said how much he would enjoy unchecked surveillance powers. During the 2016 campaign, 16 when the Russians were hacking his opponents, he said, “honestly, I wish I had that power. I’d love to have that power.”

So if Donald Trump decides that national security is at stake and William Barr is his attorney general, it would be Mr. Barr who might give him that power — power he could use with no oversight from the courts and without regard to what Mr. Barr has dismissed as the “schemes” of the Congress. And, in case anyone thinks that Mr. Barr would himself serve as a check on the president, he has also written that that is not the job of the attorney general. Just last year, he wrote that all executive power rests in one and only one person — the president — and the president does not have to convince his attorney general that his orders are legal.

Fears about Mr. Barr’s views on surveillance are not conjecture. They are based on Mr. Barr’s own testimony. I ask every member of this body to read it and consider what is at stake. There are members of both parties who have long been concerned about expansive surveillance authorities under FISA or the possible abuse of FISA. But those concerns are small potatoes compared to what Mr. Barr has proposed — which is that the law need not constrain the president at all. For example, some members of this body have expressed concern about FISA warrants in connection with the Russia investigation and whether all relevant information has been provided to the FISA court. Now consider a world in which the government doesn’t need a warrant and doesn’t have to justify its surveillance to any court. Consider the possibility of abuse in that world. That is the world that William Barr wants.

I would also appeal to my colleagues with whom I have had spirited debates over the years about surveillance and who may have no concerns about the current FISA framework. We have sometimes disagreed about how to write the law. But we agree that the laws passed by Congress have meaning and that they are binding. Congress cannot allow the law to be dismissed as mere “schemes” that the president can ignore when he wants.

William Barr has been more than clear about where he stands. He believes that the president alone decides when there’s a threat and, when he does, he doesn’t have to worry about Congress, judges, the laws or the Constitution. That is a recipe for more abuses, which Congress may or may not even be told about. We have all been warned.

Finally, Mr. President. I have concerns about Mr. Barr that relate to classified matters. I am currently seeking declassification of those matters and hope that this will be resolved prior to any votes on the nominee.

After having the honor to speak in southern Oregon at Memorial Day ceremonies in Eagle Point and Central Point, I awoke the next morning back home in Portland ready for jury duty in Multnomah County.

Ron Wyden on Twitter

After #2018TownHalls and #MemorialDay services in Eastern and Southern Oregon, I'm headed to the Multnomah County Courthouse for jury duty this morning. Jury duty is the heart of our justice system. #RonReport https://t.co/2UOB4OU47O

I did not get called this time to serve on a jury. But talking with Multnomah County residents in the downtown Portland courthouse about this shared civic duty makes one realize how essential that public service of jury participation is to the function of justice in our court system.

Simply put, our judicial system depends on all of us to answer the call so that when warranted, cases can be heard by a jury of peers — made up of our fellow citizens.

Another key part of public service is coming together as Oregonians to discuss issues and seek solutions, not standoffs. As Oregon’s senator, I have sought to provide public forums with town hall meetings statewide where such discussions can occur in a civil and productive setting I like to call the “Oregon Way.”

I hold at least one of these open-to-all town halls in each of Oregon’s 36 counties each year. And last week, one of those meetings was my annual Lake County town hall in the tiny community of Paisley.

Ron Wyden on Twitter

Enjoyed today's #2018townhall in Paisley & hearing from Lake County students & adults about common-sense solutions that can generate rural jobs, reduce gun violence, restore #NetNeutrality and more.

Paisley has a population of about 241 people — or roughly the same number of people who were in the Multnomah County jury room with me days before.

The Lake County students and adults who attended the Paisley town hall came out in the true spirit of the Founding Fathers who expected any person to have the opportunity to ask any question of an elected official in public.

The Founding Fathers were right: Throwing open the doors of government for town halls for these conversations is a must in our democracy. And I have done so 899 times, including recent town halls in slightly larger rural communities such as Joseph and Prineville.

One question that comes up often at these town halls is what difference any one person can have when they speak up at a town hall or other public gathering.

My answer is those voices add up to provide a public service I like to call “people power.” Let me be specific about how that people power works as a public service.

In the last five years at town halls, I heard from frustrated Oregonians about wildfires threatening their homes and businesses — in large part because fire prevention work was being shortchanged by federal agencies “borrowing” from the prevention fund to fight big blazes.

In response, I worked with Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo on legislation to halt that short-sighted practice of “fire borrowing.” The legislation will not end wildfires, but it will help the federal government be a smarter partner for Oregon and the West with wildfires.

At the Paisley town hall I heard about the importance of reliable broadband to quality rural health care by using telemedicine to allow rural providers to share key information like imaging and X-rays with counterparts in larger medical institutions.

And back in Portland at week’s end, I held a meeting with young people aching to bring common-sense solutions to the national epidemic of gun violence.

Ron Wyden on Twitter

It was insightful listening to @march4portland leaders this afternoon share their ideas for addressing gun violence in our communities and schools. Political change to stop this epidemic must come from the grassroots. #EnoughisEnough #NeverAgain

Their fresh voices bring new solutions to old debates. And I am tremendously encouraged about the future of public service with these students and so many others all over the state ready, willing and able to serve from Paisley to Portland and all points in between.

I’ve proposed the ACCESS to Recordings Act, which would give artists new rights in two ways: first it would apply the current 95-year copyright to pre-1972 works, starting in 1923. So if you are an artist who wrote a top ten hit in 1958, for example, you would immediately get copyright to that song until 2053.

For absolutely every living artist who recorded before 1972, my bill would give you new rights and new revenue from digital streaming, while also creating a uniform copyright law across the whole country. And works that were created before 1923 would enter the public domain, which would be a boon for researchers and archivists working to preserve old recordings.

This bill is part of my long standing view that we need a strong, but balanced, copyright system that not only protects artists and creators, but also fosters innovation, freedom of expression and education. Artists deserve to be compensated for their work, but at the same time, we shouldn’t lock up ideas for decades after the creator has passed away.

That’s why researchers like the Library Copyright Alliance (which includes the American Library Association), the Internet Archive and the Society of American Archivists all have endorsed my ACCESS to Recordings Act.

The other proposal on music streaming has worthy goals, but in my view only partially solves the problem, and creates new ones along the way.

The CLASSICS Act, like the ACCESS to Recordings Act, would create a federal copyright for streaming pre-1973 sound recordings, but CLASSICS would do nothing to solve the confusing mishmash of state laws for all other copyright issues.

So if, for example, someone records and then streams a sound recording, they would have to deal with the uncertainty of navigating two different systems to understand their rights and obligations. The other problem is that CLASSICS creates a streaming copyright for any song or recording from 1923 until 2067 — up to a whopping 144 years — which is long past the time any artist would benefit from their work.

To be clear, I support one of the goals of CLASSICS, and the reason it is supported by artists — to open up the revenue from new digital streaming services to older artists. Due to pending litigation, or the threat of litigation, virtually all streaming services are making payments to the copyright owners — often record labels. But, without the safeguards in federal law, we don’t know whether or how distributions are being made to the artists.

ACCESS creates more legal certainty and uniformity by applying all federal copyright law to the recordings. It also ensures a stream of revenue for artists well into the future most likely well after the artist’s lifetime, while ensuring that older works enter the public domain to the enrichment of our cultural heritage.

At the time, we thought of Thurston as a tragic anomaly and not as the forerunner of the horrific epidemic of gun violence in our schools we are living today. This plague rips away the lives of children and teachers, forever wounding the body and spirit of entire communities which never truly heal.

Twenty years have passed since a 15-year-old Thurston student went to his school, after killing his parents in their home, and opened fire on his classmates. But the roll call of mass shootings and gun violence continues to grow. In my own home state of Oregon, in the past 20 years we endured Thurston, Reynolds High School, Clackamas Town Center and Umpqua Community College, among other acts of gun violence. And every time we say this will be the last…and every time it is not.

Even one, the shooting at Thurston, is too long a list, in my book. Yet, tragically this epidemic of gun violence struck yet another community just last week in Santa Fe, Texas.

The students, teachers, families and communities devastated by the mass shootings at Thurston, Newtown, Parkland, Santa Fe, and all of those not listed here, deserve and rightfully demand so much more than thoughts and prayers.

They demand action. Congress must push back against special interests that have blocked every reasonable effort to protect our children and communities from gun violence. Congress must finally honor the lives lost and those many lives that have been so irrevocably altered by passing commonsense gun laws.

All of our students and teachers and all of their families and communities deserve to go about their regular daily lives free from the fear of gun violence. Sadly today that is not our reality.

When I see the students and young people who organized the March for Our Lives in our nation’s capital, in Oregon and across the country, I see the spirit of those Thurston youngsters violently stolen from their families and loved ones. Let’s honor them with action to protect our future.

When the Senate votes on a nomination when all the relevant information is by design kept secret, how is this any different from a cover up? This surrender of the Senate’s responsibility to conduct real oversight of this nominee means that Gina Haspel has officially been given a pass on all the key questions.

Number one, what was her opinion about the CIA’s torture program when it was happening? The Washington Post reported that unnamed officials were pushing back against accusations that she had supported torture. She said she learned about the program in 2002. But I wanted to know what her views were later, between 2005 and 2007, when the CIA itself was winding the program down. Did she call for the program to be continued or expanded? She wouldn’t directly answer the question.

Number two, what was her role in the destruction of torture videotapes? Her story is riddled with holes and key facts have been covered up.

And number three, how can the Senate possibly take seriously Ms. Haspel’s confirmation conversion on torture submitted on the eve of the vote? There has been extensive reporting in the press saying that she personally played a role in the CIA torture program. The American people deserve to know whether those reports are true. But every single question to her about them has been met with stonewalling. Instead of real responses, Ms. Haspel offered possibly the latest confirmation conversion in history — sixteen years after she first learned about the program and only just before a vote on her confirmation.

The Senate has a constitutional responsibility to engage in a meaningful vetting of nominees. That means transparency and accountability. The American people expect a public examination of the nominee’s background. They deserve to hear their representatives ask questions and get answers. What the Senate is doing now is an insult to the public and an abdication of this body’s constitutional responsibilities. It is as stark a failure of oversight as I have ever seen.

Over and over again, I and other Senators insisted that Ms. Haspel declassify information about her background. This is information that is directly relevant to her nomination and can be released without revealing sources and methods. And, every single time, Gina Haspel said no. Despite our repeated requests, Ms. Haspel decided that she would not allow the American people to know who she is or what she has done. That was when the U.S. Senate should have stood up to this blatant and self-serving abuse of power. But it did not.

In our democracy, confirmations are not supposed to take place in secret. Nominees do not get to decide what is and isn’t known about them. But these principles have been thrown out the window. Instead of standing up for the Constitution and for the American people, the Senate is rewarding Gina Haspel and the CIA for this abuse of power.

Gina Haspel has openly acknowledged that, as the Acting CIA Director, she is making the decisions about what gets declassified about herself and what does not. It is hard to imagine a more obvious conflict of interest.

The CIA, under Ms. Haspel, has also conducted an unprecedented influence campaign to promote her confirmation. This is inappropriate. It is wrong.

The CIA, like every other government agency, works for the American people. It is not supposed to use its enormous power to serve the personal interests of whoever is running it. The classification rules are there to protect the dedicated women and men who undertake dangerous missions under cover. Those rules are not there to shield a nominee for a Senate-confirmed cabinet position from scrutiny.

Gina Haspel is using the CIA she has been entrusted to lead to promote herself and to get confirmed. This is not what the CIA is supposed to be doing in the name of the American people and with their taxpayer dollars. But that is what the Senate is allowing Ms. Haspel to do.

I and a number of my colleagues have looked at classified information about Ms. Haspel’s background and have concluded that it can be released to the public without compromising sources and methods. So we asked her how she could justify keeping it secret. As best as I can tell, her answer consists of “we always protect our officers.” That makes no sense whatsoever. Of course, the CIA must protect undercover CIA officers. But Gina Haspel is not under cover. More to the point, she is asking the U.S. Senate to consider her nomination to a cabinet position. She cannot insist that she be treated like she’s under cover when she’s seeking a job as one of the most public and visible intelligence leaders in the world.

Hiding behind the protections we rightly grant undercover officers to advance her own career is not just ridiculous but insulting.

I have asked Ms. Haspel at every opportunity for some plausible justification for her self-serving classification decisions. Every response I have received, in classified and unclassified settings, has convinced me further that those decisions have nothing to do with national security and everything to do with protecting her image and getting herself confirmed.

Ms. Haspel’s classification decisions are also in violation of Executive Order. For decades, the Intelligence Community has been prohibited from keeping information classified to prevent embarrassment or to conceal violations of law or administrative error. It is clear to me these rules just don’t matter to Ms. Haspel. And what really worries me is that, if she is willing to violate the classification rules to get confirmed, and the Senate lets her get away with it, she will do it again and again as CIA director. The last thing this country needs right now is more unnecessary secrecy and more cover ups.

Most of the attention on this nomination has been about the many press reports that Gina Haspel played a role in the CIA’s torture program. Throughout this process, Ms. Haspel has outright refused to confirm or deny if had any connection to the program. How could this question possibly be classified? More than three years ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released to the public a 500-page Executive Summary of its Torture Report. The CIA released a long and detailed response. What the CIA did to all those detainees is now officially declassified. Former CIA officers have written entire books about the program and their involvement in it. How could Gina Haspel’s reported involvement in the program be classified? Simply because she said so and because she’s the boss.

The extent to which Ms. Haspel has abused her authority is mind-boggling. As a result of this cover-up, her answers to Committee questions have been unresponsive, incomplete, deliberately vague, and downright misleading. And, because of her classification decisions, Senators are prevented from pointing out all the problems in her testimony and in her responses to written questions.

At one point, I asked Ms. Haspel whether opinions about the CIA torture program expressed by CIA officers were classified. I wasn’t even asking about anyone’s involvement in the program — just what people might have thought about it. Ms. Haspel wouldn’t even answer my question. She said that even the matter of whether those opinions are classified is itself classified.

This is downright Orwellian. In a democracy, there have to be some basic rules about what is and isn’t classified. But we are seeing a replacement of those rules with the whims of unaccountable leaders. Secret law — the classification of legal interpretations rather than sources and methods — remains a serious problem, including at Ms. Haspel’s CIA. Information that does not need to be classified to protect national security is being covered up for political purposes. Now, even the classification rules themselves are classified.

I have been concerned about this tendency for years, through administrations of both parties. But I fear that, if Ms. Haspel and the CIA can get away with such a blatant disregard for classification rules, the worst is yet to come. And, this time, the Senate will have been complicit.

As I have been saying since she was nominated, my concerns about Gina Haspel are wide-ranging and are based on still-classified matters that are far broader than what has been reported in the press. Most of this information could be released to the public without in any way endangering national security.

I believe that Ms. Haspel’s background makes her unsuitable to be CIA Director. But had she not abused her position — had she released information about her background — at least we could have had an open debate that is worthy of our democracy. The American people could have learned who she is and could hold members of the Senate accountable for their votes. I believe that, had that happened, she would not have been confirmed.

But I would encourage Senators to judge for themselves. There is a classified Intelligence Committee minority memo about Ms. Haspel. Every Senator should go read it and then ask themselves: if the public actually knew about all this, how would I vote?

My underlying concerns about Ms. Haspel have only increased during this confirmation process. Her classified comments about her background have been as troubling as her public testimony and have raised more concerns in my mind about how she has, and would, lead the CIA. I have also been unsatisfied with her answers to questions about current classified programs.

When I did get unclassified responses to my questions, they were not assuring. Public discussions about the CIA have generally been about overseas operations affecting foreigners. It has been a decades since the public really focused on the danger that the CIA could violate the privacy of Americans. But the danger is there and hard questions need to be asked.

One example is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress recently reauthorized. The CIA has the authority, under Section 702, to identify foreign targets and then to search through the communications of those targets for particular Americans. And the CIA can conduct these backdoor searches of Americans without a warrant. That creates a danger of reverse targeting, which is when the government — in this case the CIA — targets a foreigner to find out what an American is saying.

One way to help prevent reverse targeting is to recognize that when the government is conducting lots of backdoor searches on Americans and then sending around reports on those Americans, maybe it’s those Americans who the government is really interested in. Sounds pretty obvious. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board agrees with this approach. So does the current Assistant Attorney General for National Security. So I asked Ms. Haspel about it. What I got back was a lot of words, none of which assured me that the CIA has any system at all for guarding against reverse targeting of Americans under Section 702.

The CIA also collects a lot of intelligence under Executive Order 12333, which is going to include information about Americans. So I wanted to know whether the CIA conducts backdoor searches on Americans through all that data. The current director of the NSA told me that, when the NSA conducts searches of Americans, those searches must be approved, on a case-by-case basis, by the Attorney General. And there must be a probable cause finding, which is the standard for a court order. The NSA doesn’t actually have to go to a court, which is a concern. But these requirements create meaningful hurdles to abuse.

So what about the CIA? When can the CIA conduct backdoor searches of Americans? The response I got from Ms. Haspel is that the searches are authorized if they are designed to get information related to the CIA’s activities. That’s no standard at all.

These two unclassified examples matter because they reveal how vague the rules are and how easily the CIA could violate the privacy of Americans. That’s why we need leaders at the CIA who believe in the sanctity of Americans’ privacy and protect it. We need leaders who will protect Americans even if the lawyers say that something is technically legal. I do not believe that Gina Haspel is that kind of leader.

Mr. President, I want to return to the CIA’s torture program. There are, of course, many press reports that Ms. Haspel was deeply involved in the program. But Ms. Haspel decided that she would keep secret even the question of whether or not she was involved at all. There is no justification for this. Certainly, no sources and methods are at stake.

But since the torture program has been largely declassified, it can be discussed openly. The CIA captured innocent people. It tortured dozens of its detainees. It didn’t just waterboard people. The CIA placed detainees in ice water. It kept detainees awake for a week, forced to stand or subjected to stress positions. The CIA stuffed detainees into small boxes. The list of techniques goes on. And they were always worse than they were described to the Department of Justice or to Congress. And, throughout it all, the CIA rarely ever held anyone accountable.

The CIA also provided numerous false claims — to the Department of Justice, the Congress, and everyone else — about how they were treating detainees and how their torture techniques were supposedly working.

Much has been made of Ms. Haspel’s last-minute promises about torture. I’ve never been a big believer in confirmation conversions. Nominees will say anything to get confirmed. But Ms. Haspel’s statement has to be the most delayed, and the most grudging confirmation conversion in history. She says she learned about the CIA torture program in 2002. She had sixteen years to say something critical about it.

For example, I asked her what her views were between 2005 and 2007, when the CIA was winding down the program. This was a time when the CIA was capturing fewer people and was no longer using the waterboard. So what were her views on the program? She said she was “committed.” I asked her twice, once in the hearing and then again in a written question — whether she called for the program to be continued or even expanded. Both times she ducked the question.

That brings us to the present. Usually, nominees offer their confirmation conversations before the eve of the key vote. This one might be the slowest on record.

Ms. Haspel’s also has to be the most grudging confirmation conversion in history. The CIA shouldn’t have undertaken a torture program, she now says, because it “did damage to our officers and our standing in the world.” That’s true, of course. But at no time has Ms. Haspel expressed any regret for CIA torture. At no time has she acknowledged that it was immoral, or illegal, or ineffective. She just offered up a classic Washington apology — she’s not sorry for what the CIA did, just how it was perceived.

Worse still are some of the justifications for the torture program she is still providing. For example, she is still arguing that the CIA torture program produced “valuable intelligence.” She says now that it is — quote — “unknowable” whether the CIA’s torture techniques produced that intelligence. But, in fact, it is knowable. The intelligence that the CIA attributed to torture came from other sources. And when the Committee looked at the CIA’s own records, it found that key intelligence was provided by detainees before the CIA tortured them. It is these kinds of documented facts that make Ms. Haspel’s statements so troubling.

Why do Ms. Haspel’s equivocations about the effectiveness of torture matter? Because Donald Trump has said — quote — “torture works.” We cannot afford to have a CIA director who responds “maybe.”

On these questions — the immorality and ineffectiveness of torture — I also turn to Senator McCain.

Senator McCain announced last week that Ms. Haspel’s “refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying.” He urged the Senate to reject her nomination. There is no greater voice on this than Senator McCain’s. His towering authority on the subject of torture has served as a guiding light for the U.S. Senate and it is my greatest hope that his powerful and unimpeachable views will continue to be heard, today and well into the future.

Mr. President, throughout this nomination process, there was a single topic that wasn’t entirely classified — Gina Haspel’s central role in the destruction of torture videotapes. Let me be clear — there was nothing approaching actual transparency. There is much, much more to the story about Ms. Haspel and the destruction of the videotapes that remains needlessly classified. And there is important information in the report by U.S. Attorney John Durham that most U.S. Senators were not allowed to see. Like everything else about her career, the information that reflects poorly on Ms. Haspel gets covered up.

But we did learn a few things about Ms. Haspel and the destruction of the torture videotapes. For one, she wrote the cable authorizing that destruction. Second, she was an advocate for destroying the tapes and was involved in what former Acting Director Mike Morell called, quote — “efforts to press for and facilitate a resolution of the matter.” That’s a whole lot more than drafting a cable.

The problem for Ms. Haspel and for her boss, Jose Rodriguez, was that there were reservations or even outright opposition to destroying the tapes from the White House, the DNI, the CIA Director and Congress. So Mr. Rodriguez decided to go it alone, sending the cable Ms. Haspel had drafted without telling the lawyers, the CIA Director or anyone else.

Here’s where Ms. Haspel’s story really starts to run into trouble. Jose Rodriguez recently gave an interview in which he said he told Ms. Haspel in advance that he was planning on sending the cable without seeking authorization. So I asked her about that story, and she denied it. I do not know who is telling the truth, but here we are voting on this nominee without this direct contradiction in any way resolved.

Then we get to what happened after the cable was sent, but before the tapes were actually destroyed. Ms. Haspel has said that she was at her desk and could see her computer screen, so it was shortly after the cable was sent that she became aware of it. She said it was at that point that she walked over to discuss it with Mr. Rodriguez. So what did she do? She knew that the destruction of evidence had been ordered over everyone’s objections. Did she intervene to stop the destruction before it happened? Did she tell the lawyers in time for them to intervene? Did she tell the White House? Did she tell the DNI? The Department of Justice? The Congress? Or did she just let it happen?

These are central questions because they tell us what kind of leader Ms. Haspel is. In order to get confirmed, she has made all kinds of promises about standing up for what is right and rejecting inappropriate orders. But what did she do when she knew an order had been sent to destroy evidence over the objections of the lawyers and everyone else? There is no record of her doing anything to stop it.

There are many, many episodes in Ms. Haspel’s career that cause me grave concern, but they remain needlessly classified. So I offer this one small window into her background as an example of how she might react when confronted with an illegal, immoral or inappropriate direction.

This matters because of what Donald Trump himself has said about his intentions and how he views Ms. Haspel. During the campaign, he said he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Last week, when Senators raised concerns about reports that Ms. Haspel was involved in torture, Donald Trump said that it was wrong to oppose her confirmation — quote — “because she is too tough on terror.” You don’t have to be Picasso to connect the dots about what Donald Trump has in mind. And, other than a few belated promises she made to get confirmed, what do we have to go on to suggest that Ms. Haspel would really push back?

This is not just about torture. Even if we believe Ms. Haspel’s last-minute promises, there are an almost infinite number of other ways in which the CIA can go off the rails — morally or legally. That’s not a criticism of the people who work at the CIA. It’s the nature of the secret risk-taking work they do. And when something goes off the rails, it will be because there is a CIA director who sees every lawyer’s approval as a green light, and every lawyer’s warning as an annoyance. And it will be because CIA leadership decided to hide from public scrutiny information that need not be classified.

My concerns about Ms. Haspel are not just historical. I have concerns about what she is saying today, both about her background and about current programs. There is much more that the full Senate and the public should know, and I am convinced that, if they did, her nomination would be rejected. Unfortunately, Ms. Haspel and the CIA have conducted an unprecedented and entirely self-serving cover-up, and the U.S. Senate has been a willing partner. This nomination process has been a disservice to our constitutional duties, to our democratic principles and to the American people. Americans deserve better from the CIA. They deserve better from the United States Senate.

I urge my colleagues to oppose the nomination.

Today the debate is over the mishandling of the nomination of Michael Brennan to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. This could be the first time in decades that a judicial nominee is confirmed over the objection of a home-state Senator.

And tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee is going to throw out a bipartisan practice that dates back more than a century when it holds a hearing on the nomination of Ryan Bounds to sit on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

It goes without saying that individuals up for a lifetime seat on a powerful federal court must be truthful and forthcoming in their nomination process. Yet Ryan Bounds hasn’t even cleared that low bar.

Mr. Bounds misled the independent committee that considers potential nominees in Oregon by withholding inflammatory writings that reveal disturbing views on sexual assault and on communities of people who are vulnerable and disadvantaged.

He’s had ample opportunity to clean up this mess, express remorse, and explain how his views have changed, but I certainly haven’t seen it. The comments I HAVE seen suggest Mr. Bounds views this as a matter of clumsy word choice and youthful indiscretion — an issue that he can dismiss with a little wave of the hand. In my view, he’s wrong, and an individual up for a lifetime seat on a federal bench must do better than that. But his nomination has moved forward anyway.

This action by the majority throws in the dustbin a century of bipartisan tradition, it cheapens the “advice and consent” role of the Senate and, and it cedes power to the executive branch.

First, to explain what I mean, let me discuss the practice we maintain in Oregon with respect to judges. When there are vacancies on the bench, Oregon Senators convene an independent committee of people from all over the legal community to select and interview candidates for judicial nominations. The committee performs a thorough, statewide search, it conducts rigorous interviews, and it makes recommendations to Oregon’s Senators. Senator Merkley and I review those recommendations, and we submit a short list to the president for his consideration. For us, this process is the core of what “advice and consent” is all about when it comes to judicial nominees. We even wrote to the current White House Counsel very early on in the administration — more than a year ago — to make sure they knew about our practice.

As part of the work the independent committee does in Oregon, candidates are asked whether anything in their pasts would have a negative impact on their potential nomination. Any lawyer who’s read up on a hard-fought nomination in the past ought to know that inflammatory writings about women, people of color, and LGBTQ Americans certainly qualify as potentially threatening to a nomination.

But Mr. Bounds did not alert the committee to his writings. He said there was nothing to worry about. In fact, Mr. Bounds highlighted his pre-college days in an effort to paint a picture of diversity and tolerance, conveniently skipping over his intolerant writings. He misled the committee by omission, and he was wrong.

And it was not until AFTER the committee finished its work that these writings came to light. That’s why five of the seven members of the independent Oregon committee, including the chair, said this would have changed their decision to include Mr. Bounds among their recommended candidates. But the administration and the majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee have moved forward with his nomination anyway in direct violation of our longstanding practice.

Here’s the second tradition that could be thrown out — one that goes back even further. Not once in more than a century has the Senate held a hearing on a judicial nominee without input from either home-state Senator. This tradition has stood for 101 years benefitting both sides as a check on the power of the president.

In fact, let me quote a letter that the entire Senate Republican Conference sent to the last president at the very beginning of his term in 2009. They wrote that dating back to the nation’s founding, the Senate has a “unique constitutional responsibility to provide or withhold its Advice and Consent on nominations.”

They continued, quote, “Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged the importance of maintaining this principle, which allows individual senators to provide valuable insights into their constituents’ qualifications for federal service.”

So in 2009 when a Democrat was in the White House, my Republican colleagues insisted on maintaining this tradition. And Democrats did. The last administration and Democratic leaders here in the Senate respected the request of our Republican colleagues. There were no hearings on judicial nominations when neither home-state Senator had consented. Now the Republican majority is on the verge of breaking that practice, in lockstep with the White House, to seat a nominee with serious red flags.

Colleagues, the Trump White House might believe that providing advice and consent begins and ends with us rubber-stamping whatever names they send up. And the majority here in the Senate might be happy to go along. But that is the wrong way to go.

Neither Senator Merkley nor I have given our approval for this nomination to go forward. We are not stonewalling. We are not fishing around for any old reason to bring down a Republican nominee. We are honoring the bipartisan tradition that has stood for more than a century and fulfilling our constitutional duties.

I have declined to give approval for a hearing because Mr. Bounds purposely misled the independent committee that reviewed his candidacy. He omitted information that was vitally important to the vetting process. And that cannot be dismissed, ignored or wished away. It is a fact — and a disqualifying one.

I yield the floor.