mr. whitehouse: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from rhode island. mr. whitehouse: mr. president, assuming that the senate is in a quorum call, may i ask unanimous consent that the pending quorum call be vitiated. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. whitehouse: thank you, mr. president. i'm here to speak on the confirmation of steven menashi to be a judge to the -- on the united states court of appeals for the second circuit. and we've grown accustomed to the violation of norms around here, kind of a dumbing down of the institution, so by all of those standards, i would ordinarily be opposing mr. menashi. we have disposed of the blue slip convention for circuit court nominees, and i'll just warn my colleagues again that there is a price to be paid for that. the blue slip for circuit court nominees is the thing that connects a circuit court nominee to a particular state so that an arkansas judge on the circuit court of appeals or the rhode island judge on our circuit court of a

mr. whitehouse: i first ask that the pending quorum call be vitiated. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. whitehouse: second, i ask unless there is no objection that the 1:45 p.m. vote be allowed to start now. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection. all postcloture time has expired. the question is on the nomination. there is a sufficient second. there appears to be. the clerk will call the roll. vote: vote:

senator whitehouse. >> thank you, mr. chairman. .. business leaders by microsoft and marchant 37% of firms believe soft industry standards are effective at preventing cyber attacks. and 19% of firms had, quote, no-confidence they could prevent cyber threats and 22% had no confidence they could respond to cyber events. is it time to stress test the framework. >> two things about that survey, performs from collaboration with microsoft. one of the things we saw that we think is a positive development is from 2017 when we did at the first time in the most recent survey, we have seen a number of people in these enterprises that were surveyed that are aware of the risks they face and the need to take steps has increased significantly. it is not enough and more needs to be done. we were one of the contributors working on that. we believe this framework is a very useful framework. and companies should be assessing their cyber security. our cyber security as a country relative to the framework and i know from discussions with others around ind

mr. whitehouse: thank you, mr. president. for this 259th climate speech, i'm going to return to the theme of corruption. before diving into the how, let's start with the why because the scale and the remorselessness of the scheme of corruption the fossil fuel industry has run is hard to comprehend without understanding why. so here's the why. the fossil fuel industry reaps the biggest subsidy in the history of the planet. i'll say that again. the fossil fuel industry reaps the biggest subsidy in the history of the planet. the i.m.f., the international monetary fund, estimates the global subsidy for fossil fuel in the trillions of dollars every year. that's globally. in the united states alone, the fossil fuel industry got a 650 billion -- that's with a b -- $650 billion subsidy in 2015, that's from the i.m.f. that's $2,000 out of the pocket of every man, woman, and child in the united states. here's that i.m.f. report. look it up. read it and weep. stop for a minute and understand this subsidy. some of it is favorable tax dea

anything further, more senator whitehouse. >> if i may ask two questions. first, mr. kitchen you mentioned the opm hack. i think the opm hack is very significant appear highly relevant to the hearing. for the sake of the hearing record could you give a minute on what the opm hearing hack -- the opm hack was and what it discovered about you and other government workers. >> and who did it. >> so i'm going to discuss this as it was reported in the news. >> correct. >> it was publicly reported in the news and has been identified that the chinese were responsible for infiltrating and exploiting a number of data bases that were held by the office of personnel management, the federal government's hr organization. and they were able to among other things exfill trait what's called the sf 86 form, which is people who worked in the intelligence community and government we fill out a 100 page report giving you everything about ourselves. they got fingerprints and a whole host of other things. this information -- it's hard to scope just how that information con couldn't be used i

whitehouse visit. is that your understanding, ambassador taylor, of what we just read? >> yes. >> and, mr. kent, is that yours? >> yes. >> i yield back. >> the majority time has expired. would you gentlemen like a brief recess? let's take a five-minute recess and then resume with majority questioning. it shows an exchange over cooperation of a range of issues. democrats claim this call is extortion, bribery and a host of monstrous crimes that spin against president zelensky. yet, president zelensky himself insist that there was nothing improper whatsoever about the conversation. the routine nature of the car helps explain why it this committee last public hearings democrats recited a fictitious version of the car instead of reading the actual transcript. democrats get the president saying quote, i want you to make up dirt on my political opponent on this and on that. the transcript did not show president trump saying anything really like that. the president did not ask you crime and the democrats are not try to discover facts are trying to embed the narrative and the fact they need to do n

mr. whitehouse: i thank the chairman of the armed services committee for his bipartisan work with my senior senator jack reed year after year on the national defense authorizations. mr. president, i would like to ask unanimous consent that lucia ciminella a triple a-s fellow in my office be granted floorns for the remainder -- granted floor privileges for the remainder of this college. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. whitehouse: this speech reports on my trip to colorado to see how climate change is affecting the centennial state and to learn more about the remarkable action that coloradans are taking to confront climate change. colorado is the 18th state i have visited on my climate road trips. typically these trips land me in states where people fighting for climate action needs some bucking up. often i remind those people that there's hope even if their state legislature may be captured by fossil fuel interests, even if climate change is a dirty word in local hangouts. that was not the case in colorado. in fact, it's a state on a major climate change winning streak. colorad

mr. president. you're one of them. we have senator boozman and three of us all members of the committee, and senator sullivan from alaska, and senator whitehouse, a republican and democrat along with tom udall on the commerce committee from new mexico and try to address some of these plastic contaminations. but if we continue down this path, the world economic forum predicts that we're on track to have plastic pollution in our oceans outweigh the fish in our world's ocean by 2050. let that sink in for just a minute. by 2050 if we continue on the track we're on, we're going to end up having more plastic pollution by weight than fish in our world's oceans. not a good thing. last time i checked delaware is blessed with more five-star beaches than any other state in america. if we don't begin to change our recycling habits, our pristine beaches will be better known for washing up plastic waste than the big waves to ride. somebody called delaware's annual coastal cleanup along with thousands of people. we started at the most southern part of delaware, a great beach town and north of ocean city, the maryland line, and we clean up our beaches from al