The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“Ukraine (Executive Calendar)” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the in the Senate section section on pages S2482-S2486 on May 12.
The State Department is responsibly for international relations with a budget of more than $50 billion. Tenure at the State Dept. is increasingly tenuous and it's seen as an extension of the President's will, ambitions and flaws.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
Ukraine
Mr. GRAHAM. Madam President, we will get into this in a minute, but I want to respond to something that was said just a few minutes ago.
What would it cost America if Putin continues to slaughter Ukraine and gets away with it? What kind of world do you want to live in?
Let's see if I have got this right. I can understand not wanting to get involved in wars. If you have ever been in one, if you have ever been in a war zone for any time period, you understand war is a horrible thing. If you have ever been in the military, you understand some of your buddies don't come back when you have wars.
But what I don't understand is this idea that not only are we not going to engage in a war against a thug and a bully like Putin but, when somebody like Ukraine is fighting like tigers, we are not going to help them either.
So this idea about this aid package costing too much, put it in the context of what happens to the world if Putin continues to rewrite the map of Europe. If we don't get Ukraine right, then China will invade Taiwan. And 90 percent of all the semiconductors and high-end chips come out of Taiwan.
Why do you have the cops? Because if people go up and down the streets breaking into stores and ransacking the community, nobody wants to live there. I would rather have the rule of law versus the rule of gun. Sometimes, you have to pay a price. Ukrainians are paying the ultimate price. They are fighting like tigers. They are dying by the thousands to stand up to an enemy of the United States and mankind.
Putin is a war criminal by any reasonable definition, and if you think he is satisfied with Ukraine, you are miscalculating him like we did in the last century with Hitler. In June of last year, Putin talked about the Russian Empire being recreated. Well, it is just not Ukraine that he considers a legal fiction; it would be Moldova. And when you look at his view of recreating possibly the former Soviet Union, there are NATO nations in his crosshairs.
What does it matter to the United States, if Europe is in a constant state of turmoil, that you have Russia toppling one democracy after another? It means a lot to us. We can't live in a world that way--or at least, I choose not to live in a world that way.
To the American people, $40 billion is a lot of money, but if we can stop Putin in Ukraine, it would be the best money you could ever spend. Let's don't be penny wise and pound foolish. They are running out of ammo. They are kicking the Russians' ass all over Ukraine. They are doing the fighting on behalf of freedom itself, and we should be the arsenal of democracy. The EU should spend more. The Germans are giving lethal weapons. Everybody can do more.
And there is a problem with baby formula. I would like to get more baby formula on the shelves, but letting Putin win in Ukraine doesn't help the problem of babies here in America. If you care about raising your children, you need formula, but you need a world where you can travel and trade without chaos.
Who is going to run the world in the 21st century: the communist dictatorship in China, people like Putin, or a world order where the rule of law really matters more than the rule of gun?
So this package has been stalled, but it will get over the finish line.
To the people in Ukraine, Senator Paul's request to have an inspector general overseeing the money actually makes sense to me. I don't know why we didn't do that before, but his argument that this package is way beyond what the market should bear misses the point of what we are engaged in here.
The outcome of Ukraine matters because if you don't stop Putin there, he keeps going. This doesn't end. Have you learned nothing from World War II? Go watch a movie about World War II. How many people appeased Hitler to the point that 50 million people eventually died? Putin is not going to stop in Ukraine unless somebody stops him.
Here is the good news: His army was oversold; and with the weapons we have delivered to Ukraine, plus our allies, the Ukrainian military and citizenry are dismantling the Russian military. It would be an enormous blow for freedom and stabilize the world if we could stop Putin in Ukraine. And the Ukrainians are not asking us for soldiers; they are asking us for weapons.
And if you don't think Russia under Putin is a foe to the United States and all we believe in, you haven't been paying attention to what has been going on for the last 20 years.
So we have a moment in time here to go all in in terms of economic assistance. Their economy is in shambles because they are under siege. They are fighting like tigers. The weapons we have given them, they have put to good purpose. The Democrats and Republicans are now united around the idea that it is a good thing to help Ukraine.
To my Republican colleagues who vote against this package, what is your alternative? Don't go to Poland anymore. Don't go to Ukraine and say: We are with you. If you vote against this package--and there are a million reasons to vote against anything--you are missing the point. The world hangs in the balance here. If we don't get Ukraine right and stand up to Putin, there goes Taiwan.
I am tired of being lectured to by people who have no understanding of the world in which we live. The mistakes of the last century are being played out on our screen every night.
So to those who believe that we can just let it go in Ukraine, boy, you are going to be in for a rude awakening. The world is going to be turned upside down, and the converse is true.
If we can stop him in his tracks, help the Ukrainians, who are doing all the fighting and dying, then China is less likely to go into Taiwan.
This is one of the biggest moments in the 21st century. Where are you? Whose side are you on?
Oh, it is too much here; it is too much there. To one Senator who will remain nameless on our side, why don't we have money for food? There are 227 million people in the world knocking on famine's door. Between droughts and wars all over the world, the World Food Programme run by Governor Beasley from South Carolina is completely under siege. Forty-something countries in the world have over 50 percent of their grain supply coming from Ukraine, and they are out of production right now.
It is in our interest, ladies and gentlemen, to help people when they are starving so they don't do the things that they may do to feed their families that are bad for us. What would you do to feed your family? Would you take money from Al Qaeda and ISIS if it was the only source of money available to feed your family? So we live in a very dangerous time where one thing affects the other.
This package was put together quickly, and I am sure there are things in this package that could be done better. But we are living in realtime here. The President's ability to send weapons really expires in a couple of days.
So what I hope will happen is that we will unite around the idea that Putin is the bad guy and the Ukrainians are the good guys, and if we lose this war, we are going to regret losing this war because it won't end in Ukraine.
So to my two colleagues on the Democratic side, thank you both. You have done something that is hard for people around here to do. Talk about victory, victory for Ukraine--Senator Blumenthal, there has been no stronger voice of standing up to Putin and making him pay a price. How many people does he have to murder? How many war crimes does he have to commit until we realize this needs to stop?
We had this same experience with Adolf Hitler. People excused his behavior, wrote it off as he just wants to get German-speaking territories back. No. He wrote a book about what he wanted to do. He wanted to kill all the Jews and remake Europe and create a master race for people on planet Earth, in his own image.
What is Putin trying to do? A bit less ambitious: create the Russian Empire in the former Soviet Union anew, crush democracies that have had a chance to go a different way. And are you surprised that the Ukrainians are fighting? Who the hell would want to live under Putin's thumb? Would you? Would you want to live in Putin's Russia? Would you want him to be your leader if you didn't have to? People who have gone down the communist road are literally willing to die because they don't want to raise their children that way.
So we are going to have a discussion here in a moment about some things that we can do that will matter beyond money. The American taxpayer should not be the only source of help to the Ukrainian people. Count me in for that.
There is a proposal that was left out of this bill that would empower the Department of Justice to go after Putin and all of his cronies and take from them their yachts and their villas and their dachas, sell it, and put the money into Ukraine to buy bullets. That got left out of the package.
To the American people, I get it. Other people should be doing more. There is a bipartisan consensus here that, with additional resources in the hands of the Department of Justice and some legal changes, we could go after billions of dollars of ill-gotten gain and ply it back into the Ukrainian war effort--money coming from thugs and thieves in Russia--to help the brave people in Ukraine. But that fell out of the package.
To my colleagues in this body, what the hell are you thinking? Why would you do that? Why would you take out of the package the ability to hunt down the oligarchs and take their stuff away from them--that they bought with stolen money--to help the Ukrainian people, another source of revenue other than the American taxpayer? We are not going to let that go.
Finally, there is an idea that Senator Blumenthal and I have that maybe it is time to label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. Why? Because they are.
After 20 years of mass murder on an industrial scale, the Wagner Group is roaming the planet, which is a proxy, according to our Treasury Department, of the Russian military. They are in Africa today doing all kinds of horrible things. Russia is propping Assad up, who is one of the four countries that are considered state sponsors of terrorism.
Without Russia, Assad would have fallen. So we have an idea that doesn't cost any money to designate Putin's Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, and it would allow and waive sovereign immunity so people who are a victim of his terrorism could take him to court. And it would put Putin in a club that he deserves to be in--Iran, North Korea, Syria. We would add Russia. We couldn't get that in the package. We are not going to stop.
It would be good to let the Ukrainian people know that we see Russia in the hands of Putin as a terrorist state. We would like to tell everybody who is on the fence, America has made a decision about Putin and there is no going back. If he is still standing when this is all done and we forgive and forget, the worst is yet to come.
So from my point of view, Putin's Russia needs to end. The Russian people need to fix this problem. Until they do, we need to keep all the sanctions in place and up the ante. Labeling Putin's Russia a ``state sponsor of terrorism'' is a good place to start. Going after the ill-
gotten gains of the oligarchs to help the war effort is a good thing to do.
We are not going to quit here.
To the people of Ukraine: Most people in this body--not all--are with you because we understand your fight makes our world in America a safer place and a better place to live.
I will ask a question to my colleague from Connecticut. Why does he think Russia is a state sponsor of terrorism and what can we do to make that happen?
Mr. BLUMENTHAL. I want to thank my friend and colleague who has been such a leader of this bipartisan effort, Senator Graham, for the question and for his powerful and passionate remarks just now.
Very simply, the reason for this bipartisan initiative to designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism is because of what the American people and the world have seen day after day after day, not only this assault on Ukraine, trying to deprive it of its freedom and independence, but also the mass atrocities that its soldiers have committed at the direction, potentially, of Vladimir Putin: holding women and children hostage when bombs are falling, tying people's hands behind their backs and shooting them in their heads, raping and torturing innocent civilians, making them the targets of warfare in a purposeful and direct way, in a reign of terror. Make Russia a state sponsor of terrorism in the same way that Iran and Syria and Cuba have been. Vladimir Putin should be part of that club.
It will give individuals who are victims rights of action. But equally important, it will impose additional support controls and sanctions and other kinds of measures and send the world a message that, literally, anybody who deals with Russia is dealing with a terrorist cabal, a terrorist organization that is beyond the pale, that is to be treated as a pariah and is a member of a club that no one should want to be a part of.
It costs nothing to give Russia this well-merited label. It also works very much in favor of not only Ukraine but American taxpayers and our NATO allies to have the Asset Seizure for Ukraine Reconstruction Act, a bipartisan initiative, that will enable not only seizure but also sale of Russian oligarch assets as a part of this package.
I am disappointed that it wasn't included, but I am very optimistic that we will move forward because people have seen on their TVs, day after day, the seizure of the superyachts. We have seen those pictures--the mansions, the jets, the fine art, other ill-gotten gains. They have bought these items with money they have stolen from the people of Russia and elsewhere around the world. Those ill-gotten gains are sometimes in bank accounts that can be seized, and they should be used for Ukraine's defense against this invasion and for reconstruction of Ukraine.
Their use should be humanitarian reconstruction efforts, as well as the ongoing fight. They are resources that Putin has, in effect, enabled his oligarchs to take in this kleptocracy known as the Russian regime. We should be cracking down on those beneficiaries of ill-gotten gains and enablers of Putin's cruel and kleptocratic regime.
Let's be clear. Once enacted, this measure would enable law enforcement agents from around the world to seize those oligarch assets and enable them to liquidate--that is to say, sell those assets--to be used immediately to provide more weapons for the brave Ukrainians who are fighting Russian aggression and to deliver humanitarian aid to displaced Ukrainians.
I have been to the border and seen those refugees coming from Ukraine--literally crossing the border, carrying their pets and stuffed animals, women and children--because the men are staying to fight--with just the clothes on their back. They need help. Those assets should be used to help them, as well as the men who are left behind to fight with a ferocity and bravery that is the awe of the world. Literally, our own military has said how deeply impressed they are with the fierceness and courage of Ukrainians who are pushing back not only from around Kyiv, but now in the Donbas, Lutsk, and Luhansk. Literally, they are winning victories.
But those victories are occurring because of aid we have provided. If we cease that aid, they will be deprived of the tools they need to win this war.
Yes, our objective should be Ukraine winning this war. We are not going to have troops on the ground. We are not going to be engaged through NATO. We are not going to be a party in the combat. But we can be the arsenal of Ukraine's democracy. We can step up and stand up for democracy.
My colleague has made the point very well that history teaches about bullies. They are stopped, or they will continue. That is a lesson throughout history, whether it is World War II or any of the other conflicts where aggression has been stymied and halted.
Vladimir Putin is a thug. He is a KGB operative. He understands only one thing: force--economic force, military force--and that force needs to be brought to bear before he moves against countries that are at risk.
What does it mean that Finland wants to join NATO? What does it mean that Sweden is talking about joining NATO? They see the threat. They need that protection. They know they can't do it alone. They know that Putin will pick them off if we do not stand together.
As Benjamin Franklin said at the time of our Revolution: We will hang together, or we will hang alone.
That has to be the mantra that we take to our allies and to the American people. One last point. We need to bring together this body and our Congress in the bipartisan way that the three of us are doing today. This issue is way above partisan politics in its importance to our future as a nation.
The American people understandably are focused on inflation, which is a serious challenge. They are fatigued and tired of COVID, which is not only irksome but threatening. Our job is to make them aware of the threat that is posed by Putin's Russia. It isn't the Russian people's Russia. They have no idea what is actually happening. They believe because they have been told that President Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, is actually a Nazi. That is what they have been told.
We visited Ukraine not long before the invasion. One of my colleagues in this bipartisan trip said to President Zelenskyy: Are you fearful about a Russian invasion?
This was January of this year.
He said: The Russian invasion began in 2014. The Russian invasion has been ongoing and has killed 14,000 of our people.
This latest threat of an assault on Ukraine is just another phase of the same war, and Ukrainian people have fought on behalf of democracy for these years. They have lost blood and lives and treasure, and we have an obligation to stand strong for our democracy at this moment. We have an opportunity and an obligation.
I am proud to stand with my colleagues in favor of using the proceeds of selling oligarchs' ill-begotten gains so that we can benefit the people of Ukraine in their fight for freedom and their effort to reconstruct their country.
I would like to yield the floor back to my colleague, hopefully, having answered his question and pose a question to my colleague from Rhode Island.
Will the proceeds from the sale of these ill-gotten gains potentially benefit Ukraine in a way that will be meaningful and will help save American taxpayers' funds that are necessary to support the freedom of that country?
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I would say to Senator Blumenthal, absolutely, yes, and to Senator Graham, also yes, and thank you.
Let me just give a quick overview of my part of this colloquy as to where we are.
This began with the Munich Security Conference, which Senator Graham and I led this year, the so-called McCain codel. When we heard about the imminent invasion, we both became very ardent that we needed to get after Russia's oligarchs; first, because it was turning the oligarchs against Yanukovych, which freed up Ukraine, and, second, because these oligarchs in Russia are part and parcel of the way in which Putin has manipulated his country and acceded enormous hidden wealth to himself.
So we knew that the oligarchs needed to be a target. We talked about it so relentlessly that whenever Secretary of State Blinken saw us coming, he would say: I know. I know. Oligarchs, I get it.
Afterward, the President came back and he took the Treasury's Asset Forfeiture Section and the State Department's Asset Forfeiture Section and the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture Section and pulled them together into what he is calling the Kleptocratic Initiative. That is a good thing the President did.
In this bill, there is money for it. We give $67 million to that enterprise and another $30 million to FinCEN, which is the group within Treasury that tracks dirty money. So that is about $100 million to support the KleptoCapture operation.
What they still need is authorities, and that is what our bill would give them. When we got back, Senator Graham, Senator Wicker, Senator Blumenthal, and I drafted this bill, and a version of it has been passed in the House, thanks to the leadership of Representative Tom Malinowski. And after that bill was filed, the Biden administration got together and they gave technical assistance to us from the Department of Justice as to what it was that they actually need to be more effective at going after these oligarchs to seize, to sell, and to send to Ukraine the proceeds.
So that is where we are right now. And one of the things that we need is to speed up the process; it can take forever to go through the process. We need to couch this process in the national security authorities of the President as much as possible, because this is primarily a national security issue. We need to speed up the process so that, for instance, you don't have to prove who the true beneficial owner is before you seize the yacht.
You can go on intelligence reports. You can go on whistleblowers. And, by the way, we want to reward whistleblowers. You remember the Ukrainian who sunk his boss's yacht and he got arrested because he pulled the plug out of that yacht and sunk it?
I would rather have that guy come to the Department of Justice and say: I can tell you all about who owns this yacht. You don't have to worry about going through the Cypriot bank account, the Cayman Islands shell corporation, the Dakota trust--wherever else this has been hidden. I can tell you that is the guy--and be able to act based on that and have the authority to have the action, what is called ``in rem'' by lawyers. You don't have to find the defendant.
This is United States v. Motor Vessel--whatever it is called--
Scheherazade. And you give public notice, and you invite the world to come and make whoever has a claim to that yacht to show that it is there and it shouldn't be condemned, sold, and the proceeds go to Ukraine, which is an interesting predicament for the oligarch who owns it but has pretended he does not, who has hidden behind all these shells.
He now has to come forward and say: Actually I own that yacht.
Gotcha, game over.
Or he has to put in some phony to come and say: Hey, I actually own that yacht. I may be a cellist, but I am a billionaire cellist who happens to own that yacht.
And we get to say in a court of law: Prove it. Let's have some real discovery. Let's have some testimony under oath. If this is your yacht, God bless you, you can have it. Prove it. We dare you.
I think what is going to happen is a lot of these claims are going to be forfeit, because they are, in fact, crooked. And we have every right and every need to go after these assets because Putin's attack on Ukraine is supported, aided, abetted, and given aid and comfort to by this retinue of slippery oligarchs around him who have protected him.
You saw 29 of them showing up in that big office of his to have the little talk with him about how this was all going. We know who they are. And we know what their role is, and they are aiding and abetting and giving aid and comfort to an enemy of our ally Ukraine--as Senator Graham has pointed out--at the fulcrum in the world of our battle for freedom right now.
If we can't act on this, shame on us. So we are going to continue; we are going to continue in bipartisan fashion. We are going to take our bill, and we are going to add on to it the technical language from the Department of Justice that will specify the authorities that they need. And we are going to find a way to get this passed. If we can't do it by unanimous consent, which I hope we can, then perhaps on the NDA or some other must-pass piece of legislation.
But this must be done. And to Senator Blumenthal's question, will this make a difference? Some of these yachts cost half a billion dollars, and there are dozens of them floating around. This is real money. And that is before you get to the fancy paintings and before you get to the mansions in London and before you get to the villas on the coast of Spain.
We need to make it very expensive to be an oligarch supporting Putin, and we need to take the filthy pelt, the lucre that they stole from their country and put it to the benefit of the Ukrainian people.
So I am delighted that Senator Wicker was an initial cosponsor of this bill. I am delighted that Senator Graham was an initial cosponsor and Senator Blumenthal.
And I will close by saying that, you know, this Munich security delegation that we do every year has made a big difference on several occasions, because we get together in bipartisan fashion, we are presented with real, immediate problems in the world that we face when we go to that conference. And we craft bipartisan solutions in realtime there, and then we come back and deploy them. And that is what was done here. We are going to see this through. We are going to get this right.
Thank you, Senator Graham.
Mr. GRAHAM. Yield for a quick question?
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Gladly.
Mr. GRAHAM. Number one, Senator Whitehouse has been talking about this 3 years that I know of. Long before Putin invaded Ukraine, when we were in charge of the Judiciary Committee, we had several hearings about autocracy, about ill-gotten gains, people stealing money from their country, but particularly in Russia. So I want to thank you for understanding this issue better than anybody I know and been talking about it for years.
Now, we have a moment here, and to my colleagues over here, this is a moment in world history. This is not about, I don't like this part of the bill, and I don't like that part of the bill. It is about you are either going to help Ukraine or not, and perfectly so. Whatever imperfections in this bill that exist, the worst possible outcome is to say no to the people of Ukraine because it is not exactly the way you would have done it.
Now, if you want to say no to the people of Ukraine because you don't care about what happens in Ukraine, that is a different conversation. Please come down here and say that. If you believe that the outcome in Ukraine has no effect on the national security interest of the United States, if you believe that Putin will stop after Ukraine and China is not watching, come down here and say it.
The reason nobody will do that--I doubt--is because you would be crazy. But you can say it. The floor is yours. Come down here and make the argument that Ukraine is not connected to world events and that Putin would be satisfied with dismembering that country and stop. He is not.
You know, Hitler wrote a book. Somebody should have read it. This guy gave a speech and for 20 years has been acting on that speech. So the people around him, the oligarchs--and Senator Whitehouse is the oligarchs' worst nightmare--have been living large off the system created in Russia where everybody gets a piece of the action except the Russian people.
We have got a chance where the world is galvanized, and Attorney General Garland, who I have been working with on this, has been very good, needs some changes in the law to make this more effective.
About seizing yachts, you have got to have a reasonable belief that the yacht is part of a criminal enterprise, an ill-gotten gain. You seize the yacht, and you ask people to come forward to contest your assertion. If they don't, then it proves all you need to know. If they have got a good counterclaim, then they win in court.
But right now, you have got this game where you have to find a specific person, which is crazy. Seize the yacht if there is reasonable evidence it is part of one of these enterprises. This bill that we are talking about would do that.
And why it didn't get in the package, I don't know. But I want to ask Senator Whitehouse one final question: How much money does he think could be gathered up if we unleashed law enforcement throughout the world to go after these oligarchs, and what would be the signal we would be sending throughout the world if we actually did this?
Would it make the world a better place? What is his view?
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. The oligarchs working with and for Vladimir Putin have stolen almost all of the wealth of Russia. These are extremely wealthy individuals. If you can afford a $500 million yacht, you have got money to burn. And that is not your only asset--that is just your yacht.
And you have got all the other stuff, the villas and the mansions and the artworks and the jets and all of that. The number is obviously in the tens of billions of dollars. When you consider that we are appropriating $40 billion, I think it is a fair bet that we can do half again, just from these oligarchs. And to have that money go to Ukraine's relief, to its victory, and to its rebuilding would be a very, very good use.
And at the same time, it would provide the strategic feature that it would start turning these greedy oligarchs against Putin because we are going to keep coming after them until this is over, and it would disable his apparatus of control over Russia, which is run through being basically a gang of thieves who all allow each other to loot their country.
I am reminded of Senator Graham's great friend, Senator McCain, who used to describe Russia as a gas station run by gangsters with an army.
Well, this turns the gangsters against each other, in addition to taking ill-gotten gains and turning them to a valuable and proper use. And the message it sends is: If you are a crooked oligarch who will support a dictator, a tyrant who will go into another country and shell its schools, send cruise missiles into its apartment buildings, target artillery at its hospitals, you are not going to get away with that easily.
And it sends a signal through that to the entire world of kleptocracy, which extends beyond Russia, that your days of thievery are numbered, we are going to have the resources to put rule of law back in charge.
Mr. GRAHAM. I can't say it any better. Just to wrap this up, I believe that if there were a vote tomorrow designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, we would get 90 votes in the U.S. Senate. I will ask Senator Whitehouse to comment on that. I think we could take his idea, his kleptocracy regime, and embolden the Department of Justice and others to make it easier to go after these assets. If we had a vote on that concept, we would get 90 votes.
So what is frustrating is that in the desire to get aid and bullets and help into the Ukraine, we left out two provisions: state sponsor of terrorism and permissions to go after the ill-gotten gains of the Russian oligarchs and plow it into Ukraine to help them.
But what I want you to know is that the process did not accommodate these two provisions. But as you can tell from this discussion, we are not going to stop. To my colleagues in this body, we are not going to stop. Everybody is going to stand up one way or the other here pretty soon.
I have talked to the Speaker of the House. She is very sympathetic to the idea about Russia being a state sponsor of terrorism. I will talk to Kevin McCarthy. I think the bipartisanship here exists in the House. You should see it.
So just finally, Senator Whitehouse, can he assure the people of Ukraine, can he assure the oligarchs, can he assure Putin, that we are not going to stop?
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I can, indeed, Senator Graham. I can, indeed. And I thank him for his persistent effort on this, and I thank our colleagues in the House who have been very persistent on this, none more than Congressman Malinowski of New Jersey.
Mr. GRAHAM. I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Warnock). The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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