Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, in a few minutes, the Senate will vote on the nomination of John Heil to serve as a district court judge for Oklahoma.

We have three areas in Oklahoma: the Northern District, Eastern district, and Western district. This judge position covers all three of those, and they move to wherever there is the greatest need, and we are in great need. This is a position that we have needed for a while, and I am proud that John Heil has gone through this process. He was overwhelmingly confirmed in his nomination process through committee. I expect him to have wide bipartisan support when it passes this floor in a few moments and look forward to him transitioning from being a great attorney in our State to being a great judge to serve the people of Oklahoma and the United States on the Federal bench. So I am looking forward to that vote being completed. Memorial Day

Madam President, in the days ahead, we will celebrate Decoration Day. Decoration Day was first declared locally in 1866, after the Civil War. It was a day to remember those who gave their lives in battle for our country by decorating the graves and remembering their sacrifice.

Now we call it Memorial Day. We remember all of those who have given their lives for our Nation. It is, unfortunately, not those who just gave their lives long past. Unfortunately, it is still in the painful present.

Last weekend, I sat in the agonizing funeral of TSgt Marshal Roberts, who was killed by rocket fire just 2\1/2\ months ago. He was in the process of getting others to safety when a rocket took his life. He is the first Oklahoman air guardsman to ever lose his life in battle. This Memorial Day will be very different for his wife, his daughter, their family, and the State of Oklahoma, because it is not just a day about sleeping in and sales on dishwashers and cars. It will evoke the memory of TSgt Marshal Roberts and the hundreds of thousands of others like him. They gave their everything for the sake of our liberty. Those men and women are not forgotten. They are our heroes, and this Memorial Day we will remember Agriculture

Madam President, in this time, it is interesting to note that, with all that is going on, America is still eating, and America is still moving because there are essential workers who are still serving. They are healthcare workers. They are grocery store workers. They are truckers. They are folks at convenience stores, gas stations, sanitation workers, and in power generation. They are farmers and ranchers. They are the refineries. Yes, they are even in government-- public safety and law enforcement.

While the news every day covers folks who are at home waiting to return to work, at times we forget the people who are working twice as hard right now to be able to make sure that is even possible. And we are grateful for what they are doing. We are grateful for the sacrifices of their families and of the hours they are putting in.

But I want to highlight a couple of different groups that are unique in this mix--some of the folks who are really and truly behind the scenes and whom we really don't see a lot, but we see the end result of their products.

Let me start with farmers and ranchers. They are folks who are on the farm and the ranch, and they are taking care of our food because, as we know well, food does not grow in a grocery store. It actually has to happen somewhere by folks putting in the workout in the Sun and getting the chance to be able to bring that crop in.

We are watching it happen across my State and across the country right now. In Oklahoma, wheat is coming in, and it looks beautiful. It is green still, but in the days ahead, as it comes in, it will be very important to us. But it will be interesting to see this crop, if it is not taken out by the hail that is coming in this weekend. As it comes in, this crop will be very important to us. But this year the challenge will be that the H2A workers who typically come in literally from all over the world to do custom cutting are not able to come because of the coronavirus. And the challenge will be this: Will Americans step up when, literally, the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few? Will Americans step up and say: I will not let that harvest go to waste; I will engage and bring the harvest in.

Folks who are in forestry--yes, forestry and logging is a crop in Oklahoma. For those of you who haven't been there, it is the eastern side of our State. It is incredibly important to us. We are seeing a boom in that area, thanks to things like a great need for boxes, for everyone who is getting all of their materials shipped to their house right now and this small commodity we call toilet paper, for which there seems to be a run on going on right now.

Cotton, corn, sorghum, beans--there are so many things that are so important and behind the scenes. If we lose sight of that fact, we will just miss it.

One of the things that has been in the news lately is livestock and the processing of the livestock. There has been news about how coronavirus has spread in some of those facilities. I have one of those facilities in my State. It is Seaboard. It is a tremendous operation, where folks have worked for decades in a tremendous place to be able to harvest those hogs and to turn them into fabulous things like bacon and pork chops.

In this location in Texas County, in Guymon, we have seen an outbreak. The folks at Seaboard Farms have stepped up to it. Ninety- five percent of their workers have now been tested, and they are in the process of actually doing an entirely different test all over again just to be able to track and to be able to find, even for the people who were negative, if they will show up positive the next time and to make sure they are staying on top of it. But they are running at 60 percent operation right now. That may not seem like a big deal to you, but that is about 7,000 hogs a day that are not being harvested. They are having to be--what is euphemistically called--depopulated. That is a tremendous loss to everybody in the entire country.

We are seeing major issues that are also happening with our beef production, as we have had enormous issues on trying to harvest those animals.

As we go through the process and all the challenges, it has become extremely personal to a lot of the folks in my State. In my State, this is not just a theory. In my State, this is actually happening to real people. It is Jim Howard, a fourth-generation rancher, who ranches in Jefferson County. His whole family--his brother, his wife, his grandson, his sons-in-law--everyone is involved in the operation. They are ranching cows, calves, and stockers. They have a food lot operation. They have it all. But at this point, they are facing between 35 and 40 percent loss in the price of cattle. Literally, he loses money on every single cow.

It is Robert Frymire, from Custer County. He is a third-generation wheat and cattle farmer. Using today's wheat prices, even with the crop that is coming in, he will lose $150,000 this year on his wheat crop, not to mention what is going to happen on the beef cattle.

There is a reason we are trying to put solutions in the CARES Act. There is a reason we put $19 billion there to help our food supply, and $3 billion dollars of that has gone toward providing for our food pantries and nonprofits and places to be able to get food out to people so that food doesn't go to waste. But there is direct aid that is going to farmers and ranchers to make sure we keep those operations alive long term, because we need them to exist at the end of this. We are grateful to be able to come alongside of them.

There are real challenges in the packing operations that are not new. They have been around for a while. We are pushing in a couple of areas to say: We have to solve a couple of these problems. Our small packing houses that are out there pay almost $80 an hour for overtime fees. That is $80 an hour for each inspector to do overtime. So if we have a location like Seaboard Farms that goes down, and they want to be able to go out to another location and to ramp up, they are actually financially punished from being able to do that, and they can't make the math work. We have to solve that so that we are not punishing small to medium-sized operations for ramping up in moments when we need them. And we need the small and medium-sized businesses to be able to ramp up and grow larger.

And we have to solve the issue of the CIS Program, which is allowing folks to be able to sell over State lines. Twenty-seven States, including my own, have State inspection programs that are equal to the USDA program. They have to be equal to it, but they are still not allowed to sell over State lines until they get the CIS Program done, and only three States have been able to complete that. This should be logical. We should be able to solve this.

Those two things would allow long-term fixes for the packing house operations. It is something we have complained about for a long time, and we should have solved this at this moment because it has become even more obvious.

The issues about energy continue to rise for us. As a nation, we are finally energy independent--finally. We choose to buy energy from places where we want to buy energy because we can produce it ourselves, but we cannot go backward to a time period when we were dependent on the Middle East again because of what has happened with COVID-19. We have to pay attention to this. There are commonsense solutions, and I understand full well that there are some folks who don't like fossil fuels. I get it, but those same folks fly on planes and drive cars and trucks. And we like wearing clothes, and we like having paint. And as for all of those things that are disposable now, like PPE, guess what they are made of. Petroleum. There is this whole challenge about trying to get away from petroleum. It has been interesting to me how many people have suddenly gone from ``let's reuse everything'' to the last 2 months saying: No, actually, we want to have disposable everything now. Well, guess what. Those disposable items are made with petroleum products.

We do need this balance. We can do it clean, but we have to be able to keep this part of industry open and still functioning. And if the whole system collapses, we will not be able to do that.

Many of you know that my State is a production State. At times, we will have hundreds of wells for oil and gas running. Right now, in the entire State of Oklahoma, there are 12 rigs working--12. That is the collapse of thousands and thousands of jobs, and if those jobs and those companies go away and do not recover, then, we are suddenly dependent on the Middle East again. We cannot go there. We have to resolve that. That is why the Paycheck Protection Program was opened up to small businesses--and, yes, even energy companies--to help sustain them for a couple of months to be able to get through this. But it is going to be a very big challenge for them.

Quite frankly, there is something that is news to this body that I want to raise. In 2007, long before I was in Congress, Congress passed an act dealing with ethanol, mandating a certain number of gallons of ethanol to be used every year. Well, guess what. America wasn't driving in March and in April. That means we are not going to be close to the number of gallons of gasoline that we normally use, but we still have a requirement sitting out there for the number of gallons of ethanol that have to be used this year. We literally have an energy-ticking timebomb, based on a bad law that was written years ago dealing with ethanol, and if we are not careful, we are going to cause even bigger challenges in energy based on that ethanol law and the number of gallons that are required when there is literally no way, even if we poured it on the ground, that we can use the gallons required in that law.

That is going to be an issue for us, and it is one that we need to work cooperatively on and in a nonpartisan way to say: Let's have some common sense in this moment to solve how we deal with our energy, lest the prices of gasoline explode at the backside of this, not because of undersupply but because of ethanol regulations. We should not allow that to occur. We should be able to not only solve that for this year but solve it long term.

I am grateful for the folks who are farmers and ranchers who are working, and in energy, the folks who work behind the scenes, who make America move, because in the days ahead, we will start moving.

My State has already reached phase 2 of reopening, and we continue to see a decline in the number of cases, but those folks who were working behind the scenes the whole time are making the difference for us. I further ask that, notwithstanding the provisions of rule XXII, the cloture vote with respect to the Badalamenti nomination occur at 1:30 p.m. tomorrow. Further, I ask that if cloture is invoked on the nomination, the postcloture time be deemed expired and the confirmation vote occur at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, June 1. Finally, I ask that if either of the nominations are confirmed, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

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