Unanimous Consent Request--Amendment No. 2457

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise tonight to ask: What does democracy look like in America? I have here a picture of what democracy looks like--people showing up presenting their opinions with their feet and their voices and their signs saying: We want change. And the change they want is to pursue the important value that public safety in America be a value that is applied equally to all citizens; that every single person in the community is viewed as a client for the public safety team; that the distribution of protection is equal and the treatment of citizens is equal, so that when public safety officers respond, they respond equally no matter what section of the city the call comes from; that they respond the same no matter the color of a person's skin; that profiling is a thing of the past; that viewing two young Black men on the street is not viewed differently than viewing two young White men on the street. It is that goal of having everyone treated fairly that has led so many to come out and say: We need major reform in our country. We need to set behind us the time period when departments of public safety tend to look at the White community and say, ``Those are our clients,'' and look at the Black community or the dark-skinned community and say, ``Those are the threats.'' That is what people are trying to change by turning out in America in this fashion.

It is an important moment in which we need substantive change, real change--real change like the bill Cory Booker put together and led the battle on, and Kamala Harris put together with him in partnership and led the battle on. That is the type of change we need in America. That is why people have been turning out in the streets.

But there is an unexpected twist on something we didn't anticipate, in which the President of the United States hasn't listened to this message about coming together so that everyone is treated equally. Instead, he is doubling down on a strategy of racism, a strategy of bigotry, a strategy of creating conflict in America with a determined new effort.

This is a picture of protesting in Oregon. I was at a demonstration much like this, where people chanted: ``This is what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.''

This is what democracy looks like, colleagues--people coming together with their signs and their feet and their time, saying: We need change. It is as fundamental as free expression under the First Amendment. It is as fundamental to our Constitution as the right to assemble. This is as fundamental to the vision of ``We the People'' as anyone can imagine--that vision that Lincoln summarized as ``government of the people, by the people, for the people,'' not of, by, and for some dictatorial force, not someone who wants to consolidate power in an imperial Presidency.

In fact, our Founders were really worried about authoritarianism. They were really worried about an imperial Presidency.

Once they launched that Constitution, what would happen with that first President? Would that first President say: I am now going to consolidate power in this young Republic, hold on to the Executive, ignore the balance of powers between the branches of government, and consolidate power in the Executive. I am going to take the forces that were the Revolutionary War forces, and I am going to turn them into a force to keep in power regardless of the constitutional requirement for elections.

They were very worried about this. One of the reasons they particularly liked the idea of George Washington being the first President is that George Washington was very worried about that, and the example he set would mean a whole lot.

It is one thing to have a Constitution on paper. It is a whole other thing to hold onto it, to keep it. Coming out of the Constitutional Convention, the story goes that someone asked one of the convention policymakers: What do we have? And he replied: A republic, if we can keep it--if we can keep it.

This is what democracy looks like right here. There is another picture of what democracy looks like. This is the ``wall of moms'' in Portland, OR, coming out, standing side by side, creating a barrier between the police and the Federal forces that had been allocated to the city by President Trump and the people, creating that barrier, that ``wall of moms,'' to say: Do not use flashbang on us or all the people behind us; do not use tear gas on us or all the people behind us; do not use impact munitions, a polite name for, essentially, rubber bullets--they say ``nonlethal bullets''--we hope, right, because sometimes they do enormous damage--do not use your batons to knock us down and break our bones; do not pepper spray us in the face. We are the ``wall of moms.''

This is what democracy looks like, but this is a message lost on President Trump. We have something entirely different from the President. The President said: I am going to send some forces out to Portland to basically pour gasoline on the fire and turn it into, basically, a much more intense conflict.

So you already have the basics of a challenge in which you have had folks from the White extremists coming in camouflage to Portland to create trouble and looking for a fight, and you have antifa coming to Portland to look for a fight with the White extremists, the White nationalists.

Well, that had calmed down enormously to where there was only a small group left, coming in late at night and causing trouble. But Trump said: If I can recreate conflict in Portland, well, I can run a campaign on fear. Because what we have seen, in Presidential campaign after Presidential campaign, is a Republican candidate saying: If we run on fear, we will win because people think of us as stronger on national security.

Well, we have seen the different strategies. There was the Ebola run- on-fear strategy. There was the ``immigrants, rapists, and murderers are going to run across the border and swarm America'' run-on-fear strategy. There was the ``ISIS is going to row across the Atlantic and invade America'' run-on-fear strategy. There was the Willie Horton ``you are going to be attacked by a dark-skinned person in an alley'' run-on-fear strategy.

And all too often it has worked, this effort to gear up division in America, to play on racism in America.

But to that strategy of division and racism I say: No way. That is too low, too wrong for America. We should be coming together as a country. We should have a message of coming together as a people. We should be taking on the challenges of healthcare and housing and education.

Those are the bills we should have here on the floor of the Senate. We should be taking on the issue of fair labor, good-paying jobs. We should be working on rebuilding America's infrastructure.

We should be addressing the fact that, even today in States all across this country, you can be discriminated against for being a member of the LGBTQ community. You can get married in the morning, and you can proceed to be thrown out of your apartment. You can be told you cannot eat in this restaurant, you cannot sit in this movie theater, you cannot receive this government benefit.

The Supreme Court just took one step forward on the employment question, strengthening the ability to not be discriminated against in employment.

We passed a bill here in the Senate back in 2013 to do exactly that, to strengthen protections in employment, but the Republican-controlled House wouldn't take it up and treat LGBTQ Americans fairly.

If we were doing our job, we would have a debate on the Equality Act that would end discrimination in all of these areas because it is the right thing to do that no door should be slammed in the face of an American because of who they are or whom they love. Isn't that something we should be doing here?

Shouldn't we be taking on this challenge of carbon pollution and climate chaos? All the fossil fuel companies have worked hard to turn this into a partisan issue. It didn't used to be a partisan issue. Back when President Bush--not yet President but candidate Bush ran against candidate Dukakis, it was the Republican candidate who ran on climate change. It was the Democrat who ran on fossil fuels.

It is not so long ago, before Citizens United, that we had so many climate champions on both sides, but then dark money was introduced, and the fossil fuel community said: This is our chance to control the U.S. Senate. They put hundreds of millions--not thousands, millions--of dollars into the Senate campaigns 6 years ago, 2014.

I remember it well because I was one of the folks they were targeting, and I saw their strategy of taking that money and putting it into third-party campaigns and running tremendous numbers of assault ads, negative ads, attack ads--doing it on social media all across the board

Since then, what happened? Well, all the voices that were on the Republican side of the aisle saying ``We need to take on climate'' disappeared. That is the corrupting power of Citizens United and dark money.

Then we had a bill here on the floor. We needed 60 votes, under our policy rules, to be able to pass it to close debate. It was disclosure--to say at least we should disclose where money comes from. But what happened? The fossil fuel lobby said no Republican can dare to vote for this bill if you want us to keep you in power, and every single Member across the aisle followed their lead and voted against disclosure.

They voted for darkness. They voted for hiding these massive contributions coming in from who knows where because they are hidden.

My point is that this is democracy here, people expressing their views, and here in this Chamber we should have democracy as well.

We had it almost over our entire history, of people being able to put virtually any issue on the floor and have it debated on and then to have it voted on and then to have voters know how their Senator voted so there was accountability.

But no more. We are in this incredible period in which there are a record number--low--of amendments, and the amendments we do have are basically not very significant to begin with or they are preprogrammed by leadership, not by each Senator having power. The idea of 100 Senators having that power--that sounds like something out of just another world, yet that was the Senate throughout its history until recently.

Why do I keep emphasizing this? Because this concentration of power where bills and amendments only go through the majority leader is an absolute fit with government by and for the powerful--the opposite of government by and for the people.

So if someone has a bill that says you can't gouge Americans on drug prices, they can't get that bill to the floor because it is blocked by the majority leader, and the drug companies don't want that bill on the floor, so they give a lot of money to that team.

If someone says we should have reasonable gun safety laws--not violating the Second Amendment--and we will make the world a little safer for our children, well, that bill can't get on the floor because it is blocked by the majority leader, and it is backed by massive spending of dark money and the NRA.

Or if we have a bill that says we should do a lot more about housing, I can't put that bill on the floor. How about we have a banking system that serves the cannabis industry so that we don't have huge bags of money opened up to the possibility of organized crime moving it around the country and doing bad things? We should extend that coverage, but we can't get that vote on this floor--which brings me to something more important than just basically anything I have just talked about, which is what President Trump is doing right now: deploying secret police across America, secret police here in America.

Now, we know that President Trump admires authoritarian leaders. He has spoken with admiration about Duterte in the Philippines. He seems to be in love with Erdogan in Turkey. He loves the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia, who assassinated an American-based journalist.

He can't find anything wrong with how Putin runs Russia, as basically an authoritarian-style dictator. But now he is doing something beyond just this affection: He is bringing the tactics of authoritarian governments to the streets of the United States of America.

This is what democracy looks like, but I am going to show you some pictures of what democracy doesn't look like--instead, what authoritarianism looks like, what paramilitary forces look like.

So let's take an exploration of the President's strategy. Well, first, authoritarians don't want identity about the organization on their police uniforms, and they want the police, in functioning, to look more like warriors in some other fight across the sea.

So you dress them in camouflage. Here are folks deployed by President Trump in the streets of Portland. What agency do these belong to? No shoulder patch, no identity on this front, no identity on the other shoulder, no identity on the helmet--no identity. Who are these people?

How about these people? Are these the same group here? These are White extremists, nationalists, who come to Portland to get in fights. So President Trump dresses up his Federal forces to look like White extremists on the streets of Portland.

How is there accountability if you don't know where they are from?

Who can tell me if these folks are from Customs and Border Protection? Are they from the Federal Protective Service? Are they U.S. Marshals? How do we know? We don't because they are deliberately not marked.

We are told that these are actually Customs and Border Protection. I called up the head of Customs and Border Protection, and I said: What is the story with this tactic of secret police on the streets? He said: Oh, no, no, no; we insist they have ``CBP'' on them. We insist they have a unique identifier.

In fact, he put this in a tweet. He told all of America: We don't do that. But America has pictures, and those pictures tell us there is no ID. They are being deployed as secret operators on the streets of Portland.

That is going to be terrifying because you don't know who they are. Is it just someone who wants to create trouble who puts ``police'' on their shirt? Is it one of these folks? These folks have badges on them that look a little more official. We see an American flag here. We see an American flag here.

Are these White extremists coming to the streets to beat people up, or are they Federal agents? And if so, who are they, and what is their mission? We found out their mission in short order.

Here we have a picture of a Navy vet. That Navy vet said he came down to say: What does it mean to honor your oath--your oath of office, your oath to the Constitution? He wants to know. He was a veteran who served in our forces to defend the Constitution.

How did President Trump's secret police respond? Here is a CBP agent with a baton right here, striking him. Here is another one with a baton coming around to strike him again. Here is another one spraying pepper spray into his face. This man, just standing here--his hands are basically hooked in his pocket, like this--he is just standing here saying: I came down here to see what people thought about honoring their oath to the Constitution. And he is attacked. He is attacked by multiple members of this secret force Trump puts on the streets of our Nation.

They had not just pepper spray and not just batons; they had other weapons, impact munitions--in this case, U.S. marshals.

Here is a young man who is holding a boom box over his head--that is what it looked like--and he is on one side of the street. On the other side of the street are the marshals. As he stands there in the video, you see him crumble and fall to the ground because from across the street, he was shot right between the eyes. Critical condition. Fractured skull.

Who in the world would expect a Federal officer to shoot a protester, who is either holding up a sign or a radio, between the eyes from across the street? Do you think that is accidental? They accidentally shot him in the head? It wasn't accidental; it was deliberate. They are sending a message. A lot of other people got shot with these munitions. I am told that he is no longer in critical condition. Thank goodness for that, but it could have been very, very different. We still don't know the ultimate outcome of this assault on a peaceful protester.

Pepper spray, using batons on veterans, shooting a peaceful protester in the head from a few yards away--that is not all that Trump's secret police were up to. They decided to go through the streets and grab people and throw them into unmarked vans.

Here is one of those vans on the streets of Portland. Here are President Trump's secret police, unmarked, throwing another protester into a van.

One of the individuals who was treated in this fashion said he was terrified because he thought these camouflaged folks were the White extremists who come to make trouble, and was he being kidnapped? They would not answer the question when they were asked ``Who are you?'' They didn't answer the question.

Secret police, unmarked, using pepper spray, batons, impact munitions, and tear gas on peaceful protesters, and then throwing people--grabbing them and throwing them into unmarked vans. What does that make you think of? What country are we talking about here? Are we talking about Syria? Are we talking about Duterte in the Philippines? Are we talking about Erdogan in Turkey? Are we talking about the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia? Are we talking about Putin running Russia? We could be talking about any of those folks, as they use these tactics, but this is unacceptable and outrageous and unconstitutional in a democratic republic.

President Trump coordinated this deployment of secret police and attacks on peaceful protesters to create a big conflagration, a big explosion of protests in Portland. The protests had died down to just less than 100 actors and some bystanders in the late evening, and then I am told that on the days that followed these outrageous attacks, the protests multiplied--not one- or twofold but fivefold or more. That is exactly what Trump wanted because he wanted to say: There is this dissent and trouble in the streets of Portland. I am your law-and-order President; I will take care of that trouble.

You create the trouble. You escalate the conflict so you can say ``I am the one who can deescalate it'' later. This is a horrific strategy that no Member of this Senate should have the slightest sympathy for--a strongman in the Oval Office adopting the secret police tactics of the worst dictators from around the globe.

Some of the headlines that followed were things like this:

``Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles To Grab Protesters Off Portland Streets.''

``A Navy vet asked federal officers in Portland to remember their [constitutional] oaths. Then they broke his hand.'' You saw the pictures of them striking him with the batons.

``Federal Officers Deployed in Portland Didn't Have Proper Training, D.H.S. memo said.'' It says: Untrained, undisciplined folks, but they knew what the President wanted and that was to create an escalation of violence on the streets of our city.

You are probably wondering, didn't the President call and talk to the Governor before he decided to deploy these secret police on the streets of Portland? No, he didn't. Didn't the DHS Secretary? No. How about the Department of Justice? The Attorney General? No. Surely they called the mayor and said: Before we deploy folks to patrol the streets with tear gas and batons and impact bullets, rubber bullets, pepper spray; before we beat up peaceful protesters and shoot them in the head, we want to talk to you, Mayor, about what is going on. Did the President call? Did the Secretary call, the Secretary of Homeland Security? Did the Secretary or the Attorney General call? Did the head of Customs and Border Protection, CBP, call before they sent in their special operating group? Did the Marshals' lead director, commissioner call? The answer is no, no, no, no, and no. None of them called because they weren't coming to coordinate, to help; they were coming to disrupt. They knew that if they asked to come, asked whether they were wanted, the answer would be no, you are not wanted because you are coming to inflame the violence and disruption

The President was giving speeches, saying ``Look at what a wonderful President I am because I am sending help to quell violence in Portland'' while he was sending secret police to create violence. This has to be one of the bigger lies he has told in his time as President. By various accounts, he tells a number of them every single day. But this lie to the American people is not just a little white lie; this is not just a little misrepresentation; this is something of constitutional input about who we are as a country. We don't do secret police in our country. We don't grab people off the streets and terrify them and throw them in unmarked vans in our country--at least not until now.

You see, the President has looked at the polls that say we are not very happy. Americans are not very happy with the way you have executed the Presidency. We are certainly not very happy with the way you have managed this really big crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. When there is a crisis, you start to see someone--can they rise to the occasion? Can they bring forth the best in people? Can they facilitate cooperation? Can they mobilize resources? Can they make the case in an effective and persuasive fashion?

The American people have seen that President Trump could not rise to the occasion. He could not bring himself to bring people together. He could not make the case for a national strategy on how to tackle the coronavirus. He could not mobilize resources to address it in a timely fashion. Millions more are going to get sick as a result of his incompetence, and tens of thousands more will die because of the incompetence of President Trump.

What is a President running for reelection to do when his incompetence is revealed in its complete and total clarity to the Nation? You create a war. That is what you do. You create a war because a war might rally people to your side when we are being attacked. But in this case, the President couldn't come up with an overseas war. ISIS? Too weak. The scary Ebola? Too long ago. North Korea? A completely failed strategy by the President of expressing his love for yet another dictator and that love not being returned in any effective policy changes. So what is left? Immigration. Oh, wait--he already played the rapist and murderers at the border card. He already offended people throughout our Nation by snuffing out the lamp of Lady Liberty. What is left? You have to create a war inside the United States.

First came Washington, DC. He tried out the secret police strategy by deploying forces onto the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, unmarked, and nobody knew who the hell they were. Who are these people who are on the Lincoln Memorial? Are they far-right extremists carrying guns? Are they Customs and Border Protection? Are they U.S. Marshals? Who are these people? Nobody knew. They were secret police at the Lincoln Monument.

And then he decided to test the strategy of using weapons against peaceful protesters across from the White House. There they are gathered together. There is this great tradition in America. If you want to protest where the President can see you, you go to L'Enfant Plaza and you look up at the second story and you hold up your protest sign and you scream your position on something that you consider very important for America--the change you want to see or the man you object to. The President and his family look out those windows and say: I sure hate seeing those protesters.

But that is symbolic of the right to assemble and the freedom of speech in our beautiful Nation under our extraordinary Constitution. What did President Trump do? Well, he walled off L'Enfant Plaza across from the White House so people couldn't protest there. That is what this President thinks of protesters. He sees them as a threat to him. He doesn't like freedom of assembly, and he doesn't like freedom of speech, but what he does like is a good photo opportunity.

So the President decides to get the team together and we will go over and I will stand on the steps of the church and hold up a Bible. I still am a little confounded about what his message was to do that. The thing is, to get to the steps of the church, he would have to come near these protesters he hates because he hates protesters. He doesn't like Americans calling for change or criticizing his policies.

I am thinking back about this ``wall of moms'' that I showed you earlier--these moms coming down, forming a line, and saying: Don't tear gas us. Don't do shock grenades. Don't shoot us with rubber bullets. Don't pepper spray us.

And yet his forces did all those things.

Where did he try this out first? He tried it in that area behind L'Enfant Plaza where the church steps were. His forces went out and attacked those protesters. Nobody saw violence of any kind. This had nothing to do with quelling a riot. This had to do with one simple thing: The President hates protests and wanted to show what a strong man he is, like those dictators he admires all across the planet--like the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia, like Duterte with his extrajudicial executions in the Philippines, like Putin, whom he just can't say enough good things about who suppresses the civil rights of the Russian people. He wanted to show how strong he was so he sent his team out to tear gas, use impact munitions, rubber bullets on the protesters so he could stand at the church with a Bible.

I am still wondering what passage in the Bible he was there to talk about. You can think for yourselves. You can imagine. You can ask yourselves: What did the President want to say with the Good Book in his hand? Did he want to say this book talks about turning the other cheek, and I will show how much I admire that principle of turning the other cheek by coming out and telling my team to tear gas and shoot peaceful protesters? Is that what the President wanted to do, kind of somehow demonstrate support for turning the other cheek by having his team gas and shoot people in that area close to L'Enfant Plaza, close to the steps of the church, or did the President want to come out and say: This Good Book talks about beating swords into plowshares, and I want to come out and show just how I believe in the principle of beating swords into plowshares by having my team gas people and baton people and do these explosive flashbang grenades. Is that what the President was trying to do?

What message in the Bible was he trying to convey? Was he trying to convey the message that Jesus Christ talked about time and time and time again of helping the poor and the destitute, and he thought it was such an important message to carry to the United States that he would use force, tear gas, rubber bullets to clear the path so he could talk about how important it was to help the destitute and the poor in America and how his policies might help them? No. We don't know. I don't think the President knew. He has never indicated that he is actually familiar with the contents of that book he was holding up, which makes it a particularly bizarre photo op.

But this was his first trial run of this strategy of using weapons against peaceful protesters, of using unmarked uniforms on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He loved it so much. He loved that sense that he was so strong because he could clear the path with his Presidential team so he could get to those steps. He was such an awesome man, such an incredible President showing strength by attacking peaceful protesters so he could have his photo on. It filled him with such energy, he thought: Let's try this out elsewhere in the country--so he comes to Portland.

He comes to Portland, and he proceeds to say: Let's use that secret police strategy again, unmarked. Let's use those batons and pepper spray again against a peaceful protester. Let's use those impact munitions again against someone holding up a sign, shooting them from across the street, giving them a fractured skull and putting them in critical condition and into the hospital. Let's take it and even amplify it a little bit and put them into unmarked vans and sweep them away. This is what we have with the Trump secret police strategy.

As he did these things, he went out on the campaign stump and said: Look what a mighty leader I am attacking these peaceful people with these weapons. I did it to the protesters in Washington, DC, and I did it to the protesters in Portland, OR, and now I am going to take my strategy of attacking protesters and spread it all across America.

What does he talk about? He says: I want to take this strategy to Baltimore. He says: I want to take this strategy to Philadelphia. He says: I want to take this strategy to New York. And then he said: I want to take it to Chicago and I want to take it to Detroit and I want to take it to Oakland, CA. What do those things have in common? And then he says: They are led by Democrats. I will take my strategy of inciting violence with secret police, unmarked van abductions, use of pepper spray, batons, and flashbangs--the whole arsenal--and I will take it to all these cities where there are Democratic mayors. Then I will say: Look at me. I am a law-and-order President, and I can quell all that trouble I created across this country.

You are probably thinking I made up this list of cities that the President talked about. Surely, the President wouldn't take this incredibly horrendous secret police strategy and express that he wanted to take it on a trial run all across America so he could create violence in Democratic cities, but in his own words:

Who's next? New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these--Oakland is a mess.

And he framed it as going to quell violence, but, instead, the strategy produces violence. It enflames. It accentuates. It outrages. It creates conflict.

I have here an article, and it is from FOX 32 News in Chicago: ``Lightfoot confirms federal agents will help manage Chicago violence.'' Chicago has a Democratic mayor. Let's go create trouble there.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot had a different tone Tuesday regarding President Donald Trump's decision to send agents to Chicago. ``I'm hopeful that they will not be foolish enough to bring that kind of nonsense to Chicago,'' the mayor said.

Well, what did she mean by ``nonsense''? It is the polite word for attacking peaceful protesters with batons and flashbangs and tear gas.

I am certainly not saying that Portland didn't have some tensions. The extremist groups on the right have made a favorite trip out of coming to Portland to cause trouble and the anti-fascists have responded in kind, and that is what the local team has to manage and deescalate. They have succeeded in deescalating it to where it was a small group late at night. And then Trump came in and blew it all into a big crisis once again.

When I said that this is coordinated with his campaign, campaign ads went up. His strategy of creating chaos in America, then campaigning on it couldn't be more transparent.

As President Trump deploys Federal agents to Portland, Ore., and threatens to dispatch to other cities, his re-election campaign is spending millions of dollars on ominous television ads that promote fear. . . . The influx of agents in Portland has led to scenes of confrontations and chaos that Mr. Trump and his aides have pointed to as they try to burnish a false narrative about Democratic elected officials allowing dangerous protesters to create widespread bedlam.

The Trump campaign is driving home that message with a new ad that tries to tie its dark portrayal of Democratic-led cities.

There it is--campaign ads to fit his dark portrayal of Democratic-led cities.

The idea that not only would the President bring those secret police tactics to America--to our streets--he would deploy them in his effort to create conflict so he can win reelection, so he can have something that scares the American people. Don't we have enough to be worried about already? Don't we have a pandemic to manage?

A number of us worked to say: Mr. President, you need to have a national strategy on producing protective equipment to help stop the spread of this contagion. Mr. President, that should probably include taking available factories and putting them to work making protective equipment and distributing it quickly. The President said, no, he's not doing it. He is not activating the Defense Production Act to have a national strategy to stop the spread of this disease.

I have two healthcare workers in my family. My son works in a doctor's office recording the computer code on the symptoms and so forth. He is a medical scribe. My wife goes house to house visiting folks who are in hospice. They are in the final chapter of their life, and she coaches them and their family on care and support during this final chapter of our journey here on this planet. A number of the people she sees are very high risk because they are fragile and sick in that final chapter, so they would be very affected if this disease were introduced. Some of them have the disease.

She has to be very careful that she doesn't pick it up and bring it home to my elderly mother who lives in our house. My elderly mother is in her nineties. She probably wouldn't want me to call her elderly in her nineties, but she is fragile, and she would be affected. My son doesn't want to bring it home or spread it. Both of them had trouble getting the protective equipment they needed early in this pandemic because we didn't have a national strategy. Trump failed the leadership test.

How about another critical piece of this, which is testing?

We needed to crank up all of the biological manufacturing capacity of America to produce the reagents so that people could be tested and get the results within hours or a day so that, if they were infected, even if they were asymptomatic--they didn't have the disease symptoms, but they had the disease, and they could spread it--that they would be quarantined, but the President said no.

So we put into the bill a requirement for the President to produce a national test strategy and produce a report with his test strategy. What did it read? It read our test strategy--our national strategy--was to leave it to the States. What kind of leadership is that to have no strategy on producing the reagents or the tests and getting them around the country?

One thing we have done here is we have funded a lot of money to help communities buy tests because they are expensive. We said they should be free to the victims--to the people who are getting tested, that is. Every health expert has said you have to crank up this testing so that there is no wait time. It doesn't help to get the results 7 or 10 days later.

I have been holding townhalls. I hold one in every county every year in Oregon, 36 counties. This year, I only got 21 in before the coronavirus made it impossible to hold them in person, but I have been holding them digitally, electronically. I keep hearing the report from the county health agents that now testing has increased to its taking 7 days to get a response, 9 days to get a response, 11 days to get a response. Why is that? It is because we didn't have any national strategy for producing tests. As the disease flares up and grows in magnitude in the Southern States, more and more resources are getting diverted to those Southern States. So there are not the testing supplies because there is no national strategy.

Then the experts said: Well, you should have a contact tracing strategy, so, when people test positive, you can immediately find out who they have been in touch with so those people get immediately quarantined before they can pass it on to other people.

Yet that doesn't work if you can't get test results quickly, and it doesn't work if you don't have contact tracers. A number of us have worked to provide funding for contact tracers. Elizabeth Warren and I have introduced a bill that calls for 100,000 contact tracers across this country. There is $75 billion in the House's bill for testing and tracing across the country.

How did President Trump respond this last week? President Trump said: I don't want any money for testing in this bill--no money for testing. He wants this stripped out; yet it is an essential element for controlling the coronavirus.

I don't think he will win on that one. I think the Members of this Chamber, on both sides of the aisle, care enough about their constituents that they want to help with testing and contact tracing, but the President wants the testing stripped out.

Why does he want it stripped out? It is because, if you test more people, then you get more positives, and if you get more positives, it doesn't look good. So he is choosing to have things look good rather than to contain the coronavirus.

If you proceed to offend people across the country by failing in leadership on protective equipment and failing in leadership on testing and failing in leadership on contact tracing, you need another plan, and we have the plan.

The President has made it clear he will test out his secret police and attacks on peaceful protesters in DC, magnify that experiment in Portland, and see if it creates more chaos. If it does, he will deploy that effort across the Nation. That is President Trump's plan, and it is as wrong as anything could be. Secret policing has no place in the United States of America.

I introduced a simple amendment to the Defense Authorization Act, which deals with security powers and things like Customs and Border Protection and deals with things like U.S. Marshals, and I said we are on that right now on the floor of the Senate. Let's have this debate about secret policing, and let's just ask a few simple things.

First, when the President sends agents anywhere in the country, they have to carry identification about who they work for. It is not that big of a request, and it is not expensive. Instead of putting a generic ``police'' or no marking at all, you put ``CBP,'' or you put ``U.S. Marshals,'' or you put ``Federal Protective Service'' or one of a dozen other Federal police units that play different roles. That way, the American people will know who they are. Then you put unique identifiers on them so that, if they do something terrible, like walk up and shoot a protester in the head, you would know who had done it. You could find out.

Now, some of my friends have said: Well, we are not sure we want to require names to be on the uniforms because there have been some cases in which people have been so outraged that they have harassed the families of the police officers or of these Federal agents. We don't want that. OK. A number would work that could be used to identify someone after an egregious act but would protect the families of our Federal agents who are doing a good job. That is pretty simple. Have an ID as to what agency you belong to and a unique identifier. You are no longer secret.

Then you can't be deployed on some expanded mission of sweeping the streets. Your legitimate mission should be to protect a Federal monument or a Federal building, and you have to be at that Federal building or in the near vicinity of it or of the monument. That is pretty simple. If you want a broader mission, you have to coordinate with the mayor and the Governor and get their permission

It is pretty straightforward. Have a patch with the agency, a unique identifier, and pursue your mission in the near vicinity of the Federal property.

What else?

The President would have to tell the people of America how many people he is sending, from what agencies, and to what city for a little bit of transparency. That is it.

This amendment that I am proposing to stop secret policing is simple; yet my colleagues are blocking it from being considered in this bill.

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, in a moment, I will again ask for this important issue of deployment of secret police to be debated and voted on, on this floor. That is what the U.S. Senate is for, to address the issues facing Americans, but I didn't want to ask until my colleague was here to respond from the Republican Caucus. When he is ready, I will make that motion.

I make this motion to send a couple of different messages. One, most importantly, is that secret policing has no place in America, and all Americans must stand arm in arm and say no. The second is, when there is an important issue like this, this is the Chamber in which it should be debated and voted on so we can hear the conflicting views.

There may be clauses in the amendment that I will propose that people won't like, insight that they can provide, or modifications that they would like to propose to my amendment, but it can't happen unless this amendment is considered on the floor.

2457, an amendment to limit Federal law enforcement officers for crowd control; that there be 2 hours for debate, equally divided between opponents and proponents; and that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate vote in relation to the amendment with no intervening action or debate.
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Mr. MERKLEY. And I would invite my colleague to stay if he would like to and yield to him if he wants to jump into the conversation.
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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, my colleague has said that the facts I have presented tonight are a fabrication, to use his exact word. He has called it a breach of protocol. He has called it a violation of common decency.

I think we are here as a Chamber to address difficult, important issues in America. This is a difficult and important mission.

This is a new use of force in a manner that doesn't belong in the streets of America. It is important that we debate it.

I would be happy to have it be a standalone bill, come up right after this National Defense Authorization Act, and have it debated for 2 hours and voted on, because then we actually have a conversation and we have to take a position, and our constituents can see where we stand, and folks could propose an amendment to it if they didn't like the way I have written it. It is so simple. It says: Do what we have always done. Put ID about where you come from. Have a unique identifier. And don't go sweeping through the streets if your mission is to protect a Federal property. Stay at that Federal property or work with the Governor or the mayor if you have a broader effort.

Those are reasonable things.

I don't think that it was a breach of protocol to ask this Chamber to consider that on this bill because there is a connection. We are talking about a bill that involves the use of force and how we govern in America.

I don't think it is a violation of common decency. My colleague does, and I would prefer that we actually have that conversation about the facts and about the arguments, about the simple solution I proposed when we can actually take a vote or other people can offer amendments to it and modify it. That is this Chamber doing what it should be doing.

So I am disappointed that my colleague is blocking this from being considered before this body.

I do love this body, and I first came here when amendments were freely--

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Mr. MERKLEY. Thank you, Mr. President.

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