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Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, last year, this body unanimously passed 41 bills from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Now, 16 of those bills, for one reason or another, didn't end up getting signed into law last year. Some of those bills perhaps were casualties of the legislative calendar but for one reason or another didn't make it through but remained undisputed and remained noncontroversial. They have been reintroduced by Republican and Democratic Senators and are cleared on the Republican side of the aisle.

It is important to note here that these noncontroversial, bipartisan bills all remain completely unchanged. Not a single letter, not a single period, comma, or exclamation mark has been altered on them. They remain utterly noncontroversial--not a whiff of partisan dispute between them.

In the past, these bills were, in many circumstances, packaged together. It has been something of a custom in the Senate to package together groups of bills. Lands bills in some cases were paired together as part of much larger bills.

In some instances, parts of some of those bills were themselves controversial--larger bills, bills that were sometimes written in secret and not available to individual Members to review prior to the time that they were propounded for a unanimous consent request on the floor.

So today, I am going to make an entirely reasonable offer to move four bills off of the floor from among that group that passed last year by unanimous consent in the Senate. They are unchanged, they are still noncontroversial, and they carry no substantive policy objections, no objections to the merits of the bill and what they do. They are bills that are locally supported, bills that have been thoroughly vetted by the committee of jurisdiction and that are ready to move today.

In short, they are bills that are ready to move in the same type of open, Member-driven process that the Senate was built for and that the Senate, quite frankly, prides itself in fostering and encouraging rather than being held hostage for a larger backroom deal negotiated in secret.

The first is a bill from Senator Barrasso that would provide commonsense flexibility for ranchers during natural disasters to help ensure rangeland health on Federal lands.

The second is a bill that I have introduced called the Utah Wildfire Research Institute Act, which would add Utah as a fourth location for the Southwest Ecological Research Institutes, which would be housed, for the Utah portion of it, at Utah State University. This institute would foster collaboration to promote healthy forests, wildfire prevention, and resilient water supplies. Utah is well positioned and ready to work with the other institutes, including the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute, to protect the unique landscapes and communities across the Western United States.

The third bill is one from Senator Cortez Masto, the Sloan Canyon Conservation and Lateral Pipeline Act. This bill would make certain boundary changes and would authorize a right-of-way for the Horizon Lateral water pipeline in Nevada-- something important to Nevadans as a desert State like mine. Water for Nevadans is very important.

The fourth bill is one from Senator Padilla which would adjust the boundary of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Now, again, just to reiterate, all four of these bills have certain things in common. They do different things. They operate in different parts of the country. They have different sponsors from different political parties. But they all have a few features in common: They all passed by unanimous consent in this body just a few months ago. Not a single Republican, not a single Democrat objected to any of them. They remain entirely unchanged and entirely noncontroversial.

If there is any outstanding policy issue, I would love to be made aware of it and would love to address it, but as of this moment, I am not aware of one--not on the House side and not even on the Senate side.

211, Resiliency For Ranching and Natural Conservation Health Act from Senator Barrasso; S. 457, Utah Wildfire Research Institute Act of 2025 from myself and Senator Curtis; S. 1142, Golden Gate National Recreation Area from Senator Padilla; S. 392, Sloan Canyon Conservation and Lateral Pipeline Act from Senator Cortez Masto; further, that the bills be considered read a third time and passed and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all en bloc.

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I appreciate the characteristically thoughtful and thorough remarks by my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Washington. I do want to be clear about a couple of things.

No. 1, this has been the product of a lot of effort on our part, good-faith efforts that we have made to work with Ranking Member Heinrich and Members of both political parties to move these bills to the floor to get them passed over many months.

Now, again, I want to reiterate that if there are substantive policy concerns with any of the bills in this package, understanding that these are only four bills--those four bills don't comment on--they neither preclude nor prejudice in any way, shape, or form our ability to pass other bills.

Anytime you are choosing a finite group of legislative proposals to be considered for adoption by unanimous consent or through any other expedited process, you are necessarily excluding others that are not on that list. And so it becomes incumbent upon those involved in the effort to decide which ones belong.

Let's talk a little bit about how we go about that, how we went about that here with these bills. These are four of the bills that, again, passed the Senate unanimously just a few months ago that remain unchanged in this conference; that didn't draw a single ``no'' vote, a single objection from any Republican or from any Democrat. In that respect, they all have things in common, even though they operate in different States, have different sponsors from different political parties and do different things.

The bill of which my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from the State of Washington, refers does quite opposite of those things. I am sure she put an enormous amount of effort into it. I am sure it is important to her. And I am sure it has been carefully drafted because my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from the State of Washington, is thorough.

But there are some things that bill doesn't have in common with these. In fact, harkening back to childhood, there is a song called ``One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.'' If you were trying to include that bill in a list of these bills, that would be the clear standout. Why? No. 1, it hasn't passed the Senate; No. 2, it was considered in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and it resulted in strict party line votes--Democrats vs. Republicans, Shirts vs. Skins. There was not a single vote overlapping between the two parties.

That doesn't mean it is not a good bill. It doesn't mean it is not important to her or the people in the State of Washington. But it does mean it lacks the core characteristics held in common by each and every one of the bills I just offered by unanimous consent.

If that is going to be the standard, that anytime there is any package of bills--a package consists of two paired sets, a Republican and Democratic legislation brought forward together; in this case, bills that drew not a single ``no'' vote, not a single objection from Members of either party and remained unchanged since that last happened. If anytime we try to offer those bills, it is appropriate to object in the absence of any substantive on-the-merits objection or concern with the legislation, it is going to be very difficult for us to get this done.

Now, none of this means we couldn't find a way to pair that with something that would make sense, coupled with any changes that Members of both parties might insist on in order to make them comfortable with moving it forward. But it does mean that it would be incongruous, illogical, counterproductive, and destructive to the effort to pair that bill with this bill.

That is a wilderness bill. By definition, by its very nature, it designates large tracts of wilderness and large scenic rivers. It is not something inherently repugnant to either party, but it ended up drawing objections and ``no'' votes from literally every Republican on the committee. That suggests to me that before it is ready to be included in a unanimous consent request, it might need some additional work.

I am confident we can get it there. Most types of legislation can get to the point where objections can be addressed through some combination of modifications to the legislation itself and the legislation that it might be paired with in order to help offset those objections.

But, nonetheless, I will keep working to pass bipartisan bills that have unanimous support. I hope and expect and respectfully request that my colleagues across the aisle would take into account these dissimilarities. If they want to add others that meet similar characteristics, let's have that conversation. If they want to get to the point where we can pass Senator Murray's bill, I am sure there is a way that could be considered and we could possibly get there.

But we can't assume that you can pair something that is that dissimilar; that is, by its very nature and according to the legislative record, it is the very definition of partisan and not the kind of thing that one can expect. We would be crazy to assume that something that resulted in a party line committee vote last year would suddenly get to the floor and not draw a single Republican objection.

I would also hope that next time, when we add pairings to the floor-- Democrat and Republican bills--I would love to see those hotlined on the other side of the aisle in the same format of which they were hotlined on our side. My understanding is they were not; and they should be. There should be an apples-to-apples comparison. If they are given the opportunity, I can't imagine that many, if any, of my Democratic colleagues would object to any of these bills in isolation. If they wouldn't object to them in isolation based on their substantive policy merits and if they were given that in a hotline request, I think this would have turned out differently.

I do think it is important we should pass bills expeditiously and in the light of day. These bills have gone through public examination in the light of day, and they have been found not wanting for bipartisanship. They have been found richly blessed with bipartisanship through a proven, undisputed track record.

So, look, I think it is a big mistake to hold noncontroversial bills put forward by Senators in good faith--to hold those hostage in order to perpetuate a broken and sometimes corrupting process from a bygone era, one in which bills were prevented from passing, not because they were controversial but because they were popular and being used as bait in order to bring about the passage of other bills that were controversial. That makes no sense.

What makes the Senate work best are those moments when we can identify things as to which we do not disagree. This, Mr. President, is one of those things. This, Mr. President, is where we can do better; and do better we must.

I am not going away. I will be back. I will be back soon--hopefully, successful next time--and we will do what we have to do in order to move the legislative process.

I humbly implore my friends and colleagues on both sides of the aisle: Let's not take these moments where we do agree for granted. Let's not assume that just because anytime--by definition, anytime you come up with a list of four bills offered at once, that necessarily excludes the thousands of others that may be submitted during the course of any particular Congress in that legislative Chamber.

You can't get everything all at once. Why not take the things that we know can pass and have passed in the past? Let's get that done.

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