The Senator from Utah.

                           Religious Freedoms

  Mr. CURTIS. Mr. President, almost 250 years ago, 56 delegates to the
Second Continental Congress affixed their signature to the most
influential document in the history of human rights: the American
Declaration of Independence.
  Over succeeding generations, more than 100 other nations would model
their own declaration of independence with statements that followed the
American pattern of 1776. It proclaimed liberty as an unalienable right
in what Walter Isaacson has called ``the greatest sentence ever
written.''
  Among our unalienable rights, the document declared, are ``Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'' Defining liberty and giving
definition, substance, and legal guarantees of that right has been one
of America's greatest ongoing commitments to the betterment of
humanity. And at the forefront of that pantheon of liberties the
Declaration affirms has been the right to believe and practice religion
according to the dictates of our own conscience.
  Four decades ago, 160 of 170 international constitutions were
modeled, in whole or in part, on the American model. Freedom of
religion is guaranteed in principle, if not in fact, in 97 percent of
those constitutions.
  When the first colonists arrived in the New World, religious freedom
existed in theory, like that of John Locke, but not in political
practice. Roger Williams founded Rhode Island on the principle of sole
conscience in 1636, and 150 years later, in 1786, Thomas Jefferson
authored the pioneering Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

       Almighty God hath created the mind free and manifested his
     Supreme will that free it shall remain.

  The State legislation he proposed therefore decreed that no person
shall ``suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but
that all [persons] shall be free to profess . . . their opinions in
matters of religion.''
  It was a long journey from Jamestown to Plymouth Rock, to that
Virginia statute, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
  America has made great progress, but the road has been, at times,
harrowing for those people at the margins of our mainstream.
  Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts in 1659. Baptists were
imprisoned in Virginia in the 1770s. Catholic convents and schools were
burned in 1834. My own people, the Latter Day Saints, were mobbed and
murdered in Missouri and Illinois in the decade to follow. And Jewish
people have been the victims of discrimination and violence from the
founding to the present.
  One of the lessons to be learned from this history is that you can
legislate religious protections but you cannot legislate respect or
compassion or bonds of charity. Yet religious freedom hinges on these
virtues.
  Our public discourse, however, has never tipped so precariously into
what Arthur Brooks has called a ``culture of contempt.'' If you think
you sense something alarming in the air, the statistics say you are
right. A March 2026 Pew survey reveals the distressing fact that
Americans view their fellow Americans with more hostility and suspicion
than is the case in any democracy surveyed.
  The United States is the only place surveyed where more adults
describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as
bad, 53 percent, than as good, 47 percent. We can do better. We have to
do better.
  Yes, as members of this national community, we have the right to
espouse our values--religious, moral, or political--without hindrance
or constraint. That also means we must accord to others the right to
espouse their values without hindrance or constraint.
  Religious freedom is distinctly intertwined with pluralism because
the free exercise of religion presupposes a mosaic of differing values
and other life orientations.
  The words ``kindness,'' ``civility,'' and ``charity'' nowhere appear
in our Constitution or our Declaration of Independence, whose
anniversary we will commemorate next week. That is because those values
were presupposed by the Founders.
  This grand experiment in democracy required for its organization and
requires for its continuation a willingness to build bridges of
understanding, as well as defend principles to which we are committed.
  Dr. Matthew Holland has written of how civic charity is deeply
embedded in our thoughts; John Winthrop, leader of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, of Thomas Jefferson, America's apostle of religious
liberty, and of Abraham Lincoln, who so powerfully invoked the better
angels of our nature at a time of national crisis.
  We will never achieve consensus on the particulars of our religious
commitments or our lack of religious commitments, nor should we. Our
pluralism is a source of our strength and should be a source of pride.
  However, we can honor our founding principles by returning to the
particular kind of faith they did have in common: faith in the
essential goodness of each other and one another.
  The psychologist Jamil Zaki has written: Cynicism is a lack of faith
in people. Skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions. Charity is
the only way whereby we flourish in our differences, even as we work
together for a more perfect Union.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.

                         War Powers Resolution

  Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, in a few minutes, we will move into a
series of votes, and one of the votes is a motion to proceed to a
resolution that I filed a number of weeks back, an Iran War Powers
Resolution.
  The current status of that resolution is that, about a month ago, we
successfully discharged it from the Committee, and so it is now able to
be called up on a motion to proceed.
  I want to just inform all of my colleagues that, while I am always
going to vote for a motion to proceed to my resolution, the resolution
is completely superfluous. It is completely superfluous because both
Houses of Congress have now taken the historic step of voting for the
first time, under the history of the War Powers Resolution, that the
President of the United States cannot restart a war legally unless he
asks Congress for permission. That has left the station.
  Both Houses--Republican majority--have said it will be illegal for
Donald Trump to start back the war against Iran without a vote of
Congress.
  And so any action on the motion to proceed to my resolution is
superfluous because that vote is done, Congress has spoken, and the
will of both Houses is now clear.
  So I will vote to proceed to my motion, but no one else should feel
any stress about this one. Congress has clearly spoken and rebuked the
President for starting an illegal war, and said he can't restart it
without us.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.

                             S.J. Res. 196

  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, in the United States today, 42 million
Americans are drowning in $1.7 trillion in student debt--42 million
Americans, $1.7 trillion in student debt. Further, a recordbreaking 9
million Americans are now in default on their student loans.
  Instead of providing financial relief to these Americans, the Trump
administration is about to make a bad situation even worse.
  As we all know, President Trump's so-called Big Beautiful Bill--to my
mind the worst piece of legislation passed in modern history--made the
largest cut to education in the history of the United States in order
to pay for the largest tax breaks for billionaires in American history.
Not only did we throw 15 million people off the healthcare they had; we
devastated Federal funding for education.
  If Congress allows these education cuts to take effect, beginning on
July 1, just 6 days from now, 7 million Americans will be thrown off of
their low-cost student loan repayment plan, known as the SAVE plan and
into a much more expensive plan.
  What does that mean in real terms? It means that the average college
graduate will be forced to pay $4,000 more each year on their student
loan payments, about $244 a month.
  At a time when tens of millions of Americans--working-class
Americans--are struggling to pay for the outrageous cost of housing,
groceries, prescription drugs, healthcare, and other basic necessities,
the last thing in the