It is a pretty wide-ranging bill. It covers everything from energy efficiency to renewables. We have a strong focus on carbon capture. The big anchor… - Lisa Murkowski

So the question, I think, is a fair one for us to ask, to discuss here. It is an important question. What happens if we just decide we are going to turn our backs on this, our American energy? What happens if we really do move in this direction of just keeping it in the ground? What happens if we really do close our eyes to our domestic energy sources, these assets, if we close our eyes to the contributions that they provide? I will suggest to you that there are a few warning signs that we have up on the horizon. Oil prices are back up above $60 a barrel. This actually helps my State; I will be honest there. We will accept that for budgetary purposes. But we all talk about what happens typically around Memorial Day. We have driving season coming on. We are still in the midst of a pandemic. But if the United States artificially restricts its supplies and demand rebounds rapidly, where does this put us?

After Senator Stevens left the Senate in 2009, the Pentagon had tried to cut off the pensions of two dozen--just two dozen--elderly men who served in the Alaska Territorial Guard during World War II. Senator Stevens had worked very hard to get their service counted as military service and to grant them veteran status, and, not unlike the way Ted did things, he took care of it in the appropriations process, so it was an earmark. Over the Christmas holiday, the Pentagon kind of worked to reinterpret that earmark. Needless to say, Ted was gone, and this was an important issue to these 24 elderly veterans, and so I moved an amendment on the Defense appropriations bill to reverse it. I talked to John, and he was pretty skeptical at first because, he said, it was an earmark. But then he asked whether these Native Guardsmen, these Eskimo Scouts, had actually seen war, and I was able to share with him the story of those who had stood lookout on the homeland in the Aleutian Islands, the reminder that in Alaska, we were the only American soil that was occupied by the Japanese in World War II and that it was these Native warriors who were standing guard, standing lookout. So, long story short, John knew that supporting these elderly veterans was the right thing to do.

The Code of Judicial Conduct Rule 1.2 requires that a judge "act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety." And I go back and I look to that. It is pretty high, it is really high, that a judge shall act at all times—not just sometimes when you're wearing your robe—in a manner that promotes public confidence. Public confidence. Where's the public confidence? So it is high. And even in the face of the worst thing that could happen, a sexual assault allegation; even in the face of an overly and overtly political process, a politicized process; even when one side of this chamber is absolutely dead set on defeating his nomination, from the very get-go, before he was even named; even in these situations, the standard is that a judge must "act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety."