\"This is of enormous concern that the rate [of carbon emissions] is actually accelerating despite the international conversations,\" Merkley, an Oregon Democrat first elected to the Senate in 2008, told Wheeler. \"I hope you'll become more familiar with these issues our entire ecosystem and our rural agricultural base, which you've been talking about, our fishing, our farming, our forests are at grave risk.\"
Harris and Klobuchar, both members of the Judiciary Committee, had pointed questions for Barr on immigration, drug enforcement policy, and his potential role in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Harris, a former prosecutor and attorney general of California who earned praise from Democrats for her prosecutorial questioning of Trump's last nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, urged Barr to reconsider the effectiveness of the \"War on Drugs,\" an issue of understated importance to the Democratic base and vitally important to communities of color in the United States.
\"I would suggest to you that in the intervening almost 30 years since you were last Attorney General that there is consensus in the United States that when we look at the drug epidemic, whatever the narcotic may be, that there is now an understanding that the War on Drugs was an abject failure,\" Harris told Barr. \"America frankly has a crisis of addiction and putting the limited resources of our federal government into locking up people who suffer from a public health crisis is probably not the smartest use of taxpayer dollars.\"
Within an hour or so of her questioning, Harris tweeted that she had \"reminded Attorney General William Barr that the War on Drugs has been an abject failure.\"
Klobuchar, who was the top legal officer for Minnesota's largest county for eight years, took a broader approach in her questioning of Barr, asking a question not difficult to imagine her asking on the campaign trail one day.
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/Politics/amy-klobuchar-ap-jpo-190116_hpEmbed_3x2_384.jpg\")
Carolyn Kaster/AP
PHOTO: Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Amy Klobuchar questions Attorney General nominee William Barr during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington,D.C., Jan. 15, 2019.
\"There have been times throughout our history, including during Watergate, when the personal interests of the President do not align with the interests of the country. In those critical moments is the attorney general the people's lawyer or the President's lawyer?\" Klobuchar asked Barr.
The Minnesota Democrat has not signaled when a presidential announcement could come, but said in an interview on MSNBC's \"Morning Joe\" this week that her family is \"on board\" with a Klobuchar candidacy.
Brown, who won re-election as U.S. senator from Ohio last year, does not sit on either of the committees that questioned Trump's nominees this week, but did inch closer to a presidential bid on Tuesday, announcing a \"listening tour\" that will bring him to the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina in the coming weeks.
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