Earlier this afternoon I had the opportunity, the honor, to chair a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which we both serve, to consider the President’s nomination of a highly qualified lawyer, Sri Srinivasan, to serve on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
I am encouraged by what the majority leader has just said about the very real possibility that we will get a vote on the floor of this Senate on vital and important issues affecting guns, immigration, and other issues, but what I speak to today is the absolutely essential role that this Senate must fill of voting on qualified judges who have been nominated to the circuit courts of the United States.
Earlier today at this hearing, 10 of our colleagues, Republicans and Democrats, asked thoughtful questions, and Mr. Srinivasan gave thorough and thoughtful answers. I came away convinced that he has the background, the education, the skills, and, most importantly, the temperament to serve as a circuit court judge. And I was encouraged by comments of my colleagues, both Republican and Democratic, that they too were inclined to support this nomination.
Under normal historical circumstances, today’s hearing would be the beginning of a deliberate, timely, orderly process–a process required of this body by article II, section 2 of our Constitution by which we advise and consent to the President’s nominations.
We should, of course, carefully consider the qualifications of candidates and not serve as some rubberstamp, but neither should we be a firewall blocking qualified nominees from service. Unfortunately, for some number of years, this Senate has, in some vital instances, served more as a firewall than as an advise and consent body. Instead of doing our due diligence with appropriate speed, we have seen delays, stalling tactics, and in some instances, sadly, filibusters of highly qualified nominees.
Five years into President Obama’s administration, the courts are still nearly 10 percent vacant. In my view, our courts should be above politics. When the President of either party submits a highly qualified candidate of good character and sound legal mind, absent exceptional circumstances, that candidate is entitled to a vote.
The actions or in this case inaction of the Senate with regard to the DC Circuit have consequences. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals has a series of vacancies, the result of which, in my view, are to delay and deny justice for Americans far beyond the boundaries of this District of Columbia.
The DC Circuit Court is often called the second most important in the Nation, because, like the Supreme Court, it handles cases that impact Americans all over our country. Regularly, it hears cases on issues ranging from terrorism and detention to the scope of federal agency power. Yet it is critically understaffed. This circuit court has not seen a nominee confirmed since President George W. Bush’s fourth nominee to that court was confirmed in 2006. Today, more than 1,500 days after President Obama has taken office, four of the 11 seats on the DC Circuit are open, making it more than one-third vacant and putting the remaining judges under undue strain to decide the complex and important cases before this court.
Contrary to the previous administration, this administration was recently recognized by the New York Times Editorial Board as putting forward nominees who are decidedly moderate. President Obama first nominated for this vacancy on this court the exceptionally qualified Caitlin Halligan, who waited more than 900 days for a simple up-or-down vote on the floor of this chamber. She came with the American Bar Association’s highest rating, glowing recommendations from bipartisan supporters, and a diverse legal career marked by distinctive service as New York’s solicitor general. Nevertheless, sadly, here Republican senators successfully filibustered her nomination, and last month President Obama reluctantly withdrew Ms. Halligan from consideration.
We have today a chance for a fresh start with Mr. Srinivasan, who would serve equally well and ably on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. As he demonstrated in today’s hearing, he has a sharp and capable legal mind. He has served in the solicitor general’s office for both Republican and Democratic administrations. He has served in the private sector and the public sector and has earned bipartisan support from those who have worked with him.
In fact, he has been endorsed publicly in a letter from 12 former solicitors general and principal deputy solicitors general, six Democrats, six Republicans, for those who have served in Democratic and Republican administrations.
The letter, signed by conservative legal luminaries such as Paul Clement and Ted Olson, notes Mr. Srinivasan is “one of the best appellate lawyers in the country,” with an “unsurpassed” work ethic who is “extremely well prepared to take on the intellectual rigors of serving as a D.C. Circuit Court judge.”
At the same time, throughout the course of his career in private practice and as a public servant, he has represented clients with causes diverse enough that any individual policymaker or elected official is likely to disagree with some of them, including me. I disagree with a position he argued in Rumsfield v. Padillia in support of the idea that the government has a right to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely, but I do not ascribe that position to him.
One of the most foundational principles of our legal system is that we do not ascribe to the attorney the position which he successfully and vigorously advocates on behalf of his client. I will not block his nomination simply because I might disagree with the position he took on behalf of a client in one case.
Sri, in my view, is a highly capable attorney, with the character and demeanor to serve on the bench. I will strongly support his nomination. I am following in this instance the wisdom of Chief Justice Roberts, who has said: “It’s a tradition of the American Bar that goes back before the founding of our nation that lawyers are not identified with the positions of their clients.”
So I say to my colleagues, let’s move forward in that spirit. Let’s return to our historic constitutionally mandated role. Let’s give Mr. Srinivasan a speedy up-or-down vote, which I believe he has earned with decades of public service and public sector experience.
To be honest, Mr. President, if this nomination cannot move forward, if this nomination is filibustered for what really can only be political reasons, I cannot imagine what nomination could move forward to this court. A filibuster of this nomination would sadly prove to me, just as it did to those of the other party in 2005, that the judicial nomination standards and procedures at work are unworkable, the system broken, and it would lead to a reconsideration.
There was a crisis of this sort when the parties were of opposite configuration in 2005 that led the majority to threaten the so-called nuclear option to end judicial filibusters by the party in which I serve, a result that was avoided only at the last moment for the good of the Senate and the nation. I urge my colleagues to come together to give this good man a vote and avoid another such crisis today.
Let’s do our job so the judges of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals can do theirs for the people of our nation.
We have heard a great deal about balance in the debates on the Senate floor. As we move toward voting on a budget resolution, I just want to remind all of us in this Chamber today to keep in mind that a balanced path forward has broad support across all of America. Folks are looking for us to take a path toward steady and responsible deficit reduction, investing in growing our economy, investing in helping our private sector grow good jobs, while still honoring the pledges we have made to America’s veterans, to our seniors, to those who rely on some of our most important and most treasured Federal programs–Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
There is a sharp contrast–and that contrast will be clear and clearer as this day goes on–between the values embedded in the Ryan budget, passed by the House, and the budget led ably by Chairman Murray and the Senate Democrats in the Budget Committee that will be taken up later today. We will be considering dozens, perhaps hundreds, of amendments that will touch on a very wide range of issues–from paycheck fairness and gender equity, as referenced by Senator Mikulski just a few moments ago, to issues very widely ranging–ones that I have helped champion on the Budget Committee that would increase investment in manufacturing, making sure that our manufacturing sector is more competitive; ones that allow us to strengthen our R&D sector, strengthen our education sector; ones that ensure we preserve and protect these valued Medicare and Medicaid programs that I referenced.
More than anything, at the end of the day I think the challenge to all of us is to help the American people understand the fundamental difference in values reflected in these two different budgets.
I know I will be joined in just a few minutes by colleagues who are coming to speak to that point, to help lay out for the American people the fundamental difference between these two budgets. But if I might, sort of at the highest level for a moment, I want to remind folks who might be watching, folks in the Chamber, that a budget resolution is quite different from the budgets that, Mr. President, you might have been used to as a Governor, that others of us were used to from the private sector or from State or county or city governments.
A budget resolution does not have every single item to be spent by this government in great detail. As State budgets are submitted to general assemblies or legislatures, they typically have exactly how the State will spend its funds in the year ahead in enormous detail. This budget resolution sets a framework. It sets sort of top-level spending targets and then directs the committees of jurisdiction to achieve either changes to the Tax Code in the Finance Committee or changes to vital programs in other committees, whether Defense or HELP or others.
So when we talk often about the values embedded in a budget resolution, that is, in part, because a budget resolution is just the beginning of a regular order, healthy budget process. It then has to be complemented with authorization bills and with appropriations bills.
But if you compare the budget resolution that has already been adopted in the House, and that was rejected by a vote on the floor last night, with the budget resolution that has come out of the Senate Budget Committee, I think you see a few simple, stark differences. Both budget resolutions raise a significant amount of revenue through tax reform by closing so-called tax loopholes or cutting spending through the Tax Code. This is spending that is not reviewed every year. This is spending that often has been stuck into the Tax Code through the efforts of the wealthy and well-connected powerful interests in our country, that does not get reviewed every year. It is time for us to look seriously at our Tax Code to make it leaner, easier to understand, easier to enforce, more efficient, and to make our country more competitive.
But a core question we have to address is, To what end do we put the revenue raised through changes to our Tax Code? In the House budget resolution, they raise, if I remember, roughly $5.7 trillion over the 10-year budget period–all of which is dedicated to reducing the tax rates on the wealthiest Americans and on the most profitable corporations, reducing rates on corporations and individuals.
The much smaller amount raised in our budget plan–$975 billion over 10 years, through cutting spending through the Tax Code–is dedicated to deficit reduction.
The balanced path we have talked about–that balances reduction in the deficit through new revenue raised by reforms to the Tax Code with comparable spending reductions across all areas of our budget–is the sort of balanced plan that was on the ballot, that was a critical part of the 2012 election process, and that I frankly think the American people have broadly embraced.
We have put forward a budget that meets the values agenda that our Democratic Budget Committee stands behind: to invest in critical areas of our economy, whether infrastructure, education, or R&D; to help lift the private sector and help grow jobs again; to keep our most vital commitments to seniors and to veterans and to those most at risk in our society, while still making responsible, steady progress toward reducing our crippling deficit and debt. We get the deficit down to less than 3 percent of GDP. At the end of the 10-year period, we stabilize our publicly held debt at 70 percent of GDP. These are the targets broadly agreed on by every major bipartisan group that has looked at the challenges facing the United States, our economy, and our budget.
I will remind you that the Bowles-Simpson Commission–a bipartisan commission–came up with a rough target of $4 trillion in savings over a decade. This plan, this budget resolution, would achieve–in fact, would exceed–that target in a way that has balance and, I believe, is responsible.
I would be happy to talk further then, if I might, Mr. President, about some of the other issues contained both within our budget resolution and, in contrast, within the budget resolution coming over from the House.
As a number of my colleagues have spoken about movingly on the Senate floor in recent days, one of the most important differences is in the future of the fundamental entitlement programs that are a part of the progressive legacy of FDR and LBJ and that were put in place with both Republicans and Democrats over many years, strengthening and sustaining them. We see a fundamental difference in direction between what has happened in the House and what we have proposed in the Senate.
To put it simply, in the House they would change Medicare from a Federal guarantee, from a program that provides health care to millions of Americans, to a voucher program, one where what the Federal Government provides is not a guarantee but premium support, a voucher, something that would shift costs onto seniors, onto States, and onto communities. In Medicaid, in my view, even worse–because it supports the most vulnerable in our country–they would turn it into a block grant. This would shift more than $800 billion onto the balance sheets of States.
To talk further about these important differences and the values between the House and the Senate budgets, and to talk about its impact on the future of the United States, I yield 7 minutes to my colleague from the State of Rhode Island, Senator Whitehouse.
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If I might, I simply wanted to reassure those who might be watching in the Chamber the Democratic budget and resolution which is pending on the floor reflects some of our most fundamental values and makes responsible progress toward reducing our deficit. We have already done more than $2.4 trillion toward deficit reduction since the time the Bowles-Simpson Commission suggested an overall target in reduction of $4 trillion in Federal spending. With this additional $1.85 trillion, we will get to about $4.25 trillion. We are making responsible progress.
As my colleague from Vermont and many others have come to the floor and spoken about, we need to do this in a way which still keeps our commitments to America’s seniors, America’s veterans, and the most low-income and vulnerable in our communities. We need to do it in a way which both stabilizes our deficit and debt, makes critical investments in growing our economy, and preserves the core of the programs on which Americans rely.
This is not just about numbers, it is also about values. It is also about priorities.
If I might, before I yield to the full committee chair, I wish to say I am grateful to Chairman Murray for everything she has done to bring us to this point. In the 3 years in which I have served in the Senate as a member of the Budget Committee, we have not had a budget resolution on this floor.
The very difficult and very long process we are about to go through may be a reminder of how challenging legislative compromise can be. It is my hope we may engage in a thorough and vigorous debate and yet by the end of this legislative day we will have a budget out of the Senate.
Mr. President, at its heart, a budget is a statement of values and last week I joined with my colleagues on the Budget Committee to pass a budget resolution firmly rooted in our values. And thanks to the leadership of Chairman Patty Murray, the budget we passed reduces our deficit and stabilizes our debt in a balanced, responsible way, relying on an equal mix of spending cuts and cuts to spending through the tax code, a balance of cuts and increased revenue through tax reform.
This first chart briefly shows that we’ve already made significant progress towards the Bowles-Simpson goal of $4 trillion in reduced federal spending over the next ten years, and our budget relies on these two next pieces, reducing loopholes, tax expenditures, and spending cuts. This is the balance that I believe the American people called for in the last election. Our budget promotes economic growth and job creation in the short term, makes critical investments in our competitiveness for the long term, and does all this while putting a circle of protection around the most vulnerable in our society, children, low-income seniors, and the disabled.
Unfortunately, in my view, the budget resolution passed by the House Budget Committee led by Chairman Ryan does not reflect these same values or this same balance. It is wildly unbalanced, relying only on spending cuts in order to achieve claims of enormous savings. Yet when you look closer, and we’ll turn to this more detail later in this colloquy, the Ryan budget actually relies on a whole series of deceptive gimmicks, impossible arithmetic and unrealistic assumptions. The only way to make the Ryan budget add up is to increase our deficit or raise taxes on the middle class by as much as $3,000 a year.
So in my view, the House Republican budget either fails the test of deficit reduction or fails the test of basic fairness. It also, I believe, fails the test of economic growth and would put us on a fast track to austerity. Let me turn now, if I might, to my friend and colleague from the state of Maryland to ask for his further comments on the contrast between the budget we’ve adopted in the Senate and the budget offered over in the House.
I think this is a great week for the United States Congress. We are at last in stark contrast, presenting to the people of the United States a budget path forward adopted by the Republican-led House and a budget path forward adopted by the Democratic-led Budget Committee, and hopefully not just debated but adopted in this chamber this week.
Let me briefly summarize the main points made by my colleagues. First, as the senator from California emphasized, one of the core elements of the Ryan budget plan that gives us real pause and concern is that it doesn’t keep our promises to our seniors, to our veterans, to our most vulnerable populations. It block grants Medicaid. It repeals the health care law’s expansion of Medicaid. It repeals the health care law’s exchange subsidies. And more importantly than anything else, it turns Medicare into a voucher program. These are fundamental changes.
When Chairman Murray began our deliberations as a Budget Committee she laid out three core values that she wanted us to keep in mind. That our budget resolution should first help grow the economy and help the private sector create jobs. And, I believe, it does that by prioritizing critical investments, in infrastructure, in education and in R&D. Second to keep our promises to our seniors, to our veterans, to those in our country to whom we’ve made commitments over decades. Something I would add that we also continue to respect and embrace a circle of protection for the most vulnerable in our society. And last, that we make credible progress towards reducing our deficit and debt, but in a sustainable way that allows us to continue to grow our economy from the middle out.
Let me turn, if I might, for a few minutes to some criticisms or challenges that many of us on the Democratic side here in the Senate have of the Ryan Republican budget.
Briefly, it relies on outlandishly rosy assumptions about revenue and spending levels. It counts $716 billion in Medicare savings from the very healthcare reform law that it says is repealed, and that tension within the Ryan budget, I think, is unresolvable. Third, $810 billion in Medicaid savings are really just costs shifted on to state governments and as we know, states all across this country are struggling to balance their budgets today. These costs are not trimmed; they are simply shifted from the federal government on to the states. Fourth, Ryan relies on $800 billion in undefined savings in mandatory programs, significant cuts that would have dramatic and negative impacts on our country and our economy. There’s $800 billion in cuts that he doesn’t specify out of his total $962 billion in overall savings to so-called other mandatory spending. And last, Ryan claims his tax cuts for the wealthy, which cost more than $4.5 trillion, wouldn’t add to the deficit.
To give some visual sense of the likely impact, it’s anything but balanced. While Ryan claims that his budget plan would balance the budget, and I challenge that assumption given all these mathematical and programmatic challenges, it’s doing it in a way that is fundamentally unbalanced and doesn’t respect our core values. To double down on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, to give an additional tax break of more than a quarter million dollars a year to the very wealthiest Americans, while shifting that tax burden on to the middle class, just doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t meet the test of fairness and doesn’t meet the test of sustaining economic growth in a balanced way.
Last year the independent Tax Policy Center analyzed the Ryan rate reduction, the proposal to reduce rates on the wealthiest Americans to 25%, and estimated that, unless those costs were offset with corresponding tax hikes, it would add $4.5 trillion to our deficit. So which one is it, Mr. Ryan? Does your plan shift tax burden to middle-class Americans, as was described in some detail by my colleagues? Or does it actually add to the deficit and fail the test of balance?
Let me move then to the question of revenue and how our budget package achieves some contributions to balance going forward. One of the things that I think is important for folks watching the difference between these two plans to grasp is that both plans make significant changes to what my colleague from Maryland talked about as spending through the tax code.
We spend almost as much as we receive in revenue through a tax code that – in the many years since 1986 – has become riddled with loopholes, exemptions, and special treatments, particularly for the wealthiest and best connected. And both plans, the Ryan plan in the House and the Democratic plan in the Senate, both close tax loopholes. Out of an estimated $14 trillion in these tax expenditures over the next decade, the Ryan plan actually cuts $5.7 trillion. The Democratic plan – that we are moving forward today – only cuts 7% of these tax expenditures.
That’s how I think we can credibly say that it won’t cut into those tax expenditures relied on by the middle class, things like the home mortgage deduction, the deduction for employer-provided healthcare, the deductions for charitable contributions. This 7% reduction in tax expenditures is much more modest than the significant amount of revenue raised in the Republican plan. The most important contrast, though, is to what end. What do we do with these two significant differences in revenue raised through closing tax loopholes?
As I’ve said a few minutes ago, the Ryan plan would dedicate it almost exclusively to reducing tax rates for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Well, in our balanced plan, this is half of the total contributions we make towards deficit reduction.
Let me move towards a close, if I might, with a few comments.
There are reasons to say that the House Republican plan makes cuts that will grind our economy to a halt; makes cuts that are unduly focused on just those areas that we think deserve investment, research and development, infrastructure, education, public health. In my view, it wipes out the chance for us to continue to expand high-tech manufacturing, to ensure we have a more competitive economy, to cure life-threatening diseases and to bring America’s economy fully back to health. It relies on budget gimmicks and on faulty assumptions and, in my view, the plan we move forward today is a more balanced and responsible path forward to keeping our promises to seniors and veterans, to protecting the most vulnerable in our society, to dealing with our deficit and debt, and to moving this country forward.
Mr. President, the future that our budget plan would move us towards is the kind I envision for my kids, for my state, and for our country, one where we can grow our economy but continue to respect our most basic values. And even though the Ryan plan in my view fails a basic test of values, it also fails a basic test of balance.
We have a budget that this body will take up and consider today and I hope we will pass. As it passed out of Committee with the strong leadership of Chairman Murray, I am confident it will pass out of this chamber today and from that passage it is my hope the people of the United States can see us begin to work together on a balanced, bipartisan plan that will responsibly deal with our deficit and debt, grow our economy, but continue to respect our most fundamental values.
Mr. President, I rise today to reflect on how we can do what we so often say we want to do here in the Senate of the United States, and that is to help grow our American economy, to help create jobs for people from our home states and from all across our country.
Yesterday, in my state of Delaware, I cohosted with my Congressional colleagues a job fair–a job fair where 1,300 people showed up. They showed up early, stayed late, and interviewed for jobs with dozens of employers. It was a personal reminder of how many people in my home state and across this great country of ours continue looking for work in this recovery that is still too slow. It is a reminder that one of our core challenges in the government is to do what we can to create an environment of opportunity and an environment of economic growth where the people we work for have a shot at a better job.
One of the things I think we can do is to seize opportunities in the global markets, because 95 percent of consumers worldwide actually live beyond our borders. As the Africa Subcommittee chair, on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I wanted to take some time today to draw the attention of those in this chamber and those who watch us around the country to the enormous opportunity presented by the continent of Africa.
Too often the impression of Africa in the American media and in the popular imagination is one that focuses on crises–on very real humanitarian or security crises–in a few countries like Somalia or Mali or Congo. The average American, the average member of this chamber, often overlooks a changed reality in the last decade–a decade in which six of the 10 fastest growing economies on earth were in sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, studies show in the decades to come that number will simply increase to seven.
So what are we to make of all this opportunity in Africa? There are some Fortune 500 companies–well-known household names such as Coca-Cola, Caterpillar, DuPont-Pioneer, who have seen this opportunity and are taking advantage of it. They have recognized a vast and rapidly growing middle class in countries such as Nigeria, Chad, Ethiopia, and Rwanda–not exactly household name countries and not exactly countries the average American thinks of as having great growing markets. But these companies have penetrated these markets and have recognized the opportunity that lies therein.
It is important they have done that in no small part with help from the U.S. government. But as I held two hearings last year on the Subcommittee, and as the folks who work with me and I met with folks from think tanks and from companies and from embassies, we realized we could do this better; we could be more streamlined, more targeted, and more focused in the work we are doing to take advantage of this remarkable opportunity.
It’s also, frankly, in our strategic national interest for us to do a better job of promoting U.S.-Africa trade, because as African economies grow, it promotes free markets, democratic values, good governance, and stability in African countries. And by ensuring that these countries and the region are stable and economically vibrant, we reduce the number of times that we are drawn into humanitarian crises or security crises and we improve the lot of hundreds of millions of Africans who then go on in a virtuous cycle of building their trade relationships with us.
As I have heard time over time, it takes firsthand personal engagement, it takes trade missions, it takes being there in person to grasp the scope of the opportunities and to respond to them responsibly. To do that well takes American diplomats and American representatives there on the ground.
I won’t soon forget meeting with a head of state in West Africa on a trip with another senator last year, and he asked us why America isn’t more present; why we don’t send more trade delegations. His comment was, “the Brazilians were here last week, the Indians are coming next week, and the Chinese practically live here.” As I have learned in the past year, we are not doing enough as a country, as a government, as a Congress to promote investments and to see this opportunity for what it is.
Well, others have seen the opportunity and have seized it. Just to pick one, China has actually exceeded the United States in terms of its total amount of exports to Africa of just a few short years ago. It has rocketed past us. The amount of foreign direct investment, the amount of export sales, the amount of import sales between China and Africa have grown dramatically. In fact, far more rapidly than the United States. Even though we have longstanding and positive relationships, I fear that we will wake up and discover that China has secured long-term contracts that lock in their interests for decades and lock out American companies, American employers, and American interests.
The World Bank has recently predicted Africa is on the verge of a takeoff, much as we saw happen in the Pacific Rim or in India or in Central America over the last 20 years. In my view, we have to engage now. When we grow our exports to parts of the world like Africa, it grows American jobs and high-quality jobs. Every billion dollars in exports we send overseas supports another 5,000 U.S. jobs. And just last year, U.S. exports overseas supported more than 7 million jobs.
I salute the initiative of the president and the Department of Commerce, who are focused on trying to do more business with Africa, and to do it more wisely. But, frankly, we need to do more. So as chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa, along with my friend and partner in the last Congress, Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, I convened a series of hearings to focus on U.S. economic statecraft in Africa, to gather data, to have conversations, and to learn the facts about what we need to do to be more competitive.
I have released a report today called “Embracing Africa’s Economic Potential,” that offers concrete recommendations to the U.S. government–actions we can take right now, often in partnership with our private sector and with African governments, to strengthen our trade relationship between the U.S. and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Anyone interested can download a copy at coons.senate.gov/africa.
Our report makes six recommendations, none of which involves spending a single dime of additional taxpayer money. In fact, it recommends ways to use what money we already spend on exploring and expanding into the market of Africa more efficiently and more effectively.
So let’s look at the recommendations in the report.
First, it suggests we work with our African partners to remove barriers to trade. Trade is impeded in Africa by everything from poor governance, unreliable infrastructure, complex tariffs, to corruption. There are solutions the United States has already offered and there are efforts already underway by American businesses in partnership with our African partners. In particular, USAID has set up regional trade hubs that have done great work in breaking through barriers to growing regional trade. But we can and should do more.
Second, reauthorize and strengthen the African Growth and Opportunity Act, better known as AGOA, in advance of its expiration in 2015. This legislation has been hugely successful in promoting African exports into the American market and in building mutually reinforcing relationships between the United States and the continent. I think we can do even more to create jobs both in the United States and Africa by diversifying products covered by AGOA, by improving its utilization by African countries, by ensuring its benefits are mutually beneficial between our country and Africa, and by not waiting until the 11th hour to act on reauthorization.
Senator Isakson and I, in this chamber, worked very hard to secure reauthorization of the Third Country Fabric Provision of AGOA last year, but it took longer than it should have and it was more difficult than it needed to be. It is my hope, that working together with colleagues here and in the House, we can get a jump on this in advance of 2015.
The third recommendation is to improve coordination between the many U.S. government agencies working on trade policy to develop a comprehensive strategy for investment in sub-Saharan Africa. As many as 10 different federal agencies are responsible for parts of trade policy and international development. So making sure they are working together efficiently is a good way for us to ensure success.
Fourth, we need to increase the presence of the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service in critical areas in the region. This chart shows those countries that have the fastest growing economies, and these are the few places where we have representatives from USAID or from the Department of Commerce.
In short, my point is there are many, many countries that have strongly growing economies where we have no representation. We have, in fact, zero U.S. Foreign Commercial Service officers in five of the six countries listed here as having the fastest growing economies. In fact, we only have six officers in all of sub-Saharan Africa, compared with significantly higher numbers in Asia and elsewhere.
I am concerned the reason for this is that Commerce isn’t forward looking in its resource allocation and doesn’t see the scale of the opportunities in Africa. Although I was grateful that Acting Secretary Blank made a trade mission trip to Africa late last year, that was the first time in a decade a U.S. secretary of commerce had made a visit to the continent, and there is much more we need to do.
Our fifth recommendation is to bolster support for the agencies that finance and support U.S. commercial engagement overseas, particularly in Africa. That’s the Export-Import Bank–known as Ex-Im–and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, known as OPIC—they issue political risk insurance and help with financing, particularly financing to markets where they don’t yet have a robust banking sector and where the rule of law is less certain. These agencies are smart investments that actually generate real returns for American taxpayers and contribute to the bottom line for the American federal government.
Our sixth and last recommendation is to engage the community of African-born individuals who now live in the United States–the so-called diaspora community–to strengthen economic ties. Who better to serve as a representative of the American system, and who better to take on the spirit of entrepreneurship and penetrate African markets than those born, raised, or connected to African countries and who have been educated in the United States and have been successful here and now have the resources and opportunity to reconnect with their countries of origin or the countries of their families. We can and must do more to strengthen these resources, and I was pleased to get a chance to speak at the second annual diaspora conference hosted by the Department of State last year. It is my hope we will invest further in this untapped resource–something that distinguishes the United States from our competitors in other parts of the world who do not have the blessing of a strong diaspora community as we do.
So in short, each of these six recommendations will get us closer to our goal of a more vibrant, a faster growing and more sustainable U.S.-Africa trade relationship. But the key to implementing these recommendations in an integrated way is to listen to each other, to embrace them, and move forward across the several committees of jurisdiction, across the 10 different federal agencies and entities, and to develop a coordinated plan for taking advantage of this remarkable part of the world that can also grow American jobs.
We have an opportunity to seize, to promote economic engagement, to strengthen the American economy and to advance the values of freedom and democracy around the world. Make no mistake, though, today we are falling short. We are failing to grasp this opportunity as strongly and clearly as our competitors are. So we can act on a number of smart legislative proposals, including the Increasing American Jobs Through Greater Exports to Africa Act, which I cosponsored in the last Congress along with Senators Durbin and Boozman, and which I hope we will reintroduce shortly to establish a comprehensive U.S. strategy for public-private investment, trade, and development in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, the administration can, and I hope will, do more to coordinate strategy and use our resources effectively.
This report we have issued today I hope will be seen as a wake-up call. If we fail, we will wake up 10 years from now and we will see jobs and opportunities we might have grasped taken by our competitors. It is my hope we will not watch these opportunities pass us by but will, instead, take advantage of this remarkable moment and this great opportunity.
Mr. President, the Founders of our country, committed to justice and fairness for all its citizens and in establishing a structure that would make this country uniquely strong as a democracy, gave us three coequal branches of our government. Two of those branches have dominated the national news recently as we lurch from crisis to crisis, from fiscal cliff to sequester. The back-and-forth between the President and Congress, between the Executive and the Legislative branches, has been the headline day after day.
Meanwhile, the third coequal branch, the Judicial branch of our federal government, has quietly gone about its business, doing its job for the American people, providing fair hearings, equal justice under the law, the basic right to a speedy resolution to any dispute. Or are they?
All around this country members of the Judicial branch are getting their jobs done but with fewer and fewer resources and support, fewer colleagues on the bench than ever before. Nearly 10 percent of all federal judgeships – positions for federal judges that should be filled – are vacant, empty. Leaving those judges who are on the bench overwhelmed with steadily increasing caseloads and unable to provide the level of service, certainty, and swift resolution that the American people deserve and that our government was predicated on.
Particularly when you are the one going into court seeking redress or when you are the one facing legal action, justice delayed is justice denied.
As a member of the Delaware Bar and a former federal court clerk myself, as well as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have seen firsthand the consequences of this ongoing, slow-rolling crisis in our federal courts.
Right now we have more than double the judicial vacancies we had at the same point in the last administration. The Senate has confirmed 30 fewer of President Obama’s nominees than it had of President Bush’s at this same time.
One of the most under-resourced circuits is right here under our nose in Washington, D.C. The D.C. Circuit is often called the second most important court in the land. Although it may not make the headlines, it may not be as visible to the American people as this ongoing fight between the Congress and the President, the D.C. Circuit decides issues of national importance, from terrorism and detention to the scope of agency power. It has importance to every American, not just the ones who happen to live in the District of Columbia, and yet its bench is almost half empty.
Congress has set the number of judgeships needed by the D.C. Circuit Court at 11, and right now they have just seven. President Bush had the opportunity to appoint four judges to the D.C. Circuit, including the 10th judicial position twice and the 11th judicial position once. Yet President Obama has been denied the opportunity to make even a single appointment to the D.C. Circuit Court, despite four vacancies. As a result, the per-judge caseload is today 50 percent higher than it was after President Bush had the opportunity to fill that last, that 11th seat. And that, Mr. President, in terms of our obligation to this coequal branch, our obligation to the citizens of the United States, and our obligation to provide an opportunity for justice, that is an outrage.
Today, the Senate has the opportunity to take up and consider a highly qualified nominee to fill one of these vacancies, to start to do our job and bring this vital circuit court closer to full capacity. We can do that by confirming the nomination of a brilliant lawyer and a dedicated public servant named Caitlin Halligan.
Ms. Halligan, with whom I have met, has been nominated to the D.C. Circuit Court and renominated to the D.C. Circuit Court and renominated to the D.C. Circuit Court across three sessions of Congress – the 111th, 112th, and 113th. She has been nominated because of her superb qualifications and her impressive personal background.
She worked in private practice at a respected New York law firm. She served in public service as solicitor general for the state of New York. She is currently the general counsel of the New York County District Attorney’s Office – an office that investigates and prosecutes 100,000 criminal cases every year.
Ms. Halligan has earned the support of her colleagues in law enforcement across the spectrum. Everyone, from New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to preeminent conservative lawyer Miguel Estrada have supported her nomination. The American Bar Association’s standing committee unanimously gave her its ranking of highest qualification to serve: “highly qualified.”
Yet Ms. Halligan has had to face, in my view, outrageous distortions of her record that cause one to wonder if any nominee to this circuit would be acceptable on their merits.
Ms. Halligan has withstood steady and withering political attacks on positions that she advocated while solicitor general for the state of New York, positions she argued on behalf of her client – New York State and its attorney general – not positions that represented her own personal views.
If you reflect on this, Mr. President, it is, as all practicing attorneys know, inappropriate to disqualify a judicial candidate because she advocated a position for a client with which a certain senator might disagree or which has been rejected by a court.
This fundamental principle that you do not associate an attorney with a position advocated in court has been widely shared, widely supported, and, in fact, Chief Justice Roberts himself said, “It’s a tradition of the American Bar that goes back before the founding of our nation that lawyers are not identified with the positions of their clients.”
Even so, Ms. Halligan’s positions on issues such as, for example, marriage and states’ rights have hardly been radical. When asked to analyze New York’s marriage law, she concluded that the state statute did not provide same-sex couples with the right to marry. When presented with the question of whether a ban on same-sex marriage was legal under the New York Constitution, she merely said that there were arguments for and against and that it should be left to the courts to decide.
What could be more modest than deciding that a Constitutional question should be decided by the courts and not the Executive Branch? Yet I have heard on this floor and elsewhere her positions on this and other issues mischaracterized as extreme, as out of the mainstream. In my view, this position demonstrates her great respect for our judicial process and proves that if this body confirms her to the bench, she would fairly and faithfully apply precedent in making important decisions on the D.C. Circuit.
She told us directly on the Judiciary Committee that she would respect and apply precedent in other important cases – cases that touch on the Second Amendment, such as the District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, cases that held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. I am confident, despite what we have heard spun in the press about Ms. Halligan’s position, that she would faithfully respect precedent in these cases.
So in these two areas, I think we can see that Caitlin Halligan is not a radical or an ideologue. She is an attorney, she is a lawyer – and a good one. In my view, having reviewed her qualifications, having sat through meetings, and having looked at her record, she has earned her nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court. She deserves this Senate to get out of the way and to stop this endless delay of consideration of qualified candidates for the bench and let her get to work.
Today the Senate has an opportunity, a chance to do the right thing, to stop endless partisan political games, to break through our gridlock here and get something done in the interest of the American people and especially those who seek swift and sure justice.
Every individual and business in this country has the fundamental right to a fair, fast trial, to access to the judicial system, and to the hearing of their appeals in an appropriate and timely manner. And judicial vacancies and understaffed courts at the district and the circuit level are denying them that right. This Senate and its dysfunction is denying them that right.
So today I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to do our jobs, to confirm Caitlin Halligan and recommit ourselves to moving forward in a productive and bipartisan way.
Mr. President, we are no longer in an election year, which makes this the perfect time for this Congress to take action on real and meaningful election reform. Regardless of which candidates we voted for last November, we can all agree that in the world’s greatest democracy, in this year 2013 we should put in place systems that ensure that every voter will be able to cast their ballot without unnecessary delays, red tape, or restriction in our next elections. That’s why I’m looking forward to working with my colleagues here in the Senate, with leaders in state and local governments across the country, and with folks in the U.S. Department of Justice to discuss ways we can reform our election process to make voting more accessible for more Americans.
In his second inaugural address delivered just this Monday, President Obama made a point to tie voting rights to civil rights. President Obama spoke of the long American march toward justice.
He said: ‘And the first steps of that march—of the journey toward a better, fairer, more equal society, one where every American, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or economic status, has the same shot at success—has always started at the ballot box.’
President Obama mentioned Seneca Falls, a central moment in the movement for women’s suffrage, and Selma, the emotional heart of the fight for equal access to voting rights for African Americans.
He [President Obama] said: ‘Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.’
He’s right.
The 2012 elections were a wake-up call to those of us who treasure the right to vote. All over our country—in blue states and red states—Americans saw their fundamental right to vote eroded by exceptionally long lines, confusing rules, and widespread voting machine malfunctions. There were problems in more than a dozen states documented in the media.
There were voting machine irregularities in Pennsylvania and Colorado; error-ridden voter rolls in Ohio; delays counting ballots in Arizona; voters waiting in lines five hours long in Virginia and eight hours long in Florida. We have to do better than this.
As Americans, the right to vote is in our DNA. So just days after these 2012 elections, that had such widespread problems, I introduced the FAST Voting Act, the Fair, Accurate, Secure, and Timely Voting Act, along with Senator Warner and colleagues in the House, Congressman Connolly and Congressman Langevin.
Our bill challenges states to implement commonsense changes well before the next election. It would provide incentives and competitive grants to those states that can turn around their poorest performing polling places, improve the administration of their elections, and make voting faster and more accessible to all voters.
As a former county executive myself, I know that states and local governments are laboratories of democracy. When it comes to administering elections, many states and counties are getting it right. We can learn from them and replicate their successes elsewhere in the country to ensure these same problems do not plague the next national elections.
For example, Florida was one of many states with rampant election problems in 2012. Long lines, limited early voting, and other issues that may have disenfranchised as many as 49,000 Floridians, according to a study by Professor Theodore Allen of the Ohio State University.
Floridians like Richard Jordan. Richard waited more than three hours in a line that just wasn’t moving to try and cast his ballot on Election Day 2012. He had already worked a 10-hour shift that day. He was exhausted, his back hurt, he was hungry, and ultimately in anger decided he could not wait anymore. He simply gave up and walked away; denied the opportunity to cast his ballot by an unprepared, under resourced, or just incompetent election system.
On behalf of voters across the state like Richard, earlier this month Florida’s elections administrators presented Florida’s Governor Rick Scott with a list of reforms they’d like to see implemented to prevent these problems from happening again. Governor Scott admitted that his own state’s election process was clearly in need of improvement. He said he agreed with some of the election supervisors’ proposals. This is in my view, is a very positive step forward, and one which should be undertaken in every state where there is documented need for stronger, fairer, faster, freer elections.
In my view, the federal government can and should play a role in incentivizing that process and ensuring that election improvements are made to last. It can help states move forward in using available technology, and it can ensure states do a better job of enforcing laws that are already on the books.
The National Voter Registration Act, for example, commonly known as the Motor Voter Law, requires states to allow voters to register when they renew their driver’s license at the DMV or at other governmental agencies. Yet there are substantial and credible allegations that some states just aren’t fulfilling their obligation under this Act – blue states, red states, purple states all across the country.
In talking with elections administrators from around the country, it is clear to me that compliance with existing law is not complete. So we have to do more to ensure voters are afforded the rights given to them under current law and that state agencies are doing what is required to simplify the registration process, to maintain uniform and nondiscriminatory voter rolls, and to provide widespread registration opportunities. Enforcing existing law then is just part of the solution to the voting problems we saw across our country in 2012.
We also have to look forward at ways to deliver the best and most efficient voting process to all Americans. There is still much more we can do to meet that goal, and part of the solution, I think, is the mechanism of the FAST Voting Act.
Our legislation focuses on cost-effective reforms, like making it easier to register online and ensuring citizens who move to a new jurisdiction can easily transfer their voter registration. If we use modern technology that we already have at our disposal, we can make it easier for all eligible American citizens to cast their ballot and ensure that every vote is counted.
President Obama was right to mention election reform alongside the most essential civil rights struggles in our country’s history in his inaugural address on Monday. Because making it harder for citizens to vote is a violation of their civil rights. Long lines are just another form of voter disenfranchisement. Running out of ballots can be just another form of voter suppression. The fact is access to vote is denied when registration is cumbersome or inaccessible and when early voter vote-by-mail options are just not available.
So let’s do something now when we are no longer hamstrung by election year politics here in the Senate so that changes that last, changes that make a difference can be implemented well before the next election.
As someone who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee and who often speaks with foreign heads of state, civil society leaders, and voting advocates from around the world, it is an embarrassment that in 2012 our nation couldn’t overcome the simple challenges to ensuring fair and accurate elections all across our country.
If we ignore these assaults on America’s civil rights that we saw last November, we are certain to have to endure them the next time around. We cannot stand by and allow that to happen. Our democracy needs to be a model to the rest of the world for how to ensure that every citizen gets to exercise the right to vote.
Let’s find a way to come together to put meaningful election reforms in place now before we deny one more American their fundamental right to vote for the candidate of their choice.
Madam President, in this dangerous world we have an obligation to give our intelligence community the tools and the resources that they need to keep us safe. But we also have a fundamental obligation just as great, I believe, to protect the civil liberties of law-abiding American citizens. A right to private communications, free from the prying eyes and ears of the government, should be the rule, not the exception for American citizens on American soil, whom law enforcement has no reason to suspect of wrongdoing.
And yet, the legislation that we debate on this Senate floor today, the FISA Amendments Act, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act would reauthorize surveillance authority that most Americans, most of the Delawareans whom I represent, would be shocked to learn that the government has in the first place. Under section 702, FISA permits the government to wiretap communications in the United States without a warrant if it reasonably believes the target of the wiretap to be outside of the country and has a significant purpose of acquiring foreign intelligence information.
Of course communications are by definition between two or more people. So even if one participant is outside our country, the person they’re talking to may be here in the United States, and they may well be an American citizen. Under this legislation, the government is permitted to collect and store their communications but without clear legal limits on what can be done with this information. They can keep it for an indefinite period of time. They can search within these communications and use them in civilian criminal investigations. And perhaps most concerning of all to me, they can search information obtained under this act for the communications of a specific individual U.S. citizen without judicial oversight and for any reason. If these are all true, and this is the case, then I am gravely concerned.
What is at issue today is the scope of the government’s power to conduct surveillance without getting a warrant. The warrant requirement is enshrined in our legal system from the very founding of our nation, because we believe in judicial checks and balances. If the government suspects wrongdoing by a U.S. citizen, it must convince a judge to approve a warrant. Warrants are issued each and every day in courts across the United States for investigation of potential offenses across the whole spectrum of criminal activity, including crimes affecting national security.
In contrast, surveillance under this act is not required to meet this standard, leaving American citizens vulnerable to potentially very real violations of their privacy.
Madam President, the balance between privacy and security is an essential test for any government, but it is a vital test for our government and for this country.
This law in its current form does contain some checks that I want to review that are supposed to protect our privacy. It requires that the government surveillance program must be “reasonably designed” to target foreigners abroad and not intentionally acquire wholly domestic communications. The law requires that a wiretap be turned off when the government knows it is listening in on a conversation between two U.S. individuals, and it forbids the government from targeting a foreigner as a pretext for obtaining the communications of a U.S. national. All three of these are important privacy protections currently in the law.
The problem is we here in the United States Senate, and so the citizens we represent don’t know how well any of these safeguards actually work. We don’t know how courts construe the law’s requirement that surveillance be, as I mentioned, “reasonably designed,” not to obtain any purely domestic information. The law doesn’t forbid purely domestic information from being collected. We know that at least one FISA court has ruled that a surveillance program violated the law. Why? Those who know can’t say and average Americans can’t know. We can suspect that U.S. communications occasionally do get swept up in this kind of surveillance, but the intelligence community has not — in fact, they say they cannot, offer us any reasonable estimate of the number or frequency with which this has happened.
The government also won’t state publicly whether any wholly domestic communications have been obtained under this authority. And the government won’t state publicly whether it has ever searched this surveillance, this body of communications, for the communications of a specific American without a warrant. For me, this lack of information, this lack of understanding, this lack of detail about exactly how the protections in this act have worked is of, as I said, grave concern.
Too often this body finds itself in the position of having to give rushed consideration to the extension of expiring surveillance authorities. The intelligence community tells us these surveillance tools are indispensable to the fight against terrorism and foreign spies, just as they did during the PATRIOT Act reauthorization debate last year. Also, as in the case of the PATRIOT reauthorization, the expiration of these authorities, we were told, the impending expiration of these authorities would throw ongoing surveillance operations into a legal limbo, would cause investigations to collapse or harm our ability to track terrorists or prevent crimes. All of these are profound and legitimate concerns.
It is precisely because this legislation is so important that it is all the more deserving of the Senate’s careful, timely and deliberate attention. This kind of serious consideration requires more declassified information on the public record than we have available now. That’s why I am supporting the amendments reported by the Judiciary Committee, on which I serve, which would help to shine a light on exactly how this surveillance authority is used. It would direct the Intelligence Community Inspector General to issue a public report explaining whether and how the FISA Amendments Act respects the privacy interests of Americans.
This amendment would also give us another chance to amend this FAA after we receive this report by adjusting the sunset not to 2017 but to 2015. This new expiration date would align the sunset of the FISA Amendments Act with those in the PATRIOT Act, allowing for more comprehensive review of both surveillance authorizations.
Concerns about privacy rights of law-abiding American citizens, as well as the striking lack of current public information, are also why I support Senator Merkley’s amendment to direct the administration to establish a framework for declassifying FISA court opinions about the FAA. Secure sources and methods vital to the success of our intelligence community must be protected, and I agree with that, and this amendment would do that, but the default, the default position here ought to be that the legal analysis about the government’s use of warrantless surveillance in this country is public rather than hidden from view.
I also strongly support Senator Wyden’s amendment to force the intelligence community to provide Congress and the public as appropriate with specifics on just how much domestic communication has been captured under the FAA and what the intelligence community does with that information. This amendment simply asks for the most basic information about the practical consequences of the use of the powerful surveillance authorities in this act. To what extent are these authorities being used to discover the content of private conversations by U.S. citizens? What is the order of magnitude? We don’t know.
To me, this amendment is simply common sense. The Delawareans for whom I work, the nation for whom we work expects that the government cannot listen in on their phone calls or read their emails unless a judge has signed a warrant.
If there is a reason why this requirement is not consistent with national security, then I say let the intelligence community make that case and allow us to debate that and consider it in public. It is to me simply not acceptable for the intelligence community to ask us to surrender our civil liberties and then refuse to tell us with any specificity why we must do so, the context and the scale of the exercise of this surveillance authority. In my view, America’s first principles demand better.
So I thank Senator Wyden for his leadership on this issue and I thank Majority Leader Reid for assuring we have the opportunity to debate and consider these amendments and the very important issues that they reflect here today. I urge all of my colleagues to consider carefully and then support these amendments to the FAA.
We cannot let the impending deadline distract us from the important opportunity to conduct oversight and implement responsible reforms. To simply be rushed to passage when we have known the deadline was approaching for years strikes me as an abrogation of our fundamental oversight responsibility. In my view, this chamber deserves a full and informed debate about our intelligence-gathering procedures and their potentially very real impact on Americans’ privacy rights, and we need it sooner rather than later. These amendments would allow us to have that conversation and to work together on a path that strikes the essential balance between privacy and security for the citizens of these United States.
Mr. President, this has been a hard week here in the Senate as we have said goodbye. As you’ve just seen in the remarks of the majority leader, retirements are very difficult. Parting with the company of honored and treasured colleagues here in the Senate is as hard as it is anywhere in the world, but we have had some particularly difficult moments here just earlier today as all of us assembled in the Rotunda of this great building of this Capitol to mourn the loss and celebrate the life of one of our greatest colleagues, Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii. Even now, his desk sits draped in black, and his chair with a lei flown in from his home State of Hawaii.
And all of us, this week we have all known and felt the change in this chamber. The Senate has lost a giant and America has lost a hero. Danny Inouye was truly a great man, and I feel blessed in my short time here, my two years to have had the opportunity to sit with him over a private lunch, to joke with him occasionally in the anteroom, to learn something of his spirit and his personality. He had such a big heart and such a wonderfully gracious spirit.
Most of the senators I have had the honor to come to know in these two years I only knew from a great distance as a local elected official, as someone in the business community at home in Delaware. Frankly, when I asked Senator Inouye to lunch, I was intimidated. As a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, as a giant of the Senate, as the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and the President pro tempore of this Senate I, frankly, trembled to sit with him at a lunch and was delighted to discover a person so approachable, so warm, so human, so hard working, so loyal, so spirited, and so passionate. So in the minutes ahead, I would like to share, if I can, a few insights about a dozen other senators who are retiring from this body and a few among them whom I have had the joy of getting to know in the last two years.
You don’t often see the level of humanity in the Senate that we have seen this week, but it is an important one, I think, that the people who work in this building can be better than the passing politics that sometimes dominates, and Senator Danny Inouye knew that. His enduring friendship with Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican of Alaska, was legendary. He believed passionately that it was important for us to work together and to get past party affiliation and the picayune matters of the moment and to do right for our country.
If I could, of the many speeches I heard in this chamber and the remarks we heard earlier today in the Capitol Rotunda, one thing leaps out at me about Danny Inouye: Even when he was declared an enemy alien–as were all of his ancestry at the outset of one of the greatest conflicts this world has known–Senator Inouye volunteered for service in Europe and in our most decorated military unit, the 442nd Combat Battalion. He engaged in the fields of Europe and the hill country of Italy in a moment of such personal sacrifice and remarkable bravery as to humble any who hear its details.
In his service over decades after that moment, he proved what he showed forth on that battlefield: that Danny Inouye believed in America even before America believed in him. Even in a moment of such immense injustice, in this country, this man’s great heart, his aloha spirit, his embrace of the American dream, even in the moment when it was made most bitterly unreal to thousands of people across this country of Japanese ancestry, he led us forward. He pulled us into the greatness that was meant for this country.
The star of Senator Inouye may have dimmed in this chamber, this chamber that is surrounded in its border by stars, but, Mr. President, as I share with you the daily honor of presiding over this chamber, I will–in the days and months and years ahead—looking to our flag and remember this Senator, who represented the 50th state, the state of Hawaii, from its very first moment of joining the stars on our flag in statehood. He has shown ever more brightly in his decades of service here, and that example of service pulls us forward into an ever brighter commitment to human dignity, to decency, to the respect for all in this country that his lifelong service challenged us to believe in.
Mr. President, there are so many other senators I want to speak about today, but let me turn to a few, if I might, and give, if I can, some insight for the folks who only see the members of this chamber on cable TV shows or in the give-and-take of election season or who only know them as the cutout and caricatures that the public thinks of as senators. If there is a common thread between them, it is that they share that loyalty, that work ethic, and that humility that so characterized Senator Inouye in his decades of service here.
Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana, with whom I’ve had the honor to serve on the Foreign Relations Committee, subscribes to that same philosophy. Over the 35 years he served in the Senate, he applied the practical perspective that experience as the mayor of Indianapolis gave him. He got to the work of making the world a safer place for all of us.
Along with nine of our colleagues, Senator Lugar will retire from this chamber this month after a remarkable career. He knew the stakes were too high to let partisan politics and personality prevent progress. On the Foreign Relations Committee, he partnered with Delaware’s own Joe Biden, with Senator John Kerry, and with Senator Sam Nunn. Because of that work together, there are today thousands fewer nuclear weapons in our world. Serving with Dick Lugar these last two years has been a tremendous honor.
As has been serving with Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, also a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, another retiring colleague, who knows there are things in this world, in our lives more important than our politics. A decorated marine, a celebrated author, a former Secretary of the Navy, and now a respected senator. His tireless work has helped to make the world safer, our veterans stronger, and our criminal justice system more fair. And I will truly miss his company.
Mr. President there are a few more retiring senators I would like to share some more detailed stories about today, but let me, if I might, start with my chairman from the Budget Committee, Senator Kent Conrad. Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota is a Senator I met many, many years ago. But if I am going to talk about him, I feel, I have to have a chart. You really cannot speak to Kent Conrad’s service and record here in the United States Senate without a chart.
Senator Kent Conrad tackled for decades the challenge of educating the men and women of the Senate and the people of this country about the very real fiscal and budgetary challenges facing our country. As we can see, especially after the debut of Microsoft Excel, and then after he was named Budget Committee chair, the steady increase and usage of floor charts by Senator Conrad has paved a path which few of us can hope to follow.
Senator Conrad is a budget wonk after my own heart, a numbers guy. Someone who is not afraid to get into the weeds and to project in a clear and legible format the minutia and magnifying details of the complex federal budget. I am not sure I have met anyone in the Senate so passionately serious about the numbers and about getting them right as my friend, Senator Conrad.
The first time I met him was more than 15 years ago. He had come to Wilmington for an event that then-Senator Biden hosted at the Delaware Art Museum. There were maybe 200 folks in a big auditorium. I will never forget Senator Biden introducing Senator Conrad as, literally, the most serious, most thoughtful, and most detailed budget leader in Washington.
Senator Conrad stands up and fires up his overhead projector, the lights dim, and he launches into a lengthy discourse on the minutia of the federal budget and deficit at the time. Thirty minutes and maybe more than 40 slides later, the lights came back up, and I think there were maybe 20 of us left in the auditorium. Everyone else wandered outside for the cocktails.
I was enthralled by his presentation, the clarity of his thinking, and by his dedication to get things right for the American people. Today I am on the Budget Committee, and I have enjoyed serving with Senator Conrad as my chairman. It was, for this budget nerd, a dream come true to have the chance to show up on time and know that this Budget Committee chairman was the other member of the committee who always showed up on time. It gave us a moment to reflect on the challenges we face and the very real solutions he has offered over these many years of service.
Senator Conrad has earned the deserved respect of his colleagues the old-fashioned way: through hard work, attention to detail, and thoughtful leadership. He has been trying and working hard for many years to get us to make the tough choices in the Senate that we need to make to deal with our national debt. He has not given up, and I don’t intend to either. I am grateful for his friendship and service.
Mr. President, another full committee chairman with whom I have had the honor to serve these past two years is Senator Bingaman of New Mexico, chairman of the Energy Committee. He is one of the kindest, smartest, gentlest people I have ever met. He has been a pleasure to work with on the Energy and Natural Resource Committee.
I remember we were both speaking at a conference on advanced energy research last year out at National Harbor. Thousands of scientists, investors, and entrepreneurs were there. I pulled up in front of the massive convention hall, and right out in front was a Prius with New Mexico plates. Sure enough, Chairman Jeff Bingaman jumps out of the driver’s seat – no staff.
So here was the chairman of the Energy Committee, and a senator for nearly 30 years, driving himself to a major policy speech in his Prius. Practicing what he preaches, as he prepared to deliver an important speech in a moment that showed his humility.
As unassuming a man as Senator Bingaman is, when he speaks, you listen. He is living proof that the value of one’s words can and should exceed their volume. On that day at National Harbor, Senator Bingaman delivered a message similar to one he had given a decade earlier in a report: “Rising Above the Gathering Storm.” Jeff Bingaman saw that this country was falling behind in the race for innovation, falling behind on investment in research and education, things that lay the foundation for our long-term competitiveness. This vision and concern haunted him, so he teamed up with our great colleague from Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, and challenged the National Academy of Sciences to study this trend and offer recommendations. From that challenge, we got the Seminole study, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm.”
It asked what it would take for America to continue to lead in innovation and it led to the America COMPETES Act and the creation of ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy. The very conference at which we had been speaking was the ARPA-E annual conference. Both of these important accomplishments played vital roles in our future competitiveness. They are focused on nurturing innovation, creating an ecosystem where political, scientific, and economic forces work together and not against each other.
That is Jeff Bingaman. That is his sweeping, long-range vision, one we should all heed. His commitment to thoughtful and forward-looking service on our nation’s long-term competitiveness will be sorely missed. But even more, I know many of us will miss his reserved, dignified passion.
I had a similar experience, Mr. President, with Senator Herb Kohl, my colleague on the Judiciary Committee. I remember in my first few months here that Senator Kohl spoke so rarely that when I first heard him speak at an event on the manufacturing extension partnership–one of his passions, and mine–I was struck by the power and reach of his voice. It is because he uses it so sparingly, but his example speaks even louder. He never sought the spotlight here but worked tirelessly to make a difference fighting for the little guy on antitrust issues in the Judiciary Committee.
He believes, as do I, that if an American entrepreneur has a great idea, we should help protect that idea by preventing trade secret theft and other intellectual property threats. We also share a deep commitment to the idea that higher education should be more accessible and affordable to every student who wants to pursue it. I am honored to have the opportunity to take up from Senator Kohl’s work on these and other important issues.
Outside this chamber Senator Kohl has just as strong a voice and broad an impact with his personal philanthropy, but we would never hear him speak about it; that is just not his style. He has earned my abiding respect with his unassuming grace and his determined leadership.
Mr. President, those who adhere to the Jewish faith around the world are inspired by the ancient concept of “tikkun olam” –“to heal the world”–to challenge to each of us who seek to serve each other and our communities. Like Senator Kohl, my dear friend Senator Joe Lieberman has certainly risen to that challenge. A man deeply committed to his faith, which has significantly influenced his career and his drive to serve, something I share with Senator Lieberman.
On my very first congressional delegation, my first trip as a senator, just a few months after being sworn in, I visited Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, and Israel. Senator Lieberman was on a different CODEL, and our paths crossed and we got to share a shabbat dinner at the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem one night. As he was crossing the room for us to sit, I realized he could be elected mayor of Jerusalem.
As we sat and broke bread and shared, it was a great comfort for me. Earlier that day, I had gotten word that Delaware had lost one of our great leaders, Muriel Gilman, a personal friend and a remarkable leader and a person of kindness and spirit. She was a pioneer for women in my state and personified this spirit of tikkun olam. So over dinner that night in Jerusalem, Senator Lieberman and I talked about Muriel, about what I had seen in Jordan and Israel, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and experienced in my first trip as a senator. It was just a remarkable moment for me. Senator Lieberman was engaging and warm, interesting and passionate as we talked about policy and faith, and he reflected with me on the point of his own life when his religion became his faith, when he really took ownership of the religion of his birth and how that faith and its lessons have shaped his public service. For me as a young senator, it was a formative moment.
His passion for the stability of the world and the security of the United States and our vital ally, Israel, and his dedicated work for the clarity of the air we breathe and his tireless advocacy for the equality of all Americans regardless of whom they love, has been inspirational. His desire to work together and find responsible compromise has been motivating.
I am deeply grateful to Joe Lieberman for his service, his counsel, and his friendship. And his lesson that, no matter what faith tradition we are from, we can use our service in this chamber as an opportunity to repair our world.
So, Mr. President, here we are, five days before my family celebrates Christmas and 12 days before the new year and the beginning of the so-called fiscal cliff. Our politics have paralyzed this chamber and this town. But what the example of all of these remarkable senators has shown us, what it has taught me: is that we can still be better than our politics.
The humanity of this place, too often shoved aside by the politics of the moment, shows us that we can do better. One by one, these senators, in delivering their farewell addresses to this chamber, stood at their desks and each in turn urged us to find a way to return to the days when senators knew each other and worked together. What will it take, Mr. President, to get us to that point again–a horrific tragedy in an elementary school? A dangerous economic cliff? Some devastating attack? A cyber assault on America?
Our retiring colleagues are each telling us, each in turn, that it is not too late to restore the humanity of this chamber and make a positive difference in the lives of all we serve. Will we heed their call? I hope and pray we will, because we can do better. We must do better. And in the spirit of each of these departing colleagues, I will do my level best. I hope we all can commit to doing the same.
Mr. President, I rise today with a heavy heart. When we first heard of the horrific shooting in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, it was impossible for me not to react, not just as a Senator but as a parent, as a father. And as my wife and I spent the weekend reflecting on the heartbreaking loss of 20 innocent children and six of their teachers and faculty, as we talked to our own three young children about what had happened, we thought about the grief, the anguish for a whole range of different parents deeply touched by this tragic incident.
The first, of course, are the parents who lost their precious, innocent children, their six- and seven-year-olds in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday. Parents like Joel and JoAnn Bacon, who lost their precocious, outgoing, red-haired daughter Charlotte, just six years old. JoAnn had recently bought Charlotte a new holiday dress in her favorite color–pink–and a pair of white boots. Charlotte had begged and begged to wear her new outfit early, and on Friday, December 14, the last day of Charlotte’s young life, her mother JoAnn agreed.
Or parents like Steve and Rebecca Kowalski, who lost their active and athletic seven-year-old son Chase. Just two days before the shooting, Chase’s next-door neighbor had asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and I understand he pointed to his two missing front teeth.
Any of us who have had the special blessing and joy of raising young children, especially at holiday time, can only imagine the unbearable sorrow of these families who now and forever will have a child-sized hole in their hearts and their lives.
We offer them whatever small measure of comfort we can in knowing that you are not alone, that all across this country and world we pray for your healing, and we hope that with time you and your families can come to understand and live through the grief of this moment.
We also think, Mr. President, of other parents, parents who years before raised their young adult children to give back to their community and the next generation by being teachers. In addition to the heroics of school principal Dawn Hochsprung, school psychologist Mary Sherlach and teacher Anne Marie Murphy, a mother of four herself, three other very young teachers gave their lives to protect the students in their care: Lauren Rousseau, a 30-year-old substitute teacher; Victoria Soto, a heroic 27-year-old teacher; and Rachel D’Avino, a 29-year-old whose boyfriend was planning to propose on Christmas Eve. Their parents too, their families, their loved ones, now lost, are in our prayers.
There is, also, I think, in our hearts today the families of the courageous first responders who rushed toward danger as everyone else rushed away. In any emergency, Mr. President, as you know, as a former attorney general, our law enforcement officers face unknown danger with extraordinary courage. At Sandy Hook Elementary, police officers rushed inside knowing full well that an armed gunman awaited them. What they found was unimaginable. Thank God they arrived as quickly as they did or the carnage might have been worse. But we need but reflect for a moment on what those police officers and firefighters and folks from the ME’s office ultimately found–unspeakable carnage. These heroes could not react as parents, as community members. They had to choke back their own grief and horror to carry out their professional responsibilities to catalogue, and investigate and document every detail of this tragic scene so that justice can be done and lessons learned. The scars of those long hours on a crime scene like this last a lifetime, and our first responders all across this country in situations like this bear them with honor and dignity and without complaint.
Mr. President, this tragedy, of course, also has ripple effects far beyond Sandy Hook and far beyond Newtown, Connecticut. All over this country there are parents whose children struggle with mental illness, with mental health challenges and who don’t have the resources they need to cope. My office has had many calls from worried parents since Friday’s shootings, worried for many reasons, but one that really stood out for me was a dad from Newark, Delaware, whose own child is struggling with mental illness and who is working hard to try and find the resources to ensure appropriate care so that someday he isn’t watching with horror on the television as the tragic actions of his child unfold.
We think of the story also shared online of the mother in Idaho, terrified her own son has the capacity to kill someday and yet without the ability to give him the intensive medical care, treatment, and intervention she believes he needs.
Across this country, mental health care is a growing challenge for us. Between 2009 and 2011, states cut more than $2 billion from community mental health services. Two-thirds of states have significantly slashed funding in these difficult economic times, leaving parents seeking help for their mentally ill children often with nowhere to turn.
Mr. President, we must do better for all these parents–the parents who lost their children at Sandy Hook Elementary, the parents who lost their children who were teachers and faculty, the families of those who were first responders and families who struggle with children with mental illnesses and mental health problems.
But, frankly, this week I also think about parents all over our country who have lost their children, just as precious and just as innocent as those at Sandy Hook, to gun violence that’s outside the media spotlight. The truth is gun violence knows no boundaries of race or class, but our national response at times seems to.
There were 41 murders in Delaware alone last year, 28 of them where guns were used as the murder weapon.
Sixteen-year-old Alexander Kamara was playing in a soccer tournament at Eden Park in my hometown of Wilmington this summer when he was shot and killed in an execution-style public murder.
Dominique Helm, age 19, standing with his teenage cousins on the steps of his Brandywine Village row house last September when a gunman opened fire. He stumbled through the doorway and died in his living room as his mother Nicole ran to him.
Stories like these are tragically, appallingly, common across our country every day. Every day, 34 Americans are murdered with a gun. It happens in our streets and in our neighborhoods. It happens in movie theaters in Aurora, Colorado, and houses of worship in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. It happens in high schools in Littleton, Colorado, and on a college campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It happens outside a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona, where one of the six people killed was nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green–a child born herself on 9/11, imbued with a sense of hope and a call to public service, who wanted to meet her Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in order to learn more about public service.
They say, Mr. President, that nearly 40 percent of Americans know someone directly who has been a victim of gun violence. In Christina’s case, her father was my high school classmate back in Delaware. Gun violence touches families, communities, and neighborhoods all over this country.
So, Mr. President, what do we owe these parents? What can we offer their families besides our thoughts and prayers? I believe we must fulfill our central responsibility of protecting the safety of our children and our communities, while also preserving the individual liberties guaranteed in our Constitution.
On Sunday night, we watched or president, President Obama, speak to a community reeling in shock and grief for the fourth time in his time as president. He asked us as a nation whether we are doing enough to protect our children, and he gave us the painfully honest answer that we did not give ourselves after Fort Hood, after Tucson, after Aurora. He said, no, we are not. We are not doing enough to protect our own children.
Horrible crimes like these have a very complex web of causes–including, of course, mental illness. This complexity presents us with a complicated challenge. But the reality is, Mr. President, the United States has the highest rate of gun deaths in the industrialized world, nearly 20 times higher than comparable nations.
In my view, this calls out for a comprehensive approach, for a thorough and searching examination of the causes of this uniquely American crisis. And I believe it requires action by this Congress and our president.
I have received calls and letters, e-mails and Facebook posts, from Delawareans around the state, Republicans and Democrats, doctors and teachers, parents and children. They have shared with me their grief and their ideas, and they have called for action.
The United States has a long and proud tradition of independence, of protecting ourselves, of exercising our right to self-determination, of hunting and of a sporting tradition that is enshrined in our Second Amendment. And we have to recognize the importance–the legitimacy–of the concerns of gun owners to know that in the debate that can and will and should unfold in this chamber we will respect their right to bear arms and that we will respect and honor this most important part of America’s fabric. But every constitutionally protected right has its boundaries, its limitations.
And I am troubled in particular by the thread that ties together too many of these tragic mass shootings: that the perpetrator had clear mental health problems, unaddressed, untreated mental illness challenges, and used military-style weapons and clips that have no place in everyday civilian life.
Several of my colleagues have already come forward with proposals–Senators Manchin, Lautenberg, Warner and Feinstein, and others. And of all of these, I will touch on a few.
I believe reinstating the ban on high-capacity magazines, focusing on ammunition and on the outrageously devastating impact of military clips and military ammunition particularly on children across all these instances—I think we should focus on that, and reinstate the ban on high-capacity magazines in the next Congress.
In addition, Senator Lieberman just the other day on the floor–and he has been joined by Senator Rockefeller–has called for a study to gain better understandings of the linked issues of mental health, mass shootings, and the desensitization to violence in our culture. President Obama has picked that up and carried it forward, and is proposing a new commission which the Vice President–Delaware’s own Joe Biden–will be chairing. And it’s my hope that out of this important work we can find a path forward that marries the crying need to deal with mental health issues with cultural concerns about violence and desensitization with responsible limitations on the excessive use of military-style weapons and clips.
Last, in my view, we can and must do more to keep guns out of the hands of those with a history of violent crime or demonstrated mental illness. Our database system is broken and has to be repaired.
At Virginia Tech, 32 students and professors were murdered by a young man who got a gun he should have been prohibited from buying. A court had already ruled he was mentally ill and posed an imminent danger, but these findings simply weren’t reported to the FBI’s gun background check system. Mr. President, that is a travesty. The parents of those 32 murdered in Blacksburg, Virginia should be crying out for justice.
We should ensure that no gun sold in this country is sold to someone we know to be dangerous or who poses a direct threat to innocent American lives. Today, an estimated 40 percent of all gun sales–some six million weapons a year–are sold by unlicensed dealers who aren’t required to conduct any criminal background check under federal law. This is how 12 students and one teacher were murdered at Columbine High School in Colorado, with guns bought from an unlicensed seller–no paperwork, no questions asked.
It is my hope, it is my prayer, that we will work to address this and many other complex but important issues in the coming weeks and months, and that we will consider all these proposals carefully and reach a balanced but effective solution. I will apply the test of balance to find ways that we can continue to respect our traditions and protect constitutional liberties while still advancing our moral requirement to keep our kids and our communities safe.
As parents, we can’t help but react with horror at the slaughter of innocent children in their classrooms. We all have to take time first to grieve with our families and our communities; but as policymakers, we also have a calling to react to the facts as we see them. And in this regard a reaction will have three stages: we need to reflect, we need to debate, and then we need to act.
The reflection and the debate have already begun. The action is still to come. And Mr. President, I look forward to working with you and my colleagues in the weeks and months ahead to ensure that this time we act. The victims of Newtown, Connecticut, deserve nothing less.
Mr. President, I rise today to mark the 376th anniversary of a great American institution that is critical to our safety and security here and abroad, the National Guard. The National Guard goes back to the citizens soldier tradition of our colonial-era militia, of citizens who took up arms or who came together for collective action in times of natural disaster or threat, and the National Guard today, 376 years later, still has that dual mission to serve our communities by responding to domestic emergencies and to deploy when needed to serve and protect our nation overseas.
While they do all this, Mr. President, they also hold down often full-time civilian jobs. In their daily lives, National Guard troops are teachers and police officers, firefighters and office workers. Then when called upon by their governor or their commander in chief, they change their uniforms and report for duty as citizen soldiers.
In my home state, Mr. President, our Delaware National Guard is on the front lines every day. Whether they are keeping our streets safe after a storm, deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan or traveling to other parts of the country to help our citizens recover and cities rebuild in the wake of a natural disaster.
Organized and led so capably by our Adjutant Major General Frank Vavala, the Delaware National Guard has the capability to keep us safe. They transport people and supplies on land and through the air, they defend the nation in cyberspace, they support law enforcement’s work against illegal drugs, they are on the scene of any suspicious chemical or biological event, and they enable friendly forces to communicate with each other in war zones.
When duty calls, Mr. President, the Delaware National Guard is there. The 153rd Military Police Company, for example, was deployed to Iraq where they log hundreds of combat patrols on some of the most dangerous streets in the world and trained Iraqi police officers in all aspects of their profession. And in January, this unit will deploy again, this time to Afghanistan. The 126th Medical Aviation Battalion was deployed to Afghanistan where they flew 400 priority MEDEVAC missions for over 500 critically injured patients, about half to unsecure landing zones outside of secure walls or fortified structures.
These are just two examples of the many ways that the Delaware Guard protects our nation overseas, but they are also vital to our security here at home. When there is a blizzard, the National Guard uses their Humvees and heavy trucks to transport Delawareans with medical emergencies. When Superstorm Sandy struck just last month, 120 soldiers from Delaware traveled with heavy equipment to assist recovery efforts in New York and New Jersey. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, two of our C-130 aircraft left from New Castle Airport the next day, carrying the first of what would be 400 troops from Delaware who assisted with Gulf Coast recovery.
The National Guard is resourceful, ready to serve and they go everywhere they’re called. These are truly
citizen soldiers. When I was the County Executive of New Castle County, Delaware, we had as many as seven different county employees at different times deployed overseas, many of them police officers, called up for their National Guard service, folks who are the epitome of serving at home and serving abroad. So it’s with a very personal sense of the needs and the challenges when I thank those employers who recognize that even when they are not at their desks, even when they are not contributing to their employer, our National Guard members are making a vital contribution to our community and to our country.
Mr. President, tomorrow morning, I’m going to the Pentagon where I’ll talk with leaders there about critical needs in an age of ongoing budget austerity. One of the priorities I’m fighting for is a responsible investment in our National Guard. These heroes deserve more than our gratitude. They deserve our rock-solid commitment to ensuring they have the resources they need to do their jobs. The National Guard plays a unique dual role in our security as first responders and as a reserve force for foreign conflicts.
We have to make sure they have got equipment and support for both their military missions and their domestic missions. I’m proud that this year the President signed into law legislation to give the Chief of the National Guard bureau a seat at the table, a seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I was glad to help work to build bipartisan support for this bill because I believe the Joint Chiefs need someone at the table who has seen the full capabilities and range of operations and the unique challenges and resources of the National Guard firsthand.
So 376 years after its founding, the National Guard continues to grow and evolve to meet the security challenges for the United States in the 21st century. I believe the Guard of the future must continue to fulfill both sides of this vital, dual mission. Additionally, it must be a place where highly skilled soldiers and airmen can continue to serve their country while also working in and serving civilian communities. The Guard can and should be a bridge between the military and civilian responses to threats facing the United States, not least of which is cyber attacks and terrorism.
Mr. President, on this anniversary, the National Guard remains essential to the safety and security of Americans at home and abroad, and today I’d like to thank the soldiers and airmen of the Delaware National Guard, as well as the entire National Guard family at home and abroad for their service and dedication to our country.