[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 170 (Wednesday, November 18, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8058-S8060]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




EXPRESSING SUPPORT FOR THE GOALS OF NATIONAL ADOPTION DAY AND NATIONAL 
                             ADOPTION MONTH

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate 
proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 315, submitted earlier today.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the resolution by title.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

       A resolution (S. Res. 315) expressing support for the goals 
     of both National Adoption Day and National Adoption Month by 
     promoting national awareness of adoption and the children 
     awaiting families, celebrating children and families involved 
     in adoption, and encouraging the people of the United States 
     to secure safety, permanency, and well-being for all 
     children.

  There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the 
resolution.
  Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, 
the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon 
the table with no intervening action or debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The resolution (S. Res. 315) was agreed to.
  The preamble was agreed to.
  (The resolution, with its preamble, is printed in today's Record 
under ``Submitted Resolutions.'')
  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, before I start my remarks, let me say how 
pleased I am to see Senator Reed and Senator Collins here with this 
important bill, the opportunity to amend the bill and do the business 
we should be doing.
  This Senator is also glad to be here with Senator Klobuchar. She and 
I cochair the Senate side of the congressional caucus on adoption, and 
the resolution that was just agreed to adopts November as National 
Adoption Month, and November 21 as National Adoption Day. While we are 
here talking about this, all of our States have kids who need to be 
adopted.
  If you went to the Missouri Department of Social Services Web site 
today, you would find 114 foster youth who are ready and waiting to be 
adopted. If you looked around the country today, you would find that 
there are 415,000 children in the U.S. foster care system and 108,000 
of those kids are waiting to be adopted. Last year 22,000 young men and 
women aged out of the foster care system and they never got that 
opportunity for the permanent home, the forever home that could make 
such a difference in their lives, not only as a kid but their lives as 
an adult.
  I have two or three kids I want to talk about. Austin is 12. He is 
full of energy. He has a great smile. He is extremely active, as lots 
of 12-year-old boys are. He loves to be outside. He enjoys, as he would 
phrase it, ``going on adventures.'' He likes animals. He would like to 
live on a farm one day. He likes basketball. He likes being on his 
basketball team, but mostly he would like to have a family. Mostly his 
dream is the dream that he would have a family to encourage him and 
support him.
  There are two other young brothers, aged 11 and 7. When you first 
meet Mykez, you can tell he is relaxed. He is laid back. He is an easy 
guy to be with. In his free time he likes being active. He likes to be 
on his bike. He likes to play football. If it is possible being 
outdoors, he would like to be outdoors, but he is also happy with a 
video game or with the TV. At school he likes history class the best, 
but his best grade in school is art. His brother Jameer appears to be 
pretty shy and quiet, but once he gets to know you, he easily turns on 
the charm. He is a football and basketball guy as well, but he enjoys 
quiet activities such as drawing, reading, and coloring. He loves being 
with his brother. He loves video games. His favorite class is math, 
earning his highest grade there. But what they would like is a family. 
They would like a family that would allow them to keep in contact with 
their siblings but would also give them some structure, some attention, 
and some consistency that has been missing in their life.
  Marissa is 5. She has some challenges. She is a sweet, loving girl. 
She is happy, curious, and loves to laugh. She has a hard time right 
now expressing herself in lots of other ways. She is working on 
building her vowels and consonant sounds. She works on her sign 
language vocabulary. She has a spunky attitude, but she would melt the 
heart of a future family if those things ever become connected.
  There are tens of thousands of children all over the country just 
like them who just need a family--tens of thousands of children where a 
family could make all the difference in the world, not only when they 
are growing up but when they are adults and they have that family to 
turn back to.
  Nobody is better to work with on these issues than Senator Klobuchar. 
I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with her and then come 
back to me in a little bit after she has had a chance to talk about the 
importance of National Adoption Month and National Adoption Day.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I actually would have a question, 
first, of Senator Blunt, because I know he is the parent of an adopted 
child from Russia.
  I heard a rumor they are traveling to every State in the Union; is 
that correct?
  Mr. BLUNT. We are trying.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. OK, good. I wanted to get that on the record because I 
know he wanted to come to North Dakota, which is everyone's dream, and 
so Senator Blunt asked for some advice from me to go to the great State 
of North Dakota.
  Your child whom you adopted is Russian, and we have so many issues 
with some of these countries, from Russia to the Congo. I know families 
in Minnesota who have adopted children from Russia, and they were just 
ready to adopt the sibling. They met the brother or sister--and of 
course the kids know the brother or sister--and then the curtain was 
brought down, and those kids were literally pawns in a political game 
when Russia stopped all adoptions.
  Senator Blunt is hosting a meeting with the people involved in 
adoptions in the Congo. We have had a similar situation where the visas 
were pulled and the parents who visited these kids and are ready to 
adopt these kids haven't been able to do that.
  I wondered if Senator Blunt could comment on the situation with these 
countries and what the Senator thinks we can do.
  Mr. BLUNT. I think this is a problem, and there are lots of families 
in the United States who would love to

[[Page S8059]]

have kids from wherever in the world kids are who need families. The 
two examples you have just given are some of the frustrations of 
international adoption in just the last few years, where thousands of 
kids were coming to the United States from other countries such as 
China, Ethiopia, Guatemala, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and 
certainly from Russia.
  The tragedy of so many of these stories is that the child has 
suddenly seen that opportunity, they have bonded with families, and 
they have gone through the whole process. Many people, when Russia 
stopped Russian adoptions, were ready to go to court, had been to 
Russia multiple times and had exchanged visits and photos. Not only is 
it that the family is ready for the adoption to occur, but, more 
importantly, the person who is to be adopted is ready for the adoption 
to occur.
  Just to show what can happen, in the case of Russia, the kids who 
were closest to being adopted by American families, the Russian 
Government suddenly created incentives to put them at the top of a list 
that doesn't get much attention, which gave special incentives to 
Russian families to adopt these kids before the American families who 
were ready to welcome them could adopt them.
  We are having a meeting today with the Ambassador from the Democratic 
Republic of the Congo, and I am grateful the Ambassador would come. Our 
real concern there is that there are many kids in the Congo who had 
actually been adopted. There was a commission that had been put in 
place to study the question of why they can't get their exit visas now 
to leave with the families the courts in the Democratic Republic of the 
Congo have said could adopt these kids and that group has been 
disbanded. All that is necessary there is the exit opportunity--the 
exit permission--to leave the country to go with the families who have 
already legally adopted them.
  The Senator and I and several of our colleagues are going to meet 
with the Ambassador today. We are glad he is coming. We would like to 
see that meeting result in going back and looking at cases where their 
government has already decided this is a great match for these kids and 
these families and figure out how to let those families get their kids 
to the United States.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Thank you. This is also very important in my State. As 
I mentioned, we have the highest rate of international adoptions in the 
country. We have families who have opened their hearts and their homes 
to kids from every country, including Vietnam, Guatemala, Nepal, and 
Haiti.
  In my background as county attorney, for 8 years I oversaw the 
lawyers who worked with foster care and adoptions. We made it a huge 
priority to try to speed up the process for kids to be adopted from 
foster care. Right now in our country nearly 400,000 children are 
living without permanent families in the foster care system. Over 
100,000 of these children are eligible for adoption, but too many of 
them will languish for years in foster care--oftentimes with very good 
families for them, but obviously a permanent home is what you want.
  We talked about international adoptions around the world. There are 
estimated to be nearly 18 million orphans who have lost both parents 
and are living in orphanages or on the streets who want, again, a 
permanent home.
  Senator Blunt talked about some examples from his own State. One 
example is the Hatch family. Emerson Hatch was one of these orphaned 
children. They started the process to adopt her from India in 2000. 
Emerson was one of 300 kids living in an orphanage built to house 34 
children.
  The Indian Government refused to release her, and the family had to 
endure a 2-year wait, an earthquake, and a contested election in India 
before they were finally able to get her out of India with 1 minute to 
spare before her passport expired. She was malnourished, 2 years old 
but only weighed 14 pounds and was in poor health.
  But with a lot of love and the help of the Adoption Medicine Clinic 
at the University of Minnesota, Emerson and the Hatch family are 
thriving. She is in high school, and the family is passionate about 
giving orphans permanent, loving homes.
  There are many things that this Senate can do. The first, as Senator 
Blunt explained, is leading efforts when countries put up barriers for 
no good reason. Obviously, sometimes you will have legal issues in 
countries with corruption or other reasons why there is a pause in 
adoptions. But when countries are putting up barriers for no good 
reasons and for reasons that are fairly transparent, we must lead and 
work with other Senators across the aisle to get this done.
  The second is legislation. We have had a number of successful bills 
passed in the Senate. The bill I am probably proudest of is something 
that I did with Senator Sessions and Senator Inhofe, which was to allow 
older siblings to come in internationally when a younger sibling had 
been adopted. What was happening is kids would turn 17 after holding 
the family together as the oldest sibling, and then they would no 
longer be eligible for adoption.
  We had a family out of the Philippines with nine children, and the 
oldest two kids helped hold them together in an orphanage and then they 
turned too old to be adopted. That family I will never forget. The 
Merkourises came to me and said: Well, we have these choices. We can 
adopt the seven kids and leave the two behind--it was like a ``Sophie's 
Choice''--or we can leave them all there because we want them to stay 
together or you can change the law. That was the discussion.
  So I worked with my colleagues. I will never forget. The Merkourises 
came with pictures of these children on their iPads and went around to 
the offices of House Members and Senators who were holding up the bill 
and showed them to their staff members. The staff members would call 
our staff crying and said: OK, well, we won't hold it up anymore. And 
we were able to get that passed.
  To Senator Blunt, I was able to be with that family in their home, a 
farmhouse that they have expanded. It was like a Philippine version of 
``The Sound of Music.'' They are an incredible family. I just talked to 
them a few months ago, and they are doing very well.
  This is, I would argue to our colleagues, a bipartisan area in 
Congress. It is something we can do across the aisle, but it is also 
something where we can make significant difference--not just in one 
family's life but in many, many families' lives.
  I thank the Senator for his work and his continued leadership in this 
area.
  Mr. BLUNT. I would say in this regard that there are several things 
we are trying to do that we are still working on with Senator Klobuchar 
and others together. Clearly, there are great stories to be told.
  One thing we don't want to forget with National Adoption Month and 
National Adoption Day is the many families and the many individuals who 
benefit from adoptions. It is very easy to talk about the frustrations 
of trying to make things work better--the foster kids who aren't 
adopted, the international kids who should be here who have families 
who want them to be here.
  We also want to talk about the many success stories. We had an Angels 
in Adoption event just a few weeks ago and recognized from virtually 
every State a family that had done something extraordinary, such as the 
family who took a family from the Philippines. Expanding the farmhouse 
is probably job one if you are going to bring nine more people into 
your house.
  The Supporting Adoptive Families Act, the Timely Mental Health for 
Foster Youth Act, and the Adoption Tax Credit Refundability Act all 
need attention to make adoption work and to make it easier. It is life 
changing for everybody involved and, in most cases, it is life changing 
not just for the family but for anybody who really knows the family and 
sees what happens when people are able to reach out, become a family, 
and make a difference in the moment but also to make a difference 
forever.
  I will let Senator Klobuchar finish, but working on these issues is 
important, and it is bipartisan. You are never going to find anybody 
who says: Well, we don't need that. But we do need to be sure we are 
paying the kind of attention that we need to make this work better, to 
make it easier, and to increase the chances that adoptive families not 
only are able to become adoptive families but that they are

[[Page S8060]]

also able and more likely to be successful adoptive families.
  Again, I thank Senator Klobuchar for her leadership and for her work.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Thank you.
  As you know, our work is never done. We have a number of bills out 
there for which we have bipartisan support and that we are going to 
work on.
  I think my last statement would be that our kids deserve so much more 
than just a roof over their heads and a bed to sleep in. Each and every 
child deserves a loving home, a nurturing family, and a brighter 
future. That is what National Adoption Month is all about, and that is 
why Senator Blunt and I are on the floor today. That is why all of us 
have a responsibility to carry on this torch and to keep fighting for 
these children.
  I thank Senator Blunt.
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________