[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 86 (Wednesday, May 22, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3026-S3028]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                       Senate Legislative Agenda

  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, we are now 5 months into the new 116th 
Congress. During that 5-month period, the new Democratic majority in 
the House of Representatives has passed a series of bills on issues 
important to the overwhelming majority of the American public. They 
include legislation to reduce the death toll from gun violence by 
requiring universal criminal background checks and legislation to end 
the millions and millions of dollars of secret money flowing into 
elections and polluting our politics. The House legislation includes a 
bill to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work, and the 
House has also passed legislation to strengthen the protections under 
the Violence Against Women Act. Those are just some of the initiatives 
the House has passed in the last 5 months.
  Here in the Senate, what has the Senate done on those important 
issues? What has the Senate done with the legislation that the House 
has passed and is now sitting in this body? We have done nothing--zip. 
We haven't taken up any of those bills. In fact, the Senate Republican 
leader has refused to allow this body to consider those important 
measures.
  What are we doing instead? Instead, the Senate is consuming all of 
its time not on the matters most important to the public but on 
debating and confirming judicial and executive branch nominees. Here is 
the thing: If you look at these judicial nominees--let's just take the 
ones we are looking at this week--you will find a very dangerous 
pattern.
  This week, in looking at the five nominees, the pattern is selecting 
judges who will strip away women's reproductive choices and who will 
strip

[[Page S3027]]

away and potentially eliminate the rights under Roe v. Wade. That is 
the clear pattern.
  If you look at the records of these nominees, they indicate hostility 
toward a woman's right to choose and hostility to Roe v. Wade. Take, 
for example, Stephen Clark. He is the nominee for the Eastern District 
of Missouri. He drew the outrageous comparison between Dred Scott and 
Roe v. Wade, including Roe as bad law. He also opposed provisions in 
the Affordable Care Act that would expand access to contraception to 
help people avoid unintended pregnancies.
  Then there is the nomination of Kenneth Bell to be a judge in the 
Western District of North Carolina. He has argued that abortion rights, 
the pro-choice position, is ``indefensible'' and went on to say that 
``there is no middle ground'' on this issue. In other words, he is 
another judge who would deny women the right of reproductive choice, 
and the list goes on if you look at the list of judges who are before 
the Senate this week.
  This would be alarming at any point in time, but the timing of these 
nominations is no coincidence. Just in the last couple of months, we 
have seen States around the country passing laws to take away a woman's 
right to choose.
  Let's take a look at Alabama. In the case of Alabama, they passed a 
law that denies a woman's right to choose to have an abortion even in 
the case of rape or incest. Under the Alabama law, doctors who perform 
abortions could be locked up in prison for up to 99 years--a prison 
term longer than that of a rapist.
  We also have Candidate Trump arguing that not only should doctors be 
punished but women who exercise their rights to reproductive choice 
should be punished too.
  Meanwhile, in addition to Alabama, five other States have passed laws 
that would outlaw abortion at a very early stage--in fact, at a stage 
of pregnancy when many women do not realize they are yet pregnant, 
especially if the pregnancy is unplanned and unexpected.
  I think people recognize how outrageous it is to see State 
legislators and other elected officials who normally take the position 
that the government has no place in regulating or being involved in any 
aspect of our lives, who then take the position that they want the 
government right between a woman and her most sensitive decisions with 
respect to reproductive choice.
  We have legislators who say they don't want the government protecting 
people from air pollution. They don't want to pass any regulations to 
protect people from air pollution or water pollution. We have some 
legislators who say they don't want any legislation to protect 
consumers from predatory lending or other scams in the economy. They 
don't think the government has a role there, but, by God, when it comes 
to interfering with a woman's right to choose, they want the government 
smack in the middle of that decision. That is what Alabama has done. 
That is what the other five States have done.
  Now we have judicial nominees coming before the Senate who are going 
to sign off potentially on those State laws.
  It gets even more alarming because we also see a pattern from the 
judicial decisions that have been made and from the records of a lot of 
the nominees who are before us now of judges or people being appointed, 
who not only want to strip away a woman's right to reproductive choice 
but who actually want to go after programs that help provide family 
planning, programs that help prevent unwanted and unplanned 
pregnancies. So, on the one hand, States are passing these laws 
restricting a woman's right to choose, but at the same time they are 
saying that they want to get rid of or severely limit programs that 
prevent unintended pregnancies.
  Looking at the figures from the Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention--and they keep statistics on all sorts of health 
indicators--you will find that from 2006 to the year 2015, there was a 
24-percent drop in the number of abortions in the United States. There 
was a 24-percent drop in the years between 2006 and 2015. Researchers 
who have looked into this have determined that the biggest driver 
behind this decline in abortion has been increased access to 
contraception and family planning. Yet the Trump administration is 
going after and targeting for elimination the very programs that help 
reduce unintended pregnancy and, therefore, also help reduce abortions. 
So this administration is trying to take a hatchet to title X. They 
want to essentially take Planned Parenthood out of the equation, even 
though Planned Parenthood provides family planning services to 4 in 10 
women.
  As we all know, Planned Parenthood is barred by law from spending any 
Federal dollars on abortion. They spend most of their time counseling 
their patients on family planning and helping people make decisions 
about contraception to avoid unplanned pregnancies.
  This administration tried to target the Teen Pregnancy Prevention 
Program. I know that because it went after a program in Baltimore City 
that has been very successful in reducing teenage pregnancy.
  In fact, if you look at Baltimore from a period during the year of 
2000 to 2016, we saw a 61-percent decline in teen pregnancy. That was 
as a result of a number of programs, easier access to contraception, 
the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program that was targeted for elimination 
by the Trump administration, and, after the Affordable Care Act went 
into effect, the ability to access contraception as a result of the 
Affordable Care Act.
  All of these measures to help prevent unplanned pregnancies have also 
helped to significantly reduce the number of abortions. Yet we have an 
administration that wants to go after those family planning programs, 
and we have a number of judges who would side with the administration. 
I will mention a couple of important family planning programs.
  One is title X. This administration wanted to severely undermine 
title X. It has not been successful. Why not? Because it was taken to 
court. So far, the courts have stayed the administration's decision.
  Let's look at the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which I 
mentioned, that is so important in Baltimore. The administration wanted 
to eliminate it, and so we had to go to court. The judge said that it 
was an illegal action--an unauthorized action--by the Trump 
administration.
  Let's look at the contraception provisions--the provisions on access 
to contraception--in the Affordable Care Act. This administration wants 
to wipe them out. The only reason they are still there is due to the 
courts. The courts have been very important not only in protecting a 
woman's right to choose but in protecting these important family 
planning programs that have prevented unintended pregnancies and, 
therefore, have also reduced the number of abortions.
  Now we have a whole bunch of judges who are coming before the Senate 
who would rule differently in all of these cases. That is why I believe 
the American people need to really be alarmed about what is happening 
here. We are not acting on important measures that are coming out of 
the House that I mentioned earlier. What we are doing is spending the 
full time passing through judges--in a factory-like procedure here--who 
will undermine a woman's right to choose and go after important family 
planning programs. We have a lot to think about, and I hope all of our 
colleagues will recognize what is happening here.
  I will go back to where I started.
  Instead of churning out judges who are going to strip away the rights 
of women--and other nominees who side with big corporations against 
consumers--let's take up the legislation that is in front of us right 
now that has come over from the House.
  We have before us H.R. 8. It is the Bipartisan Background Checks 
legislation. It was bipartisan because it came out of the House on a 
bipartisan vote.
  It was bipartisan because, if you ask the public, 85 percent of the 
public is in favor of the simple idea that we should have criminal 
background checks and that the people who have committed crimes 
shouldn't be able to go to gun shows and purchase guns. If you have a 
record of posing a danger to the community, my goodness, why would we 
want to put a gun in your hand and endanger the community?

[[Page S3028]]

  It is a pretty straightforward piece of legislation, and it has been 
in this Senate for 83 days now. For 83 days, it has been sitting right 
here in the Senate, but the Republican leader will not let us take it 
up to debate it or to vote on it.
  I mentioned another bill that came over from the House that would get 
rid of secret money in politics. What do I mean by that?
  After the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, we had two 
things happen. One was that just a flood of corporate money flew into 
elections because, before that decision, corporations could not spend 
money directly to try to elect public officials. The Congress had 
previously passed a law to prevent that, and previous Supreme Courts 
had upheld that ban on corporate spending to try to elect public 
officials. In Citizens United, they decided, well, corporations are 
people, too, for the purpose of spending money in elections. So they 
got rid of that law.
  If you read that opinion, even those who voted to overturn those laws 
said that what is going to protect the system will be the public's 
knowing who will be spending all of that money. They said: All right, 
we are going to let corporations spend all of that money. We are going 
to let 501(c)(4)s spend all of that money. Do you know what? The public 
will know, and that will serve as a check on the system. That will 
provide transparency, and the transparency will provide accountability.
  Guess what. It didn't happen. In fact, the Senate's Republican leader 
has been one of the arch opponents of any kind of transparency and 
disclosure. I have had a long-running back-and-forth with him on this 
issue because, even if you look at the proponents of the terrible 
Citizens United decision, as I said, those Justices said: Well, 
transparency will take care of it. The reality is that people spend 
millions and millions of dollars in secret money in elections.
  Let me just tell people that it may be secret to the public, but it 
is not a big secret to the candidates who are running. It is not a big 
secret to them who is spending millions of dollars to try to get them 
elected or to defeat them. That is a farce. Years ago, when I was in 
the House, I authored something called the DISCLOSE Act. It passed the 
House. It died here by one vote. We got 59 votes on an almost identical 
bill. It didn't get 60. So we still have secret money in politics 
today.
  My view is that voters have a right to know who is spending millions 
of dollars to try to influence their decisions, and that is a big part 
of the bill that came over from the House 74 days ago. It is called the 
For the People Act. It has a lot of other important provisions in it to 
protect our elections and important provisions to make sure that we 
uphold the right to vote.
  Among the important provisions is the DISCLOSE Act--to get rid of 
secret money in politics. That is sitting over here and has been for 74 
days.
  What else has the House sent over? It sent over the Equal Pay Act, 
which has a pretty straightforward idea, and I think most Americans 
agree with it. In fact, public surveys show that people agree that if 
you put in an equal day's work--if you put in the sweat equity, if you 
do the job--and if a woman does the job just like the man does the job, 
by God, obviously, she should get paid the same amount. It is a pretty 
simple concept. That came over from the House. In fact, it came over 
from the House just 55 days ago. For 55 days, it has been sitting here.
  Another bill that has come over from the House also relates to making 
sure that we address issues that are important to all of us, but it has 
specifically dealt with the Violence Against Women Act. What we say 
within the Violence Against Women Act, in the House bill, is that if 
you have someone who is abusing you in a relationship--it doesn't have 
to be your spouse; it could be someone else who is abusing you in a 
relationship--they shouldn't be able to go out and buy a gun. What we 
have seen from the sad statistics is that those kinds of situations 
often escalate into somebody's getting killed when someone is in a 
relationship in which one of the people in that relationship is abusing 
the other.
  Just as we prevent the sale of guns to spouses who have records of 
domestic violence and domestic abuse, we should extend that prohibition 
on running out and getting guns to other abusive relationships. That 
was the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, and it 
passed out of the House 47 days ago. So, 47 days ago, the House passed 
the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
  It passed the Paycheck Fairness Act--equal pay for equal work--55 
days ago.
  It passed the For the People Act 74 days ago, which includes the 
provision to get rid of secret money in politics.
  It also passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act--to reduce the 
death toll from gun violence in our country--83 days ago.
  All of those bills are sitting right here in the Senate. We could be 
debating them today if the Republican leader would allow them to come 
up. Instead of taking up that important work, we are here, acting like 
those in a factory who churn out more judges who have records of 
stripping women of their right to reproductive choice. It is a very, 
very dark time in the Senate, and I hope that we will get about the 
business of the American people and stop stripping women of their 
constitutional rights.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Perdue). The Senator from Missouri.