[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 159 (Tuesday, September 15, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5589-S5592]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                           EXECUTIVE CALENDAR

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the nomination.
  The bill clerk read the nomination of Todd Wallace Robinson, of 
California,

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to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of 
California.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania.


                   Unanimous Consent Request--S. 1508

  Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I have a unanimous consent request.
  ``We hope they die.'' ``We hope they die.'' ``We hope they die.''
  These are the vile words that anti-police protesters yelled on 
Saturday night, outside St. Francis Medical Center, in Los Angeles 
County, CA. They were yelling that about two deputy sheriffs, who, at 
the time, were clinging to life inside the hospital. They were clinging 
to life, just barely, because, earlier that night, those two deputy 
sheriffs were brutally ambushed by a gunman, who shot them multiple 
times as they sat in their patrol car while they were simply doing 
their jobs of patrolling the local train station.
  One of the deputies is a 31-year-old mother of a 6-year-old boy. The 
other deputy is a 24-year-old man. Both joined the force about 14 
months ago. The female deputy was shot through the jaw, but, 
heroically, she still managed to radio for help and apply a tourniquet 
to her partner's wounds.
  What happened to these deputies in Los Angeles was horrific and 
dangerous. It is a reminder that, every single day, law enforcement 
officers put on a badge and then risk their lives to protect all of 
us--and I mean every single day.
  Just this past Sunday, a police officer in Lancaster, PA, responded 
to a domestic violence call. It came from a home in the city. His body 
cam video captured what happened next. When the officer arrived, a 
full-grown man, wielding a huge carving knife and waving it over his 
head, came charging out of the house and charged straight at the 
officer. The man who did this, as it happens, is scheduled to go on 
trial in October on charges of stabbing four people last year.
  What happened to the deputies in Los Angeles is not only horrific but 
is part of a disturbing trend of violence against police. According to 
the FBI, 37 law enforcement officials have been intentionally killed in 
the line of duty so far this year. That is a 23-percent increase from 
the same period last year. Rioters have attacked law enforcement. We 
have seen them hurling bricks and rocks and other dangerous objects. We 
have seen them ram them with their vehicles and set police cars on 
fire.
  This violence against police is not happening in a vacuum. It is not. 
In recent months, the Nation has been engaged in an important, 
substantive debate about the relationship between law enforcement and 
the communities they serve and protect. I happen to think the debate is 
important. It is one of the reasons I supported Senator Tim Scott's 
bill--to provide more accountability and transparency with respect to 
law enforcement.
  Unfortunately, our Democratic colleagues blocked us from even being 
able to hold a debate on that bill. Senator Scott and the Republicans 
were willing to allow votes on any Democratic amendments. They could 
have changed the bill in any way they had seen fit if they could have 
made the case with their amendments, but they refused to even have a 
process--they refused to even allow anyone, including themselves, to 
offer amendments. They refused to let us even consider the bill.
  The police reform debate has exposed some radical voices. 
Unfortunately, that sometimes includes government officials who spew 
anti-police rhetoric. They call for defunding--sometimes even for 
abolishing--the police, and they want to bail out rioters in 
Minneapolis.
  For example, after the two Los Angeles deputy sheriffs were shot on 
Saturday, not only did anti-police protesters yell ``We hope they die'' 
and other vile things outside the hospital, but the city manager of 
Lynwood, CA--the very city where the deputies were clinging to their 
lives in the hospital--the city manager responded to the shooting by 
posting on social media a message saying ``Chickens come home to 
roost.'' Can you imagine?
  Well, protesters feed off the failure of elected officials to support 
and defend the police. In Lancaster, after that knife-wielding man was 
shot by an officer who was just protecting his own life, which was 
obviously under serious risk, protesters came out and started rioting--
throwing bricks, rocks, and bottles at police, smashing windows at a 
police station and a post office, setting a dumpster on fire--despite 
the fact that the video clearly shows that the officer was being 
attacked. He was simply defending his life. I have no idea why anyone 
would protest a police officer defending his own life.
  In my own State of Pennsylvania, a local Democratic elected official 
in Delaware County recently posted an image--unbelievable--on social 
media of two Black men holding guns to the head of a White police 
officer with a caption that said ``Does it have to come to this to make 
them stop murdering and terrorizing us?'' What kind of message is that?
  As the Los Angeles County sheriff noted on Saturday--after his 
officers were shot, he said: ``Words have consequences.'' They do.
  You know, instead of defunding the police, we should be defending the 
police--defending them against this kind of violence both in word and 
especially in deed. That is why I am here today, calling on the Senate 
to pass my Thin Blue Line Act today.
  My bill sends a very simple and clear message: Anyone who murders a 
law enforcement official should be prepared to pay the ultimate price. 
Under Federal law, killing a Federal law enforcement official is an 
aggravating factor for the Federal jury to weigh when considering 
whether to impose the death penalty on a cop killer, but that 
consideration does not apply when a State or local law enforcement 
officer is killed. So the Thin Blue Line Act provides that same level 
of justice to State and local law enforcement officers that we already 
apply to Federal law enforcement officers by also making the killing of 
a local law enforcement officer an aggravating factor in determining 
whether to impose the death penalty in a Federal case.
  In 2017, the House passed this bill with bipartisan support, 
including support of liberals like Adam Schiff and Beto O'Rourke. The 
bill has very broad support from law enforcement groups, as you might 
imagine, including from the Fraternal Order of Police, the National 
Sheriffs' Association, the National Association of Police 
Organizations, and others.
  The Thin Blue Line Act is commonsense, bipartisan legislation that 
the Senate should pass now. Our law enforcement officers put themselves 
in harm's way every day, and we are reminded of that every day. They 
are out there protecting us, and I am not sure that has ever been more 
dangerous for law enforcement than it is today. We need to do our part 
to support them, to send a message to them that we support them but to 
send a message to criminals and potential assassins that they will pay 
the ultimate price.
  In the tragic event that a police officer is killed in the line of 
duty, we owe that officer justice, and I am going to keep fighting for 
them to receive it.
  So, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the 
Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 1508 
and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that 
the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to 
reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no 
intervening action or debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. UDALL. Mr. President, reserving the right to object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico
  Mr. UDALL. Mr. President, thank you for the recognition.
  As a former New Mexico attorney general and assistant U.S. attorney, 
I have worked hard to prosecute violent crimes. I have been privileged 
to work with law enforcement, and we are all thankful for the 
tremendous work the Capitol Police do here in our Nation's Capital.
  The recent shootings of two sheriff's deputies in California was 
heinous. Our prayers go out to the officers and their families. The 
perpetrator must be brought to justice. But I do not support rushing 
through this bill in response to the California shootings.
  Under California law, murder of a law enforcement officer already 
makes someone eligible for the death penalty. This bill needlessly 
expands the Federal death penalty.
  As I understand this bill, for someone to be eligible for the death 
penalty, he

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or she would have to first be convicted of Federal murder, and then it 
would need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the victim was 
killed or targeted because he or she was a law enforcement officer.
  I also want to point out that the death penalty itself has widespread 
issues and many instances of misapplication. DNA testing and other 
science have proven that innocent people have been executed. The 
Innocence Project has found that 21 of 375 individuals who were falsely 
convicted and exonerated by DNA testing since 1989 had served time on 
death row.
  The death penalty has also been applied in a racially discriminatory 
way. A 1990 GAO report on capital sentencing noted that 82 percent of 
studies conducted between 1972 and 1990 found that the race of the 
victim influenced whether a capital murder charge was brought or a 
death sentence imposed.
  As Justice Breyer has noted, ``The factors that most clearly ought to 
affect application of the death penalty, namely, comparative 
egregiousness of the crime, often do not. Instead, circumstances that 
ought not to affect application of the death penalty, such as race, 
gender or geography, often do.'' That is in a recent Supreme Court case 
here in 2015.
  I also understand that this bill has not been through the regular 
order in the Judiciary Committee. It is important that legislation that 
would have serious consequences is fully examined by the Judiciary 
Committee, the committee of jurisdiction here.
  I would also like to take this opportunity to call attention to key 
legislation that addresses violence and should come to the floor, and 
that is the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act.
  VAWA authorization expired over a year and a half ago, on February 
15, 2019. Funding continues, but key improvements are being delayed by 
lack of reauthorization.
  The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2019 is supported 
by all 47 Democratic Senators. The House passed the bill 263 to 158. 
Thirty-three House Republicans voted yes on that bill. This bill would 
extend VAWA for 5 years, through 2024.
  As the vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, I 
know how critical this bill is to Indian Country. Data from the U.S. 
Department of Justice indicates that Native women face murder rates 
that are more than 10 times the national average murder rate. There are 
more than 5,000 cases of missing American Indian and Alaska Native 
women, and 55 percent of Native women have experienced domestic 
violence. More than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native 
women experience violence in their lifetimes. Without enactment of a 
VAWA reauthorization, these Tribes will lack the jurisdictional tools 
they need to keep their communities safe.
  The VAWA bill also explicitly states that grant recipients can train 
staff to prevent LGBT discrimination, and it adds dating partners 
convicted of domestic violence and stalking to the category of persons 
barred from having handguns.
  This bill would make a real difference in preventing violent crimes 
against women and has passed the House and has been pending before us 
here in the Senate for many months.
  For these reasons, I respectfully object to the Senator's request.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The objection is heard.
  The Senator from Pennsylvania
  Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, first of all, let me just say that 
bringing up VAWA can't be anything other than an attempt to obfuscate 
from the case that is in front of us. I would be happy to talk about 
VAWA. I happen to agree that violence against women is a serious issue. 
It is a serious problem. All the programs in VAWA are still fully 
funded. They continue.
  I don't think anybody in this body or the other body has done as much 
as I have done to make sure that the resources in the Crime Victims 
Fund go to the victims of crime--very much including women who are 
victims of violent crime and children and the groups who serve those 
victims.
  As a matter of fact, I have supported previous versions of VAWA. 
There has been a bipartisan effort to get a new reauthorization of 
VAWA. Senator Ernst and Senator Feinstein have spent months developing 
that. But that is not the version that has been under consideration 
here.
  No, there is nothing incompatible about passing my legislation, the 
Thin Blue Line Act, standing up to protect local law enforcement, and 
having a separate consideration on VAWA. They are not mutually 
exclusive. They are not in any way related to each other. But, 
unfortunately, our Democratic colleagues are not willing to simply 
extend the same protection we extend to Federal law enforcement 
officials to the local law enforcement officials who are at risk every 
single day.
  I am very disappointed that my colleague from New Mexico would object 
to a very simple and sensible bill that has bipartisan support.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.


                   Unanimous Consent Request--S. 2843

  Mr. UDALL. Mr. President, as if in legislation session, I ask 
unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from 
further consideration of S. 2843, the Violence Against Women 
Reauthorization Act, and that the Senate proceed to its immediate 
consideration; further, that the bill be considered read a third time 
and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid 
upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, for the reasons that I mentioned earlier 
in my comments, I object to this version of VAWA.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  The Senator from New Mexico.
  Mr. UDALL. Mr. President, thank you for the recognition today.
  We rise--a number of Senators who will be speaking today in this 
hour--we rise today to demand that the White House immediately remove 
William Perry Pendley from exercising the authority of the Director of 
the Bureau of Land Management and nominate a qualified person to be 
Director, subject to Senate confirmation.
  William Perry Pendley embodies the Trump administration's approach to 
conservation--they don't believe in it. He embodies the Trump 
administration's approach to Tribal sovereignty--they don't respect it. 
His continued employment at BLM embodies the Trump administration's 
approach to the law and the separation of powers--they will trample all 
over it every chance they get.
  Mr. Pendley has been exercising the authority of the Director since 
July 2019. Let's get one thing straight: This title has no basis in 
law. He is serving as Acting BLM Director under temporary appointments 
that the Secretary keeps renewing in a cynical ploy to evade the 
Constitution, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and the judgment of the 
Senate.
  Mr. Pendley's record on conservation is so bad, so antithetical to 
the agency he oversees, that the Trump administration knew he wouldn't 
survive a Senate confirmation. So, instead, they have concocted this 
shell game.
  The Director of BLM is subject to Senate confirmation. This 
administration did not bother to nominate anyone for 4 years until June 
of this year when Mr. Pendley was formally nominated. However, the ink 
had barely dried on his nomination papers before the President was 
forced to withdraw the nomination.
  From the beginning, the conservation outdoor recreation sports men 
and women communities have been uniformly opposed to Mr. Pendley's 
appointment, but that is not why the President withdrew his nomination. 
He withdrew the nomination because Mr. Pendley's extreme anti-public 
lands positions made him too toxic for Republican Senators from Western 
States facing tough reelections.
  If Mr. Pendley can't be confirmed as BLM Director, he should not 
remain the de facto leader of the agency. He should be immediately 
removed. No more shell games. There are many reasons Mr. Pendley is 
unfit to serve, more than I have time to discuss, but let me discuss 
three with you now.
  First, over the course of his 40-year career, he has established 
himself as one of the premier anti-public lands crusaders in the 
Nation. He has repeatedly advocated that the Federal Government sell 
off public lands, arguing that was the Nation's Founders' intent.
  As recently as 2016, he penned an op-ed entitled--and I quote here 
from his

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op-ed--``The Federal Government Should Follow the Constitution and Sell 
Its Western Lands.'' This is from the man who is now charged with 
running the agency that oversees our public lands. It is appalling.
  BLM manages 245 million acres on behalf of the American people. 
Managing these public lands is the central mission of the job, and he 
doesn't think there should be any. It is no wonder he is trouble for 
western Republican candidates. Poll after poll of westerners show 
overwhelming support for public lands among Republicans, Democrats, and 
Independents. Selling off our national heritage to the highest bidder 
is extreme and extremely unpopular.
  Mr. Pendley has been singularly focused on renting out our public 
lands to extraction industries to the exclusion of other purposes, such 
as conservation, outdoor recreation, and preservation of cultural and 
historic values.
  As Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy and Minerals for the 
Department of the Interior in the 1980s, Pendley was a tireless 
advocate for opening up public lands, from the Outer Continental Shelf 
to wilderness areas, to drilling and mining. When he was in charge of 
coal leasing in the interior in the 1980s, he helped coal companies get 
a sweetheart deal--leasing 1.6 million tons of coal in the Powder River 
Basin at bargain basement prices. The General Accounting Office 
concluded that Federal taxpayers received about $100 million below fair 
market value for that sale, or about $286 million in today's dollars.
  Mr. Pendley was removed from his position after that GAO report, and 
he hasn't changed one bit over the years. As executive director of the 
Mountain States Legal Foundation for 30 years, Pendley fought tooth and 
nail for drilling and mining on our public lands. If left unchecked, I 
have no doubt Mr. Pendley will continue to turn back the clock on 60 
years of our Nation reckoning with the devastating consequences of 
recklessly extracting from the Earth.
  Second, Mr. Pendley's well-documented racist attitudes make him unfit 
for his role. He has disdain for Native Americans--their Tribal 
sovereignty and their religious practices. He is very anti-immigrant. 
He smears the Black Lives Matter movement. He called Native religious 
views: ``pantheism, paganism, and cultural myths.'' He has fought 
against protecting their sacred sites on Federal lands.
  It is Pendley's BLM that wanted to hold virtual meetings to determine 
the future of the greater Chaco Canyon landscape at the same time that 
the Navajo Nation was facing one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the 
country. And in that area that has some of the lowest broadband rates 
in the Nation--now talk about tone-deaf--as the vice chair of the 
Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, I am here to say that Mr. Pendley 
has no business managing lands that are home to sacred Native sites. He 
has questioned the basis of Tribal sovereignty and even Tribal 
recognition. He wrote: ``The day may come sooner than many expect given 
that, with ever-declining blood quantum per tribal member, recognized 
tribes may soon be little more than associations of financial 
convenience.''
  Let's call Mr. Pendley's offensive statement what it is: overt 
racism. But his disdain for people of color is not limited to Native 
Americans. He has called undocumented immigrants ``a cancer.'' He has 
claimed immigration will lead to: ``You and I permanently losing the 
country we love.'' He has claimed undocumented immigrants create 
violent crime, crowded schools, and spread disease. Mr. Pendley's 
racism has no place in today's America. He is unqualified to manage 
public lands at a time when we all should be working to make them more 
accessible to all America.
  People of color who have business before the Bureau of Land 
Management, as many do every day, have every right to wonder: Is the 
deck stacked against them? It shouldn't be that way.
  And, finally, a third reason that all of us should demand Mr. Pendley 
be removed from his position: He is a climate change denier. The 
science of climate change that is happening and that is human-caused is 
well established. We are years and years beyond any scientific argument 
on these points. Just open your eyes and look at the wildfires that are 
raging throughout the West, forcing people to evacuate their homes and 
making wide swaths of the West look like an apocalyptic scene out over 
a Hollywood movie. Yet Pendley has claimed that climate change is like 
unicorns--neither exist.
  Pendley's hostility to science comes as no surprise. He is working 
for a President who claimed just yesterday, as he made a belated visit 
to California, that ``I don't think science knows,'' referring to 
climate change. The President is saying: ``I don't think science 
knows.''
  The President claims he knows, insisting, ``It will start getting 
cooler.'' This President tries to undermine any institution that 
challenges his world view--whether it is science, the press, our 
national intelligence agencies, or the courts.
  But while Mr. Pendley and the President deny the reality of climate 
change, right now, today, in California and Oregon, BLM and other 
public lands are burning. While they put their heads in the sand on 
climate change, the families who have lost loved ones in this 
unprecedented fire season in that part of the country and the thousands 
who have lost homes don't have that luxury. In the view of William 
Pendley, the President, and his administration, the West is a place to 
be plundered for natural resources and then left to burn. And while 
Pendley and the Trump administration don't think the Interior 
Department has any role to play combating climate change, in fact, one-
quarter--25 percent--of all U.S. carbon emissions come from fossil 
fuels extracted from public lands.
  Our public lands are a big part of the climate change problem. 
Instead of being a source of pollution, public lands must be an 
integral part of the climate solution. William Pendley's vision for 
public lands is some terrible caricature that should be consigned to 
the history books, where our public lands are to be exploited, not 
conserved, where Native people are scorned and people of color are not 
seen, and where climate change does not exist.
  William Pendley is an extremist, and he was never going to be 
confirmed by the U.S. Senate. It is time he is shown the door.
  I now turn to my colleagues who are with me on the floor. I am very 
proud to introduce my good friend and colleague, New Mexico's junior--
soon-to-be senior Senator--Senator Martin Heinrich. Martin led the 
entire Senate Democratic caucus in a letter to the President opposing 
Mr. Pendley's nomination as BLM Director, and once the nomination was 
withdrawn, he led the caucus urging the Secretary to remove Mr. Pendley 
from his Acting position
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.