[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 48 (Monday, March 15, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1518-S1519]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                    Nomination of Debra Anne Haaland

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am here to say a few words on 
behalf of Deb Haaland to be Secretary of the Interior.
  There is something wonderfully beautiful and symmetrical about her 
appointment to this position because of the Department of the 
Interior's role supervising America's public lands. Well, of course, 
before America's public lands were America's public lands, they were 
Native American lands, and Deb Haaland will be the first Native 
American to serve in any President's Cabinet and the first to serve as 
the Secretary of this Department. So that is kind of a wonderful 
harmony with history, and I hope we appreciate that here.
  The second thing that I want to say is that it is, to me, deeply 
ironic how much of the opposition to her as Secretary has come on the 
theory that she won't be fair to fossil fuels. We have lived through 4 
years of a Trump administration with Secretaries of the Interior who 
were out-and-out operatives of fossil fuel. The fossil fuel hand in the 
Secretary's glove was obvious.
  The idea that anything other than fossil fuel was treated fairly in 
the Trump administration is a preposterous notion. Basically, anything 
that wasn't nailed down, they gave to the fossil fuel industry with no 
consideration for any of the competitors, and they did it so badly and 
so shabbily and so sloppily because they were so greedy that a lot of 
the stuff they did got thrown out by courts because they didn't even 
bother to do their homework.
  So, please, let's not talk about fairness after the last 4 years. Our 
friends on the other side lost their standing to talk about fairness 
after what they did for fossil fuel in the last 4 years, including 
outright lies about climate change.
  My good friend from Texas talks about hurricanes. He has real 
hurricanes coming because of climate change. Yet where is the climate 
plan from the other side? None, because the fossil fuel industry won't 
let them.
  Let me last say as I conclude, I come from the Ocean State. 
Representative Haaland comes from one of those interior square States. 
Her Agency is called the Department of the Interior. When you look at 
things like the Land and Water Conservation Fund, floods of money go to 
inside America, interior America, upland and inland America, and the 
coasts always get overlooked. I have made it very clear to Ms. Haaland 
that has to stop. With climate change coming, with fisheries moving 
about, with sea levels rising, with oceans warming, with actual seas 
acidifying in front of our eyes, to overlook the coast can happen no 
more. I trusted her when she said she would. I will take her at her 
word, but I also intend to work very hard to make sure that I can 
support her in keeping her word that oceans and coasts will matter.
  I yield to my friend from Minnesota.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
  Ms. SMITH. Madam President, I rise today in strong support of the 
historic nomination of Deb Haaland to serve as Secretary of the 
Interior. When Representative Haaland appeared before the Senate for 
her confirmation hearing, she opened by saying: ``My story is unique.''
  Haaland is a 35th-generation New Mexican, an enrolled member of the 
Laguna Pueblo, and will be the first-ever Native American to serve as a 
Cabinet Secretary.
  National Congress of the American Indians President Fawn Sharp noted 
that it is fitting that as we celebrate Women's History Month, Deb 
Haaland is poised to make it. Her nomination is a historic choice and a 
moment of deep meaning to Tribal nations and indigenous people across 
the country who have seen over and over again the Federal Government 
fail to keep its promises to Native people, promises made in law and 
treaty.
  It is clear to me that we need Representative Haaland's strong voice 
of stewardship for our public resources, cultural resources, and public 
lands, for action on the climate crisis, and for making sure that the 
Federal Government lives up to its treaty and trust responsibilities 
for Tribal nations and their citizens.
  Representative Haaland's background and her life experiences make her 
perfect for this job. As Haaland said during her confirmation hearings, 
``If an Indigenous woman from humble beginnings can be confirmed as 
Secretary of the Interior, our country holds promise for everyone.''
  The Interior Department includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which 
manages the Federal Government's relationship with American Indian, 
Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities. Indigenous leaders 
across the country have expressed broad, bipartisan support for 
Representative Haaland's nomination because they know that she will 
bring a personal commitment to lifting up Native voices and addressing 
deep inequities and longstanding funding challenges on Tribal lands.
  The Department is also responsible for public lands, energy 
resources, and wildlife conservation, and so it requires a leader who 
understands the cultural and economic value of these resources and the 
importance of conserving them. Representative Haaland grew up with a 
deep affinity for public lands, for responsible land use, and for 
hunting and fishing. In fact, her family on her father's side is from 
Minnesota, where she tells me she learned a lot about the joys of 
walleye fishing.
  In the House, Representative Haaland served as the chair of the 
Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands, and she has 
earned the support of hundreds of groups working on climate change, 
conservation, and public lands management.
  Representative Haaland has been a champion for the tragic crisis of 
missing and murdered indigenous women.
  Here we have a strong, capable, competent leader ready to serve our 
country as the first Native woman to lead the Interior Department. 
Colleagues, I can't help asking here during Women's History Month, why 
is it that almost 2 months after President Biden's inauguration, 
Representative Haaland is one of the last three core Cabinet members to 
be confirmed in the Senate?
  Why is it that she has faced such ferocious opposition from some 
Republicans?
  Colleagues, over the last 3 months, Representative Haaland has been 
called ``extreme'' and ``radical.''
  One Republican Senator I serve with on the Indian Affairs Committee 
labeled Haaland a ``hardline ideologue with radical views''--this from 
a person who spent months promoting the false and widely debunked 
conspiracy theories about voter fraud in our election. Another 
Republican Senator called Representative Haaland a ``socialist, left-
of-Lenin whack job''--though, later, he said he merely meant to call 
her an ``extremist.''
  In the House, a Member of my own Minnesota congressional delegation 
orchestrated a hit campaign on Representative Haaland by attacking her 
position on natural resources management and boundary waters. 
Strangely, this same Member happily supported Secretary Vilsack's 
confirmation even though he holds exactly the same positions.
  As our former colleagues Tom Udall and Mark Udall said in an op-ed in 
USA Today, it is hard to imagine that either of them, had they been 
nominated to lead Interior, would have faced the same attacks for 
radical ideas.
  I just find it difficult to take these Republican attacks at face 
value. My colleagues should know that Representative Haaland was named 
the most bipartisan House freshman in the last Congress. If that is 
what a hardline ideologue looks like, maybe we should all aspire to be 
the role model that Deb Haaland provides.
  Colleagues, I think we need to be honest with ourselves about what is 
going on here. Once again, a woman--

[[Page S1519]]

and a woman of color--is being held to a different standard, and we 
need to name it. We have to come to grips with the reality that, time 
after time, strong women, especially women of color, are attacked when 
White men with the same views are welcome to walk right through that 
door, unopposed.
  At their worst, these efforts--these attempts--to portray 
Representative Haaland as extreme and unqualified show how much work we 
still have to do to reckon with our country's history of disparaging, 
disrespecting, and erasing Native people and how this tragic history 
has been reflected in the biases on exhibit during Representative 
Haaland's confirmation. This is clear when we see how few Republicans 
could even acknowledge the historic nature of Representative Haaland's 
nomination, choosing, instead, to focus on hostile questions about her 
tweets and whether she understands the law.
  Now, sadly, these attacks that Representative Haaland has been 
subjected to are not unique. We have seen this dance play out time and 
again with Biden-Harris nominees, especially with women of color. 
Excellent nominees, like Secretary Vilsack and Secretary Buttigieg, 
faced relatively tame confirmation processes. The vast majority of 
questions were about policy goals and their experience. No Senator 
referred to these nominees as ``extremists'' or ``radicals.''
  Yet how did the women of color fare?
  In the Banking Committee, my Republican colleagues grilled Secretary 
Fudge, our new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development--and a Black 
woman--about her intemperate comments on race. This was less than 3 
weeks after our former President incited an insurrection of White 
supremacists, among others, and faced essentially no consequence from 
his own party. Neera Tanden was forced to withdraw her nomination to 
lead the Office of Management and Budget after some declared that her 
Twitter account was too divisive.
  Well, if we had only known that mean tweets could disqualify you from 
public office, we could have saved ourselves 4 years of division and 
chaos and two impeachment trials after a torrent of inflammatory and 
hateful rhetoric from the former Twitter account of our former 
President, which most of my Republican colleagues said they tried to 
ignore or just hadn't read. Strong opinions from strong women of color 
are deemed unacceptable and cause for disqualification. I am just not 
buying it.
  In my first floor speech in this Chamber, I said that, when you 
really listen to women, you begin to understand all the ways in which 
women are made less and are denied opportunities to contribute to their 
communities and to their country.
  So I urge my colleagues: Don't let this be one of those times. Let's 
not silence these women and deny them opportunities to lead because we 
are uncomfortable with their power.
  During Representative Haaland's confirmation process, I started to 
get text messages from women friends, especially from Native women, who 
were horrified by the yelling and the condescending questions that were 
directed her way. We were proud of how she responded--with grace and 
with dignity--and we all knew how it felt.
  I would bet that every woman in this Chamber knows what it feels like 
when this happens. A man talks down to you. He uses his power to 
explain something that you already know and signals in a hundred 
different ways that you don't belong in the room where it happens. 
Well, for a long time, women have found ways to respond to these 
affronts with grace as did Representative Haaland, Marcia Fudge, Vanita 
Gupta, and Neera Tanden.
  When I was a young woman, my mother was a very strong woman herself. 
She used to advise me to just ignore these folks and go about my 
business. Even today, as I worked on this floor speech, I wondered: Am 
I going to offend anybody? Am I going to sound too shrill? I bet there 
is not a man in this room who has ever worried about sounding too 
shrill.
  So, colleagues, tonight, we will vote on Representative Deb Haaland's 
confirmation to Secretary of the Interior, and we will all have a 
chance to restore dedicated, capable, passionate leadership to this 
important Department.
  The choice to confirm Representative Haaland is, indeed, historic, 
but it is not an abstract opportunity. As Secretary, Representative 
Haaland will play a consequential role in combating climate change. She 
will also honor Tribal sovereignty and strengthen the government's 
relationship between the United States and Tribal nations. Maybe, just 
maybe, her leadership will help us see the strength of Native women and 
of all women and to not be threatened by that. Our country will be the 
better for it. I urge my colleagues to support the confirmation of Deb 
Haaland for Secretary of the Interior
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.