[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 157 (Wednesday, September 27, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4707-S4709]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             PROTECTING HUNTING HERITAGE AND EDUCATION ACT

  Mr. TESTER. Madam President, I rise today in support of my bipartisan 
legislation to protect funding for hunter safety programs.
  Senator Cornyn is going to make a UC here in a bit. I just want to 
thank him and Senator Murkowski for the work that they have done on 
this bill. It has been incredible.
  You know, in Montana and across rural America, our schools have long 
offered hunter safety classes and taught our kids gun safety and 
personal responsibility, but recently the Biden administration and the 
bureaucrats here in this city who really don't understand rural America 
very well decided to block funding for these important education 
programs.
  I want to be clear. That was a poor decision that will hurt thousands 
of students who benefit from these resources and these programs every 
year. That is why I am pushing for this bipartisan fix that would 
require the Department of Education to restore a school district's 
ability to use Federal dollars for school archery or gun safety or 
hunter education programs.
  Look, folks, when Republicans and Democrats came together to pass the 
Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, we did so to ensure that our kids are 
safe when they go to school. This commonsense bill will make sure that 
we stay true to that intent by educating future generations on the 
importance of responsible gun ownership and hunting, which will only 
make our students and our communities safer. It will protect Montana's 
longstanding and proud tradition of hunting and shooting sports, which 
are essential to Montana's way of life.
  I would urge my colleagues in this room today to support this 
bipartisan solution.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, following the devastating shooting in 
Uvalde just a little over a year ago, Congress passed the Bipartisan 
Safer Communities Act. As we know, this legislation invested in mental 
health, school safety, and commonsense measures to prevent dangerous 
individuals--namely, those with mental health problems or with criminal 
records--from carrying out acts of violence.
  Importantly, it did all of this without impacting the Second 
Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. That was a red line. 
Unfortunately, the Biden administration has misinterpreted a section of 
this law and is using it as a pretext to defund hunter education and 
archery programs, which is ironic because one of the things that many 
people have advocated is, let's teach people how to safely use firearms 
for recreational or hunting purposes. Yet they want to somehow stop 
those very programs?
  Well, these programs are offered in school districts across Texas and 
equip

[[Page S4708]]

students with invaluable skills, including, as I suggested, firearms 
safety and wildlife management. They are teaching students to be 
responsible gun owners and good stewards of the environment, something 
I would think we would all want.
  These programs have overwhelming bipartisan support, and Congress had 
no intention of impacting them or curbing their availability in any 
way. Members of Congress worked together in good faith to pass this 
legislation that will build stronger, safer communities. But the fact 
that the administration is stretching the law--the words of the law--
beyond any meaning that we intended is unjustifiable. When this 
happens, it undermines the good will between Congress and the White 
House. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, to legislate on 
important and contentious issues like this.
  The Biden administration is attempting to take creative license with 
the law, and Congress needs to step in and correct the situation 
immediately. That is what we are doing today. Senator Sinema, Senator 
Tillis, and Senator Murphy were my partners in negotiating this 
Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. We came together with Senator Capito 
and immediately started working on a new bill to clarify congressional 
intent on this legislation given the overreach by the administration. 
We worked with our colleagues on the House side to craft a bill that 
could pass both Chambers of Congress.
  The Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act clarifies that 
Federal funds can be used to support archery, hunting, and other 
valuable enrichment programs in schools.
  This legislation passed the House yesterday evening by a vote of 424 
to 1, an overwhelming show of bipartisanship. I hope the Senate will 
follow suit today and send this legislation to the President's desk to 
clarify, once and for all, that the Biden administration cannot ignore 
the express will of Congress.
  This is the Biden administration, not the Biden kingdom. The wishes 
and whims of the President and his staff do not outweigh Congress's 
intent. I am eager for President Biden to sign this legislation and 
acknowledge that this interpretation of the clear words of the 
legislation that we passed on a bipartisan basis were totally in 
conflict.
  Once again, Congress has reclaimed its right as a separate, coequal 
branch of government in a bipartisan way to pass legislation that 
expresses not the will of the staff at the White House or some 
administrative Agency but the will of the Members of Congress. I am 
glad the House acted quickly to correct this shameful behavior, and I 
hope now the Senate will follow suit.
  Madam President, I see the Senator from Arizona here on the floor, 
and I yield to her.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
  Ms. SINEMA. Madam President, I join the senior Senator from Texas in 
support of our commonsense bill today that ensures the administration 
follows the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act as we wrote it.
  When we wrote this law last year, this was historic legislation to 
reduce community violence, improve mental health services, and save 
lives. When we wrote this bill, we were clear in our intent. We wanted 
to make our schools safer places to learn, our communities safer places 
to live, and our mental and behavioral healthcare system among the 
strongest in the world, and we did that with broad bipartisan support.
  Our law prohibits the use of new Federal funding for weapons for 
school staff, but our law very specifically does not prohibit the use 
of funds for archery classes, hunting safety classes, or any other 
extracurricular activities of the sort.
  What is at issue here is a misinterpretation of this section of our 
law by the White House, and it is a symptom of a larger issue: the 
alarming tendency of this administration to ignore the will and intent 
of Congress when carrying out the very laws that we pass.
  Time after time, Congress has come together to pass historic 
legislation with bipartisan support just to see the current White House 
interpret provisions--repeated provisions of repeated pieces of 
legislation--not in line with congressional intent. We pass the laws; 
that is our job. The administration is supposed to follow and implement 
those laws; that is their job. But this administration routinely fails 
to do its job correctly. This creates distrust; it delays meaningful 
solutions for our constituents; and it wastes taxpayer money.
  Enough is enough. We shouldn't have to be here today. We shouldn't 
have to pass a bill today telling the administration to do its job and 
follow the law, but here we are.
  So, once again, Congress will come together in a bipartisan, 
bicameral way to pass a bill. We will hold the administration 
accountable, ensure the accurate interpretation and implementation of 
our Bipartisan Safer Communities law, and we will allow students in 
Arizona and all across the country to continue enjoying school-based 
hunting and archery programs, just as our law intended.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I want to thank my colleagues from 
Arizona and Texas for, really, the first historic activity.
  It was a historic month last year. In the wake of the Uvalde 
shootings, we came together in one meeting--and this is a very diverse 
group of people, Senator Murphy from Connecticut being one of them. We 
came together in one meeting, and we developed enough trust to say that 
we thought we could do something that hadn't been done in a generation: 
trying to come up with a bipartisan bill that addresses what we 
considered to be some of the root causes of community safety. We did it 
in 30 days with bipartisan support, and we sent it to the President's 
desk.
  I am sure Senator Cornyn and Senator Sinema are doing the same thing, 
but I watch it virtually every day. I watch what is happening on the 
ground. I look at funding for school safety, funding for school 
hardening, funding for veterans courts, funding for VA courts, funding 
for family courts, more funding to make sure that background checks are 
done quickly, and identifying young people who, yes, a couple of 
hundred should not have a gun out of about 150,000 who have actually 
tried to purchase a gun over the last year. The short story is it was a 
very successful bill.
  I have been involved, in the last Congress, in every bipartisan bill 
that went to the floor. I took the heat back home, and Senator Cornyn 
took the heat back home, but we worked on it, and we had trusted 
partners who understood the intent. It goes to the President's desk, 
and what does somebody in his administration do? Get in our heads. All 
they needed to do was call us. They knew this wasn't our intent. Hunter 
safety? Archery training? Teaching a young person how to respect and 
handle a gun safely? They really thought that we did not want to train 
them on that; that we didn't want to train them about conservation and 
wildlife stewardship? That is what you also learn when you go to hunter 
safety.
  As a matter of fact, even if you never want to own a gun, I encourage 
you to go to a hunter safety course. You are going to learn a lot of 
stuff. You are going to learn a lot of stuff about conservation, 
wildlife stewardship, and also the safe handling of a gun. It is the 
same thing for archery.
  So I can only assume that the reason we are here today and the reason 
the House had to cast a vote is that somebody in the administration 
wanted to play politics--``gotcha.''
  Well, let me tell you why that is dangerous. It is because it makes 
people like me question whether or not I should trust the 
administration to implement a bill in the manner that we intended to 
implement it. If I am going to get a ``gotcha'' at the end for 
something like this, what encourages me to do it again?
  So, today, I think we are going to right this wrong, but I really 
hope the administration recognizes that some of us are sick of the 
polarizing environment in Washington. Some of us are willing to work on 
a bipartisan basis to make things different, but we have to have a 
willing and trusted partner down the street. This rights a wrong now, 
but I hope the administration recognizes, in the future, if you want to 
see more people like me stick our necks out for things that need to be 
done, you had better behave differently.

[[Page S4709]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
  Ms. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, I am really very pleased to be on the 
floor with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to talk about this.
  As my colleague from North Carolina has pointed out, it was pretty 
clear--it was more than pretty clear; it was crystal clear--what the 
intent of this provision was. The intent was really designed to prevent 
gun violence. What this administration is doing with this 
interpretation is so far afield of where we were with the Bipartisan 
Safer Communities Act that it is almost breathtaking.
  I had an opportunity less than a week ago to be back home in 
Fairbanks, and I went to the Tanana Valley shooting range. I was 
greeted by about probably 25, maybe even 30 high school students from 
Hutchison, from West Valley, and from Lathrop who were all part of the 
rifle team. They were there, pretty proud of what they were doing and 
how they were doing it; but they wanted to know, they wanted to 
understand how we could possibly--we here in Washington, DC, we in the 
Congress could possibly be doing something that was going to be 
limiting or restricting opportunities to understand more about firearms 
and firearm safety and hunting safety.

  This is hunting season in Alaska. It is moose season. It is duck 
season. We all have our firearms out as we are providing for our 
families. In my family, one of the first things that you learn in a 
household that has firearms is about gun safety, firearm safety. Those 
schools that have those programs that provide for hunters' safety, 
those are the ones we all want our kids to be part of. It is not just 
the hunters' safety, it is the archery programs.
  Again, when you are thinking about programs that help build young 
people in strong ways--in leadership skills, in safety, in discipline--
that is what these kids from the Fairbanks area schools were telling 
me.
  I said: What else do you learn other than, really, being a 
sharpshooter?
  They said: A sense of discipline--discipline and respect. They said: 
Every single one of us--there is not one of us in this room here who 
has been subject to any kind of discipline from within the school. We 
kind of look out for one another. There is a respect that comes when 
you are operating around a rifle.
  The other issue that they raised was, they said: We understand that 
the way the Department of Education is interpreting this is not only 
hunters' safety programs would be at risk, not only archery programs 
would be at risk, but culinary programs where you have to use a knife 
with a blade that is in excess of 2\1/2\ inches, I believe it is.
  So how do you work with a student when you are trying to chop celery 
in a classroom if you can't use a chopping knife? What do you do in a 
rural school where all aspects, practically, of your curriculum 
surround those matters that are relevant to you, subsistence? So as 
part of your science class, you are cleaning or preparing a skin from a 
seal or a walrus, and you are using an ulu. Believe it or not, the 
Department of Education would say that that ulu that, basically, is 
preparing your food for your family, would be a dangerous instrument 
and you can't teach that in the classroom.
  Trying to explain what the Department of Education has interpreted 
this to mean as separate from what we, as the lawmakers who help put 
this into law--trying to explain to them made no sense.
  Do you know what their message was? Can you just fix it? That is what 
we are here on the floor to do today.
  It has not only been the work that Senator Tester has done with his 
bill, the work that Senator Cornyn has done with his bill, the work 
that Senator Barrasso has done with his bill, the letters that have 
gone out--we have given the Department the ample opportunity to fix it 
on their own. But if they don't, we have got to do the legislative fix, 
and I am standing with my colleagues to do just that.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate 
proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 5110, the Protecting 
Hunting Heritage and Education Act, which was received from the House.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the bill by title.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       A bill (H.R. 5110) to amend the Elementary and Secondary 
     Education Act of 1965 to clarify that the prohibition on the 
     use of Federal education funds for certain weapons does not 
     apply to the use of such weapons for training in archery, 
     hunting, or other shooting sports.

  There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the bill.
  Mr. CORNYN. I further ask 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. Without objection, so ordered.
  The bill (H.R. 5110) was ordered to a third reading, was read the 
third time, and passed.

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