[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 186 (Monday, December 16, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7049-S7052]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Rules Committee

  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I rise today to thank my colleagues 
on both sides of the aisle who have been involved in work with the 
Rules Committee.
  I have led that committee as chair for the last 4 years and as 
ranking member before that.
  As we look ahead to the new Congress, I would like to thank our 
ranking member, Senator Fischer, for her partnership in the last 2 
years and the opportunity to do important work with her. And I look 
forward to continuing

[[Page S7050]]

our work together next month on the Joint Congressional Committee on 
Inaugural Ceremonies that I chair.
  I also want to express my gratitude to my friend, former Senator 
Blunt, for our work when we led the committee together and to 
congratulate our incoming chair, Leader McConnell, and Ranking Member 
Senator Padilla.
  In addition, I want to thank the Rules Committee members for their 
service, and I look forward to continuing to serve on the committee. 
And that would be Senator Schumer and Senator Warner; Merkley; Senator 
Padilla, of course; Senator Ossoff; Bennet; Welch; Senator Schiff, who 
just joined the committee in place of Senator Butler--we also thank 
her; Senator McConnell; Senator Cruz; Senator Capito; Senator Wicker; 
Senator Hyde-Smith; Senator Hagerty; and Senator Britt, as well as the 
staff who have supported our work, including my staff director who is 
here, Elizabeth Farrar, who has been with me for a very long time as my 
counsel and judiciary and leg director, has done incredible work. I 
also want to thank former staff director Lizzy Peluso and Lindsey Kerr 
and the other members of our Rules Committee staff, some of whom are 
here today, including Steve Spaulding, who has done excellent work on 
elections; Ben Driscoll; Counsel Kristin Mollet; Allison Hunn; Kulani 
Jalata; Khalil Lee; and our clerks, Cami Morrison and Kasie Jones, as 
well as the staff for Senator Fischer and the nonpartisan staff as 
well.
  The Rules Committee is a little different than some of the other 
committees, and if we have disagreements, we have tended to work them 
out. As Senator Blunt used to say: The chair and ranking member of the 
committee are kind of like the mayors of the Capitol, kind of getting 
involved in many issues regarding the building itself, regarding the 
personnel, regarding our Senators, and making sure that this place 
functions. And that means you don't want to have a lot of public brawls 
over how to fix things.
  We have managed to get a lot done and made a lot of changes that are 
really positive over the last few years. What may be our committee's 
lasting contribution to the Senate and the country will be on display 
next month when we convene to certify the results of the election in 
line with the significant reforms that we have made to the Electoral 
Count Act.
  Senator Blunt and I shepherded that bill through the Rules Committee 
and worked on the bill, along with, of course, Senator Collins and 
Senator Manchin.
  We got a bipartisan vote on our committee of 14 to 1 to significant 
changes to make sure that the will of the voters prevails and that, in 
fact, we don't have situations where one Senator or one House Member 
can block the electoral count or that claims can be made that a Vice 
President can overcome the will of the people and the like. That was an 
old law that needed to be changed; we changed it for generations to 
come.
  We also will see the changes as we see key security improvements that 
we have made, thanks in large part to Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, 
someone who we installed after January 6, and as well as the men and 
women of the Capitol Police who stand in defense of the Capitol every 
single day.
  We also thank Sergeant At Arms General Karen Gibson for her good 
work. We had a final hearing of the Rules Committee last week involving 
Chief Manger. It was our eighth hearing on the Capitol Police, 
including two hearings that I held with the Homeland Security 
Committee--major, major joint hearings after January 6 in which our 
focus was on security failures and how they had to be fixed after 
January 6.
  We also had our first joint hearing of the Capitol Police Board with 
the House, with Representative Steil--first hearing since 1945. As the 
Chief testified at our hearing last week, the Capitol Police have made 
significant progress in the last 4 years. In that time, the Department 
has made necessary enhancements impacting all aspects of work, 
including implementing the bipartisan security report that came out of 
those major, major hearings that were televised in which we called the 
former Police Chief of the Capitol Police, the former Sergeant At Arms 
at the House and the Senate, and major leaders in the FBI and in 
Homeland Security to figure out what went wrong.
  On my mind is always the haunting voice of the officer on the police 
line that day that went over the police radio saying: Does anyone have 
a plan, does anyone have a plan; the horror story of 75 percent of the 
cops not having access to riot gear; that a number of their gears were 
actually locked on a bus that they couldn't access, with the 
insurrectionists sometimes having better gear than our police officers 
had.
  Senator Blunt and I then led legislation, which has passed, to allow 
the Capitol Police to request immediate assistance from the National 
Guard in an emergency. It was like a phone tree they had to go through 
that led to significant delays. That legislation has passed and allowed 
the Police Chief to do that.
  The bipartisan security report that Senators Blunt, Peters, Portman, 
and I put in the wake of our hearings, those changes have been made, 
and 103 recommendations from the Department inspector general have been 
implemented--all 103 recommendations. The way we know that is we had a 
hearing, and half were done. Then we had another hearing, and more were 
done. That is accountability. That is the bipartisan job of the U.S. 
Senate--to oversee these things and make sure they get done for the 
safety of our police officers, for the security of the people who work 
in this Capitol, and not just the Members but the court reporters and 
the people who are working in the cafeteria and the people who are 
keeping things clean around here. They need that protection. They were 
the ones hiding in closets.

  (Mr. WELCH assumed the Chair.)
  We also passed my bipartisan legislation with Senator Fischer to 
improve accountability and empower Congress to appoint and remove the 
Architect of the Capitol. We learned that day through hearings from the 
House of Representatives as well as our work in the Senate that the 
then-Architect of the Capitol didn't even come in that day. He said he 
was in his mobile van. That person has been terminated, but we found 
out in the course of all this that we didn't have the ability to 
terminate the Architect of the Capitol in the House and the Senate, so 
we passed the legislation that gave us the ownership of it. We hire 
this person on a bipartisan basis--with the Senate and the House, 
Republicans and Democrats--who supervises the work of thousands of 
employees in this Capitol, and we also have the right to terminate that 
person--not the President; us. As a result, we have our new Architect 
of the Capitol, Tom Austin, and he was supported with unanimous 
bipartisan and bicameral support.
  With the support of so many servicemembers, veterans, and military 
families, our committee passed a resolution that paved the way--I see 
the Presiding Officer, Senator Welch, was part of this--to pass a rule 
that paved the way for an eventually voluntary agreement so that more 
than 400 military promotions would move forward after months and months 
of delay.
  I thank my Republican colleagues that stood up on this floor to get 
those nominations through, as well as all the Democrats, and I thank 
the Democrats on the committee for working with me on this resolution 
so that we could pass it to change the rules, and that eventually put 
some pressure on to get this done.
  During my time in the committee, thanks to our great members, we have 
taken on a whole host of issues: reopening the buildings after the 
pandemic; reforming the outdated process of the reporting and handling 
of harassment claims on Capitol Hill, which was something I did with 
former-Senator Blunt as well as Senators Schumer and McConnell--they 
showed great leadership, all of them; making closed captioning 
available for all Senate committee hearings.
  We worked to ensure that the people we venerate in this Capitol more 
closely reflect the people of this country. It is not just about 
removing paintings and statues; it is about who you put up there so 
that when little kids come in, they see them and think, oh, that is 
someone who looks like me.
  We passed my legislation, with Senators Murkowski, Collins, and

[[Page S7051]]

Sinema, for two statues of two former, trailblazing Supreme Court 
Justices--one appointed by a Democratic President and one by a 
Republican--Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Once those are 
completed, there will be 21 women finally represented in statues in the 
Capitol. Of the 209 statues in the Capitol, 192 are men--but, OK, I am 
not counting--but I changed this one statue at a time. We have added 
five of those statues of women just in the time I have been chair.
  We also dedicated the first rooms in the Senate wing of the Capitol--
this was sort of ironic. We had not one room in the Capitol named after 
a woman when I came in--not one; zero--when we had, in fact, many women 
leaders in the Congress. We dedicated those first rooms in the Senate 
wing in honor of women--I am talking about the Senate wing here--former 
Senators Barbara Mikulski and Margaret Chase Smith.
  Margaret Chase Smith was from Maine, and she was the first Republican 
on the Armed Services Committee and the first major candidate for 
President on the Republican side.
  The bust of Justice Taney, who authored the Dred Scott decision, was 
removed and will be replaced with one of Justice Thurgood Marshall--
that sounds like a pretty good trade to me--the first African American 
to serve on our Nation's High Court.
  When our restaurant workers unionized, we fought to make sure they 
had a fair contract.
  In one of my favorite moments--and this was one of my more fun things 
we worked on. I work on a lot of kind of detailed things which involve 
Senators telling me when there is too long of a line of visitors trying 
to come into the Capitol, sending me pictures, making sure we have 
people working at those gates, making sure Senators are able to get to 
and from, that they get offices they need, that they get their 
hideaways. Some of that isn't fun, but it is still important.
  But what was really fun was when Senator Blunt and I worked to update 
the rules so that Senator Duckworth, who was just presiding over the 
Senate, and everyone in her wake are able to bring their babies onto 
the Senate floor. Before that, we only allowed dogs onto the Senate 
floor.
  Senator Duckworth already had a toddler. She said that if there were 
late-night votes, she would have to bring her baby with her. The House 
already allowed for this.
  What I most remember from that time is that I had to use a Dr. Seuss 
rhyme, which I am not going to use, about how we had to get this done 
because she wasn't going to burp the baby in the house; she would be as 
quiet as a mouse. It was really long. I am not going to go into the 
whole thing, but it was quite effective.
  So out of that, after some of maybe the more senior Members of the 
Senate didn't want to change the rule and they didn't want to talk 
about breastfeeding and things like that--but none of that ever 
happened. We changed the rule. It is a good thing.
  I will never forget the first day Tammy Duckworth brought her little 
baby Maile Pearl--now not so little but at the time, all 6 pounds of 
her--here onto the floor, wheeling her in on her wheelchair, with all 
the reporters looking down and not really a dry eye in the house, and 
it was kind of an amazing moment. So things have changed in little ways 
one thing at a time.
  We have done important work, as I note, much of it behind the scenes 
to help so many of our colleagues with issues that impact their ability 
to do their work, regardless of party or ideology. We help to support 
repairs and updates to offices here in Washington. In their home 
States, we have implemented new security measures. We have made sure 
that constituents can be hosted and feel welcome in this place.
  We strived to make sure the security lines to get in the buildings 
were moving along--there was some transition after the pandemic--and we 
literally have worked to make sure the trains in the basement were 
running smoothly. I got a lot of texts from Members about that.
  As we look ahead to the new Congress, we have worked with the 
Secretary of the Senate, the Architect of the Capitol, and the Sergeant 
at Arms to welcome our newly elected colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle to the Senate and make sure they have what they need to run their 
offices on day one.
  We also have worked tirelessly to support the safety of those in the 
Capitol, which I mentioned, especially the Parliamentarian's office, 
which was really at risk--as I look at some of my favorite employees in 
the Senate--that day of January 6, and we take their input and try to 
make changes whenever we can with those concerns.
  We work to support the Agencies in the committee's jurisdiction here 
in our Nation's Capital. The Library of Congress has expanded public 
access to its digital collections, and its new David M. Rubenstein 
Treasures Gallery opened to the public earlier this year, featuring 
special items from the Library's collection, like a draft of the 
Gettysburg Address, handwritten by President Lincoln; President James 
Madison's crystal flute; and the original handwritten lyrics from ``The 
Sound of Music.'' I thought that was cool.
  We celebrated the arrival of the new pandas that will be ready to 
meet visitors at the National Zoo next month. I got to see them 
already. They are really cute.
  Since two new Smithsonian museums were established with bipartisan 
support after legislation passed the committee unanimously in 2020, we 
are at this moment working to get those locations nailed down. The 
locations have been chosen, and tens of millions of dollars have been 
raised for both the Women's Museum and the Latino Museum.
  We have 50 Republicans in the House of Representatives on the bill, 
on the joint bill, and we are doing everything we can to get this done 
at the end of the year. I really don't understand what people's issue 
is when this is not a money situation; this is a location situation. So 
they can raise even more money than they have already to build these 
museums. The Smithsonian is supportive of this. These will be very 
positive museums. People want to go see the Women's Museum, they want 
to see the Latino Museum, and this is our big opportunity to get this 
done on a bipartisan basis.

  Fundraising is now at--private fundraising--$68 million for each new 
museum. Directors have been hired and staff working to build the 
collections because of Congress. Congress gave them the authority to 
move forward. They have done it, and they have done it incredibly well 
and found locations that both Senator Blunt and I have signed off on.
  These two open sites on the National Mall will look even better to 
anyone who goes and looks at them and actually looks at it and thinks 
about it, and the Smithsonian Board of Regents has determined that.
  Our work to get the needed waivers to begin construction, as I noted, 
is ongoing, with over 100 cosponsors, evenly split between the parties, 
on the House bill, led by Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New 
York, a Republican, and Judy Chu of California.
  As we are nearing the end of this Congress, we have two major 
challenges--one, getting the two new museums the waivers so they can 
continue progressing. Our leaders on both sides will decide the fate of 
the Women's Museum. The four men who are leading our Congress in the 
Senate and the House will make this decision. Many women have been 
involved in pushing this issue so we can finally move forward on this, 
and we appreciate Senator Schumer's strong support for this.
  Through the past several years, we have not stopped fighting to 
protect our free and fair elections, the cornerstone of our democracy, 
which is our second challenge--to continue that work--supporting our 
State and local election workers on the frontlines, ensuring they have 
needed resources, and successfully urging the Election Assistance 
Commission to enable them to use funding to protect against threats. We 
held our first field hearing in 20 years in Georgia on the Freedom to 
Vote Act, which we are looking forward to reintroducing next year.
  I am very focused on artificial intelligence in our elections and 
bipartisan work. I have one bill with Senator Murkowski and another 
with Senator Hawley to take this on.
  In closing, I want to end my work on the Rules Committee with a story 
that

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Senator Blunt always loved to share with our colleagues. It is a story 
of a bust that he always had in his office called The Unknown Cleric, a 
statue, and it is a guy that looked very distinguished.
  Senator Blunt did a bunch of research, and he could never figure out 
who this guy was. It was over 100 years ago that they made this 
beautiful statue of him, and no one could figure who he was except that 
he is a cleric, because of his collar, so he called him The Unknown 
Cleric.
  At the time, they thought this man was so important, but today, as 
Senator Blunt likes to tell people who came to his office, whether they 
were Senators or school kids, today, no one even knows who he is.
  So what is the message we learn from that? That what we do here is 
more important than who we are. Most people aren't going to remember 
who we are 100 years from now--and I like to remind my colleagues of 
that--but they are going to remember when we do good things that help 
them, that help their kids, that help their grandkids. They are going 
to remember, when they walk into that Women's Museum or that Latino 
Museum, that someone back at this point had the foresight to think, OK, 
these are pretty important things in American history, and maybe we 
should honor them. Or maybe they are going to think 100 years from now, 
I am sure glad we still have our democracy because somewhere back 
there, they changed an old law and made sure that we reformed our 
election process or that we protected our democracy or we stood up for 
democracy, because what we do is more important than who we are.
  That is why this committee, which has been run on such a strong 
bipartisan basis over the last decades under both Democrat and 
Republican leadership, has been a big part of that.
  I look forward to working with our incoming Rules Committee chair, 
Leader McConnell, and ranking member, Senator Padilla. I know they are 
both well suited to do this work. I think maybe Senator McConnell knows 
a little bit about the Capitol and how it is run. I look forward to 
working with them.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas.