[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Pages 4436-4438]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          LEGISLATIVE SESSION

                                 ______
                                 

     CHILD CARE AND DEVELOPMENT BLOCK GRANT ACT OF 2014--Continued

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I think the end is in sight, hopefully, 
on this bill. Our staff has been working hard. We have all been working 
hard to get amendments worked out. I know both sides have conference 
lunches that are taking place now. So we hope to come back shortly 
after these luncheons conclude. We will then be able to move ahead.
  As I understand it, there are three amendments pending. We don't know 
whether they will have votes, but we are working on that right now. So 
I hope we can have final passage on this bill very shortly.
  Does my friend, the Senator from North Carolina, concur with that?
  Mr. BURR. Madam President, I do concur. I urge those Members who 
might be the subject of us trying to work out some language on their 
amendments, if they have not spoken on them, they exercise the 
opportunity between 1 o'clock and 2 o'clock, while the caucuses are at 
lunch, to come to the floor and speak on their amendments. But we are 
confident we have made tremendous progress and we think we can wrap 
this up shortly after lunch on the remaining amendments, as well as on 
passage of the bill.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that 
the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Hirono). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to 
speak for 10 minutes as in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (The remarks of Mr. Udall of New Mexico pertaining to the 
introduction of S. 2129 are printed in today's Record under 
``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. UDALL of New Mexico. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.


                           Amendment No. 2827

  Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I rise today to thank my colleagues for 
adopting a moment ago an important amendment to this underlying bill. 
It is an amendment to provide for evidence-based training in efforts 
that promote early language development and literacy development. This 
is really important for kids to get them ready for kindergarten, and, 
again, I appreciate the fact that on a voice vote that was adopted 
earlier this afternoon.
  Madam President, I now rise to urge the Senate to support a child 
safety amendment I have submitted to the child development block grant 
bill. I thank Senator Alexander, Senator Burr, Senator Mikulski, and 
Senator Harkin for all their help on this amendment. I appreciate their 
working with us.
  I like the underlying legislation. It is a good bill because it goes 
a long way to ensuring that our Federal dollars are spent in a way that 
does keep our children in safe learning environments and care 
facilities. I believe my amendment makes a good bill even better.
  Currently, this legislation prohibits individuals who have been 
convicted of a felony from working in a childcare facility that is 
funded through these Federal block grants. That is a good start, but by 
limiting the prohibition only to felonies, we are leaving other people 
out. We are leaving a pool of individuals who have been convicted of 
crimes against children eligible for employment in a setting where they 
could prey on vulnerable kids.

[[Page 4437]]

  So the amendment simply expands to ensure that we are covering those 
people. It ensures the health and safety of children by clarifying that 
adults who are convicted of misdemeanor violent crimes against 
children--child abuse, child endangerment, sexual assault--or of a 
misdemeanor involving child pornography are also identified in criminal 
background checks and are not permitted to work in a childcare facility 
that receives support through these child care development block 
grants.
  Let me give a couple examples of crimes that under the bill as 
currently drafted would not prevent an individual from working in a 
childcare facility funded by the legislation.
  In my home State of Ohio, we just had a terrible example. An Ohio 
daycare worker was accused of sprinkling drugs on snacks to get 
children to sleep. She was fined $250 and then had her charges reduced 
to a misdemeanor count of child endangerment after a plea agreement. So 
she did not get charged with a felony in the end because she pled it 
down to a misdemeanor. But certainly you do not want someone like this 
working in one of these facilities.
  There are lots of other examples.
  A Utah women pled guilty to two class A misdemeanors recently for 
child abuse. These charges were reduced from five second-degree 
felonies for intentionally inflicting serious physical injury on a 
child. She had been arrested for physically and emotionally abusing her 
daughter. According to the police report, she hit her daughter with a 
closed fist and choked her. But she pled, again, guilty to two 
misdemeanors because of the plea agreement.
  These are just a couple cases. There are many more, and these are 
just ones that have been decided in the last few months.
  Under the legislation as currently written, these individuals would 
be eligible to work in a childcare facility that receives Federal 
funds.
  This amendment is very simple. It only seeks to protect children and 
to bar individuals who would commit crimes against the most vulnerable 
among us from receiving these Federal tax dollars. I urge my colleagues 
to accept the amendment.
  Again, I thank the authors of the underlying bill for working closely 
with us on this amendment to improve legislation that is already a good 
and is doing a lot to protect our kids.
  I yield back my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, as we talk today about passing new laws, 
I would like to take a few minutes to talk about enforcing the laws the 
Congress has already passed.
  I want to talk today about something that I believe has been pushed 
to the wayside too many times by the current administration, and that 
would be the Constitution of the United States.
  Article II, section 3 of the U.S. Constitution declares that the 
President--coming right out of the Constitution--that the President 
``shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.'' Simply put, 
constitutional requirements are just that--they are constitutional 
requirements. They are not constitutional suggestions. This is not 
something the Constitution does not clearly define. The branches of 
government in the Constitution are the judicial, the legislative, and 
the executive. And the job of the executive is, again, to do what? To 
``take care that the laws be faithfully executed.''
  Yet time and again President Obama has refused to enforce the law and 
shown a willingness, frankly, to misuse regulations, in my view, to 
sidestep the Congress, to sidestep what the law intended to do and, 
more importantly, to step around the Constitution. Whether it is 
issuing waivers to States from the work requirements contained in the 
bipartisan Welfare Reform Act of 1996 or announcing yet another 
change--and we are now at over two dozen changes and delays--in the 
President's own health care law, the current administration has sought 
ways, over and over again, to circumvent the Congress by picking and 
choosing which laws it wants to enforce--clearly not a power given the 
President in the Constitution.
  In fact, there is a reason the legislative branch is article I of the 
Constitution. Because the Founders clearly saw the legislative branch 
as the branch that would determine the direction of the country, and 
the President's job was not to write the law, the President's job was 
to execute the law, to enforce the law.
  People all over America are rightly concerned about government 
overreach. They are rightly concerned about government dysfunction. 
They are rightly concerned about a Senate that has not brought the 
appropriations bills to the floor the way they should come to the floor 
for over 7 years now, so we are not debating our priorities.
  But it is the overreach, the dysfunction, the lack of compliance with 
the law and the seeming belief that somehow that is the President's 
job, to decide which laws we comply with as a country and which ones we 
do not, which laws the government enforces and which ones it does not 
enforce. That is not the President's job.
  I introduced a bill this week to stop this overreach and to force 
President Obama to uphold the Constitution. The ENFORCE the Law Act, 
which is cosponsored by more than half of my Republican Senate 
colleagues, and which passed the House yesterday, permits Congress to 
authorize a lawsuit against the President if he fails to uphold the 
constitutional obligation to uphold the law.
  Whenever we are asked, all of us as Members of the Senate, by people 
that we work for: How can the President decide he is not going to 
enforce the law, one of the responses we all have thoughtfully given to 
the other question of: What are you going to do about it, is at this 
point there is no standing of individual Members of Congress or even 
the entire body of the Senate or the body of the House to go to court 
and say: We have standing in court to have this law enforced.
  This bill would become law, and a law that would give the Congress 
that standing. It effectively permits the Congress, either House of the 
Congress, to authorize a lawsuit against the President if he fails to 
uphold his constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the law.
  If the President has a defense, this is a lawsuit. His side can go to 
court and defend that. But if he does not have a defense, he has sworn, 
as we have, to uphold the Constitution. This is not a partisan matter. 
This bill is important because it gives Congress the ability to combat 
executive disregard for the Congress no matter what party controls the 
White House or no matter what party controls the Congress.
  The courts have ruled that individual Members of Congress lack 
standing to take the administration to court. We are not considered 
individually so-called ``aggrieved parties.'' That is why Members, 
whether it was the National Labor Relations Board case where the 
President thought he could decide whether the Senate was in session, 
instead of the Senate deciding whether the Senate was in session--I 
joined many of my colleagues to file an amicus brief. I am not a 
lawyer, but I am able to do that as a citizen, to file an amicus brief, 
a friend-of-the-court brief, saying why we thought the President was 
wrong and why we thought the people who were challenging the rules that 
this group created, that were put in power in an unconstitutional way--
we could file that but we could not initiate that. We could not go to 
court and say: We believe the law is not being enforced.
  The ENFORCE Act removes that procedural barrier, so that a Member of 
the House, a Member of the Senate, can be empowered to bring a lawsuit 
in Federal court challenging the administration's refusal to enforce 
the law, challenging the administration's belief that on their own they 
can suspend the law, they can postpone the law, they can delay the law.
  If the law gives the President the ability to do that, it is going to 
be in the clear black-and-white letters of the law. It is not there 
now. The ENFORCE Act provides an expedited process so that if this 
lawsuit is initiated this

[[Page 4438]]

way, by one or both Houses of the Congress against the administration 
for not faithfully executing the law, it goes immediately to a three-
judge panel in the U.S. district court and then goes directly to the 
Supreme Court if there is an appeal.
  This is an a easy way to solve this problem. It is a way that creates 
standing to define who is constitutionally obligated to do a job that 
they are not doing. It is time we reestablished the proper limits on 
the executive branch. The Founders believed in separation of powers. It 
is the responsibility of the Congress to protect the idea they came up 
with in a document for the first time that was a governing document, 
the idea of checks and balances. If you eliminate that idea of checks 
and balances, you eliminate the miracle of the Constitution.
  I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join me and others 
in supporting this effort to stop executive overreach and encourage the 
President to enforce the law. The Constitution still matters. The 
Constitution deserves to be defended. This is a way the Members of the 
Congress of the United States can give themselves the ability to launch 
that defense.
  Again, I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this bill that 
the House passed yesterday. All we have to do to do our part is step 
forward and pass this legislation.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. REID. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


             Unanimous Consent Agreement--Executive Session

  Mr. REID. I ask unanimous consent that at 2:30 p.m. today, the Senate 
proceed to Executive Session to consider the following nomination: 
Calendar No. 686; that the Senate proceed to vote without intervening 
action or debate on the nomination; that the motion to reconsider be 
made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate; 
that no further motions be in order; that any related statements be 
printed in the Record; that the President be immediately notified of 
the Senate's action and the Senate then resume legislative session; 
further, that there be 2 minutes of debate equally divided prior to 
each vote.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. REID. I yield back all time, and ask that the vote start 
immediately, and all Senators should be advised that we will start the 
vote.

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