[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 1147-1148]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            THE LEGAL SYSTEM

  Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, across the street at the Supreme Court, 
four simple words are engraved on the face of the building: ``Equal 
Justice Under Law.'' That is supposed to be the basic premise of our 
legal system: that our laws are just and that everyone--no matter how 
rich, how powerful or how well connected--will be held equally 
accountable if they break those laws.
  But that is not the America we live in. It is not equal justice when 
a kid gets thrown in jail for stealing a car while a CEO gets a huge 
raise when his company steals billions. It is not equal

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justice when someone hooked on opioids gets locked up for buying pills 
on the street, but banking executives get off scot-free for laundering 
nearly a $1 billion of drug cartel money.
  We have one set of law on the books, but there are really two legal 
systems. One legal system is for big corporations, for the wealthy and 
the powerful. In this legal system, government officials fret about 
unintended consequences if they are too tough. In this legal system, 
instead of demanding actual punishment for breaking the law, the 
government regularly accepts token fines and phony promises to do 
better next time. In this legal system, even after huge companies plead 
guilty to felonies, law enforcement officials are so timid that they 
don't even bring charges against individuals who work there. That is 
one system.
  The second system is for everyone else. In this second system, 
whoever breaks the law can be held accountable. Government enforcement 
isn't timid here. It is aggressive, and consequences be damned. Just 
ask the families of Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Michael Brown about 
how aggressive they are.
  In this legal system, the government locks up people for decades, 
ruining lives over minor drug crimes because that is what the law 
demands.
  Yes, there are two legal systems--one for the rich and powerful and 
one for everyone else.
  Last Friday I released a report about the special legal system for 
big corporations and their executives. The report is called ``Rigged 
Justice,'' and it lists 20 examples from last year alone in which the 
government caught big companies breaking the law--defrauding taxpayers, 
covering up deadly safety problems, stealing billions from consumers 
and clients--and then just let them off easy. In most cases the 
government imposed fines and didn't require any admission of guilt. In 
the 20 cases I examined, just 1 executive went to jail for a measly 3 
months, and that case involved 29 deaths. Most fines were only a tiny 
fraction of the company's annual profits, and some were structured so 
that the companies could just write them off as a tax deduction.
  It is all part of a rigged game in Washington. Big businesses and 
powerful donors, with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers, write the 
rules to protect themselves. And when they don't follow the rules, they 
work the system to avoid any real responsibility.
  How can it be that corporate offenders are repeatedly left off the 
hook when the vast majority of Americans--Republicans, Democrats, and 
Independents--want tougher punishment and stronger new laws for 
corporate crimes?
  Well, that is how a rigged system works. Giant companies win no 
matter what the American people want.
  Currently, we can see the rigged game in action. Republican 
politicians love to say they are tough on crime. They love to talk 
about personal responsibility and accountability when they are back 
home in their districts. But when they come to Washington, they are 
pushing to make it even easier for corporate criminals to escape 
justice.
  This is one example. It starts, actually, with a great idea: 
reforming the criminal justice sentencing system to help some of the 
thousands of people who have been locked away for years for low-level 
offenses. Legislators in both parties have been working for years to 
slowly build bipartisan momentum for sentencing the reform. This is 
enormously important--a first step away from a broken system where half 
of our Federal jails are filled with nonviolent drug offenders. But 
now, all of a sudden, some Republicans are threatening to block reform 
unless Congress includes a so-called mens rea amendment to make it much 
harder for the government to prosecute hundreds of corporate crimes--
crimes for everything from wire fraud to mislabeling prescription 
drugs.
  In other words, for these Republicans, the price of helping people 
unjustly locked up in jail for years will be to make it even harder to 
lock up a white collar criminal for even a single day.
  That is shameful--shameful. It is shameful because we are already way 
too easy on corporate lawbreakers.
  And that is not all. Tomorrow the House will be voting on another 
Republican bill. This one would make it much harder to investigate and 
prosecute bank fraud. Yes, you heard that right. Tomorrow the House 
will be voting on a Republican bill to make it much harder to 
investigate and prosecute bank fraud.
  When the bankers triggered the savings and loan crisis in the late 
1980s, more than 1,000 of them were convicted of crimes and many got 
serious jail time. Boy, bankers learned their lesson. Now the lesson 
was not ``Don't break the law.'' The lesson they learned was ``Get 
Washington on your side.'' And it worked.
  After systemic fraud on Wall Street helped spark a financial crisis 
in 2008 that cost millions of Americans their jobs and their homes, 
Federal prosecutors didn't put a single Wall Street executive in jail. 
Spineless regulators extracted a few fines and then just moved on.
  But I guess even those fines were just too much for the big banks and 
their fancy executives. So now they have gotten their buddies in 
Congress to line up behind a bill that would gut one of their main 
laws, called FIRREA, which the Justice Department used to impose those 
fines.
  It has been 7 years since the financial crisis. A lot of people in 
Washington may want to forget, but the American people have long 
memories. They remember how corporate fraud caused millions of families 
to lose their homes, their jobs, and their pensions. They also remember 
who made out like bandits, and they didn't send us here to help out the 
bandits.
  The American people expect better from us. They expect us to 
straighten out our criminal justice system and reform drug enforcement 
practices that do nothing but destroy lives and communities. They 
expect us to stand against unjustified violence. But they also expect 
us to protect the financial system and to hold Wall Street executives 
accountable when they break the law. They expect us to hold big 
companies accountable when they steal billions of dollars from 
taxpayers, when they rip off students, veterans, retirees or single 
moms; or when they cover up health or safety problems, and people get 
sick, people get hurt or people die because of it.
  The American people know that we have two legal systems, but they 
expect us to fix it. They expect us to stand for justice. They expect 
us to once again honor the simple notion that, in America, nobody is 
above the law. And anyone in Congress who thinks they can simply talk 
tough on crime and then vote to make it harder to crack down on 
corporate criminals, hear this: I promise you--I promise you, the 
American people are watching, and they will remember.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cotton). The Senator from Michigan.

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