data_type stringclasses 2 values | dog_whistle stringlengths 2 26 | dog_whistle_root stringlengths 2 98 ⌀ | ingroup stringclasses 17 values | content stringlengths 2 83.3k | date stringlengths 10 10 ⌀ | speaker stringlengths 4 62 ⌀ | chamber stringclasses 2 values | reference stringlengths 24 31 ⌀ | community stringclasses 11 values | __index_level_0__ int64 0 35.6k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 6868) to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to provide for financial assistance to fund certain cybersecurity and infrastructure security education and training programs and initiatives, and for other purposes, as amended, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgH5078 | null | 4,400 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (S. 3527) to amend title 38, United States Code, to authorize the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to transfer the name of property of the Department of Veterans Affairs designated by law to other property of the Department, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgH5079 | null | 4,401 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (S. 2514) to rename the Provo Veterans Center in Orem, Utah, as the ``Col. Gail S. Halvorsen `Candy Bomber' Veterans Center'', on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgH5080-2 | null | 4,402 |
formal | based | null | white supremacist | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (S. 1760) to designate the community-based outpatient clinic of the Department of Veterans Affairs planned to be built in Oahu, Hawaii, as the ``Daniel Kahikina Akaka Department of Veterans Affairs Community-Based Outpatient Clinic'', on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgH5080 | null | 4,403 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (S. 1760) to designate the community-based outpatient clinic of the Department of Veterans Affairs planned to be built in Oahu, Hawaii, as the ``Daniel Kahikina Akaka Department of Veterans Affairs Community-Based Outpatient Clinic'', on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgH5080 | null | 4,404 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 5754) to amend title 38, United States Code, to improve the ability of veterans to electronically submit complaints about the delivery of health care services by the Department of Veterans Affairs on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgH5082 | null | 4,405 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (S. 2687) to provide the Inspector General of the Department of VeteransAffairs testimonial subpoena authority, and for other purposes, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgH5083-2 | null | 4,406 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 6604) to amend title 38, United States Code, to improve the method by which the Secretary of Veterans Affairs determines the effects of a closure or disapproval of an educational institution on individuals who do not transfer credits from such institution, as amended, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgH5083 | null | 4,407 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 6376) to amend title 38, United States Code, to extend eligibility for a certain work-study allowance paid by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to certain individuals who pursue programs of rehabilitation, education, or training on at least a half-time basis, and for other purposes, as amended, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgH5085 | null | 4,408 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 7153) to direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to submit to Congress a plan to modernize the information technology systems of the Veterans Benefits Administration, and for other purposes, as amended, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgH5086 | null | 4,409 |
formal | terrorism | null | Islamophobic | The Chaplain, Dr. Barry C. Black, offered the following prayer: Let us pray. Eternal God, You are our shelter from the storm. Lord, thank You that though wrong seems so strong, You continue to rule. Lord, we pray for grieving families who have become the collateral damage of domestic terrorism. We pray for sons and daughters, for fathers and mothers, for sisters and brothers who have had their lives maimed by the incomprehensible. Lord, use our lawmakers as sowers of reconciliation. Where there is hatred, may they sow seeds of love. Where there is despair, may they sow seeds of hope. Where there is falsehood, may they sow seeds of truth. Lord, permit this planting to produce the harvest of a more perfect Union for this land we love. God bless America. We pray in Your merciful Name. Amen. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2525-2 | null | 4,410 |
formal | based | null | white supremacist | Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, yesterday, in a bipartisan landslide, the Senate advanced legislation to get more arms and assistance to the innocent people of Ukraine. Senators Collins, Cornyn, Barrasso, and I just returned last night from Europe. Our first stop was Kyiv. It was moving to feel some of the impacts of Putin's aggression, to see a free and independent nation made to literally fight for its life. But it was also inspiring to witness the bravery and the determination that have united Ukrainians in the face of this onslaught. Ukraine has had more than its share of domestic political differences in recent years. Putin must have thought some Ukrainians would welcome--would actually welcome--invading Russian forces. Instead, both Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking Ukrainians have united in defense of their sovereign nation. Some predicted Ukraine would fold in a few days and Russia would stroll right to Kyiv. That was wrong too. Ukraine is tough, and Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands, with life moving back toward normalcy despite the continued threat. Our delegation was honored to meet with President Zelenskyy. He expressed his gratitude to the United States for our leadership and support on a bipartisan basis, as well as for other countries that have stood by his people in their time of need. America is not the only free country that has Ukraine's back. President Zelenskyy was moved by certain European countries who have given Ukraine, in his words, literally ``everything they had.'' Of course, other European countries can and should do more to help Ukraine. And the administration should lead an effort to ensure broad, sustained international support for Ukraine. America's support for Ukraine has highlighted the limits to our stockpiles of certain munitions and shortcomings in our own defense production capacity. A number of European countries have dipped even deeper into their weapons inventories. They will need a refill as well. As our European friends wake up from their ``holiday from history'' and increase defense spending, I hope the United States will be a reliable supplier of advanced weaponry to our NATO allies, a textbook win-win. Our delegation reiterated to President Zelenskyy the bipartisan consensus which the Senate demonstrated with last night's vote. The United States of America has Ukraine's back and will stand with our friends until they win. Ukraine is not asking anybody to fight their fight for them. They are only asking for help in getting the resources and tools they need to defend themselves. And we and our friends and partners across the free world will stand behind Ukraine until they achieve victory as they define it. The outcome of this fight has major ramifications for the West, and the Ukrainians should not be left to stand all alone. As an overwhelming bipartisan majority of the Senate reaffirmed yesterday, America's decision to support Ukraine is not some frivolous act ofcharity. It serves our own national security and strategic interests for international borders to continue to actually mean something. It serves our own security and interest to impose massive costs on Putin's long-running campaign of violent imperialism. And it directly and powerfully serves our national interest to deter potential future wars of aggression before they start. So, Madam President, I assure you that President Xi and the CCP are watching Ukraine carefully. There is a concrete reason why democratic Asian countries like Japan and Taiwan are rooting hard for Ukraine to prevail. Moreover, if we are stuck in a long-term strategic competition with China, we will want a stable, secure, and strong Europe on our side. Speaking of America's national interest, our delegation also visited what we hope and expect will soon be the two newest members of the NATO alliance. We arrived in Stockholm and Helsinki just as the leaders of Sweden and Finland announced their nations will seek to join the alliance that has secured peace in Europe for more than 73 years. It was an honor to have robust discussions with Prime Minister Andersson, Defense Minister Hultqvist, and key parliamentary leaders in Stockholm; and President Niinisto, Prime Minister Marin, Defense Minister Kaikkonen, and parliamentary leaders in Helsinki. I gave them my assurance as Senate Republican leader that I fully support both Finland's and Sweden's accession. I will do all I can to speed treaty ratification through the Senate. Finland and Sweden are impressive and capable countries, with military capabilities that surpass many of our existing NATO allies. As new members, they would more than pull their weight. These two nations' geographic locations are strategic. They have well-equipped and professional armed forces. Their military and high-tech industrial bases are robust. There is already significant interoperability that connects their defenses and NATO's. I will have more to say on this subject in the days and weeks ahead. Finland and Sweden would make NATO even stronger than it stands today. Finally, it must be noted that our delegation was not the most important group of Americans shipping out to stand with our friends in Europe--not by a longshot. There are 100,000 American soldiers currently stationed in Europe to bolster the peace and shore up NATO. This includes the Kentucky-based V Corps. And we received word just last week that 4,700 members of the 101st Airborne from Kentucky's Fort Campbell will also travel to Europe in the coming months. The Screaming Eagles have a long history of defending America's national security interests in Europe. I am proud of these brave men and women for being ready to deploy at a moment's notice. I am proud America can make this peaceful contribution to our allies' sovereignty and strength in Europe, and I am proud of the entire Fort Campbell community for keeping these men and women well-prepared for this mission. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. McCONNELL | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2525-6 | null | 4,411 |
formal | working families | null | racist | Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, now on another matter, by early 2020, before the pandemic, Republican policies had helped create one of the best economic moments for working Americans literally in our lifetimes. Unemployment was low, inflation was low, and real take-home pay was rising steadily. In fact, we had wages rising faster for the bottom 25 percent of the wage scale than for the top 25 percent. The incoming all-Democratic government was handed a reopening economy and a million vaccines going into arms per day. The country was packed with optimism and primed for a comeback. But through their far-left policy choices, Washington Democrats have driven our economy right into the ground. Inflation is setting 40-year records in consecutive months; gas and diesel prices have set new all-time highs on consecutive days; and sticker shock continues to cause headaches for Americans buying household essentials. One college student in California said that buying groceries has him ``taking extra loans to pay for my expenses. I'm maxing out my credit cards.'' A woman in Virginia reports she has taken to visiting three different food stores in one trip to make sure she is getting the best prices on everything she needs. A warehouse worker in New Jersey says she and her husband are spending more time hunting for coupons. It's not a lot, but I'm trying to buy healthy things that also fill us up. Overall grocery prices have jumped 10 percent in the past year, just one part of why many Americans say the Biden economy is not working for them. Fewer than one in four American consumers say the current economic conditions are even somewhat good, and fewer than one in five say the Biden administration's policies have done anything to help. Democrats made runaway reckless spending their new normal here in Washington. So historic, painful inflation has become the new normal for working families everywhere else. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. McCONNELL | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2526 | null | 4,412 |
formal | China Virus | null | anti-Asian | Mr. CARDIN. Madam President, I rise today in recognition of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This annual recognition offers the opportunity to celebrate the unique impact the Asian American and Pacific Islander community has made and continues to make in the United States. On this heritage month, we reflect on the incredible achievements of this minority community and honor the unique combination of traditions and cultures that create the rich tapestry of the Asian American Pacific Islander diaspora and experience. We also use this time to educate ourselves on the nuances of the AAPI identity and better understand the challenges this community faces. In 1977, then-Representative Frank Horton of New York introduced a resolution to designate the first 10 days in May as AAPI Heritage Week. The month of May was appropriate because of two key anniversaries that occurred in that month. On May 7, 1843, the first Japanese immigrants came to the United States. On May 10, 1869, the first transcontinental railroad was completed, largely due to the backbreaking work of Chinese laborers, some of whom lost their lives in the construction. Congress did not enact Representative Horton's initial resolution. The following year, however, with the persistent help of then-Representative Norman Mineta, Congress enacted a new resolution to designate the 7-day period beginning on May 4 as Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Week. In 1992, Congress authorized the entire month of May as AAPI Heritage Month, which we now celebrate. The presence and influence of the AAPI community in the United States has been growing steadily since the 19th century. The 1870 census classified approximately 63,000 individuals as Asian. By 1960, when the census allowed respondents to select their race, that number grew to 980,000. As of 2019, there are 22.4 million AAPI individuals in America, 475,000 of whom call Maryland home. It is important to remember that the AAPI community is not a homogenous group. It is an incredibly diverse community, made up of a wide array of cultures spanning many countries and territories, which includes over 50 ethnicities, over 100 languages, and multiple religions. Each subset draws from a unique set of traditions, and we cannot assume they have one shared, uniform experience. We know that the AAPI community makes up about 7 percent of our total population, and this rich and diverse community has an outsized impact on every pillar of our society. We cannot forget the many barriers to success this community has overcome to reach such heights, which makes this community's successes all the more impressive. To understand the profound influence the AAPI community has, we need not look further than Capitol Hill. This year, we mourned the passing of my good friend and former colleague, Norman Mineta. A passionate defender of justice, talented strategist, and exemplary patriot, Representative Mineta dedicated his life to service as a mayor, Congressman, and Cabinet member. In 1941, the U.S. Government interned his family along with hundreds of thousands of other Japanese Americans. Perhaps both in spite of and because of that experience, Representative Mineta pursued a career as a public servant. During his tenure as a legislator, he cofounded and chaired the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. He led the charge on the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which directed the Federal Government to issue a formal apology to and compensate the survivors of Japanese internment. He inspired generations of Asian Americans to get involved in politics. We miss him, but his legacy will live on for years to come. As chairman of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, I am in awe of the resilience and determination we have seen from AAPI small business owners over the past 2 years. In Maryland alone, there are 13,375 AAPI-owned businesses, many of which include restaurants and eateries. In fact, if you use cuisine predominance as a barometer of cultural impact, the Asian American influence is unparalleled. In 2021, the New York Times published a list of the 50 most exciting restaurants in the United States. Seventeen of the top 50 restaurants, or 34 percent, incorporate AAPI food or have an AAPI head chef, more than any other foreign cuisine. Through food, AAPI culture has become inextricably linked to the American identity. In my home city of Baltimore, a group of volunteers known as the China Collective organizes a pop-up market named the Charm City Market. I have watched as the event has grown in both attendance and footprint over the years, celebrating the AAPI community's diverse food and entrepreneurship landscape. Each year, I look forward to the market's ever-growing celebration and empowerment of AAPI small business owners and entrepreneurs. Asian American Pacific Islanders also played a massive role in our COVID-19 response, oftentimes finding themselves on the front lines as essential workers. Despite facing racial bias and prejudice largely attributed to Donald Trump's deliberately inflammatory use of the term ``China Virus,'' the AAPI community remained a steadfast lifeline for Americans in need. At Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Erika Rono, an emergency room nurse who came to the U.S. from the Philippines in 2014, continues to work every day through the harrowing realities of a hospital overrun by COVID-19 patients. Over the past 2 years, she has toiled day and night, putting her own life at risk, to saveBaltimoreans. We cannot thank her and her colleagues enough for their bravery. Despite the vital role the AAPI community plays in the U.S., they still endure racism and discrimination. I am broken-hearted to see an unprecedented increase in hate crimes against the AAPI community in recent years. According to a study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino, there was a 44-percent increase in anti-Asian American hate crimes across 16 of the largest cities in the United States. In 2021, 81 percent of Asian Americans who participated in a report by Pew Research stated that violence against them was increasing. One in 4 AAPI small business owners has experienced vandalism or threats to their business at least once between 2020 and 2021, and one in five Asian Americans worries daily about potential racial threats and attacks. On top of this fear of retaliation, there is also concern in the community, as with everyone else, about contracting the virus. We must continue to do all that we can to preserve, protect, and support the AAPI community. Last year, Congress enacted and President Biden signed into law S. 937, the ``COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act,'' which formally condemns anti-Asian violence and creates pathways for the expedited reporting and prosecution of such abhorrent events at the Federal, State, and local levels. There is no place for hate in our society. Today, as I think about my late, great colleague Norm Mineta and all the Asian Americans who make America what it is today, I re-emphasize my gratitude for the AAPI community and reaffirm my commitment to eliminating systemic barriers to its success. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. CARDIN | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2540-2 | null | 4,413 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | Mr. CARDIN. Madam President, I rise today in recognition of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This annual recognition offers the opportunity to celebrate the unique impact the Asian American and Pacific Islander community has made and continues to make in the United States. On this heritage month, we reflect on the incredible achievements of this minority community and honor the unique combination of traditions and cultures that create the rich tapestry of the Asian American Pacific Islander diaspora and experience. We also use this time to educate ourselves on the nuances of the AAPI identity and better understand the challenges this community faces. In 1977, then-Representative Frank Horton of New York introduced a resolution to designate the first 10 days in May as AAPI Heritage Week. The month of May was appropriate because of two key anniversaries that occurred in that month. On May 7, 1843, the first Japanese immigrants came to the United States. On May 10, 1869, the first transcontinental railroad was completed, largely due to the backbreaking work of Chinese laborers, some of whom lost their lives in the construction. Congress did not enact Representative Horton's initial resolution. The following year, however, with the persistent help of then-Representative Norman Mineta, Congress enacted a new resolution to designate the 7-day period beginning on May 4 as Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Week. In 1992, Congress authorized the entire month of May as AAPI Heritage Month, which we now celebrate. The presence and influence of the AAPI community in the United States has been growing steadily since the 19th century. The 1870 census classified approximately 63,000 individuals as Asian. By 1960, when the census allowed respondents to select their race, that number grew to 980,000. As of 2019, there are 22.4 million AAPI individuals in America, 475,000 of whom call Maryland home. It is important to remember that the AAPI community is not a homogenous group. It is an incredibly diverse community, made up of a wide array of cultures spanning many countries and territories, which includes over 50 ethnicities, over 100 languages, and multiple religions. Each subset draws from a unique set of traditions, and we cannot assume they have one shared, uniform experience. We know that the AAPI community makes up about 7 percent of our total population, and this rich and diverse community has an outsized impact on every pillar of our society. We cannot forget the many barriers to success this community has overcome to reach such heights, which makes this community's successes all the more impressive. To understand the profound influence the AAPI community has, we need not look further than Capitol Hill. This year, we mourned the passing of my good friend and former colleague, Norman Mineta. A passionate defender of justice, talented strategist, and exemplary patriot, Representative Mineta dedicated his life to service as a mayor, Congressman, and Cabinet member. In 1941, the U.S. Government interned his family along with hundreds of thousands of other Japanese Americans. Perhaps both in spite of and because of that experience, Representative Mineta pursued a career as a public servant. During his tenure as a legislator, he cofounded and chaired the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. He led the charge on the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which directed the Federal Government to issue a formal apology to and compensate the survivors of Japanese internment. He inspired generations of Asian Americans to get involved in politics. We miss him, but his legacy will live on for years to come. As chairman of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, I am in awe of the resilience and determination we have seen from AAPI small business owners over the past 2 years. In Maryland alone, there are 13,375 AAPI-owned businesses, many of which include restaurants and eateries. In fact, if you use cuisine predominance as a barometer of cultural impact, the Asian American influence is unparalleled. In 2021, the New York Times published a list of the 50 most exciting restaurants in the United States. Seventeen of the top 50 restaurants, or 34 percent, incorporate AAPI food or have an AAPI head chef, more than any other foreign cuisine. Through food, AAPI culture has become inextricably linked to the American identity. In my home city of Baltimore, a group of volunteers known as the China Collective organizes a pop-up market named the Charm City Market. I have watched as the event has grown in both attendance and footprint over the years, celebrating the AAPI community's diverse food and entrepreneurship landscape. Each year, I look forward to the market's ever-growing celebration and empowerment of AAPI small business owners and entrepreneurs. Asian American Pacific Islanders also played a massive role in our COVID-19 response, oftentimes finding themselves on the front lines as essential workers. Despite facing racial bias and prejudice largely attributed to Donald Trump's deliberately inflammatory use of the term ``China Virus,'' the AAPI community remained a steadfast lifeline for Americans in need. At Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Erika Rono, an emergency room nurse who came to the U.S. from the Philippines in 2014, continues to work every day through the harrowing realities of a hospital overrun by COVID-19 patients. Over the past 2 years, she has toiled day and night, putting her own life at risk, to saveBaltimoreans. We cannot thank her and her colleagues enough for their bravery. Despite the vital role the AAPI community plays in the U.S., they still endure racism and discrimination. I am broken-hearted to see an unprecedented increase in hate crimes against the AAPI community in recent years. According to a study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino, there was a 44-percent increase in anti-Asian American hate crimes across 16 of the largest cities in the United States. In 2021, 81 percent of Asian Americans who participated in a report by Pew Research stated that violence against them was increasing. One in 4 AAPI small business owners has experienced vandalism or threats to their business at least once between 2020 and 2021, and one in five Asian Americans worries daily about potential racial threats and attacks. On top of this fear of retaliation, there is also concern in the community, as with everyone else, about contracting the virus. We must continue to do all that we can to preserve, protect, and support the AAPI community. Last year, Congress enacted and President Biden signed into law S. 937, the ``COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act,'' which formally condemns anti-Asian violence and creates pathways for the expedited reporting and prosecution of such abhorrent events at the Federal, State, and local levels. There is no place for hate in our society. Today, as I think about my late, great colleague Norm Mineta and all the Asian Americans who make America what it is today, I re-emphasize my gratitude for the AAPI community and reaffirm my commitment to eliminating systemic barriers to its success. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. CARDIN | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2540-2 | null | 4,414 |
formal | Baltimore | null | racist | Mr. CARDIN. Madam President, I rise today in recognition of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This annual recognition offers the opportunity to celebrate the unique impact the Asian American and Pacific Islander community has made and continues to make in the United States. On this heritage month, we reflect on the incredible achievements of this minority community and honor the unique combination of traditions and cultures that create the rich tapestry of the Asian American Pacific Islander diaspora and experience. We also use this time to educate ourselves on the nuances of the AAPI identity and better understand the challenges this community faces. In 1977, then-Representative Frank Horton of New York introduced a resolution to designate the first 10 days in May as AAPI Heritage Week. The month of May was appropriate because of two key anniversaries that occurred in that month. On May 7, 1843, the first Japanese immigrants came to the United States. On May 10, 1869, the first transcontinental railroad was completed, largely due to the backbreaking work of Chinese laborers, some of whom lost their lives in the construction. Congress did not enact Representative Horton's initial resolution. The following year, however, with the persistent help of then-Representative Norman Mineta, Congress enacted a new resolution to designate the 7-day period beginning on May 4 as Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Week. In 1992, Congress authorized the entire month of May as AAPI Heritage Month, which we now celebrate. The presence and influence of the AAPI community in the United States has been growing steadily since the 19th century. The 1870 census classified approximately 63,000 individuals as Asian. By 1960, when the census allowed respondents to select their race, that number grew to 980,000. As of 2019, there are 22.4 million AAPI individuals in America, 475,000 of whom call Maryland home. It is important to remember that the AAPI community is not a homogenous group. It is an incredibly diverse community, made up of a wide array of cultures spanning many countries and territories, which includes over 50 ethnicities, over 100 languages, and multiple religions. Each subset draws from a unique set of traditions, and we cannot assume they have one shared, uniform experience. We know that the AAPI community makes up about 7 percent of our total population, and this rich and diverse community has an outsized impact on every pillar of our society. We cannot forget the many barriers to success this community has overcome to reach such heights, which makes this community's successes all the more impressive. To understand the profound influence the AAPI community has, we need not look further than Capitol Hill. This year, we mourned the passing of my good friend and former colleague, Norman Mineta. A passionate defender of justice, talented strategist, and exemplary patriot, Representative Mineta dedicated his life to service as a mayor, Congressman, and Cabinet member. In 1941, the U.S. Government interned his family along with hundreds of thousands of other Japanese Americans. Perhaps both in spite of and because of that experience, Representative Mineta pursued a career as a public servant. During his tenure as a legislator, he cofounded and chaired the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. He led the charge on the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which directed the Federal Government to issue a formal apology to and compensate the survivors of Japanese internment. He inspired generations of Asian Americans to get involved in politics. We miss him, but his legacy will live on for years to come. As chairman of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, I am in awe of the resilience and determination we have seen from AAPI small business owners over the past 2 years. In Maryland alone, there are 13,375 AAPI-owned businesses, many of which include restaurants and eateries. In fact, if you use cuisine predominance as a barometer of cultural impact, the Asian American influence is unparalleled. In 2021, the New York Times published a list of the 50 most exciting restaurants in the United States. Seventeen of the top 50 restaurants, or 34 percent, incorporate AAPI food or have an AAPI head chef, more than any other foreign cuisine. Through food, AAPI culture has become inextricably linked to the American identity. In my home city of Baltimore, a group of volunteers known as the China Collective organizes a pop-up market named the Charm City Market. I have watched as the event has grown in both attendance and footprint over the years, celebrating the AAPI community's diverse food and entrepreneurship landscape. Each year, I look forward to the market's ever-growing celebration and empowerment of AAPI small business owners and entrepreneurs. Asian American Pacific Islanders also played a massive role in our COVID-19 response, oftentimes finding themselves on the front lines as essential workers. Despite facing racial bias and prejudice largely attributed to Donald Trump's deliberately inflammatory use of the term ``China Virus,'' the AAPI community remained a steadfast lifeline for Americans in need. At Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Erika Rono, an emergency room nurse who came to the U.S. from the Philippines in 2014, continues to work every day through the harrowing realities of a hospital overrun by COVID-19 patients. Over the past 2 years, she has toiled day and night, putting her own life at risk, to saveBaltimoreans. We cannot thank her and her colleagues enough for their bravery. Despite the vital role the AAPI community plays in the U.S., they still endure racism and discrimination. I am broken-hearted to see an unprecedented increase in hate crimes against the AAPI community in recent years. According to a study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino, there was a 44-percent increase in anti-Asian American hate crimes across 16 of the largest cities in the United States. In 2021, 81 percent of Asian Americans who participated in a report by Pew Research stated that violence against them was increasing. One in 4 AAPI small business owners has experienced vandalism or threats to their business at least once between 2020 and 2021, and one in five Asian Americans worries daily about potential racial threats and attacks. On top of this fear of retaliation, there is also concern in the community, as with everyone else, about contracting the virus. We must continue to do all that we can to preserve, protect, and support the AAPI community. Last year, Congress enacted and President Biden signed into law S. 937, the ``COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act,'' which formally condemns anti-Asian violence and creates pathways for the expedited reporting and prosecution of such abhorrent events at the Federal, State, and local levels. There is no place for hate in our society. Today, as I think about my late, great colleague Norm Mineta and all the Asian Americans who make America what it is today, I re-emphasize my gratitude for the AAPI community and reaffirm my commitment to eliminating systemic barriers to its success. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. CARDIN | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2540-2 | null | 4,415 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | Mr. REED. Madam President, today I wish to recognize the dedicated public service of Michele Mackin, who retired on April 30 as managing director for contracting and national security acquisitions with the Government Accountability Office. For 34 years, Michele has helped Congress analyze the Federal Government's largest acquisition programs, from the Air Force's C-17 and C-130 aircraft to the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship, Ford-class aircraft carrier, and Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, along with scores of other systems and related services that the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security have procured to make our Nation safe. She has also been a leading voice on Federal contracting issues and a vigilant watchdog who consistently brought important issues related to the improper use of contracts to light. In so doing, Michele has obtained the respect of the Members of this body and the deep affection of her colleagues, who for decades have been drawn to her fine example of public service. Michele has been a trusted voice on this Nation's shipbuilding programs, and Congress has relied greatly on her clear analysis and recommendations to guide us in our oversight role. Since first becoming a member of the Senior Executive Service in 2013, Michele has testified before Congress 11 times for a variety of committees--voicing concern on the Littoral Combat Ship program, raising questions about the Navy's acquisition strategy for the Constellation-class guided-missile frigate, highlighting risks in the Coast Guard's Deepwater program, and advocating for contracting and acquisition reforms at the Departments of Navy, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs. Michele epitomizes what Congress and the American public value about the Government Accountability Office: the honest broker. In embracing the idea that oversight of programs and contracts represents a sacred trust, Michele has been a tireless, effective advocate for both the American taxpayer and the men and women serving the government's many and varied missions. She has inspired her teams with the notion of stewardship that the American people should get what they have paid for, that government should operate fairly and transparently, and American warfighters should get the capabilities they need to defend this great Nation. We wish Michele a fond farewell and thank her for her distinguished service to Congress and the American public. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. REED | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2541 | null | 4,416 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | At 2:32 p.m., a message from the House of Representatives, delivered by Mrs. Alli, one of its reading clerks, announced that the House has passed the following bills, in which it requests the concurrence of the Senate: H.R. 5658. An act to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to submit a report on the cybersecurity roles and responsibilities of the Federal Government, and for other purposes. H.R. 6824. An act to authorize the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security to hold an annual cybersecurity competition relating to offensive and defensive cybersecurity disciplines, and for other purposes. H.R. 6825. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to enhance the funding and administration of the Nonprofit Security Grant Program of the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2542-4 | null | 4,417 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | The following bills were read the first and the second times by unanimous consent, and referred as indicated: H.R. 5658. An act to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to submit a report on the cybersecurity roles and responsibilities of the Federal Government, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. H.R. 6824. An act to authorize the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security to hold an annual cybersecurity competition relating to offensive and defensive cybersecurity disciplines, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. H.R. 6825. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to enhance the funding and administration of the Nonprofit Security Grant Program of the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2542-5 | null | 4,418 |
formal | working families | null | racist | Mr. TESTER. Madam President, I would like to share a few words today to honor an outstanding leader and friend of mine who recently passed away. Mark Sweeney was a State senator for Montana's 39th District and a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. Mark was the face of public service in Montana, with an unyielding commitment to make our State better for all of our kids and grandkids. Born in Butte, raised in Miles City, and a longtime resident of Anaconda, Mark was a Montanan through and through. Mark worked for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks for 32 years until he retired as a fisheries manager. He started his political career as a commissioner in Anaconda-Deer Lodge and later successfully ran for a seat in Montana's State Legislature as a representative. He was elected to the State senate in 2020. During his career, Mark was a tireless advocate for public lands and public access, working with sportsmen and women around Montana to protect our greatest treasures for future generations. When Mark talked about running for office, he focused on how he would improve the lives of his fellow citizens, and he worked with anyone and everyone, regardless of whether they agreed or disagreed with him. Mark was a fierce advocate for working families across Montana. He believed in the power of public education to lift folks up and prioritized the creation of good-paying jobs, especially for young people, that would keep them living and working in Montana. Mark was an effective policy-maker who made it a priority to balance conservation and responsible development in our communities. Mark's lifelong commitment to bettering our State and preserving our public lands for generations wasn't something he preached; it was something he lived every day. I want to express my deepest sympathy to Mark's wife, Sue, his children, Shannon and Jordan, stepchildren, Carly and Brandi Johnson, and grandchildren, Wes and Brooks, as well as the rest of the Sweeney family. Those who knew Mark will remember him as not only a dedicated public servant, but as a family man and a dear friend. His friendly demeanor and sense of humor will be sorely missed. Mark has left a lasting legacy on us all, but especially his family and friends, his colleagues in the State legislature, and those he represented in the State of Montana. He will not be forgotten. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. TESTER | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2542 | null | 4,419 |
formal | urban | null | racist | Mr. MENENDEZ (for himself, Mr. Risch, Mrs. Shaheen, and Mr. Johnson) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations: S. Res. 638 Whereas, on February 18, 2022, the United States and Moldova marked 30 years of diplomatic relations; Whereas, on February 24, 2022, armed forces of the Russian Federation began an illegal, unjustified, and unprovoked attack on Ukraine with missile strikes against densely populated urban areas, including Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and the regional hubs of Odesa and Mykolayiv, which lie close to Moldova; Whereas Moldova is a country of approximately 2,600,000 people that relies heavily on remittances sent to Moldova by the Moldovan diaspora; Whereas, in 2011, the Government of Moldova passed a law entitled ``Law on Integration of Foreigners in the Republic of Moldova'', which provided refugees and beneficiaries of humanitarian protection access to social security, primary and secondary education, medical insurance, cultural integration support, language classes, and employment counseling; Whereas, prior to the most recent invasion of Ukraine by President Vladimir Putin, the Government of Moldova assessed that the infrastructure in Moldova could accommodate not more than 15,000 refugees; Whereas, only one day after the commencement of the unconscionable attack on Ukraine by President Putin, the people of Moldova welcomed more than 16,000 refugees; Whereas, since 2014, more than 450,000 refugees fleeing the invasion of Ukraine by President Putin had entered Moldova and more than 100,000 of such refugees chose to remain in Moldova; Whereas, by March 7, 2022, 89 percent of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Moldova were women and children; Whereas, by March 9, 2022, an estimated 6 out of every 100 people in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, were refugees; Whereas, by April 26, 2022, refugees comprised more than 16 percent of the population of Moldova; Whereas the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Representative for Central Europe Roland Schilling said, ``The attitude of Moldovan authorities is really impressive'', and noted that ``local communities came to help refugees, feeding them, supporting them'' at the border; Whereas the Government of Moldova has created ``green corridors'' to facilitate the crossing of refugees from Ukraine to Romania and other countries in the European Union; Whereas, over the past year, the Government of Moldova and civil society have embarked on meaningful reform of the justice system and promoted good governance and economic stability in Moldova; Whereas, on March 3, 2022, Moldova formally submitted its application to join the European Union, signaling a commitment to democratic values and the rule of law; Whereas, on March 16, 2022, the European Union announced that Moldova and Ukraine had completed the emergency synchronization process with the Continental European Grid, operated by the European Network of Transmission System Operators; Whereas, as of April 21, 2022, the United States has provided more than $25,000,000 to support humanitarian operations in Moldova; Whereas, on April 22, 2022, a senior military official of the Russian Federation indicated that the Russian Federation intended to conquer southern Ukraine and join that territory with Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova; and Whereas, in late April and early May 2022, reports of unexplained explosions in Transnistria elevated concerns that the Russia Federation could expand its war into Moldova: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the Senate-- (1) commends the people of Moldova for their hospitality and extraordinary efforts hosting more than 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine; (2) condemns provocation and aggressive action by the Russian Federation in the Transnistria region of Moldova; (3) reaffirms the sovereignty of Moldova and supports the choice of the Government of Moldova to further integrate with structures of the European Union; (4) calls on the United States Government to continue to provide meaningful financial and technical support to Moldova; (5) calls on international partners to join the United States in providing swift and immediate humanitarian aid to Ukrainians in Moldova; (6) calls on the United States Government to continue working with the European Network of Transmission System Operators, the Government of Moldova, and the Government of Ukraine to complete full synchronization of the electricity grids of Moldova and Ukraine with the Continental European Grid; and (7) expresses support for the ongoing efforts by the Government of Moldova to reform the justice sector, promote good governance, and bolster the energy security of Moldova. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2548-2 | null | 4,420 |
formal | single | null | homophobic | Mr. GRASSLEY (for himself and Ms. Ernst) submitted the following resolution; which was considered and agreed to: S. Res. 639 Whereas Ames Laboratory was established by the Atomic Energy Commission on May 17, 1947, as a National Laboratory; Whereas Ames Laboratory originated as the Ames Project at Iowa State College, later known as Iowa State University, which, under the leadership of Frank Spedding and Harley Wilhelm, contributed valuable scientific and production assistance to the Manhattan Project, including-- (1) a unique method of purifying uranium metal; (2) substantial quantities of purified uranium metal to the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction; and (3) 2,000,000 pounds of purified uranium in assistance of the war efforts of the United States during World War II; Whereas Ames Laboratory (as the Ames Project at Iowa State College) was recognized on October 12, 1945, for its contributions to the defense of the United States during World War II with the award of the Army-Navy ``E'' flag for Excellence in Production, the only educational institution to be so honored; Whereas the science and technology developments of Ames Laboratory have contributed to the advancement of human understanding and the benefit of society over 7 \1/2\ decades, including-- (1) the discovery, design, and mastery of rare earth and other materials that helped advance early progress of the Atomic Age; (2) globally recognized expertise in the properties of rare earth elements and their importance in technologies such as data-storage, wind power, lighting, and batteries; (3) the invention of lead-free solder, which removed toxic lead from electronic manufacturing processes; (4) the understanding of quasicrystals, including work by scientist Dan Shechtman, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; (5) national and international leadership in critical materials important for United States manufacturing; (6) the development of analytical equipment to enable the mapping of the human genome; (7) the development of analytical instrumentation that can detect parts per trillion of atoms, molecules, and compounds; (8) the discovery and development of catalysts leading to cost-effective biofuel production; (9) the development of metal and alloy powder synthesis to accelerate the adoption of 3D printing and enable clean energy technologies; (10) the discovery of the first giant magnetocaloric material and demonstration of magnetic refrigeration; (11) the discovery of chemical processes to convert plastic waste into valuable resources; and (12) ground-breaking advances in the understanding of superconductors and topological semimetals; Whereas Ames Laboratory is the home of the Materials Preparation Center, a research facility globally recognized for its unique capabilities in purification, preparation, and characterization of metals, alloys, and single crystals; Whereas Ames Laboratory is the home of the Critical Materials Institute, an Energy Innovation Hub that provides the United States with vital supply chain expertise in rare earth and other critical materials, including-- (1) diversifying supplies of rare earth and other critical material resources; (2) developing substitutes for high-demand materials; and (3) driving recycling and reuse; Whereas Ames Laboratory is a leader in technology transfer, with 257 issued United States patents and licensed innovations resulting in worldwide sales of more than $3,000,000,000 and returning royalty revenue of nearly $78,000,000; and Whereas Ames Laboratory has nurtured more than 2,500 graduate students in its history, mentoring the scientific leaders and innovators of tomorrow through education and outreach programs designed to train and inspire young minds for the discoveries of the future: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the Senate congratulates Ames Laboratory for 75 years of outstanding service to the Department of Energy, the United States, and the world in fulfilling its mission as a National Laboratory dedicated to discovery and innovation in the chemical and materials sciences. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2549 | null | 4,421 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | 2022, AS ``NATIONAL PUBLIC WORKS WEEK'' Mr. INHOFE (for himself, Mr. Cardin, Mr. Carper, Mrs. Capito, Mr. Cramer, Mr. Wicker, Mr. Padilla, and Ms. Duckworth) submitted the following resolution; which was considered and agreed to: S. Res. 641 Whereas public works infrastructure, facilities, and services are of vital importance to the health, safety, and well-being of the people of the United States; Whereas public works infrastructure, facilities, and services could not be provided without the dedicated efforts of public works professionals who represent Federal, State, and local governments and private sector organizations throughout the United States; Whereas public works professionals design, build, operate, and maintain the transportation systems, water infrastructure, sewage and refuse disposal systems, public buildings, sanitation and waste management systems, and other structures and facilities that are vital to the people and communities of the United States; Whereas public works professionals have played, and will continue to play, a key role in helping the United States recover from the COVID-19 pandemic; and Whereas understanding the role that public infrastructure plays in protecting the environment, improving public health and safety, contributing to economic vitality, and enhancing the quality of life of every community of the United States is in the interest of the people of the United States: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the Senate-- (1) designates the week of May 15 through May 21, 2022, as ``National Public Works Week''; (2) recognizes and celebrates the important contributions that public works professionals make every day to improve-- (A) the public infrastructure of the United States; and (B) the communities that public works professionals serve; and (3) urges individuals and communities throughout the United States to join with representatives of the Federal Government and the American Public Works Association in activities and ceremonies that are designed-- (A) to pay tribute to the public works professionals of the United States; and (B) to recognize the substantial contributions that public works professionals make to the United States. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-17-pt1-PgS2550 | null | 4,422 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the Chair will postpone further proceedings today on motions to suspend the rules on which the yeas and nays are ordered. The House will resume proceedings on postponed questions at a later time. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5104-6 | null | 4,423 |
formal | entitlement | null | racist | Mr. TAKANO. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (S. 4089) to restore entitlement to educational assistance under Veterans Rapid Retraining Program in cases of a closure of an educational institution or a disapproval of a program of education, and for other purposes. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. TAKANO | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5110 | null | 4,424 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 9 of rule XX, this 15-minute vote on ordering the previous question will be followed by 5-minute votes on: Adoption of the resolution, if ordered; The motion to recommit on H.R. 6531; Passage of H.R. 6531, if ordered; Passage of S. 2938; and Motions to suspend the rules with respect to the following: H. Res. 1125 | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5135 | null | 4,425 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to recommit on the bill (H.R. 6531) to provide an increased allocation of funding under certain programs for assistance in areas of persistent poverty, and for other purposes, offered by the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Ms. Herrell), on which the yeas and nays were ordered. The Clerk will redesignate the motion. The Clerk redesignated the motion. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5137 | null | 4,426 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on passage of the bill (S. 2938) to designate the United States Courthouse and Federal Building located at 111 North Adams Street in Tallahassee, Florida, as the ``Joseph Woodrow Hatchett United States Courthouse and Federal Building'', and for other purposes, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5138 | null | 4,427 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Beatty). Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 1125) condemning rising antisemitism, as amended, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Beatty) | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5139 | null | 4,428 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 5738) to amend title 38, United States Code, to require a lactation space in each medical center of the Department of Veterans Affairs, as amended, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5140 | null | 4,429 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 7335) to improve coordination between the Veterans Health Administration and the Veterans Benefits Administration with respect to claims for compensation arising from military sexual trauma, and for other purposes, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5141 | null | 4,430 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 6961) to amend title 38, United States Code, to improve hearings before the Board of Veterans' Appeals regarding claims involving military sexual trauma, as amended, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5142 | null | 4,431 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1124, I call up the bill (H.R. 350) to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism and ask for its immediate consideration in the House. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. NADLER | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5143 | null | 4,432 |
formal | terrorism | null | Islamophobic | Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1124, I call up the bill (H.R. 350) to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism and ask for its immediate consideration in the House. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. NADLER | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5143 | null | 4,433 |
formal | terrorist | null | Islamophobic | Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1124, I call up the bill (H.R. 350) to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism and ask for its immediate consideration in the House. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. NADLER | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5143 | null | 4,434 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 7791) to amend the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 to establish waiver authority to address certain emergencies, disasters, and supply chain disruptions, and for other purposes, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5163-4 | null | 4,435 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Dingell). Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to recommit on the bill (H.R. 7790) making emergency supplemental appropriations to address the shortage of infant formula in the United States for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2022, and for other purposes, offered by the gentlewoman from Iowa (Mrs. Hinson), on which the yeas and nays were ordered. The Clerk will redesignate the motion. The Clerk redesignated the motion. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Dingell) | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5164 | null | 4,436 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 2992) to direct the Attorney General to develop crisis intervention training tools for use by first responders related to interacting with persons who have a traumatic brain injury, another form of acquired brain injury, or post-traumatic stress disorder, and for other purposes, as amended, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5166-2 | null | 4,437 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on passage of the bill (H.R. 350) to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5166 | null | 4,438 |
formal | terrorism | null | Islamophobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on passage of the bill (H.R. 350) to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5166 | null | 4,439 |
formal | terrorist | null | Islamophobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on passage of the bill (H.R. 350) to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5166 | null | 4,440 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on passage of the bill (H.R. 350) to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5166 | null | 4,441 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 6943) to amend the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to authorize public safety officer death benefits to officers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or acute stress disorder, and for other purposes, as amended, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5167 | null | 4,442 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 2724) to amend title 38, United States Code, to direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to provide for peer support specialists for claimants who are survivors of military sexual trauma, and for other purposes, as amended, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5168 | null | 4,443 |
formal | entitlement | null | racist | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (S. 4089) to restore entitlement to educational assistance under Veterans Rapid Retraining Program in cases of a closure of an educational institution or a disapproval of a program of education, and for other purposes, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5169 | null | 4,444 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (S. 4089) to restore entitlement to educational assistance under Veterans Rapid Retraining Program in cases of a closure of an educational institution or a disapproval of a program of education, and for other purposes, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5169 | null | 4,445 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (S. 2533) to improve mammography services furnished by the Department of Veterans Affairs, and for other purposes, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5170-2 | null | 4,446 |
formal | XX | null | transphobic | The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill (S. 2102) to amend title 38, United States Code, to direct the Under Secretary for Health of the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide mammography screening for veterans who served in locations associated with toxic exposure, on which the yeas and nays were ordered. | 2020-01-06 | The SPEAKER pro tempore | House | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgH5171 | null | 4,447 |
formal | based | null | white supremacist | Restaurants Mr. President, on a different matter--the restaurants bill--tomorrow, the Senate is going to hold a vote on legislation to help our restaurants, gyms, minor league teams, and other small businesses that have been utterly devastated by the COVID pandemic. This bill, championed by my colleagues Senator Cardin, a Democrat, and Senator Wicker, a Republican--which I very strongly support--will help restaurants and other small businesses like gyms that were left out in earlier rounds of emergency aid. Every proposal included in this package is bipartisan. Some have said: Well, COVID is over, and the restaurants are back. I see them sort of full. That may be true for some restaurants, but for just about every restaurant, there is a shortage of labor, and many are only opening at limited times. Most of the restaurants I speak to are either closed certain days, don't serve lunches, or whatever, because they can't find labor. Let's not forget that many of the restaurants, particularly the smaller ones, the nonchain ones, had to borrow during COVID, borrow large amounts of money. They need to repay that money, and they can't do it based on their limited incomes that are occurring right now. If they don't get the money to pay it back, the lenders are going to foreclose and close restaurants that are already back on the road to prospering and recovering. That makes no sense. We must pass this legislation. I hope we will get a good number of our Republican colleagues to join Senator Wicker in supporting this. Two years into this crisis, the idea that restaurant owners have all recovered could not be further from the truth. Restaurants are part of the fabric of every Main Street and every tight-knit neighborhood. It is where friends run into each other on the weekends, grab a drink after work, have lunch after church. The same can be applied to minor league teams and local gyms and businesses that support theaters. These are places where Americans have always come together. I was proud to champion the $28 billion restaurant relief in the American Rescue Plan, but these establishments, as I mentioned, still need our help. Tomorrow, there should be a strong bipartisan show of support to help these businesses. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2555 | null | 4,448 |
formal | single | null | homophobic | Gun Violence MR. MURPHY. Mr. President, the conventional wisdom is that one of the adaptations that helped humans separate ourselves from all other species is this--the opposable thumb. The theory goes that the transformation of the thumb, able to operate by itself independently from the rest of our fingers, allowed humans to be able to manipulate objects with a level of precision and dexterity that was previously unseen in the animal kingdom, and this newly nimble hand allowed humans to, for instance, more easily catch fish and open fruit, pull out the seeds, this newfound bounty of fats and proteins. It vaulted the human brain into developmental overdrive. But about 10 years ago, biologist David Carrier, a longtime student of the evolution of the human hand, proposed a different theory. What if the primary utility of the opposable thumb was not to do this, but instead this. The ability to tuck your thumb into the middle of your four fingers immediately gave humans a more effective fighting tool--important, since we lacked tusks or fangs or claws like other animals. Maybe the development that mattered most to human development was the one that allowed us to become more effective fighters not just with predators but with ourselves because from the beginning, as a species, humans have been drawn to violence. In fact, there are few species, few mammals, that are more violent than humans. There is a really interesting study of intraspecies violence, meaning when you conduct a violent act against another member of your species, and these researchers looked at over 1,000 mammals. What is interesting is that 60 percent of mammals actually have zero intraspecies violence--bats and whales, they never attack each other. That tells you something, in and of itself; that it is not endemic to mammals to be violent. But what the data showed is that right at the top of that list of those 1,000 species, when it came to the rates of intraspecies violence--humans. Biologists trace our violence back to our earliest days. Without those tusks or fangs, humans could really only survive by grouping ourselves tightly together. We were quickly rewarded socially and materially for joining up in groups. But with resources scarce in the early human world to survive, you had to find a group, and then you had to defend it--defend it against other humans who were competing with you for those same resources. Intertribal violence was epidemic in this world in the early days of humans. In the bronze age, estimates suggest that one out of every three humansdied a violent death at the hands of another human. Records suggest that in pre-Columbian America, as many as one out of four Native Americans died violently. The primary reason? Humans have an in-group bias. To survive in those early days, we needed to group ourselves tightly together and view with fear and skepticism members of other outside groups who were competitors for those scarce resources. And centuries and centuries of human development have hardwired this in-group bias, this anxiety about out groups into our genetics. One 2012 study determined that today, when an individual first meets a person who is perceived to be outside of one's defined social group, individuals demonstrate immediate, almost automatic instinct of anxiety and a surge of intention to act on that anxiety. It is not conscious; it is genetic. And so if humans are hardwired to view out-group members as suspicious and to act on those suspicions, sometimes violently, then America was destined, by design, to be an abnormally violent place. Now, why do I say that? First, let's just be totally honest with ourselves. Our Nation was founded through the use of mass-scale violence. There are lots of people who are trying to erase these parts of our history as if there is some weakness in admitting the truth about our past. That is ridiculous. We should just tell the truth about our history, and the truth is that we exterminated Native Americans in order to gain control of this land. We enslaved millions of Africans and used daily epidemic levels of violence--beatings, whippings, lynchings--to keep these people enslaved. From the start, we were a nation bathed in violence, and we became a little immune, a little anesthetized to violence in those early days. And our decision to build a melting pot of ethnicities and races and religions--it is our genius, right? It is our superpower as a nation. It is why we catapulted the rest of the world to economic and political dominance, but it also set us up as a nation with built-in rivalries, with easily defined groupings and easily exploited suspicions of those who aren't part of your group. This combination--epidemic levels of violence in our early days that continued throughout our history and built-in tensions between easily defined groups--ensured that America would be a place with a higher tolerance for and a higher risk of violence. OK. That is the end of the history lesson, but it is important to set this frame because this generation, our generation of Americans--we inherited this history. We can't do anything about that. We were born into and became citizens of a nation with a past--a past that does make us a little bit more prone to violence than other places. The question really is simply this: What are we going to do? Do we acknowledge this lean toward violence and take steps to mitigate it? That, of course, would be the commonsense approach. Instead, we have done the opposite. Throughout American history, hateful, demagogic leaders have found political capital to be gained by playing upon people's instinct to fear others who aren't part of their group--again, so easy in a multicultural America. From Orval Faubus to Richard Nixon, to Donald Trump, there is an ugly tradition in American politics of leaders trying to drum up irrational fears of Blacks or immigrants or Muslims, gay people or Hispanics or Jews. Racism, xenophobia, homophobia--they have all been tools of leaders who seek to build followings by convincing people to organize around their fear or hatred of others. The Buffalo shooter's manifesto is a tribute to this tradition, but he is not alone. The FBI's latest hate crimes report shows a dramatic spike in this country in crimes of bigotry and racism. Most alarming was a 40-percent increase in 2020 in hate crimes against Black Americans, foreshadowing the Buffalo attack. And this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The most visible political figure in America--Donald Trump--has spent the last decade relentlessly spreading the gospel of fear and anxiety and hate. His campaign rollout in 2015 was centered around hyping the threat to America from Mexican immigrants. His most significant campaign policy proposal was to ban all people from the country who practice a certain religion. There is a straight line from this embrace of racism and fear to the increase in violence in this country. I know many of my Republican colleagues don't use the same terminology, the same language that Trump does, but they know the danger he poses to this Nation. They know that his movement is egging on violence, and they do nothing about it. They still accept him as the leader of the party, when they had a chance to get rid of him after January 6. Republicans go to Florida to kiss the ring. They appear on FOX shows that spread this message. They empower the message. Knowing America's natural predilection toward violence, Republicans could have chosen to embrace leaders who seek to unite us, who would choose to push back against this tendency for Americans to be wary of each other. Instead, they did the opposite, and we are paying a price. The other way that our Nation could have chosen to mitigate our violent instincts is to make sure that when American violence does occur, it does the least damage possible. This is commonly referred to in public health circles as harm reduction. If you can't completely and totally prevent the harm, then make sure that it is glancing rather than catastrophic. Instead, America, once again, has adopted the opposite strategy--a strategy of harm maximization. We are, as I have told you, a historically violent nation. We know this. And instead of trying to mitigate for this history, we choose to arm our citizenry to the teeth with the most dangerous, the most lethal weapons imaginable, to make sure that when conflict does occur, it ends up with as many people dying as possible. That is a choice that we have made. The jumping-off point in the choice was in the mid-19th century, when Hartford, CT, inventor Samuel Colt built the first repeating revolver, allowing Americans to hide an incredibly lethal weapon in their coat pocket. All of a sudden, drunken street corner arguments, which used to result in a few awkward punches thrown, became deadly. And nearly every other country in the high-income world at this point, in the mid-1800s, saw this danger, and so they decided to regulate the handgun and the weapons that came after to make sure that those arguments stayed fist fights rather than shootouts. But America took the other path. We let these weapons spread across the Nation. And then, as much more deadly guns were developed for the military, our Nation decided to go its own way again and let citizens own and operate these weapons too. The result is, of course, a nation that is awash in guns, with no comparison--no comparison--in the high-income word. We have more guns in this country on our streets than human beings, than American citizens. So it is no wonder that in this Nation, everyday arguments seamlessly turn into gunfights, passing suicidal thoughts result in lives ended, and hateful racists can kill efficiently by the dozens. I think about September 14, 2012, all the time. That is the day that a gunman, armed with an assault weapon and 30-round magazines, walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and in less than 5 minutes, killed 20 kids and 6 educators. Think about that. The military weapons that this guy was able to own legally killed 26 people in under 5 minutes. The gun he used was so powerful that not a single child who was shot survived. Those bullets moved so fast, so lethally through their little bodies, it just tore them to shreds. But on that same day in China, a similarly deranged young man entered a similarly nondescript school and attacked almost the identical number of people, but in that Chinese classroom, every single one of those 23 people who that man attacked survived. Why? Because in China the attacker had a knife, not a military-grade assault weapon. Like I said, I wish this weren't true, but our Nation has, from the jump, been more violent than other countries. I can't, you can't, none of us can erase this history. And I come to the floor today to be honest about the parts of the American story that lead to these high levels of violence that wecan control and the parts that we can't control. It is up to us whether we want to spend every hour of every day trying to mitigate this predilection toward violence or whether we want to choose to exacerbate it. Fueling the kind of racist, hateful, fear-your-neighbor demagoguery practiced by Donald Trump exacerbates American violence. Doing nothing year after year about the flow of illegal and high-powered weapons into our streets exacerbates American violence. These are choices we are making. Kids living in fear that their classroom is the next one to get shot up, that is not inevitable; that is a choice. Black shoppers looking over their shoulder, wondering whether this is the day that they die, that doesn't have to be our reality; that is a choice. We can look into the flames of American violence, this fire that has been burning since our inception, and we can choose to douse the fire or we can choose to continue to pour fuel on top of it. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2557 | null | 4,449 |
formal | multicultural | null | Islamophobic | Gun Violence MR. MURPHY. Mr. President, the conventional wisdom is that one of the adaptations that helped humans separate ourselves from all other species is this--the opposable thumb. The theory goes that the transformation of the thumb, able to operate by itself independently from the rest of our fingers, allowed humans to be able to manipulate objects with a level of precision and dexterity that was previously unseen in the animal kingdom, and this newly nimble hand allowed humans to, for instance, more easily catch fish and open fruit, pull out the seeds, this newfound bounty of fats and proteins. It vaulted the human brain into developmental overdrive. But about 10 years ago, biologist David Carrier, a longtime student of the evolution of the human hand, proposed a different theory. What if the primary utility of the opposable thumb was not to do this, but instead this. The ability to tuck your thumb into the middle of your four fingers immediately gave humans a more effective fighting tool--important, since we lacked tusks or fangs or claws like other animals. Maybe the development that mattered most to human development was the one that allowed us to become more effective fighters not just with predators but with ourselves because from the beginning, as a species, humans have been drawn to violence. In fact, there are few species, few mammals, that are more violent than humans. There is a really interesting study of intraspecies violence, meaning when you conduct a violent act against another member of your species, and these researchers looked at over 1,000 mammals. What is interesting is that 60 percent of mammals actually have zero intraspecies violence--bats and whales, they never attack each other. That tells you something, in and of itself; that it is not endemic to mammals to be violent. But what the data showed is that right at the top of that list of those 1,000 species, when it came to the rates of intraspecies violence--humans. Biologists trace our violence back to our earliest days. Without those tusks or fangs, humans could really only survive by grouping ourselves tightly together. We were quickly rewarded socially and materially for joining up in groups. But with resources scarce in the early human world to survive, you had to find a group, and then you had to defend it--defend it against other humans who were competing with you for those same resources. Intertribal violence was epidemic in this world in the early days of humans. In the bronze age, estimates suggest that one out of every three humansdied a violent death at the hands of another human. Records suggest that in pre-Columbian America, as many as one out of four Native Americans died violently. The primary reason? Humans have an in-group bias. To survive in those early days, we needed to group ourselves tightly together and view with fear and skepticism members of other outside groups who were competitors for those scarce resources. And centuries and centuries of human development have hardwired this in-group bias, this anxiety about out groups into our genetics. One 2012 study determined that today, when an individual first meets a person who is perceived to be outside of one's defined social group, individuals demonstrate immediate, almost automatic instinct of anxiety and a surge of intention to act on that anxiety. It is not conscious; it is genetic. And so if humans are hardwired to view out-group members as suspicious and to act on those suspicions, sometimes violently, then America was destined, by design, to be an abnormally violent place. Now, why do I say that? First, let's just be totally honest with ourselves. Our Nation was founded through the use of mass-scale violence. There are lots of people who are trying to erase these parts of our history as if there is some weakness in admitting the truth about our past. That is ridiculous. We should just tell the truth about our history, and the truth is that we exterminated Native Americans in order to gain control of this land. We enslaved millions of Africans and used daily epidemic levels of violence--beatings, whippings, lynchings--to keep these people enslaved. From the start, we were a nation bathed in violence, and we became a little immune, a little anesthetized to violence in those early days. And our decision to build a melting pot of ethnicities and races and religions--it is our genius, right? It is our superpower as a nation. It is why we catapulted the rest of the world to economic and political dominance, but it also set us up as a nation with built-in rivalries, with easily defined groupings and easily exploited suspicions of those who aren't part of your group. This combination--epidemic levels of violence in our early days that continued throughout our history and built-in tensions between easily defined groups--ensured that America would be a place with a higher tolerance for and a higher risk of violence. OK. That is the end of the history lesson, but it is important to set this frame because this generation, our generation of Americans--we inherited this history. We can't do anything about that. We were born into and became citizens of a nation with a past--a past that does make us a little bit more prone to violence than other places. The question really is simply this: What are we going to do? Do we acknowledge this lean toward violence and take steps to mitigate it? That, of course, would be the commonsense approach. Instead, we have done the opposite. Throughout American history, hateful, demagogic leaders have found political capital to be gained by playing upon people's instinct to fear others who aren't part of their group--again, so easy in a multicultural America. From Orval Faubus to Richard Nixon, to Donald Trump, there is an ugly tradition in American politics of leaders trying to drum up irrational fears of Blacks or immigrants or Muslims, gay people or Hispanics or Jews. Racism, xenophobia, homophobia--they have all been tools of leaders who seek to build followings by convincing people to organize around their fear or hatred of others. The Buffalo shooter's manifesto is a tribute to this tradition, but he is not alone. The FBI's latest hate crimes report shows a dramatic spike in this country in crimes of bigotry and racism. Most alarming was a 40-percent increase in 2020 in hate crimes against Black Americans, foreshadowing the Buffalo attack. And this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The most visible political figure in America--Donald Trump--has spent the last decade relentlessly spreading the gospel of fear and anxiety and hate. His campaign rollout in 2015 was centered around hyping the threat to America from Mexican immigrants. His most significant campaign policy proposal was to ban all people from the country who practice a certain religion. There is a straight line from this embrace of racism and fear to the increase in violence in this country. I know many of my Republican colleagues don't use the same terminology, the same language that Trump does, but they know the danger he poses to this Nation. They know that his movement is egging on violence, and they do nothing about it. They still accept him as the leader of the party, when they had a chance to get rid of him after January 6. Republicans go to Florida to kiss the ring. They appear on FOX shows that spread this message. They empower the message. Knowing America's natural predilection toward violence, Republicans could have chosen to embrace leaders who seek to unite us, who would choose to push back against this tendency for Americans to be wary of each other. Instead, they did the opposite, and we are paying a price. The other way that our Nation could have chosen to mitigate our violent instincts is to make sure that when American violence does occur, it does the least damage possible. This is commonly referred to in public health circles as harm reduction. If you can't completely and totally prevent the harm, then make sure that it is glancing rather than catastrophic. Instead, America, once again, has adopted the opposite strategy--a strategy of harm maximization. We are, as I have told you, a historically violent nation. We know this. And instead of trying to mitigate for this history, we choose to arm our citizenry to the teeth with the most dangerous, the most lethal weapons imaginable, to make sure that when conflict does occur, it ends up with as many people dying as possible. That is a choice that we have made. The jumping-off point in the choice was in the mid-19th century, when Hartford, CT, inventor Samuel Colt built the first repeating revolver, allowing Americans to hide an incredibly lethal weapon in their coat pocket. All of a sudden, drunken street corner arguments, which used to result in a few awkward punches thrown, became deadly. And nearly every other country in the high-income world at this point, in the mid-1800s, saw this danger, and so they decided to regulate the handgun and the weapons that came after to make sure that those arguments stayed fist fights rather than shootouts. But America took the other path. We let these weapons spread across the Nation. And then, as much more deadly guns were developed for the military, our Nation decided to go its own way again and let citizens own and operate these weapons too. The result is, of course, a nation that is awash in guns, with no comparison--no comparison--in the high-income word. We have more guns in this country on our streets than human beings, than American citizens. So it is no wonder that in this Nation, everyday arguments seamlessly turn into gunfights, passing suicidal thoughts result in lives ended, and hateful racists can kill efficiently by the dozens. I think about September 14, 2012, all the time. That is the day that a gunman, armed with an assault weapon and 30-round magazines, walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and in less than 5 minutes, killed 20 kids and 6 educators. Think about that. The military weapons that this guy was able to own legally killed 26 people in under 5 minutes. The gun he used was so powerful that not a single child who was shot survived. Those bullets moved so fast, so lethally through their little bodies, it just tore them to shreds. But on that same day in China, a similarly deranged young man entered a similarly nondescript school and attacked almost the identical number of people, but in that Chinese classroom, every single one of those 23 people who that man attacked survived. Why? Because in China the attacker had a knife, not a military-grade assault weapon. Like I said, I wish this weren't true, but our Nation has, from the jump, been more violent than other countries. I can't, you can't, none of us can erase this history. And I come to the floor today to be honest about the parts of the American story that lead to these high levels of violence that wecan control and the parts that we can't control. It is up to us whether we want to spend every hour of every day trying to mitigate this predilection toward violence or whether we want to choose to exacerbate it. Fueling the kind of racist, hateful, fear-your-neighbor demagoguery practiced by Donald Trump exacerbates American violence. Doing nothing year after year about the flow of illegal and high-powered weapons into our streets exacerbates American violence. These are choices we are making. Kids living in fear that their classroom is the next one to get shot up, that is not inevitable; that is a choice. Black shoppers looking over their shoulder, wondering whether this is the day that they die, that doesn't have to be our reality; that is a choice. We can look into the flames of American violence, this fire that has been burning since our inception, and we can choose to douse the fire or we can choose to continue to pour fuel on top of it. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2557 | null | 4,450 |
formal | single | null | homophobic | National Police Week Madam President, we honor during Police Week the law enforcement officials in our State who made the ultimate sacrifice. This year, we will add to the National Law Enforcement Memorial the names of 10 Ohioans who laid down their lives last year: Officer Brandon Stalker, Deputy Donald Gilreath III, Natural Resources Officer Jason Lagore, Officer Scott Dawley, Deputy Sheriff Robert Craig Mills, Deputy Sheriff Boyd Blake, Corrections Lieutenant David Reynolds, Corrections Officer Joshua Kristek, Patrolman Sean VanDenberg, and Officer Shane Bartek. Each of these losses is a tragedy for a family, for a community, for all of law enforcement officials in this country. We know in too many places right now the trust between law enforcement and the community is too often frayed or broken. These Ohio lives are a reminder of the ideals we strive for--women and men who are true public servants in the best sense of the word, people who give themselves to their communities, and these Ohioans gave so much. Let me mention each one briefly. Officer Brandon Stalker, a 24-year-old father of two young children, devoted to his fiance. His first partner, Officer Brent Kieffer, said he had a ``constant smile and unfailing sense of humor.'' He added that ``[e]very single day we went on patrol, Brandon was all about trying to serve the community. He truly wanted to make the community a better place.'' That comes from his patrol colleague. Before joining the force, the Toledo native coached baseball at his former high school and was passionate about mentoring young players. He gave his life last January protecting his community. Officer Stalker, rest in peace. Natural Resources Officer Jason Lagore was a Chillicothe native, devoted husband, and father of two sons. Those who knew him talked about his love of his job and commitment to helping people. When he joined the Department of National Resources in 2005, he persuaded his bosses to let him bring in and train Ranger, his first K-9 partner. Over the years, he grew the program, showing that department how successful K-9 teams could be. The department now has K-9 units all across the State. Lieutenant Hoffer watched his friend build the program from the ground up. He said of Officer Lagore: He did it all himself, and we couldn't have had a better person. He was patient, a good all-around person, a good officer, and he knew what he was doing. Last February, Officer Lagore and his K-9 partner Sarge were helping with a search operation at Rocky Fork State Park in Highland County, southwest of Columbus, when he suffered a heart attack and fell into a lake. He was 36 years old. Ohio Department of National Resources posthumously honored him with the Director's Award of Valor. Director Mertz said: Because of his courage and bravery in the face of danger, there is no one more deserving of this honor. Rest in peace, Officer Labore. Officer Scott Dawley served his hometown of Nelsonville near Athens, a small tight-knit community. His death last August in a three-vehicle crash responding to a call was felt across town. One lifelong resident said of Officer Dawley: He loved his community, and the community loved him back. The outpouring of grief and support was overwhelming. He had just gotten married in April, making a blended family of nine. He was a devoted father. He coached his son's baseball team. His wife Marissa said one of her happiest memories was watching her 9-year-old daughter give Officer Dawley a makeover, complete with finger and toenail polish. Officer Dawley, rest in peace. Officer Shane Bartek was 25 years old when he was killed during a carjacking at a West Side apartment complex not too far from my house on New Year's Eve, just 28 months after he joined the Cleveland Division of Police. His family said that from a young age, he always wanted to be an officer. His greatest aspiration was to become a detective. His twin sister Summer talked about how Officer Bartek loved to participate in the annual ``shop with a cop'' event during the holiday season, allowing a child who has been touched by law enforcement to buy and give Christmas presents to that family. One colleague said: He would tell me how much he wanted to touch other people's lives so he could actually make an impact. And he did that. Officer Bartek, rest in peace. Last year, we also lost six officers to COVID-19: Deputy Gilreath, Deputy Sheriff Mills, Deputy Sheriff Blake, Corrections Lieutenant Reynolds, Corrections Officer Kristek, and Patrolman VanDenberg. While many of us were still social distancing and working from home, police officers, like other essential workers--grocery store workers, nurses, technicians, food service people, all on the frontline of our community, all essential workers, even though many were not paid like it--risked their own health to keep our communities safe. We can't begin to repay the debt we owe these officers and their families.We can work to better support officers in the communities they swear an oath to protect. It is why I am working with colleagues of both parties on legislation to support them as they do their jobs. I joined my colleague Senator Grassley to introduce the Fighting Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Act. It would increase mental health support for police, fire, emergency medical, and 9-1-1 personnel as they cope with the stress of responding to crisis situations. These Ohioans deal with some of the most tense and life-threatening situations in our communities--car accidents, fires, family disputes, people in mental health crises. So often our local police and fire departments don't have the resources to offer comprehensive mental health support. The Grassley-Brown bill will help us do that. I also introduced the Expanding Health Care Options for Early Retirees Act, a bill that would allow retired police officers and other first responders to buy into Medicare beginning at age 50. Police officers and other first responders wear their bodies out protecting our families and communities. They should have access to affordable healthcare when their service comes to an end. This simple solution would ensure access to healthcare for police officers who are forced to retire but aren't yet eligible for Medicare. I am working across the aisle with Senator Thune and others to fix outdated IRS rules that prevent public safety officers from making tax-free withdrawals from retirement accounts to cover healthcare premiums. We need to make sure police and fire can retire with dignity. Part of dignity of work is retiring with dignity. At the very least, that means they should be able to afford the healthcare they need. This Police Week, let's offer more than empty words. Let's honor the memories of these women, these men who laid down their lives in service of their communities by getting their fellow officers the tools they need, the training they need to do their jobs and to build trust with the communities they are sworn to protect. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2573 | null | 4,451 |
formal | Cleveland | null | racist | National Police Week Madam President, we honor during Police Week the law enforcement officials in our State who made the ultimate sacrifice. This year, we will add to the National Law Enforcement Memorial the names of 10 Ohioans who laid down their lives last year: Officer Brandon Stalker, Deputy Donald Gilreath III, Natural Resources Officer Jason Lagore, Officer Scott Dawley, Deputy Sheriff Robert Craig Mills, Deputy Sheriff Boyd Blake, Corrections Lieutenant David Reynolds, Corrections Officer Joshua Kristek, Patrolman Sean VanDenberg, and Officer Shane Bartek. Each of these losses is a tragedy for a family, for a community, for all of law enforcement officials in this country. We know in too many places right now the trust between law enforcement and the community is too often frayed or broken. These Ohio lives are a reminder of the ideals we strive for--women and men who are true public servants in the best sense of the word, people who give themselves to their communities, and these Ohioans gave so much. Let me mention each one briefly. Officer Brandon Stalker, a 24-year-old father of two young children, devoted to his fiance. His first partner, Officer Brent Kieffer, said he had a ``constant smile and unfailing sense of humor.'' He added that ``[e]very single day we went on patrol, Brandon was all about trying to serve the community. He truly wanted to make the community a better place.'' That comes from his patrol colleague. Before joining the force, the Toledo native coached baseball at his former high school and was passionate about mentoring young players. He gave his life last January protecting his community. Officer Stalker, rest in peace. Natural Resources Officer Jason Lagore was a Chillicothe native, devoted husband, and father of two sons. Those who knew him talked about his love of his job and commitment to helping people. When he joined the Department of National Resources in 2005, he persuaded his bosses to let him bring in and train Ranger, his first K-9 partner. Over the years, he grew the program, showing that department how successful K-9 teams could be. The department now has K-9 units all across the State. Lieutenant Hoffer watched his friend build the program from the ground up. He said of Officer Lagore: He did it all himself, and we couldn't have had a better person. He was patient, a good all-around person, a good officer, and he knew what he was doing. Last February, Officer Lagore and his K-9 partner Sarge were helping with a search operation at Rocky Fork State Park in Highland County, southwest of Columbus, when he suffered a heart attack and fell into a lake. He was 36 years old. Ohio Department of National Resources posthumously honored him with the Director's Award of Valor. Director Mertz said: Because of his courage and bravery in the face of danger, there is no one more deserving of this honor. Rest in peace, Officer Labore. Officer Scott Dawley served his hometown of Nelsonville near Athens, a small tight-knit community. His death last August in a three-vehicle crash responding to a call was felt across town. One lifelong resident said of Officer Dawley: He loved his community, and the community loved him back. The outpouring of grief and support was overwhelming. He had just gotten married in April, making a blended family of nine. He was a devoted father. He coached his son's baseball team. His wife Marissa said one of her happiest memories was watching her 9-year-old daughter give Officer Dawley a makeover, complete with finger and toenail polish. Officer Dawley, rest in peace. Officer Shane Bartek was 25 years old when he was killed during a carjacking at a West Side apartment complex not too far from my house on New Year's Eve, just 28 months after he joined the Cleveland Division of Police. His family said that from a young age, he always wanted to be an officer. His greatest aspiration was to become a detective. His twin sister Summer talked about how Officer Bartek loved to participate in the annual ``shop with a cop'' event during the holiday season, allowing a child who has been touched by law enforcement to buy and give Christmas presents to that family. One colleague said: He would tell me how much he wanted to touch other people's lives so he could actually make an impact. And he did that. Officer Bartek, rest in peace. Last year, we also lost six officers to COVID-19: Deputy Gilreath, Deputy Sheriff Mills, Deputy Sheriff Blake, Corrections Lieutenant Reynolds, Corrections Officer Kristek, and Patrolman VanDenberg. While many of us were still social distancing and working from home, police officers, like other essential workers--grocery store workers, nurses, technicians, food service people, all on the frontline of our community, all essential workers, even though many were not paid like it--risked their own health to keep our communities safe. We can't begin to repay the debt we owe these officers and their families.We can work to better support officers in the communities they swear an oath to protect. It is why I am working with colleagues of both parties on legislation to support them as they do their jobs. I joined my colleague Senator Grassley to introduce the Fighting Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Act. It would increase mental health support for police, fire, emergency medical, and 9-1-1 personnel as they cope with the stress of responding to crisis situations. These Ohioans deal with some of the most tense and life-threatening situations in our communities--car accidents, fires, family disputes, people in mental health crises. So often our local police and fire departments don't have the resources to offer comprehensive mental health support. The Grassley-Brown bill will help us do that. I also introduced the Expanding Health Care Options for Early Retirees Act, a bill that would allow retired police officers and other first responders to buy into Medicare beginning at age 50. Police officers and other first responders wear their bodies out protecting our families and communities. They should have access to affordable healthcare when their service comes to an end. This simple solution would ensure access to healthcare for police officers who are forced to retire but aren't yet eligible for Medicare. I am working across the aisle with Senator Thune and others to fix outdated IRS rules that prevent public safety officers from making tax-free withdrawals from retirement accounts to cover healthcare premiums. We need to make sure police and fire can retire with dignity. Part of dignity of work is retiring with dignity. At the very least, that means they should be able to afford the healthcare they need. This Police Week, let's offer more than empty words. Let's honor the memories of these women, these men who laid down their lives in service of their communities by getting their fellow officers the tools they need, the training they need to do their jobs and to build trust with the communities they are sworn to protect. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2573 | null | 4,452 |
formal | based | null | white supremacist | At 11:26 a.m., a message from the House of Representatives, delivered by Mrs. Cole, one of its reading clerks, announced that the House has passed the following bills, without amendment: S. 1760. An act to designate the community-based outpatient clinic of the Department of Veterans Affairs planned to be built in Oahu, Hawaii, as the ``Daniel Kahikina Akaka Department of Veterans Affairs Community-Based Outpatient Clinic''. S. 2514. An act to rename the Provo Veterans Center in Orem, Utah, as the ``Col. Gail S. Halvorsen `Candy Bomber' Veterans Center''. S. 2520. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to provide for engagements with State, local, Tribal and territorial governments, and for other purposes. S. 2687. An act to provide the Inspector General of the Department of Veterans Affairs testimonial subpoena authority, and for other purposes. S. 3527. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to authorize the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to transfer the name of property of the Department of Veterans Affairs designated by law to other property of the Department. The message further announced that the House has passed the following bills, in which it requests the concurrence of the Senate: H.R. 5754. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to improve the ability of veterans to electronically submit complaints about the delivery of health care services by the Department of Veterans Affairs. H.R. 6376. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to extend eligibility for a certain work-study allowance paid by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to certain individuals who pursue programs of rehabilitation, education, or training on at least a half-time basis, and for other purposes. H.R. 6604. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to improve the method by which the Secretary of Veterans Affairs determines the effects of a closure or disapproval of an educational institution on individuals who do not transfer credits from such institution. H.R. 6868. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to provide for financial assistance to fund certain cybersecurity and infrastructure security education and training programs and initiatives, and for other purposes. H.R. 6871. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to provide for certain acquisition authorities for the Under Secretary of Management of the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes. H.R. 6873. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to establish the Office for Bombing Prevention to address terrorist explosive threats, and for other purposes. H.R. 7153. An act to direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to submit to Congress a plan to modernize the information technology systems of the Veterans Benefits Administration, and for other purposes. H.R. 7375. An act to direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to update the payment system of the Department of Veterans Affairs to allow for electronic fund transfer of educational assistance, administered by the Secretary, to a foreign institution of higher education. H.R. 7500. An act to authorize major medical facility projects for the Department of Veterans Affairs for fiscal year 2022, and for other purposes. The message also announced that pursuant to section 1095(b)(l)(C)-(D) of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2022, the Minority Leader appoints the following member to the Commission on the National Defense Strategy of the United States: Mr. John (Jack) M. Keane of McLean, Virginia. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2581-2 | null | 4,453 |
formal | terrorist | null | Islamophobic | At 11:26 a.m., a message from the House of Representatives, delivered by Mrs. Cole, one of its reading clerks, announced that the House has passed the following bills, without amendment: S. 1760. An act to designate the community-based outpatient clinic of the Department of Veterans Affairs planned to be built in Oahu, Hawaii, as the ``Daniel Kahikina Akaka Department of Veterans Affairs Community-Based Outpatient Clinic''. S. 2514. An act to rename the Provo Veterans Center in Orem, Utah, as the ``Col. Gail S. Halvorsen `Candy Bomber' Veterans Center''. S. 2520. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to provide for engagements with State, local, Tribal and territorial governments, and for other purposes. S. 2687. An act to provide the Inspector General of the Department of Veterans Affairs testimonial subpoena authority, and for other purposes. S. 3527. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to authorize the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to transfer the name of property of the Department of Veterans Affairs designated by law to other property of the Department. The message further announced that the House has passed the following bills, in which it requests the concurrence of the Senate: H.R. 5754. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to improve the ability of veterans to electronically submit complaints about the delivery of health care services by the Department of Veterans Affairs. H.R. 6376. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to extend eligibility for a certain work-study allowance paid by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to certain individuals who pursue programs of rehabilitation, education, or training on at least a half-time basis, and for other purposes. H.R. 6604. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to improve the method by which the Secretary of Veterans Affairs determines the effects of a closure or disapproval of an educational institution on individuals who do not transfer credits from such institution. H.R. 6868. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to provide for financial assistance to fund certain cybersecurity and infrastructure security education and training programs and initiatives, and for other purposes. H.R. 6871. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to provide for certain acquisition authorities for the Under Secretary of Management of the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes. H.R. 6873. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to establish the Office for Bombing Prevention to address terrorist explosive threats, and for other purposes. H.R. 7153. An act to direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to submit to Congress a plan to modernize the information technology systems of the Veterans Benefits Administration, and for other purposes. H.R. 7375. An act to direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to update the payment system of the Department of Veterans Affairs to allow for electronic fund transfer of educational assistance, administered by the Secretary, to a foreign institution of higher education. H.R. 7500. An act to authorize major medical facility projects for the Department of Veterans Affairs for fiscal year 2022, and for other purposes. The message also announced that pursuant to section 1095(b)(l)(C)-(D) of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2022, the Minority Leader appoints the following member to the Commission on the National Defense Strategy of the United States: Mr. John (Jack) M. Keane of McLean, Virginia. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2581-2 | null | 4,454 |
formal | terrorist | null | Islamophobic | The following bills were read the first and the second times by unanimous consent, and referred as indicated: H.R. 5754. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to improve the ability of veterans to electronically submit complaints about the delivery of health care services by the Department of Veterans Affairs; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. H.R. 6376. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to extend eligibility for a certain work-study allowance paid by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to certain individuals who pursue programs of rehabilitation, education, or training on at least a half-time basis, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. H.R. 6604. An act to amend title 38, United States Code, to improve the method by which the Secretary of Veterans Affairs determines the effects of a closure or disapproval of an educational institution on individuals who do not transfer credits from such institution; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. H.R. 6868. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to provide for financial assistance to fund certain cybersecurity and infrastructure security education and training programs and initiatives, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. H.R. 6871. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to provide for certain acquisition authorities for the Under Secretary of Management of the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. H.R. 6873. An act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to establish the Office for Bombing Prevention to address terrorist explosive threats, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. H.R. 7153. An act to direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to submit to Congress a plan to modernize the information technology systems of the Veterans Benefits Administration, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. H.R. 7309. An act to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act; to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. H.R. 7375. An act to direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to update the payment system of the Department of Veterans Affairs to allow for electronic fund transfer of educational assistance, administered by the Secretary, to a foreign institution of higher education; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2581-3 | null | 4,455 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | By Mr. DURBIN (for himself, Ms. Baldwin, Mr. Brown, Ms. Cantwell, Mr. Carper, Ms. Duckworth, Ms. Klobuchar, Mr. Schatz, Mr. Warnock, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Blumenthal, Mrs. Feinstein, and Mr. Whitehouse): S. 4255. A bill to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism; to the Committee on the Judiciary. | 2020-01-06 | The RECORDER | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2588-2 | null | 4,456 |
formal | terrorism | null | Islamophobic | By Mr. DURBIN (for himself, Ms. Baldwin, Mr. Brown, Ms. Cantwell, Mr. Carper, Ms. Duckworth, Ms. Klobuchar, Mr. Schatz, Mr. Warnock, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Blumenthal, Mrs. Feinstein, and Mr. Whitehouse): S. 4255. A bill to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism; to the Committee on the Judiciary. | 2020-01-06 | The RECORDER | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2588-2 | null | 4,457 |
formal | terrorist | null | Islamophobic | By Mr. DURBIN (for himself, Ms. Baldwin, Mr. Brown, Ms. Cantwell, Mr. Carper, Ms. Duckworth, Ms. Klobuchar, Mr. Schatz, Mr. Warnock, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Blumenthal, Mrs. Feinstein, and Mr. Whitehouse): S. 4255. A bill to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism; to the Committee on the Judiciary. | 2020-01-06 | The RECORDER | Senate | CREC-2022-05-18-pt1-PgS2588-2 | null | 4,458 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the Senate will proceed to executive session and resume consideration of the following nomination, which the clerk will report. The senior assistant legislative clerk read the nomination of Dara Lindenbaum, of Virginia, to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission for a term expiring April 30, 2027. | 2020-01-06 | The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2637-7 | null | 4,459 |
formal | based | null | white supremacist | Election Laws Mr. President, now on an entirely different matter, 5 months ago, Democrats in the media were saying the sky was falling because of some States' mainstream voting laws. Georgia passed a voting law that was more openthan the rules on the books in blue States like New York and Delaware. Texas passed a law that switched off some one-time COVID exceptions, like keeping polls open in the middle of the night. These mainstream laws brought a torrent--a torrent--of hysteria from the far left, from corporate America, Hollywood, and the corporate media rushed to condemn laws they hadn't even read. It was almost completely untethered from reality. One poll a few months back found that less than half of 1 percent of Americans said voting laws were the country's most important problem. More Americans actually believe current voting laws are too lax than believe they are too restrictive. But the far left bubble became fixated--fixated--on this nonissue. The manufactured outrage just kept coming. At the peak of the crescendo a few months back, 48 of 50 Senate Democrats voted to break this institution--to break this institution--to ram through a 3-year-old voting takeover bill on a partisan basis. That is how close we came. Now, fortunately, a bipartisan majority saved the Senate as an institution, and now, we are seeing the hard evidence that, as we all knew, the hysteria was never based on fact to begin with. Georgia's primary election day is today. But we already know a lot, thanks to early voting figures. And here was a Washington Post headline a few days ago, ``Voting is surging in Georgia despite controversial new election law.'' The story goes on: [R]ecord-breaking turnout is undercutting predictions that the Georgia Election Integrity Act . . . would lead to a falloff in voting. By the end of Friday, the final day of early in-person voting, nearly 800,000 Georgians had cast ballots--more than three times--three times the number in 2018, and-- Listen to this-- higher even than in 2020, a presidential year. Turnout is up despite the fact that fewer Georgians are availing themselves of the State's no-excuse mail-in voting. Georgians are getting back to in-person voting, a return to prepandemic norms, and doing so in huge, huge numbers. The reporter quoted one 70-year-old Black voter who was stunned by the easiness of the voting process after all the disinformation that had been thrown around. Here is what she said: I had heard that they were going to try to deter us in any way possible . . . [so] [t]o go in there and vote as easily as I did . . . I was really thrown back. Shame--shame--on the Democrats who pushed the Big Lie that a grand scheme was afoot to prevent millions of Americans from voting. It was never true. It was just to push their preexisting policy agenda. The fake hysteria was just a pretext to push a sweeping national takeover of election laws that Democrats had already had on the shelf for a number of years. Now the rhetoric is proving false right before our eyes. These commonsense Republican laws appear to be achieving just what the American people want. The American people want to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. This whole episode proves exactly why our democracy still needs its cooling saucer. This is exactly the reason why the U.S. Senate exists, so that one party cannot lose its head to a short-term fever and upend massive Federal laws on a partisan basis under false pretexts. Thank goodness--thank goodness--a bipartisan majority stopped Democrats from destroying the Senate over this fake issue a few months back. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2638-3 | null | 4,460 |
formal | blue | null | antisemitic | Election Laws Mr. President, now on an entirely different matter, 5 months ago, Democrats in the media were saying the sky was falling because of some States' mainstream voting laws. Georgia passed a voting law that was more openthan the rules on the books in blue States like New York and Delaware. Texas passed a law that switched off some one-time COVID exceptions, like keeping polls open in the middle of the night. These mainstream laws brought a torrent--a torrent--of hysteria from the far left, from corporate America, Hollywood, and the corporate media rushed to condemn laws they hadn't even read. It was almost completely untethered from reality. One poll a few months back found that less than half of 1 percent of Americans said voting laws were the country's most important problem. More Americans actually believe current voting laws are too lax than believe they are too restrictive. But the far left bubble became fixated--fixated--on this nonissue. The manufactured outrage just kept coming. At the peak of the crescendo a few months back, 48 of 50 Senate Democrats voted to break this institution--to break this institution--to ram through a 3-year-old voting takeover bill on a partisan basis. That is how close we came. Now, fortunately, a bipartisan majority saved the Senate as an institution, and now, we are seeing the hard evidence that, as we all knew, the hysteria was never based on fact to begin with. Georgia's primary election day is today. But we already know a lot, thanks to early voting figures. And here was a Washington Post headline a few days ago, ``Voting is surging in Georgia despite controversial new election law.'' The story goes on: [R]ecord-breaking turnout is undercutting predictions that the Georgia Election Integrity Act . . . would lead to a falloff in voting. By the end of Friday, the final day of early in-person voting, nearly 800,000 Georgians had cast ballots--more than three times--three times the number in 2018, and-- Listen to this-- higher even than in 2020, a presidential year. Turnout is up despite the fact that fewer Georgians are availing themselves of the State's no-excuse mail-in voting. Georgians are getting back to in-person voting, a return to prepandemic norms, and doing so in huge, huge numbers. The reporter quoted one 70-year-old Black voter who was stunned by the easiness of the voting process after all the disinformation that had been thrown around. Here is what she said: I had heard that they were going to try to deter us in any way possible . . . [so] [t]o go in there and vote as easily as I did . . . I was really thrown back. Shame--shame--on the Democrats who pushed the Big Lie that a grand scheme was afoot to prevent millions of Americans from voting. It was never true. It was just to push their preexisting policy agenda. The fake hysteria was just a pretext to push a sweeping national takeover of election laws that Democrats had already had on the shelf for a number of years. Now the rhetoric is proving false right before our eyes. These commonsense Republican laws appear to be achieving just what the American people want. The American people want to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. This whole episode proves exactly why our democracy still needs its cooling saucer. This is exactly the reason why the U.S. Senate exists, so that one party cannot lose its head to a short-term fever and upend massive Federal laws on a partisan basis under false pretexts. Thank goodness--thank goodness--a bipartisan majority stopped Democrats from destroying the Senate over this fake issue a few months back. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2638-3 | null | 4,461 |
formal | Hollywood | null | antisemitic | Election Laws Mr. President, now on an entirely different matter, 5 months ago, Democrats in the media were saying the sky was falling because of some States' mainstream voting laws. Georgia passed a voting law that was more openthan the rules on the books in blue States like New York and Delaware. Texas passed a law that switched off some one-time COVID exceptions, like keeping polls open in the middle of the night. These mainstream laws brought a torrent--a torrent--of hysteria from the far left, from corporate America, Hollywood, and the corporate media rushed to condemn laws they hadn't even read. It was almost completely untethered from reality. One poll a few months back found that less than half of 1 percent of Americans said voting laws were the country's most important problem. More Americans actually believe current voting laws are too lax than believe they are too restrictive. But the far left bubble became fixated--fixated--on this nonissue. The manufactured outrage just kept coming. At the peak of the crescendo a few months back, 48 of 50 Senate Democrats voted to break this institution--to break this institution--to ram through a 3-year-old voting takeover bill on a partisan basis. That is how close we came. Now, fortunately, a bipartisan majority saved the Senate as an institution, and now, we are seeing the hard evidence that, as we all knew, the hysteria was never based on fact to begin with. Georgia's primary election day is today. But we already know a lot, thanks to early voting figures. And here was a Washington Post headline a few days ago, ``Voting is surging in Georgia despite controversial new election law.'' The story goes on: [R]ecord-breaking turnout is undercutting predictions that the Georgia Election Integrity Act . . . would lead to a falloff in voting. By the end of Friday, the final day of early in-person voting, nearly 800,000 Georgians had cast ballots--more than three times--three times the number in 2018, and-- Listen to this-- higher even than in 2020, a presidential year. Turnout is up despite the fact that fewer Georgians are availing themselves of the State's no-excuse mail-in voting. Georgians are getting back to in-person voting, a return to prepandemic norms, and doing so in huge, huge numbers. The reporter quoted one 70-year-old Black voter who was stunned by the easiness of the voting process after all the disinformation that had been thrown around. Here is what she said: I had heard that they were going to try to deter us in any way possible . . . [so] [t]o go in there and vote as easily as I did . . . I was really thrown back. Shame--shame--on the Democrats who pushed the Big Lie that a grand scheme was afoot to prevent millions of Americans from voting. It was never true. It was just to push their preexisting policy agenda. The fake hysteria was just a pretext to push a sweeping national takeover of election laws that Democrats had already had on the shelf for a number of years. Now the rhetoric is proving false right before our eyes. These commonsense Republican laws appear to be achieving just what the American people want. The American people want to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. This whole episode proves exactly why our democracy still needs its cooling saucer. This is exactly the reason why the U.S. Senate exists, so that one party cannot lose its head to a short-term fever and upend massive Federal laws on a partisan basis under false pretexts. Thank goodness--thank goodness--a bipartisan majority stopped Democrats from destroying the Senate over this fake issue a few months back. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2638-3 | null | 4,462 |
formal | Hollywood | null | antisemitic | Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, the Country Music Highway cuts through seven counties in eastern Kentucky that have produced some of the finest singers in American history, from Loretta Lynn, to Chris Stapleton, to Ricky Skaggs. Now, this formidable list of world-famous Kentucky country artists has a new member: Noah Thompson. Today, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring Noah for becoming the first Kentuckian to win ``American Idol.'' A few months ago, few people--even in Noah's hometown of Louisa--had ever heard America's best new vocalist perform. Noah was working as a construction worker at Addiction Recovery Care, had never sung publicly, and hadn't even been musically trained. When Noah's best friend Arthur signedhim up for ``American Idol,'' the singer worried about making it past auditions, never imagining he would earn the ``golden ticket'' to Hollywood, let alone become a finalist. But Arthur believed Noah had a special talent, and, after several arduous rounds, he emerged victorious after receiving the most votes out of 16 million cast by fans all across the country. In the process, he brought the ``American Idol'' camera crew back to Louisa to film a hometown video with community leaders, his family, and thousands of fans. He shined a light on eastern Kentucky, sharing the special culture and history that makes the region such a hotbed for musical talent. Throughout the contest, Noah radiated humility and warmth. Labeled the ``king of `aw shucks' '' by one of the judges, he entered every round of competition with the best of Kentucky's attitude and spirit. Even when Noah caught COVID-19 and had to isolate in his hotel room, he performed cheerfully and continued to win viewers' hearts. I am proud of Noah for winning this contest and jumping headfirst into what I can only imagine will be a successful musical career. And I am proud of Louisa, KY, for producing such a fine young gentleman to represent the Commonwealth on the national stage. On behalf of the Senate, I share our congratulations with Noah and wish him the best as he pursues his dreams as a recording artist. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. McCONNELL | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2659-8 | null | 4,463 |
formal | Chicago | null | racist | Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I rise today to celebrate the retirement of Cyndy Novotny, principal of St. Anthony's Tri-Parish Catholic School in Casper, WY. This summer, Cyndy Novotny marks her 17th and final year as principal at St. Anthony's School. The present St. Anthony's School building stands as a testament to her 45-year career in education. St. Anthony's Catholic School was dedicated on September 27, 1927, in the belief that education is one of the most important ways that the Catholic Church fulfills its commitment to God. St. Anthony's School is dedicated to achieving academic excellence in a faith-filled community. Guided by strong religious and educational leadership, Casper students from preschool through eighth grade can learn to live enriched lives committed to Christian service. Cyndy was instrumental in the design and fundraising for this classic, state-of-the-art building. The school is able to meet students' educational needs while keeping them connected to their faith. Her skills in fundraising also supported student tuition, making Christian education accessible for many families. Cyndy grew up in the Chicago area, receiving her bachelor of science in elementary education from Illinois State University in 1977. After moving to Casper, she taught at several schools, including first grade at Southridge Elementary for 7 years and second grade at Sagewood Elementary for another 7 years. While continuing to teach, she earned her master's degree in teaching from Grand Canyon University in 2001. Cyndy was a leading light in the development of the groundbreaking innovative Woods Learning Center in Casper. Cyndy taught at Woods for 14 years before accepting the principal position at St. Anthony's Tri-Parish Catholic School. Cyndy is an accomplished academician, educator, and public servant. She worked to enhance educational curriculum and administration as a speaker at the National School Board Annual Convention and International Reading Association Annual Conference. Cyndy is also a dedicated wife, mother, and grandmother. While teaching, she met her husband, Scott Novotny, a now-retired teacher from Natrona County High School. Together, they have three children, Mick Novotny with wife Dr. Ruma Novotny, Caitlin Dixon with husband Brian Dixon, and Connor Novotny. Cyndy and Scott also have five grandchildren: Ashwin, Colter, Aubrey, Austin, and Jackson. Cyndy's community involvement is extensive, having been awarded the Natrona County School District Significant Educator three times and the Ellbogen Meritorious Education Award She was nominated for Disney Teacher of the Year and was twice nominated for the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Children across Wyoming and the Nation benefited from her involvement with the National Education Association, National Center of Innovation Conference, Wyoming Reading Association, and Casper Reading Association. Cyndy's accomplishments and contributions will continue to enrich the education of future generations of students. The community thanks Cyndy for her public service. We recognize her invaluable contribution to the St. Anthony's Tri-Parish Catholic School, Natrona County School District No. 1, and the development of educational curriculum across Wyoming. Cyndy is a pillar of the Casper community. Cyndy's dedication to her faith is evident through her service as a eucharistic minister, Music Minister, and a member of the Parish Council at St. Patrick's Catholic Church. She exemplifies Christian values and the Code of the West, living each day with courage and taking pride in her work. Cyndy's joy in her work touched the lives of hundreds of children, including my own. It is with great pleasure that I recognize this outstanding member of our Wyoming community. My wife Bobbi joins me in extending our best wishes to Cyndy Novotny upon her retirement. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. BARRASSO | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2660 | null | 4,464 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | The following bills were read the first and the second times by unanimous consent, and referred as indicated: H.R. 1215. An act to establish an office within the Federal Trade Commission and an outside advisory group to prevent fraud targeting seniors and to direct the Commission to include additional information in an annual report to Congress on fraud targeting seniors, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. H.R. 1620. An act to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, and for other purposes; to the Committee on the Judiciary. H.R. 3005. An act to direct the Joint Committee on the Library to replace the bust of Roger Brooke Taney in the Old Supreme Court Chamber of the United States Capitol with a bust of Thurgood Marshall to be obtained by the Joint Committee on the Library and to remove certain statues from areas of the United States Capitol which are accessible to the public, to remove all statues of individuals who voluntarily served the Confederate States of America from display in the United States Capitol, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Rules and Administration. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2662-5 | null | 4,465 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | The following communications were laid before the Senate, together with accompanying papers, reports, and documents, and were referred as indicated: EC-4204. A communication from the Associate Director of the Regulatory Management Division, Environmental Protection Agency, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Cocamidopropylamine oxide; Exemption from the Requirement of a Tolerance'' (FRL No. 8959-01-OCSPP) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. EC-4205. A communication from the Associate Director of the Regulatory Management Division, Environmental Protection Agency, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Flonicamid; Pesticide Tolerances'' (FRL No. 9738- 01-OCSPP) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. EC-4206. A communication from the Associate Director of the Regulatory Management Division, Environmental Protection Agency, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Fluopicolide; Pesticide Tolerances'' (FRL No. 9622-01-OCSPP) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. EC-4207. A communication from the Chair and President of the Export-Import Bank, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report relative to a transaction involving U.S. exports to the Netherlands; to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. EC-4208. A communication from the Senior Congressional Liaison, Legislative Affairs, Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report entitled ``Fair Debt Collection Practices Act Annual Report''; to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. EC-4209. A communication from the Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, Department of Homeland Security, transmitting seventeen (17) legislative proposals relative to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP); to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2662-7 | null | 4,466 |
formal | based | null | white supremacist | Mr. TESTER. Madam President, I would like to share a few words today to honor an outstanding Montana educator who is retiring at the end of this school year. Kirk Miller has dedicated his career to bettering the lives of the next generation of Montanans. Over the years, Kirk served as a teacher, a principal, and a superintendent before being appointed to the Montana Board of Public Education where he later served as chair. As Bozeman schools superintendent, Kirk played a key role in improving infrastructure for students for years to come. He championed numerous successful initiatives that strengthened public education in the region and served as a template for other communities to follow. At the end of this year, Kirk will be retiring from his most recent position as executive director of the School Administrators of Montana, where he has worked tirelessly to support administrators and educators across the State. Those who have been lucky enough to work with Kirk recognize that he has a knack for connecting with people, even those who have different views than his own. And his passion for public education shines through in everything he does. Under Kirk's leadership, the School Administrators of Montana established the Leaders Professional Learning Program, or SAM LPLP, a mentorship program that brings administrators from across the State together to receive student-focused, solution-based professional development training. The SAM LPLP has served more than 500 administrators to date. As a former public school teacher I commend Kirk for his steadfast commitment to improving our school system from the top down. In addition to his work, Kirk has a lot to be proud of--in particular, the wonderful family he has built with his wife of 42 years, Nan. A lifelong educator and a dear friend to many, Kirk has shown through his kindness and work ethic that he is truly dedicated to bettering the lives of the next generation of Montanans. Thank you for your service, Kirk; our Montana schools are better because of you. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. TESTER | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2662 | null | 4,467 |
formal | public school | null | racist | Mr. TESTER. Madam President, I would like to share a few words today to honor an outstanding Montana educator who is retiring at the end of this school year. Kirk Miller has dedicated his career to bettering the lives of the next generation of Montanans. Over the years, Kirk served as a teacher, a principal, and a superintendent before being appointed to the Montana Board of Public Education where he later served as chair. As Bozeman schools superintendent, Kirk played a key role in improving infrastructure for students for years to come. He championed numerous successful initiatives that strengthened public education in the region and served as a template for other communities to follow. At the end of this year, Kirk will be retiring from his most recent position as executive director of the School Administrators of Montana, where he has worked tirelessly to support administrators and educators across the State. Those who have been lucky enough to work with Kirk recognize that he has a knack for connecting with people, even those who have different views than his own. And his passion for public education shines through in everything he does. Under Kirk's leadership, the School Administrators of Montana established the Leaders Professional Learning Program, or SAM LPLP, a mentorship program that brings administrators from across the State together to receive student-focused, solution-based professional development training. The SAM LPLP has served more than 500 administrators to date. As a former public school teacher I commend Kirk for his steadfast commitment to improving our school system from the top down. In addition to his work, Kirk has a lot to be proud of--in particular, the wonderful family he has built with his wife of 42 years, Nan. A lifelong educator and a dear friend to many, Kirk has shown through his kindness and work ethic that he is truly dedicated to bettering the lives of the next generation of Montanans. Thank you for your service, Kirk; our Montana schools are better because of you. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. TESTER | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2662 | null | 4,468 |
formal | extremists | null | Islamophobic | Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Madam President, we are nearing the end of the session, when we will go back to our homes for the evening, but when the families of 18 children and 4 great educators go home tonight, their homes will never be the same again. There are no words in a place filled with words during today and every day in this place when we are in session. There are no words today to capture the heartbreak, the gut-wrenching grief and pain that those families will feel and that I remember feeling almost 10 years ago when we stood in the space just outside the firehouse in Sandy Hook, as parents learned that their 20 children would not be coming home that night. The same bottomless grief is hitting the families in Texas, in Uvalde, where they have lost children. And there are no words also to capture the deep, abiding pain that will last forever. That pain will be with them--a hole in their hearts, a place at their tables, a room in their houses that never will be filled again, and hugs that they will never feel, cheeks that will never be kissed. This Nation, like their families, is torn apart by violence--needless, senseless gun violence--every day in America. And the mystery is why the greatest Nation on Earth continues to tolerate it. It is no longer surprising or stunning. It is no longer unfathomable or unforeseeable. It is incomprehensible that this great Nation is blocked by Members of this body from taking action that can forestall and prevent it. Why, the outrage that we feel, the grief that pervades America on these occasions has not caused action. And this body has been complicit by its inaction. In fact, it isn't this body. It is Members of this body, principally on the other side of the aisle. Let's be blunt. I will never forget hearing from that gallery those words: ``Shame. Shame on you,'' when we failed to adopt commonsense measures--a background check proposal, even though we had 55 votes. I can still hear those words. ``Shame.'' And had we acted, who knows what tragedy could have been averted? We don't know and we can't tell and we never will be able to fathom whetherspecific measures would have prevented specific tragedy. Charleston or San Bernardino, Pulse or Las Vegas, Parkland or Santa Fe, or Pittsburgh or El Paso or Dayton or Boulder or Indianapolis or Oxford or Buffalo or Uvalde--we will never know because the false reason to object is this measure wouldn't have prevented that shooting. But that is not the way to approach gun violence reform, because we know there is no panacea; there is no single measure. What we know is that stopping gun violence requires that we act with these measures and that commonsense, sensible steps can prevent a senseless, needless violence. There is no panacea, but there are actions we can take. We are not without agency. Now, we need to be very blunt and recognize that opposition to these measures is bankrolled and emboldened and enabled by the gun lobby's dark money, by its threats and intimidation, by its encouragement. And until my colleagues have the courage to stand up to that gun lobby, they will continue in its thrall and its grip, and they will continue to be complicit. And some on our side, some who have demonstrated the courage to stand up and speak out, have shown that we have the power to take action. We lack facts about the shooter and about the killing, all the circumstances in Uvalde, but we know enough to say that those families and that community will be torn apart. It will never be the same. They will never be whole again because they have lost something precious, and there will always be that hole in their hearts. Already some of our Republican colleagues are saying we are politicizing the issue, but they are the ones who, for decades, have tied themselves to the NRA's fanatical devotion to unrestricted, unyielding firearms ownership for political purposes at the expense of real lives. Tying themselves to firearms ownership is unnecessary for law-abiding citizens to own firearms. There are commonsense actions we can take to separate dangerous killers from firearms that are absolutely consistent with the Second Amendment, as judged by the Supreme Court, and absolutely consistent with gun ownership by law-abiding people. We know these actions won't save everyone, but there can be no doubt that each of them will save some lives: expanding background checks and closing glaring loopholes in our background check system; getting untraceable ghost guns and military-style assault weapons off our streets; protecting domestic violence survivors from gun violence; keeping guns out of the hands of domestic terrorists and violent extremists and individuals who are dangerous to themselves or others, red flag statutes; preventing kids from accidentally and unintentionally shooting themselves with unsecured firearms, Ethan's Law for safe storage; investing in community violence intervention programs--we know they work in Hartford, New Haven, all around the State of Connecticut; reducing the number of firearm suicides--more than half of all gun deaths are suicides; red flag statutes, separating firearms from people who are dangerous to themselves as well as others. We need to do all these things and more. We need to do them right now because every day that passes without action means more of the same. Not surprising, not stunning--more of the same. Those measures are written, they are fully drafted, vetted for their constitutionality. My subcommittee on the Constitution has had hearings on them, many of them: S. 529, the Background Check Expansion Act; S. 591, the Background Check Completion Act; S. 1558, the Untraceable Firearms Act to stop ghost guns; S. 736, the Assault Weapons Ban; S. 527, the Protecting Domestic Violence and Stalking Victims Act; S. 2169, the Lori Jackson-Nicolette Elias Domestic Violence Survivor Protection Act, a hearing just last week on it; S. 2090, the Disarm Hate Act; S. 4278, the Age 21 Act; S. 190, Ethan's Law; S. 2982, the Child Suicide Prevention and Lethal Means Safety Act; S. 1819, the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act--the red flag statutes. Let us do one of them. Let us vote to make one of them law. That is our job: to vote. It is how we change this gut-wrenching, heartbreaking status quo, and it is how voters know where each of us stand when push comes to shove. So we have no words, but words will mean nothing without action. We have created a political movement. It is a movement that is growing as young people say: Enough is enough, as the hand wringing and the tears are translated into action at the grassroots level, action by State legislatures. Almost 20 states now have red flag statutes in the wake of Parkland. And as communities and States show that they will no longer tolerate the hypocrisy of thoughts and prayers without action, all of us who have advocated for years--indeed, for decades--that this body must act, we cannot lose courage or heart. We cannot lose the hope, and we must match our thoughts and prayers with real action. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. BLUMENTHAL | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2669-4 | null | 4,469 |
formal | terrorists | null | Islamophobic | Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Madam President, we are nearing the end of the session, when we will go back to our homes for the evening, but when the families of 18 children and 4 great educators go home tonight, their homes will never be the same again. There are no words in a place filled with words during today and every day in this place when we are in session. There are no words today to capture the heartbreak, the gut-wrenching grief and pain that those families will feel and that I remember feeling almost 10 years ago when we stood in the space just outside the firehouse in Sandy Hook, as parents learned that their 20 children would not be coming home that night. The same bottomless grief is hitting the families in Texas, in Uvalde, where they have lost children. And there are no words also to capture the deep, abiding pain that will last forever. That pain will be with them--a hole in their hearts, a place at their tables, a room in their houses that never will be filled again, and hugs that they will never feel, cheeks that will never be kissed. This Nation, like their families, is torn apart by violence--needless, senseless gun violence--every day in America. And the mystery is why the greatest Nation on Earth continues to tolerate it. It is no longer surprising or stunning. It is no longer unfathomable or unforeseeable. It is incomprehensible that this great Nation is blocked by Members of this body from taking action that can forestall and prevent it. Why, the outrage that we feel, the grief that pervades America on these occasions has not caused action. And this body has been complicit by its inaction. In fact, it isn't this body. It is Members of this body, principally on the other side of the aisle. Let's be blunt. I will never forget hearing from that gallery those words: ``Shame. Shame on you,'' when we failed to adopt commonsense measures--a background check proposal, even though we had 55 votes. I can still hear those words. ``Shame.'' And had we acted, who knows what tragedy could have been averted? We don't know and we can't tell and we never will be able to fathom whetherspecific measures would have prevented specific tragedy. Charleston or San Bernardino, Pulse or Las Vegas, Parkland or Santa Fe, or Pittsburgh or El Paso or Dayton or Boulder or Indianapolis or Oxford or Buffalo or Uvalde--we will never know because the false reason to object is this measure wouldn't have prevented that shooting. But that is not the way to approach gun violence reform, because we know there is no panacea; there is no single measure. What we know is that stopping gun violence requires that we act with these measures and that commonsense, sensible steps can prevent a senseless, needless violence. There is no panacea, but there are actions we can take. We are not without agency. Now, we need to be very blunt and recognize that opposition to these measures is bankrolled and emboldened and enabled by the gun lobby's dark money, by its threats and intimidation, by its encouragement. And until my colleagues have the courage to stand up to that gun lobby, they will continue in its thrall and its grip, and they will continue to be complicit. And some on our side, some who have demonstrated the courage to stand up and speak out, have shown that we have the power to take action. We lack facts about the shooter and about the killing, all the circumstances in Uvalde, but we know enough to say that those families and that community will be torn apart. It will never be the same. They will never be whole again because they have lost something precious, and there will always be that hole in their hearts. Already some of our Republican colleagues are saying we are politicizing the issue, but they are the ones who, for decades, have tied themselves to the NRA's fanatical devotion to unrestricted, unyielding firearms ownership for political purposes at the expense of real lives. Tying themselves to firearms ownership is unnecessary for law-abiding citizens to own firearms. There are commonsense actions we can take to separate dangerous killers from firearms that are absolutely consistent with the Second Amendment, as judged by the Supreme Court, and absolutely consistent with gun ownership by law-abiding people. We know these actions won't save everyone, but there can be no doubt that each of them will save some lives: expanding background checks and closing glaring loopholes in our background check system; getting untraceable ghost guns and military-style assault weapons off our streets; protecting domestic violence survivors from gun violence; keeping guns out of the hands of domestic terrorists and violent extremists and individuals who are dangerous to themselves or others, red flag statutes; preventing kids from accidentally and unintentionally shooting themselves with unsecured firearms, Ethan's Law for safe storage; investing in community violence intervention programs--we know they work in Hartford, New Haven, all around the State of Connecticut; reducing the number of firearm suicides--more than half of all gun deaths are suicides; red flag statutes, separating firearms from people who are dangerous to themselves as well as others. We need to do all these things and more. We need to do them right now because every day that passes without action means more of the same. Not surprising, not stunning--more of the same. Those measures are written, they are fully drafted, vetted for their constitutionality. My subcommittee on the Constitution has had hearings on them, many of them: S. 529, the Background Check Expansion Act; S. 591, the Background Check Completion Act; S. 1558, the Untraceable Firearms Act to stop ghost guns; S. 736, the Assault Weapons Ban; S. 527, the Protecting Domestic Violence and Stalking Victims Act; S. 2169, the Lori Jackson-Nicolette Elias Domestic Violence Survivor Protection Act, a hearing just last week on it; S. 2090, the Disarm Hate Act; S. 4278, the Age 21 Act; S. 190, Ethan's Law; S. 2982, the Child Suicide Prevention and Lethal Means Safety Act; S. 1819, the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act--the red flag statutes. Let us do one of them. Let us vote to make one of them law. That is our job: to vote. It is how we change this gut-wrenching, heartbreaking status quo, and it is how voters know where each of us stand when push comes to shove. So we have no words, but words will mean nothing without action. We have created a political movement. It is a movement that is growing as young people say: Enough is enough, as the hand wringing and the tears are translated into action at the grassroots level, action by State legislatures. Almost 20 states now have red flag statutes in the wake of Parkland. And as communities and States show that they will no longer tolerate the hypocrisy of thoughts and prayers without action, all of us who have advocated for years--indeed, for decades--that this body must act, we cannot lose courage or heart. We cannot lose the hope, and we must match our thoughts and prayers with real action. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. BLUMENTHAL | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2669-4 | null | 4,470 |
formal | single | null | homophobic | Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Madam President, we are nearing the end of the session, when we will go back to our homes for the evening, but when the families of 18 children and 4 great educators go home tonight, their homes will never be the same again. There are no words in a place filled with words during today and every day in this place when we are in session. There are no words today to capture the heartbreak, the gut-wrenching grief and pain that those families will feel and that I remember feeling almost 10 years ago when we stood in the space just outside the firehouse in Sandy Hook, as parents learned that their 20 children would not be coming home that night. The same bottomless grief is hitting the families in Texas, in Uvalde, where they have lost children. And there are no words also to capture the deep, abiding pain that will last forever. That pain will be with them--a hole in their hearts, a place at their tables, a room in their houses that never will be filled again, and hugs that they will never feel, cheeks that will never be kissed. This Nation, like their families, is torn apart by violence--needless, senseless gun violence--every day in America. And the mystery is why the greatest Nation on Earth continues to tolerate it. It is no longer surprising or stunning. It is no longer unfathomable or unforeseeable. It is incomprehensible that this great Nation is blocked by Members of this body from taking action that can forestall and prevent it. Why, the outrage that we feel, the grief that pervades America on these occasions has not caused action. And this body has been complicit by its inaction. In fact, it isn't this body. It is Members of this body, principally on the other side of the aisle. Let's be blunt. I will never forget hearing from that gallery those words: ``Shame. Shame on you,'' when we failed to adopt commonsense measures--a background check proposal, even though we had 55 votes. I can still hear those words. ``Shame.'' And had we acted, who knows what tragedy could have been averted? We don't know and we can't tell and we never will be able to fathom whetherspecific measures would have prevented specific tragedy. Charleston or San Bernardino, Pulse or Las Vegas, Parkland or Santa Fe, or Pittsburgh or El Paso or Dayton or Boulder or Indianapolis or Oxford or Buffalo or Uvalde--we will never know because the false reason to object is this measure wouldn't have prevented that shooting. But that is not the way to approach gun violence reform, because we know there is no panacea; there is no single measure. What we know is that stopping gun violence requires that we act with these measures and that commonsense, sensible steps can prevent a senseless, needless violence. There is no panacea, but there are actions we can take. We are not without agency. Now, we need to be very blunt and recognize that opposition to these measures is bankrolled and emboldened and enabled by the gun lobby's dark money, by its threats and intimidation, by its encouragement. And until my colleagues have the courage to stand up to that gun lobby, they will continue in its thrall and its grip, and they will continue to be complicit. And some on our side, some who have demonstrated the courage to stand up and speak out, have shown that we have the power to take action. We lack facts about the shooter and about the killing, all the circumstances in Uvalde, but we know enough to say that those families and that community will be torn apart. It will never be the same. They will never be whole again because they have lost something precious, and there will always be that hole in their hearts. Already some of our Republican colleagues are saying we are politicizing the issue, but they are the ones who, for decades, have tied themselves to the NRA's fanatical devotion to unrestricted, unyielding firearms ownership for political purposes at the expense of real lives. Tying themselves to firearms ownership is unnecessary for law-abiding citizens to own firearms. There are commonsense actions we can take to separate dangerous killers from firearms that are absolutely consistent with the Second Amendment, as judged by the Supreme Court, and absolutely consistent with gun ownership by law-abiding people. We know these actions won't save everyone, but there can be no doubt that each of them will save some lives: expanding background checks and closing glaring loopholes in our background check system; getting untraceable ghost guns and military-style assault weapons off our streets; protecting domestic violence survivors from gun violence; keeping guns out of the hands of domestic terrorists and violent extremists and individuals who are dangerous to themselves or others, red flag statutes; preventing kids from accidentally and unintentionally shooting themselves with unsecured firearms, Ethan's Law for safe storage; investing in community violence intervention programs--we know they work in Hartford, New Haven, all around the State of Connecticut; reducing the number of firearm suicides--more than half of all gun deaths are suicides; red flag statutes, separating firearms from people who are dangerous to themselves as well as others. We need to do all these things and more. We need to do them right now because every day that passes without action means more of the same. Not surprising, not stunning--more of the same. Those measures are written, they are fully drafted, vetted for their constitutionality. My subcommittee on the Constitution has had hearings on them, many of them: S. 529, the Background Check Expansion Act; S. 591, the Background Check Completion Act; S. 1558, the Untraceable Firearms Act to stop ghost guns; S. 736, the Assault Weapons Ban; S. 527, the Protecting Domestic Violence and Stalking Victims Act; S. 2169, the Lori Jackson-Nicolette Elias Domestic Violence Survivor Protection Act, a hearing just last week on it; S. 2090, the Disarm Hate Act; S. 4278, the Age 21 Act; S. 190, Ethan's Law; S. 2982, the Child Suicide Prevention and Lethal Means Safety Act; S. 1819, the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act--the red flag statutes. Let us do one of them. Let us vote to make one of them law. That is our job: to vote. It is how we change this gut-wrenching, heartbreaking status quo, and it is how voters know where each of us stand when push comes to shove. So we have no words, but words will mean nothing without action. We have created a political movement. It is a movement that is growing as young people say: Enough is enough, as the hand wringing and the tears are translated into action at the grassroots level, action by State legislatures. Almost 20 states now have red flag statutes in the wake of Parkland. And as communities and States show that they will no longer tolerate the hypocrisy of thoughts and prayers without action, all of us who have advocated for years--indeed, for decades--that this body must act, we cannot lose courage or heart. We cannot lose the hope, and we must match our thoughts and prayers with real action. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. BLUMENTHAL | Senate | CREC-2022-05-24-pt1-PgS2669-4 | null | 4,471 |
formal | single | null | homophobic | Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, there is a plague--a plague--upon this Nation, a plague of gun violence that has taken over this country. Two weeks ago, that plague claimed the lives of 10 Black Americans who were massacred in broad daylight while shopping at a grocery store in Buffalo. They were Black, and they were in a grocery store. That is the reason they were shot by an 18-year-old with an AR-15. And then, yesterday, just 10 days after Buffalo, that plague struck again in Uvalde, TX, where 19--19--innocent children and 2 teachers were gunned down at Robb Elementary in the middle of the school day, just before the start of summer when these kids were looking forward to having such a wonderful time with their family and friends. Gone. They are gone. The shooter crashed his truck near the school, overpowered the police already at the scene, and reportedly began shooting inside a fourth grade classroom. Nineteen kids, two teachers, forever gone in the blink of an eye. America's gun epidemic is unmatched by any of our peer nations in the world. No American is safe from it, and the American people are sick and tired of it. But we also have a problem--a big problem--here in the U.S. Senate--a big problem in the U.S. Senate. The problem in the Senate is simple: Too many Members on the other side of the aisle are disconnected from the suffering of the American people. Too many Members on that side care more about the NRA than they do about families who grieve victims of gun violence. As I said, the American people are sick and tired of mass shootings. They are sick and tired about active shooter alerts. They are sick and tired of children--children: 9-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 11-year-olds--being shot, gunned down in their schools. When I read the news of yesterday's shooting, I ached for the families and then thought: What if it was one of my children? I imagined what I would feel if this happened to one of them. The mere thought--just thinking about it--was a gut punch in my stomach. The fear sent ripples down my spine. To my Republican colleagues: Imagine if it happened to you. Imagine if this was your kid or your grandkid. How would you feel? Could you ever forgive yourself for not supporting a simple law that would make these mass shootings less likely? Please, please, please--damn it--put yourself in the shoes of these parents for once. Maybe that thought, putting yourself in the shoes of these parents instead of in the arms of the NRA, might let you wriggle free from the viselike grip of the NRA, might free you to act on even a simple measure for the sake of these children--these 9-year-olds, these 10-year-olds, these 11-year-olds, these beautiful children. Please--damn it--think if it were your child or grandchild. Now, Madam President, it wasn't always this way in Congress. Nearly 30 years ago, I was proud to be the author of the Brady Bill and a leader of the assault weapons bans. These were major legislative accomplishments, and they worked because they were good, commonsense laws, and they passed because both sides of the aisle worked together. And because they became law, tens of thousands--hundreds of thousands, perhaps--of lives were saved: children, elderly people, people of color, you name it, people now walking the streets who might have been dead had we not passed these laws. But today the NRA has made it all but impossible for even the bare minimum to move forward in Congress, and the other side is all too ready to bow in obeisance to the NRA, in service of their whims. Madam President, these types of shootings used to be rare--so rare, in fact, that each occurrence stood apart as a singular event. But now these shootings happen so frequently that the Nation can barely keep up, barely mourn the 10 people shot in the grocery store in Buffalo before being rocked to our collective core by the slaughter of 19 elementary schoolchildren in the predominantly Latino community of Uvalde, TX. These shootings happen everywhere: movie theaters, churches, synagogues, concerts, nightclubs, grocery stores, college campuses, high schools, elementary schools--elementary schools, with beautiful children getting ready to move out into the prime of life. Honestly, I thought Sandy Hook 10 years ago would be the breaking point. I thought that that would be the tragedy that forced Republicans to examine their conscience and think: Oh, God, we can't allow schoolchildren to be slaughtered. Well, I was wrong. The slaughter of 20 elementary schoolchildren in Sandy Hook didn't move them. We heard about their thoughts and their prayers--but no action. Then came Aurora. And the Navy Yard. Then, after Charleston, I thought: Maybe this--maybe this is the moment. Nine Americans shot in a church during Bible study? This has to move the Republicans here in the Senate. Nope. It didn't. They gave a few more thoughts, a few more prayers, no real effort to solve the problem. So, Madam President, it continued on and on and on: San Bernardino; Orlando; Las Vegas; Sutherland Springs; Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School; Thousand Oaks; the Pittsburgh synagogue; Santa Fe, TX; the El Paso Walmart; Dayton; Virginia Beach; Boulder; Buffalo; and now Uvalde. When will it end? We must act to have it end, not thoughts and prayers--action. After the shootings in El Paso and Dayton 3 years ago, the Republican leader promised that red flag laws and background checks would be front and center in a Senate debate. He was then majority leader, but then the Republicans did nothing. They ensured there was no debate, just as they wanted. They don't want to debate this issue. Indeed, all we hear from Republicans are thoughts, prayers. And now there is a new phrase. Now some of my Republican colleagues want to ``lift up'' the community. That sounds heartening, but it does absolutely nothing--nothing--to prevent the next family from having to grieve their loss, and it won't do a single damn thing to prevent another life from being taken. It won't do a single damn thing to prevent another child from being shot at school--a 9-year-old, a 10-year-old, an 11-year-old--beautiful children. Madam President, you may have noticed that when they aren't offering thoughts and prayers to distract from their inaction, many of my Republican colleagues focus on the motives of the shooters instead of focusing on the obvious common denominator. They talk about the real villain being mental illness and say nothing of the fact that we are a nation suffocated by firearms. Rates of mental illness are more or less the same across the developed world. The United States is not an outlier on mental illness, but we are an outlier in the sheer number of guns available in this country. That is why we have so many shootings and other Western countries don't. If mental illness were the simple cause, you would see mass shootings happening all over the developed world, but you don't. What you do see here in America are enough guns to give every man, woman, and child in this Nation a firearm and still have nearly 70 million guns left over. What you do see is that it is far too easy for people to access weapons in this country and then to use them to slaughter people, to slaughter children by the dozens--by the dozens. Again, America doesn't stand out when it comes to the rate of mental illness, but we are unique among the world's developed nations in that today, the leading cause of death among children is no longer a car accident; it is no longer illness or malnourishment. The leading cause of death among children is a firearm. The leading cause of death of children--do you hear that, my Republican colleagues?--is a firearm. Clearly, many of these shooters had different motives, but at the end of the day, does the motive really matter to the family with an empty seat at their dinner table? Children who lost parents don't just care whether the shooter was mentally ill; they care that the shooter had ready access to a gun. Spouses who lost their partners don't just care that the shooter had a grudge or an agenda or a grievance; they care that the shooter had ready access to a gun. Americans who lost friends and coworkers and parishioners, who lost fellow worshippers don't just care whether the shooter wrote a manifesto; they care that the shooter had ready access to a gun. They care that their loved ones had been taken from them by someone who had access to a gun--taken from them while some Members of this body refuse to do what it takes to prevent those losses, refuse to focus on the denominator to every single one of these shootings, refuse to even do the bare minimum as they bow in obeisance to the wretched NRA. What do we do about it? If the slaughter of schoolchildren can't convince the Republicans to buck the NRA, what can we do? There are some who want this body to quickly vote on sensible gun safety legislation--legislation supported by the vast majority of Americans, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike. They want to see this body vote quickly so the American people can know which side each Senator is on--which side each Senator is on. I am sympathetic to that, and I believe that accountability votes are important. But, sadly, this isn't a case of the American people not knowing where their Senators stand. They know. They know because my Republican colleagues are perfectly clear on this issue, crystal clear. Republicans don't pretend that they support sensible gun safety legislation. They don't pretend to be moved by the fact that 90 percent of Americans, regardless of party, support something as common sense as background checks, that the vast majority of gun owners support the background checks bill. They don't pretend that they want to keep guns out of the hands of those who might use weapons to shoot concertgoers or movie watchers or worshippers or shoppers or children. They don't pretend at all. Just listen to them when they show up in obeisance to the NRA at the NRA's convention in Houston--the same State as Uvalde--on Friday. Theywill offer their thoughts and prayers. They will say they want to lift up the community. And then they will go back to their smoke-filled rooms and ensure the NRA and gun manufacturers that nothing will change, that they have the NRA's back. No, Madam President, no, this isn't a case of Republicans hiding their position. They proudly tell the American people which side they are on, and America is much worse off for it. And if nothing does change, we are condemned to find ourselves right here once again very, very soon. As I was reading the reports of the tragedy in Texas, I saw that Amanda Gorman, the young woman who mesmerized the Nation at President Biden's inauguration, tweeted: The truth is, one nation under guns. ``One nation under guns.'' That is simply heartbreaking--heartbreaking--to think that this is the legacy that older generations are leaving behind for young Americans: ``one nation under guns.'' It doesn't have to be that way. Our parents don't need to drop their kids off at school and wonder if their kid will be next. That is in the thoughts of millions of moms and dads right now. Our citizens don't have to endure the fear of getting groceries while constantly keeping an eye behind their backs. Again, millions of Americans are worried about that right now. Americans can make a choice. Americans can reject the Republican ``guns at all cost'' doctrine, obeisance to the NRA, not even voting for the most simple, sensitive, positive, and popular gun legislation. Americans can cast their vote in November for Senators or Members of Congress who reflect how he or she stands with guns, with this issue--this issue--at the top of the voters' lists. In the meantime, my Republican colleagues can work with us now. I know this is a slim prospect--very slim, all too slim. We have been burned so many times before. But this is so important, and I have such a firm belief--taught to me by my late father, who passed away in November--that if you do the right thing and persist, justice will eventually prevail. But you have to keep persisting, and we will. For that reason alone, we must pursue action and even ask Republicans again to join us--maybe, maybe, maybe. Unlikely. We have been burned in the past. But their hearts might see what is happening and join us and do the right thing. They know it is the right thing. They can work with us to craft legislation that would prevent needless loss of life. It is their choice. As majority leader, I haven't been shy about putting bipartisan legislation on the floor for a vote, but bipartisan means both parties must engage in crafting a bill, like what happened in the House and Senate 30 years ago with the Brady law and the assault weapons ban. Democrats have been trying to work hard with Republicans--Senator Murphy, Senator Manchin--on legislation that will eventually pass and become law. The other side has refused. There are so many options available to us, so many ideas. We just need some brave Republicans to stand before history and yell ``stop,'' to think, if it was your child, your grandchild, how you would feel. Would that move you to do something--something--about this plague of guns? Like my colleague Senator Murphy, I refuse to believe that we cannot find a path forward. Make no mistake about it, if we can't find a good, strong bill that has bipartisan support, we will continue to pursue this issue on our own. We have no choice. It is too important. Lives are at stake. I accept the fact that most of my Republican colleagues are not willing to do what it takes to prevent this needless loss of life. The NRA will have a hold on them. That is just a reality, unfortunately. But it is unacceptable to the American people to think that there are not 10 of my Republican colleagues, just 10--1 out of 5 over here--who would be ready to work to pass something that would reduce this plague of gun violence. It is unacceptable that there are not 10 Members of the Republican caucus willing to save lives, find a way to do it. Yet that is where we are. That is where we are. Another week, another American community devastated by a mass shooting. All of us thinking of these 9- and 10- and 11-year-old children just shot, gone. Another American community, Uvalde, which will never recover, like the other communities before it. Will it be yet--Uvalde--another example of Republicans unwilling to do what it takes to keep Americans safe? I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. SCHUMER | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2675-9 | null | 4,472 |
formal | buck | null | racist | Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, there is a plague--a plague--upon this Nation, a plague of gun violence that has taken over this country. Two weeks ago, that plague claimed the lives of 10 Black Americans who were massacred in broad daylight while shopping at a grocery store in Buffalo. They were Black, and they were in a grocery store. That is the reason they were shot by an 18-year-old with an AR-15. And then, yesterday, just 10 days after Buffalo, that plague struck again in Uvalde, TX, where 19--19--innocent children and 2 teachers were gunned down at Robb Elementary in the middle of the school day, just before the start of summer when these kids were looking forward to having such a wonderful time with their family and friends. Gone. They are gone. The shooter crashed his truck near the school, overpowered the police already at the scene, and reportedly began shooting inside a fourth grade classroom. Nineteen kids, two teachers, forever gone in the blink of an eye. America's gun epidemic is unmatched by any of our peer nations in the world. No American is safe from it, and the American people are sick and tired of it. But we also have a problem--a big problem--here in the U.S. Senate--a big problem in the U.S. Senate. The problem in the Senate is simple: Too many Members on the other side of the aisle are disconnected from the suffering of the American people. Too many Members on that side care more about the NRA than they do about families who grieve victims of gun violence. As I said, the American people are sick and tired of mass shootings. They are sick and tired about active shooter alerts. They are sick and tired of children--children: 9-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 11-year-olds--being shot, gunned down in their schools. When I read the news of yesterday's shooting, I ached for the families and then thought: What if it was one of my children? I imagined what I would feel if this happened to one of them. The mere thought--just thinking about it--was a gut punch in my stomach. The fear sent ripples down my spine. To my Republican colleagues: Imagine if it happened to you. Imagine if this was your kid or your grandkid. How would you feel? Could you ever forgive yourself for not supporting a simple law that would make these mass shootings less likely? Please, please, please--damn it--put yourself in the shoes of these parents for once. Maybe that thought, putting yourself in the shoes of these parents instead of in the arms of the NRA, might let you wriggle free from the viselike grip of the NRA, might free you to act on even a simple measure for the sake of these children--these 9-year-olds, these 10-year-olds, these 11-year-olds, these beautiful children. Please--damn it--think if it were your child or grandchild. Now, Madam President, it wasn't always this way in Congress. Nearly 30 years ago, I was proud to be the author of the Brady Bill and a leader of the assault weapons bans. These were major legislative accomplishments, and they worked because they were good, commonsense laws, and they passed because both sides of the aisle worked together. And because they became law, tens of thousands--hundreds of thousands, perhaps--of lives were saved: children, elderly people, people of color, you name it, people now walking the streets who might have been dead had we not passed these laws. But today the NRA has made it all but impossible for even the bare minimum to move forward in Congress, and the other side is all too ready to bow in obeisance to the NRA, in service of their whims. Madam President, these types of shootings used to be rare--so rare, in fact, that each occurrence stood apart as a singular event. But now these shootings happen so frequently that the Nation can barely keep up, barely mourn the 10 people shot in the grocery store in Buffalo before being rocked to our collective core by the slaughter of 19 elementary schoolchildren in the predominantly Latino community of Uvalde, TX. These shootings happen everywhere: movie theaters, churches, synagogues, concerts, nightclubs, grocery stores, college campuses, high schools, elementary schools--elementary schools, with beautiful children getting ready to move out into the prime of life. Honestly, I thought Sandy Hook 10 years ago would be the breaking point. I thought that that would be the tragedy that forced Republicans to examine their conscience and think: Oh, God, we can't allow schoolchildren to be slaughtered. Well, I was wrong. The slaughter of 20 elementary schoolchildren in Sandy Hook didn't move them. We heard about their thoughts and their prayers--but no action. Then came Aurora. And the Navy Yard. Then, after Charleston, I thought: Maybe this--maybe this is the moment. Nine Americans shot in a church during Bible study? This has to move the Republicans here in the Senate. Nope. It didn't. They gave a few more thoughts, a few more prayers, no real effort to solve the problem. So, Madam President, it continued on and on and on: San Bernardino; Orlando; Las Vegas; Sutherland Springs; Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School; Thousand Oaks; the Pittsburgh synagogue; Santa Fe, TX; the El Paso Walmart; Dayton; Virginia Beach; Boulder; Buffalo; and now Uvalde. When will it end? We must act to have it end, not thoughts and prayers--action. After the shootings in El Paso and Dayton 3 years ago, the Republican leader promised that red flag laws and background checks would be front and center in a Senate debate. He was then majority leader, but then the Republicans did nothing. They ensured there was no debate, just as they wanted. They don't want to debate this issue. Indeed, all we hear from Republicans are thoughts, prayers. And now there is a new phrase. Now some of my Republican colleagues want to ``lift up'' the community. That sounds heartening, but it does absolutely nothing--nothing--to prevent the next family from having to grieve their loss, and it won't do a single damn thing to prevent another life from being taken. It won't do a single damn thing to prevent another child from being shot at school--a 9-year-old, a 10-year-old, an 11-year-old--beautiful children. Madam President, you may have noticed that when they aren't offering thoughts and prayers to distract from their inaction, many of my Republican colleagues focus on the motives of the shooters instead of focusing on the obvious common denominator. They talk about the real villain being mental illness and say nothing of the fact that we are a nation suffocated by firearms. Rates of mental illness are more or less the same across the developed world. The United States is not an outlier on mental illness, but we are an outlier in the sheer number of guns available in this country. That is why we have so many shootings and other Western countries don't. If mental illness were the simple cause, you would see mass shootings happening all over the developed world, but you don't. What you do see here in America are enough guns to give every man, woman, and child in this Nation a firearm and still have nearly 70 million guns left over. What you do see is that it is far too easy for people to access weapons in this country and then to use them to slaughter people, to slaughter children by the dozens--by the dozens. Again, America doesn't stand out when it comes to the rate of mental illness, but we are unique among the world's developed nations in that today, the leading cause of death among children is no longer a car accident; it is no longer illness or malnourishment. The leading cause of death among children is a firearm. The leading cause of death of children--do you hear that, my Republican colleagues?--is a firearm. Clearly, many of these shooters had different motives, but at the end of the day, does the motive really matter to the family with an empty seat at their dinner table? Children who lost parents don't just care whether the shooter was mentally ill; they care that the shooter had ready access to a gun. Spouses who lost their partners don't just care that the shooter had a grudge or an agenda or a grievance; they care that the shooter had ready access to a gun. Americans who lost friends and coworkers and parishioners, who lost fellow worshippers don't just care whether the shooter wrote a manifesto; they care that the shooter had ready access to a gun. They care that their loved ones had been taken from them by someone who had access to a gun--taken from them while some Members of this body refuse to do what it takes to prevent those losses, refuse to focus on the denominator to every single one of these shootings, refuse to even do the bare minimum as they bow in obeisance to the wretched NRA. What do we do about it? If the slaughter of schoolchildren can't convince the Republicans to buck the NRA, what can we do? There are some who want this body to quickly vote on sensible gun safety legislation--legislation supported by the vast majority of Americans, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike. They want to see this body vote quickly so the American people can know which side each Senator is on--which side each Senator is on. I am sympathetic to that, and I believe that accountability votes are important. But, sadly, this isn't a case of the American people not knowing where their Senators stand. They know. They know because my Republican colleagues are perfectly clear on this issue, crystal clear. Republicans don't pretend that they support sensible gun safety legislation. They don't pretend to be moved by the fact that 90 percent of Americans, regardless of party, support something as common sense as background checks, that the vast majority of gun owners support the background checks bill. They don't pretend that they want to keep guns out of the hands of those who might use weapons to shoot concertgoers or movie watchers or worshippers or shoppers or children. They don't pretend at all. Just listen to them when they show up in obeisance to the NRA at the NRA's convention in Houston--the same State as Uvalde--on Friday. Theywill offer their thoughts and prayers. They will say they want to lift up the community. And then they will go back to their smoke-filled rooms and ensure the NRA and gun manufacturers that nothing will change, that they have the NRA's back. No, Madam President, no, this isn't a case of Republicans hiding their position. They proudly tell the American people which side they are on, and America is much worse off for it. And if nothing does change, we are condemned to find ourselves right here once again very, very soon. As I was reading the reports of the tragedy in Texas, I saw that Amanda Gorman, the young woman who mesmerized the Nation at President Biden's inauguration, tweeted: The truth is, one nation under guns. ``One nation under guns.'' That is simply heartbreaking--heartbreaking--to think that this is the legacy that older generations are leaving behind for young Americans: ``one nation under guns.'' It doesn't have to be that way. Our parents don't need to drop their kids off at school and wonder if their kid will be next. That is in the thoughts of millions of moms and dads right now. Our citizens don't have to endure the fear of getting groceries while constantly keeping an eye behind their backs. Again, millions of Americans are worried about that right now. Americans can make a choice. Americans can reject the Republican ``guns at all cost'' doctrine, obeisance to the NRA, not even voting for the most simple, sensitive, positive, and popular gun legislation. Americans can cast their vote in November for Senators or Members of Congress who reflect how he or she stands with guns, with this issue--this issue--at the top of the voters' lists. In the meantime, my Republican colleagues can work with us now. I know this is a slim prospect--very slim, all too slim. We have been burned so many times before. But this is so important, and I have such a firm belief--taught to me by my late father, who passed away in November--that if you do the right thing and persist, justice will eventually prevail. But you have to keep persisting, and we will. For that reason alone, we must pursue action and even ask Republicans again to join us--maybe, maybe, maybe. Unlikely. We have been burned in the past. But their hearts might see what is happening and join us and do the right thing. They know it is the right thing. They can work with us to craft legislation that would prevent needless loss of life. It is their choice. As majority leader, I haven't been shy about putting bipartisan legislation on the floor for a vote, but bipartisan means both parties must engage in crafting a bill, like what happened in the House and Senate 30 years ago with the Brady law and the assault weapons ban. Democrats have been trying to work hard with Republicans--Senator Murphy, Senator Manchin--on legislation that will eventually pass and become law. The other side has refused. There are so many options available to us, so many ideas. We just need some brave Republicans to stand before history and yell ``stop,'' to think, if it was your child, your grandchild, how you would feel. Would that move you to do something--something--about this plague of guns? Like my colleague Senator Murphy, I refuse to believe that we cannot find a path forward. Make no mistake about it, if we can't find a good, strong bill that has bipartisan support, we will continue to pursue this issue on our own. We have no choice. It is too important. Lives are at stake. I accept the fact that most of my Republican colleagues are not willing to do what it takes to prevent this needless loss of life. The NRA will have a hold on them. That is just a reality, unfortunately. But it is unacceptable to the American people to think that there are not 10 of my Republican colleagues, just 10--1 out of 5 over here--who would be ready to work to pass something that would reduce this plague of gun violence. It is unacceptable that there are not 10 Members of the Republican caucus willing to save lives, find a way to do it. Yet that is where we are. That is where we are. Another week, another American community devastated by a mass shooting. All of us thinking of these 9- and 10- and 11-year-old children just shot, gone. Another American community, Uvalde, which will never recover, like the other communities before it. Will it be yet--Uvalde--another example of Republicans unwilling to do what it takes to keep Americans safe? I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. SCHUMER | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2675-9 | null | 4,473 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will proceed to executive session and resume consideration of the following nomination, which the clerk will report. The bill clerk read the nomination of Sandra L. Thompson, of Maryland, to be Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency for a term of five years. | 2020-01-06 | The PRESIDING OFFICER | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2678-2 | null | 4,474 |
formal | extremism | null | Islamophobic | Robb Elementary School Shooting Madam President, I cannot imagine what it was like last night in Texas in the homes of the 19 or 20 children who lost their lives in that Robb Elementary School gun massacre. Those are the longest, loneliest nights of your life as a parent when you have lost a child. And for each of them, it came as a stunning shock: a child sent off to school, nearing the end of the school year, probably happily anticipating summer camp, a visit with relatives, a family vacation, whose life was taken away in an instant. The freedom and joy of youth was ripped from every single one of those 19 children, and 2 of the heroic teachers who sought to protect them when they were murdered in cold blood by this gunman. Today, instead of thinking about vacation and summer, the parents are sadly making funeral arrangements for their babies. Others are sitting down with their children and trying to explain why their playmates are not at school. It is not even June, and this year alone there have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States. My colleague Chris Murphy of Connecticut said last night there had been more mass shootings than days in this last year. Now families across America are stepping forward to offer their condolences, to donate to the families who lost these precious, precious children, and to demand that this Senate act to prevent something--do something to prevent the appalling acts of mass murder that we see way too often. The Members of the Senate have to make a choice: Will we listen to the American people in their overwhelming numbers calling on us to set politics aside and stop the killing of children and other innocent Americans or will we cower in front of the gun industry? The lives of countless children, and I might add, grandchildren, depend on our answer to that question. It was 21 years ago--hard to imagine--but 21 years ago this September when we lived through 9/11. That morning, I was in this building, down the hall at a meeting at 9 in the morning called by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. We had just heard that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York, and we didn't know much more. We quickly turned on the television to see another plane crash into an adjoining building. It was obvious that something horrible had happened. And it wasn't long after that that we looked out the window and looked west down the Mall to see black smoke billowing in. We learned it came from the Pentagon, where another plane had crashed into that building. That was a day none of us will ever forget, nor should we. It was a day when America changed in so many ways. That was the beginning of TSA security checks at airports. Things that have become commonplace in our life were initiated because of 9/11. And did we ever mount an effort to stop international terrorism against the United States. We were serious. It was a deadly serious issue, 3,000 innocent people losing their lives on 9/11. We were bound and determined--so determined that this Senate declared war on al-Qaida and called for the invasion of Afghanistan. I voted for that because I felt then and feel now, no one should attack the United States with impunity. There is a price to pay. And so we made a decision which for 20 years guided our foreign policy in Afghanistan and other decisions by the scores around the world that really fought international terrorism. We learned something recently. Last year, we had the Director of the FBI come before us, and I asked him about domestic terrorism. What about the terrorists in America itself who are killing innocent people? His report to us was sobering. He said it is a real threat, and it is a threat that is metastasizing. We know that horrible word from the disease of cancer. It means that the cancer itself is advancing in a deadly way. That is the way the FBI Director described domestic terrorism. As we mourn yesterday's mass shooting in Uvalde, TX, we have a bill coming before the Senate tomorrow that responds to the mass shooting that took place in Buffalo just 11 days ago, in which a gunman killed 10 Black Americans in a racist act of violence. Tomorrow, we will vote on my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I first introduced it in the year 2017, and that passed the House on a bipartisan basis last week. This legislation will help law enforcement combat the serious and lethal threat of domestic terrorism. It will authorize offices within the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security that are squarely focused on this threat. And these offices will be required to regularly assess domestic terrorism risk and provide training and resources to State, local, and Tribal law enforcement. The bill will also establish an interagency task force to combat White supremacists' infiltration of the uniformed services and Federal law enforcement. Like gun safety reform, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is long overdue. I first held a hearing on domestic terrorism 10 years ago after a White supremacist marched into a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, WI, opening fire and killing seven people. In the 10 years since, violent White supremacists have massacred Americans with their sickening attacks. In 2015, a White supremacist shot and killed nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. At the time, it was the deadliest attack in a place of worship in recent American history, a horrifying record that sadly was surpassed just a few years later. In 2018, an anti-Semitic terrorist killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Think about this for a moment. There are members of that synagogue who actually survived the Holocaust in World War II, only to be targeted by the same hate nearly 80 years later in America. A year after that, a far-right extremist killed 23 people at the Walmart in El Paso, TX, targeting immigrants and members of the Hispanic community. Some of these gunmen subscribe to the same racist conspiracy theory as the shooter in Buffalo a few days ago, the so-called ``great replacement theory.'' It has become the great rallying cry for White supremacists. Each of these acts of hate-fueled mass murder has torn apart a community, traumatized the Nation, and left unimaginable grief and pain in its wake. And so it was over a year ago that FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to domestic terrorism metastasizing and growing in the United States. Well, I think it is time that we take action to stop this threat. Time and again, the Senate has failed to take any meaningful steps to prevent violent extremism. When exactly did stopping mass murder become a partisan issue? It wasn't like this after 9/11. Twenty years ago, Republicans and Democrats joined in common cause to confronting international terrorism threatening America. After that horrific act of mass murder on 9/11, we worked together on a bipartisan basis to reconfigure our entire national security apparatus. We created a new Agency, the Department ofHomeland Security, designed to prevent the next 9/11. To be sure, there were moments when we went off in the wrong direction. Over the years, we worked to rein in legislation like the PATRIOT Act and protect civil liberties of the American people. As lawmakers, our responsibility is to enact sensible solutions and save lives while also protecting our Constitution. That is exactly what the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is all about. It will improve data collection on incidents of domestic terrorism and strengthen Federal coordination to combat it. That is why it makes no sense to me that there are Republicans who oppose it. The same Republicans who once took bold steps to prevent terrorism on an international basis now won't even allow us to debate a bill to prevent terrorism at home. There are actually Republican Members of the House who are cosponsors of my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, who just last week voted against it, cosponsors. What exactly is the reason for this Republican opposition? Well, one Senate Republican claimed that the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would be ``the PATRIOT Act for American citizens.'' That is phony and wrong. First of all, as I just mentioned, the PATRIOT Act was flawed. It was an excessive policy response to a nation in panic. I should know because I voted for it and then led the effort to change it. Here is why the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is different. Unlike the PATRIOT Act, it will not provide any new law enforcement or surveilling power to the government. It also does not establish a single new criminal offense. Let me repeat this. The bill that comes before us on domestic terrorism does not create any new Federal crime, period. This is a modest bill with a simple goal: ensure that the Federal Government devotes existing resources and authorities to what has been identified by the FBI as the most significant domestic terrorism threats. Who supports this bill? The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Arab-American Institute, the NAACP. All of them and more support the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I hope our Republican colleagues will join us in a bipartisan effort to keep America safe. Last week, I spoke to the courage and sacrifice of Aaron Salter, a retired police officer who was working as a security guard in that Buffalo grocery store at the time of the attack. When the shooter entered the store, Officer Salter jumped into action. He fired multiple shots at the attacker, but his skill and courage were not enough. He was outgunned. He had a pistol. The shooter had an assault rifle and a tactical vest. It is a scenario that, sadly, is becoming too common. We saw it yesterday in Texas. The attacker in yesterday's school shooting in Uvalde was also carrying an assault rifle and wearing a tactical vest. He reportedly shot two officers before entering the school and wounding a Federal law enforcement official. Can the Members of this Senate say in good conscience that we have done enough to protect the lives of police officers and the children in communities like Uvalde? Of course not. They were killed by people who never should have had a gun in the first place. With the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, this Senate can take the first step of many steps needed to save lives and reject hate. The next step is finally closing the loophole that allows guns to fall into the wrong hands. Ten years ago, after 26 little children, God bless them, were murdered by a disturbed gunman in Sandy Hook Elementary School, we voted to close gaps in the gun background check system, and we fell short. Will we finally close those gaps now after another school filled with little babies and children was targeted in a mass shooting? The CDC reported last week that for the first time in more than 60 years, car accidents are no longer the leading cause of death for kids and teens. As of 2020, the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in America is guns--guns. Guns are the No. 1 threat to our children. When will we finally find the courage and the spine to pass commonsense changes to our gun laws that the vast majority of Americans support? Well, this Friday, the National Rifle Association is holding its annual meeting in, of all places, Texas. A few of the politicians who are scheduled to speak at that gathering were among the first to send their thoughts and prayers to Uvalde. Well, I hope and pray they will find the courage to stop cowering before the gun lobby and take action to save our children's lives. Let me address one last misconception about this bill. A number of my colleagues have said: Well, why did you have to use the words ``White supremacists'' or ``neo-Nazis'' in the bill? Why did you want to focus on that? Let me make it clear that we are focusing on domestic terrorism, and that is why we mention White supremacism. The bill requires reports to Congress on all domestic terrorism activity, with a breakdown by specific category. The bill requires that White supremacist terrorism be one of those specific categories. We include this requirement because during the Trump Presidential administration, the FBI was ordered to stop tracking White supremacist attacks as a separate category of domestic terrorism. Remarkably, the FBI stopped tracking White supremacist attacks in the middle of the spate of White supremacist violence, including the lethal attack at the 2017 Charlottesville ``Unite the Right'' rally and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. This decision also came after an unclassified May 2017 joint intelligence bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that found ``white supremacist extremism poses [a] persistent threat of lethal''--lethal--``violence,'' and that White supremacists ``were responsible for 49 homicides and 26 attacks from 2016 . . . more than any other domestic extremist movement.'' I am not making this up. People are dying because of these extremists. We are asking the FBI and other Agencies to identify the incidents of violence so that we can track them, find if they are growing or receding; train local law enforcement to recognize it. This bill does not require collecting of data on First Amendment-protected speech at all, no matter how vile that speech may be. It only requires the FBI to provide a report to Congress on violent domestic terrorist activity that the FBI is already investigating. In fact, this bill does not provide any new law enforcement or surveillance powers to the government. It does not establish any new criminal offenses. This morning there is an outrage over the violence that took place in Texas. The question is, Can we channel this outrage into an active, productive effort to pass legislation to make America safer? We know what the problem is. We know what the challenge is with domestic terrorism. The question is, Can we gather the information to put an end to it? Isn't that our responsibility, what comes to our responsibility as Senators and as citizens in this country? In the U.S. Senate, let's start with this bill. Domestic terrorism is for real. We saw a form of it in Buffalo, NY, and we are going to see it again, I am afraid, unless we take it very seriously. Fighting terrorism used to be a bipartisan effort, and I hope it will once again. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2692 | null | 4,475 |
formal | extremist | null | Islamophobic | Robb Elementary School Shooting Madam President, I cannot imagine what it was like last night in Texas in the homes of the 19 or 20 children who lost their lives in that Robb Elementary School gun massacre. Those are the longest, loneliest nights of your life as a parent when you have lost a child. And for each of them, it came as a stunning shock: a child sent off to school, nearing the end of the school year, probably happily anticipating summer camp, a visit with relatives, a family vacation, whose life was taken away in an instant. The freedom and joy of youth was ripped from every single one of those 19 children, and 2 of the heroic teachers who sought to protect them when they were murdered in cold blood by this gunman. Today, instead of thinking about vacation and summer, the parents are sadly making funeral arrangements for their babies. Others are sitting down with their children and trying to explain why their playmates are not at school. It is not even June, and this year alone there have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States. My colleague Chris Murphy of Connecticut said last night there had been more mass shootings than days in this last year. Now families across America are stepping forward to offer their condolences, to donate to the families who lost these precious, precious children, and to demand that this Senate act to prevent something--do something to prevent the appalling acts of mass murder that we see way too often. The Members of the Senate have to make a choice: Will we listen to the American people in their overwhelming numbers calling on us to set politics aside and stop the killing of children and other innocent Americans or will we cower in front of the gun industry? The lives of countless children, and I might add, grandchildren, depend on our answer to that question. It was 21 years ago--hard to imagine--but 21 years ago this September when we lived through 9/11. That morning, I was in this building, down the hall at a meeting at 9 in the morning called by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. We had just heard that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York, and we didn't know much more. We quickly turned on the television to see another plane crash into an adjoining building. It was obvious that something horrible had happened. And it wasn't long after that that we looked out the window and looked west down the Mall to see black smoke billowing in. We learned it came from the Pentagon, where another plane had crashed into that building. That was a day none of us will ever forget, nor should we. It was a day when America changed in so many ways. That was the beginning of TSA security checks at airports. Things that have become commonplace in our life were initiated because of 9/11. And did we ever mount an effort to stop international terrorism against the United States. We were serious. It was a deadly serious issue, 3,000 innocent people losing their lives on 9/11. We were bound and determined--so determined that this Senate declared war on al-Qaida and called for the invasion of Afghanistan. I voted for that because I felt then and feel now, no one should attack the United States with impunity. There is a price to pay. And so we made a decision which for 20 years guided our foreign policy in Afghanistan and other decisions by the scores around the world that really fought international terrorism. We learned something recently. Last year, we had the Director of the FBI come before us, and I asked him about domestic terrorism. What about the terrorists in America itself who are killing innocent people? His report to us was sobering. He said it is a real threat, and it is a threat that is metastasizing. We know that horrible word from the disease of cancer. It means that the cancer itself is advancing in a deadly way. That is the way the FBI Director described domestic terrorism. As we mourn yesterday's mass shooting in Uvalde, TX, we have a bill coming before the Senate tomorrow that responds to the mass shooting that took place in Buffalo just 11 days ago, in which a gunman killed 10 Black Americans in a racist act of violence. Tomorrow, we will vote on my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I first introduced it in the year 2017, and that passed the House on a bipartisan basis last week. This legislation will help law enforcement combat the serious and lethal threat of domestic terrorism. It will authorize offices within the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security that are squarely focused on this threat. And these offices will be required to regularly assess domestic terrorism risk and provide training and resources to State, local, and Tribal law enforcement. The bill will also establish an interagency task force to combat White supremacists' infiltration of the uniformed services and Federal law enforcement. Like gun safety reform, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is long overdue. I first held a hearing on domestic terrorism 10 years ago after a White supremacist marched into a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, WI, opening fire and killing seven people. In the 10 years since, violent White supremacists have massacred Americans with their sickening attacks. In 2015, a White supremacist shot and killed nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. At the time, it was the deadliest attack in a place of worship in recent American history, a horrifying record that sadly was surpassed just a few years later. In 2018, an anti-Semitic terrorist killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Think about this for a moment. There are members of that synagogue who actually survived the Holocaust in World War II, only to be targeted by the same hate nearly 80 years later in America. A year after that, a far-right extremist killed 23 people at the Walmart in El Paso, TX, targeting immigrants and members of the Hispanic community. Some of these gunmen subscribe to the same racist conspiracy theory as the shooter in Buffalo a few days ago, the so-called ``great replacement theory.'' It has become the great rallying cry for White supremacists. Each of these acts of hate-fueled mass murder has torn apart a community, traumatized the Nation, and left unimaginable grief and pain in its wake. And so it was over a year ago that FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to domestic terrorism metastasizing and growing in the United States. Well, I think it is time that we take action to stop this threat. Time and again, the Senate has failed to take any meaningful steps to prevent violent extremism. When exactly did stopping mass murder become a partisan issue? It wasn't like this after 9/11. Twenty years ago, Republicans and Democrats joined in common cause to confronting international terrorism threatening America. After that horrific act of mass murder on 9/11, we worked together on a bipartisan basis to reconfigure our entire national security apparatus. We created a new Agency, the Department ofHomeland Security, designed to prevent the next 9/11. To be sure, there were moments when we went off in the wrong direction. Over the years, we worked to rein in legislation like the PATRIOT Act and protect civil liberties of the American people. As lawmakers, our responsibility is to enact sensible solutions and save lives while also protecting our Constitution. That is exactly what the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is all about. It will improve data collection on incidents of domestic terrorism and strengthen Federal coordination to combat it. That is why it makes no sense to me that there are Republicans who oppose it. The same Republicans who once took bold steps to prevent terrorism on an international basis now won't even allow us to debate a bill to prevent terrorism at home. There are actually Republican Members of the House who are cosponsors of my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, who just last week voted against it, cosponsors. What exactly is the reason for this Republican opposition? Well, one Senate Republican claimed that the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would be ``the PATRIOT Act for American citizens.'' That is phony and wrong. First of all, as I just mentioned, the PATRIOT Act was flawed. It was an excessive policy response to a nation in panic. I should know because I voted for it and then led the effort to change it. Here is why the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is different. Unlike the PATRIOT Act, it will not provide any new law enforcement or surveilling power to the government. It also does not establish a single new criminal offense. Let me repeat this. The bill that comes before us on domestic terrorism does not create any new Federal crime, period. This is a modest bill with a simple goal: ensure that the Federal Government devotes existing resources and authorities to what has been identified by the FBI as the most significant domestic terrorism threats. Who supports this bill? The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Arab-American Institute, the NAACP. All of them and more support the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I hope our Republican colleagues will join us in a bipartisan effort to keep America safe. Last week, I spoke to the courage and sacrifice of Aaron Salter, a retired police officer who was working as a security guard in that Buffalo grocery store at the time of the attack. When the shooter entered the store, Officer Salter jumped into action. He fired multiple shots at the attacker, but his skill and courage were not enough. He was outgunned. He had a pistol. The shooter had an assault rifle and a tactical vest. It is a scenario that, sadly, is becoming too common. We saw it yesterday in Texas. The attacker in yesterday's school shooting in Uvalde was also carrying an assault rifle and wearing a tactical vest. He reportedly shot two officers before entering the school and wounding a Federal law enforcement official. Can the Members of this Senate say in good conscience that we have done enough to protect the lives of police officers and the children in communities like Uvalde? Of course not. They were killed by people who never should have had a gun in the first place. With the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, this Senate can take the first step of many steps needed to save lives and reject hate. The next step is finally closing the loophole that allows guns to fall into the wrong hands. Ten years ago, after 26 little children, God bless them, were murdered by a disturbed gunman in Sandy Hook Elementary School, we voted to close gaps in the gun background check system, and we fell short. Will we finally close those gaps now after another school filled with little babies and children was targeted in a mass shooting? The CDC reported last week that for the first time in more than 60 years, car accidents are no longer the leading cause of death for kids and teens. As of 2020, the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in America is guns--guns. Guns are the No. 1 threat to our children. When will we finally find the courage and the spine to pass commonsense changes to our gun laws that the vast majority of Americans support? Well, this Friday, the National Rifle Association is holding its annual meeting in, of all places, Texas. A few of the politicians who are scheduled to speak at that gathering were among the first to send their thoughts and prayers to Uvalde. Well, I hope and pray they will find the courage to stop cowering before the gun lobby and take action to save our children's lives. Let me address one last misconception about this bill. A number of my colleagues have said: Well, why did you have to use the words ``White supremacists'' or ``neo-Nazis'' in the bill? Why did you want to focus on that? Let me make it clear that we are focusing on domestic terrorism, and that is why we mention White supremacism. The bill requires reports to Congress on all domestic terrorism activity, with a breakdown by specific category. The bill requires that White supremacist terrorism be one of those specific categories. We include this requirement because during the Trump Presidential administration, the FBI was ordered to stop tracking White supremacist attacks as a separate category of domestic terrorism. Remarkably, the FBI stopped tracking White supremacist attacks in the middle of the spate of White supremacist violence, including the lethal attack at the 2017 Charlottesville ``Unite the Right'' rally and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. This decision also came after an unclassified May 2017 joint intelligence bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that found ``white supremacist extremism poses [a] persistent threat of lethal''--lethal--``violence,'' and that White supremacists ``were responsible for 49 homicides and 26 attacks from 2016 . . . more than any other domestic extremist movement.'' I am not making this up. People are dying because of these extremists. We are asking the FBI and other Agencies to identify the incidents of violence so that we can track them, find if they are growing or receding; train local law enforcement to recognize it. This bill does not require collecting of data on First Amendment-protected speech at all, no matter how vile that speech may be. It only requires the FBI to provide a report to Congress on violent domestic terrorist activity that the FBI is already investigating. In fact, this bill does not provide any new law enforcement or surveillance powers to the government. It does not establish any new criminal offenses. This morning there is an outrage over the violence that took place in Texas. The question is, Can we channel this outrage into an active, productive effort to pass legislation to make America safer? We know what the problem is. We know what the challenge is with domestic terrorism. The question is, Can we gather the information to put an end to it? Isn't that our responsibility, what comes to our responsibility as Senators and as citizens in this country? In the U.S. Senate, let's start with this bill. Domestic terrorism is for real. We saw a form of it in Buffalo, NY, and we are going to see it again, I am afraid, unless we take it very seriously. Fighting terrorism used to be a bipartisan effort, and I hope it will once again. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2692 | null | 4,476 |
formal | extremists | null | Islamophobic | Robb Elementary School Shooting Madam President, I cannot imagine what it was like last night in Texas in the homes of the 19 or 20 children who lost their lives in that Robb Elementary School gun massacre. Those are the longest, loneliest nights of your life as a parent when you have lost a child. And for each of them, it came as a stunning shock: a child sent off to school, nearing the end of the school year, probably happily anticipating summer camp, a visit with relatives, a family vacation, whose life was taken away in an instant. The freedom and joy of youth was ripped from every single one of those 19 children, and 2 of the heroic teachers who sought to protect them when they were murdered in cold blood by this gunman. Today, instead of thinking about vacation and summer, the parents are sadly making funeral arrangements for their babies. Others are sitting down with their children and trying to explain why their playmates are not at school. It is not even June, and this year alone there have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States. My colleague Chris Murphy of Connecticut said last night there had been more mass shootings than days in this last year. Now families across America are stepping forward to offer their condolences, to donate to the families who lost these precious, precious children, and to demand that this Senate act to prevent something--do something to prevent the appalling acts of mass murder that we see way too often. The Members of the Senate have to make a choice: Will we listen to the American people in their overwhelming numbers calling on us to set politics aside and stop the killing of children and other innocent Americans or will we cower in front of the gun industry? The lives of countless children, and I might add, grandchildren, depend on our answer to that question. It was 21 years ago--hard to imagine--but 21 years ago this September when we lived through 9/11. That morning, I was in this building, down the hall at a meeting at 9 in the morning called by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. We had just heard that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York, and we didn't know much more. We quickly turned on the television to see another plane crash into an adjoining building. It was obvious that something horrible had happened. And it wasn't long after that that we looked out the window and looked west down the Mall to see black smoke billowing in. We learned it came from the Pentagon, where another plane had crashed into that building. That was a day none of us will ever forget, nor should we. It was a day when America changed in so many ways. That was the beginning of TSA security checks at airports. Things that have become commonplace in our life were initiated because of 9/11. And did we ever mount an effort to stop international terrorism against the United States. We were serious. It was a deadly serious issue, 3,000 innocent people losing their lives on 9/11. We were bound and determined--so determined that this Senate declared war on al-Qaida and called for the invasion of Afghanistan. I voted for that because I felt then and feel now, no one should attack the United States with impunity. There is a price to pay. And so we made a decision which for 20 years guided our foreign policy in Afghanistan and other decisions by the scores around the world that really fought international terrorism. We learned something recently. Last year, we had the Director of the FBI come before us, and I asked him about domestic terrorism. What about the terrorists in America itself who are killing innocent people? His report to us was sobering. He said it is a real threat, and it is a threat that is metastasizing. We know that horrible word from the disease of cancer. It means that the cancer itself is advancing in a deadly way. That is the way the FBI Director described domestic terrorism. As we mourn yesterday's mass shooting in Uvalde, TX, we have a bill coming before the Senate tomorrow that responds to the mass shooting that took place in Buffalo just 11 days ago, in which a gunman killed 10 Black Americans in a racist act of violence. Tomorrow, we will vote on my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I first introduced it in the year 2017, and that passed the House on a bipartisan basis last week. This legislation will help law enforcement combat the serious and lethal threat of domestic terrorism. It will authorize offices within the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security that are squarely focused on this threat. And these offices will be required to regularly assess domestic terrorism risk and provide training and resources to State, local, and Tribal law enforcement. The bill will also establish an interagency task force to combat White supremacists' infiltration of the uniformed services and Federal law enforcement. Like gun safety reform, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is long overdue. I first held a hearing on domestic terrorism 10 years ago after a White supremacist marched into a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, WI, opening fire and killing seven people. In the 10 years since, violent White supremacists have massacred Americans with their sickening attacks. In 2015, a White supremacist shot and killed nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. At the time, it was the deadliest attack in a place of worship in recent American history, a horrifying record that sadly was surpassed just a few years later. In 2018, an anti-Semitic terrorist killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Think about this for a moment. There are members of that synagogue who actually survived the Holocaust in World War II, only to be targeted by the same hate nearly 80 years later in America. A year after that, a far-right extremist killed 23 people at the Walmart in El Paso, TX, targeting immigrants and members of the Hispanic community. Some of these gunmen subscribe to the same racist conspiracy theory as the shooter in Buffalo a few days ago, the so-called ``great replacement theory.'' It has become the great rallying cry for White supremacists. Each of these acts of hate-fueled mass murder has torn apart a community, traumatized the Nation, and left unimaginable grief and pain in its wake. And so it was over a year ago that FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to domestic terrorism metastasizing and growing in the United States. Well, I think it is time that we take action to stop this threat. Time and again, the Senate has failed to take any meaningful steps to prevent violent extremism. When exactly did stopping mass murder become a partisan issue? It wasn't like this after 9/11. Twenty years ago, Republicans and Democrats joined in common cause to confronting international terrorism threatening America. After that horrific act of mass murder on 9/11, we worked together on a bipartisan basis to reconfigure our entire national security apparatus. We created a new Agency, the Department ofHomeland Security, designed to prevent the next 9/11. To be sure, there were moments when we went off in the wrong direction. Over the years, we worked to rein in legislation like the PATRIOT Act and protect civil liberties of the American people. As lawmakers, our responsibility is to enact sensible solutions and save lives while also protecting our Constitution. That is exactly what the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is all about. It will improve data collection on incidents of domestic terrorism and strengthen Federal coordination to combat it. That is why it makes no sense to me that there are Republicans who oppose it. The same Republicans who once took bold steps to prevent terrorism on an international basis now won't even allow us to debate a bill to prevent terrorism at home. There are actually Republican Members of the House who are cosponsors of my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, who just last week voted against it, cosponsors. What exactly is the reason for this Republican opposition? Well, one Senate Republican claimed that the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would be ``the PATRIOT Act for American citizens.'' That is phony and wrong. First of all, as I just mentioned, the PATRIOT Act was flawed. It was an excessive policy response to a nation in panic. I should know because I voted for it and then led the effort to change it. Here is why the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is different. Unlike the PATRIOT Act, it will not provide any new law enforcement or surveilling power to the government. It also does not establish a single new criminal offense. Let me repeat this. The bill that comes before us on domestic terrorism does not create any new Federal crime, period. This is a modest bill with a simple goal: ensure that the Federal Government devotes existing resources and authorities to what has been identified by the FBI as the most significant domestic terrorism threats. Who supports this bill? The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Arab-American Institute, the NAACP. All of them and more support the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I hope our Republican colleagues will join us in a bipartisan effort to keep America safe. Last week, I spoke to the courage and sacrifice of Aaron Salter, a retired police officer who was working as a security guard in that Buffalo grocery store at the time of the attack. When the shooter entered the store, Officer Salter jumped into action. He fired multiple shots at the attacker, but his skill and courage were not enough. He was outgunned. He had a pistol. The shooter had an assault rifle and a tactical vest. It is a scenario that, sadly, is becoming too common. We saw it yesterday in Texas. The attacker in yesterday's school shooting in Uvalde was also carrying an assault rifle and wearing a tactical vest. He reportedly shot two officers before entering the school and wounding a Federal law enforcement official. Can the Members of this Senate say in good conscience that we have done enough to protect the lives of police officers and the children in communities like Uvalde? Of course not. They were killed by people who never should have had a gun in the first place. With the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, this Senate can take the first step of many steps needed to save lives and reject hate. The next step is finally closing the loophole that allows guns to fall into the wrong hands. Ten years ago, after 26 little children, God bless them, were murdered by a disturbed gunman in Sandy Hook Elementary School, we voted to close gaps in the gun background check system, and we fell short. Will we finally close those gaps now after another school filled with little babies and children was targeted in a mass shooting? The CDC reported last week that for the first time in more than 60 years, car accidents are no longer the leading cause of death for kids and teens. As of 2020, the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in America is guns--guns. Guns are the No. 1 threat to our children. When will we finally find the courage and the spine to pass commonsense changes to our gun laws that the vast majority of Americans support? Well, this Friday, the National Rifle Association is holding its annual meeting in, of all places, Texas. A few of the politicians who are scheduled to speak at that gathering were among the first to send their thoughts and prayers to Uvalde. Well, I hope and pray they will find the courage to stop cowering before the gun lobby and take action to save our children's lives. Let me address one last misconception about this bill. A number of my colleagues have said: Well, why did you have to use the words ``White supremacists'' or ``neo-Nazis'' in the bill? Why did you want to focus on that? Let me make it clear that we are focusing on domestic terrorism, and that is why we mention White supremacism. The bill requires reports to Congress on all domestic terrorism activity, with a breakdown by specific category. The bill requires that White supremacist terrorism be one of those specific categories. We include this requirement because during the Trump Presidential administration, the FBI was ordered to stop tracking White supremacist attacks as a separate category of domestic terrorism. Remarkably, the FBI stopped tracking White supremacist attacks in the middle of the spate of White supremacist violence, including the lethal attack at the 2017 Charlottesville ``Unite the Right'' rally and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. This decision also came after an unclassified May 2017 joint intelligence bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that found ``white supremacist extremism poses [a] persistent threat of lethal''--lethal--``violence,'' and that White supremacists ``were responsible for 49 homicides and 26 attacks from 2016 . . . more than any other domestic extremist movement.'' I am not making this up. People are dying because of these extremists. We are asking the FBI and other Agencies to identify the incidents of violence so that we can track them, find if they are growing or receding; train local law enforcement to recognize it. This bill does not require collecting of data on First Amendment-protected speech at all, no matter how vile that speech may be. It only requires the FBI to provide a report to Congress on violent domestic terrorist activity that the FBI is already investigating. In fact, this bill does not provide any new law enforcement or surveillance powers to the government. It does not establish any new criminal offenses. This morning there is an outrage over the violence that took place in Texas. The question is, Can we channel this outrage into an active, productive effort to pass legislation to make America safer? We know what the problem is. We know what the challenge is with domestic terrorism. The question is, Can we gather the information to put an end to it? Isn't that our responsibility, what comes to our responsibility as Senators and as citizens in this country? In the U.S. Senate, let's start with this bill. Domestic terrorism is for real. We saw a form of it in Buffalo, NY, and we are going to see it again, I am afraid, unless we take it very seriously. Fighting terrorism used to be a bipartisan effort, and I hope it will once again. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2692 | null | 4,477 |
formal | terrorism | null | Islamophobic | Robb Elementary School Shooting Madam President, I cannot imagine what it was like last night in Texas in the homes of the 19 or 20 children who lost their lives in that Robb Elementary School gun massacre. Those are the longest, loneliest nights of your life as a parent when you have lost a child. And for each of them, it came as a stunning shock: a child sent off to school, nearing the end of the school year, probably happily anticipating summer camp, a visit with relatives, a family vacation, whose life was taken away in an instant. The freedom and joy of youth was ripped from every single one of those 19 children, and 2 of the heroic teachers who sought to protect them when they were murdered in cold blood by this gunman. Today, instead of thinking about vacation and summer, the parents are sadly making funeral arrangements for their babies. Others are sitting down with their children and trying to explain why their playmates are not at school. It is not even June, and this year alone there have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States. My colleague Chris Murphy of Connecticut said last night there had been more mass shootings than days in this last year. Now families across America are stepping forward to offer their condolences, to donate to the families who lost these precious, precious children, and to demand that this Senate act to prevent something--do something to prevent the appalling acts of mass murder that we see way too often. The Members of the Senate have to make a choice: Will we listen to the American people in their overwhelming numbers calling on us to set politics aside and stop the killing of children and other innocent Americans or will we cower in front of the gun industry? The lives of countless children, and I might add, grandchildren, depend on our answer to that question. It was 21 years ago--hard to imagine--but 21 years ago this September when we lived through 9/11. That morning, I was in this building, down the hall at a meeting at 9 in the morning called by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. We had just heard that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York, and we didn't know much more. We quickly turned on the television to see another plane crash into an adjoining building. It was obvious that something horrible had happened. And it wasn't long after that that we looked out the window and looked west down the Mall to see black smoke billowing in. We learned it came from the Pentagon, where another plane had crashed into that building. That was a day none of us will ever forget, nor should we. It was a day when America changed in so many ways. That was the beginning of TSA security checks at airports. Things that have become commonplace in our life were initiated because of 9/11. And did we ever mount an effort to stop international terrorism against the United States. We were serious. It was a deadly serious issue, 3,000 innocent people losing their lives on 9/11. We were bound and determined--so determined that this Senate declared war on al-Qaida and called for the invasion of Afghanistan. I voted for that because I felt then and feel now, no one should attack the United States with impunity. There is a price to pay. And so we made a decision which for 20 years guided our foreign policy in Afghanistan and other decisions by the scores around the world that really fought international terrorism. We learned something recently. Last year, we had the Director of the FBI come before us, and I asked him about domestic terrorism. What about the terrorists in America itself who are killing innocent people? His report to us was sobering. He said it is a real threat, and it is a threat that is metastasizing. We know that horrible word from the disease of cancer. It means that the cancer itself is advancing in a deadly way. That is the way the FBI Director described domestic terrorism. As we mourn yesterday's mass shooting in Uvalde, TX, we have a bill coming before the Senate tomorrow that responds to the mass shooting that took place in Buffalo just 11 days ago, in which a gunman killed 10 Black Americans in a racist act of violence. Tomorrow, we will vote on my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I first introduced it in the year 2017, and that passed the House on a bipartisan basis last week. This legislation will help law enforcement combat the serious and lethal threat of domestic terrorism. It will authorize offices within the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security that are squarely focused on this threat. And these offices will be required to regularly assess domestic terrorism risk and provide training and resources to State, local, and Tribal law enforcement. The bill will also establish an interagency task force to combat White supremacists' infiltration of the uniformed services and Federal law enforcement. Like gun safety reform, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is long overdue. I first held a hearing on domestic terrorism 10 years ago after a White supremacist marched into a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, WI, opening fire and killing seven people. In the 10 years since, violent White supremacists have massacred Americans with their sickening attacks. In 2015, a White supremacist shot and killed nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. At the time, it was the deadliest attack in a place of worship in recent American history, a horrifying record that sadly was surpassed just a few years later. In 2018, an anti-Semitic terrorist killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Think about this for a moment. There are members of that synagogue who actually survived the Holocaust in World War II, only to be targeted by the same hate nearly 80 years later in America. A year after that, a far-right extremist killed 23 people at the Walmart in El Paso, TX, targeting immigrants and members of the Hispanic community. Some of these gunmen subscribe to the same racist conspiracy theory as the shooter in Buffalo a few days ago, the so-called ``great replacement theory.'' It has become the great rallying cry for White supremacists. Each of these acts of hate-fueled mass murder has torn apart a community, traumatized the Nation, and left unimaginable grief and pain in its wake. And so it was over a year ago that FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to domestic terrorism metastasizing and growing in the United States. Well, I think it is time that we take action to stop this threat. Time and again, the Senate has failed to take any meaningful steps to prevent violent extremism. When exactly did stopping mass murder become a partisan issue? It wasn't like this after 9/11. Twenty years ago, Republicans and Democrats joined in common cause to confronting international terrorism threatening America. After that horrific act of mass murder on 9/11, we worked together on a bipartisan basis to reconfigure our entire national security apparatus. We created a new Agency, the Department ofHomeland Security, designed to prevent the next 9/11. To be sure, there were moments when we went off in the wrong direction. Over the years, we worked to rein in legislation like the PATRIOT Act and protect civil liberties of the American people. As lawmakers, our responsibility is to enact sensible solutions and save lives while also protecting our Constitution. That is exactly what the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is all about. It will improve data collection on incidents of domestic terrorism and strengthen Federal coordination to combat it. That is why it makes no sense to me that there are Republicans who oppose it. The same Republicans who once took bold steps to prevent terrorism on an international basis now won't even allow us to debate a bill to prevent terrorism at home. There are actually Republican Members of the House who are cosponsors of my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, who just last week voted against it, cosponsors. What exactly is the reason for this Republican opposition? Well, one Senate Republican claimed that the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would be ``the PATRIOT Act for American citizens.'' That is phony and wrong. First of all, as I just mentioned, the PATRIOT Act was flawed. It was an excessive policy response to a nation in panic. I should know because I voted for it and then led the effort to change it. Here is why the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is different. Unlike the PATRIOT Act, it will not provide any new law enforcement or surveilling power to the government. It also does not establish a single new criminal offense. Let me repeat this. The bill that comes before us on domestic terrorism does not create any new Federal crime, period. This is a modest bill with a simple goal: ensure that the Federal Government devotes existing resources and authorities to what has been identified by the FBI as the most significant domestic terrorism threats. Who supports this bill? The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Arab-American Institute, the NAACP. All of them and more support the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I hope our Republican colleagues will join us in a bipartisan effort to keep America safe. Last week, I spoke to the courage and sacrifice of Aaron Salter, a retired police officer who was working as a security guard in that Buffalo grocery store at the time of the attack. When the shooter entered the store, Officer Salter jumped into action. He fired multiple shots at the attacker, but his skill and courage were not enough. He was outgunned. He had a pistol. The shooter had an assault rifle and a tactical vest. It is a scenario that, sadly, is becoming too common. We saw it yesterday in Texas. The attacker in yesterday's school shooting in Uvalde was also carrying an assault rifle and wearing a tactical vest. He reportedly shot two officers before entering the school and wounding a Federal law enforcement official. Can the Members of this Senate say in good conscience that we have done enough to protect the lives of police officers and the children in communities like Uvalde? Of course not. They were killed by people who never should have had a gun in the first place. With the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, this Senate can take the first step of many steps needed to save lives and reject hate. The next step is finally closing the loophole that allows guns to fall into the wrong hands. Ten years ago, after 26 little children, God bless them, were murdered by a disturbed gunman in Sandy Hook Elementary School, we voted to close gaps in the gun background check system, and we fell short. Will we finally close those gaps now after another school filled with little babies and children was targeted in a mass shooting? The CDC reported last week that for the first time in more than 60 years, car accidents are no longer the leading cause of death for kids and teens. As of 2020, the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in America is guns--guns. Guns are the No. 1 threat to our children. When will we finally find the courage and the spine to pass commonsense changes to our gun laws that the vast majority of Americans support? Well, this Friday, the National Rifle Association is holding its annual meeting in, of all places, Texas. A few of the politicians who are scheduled to speak at that gathering were among the first to send their thoughts and prayers to Uvalde. Well, I hope and pray they will find the courage to stop cowering before the gun lobby and take action to save our children's lives. Let me address one last misconception about this bill. A number of my colleagues have said: Well, why did you have to use the words ``White supremacists'' or ``neo-Nazis'' in the bill? Why did you want to focus on that? Let me make it clear that we are focusing on domestic terrorism, and that is why we mention White supremacism. The bill requires reports to Congress on all domestic terrorism activity, with a breakdown by specific category. The bill requires that White supremacist terrorism be one of those specific categories. We include this requirement because during the Trump Presidential administration, the FBI was ordered to stop tracking White supremacist attacks as a separate category of domestic terrorism. Remarkably, the FBI stopped tracking White supremacist attacks in the middle of the spate of White supremacist violence, including the lethal attack at the 2017 Charlottesville ``Unite the Right'' rally and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. This decision also came after an unclassified May 2017 joint intelligence bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that found ``white supremacist extremism poses [a] persistent threat of lethal''--lethal--``violence,'' and that White supremacists ``were responsible for 49 homicides and 26 attacks from 2016 . . . more than any other domestic extremist movement.'' I am not making this up. People are dying because of these extremists. We are asking the FBI and other Agencies to identify the incidents of violence so that we can track them, find if they are growing or receding; train local law enforcement to recognize it. This bill does not require collecting of data on First Amendment-protected speech at all, no matter how vile that speech may be. It only requires the FBI to provide a report to Congress on violent domestic terrorist activity that the FBI is already investigating. In fact, this bill does not provide any new law enforcement or surveillance powers to the government. It does not establish any new criminal offenses. This morning there is an outrage over the violence that took place in Texas. The question is, Can we channel this outrage into an active, productive effort to pass legislation to make America safer? We know what the problem is. We know what the challenge is with domestic terrorism. The question is, Can we gather the information to put an end to it? Isn't that our responsibility, what comes to our responsibility as Senators and as citizens in this country? In the U.S. Senate, let's start with this bill. Domestic terrorism is for real. We saw a form of it in Buffalo, NY, and we are going to see it again, I am afraid, unless we take it very seriously. Fighting terrorism used to be a bipartisan effort, and I hope it will once again. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2692 | null | 4,478 |
formal | terrorist | null | Islamophobic | Robb Elementary School Shooting Madam President, I cannot imagine what it was like last night in Texas in the homes of the 19 or 20 children who lost their lives in that Robb Elementary School gun massacre. Those are the longest, loneliest nights of your life as a parent when you have lost a child. And for each of them, it came as a stunning shock: a child sent off to school, nearing the end of the school year, probably happily anticipating summer camp, a visit with relatives, a family vacation, whose life was taken away in an instant. The freedom and joy of youth was ripped from every single one of those 19 children, and 2 of the heroic teachers who sought to protect them when they were murdered in cold blood by this gunman. Today, instead of thinking about vacation and summer, the parents are sadly making funeral arrangements for their babies. Others are sitting down with their children and trying to explain why their playmates are not at school. It is not even June, and this year alone there have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States. My colleague Chris Murphy of Connecticut said last night there had been more mass shootings than days in this last year. Now families across America are stepping forward to offer their condolences, to donate to the families who lost these precious, precious children, and to demand that this Senate act to prevent something--do something to prevent the appalling acts of mass murder that we see way too often. The Members of the Senate have to make a choice: Will we listen to the American people in their overwhelming numbers calling on us to set politics aside and stop the killing of children and other innocent Americans or will we cower in front of the gun industry? The lives of countless children, and I might add, grandchildren, depend on our answer to that question. It was 21 years ago--hard to imagine--but 21 years ago this September when we lived through 9/11. That morning, I was in this building, down the hall at a meeting at 9 in the morning called by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. We had just heard that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York, and we didn't know much more. We quickly turned on the television to see another plane crash into an adjoining building. It was obvious that something horrible had happened. And it wasn't long after that that we looked out the window and looked west down the Mall to see black smoke billowing in. We learned it came from the Pentagon, where another plane had crashed into that building. That was a day none of us will ever forget, nor should we. It was a day when America changed in so many ways. That was the beginning of TSA security checks at airports. Things that have become commonplace in our life were initiated because of 9/11. And did we ever mount an effort to stop international terrorism against the United States. We were serious. It was a deadly serious issue, 3,000 innocent people losing their lives on 9/11. We were bound and determined--so determined that this Senate declared war on al-Qaida and called for the invasion of Afghanistan. I voted for that because I felt then and feel now, no one should attack the United States with impunity. There is a price to pay. And so we made a decision which for 20 years guided our foreign policy in Afghanistan and other decisions by the scores around the world that really fought international terrorism. We learned something recently. Last year, we had the Director of the FBI come before us, and I asked him about domestic terrorism. What about the terrorists in America itself who are killing innocent people? His report to us was sobering. He said it is a real threat, and it is a threat that is metastasizing. We know that horrible word from the disease of cancer. It means that the cancer itself is advancing in a deadly way. That is the way the FBI Director described domestic terrorism. As we mourn yesterday's mass shooting in Uvalde, TX, we have a bill coming before the Senate tomorrow that responds to the mass shooting that took place in Buffalo just 11 days ago, in which a gunman killed 10 Black Americans in a racist act of violence. Tomorrow, we will vote on my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I first introduced it in the year 2017, and that passed the House on a bipartisan basis last week. This legislation will help law enforcement combat the serious and lethal threat of domestic terrorism. It will authorize offices within the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security that are squarely focused on this threat. And these offices will be required to regularly assess domestic terrorism risk and provide training and resources to State, local, and Tribal law enforcement. The bill will also establish an interagency task force to combat White supremacists' infiltration of the uniformed services and Federal law enforcement. Like gun safety reform, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is long overdue. I first held a hearing on domestic terrorism 10 years ago after a White supremacist marched into a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, WI, opening fire and killing seven people. In the 10 years since, violent White supremacists have massacred Americans with their sickening attacks. In 2015, a White supremacist shot and killed nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. At the time, it was the deadliest attack in a place of worship in recent American history, a horrifying record that sadly was surpassed just a few years later. In 2018, an anti-Semitic terrorist killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Think about this for a moment. There are members of that synagogue who actually survived the Holocaust in World War II, only to be targeted by the same hate nearly 80 years later in America. A year after that, a far-right extremist killed 23 people at the Walmart in El Paso, TX, targeting immigrants and members of the Hispanic community. Some of these gunmen subscribe to the same racist conspiracy theory as the shooter in Buffalo a few days ago, the so-called ``great replacement theory.'' It has become the great rallying cry for White supremacists. Each of these acts of hate-fueled mass murder has torn apart a community, traumatized the Nation, and left unimaginable grief and pain in its wake. And so it was over a year ago that FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to domestic terrorism metastasizing and growing in the United States. Well, I think it is time that we take action to stop this threat. Time and again, the Senate has failed to take any meaningful steps to prevent violent extremism. When exactly did stopping mass murder become a partisan issue? It wasn't like this after 9/11. Twenty years ago, Republicans and Democrats joined in common cause to confronting international terrorism threatening America. After that horrific act of mass murder on 9/11, we worked together on a bipartisan basis to reconfigure our entire national security apparatus. We created a new Agency, the Department ofHomeland Security, designed to prevent the next 9/11. To be sure, there were moments when we went off in the wrong direction. Over the years, we worked to rein in legislation like the PATRIOT Act and protect civil liberties of the American people. As lawmakers, our responsibility is to enact sensible solutions and save lives while also protecting our Constitution. That is exactly what the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is all about. It will improve data collection on incidents of domestic terrorism and strengthen Federal coordination to combat it. That is why it makes no sense to me that there are Republicans who oppose it. The same Republicans who once took bold steps to prevent terrorism on an international basis now won't even allow us to debate a bill to prevent terrorism at home. There are actually Republican Members of the House who are cosponsors of my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, who just last week voted against it, cosponsors. What exactly is the reason for this Republican opposition? Well, one Senate Republican claimed that the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would be ``the PATRIOT Act for American citizens.'' That is phony and wrong. First of all, as I just mentioned, the PATRIOT Act was flawed. It was an excessive policy response to a nation in panic. I should know because I voted for it and then led the effort to change it. Here is why the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is different. Unlike the PATRIOT Act, it will not provide any new law enforcement or surveilling power to the government. It also does not establish a single new criminal offense. Let me repeat this. The bill that comes before us on domestic terrorism does not create any new Federal crime, period. This is a modest bill with a simple goal: ensure that the Federal Government devotes existing resources and authorities to what has been identified by the FBI as the most significant domestic terrorism threats. Who supports this bill? The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Arab-American Institute, the NAACP. All of them and more support the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I hope our Republican colleagues will join us in a bipartisan effort to keep America safe. Last week, I spoke to the courage and sacrifice of Aaron Salter, a retired police officer who was working as a security guard in that Buffalo grocery store at the time of the attack. When the shooter entered the store, Officer Salter jumped into action. He fired multiple shots at the attacker, but his skill and courage were not enough. He was outgunned. He had a pistol. The shooter had an assault rifle and a tactical vest. It is a scenario that, sadly, is becoming too common. We saw it yesterday in Texas. The attacker in yesterday's school shooting in Uvalde was also carrying an assault rifle and wearing a tactical vest. He reportedly shot two officers before entering the school and wounding a Federal law enforcement official. Can the Members of this Senate say in good conscience that we have done enough to protect the lives of police officers and the children in communities like Uvalde? Of course not. They were killed by people who never should have had a gun in the first place. With the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, this Senate can take the first step of many steps needed to save lives and reject hate. The next step is finally closing the loophole that allows guns to fall into the wrong hands. Ten years ago, after 26 little children, God bless them, were murdered by a disturbed gunman in Sandy Hook Elementary School, we voted to close gaps in the gun background check system, and we fell short. Will we finally close those gaps now after another school filled with little babies and children was targeted in a mass shooting? The CDC reported last week that for the first time in more than 60 years, car accidents are no longer the leading cause of death for kids and teens. As of 2020, the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in America is guns--guns. Guns are the No. 1 threat to our children. When will we finally find the courage and the spine to pass commonsense changes to our gun laws that the vast majority of Americans support? Well, this Friday, the National Rifle Association is holding its annual meeting in, of all places, Texas. A few of the politicians who are scheduled to speak at that gathering were among the first to send their thoughts and prayers to Uvalde. Well, I hope and pray they will find the courage to stop cowering before the gun lobby and take action to save our children's lives. Let me address one last misconception about this bill. A number of my colleagues have said: Well, why did you have to use the words ``White supremacists'' or ``neo-Nazis'' in the bill? Why did you want to focus on that? Let me make it clear that we are focusing on domestic terrorism, and that is why we mention White supremacism. The bill requires reports to Congress on all domestic terrorism activity, with a breakdown by specific category. The bill requires that White supremacist terrorism be one of those specific categories. We include this requirement because during the Trump Presidential administration, the FBI was ordered to stop tracking White supremacist attacks as a separate category of domestic terrorism. Remarkably, the FBI stopped tracking White supremacist attacks in the middle of the spate of White supremacist violence, including the lethal attack at the 2017 Charlottesville ``Unite the Right'' rally and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. This decision also came after an unclassified May 2017 joint intelligence bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that found ``white supremacist extremism poses [a] persistent threat of lethal''--lethal--``violence,'' and that White supremacists ``were responsible for 49 homicides and 26 attacks from 2016 . . . more than any other domestic extremist movement.'' I am not making this up. People are dying because of these extremists. We are asking the FBI and other Agencies to identify the incidents of violence so that we can track them, find if they are growing or receding; train local law enforcement to recognize it. This bill does not require collecting of data on First Amendment-protected speech at all, no matter how vile that speech may be. It only requires the FBI to provide a report to Congress on violent domestic terrorist activity that the FBI is already investigating. In fact, this bill does not provide any new law enforcement or surveillance powers to the government. It does not establish any new criminal offenses. This morning there is an outrage over the violence that took place in Texas. The question is, Can we channel this outrage into an active, productive effort to pass legislation to make America safer? We know what the problem is. We know what the challenge is with domestic terrorism. The question is, Can we gather the information to put an end to it? Isn't that our responsibility, what comes to our responsibility as Senators and as citizens in this country? In the U.S. Senate, let's start with this bill. Domestic terrorism is for real. We saw a form of it in Buffalo, NY, and we are going to see it again, I am afraid, unless we take it very seriously. Fighting terrorism used to be a bipartisan effort, and I hope it will once again. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2692 | null | 4,479 |
formal | terrorists | null | Islamophobic | Robb Elementary School Shooting Madam President, I cannot imagine what it was like last night in Texas in the homes of the 19 or 20 children who lost their lives in that Robb Elementary School gun massacre. Those are the longest, loneliest nights of your life as a parent when you have lost a child. And for each of them, it came as a stunning shock: a child sent off to school, nearing the end of the school year, probably happily anticipating summer camp, a visit with relatives, a family vacation, whose life was taken away in an instant. The freedom and joy of youth was ripped from every single one of those 19 children, and 2 of the heroic teachers who sought to protect them when they were murdered in cold blood by this gunman. Today, instead of thinking about vacation and summer, the parents are sadly making funeral arrangements for their babies. Others are sitting down with their children and trying to explain why their playmates are not at school. It is not even June, and this year alone there have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States. My colleague Chris Murphy of Connecticut said last night there had been more mass shootings than days in this last year. Now families across America are stepping forward to offer their condolences, to donate to the families who lost these precious, precious children, and to demand that this Senate act to prevent something--do something to prevent the appalling acts of mass murder that we see way too often. The Members of the Senate have to make a choice: Will we listen to the American people in their overwhelming numbers calling on us to set politics aside and stop the killing of children and other innocent Americans or will we cower in front of the gun industry? The lives of countless children, and I might add, grandchildren, depend on our answer to that question. It was 21 years ago--hard to imagine--but 21 years ago this September when we lived through 9/11. That morning, I was in this building, down the hall at a meeting at 9 in the morning called by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. We had just heard that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York, and we didn't know much more. We quickly turned on the television to see another plane crash into an adjoining building. It was obvious that something horrible had happened. And it wasn't long after that that we looked out the window and looked west down the Mall to see black smoke billowing in. We learned it came from the Pentagon, where another plane had crashed into that building. That was a day none of us will ever forget, nor should we. It was a day when America changed in so many ways. That was the beginning of TSA security checks at airports. Things that have become commonplace in our life were initiated because of 9/11. And did we ever mount an effort to stop international terrorism against the United States. We were serious. It was a deadly serious issue, 3,000 innocent people losing their lives on 9/11. We were bound and determined--so determined that this Senate declared war on al-Qaida and called for the invasion of Afghanistan. I voted for that because I felt then and feel now, no one should attack the United States with impunity. There is a price to pay. And so we made a decision which for 20 years guided our foreign policy in Afghanistan and other decisions by the scores around the world that really fought international terrorism. We learned something recently. Last year, we had the Director of the FBI come before us, and I asked him about domestic terrorism. What about the terrorists in America itself who are killing innocent people? His report to us was sobering. He said it is a real threat, and it is a threat that is metastasizing. We know that horrible word from the disease of cancer. It means that the cancer itself is advancing in a deadly way. That is the way the FBI Director described domestic terrorism. As we mourn yesterday's mass shooting in Uvalde, TX, we have a bill coming before the Senate tomorrow that responds to the mass shooting that took place in Buffalo just 11 days ago, in which a gunman killed 10 Black Americans in a racist act of violence. Tomorrow, we will vote on my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I first introduced it in the year 2017, and that passed the House on a bipartisan basis last week. This legislation will help law enforcement combat the serious and lethal threat of domestic terrorism. It will authorize offices within the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security that are squarely focused on this threat. And these offices will be required to regularly assess domestic terrorism risk and provide training and resources to State, local, and Tribal law enforcement. The bill will also establish an interagency task force to combat White supremacists' infiltration of the uniformed services and Federal law enforcement. Like gun safety reform, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is long overdue. I first held a hearing on domestic terrorism 10 years ago after a White supremacist marched into a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, WI, opening fire and killing seven people. In the 10 years since, violent White supremacists have massacred Americans with their sickening attacks. In 2015, a White supremacist shot and killed nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. At the time, it was the deadliest attack in a place of worship in recent American history, a horrifying record that sadly was surpassed just a few years later. In 2018, an anti-Semitic terrorist killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Think about this for a moment. There are members of that synagogue who actually survived the Holocaust in World War II, only to be targeted by the same hate nearly 80 years later in America. A year after that, a far-right extremist killed 23 people at the Walmart in El Paso, TX, targeting immigrants and members of the Hispanic community. Some of these gunmen subscribe to the same racist conspiracy theory as the shooter in Buffalo a few days ago, the so-called ``great replacement theory.'' It has become the great rallying cry for White supremacists. Each of these acts of hate-fueled mass murder has torn apart a community, traumatized the Nation, and left unimaginable grief and pain in its wake. And so it was over a year ago that FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to domestic terrorism metastasizing and growing in the United States. Well, I think it is time that we take action to stop this threat. Time and again, the Senate has failed to take any meaningful steps to prevent violent extremism. When exactly did stopping mass murder become a partisan issue? It wasn't like this after 9/11. Twenty years ago, Republicans and Democrats joined in common cause to confronting international terrorism threatening America. After that horrific act of mass murder on 9/11, we worked together on a bipartisan basis to reconfigure our entire national security apparatus. We created a new Agency, the Department ofHomeland Security, designed to prevent the next 9/11. To be sure, there were moments when we went off in the wrong direction. Over the years, we worked to rein in legislation like the PATRIOT Act and protect civil liberties of the American people. As lawmakers, our responsibility is to enact sensible solutions and save lives while also protecting our Constitution. That is exactly what the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is all about. It will improve data collection on incidents of domestic terrorism and strengthen Federal coordination to combat it. That is why it makes no sense to me that there are Republicans who oppose it. The same Republicans who once took bold steps to prevent terrorism on an international basis now won't even allow us to debate a bill to prevent terrorism at home. There are actually Republican Members of the House who are cosponsors of my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, who just last week voted against it, cosponsors. What exactly is the reason for this Republican opposition? Well, one Senate Republican claimed that the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would be ``the PATRIOT Act for American citizens.'' That is phony and wrong. First of all, as I just mentioned, the PATRIOT Act was flawed. It was an excessive policy response to a nation in panic. I should know because I voted for it and then led the effort to change it. Here is why the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is different. Unlike the PATRIOT Act, it will not provide any new law enforcement or surveilling power to the government. It also does not establish a single new criminal offense. Let me repeat this. The bill that comes before us on domestic terrorism does not create any new Federal crime, period. This is a modest bill with a simple goal: ensure that the Federal Government devotes existing resources and authorities to what has been identified by the FBI as the most significant domestic terrorism threats. Who supports this bill? The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Arab-American Institute, the NAACP. All of them and more support the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I hope our Republican colleagues will join us in a bipartisan effort to keep America safe. Last week, I spoke to the courage and sacrifice of Aaron Salter, a retired police officer who was working as a security guard in that Buffalo grocery store at the time of the attack. When the shooter entered the store, Officer Salter jumped into action. He fired multiple shots at the attacker, but his skill and courage were not enough. He was outgunned. He had a pistol. The shooter had an assault rifle and a tactical vest. It is a scenario that, sadly, is becoming too common. We saw it yesterday in Texas. The attacker in yesterday's school shooting in Uvalde was also carrying an assault rifle and wearing a tactical vest. He reportedly shot two officers before entering the school and wounding a Federal law enforcement official. Can the Members of this Senate say in good conscience that we have done enough to protect the lives of police officers and the children in communities like Uvalde? Of course not. They were killed by people who never should have had a gun in the first place. With the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, this Senate can take the first step of many steps needed to save lives and reject hate. The next step is finally closing the loophole that allows guns to fall into the wrong hands. Ten years ago, after 26 little children, God bless them, were murdered by a disturbed gunman in Sandy Hook Elementary School, we voted to close gaps in the gun background check system, and we fell short. Will we finally close those gaps now after another school filled with little babies and children was targeted in a mass shooting? The CDC reported last week that for the first time in more than 60 years, car accidents are no longer the leading cause of death for kids and teens. As of 2020, the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in America is guns--guns. Guns are the No. 1 threat to our children. When will we finally find the courage and the spine to pass commonsense changes to our gun laws that the vast majority of Americans support? Well, this Friday, the National Rifle Association is holding its annual meeting in, of all places, Texas. A few of the politicians who are scheduled to speak at that gathering were among the first to send their thoughts and prayers to Uvalde. Well, I hope and pray they will find the courage to stop cowering before the gun lobby and take action to save our children's lives. Let me address one last misconception about this bill. A number of my colleagues have said: Well, why did you have to use the words ``White supremacists'' or ``neo-Nazis'' in the bill? Why did you want to focus on that? Let me make it clear that we are focusing on domestic terrorism, and that is why we mention White supremacism. The bill requires reports to Congress on all domestic terrorism activity, with a breakdown by specific category. The bill requires that White supremacist terrorism be one of those specific categories. We include this requirement because during the Trump Presidential administration, the FBI was ordered to stop tracking White supremacist attacks as a separate category of domestic terrorism. Remarkably, the FBI stopped tracking White supremacist attacks in the middle of the spate of White supremacist violence, including the lethal attack at the 2017 Charlottesville ``Unite the Right'' rally and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. This decision also came after an unclassified May 2017 joint intelligence bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that found ``white supremacist extremism poses [a] persistent threat of lethal''--lethal--``violence,'' and that White supremacists ``were responsible for 49 homicides and 26 attacks from 2016 . . . more than any other domestic extremist movement.'' I am not making this up. People are dying because of these extremists. We are asking the FBI and other Agencies to identify the incidents of violence so that we can track them, find if they are growing or receding; train local law enforcement to recognize it. This bill does not require collecting of data on First Amendment-protected speech at all, no matter how vile that speech may be. It only requires the FBI to provide a report to Congress on violent domestic terrorist activity that the FBI is already investigating. In fact, this bill does not provide any new law enforcement or surveillance powers to the government. It does not establish any new criminal offenses. This morning there is an outrage over the violence that took place in Texas. The question is, Can we channel this outrage into an active, productive effort to pass legislation to make America safer? We know what the problem is. We know what the challenge is with domestic terrorism. The question is, Can we gather the information to put an end to it? Isn't that our responsibility, what comes to our responsibility as Senators and as citizens in this country? In the U.S. Senate, let's start with this bill. Domestic terrorism is for real. We saw a form of it in Buffalo, NY, and we are going to see it again, I am afraid, unless we take it very seriously. Fighting terrorism used to be a bipartisan effort, and I hope it will once again. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2692 | null | 4,480 |
formal | single | null | homophobic | Robb Elementary School Shooting Madam President, I cannot imagine what it was like last night in Texas in the homes of the 19 or 20 children who lost their lives in that Robb Elementary School gun massacre. Those are the longest, loneliest nights of your life as a parent when you have lost a child. And for each of them, it came as a stunning shock: a child sent off to school, nearing the end of the school year, probably happily anticipating summer camp, a visit with relatives, a family vacation, whose life was taken away in an instant. The freedom and joy of youth was ripped from every single one of those 19 children, and 2 of the heroic teachers who sought to protect them when they were murdered in cold blood by this gunman. Today, instead of thinking about vacation and summer, the parents are sadly making funeral arrangements for their babies. Others are sitting down with their children and trying to explain why their playmates are not at school. It is not even June, and this year alone there have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States. My colleague Chris Murphy of Connecticut said last night there had been more mass shootings than days in this last year. Now families across America are stepping forward to offer their condolences, to donate to the families who lost these precious, precious children, and to demand that this Senate act to prevent something--do something to prevent the appalling acts of mass murder that we see way too often. The Members of the Senate have to make a choice: Will we listen to the American people in their overwhelming numbers calling on us to set politics aside and stop the killing of children and other innocent Americans or will we cower in front of the gun industry? The lives of countless children, and I might add, grandchildren, depend on our answer to that question. It was 21 years ago--hard to imagine--but 21 years ago this September when we lived through 9/11. That morning, I was in this building, down the hall at a meeting at 9 in the morning called by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. We had just heard that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York, and we didn't know much more. We quickly turned on the television to see another plane crash into an adjoining building. It was obvious that something horrible had happened. And it wasn't long after that that we looked out the window and looked west down the Mall to see black smoke billowing in. We learned it came from the Pentagon, where another plane had crashed into that building. That was a day none of us will ever forget, nor should we. It was a day when America changed in so many ways. That was the beginning of TSA security checks at airports. Things that have become commonplace in our life were initiated because of 9/11. And did we ever mount an effort to stop international terrorism against the United States. We were serious. It was a deadly serious issue, 3,000 innocent people losing their lives on 9/11. We were bound and determined--so determined that this Senate declared war on al-Qaida and called for the invasion of Afghanistan. I voted for that because I felt then and feel now, no one should attack the United States with impunity. There is a price to pay. And so we made a decision which for 20 years guided our foreign policy in Afghanistan and other decisions by the scores around the world that really fought international terrorism. We learned something recently. Last year, we had the Director of the FBI come before us, and I asked him about domestic terrorism. What about the terrorists in America itself who are killing innocent people? His report to us was sobering. He said it is a real threat, and it is a threat that is metastasizing. We know that horrible word from the disease of cancer. It means that the cancer itself is advancing in a deadly way. That is the way the FBI Director described domestic terrorism. As we mourn yesterday's mass shooting in Uvalde, TX, we have a bill coming before the Senate tomorrow that responds to the mass shooting that took place in Buffalo just 11 days ago, in which a gunman killed 10 Black Americans in a racist act of violence. Tomorrow, we will vote on my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I first introduced it in the year 2017, and that passed the House on a bipartisan basis last week. This legislation will help law enforcement combat the serious and lethal threat of domestic terrorism. It will authorize offices within the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security that are squarely focused on this threat. And these offices will be required to regularly assess domestic terrorism risk and provide training and resources to State, local, and Tribal law enforcement. The bill will also establish an interagency task force to combat White supremacists' infiltration of the uniformed services and Federal law enforcement. Like gun safety reform, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is long overdue. I first held a hearing on domestic terrorism 10 years ago after a White supremacist marched into a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, WI, opening fire and killing seven people. In the 10 years since, violent White supremacists have massacred Americans with their sickening attacks. In 2015, a White supremacist shot and killed nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. At the time, it was the deadliest attack in a place of worship in recent American history, a horrifying record that sadly was surpassed just a few years later. In 2018, an anti-Semitic terrorist killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Think about this for a moment. There are members of that synagogue who actually survived the Holocaust in World War II, only to be targeted by the same hate nearly 80 years later in America. A year after that, a far-right extremist killed 23 people at the Walmart in El Paso, TX, targeting immigrants and members of the Hispanic community. Some of these gunmen subscribe to the same racist conspiracy theory as the shooter in Buffalo a few days ago, the so-called ``great replacement theory.'' It has become the great rallying cry for White supremacists. Each of these acts of hate-fueled mass murder has torn apart a community, traumatized the Nation, and left unimaginable grief and pain in its wake. And so it was over a year ago that FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to domestic terrorism metastasizing and growing in the United States. Well, I think it is time that we take action to stop this threat. Time and again, the Senate has failed to take any meaningful steps to prevent violent extremism. When exactly did stopping mass murder become a partisan issue? It wasn't like this after 9/11. Twenty years ago, Republicans and Democrats joined in common cause to confronting international terrorism threatening America. After that horrific act of mass murder on 9/11, we worked together on a bipartisan basis to reconfigure our entire national security apparatus. We created a new Agency, the Department ofHomeland Security, designed to prevent the next 9/11. To be sure, there were moments when we went off in the wrong direction. Over the years, we worked to rein in legislation like the PATRIOT Act and protect civil liberties of the American people. As lawmakers, our responsibility is to enact sensible solutions and save lives while also protecting our Constitution. That is exactly what the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is all about. It will improve data collection on incidents of domestic terrorism and strengthen Federal coordination to combat it. That is why it makes no sense to me that there are Republicans who oppose it. The same Republicans who once took bold steps to prevent terrorism on an international basis now won't even allow us to debate a bill to prevent terrorism at home. There are actually Republican Members of the House who are cosponsors of my bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, who just last week voted against it, cosponsors. What exactly is the reason for this Republican opposition? Well, one Senate Republican claimed that the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would be ``the PATRIOT Act for American citizens.'' That is phony and wrong. First of all, as I just mentioned, the PATRIOT Act was flawed. It was an excessive policy response to a nation in panic. I should know because I voted for it and then led the effort to change it. Here is why the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is different. Unlike the PATRIOT Act, it will not provide any new law enforcement or surveilling power to the government. It also does not establish a single new criminal offense. Let me repeat this. The bill that comes before us on domestic terrorism does not create any new Federal crime, period. This is a modest bill with a simple goal: ensure that the Federal Government devotes existing resources and authorities to what has been identified by the FBI as the most significant domestic terrorism threats. Who supports this bill? The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Arab-American Institute, the NAACP. All of them and more support the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. I hope our Republican colleagues will join us in a bipartisan effort to keep America safe. Last week, I spoke to the courage and sacrifice of Aaron Salter, a retired police officer who was working as a security guard in that Buffalo grocery store at the time of the attack. When the shooter entered the store, Officer Salter jumped into action. He fired multiple shots at the attacker, but his skill and courage were not enough. He was outgunned. He had a pistol. The shooter had an assault rifle and a tactical vest. It is a scenario that, sadly, is becoming too common. We saw it yesterday in Texas. The attacker in yesterday's school shooting in Uvalde was also carrying an assault rifle and wearing a tactical vest. He reportedly shot two officers before entering the school and wounding a Federal law enforcement official. Can the Members of this Senate say in good conscience that we have done enough to protect the lives of police officers and the children in communities like Uvalde? Of course not. They were killed by people who never should have had a gun in the first place. With the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, this Senate can take the first step of many steps needed to save lives and reject hate. The next step is finally closing the loophole that allows guns to fall into the wrong hands. Ten years ago, after 26 little children, God bless them, were murdered by a disturbed gunman in Sandy Hook Elementary School, we voted to close gaps in the gun background check system, and we fell short. Will we finally close those gaps now after another school filled with little babies and children was targeted in a mass shooting? The CDC reported last week that for the first time in more than 60 years, car accidents are no longer the leading cause of death for kids and teens. As of 2020, the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in America is guns--guns. Guns are the No. 1 threat to our children. When will we finally find the courage and the spine to pass commonsense changes to our gun laws that the vast majority of Americans support? Well, this Friday, the National Rifle Association is holding its annual meeting in, of all places, Texas. A few of the politicians who are scheduled to speak at that gathering were among the first to send their thoughts and prayers to Uvalde. Well, I hope and pray they will find the courage to stop cowering before the gun lobby and take action to save our children's lives. Let me address one last misconception about this bill. A number of my colleagues have said: Well, why did you have to use the words ``White supremacists'' or ``neo-Nazis'' in the bill? Why did you want to focus on that? Let me make it clear that we are focusing on domestic terrorism, and that is why we mention White supremacism. The bill requires reports to Congress on all domestic terrorism activity, with a breakdown by specific category. The bill requires that White supremacist terrorism be one of those specific categories. We include this requirement because during the Trump Presidential administration, the FBI was ordered to stop tracking White supremacist attacks as a separate category of domestic terrorism. Remarkably, the FBI stopped tracking White supremacist attacks in the middle of the spate of White supremacist violence, including the lethal attack at the 2017 Charlottesville ``Unite the Right'' rally and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. This decision also came after an unclassified May 2017 joint intelligence bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that found ``white supremacist extremism poses [a] persistent threat of lethal''--lethal--``violence,'' and that White supremacists ``were responsible for 49 homicides and 26 attacks from 2016 . . . more than any other domestic extremist movement.'' I am not making this up. People are dying because of these extremists. We are asking the FBI and other Agencies to identify the incidents of violence so that we can track them, find if they are growing or receding; train local law enforcement to recognize it. This bill does not require collecting of data on First Amendment-protected speech at all, no matter how vile that speech may be. It only requires the FBI to provide a report to Congress on violent domestic terrorist activity that the FBI is already investigating. In fact, this bill does not provide any new law enforcement or surveillance powers to the government. It does not establish any new criminal offenses. This morning there is an outrage over the violence that took place in Texas. The question is, Can we channel this outrage into an active, productive effort to pass legislation to make America safer? We know what the problem is. We know what the challenge is with domestic terrorism. The question is, Can we gather the information to put an end to it? Isn't that our responsibility, what comes to our responsibility as Senators and as citizens in this country? In the U.S. Senate, let's start with this bill. Domestic terrorism is for real. We saw a form of it in Buffalo, NY, and we are going to see it again, I am afraid, unless we take it very seriously. Fighting terrorism used to be a bipartisan effort, and I hope it will once again. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2692 | null | 4,481 |
formal | extremists | null | Islamophobic | Robb Elementary School Shooting Madam President, I can't leave the floor of the Senate today without talking about the heartbreaking shooting that took place at Robb Elementary School in Texas yesterday. Nineteen children, two teachers at an elementary school. These were kids who were excited for summer, playdates with their friends--murdered by weapons of war. This carnage is happening right here in America in fourth grade classrooms. My heart breaks for the family and loved ones of these kids and their teachers, not to mention the kids and educators who will carry the trauma of that day with them for the rest of their lives. But I am also furious. A lot of people have characterized this tragedy as ``unthinkable.'' But at this point, this kind of tragedy is not unthinkable. Parents in Washington State and everywhere else in America think about this all the time. They think about it every day when they drop off their kids at school. How can you not? They thought about it after the shooting in Buffalo at a grocery store 10 days earlier. They think about it every time there is another mass shooting, which is far, far too often--3,865 times since the Sandy Hook school shooting 10 years ago, to be exact. What is unthinkable is that every time this happens, nothing changes. Every time, Republicans stand in the way of meaningful action. That is not just unthinkable; it is unacceptable. But we don't have to live like this. This is a solvable problem. Republicans need to have the courage, the decency, the basic concern for the lives of our kids to work with Democrats on commonsense gun safety reforms. They need to decide should school be a place where our kids and teachers feel safe, where they can talk about homework and class projects, where they can be kids and laugh about whatever happened during lunch or art class? Or will they continue to be a place where school shooter drills are as routine as recess or algebra for our kids? I want my colleagues to consider that. What message are you sending to parents and kids, to teachers and students if you won't even allow a debate on commonsense measures like universal background checks? I have heard Republican lawmakers talk about the need to have police officers at every school. I wish it were that simple, but we know it is not. We saw yesterday that having an armed officer onsite at schools will not solve this crisis, despite the best efforts of law enforcement. Some Republicans have suggested arming teachers. Are you kidding? Can you hear yourself? Teachers did not sign up to be soldiers, and guns have no place in our classroom. Some Republicans will say: Well, this is a mental health issue. So let me be clear: America is facing a mental health and substance use disorder crisis. It is serious. It requires urgency, and I am actively working on bipartisan legislation to expand access to prevention and treatment and recovery services. But I want to make this plain: The majority of people with mental illness do not commit violence against others. Treating gun violence as a mental health issue rather than a gun issue will never get us to the root cause of these horrific shootings. If we want to get at the heart of really stopping gun violence, I beg my colleagues to pull their heads out of the sand and finally start talking about what can really address this crisis of gun violence: commonsense gun safety legislation--and there is no getting around it--universal background checks and an assault weapons ban. Now, I am ready to work with any Republican to make any kind of meaningful progress here. States like mine have made good progress on gun safety measures to keep our communities safe, but we cannot count on a patchwork of laws where one State requires background checks and another one right next door does not. We need Federal action. We need to get something done. To my constituents in Washington State and the American people, I know and understand it can be disheartening to parents around the country to see the continued Republican obstruction on gun safety in Congress. Change is not easy, but let me be clear: Doing nothing and letting this continue to happen is the most extreme option on the table. I have come to the floor of the Senate countless times to call for action to keep our kids and our families safe from gun violence, just to have Republicans block our efforts again and again. It is frustrating. It is infuriating. But I will keep pushing for gun safety laws that the majority of Americans do support because we cannot give up. That is what the NRA and other extremists want us to do. The vast majority of Americans have made clear, they want an end to gun violence. And I refuse to let Republicans get away with this yet again, to dance around the real issue, to distract us with conversations about arming teachers or tripwires outside elementary schools. Enough. Enough. We need to force Republicans to bear witness to the tragic consequences of their inaction. We need people and families across the country to do the same. No one gets to look away. No one gets to change the subject. I promise all of the students and parents, grandparents, teachers, everyone in Washington State that despite the obstruction and silence from my Republican colleagues, I will not stay quiet and I will keep pushing for change and I really hope the American people will do the same. Using our voices and our votes, we can change things. We can hold Republicans accountable, and we can make progress to end gun violence. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2694 | null | 4,482 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | Nomination of Todd M. Harper Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support Todd Harper's nomination. He came out of my and Senator Smith's and the Presiding Officer Senator Ossoff's committee to be Chairman of the National Credit Union Administration. Mr. Harper is an experienced regulator. He has the background, knowledge, and leadership experience to safeguard the credit union system, a very important component of our financial system, and to protect millions of credit union members. We know that credit unions, more than Wall Street banks, really look out for the little guy and regular people and people who are, you know, mostly solidly middle class or aspiring to the middle class. A career public servant with midwestern roots, Todd Harper understands the vital role that credit unions play in local communities, especially rural and underserved communities. Being the first openly gay leader of any Federal financial regulatory Agency, the first NCUA career staff member to serve on the NCUA Board, he brings a vitally important perspective. We know that prior to this President taking over and my becoming chair of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, we know most of the Federal regulators look like me and walk like Wall Street. Those days are behind us. Another reason for Todd Harper's nomination to NCUA. Throughout his career as an NCUA Board member and Chair, he has worked with both parties. He has worked for advocates and industry to strengthen credit unions to fight for consumers. In 2019, the Senate confirmed Mr. Harper by voice vote to the three-member NCUA Board. In 2021, President Biden designated him as Chair. As Chair of the NCUA, he has worked with his fellow Board members to advance bipartisan efforts on important issues facing credit unions and their members, like digital assets and emergency capital investment. Prior to serving on the Board, he was Director of the Office of Public and Congressional Affairs. He was Chief Policy Advisor to former Chairs Deborah Matz and Rick Metsger. Mr. Harper previously served as a staffer in the House of Representatives, as staff director for the Subcommittee on Capital Markets. If confirmed, he will continue to work collaboratively. It is what we ask him to do, to represent all taxpayers to ensure that our credit union system is safe, sound, and works for all its members. Mr. President, I encourage my colleagues to support the nomination of Todd Harper. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2695-2 | null | 4,483 |
formal | middle class | null | racist | Nomination of Todd M. Harper Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support Todd Harper's nomination. He came out of my and Senator Smith's and the Presiding Officer Senator Ossoff's committee to be Chairman of the National Credit Union Administration. Mr. Harper is an experienced regulator. He has the background, knowledge, and leadership experience to safeguard the credit union system, a very important component of our financial system, and to protect millions of credit union members. We know that credit unions, more than Wall Street banks, really look out for the little guy and regular people and people who are, you know, mostly solidly middle class or aspiring to the middle class. A career public servant with midwestern roots, Todd Harper understands the vital role that credit unions play in local communities, especially rural and underserved communities. Being the first openly gay leader of any Federal financial regulatory Agency, the first NCUA career staff member to serve on the NCUA Board, he brings a vitally important perspective. We know that prior to this President taking over and my becoming chair of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, we know most of the Federal regulators look like me and walk like Wall Street. Those days are behind us. Another reason for Todd Harper's nomination to NCUA. Throughout his career as an NCUA Board member and Chair, he has worked with both parties. He has worked for advocates and industry to strengthen credit unions to fight for consumers. In 2019, the Senate confirmed Mr. Harper by voice vote to the three-member NCUA Board. In 2021, President Biden designated him as Chair. As Chair of the NCUA, he has worked with his fellow Board members to advance bipartisan efforts on important issues facing credit unions and their members, like digital assets and emergency capital investment. Prior to serving on the Board, he was Director of the Office of Public and Congressional Affairs. He was Chief Policy Advisor to former Chairs Deborah Matz and Rick Metsger. Mr. Harper previously served as a staffer in the House of Representatives, as staff director for the Subcommittee on Capital Markets. If confirmed, he will continue to work collaboratively. It is what we ask him to do, to represent all taxpayers to ensure that our credit union system is safe, sound, and works for all its members. Mr. President, I encourage my colleagues to support the nomination of Todd Harper. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2695-2 | null | 4,484 |
formal | safeguard | null | transphobic | Nomination of Todd M. Harper Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support Todd Harper's nomination. He came out of my and Senator Smith's and the Presiding Officer Senator Ossoff's committee to be Chairman of the National Credit Union Administration. Mr. Harper is an experienced regulator. He has the background, knowledge, and leadership experience to safeguard the credit union system, a very important component of our financial system, and to protect millions of credit union members. We know that credit unions, more than Wall Street banks, really look out for the little guy and regular people and people who are, you know, mostly solidly middle class or aspiring to the middle class. A career public servant with midwestern roots, Todd Harper understands the vital role that credit unions play in local communities, especially rural and underserved communities. Being the first openly gay leader of any Federal financial regulatory Agency, the first NCUA career staff member to serve on the NCUA Board, he brings a vitally important perspective. We know that prior to this President taking over and my becoming chair of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, we know most of the Federal regulators look like me and walk like Wall Street. Those days are behind us. Another reason for Todd Harper's nomination to NCUA. Throughout his career as an NCUA Board member and Chair, he has worked with both parties. He has worked for advocates and industry to strengthen credit unions to fight for consumers. In 2019, the Senate confirmed Mr. Harper by voice vote to the three-member NCUA Board. In 2021, President Biden designated him as Chair. As Chair of the NCUA, he has worked with his fellow Board members to advance bipartisan efforts on important issues facing credit unions and their members, like digital assets and emergency capital investment. Prior to serving on the Board, he was Director of the Office of Public and Congressional Affairs. He was Chief Policy Advisor to former Chairs Deborah Matz and Rick Metsger. Mr. Harper previously served as a staffer in the House of Representatives, as staff director for the Subcommittee on Capital Markets. If confirmed, he will continue to work collaboratively. It is what we ask him to do, to represent all taxpayers to ensure that our credit union system is safe, sound, and works for all its members. Mr. President, I encourage my colleagues to support the nomination of Todd Harper. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2695-2 | null | 4,485 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | Mr. REED. Mr. President, I was unavoidably absent for rollcall vote No. 200, the confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 857, Evelyn Padin, of New Jersey, to be U.S. District Judge for the District of New Jersey. Had I been present, I would have voted yea. I was unavoidably absent for rollcall vote No. 201, the confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 915, Charlotte N. Sweeney, of Colorado, to be U.S. District Judge for the District of Colorado. Had I been present, I would have voted yea. I was unavoidably absent for rollcall vote No. 202, the motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 806, Sandra L. Thompson, of Maryland, to be Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Had I been present, I would have voted yea. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. REED | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2702 | null | 4,486 |
formal | coincidence | null | antisemitic | Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I opposed the confirmation of Bridget Brink to be U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine because of her support for the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. Ambassador Brink believes in expanding NATO to any country who would like to join, including Ukraine. An important part of diplomacy is understanding your adversary. When I questioned Ambassador Brink about the eastern expansion of NATO, however, she expressed her belief that Russian President Vladimir Putin merely uses the NATO question as a pretext for actions he would take anyway. I strongly disagree. We must evaluate our leaders' actions, as well as the actions of our adversaries, on the world stage. Putin is an aggressor and must be condemned, but we cannot allow our revulsion for his invasions to blind us to the fact that our adversaries react to the actions of the West. For years, Putin stated that any attempt to expand NATO to Russia's borders would be perceived as a direct threat. Fifteen years ago, Putin asked, ``Against whom is this expansion intended?'' Yet, a year later in 2008, NATO promised that Ukraine and Georgia would one day join the alliance. Russia's invasions of Georgia and Ukraine are not a coincidence, but I left my meeting with Ambassador Brink believing that she is not willing to reflect upon the actions of the West and how they would be viewed by Russian eyes. Putin has no justification for embarking on a war and invading another country. I fully support the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia. Russia's brutal use of its military to achieve its objectives is unacceptable. But we must understand the reasons why he chose to invade in the first place. When the Cold War ended, the United States had the benefit of the wisdom of foreign policy officials who took Russia seriously. George Kennan warned that NATO expansion would ignite a new cold war. Henry Kissinger proposed a peaceful coexistence in which Ukraine pursued a policy of neutrality, with one foot in the West and one foot in the East. Jack Matlock, our Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, called the current crisis ``predictable'' and, in 1997, warned Congress that he believed that NATO expansion ``could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.'' Those wise voices are either gone or retired. Had we listened to their warnings, today's crisis might have been averted. But the State Department is now filled with officials who refuse to listen to adversaries or consider how our actions may make peace more difficult to obtain. Although I opposed the confirmation of Bridget Brink to be Ambassador to Ukraine, I wish her luck in representing the United States and finding a path to a peaceful end to the conflict. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. PAUL | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2703-2 | null | 4,487 |
formal | Chicago | null | racist | The following communications were laid before the Senate, together with accompanying papers, reports, and documents, and were referred as indicated: EC-4210. A communication from the Associate Director of the Regulatory Management Division, Environmental Protection Agency, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Air Plan Approval; Nevada; Clark County Department of Environment and Sustainability'' (FRL No. 9527-01-R9) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. EC-4211. A communication from the Associate Director of the Regulatory Management Division, Environmental Protection Agency, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Air Plan Approval; Indiana; Redesignation of the Indiana Portion of the Chicago-Naperville Area to Attainment of the 2008 Ozone Standard, NOx RACT Waiver, and Serious Plan Elements'' (FRL No. 9567-01-R5) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. EC-4212. A communication from the Associate Director of the Regulatory Management Division, Environmental Protection Agency, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Air Plan Approval; Illinois; Redesignation of the Illinois Portion of the Chicago-Naperville, Illinois-Indiana- Wisconsin Area to Attainment of the 2008 Ozone Standard'' (FRL No. 9604-02-R5) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. EC-4213. A communication from the Associate Director of the Regulatory Management Division, Environmental Protection Agency, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants: General Provisions; Technical Correction'' ((RIN2060-AU67) (RIN2060-AU66) (FRL No. 7523-03-OAR) (FRL No. 9751-01-OAR)) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. EC-4214. A communication from the Director for Legislative Affairs, Council on Environmental Quality, Executive Office of the President, transmitting, pursuant to law, a rule entitled ``National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Regulations Revisions'' (RIN0331-AA05) received in the office of the President of the Senate on May 17, 2022; to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. EC-4215. A communication from the Assistant Secretary for Legislation, Department of Health and Human Services, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report entitled ``Medicare National Coverage Determinations for Fiscal Year 2021''; to the Committee on Finance. EC-4216. A communication from the Senior Bureau Official, Bureau of Legislative Affairs, Department of State, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report entitled ``Visa Inadmissibility Determination for Russian National Roman Abramovich''; to the Committees on Foreign Relations; and the Judiciary. EC-4217. A communication from the Senior Bureau Official, Bureau of Legislative Affairs, Department of State, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report relative to the designation of Basque Fatherland and Liberty (and other aliases) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (OSS-2022-0407); to the Committee on Foreign Relations. EC-4218. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-403, ``Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4219. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-410, ``Reopen Washington DC Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4220. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-391, ``Advisory Neighborhood Commission Redistricting Deadline Extension Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4221. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-392, ``Ban on Non-Compete Agreements Applicability Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4222. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-393, ``Urban Forest Preservation Stop Work Order Authority Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4223. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-394, ``State Board of Education Membership Eligibility Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4224. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-395, ``Community Service Graduation Requirement Waiver Regulation Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4225. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-401, ``Law Enforcement Career Opportunities for District Residents Expansion Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4226. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-402, ``Medical Cannabis Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4227. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-404, ``Direct Cash Assistance Pilot Program Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4228. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-405, ``Local Business Enterprise Clarification Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4229. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-406, ``Lead Service Line Planning Task Force Interagency Plan Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4230. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-407, ``Rent Notice and Rent Increase Clarification Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4231. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-408, ``Criminal Code Reform Commission Executive Director Salary Establishment Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4232. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-409, ``Hotel Enhanced Cleaning and Notice of Service Disruption Temporary Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4233. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-389, ``Selective Service Federal Benefits Awareness Amendment Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4234. A communication from the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, transmitting, pursuant to law, a report on D.C. Act 24-390, ``Alice R. Washington Day Designation Act of 2022''; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. EC-4235. A communication from the Senior Counsel of Legal Policy, Office of the Attorney General, Department of Justice, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Civil Monetary Penalties Inflation Adjustment for 2022'' (Docket No. OLP 172) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on the Judiciary. EC-4236. A communication from the Regulation Development Coordinator, Office of Regulation Policy and Management, Department of Veterans Affairs, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Fiduciary Bond'' (RIN2900-AR11) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. EC-4237. A communication from the Regulation Development Coordinator, Office of Regulation Policy and Management, Department of Veterans Affairs, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (VR&E) Program: Name Change'' (RIN2900-AR04) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. EC-4238. A communication from the Regulation Development Coordinator, Office of Regulation Policy and Management, Department of Veterans Affairs, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Inclusion of the Space Force as Part of the Armed Forces'' (RIN2900-AR46) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. EC-4239. A communication from the Regulation Development Coordinator, Office of Regulation Policy and Management, Department of Veterans Affairs, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Threshold for Reporting VA Debts to Consumer Reporting Agencies'' (RIN2900-AR20) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. EC-4240. A communication from the Regulation Development Coordinator, Office of Regulation Policy and Management, Department of Veterans Affairs, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Informed Consent and Advance Directives'' (RIN2900-AQ97) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. EC-4241. A communication from the Regulation Development Coordinator, Office of Regulation Policy and Management, Department of Veterans Affairs, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Extension of the Presumptive Period for Compensation for Gulf War Veterans'' (RIN2900-AR22) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. EC-4242. A communication from the Regulation Development Coordinator, Office of Regulation Policy and Management, Department of Veterans Affairs, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Presumptive Service Connection for Rare Respiratory Cancers Due to Exposure to Fine Particulate Matter'' (RIN2900-AR44) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. EC-4243. A communication from the Regulation Development Coordinator, Office of Regulation Policy and Management, Department of Veterans Affairs, transmitting, pursuant to law, the report of a rule entitled ``Staff Sergeant Parker Gordon Fox Suicide Prevention Grant Program'' (RIN2900-AR16) received in the Office of the President of the Senate on May 18, 2022; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2706-7 | null | 4,488 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | By Mr. KAINE (for himself, Mr. Marshall, Ms. Hassan, and Mr. Cassidy): S. 4302. A bill to amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to require prompt reports of marketing status by holders of approved applications for biological products, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-25-pt1-PgS2709 | null | 4,489 |
formal | personal responsibility | null | racist | South Dakota Mr. President, this past weekend, I headed to Murdo, SD, the small town of around 500 people where I grew up. Needless to say, any trip to Murdo brings back a lot of memories. First and foremost are those memories of my parents Pat and Harold Thune and of growing up with my three brothers and sister. We were lucky kids to have my parents. My mom was a wonderful, loving, eternally optimistic mother who spent most of my growing up years as our school librarian. She was responsible for making sure that we Thune kids got some culture, whether we wanted it or not. She was the one who made sure we got an introduction to music and learned how to play the piano. With her encouragement, I even joined the swing choir--although I will spare you, Mr. President, from any recitals. In the summer, she would make us come inside for an hour every day to read. I didn't always want to come inside on those beautiful summer days. At the time, I would have much preferred to keep shooting hoops with the basket my dad had attached to a pole in our backyard. But today I am grateful for every minute that she made us spend with books. My dad, he was our hero--a division I basketball player, a World War II combat pilot. He was a teacher at my high school. And a coach. And the athletic director. Oh, and also the bus driver. So between him and my mom as the librarian, we Thune kids were practically never away from our parents' watchful eyes. I am so grateful to have had my dad's coaching in sports and in life. My dad taught us, as players, to play as a team. He didn't like ball hogs or people who were in the game for the personal glory. He believed your job as a member of a team was to make the people around you better. If somebody else was in a better position to take the shot, you always made the extra pass. You didn't try to pad your own statistics. You played for the good of the team. It is an attitude I have tried to carry with me throughout my life. My parents gave us Thune kids a strong set of values and an inheritance of faith. In good times and bad, faith was their anchor and the Holy Scriptures, their roadmap. And I am grateful that they taught us who to turn to in times of trouble. Mr. President, being in Murdo reminded me of my parents, as it always does. It also made me reflect on just how lucky I was to grow up in a small town--and small-town South Dakota in particular. It is true that growing up in a small town meant that my parents had heard all about any of the Thune kids' misdemeanors before we even made it home. But even with that little drawback, small-town life was wonderful. In Murdo, you know everyone, and everyone knows you. And that gave us a sense of community and belonging that we carry to this day. Growing up in Murdo also taught us just how much we are all connected. Mr. President, South Dakotans are independent people, but we also rely onour neighbors when the going gets tough. And the going can get tough. But, in Murdo, we knew that if a roof collapsed under the weight of snow or a windstorm came through and wiped out a barn or we lost a friend or family member, the whole community would rally around to help. Small-town life has a beautiful simplicity. On summer nights, my dad would take us to get ice cream cones, and then we would drive down to the White River. We would roll down the windows and feel the breeze and watch the sun drop below the horizon--no staring at iPhones or checking likes on social media. Those were idyllic evenings. Moments like those kept us connected to what really mattered: our family, our community, the land. Mr. President, the values I saw reflected growing up in Murdo are reflected in towns all across our State. In Murdo, I learned the character of South Dakotans, the work ethic, the commitment to freedom coupled with the belief in personal responsibility and the sense of responsibility to the broader community. Agriculture, of course, is the lifeblood of South Dakota, and it is a hard way of life. It is backbreaking work in all weathers, always with the risk that all your work can be wiped out in moments by a storm. Anyone who grows up on a farm or ranch knows that everybody has to pull their weight or the farm or ranch just don't survive. And I think that grounding in agriculture has helped give South Dakotans their reputation for having a strong work ethic and a commitment to getting the job done. And I am not kidding about that reputation. As a Senator, I have traveled to a number of places around the world, and I regularly meet people--often military members--who talk about the work ethic of the South Dakotans they know. I am pretty sure it is that work ethic and sense of personal responsibility that is responsible for the fact that South Dakota has always punched above its weight when it comes to military service, as well as the patriotism that runs strongly through the South Dakota character. South Dakotans cherish their freedoms, and they also believe that with freedom comes responsibility. And they have a deep appreciation for the Founders' vision that has allowed us to enjoy such freedom and for the sacrifices that have been required to secure it. With that comes an expectation that each generation has to do its part to pay freedom's price and protect all that we have been given. The South Dakota values I learned growing up helped shape my political philosophy: my belief that government should be limited and that it is best when it is closest to the people; and that if a matter can be handled at the State or local level, it should be; that the legacy of the past is something to be cherished and preserved while leaving, at the same time, room for change and adaptation when needed; that freedom is a sacred gift, one that must be defended, and that with freedom comes responsibility; and, finally, that while government is necessary, government is not where we should look for salvation. Mr. President, the legacy of growing up in South Dakota is a precious one. We didn't have much money, but we were very rich in the things that mattered. And I am deeply grateful for those years in Murdo, for the teachers and coaches and others in the community who invested in me, and for everyone who continues to make it feel like home and for the privilege of living in the Mount Rushmore State. It is my very great honor to represent the people of South Dakota in the U.S. Senate. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Unknown | Senate | CREC-2022-05-26-pt1-PgS2723-3 | null | 4,490 |
formal | terrorism | null | Islamophobic | Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, before we leave Washington, I want to make a few comments about the war in Ukraine. Our allies in Ukraine are fighting like tigers against a Russian invasion that is without foundation, that is illegal under international law and is one of the most brutal acts of war in the 21st century--maybe in any century. I just want to let the Ukrainian people know that the American people are with you in your struggle for freedom. There have been some comments made by folks whom I respect talking about the need to end this war, where Ukraine has to recognize certain parts of their territory as actually Russian territory. I cannot disagree more. Any effort to impose upon Ukraine a ceasefire that leads to a peace agreement where they have to give territory to Russia is not ending a war; it will be starting new wars. Have we learned nothing from the last century? Appeasing Putin in Ukraine makes him want more, not less. We found that to be true in the 1930s with Hitler in Germany. So this idea that Ukraine needs to come to the table and give up Ukrainian land to Putin makes zero sense to me. All the people who have been fighting in Ukraine would have died in vain. And that line of reasoning I reject completely. Here is the state of play: Due to the commitment of the Ukrainian people to fight for their freedom and their homeland, Russia has just been delivered a mighty blow. Their army is in decline. They just changed their laws so that the limitation on service from 18 to 40 now has been lifted. There was a 63-year-old retired general fighter pilot shot down in Ukraine, a Russian general. All I can say is that the Ukrainians have met their end of the bargain. This body, expressing the will of the American people, passed a $40 billion aid package. That is a lot of money, but you either pay now or later when it comes to Putin. I am convinced, along with most of my colleagues here, that if Putin is successful in Ukraine, he only goes further; he never stops. His words, not mine--he wants to reconstruct the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, whatever you would like to call it. There are other nations in his crosshairs. So the battle in Ukraine will stabilize Europe if it is done right. If the battle in Ukraine ends where Putin feels like he got away with mass war crimes and was able to get territory by force of arms, he will not stop. China will, surely as I am speaking, have a green light to go into Taiwan. So those who argue that we need to end this war by giving Ukrainian territory to Putin, you are starting another war in Asia, most likely. You are going to create a larger appetite for Putin, and I think you have lost the lessons of the last century. We have much to understand about the nature of this war. We have Russian diplomats resigning in protest. We have people at concerts shouting some pretty vulgar things about the war. You have a Russian military that is under siege in terms of manning. The more weapons we provide to the Ukrainians, the more lethal they become on the battlefield, the more likely this war ends on favorable terms. So I just want to remind the American people as we go into this holiday, remember those who sacrificed for our freedom. There is a hot war in Europe. It is 2022. Did anybody really believe after the fall of the Berlin Wall that we would be having a war with Russia in Europe trying to take over a sovereign country called Ukraine? Well, that is where we are, and I guess one thing to learn about mankind is that the calendar may change, but there is a dark side of mankind--powerful people trying to push the less powerful around; people trying to take things through force of arms rather than the rule of law. So I want the Ukrainian people to know that I am with you. I think most Americans are with you. We don't want you to entice Putin to go beyond Ukraine by surrendering your territory. We stand with you. Not 1 inch of Ukrainian territory should be given to Putin because he chose force of arms. The rule of law versus the rule of guns is at stake. I am hoping that we will send you more lethal weapons, not less, that we will increase your capability to inflict pain on the Russian military. I do believe that people in Russia are beginning to understand that, with Putin, they have a very limited future; that if you continue to support Putin, the world will isolate you further; that we are not going to forgive and forget the war crimes. NATO is getting bigger. Finland and Sweden have applied to NATO. I have talked to our friends in Turkey. I hope we can resolve that. So it would be wonderful in the next coming weeks here that the Senate, in fast fashion, could include two more members of NATO; that everything Putin wanted has backfired; that the Ukrainian nation still stands; that NATO is bigger not smaller; that war crimes investigations move forward, they don't stall. In the International Criminal Court, Mr. Khan is doing a good job of gathering evidence against Russian atrocities committed by Russian military leaders and Russian forces, all under the control of Putin, and I just encourage that effort to go further. Ukrainian courts have convicted a Russian soldier of murder, a war crime. So what I would like to see is the Western world, the democratic world, reinforce our commitment to Ukraine, not talk about having to give Putin territory to end this war, because that is not the way to end the war; that is a way to expand the war. If we can end this through diplomatic means, great, but what should be off the table is rewarding Putin for this invasion. What should be on the table is a commitment to Ukraine. As long as they are willing to fight, as long as they are willing to fight for their freedom and die for their territory, we should help them, because Putin won't stop with Ukraine if he is successful. The blood and treasure that we have spent since 9/11 has been tough for our country, but not one American soldier is on the ground in Ukraine. They are not asking for soldiers; they are only asking for the ability to defend themselves--economic assistance, military assistance. I do not want to let the pressure off Putin. Senator Risch and Senator Menendez--the chairman, Senator Menendez, of the Foreign RelationsCommittee--are considering marking up legislation urging the Biden administration to designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. So let's keep the pressure on Putin. Let's let the Russian people know that, as long as Putin is your leader, you will be isolated from the international community, your economy can't grow, and there are going to be more and more young Russians killed in this folly. I would urge the Russian people to change course here. Pick a new leader. The world will embrace Russia. Russia is a land of many talented people, with a long rich history. I am hoping and praying that the freedom-loving world will not make the mistakes in 2022 that we made in 1932, that we made in 1937 and 1938 where we thought the way to end the war was to appease a brutal dictator. That is not the way to end a war; that is the way to continue wars and make them bigger. So, as for me, I will do everything in my power to help the Ukrainian people as a Member of the U.S. Senate. I will do everything in my power to hold Putin accountable. I will do everything in my power, working with my Democratic and Republican colleagues, to isolate Putin's Russia. This is a difficult time for the world. If he fails in Ukraine, if the Russian people rise up and change course, the world will be a lot better off. If he succeeds, God help us all because the worst is yet to come. No problem here at home gets better by turning our back on Ukraine and not holding Putin accountable. Whatever problems we have at the border, with inflation, gas prices, all the domestic violence here at home, none of those problems get better if Putin wins in Ukraine. Here is the good news for the American people: The Ukrainian people are not asking for our young men and women to fight and die in Ukraine; they are only asking for our help. They need arms. They need weapons. They need economic assistance. If we will continue to show our resolve--the Western world--Putin will lose and the people of Ukraine will win. Now is not the time to put on the table capitulation. So to everybody, I hope you have a safe Memorial Day. I look forward to coming back after the break to see if we can find a pathway forward on commonsense gun reforms. Between now and then, let's keep the people of Ukraine in our prayers. I suggest the absence of a quorum. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. GRAHAM | Senate | CREC-2022-05-26-pt1-PgS2726-4 | null | 4,491 |
formal | the Fed | null | antisemitic | Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about developments this week in trying to fight to make sure that American consumers aren't paying artificially more for gas to fill up their cars and trucks and take a vacation for the holiday than they should be paying. This is an important issue for everybody in the United States but particularly my constituents, who all throughout the State of Washington are paying--well, Seattle, definitely over $5, and many other parts of the State over $5. And if you are not paying more than $5 a gallon, you are paying very close to $5 a gallon. So it is important that Members of Congress do their job in oversight and policing of these markets to make sure that there is transparency; that is, a bright light to make sure that no one is taking advantage during this tight supply and artificially driving up that price for their benefit. That is why we introduced the Transportation Fuel Market Transparency Act that asked the Federal Trade Commission to expand on authority Congress already gave to them to police transportation petroleum markets and make sure that the trading that is done on indexes that have very little oversight--very little oversight--that those indexes have a brighter light shined on them so that we make sure consumers aren't being gouged because of the kinds of practices that happen. Well, lo and behold, just this Tuesday, the Federal Government and the Department of Justice and the CFTC--the Commodities Futures Trading Commission--basically gave a statement on the largest settlement in history, a civil monetary penalty and disgorgement exceeding $1.1 billion on Glencore, one of the largest commodity trading firms. It is a major participant in the global, physical oil and oil derivatives market, and for more than a decade, it engaged in a wide-ranging scheme to manipulate oil markets--schemes to defraud other market participants by manipulating the information going to financial markets, schemes that created artificially high benchmarks so that Glencore's derivatives and physical positions would settle or price at levels more favorable to the company. (Ms. CORTEZ MASTO assumed the Chair.) These were some of the same practices that are were uncovered during the Enron scheme. I know the Presiding Officer knows because she comes from the State of Nevada, and two of the areas most hard hit by the electricity crisis were the State of Washington and the State of Nevada. Why? Because people wanted us to continue to pay on fraudulent electricity pricing. That is why we fought, along with the Presiding Officer's predecessor and others, to make sure that electricity markets were properly policed for any kind of manipulative practices. I am very proud that we authored legislation after that scandal that really has given the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the tools it needed on electricity and natural gas. They, to this date, since 2007, have used that authority to police electricity and natural gas and have had over a $1 billion of fines and settlements against companies and their bad practices. These are the same sort of practices that we are uncovering now in the commodities market and on oil market manipulation. I know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would like to pretend that this issue doesn't exist. I ask them, go home and face your constituents and tell them you voted to do nothing--nothing--to bring more transparency into the gas markets that are affecting them today and see what their reaction is. I guarantee you they are paying too much at the pump, and they want to know that we are properly policing these markets. They get the dilemma that we are in, particularly given Russia and Ukraine. They get the issues of a changing economy coming out of COVID. But they are madder than heck when they read about some company that has been doing this practice for decades and basically making money off of the back of their hard earnings. Consumers could pay as much as $1,000 more for gas this year. They want to know why. This company raked in over $320 million in improper gains. And while some of the record settlement involved penalties for bribes and kickbacks in foreign countries, the company agreed to pay $485 million in settlements for criminal and civil investigations for various fuel oil prices. Various fuel oil products that were manipulated and impacted included Los Angeles and their Bunker Fuel Oil, New York Harbor Low Sulfur Fuel Oil, New York Harbor High Sulfur Fuel, and U.S. Gulf Coast High Sulfur Fuel Oil. I am not sure how much consumers ended up getting fleeced, but it is clear that at least hundreds of millions of dollars impacted these markets. And as the Presiding Officer knows, because she has been the chief law enforcement for her State, if you don't have a policeman on the beat policing these markets, more of these fraudulent activities will exist. After the derivative crisis, I also made sure that anti-manipulation authority went to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. When we called recently to ask about their use of this authority, they told us they had put fines and penalties against companies at over $4.5 billion. That was before Tuesday's announcement of clear oil market manipulation. Some of my colleagues, as we push this transparency bill through the Commerce Committee, said: Why, if they caught some people on Tuesday,do we need to mark something up on Wednesday? Well, the issue is that we were talking about the futures market. As I just read, these companies are very adept at manipulating the futures market and the physical market to get their best gain. We are asking our colleagues to vote for transparency in the physical market of indexes traded after the product is refined. We know that there is a world oil price. We know that it is refined. But what we can't figure out is, after it is refined, why--particularly on the West Coast--is it at exorbitant rates, well over the national average and paying well over what we think market fundamentals determine? We saw, at a hearing that we had before the Commerce Committee, energy experts testify that some of these fundamentals do not make sense; that something else is going on in the market. So why turn down the opportunity for us, as a Federal Government, to get more transparency in these energy markets? Why would anybody want to say that more transparency over these indexes is not a good idea? Well, some of our colleagues--I am not sure, because they offered no substantive amendments to the legislation before us. In fact, those that were, what I would say, some improvements around the edges to the bill, we actually accepted in committee. The rest of the amendments offered were all about the issues and discussions of more supply, which were out of the jurisdiction of our committee, and I encouraged my colleagues to take them up on the Senate floor. So no substantive changes were offered to this legislation. Nobody objected on the basis of the idea that transparency is a bad idea. And yet people are holding on to an idea that they don't want to answer about this issue of manipulation. Trust me, I was shocked when I was elected to the U.S. Senate, before I was even sworn in, to find out that we were in an energy crisis; that somehow the price of electricity had gone from some of the cheapest in the United States to the most exorbitant price ever, 3,000 times the rate. I thought this couldn't possibly be a scheme. This couldn't possibly be something perpetrated because, obviously, we would catch that. Obviously, we have a policeman on the beat. Well, it turned out that the California market, what is called the ISO, really wasn't catching it, and there really was manipulation by Enron. Enron manipulated the supply of electricity by cooking up various schemes to move supply out of California to create artificial shortages and then drive up the price of electricity. They had traders who lied on the phone to people buying long-term contracts, telling them: Buy the long-term contract because the price is going up. And an analyst saying to a trader, and the trader replying back: That is not true. And the analyst saying: Tell them anyway. That is the kind of thing that we need to police. So I was shocked to find that one of my first tasks being a U.S. Senator was going to be to spend 2 years policing electricity just so my State and the State of Nevada would not pay on fraudulent contracts for more than a decade. I guarantee you, not only would the lights in Vegas have gone out, but much of the Washington economy would have been affected. This is so important now because these high gas prices are affecting every sector of transportation. It is affecting our airline economy. It is affecting our trucking economy. I have heard from our railroads on the diesel engine prices. It is affecting every part of our economy while we have to pay more. And even if it is 50 cents--as one of the witnesses testified, it may be as much as 50 cents a gallon that is artificially being put onto the consumers--why would you not want to know the answer and simply give the Federal Trade Commission the authority to make sure that these markets are properly policed for unfair and deceptive practices? I know my colleague who is presiding knows because we have even had suggestions from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that the practice is so bad among energy traders that we should consider legislation to ban energy traders who continue to perpetrate these schemes. That is right, they go from one company to another company. They know how the schemes work. They think it is just the price of doing business. Even if they get caught, they will just pay the fine, like Glencore is paying now. If you think about it, this $1.1 billion is one of the largest oil market manipulation cases ever. People probably aren't hearing about it this week because of other stories that are in the news. But trust me, this kind of behavior needs to be rooted out. So, Madam President, I hope that when my colleagues return, I hope that they will spend the recess asking their constituents whether they think there needs to be more transparency in oil markets. I will be very surprised if they don't say that something is going on, and we want to know what it is. That is because consumers have felt for a long time a disconnection between market fundamentals of supply and demand. And, yes, there have been some changes in supply as it relates to what we are facing on an international basis. My constituents understand that. But we have always been an isolated market in the Pacific Northwest for refineries in my State, most of the supply coming from Alaska. And yet we pay the highest prices in the Nation. So our constituents want to know why. My colleagues, Senator Wyden, Senator Feinstein, and I have prosecuted these issues. We have asked for more information and transparency. In both instances, when we were successful with electricity and natural gas, we did find behavior that needed to be rooted out. And here, we have proof now in this Glencore case that there is manipulation in oil markets. We are simply asking that, just don't leave it to the futures market, because if you want to give law enforcement, the Department of Justice, our attorneys general, others, the tools to root out bad behavior--even if it is 5 cents a gallon, it is worth fighting for. Even if it is a few cents more to uncover and drive down the cost, it is worth it to our constituents, who are paying exorbitant prices. Let's make sure everybody understands in a tight supply, it is a lot easier to do manipulation, and that is why we need to get this done now. I wish that the authority that we had given to the Federal Trade Commission on this issue in 2007 would have been used, but the point is, you actually have to have people and the information to prosecute these cases. My colleagues at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission built such a unit. That unit, as I said, has been successful in monitoring electricity and natural gas. I hope that they will emulate what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has done. I am proud that the CFTC and our Attorney General, Merrick Garland, made this announcement on Tuesday of this unbelievable manipulation, of bribery, of schemes, of all of the work that goes behind the scenes for people to make billions of dollars of profits when we and our consumers are being gouged with extra prices. Let's find the answers. Let's do something as basic as passing a law about transparency on a product--petroleum--that is so critical to our economy. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Ms. CANTWELL | Senate | CREC-2022-05-26-pt1-PgS2727 | null | 4,492 |
formal | Hollywood | null | antisemitic | Mr. SULLIVAN. Madam President, it is Thursday, and it is the time of the week that I like to celebrate an amazing person or people in my State who are doing something great for Alaska, great for America, great for the world. It is someone I like to refer to as our Alaskan of the Week--or Alaskans of the Week, plural. So we are doubling up this week because we have two Alaskans that we are going to be commemorating. And I want to acknowledge it has been a couple of rough weeks for America--we all know that--for reasons that are quite obvious. Some tempers here in the Senate have been flaring a little bit. So I wanted to end the week on what is really an incredible, uplifting story, an epic story. It is a bit complicated, so you have to pay attention if you are wanting to hear about just a remarkable course of events in Alaska. And it is a particularly poignant story as we head into Memorial Day weekend, a time when we honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. And I am going to tell, as I mentioned, a very special Memorial Day story--acomplicated one, but one for the history books. This story has twists and turns, dark spots, highlights, and literally a Hollywood ending, one that involves a hero who gave his life for America, what we are celebrating on Monday, but whose heroism and service was only recently acknowledged and even only recently remembered. So, first, I am going to begin the story about a young man who made the ultimate sacrifice for our Nation, an Alaskan native, an indigenous man from Unalaska--Private George Fox. Now, Private George Fox is not our Alaskan of the Week, but the whole story that I am going to tell revolves around Private George Fox, who was killed in action fighting Nazis in World War II in Italy in 1944 and, since 1949, was buried on the island of Unalaska--that is out on the Aleutian island chain in Alaska, the islands way out that go out towards Japan. But he was buried in an unmarked grave and essentially forgotten--no record of military service, no awards for heroism, nothing, forgotten by literally almost everybody but one person, for nearly 80 years. I am also going to talk about two very special people who are our Alaskans of the Week; that is Mike Livingston and Gertrude Svarny, who worked over the years to make sure that Private George Fox's exceptional service is finally going to be officially recognized. And that will happen Monday, on Memorial Day on the island of Unalaska in the Aleutian Island chains back home in Alaska in a ceremony that will take place on Monday. So, as you can tell, this is actually a story of three people: one of them a young soldier killed in action for our country in World War II; one of them a still-living 90-year-old woman, a childhood friend of the young soldier, one of our Alaskans of the Week, Gertrude; another, a man on a mission, a detective with a public servant's heart. It is a story of the invasion of the United States by the Japanese. Many Americans don't know that Japan invaded parts of Alaska. It is a story of racism, discrimination, service, honor, heroism. It is the story of how two people worked to keep history alive and to honor another who was forgotten for his heroism fighting and dying for our country. It is an epic of Alaska--an epic of Alaska--fitting to be memorialized here on the U.S. Senate floor, and, more importantly, memorialized Monday when we honor our veterans and those who died in the service of our country. So, it is a little complicated, but bear with me. Let me start this remarkable story in a remarkable place. This is Unalaska on the Aleutian Island chain. So if you are looking at a map of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands go way out west, actually the Aleutian Islands cross the international date line, way further west than Hawaii. The Aleutian Island chain of Unalaska is a beautiful island about 800 miles southwest of Anchorage in the Bering Sea. It is home to walruses and sea lions; tens of millions of birds migrate through the area. Right now, it is the largest fishing port in the country, and it is home to an incredible group of patriotic people, the Unangan native people, living in an area steeped in fascinating and sometimes very tragic history. So here is a short version of that history. First, when Alaska was a colonial possession of Russia, Russian fur seekers decimated the Aleuts, the native populations on these islands, through warfare, disease, even slavery. Then, 75 years after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, during World War II, Japan actually bombed Unalaska, June 3 and 4, almost 80 years ago today. Then the Japanese invaded and occupied nearby islands on Alaska's Aleutian Island chain. Many Americans don't know that history. The United States--Alaska--was actually occupied by our enemy, Imperial Japan. Eventually, American forces had to drive out the Japanese in a brutal campaign on the Aleutian Islands area. About 1,500 American servicemembers were killed in those battles, 600 missing, and almost 3,500 wounded in action. So that is some of the history of Unalaska and the Aleutian Islands chain during World War II. So, George Fox--at about the same time the Japanese were literally bombing his hometown of Unalaska in 1942, George Fox had volunteered as a patriotic young American Alaska Native to fight for his country and was sent to the other side of the world--Europe, North Africa. Now, we don't know a lot about Private Fox's service, but because of the work of Mike Livingston, our other Alaskan of the Week, who is alive and doing great, we do have some basic information. Here is some of what we know about Private George Fox. He was born January 20, 1920, in Unalaska--again, the Aleutian island that we are taking about on the Aleutian Islands chain. When he was 22 years old, like so many patriotic Alaska Natives, he signed up to serve his country in World War II. By the way, it should be noted and cannot be overstated that throughout history, even though so many Alaska Natives were discriminated against--and still are in some ways--Alaska Natives, certainly in Unalaska but all throughout the whole State, have served at higher rates in the military than any other ethnic group in the country--incredible patriotic service. So Private George Fox from Unalaska goes to war for his country in World War II. At the same time, his hometown is being bombed by the Japanese. He was assigned to Company G in the 179th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division. His unit was first sent to fight the Axis Powers in North Africa, then to Italy, where he landed in Italy on Anzio Beach--a very famous battle--to fight the Germans in the famous Battle of Anzio, where roughly 7,000 Allied servicemembers were killed in action. He survived that and fought his way heroically toward Rome, fighting the Nazis the whole way. Unfortunately, on June 1, 1944, a Nazi bomb exploded near him, and he was killed in action as a young American serving his country--killed in Italy. He is the only known Alaska Unangan from his region to be killed in action during World War II. So about 5 years later, after the war, his remains were removed from Italy and returned to Unalaska in 1949. We now know there was a small funeral at the Russian Orthodox church, where his ashes were buried next to his mom, but his grave was unmarked--unmarked--and it stayed unmarked for decades. Now, that is what we know about Private Fox's military service, not much else. Why? Because there was a fire where all his military records were in the lower 48, and his service records were destroyed. So, frankly, his record in the military was essentially forgotten--forgotten. Now, I think--you can't prove this, but the fact that he was Alaska Native--that there was probably some discrimination here, like, ``Hey, whatever, he is Alaska Native. We are not that worried.'' And so nobody in authority kept his memory alive, his service alive. It was all forgotten, that he was even a soldier. So his memory and his service and his heroism--because these are serious battles in World War II--all faded almost completely to nothing, if it wasn't for our heroic Alaskans of the Week that we are recognizing today. So enter our first Alaskan of the Week, Mike Livingston, also a Native Alaskan, Unangan, and he was determined to remember this vague memory of this guy he had heard about, Private George Fox. Here is a little bit of Mike's story, which is another great story. He was born in Cold Bay, AK, which is another island in the Aleutian Islands chain. He moved to Unalaska, the town we are talking about, in 1978, as a college student to learn the art of building traditional kayaks from the Native elders in the community, and he began to work as a public safety officer. From then until 2003, when he retired, he was an emergency medical technician, a firefighter, a dive rescue specialist, a police officer, a detective in various places throughout Alaska, much of it in Anchorage at the Anchorage Police Department, and he is currently a captain with the Alaska State Defense Force. Along the way--now, this guy is really impressive, what Mike did. He received a master's degree in anthropology and a doctorate in education,all of which he uses as a specialist in his job, also at the Aleutian Pribilof Island Association, and he uses his education and skills also as a detective and fuels his passion for helping people help solve mysteries, particularly in his interest of genealogy and family trees that involve stories that are untold mysteries. A tree nut--a family tree nut--he calls himself, as do his group of friends who dig deep to solve puzzles, the kind of which involve people, historic places, lapses in historic knowledge that have faded into history, which is exactly what happened to Private George Fox. Around 2005, Mike Livingston, our Alaskan of the Week, and his friends started to take on that mission. What happened to Private George Fox? They had heard about him--a fellow Alaska Native who they knew from stories was killed in action fighting somewhere in World War II--but they needed more information. Where was he buried? Nobody seemed to know. Why was he not listed as killed in action in service in World War II? In the U.S. military, when a servicemember is killed in action, the survivors get benefits, and they are entitled to receive full military honors at funerals. And in Mike's culture and in Private Fox's culture--the Unangan culture--when a warrior died protecting their village, statues were carved, songs were written and sung. It has always been a huge honor in the Native culture to be a fallen warrior, but Private George Fox got none of this from America, from his Federal Government, and even from the amazing Alaska Native people. Mike Livingston, the detective with a servant's heart, wanted to right this wrong. He wanted to do it for Private Fox, for his community, for his people, for his State, for his country. So he got to work on this mystery. He began to dig deeper. He called every Federal Agency he could think of to try to get more information about this mysterious Alaska Native whose memory had faded, whose heroism wasn't recognized. But Mike ran into brick wall after brick wall calling Federal Agencies. He was able to get a few tidbits, like the basic information mentioned above, and he also discovered that George Fox's remains were returned to Unalaska in 1949, but nothing else--little else. The mystery of where those remains were--in a grave, an unmarked grave; where Private George Fox was buried--it haunted Mike Livingston. As he said, ``When you compare some of what occurred during World War II, or shortly after World War II, people who were white were highly honored,'' he recently told a reporter, particularly if they were killed in action during the war--but not so for so many Alaska Natives. Eventually, Mike heard that another resident on the island--now we are back on Unalaska--had a piece of the puzzle, a woman who happened to be related to Mike through marriage. Enter our second Alaskan of the Week, 91-year-old artist Gertrude Svarny. Let me spend a few minutes talking about her incredible patriotic story. Gertrude was born in 1930 on Unalaska, the island out in the Aleutian Islands chain, the island bombed by the Japanese. She was also Alaska Native. Her family lived next to the Fox family. George Fox was about 8 years older than she was. George and Gertrude's older brother were good friends. So Gertrude remembers George. She said the whole island loved him. He was kind, funny, full of life, and obviously brave. As I mentioned, in 1942, George Fox left to go fight World War II for our great Nation, right at the time George and Gertrude's village, Unalaska, was bombed by the Japanese. And here is another story most Americans don't know about. After that happened, the U.S. Government took the Alaska Native people on the Aleutian Islands chain and put them into internment camps--not White people, only Alaska Native people. The treatment of these great patriotic American citizens in these camps is a dark spot in American history that, as I mentioned, not many Americans are aware of. Camps were basically abandoned buildings. The conditions were awful--crowded, unheated, unsanitary. Many died in the camps as a result of these horrendous conditions. Three years later, when the war was finally over, the people of Unalaska--the Native people of Unalaska--were allowed to go home to their community after being in these internment camps, but their homes were ransacked and burned. Many of their villages on the island were destroyed, another dark spot in our country's history. Remember, these were our citizens, our country, and the Native people, if they weren't at home, many of them were fighting overseas in the Pacific and in Europe, like Private George Fox. So Gertrude comes home from the internment camp. She is at Unalaska now, and she marries another patriot named Sam Svarny, her husband, who was in the Army, originally from Chicago, and he was stationed in Unalaska. Another patriot in this story, Sam served in World War II and later served in Vietnam. Gertrude became an artist--a renowned artist in Alaska. She is actually very famous for her work that she makes out of traditional materials, and she is in collections all over the world. And even though her childhood was marked by the wrongs inflicted on her family and her by her own country, she and her husband have remained fiercely patriotic. Even interment hasn't dissuaded the patriotism of the Alaska Native people. And one of the ways Gertrude displayed this patriotism, which still burns in her to this day--remember, she is 91 years old--was that every Memorial Day, they put flags on the grave sites on the island of Unalaska to those who served in the military. Gertrude and her husband Sam always remembered when she was a young girl the small service that she had attended, a funeral service in 1949, of the young, spritely teenager George Fox, a friend of Gertrude's who died fighting the Nazis more than 5,000 miles away from Alaska in Italy. The service was in the winter, she remembers. It was very cold. After the service, the small procession walked in the frigid winds to the cemetery where George Fox's mother was buried. So, every year, this patriotic Alaska Native woman, for decades, has quietly visited the unmarked grave of Private George Fox to place a flag on this unmarked grave to remember his service, and that is the only living memory of what this young patriotic Alaska Native soldier did for his country. When her husband Sam passed away in 2014, Gertrude continued this tradition even to this day, as I mentioned, at 91 years old. What a patriot. So here is how it all comes together. When our detective, another Alaskan of the Week, Mike Livingston, finally learned that his own relative through marriage, Gertrude, actually knew where Private Fox was buried, he got to work. The mystery was coming together. He felt like he had enough information to make the official case to the U.S. Government to finally get Private George Fox, this American hero, recognized. He wrote up an affidavit. Gertrude signed it, stating how she had been putting a flag on the unmarked grave site for decades. But still, request after request was ignored by the U.S. Government. So what did they do, Mike and Gertrude? Well, to all Americans and Alaskans watching this, here is what they did. They called their U.S. Senator. This was now in 2020, at the height of COVID. When my office heard about this, my former head of casework, Rachel Bylsma, got immediately onto the case. We all said that this is so important to make sure Private George Fox got the honor and recognition he deserved. So we worked together. And I am proud to say, he is going to be getting that recognition. Here is what is going to happen on Unalaska in the Aleutian Island chain this Monday, 2022 Memorial Day for America: The top military officials in my State, so many members of Private George Fox's family, so many members of the community, myself, and my team are going to gather in Unalaska, and we are going to gather to honor a warrior, a hero, an Unangan Alaskan, an American, on Memorial Day. Gertrude will be there, and Mike will be there, our two Alaskans of the Week. Hundreds of people will be there. There will be a procession from theRussian Orthodox church to the cemetery, and we have now a beautiful 4-foot-high gravestone to be unveiled. Taps will float from a bugle. There will be a 21-gun salute from the 4th Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division. And on Memorial Day in Unalaska, in the Bering Sea, the man who fought and died in World War II as a hero for his country in North Africa, in Italy on Anzio Beach, this American hero who has been forgotten will be recognized because of the work of so many but, in particular, the relentless work of our Alaskans of the Week Mike Livingston and Gertrude Svarny. Private George Fox's service and sacrifice and heroism will finally be recognized on Memorial Day by our Government, and we will have a gravestone befitting of his incredible patriotic service. On that gravestone, which I have seen--it is beautiful--at the bottom there will be engraved three words. These words came from George Fox to his family in his last letter that he wrote from Anzio Beach in a heroic battle a world away from Alaska when he was fighting to save the soul of the world from tyranny. There are three words in that letter--that are now on a gravestone--that meant so much then and, I would argue, mean so much now for our country to this very day. The three words on that headstone are ``Wish all love.'' ``Wish all love.'' The last words of a patriotic Alaska Native, sent home from Italy to his family, who on Memorial Day will finally be recognized due to the heroic, relentless hard work of our two Alaskans of the Week, Mike and Gertrude. Thank you for all you are doing, all you have done for your community, for your State, and for your country. Thank you to George Fox's family and to Private George Fox for his incredible service. I look forward to seeing you all in Unalaska in a few days. It is going to be a great ceremony. Congratulations on being our Alaskans of the Week as we head into Memorial Day weekend. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. SULLIVAN | Senate | CREC-2022-05-26-pt1-PgS2732-2 | null | 4,493 |
formal | Chicago | null | racist | Mr. SULLIVAN. Madam President, it is Thursday, and it is the time of the week that I like to celebrate an amazing person or people in my State who are doing something great for Alaska, great for America, great for the world. It is someone I like to refer to as our Alaskan of the Week--or Alaskans of the Week, plural. So we are doubling up this week because we have two Alaskans that we are going to be commemorating. And I want to acknowledge it has been a couple of rough weeks for America--we all know that--for reasons that are quite obvious. Some tempers here in the Senate have been flaring a little bit. So I wanted to end the week on what is really an incredible, uplifting story, an epic story. It is a bit complicated, so you have to pay attention if you are wanting to hear about just a remarkable course of events in Alaska. And it is a particularly poignant story as we head into Memorial Day weekend, a time when we honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. And I am going to tell, as I mentioned, a very special Memorial Day story--acomplicated one, but one for the history books. This story has twists and turns, dark spots, highlights, and literally a Hollywood ending, one that involves a hero who gave his life for America, what we are celebrating on Monday, but whose heroism and service was only recently acknowledged and even only recently remembered. So, first, I am going to begin the story about a young man who made the ultimate sacrifice for our Nation, an Alaskan native, an indigenous man from Unalaska--Private George Fox. Now, Private George Fox is not our Alaskan of the Week, but the whole story that I am going to tell revolves around Private George Fox, who was killed in action fighting Nazis in World War II in Italy in 1944 and, since 1949, was buried on the island of Unalaska--that is out on the Aleutian island chain in Alaska, the islands way out that go out towards Japan. But he was buried in an unmarked grave and essentially forgotten--no record of military service, no awards for heroism, nothing, forgotten by literally almost everybody but one person, for nearly 80 years. I am also going to talk about two very special people who are our Alaskans of the Week; that is Mike Livingston and Gertrude Svarny, who worked over the years to make sure that Private George Fox's exceptional service is finally going to be officially recognized. And that will happen Monday, on Memorial Day on the island of Unalaska in the Aleutian Island chains back home in Alaska in a ceremony that will take place on Monday. So, as you can tell, this is actually a story of three people: one of them a young soldier killed in action for our country in World War II; one of them a still-living 90-year-old woman, a childhood friend of the young soldier, one of our Alaskans of the Week, Gertrude; another, a man on a mission, a detective with a public servant's heart. It is a story of the invasion of the United States by the Japanese. Many Americans don't know that Japan invaded parts of Alaska. It is a story of racism, discrimination, service, honor, heroism. It is the story of how two people worked to keep history alive and to honor another who was forgotten for his heroism fighting and dying for our country. It is an epic of Alaska--an epic of Alaska--fitting to be memorialized here on the U.S. Senate floor, and, more importantly, memorialized Monday when we honor our veterans and those who died in the service of our country. So, it is a little complicated, but bear with me. Let me start this remarkable story in a remarkable place. This is Unalaska on the Aleutian Island chain. So if you are looking at a map of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands go way out west, actually the Aleutian Islands cross the international date line, way further west than Hawaii. The Aleutian Island chain of Unalaska is a beautiful island about 800 miles southwest of Anchorage in the Bering Sea. It is home to walruses and sea lions; tens of millions of birds migrate through the area. Right now, it is the largest fishing port in the country, and it is home to an incredible group of patriotic people, the Unangan native people, living in an area steeped in fascinating and sometimes very tragic history. So here is a short version of that history. First, when Alaska was a colonial possession of Russia, Russian fur seekers decimated the Aleuts, the native populations on these islands, through warfare, disease, even slavery. Then, 75 years after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, during World War II, Japan actually bombed Unalaska, June 3 and 4, almost 80 years ago today. Then the Japanese invaded and occupied nearby islands on Alaska's Aleutian Island chain. Many Americans don't know that history. The United States--Alaska--was actually occupied by our enemy, Imperial Japan. Eventually, American forces had to drive out the Japanese in a brutal campaign on the Aleutian Islands area. About 1,500 American servicemembers were killed in those battles, 600 missing, and almost 3,500 wounded in action. So that is some of the history of Unalaska and the Aleutian Islands chain during World War II. So, George Fox--at about the same time the Japanese were literally bombing his hometown of Unalaska in 1942, George Fox had volunteered as a patriotic young American Alaska Native to fight for his country and was sent to the other side of the world--Europe, North Africa. Now, we don't know a lot about Private Fox's service, but because of the work of Mike Livingston, our other Alaskan of the Week, who is alive and doing great, we do have some basic information. Here is some of what we know about Private George Fox. He was born January 20, 1920, in Unalaska--again, the Aleutian island that we are taking about on the Aleutian Islands chain. When he was 22 years old, like so many patriotic Alaska Natives, he signed up to serve his country in World War II. By the way, it should be noted and cannot be overstated that throughout history, even though so many Alaska Natives were discriminated against--and still are in some ways--Alaska Natives, certainly in Unalaska but all throughout the whole State, have served at higher rates in the military than any other ethnic group in the country--incredible patriotic service. So Private George Fox from Unalaska goes to war for his country in World War II. At the same time, his hometown is being bombed by the Japanese. He was assigned to Company G in the 179th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division. His unit was first sent to fight the Axis Powers in North Africa, then to Italy, where he landed in Italy on Anzio Beach--a very famous battle--to fight the Germans in the famous Battle of Anzio, where roughly 7,000 Allied servicemembers were killed in action. He survived that and fought his way heroically toward Rome, fighting the Nazis the whole way. Unfortunately, on June 1, 1944, a Nazi bomb exploded near him, and he was killed in action as a young American serving his country--killed in Italy. He is the only known Alaska Unangan from his region to be killed in action during World War II. So about 5 years later, after the war, his remains were removed from Italy and returned to Unalaska in 1949. We now know there was a small funeral at the Russian Orthodox church, where his ashes were buried next to his mom, but his grave was unmarked--unmarked--and it stayed unmarked for decades. Now, that is what we know about Private Fox's military service, not much else. Why? Because there was a fire where all his military records were in the lower 48, and his service records were destroyed. So, frankly, his record in the military was essentially forgotten--forgotten. Now, I think--you can't prove this, but the fact that he was Alaska Native--that there was probably some discrimination here, like, ``Hey, whatever, he is Alaska Native. We are not that worried.'' And so nobody in authority kept his memory alive, his service alive. It was all forgotten, that he was even a soldier. So his memory and his service and his heroism--because these are serious battles in World War II--all faded almost completely to nothing, if it wasn't for our heroic Alaskans of the Week that we are recognizing today. So enter our first Alaskan of the Week, Mike Livingston, also a Native Alaskan, Unangan, and he was determined to remember this vague memory of this guy he had heard about, Private George Fox. Here is a little bit of Mike's story, which is another great story. He was born in Cold Bay, AK, which is another island in the Aleutian Islands chain. He moved to Unalaska, the town we are talking about, in 1978, as a college student to learn the art of building traditional kayaks from the Native elders in the community, and he began to work as a public safety officer. From then until 2003, when he retired, he was an emergency medical technician, a firefighter, a dive rescue specialist, a police officer, a detective in various places throughout Alaska, much of it in Anchorage at the Anchorage Police Department, and he is currently a captain with the Alaska State Defense Force. Along the way--now, this guy is really impressive, what Mike did. He received a master's degree in anthropology and a doctorate in education,all of which he uses as a specialist in his job, also at the Aleutian Pribilof Island Association, and he uses his education and skills also as a detective and fuels his passion for helping people help solve mysteries, particularly in his interest of genealogy and family trees that involve stories that are untold mysteries. A tree nut--a family tree nut--he calls himself, as do his group of friends who dig deep to solve puzzles, the kind of which involve people, historic places, lapses in historic knowledge that have faded into history, which is exactly what happened to Private George Fox. Around 2005, Mike Livingston, our Alaskan of the Week, and his friends started to take on that mission. What happened to Private George Fox? They had heard about him--a fellow Alaska Native who they knew from stories was killed in action fighting somewhere in World War II--but they needed more information. Where was he buried? Nobody seemed to know. Why was he not listed as killed in action in service in World War II? In the U.S. military, when a servicemember is killed in action, the survivors get benefits, and they are entitled to receive full military honors at funerals. And in Mike's culture and in Private Fox's culture--the Unangan culture--when a warrior died protecting their village, statues were carved, songs were written and sung. It has always been a huge honor in the Native culture to be a fallen warrior, but Private George Fox got none of this from America, from his Federal Government, and even from the amazing Alaska Native people. Mike Livingston, the detective with a servant's heart, wanted to right this wrong. He wanted to do it for Private Fox, for his community, for his people, for his State, for his country. So he got to work on this mystery. He began to dig deeper. He called every Federal Agency he could think of to try to get more information about this mysterious Alaska Native whose memory had faded, whose heroism wasn't recognized. But Mike ran into brick wall after brick wall calling Federal Agencies. He was able to get a few tidbits, like the basic information mentioned above, and he also discovered that George Fox's remains were returned to Unalaska in 1949, but nothing else--little else. The mystery of where those remains were--in a grave, an unmarked grave; where Private George Fox was buried--it haunted Mike Livingston. As he said, ``When you compare some of what occurred during World War II, or shortly after World War II, people who were white were highly honored,'' he recently told a reporter, particularly if they were killed in action during the war--but not so for so many Alaska Natives. Eventually, Mike heard that another resident on the island--now we are back on Unalaska--had a piece of the puzzle, a woman who happened to be related to Mike through marriage. Enter our second Alaskan of the Week, 91-year-old artist Gertrude Svarny. Let me spend a few minutes talking about her incredible patriotic story. Gertrude was born in 1930 on Unalaska, the island out in the Aleutian Islands chain, the island bombed by the Japanese. She was also Alaska Native. Her family lived next to the Fox family. George Fox was about 8 years older than she was. George and Gertrude's older brother were good friends. So Gertrude remembers George. She said the whole island loved him. He was kind, funny, full of life, and obviously brave. As I mentioned, in 1942, George Fox left to go fight World War II for our great Nation, right at the time George and Gertrude's village, Unalaska, was bombed by the Japanese. And here is another story most Americans don't know about. After that happened, the U.S. Government took the Alaska Native people on the Aleutian Islands chain and put them into internment camps--not White people, only Alaska Native people. The treatment of these great patriotic American citizens in these camps is a dark spot in American history that, as I mentioned, not many Americans are aware of. Camps were basically abandoned buildings. The conditions were awful--crowded, unheated, unsanitary. Many died in the camps as a result of these horrendous conditions. Three years later, when the war was finally over, the people of Unalaska--the Native people of Unalaska--were allowed to go home to their community after being in these internment camps, but their homes were ransacked and burned. Many of their villages on the island were destroyed, another dark spot in our country's history. Remember, these were our citizens, our country, and the Native people, if they weren't at home, many of them were fighting overseas in the Pacific and in Europe, like Private George Fox. So Gertrude comes home from the internment camp. She is at Unalaska now, and she marries another patriot named Sam Svarny, her husband, who was in the Army, originally from Chicago, and he was stationed in Unalaska. Another patriot in this story, Sam served in World War II and later served in Vietnam. Gertrude became an artist--a renowned artist in Alaska. She is actually very famous for her work that she makes out of traditional materials, and she is in collections all over the world. And even though her childhood was marked by the wrongs inflicted on her family and her by her own country, she and her husband have remained fiercely patriotic. Even interment hasn't dissuaded the patriotism of the Alaska Native people. And one of the ways Gertrude displayed this patriotism, which still burns in her to this day--remember, she is 91 years old--was that every Memorial Day, they put flags on the grave sites on the island of Unalaska to those who served in the military. Gertrude and her husband Sam always remembered when she was a young girl the small service that she had attended, a funeral service in 1949, of the young, spritely teenager George Fox, a friend of Gertrude's who died fighting the Nazis more than 5,000 miles away from Alaska in Italy. The service was in the winter, she remembers. It was very cold. After the service, the small procession walked in the frigid winds to the cemetery where George Fox's mother was buried. So, every year, this patriotic Alaska Native woman, for decades, has quietly visited the unmarked grave of Private George Fox to place a flag on this unmarked grave to remember his service, and that is the only living memory of what this young patriotic Alaska Native soldier did for his country. When her husband Sam passed away in 2014, Gertrude continued this tradition even to this day, as I mentioned, at 91 years old. What a patriot. So here is how it all comes together. When our detective, another Alaskan of the Week, Mike Livingston, finally learned that his own relative through marriage, Gertrude, actually knew where Private Fox was buried, he got to work. The mystery was coming together. He felt like he had enough information to make the official case to the U.S. Government to finally get Private George Fox, this American hero, recognized. He wrote up an affidavit. Gertrude signed it, stating how she had been putting a flag on the unmarked grave site for decades. But still, request after request was ignored by the U.S. Government. So what did they do, Mike and Gertrude? Well, to all Americans and Alaskans watching this, here is what they did. They called their U.S. Senator. This was now in 2020, at the height of COVID. When my office heard about this, my former head of casework, Rachel Bylsma, got immediately onto the case. We all said that this is so important to make sure Private George Fox got the honor and recognition he deserved. So we worked together. And I am proud to say, he is going to be getting that recognition. Here is what is going to happen on Unalaska in the Aleutian Island chain this Monday, 2022 Memorial Day for America: The top military officials in my State, so many members of Private George Fox's family, so many members of the community, myself, and my team are going to gather in Unalaska, and we are going to gather to honor a warrior, a hero, an Unangan Alaskan, an American, on Memorial Day. Gertrude will be there, and Mike will be there, our two Alaskans of the Week. Hundreds of people will be there. There will be a procession from theRussian Orthodox church to the cemetery, and we have now a beautiful 4-foot-high gravestone to be unveiled. Taps will float from a bugle. There will be a 21-gun salute from the 4th Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division. And on Memorial Day in Unalaska, in the Bering Sea, the man who fought and died in World War II as a hero for his country in North Africa, in Italy on Anzio Beach, this American hero who has been forgotten will be recognized because of the work of so many but, in particular, the relentless work of our Alaskans of the Week Mike Livingston and Gertrude Svarny. Private George Fox's service and sacrifice and heroism will finally be recognized on Memorial Day by our Government, and we will have a gravestone befitting of his incredible patriotic service. On that gravestone, which I have seen--it is beautiful--at the bottom there will be engraved three words. These words came from George Fox to his family in his last letter that he wrote from Anzio Beach in a heroic battle a world away from Alaska when he was fighting to save the soul of the world from tyranny. There are three words in that letter--that are now on a gravestone--that meant so much then and, I would argue, mean so much now for our country to this very day. The three words on that headstone are ``Wish all love.'' ``Wish all love.'' The last words of a patriotic Alaska Native, sent home from Italy to his family, who on Memorial Day will finally be recognized due to the heroic, relentless hard work of our two Alaskans of the Week, Mike and Gertrude. Thank you for all you are doing, all you have done for your community, for your State, and for your country. Thank you to George Fox's family and to Private George Fox for his incredible service. I look forward to seeing you all in Unalaska in a few days. It is going to be a great ceremony. Congratulations on being our Alaskans of the Week as we head into Memorial Day weekend. I yield the floor. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. SULLIVAN | Senate | CREC-2022-05-26-pt1-PgS2732-2 | null | 4,494 |
formal | Baltimore | null | racist | Mr. CARDIN. Madam President, another mass shooting, another elementary school; 19 children, ages 7 through 10, gunned down; two adults killed. They were in our schools--an elementary school, a place that parents send their children expecting it to be a safe zone where they can learn and interact with other children and be safe from things like being attacked and shot. An elementary school we are talking about, the anguish of the families who have lost their children or lost their loved ones. Children who witnessed this will be traumatized for life, scarred by what happened in Texas. And then last week, we saw in Buffalo 10 people gunned down while shopping in a grocery store, very much racially motivated by a White supremacist. This is happening throughout our country. We have had gun violence in Baltimore. A few years ago, we had gun violence at Great Mills High School in Maryland. We are seeing this happen over and over and over again. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. CARDIN | Senate | CREC-2022-05-26-pt1-PgS2732 | null | 4,495 |
formal | single | null | homophobic | Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, this coming Monday is Memorial Day, the day we set aside to honor the more than 1.1 million Americans who have given their lives in military service to our Nation. It is a solemn day of remembrance and has a special resonance in my state. One of America's first Memorial Day ceremonies occurred in Illinois. It was April 1866--barely a year after the end of America's terrible Civil War. Three returning veterans from that great conflict were waiting for services to begin at a church in Carbondale when they saw a young woman with two infants approach a small, unmarked grave in the church cemetery, place flowers on the grave, and kneel in prayer. The veterans, deeply moved, collected wildflowers and placed them at all of the veterans' graves in the churchyard. They then arranged to host a parade of veterans to honor the war dead resting in the town's cemetery. More than 200 veterans showed up for that parade--one of America's first Memorial Day parades. Among the marchers was General John Logan, a Civil War hero and proud son of Illinois. The following year, General Logan was appointed the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic. One of his first acts as commander in chief was to call for a national day of remembrance to honor the soldiers who sacrificed their lives so that America could receive a ``new birth of freedom.'' In the Army's General Order No. 11--the ``Memorial Day Order''--General Logan wrote of his hope that the day of remembrance would be ``kept up from year to year, [as long as] a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades.'' On this Memorial Day, more than a century and a half later, we remember all of the American patriots who have fallen in battles--from Antietam, to the Argonne Forest, to Afghanistan. General Logan called their deaths ``the cost of a free and undivided republic.'' In these fractious times, when our Nation sometimes feels, again, like a house divided, may we remember the price those fallen heroes paid to preserve our Union. And may we also remember the duty we each bear to preserve the priceless gift for which they gave their lives--this Nation, free and undivided. On a related note, I want to take a moment to wish a belated happy birthday to an American hero who returned from war. Sgt. Victor Butler is that last surviving Tuskegee Airman in his home State of Rhode Island and one of the last of that legendary Band of Brothers in our Nation. Last Saturday, May 21, Mr. Butler celebrated his 100th birthday. When he was a young man, he and the other members of the Tuskegee Airmen helped to save the world from the tyranny of fascism--and he helped to loosen the grip of racism on America. In the weeks before his 100th birthday, Mr. Butler told family and friends all he wanted for his centennial celebration was a card. He didn't want folks to make a fuss or go to any great expense. One of his nieces posted his wish on social media--and word spread. He thought he might receive a few cards. At last count, Mr. Butler had received more than 40,000 cards and video greetings from people in every State in the Union and as far away as Japan, South Korea, and Germany. Last Saturday, on his birthday, his hometown held a parade in his honor. And he received a signed football and a jersey with the number ``100'' on the back, hand-delivered by the owner of his favorite football team, the New England Patriots--a well-deserved tribute to a real-life hero. Like the tradition of Memorial Day, the Tuskegee Airmen have a special connection to my State. The first airfield where they trained--before Tuskegee--was Chanute Field in Rantoul, IL, near Champaign. The spot where that airfield stood is marked proudly today with signs that read ``Birthplace of the Tuskegee Airmen.'' And in 2016, Illinois renamed a stretch of Interstate 57 on the South Side of Chicago as the Tuskegee Airmen Memorial Trail. It is a fitting tribute, given how many Tuskegee Airman had roots in the Chicago area. African-Americans have fought and died for America's freedom since Crispus Attucks became the first American to fall in our War for Independence. As the first African-American aviators ever to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps, the Tuskegee Airman occupy a special chapter in our Nation's history. They fought in World War II, at a time when the U.S. Armed Forces were still segregated, and our Nation was still riven with racially discriminatory laws and attitudes. Their original mission was to serve as escort pilots for other American flyers, to protect them from enemy fire. The Tuskegee Airmen also flew bombing missions themselves. Officially, they were known as the 99th Pursuit Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group. But the pilots whose flights they protected gave them a nickname. They called them the Red Tails, or the Red-Tailed Angels, due to the distinctive color on their aircraftwings. Their leader was the legendary Captain Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., who would go on to become the first African-American brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force. His father, Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., was the first Black brigadier general in the U.S. Army. There were a total of 932 Tuskegee Airmen pilots, and another 10,000 Tuskegee Airmen--and women--who served as mechanics, radio operators, and other essential support positions. They conducted more than 700 bomber escort missions--and they never lost a single lost a single aircraft--not one. They were the only fighter group in World War II with a perfect record of protecting bombers. White U.S. military pilots were permitted to fly no more than 52 missions during World War II. Some Tuskegee Airman flew as many as 100 missions. Sixty-six Tuskegee Airmen died in combat. Thirty-three were held as prisoners of war. In March 2007, the Tuskegee Airmen as a group were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor Congress can bestow. The ceremony was held in the Rotunda of the Capitol. I will never forget the sight of 300 Tuskegee Airman dressed in red sports jackets, saluting the American flag in that hallowed space. Some were in wheelchairs. But when the National Anthem played, they all rose to their feet and stood straight and proud. Just before the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, I had the privilege of hosting several Tuskegee Airmen with Illinois roots in my office. Then-Senator Obama stopped by to pay his respects. It was a historic and humbling moment. I met Lt. Colonel George Sherman, who grew up in Moline and joined the Army Air Corps in 1944 at the age of 18. He had to take the physical twice; he was rejected the first time because of his buck teeth, but he didn't give up. He ended up serving 22 years in the Air Force. First Lieutenant Shelby Westbook was born in Arkansas and lost both of his parents when he was just 12. He flew 60 missions over 12 countries in Europe. After the war, he wanted to attend engineering school. The first school he applied to rejected him because it didn't accept Black students. He moved to Chicago, earned a degree, and worked as an electrical engineer for decades. First Lieutenant Robert Martin famously claimed to have flown ``63 and a half missions.'' On his 64th combat mission, he was shot down over Yugoslavia. He was hidden by antifascist partisans until he could return to his unit. After the war, he worked as an electrical engineer for the city of Chicago for nearly 40 years. Flight Officer John Lyle--``Captain Jack'' to his friends--grew up on Chicago's South Side. He flew 26 combat missions. After the war, he earned a college degree but couldn't find work in his field so, for a time, he washed windows of downtown skyscrapers. Eventually, he owned his own insurance agency, a fish and chicken restaurant, and a tree-trimming service. Lt. Bev Dunjill flew more than 100 combat missions between World War II and the Korean war. He later worked for the Illinois Department of Human Rights. All of those heroes are gone now. But their valor and impact are not forgotten. The Tuskegee Airmen and the all-Black Montfort Point Marines were among nearly 1 million Black Americans who served in World War II. Most saw the war as a battle on two fronts--one against fascism overseas and the other against racially discriminatory laws and attitudes in America. Their goal, they said, was ``the Double V,'' victory for democracy overseas and at home. The change at home did not come easily, but it did come. Three years after World War II ended, President Truman ordered an end to segregation in the U.S. Armed Forces. And the service and sacrifice of the Tuskegee Airmen and other Black veterans and leaders helped set the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Today, as the last surviving Tuskegee Airman near their 100th birthdays and we lose hundreds of World War II veterans each day, we are painfully aware that the democracy and unity they paid such a high price for is under threat, both overseas and at home. The peace of Europe and democracy itself is under fire from Russia in Ukraine. And our sense of security and national unity seems to be fraying at home. Violence--especially gun violence--threatens us all, even our children. Our progress against division and discrimination often feels shaky. We are pitted against each other by those who believe that conflict and anger is good for their political interests or their profit sheets. But it doesn't have to be this way. As we prepare to remember and honor those who gave their lives for our freedom, let us resolve to do our part, in our time, to keep our Nation free and undivided. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. DURBIN | Senate | CREC-2022-05-26-pt1-PgS2740-2 | null | 4,496 |
formal | Chicago | null | racist | Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, this coming Monday is Memorial Day, the day we set aside to honor the more than 1.1 million Americans who have given their lives in military service to our Nation. It is a solemn day of remembrance and has a special resonance in my state. One of America's first Memorial Day ceremonies occurred in Illinois. It was April 1866--barely a year after the end of America's terrible Civil War. Three returning veterans from that great conflict were waiting for services to begin at a church in Carbondale when they saw a young woman with two infants approach a small, unmarked grave in the church cemetery, place flowers on the grave, and kneel in prayer. The veterans, deeply moved, collected wildflowers and placed them at all of the veterans' graves in the churchyard. They then arranged to host a parade of veterans to honor the war dead resting in the town's cemetery. More than 200 veterans showed up for that parade--one of America's first Memorial Day parades. Among the marchers was General John Logan, a Civil War hero and proud son of Illinois. The following year, General Logan was appointed the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic. One of his first acts as commander in chief was to call for a national day of remembrance to honor the soldiers who sacrificed their lives so that America could receive a ``new birth of freedom.'' In the Army's General Order No. 11--the ``Memorial Day Order''--General Logan wrote of his hope that the day of remembrance would be ``kept up from year to year, [as long as] a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades.'' On this Memorial Day, more than a century and a half later, we remember all of the American patriots who have fallen in battles--from Antietam, to the Argonne Forest, to Afghanistan. General Logan called their deaths ``the cost of a free and undivided republic.'' In these fractious times, when our Nation sometimes feels, again, like a house divided, may we remember the price those fallen heroes paid to preserve our Union. And may we also remember the duty we each bear to preserve the priceless gift for which they gave their lives--this Nation, free and undivided. On a related note, I want to take a moment to wish a belated happy birthday to an American hero who returned from war. Sgt. Victor Butler is that last surviving Tuskegee Airman in his home State of Rhode Island and one of the last of that legendary Band of Brothers in our Nation. Last Saturday, May 21, Mr. Butler celebrated his 100th birthday. When he was a young man, he and the other members of the Tuskegee Airmen helped to save the world from the tyranny of fascism--and he helped to loosen the grip of racism on America. In the weeks before his 100th birthday, Mr. Butler told family and friends all he wanted for his centennial celebration was a card. He didn't want folks to make a fuss or go to any great expense. One of his nieces posted his wish on social media--and word spread. He thought he might receive a few cards. At last count, Mr. Butler had received more than 40,000 cards and video greetings from people in every State in the Union and as far away as Japan, South Korea, and Germany. Last Saturday, on his birthday, his hometown held a parade in his honor. And he received a signed football and a jersey with the number ``100'' on the back, hand-delivered by the owner of his favorite football team, the New England Patriots--a well-deserved tribute to a real-life hero. Like the tradition of Memorial Day, the Tuskegee Airmen have a special connection to my State. The first airfield where they trained--before Tuskegee--was Chanute Field in Rantoul, IL, near Champaign. The spot where that airfield stood is marked proudly today with signs that read ``Birthplace of the Tuskegee Airmen.'' And in 2016, Illinois renamed a stretch of Interstate 57 on the South Side of Chicago as the Tuskegee Airmen Memorial Trail. It is a fitting tribute, given how many Tuskegee Airman had roots in the Chicago area. African-Americans have fought and died for America's freedom since Crispus Attucks became the first American to fall in our War for Independence. As the first African-American aviators ever to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps, the Tuskegee Airman occupy a special chapter in our Nation's history. They fought in World War II, at a time when the U.S. Armed Forces were still segregated, and our Nation was still riven with racially discriminatory laws and attitudes. Their original mission was to serve as escort pilots for other American flyers, to protect them from enemy fire. The Tuskegee Airmen also flew bombing missions themselves. Officially, they were known as the 99th Pursuit Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group. But the pilots whose flights they protected gave them a nickname. They called them the Red Tails, or the Red-Tailed Angels, due to the distinctive color on their aircraftwings. Their leader was the legendary Captain Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., who would go on to become the first African-American brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force. His father, Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., was the first Black brigadier general in the U.S. Army. There were a total of 932 Tuskegee Airmen pilots, and another 10,000 Tuskegee Airmen--and women--who served as mechanics, radio operators, and other essential support positions. They conducted more than 700 bomber escort missions--and they never lost a single lost a single aircraft--not one. They were the only fighter group in World War II with a perfect record of protecting bombers. White U.S. military pilots were permitted to fly no more than 52 missions during World War II. Some Tuskegee Airman flew as many as 100 missions. Sixty-six Tuskegee Airmen died in combat. Thirty-three were held as prisoners of war. In March 2007, the Tuskegee Airmen as a group were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor Congress can bestow. The ceremony was held in the Rotunda of the Capitol. I will never forget the sight of 300 Tuskegee Airman dressed in red sports jackets, saluting the American flag in that hallowed space. Some were in wheelchairs. But when the National Anthem played, they all rose to their feet and stood straight and proud. Just before the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, I had the privilege of hosting several Tuskegee Airmen with Illinois roots in my office. Then-Senator Obama stopped by to pay his respects. It was a historic and humbling moment. I met Lt. Colonel George Sherman, who grew up in Moline and joined the Army Air Corps in 1944 at the age of 18. He had to take the physical twice; he was rejected the first time because of his buck teeth, but he didn't give up. He ended up serving 22 years in the Air Force. First Lieutenant Shelby Westbook was born in Arkansas and lost both of his parents when he was just 12. He flew 60 missions over 12 countries in Europe. After the war, he wanted to attend engineering school. The first school he applied to rejected him because it didn't accept Black students. He moved to Chicago, earned a degree, and worked as an electrical engineer for decades. First Lieutenant Robert Martin famously claimed to have flown ``63 and a half missions.'' On his 64th combat mission, he was shot down over Yugoslavia. He was hidden by antifascist partisans until he could return to his unit. After the war, he worked as an electrical engineer for the city of Chicago for nearly 40 years. Flight Officer John Lyle--``Captain Jack'' to his friends--grew up on Chicago's South Side. He flew 26 combat missions. After the war, he earned a college degree but couldn't find work in his field so, for a time, he washed windows of downtown skyscrapers. Eventually, he owned his own insurance agency, a fish and chicken restaurant, and a tree-trimming service. Lt. Bev Dunjill flew more than 100 combat missions between World War II and the Korean war. He later worked for the Illinois Department of Human Rights. All of those heroes are gone now. But their valor and impact are not forgotten. The Tuskegee Airmen and the all-Black Montfort Point Marines were among nearly 1 million Black Americans who served in World War II. Most saw the war as a battle on two fronts--one against fascism overseas and the other against racially discriminatory laws and attitudes in America. Their goal, they said, was ``the Double V,'' victory for democracy overseas and at home. The change at home did not come easily, but it did come. Three years after World War II ended, President Truman ordered an end to segregation in the U.S. Armed Forces. And the service and sacrifice of the Tuskegee Airmen and other Black veterans and leaders helped set the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Today, as the last surviving Tuskegee Airman near their 100th birthdays and we lose hundreds of World War II veterans each day, we are painfully aware that the democracy and unity they paid such a high price for is under threat, both overseas and at home. The peace of Europe and democracy itself is under fire from Russia in Ukraine. And our sense of security and national unity seems to be fraying at home. Violence--especially gun violence--threatens us all, even our children. Our progress against division and discrimination often feels shaky. We are pitted against each other by those who believe that conflict and anger is good for their political interests or their profit sheets. But it doesn't have to be this way. As we prepare to remember and honor those who gave their lives for our freedom, let us resolve to do our part, in our time, to keep our Nation free and undivided. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. DURBIN | Senate | CREC-2022-05-26-pt1-PgS2740-2 | null | 4,497 |
formal | buck | null | racist | Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, this coming Monday is Memorial Day, the day we set aside to honor the more than 1.1 million Americans who have given their lives in military service to our Nation. It is a solemn day of remembrance and has a special resonance in my state. One of America's first Memorial Day ceremonies occurred in Illinois. It was April 1866--barely a year after the end of America's terrible Civil War. Three returning veterans from that great conflict were waiting for services to begin at a church in Carbondale when they saw a young woman with two infants approach a small, unmarked grave in the church cemetery, place flowers on the grave, and kneel in prayer. The veterans, deeply moved, collected wildflowers and placed them at all of the veterans' graves in the churchyard. They then arranged to host a parade of veterans to honor the war dead resting in the town's cemetery. More than 200 veterans showed up for that parade--one of America's first Memorial Day parades. Among the marchers was General John Logan, a Civil War hero and proud son of Illinois. The following year, General Logan was appointed the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic. One of his first acts as commander in chief was to call for a national day of remembrance to honor the soldiers who sacrificed their lives so that America could receive a ``new birth of freedom.'' In the Army's General Order No. 11--the ``Memorial Day Order''--General Logan wrote of his hope that the day of remembrance would be ``kept up from year to year, [as long as] a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades.'' On this Memorial Day, more than a century and a half later, we remember all of the American patriots who have fallen in battles--from Antietam, to the Argonne Forest, to Afghanistan. General Logan called their deaths ``the cost of a free and undivided republic.'' In these fractious times, when our Nation sometimes feels, again, like a house divided, may we remember the price those fallen heroes paid to preserve our Union. And may we also remember the duty we each bear to preserve the priceless gift for which they gave their lives--this Nation, free and undivided. On a related note, I want to take a moment to wish a belated happy birthday to an American hero who returned from war. Sgt. Victor Butler is that last surviving Tuskegee Airman in his home State of Rhode Island and one of the last of that legendary Band of Brothers in our Nation. Last Saturday, May 21, Mr. Butler celebrated his 100th birthday. When he was a young man, he and the other members of the Tuskegee Airmen helped to save the world from the tyranny of fascism--and he helped to loosen the grip of racism on America. In the weeks before his 100th birthday, Mr. Butler told family and friends all he wanted for his centennial celebration was a card. He didn't want folks to make a fuss or go to any great expense. One of his nieces posted his wish on social media--and word spread. He thought he might receive a few cards. At last count, Mr. Butler had received more than 40,000 cards and video greetings from people in every State in the Union and as far away as Japan, South Korea, and Germany. Last Saturday, on his birthday, his hometown held a parade in his honor. And he received a signed football and a jersey with the number ``100'' on the back, hand-delivered by the owner of his favorite football team, the New England Patriots--a well-deserved tribute to a real-life hero. Like the tradition of Memorial Day, the Tuskegee Airmen have a special connection to my State. The first airfield where they trained--before Tuskegee--was Chanute Field in Rantoul, IL, near Champaign. The spot where that airfield stood is marked proudly today with signs that read ``Birthplace of the Tuskegee Airmen.'' And in 2016, Illinois renamed a stretch of Interstate 57 on the South Side of Chicago as the Tuskegee Airmen Memorial Trail. It is a fitting tribute, given how many Tuskegee Airman had roots in the Chicago area. African-Americans have fought and died for America's freedom since Crispus Attucks became the first American to fall in our War for Independence. As the first African-American aviators ever to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps, the Tuskegee Airman occupy a special chapter in our Nation's history. They fought in World War II, at a time when the U.S. Armed Forces were still segregated, and our Nation was still riven with racially discriminatory laws and attitudes. Their original mission was to serve as escort pilots for other American flyers, to protect them from enemy fire. The Tuskegee Airmen also flew bombing missions themselves. Officially, they were known as the 99th Pursuit Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group. But the pilots whose flights they protected gave them a nickname. They called them the Red Tails, or the Red-Tailed Angels, due to the distinctive color on their aircraftwings. Their leader was the legendary Captain Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., who would go on to become the first African-American brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force. His father, Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., was the first Black brigadier general in the U.S. Army. There were a total of 932 Tuskegee Airmen pilots, and another 10,000 Tuskegee Airmen--and women--who served as mechanics, radio operators, and other essential support positions. They conducted more than 700 bomber escort missions--and they never lost a single lost a single aircraft--not one. They were the only fighter group in World War II with a perfect record of protecting bombers. White U.S. military pilots were permitted to fly no more than 52 missions during World War II. Some Tuskegee Airman flew as many as 100 missions. Sixty-six Tuskegee Airmen died in combat. Thirty-three were held as prisoners of war. In March 2007, the Tuskegee Airmen as a group were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor Congress can bestow. The ceremony was held in the Rotunda of the Capitol. I will never forget the sight of 300 Tuskegee Airman dressed in red sports jackets, saluting the American flag in that hallowed space. Some were in wheelchairs. But when the National Anthem played, they all rose to their feet and stood straight and proud. Just before the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, I had the privilege of hosting several Tuskegee Airmen with Illinois roots in my office. Then-Senator Obama stopped by to pay his respects. It was a historic and humbling moment. I met Lt. Colonel George Sherman, who grew up in Moline and joined the Army Air Corps in 1944 at the age of 18. He had to take the physical twice; he was rejected the first time because of his buck teeth, but he didn't give up. He ended up serving 22 years in the Air Force. First Lieutenant Shelby Westbook was born in Arkansas and lost both of his parents when he was just 12. He flew 60 missions over 12 countries in Europe. After the war, he wanted to attend engineering school. The first school he applied to rejected him because it didn't accept Black students. He moved to Chicago, earned a degree, and worked as an electrical engineer for decades. First Lieutenant Robert Martin famously claimed to have flown ``63 and a half missions.'' On his 64th combat mission, he was shot down over Yugoslavia. He was hidden by antifascist partisans until he could return to his unit. After the war, he worked as an electrical engineer for the city of Chicago for nearly 40 years. Flight Officer John Lyle--``Captain Jack'' to his friends--grew up on Chicago's South Side. He flew 26 combat missions. After the war, he earned a college degree but couldn't find work in his field so, for a time, he washed windows of downtown skyscrapers. Eventually, he owned his own insurance agency, a fish and chicken restaurant, and a tree-trimming service. Lt. Bev Dunjill flew more than 100 combat missions between World War II and the Korean war. He later worked for the Illinois Department of Human Rights. All of those heroes are gone now. But their valor and impact are not forgotten. The Tuskegee Airmen and the all-Black Montfort Point Marines were among nearly 1 million Black Americans who served in World War II. Most saw the war as a battle on two fronts--one against fascism overseas and the other against racially discriminatory laws and attitudes in America. Their goal, they said, was ``the Double V,'' victory for democracy overseas and at home. The change at home did not come easily, but it did come. Three years after World War II ended, President Truman ordered an end to segregation in the U.S. Armed Forces. And the service and sacrifice of the Tuskegee Airmen and other Black veterans and leaders helped set the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Today, as the last surviving Tuskegee Airman near their 100th birthdays and we lose hundreds of World War II veterans each day, we are painfully aware that the democracy and unity they paid such a high price for is under threat, both overseas and at home. The peace of Europe and democracy itself is under fire from Russia in Ukraine. And our sense of security and national unity seems to be fraying at home. Violence--especially gun violence--threatens us all, even our children. Our progress against division and discrimination often feels shaky. We are pitted against each other by those who believe that conflict and anger is good for their political interests or their profit sheets. But it doesn't have to be this way. As we prepare to remember and honor those who gave their lives for our freedom, let us resolve to do our part, in our time, to keep our Nation free and undivided. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. DURBIN | Senate | CREC-2022-05-26-pt1-PgS2740-2 | null | 4,498 |
formal | Reagan | null | white supremacist | Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, in 1988, President Ronald Reagan first recognized May as National Foster Care Month. Each year since then, the month of May has been recognized as a time to bring awareness to youth in foster care. I thank my colleagues for once again unanimously passing a resolution to recognize the experiences of youth and families in the foster care system and celebrate those who work to improve their lives. Organizations in Iowa and around the country tirelessly serve kids and families in foster care and the foster parents who open their homes to kids in need. I salute these organizations and individuals for their year-round efforts to support the kids most in need. In 2020, there were over 400,000 kids in foster care, including over 4,000 kids in Iowa. During the pandemic, there was a drop in reports of child abuse, as well as entries into foster care and exits from foster care. There were the fewest adoptions from foster care since 2016 with 8,000 fewer children being adopted compared to the previous year. However, Iowa deserves recognition for being one of only nine States to increase adoptions from foster care during 2020. Permanency for youth in foster care is so important, and I am glad that Iowa continued to make this a priority during the pandemic. Older youth in foster care and adults who experienced foster care as a child can speak to what worked for them and what didn't work. These young adults should always have a seat at the table. When I founded the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth in 2009, the special focus was to hear directly from youth themselves. Over and over again, I have heard the same thing from kids in foster care: They want a mom and dad. They want a family and a place to call home. All children, no matter their circumstances, deserve a permanent, loving home and consistent, caring adults in their lives. We know that just having one caring and consistent adult can meaningfully improve the lives of kids in the long-term. For some kids, this can be a biological parent who receives the support they need to safely care for their child. For others, a foster parent, mentor or court-appointed special advocate can be that adult. My resolution marks May 31 as a particular day to recognize and show appreciation for foster parents. Congress has worked to expand access to prevention services in the hopes of keeping families out of foster care in the first place. But in addition to this, it is crucial for foster parents to get the support they need to continue serving kids in their communities. In Iowa, almost every county has a shortage of trained foster parents who are able to provide a temporary home for kids. Without volunteer foster parents, kids who cannot remain safely at home end up sleeping in hotels and in the offices of social workers. Moving forward, Congress must continue to work to find better solutions and secure better outcomes for youth in foster care. It is clear that there is no one answer for kids in foster care. Some can be reunified with their families; others are best cared for by adoptive parents or a kinship caregiver. But the goal should always be the same: to protect kids from neglect and abuse and provide them with love and support. I thank my colleagues for unanimously passing my resolution honoring May as National Foster Care Month once again and look forward to continuing to work on this issue. | 2020-01-06 | Mr. GRASSLEY | Senate | CREC-2022-05-26-pt1-PgS2741-3 | null | 4,499 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.