Democracy Restoration Act of 2017

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to the engage in a colloquy with two of my colleagues.

Mr. President, I am here on the floor to talk about legislation that helps our national parks, which is something that everyone on this floor has been supportive of over the years.

I am here with a couple of my colleagues who have spent a lot of time and effort being focused on that issue. One is Senator Angus King, who is an Independent, although he organizes over there with the Democrats. He and his colleague, Senator Mark Warner--a Democrat from Virginia-- have been very involved in this issue and have introduced legislation to address the unmet needs in our parks, which is a critical issue right now.

There is a $12 billion deferred maintenance backlog for our national parks. Many of our roads and bridges and water systems and railroads in my home State--where we have a railroad running through a national park--are crumbling, and we need to address it. So we are going to hear a little from Senator King about that.

The other colleague I want to talk about is Senator Alexander. He has been a champion for the parks over the years. In fact, my recollection is that a few decades ago, President Ronald Reagan named him to a commission on the outdoors. It was probably when he was the Governor of Tennessee--one of the many jobs he has had, including being the Secretary of Education and the president of the University of Tennessee. Through all of his jobs and throughout his lifetime, he has been a huge supporter of the national parks and understands as well as anybody else--given that he is from Tennessee, where they have lots of unmet needs--the desperate need, right now, for us to figure out a way to address this maintenance backlog.

I mentioned $12 billion. That is a big price tag, and it is more than the funding that we give the parks every year could possibly accommodate. Again, it is about long-term capital costs. I think it was Senator Alexander and others who said it is almost like we have a debt unpaid, and that debt needs to be paid in order for us to continue to have our national parks be the shining example for our country and, really, for the rest of the world. There were 330 million visitors last year at our national parks. Think about that. Visitation is up; yet you have this crumbling infrastructure and huge issues that must be addressed.

We have come up with a creative way to deal with it by taking the revenue from the offshore and onshore Federal energy projects and saying, OK, if it is on Federal land, some of the royalties come to the Federal Government. Let's not take the money that is already going to the Land and Water Conservation Fund and other good purposes; let's take half of the part that has no other allocation currently and use it to address this issue. By doing so, we think we can address half of the backlog--about $6 billion over the next 5 years.

It so happens that the National Park Service has been asked to look at all of these projects and come up with which ones are of immediate concern, where there is a true crisis--when you have to address it now or the need is going to get much greater and when, by the way, the taxpayers' costs are going to increase dramatically because this is a compounding problem. If you don't fix the roof, then you end up having to repair and replace the entire building.

We believe there is a way to do this, a sensible way for us to use some of this funding. Guess what. So do a lot of other people all around the country. We have support from all kinds of groups that are supporting the parks around the country. There are conservation groups and groups that care a lot about what the experience is of the visitors at the parks.

We also have support from our colleagues in the House, as they have a companion bill that is bipartisan also. Republicans and Democrats alike are supporting it. It has gotten strong support in their committees over there, as this bill has gotten in our committee here. In fact, it got out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee with a big bipartisan vote.

Finally--and in some respects, maybe most importantly--as a former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the administration is supporting it. Sometimes the administration is careful about supporting proposals that have to do with this sort of spending--the mandatory spending, so-called--that comes from the revenues of these natural gas and oil resources that are on Federal lands, offshore and onshore.

So we have the Trump administration supporting it, and we have so many colleagues on both sides of the aisle supporting it, and we have so many outside groups supporting it. Why? It is just time to do it. It is a very sensible idea that will actually save taxpayer dollars over the long haul because, again, by fixing these crumbling projects and infrastructure, we will not have the huge additional costs that will be borne otherwise. Let's face it--these parks are our treasures and our legacy, and we need to protect them.

With that, I ask my colleague from Tennessee to say a few words and my colleague from Maine to say a few words in whatever order they would like to speak.

Let me finally say--and this is on a sad note--that on Monday, I learned that my colleague from Tennessee, who is about to speak, has decided that at age 78, it is time for him to enjoy a more peaceful and enjoyable lifestyle outside the Senate. He will not be running for reelection in 2 years. Yet 2 years is a long time, and we are going to get a lot done together. This bill is one of them.

I am going to miss him a lot. He is the best legislator, I believe, in the Senate. He knows how to get things done, and that is saying a lot, as there are a lot of great legislators here. He can bring together disparate parties, not just Democrats and Republicans but sometimes those within our own party. Of the personalities and so on that are not easy to deal with, he manages to smooth all of the feathers and get things done, and this park bill has been an example of that.

He has been a leader on this issue, and I have had a great experience in working with him already. Again, I hope, in working together, this will be one of the many legacy items about which he will get to talk to his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

With that, I turn it over to Senator King from Maine and then to Senator Alexander from Tennessee.

Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of both of my colleagues from Maine and Tennessee. They are both absolutely right. This legislation is ready to be passed. We have done the hard work and the research. We have looked at a number of creative ways to handle this backlog that everybody wants to get at.

Everybody agrees that our national parks are the jewels of our country, and we need to address them. Everybody knows that if you don't fix the roof and the building ends up falling down, you have to pay a lot more. So if this is to the point where this is a debt unpaid, it is also a debt that grows because it compounds over time. These are two former Governors who just spoke, and they did this in their own States, capital budgeting; in other words, not just looking at your annual expenses--in this case, park rangers and naturalists--but actually looking at how to take a building that is about to fall down and put an enormous amount of expense into that to ensure that you save money over time.

I will say that I have been all around my State. We don't have parks that are quite as big as Acadia or the Smokies, but we do have a lot of new parks in Ohio. One is Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which is actually number 13 in the country now in visitation, between Akron and Cleveland, OH. It is a fantastic opportunity for young people--school kids--to come every year. By the way, there is lots of volunteer work going on at all of these parts, including in Cuyahoga Valley. So we are not talking about displacing the volunteer work that is being done. It is very effective at building the trails and ensuring that young people can be involved in helping our parks if they have an opportunity to do so.

There are also a lot of friends groups out there. The friends group at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park happens to be headed by the national president of the Association of Friends Group. All of these parks have great groups of private citizens who give their money, private foundations who give their money for our national parks. That is all needed, but they cannot afford the $12 billion maintenance backlog that is the responsibility of the Federal Government.

So $47 million is an example of what is needed at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park to fix that railroad I talked about, to fix the bridge I saw that is about to fall down, to fix the roof at a visitors center that is about to fall down.

It is also $47 million, roughly, for a monument off Lake Erie, the Perry Monument. Some of you know the story about how there is a seawall there to protect the Perry Monument and the interpretive center there. That seawall is crumbling, and it is a huge expense to repair a sea wall, as a coastal Governor like Governor King will tell you. So that is a maintenance backlog issue that has to be addressed in this kind of a capital bill.

So I am very excited about the opportunity to get this done. I think Senator Alexander is right. It is going to be difficult to get it done this week because we are up against the end of the year and we have so many other priorities. On the other hand, this one has not just bipartisan support, but I would say nonpartisan support and bicameral support. It is one of those bills--I think Senator Alexander is exactly right--we ought to put it at the top of the agenda. It will be a great win.

I think the American people are looking for wins right now. I think they are wondering, how can a divided government work? Here is an example of how it can work. We have Republicans and Democrats alike saying that this is a problem--long in the making, by the way. It didn't just happen recently; it has been years and years of our delaying these expenditures, these capital improvements that are needed--and wouldn't it be great.

So we are going to hit the ground running. Come January, we will reintroduce our legislation. Senator Alexander, Senator King, Senator Warner, and I are going to be out there getting cosponsors from staff who happen to be listening. We want to talk to you and your Member because you ought to be on this bill if you are not one of the more than one-third of the Senate who are already a part of it.

I just can't thank my colleagues enough for showing up today to talk about this. I know Senator Warner is busy with other meetings right now, but speaking for him, I will just say that he came up with this very creative idea. I want to thank him for his hard work on this. I know that in his home State, with the Blue Ridge and other great national parks, he has the same sense of urgency that all of us have, which is that if we don't address this now, we are going to see the visitor experience be diminished, and we are going to see a lot of higher costs for taxpayers.

This is the time that we have the organizations behind us. Senator Alexander talked about 100 conservation organizations. I didn't know there were 100 conservation organizations, but they are all on board, and they understand that this is the opportunity to do something very significant.

I think Senator Alexander is right; probably in the 100-year history of our national parks, there has never been a single bill that could make such a big difference--maybe not since Teddy Roosevelt started acquiring the land to protect our national treasures.

So we need to get this done. I thank my colleagues and I welcome them to make any final comments.

Mr. President, I want to talk today about the criminal justice reform legislation before the Senate. This is legislation that deals with two huge issues in our criminal justice system. One is important to sentencing reform.

A lot of this is to level the playing field--for instance, between crack cocaine and powder cocaine, what kind of sentencing ought to be used, something that has been talked about for many years. There is, in our view--many of us--an injustice with the levels of sentencing. That is important.

Second, this legislation deals with an issue that many States are finally figuring out, which is that we need to do something to keep people who are leaving our jails and prisons from coming right back into the criminal justice system again.

These numbers are just amazing. Ninety-five percent of those who are incarcerated will be released someday. We all know that. When people are released from prison or jail, over a 3-year period about two-thirds of them are rearrested. Some call it a revolving door. There is a fancier word for it. It is called recidivism, and it is a huge issue.

Think about it. If two-thirds of the people are back in the prison system or the criminal justice system, that means they have committed another crime. That means our communities are less safe. It also means that the taxpayer ends up picking up the tab--both the cost of prosecution again and, also, the cost of incarceration, which can go from $25,000 to $40,000 a year, depending on which system prisoners are in. It is a huge cost. Frankly, this is what has driven the push toward doing something about it in many of our States. State budgets have been overwhelmed with the cost of criminal justice.

We have committed ourselves here in Congress to deal with that, to try to reduce crimes, bring families back together, and help people be able to live out their purpose in life. God's purpose in life for all of us may be a little different, but it is certainly not to be someone in the revolving door of the criminal justice system.

One thing we have focused on is this: How do you give people the tools to be able to be more successful when they have left prison and reentered society? I have worked on this for the past 15 years. One thing we came up with was legislation called the Second Chance Act. The Second Chance Act was put into law about 11 years ago. It is an idea that George W. Bush talked about in his speech to a joint session of Congress about 14, 15 years ago. What he said was: Let's give people a second chance. We believe in redemption in this country. Many of us believe in it, as it is from its Biblical roots, but it is something that George W. Bush believed in.

He also said that it makes no sense because people are costing their communities more and more in crime, costing taxpayers more in prosecution and incarceration.

Let's do something about it. Let's not hold people back because of their mistakes in the past but, instead, give them the tools to be able to lead a better life, a more productive life.

The Second Chance Act has worked well over the years. It has provided this onramp to help ex-offenders reenter society appropriately. However, it needs to be reauthorized.

The criminal justice reform we have before us deals with this issue of rehabilitation and deals with this issue of giving people the tools to be able to succeed by job training, by mental health treatment, by drug treatment, and that is important. But once they get out of the system, that is where the Second Chance Act is so important.

The message is clear. It tells ex-offenders: If you want to turn your life around and become a productive member of society, we want to help you do that. Rather than incarcerating these repeat offenders, sometimes generation after generation, let's put our tax dollars to use in a more effective way to break this vicious cycle and turn these lives around.

Congress appropriated funding for the Second Chance Program this year at $85 million, up from $68 million in some years in the past. So we are actually putting more funding against it. But the program needs to be reauthorized to improve the program, to put more accountability measures into the program. That is what it does. Again, it is part of this broader criminal justice reform that we are voting on today.

I have spent a lot of time going around my State of Ohio, seeing how these Second Chance Act grants are working. One thing they have done in my State, and probably in your State, is create reentry coalitions. To get a coalition grant, it is easier to have a reentry coalition making application for it. You have these comprehensive coalitions--I had only a few in a few of our counties in Ohio; now we have them in over 60 of our counties. It is great. You have the business sector coming together--the private sector--along with the law enforcement folks, along with the treatment providers. I have seen it work all over our State. I have seen so many people who have successfully been able to make that transition from prison and a life of crime and this revolving door into a productive life.

I will tell you about one person who is always on my mind when I think about this. It is someone I met at something called Central Kitchen. Central Kitchen is a reentry program run by the Lutheran Ministry in Cleveland, OH.

Melvin is a gentleman I met there, and Melvin's story is classic. Melvin had been in and out of prison his whole life. For about a decade and a half, he was in prison, out of prison, in prison. He grew up in a rough neighborhood. He got involved in drugs and alcohol. He couldn't get out of the cycle. He couldn't get out of the revolving door. One day he heard about this program and said: I will check it out.

It is a faith-based program. They have been particularly effective, in my view. It is one that is supported by legislation like the Second Chance Act.

Sure enough, it has worked. Melvin learned how to cook. He worked at the Central Kitchen, and went on to work

full time at another restaurant. As he said: What better way to be rewarded and what better way to be forgiven?

He has started his own catering business now. He is no longer defined by his past. He is defined by his willingness to take advantage of the Second Chance Act. His eyes are now on the future.

By the way, there is one thing he told me that I will never forget: I finally got a place to live again. I got my apartment back. And most importantly to me, I got my child back.

After 15 years of being in and out of prison, paying some child support--sometimes not--he now has his little girl living with him. He is a role model for her.

I have seen these role models all over our State. I have seen them in factories. I have talked to supervisors in factories who tell me the ``second chance employees'' I just met with at a roundtable are the role models. They show up on time. They are grateful.

They realize they have been given a second chance, and they take it seriously. I support the underlying legislation of criminal justice reform law that we are now going to take up on the floor. I think it is the right thing to do for our country in so many respects. Our communities will be safer, our taxpayers will be able to spend their money more efficiently and effectively. For these individuals who are now given a chance, given the tools to be able to lift themselves up and lead productive lives, that is their purpose in life. God's purpose in life for them is being fulfilled by this legislation.

I am glad it is being reauthorized as part of this underlying legislation. I encourage my colleagues to support this legislation. I thank Senator Leahy, who is the coauthor of the Second Chance Act on the other side of the aisle, which has been bipartisan from the start. I thank the President and Jared Kushner for their support of this legislation.

I also thank those Members of the Senate who have been so involved in this, particularly my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Durbin, Senator Lee--I just talked to Senator Lee about this legislation a moment ago, and he has been tenacious--Senator Grassley, Senator Feinstein, Senator Graham, Senator Booker, Senator Whitehouse, Senator Cornyn, and others. This legislation will make a difference in my State of Ohio and around the country. I encourage my colleagues to support it.

I yield back.

Mr. President, among the colleagues of ours who is not going to be rejoining us in January is Dean Heller. Senator Heller hails from Nevada. He is a good friend. He is also a valued Member of this body, and we are going to miss him.

Dean is a classic servant leader who has dedicated himself to public service. He has served in all kinds of roles in his community, his State, his country, and he has always done it with class and humility.

He grew up in Carson City, NV, with his five brothers and sisters. He says he started working at his dad's auto shop in middle school. Do you know what? I think he brought some of the skills he learned in middle school on the shop floor to the U.S. Senate. Like every good mechanic, he is optimistic. Every mechanic thinks they can fix whatever problem you have. That is Dean Heller. He rolls up his sleeves, he gets to work, and he has the determination to make things better. That is as true as when he is working on a car as when he is working on legislative solutions in the U.S. Congress.

He has been devoted to helping his community for a long time. He served for two terms in the Nevada Assembly, representing Carson City, and then he served for three terms as Nevada secretary of state before being elected to represent the State's Second Congressional District in the House of Representatives, across the way there.

Later, he was appointed to the U.S. Senate, and then he won his election to the U.S. Senate in 2012. I have had the privilege of working with Dean Heller a lot on issues. We both serve on the Senate Finance Committee. We have jurisdiction over a lot of things, including tax reform.

During the tax reform process over the last year, we worked hard together, and I saw the hard work and determination he first developed working at his dad's auto body shop. I saw someone who was solutions- driven, someone who wanted to create a better future for the people he represents.

He was effective in a number of ways, with regard to helping others, helping with opportunity. One that he worked with the Presiding Officer on is doubling the child tax credit. It is a provision in the new tax law that puts more money back in the pockets of hard-working families in America.

He also served on the Senate Banking Committee, the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, and the Commerce Committee. He has been involved in a lot of the issues this body takes up. In fact, more than 100 of his bills have become law during his time in the U.S. Senate. That means he has reached across the aisle to help his fellow Nevadans.

His presence is going to be missed, but I know he will keep trying to make things better. I know he will stay busy back home, too, doing some of the things he loves: bailing hay on his ranch, repairing his stock cars--he grew up racing--horse packing, hunting, fishing, and spending time with his great family.

He and his wife, Lynne, have been married for more than 30 years, have four kids and three grandkids. I know he is looking forward to spending more time with them this holiday season. In fact, he told me for one of his holiday traditions he gets out his trombone, and his kids and their spouses all grab instruments and they play music. The Heller band performs some famous well-known Christmas holiday songs. I would love to see that. I am not sure I would like to hear it, but I would love to see it--Dean with his trombone.

Let me say, it has been an honor to serve with Dean Heller. He is a great guy. It is a privilege to work with him. I know he has a bright future outside of this place. I look forward to continuing to stay in touch. We will miss him. Knowing his work is not done, we hope to continue to work with him.

I yield back my time.

Mr. President, I want to thank the Presiding Officer and acknowledge my friend, whom I deeply admire, sitting in the chair. It is great to give this short speech in front of him. It is good to see the Presiding Officer, my friend.

I want to say good afternoon to everyone, and this is a moment in which I want to give a sense of gratitude.

I want to thank my colleagues for their incredible work and leadership and, especially, recognize the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Chuck Grassley. I want to thank Senator Dick Durbin, who has been a hero of mine on the issue of criminal justice reform, as well as Mike Lee, who has been a champion, all of their staffs, everyone who is involved in the tireless work and effort that has been going on in what is the pending bill on the floor before us now, the FIRST STEP Act.

I also want to recognize the incredible people--many of them advocates, many of them citizens, many of them activists. So many of the groups have been pushing, challenging, demanding that we have criminal justice reform in this country. A lot of these groups have been organized and working for years and years--years before I came to the Senate--to try to bring forward criminal justice reform. They brought insight, wisdom, and they helped to shape this legislation. Their advocacy has made this a better bill.

It is because of the work and the diversity of voices that have been involved in this process that we stand poised today to pass this bill, to begin to deliver some reforms to our savagely broken criminal justice system.

I am proud of this coalition. I am proud that the coalition has people all across the political spectrum. I am proud that the coalition has people from diverse backgrounds. This is how change has been made in this country for generations.

I want to return to the fact that we are poised to pass this bill because of the deeply, savagely broken criminal justice system that we have.

Since 1980 alone, our Federal prison population has exploded by 800 percent. There has been an 800-percent increase in our prison population. This is because of failed policies by this body that created harsh sentencing, harsh mandatory minimum penalties--three strikes and you are out. These are the bills that caused this exploding population of prisoners to become the largest in terms of percentage on the planet Earth.

America is now the preeminent incarceration Nation. We are the incarcerating capital of the planet Earth. Even though we only have 5 percent of the world's population, one in four of the incarcerated people on the planet are in the United States of America. One in three of all incarcerated women on the planet Earth are here in the United States of America.

Today, close to one-third of all adults in the United States have a criminal record. We have criminalized the United States population. About one-third of Americans have a criminal record.

After decades of failed Federal policies and after decades of going in the wrong direction, we now have an opportunity to reverse course in a significant way.

Our criminal justice system, as it stands right now, is an affront to whom we say we are as a nation. We profess--we swear an oath to the flag that we are a nation of ``liberty and justice for all,'' but our criminal justice system violates those values.

I believe you can tell a lot about a nation--not by its buildings, not by its structures or its wealth, but you can tell a lot about the true character of a nation by looking at its prisons and seeing whom they incarcerate. You can go to countries with authoritarian regimes and see how they imprison their political opposition. You can go to some countries and see they actually incarcerate members of the media. We don't do that in the United States.

In this country, if you go into our prisons and our jails, you see, overwhelmingly, that we incarcerate those who are marginalized in our society, those who are vulnerable in our society. Overwhelmingly, in the United States, our prisons and jails are full of those Americans who are already hurting and struggling and often need more help than a system that hurts them. Our prisons and jails have become warehouses for people who are struggling with trauma, struggling with disease, struggling with illness. Right now, our prisons and jails are filled overwhelmingly with people with mental illness, overwhelmingly with Americans struggling with addiction, overwhelmingly with Americans who are survivors of sexual assault, and also overwhelmingly, it is full of Americans who are low-income, poor folks and people who are disproportionately people of color.

This is a system in our country that feeds upon certain communities and not others. The War on Drugs--which has fueled so much of the explosion of our prison population--has really been a war on certain people and certain communities and not on others. I am the only Senator who lives in a majority Black and Brown community. It is low income, but I can tell you right now, my community does not mistake wealth with worth. I live in an inner-city community, and when I go home at the end of most weeks, I draw strength from my community. I see evidence of the incredible growth that has occurred. These are good people in a city. They pull together, work together, and can accomplish more things than other people who are disrespecting, disregarding, and just plain dissing them don't think is possible. I am proud of my community.

Despite all the work that has been done in the city of Newark, I still live in a community that is both overcriminalized and underprotected because of Federal policies--because of policies in this body that mistake severity of a punishment with the actual security of a people. We know there is no deeper proclivity to commit crime among people of color, but there is a much deeper bias in the way our drug laws have been and are being applied, which disproportionately target people of color and low-income communities.

We have a system that for over a century, we as a nation have overcome slavery--decades of Jim Crow--but author Michelle Alexander calls our criminal justice system ``The New Jim Crow'' because of its disproportionate impact on people of color. We now have a criminal justice system where there are more African-American men under criminal supervision than there were enslaved in 1850. This is a punishing reality that I have seen with my own eyes, where people in certain privileged communities don't face the kind of scrutiny, the kind of arrests that you do in other communities in our country.

The truth about human beings is that all of us make mistakes. That is an inevitable part of life, but the way our country's drug laws are designed and applied, a kid in a more privileged community or on a college campus gets a chance to stumble--to learn a lesson. There is a wide margin for error, but a kid living in a community that is low income or a community that is Black and Brown, gets trapped by a system that disproportionately impacts their lives more than it does others.

Bryan Stevenson said we live in a nation ``that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.''

In the USA, we see Americans getting trapped in a system where the data is clear. There is no difference between Blacks and Whites for using drugs or selling drugs in the USA. There is no difference, but if you are Black, you are almost four times more likely to get arrested for selling drugs and almost three times more likely to be arrested for possession of drugs. This is one of the things that has led to such a dramatic racial disparity in incarceration in the USA. People right now in our country are sitting in prisons for doing things that two of the last three Presidents admitted doing, but they encounter a different type of justice system. The scales of justice in America are not balanced. This is a system that hurts people, and it hurts people who are often already struggling, often already hurt.

What we do to people in this country with a nonviolent drug offense is like getting a life sentence for the rest of your life. Even after you have come out of a prison sentence or even if you received no time served at all, once you are convicted of a nonviolent drug offense-- again, like people in this body and in the White House have done before, potentially in this body; I am making no accusations--but once you have been convicted of a crime, for the rest of your life, if you are one of those folks who has been convicted of a nonviolent drug offense, you have to check a box that says you are going to have difficulty being hired, you are going to have difficulty getting housing. You can't get many business licenses. You can't get food stamps. You can't get a loan from the bank. The American Bar Association points to 40,000 collateral consequences that come with a criminal conviction in this country--40,000 collateral consequences that follow you for life for a criminal conviction.

We are debating a funding bill that is dominating the news, but we are already throwing an exorbitant amount of taxpayer dollars into the black hole of mass incarceration. That is not making us safer, and it is not making us stronger. In fact, it is making us a more vulnerable community.

We have been using more government resources--not to offer more support for law enforcement, not to offer more opportunities for Americans to get mental health care, not to help more folks get access to drug treatment, not to rehabilitate people, but we have been spending more and more money actually hurting more Americans by putting them into a system that actually harms them more often than helps them with their addiction, with their mental health issue, with their trauma. We are using our resources to compound hurt and harm that people have already endured to incarcerate more Americans than ever before in our history, which ultimately makes our neighborhoods and communities one that is like mine: less safe, not more.

Despite the fact that our infrastructure in this country is crumbling--that our trains and roads and bridges are in desperate need of repair--we have been investing in a different type of infrastructure. Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison in this country has been opened every 10 days. We spend billions of dollars for the construction of prisons and jails to warehouse human potential: folks who often need help, need counseling, need mental health care, need rehabilitation. We have been taking the far more expensive way and warehousing human beings in our prisons and jails instead of helping them.

We call this system a justice system. It is not meant to be a system of retribution; it is meant to be a justice system. It is not meant to be a system of punishment only; it is meant to be a justice system. We are Americans. We have ideals of restoration and rehabilitation. Ultimately, in the United States of America, we all believe this is a nation where redemption is possible.

One of our former Senate colleagues who stood in this same well got into a lot of trouble in his youth. He was convicted of multiple crimes--crimes like arson and assault. He attacked a police officer. He actually became one of the most serious outspoken advocates for restoring this broken system. It was Senator Alan Simpson. This is what he once wrote. He said:

I was lucky that the bullets I stole from a hardware store

as a teenager and fired from

my .22-caliber rifle never struck anyone. I was fortunate

that the fires I set never hurt anyone. I heard my wake-up

call and listened--and I went on to have many opportunities

to serve my country and my community.

When a young person is sent ``up the river,'' we need to

remember that all rivers can change course.

He went from an arsonist, a person who attacked police officers, and a person who was admittedly guilty of crimes to a Senator because we are a nation that believes in redemption. The fact is, when most people go to prison, 95 percent of those folks right now in State prisons will come back to our communities. The question is, Will they come out further harmed by the system or better able to start again, better able to avoid more criminality or will they be people who actually help to make us safer and stronger, to be elevated toward that ideal of full citizenship?

Those of us in this body who proclaim Christian faith know the story of the prodigal child, that child who did wrong, but yet when he came back, his father embraced him. That story is held in the Christian community as an ideal, but what do we do in America? Is it the story of the prodigal child? It is not because this is a system that right now inflicts harm on those incarcerated rather than trying to rehabilitate them.

This is a system that still subjects young people to what other countries and human rights activists in this Nation call torture: juvenile solitary confinement. This is a system that, in some places, still denies women access to basic sanitary products. This is a system that, in some places, still allows the shackling of pregnant women during birth.

This is a system that burdens families, hurting them economically and fracturing entire communities like the one I live in. It is a system that inflicts poverty by concentrating its attacks on low-income neighborhoods. In fact, according to a study from Villanova University, the poverty rate in all of America would be 20 percent lower if we had incarceration rates in line with our industrial peers. This system, as a whole, is a cancer on the soul of our country, and it is hurting every single American.

Today we have an opportunity to do something about addressing the ills of this system. That is why I am proud this is a bipartisan compromise bill with extraordinary leadership on both sides of the aisle, saying: Hey, there are things we need to begin to correct for this system. There are ways to make this system more fair. There are ways to make this system better reflect our collective values and ideals.

Because of this collection of work done over the last years, this bill includes critical sentencing reform that will reduce mandatory minimums and give judges discretion back--not legislators but judges who sit and see the totality of the facts.

Thanks to the work of Senator Durbin, the racially biased crack cocaine sentencing disparity has already been negotiated down from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1. It should be equal. It should be 1 to 1, but we made progress. The problem was the change wasn't retroactively applied. Because of that, there are people sitting in jail right now for selling an amount of drugs equal to the size of a candy bar who have watched people come in and leave jail for selling enough drugs to fill a suitcase. We never made this change retroactive. That is not justice. Making this fix in this bill alone will mean that thousands of Americans who have more than served their time will become eligible for release, and it addresses some of the racial disparities in our system because 90 percent of the people who will benefit from that are African Americans; 96 percent are Black and Latino.

The bill includes a provision that I have worked on for the past 4 years that will effectively end the use of juvenile solitary confinement among young people under Federal supervision.

This bill also takes an important step but still an incomplete step in reforming the way women are treated behind bars. This bill will ensure that incarcerated women will have access to free sanitary products, and it will ban the shackling of pregnant incarcerated women. Last year, I introduced a bill that includes this reform, among others, and I am happy to see it now as part of this legislation.

Can we do more? Yes. This legislation is the product of compromise. This legislation is just one step in the right direction. If we pass this legislation, it will be a step in the right direction and I hope will be the momentum for greater, urgently needed reforms that will be supported by conservatives in this country and progressives.

Let's make no mistake. This legislation, which is one small step, will affect thousands and thousands of lives. Those are not just some people. When you affect the lives of some Americans on issues of justice, you affect the lives of all Americans because we as a people cannot fall into that trap of separateness, the insidious idea that we think that there are some throwaway people whose dignity we can assault without assaulting our own.

Dr. King said, ``Justice is indivisible,'' and he was right. We cannot separate a system of oppression in our country and think that it won't affect us all as a whole. It could not be further from the truth. You cannot deny justice, deny dignity to any American without its affecting us all. You cannot cheapen justice for some without its cheapening the justice of us all.

As a man much greater than anyone in this body once said, ``Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'' We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality that is tied in a common garment. We cannot suffer the illusion of separation when we think this criminal justice system that is so punishing of some is not hurting this country as a whole. Our criminal justice system, as it stands right now, is a gaping, self-inflicted wound. This bill is a step--a step--towards healing.

It has been perhaps one of the greatest honors of my life--easily one of the greatest honors as a Senator--to have worked in a bipartisan coalition over the last 5 years to get to this point. I have had the opportunity to sit down with people in common cause--from Republicans on the far end of the conservative spectrum to individuals with whom and organizations that on most other issues, I often disagree. Yet we have found common ground because this system is an affront to our most fundamental common values on both sides of the aisle--the value of freedom, the value of liberty, the value of equality, the value of fairness, and the value of justice. We share those common values because we still live in a nation in which the ties that bind us are stronger than the lines that divide us.

This bill is a recognition of the fact that we are bound together as a people by the most precious ideals and humanity--the ideals that were put forth by our Founders, which have been aspired to in every generation and have been worked on in every generation to make us a more perfect Union.

We know that our Nation's history--the bills and debates we have seen in this very body--is scarred by many wretched injustices--slavery and the denial of universal suffrage, Jim Crow and segregation. Like people--individuals who have done wrong in the past--our Nation has demonstrated the capacity to change. We as a nation have demonstrated the capacity to improve. Like people, we have demonstrated as a nation the capacity to redeem ourselves. None of us should ever be judged by the least of what we have done but, instead, by our ability and our capacity to find redemption.

Every generation has worked to make our ideals more true and real, which makes the dream more accessible to us all. We have stood for each other and have worked with each other. We have sacrificed with each other despite our differences in race and differences in color and differences in religion and creed. Every single great gain in this country has been made by multiethnic, multiracial, broad-based coalitions because we recognize the ideal that is above the President's desk, written in stone here, which is the ideal of E pluribus unum-- ``out of many, one.'' We know that it is not just a slogan, that those aren't just words; it is a calling to the people of this country.

I want to see more than the bill we have today. I know we can do more than just this bill we have today, but this is a first step. It is a necessary step. For the sake of thousands of Americans whose lives will be directly

affected, this is a step in the right direction. I hope that we all come together and make this first step our momentum on the journey. We have work to do in this country, and I am proud to have been a part of what can be an historic step in the right direction. May our work continue.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, thank you for the recognition.

I rise on the Senate floor as a Senator from a border State--a State that borders with the country of Mexico--with a message from my State's proud border communities: We will not stand by as the President threatens to shut down the government in an act of political extortion, as the President tries to force the American people to pay for his border wall--a wall that would run right through New Mexico and through so many of the communities and ecosystems that define our State.

I am joining with New Mexicans all along the border and all across our State who are calling on the President to stop playing politics with our border communities, with the Federal budget, and with taxpayer dollars.

New Mexico and other border States have the most at stake in this fight, and we will be heard.

Last week, we learned of a terrible tragedy along the border. On December 7, a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala, Jakelin Caal Maquin, died from septic shock, fever, and dehydration while in Customs and Border Protection custody. The sadness of the loss of this little girl coming to our country with her father in search of safety cannot be overstated. It is truly heartbreaking.

I have called upon Secretary Nielsen, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner McAleenan, and the Office of Inspector General to immediately and thoroughly investigate the circumstances of Jakelin's death. All facts must be brought to light so that no families ever have this kind of tragedy again.

Jakelin and her father turned themselves in to CBP near a remote port of entry in New Mexico. That port of entry, called Antelope Wells, was closed at the time. By the time Jakelin received adequate medical care, it was too late.

Instead of demanding massive resources for an ineffective wall, the President should direct the Department of Homeland Security to provide border stations and CBP officers with the resources necessary to meet the basic needs of children and other vulnerable individuals.

The Trump administration's cruel policy of delaying immigrants at commonly used ports of entry for weeks and months at a time inevitably results in asylum seekers taking more dangerous routes in remote areas.

Instead of creating a humanitarian crisis at the border by refusing to process asylum seekers, the President should direct DHS to meet the spirit of the asylum laws and begin treating those fleeing persecution and violence with the dignity and respect they deserve.

This administration has failed repeatedly to live up to our values as a nation when it comes to immigration. Sadly, there are tragic human consequences to the administration's inhumane immigration policies.

This week, we in Congress find ourselves in a familiar position. Once again, the President says he will shutter the Federal Government unless we appropriate billions of dollars for his border wall. This obvious political ploy, aimed at his narrowing base, is

the same tired and hateful refrain that he has used since the day he launched his campaign for President.

The President's anti-immigrant attacks are now a staple in his political toolbox. They are no surprise, but Congress should not give in to the President's latest anti-immigration tantrum--a tantrum that is not based in reality and that fundamentally lacks the support of the American people.

There has been a lot of talk about the border here in Washington--a lot of talk about what the border needs from a President that doesn't know the first thing about our border communities.

I proudly represent a border State--a State that shares 180 miles of border with Mexico, a State that is in many ways defined by our border and immeasurably strengthened by our relationships with our southern neighbor, by our immigrant heritage, and by communities and ecosystems that dot every mile along the border.

I know our border communities. I hear the hopes and concerns of New Mexico's families and businesses that form the fabric of those border communities. Let there be no equivocating. New Mexico's border communities emphatically reject the President's unnecessary, ineffective, and offensive wall.

Thirty-six communities across New Mexico, California, Arizona, and Texas have passed resolutions opposing a wall along their borders. Poll after poll shows that the American people from coast to coast and from border to border do not support this wall. People in New Mexico and across the Nation want humane immigration policies, continued community ties and economic activity between Mexico and our Nation, and smart border security that will actually make us safer, not an unnecessary and ineffective wall and not insulting attacks on Mexicans and Central Americans.

The American people reject the President's latest take-it-or-leave-it demand that they pay $5 billion for his wall--a wall he vowed during his campaign that Mexico would pay for, a wall that will not stop illegal immigration, a wall that would stand before all the world as a symbol of division, fear, and hostility.

There is little disagreement in the Halls of Congress or among the American people that we want smart border security, that our immigration laws need to be reformed, and that we want to stop illegal drugs from coming into the country. But we do disagree--and strongly-- on how to effectively achieve those goals with limited taxpayer dollars.

The President would have us believe that hordes of dangerous criminals have our borders under siege. This is one of his countless misrepresentations to the American people. The American people have had enough of misinformation and of blatant distortions.

It is time for some facts. The fact is the numbers of border apprehensions are down significantly since the early 2000s. Southern border apprehensions have dropped 81 percent. In fact, the number of apprehensions at the end of fiscal year 2017 was the lowest it has been since 1971--the lowest it has been since 1971--and we have the lowest number of undocumented immigrants in our country that we have had in over a decade.

The Pew Research Center released estimates just this month that the total number of undocumented immigrants residing in the United States is far less now than in 2004--a 14-year low, and the numbers from Mexico--people whom the President insults as rapists and criminals-- have decreased even more dramatically.

So who are the people coming to our southern border? Apprehensions between ports of entry consist largely of family units turning themselves in for asylum, fleeing the terror in their home countries. They are crossing between ports in part because of DHS's obstacles to asylum at ports of entry, including inadequate resources for staffing and infrastructure at our ports, metering individuals trying to claim asylum, and the ever-increasing Trump-manufactured wait times.

So given the number of southern border apprehensions is at an all- time low and the makeup of our southern border crossings, now is not the time to raid taxpayer-funded coffers for a boondoggle of a wall. Now is the time to begin talking across the aisle about how to meaningfully address the root causes of immigration from Central America--and not only that. Border walls have not been shown to effectively increase security or to reduce smuggling or improper entry.

In 2017, the Government Accountability Office found that Customs and Border Protection could not demonstrate that border walls had any measurable impact on border security, finding--and this is from DHS-- that DHS had ``not developed metrics for this assessment.''

As former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said, ``show me a 50-foot wall, and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder.'' Walls are not only offensive; they are ineffective.

While the effectiveness of the President's wall is in question, the extraordinary high costs are not. The Department of Homeland Security estimates the cost would be $21.6 billion. The Democratic staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee estimates $70 billion, and those costs are only to build the wall. Any wall would have to be maintained. Studies estimate maintenance costs would reach $100 to $150 million a year.

Just as troubling, GAO concluded that DHS is not responsibly spending the funds already allocated for the wall. GAO reported that ``DHS faces an increased risk that the border wall system program will cost more than projected, take longer than planned, and not fully perform as expected.''

In fact, DHS blew past its September 19 deadline to submit a risk- based border security plan as the law requires. There is no accountability here. Worse yet, while the President ups his demanded to $5 billion for a wall, DHS hasn't even spent its funds for border barriers in the previous year's budget. DHS has only spent 6 percent of the funds provided on this boondoggle since 2017. It hasn't even obligated $900 million of its last $1.6 billion appropriation.

The President ignores DHS's failure to spend the money it has been given while he demands $3.4 billion more than his own budget request. This is pure extortion. We should categorically reject the President's demand for $5 billion for the wall, and we should reject any proposal for a slush fund for the President to use to implement his anti- immigrant agenda.

Of course, Americans are no longer surprised by this administration's utter hypocrisy when it comes to fiscal responsibility, but the President's demand for billions of unnecessary funds for his wall is a particularly galling and offensive example, and it should be called out.

Budget after budget, the Trump administration says: We can't afford to provide for Americans' healthcare, to provide for environmental protection, to provide for quality education for our kids, to provide for those in society who are struggling the most.

But the President says: We can afford to throw billions and billions of dollars on a symbolic and wasteful boondoggle of a wall.

That is billions of dollars that could be spent on the priorities that New Mexicans and the American people actually value--like good jobs, good healthcare, and good education.

``Backward'' doesn't even begin to describe this administration's priorities. The Republicans claim to be fiscal conservatives, but time and again they show themselves to be fictional conservatives. They want to spend billions on a wall that doesn't work. They pass tax relief for the wealthy, leaving working and middle-class Americans high and dry. And they create massive deficits the American taxpayer will be paying off in the years to come. This is not fiscal conservatism. This is the epitome of fiscal irresponsibility.

But the wall isn't just wasteful and unnecessary. It would also do serious harm to the border region. While a border wall will not effectively address border security, it will disrupt border communities, hurt international trade, interfere with private property rights, and damage habitat and wildlife.

Much of the land along the border is privately owned, and some for many generations. Approximately 4,900 parcels are at risk. The Trump administration is already seizing private property through eminent domain to build its wall. Homes could be confiscated, farms ruined, neighbors cut off from one another.

To build the wall, DHS has waived almost 50 laws that protect the public and protect the environment, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, among others.

This proposed funding targets the border along the Rio Grande, which is home to a biologically diverse and rich environment. I have traveled to this area. Last winter I canoed part of the wild and scenic Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park, along the Texas-New Mexico border.

This month, I saw a new documentary called ``The River and the Wall,'' which showed the stunning Rio Grande Valley and part of our trip.

Adding 65 miles of border barrier through the lower Rio Grande Valley would damage this area of profound environmental and ecological significance. A wall harms ecosystems, disrupts wildlife migration patterns, blocks vital wildlife access to food and water, and fragments wildlife communities.

These photos show the problems posed to wildlife. This is wildlife blocked by a fence. Here is fencing that was previously here that allows the wildlife to get through. Animals can't get over or through the border wall. They are stopped in their tracks. For many animals, fragmented habitat has led to endangerment. Chopping up their territory pushes them closer to extinction. That is the conclusion of career biologists and wildlife managers of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They warned, in a draft letter to CBP, that the wall threatens already endangered wildlife. According to them, a wall is vulnerable to ``catastrophic natural flood events, leaving wildlife trapped behind a wall to drown or starve.''

They recommend that CBP consider technology and other resources and mechanisms when possible instead of installing walls. The Washington Post reported last week that Secretary Zinke made it known that Fish and Wildlife needed to ``support the security border mission.'' So Fish and Wildlife higher-ups scrubbed the career scientists' wildlife recommendations in a final letter to CBP on the impacts of the wall.

Science has a hard time competing with politics in the Trump administration.

To sum it up, the President's border wall will not have any effect on the number of migrants showing up at our border daily. It will not deter migrants from making the dangerous journey to cross between our ports of entry when they are fleeing horrific violence and persecutions in their home countries. It is wildly expensive. The wall hurts the communities and economies along our borders. It takes away use and enjoyment of property from private landowners, and it jeopardizes the environment and wildlife.

So why does the President want this wall? Its only discernible purpose is as a political symbol, an offensive and unpopular symbol, a symbol that America no longer welcomes the tired, poor, and huddled masses; that we close our doors to refugees and asylum seekers, that we fear the world and are shrinking from our position as a beacon of hope for people everywhere.

Since the very beginning of his Presidency, when he issued his first executive order that banned Muslims from traveling to the United States, the President's immigration policies have been inhumane and cruel, and contrary to our fundamental values as a nation. The President's policy of separating children from their parents represented a new low in immigration policy. The images of children housed in cages, toddlers being taken from their mothers' arms, and parents' pleas for return of their children are unforgettable.

The incompetence of how the administration directed the family separation policy is only matched by the sheer cruelty of the policy. They didn't know where parents and children were, could not match families. They deported parents without their children, making it all the more difficult for reunification to occur.

The American people opposed this harsh policy by wide margins. While the courts stopped this illegal policy, we must not forget that there are still 147 families separated. This is unconscionable, and I will not rest until each and every family is reunited.

The President's most recent immigration debacle is his call--just before the November 6 midterms--to send Active-Duty troops to the border. He wanted 15,000 troops to protect Customs and Border Protection officers and Border Patrol agents from migrants, including many women and children, seeking asylum. Retired military leaders have charged that the President's use of troops is ``wasteful.'' They worry that our military is being used for purely political purposes. Former Joint Chiefs Chairman General Colin Powell summed it up by saying, ``I see no threat requiring this kind of deployment.''

The President's made-up crisis takes our Active-Duty troops away from their missions and preparedness training and away from their families over the holidays.

It is costing the American people. According to the Pentagon, this Presidential stunt will cost us at least $210 million by year's end for the 5,900 Active-Duty troops and 2,100 National Guard troops who have been there since April. DHS just requested their stay be extended through January.

There is no President in my memory who has used division and fear as a political tool to the extent this President has--not even close.

The President's playbook on immigration is predictable. Every several months he dreams up a new initiative to rile his base, making sure he still has their support, but his policies are wrong-headed, unpopular, and ineffective.

His latest stunt--to shut down the Federal government unless he gets his wall--is a replay. It didn't work the first time.

There is no art in a take-it-or-leave-it deal that shuts down the Federal government, that leaves millions of workers without paychecks just before the holidays, and that shutters critical services that protect the public's welfare and contribute to the economy.

It is not artful. It is inept.

It is clear from the President's public eruption last week, meeting with Leaders Schumer and Pelosi, that he will not engage in good-faith negotiation with Democrats and that he is ``proud to shut down the government.''

Recently, the Nation came together to honor a statesman and an advocate for immigration reform. As President, George H.W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990 into law. He called it ``the most comprehensive reform of our immigration laws in 66 years.'' The act increased the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States, and it established the Diversity Visa Program and family-based visas-- two programs our current President disparages.

Of our immigrant community, President Bush said: ``Our nation is the enduring dream of every immigrant who ever sets foot on these shores, and the millions still struggling to be free . . . this idea called America was and always will be a new world.''

President Trump's wall is a symbol of division and hostility. It is wholly contrary to our ``idea called America,'' as the late President put it.

We must move beyond the political jockeying of government shutdown threats. The American people don't want the President to shut down essential services--especially over a border wall that will not work, they don't support, and doesn't represent the goodness of our ``idea called America.''

Take it from a border State like New Mexico. We can't afford a government shutdown, and we don't need the President's wall.

Thank you.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Reserving the right to object, I would like to explain my--make a point before I object.

This amendment is inconsistent with current Federal law and would allow States the right to break existing law. If there is an attempt to legalize across the country, we should have that debate and let the Congress decide the issue instead of creating a back door to legalization.

Furthermore, the amendment would allow financial institutions to bank marijuana distributors. This is inappropriate to consider in the context of a criminal justice reform bill. Criminal justice is not a vehicle through which we create reform for banks to create more business.

The Senator from Colorado is very much an advocate for the people in his State. I understand that. I respect his position. He works hard on this, and he may be ahead of the time when there will be a real debate on this, and maybe there will be, at that point, an opportunity to consider his approach as something lesser than the legalization of marijuana generally.

For those reasons, I will object to what the Senator from Colorado is trying to accomplish.

Mr. President, before we go to the amendments, I want to give a general overview of what it took to get to the point at which we are now.

The first thing we had to do was show the leader we could produce 60 or more votes for this bill. This is a big bipartisan bill. Senators Durbin, Lee, Graham, Booker, and I--and I suppose I am leaving out some people--had spoken extensively with our colleagues to address their concerns and to gain their support. As we saw last night, more than 80 Senators showed that they were ready for the debate in the culmination of this bill on the Senate floor.

The next step we had to take was to show the people we had broad bipartisan support. On November 15, the FIRST STEP Act was introduced in the Senate. At that point, we had 12 cosponsors. We now have 38 cosponsors.

Of course, the question that always comes up is, Will the House of Representatives take any action if we are successful on the floor of the U.S. Senate? Every step of the way, the House was read in on the Senate bill. The leaders in the House of Representatives, who happen to be Representative Collins, Representative Jeffries, and, of course, Chairman Goodlatte of the Judiciary Committee, were all strong partners in this compromise.

We have reached a point with the House of Representatives at which, when the Senate passes this bill--and hopefully we will--Speaker Ryan will be ready to act on this bill. We don't have problems with the House of Representatives as sometimes come up late in a session like we are in--hopefully, the last week of this Congress. We know what we are spending our time doing will be considered by the House of Representatives.

About 3 or 4 weeks ago, we had a Republican caucus, and we listened to the concerns our colleagues had. We were asked to show more Republican support within the Congress. So, with several changes that were made in the bill in the last 3 or 4 weeks, we addressed our Republican colleagues' concerns--the same ones that were raised in our caucus. We did this, obviously, because we wanted to gain support for our bill. The concern among Republicans was that the caucus was divided to the point that more of a majority was against the bill than for the bill. I think, with the answers we had from colleagues, as we individually talked to them about their support for the bill, we gained that support.

We also had to show support from outside the Congress of the United States. I have here, without reading any names, just broad bipartisan support from conservative organizations. At the same time, there are a lot of law enforcement organizations and liberal organizations, and I will just name four or five at this point: The Fraternal Order of Police, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Conservative Union, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

We had to show the colleagues in the Congress that we had broad support from, you might say, the extreme right to the extreme left in support of this legislation. I don't know whether we have had legislation like this before the U.S. Senate, whereby we have put together such diverse groups of people and organizations that support the bill.

Of course, once we had gone through this hard work of getting this bill where it is now on the Senate floor, it was very legitimate for our colleagues to ask: Is the President going to sign it? We worked very closely with the House of Representatives and had even made some changes at the House's suggestion. We also talked to individual Members of the Senate, and the House knew what some Senators had concerns about.

We got admonition from the President and the White House to change some things to bring the President on board. We now have a person who has a reputation for being tough on crime but also a person who recognizes that within our criminal justice system and the prison system and the way judges have to make decisions under mandatory minimums, there is some unfairness. We have a President who may now be seen by a large part of this country as being somebody who not only wants to be tough on crime but be fair on crime.

The President of the United States had a news conference when we put the original bill together, but it was before the fine-tuning, which I have already talked about, to get additional Members' support. At the end of the news conference, at which many Members of the House and Senate were present, the President said, I have my pen ready to sign this bill.

If anybody has any doubt whatsoever about whether the President is for this bill, I am telling you what I heard from his own words--that he has a pen ready to sign this bill. So I hope nobody comes up here and wonders, what does the President of the United States think about this bill? I heard him say it.

So I hope we have a Senate majority--particularly, the Senate majority. When you have an opportunity to have the President of the United States, who is tough on crime but understands there has to be some fairness to it, that the majority party in the U.S. Senate would support the President of the United States--I hope that is what they will think about as they cast these votes on these amendments that we are soon going to have.

I think it is fair to say that as we proceeded over the last 4 years to get a piece of legislation like this, they would be skeptical about this President. But don't be skeptical anymore, because this President gives this bill his full backing.

This is an opportunity for a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate to show that this Republican President can do something that even President Obama couldn't get done, because this was a big issue in the last Congress, but we couldn't get it here to the Senate. So the Congress can deliver a big bipartisan legislative accomplishment for President Trump with the passage of this bill.

I have just described to my colleagues how the legislative process is supposed to work--one on one. How do you eat 10,000 marshmallows? One at a time. How do you get support for a bill? One person at a time, and that is pretty much what the Republican supporters of this bill have been trying to do. Why do it? To placate the honest interests of people in our caucus that raised those same concerns 3 weeks ago.

So this is how the legislative process works. You work in a bipartisan way to build support for your policy and debate it on the floor of the Senate.

Later on I will ask for support for a unanimous consent request.

The Senator from Louisiana is ready to object to what I am doing.

I am going to ask unanimous consent, but before anybody objects, I would like to make, maybe, a 1-minute statement on the reason for my unanimous consent request.

I ask unanimous consent that amendment No. 4132 be made pending and agreed to.

This is why I ask that. This amendment ensures that faith-based groups can operate in Federal prisons to help prisoners turn over a new leaf. It also excludes dangerous criminals from earning time credits. Finally, it extends the independent review committee from 2 years to 5 years, and it also requires an annual report.

Now, I have had a little bit of conversation with Senator Cotton, the main opponent of our legislation, and Senator Kennedy as well. I think that everything that is in amendment No. 4132 is something that at least every Republican ought to support, and I think a large part of the Democrats support it. As far as I can tell, from reading the point of view of my friend from Arkansas on some of these amendments, this point about extending the independent review committee from 2 years to 5 years and requiring an annual report is about the only part of this amendment No. 4132 that Senator Cotton disagrees with. I don't know why he would disagree with an independent review that could be done over a period to go on from 2 to 5 years, because there is going to be periodic decisions made in the meantime, and there is an annual report.

That is what this amendment does, and I hope we can get it adopted.

Mr. President, before I speak, I think we need to give the Senator from Arkansas another 2 minutes because he was speaking on the wrong amendment that is before the Senate.

It is the victims notification amendment.

Mr. President, before I take my 2 minutes in opposition to this amendment, for the leader I ask unanimous consent that the votes following the first vote in this series be 10 minutes in length.

Mr. President, I rise in opposition to this amendment. This amendment is unnecessary. This amendment is duplicative of requirements already enacted into law under the Crime Victims' Rights Act.

Current law requires notification to crime victims who choose to be notified. It allows others to opt out to avoid being retraumatized. This would change the law to require victim notification, which could retraumatize victims who choose not to be notified.

This is not a victim-centered approach. It is a heavyhanded violation of a victim's choice. This amendment would require notification even if the victim doesn't want it, raising the specter of retraumatizing a victim who has tried to move on with their life.

This is not a victim-centered approach. It is a heavyhanded government violation of a victim's choice. Victims' rights groups oppose this amendment for this reason.

The public notice mandates create a series of new bureaucratic, big- government requirements and a new unfunded mandate for the Bureau of Prisons.

So I will vote against this amendment. To support my reasons, I will quote a whole list of conservative groups: the American Conservative Union, FreedomWorks, Right on Crime, R Street Institute, Jessica Jackson's group, U.S. Justice Action Network, and a whole host of groups like that.

Heritage Action scores it

We have from the victims' rights groups, Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, fairness, dignity, and respect for crime victims and survivors, and the National Coalition of Police and Prosecutors warns of hostile amendments.

I am going to end by simply stating what you heard me say in my opening remarks before this--that we have a chance to send a bill to the President. In his news conference, he said that he is ready to sign it. We have a President who is tough on crime, but he wants to be fair on crime. The bill we put together with the White House does that. I ask you to vote no.

As we talked about the earlier amendment, we talked a great deal on the previous amendment about victim's notification. There is also a victim's notification in this amendment as well. So I don't want to go into--the arguments are the same. Remember, victim rights groups oppose this amendment because it is covered by current law.

So I want to spend my time on talking in opposition to this amendment from the standpoint of granting wardens veto authority over what this law sets up as an objective, evidence-based system--or you could call it a risk assessment system--in the act to make sure that we have a good foundation for determining whether somebody is a risk to society if they take advantage of this program and to do it in a studied way. Once that is set up, then this amendment would allow a warden to veto it.

If a low- or minimal-risk inmate works hard to make themselves ready to be productive citizens and community leaders or members, then they ought to reap the rewards of that work under the FIRST STEP Act and not have a person step in who could put bias into the system and human error into the system. We are trying to set up a system to get away from it, because this legislation is all about bringing fairness to the prison system and to the judicial system as well.

How much time do I have left?

I am done.

Did you say 2 seconds?

OK. Vote against the amendment.

Mr. President, if I had 2 minutes the last time, I should have had more than 2 seconds left over.

No, I can't do that.

Let's see if we can keep our bipartisan coalition together to pass a bill that the President said he is ready to sign. That is what he said at the end of his news conference. It is pretty important to understand, this is something the President is behind. So we are facing a very serious vote on this next one.

Obviously, I rise in opposition to this amendment. This amendment is very finely tailored to scare you that if you don't vote for this amendment, you are going to have somebody out on the street, contrary to the intent of this law, who is going to commit some awful act. Remember, this law is centered on those people who are the least violent people who are in prison already.

Don't be scared by what you have heard about this amendment--it is unnecessary--because the system that is set up by the FIRST STEP Act itself renders dangerous and violent criminals ineligible for the benefits available to low-level offenders under this bill. We are only going to help low-level offenders.

This tactic that is being used to scare you into voting for this amendment and then into destroying the bipartisan cooperation we have gotten in order to get this bill passed undermines the goal of incentivizing low-level offenders to prepare themselves to be productive on reentry.

My 2 minutes are up already?

Will you vote against the amendment, please?

Mr. President, I rise in strong support of the FIRST STEP Act, which I have cosponsored. This bipartisan legislation, introduced by Senators Grassley and Durbin, includes positive prison reforms that the House passed by a 360 to 59 vote. The Senate has now combined the House legislation with sentencing reform provisions that passed out of the Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan basis.

Senators on both sides of the aisle agree that our criminal justice system is broken and badly needs repair.

In my own State of Maryland, we passed major criminal justice reform legislation on a bipartisan basis in 2016, which is known as the Justice Reinvestment Act. The Justice Reinvestment Act seeks to reduce Maryland's prison population and use the savings to provide for more effective treatment to offenders before, during, and after incarceration. This is intended to reduce the likelihood of reoffending, as well as to benefit victims and families and reduce costs to taxpayers.

This fall, I visited the headquarters of the Baltimore Ravens in Owings Mills, MD, in Baltimore County. I am a Baltimore resident and live in Baltimore County and, of course, am a proud Ravens fan, but on that day, I had come to discuss criminal justice reform. I wanted to hear directly from the Ravens players about their insights into the criminal justice system, and they shared their stories involving their friends and family with me.

So I am pleased that several Ravens players and team executives wrote a letter on November 26 to Senator McConnell asking him to bring this critical legislation to the floor. The letter reads: ``The undersigned players and executives of the Baltimore Ravens write to voice our support for the First Step Act, a bill which has the potential to bring transformative and much needed change to our criminal justice system. Criminal justice is an issue that deeply affects our community in Baltimore, as well as the nation as a whole. Not only will this legislation strengthen our nation's criminal justice system, but it enjoys the backing of an incredibly diverse group of supporters.''

Indeed, this legislation is endorsed by both law enforcement and civil rights groups. Law enforcement groups endorsing this legislation include the Fraternal Order of Police, the National District Attorneys Association, and the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. Civil rights groups endorsing this legislation include the ACLU. President Trump has endorsed this legislation, which has a growing number of bipartisan Senate cosponsors.

The legislation includes key sentencing reform provisions added by the Senate to the House-passed measure. First, it expands the so-called safety valve, which allows judges to sentence below the mandatory minimum for qualified low-level nonviolent drug offenders who cooperate with the government. Second, it makes retroactive the application of the Fair Sentencing Act, in which Congress addressed the crack-powder sentencing disparity and allows individuals affected by this disparity to petition for sentence reductions. Third, it reforms the two-strikes and three-strikes laws, by reducing the second strike mandatory minimum of 20 years to 15 years and reducing the third strike mandatory minimum of life in prison to 25 years. Fourth, the legislation eliminates the so-called stacking provision in the U.S. Code, which helps ensure that sentencing enhancements for repeat offenses apply only to true repeat offenders. The legislation clarifies that sentencing enhancements cannot unfairly be ``stacked,'' for example, by applying to conduct within the same indictment.

I am pleased that the revised legislation reauthorizes the Second Chance Act. This critical Federal program helps individuals returning to the community from prison or jail and has a proven track record of reducing recidivism and saving money for the taxpayers.

This legislation marks the first time that the Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police union, has ever supported a criminal justice reform bill. At law enforcement's request, the bill prohibits time credits for individuals convicted of a fentanyl trafficking offense, as well as bars time credits for individuals convicted of repeatedly possessing or using a firearm in relation to a violent or drug- trafficking crime.

On the prison reform side, this legislation includes several positive reforms from the House-passed FIRST STEP Act. The bill makes a good time credit fix and revises the good-time credit law to accurately reflect congressional intent by allowing prisoners to earn 54 days of credit per year, rather than 47 days. The bill prohibits shackling pregnant prisoners and requires healthcare products be provided to incarcerated women. The bill requires prisoners be placed within 500 driving miles of their home and provides additional phone, video conferencing, and visitation privileges. The bill expands evidence- based opioid and heroin abuse treatment for inmates. The bill expands compassionate release under the Second Chance Act and expedites compassionate release applications.

The revised Senate bill also includes several prison reforms beyond what were included in the House-passed bill. The bill establishes an Independent Review Committee of outside experts to assist in the development of the risk and needs assessment system. The National Institute of Justice would select a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization with expertise in risk and needs assessments to host the IRC.

This added guardrail will help to ensure the risk and needs assessment system is evidence-based and minimize racial disparities.

It allows the use of earned credits for supervised release in the community, such as halfway houses or home confinement. The bill also would permit individuals in home confinement to participate in family- related activities that facilitate the prisoner's successful reentry.

It effectively ends Federal juvenile solitary confinement, and limits the discretion of the Bureau of Prisons to deny release to individuals who meet all eligibility criteria. The bill expands evidence-based opioid and heroin abuse treatment for inmates.

Let me be clear that this legislation is entitled the FIRST STEP Act, and it is indeed only the first step in reforming our broken criminal justice system.

In my own State of Maryland, we know the importance of criminal justice reform after the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore Police Department custody in 2015. Baltimore is a good example of the necessary Federal and State partnership we need in order to reform the criminal justice system. When I am talking about the criminal justice system, I am not only talking about the so-called back end of the system, which involves sentencing, corrections, and release from prison; I am talking about the ``front end'' of the system, which involves relations between the community and police and often the first interaction between our citizens and law enforcement.

In Baltimore, the U.S. Department of Justice initiated a Federal ``pattern or practice'' inquiry at the request of the city of Baltimore and the Federal congressional delegation. This investigation led to a comprehensive report finding a pattern and practice of unconstitutional arrests and policing in Baltimore that disproportionately affected minority residents, particularly the African-American residents of Baltimore.

Baltimore City and the Justice Department ultimately agreed to a consent decree and are now under supervision by the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. This will entail a multiyear process of overhauling the police department to finally give the citizens of Baltimore the police department they deserve, using the ``guardian'' and not the ``warrior'' model, as recommended by President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

Congress should take up and pass my End Racial and Religious Profiling Act, S. 411, as racial and discriminatory profiling is wrong, counterproductive, and a wasteful use of resources. This amendment would prohibit racial, religious, and other discriminatory profiling by any Federal, State, or local law enforcement, setting a national standard. It would create a cause of action for such profiling, condition the receipt of Federal law enforcement grants on the elimination of profiling, and create grants for best practices and training of law enforcement officers.

Congress should also take up and pass my Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act, S. 3195, to address the issue of police accountability and build trust between police departments and the communities they serve. This legislation provides incentives for local police organizations to voluntarily adopt performance-based standards to ensure that incidents of misconduct will be reduced through appropriate management, training and oversight protocols.

Finally, this legislation authorizes funds for the implementation of consent decrees and judgements entered into between the Department of Justice and local police departments, such as the Baltimore Police Department.

I have filed two additional amendments to this legislation. The first is the text of S. 1588, the Democracy Restoration Act, DRA. This legislation would strengthen American communities by restoring voting rights to individuals after they have returned to their communities after being released from incarceration. Studies indicate that former prisoners who have voting rights restored are less likely to reoffend and that disenfranchisement hinders their rehabilitation and reintegration into their community.

I am pleased that last month the citizens of Florida, by a nearly two-thirds margin of 65 to 35 percent, voted to amend their State constitution to automatically restore the right to vote for most individuals with prior felony convictions. Under the previous law, people with prior felonies never regained their right to vote in Florida unless a State board used its discretion to individually restore your voting rights.

The United States is one of the few Western democracies that allows the permanent denial of voting rights for individuals with felony convictions. It is simply wrong that State disenfranchisement laws deny citizens participation in our democracy. Casting a vote is one of the most fundamental rights in a democracy and gives you a say in the future of your community. Congress has a responsibility to ensure that right is protected and should be leading an effort to remove barriers and make it easier for more people to register to vote, cast their vote, and make sure their votes are counted.

In the United States, an estimated 6.1 million adult citizens are currently disenfranchised as a result of a criminal conviction. While 16 states and the District of Columbia already restore voting rights upon release from prison, 34 States continue to restrict the voting rights of people who are no longer incarcerated. In 10 States, a conviction can result in lifetime disenfranchisement. Several States deny the right to vote to individuals convicted of certain misdemeanors. Since March 2016, Maryland automatically restores voting rights after individuals are released from prison. The new law immediately restored voting rights to approximately 40,000 Marylanders.

My second amendment includes the text of S. 1728, the Private Prison Information Act, or PPIA. This amendment would apply the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, to private prison. This would ensure that non- Federal prisons are held to the same standard of information sharing and recordkeeping as Federal detention facilities, and would increase transparency and accountability. Private prisons account for 20 percent of our Federal prison and detention population but hide behind loopholes in the law when it comes to how they perform their job on behalf of the American people. Security breaches, overcrowding, and misuse of funds were among the many reasons the Justice Department under President Obama and Attorney General Lynch rightly began to phase out the use of private prison contracts. These companies receive Federal funds and provide the same service as governmental agencies. They perform the ``inherently governmental function'' of incarcerating individuals convicted of a crime by the Federal Government. They must be held accountable to the same standards.

I would note that the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union sent a joint letter of support for the FIRST STEP Act. I want to quote from a statement recently released from the Leadership Conference on this legislation.

The Leadership Conference wrote: ``Bringing fairness and dignity to our justice system is one of the most important civil and human rights issues of our time. This bipartisan bill offers some modest improvements to the current federal system--such as revising mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug offenses and fixing the `good time' credit calculation. For this reason, we urge the Senate to vote yes on cloture and no on all amendments [to the FIRST STEP Act].''

``We must acknowledge, however, that the bill falls short in providing the meaningful change that is required to truly reform the system. Several sentencing provisions don't apply to individuals currently incarcerated, and the bill excludes too many people from earning time credits, allows private prison companies to profit, fails to include parole for juveniles, and expands the use of electronic monitoring. We will continue working to ensure the current bill does not further limit the number of people impacted.''

The Leadership Conference statement concludes: ``The FIRST STEP Act is not the end. We must address these concerns and create a system that is just and equitable, significantly reduces the number of people unnecessarily entering the system, eliminates racial disparities, and creates opportunities for second chances. Congress has much more work to do to achieve the transformational change that will end mass incarceration in America.''

Let us take this first step to reform our broken criminal justice system by passing this legislation during this session, and let us pledge to work together to make further improvements in the new Congress.

FIRST STEP Act