A joint resolution removing the deadline for the ratification of the equal rights amendment.

Mr. President, today I wish to join the American people in celebrating Women's History Month. I would like to begin that celebration by paying homage to several women whose ingenuity and inventions have shaped modern society, but who, like innumerable women throughout history, have not received the credit or recognition they are due.

Katherine Blodgett is a good place to start. In 1935, she invented the first transparent glass that eliminated distortion and glare. Before her, glass contained small bubbles and inclusions that was suitable for windows, but little else. Her method of producing and cutting glass revolutionized the material and is the reason we have camera lenses, microscopes, and eyeglasses today. Without her pioneering work, our ability to see and our ability to look into the universe would be degraded.

In 1942, the actress Hedy Lamarr and a partner were granted a U.S. patent for a secret communication system that involved manipulating radio frequencies to form an unbreakable code to prevent classified messages from being intercepted. The significance of her invention was not fully realized until the 1960s, when it was used by naval ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were able to navigate that perilous nuclear threat successfully in part because of her self-taught inventiveness and skill. Lamarr's coded communications system has been used by numerous military agencies since.

Just 2 years later, in 1944, Grace Hopper made her own kind of history, becoming what many consider to be one of the world's first computer scientists. She invented the compiler that translated written language into computer code and coined the terms ``bug'' and ``debugging.'' Fifteen years later, she led the team that developed COBOL, one of the very first programming languages.

More recently, in 1965, Stephanie Kwolek invented Kevlar. We know Kevlar best as the material used to manufacture bulletproof vests, protecting our police officers and first responders in their greatest moments of crisis, but Kevlar is widely considered to be one of the strongest, most durable materials ever invented and has become a critical component in the manufacturing of airplanes, boats, cars, and bridge cables.

I pause to honor these great inventors and scientists because their names should be familiar, but they aren't. As long as toxic, gender- role stereotypes persist, these women serve as important examples that such stereotypes are hollow and wrong. Women have been serving on the frontlines of war, science, and invention since long before men ``allowed'' them.

These women and others are part of our untold history. You will rarely hear them discussed in American classrooms, and you will seldom find their stories printed in textbooks. Most people wouldn't even recognize their names; yet our lives and fortunes have been shaped by them. Every day, men go to work protected by Kevlar vests, live their daily lives with the benefit of eyeglasses, or boot up their laptop computer using the devices and tools women gave them. That is both the majesty and tragedy of women's history: it is inextricable and powerful and entirely undervalued.

This Women's History Month should not pass without each and every one of us at the very least taking the time to acknowledge and appreciate the women of history who helped to invent modern society, who fought alongside men in every war, who gave us more complete rights and equality, who endured the habitual and everyday scorn of sexism--and who did so generation after generation without accolade or recognition.

Perhaps the best way to honor the past is to secure the future. The denizens of women's history didn't endure systemic misogyny or work so hard to change our world so that we would peer backward and applaud. They did so with the hope we would look forward and make progress.

We still have a long way to go, but we have made progress. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, being a woman is no longer considered a ``preexisting condition'' that warrants higher premiums and deductibles. Also thanks to the Affordable Care Act, preventative services for women--like mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, and prenatal care--are covered by insurance companies. Today more than 48 million American women take advantage of that.

Thanks to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, women have extended protection in cases of wage discrimination. The Lilly Ledbetter Act finally recognized that, when pay discrimination occurs, it is not a single event, but a chronic and repeated offense that inflicts ongoing damage with each and every substandard paycheck. This simple and commonsense recognition has allowed women to seek justice against the kind of economic disenfranchisement that has plagued generations.

Progress, however, does not have its own autopilot button. We must be its stewards and its champions. We must be its agents. We must protect it actively, each and every day, or else we will be complicit in its loss.

I am talking about women's reproductive rights. A woman's right to make her own decisions is under threat today. Her body is her body. It is not ours, and it certainly is not the government's. Roe v. Wade decided that in 1973, yet 44 years later, the Federal Government is run by a party that uses every tool at its disposal to chip away at reproductive rights. Whether it is State policies to limit the types of buildings abortions can be performed in or the threat to defund Planned Parenthood, women's rights are under attack.

Let's be clear that Federal funding for abortion services is already banned under the Hyde Amendment. Today's witch hunt against Planned Parenthood is not substantive in nature; it is a thinly-veiled attempt to prolong a culture war with the hope of assuaging far-right voters. Women's reproductive rights deserve more than to be treated as a political punchline. Reproductive rights were hard-won by centuries of activism and pain, and we--all Members of this Chamber--must vow this month and every month to honor that with our votes and with our voices. We must vow not to let women's reproductive rights be diminished on our watch.

It is 2017, and still, women are expected to be everything simultaneously, all while they are refused the tools and the freedom to balance such difficult demands. It is 2017, and still, families-- mothers most of all--are too often forced to choose between parenthood and economic security, between recovering from childbirth and their career. No woman, no matter what her line of work or Zip Code may be, should be forced to make such an impossible decision. It is our job to pass legislation to ensure no woman has to.

Even with the Lilly Ledbetter legislation, women today are paid, on average, just 77 cents for every dollar men receive for performing the same work. That gap is even worse for women of color: African-American women only earn 64 cents to the dollar, while Latina women earn only 55 cents. That is a problem begging to be solved by Congress. That is a problem for all of us. Women are powerful economic engines in this country, and if we continue to stand idly by while their work is underpaid and undervalued, we will all suffer. We will all have to explain to our daughters and granddaughters why we didn't fight harder for them.

Critically, there is also the issue of violence against women. It is a moral outrage that women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner related physical and sexual assaults every single year. When women stand up and tell us the stories behind this number, we must sit down and listen. We must stop speaking over them with advice on how to protect themselves or avoid certain social situations. They shouldn't have to. It is insulting to presume they require lectures on personal safety, but that men don't require lectures on consent. This problem demands a cultural shift, and we must be its purveyors.

There is the issue of college affordability. A related issue is access to and participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, STEM, programs and--of equal importance--encouragement to join them. Women need to be better represented in positions of power.

These and other issues are what is at stake. These and other issues are why we recognize Women's History Month: to remind ourselves and each other that women helped build this Nation and this world. We need to remind ourselves that women are therefore entitled to equal representation in it and equal access to its opportunities. We need to remind ourselves that women deserve equal respect and equal protection under the law and that women's rights are human rights. We all prosper when we fight to protect them.

Toward these ends, I have led the charge in Congress to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Many Americans would be shocked to learn that the Constitution still lacks a provision ensuring gender equality. That is wrong, but it is fixable. I have introduced S.J. Res. 5, legislation to remove the deadline for States to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, which would pave the way for its formal adoption. Nevada recently passed the Equal Rights Amendment, leaving us just two States shy of success.

The Equal Rights Amendment is only slightly longer than two tweets, but its ratification would finally give women full and equal protection under the Constitution. It reads as follows:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be

denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on

account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by

appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after

the date of ratification.

It is that simple, and it is both necessary and past time to adopt it.

When Congress passed the ERA in 1972, it provided that the measure had to be ratified by three-fourths of the States, 38 States, within 7 years. The original deadline was later extended to 10 years by a joint resolution enacted by Congress. Ultimately, 35 States ratified the ERA by the time the revised deadline expired, leaving advocates a little short.

Article V of the Constitution contains no time limits for ratification of constitutional amendments. In fact, in 1992, the 27th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting immediate congressional pay raises was ratified after 203 years. The Senate could pass my legislation removing the 10-year deadline right now. I strongly encourage the majority leader to bring S.J. Res. 5 up for a vote as soon as possible. American women deserve to know that their most fundamental rights are explicitly protected by our nation's most venerated document.

I have often said that how a nation treats its women is a good barometer of that nation's potential for success as a whole. I hold the United States of America to that standard. Every day, I weigh the successes and failures we have had along the path toward fair treatment and gender equality, and I assess ways Congress can facilitate more successes. Every day, I reevaluate how best to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, how best to protect reproductive rights, how best to fight for

paid family leave and affordable higher education and greater representation in this very Chamber.

I invite every Senator to do the same, both because those are the right battles and because fighting them protects gender equality progress that has been so hard-won by the women of this Nation. We must not allow those victories to be reversed. We must keep progressing.

This Women's History Month, I am reminded of what the poet G.D. Anderson once said: ``Feminism is not about making women strong. Women are already strong. It's about changing the way the world perceives that strength.'' Let us remember it is precisely that strength that has propelled our world forward. It is precisely that strength that serves as the foundation of so many of this country's successes, and it is precisely that strength we must remember and meet with our own, when women's rights are under siege.

Mr. President, this week the Senate is considering two important labor-related nominations: the nominations of John Ring to serve as a Member of the National Labor Relations Board, NLRB, and Patrick Pizzella to serve as Deputy Secretary of Labor, DOL. Unfortunately, given the nominees' well-documented hostility to the collective bargaining rights of working men and women, I will not vote to confirm either of them.

If Mr. Ring is confirmed, he will restore the Board to the 3-2 anti- labor majority, with no assurances that President Trump will fill the Democratic seat of former chairman Mark Gaston Pearce expiring this summer. It is important to note here that nominations to the NLRB have traditionally been confirmed in bipartisan pairs.

Mr. Ring authored blog posts calling the NLRB an ``activist'' organization during the Obama administration. In other blog posts, he characterized the NLRB's union election procedures as ``some of the biggest assaults on employer rights in recent history.'' In fact, the election rule simply modernized union election procedures and has actually resulted in slightly fewer union elections.

During the brief 3-2 Republican majority late last year before then- Board Chairman Phillip Miscimarra completed his term on December 16, 2017, the NLRB rushed to overturn landmark decisions, weakening workers' rights under the National Labor Relations Act, NLRA, and undermining the statute's core purpose of promoting collective bargaining, including the Browning-Ferris Industries joint employer standard decision. The Board's inspector general has faulted those efforts, and the Board has been forced to vacate the joint employer decision. A new Republican majority may reorganize the NLRB in ways that are unfavorable to workers and their collective bargaining rights.

Mr. Pizzella is a vocal advocate of so-called right-to-work laws. They really ought to be called right-to-be-exploited laws. As Ross Eisenbray of the Economic Policy Institute reported last year, ``Wages are 3.1 percent lower in so-called `right to work' (RTW) states, for union and nonunion workers alike--after correctly accounting for differences in cost of living, demographics, and labor market characteristics. The negative impact of RTW laws translates to $1,558 less a year in earnings for a typical full-time worker.''

There is a clear correlation between the decline in union membership and stagnant wages. If the Senate confirms Mr. Pizzella and Mr. Ring, the Republican assault on unions and collective bargaining rights enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act, NLRA, will gain momentum, and working people and their families will suffer as a result.

Mr. Pizzella previously served at the Department of Labor, as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Administration and Management under President George W. Bush. During Mr. Pizzella's previous tenure at DOL, the Government Accountability Office, GAO, determined that the Department left workers vulnerable to unscrupulous employers while investigating complaints of minimum wage, overtime, and child labor violations. GAO found that the Wage and Hour Division's complaint intake, complaint resolution, and investigation processes were ineffective and discouraged workers from lodging wage-theft complaints.

Mr. Pizzella also has expressed his antipathy to Federal workers and their unions. I am proud to represent many of these public servants. The Federal workforce is one of our Nation's finest assets, and public sector unions make it more productive.

It is ironic that the Senate is considering two nominees this week who are

openly hostile to the collective bargaining rights of working people. Yesterday was Equal Pay Day, which symbolizes the number of extra days a typical woman who works full-time, year-round must work into 2018 to be paid what a typical man was paid in 2017. Women are still only paid 80 cents for every dollar paid to a man, a yearly pay difference of $10,086, and the disparity is even worse for many women of color.

Based on an analysis of Census Bureau data, the National Partnership for Women and Families is releasing a study which concludes that, in sum, women employed full time in the U.S. will lose nearly $900 billion to the wage gap this year. If the wage gap were closed, on average, a working woman in this country would be able to afford more than 1 additional year of tuition and fees for a 4-year public university, 74 more weeks of food for her family, nearly 7 more months of mortgage and utility payments, or 14 more months of childcare.

If Mr. Ring and Mr. Pizzella and President Trump are unwilling to protect female workers and try to close that pay gap, which seems likely, then let us let us arm women with the most powerful tool in our legal system: the U.S. Constitution. Let us finally pass the Equal Rights Amendment, ERA.

The ERA is barely longer than a tweet, but it would finally give women full and equal protection under the Constitution. Section 1 of the ERA states, quite simply, that ``Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.''

When Congress proposed the ERA in 1972, it provided that the measure had to be ratified by three-fourths of the States--38 States--within 7 years. This deadline was later extended to 10 years by a joint resolution, but ultimately only 35 out of 38 States had ratified the ERA when the deadline expired in 1982. Note that the deadline wasn't contained in the amendment itself; the deadline was in the text of the joint resolution.

Article V of the Constitution contains no time limits for the ratification of amendments, so the ERA deadline is arbitrary. To put the matter in context, the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits congressional pay raises without an intervening election, was ratified in 1992, 203 years after it was first proposed.

The Senate should vote on a Senate Joint Resolution I have introduced--S.J. Res. 5--to remove the ERA deadline, and every State in our Union that has not yet taken up its consideration should do so without any further delay.

Nevada became the 36th State to ratify the amendment last March, leaving the ERA just two States short of the required three-fourths of the States threshold under the Constitution if the deadline were to be abolished.

The ERA would incorporate a ban on gender-based discrimination, explicitly written or otherwise, into the Constitution. It could change outcomes in discrimination cases by requiring the Supreme Court to use the higher standard of ``strict scrutiny'' when assessing those cases, the same standard used in racial and religious discrimination cases.

I think many--perhaps most--Americans would be shocked to learn that our Constitution has no provision expressly prohibiting gender discrimination.

In a 2011 interview, the late Justice Antonin Scalia summed up the need for an Equal Rights Amendment best. He said, ``Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't.''

So I ask my Senate colleagues this question most sincerely: Are we willing to do what must be done to prohibit gender discrimination in the Constitution? The people being affected by systemic gender inequality are our constituents. They are our mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, and our granddaughters. They are American citizens who deserve basic respect and equality.

It is time to end the assault on working families in this country. Let's end discrimination by making it possible to ratify the ERA. Let's close the pay gap. Let's stop denigrating Federal workers. Let's support, not attack, the collective bargaining rights that are the cornerstone of a strong middle class. I regret that the Senate is poised to confirm two individuals who are unlikely to assist these efforts. We can and must do better.

Mr. President, today the Senate will vote on the confirmation of John Ring to be a member of the National Labor Relations Board, NLRB. I am glad that we are voting on this nomination because, once Mr. Ring is confirmed, we will once again have a full five-member National Labor Relations Board.

Created in 1935, the NLRB administers the National Labor Relations Act, which seeks to mitigate and eliminate labor-related impediments to the free flow of commerce. The 5 board members have 5-year, staggered terms, and the general counsel has a 4-year term.

The NLRB should be a neutral umpire in labor disputes. While Board partisanship did not start under President Obama, it became worse under him. An overly partisan Board creates instability in our Nation's workplaces and does not serve the intent of the law, which is to create stable labor relations and the free flow of commerce.

The NLRB under President Obama took two particularly harmful actions that are still in place today. First, the joint employer decision threatens the American dream for owners of the Nation's 780,000 franchise locations. Under that decision, companies could find it much more practical to own all their stores and restaurants and daycare centers themselves, rather than encourage more franchisee-owned small businesses.

Second is the ambush election rule, which can force a union election before employers and employees have a chance to figure out what is going on. The rule also forces employers to provide union organizers with a list of employees' work locations, shifts, job classifications, personal email addresses, and home and cellular telephone numbers. This information is highly personal, and employees may not want it shared, but workers do not have a choice. I am pleased the Board is accepting comments on whether this rule should be revised.

A fully staffed board is vital to both employees and employers, and I am not the only one who thinks that is important. At a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, HELP, hearing in September 2014, then-Chairman Harkin said, ``Keeping the NLRB fully staffed and able to do its work will send a strong message to the American people that yes, Washington can work, and our government can function.''

While attending the Catholic University Columbus School of Law in the evening, Mr. Ring worked for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. After law school, he joined the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he has worked since 1988. Mr. Ring flourished at the firm, where he worked his way up from summer associate to coleader of the firm's labor and management relations practice.

Mr. Ring was nominated to be a member of the NLRB on January 18, 2018. The HELP Committee held Mr. Ring's hearing on March 1, 2018, and he completed all paperwork in accordance with the committee's rules, practices, and procedures. We received Mr. Ring's HELP Committee paperwork and his Office of Government Ethics paperwork on January 24, 2018, 36 days before his hearing. Mr. Ring offered to meet with all HELP Committee members and met with five of them, including two Democrats. Following his hearing, Mr. Ring responded to 97 questions for the record, or 158, if you include subquestions. These responses were provided to Senators prior to the markup, and the HELP Committee favorably reported Mr. Ring's nomination on March 14, 2018.

I look forward to voting for John Ring, and I trust that he will serve with distinction.