Prevent Unconstitutional Vaccine Mandates for Interstate Commerce Act

Madam President, last month I was proud to see the Senate come together in a bipartisan effort and pass a Congressional Review Act measure to overturn President Biden's unconstitutional Federal vaccine mandate on private businesses. In that bipartisan vote, a majority of U.S. Senators sent a clear message that these job-killing mandates are wrong and have no place in our country's fight against COVID-19.

Then, just days after Christmas, President Biden said something very interesting. While he was talking with Governors about the COVID-19 pandemic, he admitted:

Look, there is no Federal solution. This gets solved at a

State level.

This is President Biden's message: States should be leading the effort. Now, that doesn't mean there isn't a role for the Federal Government. But what we have seen from the Biden administration is no progress, just worsening cases, and the horrible job-killing consequences of his unconstitutional mandates on private businesses.

I want to be clear: His unconstitutional mandates are job killers. Back in October, the Federal Reserve reported that vaccine mandates were widely cited by businesses as a reason for low labor supply and hiring and retention issues. It was a finding my Republican colleagues and I have been warning about for months before their report, and it is directly tied to inflation.

When the labor supply is reduced, prices go up, and families, especially those on low and fixed incomes, suffer. Restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations, and small businesses all have to charge more.

I heard about a restaurant owner in St. Petersburg, FL, who had to take certain items off the menu because they simply cost too much, and he can't pass the cost on to his customers. He has even seen the price of oil and to-go boxes more than double.

I talked to an operator of a food bank in Osceola County, FL. She used to see 15 families each day, and now she is seeing upward of 70 families. Food prices have gone through the roof. It is more expensive for her to get food to give to people hurting at the very time demand is up. This is the reality for families and small businesses all across America, and vaccine mandates do nothing but make these problems even worse.

I can't imagine why, just when our country is working to get back on its feet, the President of the United States would be pushing policies that kill jobs, but that is exactly what he is doing. Now lockdown- loving Dr. Fauci and President Biden want to double down on their insane mandates and are considering forcing every American who wants to fly to show proof of vaccine before boarding an airplane. This is just another Orwellian response from the Biden administration and radical Democrats that does nothing to protect the American people.

Providing information about the virus, providing tests, supporting vaccine and therapy developments, and getting the economy back on track should be the only role of the Federal Government in this pandemic.

Congress has to take a stand and protect the American people from these

communist China-style policies that are meant to divide us. That is why a few months ago, I introduced the Prevent Unconstitutional Vaccine Mandates for Interstate Commerce Act. The bill would prevent Federal Agencies, like the Department of Transportation and Department of Commerce, from requiring proof of vaccination for companies trying to do business across State lines.

Importantly, it would block the Federal Government from making airline passengers show proof of vaccine before catching a flight, which is exactly what Dr. Fauci wants to do.

This bill also protects truckers and will ensure that the Biden administration can't ruin our supply chains even more. Our truckers are the key to fixing Biden's supply chain crisis, and we should do everything we can to protect them.

President Biden has continually showed us his track record of failed policies and a mandate for domestic airline passengers would only add to his growing failures and blame shifting. We saw it in his failed and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan. We have seen his administration's complete failure to handle the crisis across the southern border. We see it every day in President Biden's inability to fight inflation by stopping reckless spending. We continue to see his failure and complete void of leadership in how this administration is fighting COVID-19.

Now, I am sure my Democrat colleagues will say that this legislation isn't needed because at this exact moment, there is not a vaccine mandate to fly on a plane, but they said the same thing last year when we tried to preemptively block vaccine mandates for private businesses. They claimed the President has committed not to do that. We know the President broke that promise.

The American people deserve better than politicians who continue to mislead them on the Federal Government's failures to fight COVID properly. The back-and-forth has to end.

We must end these ridiculous, unconstitutional vaccine mandates and focus on getting our economy back on track. That is why, as I mentioned earlier, the U.S. Senate passed a Congressional Review Act measure to invalidate President Biden's vaccine mandate on a bipartisan basis. The Senate, along with the majority of Americans, doesn't believe that the Federal Government should force people to choose between taking the vaccine and losing their job. That is why I am again demanding that the Federal Government stop trying to force the American people to follow draconian, job-killing mandates that hurt families.

This is the second time I have come to the floor to try to pass this bill and protect the rights of American families and businesses. I would like to thank Senators Cynthia Lummis, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Roger Marshall for joining me in introducing this important and urgently needed legislation. This is a commonsense bill, and I hope all my colleagues will support it.

As if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration of S. 2895 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

First off, I want to make sure my colleague understands what this bill would do. This bill would prevent Federal Agencies, like the Department of Transportation and the Department of Commerce, from requiring proof of vaccination for companies trying to do business across State lines.

So what this bill does is say that the Federal Government is not going to mandate this. If a private business wants to say that you have to have a vaccine to come in, that is a decision that private business gets to make. But government shouldn't be in the position to tell a new business that they have to require a vaccine. I mean, that is not what you do.

What this does do is it is killing jobs. It is killing people and killing the jobs of people who worked their tail off in the prior 12 months.

Now, I don't know why this is controversial. The Senate, on a bipartisan basis, just passed a Congressional Review Act measure striking down President Biden's vaccine mandate. On a bipartisan basis we already decided we don't believe in what the President is doing.

We have got families and businesses all across this country that are struggling to keep up with the cost of inflation, and the government should be doing everything it can to reduce inflation and get the economy going.

Look, I know what it is like to go hungry because groceries cost too much. I watched my mom and my dad struggle for years. When prices rose, my mom took in odd jobs. When she struggled, we didn't have as much food on the table.

It is the responsibility of the Federal Government to improve the economy and help families get ahead. We know the vaccine mandates are absolutely causing prices to rise. When prices rise, people are getting hurt, and they are making interstate commerce much more difficult.

So instead of taking action to help families and curb inflation, the Biden Administration is taking every possible step to make it harder for them to put food on the table and afford to live in this country.

The President has already said that this must be handled at the State level. I agree. And the Federal Government can take a step in this direction by ensuring vaccine passports won't be required for interstate commerce.

They shouldn't be required to get on a plane. They shouldn't be required to carry goods across State lines.

Even our Nation's healthcare providers know that mandates don't work. They stopped doing it in most cases. Just last month we saw hospitals across this country delay or suspend their vaccine mandates because they knew it was killing jobs.

We know that Biden's unconstitutional mandates are going to make it more difficult to retain staff and deliver quality care to their patients. I don't understand why my colleague wants to give the government more power, more power, more power--upholding regulations that are causing prices to rise and forcing people to choose between keeping their jobs and getting a vaccine.

We ought to give people the freedom to live their lives, to do exactly what my colleague just said: If a business wants to require a vaccine, they should require that. But if they don't, the government shouldn't be doing that. Our government should be giving people information, and let them make the decisions they want to make.

I trust American families. I trust American businesses. They are smart enough to make informed decisions about their health. But my colleague's objection is bad for American families and bad for business owners, and I hope she will reconsider her objection.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object. I recognize that my friend from Oregon has been busy with affairs on the Finance Committee and so has not been involved in the now 2 years of debate over Nord Stream 2 on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But, unfortunately, that has resulted in the Senator from Oregon being given talking points--perhaps from the administration, perhaps from colleagues--that are simply factually incorrect. I am sure that is inadvertent.

The Senator from Oregon just said that there is no way to stop this pipeline, and that the Trump administration failed to impose sanctions to stop

the pipeline. Both of those statements are factually wrong.

I was the author of two separate pieces of legislation that passed into law concerning Nord Stream 2. Both were bipartisan legislation. Both, I authored with Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, in the Senate. Both passed with overwhelming bipartisan support from both Houses of Congress.

The first bill passed in December of 2019. Nord Stream 2 at the time was more than 90 percent complete, and the argument then that was being pushed by Russian disinformation and that, sadly, has been echoed by the Biden administration and was just echoed by the Senator from Oregon--the argument from Russian disinformation was, the pipeline can't be stopped; it is too late.

We know that was Russian disinformation because it was conclusively disproved. Putin stopped building the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline the very day that the Cruz-Shaheen bipartisan sanctions were signed into law-- not the next day, not the next week. That day, we stopped the pipeline in its tracks.

But, Mr. President, it was not only stopped for 1 day; it was stopped for more than a year. For December of 2019, for January, February, March--every month in 2020, the pipeline lay dormant. It was a piece of metal at the bottom of the ocean. So the claim that we cannot stop this pipeline is flat-out false because we did.

By the way, when the Senator from Oregon said the Trump administration couldn't stop this pipeline, that, again, is just incorrect. When the President signed the legislation, the pipeline was stopped that day. It remained stopped for over a year.

When did Putin return to building this pipeline? The date is important. Putin returned to building the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline on January 24, 2021, 4 days after Joe Biden was sworn into office. And he did so because Joe Biden and his team had already conveyed weakness that they would not enforce U.S. sanctions law and that they would roll over and give Putin and Russia a generational geopolitical gift. The only reason Putin began building again is because the Biden White House defied U.S. law to surrender to Putin.

Now, Joe Biden is entitled to believe that is a good policy idea. What he is not entitled to do is ignore U.S. law. And the Senator from Oregon suggests this nominee has nothing to do with that. Well, it is the Department of the Treasury that is ignoring the CAATSA law, that is refusing to follow the policy.

Sadly, this moment marks a new threshold in that debate. Up until this point, it has only been the Biden White House that has been surrendering to Russia. Sadly, now we have a Democratic Member of the Senate objecting to legislation to stop the Biden White House from surrendering to Russia. That is a move in the wrong direction.

That being said, my offer of reasonable compromise remains if we can come together as we have repeatedly, Republicans and Democrats, to force the President to obey the law and to stop surrendering to Russia in a way that hurts America, hurts Europe.

By the way, the European Parliament--my friends on the Democratic side of the aisle like to consider themselves lovers of our friends in Europe. The European Parliament voted on Nord Stream 2. The vote was roughly 500 to 50 against Nord Stream 2 because it makes our European allies subject to energy blackmail by Putin and his successor dictators.

This is bad for America, bad for Europe, bad for peace, bad for the environment, but good for Vladimir Putin and for Russia. Joe Biden is mistaken to be committing this surrender, and my friend from Oregon errs in joining Joe Biden in that surrender to Russia.

I hope the Senator from Oregon reconsiders. I hope Congress comes together again. But as long as that does not happen, I object.

Mr. President, I don't have objection to the article being included in the Record, but I would note that, once again, the Senator from Oregon is limited by the fact that he has not participated in the debate on this in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the last 2 years, because what he stated in his first remarks was that there was no way to stop the pipeline initially and the Trump administration failed to do so. That was factually incorrect.

We stopped the pipeline the day President Trump signed the bipartisan Cruz-Shaheen sanctions into law. That was December of 2019, and the pipeline was stopped for over a year. As I mentioned, on January 24 of 2020, 4 days after Joe Biden was sworn into office, Putin began-- returned to building the pipeline because Biden had already telegraphed his surrender to Russia.

Now, what my friend from Oregon just said is--he repeated news coverage that the pipeline is now, today, complete. That is, in fact, correct, that because Biden surrendered on this point, Putin went all in and finished the pipeline. But this is where being part of the Foreign Relations Committee discussion matters, because even though the pipeline is now physically complete, it does not mean it is operative. After the pipeline is physically complete, there are months of certifications required and multiple authorities.

The legislation that Congress passed as a bipartisan matter also imposes sanctions on any entity, any company that certifies the pipeline. Indeed, the position of the Biden State Department has been that even when the pipeline is complete, we can stop it from ever going online by stopping certification.

So the legislation that I just asked for consent would do exactly that--it would stop certification, and it would leave it as a hunk of metal rather than an operating pipeline enriching Putin at the expense of Europe and America. So we still have time to stop this.

One final observation. This morning, I spent a couple of hours in a classified briefing on this topic, on Nord Stream 2. A question that I posed to the Biden State Department--I said: What exactly did Joe Biden, did the administration get in exchange for surrendering to Russia in a way that will impact this country and Europe for decades to come?

The answer, I will say, was altogether unsatisfactory. The only thing the Biden White House got was good will from Angela Merkel, whose party was just defeated resoundingly this past weekend in the election. So Angela Merkel is on her way out. We got good will from someone who will very soon no longer be the leader of Germany.

Instead, the German people voted in--elevated the Greens, who were vocally opposed to the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline. So the new government in Germany is not going to appreciate Biden surrendering to Putin in a way that hurts the environment and hurts Germany. But we have alienated the Ukrainians; we have alienated the Poles; we have alienated Eastern Europe. The European Union voted 500 to 50, roughly, against Nord Stream 2. We got nothing, and we hurt U.S. jobs.

This is foolhardy, and I am hopeful that the Senate will exercise our historical role over foreign policy and prevent a President and an administration from making this mistake.

I would note, Secretary of State Blinken and the State Department argued vociferously in the interagency process to sanction Nord Stream 2 AG, and it was the political operatives at the Biden White House who overrode the State Department. They should not have done so, and today the Department of the Treasury should follow the law and impose sanctions under CAATSA or delist them and trigger a vote in this Congress.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise in support of Senator Scott's bill. I want to make a few different points. First of all, I don't believe this administration or people who support the mandates are really thinking the process through as to how devastating these mandates are going to be on our economy.

Well before the President even announced his unlawful regulatory initiative, I was hearing from truckdrivers; I was hearing from nurses and doctors who have already had COVID, who had natural immunity, who are looking at, for example, the reports, are looking at some of the data and science saying that natural immunity is 13 to 27 times more effective than the vaccine, and they have chosen not to get it.

President Biden promised the American public he wouldn't mandate this. He said: ``I don't think it should be mandatory. I wouldn't demand it to be mandatory.''

His Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, said it is not the Federal Government's role.

I agree. The President also said: ``This is not about freedom or personal choice.''

No, this is exactly about freedom and personal choice.

I have written so many oversight letters to the healthcare Agencies. I completely agree with Senator Scott. I was a big supporter of Operation Warp Speed. I have gotten every vaccine until this one because I have had COVID, but the Federal Agencies have not been transparent. They have not given the American public information that we need to make that informed choice.

We need to recognize people's health autonomy. This is their body. They should be able to make these choices.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the information we are not getting from our healthcare Agencies that people who are choosing not to get vaccinated are looking at. And it is not disinformation. This is real information. It is just being withheld from the public by our healthcare Agencies, by the media, and the social media.

The first thing I want to show is a chart that I put together. Again, this is real data. This comes from the CDC in terms of the number of new cases per day, as well as the number of deaths per day. The deaths are down here in a very thin red line. But you can see by this chart that in terms of the surge of the initial Alpha variant of COVID, it pretty well peaked late December, early January.

The vaccines got the emergency use authorization about mid-December. The orange line shows the percent of Americans vaccinated, fully vaccinated. You can see the initial surge, the initial pandemic, was winding down before the vaccines even could take effect.

Now, again, we all hoped and prayed that the vaccine would be 100 percent effective and 100 percent safe. But when you look at this chart, as the pandemic is winding down, the percent of fully vaccinated individuals are going up, you would think--again, you would think what you would see is just a complete winding down of the pandemic. But that is not what we have seen.

We have seen this new surge, this new surge of a variant called Delta. So what are we to make of this? Again, I am not a doctor; I am not a medical researcher--but I look at this, and I am going, well, it certainly doesn't look like the vaccine has been particularly effective against the Delta variant.

But let's look at some data, the type of data that we are not getting from our healthcare Agencies. So we have to look, unfortunately, to England and to Israel that are more transparent. I don't expect anybody to be able to read the figures here. I will give you the highlights, but I am showing that this is from Public Health England. This is one of their Federal healthcare Agencies. This is from their technical briefing No. 23, dated September 17, 2021. It covers cases for about 7\1/2\ months, from the beginning of February to February 12. What the data shows is that during that 7\1/2\-month period in England, there are about 750,000 new COVID cases. A little under 600,000 of those were the Delta variant, about 80 percent. The number of deaths associated with those 600,000 Delta cases was 2,542, which gives us a case fatality ratio of about 0.4.

Now, again, case fatality is higher than infection fatality because these are actually registered cases, and there are all kinds of infections that never get registered. So to put this in context, an infection fatality rate for a bad flu season is slightly under 0.2, half of this. Again, put things in perspective.

Now, President Biden--and this has been parroted by media, news media--said that what we are currently experiencing is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. They don't give us, really, any data to back that up; they just proclaim, pronounce, that 99 percent of people with COVID now are unvaccinated, but they don't give us the data.

We have data from England. And here is the data. So of the 600,000 cases in England, 43 percent were with the unvaxxed; 27 percent were with the fully vaxxed; another 30 percent were partially vaxxed or just undetermined. But I think what is interesting--here is another quote from President Biden--President Biden said: If you are vaccinated, you are not going to be hospitalized; you are not going to an ICU unit; you are not going to die; you are not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

Well, maybe that is true in the United States. I kind of doubt it because in England, of the 600,000 new cases of Delta, of the over 2,500 deaths--63 percent of those deaths--1,613 people were fully vaccinated. Twenty-eight percent were with the unvaxxed.

This is information the American people probably never heard. It is information, by conveying it, I will get attacked. I will be vilified. I will be

censored. I will be suppressed. It is one of the reasons I come to the floor of the Senate to reveal this information that the American people need to know.

Let me close with something else that certainly nurses know, nurses who were our heroes. They had the courage and compassion to treat COVID patients. Many got infected; some tragically died; most survived. Now, many of those nurses are treating the vaccine injured.

Let me just quick quote a couple of figures from the CDC's own safety early surveillance system--the VAERS report, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Worldwide, from a couple of weeks ago--these numbers are pretty fresh--there have been over 15,000 deaths reported on VAERS. Now, I realize VAERS does not prove causation. But of those 15,000 deaths, over 5,000 of those deaths have occurred on days 0, 1, or 2 following vaccination.

Now, again, it doesn't prove causation, but if I were working at the CDC, I would be looking at that very closely and analyzing those cases. The final number, total adverse events, on the VAERS system in 10 months, since the COVID vaccines have been under emergency use authorization, over 725,000 adverse events. So, again, I was hoping and praying this vaccine was 100 percent effective, 100 percent safe, but that does not appear to be the case.

And I believe this administration, I believe our healthcare Agencies need to be honest and transparent with the public. They have not been. The American people have the right to choose. It should not be mandated. We should respect their personal choice. We should respect their freedom.

And I will just close on--I will be bringing more information as we discuss other ways to push back on these mandates over the next few days, so stay tuned.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise in support of Senator Scott's bill. I want to make a few different points. First of all, I don't believe this administration or people who support the mandates are really thinking the process through as to how devastating these mandates are going to be on our economy.

Well before the President even announced his unlawful regulatory initiative, I was hearing from truckdrivers; I was hearing from nurses and doctors who have already had COVID, who had natural immunity, who are looking at, for example, the reports, are looking at some of the data and science saying that natural immunity is 13 to 27 times more effective than the vaccine, and they have chosen not to get it.

President Biden promised the American public he wouldn't mandate this. He said: ``I don't think it should be mandatory. I wouldn't demand it to be mandatory.''

His Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, said it is not the Federal Government's role.

I agree. The President also said: ``This is not about freedom or personal choice.''

No, this is exactly about freedom and personal choice.

I have written so many oversight letters to the healthcare Agencies. I completely agree with Senator Scott. I was a big supporter of Operation Warp Speed. I have gotten every vaccine until this one because I have had COVID, but the Federal Agencies have not been transparent. They have not given the American public information that we need to make that informed choice.

We need to recognize people's health autonomy. This is their body. They should be able to make these choices.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the information we are not getting from our healthcare Agencies that people who are choosing not to get vaccinated are looking at. And it is not disinformation. This is real information. It is just being withheld from the public by our healthcare Agencies, by the media, and the social media.

The first thing I want to show is a chart that I put together. Again, this is real data. This comes from the CDC in terms of the number of new cases per day, as well as the number of deaths per day. The deaths are down here in a very thin red line. But you can see by this chart that in terms of the surge of the initial Alpha variant of COVID, it pretty well peaked late December, early January.

The vaccines got the emergency use authorization about mid-December. The orange line shows the percent of Americans vaccinated, fully vaccinated. You can see the initial surge, the initial pandemic, was winding down before the vaccines even could take effect.

Now, again, we all hoped and prayed that the vaccine would be 100 percent effective and 100 percent safe. But when you look at this chart, as the pandemic is winding down, the percent of fully vaccinated individuals are going up, you would think--again, you would think what you would see is just a complete winding down of the pandemic. But that is not what we have seen.

We have seen this new surge, this new surge of a variant called Delta. So what are we to make of this? Again, I am not a doctor; I am not a medical researcher--but I look at this, and I am going, well, it certainly doesn't look like the vaccine has been particularly effective against the Delta variant.

But let's look at some data, the type of data that we are not getting from our healthcare Agencies. So we have to look, unfortunately, to England and to Israel that are more transparent. I don't expect anybody to be able to read the figures here. I will give you the highlights, but I am showing that this is from Public Health England. This is one of their Federal healthcare Agencies. This is from their technical briefing No. 23, dated September 17, 2021. It covers cases for about 7\1/2\ months, from the beginning of February to February 12. What the data shows is that during that 7\1/2\-month period in England, there are about 750,000 new COVID cases. A little under 600,000 of those were the Delta variant, about 80 percent. The number of deaths associated with those 600,000 Delta cases was 2,542, which gives us a case fatality ratio of about 0.4.

Now, again, case fatality is higher than infection fatality because these are actually registered cases, and there are all kinds of infections that never get registered. So to put this in context, an infection fatality rate for a bad flu season is slightly under 0.2, half of this. Again, put things in perspective.

Now, President Biden--and this has been parroted by media, news media--said that what we are currently experiencing is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. They don't give us, really, any data to back that up; they just proclaim, pronounce, that 99 percent of people with COVID now are unvaccinated, but they don't give us the data.

We have data from England. And here is the data. So of the 600,000 cases in England, 43 percent were with the unvaxxed; 27 percent were with the fully vaxxed; another 30 percent were partially vaxxed or just undetermined. But I think what is interesting--here is another quote from President Biden--President Biden said: If you are vaccinated, you are not going to be hospitalized; you are not going to an ICU unit; you are not going to die; you are not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

Well, maybe that is true in the United States. I kind of doubt it because in England, of the 600,000 new cases of Delta, of the over 2,500 deaths--63 percent of those deaths--1,613 people were fully vaccinated. Twenty-eight percent were with the unvaxxed.

This is information the American people probably never heard. It is information, by conveying it, I will get attacked. I will be vilified. I will be

censored. I will be suppressed. It is one of the reasons I come to the floor of the Senate to reveal this information that the American people need to know.

Let me close with something else that certainly nurses know, nurses who were our heroes. They had the courage and compassion to treat COVID patients. Many got infected; some tragically died; most survived. Now, many of those nurses are treating the vaccine injured.

Let me just quick quote a couple of figures from the CDC's own safety early surveillance system--the VAERS report, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Worldwide, from a couple of weeks ago--these numbers are pretty fresh--there have been over 15,000 deaths reported on VAERS. Now, I realize VAERS does not prove causation. But of those 15,000 deaths, over 5,000 of those deaths have occurred on days 0, 1, or 2 following vaccination.

Now, again, it doesn't prove causation, but if I were working at the CDC, I would be looking at that very closely and analyzing those cases. The final number, total adverse events, on the VAERS system in 10 months, since the COVID vaccines have been under emergency use authorization, over 725,000 adverse events. So, again, I was hoping and praying this vaccine was 100 percent effective, 100 percent safe, but that does not appear to be the case.

And I believe this administration, I believe our healthcare Agencies need to be honest and transparent with the public. They have not been. The American people have the right to choose. It should not be mandated. We should respect their personal choice. We should respect their freedom.

And I will just close on--I will be bringing more information as we discuss other ways to push back on these mandates over the next few days, so stay tuned.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, 10 years ago this month, Congress worked on a broad bipartisan basis to pass the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, the biggest change to the United States patent laws in half a century. The patent system exists to create incentives that promote the progress of science and the useful arts for the benefit of the public. Our whole economy depends on a working patent system that reinforces high-quality patents while ensuring that poor-quality patents cannot throw a wrench into the gears. Today, I am proud to introduce, alongside Senator Cornyn, the bipartisan Restoring the America Invents Act to ensure that the improvements we made to maintain high patent quality in the Leahy- Smith Act continue to work as Congress intended.

One of the challenges we confronted 10 years ago was that too many invalid patents were being issued. Instead of rewarding true innovation, these patents were being used to indefinitely extend monopolies, quash competition, and harm American consumers. For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, brand-name drug companies would artificially extend a drug's patent term by patenting minor and insignificant changes to the underlying product. In other industries, entities that did not even make products would buy up tens of thousands of questionable patents covering simple and obvious actions like doing business on the internet, and they would sue thousands of small businesses that sold innovative products online.

One of the biggest accomplishments of the Leahy-Smith Act was that it empowered members of the public to challenge a patent's validity at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office--PTO--directly, providing a faster, less expensive, and more accessible avenue than litigation in the courts. These proceedings, called inter partes review

and post-grant review, have been wildly successful. According to one economic impact study, in one 5-year period, the Leahy-Smith Act saved the U.S. economy $2.64 billion in litigation costs alone, with more than $1 billion more in added personal income for Americans.

The Leahy-Smith Act's new proceedings have been used thousands of times and have had the aggregate impact of improving the quality of patents in our patent system. Unfortunately, over time and especially during the last administration, the PTO has limited the availability of these proceedings beyond what Congress intended. The PTO began routinely declining to hear challenges brought by members of the public, even when those challenges met timing requirements, met all other statutory criteria, and would have likely succeeded on the merits. In 2020, roughly one in five challenges was summarily denied proceedings by the PTO, undermining the intent of the Leahy-Smith Act.

Furthermore, whether a patent is valid should not depend on which party is in the White House or what individual is in charge of the agency. During the last administration, there was reported nontransparent meddling by the PTO Director in the work of the administrative patent judges who were making inter partes and post- grant review decisions. While the Supreme Court has recently held that the PTO Director should have the last word on patentability decisions, the public deserves to know when decisions are being made by dedicated civil servant judges and when they are being made by the politically appointed Director.

This bill fixes both problems and generally restores the Leahy-Smith Act to what Congress intended 10 years ago. It requires institution of inter partes review petitions that meet the statutory criteria and further encourages district courts to stay litigation when a parallel proceeding at the PTO will resolve the same validity issues. The stay factors in this bill are intended to put a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of a district court stay, preventing duplicative proceedings, and protecting patent owners from having to repeatedly defend their patents. The Restoring the America Invents Act further imposes transparency. The PTO Director must provide a separate written opinion when overriding part or all of a decision of administrative patent judges, and the PTO Director may not interfere in any way in the judges' initial decisionmaking. The public and any reviewing court should get to see the judges' decisions first, before any political actor might change the outcome.

This bill further clarifies other aspects of the Leahy-Smith Act. It clarifies the intent of the Leahy-Smith Act that the PTO can address, in inter partes review proceedings, certain clear instances of invalidity: double patenting, where applicants amass dozens of patents covering trivial iterations of an already-patented drug or other product; and admissions by the patent owner, in the patent itself, that someone else first came up with the invention. It clarifies that, when patent owners want to amend their patent claims during these post- issuance proceedings, the PTO must fully examine and vet those claims before issuing them. Likewise, the bill prohibits the PTO from issuing new claims to a patent that are essentially the same as existing claims, addressing the problem of patent thickets. And the Restoring the America Invents Act addresses multiple related proceedings pending at the PTO, specifying that the PTO must decide ahead of time how to proceed, to avoid conflicting outcomes from separate parts of the agency. This is in addition to the agency's ongoing obligation to make rules addressing common situations, such as under 35 U.S.C. Sec. 316(a)(4). The PTO should study frequent scenarios and determine whether new regulations are needed to address them.

Fundamentally, we need to address why the PTO issues invalid patents in the first place. But when these invalid patents have already been issued, they need to be addressed on the back end. On this 10th anniversary of the Leahy-Smith Act, I am proud to introduce this bill-- the Restoring the America Invents Act, that will restore the patent system so it can continue to accomplish its goals into the next decade and beyond, reinforcing high-quality patents while ensuring that poor- quality patents don't disrupt the American economy, costing Americans untold sums in unreasonable drug costs and overly inflated prices generally. I am excited to work alongside Senator Cornyn, on a bipartisan basis, to pass this important piece of legislation. The Founders envisioned the patent system to promote the progress of science and the useful arts for the benefit of the public. It is time to get back to the Founders' vision. I hope the Senate will act quickly to pass this critical legislation.