No Early Release for Carjackers Act of 2023

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I wanted to come down here because a single Senator in this Chamber, a colleague from Alabama, has put a blanket hold on every pending nominee and promotion of flag officers at the Department of Defense.

As far as we can tell--and this might be the intention of the Senator from Alabama; I don't know whether he knows this or not--there is no precedent for what the Senator from Alabama is doing. There is no precedent for what he has done. It has never been done, stopping the U.S. Senate from taking up promotions for uniformed military officers. These are promotions that happen to people as a group. These are flag officers at the Department of Defense that we have to ratify here in the Senate.

And we asked the Senate Armed Services--I couldn't believe it when I heard it. I couldn't believe it. But we asked the Senate Armed Services Committee if this had ever happened in the history of America, the history of the Senate; and the answer was, they have no record of that ever happening before.

And it is happening at an incredibly unusual and difficult time in the world's history with the biggest land war in Europe since the Second World War, China's saber-rattling in the Pacific. We just had an hours-long open session of the Intelligence Committee to hear the report from the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. All of these folks were coming together to say: This is what the threat looks like. This is the global threat that America faces--a geopolitical landscape more unsettled than at any point in my lifetime, Madam President.

My understanding is that the Senator from Alabama has placed this unprecedented blanket hold because he objects to the Department of Defense's new policies to help our servicemembers access reproductive care. And I will have more to say about that in a minute; but I don't think I should wait any longer to advance these personnel. We should get this done today.

Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nomination en bloc: Calendar Nos. 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc; that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to any of the nominations; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then resume legislative session.

Madam President, I appreciate the words of the Senator from Alabama and his conviction. I will say he said I am mistaken on the facts.

I think one thing you didn't hear was any dispute at all that this is the first time in American history that a U.S. Senator has held up the promotion of flag officers--the first time. It is the first time in American history that any of the more than 2,000 people that have served in this body--but less than 3,000 people--have seen fit to hold up the promotions of people at DOD. That is not a fact that is in dispute, Madam President, as we sit here today on the floor.

You know, I have spent a lot of time when I come down to this floor-- and I am on the floor listening to people's speeches, or I am thinking about my own--thinking about the history of America. And broadly speaking--it has not always been true at every moment or at every juncture--but broadly speaking, the American story has been a story of expanding freedoms and expanding opportunity for the American people. It is the story of one generation after another putting their shoulder to the wheel to make our country more democratic, more fair, and more free.

It can be easy, when you are on this floor, to think about those victories as ancient history, as old as the marble in this Chamber. But it was only 100 years ago, our grandmothers' generation--our grandmothers' generation--when women in America didn't have the right to vote. That is just 100 years ago. It took 100 years for the people that were fighting for women to have the self-evident right to vote to vote, and they didn't get it until 100 years after they fought. And it was only 100 years ago that they got it.

It was only when I was born in the middle of the 1960s that we attempted, finally--finally--after the Civil War in the United States, after Reconstruction and then the redemption that came after that, after the Jim Crow

laws and the redlining that had happened in the United States of America--it was only after that that we finally tried to secure the rights of African-American citizens to vote, a promise that had been made after the Civil War was over and never fulfilled. I would argue it hasn't been fulfilled to this day.

By the way, when I was born in 1964--I was at the African American Museum the day before I got sworn into this body, this time with my family, and I said to one of my nephews--we were walking through the slavery exhibit--I said, I was born in 1964, which, to him, admittedly, that seemed like ancient history. But the year I was born was just 100 years since the people in this country still enslaved human beings. Just two short lifetimes divided when I was born from when we still enslaved human beings.

It was even more recent in our country's history--just 50 years ago, Madam President--before we secured the constitutional right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade, putting an end to the days when women in this Nation--when our mothers and our grandmothers--were forced into back- alley abortions in the United States of America, forced to carry pregnancies to term, and forced to live without any freedom to chart their own course about their lives or their families' lives. That was just 50 years ago when the Court in Roe v. Wade said there is a constitutional right at stake here; there is a constitutional right that we are going to protect here.

And in all of these cases, in my judgment, our fellow citizens have sought to broaden the horizon of freedom and equality in America. And our progress has never been in a straight line. The pages here should know that. We have always been in a battle. We have always been in a battle in this country between the highest ideals that have ever been expressed on the page by human hand, the words in the Constitution of the United States and the worst impulses in human history--the worst impulses in human history--in our case: human slavery and the genocide that was perpetrated on the Native American population that was here at a time when those incredible words were etched into the Constitution that are etched all over the walls of this beautiful building--a building, by the way, that itself, I say to the pages that are here, was built by enslaved human beings. And we are in that fight today.

Today, we face a decades-long campaign that stretches back, at least, to when Ronald Reagan was elected President. It is a battle that has been mostly invisible until recently to the American people, even though it has transformed American life. While that campaign had many objectives over its 40 or 50 years or so--those four decades--one of those objectives was to confirm a majority of Justices on the Supreme Court who subscribed to a radical constitutional interpretation called originalism, a legal document that was invented in the 1970s.

My colleague from Louisiana is here today. He is a distinguished lawyer. He might disagree with some things that I would say, but I was there at the origin of originalism. I was a lawyer trained a decade or so after this was something that was perpetrated by the Federalist Society and Anthony Scalia and the law-of-economics guys and Mark Feldstein and all these folks, as part of what they were trying to do with the Reagan revolution. And a huge part of that was originalism. It is the most amazing name. It is the most amazing name, I think, in political history. I don't think there has been greater branding in the history of mankind than ``originalism'' because it makes you think immediately: That is what the Founding Fathers must have set. It is their original intent, as if that could be divined across the decades, across the centuries, or across the ages, as if they even agreed with each other.

You don't have to go to a musical like ``Hamilton'' to see the disagreements that these people had with one another. That is the beauty of the founding of our Republic, which is to see the disagreements that they had with each other and the way they sorted through them and the compromises they made as a result of this disagreement--some of them, American tragedies that we live with to this day.

But they called it original. I just want the pages to know this and the law students that are out there today that might want to dispute this to just look up the history. There is a beginning of this. There is a beginning of this, and it does not start with John Marshall. It does not start with George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, who himself--Jefferson would be absolutely shocked to believe that there are people in the 21st century who think that we should be dictated to by the hand of the 18th century or the 17th century. There should be a revolution even less than in every generation.

If you had told me--I mean, we all knew about originalism when I was in law school. We certainly did. I did. We had professors who subscribed to it. Certainly, there are political people who subscribe to it. But if you had told me when I was in law school that I would live to see the day when a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court would subscribe to the originalist position of the Federalist Society, I would have said: That is not believable. That is preposterous.

I am not saying there wouldn't be people who wouldn't have fundamental constitutional disagreements with me on all kinds of things, but the idea that you would have a Court that would say originalism is where it is at? But that is what has happened, and it has been a 40-year campaign to do it.

I actually had a moment on the floor of this Senate once when I congratulated the leader of the Republican Party for having achieved his dream, having achieved his vision. I wasn't congratulating him because I agreed with him or that I felt positive about what he had done, but he had set out to carry that water, and he did it decade after decade after decade.

I said earlier that this wasn't really noticed by the American people, this battle. In many ways, it wasn't until 8 months ago. Eight months ago, we saw that majority take its most radical decision yet when it overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping the American people of a fundamental constitutional right to make their own reproductive choices--a right that Justices appointed by Republican and Democratic Presidents had upheld for half a century, for 50 years.

I have a colleague in this Chamber whom I love named Jon Tester, who is from Montana. He is a farmer. He is one of the last farmers in this place. He said to me--this was even before this happened--he said to me: My daughter is having to fight for things her mother never had to fight for because her grandmother won these freedoms. Her grandmother won these rights, and she won these freedoms and these rights when Roe v. Wade was decided half a century ago.

I read on the way home to Colorado--well, I guess in honesty, I read the decision--I am sure my friend from Louisiana read it earlier, too, when it got leaked by the Supreme Court somehow--something that should have never happened--something that should have never happened. That is when I first read Justice Alito's opinion. I had a chance, again, to read it on the plane back to Colorado, and I was hoping that it would be different because the opinion that I had first read as a draft opinion just dripped--dripped--with a cavalier dismissal of the right that it had destroyed. And when I reread it on the airplane, that is what I saw again.

Justice Alito's opinion doesn't even have the courage to grapple with the fundamental nature of the right it was stripping the American people of. It didn't contend with the simplest questions like what it would mean for millions of Americans, including for millions of American women like my three daughters.

Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor expressed this in their dissent. They wrote:

[The majority opinion lacked] any serious discussion of how

its ruling will affect women. . . . It reveals how little it

knows or cares about women's lives or about the suffering its

decision will cause.

That is a quote of the dissent in that opinion.

Instead of grappling with the consequences of his ruling--which would have been, I am sure, painful even for Justice Alito to deal with, just as it is for women all over this country and their families to deal with the aftermath of this decision every single day since it has been rendered--Justice

Alito essentially wrote that if it wasn't a right in 1868, it is not a right today.

I mean, you have to give him credit. That is originalism, although he is not going back to the Constitution; he is going back to the 14th Amendment. If it wasn't a right in 1868, it is not a right today.

We ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868. That is the depth of the analysis in that opinion, which, if you were guided only by originalist ideology, I suppose that would be what you would say. The dissenting Justice pointed out that Justice Alito completely ignored that the men who ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868--and all of them, obviously, were men--did not perceive women as equals, did not recognize women's rights.

Quoting them now in the dissent:

When the majority says we must read our foundational

charter as viewed at the time of ratification . . . it

consigns women to second-class citizenship.

Of course it does. Women had no right to vote. Black Americans had no right to vote. The dissent continued:

Because laws in 1868 deprived women of any control over

their bodies, the majority approves States doing so today.

Because those laws prevented women from charting the course

of their own lives, the majority says States can do the same

again.

And that is exactly what we have seen with one State after another treating Dobbs as a green light to obliterate access to reproductive care for millions of American women and families. Many of us have spoken about how the ruling has harmed the privacy, the health, the freedom of our fellow Americans, and all of those are important.

Let me say also, this is a difficult issue in my State. I want the Senator from Alabama to know that and everybody to know that. It is a difficult issue for all of the families across America. It is difficult for anybody who has been through this. And I am certainly not cavalier about how difficult this decision is and the fact that different people have different points of view, different people have different religious perspectives, different people come from different parts of the country.

I thought about these things a lot over the years, and my conclusion is that it is best to leave this decision in the hands of a woman and her--well, whomever she chooses to consult--her doctor, her family. That is my opinion. I respect the opinion of other people who disagree about that. I realize that this is a heartfelt decision.

But there is a reason why people have been out on this floor and other places talking about the effect on freedom, the effect on the right to privacy, the effect on the health of our fellow citizens because it has an unbelievable effect on all of those dimensions.

But I don't think we have focused nearly enough on how the ruling will harm our national security, and that is what brings us here today. That is what brings us here today at this unprecedented moment, when a Member of this body, for the first time in American history, has said: No, I am not going to let a single person go through. I am not going to let any of these flag officers go through because I am upset with the policy that the DOD has pursued, that the DOD is pursuing a massive subsidy on abortion here, the abortion travel agency that the DOD has become. And because I don't like that--I am not accepting those characterizations of what the DOD is becoming--but because I don't like that, I am going to hold hostage the promotion of the flag officers at the Department of Defense.

Over a million men and women serve in our Armed Forces, supported by over 700,000 civilians in the Department of Defense. These are obviously moms and dads, sons and daughters who volunteer to risk their lives to protect ours. But when our men and women in uniform volunteer to serve, when they heed the call and they say, ``Sign me up,'' they don't get to decide where they serve. When our men and women in uniform volunteer to serve, they don't get to decide where they are going to serve; the Pentagon decides that. You can't sign up and say: Well, I would like to be in Colorado, or, well, I would like to be in Alabama, or I would like to be in a State where my reproductive healthcare is going to be covered or a State where it is not.

Before Dobbs was decided, our troops had at least some assurance that wherever the Pentagon sent them, they would have minimal access to reproductive care as a protected constitutional right. They knew that for 50 years--for 50 years, for 50 years--no matter where they served. That is no longer true. The Supreme Court stripped that right away, again, without even bothering to consider what it would mean for our troops based in States with no access to reproductive care. Justice Alito doesn't deal with that in his decision.

After Dobbs, one of the first calls I received was from a woman who once served as a senior officer in the Air Force. She immediately grasped how Dobbs is going to affect our military readiness. And that is what this is about--our military readiness. She understood, as, I would say, thousands of women in this country understood, how disruptive it is to force women in uniform to travel from their duty station to access care, to say nothing of the cost to her privacy when every single person in her unit finds out about it, knows about it, unlike any other medical procedure that we give people leave for, that people can get paid travel for. The privacy issues here are seismic, and the military readiness issues as a result are seismic, too.

Women are the fastest growing part of our military. They are about a fifth of our total force and over one-third of our civilian workforce. It is not hard to see why they might think twice before enlisting if they know they are going to be stationed somewhere that doesn't respect their reproductive freedom.

(Senator MURPHY assumed the Chair.)

The Senator from Alabama talked about how the DOD is having the worst recruiting they have had for generations. She is right. That is true. It is hard to see how this is going to help.

You don't have to take my word for it. A recent study from RAND concluded that Dobbs could increase attrition, decrease readiness, and hurt national security. And that is after the Pentagon had its worst recruiting season, as the Senator from Alabama suggested, since the Vietnam war.

In an attempt to deal with these issues 2 weeks ago, the Pentagon announced three new policies, and here is what they were.

By the way, I apologize to my colleagues who are here because I know you are here to give this other speech. I delayed for 24 hours or more, so I am going to just continue, and I will beg your forgiveness.

But these are the three things that have brought the Senate to a halt. These are the three things that have created an unprecedented objection to flag officers of the Department of Defense being approved in the common way that they have been approved in this body for 230 years.

The first of these policies authorizes travel allowances for servicemembers to access reproductive care if it is unavailable at their duty stations. That is important because they may not be able to afford to travel, which is why we pay for other procedures, like LASIK eye surgery or to remove a bunion, none of which seem to have gotten the objection of anybody in this body.

The second allows servicemembers to take absences without leave to access reproductive care. This recognizes, I think, the difficult choice a woman has to make in incredibly, profoundly challenging circumstances. LASIK surgeries aren't banned in Alabama or Connecticut.

The last policy extends the time before servicemembers have to tell their commanding officers about a pregnancy. It gives them just a little bit more time to deal with the shock that can come when somebody has an unexpected pregnancy and is trying to make a decision about what to do. This says that rather than get you in a position where you might find yourself feeling like you can't tell your superior officer the truth, this says take a little bit more time so you can think of it.

That is what these three provisions do, these guidelines do, these rules do, about giving the women in uniform the time and the privacy to decide if they want to carry a pregnancy to term or not--a decision that anybody on this floor, no matter what they think about this, surely can understand has become more complicated in the wake of Dobbs.

So I applaud the Secretary of Defense, Secretary Austin, for taking

these steps to protect our soldiers, our sailors, and our marines. He is in a difficult position. It is hard to do because, you know, I don't think many people were expecting that this would actually happen, and yet it has.

Instead of welcoming this leadership from the Secretary of Defense, some of my Republican colleagues have attacked these proposals. They call them--I am now not quoting the Senator from Alabama; I am quoting others who have written about this. They have called them ``disgusting.'' They have called them ``heavy-handed.'' They have called them ``disastrous.''

I could be wrong--I have certainly been wrong before--but I don't think the American people would consider it disgusting or disastrous that women in uniform don't have to dig into their own paycheck and use their limited leave to seek care that is unavailable because of where our government required them to deploy. I think fundamental fairness would say that is a reasonable reaction to the disruption that has been caused by the Supreme Court.

Now I am quoting the senior Senator from Alabama when I say:

The Secretary of Defense is following through with his

radical plan to facilitate thousands of abortions a year with

taxpayer dollars, so I will follow through with my plan to

hold all DOD civilian, flag, and general officer nominations

that come before the U.S. Senate.

OK. Let's just hold up here for one second. Thousands. The Senator was down here the other day saying this is not a readiness problem because it is only 20 abortions that DOD paid for last year. Well, I don't know the facts of every one of those abortions. I do know the facts of the DOD policy with respect to abortion on paying for it, and that is in cases where there has been rape, incest, or the life of the mother is at stake. And maybe that is what those 20 were.

But the Senator from Alabama himself said that what we are talking about here in the context of the rule are what he calls thousands and thousands of abortions that he is saying are subsidized by DOD because the DOD is willing to pay for the travel of women to go from a State that has banned abortion to a State that hasn't. I don't see how--how could that not be a matter of readiness when you are talking about thousands of people?

The Senator from Alabama said:

The American people want a military focused on national

defense, not facilitating a progressive political agenda.

I could not agree more--could not agree more--with the Senator from Alabama. The American people want a military focused on national defense, and for that reason, that is why I find it so hard to imagine that the American people would tolerate any Senator holding up critical national security personnel to impose their ideology.

The Senator from Alabama correctly says that abortion is illegal in his State. I read the polling data that shows that 55 percent of Alabamians actually support a woman's right to choose. But that is neither here nor there. In terms of the law in Alabama, the Senator from Alabama is right about that--abortion is banned there. In Alabama, abortion is banned at any stage of a pregnancy. It has no exceptions for rape or for incest.

Under Alabama law, doctors can face up to 99 years in jail if they perform an abortion. Last month, an Alabama State legislator announced a bill to treat abortion as murder. The State's attorney general suggested using a chemical endangerment law--a law designed to protect kids from methamphetamine--to prosecute a woman for taking a pill to terminate her pregnancy. That is the law. That is the debate that is going on in Alabama.

I recognize that Alabama has made certain decisions about this issue that are different from the ones that Colorado has made. We were the first State in America to decriminalize abortion in 1967. That was the State of Colorado, a Western State, 5 years before Roe v. Wade was ever decided.

In Colorado, we believe these decisions belong between a woman and her family and her doctor, and we don't accept that the government should impose itself on that private decision. And of course, that is not just what I believe; it is not just what Colorado believes; that is what the large majority of the American people believe. That is what the American people believe.

I acknowledge that Alabama has made a different choice, but what I can't accept is that its Senator would impose that choice on every woman and family in our armed services who happened to be stationed in his State or any State that doesn't protect access to reproductive care, because it is not just Alabama. It is not just Alabama. Eighteen States have banned abortion. Nine of them--nine of them--have no exceptions for rape or incest.

Many States have only begun their war on a woman's right to choose. Just yesterday in Florida, which is home to 22 military bases--22 bases, where men and women in the United States who signed up to fight or to join our military have no choice about where they serve. Governor DeSantis committed just yesterday to sign a 6-week abortion ban. He may be unaware--I haven't talked to him about it. I don't know. He might be unaware that one in three women doesn't even know that she is pregnant until around 6 weeks--or maybe he does know that. I don't know which would be worse.

Texas is posting $10,000 bounties to any resident who successfully sues a doctor or nurse for performing an abortion after 6 weeks or even someone who just drives their friend or relative or neighbor to have a procedure--a procedure that for the last 50 years--until this radical, originalist majority came into the Court--for the last 50 years, for almost my entire lifetime, has been a constitutionally protected right in this country.

All of us who are in this Chamber can remember how, in the aftermath of Dobbs, State legislators all around the country wrote laws restricting the freedom of female citizens to travel from States like Texas or Alabama that had banned abortions to States like Colorado that had ratified a woman's right to choose.

Now we have Senators here who aren't content to merely deprive servicewomen of reproductive care if they are based in a State where abortion has been banned; they want to make it even harder to travel to another State to avail themselves of that care.

From the vantage point of my daughters, the nearly 6 million people who live in Colorado, and the vast majority of Americans who support a woman's right to choose, I think there is a real question here about whose position is radical.

When the military pays for servicemen to travel from one State to another if they need LASIK eye surgery or a sinus procedure or to remove a bunion on their foot, is it really radical to imagine that servicewomen should have the right to travel--to have the price of that travel defrayed so they can get reproductive care?

That is just the debate we are having. That says nothing about why we are actually here today, which is the vehicle that the Senator from Alabama is using to delay the vote of every pending nominee and promotion at the Department of Defense at a moment when we have the biggest land war in Europe since the Second World War and China saber- rattling in the Pacific.

If you told most Americans that a single Senator in this place was delaying every nomination and promotion at the DOD, all for the privilege of making it harder for servicewomen to travel for reproductive care or take leave for that care or shorten the time a woman has to make a choice about her reproductive health before she has to tell her commanding officer--and those are the facts of what these rules do. If you told Americans that is what was happening on the floor of the Senate, I don't think they would believe it. I don't think they would accept it. And maybe that is the reason why it has never happened. Coloradans wouldn't accept it.

Like the Senator from Alabama, we in Colorado are honored to host a strong military presence in our State, from the U.S. Air Force Academy to Fort Carson, to Schriever, to Peterson, and to Buckley and Space Command, and we are honored to protect the reproductive care for the men and women who protect us.

In the case of Space Command, we have a live example, I am sad to say, of how the Supreme Court's decision could harm our national security. I will not go through the whole story today. I will spare the Senators from Alabama and Louisiana and everybody else who is here this painful and, as I describe it, saddest story I know.

Here is the essential point: In the waning days of the last administration--I think Donald Trump, President Trump, had 9 days left--our top generals recommended Colorado as the top choice for Space Command's permanent headquarters, but President Trump overruled them and said it should go to Alabama. He later went on the radio and said: They all were against me. They all said it ought to go to Colorado, but I overruled them, and I said it should go to Alabama.

Now, look, I do not think that is how we should be making basing decisions in this Nation. Every single person who has looked at this Space Command issue knows what the generals recommended, and they know they were overruled by the President of the United States for his own political purposes. We need to make these decisions according to the national security interests of the United States, not in the political interests of a President.

That is why, over and over, I called on the Biden administration to restore integrity to this process and honor the generals' original recommendation. They should have made that decision 2 years ago after President Trump made this decision, in the last few days of his administration, overruling these generals, the experts who know where Space Command should be.

But my specific issue with Space Command has led me to a much broader concern as I have studied this issue. In the wake of Dobbs, we literally have no policy to account for the harm of moving a base from a State that protects access to reproductive care, like Colorado, to a State that does not, like Alabama. We are now living in a world where the Pentagon makes basing decisions according to criteria like the number of parking spaces or the quality of schools or the availability of childcare. All of those are relevant decisions, important decisions, questions to ask. But one question they are not asking is about basic reproductive healthcare in a country where it has been legal, where it has been a fundamental constitutional right for the last 50 years, that the majority of the American people and the majority of the people in Alabama supports.

They are not asking whether a State prosecutes women who seek an abortion or imprisons doctors for 99 years for performing abortions or turns residents into bounty hunters against women. It is ridiculous that they would be counting parking spaces and not reflecting on what this world looks like for the people in our armed services, especially women and their families, post Dobbs. I can't agree that the Pentagon should care about how much it costs to house a family when it makes basing decisions but not whether the family has the freedom to plan its future.

The Supreme Court, because of its ideology, may not have had the courage to grapple with the consequences of its ruling on our men and women in uniform and on our national security, but that doesn't give us the ability or give the Department of Defense reason to shirk its responsibility. We have to stand on the side of expanding rights and expanding opportunity for Americans, not restricting them.

So, today, I am calling on the Pentagon to codify the policies it announced last month and develop a new framework that accounts for access to reproductive care in its basing and its personnel decisions.

I call upon my colleague from Alabama to lift his holds so the Senate can advance these national security personnel, because if our men and women in uniform can spend every day defending our freedom, surely, we can defend theirs.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, first of all, I would say, with respect to my colleague from Alabama, I appreciate his arguments here.

He first says that he clearly doesn't have the ability to do this; that, somehow, this is up to Congress to pass a law to make sure that servicemembers who need to travel for reproductive healthcare have it paid for them, not the abortion, by the way, which is what the Senator from Alabama said--that is inaccurate--but the travel is his argument.

The reality is that the DOD, it is clear, can pay for servicemembers' travel for LASIK eye surgery, but current law doesn't say that. It can pay to have a bunion removed, but current law doesn't say that either. All of that has happened without complaint from this body because it makes sense that the DOD has the discretion to provide the care it believes its servicemembers require. And they are making those regulations as part of the law that they have been granted from our branch of government to make sure they care for our servicemembers. I think that is point 1.

Point 2, the Senator from Alabama talked about, you know, this being about who is paying for abortion. This is not about who is paying for abortion. This is about those three changes to the law I mentioned earlier. I won't go into them because I know my colleagues are going to lose their minds over my staying here. But those are the three things. One is travel. One is, you know, being able to take a little bit of a longer time to talk to your supervisor, and those kinds of things. So it is not about paying for abortions.

Although, I will say that the Senator from Alabama has another piece of legislation that he has introduced that objects not to the DOD but to the VA. He says this is radical. The VA has said: We have noticed that our policies that allow us to pay for abortion when the life of the mother is at stake don't also include exceptions for rape and incest, and we are going to add those exceptions for rape and incest. The Senator from Alabama has brought that to the floor and said he wants to have a vote.

I want to have a vote on that too. I can't wait to see how every single Senator in this Chamber stands on the Senator from Alabama's position that

having the VA add cases of rape and incest to the exception to allow it to pay for abortion is not somehow abortion-on-demand or abortion--as some people say, abortion after people have already had the child but is simply adding two things that probably 80 percent of the American people agree with.

On the last point, on Space Command's being decided on the facts, let me tell you something. Here are the facts as I understand them: The generals said they thought Space Command should stay in Colorado. The generals and the Secretary of the Air Force went to the White House with the recommendation of Colorado. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, overturned that recommendation on their advice. He went on the radio--the Rick & Bubba Show, I think it is called--in Alabama, where he said: Everybody was for Colorado, and everybody was against me on Alabama, but I made the decision to send it to Alabama.

Those are the facts on Space Command. And it is not off-topic. You know, it is not off-topic. That was a political decision that should never have been made. If the politics had not entered into that decision, the generals would have gotten their way, and Space Command would be in Colorado, and we wouldn't be having the conversation we are having today because no one in Colorado would be having their abortion rights stripped from them and being sent to another State that has banned abortion, where doctors can go to jail for 99 years because they perform an abortion, where laws that are meant to bring down folks who traffic in methamphetamine are being threatened to be used against women who use a chemical version of abortion.

This is not a complaint I have with the Senator from Alabama. This is my complaint with the White House. You should have dealt with this 2 years ago. And now I hope this administration will deal with, in the wake of Dobbs, this daily gray area that is tearing at the emotions and the well-being of members of our Armed Forces, who don't get to decide where they are stationed.

Alabama can have whatever law it wants. That is not up for me to decide. I respect that there are differences in this country, but people in this body have a duty and a responsibility to the men and women of the armed services, and we have a duty and responsibility to fulfill our duty and responsibility, which is not to hold up the promotion of flag officers at the Department of Defense because I have a position that is different from what others may think. That is what I think.

I yield to the Senator from Louisiana.

I thank my colleague, and I thank both of my colleagues for their very, very powerful remarks.

Nomination of Daniel I. Werfel

Madam President, the Senate this afternoon is going to vote on the nomination of Mr. Danny Werfel to serve as the next Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.

I want to say that I believe Mr. Werfel is superbly qualified. He is a good-government nominee, and I urge my colleagues strongly to support him.

Mr. Werfel--and this is true of his professional life and at his hearing--has made it clear that he is going to make sure that the IRS does its job consistent with the law and that transparency will be a top priority for his service, which is focused on building trust.

This means a lot because Mr. Werfel has done that at the IRS before. He stepped up when President Obama asked him to serve as Acting Commissioner during a very challenging time a decade ago.

Now, the issues were different then. Danny Werfel came in after the public learned that the IRS had used some very sloppy methods of monitoring the political activities of tax-exempt groups. In the Finance Committee, particularly Chairman Hatch and myself, we did an extensive investigation, and we found that both left-leaning and right- leaning groups were affected.

While Mr. Werfel served in that acting role, he worked effectively with both sides of the Finance Committee. He helped right the ship and improve confidence in the IRS.

The late-Senator Hatch, who was certainly conservative but somebody who always valued fairness and professionalism, spoke to me several times and to our colleagues about his high regard for Danny Werfel. In my view, that is a big reason why Danny Werfel has bipartisan support today.

I have a few comments on the big initiatives he is going to lead when he is confirmed.

After a decade of Republican budget cuts, the Inflation Reduction Act finally gave the IRS the resources it needs to go after tax cheating by too many of the very wealthy and multinational corporations, and it is in a position to improve customer service for everybody else, the vast majority of Americans who follow the law.

I will start with customer service, where the IRS is making significant improvements. Let's go back a few years when the IRS was able to answer only 11 percent of the phone calls it was receiving. In 2022, it was 13 percent. This time last year, there was a backlog of 24 million unresolved tax returns. As of a few days ago, the IRS was answering 90 percent of phone calls. It has processed more than 99 percent of the returns filed so far this season. And the IRS has cut the backlog of individual returns by 92 percent.

Now, they have achieved that by spending about 1 percent of the IRA funding. In my view, that is a record that we ought to put a lot of focus on because, if it continues, it will be an historic return on investment. We expect it to continue. We are counting on Mr. Werfel to maintain that progress.

The long-term initiative is also stepping up the fight against, unfortunately, the fact that there are too many of those wealthy tax cheats and scofflaw corporations that rip off American taxpayers too easily today, and the Republican budget cuts over the years resulted in a double standard in tax enforcement. The IRS' ability to go after sophisticated wealthy tax cheats, who are employing armies of lawyers and accountants, was severely limited for years. The burden of tax audits shifted far too heavily onto working people and the middle class.

The reason that was the case is that for working people in Wisconsin and Oregon--nurses and firefighters and teachers--the government has most of the information about their lives. So it is very straightforward, if there is something to question there.

The wealthy tax cheats use their accountants and the lawyers to pay taxes very differently. Billionaires tend, to a great extent, to pay little or nothing for years on end because they structure their affairs to knock out their annual income.

Democrats have made clear from the very beginning that this isn't about increasing audits of people with incomes under $400,000. In fact, we wrote that limitation into the Inflation Reduction Act.

Republicans struck the language from the bill during the debate. Nevertheless, Secretary Yellen has ensured the Congress and everyone concerned know that the Treasury will stand by that commitment. The plan laying out how the IRA funding will be used is in the works.

I want to be clear this afternoon because I have been asked about this. Colleagues on the Finance Committee, of both political parties, are insisting that we get that report on how the funds are going to be used--that we get it soon.

Frankly, that is one of the reasons to support Danny Werfel this afternoon, because he is experienced in this deal. He stepped in for President Obama. We are convinced that he is going to follow that directive and focus on getting us the plan and ensure that the focus is on better service and on wealthy tax cheats and multinational corporations paying their fair share.

I think he is going to handle his position in a way that is transparent. He made it clear that he would be open to talking to Senators on both sides of the aisle and that he will strongly favor protections for confidentiality of taxpayer data. That is the kind of good-government approach that both sides of the aisle should support.

This is a highly qualified, highly experienced nominee. He is the right choice to lead the IRS. He has earned bipartisan support. A number of our colleagues, both in the committee and here on the floor on both sides of the aisle, support him. I would just urge my colleagues, this afternoon--I think we will vote in a couple of hours-- to strongly support his nomination.

Remembering Bill and Dottie Schonely

Madam President, I want to rise today on behalf of all the people that I have the honor to represent to honor the late Bill Schonely, the Portland Trail Blazers' radio voice for the better part of three decades, and his late wife Dottie.

Bill passed in January, leaving a timeless legacy for all of us Blazer fans in ``Rip City,'' the name that Bill coined for my hometown.

Dottie passed last month, leaving her own legacy as an accomplished woman who radiated smarts and kindness to everybody she met in Oregon.

Bill and Dottie were the ultimate teammates, as the ``First Couple of Rip City.'' So perhaps it is fitting they could not be separated for long.

In fact, when Bill and I spoke last, before his passing in January, he made sure to ask me if I was doing my level best to protect Social Security. I have kept the message on my phone with his resonating voice saying: Ron, what are you doing to protect Social Security and the Gray Panthers? I am really concerned about it. And make sure you also do it for Dottie as well.

That will be on my phone forever.

Like storied broadcasters Johnny Most for the Boston Celtics fans or Chick Hearn for Los Angeles Lakers fans, my friend Bill was much more than an NBA play-by-play guy for us Trail Blazers fans in Portland and throughout Oregon. As the Blazers' first broadcaster, starting with the team's inaugural season in 1970--that was a world long before ESPN or even before the team's games aired on local TV--Bill became the soundtrack for generations of Portland fans. He connected our State's first big-league franchise with Oregonians in every nook and cranny of Oregon.

I have logged lots of miles getting around Oregon for 1,040 open-to- all townhall meetings. In fact, I have got two more scheduled this weekend in Jefferson and Deschutes Counties in Central Oregon. But I bet Bill covered just as many miles as the Blazers' ambassador in every part of Oregon.

I can't tell you how many times I would show up at a radio station in a small Oregon town--you know, there are lots of those kinds of towns in Wisconsin--and I would see a photo of Bill there, from back in the day, when he was on a local golf course or some local community function. And any elected official in Oregon will tell you how fortunate we were that Bill Schonely never ran against any of us.

In addition to coining the phrase ``Rip City,'' which is forever tied with my hometown, Bill had an expansive basketball lexicon in his unofficial role as professor of basketball English for Blazers fans.

Unlike me, he had a baritone voice, and he taught all of us how rebounders

``climbed the golden ladder'' and how point guards dribbled ``lickety brindle up the middle.'' As a former player myself, I always nodded my head in agreement whenever Bill would intone, pausing theatrically with each word, ``You've got to make your free throws.''

So as Rip City prepares to say good-bye to Bill and Dottie at a public memorial service in Portland, in which I will be at on Monday the 13th, I will close with this:

Oregon is said to have ``Seven Wonders,'' including Mount Hood and Crater Lake. In my scorebook and the scorebooks of Blazer fans, ``The Schonz'' and Dottie are our State's ``Eighth Wonder.''

So today, on behalf of all Oregonians, I extend my condolences to all Bill and Dottie's loved ones. I will always remember both with a smile and be forever grateful that they leave so many wonderful memories as part of their unforgettable legacy for our community.

On behalf of all Oregonians, today, I close by simply saying: Thank you, Bill and Dottie Schonely.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I rise in strong support of the Women's Health Protection Act.

This legislation needs to be a centerpiece in the battle to defend privacy rights in America. This is the third week I have stood on the Senate floor to talk about this extraordinary assault on privacy and bodily independence that is taking place in America, and it started, of course, with the horrendous Dobbs decision.

When that decision came down, Republicans all over America said that this was going to be a matter of State's rights. They weren't telling the truth to the American people.

Shortly after the decision, there was a full-court press by Republicans at the local level, State level, and, yes, the national level to claw back the rights of women and deny access to reproductive care. Months after the Dobbs decision, a bill to enact a 6-week abortion ban, to ban abortion before most women even know they are pregnant, was introduced in this body.

That was a national ban--every single State--every single State. So much for State's rights.

Anti-abortion activists are not only working Senate Republicans, they are working the court system as well. I call it court washing. It goes way beyond the issue--and I know we have got an expert lawyer in the Chair. It goes way beyond so-called judge shopping that everybody has heard about in the past. It is not simply a matter of looking at a judge's long record of soundly reasoned opinions and hoping for an outcome.

Republicans--particularly talking about this Texas case, this one in Amarillo, TX. Republicans picked him because he was a lifelong rightwing activist who was planted in a district court to deliver the decision they wanted, the verdict that they have been scheming to deliver. We are talking about banning mifepristone nationwide, a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration. This is something I care about deeply because I held the first congressional hearing on the role of the FDA, particularly with

mifepristone. It has been safe and effective, and it has been the law of the land for years and years. If you throw that out, you take away women's independence, and the government puts itself front and center in the exam room and in the private decisions about whether and when to start a family.

As women grapple with restrictive State laws that take away their right to privacy and threaten their health, they are also facing a crisis of digital privacy and--what I call--the threat of uterus surveillance.

We have long been concerned about location data leaching from phone apps and how ripe for abuse it is. In States where extremists have restricted or banned abortion, the whole issue of women having their personal data weaponized against them is now front and center. Shady data brokers have already tracked women to and from Planned Parenthood health centers and have sold their information, basically, to anybody who has got a credit card. In States where abortion is illegal, anything women say or read online can be used against them. Researching birth control online, updating a period tracking app, or even carrying a phone into a doctor's office may become weaponized against you. It could be evidence for the prosecution--the most personal and private data about women's bodies and their health. Just imagine how much worse it could get if more States pass draconian laws or Republicans get their nationwide ban.

That is why we are here to pass this legislation: to ensure that every woman in every State is in a position to make private medical decisions, where that woman is in the driver's seat with respect to her privacy and her independence. To do otherwise is going to keep healthcare providers from doing their jobs. To do otherwise is going to mean more delaying care for women and more bullying pharmacies out of providing medications that are completely legal and FDA-approved.

These providers ought to be able to do their jobs based on science. That is what the FDA decision was all about. It wasn't a political decision. It wasn't made here on the floor of the U.S. Senate and having people go back and forth about their opinions. It was an FDA decision based on science. These policies are common sense, and they are popular.

I am going to close with just a couple of quick points.

Once women lose the ability to make private healthcare choices about their reproductive healthcare, I think we ought to make sure everybody understands that there will be women who will die.

I think we need to understand that what this is about is whether freedom is going to mean the same thing for women as it does for men. Women do not have the same privacy rights right now. They don't have the same freedom. If women are subjected to uterus surveillance, they don't have true freedom. If Republican politicians dictate what goes on in an exam room, they don't have true freedom. If women can't control their own bodies and make their own decisions about when and whether to get pregnant, they don't have true freedom. If women are forced to give birth--and in some cases, Republicans want to force women to give birth even after cases of rape and incest--those women do not have true freedom.

So if there is one word--one word--that this debate is all about for women as to what is at stake, that one word is ``freedom,'' and our legislation ensures they will have it. I urge colleagues to support it.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I rise in opposition to the resolution by Congress to overturn a law that was duly passed and enacted by the elected representatives of the people of the District of Columbia.

I support self-determination. I support self-governance. I support full democracy for the nearly 700,000 residents of the District of Columbia. Citizens who pay more Federal taxes collectively than the people in 21 States, citizens who serve their country in the Armed Forces, citizens who live in the Capital of the oldest democracy deserve the same rights to full democracy and self-determination as the citizens who live in any other State or any other city in the United States of America.

That is why I have long championed and supported the cause of DC statehood. But I want to point out, that is a fight not only for voting representation in the House and the Senate but also for the principle of local economy, the principle of self-determination also known as home rule.

In my view, this resolution is an attack on the democratic rights of the people of the District of Columbia, which has its own duly elected democratic representatives: the Mayor and the DC Council. Its residents and citizens are fully capable of deciding their own law and deciding their own future.

The Congress should not be overriding the will of the people of DC as reflected in their elected representatives. This process of directly overruling a law passed by the District of Columbia has not been used for 30 years--not for 30 years--and we should not start it now.

This bill was passed by the DC Council. It was vetoed by the Mayor. And I share some of the concerns that have been expressed by the Mayor. But then, the city council overruled the Mayor's veto by a vote of 12 to 1. And here is what the Mayor of the District of Columbia says; that while she had differences with what the council did, she strongly, strongly encourages this Senate to uphold the larger principle of democracy for the people of the District of Columbia.

Here is a letter she sent to all of us on February 23.

[A]s Mayor and the Chief Executive Officer of the District,

I call on all senators who share a commitment to basic

democratic principles of self-determination and local control

to vote ``NO''--

Vote no--

on any disapproval resolutions involving duly enacted laws of

the District of Columbia.

The Mayor points out in this letter that she is in a back-and-forth with the council to try to address some of the concerns that she has expressed, concerns which I understand and which I share. But she is very clear that the U.S. Congress should not be bigfooting the decisions made by the elected representatives of the District of Columbia.

No other jurisdiction in the United States of America has its laws subject to veto by the U.S. Congress. We all have Governors of our State. We all have State legislators. We have cities with mayors and elected councils. No one here would appreciate the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives interfering and overturning decisions made by their State representatives or their local representatives, even if we might disagree with some of those decisions from time to time. And yet that is what we are doing to the people of the District of Columbia having elected their representatives, the Mayor and the council, to represent them.

We must ensure that the people who live in the Capital of the world's oldest democracy have the same democratic rights as the people who live in every other part of the country.

Now, I do want to address some of the particulars here because we have heard from lots of people, especially our Republican colleagues, that what the DC Council did and the DC government did was so egregious that we have really no alternative but to make a decision we haven't made for 30 years, which is to overturn a law that was duly passed by the DC government.

So let's take a look at it.

Even opponents within the District of Columbia acknowledge that the majority--the great majority--of the revised Criminal Code is noncontroversial, providing essential updates and clarification to a criminal code that is in desperate need of modernization. The Mayor herself who vetoed the legislation says she supports 95 percent of it and has offered concrete proposals to address the other concerns that she points out that even though she disagrees with 5 percent, that is no reason for the U.S. Congress to overturn a law that was passed by the government of DC.

Why did the District of Columbia revise its code? Because it is hopelessly outdated and confusing. It was written in 1901, more than 120 years ago. Many of our States have updated our laws since then-- most of them, if not all of them--but in DC, while they made some changes to some parts over that 120 years, they had never taken a comprehensive look at the DC Criminal Code. We all know a lot has changed since 1901.

And so the revised DC Criminal Code is the result of an exhaustive effort led by the Criminal Code Reform Commission, an independent DC agency established in 2016 and comprised of nonpartisan experts. The commission drafted the code over nearly 5 years in a fully public process that included 51 public meetings, extensive public feedback, and robust negotiations.

The advisory group that unanimously approved the recommended changes included representatives from the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia.

The new code removes some obsolete provisions. It ensures that sentences are more proportionate to the actual sentencing. It simplifies overlapping charges and addresses missing and inconsistent laws that create legal loopholes that people have been able to slip through.

Now, while I may not have supported every one of these hundreds of provisions in the revised Criminal Code if I were sitting on the DC Council--I am not sitting on the DC City Council and

neither is any Senator in this Chamber. None of my 99 other colleagues were there to hear all the testimony that was heard by those who made these decisions on behalf of their constituents as elected representatives.

Let's dig a little deeper into some of the changes that were made because listening to some of the public discourse, you would think--I know my friend, the Senator from New Jersey, has heard this--you would think that, boy, the DC Council just went wild with this leftist effort to loosen the laws and let criminals run free.

Well, let's take a look at what they did. They raised some penalties. In some cases, they looked at actual sentences, not just in DC but other States, and lowered them, and in some cases, they closed legal loopholes.

Here is where they raised penalties: attempted murder. The current maximum sentence in the District of Columbia is 5 years in prison for attempted murder; the maximum under the new DC law, 23\1/2\ years for attempted murder.

How does this compare to other States?

Well, there are at least seven of our States that have maximum penalties for attempted murder below the new DC maximum penalty for attempted murder.

I see the Republican leader is not on the floor. The State of Kentucky has a lower sentence for attempted murder than the revised DC Code has. Maybe tomorrow I should introduce a piece of legislation to raise the penalty for attempted murder in the State of Kentucky because I just don't think that theirs is good enough for the people of Kentucky. That is what we are doing here. We are substituting our judgment for the considered judgment of the people of the District of Columbia.

Let's look at another area: attempted sexual assault. The DC government increased penalties for sexual assault from 5 years to 15 years. Again, I surveyed some of our other States. You know, we have Senators from a number of States--at least six--that have lower penalties for attempted sexual assault than the current, new, proposed DC law, including, once again, the State of Kentucky. The State of Kentucky has a lower maximum penalty for attempted sexual assault than the new, revised DC law has.

For Federal assault on a police officer, they raised it from the current max of 10 to 14 years. For misdemeanor sexual assault, the maximum will now be 2 years, up from 180 days.

The statute also includes new offenses. As I say, we are modernizing the code, including nonvehicular negligent homicide and reckless endangerment with a firearm and new penalties, such as for offenses against vulnerable adults, in order to strengthen public safety in the District of Columbia after having listened to their constituents.

It also includes increased penalty enhancements for aggravating factors--such as the presence of a firearm, such as property damage or having prior convictions--in addition to the base penalties that are established for various crimes.

Now, that is where they increase penalties, and that is where they close loopholes, but when you are doing comprehensive reform, you look at everything. You don't necessarily measure justice just because a maximum penalty for something goes up. Sometimes you measure justice by making sure that the penalty is proportionate to the crime.

We have had lots of debates on this floor, and the Senator from New Jersey, my friend Mr. Booker, has been front and center in leading the charge when it comes to criminal justice reform because we have an absolute scandal in the United States of America about the mass incarceration of people of color.

So when the DC Council passes some of these laws, people apparently ignore all of the cases they are increasing penalties for--things like attempted murder--and zeroing in on some areas where they are actually bringing sentences in line with what judges are doing based on their discretion.

A lot of attention has been given to the issue of armed carjacking because, in this case, the DC government lowered the maximum penalty for armed carjacking. They did that to bring the maximum penalty more in line with what the actual sentencing was. The current carjacking maximum after the change is 21 years. It went from 40 years down to 24 years.

Now, here is the thing: I looked again, as I know my friend from New Jersey did, at what other States' laws are for armed carjacking, their maximum penalties. Once again, in many cases, they are lower than the new DC statute, the new DC penalty. In fact, a lot of States don't even have armed carjacking statutes. So if you want a point of comparison for those States, you would look at armed robbery.

When you look at States with armed carjacking statutes and when you look at the penalties they apply for armed robbery in carjacking cases, you will find that 15 States have lower penalties than the new, lower DC maximum penalty for armed carjacking. Fifteen States represented by Senators in this Chamber who want to override DC law have sentences for armed robbery or armed carjacking lower than what DC's new penalty is. Those States include Alaska; they include Kansas; they include North Dakota; and yes, once again, they include the State of Kentucky. The State of Kentucky seems to be an outlier here in terms of low sentences for many violent crimes, lower than the newly revised code passed by the DC government.

I am not going to go into all of the other details here. I think my colleagues get the picture, which is that the elected representatives of the District of Columbia, after an exhaustive review, made some decisions about criminal justice reform. I don't agree with every single one of them that they made, but I will tell you this: What they did is entirely defensible, and it certainly doesn't rise to the level of the U.S. Congress, for the first time in 30 years, bigfooting their decisions.

That is also the testimony we received from a number of attorneys general of our States. Everyone--including, I am proud to say, my attorney general, Anthony Brown, a former Member of the House--wrote to us all. They pointed out in their letter that the question of public safety is best left to those who are closest to the community and who are in the best position to decide these laws. They say: We know from experience that each of our jurisdictions is very different and at times requires different policy approaches.

A law that makes sense for one community may not make sense for another. If the State of Kentucky wants to have lower criminal penalties than the District of Columbia, that is their decision. As I said, based on today's action, maybe I will get up tomorrow morning and introduce a bill to change the criminal penalties in the State of Kentucky.

The bottom line is this: The people who live in the District of Columbia deserve the same right as the people who live in every other part of our country--the right to self-determination and democracy. That is what they did in passing this new law, and we should not be substituting our judgment for that of the duly-elected representatives of the people of the District of Columbia.

I now yield to the Senator from New Jersey, Mr. Booker.

Madam President, I want to just say that I respect and am grateful for the generosity of the chairman, the Senator from Oregon, for allowing me to slip in and say some remarks.

I want to thank Senator Van Hollen for his incredible leadership on this issue.

I have the distinction of being the only one of the 100 Senators who was actually born in Washington, DC. This is the city my parents met in. This is the city they married in. My mom worked for the DC Public Schools. My father was one of the first Black salesmen hired in the entire DC region by the company IBM. I owe this city so much, and I am disappointed that there is nobody in this body who was officially elected to speak for this city.

Washington, DC, is suffering, as it has, from a violation of one of our most sacrosanct principles of the country, which is this idea that this democracy is rooted in the ideal of representative democracy, the separation of powers, and most certainly the idea that you can't have taxation without representation. In fact, DC residents pay more

per capita in Federal taxes than any other State, but yet they have no say in the Federal Government.

Madam President, 700,000 Americans, in one of the only expressions of representative democracy available to them, have 13 council people who were part of a process. As was said already by my colleague, the council members completed the monumental task of modernizing the 120- year-old DC Criminal Code to make it more consistent, clarifying conflicting provisions, and bringing it in line not just with current best practices reflected in the majority of States' criminal codes but in trying to address the urgencies of the moment wherein you have a city that is deeply concerned about the crime in its community.

DC's efforts are not unique. There are 37 States that have gone through similar processes--so-called red States, so-called blue States, and purple States.

The process was spearheaded, as my colleague said, by the independent DC Criminal Code Reform Commission, which was a nonpartisan agency that was very representative of prosecutors and victims' rights advocates. All of these nonpolitical people came and unanimously endorsed what we have before us today.

Now, the first time any partisan politician got involved was with the City Council just voting to confirm this nonpartisan body's unanimous recommendations. It was to that process that the Republican leader said: Oh, it looks like, with what they did, they are in need of adult supervision.

Think of how patronizing and paternalistic that is for this body, not being any part of this process, now suddenly saying they need adult supervision as if they are children.

The DC Criminal Code was about keeping DC safe. It is what the prosecutors involved said and what the U.S. Attorney's Office said: We need to do this to create a safer city because of the confusion in the code and the lack of having criminal penalties at all for certain crimes. All of these things opened up opportunities for DC not to have the security they wanted. So this was about DC's safety.

Unfortunately, it is now embroiled in scare tactics, where political, opportunistic actions are taking place to try to use this as a way to win political points. Even the media, for whom I have tremendous respect for its role, has been more keen on asking questions about the political analysis than actually the facts of what DC has done.

What DC has done in this bill is to actually create a tougher element on crime, tougher laws on crime. In looking at the totality of this bill, it is impossible to say that it isn't about making DC safer and having tougher penalties on crime.

My colleague went through some of this. It actually quadruples the maximum penalty for attempted murder, and it triples the maximum penalty for sexual assault because people in DC see those as serious crimes, and they want to seriously increase the consequences for them.

DC is pro-police officer, so what did they do? They doubled the maximum penalty for misdemeanor assaults on police officers, and they increased by 40 percent the maximum penalty for a felony assault on a police officer.

Washington, DC, knows that there is too much gun violence and that they need to take action against it, so it quadruples the maximum penalty for the possession of assault rifles, for ghost guns, for restricted explosive devices. I know the NRA doesn't want laws like this, but DC residents do. It doubles the maximum penalties for possession of a firearm or a bump stock--tougher laws on guns, more serious penalties.

DC's Criminal Code actually modernizes and creates new categories of offenses that aren't currently crimes. It creates new offenses for negligent homicide. It creates new offenses for reckless endangerment with a firearm. It creates new offenses by expanding liability for sexual assault, including for the sexual abuse of a minor. It expands liability for the possession of sexual images of children.

This is a city that came together and said: We want to protect our children. We want to protect sexual assault victims. We want to better protect our police officers. We want to better protect people from murder. But no. This body now, in a rush of politics, is going to prevent a city from protecting itself.

It actually increases the protections for domestic violence victims. It criminalizes strangulation as a felony, which is currently very difficult to even prosecute. In fact, every State but South Carolina has closed this loophole, but this body is going to stop them from doing it today. It criminalizes nonconsensual conduct as a felony and quadruples the maximum penalty. It helps the victims of domestic violence better obtain civil protection orders because the current law lacks clarity and makes it very hard to do this.

Let me say this again. By rejecting this law today, by voting against this, people, in the name of being tough on crime, are actually the people who are preventing a city from better protecting itself--from better protecting its children, its sexual assault victims, its police officers. I mean, think about that.

I have not, in my 10 years in the Senate, seen such a distortion of facts, such a misrepresentation of what something is. The RCCA sets new maximum penalties for armed carjackings--my friend talked about that-- and their carjacking laws now have a maximum penalty higher than Georgia, Kansas, North Dakota, and Kentucky. Maybe we should do a unanimous consent request right now saying that Kentucky is too soft on crime because DC wants higher maximum penalties.

It sets new maximum penalties for unarmed carjackings higher than Georgia, higher than Iowa, higher than North Dakota, higher than Tennessee and Kentucky. The very Senators coming down here to criticize laws--Senators from Tennessee I have seen today, from Kentucky, from Iowa--actually, their States have lower maximum penalties than what DC is trying to do, but they are going to stop DC from doing it.

Armed robbery, the same thing--higher maximum penalties than North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio.

The same thing for unarmed robbery--higher than Kansas, higher than South Dakota, higher than Tennessee, the sponsor of this bill, and Kentucky.

Yes, they may be lowering the maximum penalty, but it is still higher than so many States of the Republicans pushing this bill and not speaking to the facts of it.

I am a former big-city mayor, and there are communities like Washington, DC, all over this country that are trying to fight crime. Many of them have significant numbers of African Americans as a percentage of their population who have higher rates of victimization. Those cities are grappling with this. They feel a sense of urgency.

That is why this bill actually is raising penalties, putting in new criminal statutes, and making sure that so many of their laws are tougher than even many of the red States, like Kentucky and Tennessee here.

That is what happens in a city that has elected representatives that know that their No. 1 job is to protect the community because those communities often are being more victimized than Senators and their families are in their States.

Give DC what we believe was a revolutionary idea then but not a revolutionary idea now, which is to let them protect themselves. Don't strip them of their ability to protect themselves. Don't take away their ability to protect their children. Don't take away their ability to create laws that protect their police officers. Don't take away their ability in this law to protect their citizens--700,000 residents who do not have a voice in this body, 700,000 residents who are about to have a law that will better protect them overturned because of politics, because of opportunism, because of the big divisions in our country that tear our Nation apart.

But DC is united in its fight for self-determination, for representation, for safety, and security. Those are the ideals that started America, and this body shouldn't interrupt a city trying to live its American ideals that we take for granted but they, obviously, today, are still fighting for.

I yield the floor, and I give my apologies to the great Senator from Oregon.

Reserving the right to object.

Madam President, last year, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I convened a bipartisan hearing on carjacking. It was the first-ever Judiciary Committee hearing on the subject. We heard from experts in law enforcement and the automobile industry. And since then, I have been working with Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican from Iowa, on a bill we are going to introduce soon on the subject.

The Senator from Arkansas is a member of the Committee on the Judiciary. He did not attend our hearing, and he has never raised this issue with me. In fact, he introduced the bill we are considering at this moment yesterday.

Why now? Well, he is very open when he said on the floor and what he said in his press release. Later this afternoon, there will be a vote on the DC Criminal Code. One of the issues is carjacking. He is trying to hitch a ride on this train in terms of the discussion of the penalties for crime. It is no coincidence.

Senator Cotton has brought this bill to the floor because, today, we are voting on that resolution. The opponents of the resolution have focused on the bill's new sentence for carjacking, reducing the penalty from 40 years to 24, and ignored the fact that the resolution increases sentences for a host of other violent offenses and goes after crime guns--a source of gun crimes in many cities, including Washington and those I represent.

Don't take my word for it. The Senator's own press release explicitly links his new bill to today's vote. The Senator knows this bill is not going to pass today. He wants a Democrat to object so he can falsely claim we don't care about carjacking.

The reality is that the Senator's bill would not help prevent carjacking, and it would make our Federal prisons less safe.

Let me explain. The Senator from Arkansas' bill is called No Early Release for Carjackers Act. Catchy title. But it fails to recognize one basic fact: Carjackers cannot get early release from the Federal system. Like every other Federal sentence, it is measured in years. Carjacking sentences have a full-term release date and a good conduct release date. If you go to Federal prison, you earn 54 days a year of good conduct credit if you follow the rules. If you break the rules, they take away your good conduct time. That has been the standard in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which abolished Federal parole.

Every Federal judge knows about good conduct time when they impose a sentence. Earning good conduct time isn't getting released early. It is getting released when you really expected to, so long as you behave and follow the rules.

I made it a point of visiting prisons regularly as a Member of Congress and Member of the U.S. Senate. I recommend it to all my colleagues. We spend a lot of time talking about criminal sentencing and criminals themselves and very little time actually visiting prisons to see what life is like behind bars. It is an educational experience.

I can tell you one thing you will come to realize right off the bat: It is a dangerous place. The men and women who are corrections officers in the Federal system literally risk their lives every single day to keep those incarcerated who have been sentenced by the courts. They ask us for very little: enough people to do the job right, safety in the workplace, and those few incentives that make it possible for them to have a decent day at work and go home alive at the end of the day.

One of those things is good conduct. If they can incentivize prisoners not to beat up other prisoners or the correction officers themselves with the promise of good conduct reductions in their sentences, it is a very important thing to do. We want these men and women, these law enforcement professionals, to have respect and also to have the law on their side.

There are no Federal offenses that disqualify you from good conduct time--not a single one. And for good reason. Good conduct time is an incentive to follow the rules in prison. That is what we want people who have broken the law to do while they are in prison: learn to follow the rules. The threat of losing good conduct time is also a deterrent against breaking the rules. That helps prevent violence in prison, protects correction officers, and protects the other incarcerated people. Good conduct time is a critical tool for Federal prison officials to maintain order. That is why we don't disqualify anyone from good conduct time based on their offense of conviction. This bill would be the first time in history. We have never done it before, and we shouldn't start now.

Now, this is not the first time that this Senator has opposed efforts to rehabilitate prisoners. The reason he is trying to dismantle good conduct credit is because carjackers are already excluded from an important rehab program created by the FIRST STEP Act. He comes to the floor regularly to criticize the FIRST STEP Act, which he didn't support, and it is his right not to. He fails to mention two things. It was a bipartisan measure introduced by the primary sponsor at the time, Senator Grassley, and myself and Senator Lee. It was signed into law by President Donald Trump. Soft on crime? This bill passed by an overwhelming vote of 87 to 12 in the Senate. It was signed into law by President Trump.

Unlike most Republican Senators, Senator Cotton opposed the FIRST STEP Act. The FIRST STEP Act established earned time credits that allowed prisoners to earn time off their sentences in exchange for completing programs that help reduce the likelihood they will commit a new crime after their release. The bill included a compromise and excluded from the program individuals who had committed any of dozens of offenses. Carjacking is one of those offenses. So the criticism he is making of the FIRST STEP Act doesn't apply to the argument he made on the floor.

No matter how many recidivism-reducing programs a carjacker completes, no matter how many classes he takes or how many skills he learns, he cannot earn a day off his sentence under the FIRST STEP Act--exactly the opposite of what the Senator from Arkansas just said.

That compromise wasn't enough for the junior Senator from Arkansas. He offered an amendment to the FIRST STEP Act that would have excluded tens of thousands of low-level offenders for earned time credits. And I stood here on the Senate floor to oppose that amendment because I knew then and I know now the purpose of a recidivism reduction program is to reduce recidivism. Almost everyone in the Federal Bureau of Prisons will get out one day. And when we exclude people from these programs, we do not facilitate successful reentry, and we do not reduce recidivism.

Now let's talk about what we can do to reduce carjacking. I have been working for months on a bill with Senator Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Our Combating Carjacking Act is based on recommendations from experts who came to our hearing last year.

I have discussed one key provision many times with the sheriff of Cook County, Tom Dart, and here is what it does. Almost any car manufacturer today has some kind of vehicle location system built into it. It is a device that automatically calls for help if you have been in an accident.

This system is a great way to locate cars right away in real time after they have been carjacked, and that should be a huge deterrent to carjacking. If you take a car by threat of violence, law enforcement should be able to find you right away, take back the car, and put you under arrest for your crime.

But right now, law enforcement has a hard time getting auto manufacturers to provide that location data, even when the victim, the vehicle owner, is

standing there saying: Please help the police find the person who just stole my car.

Why? Some manufacturers are better than others about this, but they tell us that we are worried about violating the Federal Driver Privacy Act, and they are worried about liability.

So the bill we are working on, on carjacking, creates an exception to the Driver Privacy Act. It says, if a car manufacturer gets a reasonable, good-faith request from law enforcement for vehicle location data after a carjacking, they can provide that location data without liability because we want to make carjacking a crime that never pays off, and it won't if carjacked vehicles can be immediately tracked and recovered. That is why we are pursuing this.

As I said before, I agree with Senator Cotton, carjacking is a serious problem that needs local and Federal solutions. I invite him to join me and Senator Grassley in our bipartisan effort. I don't agree that wiping out good conduct credit for Federal prisoners is the way to do it.

Madam President, I object.

I announce that the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Carper), the Senator from California (Mrs. Feinstein), and the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fetterman) are necessarily absent.