S.J.Res. 49

Mr. President, I rise today to speak about North Korea, the most urgent national security challenge for the United States and our allies in East Asia.

Secretary Mattis has said that North Korea is the most urgent and dangerous threat to peace and security. Admiral Gortney, previously the commander of the U.S. Northern Command, stated that the Korean Peninsula is at its most unstable point since 1953, when the armistice was signed. North Korea just conducted its sixth nuclear test, its most powerful to date. An early analysis from experts says:

North Korea has comfortably demonstrated an explosive yield

in the range of at least 100 kilotons with this test.

That would be a considerable improvement from the 30

kiloton yield estimated in its fifth test and ideal for

targeting U.S. cities--a primary objective in North Korea's

pursuit of an ICBM.

Unless drastic and credible measures are taken today, we are fast heading for a nuclear showdown that could cost millions of lives on the Korean Peninsula.

Last year alone, North Korea conducted two nuclear tests and a staggering 24 ballistic missile launches. This year, Pyongyang launched 21 missiles during 14 tests, including the 2 tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles that are reportedly capable of reaching the U.S. homeland. During 6 years of rule as the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un has launched more missiles than his father and grandfather combined. Patience is not an option with the U.S. homeland now in the nuclear shadow of Kim Jong Un.

Our North Korea policy of decades of bipartisan failure must turn to one of immediate bipartisan success, with pressure and global cooperation resulting in the peaceful denuclearization of the regime.

Vice President Pence stated during his visit to South Korea in April:

Since 1992, the United States and our allies have stood

together for a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. We hope to

achieve this objective through peaceable means. But all

options are on the table.

I believe U.S. policy toward North Korea should be straightforward. The United States will deploy every economic, diplomatic, and, if necessary, military tool at our disposal to deter Pyongyang and to protect our allies. But time is not on our side. The international community needs to finally and fully join together to completely isolate this dangerous regime.

As a first step, North Korea should immediately be kicked out of the United Nations and many multilateral institutions from which they derive the benefits of global recognition. Next, the United Nations Security Council should enact a new resolution that imposes a full economic embargo on North Korea that bans all of Pyongyang's economic activities, including petroleum resources.

These economic tools need to be combined with robust military deterrent, including a U.S.-led international naval blockade of North Korea, in order to ensure a full enforcement of United Nations actions. We must also continue frequent show-of-force exercises by the United States and our partners in Seoul and Tokyo, enhanced missile defense activities, and assurances of extended U.S. nuclear deterrence to our allies. Kim Jong Un must know that any serious provocation will be met with a full range of U.S. military capabilities.

The road to peacefully stopping Pyongyang undoubtedly lies through Beijing. I am continuing to call on the administration to block all entities that do business with North Korea, no matter where they are based, from conducting any financial activities through the U.S. financial system. China is the only country that holds the diplomatic and economic leverage necessary to put the real squeeze on the North Korean regime. China accounts for 90 percent of North Korea's trade and virtually all of North Korea's exports. Despite China's rhetoric of concern, from 2000 to 2015 trade volume between the two nations climbed more than tenfold, rising from $488 million in 2000 to $5.4 billion in 2015--hardly the sign of cracking down on the rogue regime.

Beijing is the reason the regime acts so boldly and with relatively few consequences. China must move beyond an articulation of concern and lay out a transparent path of focused pressure to denuclearize North Korea. A global power that borders this regime cannot simply throw up its hands and absolve itself of responsibility. The administration is right to pursue a policy of ``maximum pressure'' toward North Korea, and we have a robust toolbox already available to ramp up the sanctions track--a track that has hardly been utilized to its full extent.

Last Congress I led the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement

Act, which passed the Senate by a vote of 96 to 0. This legislation was the first stand-alone legislation in Congress regarding North Korea to impose mandatory sanctions on the proliferation activities, human rights violations, and malicious cyber behavior. The following is according to a recent analysis from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:

North Korea sanctions have more than doubled since the

NKSPEA [North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act]

came into effect on February 18, 2016. Prior to that date,

North Korea ranked eighth, behind Ukraine/Russia, Iran, Iraq,

the Balkans, Syria, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.

Even with the 130-percent sanctions increase after the sanctions bill passed last Congress, North Korea is today still only the fifth most sanctioned country by the United States.

So while Congress has clearly moved away from the Obama administration's inaction to at least some action, the Trump administration has the opportunity to use these authorities to build maximum leverage with not only Pyongyang but also with Beijing. I am encouraged by the actions the administration took in June to finally designate a Chinese financial institution. But this should just be the beginning.

The administration, with Congressional support, should now make clear to any entity doing business with North Korea that they will not be able to do business with the United States or have access to the U.S. financial system.

A report released in June by an independent organization known as C4ADS identified over 5,000 Chinese companies that are doing business with North Korea today. These Chinese companies are responsible for $7 billion in trade with North Korea. Moreover, the C4ADS report found that only 10 of these companies--10 of these 5,000 companies-- controlled 30 percent of Chinese exports to North Korea in 2016. One of these 10 companies controlled nearly 10 percent of total imports from North Korea. Some of these companies were even found to have satellite offices in the United States.

Enough is enough.

According to recent disclosures, from 2009 to 2017, North Korea used Chinese banks to process at least $2.2 billion in transactions through the U.S. financial system. This should stop now. The United States should not be afraid of diplomatic confrontation with Beijing for simply enforcing existing U.S. law. In fact, it should be more afraid of Congress if it does not.

As for any prospect of engagement, we should continue to let Beijing know in no uncertain terms that the United States will not negotiate with Pyongyang at the expense of U.S. national security or that of our allies.

Instead of working with the United States and the international community to disarm the madman in Pyongyang, Beijing has called on the United States and South Korea to halt our military exercises in exchange for vague promises of North Korea suspending its missile and nuclear activities. That was a bad deal, and the Trump administration was right to reject it.

Moreover, before any talks in any format, the United States and our partners must demand that Pyongyang first meet the denuclearization commitments it had already agreed to in the past and subsequently chose to brazenly violate.

President Trump should continue to impress with President Xi that a denuclearized Korean Peninsula is in both nations' fundamental long- term interests. As ADM Harry Harris, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, rightly noted recently: ``We want to bring Kim Jong Un to his senses, not to his knees.''

To achieve this goal, Beijing must be made to choose whether it wants to work with the United States as a responsible global leader to stop Pyongyang or bear the consequences of keeping Kim Jong Un in power.

In July, I introduced, with a bipartisan group of cosponsors, legislation called the North Korean Enablers Accountability Act, S. 1562. This legislation takes the first steps toward imposing an economic embargo on North Korea, including a ban on any entity that does business with North Korea or its enablers from using the U.S. financial system and imposing U.S. sanctions on all those participating in North Korean labor trafficking abuses. Our legislation specifically singles out the 10 largest Chinese importers of North Korean goods that we talked about earlier and sends a very clear message: You can either do business with this outlaw regime or the world's largest economy.

I urge my colleagues to support this legislation in order to finally put real pressure--maximum pressure--on this regime and its enablers wherever they are based.

Thank you.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Madam President.

I want to thank Senator Harris for her incredible partnership and leadership on this bill, and I want to thank Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina for his leadership and for the consistent examples of character and integrity they both have shown as my partners on this legislation in this body.

As my colleague has said, it has been a very long time coming. For over a century, Members of Congress have attempted to pass some version of a bill that would recognize lynching for what it is--a biased, motivated act of terror.

Today, Senator Harris and I have requested that after a century-- after 100 years and over 200 bills introduced in this body--we finally make lynching a Federal crime in the United States of America.

Thanks to the work of incredible people around this country--truth tellers such as Brian Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative-- today, we have a more comprehensive understanding of just how widespread and purposefully lynching was used as a tool of racial terror and oppression in our history.

We know that the Equal Justice Initiative was able to document thousands of cases--over 4,000 documented cases of racially motivated lynchings between 1877 and 1950. During that time, lynchings were used to terrorize communities. They weren't only vicious acts of murder against individuals, but in many cases bodies were hung trying to drive fear into communities to make them submit to second-class citizenship and inconsistent justice.

The use of lynching as a larger part of terrorism is disturbing. It is a dark chapter of our past and part of our history. Its legacy doesn't just live in our history books. Despite activists and organizations that have dedicated themselves to studying and addressing the racial terror in our history, we have failed to correct for many of those past sins.

We know that the passage of this bill will not undo the damage, the terror, and the violence that have been done and the lives that were brutally taken in our past. We do know that the passage of this bill, even though it cannot reverse the irrevocable harm caused by lynching used as terrorist oppression, is a recognition of that dark past. We know that when wrongs are ignored they fester underneath the skin of the body politic, and we know that justice delayed is justice denied. Today, this is a moment of potential justice in this body, a reckoning to the victims of lynching that for too long have been denied.

I want to go back to a point in history in this body. The very first bill introduced by Congress to address the terror of lynching was by a man on the other side of the Capitol, Congressman George Henry White, in 1900. The year after it was introduced, in 1901, was the last year he would serve in Congress. That is because Congressman White was the very last Black Congressman of the group who had been elected to Congress during Reconstruction.

Congressman White's departure in 1901 would be the last time an African-American Black southerner would serve in Congress for over 70 years. Congressman White must have had an understanding of what was to come with the long dearth of time and the lack of diversity. He knew the terror of

Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement that would stop the election of African-Americans.

In his last speech in this body on January 29, 1901, 1 year after he introduced the bill to criminalize lynching, he delivered a farewell address he called ``The Negro's Temporary Farewell to the American Congress.''

In that address to Congress over one century ago, he made the same request that Senator Harris and I are making right now--for the United States to officially criminalize lynching.

Congressman White said:

Mr. Chairman, permit me to digress for a few moments for

the purpose of calling the attention of the House to a bill

which I regard as important, introduced by me in the early

part of the first session of this Congress.

[It was intended] to give the United States control and

entire jurisdiction over all cases of lynching and death by

mob violence.

During the last session of this Congress I took occasion to

address myself in detail to this particular measure, but with

all my efforts, the bill still sweetly sleeps in the room of

the committee to which it was referred. The necessity of

legislation along this line is daily being demonstrated. The

arena of the lyncher no longer is confined to Southern

climes, but is stretching its hydra head over all parts of

the Union.

Referring to the terror of lynching, Congressman White knew that ``the evil peculiar to America, yes, to the United States, must be met, somehow, some day . . . ''

Well, now in this moment in America, we have a chance to make some day today. We have the opportunity to recognize the wrongs of our history, to honor the memories of those brutally killed, and to leave a legacy that future generations can look back on, knowing that after 200 attempts over the course of 100 years of trying, on this day in American history this body will do the right thing.

So I would recognize my colleague from California for the historic calling up of this piece of legislation.

Madam President, my friend, the Senator from Oregon, just came over. This is a very meaningful moment for this body.

There was a speech by a man that I revere. His picture hangs in my office. His name is Martin Luther King. For many people who endured the pain and agony of our past, with lynchings that went on up to the 1970s in this country, and for those people who yearned for justice they would never experience, for those people who know the pain, agony, and hurt in their family's history and the trauma that is still felt by many people today, who remember lynching in this country that was so pervasive--Dr. King once spoke to those people who were hurting and seeking justice, and he asked at the end of his speech:

How long? Not long, because ``the truth crushed to the

earth will rise again.''

He asked:

How long? Not long, because ``no lie can live forever.''

He asked:

How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe

is long, but it bends toward justice.

This has been a long arc, a painful history and shameful history in this body--that at the height of lynchings across this country affecting thousands of people, this body did not act to make it a Federal crime. At least now, the U.S. Senate has acted--100 Senators, no objections.

I just want to give gratitude to this body for what we have just done. Thank you.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, over 2 months ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously voted to advance the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018, which I introduced proudly with Senators Booker and Scott. This is a historic piece of legislation that would criminalize lynching, attempts to lynch, and conspiracy to lynch, for the first time in America's history.

Lynching is a part of the dark and despicable aspect of our country's history that followed slavery and outrageously continued unabated in our country. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, lynching was used as an instrument of terror and intimidation 4,084 times during the late 19th and 20th centuries. These lynchings were needless and horrendous acts of violence motivated by racism. We must acknowledge that fact, lest it be repeated.

Lynching is a crime committed against innocent people. These crimes should have been prosecuted. There were victims who should have received justice, but they did not.

With this bill we are finally able to change that and correct a burden on our history as a country. We finally have a chance to speak the truth about our past and make clear that these hateful acts should never happen again without serious, severe, and swift consequence and accountability.

From 1882 to 1986, the U.S. Congress failed to pass anti-lynching legislation when it had an opportunity 200 times. We now have an opportunity to pass this bill and to offer some long overdue justice and recognition to the victims of lynching and their families-- recognition that these are crimes for which there should be severe consequence and accountability.

I now yield to my friend, the Senator from the great State of New Jersey, Cory Booker.

Madam President, I thank my friend Senator Booker. It is truly an honor to be on the floor of the Senate with my colleague and friend proposing this legislation.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 3178 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I further ask unanimous consent that the substitute amendment be agreed to and that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time.

I know of no further debate on the bill.

I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, I want to thank our colleagues for this incredibly important act of bipartisanship in the U.S. Congress.

Thank you, Madam President.

Mr. President, I want to welcome all my colleagues back to the Capitol. Obviously, we have a busy time in front of us.

I would appreciate a moment of personal privilege to thank my colleagues--including the Senator from Colorado--who reached out to me in the wake of the horrible events 4 weeks ago in Charlottesville, VA. I appreciated the messages of support for the Charlottesville community and the bipartisan condemnation of the White nationalists and anti- Semitic activists who chose my State and the home of the author of the Declaration of Independence to show the world their hateful, misguided, and violent beliefs.

I have partnered with my fellow Virginian, Senator Kaine, and with Senator Gardner, Senator Isakson, and others on a bipartisan basis to create a resolution condemning the hatred and violence we saw on display in Charlottesville.

Our resolution condemns the White nationalists and White supremacists, the KKK, and anti-Semitic groups. Our resolution also honors the memory of Heather Heyer and the two Virginia State police officers, Lieutenant Jay Cullen and Trooper Berke Bates, who lost their lives in Charlottesville. Our bipartisan resolution also calls upon the Trump administration to do more than track the recent and distressing increase in these violent discriminatory attacks but to actually counter these efforts with a coordinated response that draws upon all the resources of our Federal Government.

Our Nation is better than the vileness and violence we saw in Charlottesville on August 11 and 12. Our Nation also deserves clear and unequivocal condemnation of racist and discriminatory attacks from our Nation's leaders.

We are introducing the resolution today, and I encourage my colleagues to show their support for the people of Charlottesville and the people of the Commonwealth by cosponsoring this initiative.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take from the Speaker's table the joint resolution (S.J. Res. 49) condemning the violence and domestic terrorist attack that took place during events between August 11 and August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, recognizing the

first responders who lost their lives while monitoring the events, offering deepest condolences to the families and friends of those individuals who were killed and deepest sympathies and support to those individuals who were injured by the violence, expressing support for the Charlottesville community, rejecting White nationalists, White supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups, and urging the President and the President's Cabinet to use all available resources to address the threats posed by those groups, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.