Floor Statements

Mr. President, all of us have lived through the failed experiment of mass mandatory masking. Today, I want to ensure that we do not subject the American people to this tyranny again for the sake of nothing.

We have recently seen a seasonal uptick of COVID cases across the country. This is not something to worry about. I don't like this fact that COVID is here to stay. Seasonal upticks in a respiratory virus are exactly to be expected. They shouldn't cause panic from our leadership or from our country, and they shouldn't cause us to reimpose a policy that has failed time and time again.

Many are now calling to bring back mask mandates and regulate social gatherings. I have heard some of my friends on the opposite side of the aisle saying that no one is trying to do this, but let's just recapture and summarize the last couple of weeks in August. Lionsgate studios asked its employees to wear masks at their filming facility. Last week, Kaiser Permanente reimposed a requirement of staff and visitors to wear masks at its Santa Rosa, CA, facility. Schools such as Morris Brown College in Atlanta, and even local public schools here in the DC area, have reimposed mask mandates.

Now, it is not just that masks--according to randomized control studies--do no good; it is that they could actively cause harm. We know a generation of school children have suffered significant speech and developmental disabilities because this country panicked instead of using its brain and forced toddlers and small children to wear masks. We cannot return to the failed policies of the COVID pandemic.

I am not mad that we screwed up. I made mistakes. Many people in this body made mistakes. What I do think that we should avoid is repeating the mistakes in 2023. Let's learn from the mistakes that we made instead of just doubling down on them.

This policy does not set anything for an unlimited period of time. It says that for the next 15 months, the government can't force you to wear a mask on planes, on public transit, or in public schools. Taxpayer dollars cannot be used to force and enforce a mandate against our people. It is not setting a policy that we cannot deal with pandemics in the future. If something else comes--God forbid--then let this body deal with it at that time.

But now, let's heed the message from the American people, and let's learn the lessons of the past couple of years. Mandatory masking was a failure. It had costs for very little benefit, and we shouldn't repeat it.

Mr. President, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the

Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 2738, the Freedom to Breathe Act, which is at the desk; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, let me offer a couple of thoughts in response.

Mr. President, I know we are on a short timeline, but let me just offer a couple of points in response, and then I will let this body go on with its business.

No. 1, Senator Markey mentioned the tragic number of Americans, over 1 million, who lost their lives due to COVID. And I agree that it is a tragedy, and I wish that we hadn't lost them. But we lost them in spite of some of the most aggressive masking policies in the world. If mandatory masking were going to save our citizens, it would have already done so. That is the first point.

The second point is that this legislation doesn't prevent any of our citizens from wearing masks. If you would like to wear a mask, of course, you have the right to do so, but the Senator talked about freedom. What I would like is for the freedom of a school child to not be thrown out of the classroom because he doesn't want to wear a mask. I would like the freedom of airline passengers to be able to go and visit their families and not be thrown off an airplane because they refuse to wear a mask. Freedom is fundamentally about respecting that you might have a different view than I do, respecting that, accepting it, and not using government mandates to force our fellow citizens to do exactly what we want them to do but to let us all figure this out together.

The final point that I will make here is I heard some pretty alarming rhetoric from my friend on the other side of the aisle. We are about to have some serious respiratory problems. We always do in the fall, and maybe it will be worse this fall and this winter than before. But I think that what our children most of all need--and I am the father of three kids under the age of 7--they need us to not be ``Chicken Little'' about every single respiratory pandemic and problem that confronts this country.

We are going to have people who get sick from viruses. It has always been thus, and the way to respond to it is with calmness, resolve, and strategic thinking, not by pretending the world is ending because what has always happened is going to happen once again.

We cannot repeat the anxiety, the stress, and the nonstop panic of the last couple of years. That is what this legislation is about. End the mandates; end the panic; and let's get back to some common sense.

I yield the floor.

Reserving the right to object, Mr. President, my objection is not specific to this nominee. I think the Biden administration is not sending its best to the Department of Justice. Many of the nominees are unqualified. Some of them seem actively corrupt, and some, I assume, are good people. But the problem is not this specific nominee. The problem is the fact that the Department of Justice has been corrupted under the Biden administration, and there needs to be some reckoning with the American people and with this body and with the nominations process before we allow these nominees to glidepath to the confirmation process.

Let's just talk about a tale of two leaders in this country right now, one a Democrat and one a Republican. Of course, for the President of the United States, his son Hunter Biden has multiple Federal charges, multiple Federal investigations that implicate directly on the President's business dealings and may very well implicate the President directly and plausibly could lead to some significant problems for the President in the Presidential election.

Yesterday, the plea deal that the Department of Justice cut with Hunter Biden fell apart with minimal scrutiny from the Federal judge in that case. That is how the Department of Justice treats the Democratic leadership in this country, with kid gloves, even in the face of very serious corruption.

Let's ask ourselves how they treat the former Republican President in the face of a classified document scandal, where, literally, the claim is that the President of the United States mishandled the documents of his own administration.

Now, nobody doubts that President Trump had the right to declassify documents at issue in this case. The argument is that he didn't, and, therefore, they want to throw him in jail. Is that really what we are doing at the height of the Presidential campaign--trying to throw the former President in jail, the likely leader of the opposition, in prison, because he didn't cross the t's and dot the i's on the classification or declassification process? This is a ridiculous scandal in our entire country.

Look, whether these nominees are qualified or not qualified, we should have the vote and make that determination as a body. It is not, at the end of the day--as I have learned in 8 months--all that difficult and all that hard to vote. But we have to stop giving these nominees a glidepath until Merrick Garland commits to using the Department of Justice for justice and not for politics, as it is being used today.

So I object.

Mr. President, on rollcall vote 200, I voted nay. It was my intention to vote aye.

I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote, since it will not affect the outcome.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 4 minutes equally divided prior to the next rollcall vote.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 838 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, I propose amendment No. 838 for the very simple reason that, as we spend resources to support the Ukrainian war effort against the Russians, we need to be honest with ourselves and honest with the American people about exactly what we are spending and how much we are spending.

We saw recently, in a $6 billion Department of Defense accounting error, which fails to give the American people and fails--and what our amendment does is simple. It forces the Department of Defense to use an accurate accounting method. If we ask ourselves, when the President uses his drawdown authority to send weapons systems to Ukraine, how do we account for it? Do we account for it based on an old cost with depreciation or do we account for it on its cost to the American taxpayer?

I think it is very clear that the cost to the American taxpayer is the one that we should use, and I also think this allows us to more adequately count and account for the resources we are giving to Ukraine and other nations as well.

Mr. President, I ask to reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I ask to be recognized.

Mr. President, I will be brief here. First of all, the Department of Defense clarified that it has not used the proper accounting methods in Ukraine. So I don't think this is a change to a longstanding policy. I think that it reinforces proper accounting methods within the Department of Defense.

The more important point here is that a $6 billion accounting error is approximately the amount of aid that the United Kingdom has provided to Ukraine. If we are not using an accounting method that allows us to properly account for this stuff, we are missing gaping numbers. We can't possibly have a reasonable cost-benefit debate if we don't know the cost of the resources and the weapons we are sending to Ukraine.

We just need to be honest with ourselves and with the American people. That is all this amendment does. And I ask that it be called up for a vote.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, I speak today on behalf of millions of Americans who come to Washington, DC, and want this to be a safe city where they can enjoy it, where they can view the beautiful monuments, and where they can actually live in this city comfortably and in safety.

I speak for the staff members who have seen this city deteriorate over the last decade, and I speak for the many people who have no connection to this city but want it to be a beautiful and safe place to live and work because this is where the people's business is ultimately done.

A very simple problem that we have is the DC violent crime rate and the nonviolent crime rate have gone up way too quickly, in part because the DC Council has passed a number of statutes and a number of laws that make it harder for police officers to do their job.

I will not go through the laundry list of the act that we are dealing with here today and the number of ways in which it makes police less safe in doing their job and makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs in the first place, but a few things in particular jump out. First of all, the law that we are trying to undo bans or severely restricts ordinary law enforcement practices, including the use of riot gear to disperse violent crowds; it makes it harder for police to actually give chase to violent offenders; and it also forces police to go through these ridiculous exhaustion requirements before they can use lethal force to protect themselves and people around them.

This is why a number of DC police officers and organizations don't agree with this act. It is why they think that it makes them less safe, and it is why we have to go in a different direction in this community.

I will close by saying that whether you are a Democrat or a Republican--whatever your politics are--we should be proud of this incredibly beautiful city. The people sent us here to do a job; they sent us here to do that job proudly; and it is hard to do it if we are surrounded by crime and we are surrounded by lawlessness.

I want this to be the kind of place where Ohioans can come and visit, where they can walk the streets with their children without fear of their personal safety; and, unfortunately, DC is going in the wrong direction.

I yield the floor.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I want to talk about a few things here and why I am objecting to this nomination and why I would not vote for it if and when it comes before the full Senate.

First is a question of competence. This is an ambassador--Ambassador Sullivan--who went to Ghana and said on local television that she was proud of the fact that she had failed her Foreign Service exam twice.

It is hard to imagine a Chinese leader going to a country where they were trying to develop diplomatic relationships and bragging about failing any type of Foreign Service exam.

I don't know where this idea that we should celebrate failing the Foreign Service exam amongst our diplomatic corps comes from, but it doesn't make us look good, and it doesn't help Ambassador Sullivan in her duties.

Now, a second problem, the last time we sent Ambassador Sullivan to a senior job in Africa, her successor spent the following couple of months apologizing for and cleaning up for the job that she had done. In particular, she did so much to push a very, very divisive set of ideas in an American political context on a foreign country that had nothing to do with our national interests.

In particular, she seems particularly fond of the most leftwing versions of transgender ideology. Now, let me just address this particular issue.

I have my views on the transgender ideology question. In particular, I really worry that we are going too far, too fast not in support of the evidence, prescribing treatments and surgeries and hormonal therapies that could damage children for years. I think we need to be patient with this, and we need to follow the science.

This is why, by the way, most of our European allies--Sweden, for example, a country hailed as a great example of good healthcare, 10 years ago, by many Democrats in this Chamber, is going in the opposite direction of where we are going on the transgender ideology question.

Now, that said, I can accept that many people disagree with me. But

that disagreement in an American political context has no place for the diplomatic corps of our country. We should not be taking something that a majority of Americans disagree on and try to force it down the throat of another country. And the fact that we engage in this cultural imperialism is one of the biggest threats to American national security in the world today.

Now, let's talk about this cultural imperialism, the fact that it is unsupported and the fact that it is not good for our country.

We haven't had a real debate in this body. We have not had a sufficient conversation about whether we want to support certain ideological preferences in our diplomatic corps.

Why, for example, do we have a liberal White woman going to Africa and telling them that they are not civilized enough when it comes to issues of transgender ideology?

Why do we have a diplomatic corps that is taking a hotly contested issue in an American political context and demanding that African nations follow the lead of the far left instead of doing what they think that they should do?

Now, there are going to be people who say that there are all manner of atrocities that happen in Africa when it comes to sexual issues, when it comes to gender minorities, and so forth, and, of course, we think that is terrible, and we don't want that to happen. But she has gone so much further than that in placing a very particular set of ideas at the forefront of our diplomacy.

Let me just leave this body with one final thought. Look at the demographics of the people who have fought and died in American wars over the last generation. Many Democrats, of course, have done so, and we honor their service and we honor the sacrifice of themselves and their families. But a disproportionate share, especially of the enlisted troops, who are at the forefront of American power--the threat of military action and, sometimes, the reality of military action is what gives the State Department so much power in the first place--the knowledge that, if you don't follow America's lead, you can sometimes have military and security consequences because of it.

Do we think that the thousands of Americans who have died in America's wars in the last 20 or so years died so that the trans flag would fly over the nation of Ghana or any other African nation?

And why is it the policy of this government, again, to take a controversial topic in the context of an American political debate and force it down the throats of somebody else?

This is damaging our national security. Larry Summers, an Obama administration economist, a guy well respected on the left side of the aisle, said, talking to some of his friends who work in development in Africa, that when the Chinese come, they bring--let me get the exact quote here because I don't want to mess it up:

What we get from China is an airport. What we get from the

United States is a lecture.

That is Larry Summers quoting somebody who does economic development in troubled regions of the world. Why----

Can I finish the point, Senator Coons?

Here is what I would say here. The final point that I will make is, we have built a foreign policy of hectoring and moralizing and lecturing countries that don't want anything to do with this.

The Chinese have a foreign policy of building roads and bridges and feeding poor people, and I think that we should pursue a foreign policy, a diplomacy, of respect and a foreign policy that is not rooted in moralizing; it is rooted in the national interests of this country. Because Ambassador Sullivan is at the lead of moralizing instead of pursuing America's national interests, I object.