Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, tonight I want to talk about the passing of an extraordinary woman--a woman who captured the hearts of Americans across every spectrum.

Barbara Bush was one of the most popular people in America--and for good reason. One of only two women in the history of our country to be both the First Lady of the United States and also the mother of a President, she consistently used those platforms that, as she would say, God graced her with, for good causes.

There are many stories, but one I would like to recount was shortly after President Bush's election. She went to an AIDS hospice here in Washington, DC. This was a time when the AIDS epidemic was a huge crisis. Frankly, there was a stigma attached to it and a lot of nervousness about the disease.

Barbara Bush picked up a baby with AIDS and cradled that baby. She hugged and kissed kids with AIDS. The message was very clear: There should be no stigma. We have nothing to fear. It is time for us to embrace these people. Her quote that day was everlasting: ``There is a need for compassion.'' She spoke to the heart.

She also used the platform she had to empower people through literacy. This was one of her great causes. She believed the world would be a much better place if everyone could read, write, and comprehend, and the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy continues to do amazing work. She has touched the lives of so many--so many young people, so many adults--and brought them into a new world through literacy.

She accomplished a lot more through her distinguished life. She was dignified, straightforward, witty, and well-intentioned. She had a habit of speaking her mind freely, and sometimes that got her in a little bit of trouble, but, frankly, when she did that, almost all of us nodded our heads in agreement.

Interestingly, her Secret Service code name was ``Tranquility.'' For anyone who knew her personally, that might have seemed to be an odd code name. Probably she chose that code name herself, by the way. She wasn't always tranquil. In fact, she was sometimes feisty--famously so.

One story that I think shows some of her feistiness was when she was having dinner one night with the President of the United States--43, who happened to be her son--and in front of many others, including staff, she commented critically on his table manners, which, of course, she loved, and so did he.

The night before she left us, that feistiness was on display when Barbara Bush, instead of asking for pain medication, asked for a glass of bourbon and, with a smile, took a sip.

I think the name ``Tranquility'' was also fitting for her. It was fitting for her because she was a calming influence. She made things more tranquil. I saw that firsthand at the White House, where she made life easier for everybody.

I had the pleasure of first getting to know her when I was doing volunteer advanced work for her husband, then-Vice President Bush. I traveled overseas with them, traveled around the country some with them, and got to see the calming influence she had on everyone around her.

Later, when I was in the counsel's office at the White House, I got to see how she made everybody feel more comfortable--including me, as a young White House staffer--encouraging me, knowing people, saying hello to them, talking to them, ensuring that the morale was good.

Tranquility. It was helpful then, and it was helpful through her life, as she was there as the rock, as the adult.

My wife Jane and I had recently become married. We had a child when I worked at the White House. Barbara Bush couldn't have been more gracious. She was a dear friend ever since. In fact, a few years later, when I first ran for public office--I ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Cincinnati, OH, the Second Congressional District of Ohio--she came to campaign for me. This was early in 1993. Recall that, in 1992, George H.W. Bush--41--had lost his reelection.

We did a political event in Cincinnati. I took her to Skyline Chili, which is a famous place in my hometown and all around Southwest Ohio. Although Skyline Chili and Cincinnati chili is an acquired taste, she at least acted like she really enjoyed it. She wore the bib, and people loved it. Maybe most importantly for me, while she was there, she cut a radio ad for me. In that radio ad, she said: ``I always enjoy having Skyline Chili with Rob Portman when I'm in Cincinnati.'' She said some other things that were kind. Frankly, as I look back on that race-- there were 10 people in the primary. My name identification was about 6 percent, half of whom thought I was somebody else with a similar name. I think that radio ad played a huge role in my first election, my ability to be here today and to serve the people of Ohio. Barbara Bush was an important reason I won.

In that election, by the way, I had stuck with George H.W. Bush, who had just lost his reelection, when others were being critical, because I had so much respect for him and so much respect for her. Frankly, I think her popularity was an important reason I was able to win.

In recent years, I made a habit of making a pilgrimage to Maine every summer to see them, sometimes going to Houston during the winter as well, but going to Maine has been a wonderful way to connect with them. I have gone with my daughter. I have gone with my wife Jane a few times. I sit with them. President Bush loves to give advice still, and I love to get it.

Barbara Bush loved the political gossip, and we loved to talk about people and things and what was going on in Washington. She was curious, engaged, sharp, and up to speed.

She loved George H.W. Bush so deeply. She sometimes called him ``FLFW,'' former leader of the free world. Again, her wit was on display everywhere she was.

I remember being with them last summer on the porch. She always insisted on eating lunch outside. The waves were coming in on the Maine coast and the Sun was reflecting on the waves. Family was always around. That is when she was happiest.

I will certainly miss those moments we shared, the encouragement, and the very candid advice that she was never hesitant to offer, but as we mourn the loss of this authentic and admired American, we should all find comfort in remembering the way she lived and the incredible legacy she leaves.

She never ran for political office herself, but in a way she represented all of us, and I think she represented the best in all of us. I think that is one reason she was so popular. She showed us how to handle the spotlight and responsibility with grace, with dignity, and with the incredible way that she, again, was able to bring tranquility wherever she was.

No wife, no mother, no grandmother was more devoted to her family. She had unconditional love for her children, including the 43rd President of the United States, with whom she had a great relationship. Her true partnership with George H.W. Bush, in service to the country, all the way from the time he was an 18-year-old Navy pilot through his career as President and after is an inspiration, that unconditional love and that partnership--an inspiration certainly to me and to Jane as a role model but an inspiration to all of us as Americans.

I know I speak for all of my colleagues in the United States Senate as we pay tribute to her and also send our condolences to the entire Bush family.

Barbara Bush is now in a better place. I can imagine her smiling, surrounded by family, including her beloved daughter, Robin, whom she lost as a child. She is on a coast somewhere, dignified, witty, and feisty, all at once, and she is earning that code name ``Tranquility.''

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I just had a chance to hear my colleague from Nevada talk a little bit about the importance of the tax cuts and tax reform that this Chamber passed at the end of the year and that is now in effect.

All I can say to my constituents is, this is the last year you are going to have to file under the old code. You will have the new code next year. Why is that important? Because it is simpler. It doubles the standard deduction, as an example, which is a great simplification for a lot of taxpayers. It also takes about 3 million people off the tax rolls altogether.

Think about that. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, over 3 million Americans, who currently have income tax liability, will no longer have it under this new tax reform bill. Why? Because it focuses on lowering the rates, doubling the standard deduction, and doubling the child tax credit. That helps people who are lower income Americans, who right now have tax liabilities and will not in the future. So it will be easier for a lot of people a year from now because they will have no tax-filing debate because they will not have any tax liability, and for others, it is just a simpler form.

What is already happening this year is that the paychecks are changing. Why? Because the IRS is saying the employees are going to get more money in their paychecks because the employers are going to withhold less as we go into 2018 because the tax proposals went into effect at the beginning of this year. So even though this is the last time we will have to file under the old code, people are already seeing some of the benefits of tax reform.

When I go around Ohio, I talk to people, and they say: You know, Rob, my paycheck has already changed. That is because 90 percent of Americans are now being told they will have less withholding taken out of their paychecks, again, because of the lower tax rate, doubling of the child tax credit, and doubling of the standard deduction.

This is really helping. The average person in Ohio will probably see maybe $30, $40, $50 every 2 weeks in their paycheck. That adds up. The average in Ohio for a median income family is about $2,000 a year in tax relief. That is the average. That is a big deal. That is not just crumbs.

Most people I represent live paycheck to paycheck. Most people I represent think $2,000 is really helpful. By the way, they tell me they are using it. It might be for a long-planned vacation they couldn't afford. It might be, as a couple of people have told me, to help with healthcare because they couldn't afford to buy healthcare until they had that extra $2,000 in their pocket--or more for some people--to be able to afford healthcare.

For others--we heard a great story this morning from my colleague from West Virginia about a woman who said her daughter used to have to do her schoolwork at school or maybe at the library. She couldn't come home to do it because they couldn't afford high-speed internet. Now she can afford high-speed internet with this tax relief that is being provided. So this is something that is actually affecting people right now.

As you go to the post office to mail your form today, or as you send it in electronically, just know it is going to get a little bit better, a little bit simpler, with a little bit less tax liability.

By the way, the IRS has had some difficulty in accepting electronic filings today--another reason we actually have had to go beyond just tax reform, as important as that is, because we have to ensure we have an IRS that is working for the American taxpayer. The taxpayer service, the number of calls that are being answered, the number of answers which will be given correctly, all of those indicators are concerning right now. So we do need to ensure that the IRS has adequate funding to respond to taxpayers but also that there are reforms at the IRS so their computer systems do work, so the different stovepipe systems are talking to each other.

So tax reform and tax relief are very important but also, as we have seen today with this glitch with regard to electronic filing, we have to make sure the IRS is up to the task and providing the taxpayer service that people deserve.

The tax relief effort, though, wasn't just for families and individuals. It also focuses on business relief. Why? Because we know American companies were not competitive under the old code. You had investment going overseas and you had jobs going overseas. There is tax relief for small businesses and large businesses alike. We are hearing more about that because we have seen a lot of headlines.

There was another one today about yet another major company that is making some investments in this country.

I was at the Kroger company yesterday. Kroger is one of the largest employers in the United States. It is a great grocery store chain--the largest in the country, by the way. They happen to be headquartered in Ohio. They made a huge announcement yesterday. They said they are going to take the savings they got from the tax relief and tax reform measure, and they are going to substantially give it back to their employees.

The things they talked about were very interesting. One is to increase the 401(k) match. That is important. They already give a 100- percent match. Now they are going to do it at 5 percent, rather than 4 percent, of people's salary. That is nice because people can save more for their own retirement.

They talked about helping employees who are having a tough time through the employee assistance program. They are increasing funding for that program. They talked about the employee discount program so the employees can buy more from their own stores, expanding more things they can buy and how much they can buy with discounts. That helps their employees.

They also talked about something I thought was really great, which is continuing education--lifelong learning. They said they are going to provide their employees with a $3,500-a-year--$3,500-a-year--stipend to continue their education. Maybe it is getting a GED, or maybe it is getting an MBA and everything in between, but they believe in education. They want to help these employees be able to better themselves. They believe that will also help them to keep people longer term. This is part of how they are using the tax cut.

By the way, it is applicable to everybody who has been there for 6 months. You only have to be there for 6 months to apply for this. You can be there part time or full time, and you get this assistance for education. This is all coming from the tax relief this body passed.

Is it making a difference in the lives of your constituents? It certainly is in the lives of my mine; I can tell you that.

I have now been to 13 different businesses around the State of Ohio, and I have asked them this question directly: What is happening? What are you doing? All of them tell me they are investing either in their people or they are investing in their plants and equipment, helping the technology so people can be more competitive and more effective at doing their jobs.

I have also had a half dozen roundtable discussions, where I bring small business owners together, and dozens of businesses have told me what they are doing. Some are providing more healthcare coverage. In a couple of cases--one is a small craft brewer in Ohio, another is an auto parts company--they are providing healthcare for their employees for the first time.

In one case, they had it before it got too expensive because of the Affordable Care Act, and now they are able to provide healthcare for their employees.

Another one had never provided healthcare because it was a small business just getting started, and now they can provide healthcare for their employees because of the savings from the tax bill.

Others are doing much more in terms of the community and charitable giving, again, some with regard to 401(k)s and some with regard to new equipment and machines to make their employees more productive.

When economists look at what is going on in our economy, they think: Gosh, the reason wages haven't gone up much in the last decade--and, really, it has been flat in Ohio--is because work productivity has not been high enough. Well, this tax reform effort is providing more investment to our companies.

I would much rather have people investing here in America than investing overseas, and that is what was happening. Three times as many American companies were bought by foreign companies last year, instead of the other way around because of our Tax Code. There was a study out by Ernst & Young that said 4,700 of companies went overseas. When they do that, they take their investment with them. They take some of their R&D with them.

We have done studies on this to be able to show that 4,700 companies had gone overseas that would have stayed--American companies--just over the last 13 years if we had the kind of tax reform in place we now have. Those companies now have incentive to be here. They have incentive to invest here.

Foreign companies now have an incentive to invest here. When they are trying to decide between investing in Japan, China, or Europe, now they look here and say: This is a lower tax rate, and you get immediate expensing. In other words, when you buy something, you can expense it more quickly, deduct it more quickly. That encourages investment here, whether you are a U.S. company or a foreign company. That is why this is exciting.

There is some new information out from the Congressional Budget Office that talks about economic growth, and it says that because of the tax reform effort, we are seeing higher growth rates. For this year--the year we are in right now--the Congressional Budget Office had projected 2 percent economic growth--pretty weak. I mean, it is growth, but it is not enough to get wages up. It is not enough to really get people the opportunities they are looking for when they work hard and play by the rules. Guess what they are saying now: 3.3 percent, not 2 percent. So 3.3 percent economic growth is projected for this year. Again, they say this is largely attributable to the pro-growth policies included in the tax reform effort we are talking about--the tax cuts.

They also say that for the first time in a long time, we are seeing wages going up. They project wages going up. When we look at last month and the month before, we can see these wages start creeping back up again.

This is really exciting to me because, ultimately, we want to see economic growth, yes, but we really want to see working families be able to see a little higher income so that they are not stuck in this squeeze where their income is flat and yet their expenses are up.

What is the biggest expense that has been increasing? Healthcare. So, yes, we have to do more on healthcare and, yes, we have to do more to increase economic growth, but wouldn't it be great to have wages going up to be able to compensate for that and to give people again the sense that if they are doing the right things in life, if they are willing to work hard and play by the rules, they can get ahead and their kids and their grandkids can get ahead too.

So I am excited to be here today to say that this is the last day we have to file under the old Tax Code but also to say that the new Tax Code is helping to give the families that I represent the opportunity to do a little better, to give businesses that I represent the opportunity be more competitive and to reinvest in their employees and to reinvest in their businesses and their competitiveness and their productivity. That, ultimately, is what is going to make the biggest difference in this tax reform effort.

With that, I see that one of my colleagues is here.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I wish to talk tonight about the brave Ohioans who dedicate themselves every day to protecting all of the rest of us; that is, our first responders. This week is Ohio First Responders Week, a week of appreciation, the theme being ``Bringing Help, Bringing Hope.'' Well said.

Police officers, firefighters, EMS professionals, and other first responders put themselves in harm's way for us every single day. They risk their own safety to care for others. They wake up every day, put on their uniforms, and carry out their duties with an unwavering commitment to their communities and a pledge to protect those around them.

This morning, we had our weekly Buckeye Coffee. We had people from all over Ohio there. Sure enough, a bunch of first responders showed up. It was the EMS chiefs association, and we had an opportunity to talk with them about what they are doing every day.

Of course, EMS help with regard to traffic accidents, gunshot wounds, and so on. But one of the new challenges they face that is taking an enormous amount of their time and effort is the opioid crisis. I would bet if you go to your firehouse and ask them, the first responders in our communities are responding more to overdose runs than they are to fires. This is one example of where they are on the frontlines dealing with this issue and are applying Narcan, the miracle drug that reverses the effects of an overdose to save lives.

We appreciate them, and the service and commitment of these first responders is needed now more than ever. I urge all Ohioans this week to demonstrate their thanks to first responders. If you live in a community that is having an event, which a number are, I hope you will attend the event. If not, if you cross paths with a first responder, thank him, thank her, and tell them we appreciate what they are doing.

I know I speak for the entire Buckeye State when I say that we are grateful for the work our first responders do every single day, and they will continue, as the theme says this year, to bring help and hope to all of us. We thank them.

On another topic, Mr. President, today is a big day in the fight against sex trafficking.

I just got back a couple of hours ago from a meeting at the White House where the President of the United States signed legislation that we have been working on for several years to be able to push back against the sex trafficking that is occurring online. It was very emotional. We had a lot of survivors, victims of sex trafficking, who were there.

One of them was standing next to the President. When he signed the bill, he asked whether she wanted to say anything. Fighting back tears, Yvonne Ambrose said: I want to tell you about my daughter.

She told the President about her 16-year-old daughter who was trafficked on backpage.com, a website that has most of the commercial sex traffic, and how she got a call on Christmas Eve a couple of years ago. Her daughter had been murdered. As she said, no mother

should ever have to accept or take that call.

She talked about how her daughter got dragged into this issue of trafficking and said that she hopes the legislation we passed will be able to save other daughters, other granddaughters, other Americans who otherwise would become part of the sex trafficking tragedy we have seen unfold in our country.

This legislation came out of experiences we have all had when we go back home. We talk to victims and survivors, and we have learned over the past several years that trafficking is actually on the increase in this country, in this century. People think: Well, trafficking is going on, but it happens in Africa or it happens in Asia or it happens in Latin America. It happens here. It probably happens in your community. Unfortunately, it happens in my State of Ohio way too frequently.

Through our investigation and studies of this, increasingly, we heard about online trafficking. Survivors have told me: Rob, this has moved from the street corner to the smartphone.

Groups, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, showed that from 2005 to 2015 there was an 800-percent increase in reports of trafficking. All of the experts agree that there is an increase in trafficking, and all agree that most of this is attributable directly to one thing--the movement to the ruthless efficiency of online selling of women and children.

One website in particular kept coming up--backpage.com, which I mentioned earlier. So we launched an investigation over a 2-year period in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair. We decided to dig deep and find out what was going on, why it was happening, and what the nature of this was. What we found was shocking.

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri is the ranking member of the committee. She and I did this investigation, together with our committee, and we issued the report together. It was bipartisan from the start. I would say it was even nonpartisan, and it is to this day.

The investigation involved asking backpage.com for a lot of information that they were unwilling to give. We had to subpoena them, and they still refused to provide the information. We had to come to this Chamber, to the U.S. Senate, and get a vote of the entire Senate-- the first time in 21 years we had to do this--to be able to enforce these subpoenas. Every Member of this body got engaged and involved in this, and by the end of the process, we had a unanimous vote from the Senate to say: Yes, you should be able to force people to provide relevant information to the committees that are doing oversight, like ours.

We got permission to enforce it, which meant potential criminal sanctions, and they still wouldn't give us information. They fought us at the district level. They lost there. Then they fought us at the circuit level. We fought and won there. Then they fought us at the Supreme Court of the United States. We had to take it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Then, yes, they did provide us with about a million documents. They still refused to testify. They took the Fifth. But they did provide us with the documents because they had to under the threat of penalty of law. Through those documents, we found out something shocking, which was that not only were they selling women and girls online and making a lot of money doing it, but they were purposely selling underage girls and trying to hide the fact that they were doing it. Think about that. They were not only selling girls and women online, but they were taking ads for underage girls, knowing they were underage and running the ads anyway.

In fact, they would go to the people who were trying to place the ads and say: You know what, you need to change this word. You can't use the word ``schoolgirl'' because this indicates the girl is underage. You can't use the word ``cheerleader'' because that shows that she is underage. You can't use the word ``Lolita,'' which is a novel about a young girl being trafficked and an older man.

You can't use the description of the girl and put her age in there if she is underage, but they want your ad anyway. They edited the ads, so they were complicit in this.

You would think a prosecutor would be able to go after these people, right? They are engaged in illegal activity online. If that activity were happening offline, on the street corner in your community, it would be illegal. When the prosecutors went after these people online and when the victims of trafficking, like the woman I talked about earlier whose 16-year-old daughter was murdered while she was being trafficked on backpage--when they went after backpage in that case, they were unsuccessful. Why? Because they said: Yes, Desiree died. Yes, Desiree would have a lawsuit here, as well as other women and families who came to testify before us. Kubiiki Pride is one, and her daughter was there today. But there is a Federal law that says: We, the courts, can't even take up this case because the Federal law provides an immunity, a shield, to these websites. Unbelievable.

We had a court in Sacramento last year actually tell Congress, basically: Please change this law. They said: We can't stop this exploitation--this alleged exploitation of women and girls. We can't stop it because Congress has passed a law that protects these websites. No one can go after them.

The more we learned, the more we dug, the more we found out what was really going on, we determined that our report, which you can see here--and I encourage you to check out this report. You can find it online. ``Backpage'' is the search, and look on Portman.senate.gov. Go to Portman.senate.gov, and you will see this report, if you are interested in it. The summaries will help. What it says, basically, is that they are trafficking these individuals, and they know they are doing it. Yet they are immune.

Once we determined that was our issue, we determined it was time for us to figure out legislation to actually change our Federal law that was permitting it. The culmination of that was today when the President of the United States signed that into law.

For a couple of years, we had quite a legislative struggle because there were a lot of individuals who said: Well, you can't touch these internet companies because of this law.

The law was passed 21 years ago, at the infancy of the internet. It was well-intentioned, but I do not believe that any Member of this body intended, when they passed that law, to say that you should be able to traffic people online knowingly and not pay some consequence for it, not be accountable for it.

We made a very narrow carve-out for trafficking of individuals online. We made sure that it was consistent with the Federal criminal law that was already in place if you were to do it offline. We ensured that there was a Good Samaritan provision so that if a website was in good faith trying to clean up its site and edit its site and get this information off of it, they would not be liable. That Good Samaritan or safe harbor provision was in our legislation. We proceeded to get it passed.

We had a lot of pushback, particularly from the tech community--not everybody in the tech community but certain people who believe strongly that this legislation was somehow a threat to internet freedom. I do not believe that to this day. I believe it is targeted, it is responsible, and it certainly is an issue on which you would think everybody would agree.

Just because you are online does not mean you are not accountable and responsible for selling people online--again, in the context of more and more trafficking in this country. As you look into it, you determine that is because of this online presence, the ruthless efficiency of the online selling of women and children.

We were able to bring it to the floor for a vote after a committee process. We went through the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. We went through the Commerce Committee. At the end of the day, we got a vote in this Chamber of 97 to 2. That rarely happens around here-- rarely, if ever. Again, today, finally, the President signed the bill.

It looks like it was easier to do at the end. I will tell you, a couple of years ago, we were told: This will never happen. You can't make this happen. You can't beat us. We have a lot of

power. We have a lot lobbyists. We have a lot of abilities to stop you in the committee.

Yet, through persuasion and, frankly, through the personal testimony of victims and survivors who were willing to come forward and courageously share their stories, we were able to prevail. Today, it was a victory--not for this body, not for the legislative process, but it was a victory for those victims and those survivors.

One mom told me today: This means my granddaughter won't have to worry about this issue. It means that when my kid goes to the mall, I don't have to worry as much about what might happen, who might try to take her into this web of trafficking.

My hope is that this legislation will be able to curb the online trafficking in a significant way. We are already seeing the results of that. I was told today, in fact, that websites that trafficked people online are shutting down all over America because they don't want to be sued, because they are losing their immunity. It is not affecting the freedom of the internet, but it is affecting those evil websites that were engaged in criminal activity and hiding behind section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I am told that as many as 80 percent of those trafficking websites have shut down just in the last several days because they don't want to be subject to these lawsuits.

We also had something else that was very interesting happen this week. The Department of Justice went after backpage.com. They actually indicted seven individuals. If you look at the indictment, which I have here--you can find this by going on the Justice Department website, I am sure; it is in the district court in Arizona--you will see that they named seven individuals. These are the same seven individuals we named in our report. They also used the information from our report about the fact that backpage was changing ads, editing ads. In other words, they were knowingly allowing ads about underage girls to be run because they wanted the profits. That is exactly what is talked about in this indictment.

The work of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was very important because it enabled us to provide to the Justice Department information they used for these indictments. We provided that information 10 months ago, and the indictments came out in the last several days.

My hope is that now, because this law passed, we will see a lot more prosecutions because we have now allowed State prosecutors and attorneys general around the country and local prosecutors, district attorneys, and county prosecutors--who are the ones who ultimately are going to be much more effective and more able to go after this kind of activity--to do so.

Backpage has been in existence for 14 years. Until this week, the Federal Justice Department had not made these indictments. It was great that they did it. It is also about time, in my view. Now we have this tool to allow other prosecutors to be more aggressive, to do what should have been done years ago--to save the lives of so many girls, women, and boys whose lives have been taken off track because of the trauma associated with this. We also now have the opportunity for the victims themselves to file lawsuits.

This is already having a chilling effect. In other words, it is already taking down these websites that don't want to be sued. They know our legislation--although very narrowly crafted--applies to them because they are knowingly involved in, supporting, assisting sex trafficking.

I think this is a victory for the victims, the survivors, and, maybe most importantly, the potential future victims. It is also an opportunity for us to celebrate something that this Chamber accomplished in a bipartisan way, going through the right process, doing the research, coming up with the facts, narrowly crafting legislation that works, which doesn't have a negative impact, but in fact, it helps to change behavior. We are already seeing it.

My hope is that we will do more of that around here. We have many other issues to address. Earlier, we talked about the opioid crisis. Congress passed some good legislation, but we need to do more.

We have an issue with getting people back to work who are in the shadows of our economy, some of whom have a felony record, some of whom are addicted to opioids, some of whom don't have the skills to engage in a modern economy. That is a huge challenge. To me, it is unbelievable that we have so many people who are in our country but not in our labor force. Our labor force participation rate, as economists call it, is as low as it has ever been for men in the history of our country. There are probably 9 million men between 25 and 55 who are able-bodied and not working today. That is wrong.

There are many issues we need to address. If we can do those studies in the same way and come up with sensible solutions based on research, based on good practices, keep it not just bipartisan but nonpartisan, and say: Let's get the politics out of this, and let's try to figure out how to help people--which is our job around here; that is what we were elected to do--maybe we can make progress in a number of different areas.

Today, at the signing ceremony for this legislation, the SESTA legislation, I had the opportunity to see a friend of mine, Theresa Flores, who runs a group called Save Our Adolescents From Prostitution, S.O.A.P. the reason she uses the acronym S.O.A.P. is that Theresa, who is a survivor--she was trafficked years ago and now has a passion for this issue. She calls her organization S.O.A.P. because she goes to major events around the country, sporting events, where there tend to be an increase in trafficking. What she does is she goes to the hotels and asks them to put a bar of soap in the bathroom. On that bar of soap, she has listed the national hotline for sex trafficking. A girl can call that number and have someone come rescue her, and she can escape from her trafficker.

That simple act of making these bars of soap and getting hotels to place them in these bathrooms has been remarkably effective. Think about it. These girls or women may have no other time where they have privacy, where they don't have the trafficker with them, where they are not feeling under duress. When they have their private moment in the bathroom, they see the number. Many of them have called that number and have been able to escape this life and get back to a productive life, with treatment, with support, with the kind of longer term recovery that is needed to get through the trauma, to get through, in many cases, the drug addiction. Drugs are involved in this, as you can imagine, as a way to make these women, girls, and boys dependent. In fact, in Ohio, unfortunately, that is a common practice, is that drugs are involved.

Theresa Flores has done something incredible. She has channeled her frustration and all of the trauma she went through into something very constructive. She was there today, and her comment to me was that, by this act, by passing this law, we are going to save lives, and we are going to enable future generations to not go down the tragic and dark road she had to go down. That should make us feel good in this Chamber. It should make us feel good for those whose lives can be helped through this and for those victims to at least have the opportunity to have their day in court, to be able to seek justice.

I thank the President of the United States for signing the legislation today. I thank Ivanka Trump in particular for her support on the legislation all along the way. I hope this legislation will be a model for others to come.

I yield back my time.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy on this legislation with some of my leadership colleagues who are present: first, Senator John Thune, the chair of the Commerce Committee, who has been very involved in this issue; Senator Richard Blumenthal as well, who is the coauthor of the legislation and cochair of the trafficking caucus; Senator Claire McCaskill, who is ranking member of the Subcommittee on Investigations; and Senator Heidi Heitkamp, one of the original cosponsors of this legislation.

Mr. President, I am pleased to be joined by my colleagues this morning in this Chamber as we begin the process of debating the amendments that are being offered and moving toward a final vote on this important legislation to deal with sex trafficking which, unbelievably, in this century and in this country is actually increasing. All of the experts say it is increasing because of the presence of these organizations online that are using the ruthless efficiency of the internet to sell women and children.

It is fitting that this group is bipartisan, because this process has been bipartisan in coming up with this legislation all along. It is really the culmination of 2 years' worth of work--a lot of great work and investigations being done by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, as well as good work being done by the Commerce Committee through regular order. We would not be on the verge of sending this bill to the President's desk without the hard work of every Senator who will be on the floor this morning.

I would also like to briefly recognize a sixth member of our group who cannot be here but whose passion about this issue means that although his presence is not here, it is felt; and that

is Senator John McCain. Both Senator McCain and his wife Cindy McCain have taken on this issue of human trafficking through the McCain Institute, and Senator McCain, through our work on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, also helped us with this legislation. We wish they could be here for the final vote on this bill. I know John McCain is watching right now and wishing he could be here with us, and we look forward to his return to this Chamber. I thank them on behalf of all of us for their hard work on this issue over the years.

We will hear from my colleagues today on a number of things we have done in Congress in this process of putting together the right legislative fix to be able to take away an immunity, unbelievably, that some of these evil websites currently have under Federal law to be able to sell people online. We will hear about the 18-month investigation into online trafficking by backpage.com by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. We will hear stories about online sex trafficking and some of the injustices experienced by some of the victims and survivors who have come to us back home in our States and who have come to testify bravely in the U.S. Congress.

We will hear about some of the calls from courts around the country asking us to pass legislation to fix this problem; the prosecutors, the U.S. attorneys, the people back home who are eager to prosecute these cases but can't because of Federal law.

We will hear about the work of the Commerce Committee, as I said earlier, helping us come up with a commonsense target bill through the regular order to be sure we would have not just the best legislative product but that we would have buy-in from Members of both sides of the aisle.

I commend Senator John Thune for doing that. He chairs the Commerce Committee, which held a hearing on this legislation--SESTA--last September. It actually was reported unanimously out of committee after making a few changes to the legislation which clarified the intent in a positive way.

I yield to my colleague John Thune.

Mr. President, again, I thank my colleague from South Dakota, who has been at the forefront. Getting this bill through the Commerce Committee with a unanimous vote, frankly, exceeded expectations. Many on the outside thought this might be an opportunity for many who are against the legislation to stop the bill but instead we were able, through testimony, to show that this is a commonsense, targeted approach that will make a huge difference in the lives of the people we represent, without affecting the freedom of the internet. That is the right balance Senator Thune helped us to get.

I see that my colleague Senator Blumenthal is here, whom I talked about earlier. He is a coauthor of this legislation and also a former State prosecutor who took on trafficking cases, and so he has a professional background in prosecuting these cases and, therefore, joined me in ensuring that this legislation allows for our State and local prosecutors, who are going to take many of these cases, to be able to sue these websites that are selling people online using the current shield in Federal legislation. But after this legislation, prosecutors will be able to successfully prosecute to stop this criminal activity.

Mr. President, I yield the floor to Senator Blumenthal.

I thank my colleague for his comments and, more importantly, for his leadership all the way through the process of drafting the legislation.

I am now going to yield to one of my other colleagues. It looks like Senator Heitkamp will be next to speak. She is from North Dakota, not South Dakota, as we talked about earlier with Senator Thune, and she has a similar passion for this issue and has been involved in this issue for many years and is also on the committee in which we did the PSI work we talked about earlier. I appreciate her being one of our six original cosponsors, helping us to draft this targeted, focused legislation that deals directly with the problem we have seen around the country, which was discussed by Senator Blumenthal.

With that, I would like to yield to my colleague Senator Heitkamp.

I thank my colleague for the expertise and experience she has brought to this effort. As she said, in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, we spent 18 months digging deep, trying to figure out why this was happening, why we had an increase in trafficking in this country in this century, and increasingly we were told that this was because of the internet, moving from the street corner to the smartphone. Trafficking survivors and victims told us this, but so did the experts.

Senator Heitkamp jumped in, and the leadership of that subcommittee included Senator McCaskill. She is no longer the ranking member. She has gone on to bigger things--to be ranking member of the full committee--but during this investigation of 18 months, she was the ranking Democrat on our subcommittee, and I appreciate working with her there. She is a former prosecutor. She knows how to dig deep for this information, and she had a good staff. She also was very helpful to us in helping to enforce the subpoenas.

I will let her tell the story, but this is really incredible. We knew this one website, backpage.com, was engaged in this effort because we heard about it all over the country. In my home State of Ohio, women and girls would say they were trafficked on backpage. If I talked to a dozen victims or survivors, 10 would say backpage. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said that 75 percent were backpage. Another group said: No, it is 80 percent.

In other words, we knew this was happening, but we couldn't get the information because although we subpoenaed documents and subpoenaed their testimony, they refused to show up and refused to give us documents. We had to go through an extraordinary process. I will let Senator McCaskill talk about it, but for the first time in 21 years, this Senate did something that was critical to our investigation. I want to thank her for her hard work, and I would like to yield time to her to talk about it.

Madam President, I thank Senator McCaskill. She is absolutely right. We are grateful to the entire Senate for jumping in on this because we would not have gotten to the bottom of this without our having gotten the Senate to decide for the first time in 21 years this question: Are we going to enforce the subpoena or not? People stepped up. As a result, through the court system and with the sanction of criminal liability as a possibility, we were able to get these folks to come forward and provide this information.

They never really testified. They came forward, and they claimed their Fifth Amendment rights, but at least we were able to get 1 million pages of documents--1 million pages. Then we sifted through 1 million pages of documents to discover, lo and behold, that these people actually knew what they were doing. In fact, they were altering ads. They would get an ad from somebody who was selling an underaged girl. The ad would read something like ``schoolgirl'' or ``cheerleader'' or ``young girl.'' They would then edit that ad to take out those words that would indicate what was going on, and they knew it was going on. Then they would place the ad anyway. In other words, they would make the money, make the profit, knowing that they were selling an underaged girl online. They were also destroying the evidence that, later, law enforcement could use in going after these people.

This is evil, and this has been happening. We have heard the stories. We have talked about Yvonne Ambrose. We have talked about Kubiiki Pride. We have talked about Nacole S. We have talked about some of these mothers and their daughters who have gone through this horrific situation. You also heard earlier about Desiree. This was the 16-year- old who was being sold on backpage, and on Christmas Eve, she was murdered. Imagine getting that call as a parent.

We have talked before about the testimony we received in the committee with regard to the 14-year-old girl who had gone missing. Kubiiki Pride is her mom. Kubiiki Pride said she had been

missing for several weeks when someone finally told her: Why don't you check on backpage.com. So she did. She went on backpage.com and found her daughter, who had been missing for weeks. Imagine the mixed emotions there--the relief of finding her daughter but her horror in seeing the explicit sexual photographs of a 14-year-old who was being sold for sex.

She did what you would do as a mom. She called backpage immediately and said: I found my daughter on your website. She is 14 years old. Thank you for taking down that ad and helping me to connect with my daughter.

The answer from backpage.com was this: You didn't pay for the ad. We will not take it down.

Again, talk about evil. Think of the heartbreak.

Then, later, when she was reunited with her daughter, she was one of those brave moms and her daughter was one of those brave victims who said: Do you know what, we are going to file a lawsuit and go public with this and talk about our experience--the trauma that this young, 14-year-old girl had gone through in having been repeatedly raped by older men--and we are going to hold these websites accountable.

Do you know what happened?

The court system said: I am sorry. Under a Federal law that was passed by the Congress--a 21-year-old law--this website is not culpable. It has a shield. It has an immunity.

That is why we are here today.

Justice cannot always be seen, but its absence is felt, and the absence of justice is exactly what we are trying to address here today.

You have heard from my colleagues, and I appreciate all four of them for speaking up and talking about their experiences and how we got to this point. We may hear from a couple of other colleagues later today who were part of helping us put together a sensible approach that targeted this activity. Sure, we have freedom of the internet on the one hand, but on the other hand, this is criminal activity that cannot continue to go on here in America, in this century, at this time.

Again, as we have learned, this is where you see the increase in trafficking. You not only hear this from the experts who give us their data that show huge increases in trafficking reports, but you also hear it and feel it from the victims and the survivors whom I have met with in Cleveland, in Cincinnati, in Columbus, in Dayton, in Akron. They have told me the same story, which is: Yes, I was sold online. It is very efficient.

One 9-year-old girl was sold online by her father. I first met her when she was almost 20 years old and had finally escaped from the clutches of her own father.

Think about that--backpage's going from sporting event to sporting event around the country and, online, one being sold many times on a single night with the efficiency of the internet.

This is legislation that is overdue, in my view, and it is required. The courts have told us that. The district attorneys have told us that. The attorneys general have told us that, and 50 of them sent us a letter, writing to make this change. They have all said: Congress, step forward. They have not just invited us to do it; they have welcomed us to pass this legislation to give these families the justice they deserve and to give our prosecutors the ability to go after them.

One thing that I hope has been made clear from the other comments we have heard today is that one of the important parts of this legislation is to simply allow these local prosecutors we talked about earlier to take these cases while using the Federal standard rather than just relying on the Department of Justice.

Having said that, sifting through those 1 million pages, our report, with all the documents we received, you can go online to see this at the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, PSI.

We did provide this to the Justice Department. We did provide this to the prosecutors around the country who were interested. We did provide it to others who are pursuing lawsuits so they have information now that they never had before, but we also need to change the law, and that is what we are about to do today.

You heard from my colleagues about the amendments that are likely to be offered. There are two amendments. The first amendment is one that is going to be called a moderating amendment, meaning that if somebody is on their website moderating the website, cleaning up the website, they should be given a good-faith acceptance. Let me just be clear. This amendment is a poison pill and will make it easier for those sites that are involved in sex trafficking to continue to do so.

Right now, under current law, there is a good-faith exception. There is a Good Samaritan exception under current law. We actually restate that in our legislation, to be absolutely clear, that if you are one of the good guys--a website online--who wants to be sure your site is not going to have these girls being sold that we talked about earlier, that you should be protected. However, this legislation, having restated the Good Samaritan provision, also says that if you are one of the bad actors, you don't have that protection. The first amendment that is going to be offered includes protections for some of the bad actors. It purposely strips the good-faith element, and I believe it would assist online sex traffickers rather than hold them to account.

For instance, if backpage or another website filters for illegal content and, as a result, learns that their site is being used for trafficking but ignores that activity, I think this amendment would say that evidence could not be considered in a case against backpage. To me, that is wrong, and I hope the first amendment is going to be handled appropriately, which is to say, we don't want to weaken this bill or have a poison pill in here.

By the way, the law enforcement community represented nationally by their associations agrees with us, as do the victims groups, as do the groups who are concerned about the effect of trafficking on girls, women, and boys online. So we are together on this with all the outside groups.

The second amendment is going to be asking for additional Department of Justice resources specifically to combat online trafficking. I support funding to investigate and prosecute traffickers, of course, but we have to appropriate that funding in the proper manner. This amendment would be subject to a budget point of order because it is not going through the right process. The right process is the bill we are taking up the day after tomorrow, which will be the spending bill.

In fact, there are three budget points of order that the Committee on Budget in the U.S. Senate has found against this amendment. This amendment is subject to points of order. Every law enforcement group in the country opposes the amendment because as law enforcement said, it is a poison pill that is dead on arrival if sent back to the House. We have to defeat these amendments in order to have this legislation move forward. I hope my colleagues will all stick with us on that as they stuck with us through this process of getting the information, coming up with the right legislation, being sure we have the opportunity to take it to the floor and get it to a clean vote, get it to the President's desk and get it signed, and starting in a couple of weeks to be able to make a difference in the lives of the people we represent, stopping the online trafficking that is occurring and providing justice to those who are victims and survivors and ensuring that, indeed, justice can be served.

One of my colleagues has joined us on the floor. Senator Nelson is the ranking Democrat on the Commerce Committee that took up this legislation and clarified some points in the legislation. By the time he was done with it--and, by the way, he was a cosponsor of the legislation long before that--but by the time the Commerce Committee was done clarifying the legislation, listening to the testimony from both sides, he received a unanimous vote in committee. That doesn't happen very often, and I appreciate Senator Nelson being on the floor today. More importantly, I appreciate his leadership on the issue.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent additional material be printed in the Record.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this is in relation to an amendment that has been offered by my colleague Mr. Wyden. It has to do with funding for the Department of Justice dealing with trafficking. I appreciate the intent behind it, but I will tell you, as one of the letters from the law enforcement community, who are opposing this amendment, said, this is a poison pill. This will derail this in the House of Representatives.

We have law enforcement from the Fraternal Order of Police, the National District Attorneys Association, and from all of the national groups opposing this amendment because they believe it is so important to pass the underlying legislation and to do it now to provide the justice that the victims of human trafficking deserve.

Mr. President, I strongly urge my colleagues to join us in supporting this legislation. Most of you are cosponsors already. It strikes the right balance. It helps to allow victims to get the justice they deserve and, lastly, to hold these websites accountable through prosecution, while at the same time protecting the free and open internet.

I would like to yield my remaining time to my coauthor and colleague Senator Blumenthal.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, last night I came to the floor to talk about legislation we are debating in the Senate this week that has to do with combating human trafficking, an issue that every Senator in the Chamber cares about. Last night, I talked about some of the women and children who have been exploited online, their stories--some of the heartbreaking stories.

This opportunity we have before us is to pass legislation that addresses that very directly because we are seeing in this country, in this century, unbelievably, an increase in trafficking right now. The experts all say it is for one primary reason; that is, because the trafficking is moved online.

The ruthless efficiency of the internet, the dark side of the internet--Mr. President, you have been involved with this issue in our committee. As you know, we spent a couple of years coming to this point, an 18-month investigation of what is happening online, why it is happening, and then coming up with a legislative solution. The reports of human trafficking to one of the major anti-trafficking groups in the country, called Polaris, through their hotline and through their text line, have increased 842 percent over the past 10 years. This is consistent across the board in talking to other experts. There is this increase. When they look at it, where they see it is happening is online. Victims have told me, have told you and other Members, this has now moved from the street to the smartphone, from the street corner to the internet.

According to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 75 percent of the child trafficking reports it receives from the public involve one single website; that is, backpage. That is why we spend a lot of time looking into backpage, why this was happening, and how we could address it.

According to Shared Hope International--another advocacy group--the number is even higher than 75 percent. We researched this through a process that many in this body were involved with. Claire McCaskill was the ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee On Investigations. We investigated that. I see she is on the floor now. She and I, along with our subcommittee, along with you, Mr. President, and other members of the full committee, looked into this issue. What we found was even more shocking than we expected. We knew people were being trafficked online by this website. We knew they had to be complicit with some of this. What we didn't know was they were actually taking ads and altering the ads, editing the ads to try to hide the fact that people were selling underaged girls online. As they put it, they were cleaning the ads for illegal transactions and then covering up the evidence of these crimes in order to increase their profits.

Last night, I talked about three brave mothers who shared the tragic stories of their daughters who were exploited and sold for sex on backpage.com. Their daughters were between the ages of 14 and 16 when they were trafficked. Kubiiki Pride was one of the women we talked about. She is also part of a documentary called ``I am Jane Doe.'' It tells the stories of her family and other families. It is a powerful, powerful presentation, and it is powerful in that you can feel their frustration, feel their pain. It is not easy to see, but it is important to see, and I recommend it. You can go on Netflix and find ``I am Jane Doe.''

Unfortunately, for those mothers and countless others, backpage has gotten away with this. It is not because people haven't tried to sue them, prosecutors haven't tried to go after them; it is because the courts have consistently said they are shielded from prosecution, they are shielded from these lawsuits. They are shielded by a Federal law, one we passed in this Chamber 21 years ago.

It is called the Communications Decency Act. It was a well-intended law. In 1996, the focus was, when the internet was in its infancy, trying to ensure there could be freedom of the internet.

Ironically, part of the original intention of the Communications Decency Act was to protect children from indecent material on the internet by letting websites remove and block some of that explicit material. Now that same law is being used as a shield by online sex traffickers who promote and engage in this with immunity. This Federal law is being used by websites to get away with something that would be illegal, criminal if they were to do it on the street corner.

Congress did not intend this broad immunity, but numerous courts across the country have made it clear their hands are tied because of the illegal precedents that have been set the way the courts have interpreted this law. As the lawmaking branch of the Federal Government, it is up to us to fix this injustice. No one else can do it.

One of the Federal courts said this cannot be fixed by litigation; it has to be fixed by legislation. That is why America's district attorneys, 50 of the State attorneys general in this country, judges all over the country, and many others have called on Congress to amend the Communications Decency Act and fix this injustice.

In one of the most direct calls for congressional action yet, in August of last year, a Sacramento judge cited the broad Communications Decency Act in dismissing pimping charges against backpage.com. The court opinion stated: ``If and until Congress sees fit to amend the immunity law, the broad reach of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act even applies to those alleged to support the exploitation of others by human trafficking.''

This judge issued an invitation to Congress to act. Others have as well. Websites that knowingly sell vulnerable women and children for sex are profiting and getting away with sex trafficking because of a Federal law. It is up to Congress to do the right thing, to fix this loophole. That is why my coauthor, Richard Blumenthal, who is on the floor this evening, and I introduced the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA, alongside a bipartisan group of four other original cosponsors: Senator John McCain, Senator Claire McCaskill, Senator John Cornyn, and Senator Heidi Heitkamp. Soon, others joined us. In that first day, we had 24 cosponsors, bipartisan. Soon, we had a majority of Republicans and majority of Democrats cosponsoring this legislation. I want to thank those five original cosponsors because they helped us put together legislation that was targeted, focused, and actually fixes the problem.

SESTA will provide justice for victims of online sex trafficking and hold accountable the websites that knowingly facilitate these crimes by making two very narrowly focused changes to Federal law. First, it allows victims to get the justice they deserve by removing the Communications Decency Act's broad liability protections for a narrow set of bad actors, specifically for websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking crimes. Second, it will allow State prosecutors and State attorneys general to prosecute these websites that violate Federal trafficking laws.

SESTA says if you are violating sex trafficking laws and you are doing it knowingly, you are facilitating it, then you have to be held to account. That is common sense. This bill includes legislation from the House side that creates new criminal penalties. It creates a new Federal crime for websites that have the intent to promote or facilitate illegal prostitution.

All of these changes will help to hold bad actors accountable while doing nothing to impair the free internet. In fact, SESTA will protect websites that do not actively and knowingly engage in online sex trafficking. We do that by preserving the Communications Decency Act's Good Samaritan provision, which protects good actors who proactively block, and screen for, offensive material, thus shielding them from frivolous lawsuits.

SESTA's fair, commonsense approach is why this bill has an extraordinary coalition of support. National law enforcement organizations, including the Fraternal Order of Police, faith-based groups, the civil rights community, major businesses, even including a number of tech companies, support this legislation. Most importantly, anti-trafficking advocates and trafficking survivors are the ones who support SESTA. They are the ones we listened to when we drafted this legislation. They are the folks back in Ohio, back in Connecticut--back in our States--who came to us and talked to us about this issue. They are the ones we not just listened to but actually worked with to help draft something that would work to close this loophole.

This bill makes all the sense in the world, and it will do its part in helping to close this gap, in helping to deal, in this century, in this country with the amazing ability that people have to exploit someone online criminally and not be held liable.

I thank Leader Mitch McConnell for his leadership, for his commitment to combat sex trafficking, and for putting this bill on the floor for a vote.

I thank Senator John Thune, who chairs the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and Bill Nelson, who is the ranking member. They held a hearing on this bill and marked it up, and it addressed some of the concerns that had been expressed by the tech community.

Here in the Senate, we now have over 60 cosponsors. This has not been an issue of politics or partisanship. It has been an issue of the heart. It is about preventing exploitation. It is about providing justice. There are some in this Chamber who will want to change this legislation over the next couple of days as we debate it.

I have a great deal of respect for my colleague from Oregon, Senator Ron Wyden. I talked about him last night on the floor. I talked about the work he has done to combat human trafficking. I talked about the legislation I did with him to provide better data for sex trafficking, which was his legislation. He was also a leader in passing the Communications Decency Act, which we are amending through this legislation. I understand he is passionate about that bill that passed 21 years ago.

We took a very targeted approach here, which is why the Internet Association, which represents much of the tech community--not all but much of it--actually endorses our efforts. This is the Senate's immediate opportunity to help stop online sex trafficking while protecting a free and open internet. It is the right balance. It has already passed the House of Representatives. The White House has shown a commitment to it and is willing to sign the legislation. Now it is the Senate's turn to act.

So let me tell you where I stand. I stand with law enforcement officials all around the country and with prosecutors all around the country who have asked us to pass this legislation to give them the tools they need to stop this exploitation. I stand with Kubiiki Pride, whom I talked about earlier, Nacole S., Yvonne Ambrose, and the mothers across the country who have had their children exploited at the hands of online sex traffickers. I stand with the young women and children I have met in Dayton and Columbus and Akron and Toledo and Cincinnati and Cleveland--all over Ohio--who are sex trafficking survivors, who are victims who want justice.

I know that, together, we will all stand on the right side of history when the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act is voted on, has passed this Chamber, and eventually becomes law so as to immediately help provide justice for these victims. Justice cannot be seen, but its absence is felt. Those who have been trafficked online, who see the websites that have knowingly facilitated in this prosper and escape legal consequences, are the ones who have experienced real injustice. They have felt that injustice. We can right this wrong. Let's pass the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act to provide these victims the justice they deserve.

I notice again, as I mentioned earlier, the coauthor of this legislation--my colleague--is on the floor. He is a former Federal prosecutor. He has dealt with these issues both as a prosecutor and as a legislator. We are the cochairs and cofounders of the Caucus to End Human Trafficking, which we started 6 or 7 years ago. I thank him for his work on this important legislation.

I yield my time to Senator Blumenthal.

Mr. President, I know there are other Members who are interested in speaking.

Let me just say, Senator Blumenthal's role as a prosecutor has informed him; therefore, the legislation is better for it.

We just heard what Senator Blumenthal said. He understands this bill inside and out and the fact that there are well-meaning amendments that are being offered that would derail this legislation, which is something we want to avoid. We want to get this to the President's desk for his signature and begin to save people.

I notice my other colleague, Senator McCaskill, whom I mentioned earlier a couple of times, is on the floor. She was the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee that investigated this issue of looking at the websites and that came up with not just how it was happening and why it was happening but a legislative response.

I yield a few minutes to Senator McCaskill.

Yes.

I thank Senator McCaskill, Senator Blumenthal, and the other Members who came to speak. We will continue this dialogue tomorrow on the floor before passage.

I yield back.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, we just had a vote in this Chamber on a very significant piece of legislation. It was the motion to proceed to it. It was agreed to with good Republican and Democratic majorities, with both sides of the aisle supporting moving to this debate.

Because we have cosponsors from both sides of the aisle, I feel confident that we will get to an end point, and we

must. This issue of trafficking human beings is something the Senate must stand up against, particularly because there is a Federal law that now permits trafficking online that otherwise would be considered a criminal act. I want to talk a little about that legislation tonight.

We probably will not have the final vote until Wednesday, and some of the information I will provide tonight will be setting the reasons, the basis for doing this legislation. Then, between now and Wednesday, we will have to learn more about the specifics of it, what is happening online, and how the U.S. Senate can step in and provide the legislation to remediate what is an obvious problem to anyone who looks at this issue.

Human trafficking is such an egregious crime. We all, I hope, agree with that. It is also a very lucrative crime--$150 billion a year is the estimate, and that is probably second only to the drug trade in terms of the amount of money involved. Think about this. This is selling human beings.

The Senate has taken steps in this body in a bipartisan way over the past 6 or 7 years to focus on this issue, and I certainly commend my colleagues for that. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, and I, as a Republican, started a bipartisan caucus to stop human trafficking about 6 years ago. We started with the two of us, and now there are a couple of dozen. There are many Members who are engaged and involved in this.

Over those past 6 years, the Senate has passed legislation to increase the penalties on those who buy children for sex. For the first time in a decade and a half, we increased the Federal penalties.

We have helped to stop international trafficking by U.S. Government contractors overseas with legislation that was signed into law.

We have helped with regard to finding missing children by requiring for the first time that those missing children have a photograph attached to them. Unbelievably, until that legislation, most kids in my home State of Ohio and other States who went missing did not have the information provided to law enforcement and others--people who work in shelters, people who are in the juvenile justice system--to be able to find those children. Why is that so important? Because, as you can imagine, kids who go missing are sometimes the most vulnerable to being trafficked.

We also passed legislation to improve the data on trafficking. There is legislation called the Sex Trafficking Data and Response Act, which we passed in this body to provide better information about this problem so we could come up with better solutions by understanding what is going on. Trafficking is in the shadows. It is very profitable, but it is an illicit activity. So that legislation was critical.

By the way, the primary author of that legislation was Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. Senator Wyden will probably be on this floor over the next couple of days talking about some of the concerns he has about the online legislation we have, but I want you to know that Senator Wyden has been out front on opposing trafficking through this Sex Trafficking Data and Response Act. I was the lead Republican on that legislation, so I worked with him, and I commend him for that.

We also passed legislation to change the paradigm in Federal law and treat these children who are trafficked as victims rather than as criminals. The key is to get these young people into treatment, longer term recovery, and deal with what is, as you can imagine, a very traumatic situation--often related to drugs as well, so drug treatment. Something that I think is perhaps the most important thing we can do is to understand that these are victims who, in order to get back on their feet, need to be taken from the criminal justice system and put into the kind of treatment they need.

Despite efforts here in the Senate--and by others around the country, by the way--to deal with this trafficking issue and raise an awareness of it, unbelievably today, as we stand here in this country, we are seeing an increase in one type of trafficking, and that is sex trafficking. You might ask, how could that be possible? We passed all this legislation to help. We have gotten increased consciousness about the issue. People are more aware of the problem, and certainly there is a consensus that this is something we ought to crack down on. Yet it is happening. I will tell you what the experts say. They say it is happening for one simple reason, and that is that more and more women and children are being sold online--the ruthless efficiency of the internet. So that is where this legislation focuses, and it focuses there because that is where we see the problem.

Traffickers are using the internet to sell women and children, and we have a responsibility to act. If we don't act, we will allow a Federal law that was passed by this body 21 years ago, which I think inadvertently has created part of the problem by shielding these websites, to remain.

I will talk more about this later in the week as we get into the specifics of our legislation and why it would address the problem, but the bottom line is that we have a real problem.

The anti-trafficking group Polaris--we recently received its 2017 report. The report illustrates the true nature of the crisis. This is the heat chart put up by Polaris. It shows the locations of cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline last year alone, in 2017. As we can see--and this explains why we see such strong, bipartisan support for our legislation--this is happening everywhere, in every State in the Union. Unfortunately, it is increasing, not decreasing, despite all the efforts locally and even here at the Federal level.

The national hotline that Polaris runs--and I hope to be at that hotline, by the way, later this week, as they are opening a new facility and expanding what they are doing--experienced a 13-percent increase in reported cases nationwide just last year. So despite all the efforts, they are actually seeing an increase. In my home State of Ohio alone, 371 cases of human trafficking were reported to the hotlines. Across the country, their hotlines handled a record 8,759 cases in 2017, up from 7,737 reported cases in 2016. Again, these are only the cases that are reported. That doesn't mean there aren't many, many more cases out there that are not reported to the hotlines.

In the 10 years they have operated these hotlines, by the way, human trafficking reports have increased 842 percent. Again, it is unbelievable that this is happening in this country in this century and increasing.

I chair the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. A couple of years ago, being interested in this issue, we started to talk to some of the experts around the country. I met with people back home-- particularly the victims of trafficking and some of the survivors--and I kept hearing the same thing from everybody, whether it was the advocacy groups for those being trafficked, law enforcement, or the social service agencies that are helping to treat these women and girls who are dealing with the trauma we talked about earlier. The one thing I kept hearing was the word ``backpage.'' That is just one website, but it seemed as though there were a lot of people being trafficked on that one website. I certainly heard it back home, where these women and girls said to me: Rob, this has moved from the street corner to the smartphone, and backpage is where I was trafficked.

Nearly 75 percent of all child trafficking reports that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children receives from the public involved backpage--75 percent of the reports.

Another anti-trafficking organization called Shared Hope International says that service providers working with child sex- trafficking victims have reported that more than 80 percent of their clients were bought and sold on backpage.

We talked earlier about how lucrative this business is, but one website seems to have practically monopolized it.

With that knowledge, in 2015 the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Ranking Member Claire McCaskill from Missouri and me, conducted an investigation. We spent 18 months researching this. We looked at every angle of this issue, and specifically we looked into how backpage operates. It wasn't easy because backpage was not willing to cooperate, as you can imagine. What we did find was that the company was far more complicit in these crimes than we had previously thought.

We subpoenaed backpage for their company documents, and they refused to comply. When you refuse to comply with a subpoena around here, normally we can kind of tell people: Well, if you don't comply, we will bring the full weight of the criminal law on you. They still wouldn't comply. So we had to come to the floor of the U.S. Senate to enforce the subpoenas, which hadn't been done in 21 years around here. Fortunately, when we made our case to our colleagues here in the Senate, everyone in the Senate said: Yes, let's be sure they do comply by taking this to the criminal justice system and allowing our lawyers here to take this case. So we did.

We thought, well, we will win a case at the district court level, which we did, and that will be it. No, they appealed that. We won a case at the circuit court level, and we thought that was it. No, they appealed that. Are you getting the drift here that they did not want to supply these documents and did not want to testify? Finally, we took it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Supreme Court agreed with us and told them that they had to comply, with the threat of criminal sanctions if they did not.

Having won that, we then found ourselves in possession of over 1 million pages of documents. In other words, they flooded us with documents, and our lawyers did a good job going through them. Through this investigation, we found what some of us had kind of thought might be the case, which was that this company was actually complicit. In other words, they knew what they were doing, and they were knowingly facilitating criminal sex trafficking of vulnerable women and children. They actually coached traffickers on how to edit the adult classified ads to post so-called clean ads for these illegal transactions. Then, of course, they would cover up evidence of those crimes in order to increase their own profits.

In 2006, as an example, backpage executives instructed staff to edit the text of adult ads--not to take them down, mind you, but to edit them--which is exactly how they facilitated this type of trafficking. By October 2010, backpage executives had a formal process in place, we learned through all these documents, of both manual and automated deletion of incriminating words and phrases in ads.

This is an email from one of backpage's executives in 2010. It says:

I'm attaching a spreadsheet with the most current list of

coded items to be stripped out. Email your lists to me by the

end of the day. . . . Thanks.

In other words, they were telling these people who were posting ads: Oh, you can't say this word or that word because then law enforcement will know that we are engaged in selling underaged girls online. So they told them to take out those words. It is unbelievable.

What kinds of words were stripped out of the ads, allowing sex trafficking posts to stay up without violating the posting words? These are the kinds of words they took out: ``teenage,'' ``little girl,'' ``school girl.'' ``Cheerleader'' was one of them. For those of you who are literary types, one was ``Lolita,'' which is a novel about an underaged girl and an older man, and also ``fresh'' and ``AMBER Alert.''

These are the kinds of people we are dealing with here. Once these incriminating words were removed, the posts could then go on the website. That is how backpage coached the traffickers on how to get away with their crimes. Again, this filter didn't stop the ads, even though they knew it was illegal activity; they only edited them to try to hide that. So it didn't change what was advertised--the fact that these were underaged girls; they only edited the way it was advertised. Of course, this did nothing to stop the criminal activity, but it facilitated it knowingly.

The incentive? Why would backpage go through all of this? Quite simply, profits. This is a very profitable enterprise.

What is the cost of these crimes? It is very profitable, but the cost is human dignity, trauma. The cost is far more than money; it is suffering and sometimes human life. I have heard stories about this. I know my colleagues in the Senate have heard stories about it, and that is why there is so much support for this legislation across the country. These individual stories are compelling, they are powerful, and they are heartbreaking.

Imagine for a moment that your daughter is missing. She has been gone for several weeks. She is 14 years old. Someone says: You ought to look on this website called backpage. So you do. You look on backpage--you are a mom--and you find your daughter.

This is the story of Kubiiki Pride and M.A. She told her story bravely before our Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. She told us the details, and we were able to use that as part of our investigation and to come up with a legislative response. She said she actually told backpage--she called them and said: I found my daughter. She has been missing for weeks. She is on your website. Thank you for taking down the ad and helping me to connect with my daughter.

As you can imagine, these were sexually explicit photographs of a 14- year-old girl. She didn't know whether she was alive or dead, so she was excited to find her but appalled by what she saw, as any of us would be.

What did backpage say? We can't take down the ad because you didn't pay for it, did you?

She said: Of course, I didn't pay for it; she is my daughter.

That is the level of evil we are talking about.

This is another story of another brave individual who has come forward. This is Nacole, the mom, and J.S. Nacole also bravely testified in front of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. J.S. was a 15-year-old when she ran away. She loved her family, and she wrote them a 5-page letter saying how much she loved them, but she chose to leave the safety of her family and home, and she ended up in a homeless shelter for teens. A 22-year-old woman who was posing as a teen there approached her and said, ``I can help you make some money'' and then introduced her to a pimp, who then sold her on backpage. For more than 3 months, she was sold online multiple times a day.

Finally, an undercover police officer posing as a customer rescued her. Thankfully, he did, because for some many of the girls, the story goes on and sometimes ends in a very tragic way.

This is Yvonne Ambrose. Yvonne actually testified before the Commerce Committee. She and her mom did a beautiful job talking about her heartbreak and her tragic encounter with backpage. Yvonne got a call on Christmas Eve in 2016 that every parent dreads. It was about her daughter Desiree. They said in the call that her 16-year-old daughter had been murdered after being exploited and sold for sex on backpage.com. One of the backpage customers apparently was the one who murdered her beautiful daughter.

Yvonne is honoring Desiree's memory by working with us to try to hold these websites accountable, and Kubiiki and Nacole are fighting for justice.

These are only three examples tonight, but there are so many others and so many I have experienced back home. Again, these are heartbreaking stories. One girl told me she started to be trafficked at age 9 by her father. Some others have told me of not having parents at home, being in foster homes and leaving the foster homes either when they were emancipated at age 18 or earlier and the horrible situation they found themselves in.

I have had the opportunity to meet with survivors in cities around Ohio--in Dayton at Oasis House, in Columbus at Alvis, in Akron, Toledo, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. The majority of these young women tell me the same thing about backpage. Usually there are drugs involved as well that create a dependency.

Unbelievably, for years, these websites have gotten away with this because when parents like Yvonne, Kubiiki, or Nacole file a lawsuit for damages to try to stop what is going on, they are told: We are immune. When the prosecutors in these local communities step up and ask: ``How could this illegal activity be going on? This is illegal to do on the street corners, certainly it is illegal to do online,'' the judges say: We are immune.

We will get into this later as to why that happens, how it happens, and what

we are doing about it in this legislation. I look forward to that discussion. I look forward to the debate on the Senate floor as to how we came up with a very targeted and very specific approach to this that doesn't interfere with the freedom of the internet at all, but it does stop activity that never was imagined. When Congress passed a law 21 years ago, it never imagined it would permit this kind of criminal activity online.

Tonight I thank those families who had the courage to step forward, tell their stories publicly, and channel their grief into something constructive, which is to come up with a legislative solution that helps address this problem so the next 14-year-old daughter or 16-year- old daughter does not find herself in these same horrible situations, with all the trauma and all the heartbreak that occurs.

Justice cannot be seen, but its absence can be felt, and that is what is happening now, an absence of justice. Those who have been trafficked online only see the websites that knowingly facilitated it to prosper and escape legal consequences. That has to stop. That is an injustice to me.

I look forward to further debate again this week. I look forward to the vote on Wednesday. If we can pass the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, we will make a difference. We will save lives. We will save women, girls, and boys from going through this traumatic experience and instead enable them to achieve their God-given potential in life.

I yield back.

Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the issue before the Senate, and I am very pleased the Senate is finally taking up this legislation. It has to do with stopping sex trafficking specifically--a growing scourge in our country and really a stain on our national character--which is girls, women being sold online.

The legislation is called the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. It includes the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA. That has gone through a process here in the Senate. We had hearings on it. We had a markup. This is an issue many of us have been working on for many months--in fact, for the last couple of years--doing the investigations to come up with how to deal with this problem.

I am very pleased that we now have the opportunity here in the Senate to take up this legislation and begin the process of turning the tide, changing this horrific situation where, in this country, in this century, we actually have an increase in the trafficking of human beings--specifically women and children being trafficked online. I thought the speech earlier by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell laid this out very well. He talked about the fact that there has been an eightfold increase, in the most recent data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; that is, between 2010 and 2015, there was an eightfold increase in the incidence of trafficking. He also talked about the fact that this is growing because of this growth of the internet, that the internet--specifically this one website--has caused this increase that Congress has the ability to address through a change in a Federal law that can be targeted and focused and can make a huge difference in the lives of those who would be trafficked and undergo the intense trauma that results.

I am very pleased we are taking up this legislation. I thank Majority Leader McConnell for putting the bill on the floor.

I know we have an important omnibus spending bill coming up, and I know the Senate needs to focus on that, but first let's get this commonsense legislation passed. Let's take this opportunity to do something that is actually going to help immediately on this issue of sex trafficking.

I also thank Senator John Thune. He is the chairman of the Commerce Committee, which had the hearings and marked up this legislation. I also thank his colleague, Ranking Member Bill Nelson, for his work on this. We held a powerful hearing. I had a chance to testify there and testify about the work we had done in another committee investigating this issue. We heard from victims, and we heard from experts. At the end of the day, that vote in the Commerce Committee was unanimous-- Republicans and Democrats alike saying: We get it. We need to address this issue.

We have had a lot of collaboration on this over the last couple of years. I would say it has been a truly nonpartisan effort, not just a bipartisan effort, which is rare around this place. In particular, I would like to thank the coauthor of the legislation we are dealing with, and that is Richard Blumenthal, who, as a former prosecutor, understands these issues because he prosecuted sex trafficking cases.

I also thank Senator Claire McCaskill because it was Senator McCaskill and I who headed up the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which looked into this issue. We spent a year and a half studying it, and we were able to find out shocking information about what is going on online.

I also thank Senator John Cornyn, Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and Senator Ted Cruz. They are a group of Senators who were the initial cosponsors of this legislation and have helped us put this legislation together in a way that addresses the issue in a very focused and targeted way, so we are going to actually have the result we are looking for but without affecting what some were concerned about, which was the freedom of the internet. We all believe in the freedom of the internet, but we also know that committing these kinds of horrific crimes on the internet has to be something people are held accountable for.

I want to take a moment to recognize a couple of other leaders in this effort, one of whom is a Senator, and the other is his spouse, and that is Cindy and John McCain. I hope they are watching these proceedings over the next week as we take up this legislation, debate it, and I hope pass it on the floor of the Senate, because they have been very involved.

John McCain from the start, as one of the leaders on this issue here in the Senate, helped us put together the legislation. He was with me on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as we looked into this matter. John can't be with us here on the floor, but I know his presence is felt. I will tell my colleagues that it is felt by me, as well as the influence he has had on this legislation and on many of us in bringing up this issue.

One reason he brings up this issue a lot is that he has a spouse who is passionate about it and has spent a lot of time working on it. The McCain Institute has specialized on this issue of human trafficking, and Cindy McCain has been a tireless advocate globally on this issue. So I thank both Cindy and John for their inspiration. Again, I am confident that as we get it across the finish line here, they will be celebrating with us.

We have 68 cosponsors of this legislation now, and, again, for those who follow scorecards around here, that is unusual. We have a majority of Republicans, and we have a majority of Democrats. We have a situation here where everybody is affected by it in their States. They get it, and they understand that this is a Federal responsibility to change this law because it is a Federal law that creates this opening for websites to engage in this kind of behavior without accountability. They are effectively shielded from prosecutions or from lawsuits. This legislation takes away that shield.

We have heard from the FBI, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; we have heard from Polaris, which runs the national tip line on human trafficking. All kinds of experts have told us that trafficking is not just increasing, but it is increasing because of the ruthless efficiency of the internet.

One website--backpage.com--is involved in the majority of online sex trafficking. One anti-trafficking organization has said that backpage is involved in about 75 percent of the online trafficking reports it receives from the public. Another organization, Shared

Hope International, says it is even more than that. So think about that. We have this increase in trafficking. It is primarily being caused by this movement from the street corner to the smartphone, as victims have told me back home, and there is one website that has the majority of this activity. That is what we studied.

As we looked into it further, Senator McCaskill and I were shocked to find out that not only is this activity going on on this website, but they were complicit in the sense that they knowingly facilitated criminal sex trafficking, including coaching users--people who were placing ads with them--to post clean ads so that they wouldn't indicate--which was very obvious in the initial ads that were presented--that these were underage girls. As an example, taking out words like ``schoolgirl'' or ``cheerleader''--they told them to do that so they could still place the ads; in other words, get the money for the ads. As you can imagine, this is a very lucrative business. So they were saying that they needed to clean it up. That practice covered up evidence of these crimes. It actually also made it harder for law enforcement to follow up on these cases. They did it for a very simple reason. They wanted the ads because they increased their profits, but obviously they had an incredibly detrimental impact, and still do, on women and children around our country.

I spoke earlier this week on the floor about Kubiiki Pride because she testified before us and she is also part of a documentary called ``I Am Jane Doe.'' If you are interested in this issue, check it out. It is on Netflix.

Kubiiki Pride told us this alarming story of a mom whose daughter goes missing. She can't find her. She was told to look on this site called backpage. She does, and she sees her daughter's photographs there--sexually explicit photographs.

She calls backpage and says: That is my daughter; she has been missing. She is 14 years old, and she is on your website. Thank you for taking down the ad.

Their response: Did you pay for the ad?

She said: No, of course I didn't pay for it. I am the mother.

They said: We can't take down the ad because you didn't pay for it.

That story tells us how evil these websites are.

Let me tell you another story about Yvonne Ambrose. Yvonne testified before the Commerce Committee, and you could have heard a pin drop when she was telling her story. Her daughter was 16 years old and she was trafficked on backpage.com. She was sold for sex on backpage.com at 16 years old. Yvonne got a call on Christmas Eve 2016, the call no parent ever wants to get. The call was from law enforcement saying that her daughter, Desiree, who was being trafficked at the time on backpage.com, had been murdered.

Yvonne is honoring Desiree's memory by getting engaged in this issue and helping us to pass this legislation. I appreciate her challenge and her grief. But she is also sure that this legislation is the thing that would have kept girls like her daughter from getting involved in this, because when she went after backpage to try to hold them accountable, she was told: I am sorry; they have immunity under Federal law.

That Federal law, by the way, is called the Communications Decency Act. It was put in place with good intentions to help protect the freedom of the internet. It protects websites from liability when users put something on their site, but it was never meant to protect criminal activity. It has been misinterpreted, in my view, by the courts, but it also needs to be clarified, because it is not as clear as it should be, and that is what our legislation does.

This legislation, by the way, was enacted back in 1996--22 years ago, when the internet was in its infancy. There needed to be something to help provide protection from liability. But, unfortunately, it has been used as a shield by these criminals to be able to sell women and children online without accountability.

The same law that was actually written back then was also focused, in part, on keeping indecent material--pornography--from going to children, ironically, and now it is being used to shield these traffickers. I know Congress did not intend that broad immunity, and I know we need to fix it.

By the way, the district attorneys around the country agree with us on this--prosecutors. They have asked us to change this law. Their associations have even been involved in this issue. Fifty State attorneys general have written to us, asking us to do this, including, by the way, some former State attorneys general who are now Members of this body.

In the most blatant call on Congress yet, we had a court in Sacramento, CA, say: You have to fix this law because, otherwise, we can't do anything to keep people from exploiting women and children online. A number of courts have said this and basically have called on Congress--welcomed us to enter into it. The one in California said: ``If and until Congress sees fit to amend the immunity law, the broad reach of the Communications Decency Act even applies to those alleged to support the exploitation of others by allowing trafficking.''

In other words, they are asking Congress to step in and do something.

That is what this does. It allows online sex trafficking victims to get the justice they deserve and it allows prosecutors to hold these websites accountable.

We do it with two very narrow changes. First, allowing these victims to get the justice they deserve by removing the broad liability protections for a narrow set of bad actors. In fact, we actually say that for the good actors, there is a Good Samaritan provision: If you want to clean up your website and get the offensive material off, you are protected.

Second, it does allow for the State prosecutors to go after these websites, which they can't do now. So it takes the Federal standard--it is not a new standard; it is Federal law, which is already a criminal act--and says, allow these State prosecutors, these State attorneys general, to prosecute these websites that violate these Federal laws.

It is incredibly important to pass this. We did it narrowly. We have a knowing standard here; in other words, to be affected by this, you have to knowingly be facilitating, supporting, or assisting sex trafficking. We did that because we wanted to be sure it was focused on this issue and not affecting the broader freedom of the internet.

We have a lot of support now. A couple of weeks ago the White House announced its support for this legislation. I mentioned that 68 Senators are now supporting it. It passed in the House of Representatives about 10 days ago with over 300 votes.

It has support from around the country, most importantly. All of the groups are focused on this issue of how to avoid women and children from getting caught in this web of human trafficking and then how to help them when they get out to provide for the important recovery efforts that are needed from the trauma of this. Those groups, of course, are strongly supportive.

Law enforcement has been terrific. The Fraternal Order of Police stepped up early on in strong support of this legislation. So have all of the other law enforcement groups represented here in Washington through their national offices. We appreciate their help.

We appreciate the fact that parents have been willing to come forward and tell these difficult stories, as was the case of Kubiiki Pride, as was the case of Yvonne Ambrose, whom I talked about earlier, and her daughter, Desiree. They told their stories from their heart in order to get Congress to wake up and do the right thing. We now need to do that.

This legislation is now before this body. We expect to have a vote next week on it. We need to do all we can to address this stain on our national character. We need to do all we can to provide these victims the justice they deserve. We need to do all we can to ensure that we stop the selling of women and children online.

Thank you.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, today I want to talk about the tragedy of human trafficking. I want to talk about it today because this is an issue that I hope the entire U.S. Senate will take up within the next week.

We have legislation on which we have worked on a bipartisan basis over the last couple of years, and we have an opportunity late this week or early next week to address this growing problem. I have spent a lot of time focused on this issue over the last couple of years because of the growth of trafficking and my sense that we can do something constructive about it. Others have been involved as well.

Today, I will be at the White House for a meeting that Ivanka Trump is hosting with congressional colleagues, anti-trafficking advocates, and others who have demonstrated a commitment to addressing this issue. We will talk about the need to pass this legislation, get it to the President's desk for signature, and begin to help women and children across our country who are currently being exploited online.

We will probably talk about lots of different kinds of trafficking this afternoon, including work trafficking and other human trafficking, but the one I want to focus on this afternoon is sex trafficking, and the reason is that we think we have a legislative solution for addressing the biggest problem.

Unbelievably, right now in this country, sex trafficking is actually increasing. That is based on all the best data we are getting from all the experts around the country. They say that it is increasing primarily for one simple reason, and that is the internet. The great increase is happening online.

As some have said, this is because of the ruthless efficiency of selling people online. When I am back home in Ohio, victims tell me: Rob, this has moved from the street corner to the smartphone. There is a ruthless efficiency about it.

Anti-trafficking organizations, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Shared Hope International, and others, have told us that the majority of the online sex trafficking they encounter occurs through one single website, and that is backpage.com.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says that backpage is involved in about 75 percent of the online trafficking reports it receives from the public. Shared Hope International says it is more than that.

I chair the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Learning about what is going on online, we decided to do an in-depth investigation to find out what is really happening and how we could address it. We spent 18 months studying this, and studying online trafficking quickly led us to backpage.com because, again, that is where the majority of this commercial sex trafficking is occurring.

What we found was really shocking. Not only was backpage--as other websites have in the past--selling women and children online, but this organization and others are actually complicit in these crimes; in other words, they knew much more than we had previously thought. We found that backpage was actually knowingly selling people online.

We did this through a subpoena process that had to be approved here in the U.S. Senate because the company objected to responding to our subpoenas. For the first time in 21 years, we had to come to the U.S. Senate to get approval to actually enforce the subpoena. We then had to take it all the way to the Supreme Court because they appealed it all the way up, and we won.

Through this, we were able to get about 1 million documents. We went through these documents to find out what was happening. What we learned was that this website actually was actively and knowingly involved in selling people online. When a user would post an ad that might have a word indicating that the girl they were selling was underage--for instance, it might say ``cheerleader'' or it might simply reference the age of the girl being 16, 17 years old or younger sometimes--instead of rejecting that ad, knowing that it was of course illegal, they would instead clean up the ad; in other words, they would edit out the words that indicated someone was underage. They didn't just remove the post because they didn't want to lose the revenue--and you can imagine this is a very lucrative business. They just insisted that the ad be edited.

By the way, this also covered up the evidence of the crime, so it was then harder for law enforcement to find out who was involved in the selling of girls online--and underage girls. Of course, it also increased the company's profits. That is what we found in our investigation.

We also found that for years and years people who had been trying to hold these websites accountable in court had failed, and they had failed and been unsuccessful because of a Federal law that, in essence, said to these websites: You have an immunity to be able to do this. You couldn't do it on the street corner, but online you have an immunity to be able to do it.

I recommend a powerful documentary. It is called ``I am Jane Doe.'' You

can find it on iamjanedoe.com. It is on Netflix. It tells the story of underage girls who have been exploited on backpage. It talks about the trauma they have experienced, and, finally, it also talks about their frustration with their inability to hold these websites accountable.

What might surprise you is the reason these websites are not held accountable--the more we dug into it, the more it became clear--is that Washington basically passed a Federal law, which I believe has been misinterpreted by the courts, but it has been interpreted by the courts to say that these websites have no risk, that they are not liable, and that they have an immunity under Federal law. It is called the Communications Decency Act.

The Communications Decency Act was enacted back in 1996, when the internet was in its infancy. It was intended to protect websites from liability based on third-party posts on that website. I understand the intention of Congress, but it now protects websites when they knowingly allow this criminal activity--the crime of sex trafficking--to occur through their site.

I believe Congress meant well when enacting this law. In fact, part of its original intent was actually to protect children from indecent material on the internet by holding individuals liable for sending explicit material to those children.

Now that same law is being used as a shield by websites that promote and engage in online sex trafficking with immunity. I don't believe Congress ever intended this broad liability protection for websites that actively and knowingly facilitate online sex trafficking, but the legal interpretation of the law has led to this. That is why America's district attorneys, 50 State attorneys general, judges all over the country, and so many others have called on Congress to amend this Communications Decency law and fix this injustice--really, this loophole.

Last year, a Sacramento judge threw out pimping charges against backpage and directly called on Congress to act. Here is what this judge said--again, this sort of message has been repeated by other courts: ``If and until Congress sees fit to amend the immunity law, the broad reach of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act even applies to those alleged to support the exploitation of others by human trafficking.'' That is not just a suggestion; it is an invitation--an invitation to this Congress to act, calling on us to do what we were sent here to do, which is to craft laws that promote justice.

For too long, victims of online sex trafficking have been denied the justice they deserve, and now we have the opportunity here in the Senate--I hope within the next week--to fix that.

Last August, I introduced legislation called the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA, with a bipartisan group of 24 cosponsors, including my coauthor, Senator Richard Blumenthal, and Senators John McCain, Claire McCaskill, John Cornyn, Heidi Heitkamp, and others.

SESTA would provide justice for victims of online sex trafficking and hold accountable those websites that intentionally facilitate these crimes. We do this by making two very narrowly crafted changes to Federal law. First, we remove the Communications Decency Act's broad liability protections for a narrow set of bad-actor websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking crimes--high standard: knowingly. Second, the legislation allows State attorneys general to prosecute websites that violate existing Federal trafficking laws. SESTA simply says that if you are violating Federal sex trafficking laws and you are knowingly facilitating it, then you have to be held to account. That seems to make all the sense in the world, and it will make a big difference for these girls and women who are being exploited online.

Our bill protects websites that are doing the right thing, by the way. In fact, it preserves what is called the Good Samaritan provision of the Communications Decency Act, which protects good actors who proactively block and screen their sites for offensive material, and thus it shields them from frivolous lawsuits. I think that is appropriate. We simply carve out a very limited exception in the Communications Decency Act's liability protections for those who knowingly facilitate sex trafficking.

By the way, there are already exceptions for things in this law-- exceptions for things like copyright infringement. This isn't a new idea. So unless you think protecting copyrights is more important than protecting women and children from the trauma of trafficking, you should be for this. Even those who support section 230 otherwise should strongly support this.

If a prosecutor can prove in court that a website has committed these acts, SESTA allows that website to be held liable and the victims to get the justice they deserve.

By the way, 68 Senators now--more than two-thirds of this body--have signed on as cosponsors of this legislation, a majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats. That doesn't happen very often around here. The House of Representatives passed SESTA as an amendment to a broader anti-sex trafficking bill just a couple of weeks ago by an overwhelming margin--more than 300 folks. The Trump administration has endorsed this solution and again shown a commitment to the issue. So SESTA has overwhelming support from the White House, from more than 300 House Members, and from the 68 Senators who signed on to be a part of this solution.

I think one reason it has gotten so much support is because of the logic of the legislation, the fact that we narrowly drew up the legislation not to affect internet freedom, to be sure we were listening to people who had concerns, but also, and more importantly, because we are all hearing about this issue back home. We are all hearing the stories, and they are powerful, they are compelling, and they are heartbreaking.

Kubiiki Pride came to Congress, to our subcommittee, as we were looking into this issue and told us her story. In testimony, she said: My daughter ran away from home. She had gone missing. She had been missing for several weeks. Obviously, I was very concerned. I couldn't find her. Someone suggested that I look at this website called backpage, so I did. I found my daughter.

She found her daughter--14 years old--but found her daughter in very sexually difficult photographs, horrible photographs of her beautiful daughter. So she called backpage.com and said: I am Kubiiki Pride, and that is my daughter on your website. She is 14 years old. I am so glad I found her. Thank you for taking down that ad. She is 14 years old.

Do you know what the person on the other end of the phone said? They said: Did you post the ad?

This is how evil these people are.

She said: No, I didn't post the ad. That is my daughter. I have been trying to find her. She has been missing for several weeks.

They said: If you didn't post the ad, if you didn't pay for it, you can't take it down and we won't take it down.

That is what we are dealing with here.

Eventually, she found her daughter, got her daughter back. She went through the proper process to be able to hold backpage accountable, and guess what. The court said: Sorry. Under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act--Congress wrote this bill--this website has immunity, even though she is 14 years old and she was being sold online.

So I think that is why 68 Senators have said: Let's step up and do this. This is something we can do around here that is not partisan, that isn't about politics. It is about people. It is about human dignity. It is about ensuring that more girls like Kubiiki Pride's daughter don't have to go through this trauma, that more women and children can live out their life's purpose without having to go through this trauma. I think that is why we have been able to find so many Members who want to step up and do something here and do something that will really make a difference.

So let's vote on this legislation in the next week. Let's get it signed into law so that more children and more women are not exploited through this brutally efficient online process of selling people. If we do this, we are going to be able to provide justice to those victims who deserve it, and we are going to make this world a little better place. I urge the Senate to vote this next week.

For those Members who are not yet a part of this legislation, we urge you to join us. Wouldn't it be great to have everybody on board to correct this injustice, to close this loophole, and to ensure that everybody has the ability to meet their God-given purpose in life?

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I want to recognize and celebrate the life of a friend, a colleague, and a trusted adviser whom we tragically lost last week.

That is what Matt Niemeyer was to me, but Matt would say that he was a husband and a father first. Everything else was secondary. Matt leaves behind his beloved wife, Amy, and their two beautiful children, Anna and Peter.

I first met Matt in 2005 when he was an Assistant U.S. Trade Representative. He was well known in the trade community, and he stood out as a substantive expert in his field. Matt would say that his time at USTR was the most fun he had ever had in government. That says a lot as Matt also worked on Capitol Hill for the National Republican Congressional Committee and as a congressional liaison for a number of private companies and organizations throughout his life.

Matt played a key role in our successful efforts to pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement. He was a happy warrior in that he loved trade, USTR, and getting things done. I think his thick skin and constant hopefulness was a credit to his upbringing as a long-suffering and then long-celebrating Boston Red Sox fan. He always found a way to get his mission accomplished and always had a quick wit.

I was lucky to remain close with Matt after our time together at USTR had ended. He would go to any length for his friends, and he was always thoughtful, kind, and jovial. He never passed at the opportunity to joke about one of his earliest experiences in politics, when he worked for the first primary opponent I ever faced. He would generously tell me how happy he was that, for one of the only times in his career, he wasn't successful in that job.

While Matt is no longer with us in person, his memory lives on through his family who love him dearly and friends and colleagues like myself who will forever cherish his impact on our lives.

Mr. President, I rise tonight to talk about the bipartisan legislation that is before the body. It is an opportunity that provides significant needed regulatory relief, primarily to smaller financial institutions like community banks and credit unions.

The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act will modernize the Federal Dodd-Frank regulations to ensure that small- and medium-sized banks, as well as credit unions, can lower their compliance costs, which will mean more loans to small businesses and better deals for their customers.

For years, Dodd-Frank has hurt these smaller community banks and credit unions that have been caught up in this broader effort to rein in a select few larger financial institutions--primarily financial institutions on Wall Street. In effect, these smaller banks were caught in the web.

Last week, I met with some of Ohio's community banks. I meet with them regularly, and they tell me these stories. Their view, of course, is these Dodd-Frank rules targeted at the big banks are actually hurting the little guys. Over the past several years, they have told me story after story about how their compliance costs have increased. A small bank will say they used to have one person doing compliance, but now they have three people doing compliance, and those costs get passed along to their consumers. They also say, with the redtape and regulations and rules they live under, it makes it harder for them to lend to small businesses, which is one of the problems we have today in our economy. As the economy is beginning to grow, we need to ensure that startups and people who are interested in taking a risk and may not have a lot of business experience are able to get that loan to get started.

What has happened is, there has been a consolidation of these community banks because of these costs. In fact, they say one community bank is becoming insolvent every day in this country because of these big compliance costs, but others are consolidating into larger banks. That may be fine in some cases, but I like these community banks.

I like the fact that these community banks are close to the people in the neighborhood, and they know the businesses that are coming to them for loans. Again, it is easier for small businesses to get loans when you actually have a banking relationship. They also are very involved in our communities.

So these community banks, which are really the backbone of America's financial sector, are what this bill is primarily about. The bill on the floor this week makes it easier for them to extend credit, loans, mortgages, and provide other products and services to working families in Ohio and around the country.

The legislation does more than that though. It also focuses on the regional banks in Ohio. These are banks that were not part of the financial crisis. They had nothing to do with it, but despite that, they have been required to live under the onerous systemically important financial institution rules and regulations or the SIFI designation. It has caused higher compliance costs for them. Again, it has hurt lending to Ohio businesses.

In Ohio, we happened to have three very big employers in the State that are regional banks--Fifth Third Bank, Huntington Bank, and KeyBank. They are all examples of well-capitalized Ohio regional banks that will benefit from this legislation, and the benefit will go to their thousands of employees, but it will also go to their many thousands of customers.

This legislation also increases important consumer protections for veterans, senior citizens, victims of fraud, and those who have fallen on tough financial times

Another thing I like about the legislation that is particularly important to me is it includes a specific piece of legislation I authored to make it easier for a group called Habitat for Humanity to carry out their mission of providing safe and affordable housing to those in need. Habitat is a great organization. I volunteer at Habitat regularly. I see firsthand the great work they are doing back in my home State of Ohio.

My legislation is called the Housing Opportunity Made Easier Act or HOME Act, and it simply ensures that Habitat affiliates and other organizations--nonprofits--can receive donated appraisals of the homes they build. This is a really important issue for Habitat because Dodd- Frank disallows this donated appraisal, and the affiliates have traditionally accepted the donations. That has allowed them to have lower costs. When they have to pay the appraisal fees, it increases the cost of the homes to the families that are so badly in need of affordable housing. So getting rid of this redtape is something that should be bipartisan and even nonpartisan. It has been tough for us to get this legislation moving because people have wanted to block anything that has to with Dodd-Frank, but this obviously, I hope, was inadvertent. So in this legislation we have the ability for Habitat and other nonprofits to take advantage of these donated appraisals. Getting rid of that redtape is going to help create more affordable housing for families in need.

I want to thank Chairman Crapo for including that legislation. I also want to congratulate him and his colleagues on the Banking Committee for their bipartisan work on this legislation, dealing with the very real problem we have, which is the burdens, the redtape, the compliance costs, and coming up with a balanced product that can be supported on both sides of the aisle, get through the House, get through the Senate, get to the President for signature, and begin to improve this economy even more.