Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016-- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Madam President, I know the President is traveling to Oregon tomorrow. There is a lot of focus, and appropriately so, on the tragedy that occurred last Thursday afternoon in Oregon. I want to start out my remarks this morning by offering, again, our deepest condolences and heartfelt prayers to the families and friends who suffered so much in what seems like a senseless act of violence.

Perhaps stating the obvious, that it is terrible for our Nation to experience yet another tragedy like this, what I hope is that we don't become numb to hearing these reports so we end up being frozen into inaction or dysfunction but that we actually look for ways to try to work together to try to make some progress to deal with the root causes of incidents like this.

For the family and friends of those who lost loved ones last week--like so many others who have lost children, their friends, and siblings in one of these shootings--we know the emotions are still raw and real. So it is with great deference to those who have suffered this loss that I wish to discuss what I believe to be one of the major contributing factors to these seemingly senseless acts of violence that have occurred across the country, and I will talk a little bit about some legislation which I have introduced which I think will actually help us address one of those root causes.

The legislation I have introduced is called the Mental Health and Safe Communities Act. I believe it would bring real change to our Nation and provide help to those struggling with mental illness. This bill would empower families with more options for their loved ones. I think about the mother of Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook, and how she knew her son was suffering from mental illness, but basically she didn't have any options other than to let him continue to descend and become sicker and sicker or to go to court and seek an involuntary commitment for a temporary period of time.

So to make sure that families like Adam Lanza's and like the mother of the Oregon shooter--she said her son seemed to be doing fine as long as he took his medication, but when he quit taking his medication, he would become a real problem because he would get sicker and act out.
The legislation I have introduced attempts to strengthen the safety of our communities by providing families with more options when it comes to treating people with mental illness and treating them different from common criminals.

We know the majority of inmates at our jails in America are people with mental illness. They may have committed some petty crime because of their mental illness, and frequently, because of their attempts to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol, they get in trouble with the law. But rather than just lock them up, wouldn't it be so much better if we could get at the root causes of their mental illness and the reason they show up there in the first place? That is actually the goal of some very innovative programs I will mention in just a moment, but the goal of my bill that I introduced in August is to support families before it is too late and to provide a path to recovery and healing for the mentally ill.

Proactively treating those with mental problems is a vital component to reducing the risk of violence in towns and cities across the country. This bill would help the whole community, including families, as I mentioned, and schools. Certainly teachers and administrators at schools are privy to information and know things or suspect things that could be very helpful in providing assistance to families and those suffering from mental illness. It would also help law enforcement, providing them the training to spot the warning signs of individuals who could become a danger to themselves and others.

Many of the provisions of this legislation are based on policies that have been proven effective in State and local jurisdictions around the country.

Recently, I was in San Antonio--my hometown and where I served as a district judge. In August I had an opportunity to visit with those in the San Antonio area who have taken a leading role in coming up with new and innovative ways to approach this issue, including one of the leaders of that effort, Sheriff Susan Pamerleau. She championed those reforms, made our community safer, and provided families with alternatives to an endless cycle of incarceration for people with mental illness who don't actually get their symptoms and the cause of their problems treated.

The mental health program in Bexar County, which is the county where San Antonio is located, is now touted as the national standard for how to think strategically about those suffering from mental illness in our criminal justice system. The legislation I have introduced will help institute some of these best practices at the national level.

This legislation would empower families who struggle to find help for their mentally ill loved ones and encourage the development of mental health awareness programs in schools to help educators identify students with mental illness and provide them with the resources and treatment they need. It also includes specialized training for those on the frontlines, such as law enforcement. I heard in San Antonio recently that because of the training law enforcement receives, they have been able to reduce, if not almost completely eliminate, the violence that occurs when a police officer arrives at a call and encounters someone who is mentally ill. By providing the specialized training, you can deescalate the violence and allow the officer to direct the person to a place where they can actually get some help.

This legislation would also encourage State and local governments to create pretrial screening and assessment programs to identify mentally ill offenders, provide need-based treatment, and develop post-release supervision plans so they don't become a danger to themselves and others.

This bill also strengthens the current background check system by incentivizing information sharing among the States so that law enforcement has appropriate information regarding individuals with adjudicated mental illness in the criminal justice system. One example that is pretty close to Washington, DC, is the Virginia Tech shooter, who actually had been adjudicated mentally ill, but the State of Virginia had not uploaded that information to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System maintained by the FBI. So when he purchased a firearm, it did not show that he was disqualified, as he would have been if that information had been uploaded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Trying to make it easier for the States to put information into the system is one of the goals of this legislation.

I hope my colleagues will view this as a commonsense attempt to try to make a significant step forward that will help not only those with mental illness get the help they need but also equip our Nation's law enforcement officers to perform their jobs.

Last week, more than 20 mental health organizations sent a letter to Members of the House advocating for mental health reform, calling the need ``urgent'' to ``improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans, their families, and our communities.'' We need to listen to them, and we need to act.

I know from reports that some of our Democratic colleagues have said they are going to introduce some gun control legislation that we all know has been tried before and cannot pass this Chamber. What

we need instead is a broad consensus to try to get something done that can bring people together, and I believe my legislation can do that by addressing the root cause of some of these horrific events--again, mental illness.

So instead of calling each other names, as the minority leader did on the floor last week, I would invite our colleagues across the aisle to do something constructive and to work together on this legislation.

The Mental Health and Safe Communities Act is a serious proposal and will take important steps toward preventing additional tragedies across the country. I think many of us understand that mental health reform, generally speaking, is long overdue, and this is an issue many groups in the mental health community support.

I should point out that there are many other organizations that support this legislation as well. Just to make my point about this being consensus legislation, I will mention some of the organizations that are supporting the Mental Health and Safe Communities Act: the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the National Association of Police Organizations, the American Correctional Association, the American Jail Association, the Council of State Governments, the Treatment Advocacy Center, the National Association of Social Workers, and the National Rifle Association. Madam President, I daresay that you won't find a group like that coming together on many issues, but on this legislation, on which we worked very closely with them, they have actually been able to settle some of their differences and meet each other on common ground in a way that I think gives us hope that we can actually get some legislation passed and send it to the President. That will actually provide help to people like Adam Lanza's mother or the mother of the shooter in Oregon, who had nowhere else to turn, under the current state of the law, in order to get her son to comply with his doctor's orders to take his medication. Thanks to the miracle of modern medical science, there are miraculous medications that can help people suffering from mental illness lead productive and relatively normal lives.

I encourage my colleagues to consider how we can move this conversation forward in a way that results in real, positive change for our country--above the polarizing rhetoric and political gamesmanship that tends to characterize too much of what we do here in Washington and certainly on this topic.

Last week President Obama addressed the Nation after this horrific incident in Oregon. I believe his emotions were real, but unfortunately he didn't offer any concrete solutions to the problem. He said, among other things, that making our communities safer will require changing our laws. He went on to say that Congress needs to put forward such legislation, and that what is I have tried to do.

I am pleased that the President indicated his interest and concerns, but the real question is, Will the President work with us on legislation that actually offers solutions or will it just be a matter of grandstanding? Will our Senate colleagues offer legislation that previously has shown it cannot move in the Senate and render us dysfunctional or will they work together in a bipartisan way to try to find common ground and real solutions? I think that is the question.
I would ask our colleagues who are offering legislation--sort of relitigating some of these issues on which we haven't been able to find consensus--which of these proposals would have actually gone on to address the root causes of some of these incidents in the past? I think that is a very important question because if you are interested in demagoguing an issue, you can talk about that and offer purported solutions which can't pass and which actually would not have changed the outcome. What I have tried to do is figure a way that--OK, given our differences on this issue, how can we find that common ground and offer solutions?

Through this legislation, we would give families a way to help their mentally ill family members. We would help schools appropriately identify and respond to someone with mental illness. We would improve the response of law enforcement and the criminal justice system to make sure that mentally ill individuals do not become dangerous to themselves and others. We would work to help the States fix the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. We would reduce the stigma associated with mental illness by protecting due process rights of the mentally ill.

I was somewhat taken aback and disturbed when I saw a story this morning in Politico: ``Dems ready sweeping new guns bill.'' One of the statements in the article jumped out at me. It says: ``Democratic leaders are wary that their rank and file could defect and begin supporting the Cornyn bill.'' So actually, according to this article, what is occurring is, rather than looking to find consensus or to join together to support legislation that might actually help solve the problem, some in the Democratic leadership are actively lobbying their own Members not to get on legislation or support legislation that might actually pass and might actually work. That strikes me as incredibly cynical and doesn't demonstrate an interest in actually solving the problem but, rather, political grandstanding.

I would encourage all of our colleagues, regardless of where you stand on this issue, let's try to figure out a way to move forward. We have a real opportunity to address the common element found in most of these mass shootings, and we don't have any time to waste. We can do better for the American people and get the Mental Health and Safe Communities Act done.

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