Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. REID. Mr. President, our Nation's heart remains broken over the senseless tragedy last week in Charleston, SC. A young man full of hate took the lives of nine worshippers after they welcomed him into their Bible study.

Once again, someone motivated by ignorance and hatred got his hands on a gun and inflicted pain on innocent Americans. Once again, we must witness the people of a community as they struggle to reconnect and put the pieces of their lives back together. Once again, we are looking at our newspapers, watching our TV screens, and talking at our dinner tables about why--why did this happen?

As the painful details emerge, we cannot turn away from the hard truth this tragedy lays bare: Racism still exists in our society.

We have to accept that reality. If we ever hope to change it, we have to accept that reality. I watched this weekend as pundits and the Nation's thought leaders attempted to address this issue by sidestepping the truth. This violent attack was racially motivated, plain and simple. It was intended to terrorize the African-American community both in Charleston and around this Nation.

Fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King led a March in Washington, 50 years after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, 50 years after the march for voting rights in Selma, 50 years after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, we must still face the hard truth about race in America. The truth is that we still have much to do. We must overcome. We have no choice. One cannot ignore this underlying issue.

It deeply troubles our Nation that hatred and bigotry exist. The harsh reality of hatred and bigotry in this country, in addition to the consistent lack of opportunities in communities of color, have left far too many men and women of color feel that their lives really don't matter. It is easy to feel that your life doesn't matter when the odds are stacked against you every place you look, on every hand.

Here are some of the facts African Americans face on a daily basis. Nearly half of all African-American families have lived in poor neighborhoods for at least two generations--50 percent compared to 7 percent of White families. An African-American man is far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than a White male--10 percent longer for the same crimes in the Federal system. In the State system, the numbers are even more skewed than that.

These facts alone illustrate that countless men and women face unprecedented challenges and are still judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.

We have a moral obligation to change these realities. We must do everything within our power to ensure that all Americans know that their lives matter. This means standing for what is right, calling out bigotry and hatred when it is seen and felt, and then taking action to address the bigotry.

It is hard to fathom that even as the community of Charleston grapples with the devastation of this hateful act, African-American men and women have to walk under a Confederate flag when they step on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia, SC.

The Confederate flag is a symbol of the dark past from which our country has come. It does not and should not represent our values or the way we treat our fellow Americans. It is a symbol of slavery. It is a symbol of White supremacy. There is no other way to explain it. It often flew high as vile organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan torched African-American churches.

This symbol of the past has no place atop buildings that govern Americans. It is just not who we are, and certainly it shouldn't be who we want to be. The flag should be removed and now.

Yesterday, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina said that in the Capitol of South Carolina the flag should not be flown. She said: We will do this in spite of what the State legislature feels.

We have tried this in the past, and the State legislatures have said: No, we are keeping the flag flying.

So I applaud her. I appreciate her courageous act so that the Confederate flag has no future in the future of South Carolina. It belongs in the past in every place in America, not just South Carolina. Anyone who desires to fly that flag on private property can do so, of course, but no State in our great Nation should allow this flag to soar above its capitol. It shouldn't soar in public places.

We must always stand for what is right. We must stand for equality and justice and act to defend them. We must preserve and protect the rights of every American, not because it is the safe thing to do, not because it is popular or because it has political benefit. We must stand and defend equality and justice because that is the right thing to do.

We must take meaningful action to ensure the safety of our citizens.

Once again, our hearts are broken as another community struggles to recover from a mass shooting. I am going to mention now just a few of them: Fort Hood, 13 Americans killed, and this was on a military base; Tucson, AZ, 6 Americans killed; Carson City, NV, 4 Americans killed; Newtown, CT, 27 Americans dead, and 22 of them were innocent little children; Aurora, CO, in a movie theater, 12 killed; the Navy Yard, maybe a mile from here at the most, in the District of Columbia, 12 killed; Charleston, SC--of course we know 9 were killed while in a Bible study class. And these are not all of the violent acts; these are but a handful. All of these violent events occurred within the past few years.

Our country, the United States, is the only advanced country where this type of mass violence occurs--the only country. Per capita, in America we kill each other with guns at a rate 297 times higher than Japan, 49 times higher than France, 33 times higher than Israel, and we outdistance every other country by far too much.

We can do something about this sad, violent reality. Let's do something. We can expand, for example, background checks for people who want to buy guns to prevent the mentally ill and criminals from buying guns. Is that asking too much--the mentally ill and criminals? More than 80 percent of the American people support this. Why can't we in Congress support it? The American people support it. It has bipartisan support. I say it over and over again. The American community is overwhelmingly in support of not giving guns to people who are mentally ill or felons. They shouldn't be able to buy guns. We should act to save lives by expanding these background checks. Isn't that the least we can do?

I know people will come and say: Well, he wasn't a felon. Maybe so. But couldn't we do something? Couldn't we at least do this minimal thing to stop people who are sick in the head and people who are criminals from purchasing guns? Couldn't we at least do that?

Einstein's definition of insanity is continuing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result, and that is what we are doing. For the future of our country, we have to change. In the face of racism and bigotry, we must act. We can't do nothing. We must prevent felons and the mentally ill from gunning down even more Americans in broad daylight. If we do not, we will be here again. Our hearts will be broken again. Again we will have to ask ourselves how we allowed another senseless tragedy to take place while we stood by doing nothing to prevent other deaths.

Mr. President, what is the business before the Senate today?

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