Cloture Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, before they leave the floor, I want to say a special thanks to Senators Klobuchar and Collins for their leadership on this issue. This is one that hits close to home for me and my sister and my family. Our mother had Alzheimer's disease, dementia, and her mother and grandmother. So this is one I care a lot about, and I applaud their efforts to work together on a hugely important issue on a personal level as well as a financial one.

For a long time, I thought Medicaid was a health care program for mostly moms and kids. As it turns out, most of the money we spend in Medicaid is to enable elderly people, many with dementia, Alzheimer's disease, to stay in nursing homes. The lion's share of the money is actually for seniors, many of them with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. So there is a fiscal component and a personal human component.

I thank the Senators for this. I have written down the information about their bill, and I will be researching it through the night to see if I can join them as a cosponsor. I thank them both, and I really appreciate what they are doing. ISIS

Mr. President, just before Senators Collins and Klobuchar took to the floor, one of our colleagues--one of my three favorite Republican colleagues--spoke about ISIS and suggested that we are not doing too well in the battle against ISIS.

I have a friend, and when you ask him how he is doing, he says: Compared to what? I want to compare now with where we were with ISIS about 2 years ago.

Two years ago, ISIS was on the march. They were almost knocking on the door of Baghdad. They stormed through Syria, through much of Iraq, headed toward Baghdad, and were stopped almost on the outskirts of Baghdad. The question was, Can anybody stop them?

The United States, under the leadership of our President, and other countries said: Let's put together the kind of coalition that George Herbert Walker Bush put together when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait many years ago.

Some of us may recall that under the leadership of former President Bush, we put together a coalition of I think more than 40 nations. Everybody in the coalition brought something to the fight. Among other things, we brought some airpower and some troops on the ground. Other countries, like the Japanese, didn't send any military forces, but they provided money to help support the fight. We had Sunni nations, we had Shia nations, and we had nations from NATO. It was a very broad coalition, and we were ultimately very successful in pushing Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis out of Kuwait and enabling the Kuwaitis--even today--to live as a free people.

So when we hear people talk about how things are going with respect to ISIS, let me say this: Compared to what? Compared to 2 years ago, a heck of a lot better--a whole lot better.

You may remember that 2 years ago, ISIS had the Iraqis on the run. The Iraqi soldiers were running away, leaving all kinds of equipment behind for the ISIS folks to take over. ISIS came in and took control of the oilfields and took over banks and looted them.

Two years ago, they were attracting 2,000 fighters per month from around the world. Every month, 2,000 fighters were going to Iraq and Syria to fight with ISIS. How about last month? Two hundred.

Two years ago, the ISIS folks were attracting 10 Americans per month to the fight in Iraq and Syria--10 Americans per month 2 years ago. Last month? One American.

The land mass that the ISIS folks took over to create their caliphate was about half of Iraq--not that much, not half of Iraq, but they had taken over large parts of Iraq. Today, with the alliance, we have retaken I think at least half of that. With American airpower and American intelligence, with some support on the ground--but mostly Iraqis and Kurds and other components of our coalition have enabled the Iraqis to retake what we call the Sunni Triangle, which includes Ramadi, Tikrit, and Fallujah. That is the triangle in western Baghdad where a whole lot of the Sunnis live. And a lot of the boots on the ground were not ours. The boots on the ground were those of the Iraqi Army, which is starting to show a sense of cohesiveness and a sense of fight we didn't see 2 years ago.

Up in the northern part of Iraq, there is a big city called Mosul which is being surrounded by forces of the alliance that include not so much U.S. troops on the ground--we have some support troops on the ground. We certainly have airpower there. We are providing a fair amount of help in intelligence, and we will have elements of the Kurds, their forces, the Iraqi Army, and some other forces, too, surrounding Mosul. My hope and expectation--we are not going to rush into it--is that we are getting ready to gradually go into that city, try to do it in a way the civilians there do not get killed unnecessarily. It is something we are going to do right, and I think ultimately we will be successful.

If you go almost due west from Mosul toward Syria, you come to a big city called Raqqah, and that is essentially the capital--almost like the spiritual capital of the caliphate the ISIS folks are trying to establish. Raqqah is now being approached from the southwest by Syrian Army forces, some Russian airpower, and for us from the northeast--not American ground forces but Kurds and others and US airpower. It is almost like a pincer move, if you will. Two forces that are not ours but seen as allies--one led by the United States and the other by the Russians--are moving in against a common target, and that is Raqqah.

So how are we doing? Compared to what? Compared to 2 years ago, we are doing a heck of a lot better. And it is not just the United States. We don't want to have boots on the ground, but there are a lot of ways we can help. As it turns out, there are a lot of other nations in our coalition that are helping as well.

So far in this fight in the last 18 months or so, we have killed I think over 25,000 ISIS fighters. We have taken out roughly 120 key ISIS leaders. We have reduced the funds of ISIS by at least a third. I am told that we have cut in half the amount of money they are getting from oil reserves, from oil wells and so forth that they had taken over.

It is not time to spike the football, but I think anybody who wanted to be evenhanded in terms of making progress toward degrading and destroying ISIS would say it is not time to spike the football but it is time to inflate the football.

We are on the march. We are on the march--and not just us but a lot of others. We have two carriers groups, one in the Mediterranean and another in the Persian Gulf. I understand that F-16s and F-18s are flying off those aircraft in support of these operations. We have B-52s still flying. They are operating out of Qatar. We have A-10s operating out of someplace. We have to operate flights, I believe, out of Iraq and maybe even out of Turkey, maybe even out of Jordan--not necessarily all--maybe even out of Kuwait. So there are a lot of assets involved--a lot of their assets involved--and I think to good effect.

I am a retired Navy captain. I served three tours in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war. I am not a hero like John McCain and some of our other colleagues, but I know a little bit about doing military operations with units of other branches of the service or even in the Navy--naval air, working with submarines, working with service ships. It is difficult and complicated. Try to do that with other countries speaking different languages and having different kinds of military traditions and operating norms, and it is not easy to put together a 16-nation alliance and be an effective fighting machine all at once. But we are getting there. We are getting there. We are making progress, and I am encouraged.

But I would say, if I could add one more thing--and then I want to talk about what I really wanted to talk about, Mr. President--there is a fellow named Peter Bergen who is one of the foremost experts in the country and in the world maybe on jihadi terrorism. He points out that if you go back to the number of Americans who have been killed since 9/ 11 by jihadi terrorists in our country, they have all been killed by American citizens or people who are legally residing in this country.

Part of what we need to do is to make sure folks in this country don't get further radicalized. I think one of the best ways to make sure they are not going to get radicalized is to not have one of our candidates for President saying we ought to throw all the Muslims out of this country, send them all home. If that doesn't play into the hands of ISIS, I don't know what does. That is not the way to make sure we reduce the threat of jihadism in this country; it actually incentivizes and is like putting gasoline on the fire.

What the administration, what the Department of Homeland Security is trying to do, and what I am trying to do in our Committee on Homeland Security is to make sure we reach out to the Muslim community not with a fist and saying ``You are out of here,'' but in the spirit of partnership. They do not want their young people to be radicalized and go around killing people. That is not what they want. We need to work with people of faith, people in the Muslim community, with families, and with nonprofit organizations and others to make sure it is clear that we see them as an important part of our country. We are not interested in throwing them out of this country. There are a lot of them making great contributions to this country. We want them to work with us and we want to be a partner with them to reduce the incidence of terrorism by Muslims and, frankly, any other faith that might be radicalized here.

That isn't why I came to the floor, Mr. President, but I was inspired by one of my colleagues whom I greatly admire. Federal Records Act

What I want to talk about, Mr. President, is something that, when you mention it, people really light up. It really excites them; and that is the Federal Records Act. It will likely lead the news tonight on all the networks. It is actually topical and I think important. Maybe when I finish, folks--the pages who are sitting here dutifully listening to my remarks--will say: That wasn't so bad. That was pretty interesting.

So here we go.

Mr. President, I rise this evening to address the importance of the Federal Records Act and the recent attention that has been given to the Federal Government's recordkeeping practices during investigations into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server.

Yesterday, as we all know, FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI had completed its investigation into Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email server. After an independent and professional review that lasted months, the FBI recommended to the Justice Department that based on the facts, charges are not appropriate and that ``no reasonable prosecutor'' would pursue a case.

In addition, the State Department's inspector general recently concluded its review of the recordkeeping practices of several former Secretaries of State, including those of Secretary Clinton.

While these investigations have been the subject of much discussion in the media and here in the Senate, I just want to put into context the findings and their relation to Federal recordkeeping.

The truth is, for decades, and across Republican and Democratic administrations, the Federal Government has done an abysmal job when it comes to preserving electronic records. When Congress passed the Federal Records Act over 60 years ago, the goal was to help preserve our Nation's history and to ensure that Americans have access to public records. As we know, a lot has changed in our country since that time due to the evolution of information technology. Today, billions of documents that shape the decisions our government makes are never written down with pen and paper. Instead, these records are created digitally. They are not stored in a filing cabinet, they are not stored in a library or an archive somewhere but in computers and in bytes of data.

Because of a slow response to technological change and a lack of management attention, agencies have struggled to manage an increasing volume of electronic records and in particular email. In fact, the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency charged with preserving our Nation's records, reported that 80 percent--think about this, 80 percent--of agencies are at an elevated risk for the improper management of electronic records. As the inspector general's recent report showed, the State Department is no exception to this governmentwide problem.

The report found systemic weaknesses at the State Department, which has not done a good job for years now when it comes to overseeing recordkeeping policies and ensuring that employees not just understand what the rules are but actually follow those policies. The report of the inspector general and the report of the FBI also found that several former Secretaries of State, or their senior advisers, used personal emails to conduct official business. Notably, Secretary Kerry is the first Secretary of State--I believe in the history of our country--to use a state.gov email address, the very first one.

The fact that recordkeeping has not been a priority at the State Department does not come as a surprise, I am sure. In a previous report, the inspector general of the State Department found that of the roughly 1 billion State Department emails sent in 1 year alone, 2011, only .0001 percent of them were saved in an electronic records management system. Think about that. How many is that? That means 1 out of every roughly 16,000 was saved, if you are keeping score.

To this day, it remains the policy of the State Department that in most cases, each employee must manually choose which emails are work- related and should be archived and then they print out and file them in hard-copy form. Imagine that. We can do better and frankly we must.

Fortunately, better laws have helped spur action and push the agencies to catch up with the changing technologies. In 2014, Congress took long-overdue steps to modernize the laws that govern our Federal recordkeeping requirements. We did so by adopting amendments to the Federal Records Act that were authored by our House colleague Elijah Cummings and approved unanimously both by the House of Representatives, where he serves, and right here in the United States Senate. Today, employees at executive agencies may no longer conduct official business over personal emails without ensuring that any records they create in their personal accounts are properly archived in an official electronic messaging account within 20 days. Had these commonsense measures been in place or required when Secretary Clinton and her predecessors were in office, the practices identified in the inspector general's report would not have persisted over many years and multiple administrations, Democratic and Republican. Secretary Clinton, her team, and her predecessors would have gotten better guidance from Congress on how the Federal Records Act applies to technology that did not exist when the law was first passed over 60 years ago.

Let's move forward. Moving forward, it is important we continue to implement the 2014 reforms of the Federal Records Act and improve recordkeeping practices throughout the Federal Government in order to tackle these longstanding weaknesses. While doing so, it is also imperative for us to keep pace as communications technologies continue to evolve. While it is not quick or glamorous work, Congress should support broad deployment of the National Archives' new record management approach called Capstone. Capstone helps agencies automatically preserve the email records of its senior officials.

Now, I understand Secretary Clinton is running for President, and some of our friends in Congress have chosen to single her out on these issues I think largely for that reason--because she is a candidate--but it is important to point out that in past statements, Secretary Clinton has repeatedly taken responsibility for her mistakes. She has also taken steps to satisfy her obligations under the Federal Records Act. The inspector general and the National Archives and Records Administration have also acknowledged she mitigated any problems stemming from her past email practices by providing 55,000 pages of work-related emails to the State Department in December of 2014.

The vast majority of these emails has now been released publicly through the Freedom of Information Act. This is an unprecedented level of transparency. Never before have so many emails from a former Cabinet Secretary been made public--never. I would encourage the American people to read them. What they will show is, among other things, someone working late at night, working on weekends, working on holidays to help protect American interests. The more you read, the more you will understand her service as Secretary of State. She called a dozen foreign leaders on Thanksgiving in 2009. What were the rest of us doing that day? She discussed the nuclear arms treaty with the Russian Ambassador on Christmas Eve. What are most of us doing on Christmas Eve? She responded quickly to humanitarian crises like the earthquake in Haiti.

Finally, I should point out that the issue of poor recordkeeping practices and personal email use are not unique to this administration or to the executive branch. Many in Congress were upset when poor recordkeeping practices of President George W. Bush's administration resulted in the loss of White House documents and records. I remember that. At times, Members of Congress have also used personal email to conduct official business, including some who are criticizing Secretary Clinton today, despite it being discouraged.

Now that the FBI has concluded its review, I think it is time to move on. Instead of focusing on emails, the American people expect us in Congress to fix problems, not to use our time and resources to score political points. As I often say, we lead by our example. It is not do as I say, but do as I do. All of us should keep this in mind and focus on fixing real problems like the American people sent us to do.

Before I yield, I was privileged to spend some time, as the Presiding Officer knows, as Governor of my State for 8 years. After I was elected Governor, but before I became Governor, all of us who were newly elected and our spouses were invited to new Governors school for new Governors and spouses hosted by the National Governors Association. That would have been in November of 1993. The new Governors school, for new Governors and spouses, was hosted by the NGA, the chairman of the National Governors Association, and by the other Governors and their spouses within the NGA. They were our faculty, and the rest of us who were newbies, newly elected, we were the students. We were the ones there to learn. We spent 3 days with veteran Governors and spouses, and those of us who were newly elected learned a lot from the folks who had been in those chairs for a while as Governors and spouses. One of the best lessons I learned during new Governors school that year in November of 1992, as a Governor-elect to Delaware, was this--and I don't recall whether it was a Republican or Democratic Governor at the time, but he said: When you make a mistake, don't make it a 1-day problem, a 1-week problem, a 1-month problem, or a 1-year problem. When you make a mistake, admit it. That is what he said. When you make a mistake, admit it. When you make a mistake, apologize. Take the blame. When you have made a mistake, fix it, and then move on. I think that is pretty good advice. It helped me a whole lot as Governor and has helped me in the United States Senate, in my work in Washington with our Presiding Officer on a number of issues.

The other thing I want to say a word about is James Comey. I have been privileged to know him for a number of years, when he was nominated by our President to head up the FBI and today as he has served in this capacity for a number of years. We are lucky. I don't know if he is a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, but I know he is a great leader. He is about as straight an arrow as they come. He works hard--very hard--and provides enlightened leadership, principled leadership, for the men and women of the FBI. I want to publicly thank him for taking on a tough job and doing it well.

I hope we will take the time to sift through what he and the FBI have found, but in the end, one of the things they found is that after all these months and the time and effort that has gone into reviewing the email records and practices of Secretary Clinton--which she says she regrets. She has apologized for doing it. She said if she had to do it all over, she certainly wouldn't do it again, even though it wasn't in contravention of the laws we had of email recordkeeping at the time. We changed the law in 2014. She has taken the blame. At some point in time--we do have some big problems we face, big challenges we face, and we need to get to work on those as well.

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