Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016--Conference Report

Floor Speech

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Mr. REID. 2577 and the conference report be agreed to with no intervening action or debate.

That must be the wrong one. Sorry about that. Madam President, it is sure good we have staff around; isn't it? Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 5243, which is at the desk; that all after the enacting clause be stricken; that the substitute amendment, which is the text of the Blunt-Murray amendment to provide $1.1 billion in funding for Zika, be agreed to; that there be up to 1 hour of debate, equally divided between the two leaders or their designees; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the bill, as amended, be read a third time and the Senate vote on passage of the bill, as amended, with no intervening action or debate.

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Mr. REID. Only 11 have not voted in the affirmative. It doesn't seem too outrageous to suggest that the House send this back to us as it is.

What the Republican leader is asking has very little support over here that is not partisan in nature. He is proposing a completely partisan conference report riddled with poison pill riders. It is one of the worst conference reports I have ever seen in this body. The report is truly nonsensical. It restricts funding for Planned Parenthood--the very place women rely on for care to prevent the spread of Zika and get contraceptives.

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Mr. REID. Madam President, carrying on, this week the Republican leader will continue with the pointless approach that has been a hallmark of his time as leader--bringing another failed partisan bill back before the Senate for a revote. The Republican leader will force yet another failed vote on this cynical Zika conference report.

The Republican agreement on the MILCON-VA-Zika conference report is a disgrace. It is a mockery of how Congress should treat an emergency. Remember, we passed a bill out of here--89 votes. It wasn't everything we wanted. It was a compromise. Instead of $1.9 billion, it was $1.1 billion. But we agreed to that. Democrats and Republicans agreed to that. It went to the House, and we thought we were home free, but little did we realize we were dealing with the same problems Speaker Boehner dealt with for a long time until he was forced to leave. It seems that Ryan, who was going to bring a new voice to the House, has not been able to do so. I know he has tried.

I repeat, it is a mockery of how Congress should treat an emergency. What does it do? It restricts funding for birth control provided by Planned Parenthood. It exempts pesticide spraying from the Clean Water Act. It cuts veterans funding by $500 million below the Senate bill. It cuts Ebola funding by $107 million. It rescinds $543 million from ObamaCare that simply would fall, like that, with raising a point of order. It strikes a prohibition on displaying the Confederate flag that was in the House bill. Why would the Republican leader waste his time on this? The conference report is going nowhere. The Senate will not pass this Republican conference report and President Obama will not sign it into law.

Democrats were willing to negotiate, willing to compromise. I told the Republican leader to give us something to work with. I feel we have given him something to work with. I feel it is reasonable.

Instead of wasting time, we should be responding to the real Zika emergency that is now in the United States. It is not just in Puerto Rico; it is on the mainland. I know the number of people affected with Zika is increasing every day. According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 3,700 people in the United States and territories have Zika. As of right now, 599 pregnant women have shown evidence of the infection. Seven babies have been born with birth defects caused by Zika. These babies were born in the United States. There is a path toward a bipartisan solution to combating this terrible virus if Republicans are willing to take it.

Two months ago, the Senate passed a bipartisan compromise to address the Zika crisis. As I have indicated previously, we didn't like that. We believed, as we still do, that $1.1 billion is not enough and will shortchange what scientists, doctors, and public health officials need to fight Zika. But we still voted for the bill because it was a step in the right direction. And, as I have indicated now for the third time, it passed with 89 votes.

The Senate bill, while imperfect, was not riddled with the vexatious provisions in the Republican conference report that I have enumerated. The Senate Zika legislation would save lives. We need to get to this soon. We need to send it to the President. The only way to do that is to pass the Senate compromise as a stand-alone bill. That is precisely what we Democrats are proposing. It is too bad that the House says we can't do that unless we have a Confederate flag flying over veterans cemeteries, stop people from going to Planned Parenthood, adversely affect EPA with the Clean Water Act, take money from Ebola, which everyone says we need to stay on top of that, and take $500 million away from veterans for processing claims.

The Senate should take up and pass the Zika compromise as a stand- alone bill. If we send it to the House, if the Speaker would bring up the legislation today, if he would let the Democrats vote, it would pass overwhelmingly. But he doesn't do that. He is still following the disgraced Hastert rule, and we need not say more about that other than to remind everybody that he is now in prison--the man whose name is affixed to that. Tragedy in Dallas

Madam President, a couple of other things. Last Thursday night, a peaceful protest for justice in Dallas, TX, erupted into violence as a sniper ambushed law enforcement officers. Five police officers and two civilians were killed, murdered, and nine were wounded--seven police officers and two civilians. We grieve with the victims, their families, and the brave men and women who serve the people of Dallas, TX. We thank the police and first responders whose timely action prevented further loss of life.

It is insufficient to say that we as a nation are saddened by this attack. It is more than that. We are devastated. We are aghast at this sickening violence perpetrated on innocent police officers who were on duty to protect and to serve. There is no justification for this senseless, evil act.

This shooting rampage ran counter to the message conveyed by the peaceful demonstrators in Dallas. The people at the Dallas march were demonstrating for an end to violence. They were calling for no more of the brutality and hostility that have taken the lives of Americans of all backgrounds but disproportionately people of color. That message should not be lost, particulately in the aftermath of the two fatal shootings last week in Louisiana and Minnesota.

Last Tuesday, Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man from Baton Rouge, LA, was pinned down by two police officers and then shot and killed. The next day, on the outskirts of St. Paul, MN, a 32-year-old school cafeteria supervisor named Philando Castile was pulled over for a broken taillight. The police officer killed Castile when he reached for his license as his fiancee and her 4-year-old daughter sat in the car and watched.

We are saddened by this loss of life, but our condolences mean nothing if this epidemic of violence persists. Our words are worthless if we don't do something to stop this violence.

The Black community is grieving over the disproportionate number of deaths of their young men. How would you explain all these deaths? How would you explain this violence to your children--Tamir Rice, a 12- year-old boy in Cleveland killed by police for holding a BB gun, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore, or Eric Garner in New York, or the other unarmed Black men who died in confrontations with law enforcement.

Some 512 people have been shot and killed by police this year so far. Black Americans are killed at a rate 2\1/2\ times greater than that of Whites. According to the Washington Post, the number of fatal shootings by police officers increased during the first 6 months of this year. Twenty-six more people have been killed this year than during the first half of last year.

The evidence is indisputable. We have, as President Obama called it last year, a slow-rolling crisis of troubling police interactions with people of color, and because we are not addressing the problem, people are rightly outraged. We all should be outraged. In America, police brutality is not a new issue.

I echo the pleas from the Congressional Black Caucus leaders who are calling for more funds and more training for our police departments. We must help ensure that those who police our neighborhoods have proper training in community-oriented policing and deescalation tactics. The Black Caucus has said that. I agree.

The Dallas Police Department is exemplary in their effectiveness of community policing. Long before this tragedy in Dallas, long, glowing articles have rightfully been written about the Dallas Police Department. America looks to Dallas and other police chiefs look to Dallas not only to grieve for the fallen officers but to learn from the department's improvements under the leadership of Police Chief David Brown. But, as Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said in the aftermath of these attacks, we must get to the root cause.

From Baton Rouge, to St. Paul, to Dallas, intolerance and hate are breeding division and violence. As a nation, we must work to bridge the gaps between police and the communities they serve and unite against prejudice and brutality.

I apologize to everyone for taking a little extra time, but it is necessary because of the exchange the Republican leader and I had. Climate Change

Madam President, over the next 2 days, Senate Democrats, led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, will speak about how the world is being distracted and misled on climate change. The Senator from Rhode Island has been the champion of this frightening issue--climate change. He has spoken 143 times on the Senate floor calling for action.

Dozens of shadowy organizations are waging a campaign to mislead the public and undermine American leadership on climate change, the Paris climate agreement, and clean air initiatives across the country. Every day that is going on. All of these shadowy, dark entities--such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Heartland Institute, and the Cato Institute--are all fronts for the Koch brothers. Clearly, these groups all have one thing in common: They are bankrolled by the multibillionaire Koch brothers.

Charles and David Koch and the shadowy groups they fund have a simple agenda--to promote their own interests at everyone else's expense. These two brothers own Koch Industries, one of the largest privately held corporations in the entire world. Together, Charles and David Koch are worth, some say, up to $100 billion but at least $80 billion.

Why would the Koch brothers mastermind a plot to convince America that climate change doesn't exist? Because denying climate change is fundamental to the Koch business model. That is why it is done. The volume of pollution the Koch Industries emit into our environment is staggering. The company is among the worst in toxic air pollution in the entire United States. Koch Industries churns out more climate- changing greenhouse gases than oil giants Chevron, Shell, and Valero.

To acknowledge that climate change exists is to acknowledge that the Koch brothers' empire contributes to it, but the Kochs will not take that responsibility because they don't care. The Kochs don't care about climate change. They don't care that it is making wildfires more frequent and intense and that they are endangering the lives and property of millions of Americans, especially in the West.

As I speak, there are fires raging all over the western part of the United States--Arizona, California, and other States. They are very vicious in those States. The Koch brothers, as wealthy as they are, don't care about Nevada. They don't care that Nevada is enduring the 15th year of a terribly difficult drought. The Kochs don't worry about the water levels in Lake Mead. They don't worry that they have dropped to the lowest level since the Great Depression, when the lake was first filled.

The Kochs have ignored the underlying cause of the California and Nevada droughts--the unsustainable amounts of carbon being dumped into our atmosphere because of fossil fuels. One of the chief contributors, of course, is the Koch brothers. Those who ignore the climate crisis or deny it exists do not have a valid point of view. They are wrong. They are out of touch with reality.

These wealthy moguls, the Kochs, aren't just on the other side of this debate. They are on the other side of reality. Their flagship organization, Americans for Prosperity, is carrying the Kochs' toxic agenda into statehouses and city halls across America. They are involved at every level of government, trying to buy government. They are doing pretty well. They buy their own scientists to publish misleading reports to confuse the public about the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.

This isn't my theory. This is fact. A Drexel University Professor found that in 7 years half a billion dollars was spent by the Koch network on a ``campaign to manipulate and mislead the public about the threat posed by climate change.''

Consider the example of one of their front groups, the Nevada Policy Research Institute. The Kochs use this institute to fight efforts to increase my State's use of clean energy, even though to date $6 billion has been invested in clean energy projects in Nevada, including tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. This is in spite of the Kochs' bankrolling of more coal and more oil.

I can remember when I came out against more coal-fired plants in Nevada. I didn't know where all this opposition was coming from. I know now. It is the Koch brothers. The Kochs don't appreciate Nevada's renewable energy acceleration. So they fund the Nevada Policy Research Institute to bash clean energy solutions.

The Kochs are heavily involved in the Nevada State Legislature. This Koch front group recently hired an academic to write a report saying that renewable energy was raising Nevada's energy costs. How about that one? The report, of course, was false and, of course, it is misleading.

When experts studied the report, it was found to be without basic facts. The Nevada Policy Research Institute went so far as to oppose the Tesla Gigafactory that is being constructed just outside of Reno, which will use clean energy and employ thousands of Nevadans. This is a project that every State wanted to have in their State. Nevada was fortunate to get it there. The footprint of that facility is so large that the only standing building that would be any larger is the Boeing factory in Seattle.

Listen to what I said. All the energy will be with renewable energy. The Kochs don't like that. Even though they oppose something as basic as bringing thousands and thousands of jobs to Nevada through the Tesla Gigafactory, this kind of deceitful activity from large corporations has occurred before. But the Kochs deserve to be in the hall of fame. They have done so much deceitful activity that other corporations are on the sidelines. They are in the minor leagues.

For more than 40 years, Big Tobacco confused scientific consensus about the effects tobacco had on our health, leading to millions of premature deaths. Just like the tobacco companies, Big Oil has known about the harm it is causing. As early as 1981, Exxon's in-house climate expert knew that climate change was an issue, but they bought off enough scientists so they could stall for a while longer. In spite of knowing, Exxon provided over $30 million to 69 organizations to cast doubt on the science of climate change. This is what a clean environment confronts--lots of Koch money and lots of falsehoods.

The Koch brothers and their shadowy organization know the truth. Science has long been proven, but they don't care. They will sacrifice the future of our planet for bigger Koch profits. I join my colleagues today and tomorrow, calling attention to the web of denial financed by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel interests. The Kochs' money and power amplified the climate deniers' voices.

The government belongs to the people. Our planet belongs to the people--not the Koch brothers, these multibillionaires. It belongs to the people. The public deserves to know who is behind these deceitful efforts, to allow better informed decisions about understanding climate change, and we are going to continue doing everything we can to show the evil nature of the Koch brothers. RESERVATION OF LEADER TIME

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