Protect Act--Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. JONES. Thank you, Senator Durbin for this bill. Thank you for the colleagues who are on here.
I was struck when Senator Kaine rose in honor of those who died in Virginia. The list goes on and on. You can go to Emmett Till. You can go to the four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair, and Cynthia Wesley. You can go to those who lost their lives in a church in Charleston, SC. The thing that connects them all is not just that they died because of the color of their skin, not just because of the White supremacists who were trying to change the political dynamic in this country. It is an unbroken stream that goes back decades and generations. It goes back to the time of the great original sin of slavery, when White supremacy tried to dominate this country, and it goes back to a string of unbroken deaths that are occurring even as we speak.
Hate crimes across this country have proliferated, whether it is not just White on Black or it is the Tree of Life synagogue. It is so many things that we have to stop.
The interesting thing to me of what happened this week is that the day after the Presidential debates when the President of the United States refused to condemn White supremacy, the Governor of the State of Alabama, my friend Kay Ivey--Republican Governor of the State of Alabama--apologized to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that occurred 57 years ago. It was an implicit acknowledgement that words matter, that statements of public officials have an effect on people. They give a green light to violence, often even unintended.
This bill Senator Durbin has proposed that passed, as Senator Blumenthal and others said, unanimously is a statement that we cannot allow this to continue. It is a statement that we will--as law enforcement, as citizens, as people in a free country--we will put an end to this kind of rhetoric and this kind of hate.
Folks, we cannot let this moment pass in this body. The House passed this bill unanimously and so should the U.S. Senate. We should make a stand with our colleagues in the House--Republican and Democrat--that this is an important statement right now because what is unsaid so much right now is that we see this playing out in this country. We see it playing out in the streets. And we can talk about it from the right or the left, and we can talk about it from Republicans or Democrats, but the fact is, we need to be talking about it in terms of people and victims--innocent victims. That is what this bill is about--protecting the lives of all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of their religion, regardless of their political persuasion. This bill will do that.
Give the FBI the tools necessary. Give the statement from the U.S. Senate that we will not stand for this. Support this bill.
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Mr. JONES. Madam President, I am compelled to talk about this process that I just heard about.
There is no process, folks. Let's just be candid. This Senate is not the deliberative process body that the Senator from Wisconsin talked about. We don't have that. This bill has been pending for 9 months. But we don't have that. This is not the Senate in which I worked in 1979, where there was a deliberative attempt. There were debates on the floor, and there were debates in committee. This is not a process. Whether it is on the floor of this Senate or whether it is in the media or wherever else, when someone says that this should go through the normal process, those processes were killed a long time ago. I have been in this body for almost 3 years, and we have had only a relatively handful of amendments on any bill that has come here. We have had virtually no markups and debates in committees. Those don't exist. This bill has been pending for 9 months, which is more than adequate time for the Homeland Security Committee to have taken a look at it, more than enough time for the Committee on the Judiciary to have taken a look at it, and more than enough time to have had a hearing on it.
Apparently, our colleagues in the House felt it was OK, but this body has gotten to be so dysfunctional that, to send a statement, we will not allow a unanimously passed bill that has been pending in the Senate of the United States for 9 months to be passed.
There is one thing with which I might disagree a little bit with Senator Durbin. For me, this is not a political statement. This is a statement about law enforcement and increasing the ability of law enforcement. It is a statement to protect victims of crime. That is what this bill is about for me. I have seen it all too often in my State and throughout the South. Again, that unbroken string--that is what I see this bill as.
So I don't need lectures about process when I see a Senate that does not function but that leapfrogs substantive legislation simply to ram a Supreme Court nominee through--one that hasn't been pending for very long, either. This is the kind of thing the Senate needs to be doing and passing, and we should be ashamed of ourselves for not doing it. Hopefully, that will change.
Recognition of the Minority Leader
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