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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, we are nearly halfway through the 118th Congress--you know, it is hard to believe. And despite the challenges that confront this Chamber, working with the House and the President to get legislation passed, the Senate has managed to advance some great bipartisan bills this year.

All of this attention the media gives tends to focus on where we disagree. And there is no question there are a lot of disagreements. But there are areas where we have found the chance to work together to do important things.

While some of the bills I have talked about actually passed this Chamber unanimously and will have a positive impact on our constituents in communities from Maine to Texas to Nebraska and while a number of these bills have been signed into law, many are still awaiting action in the House. And I would like to provide a few examples.

Project Safe Childhood is a bill that I introduced with Senator Klobuchar, the Senator from Minnesota, to provide greater protection for our children online. The anonymity and accessibility afforded in the digital realm have allowed predators to infiltrate our homes and target our children. This, of course, is the dark side of the internet, and it has been a problem since the advent of the digital age.

But it gets worse. Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 32 million reports--32 million reports--of suspected child sexual exploitation, an alltime record.

One of our most valuable tools for combating these crimes is the Project Safe Childhood Program at the Department of Justice.

This program was created in 2006 to bolster law enforcement efforts and to invest in education and prevention strategies. Since its inception, the number of cases and defendants prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Offices has increased by 40 percent.

This is a positive sign we are moving in the right direction despite the dismal facts that I have recounted here, but it is clear more needs to be done.

This bill reauthorizes and strengthens this program by modernizing the investigation and prosecution of these crimes. It will provide law enforcement with additional tools they need to bring more predators to justice.

This bill passed the Senate unanimously last month, but it is currently awaiting action in the House. I have been proud to work with Representatives Wesley Hunt and Debbie Wasserman Schultz--Republican and Democrat alike--on this legislation. Again, this is bipartisan consensus legislation that just needs a vote in the House.

Another example is Project Safe Neighborhoods. This bill reauthorizes this program at the Department of Justice. Now, at a time when we are all concerned about violent crime in our neighborhoods, this is one of the most efficient, one of the most effective ways of combating violent crime in our neighborhoods that we have devised.

It is inspired by a successful program that I appropriated when I was attorney general of Texas that started in Richmond, VA, called Project Exile. What they realized is that if they targeted the most violent criminals, the ones who, in violation of the law, possessed and used firearms in the commission of a crime--that if they were prosecuted under mandatory minimums, that this would prove as a big deterrent for people using firearms to commit crimes or carrying firearms when they are prohibited by law.

Since this nationwide program was launched in 2013, we have seen more than a 13-percent decrease in violent crime in cities with a high rate of program participation. This is a partnership between State, local, and Federal. Today, the American people are increasingly concerned about crime, more concerned here in the Nation's Capital where the number of carjackings have gone through the roof, including some of our colleagues in the House of Representatives who have been a victim of carjacking.

A Gallup poll earlier this month found that 63 percent of Americans view crime as either an ``extremely'' or ``very'' serious problem, marking a new record for the poll. So it is clear we need to focus on crime and violence reduction strategies like Project Safe Neighborhood, but, again, this legislation passed the Senate unanimously after being voted out of the Judiciary Committee and is awaiting action in the House.

Finally, I want to mention another critical piece of legislation that is stuck in purgatory--at least, hopefully, temporarily--and that is the Debbie Smith Act. Years ago, we learned that 400,000 rape kits were sitting in evidence lockers or at forensic labs and had gone untested.

This, unfortunately, is the evidence that has to be collected from the victim of a sexual assault, and using DNA technology we are able to figure out, with basically certitude, who the perpetrator was. But 400,000 of them were sitting in lockers and untested.

Now, Debbie Smith is a heroic figure. She has made it her life's work to eliminate this rape kit backlog, and her work is directly responsible for the testing of hundreds of thousands of rape kits and locking up countless violent criminals.

Her advocacy was born of a personal tragedy. She was raped at home in 1989 and immediately reported the crime to police and went to the emergency room for a sexual assault forensic exam. That is the rape kit. But she said while waiting for answers, she was overcome by fear. She was terrified for herself and her family and even became suicidal. It wasn't until 6\1/2\ years later that Debbie finally received the answer she desperately wanted from this rape kit test. And it happened when a DNA hit revealed the identity of her rapist because what they can do is take that information, match it against CODIS, which is an FBI-maintained database, to identify the perpetrator.

She later said in an interview that DNA gave her her life back, and she chose to harness her pain and use it to prevent others from facing years of fear and uncertainty like that that controlled her. So she is the namesake of the Debbie Smith Act originally signed into law in 2004.

As a result, more than 860,000 DNA cases have been prosecuted-- 860,000. It is hard to imagine how one person can make more of a difference than Debbie Smith has, in terms of bringing closure and making sure that the guilty are investigated and prosecuted. But 860,000 cases have been processed. Sadly, we are still facing a 90,000- case backlog. Each of those hold the key and an answer to bringing a violent criminal to justice.

The Senate, again, unanimously has passed the Debbie Smith Act reauthorization, and, unfortunately, the House recently took it up and passed a version of the bill that inadvertently deauthorized existing funds for the Debbie Smith Act. I encourage the House to take whatever action they need to swiftly take up and pass the Senate version to reauthorize the Debbie Smith Program for a full 5 years without jeopardizing any existing funds that are being used by law enforcement to take violent criminals off the street.

So these are just a few examples of bipartisan legislation that has enjoyed nearly unanimous support here in the Senate that is simply waiting for the House to act.

I know we are coming up on the end of the year, and there is not a lot of time, but my suspicion is, if the Speaker would put these bills on the floor of the House, that they would pass overwhelmingly, but we can't get these bills to the President to actually sign into law until the House acts.

So my wish, my request, my prayer is that the House simply take up these bipartisan bills and act.

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