Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I rise in support of S. 1881, which would transfer Federal funds now granted to Planned Parenthood to other women's health care and counseling centers. It is a modest, commonsense response to the blood-chilling scandal besetting America's leading abortion provider.
To date, only 4 of the promised 12 undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officers and facilities have been released. To be sure, in coming months there will be more revelations about Planned Parenthood's profiteering, violence, and fraud. There will be congressional investigations to cut through the obstructions and obfuscations of Planned Parenthood's army of lawyers, spokespeople, and friends in the media. There will be criminal investigations into whether physicians altered procedures in violation of the law and in violation of medical ethics to maximize the prices they could charge for the remains of their victims. There will be inquiries into Planned Parenthood's army of clerks, lawyers, and bookkeepers who turned barbarism into commerce. There might well be civil litigation brought against Planned Parenthood by former patients who did not realize their harrowing personal ordeals were being exploited for profit by people they thought they could trust.
It may be some time before all the facts come out about the full scope of Planned Parenthood's moral and economic corruption, but the revelations exposed in just the first four videos all by themselves are more than enough to disqualify Planned Parenthood from continued taxpayer support. After all, nobody is entitled to taxpayer money. Nobody is entitled to it. Nobody can just assume that it is theirs. Recipients have to continually demonstrate their worthiness for public support.
I think we can all agree it is not too much to ask that our women's health care grants not finance a criminal conspiracy against American women and children. So, of course, we should pass Senator Ernst's bill. Now, it does not cut any funding. We have to remember that. It does not cut anything; it just transfers Planned Parenthood's grants to other women's and community health centers.
This is a no-brainer. This is something every Member of this body should be able to vote for and do so enthusiastically. Yet this bill did not pass today. It did not get past the cloture vote. Planned Parenthood's defenders don't even want to debate it. They are not willing even to bring it to the floor to allow it to be debated, discussed, and voted on on the merits at the end of the day.
Now, in a sense, I cannot say I blame them, but the fear of open dialogue on the other side of the aisle is itself part and parcel of the unfolding scandal. Now, let's be honest. Let's be honest about the fact that the multibillion-dollar abortion industry includes grisly revenue streams, legal corner-cutting, and the bullying dehumanization of the human family's most vulnerable members. This should not surprise anyone who gives the matter 5 minutes of concentrated thought. For all of the political spin, at the end of the day, Planned Parenthood makes its money doing things any child could tell you are simply indefensible. That is why those things are almost never actually defended, including on this floor today. Defenders of Planned Parenthood offer, instead, gauzy rhetoric about ``care'' and ``access'' and ``choice,'' which are totally irrelevant to Senator Ernst's thoughtful, focused compromise proposal.
On the other hand are the shocking words at the heart of this scandal. Shocking words like ``abortion,'' ``organ,'' ``price,'' ``crunch'' are carefully, almost religiously avoided. That is what you do when you are forced to defend the indefensible. You distract, you confuse, you talk about anything else besides the facts at hand. In this debate, Planned Parenthood's defenders' true adversary is not the Center for Medical Progress or the pro-life movement or the millions of even pro-choice Americans outraged by the scandal. Like all defenders of institutional violence, their real adversary is the truth.
The pro-life movement today may love different sinners and hate different sins than previous social reform movements, but they fight for the same truth: that not only are all men created equal but that all human beings are, in fact, human beings. Abortion on demand survives today as other peculiar institutions once did, violating a universal moral principle by disguising a biological fact.
Such is the nature of violence. As the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it in his Nobel lecture in 1974:
[L]et us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of national bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.
Complicity in falsehood, Mr. President, that some of us created in the image and likeness of a loving God are not; that some of us endowed with inalienable human rights weren't; that because of the color of our skin, the arrangement of our genes, the content of our prayers or the tiny size of a little girl's hand, some of us become them--all to absolve ourselves from doing to them, to the weak, the vulnerable, the voiceless, terrible, unspeakable things that we know are terrible. That is what violence demands.
Because the inhumane but all too common logic goes: If we all do it, and we all agree only to speak of it in comforting words, then, maybe, just maybe, we can tell ourselves it isn't wrong. ``Clump of cells,'' ``tissue specimens,'' ``products of conception''--but even as we grope through this fog of lies, we all know the truth. We know that one day, that truth is going to burn through the euphemisms like the sun through the clouds. When that day comes, we are going to have to choose whether to stay complicit in the falsehood, to crouch down a while longer in our comforting fog or stand up and face the searing truth of what is being done to these little hands and hearts, our fellow passengers to the grave, still so fresh from God.
The day will come when, in an act not of reckoning but of love, America finally sets these things right in full. That day is not yet here. For now, even though Planned Parenthood apparently breaks some laws, its lucrative business remains protected by others.
So even when we do pass the Ernst bill, and we will one day soon, Planned Parenthood will nonetheless continue at least for a while in its grisly work, but not in our name, and not with our money. Planned Parenthood has betrayed our trust and the trust of the women who came to them for help. Within the community of women's health and services, even among those who support its mission, Planned Parenthood now stands apart.
Planned Parenthood has chosen a path we cannot follow, crossed a line we cannot ignore, and profited from an unspeakable business we cannot support. We can, and under the Ernst bill we will, support health care, especially for vulnerable women and children who are always targets for exploitation. That is why we must pass the Ernst bill, and why I urge my colleagues to support it, to protect America's women and children from Planned Parenthood's ongoing abuse and to protect American taxpayers from financing it.
We no longer have to be complicit in the lie of Planned Parenthood or the violence that it protects. The Ernst legislation, S. 1881, finally accepts the facts, embraces the truth, and would help move our Nation a small step forward toward the culture of life America's every mother and child deserve.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source