Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I call up the substitute amendment No. 3378.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I call up the Feinstein-Grassley amendment No. 3362.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I am pleased we are considering the bill before us entitled the ``Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act''-- acronym CARA--and that we are on the floor discussing this very important issue.
Since I spoke about the bill earlier this week, I will not have any more opening remarks at this point. I look forward to a bipartisan process where we are able to consider many amendments and move this bill forward.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, we just heard some very legitimate questions from the previous speaker that ought to be answered, and I am going to go back to the familiar to answer that--to the so-called Biden rules.
By now everyone is pretty familiar with the Biden rules, so I am not going to take time to go over all of them again, but they boil down to a couple basic points.
First, the President should exercise restraint and ``not name a nominee until after the November election is completed,'' or, stated differently, the President should let the people decide. But if the President chooses not to follow this model, but instead, as Chairman Biden said, ``goes the way of Fillmore and Johnson and presses an election-year nomination,'' then the Senate shouldn't consider the nomination and shouldn't hold hearings.
It doesn't matter, he said, ``how good a person is nominated by the President.'' So the historical record is pretty clear. But we haven't talked as much about one of the main reasons Chairman Biden was so adamant that the Senate shouldn't consider a Supreme Court nominee during a heated Presidential election. It is because of the tremendous damage such a hyperpolitical environment would cause the Court, the nominee, and the Nation. In short, if the Senate considered a Supreme Court nominee during a heated Presidential election campaign, the Court would become even more political than it already is.
That is a big part of what was driving Chairman Biden in 1992 when he spoke these strong words. Here is how Chairman Biden described the problem in an interview--not the speech on the floor that I have quoted in the past--about a week before his famous speech of 1992:
Can you imagine dropping a nominee . . . into that fight, into that cauldron in the middle of a Presidential year?
He continued:
I believe there would be no bounds of propriety that would be honored by either side. . . . The environment within which such a hearing would be held would be so supercharged and so prone to be able to be distorted.
As a result, Chairman Biden concluded:
Whomever the nominee was, good, bad or indifferent . . . would become a victim.
My friend the Vice President--but a friend when he was in the Senate--then considered the tremendous damage that thrusting a Supreme Court nominee into a frenzied political environment would cause and weighed it against the potential impact of an eight-member Court for a short time. He concluded that the ``minor'' cost of the ``three or four cases'' that would be reargued were nothing compared to the damage a hyperpoliticized fight would have on ``the nominee, the President, the Senate, and the Nation, no matter how good a person is nominated by the President.''
The former chairman concluded that because of how badly such a situation would politicize the process, and based on the historical record, the only reasonable and fair approach--or as he said, the ``pragmatic'' approach--is to not consider a nominee during a Presidential election.
He said.
Once the political season is underway . . . action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over. That is what is fair to the nominee and is central to the process. Otherwise, it seems to me, Mr. President, we will be in deep trouble as an institution.
He concluded:
Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the President, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself.
This, in part, is why Chairman Biden went to such lengths to explain the history of the bitter fights that occurred in Presidential years. He said: ``Some of our Nation's most bitter and heated confirmation fights have come in Presidential election years.''
I will state this about the discussion we are having today and will probably have every day for the next several months: Everyone knows that this nominee isn't going to get confirmed. Republicans know it, Democrats know it, the President knows it, and, can you believe it, even the press knows it. That is why the Washington Post called the President's future nominee a ``judicial kamikaze pilot,'' and the New York Times noted that the nominee would need an ``almost suicidal willingness to become the central player in a political fight that seems likely to end in failure.''
So the only question is, Why would the other side come to the floor to express outrage about not having a hearing? It is because they want to make this as political as possible.
The press has already picked up on it. For instance, CNN reported that the other side hopes to use the fight over a Supreme Court nominee to ``energize the Democratic base.'' They are already using the Supreme Court and the eventual nominee as a political weapon. They want nothing more than to make the process as political as possible. That is why the President wants to push forward with a nominee who won't get confirmed. That is why the other side is clamoring for a hearing on a nominee everyone knows won't get confirmed. Making the Court even more political is absolutely the last thing the Supreme Court needs.
The Court has been politicized enough already. A recent Gallup poll documents the frustration I hear expressed even at the grassroots of my State of Iowa. In the 6 years since President Obama has appointed two Justices, the American people's disapproval of the Supreme Court jumped from 28 percent disapproval in 2009 to 50 percent disapproval in 2015. That is what happens when Justices legislate from the bench. This Senator might say there is even a Republican nominee sitting on that bench that has legislated from the bench as well.
That is what happens when Justices make decisions based on their personal political preferences or what is in their heart rather than what is in the Constitution and the law. The last thing we need is to further politicize that process and the Court.
I just want to make sure that everyone understands what all of this outrage is really about. It is about making this process as political as possible.
We aren't going to let that happen to the Court, the nominee or the Nation, to follow the suggestion of then-Senator Biden. We are going to have a debate--a national debate--between the Democratic nominee and the Republican nominee about what kind of Justice the American people want on the Supreme Court. That is what the American people deserve, and that is why we are going to let the people decide.
But beyond one Justice, there is an even more basic debate occurring. At my town meetings, often somebody will come in very outraged about why I won't impeach Supreme Court justices. They say: ``They're making law, instead of interpreting law. How come you put up with that?''
So we can have a debate between the Republican nominee and the Democrat nominee on what the constitutional role of the Court is. And we can have a debate about whether we want a Justice who expresses empathy and understanding of people's problems--the President's standard. As we all know, that is not the purpose of the judicial branch of government. That branch of government isn't supposed to let their personal feelings be involved whatsoever. And the President should not encourage the Justices he appoints to let their feelings decide cases. Their job is to look at what the law says, what the Constitution says, what the facts of the case are, and to make an impartial judgment.
Consider a Justice appointed to the Supreme Court by a Republican president, who wrote that the Affordable Care Act didn't fit into what Congress could do in regards to regulating interstate commerce--because that reasoning could not be upheld under the Constitution. Instead, that Justice decided the Court could uphold the Act under the Congressional taxing power and found a way to sustain this President's legacy. It was also a Republican Justice who said: Find all kinds of ways to do what you want to do as opposed to what the Constitution requires or what Congress intends in legislation.
It would be nice to have a debate between a Democratic nominee and a Republican nominee, whether we have two, three, or four national debates or whether they have hundreds of appearances around the country, to have these basic constitutional issues discussed. And then we should let the people decide not only who appoints the next Justice but who will decide the direction of the Supreme Court for generations to come.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, I call up the Toomey amendment No. 3367.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I wish to speak in strong support of amendment No. 3362, offered by Senator Feinstein and me, the Transnational Drug Trafficking Act. This is a bill that she and I have worked on for many years.
One of the many reasons for the ongoing heroin epidemic in this country is the increase in heroin supply on the streets of the United States.
Mexican cartels are aggressively expanding into new territory here. And they are flooding our communities with cheap, pure heroin. Indeed, heroin seizures at the border have more than doubled since 2010. The U.S. Government estimates that Mexican heroin production jumped an incredible 62 percent from 2013 to 2014 alone.
And the reality is that it isn't just heroin coming over the border. Between 2009 and 2014, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a 300 percent increase in methamphetamine seizures on the southwest border as well.
This bill is a natural complement to CARA. We can't arrest our way out of this heroin epidemic. We can try to reduce the heroin supply on our streets by making it easier to target these cartels for prosecution.
This is in part why Senator Feinstein and I introduced this legislation. Our bill would make it easier for the Department of Justice to prosecute cartels who harm our communities from abroad by trafficking heroin, other drugs, and precursor chemicals for ultimate delivery here.
If this amendment is adopted, prosecutors would need to prove only that an international drug trafficker had reasonable cause to believe that the illegal drugs or chemicals he manufactured or distributed would be unlawfully imported into the United States, as opposed to knowing or specifically intending that result.
This amendment passed the Senate by unanimous consent in October. It also passed the Senate unanimously the past two Congresses.
But the House still hasn't taken it up. So I ask my colleagues to vote for this amendment so we can send it to the House again, this time along with CARA.
We need to attack the problem of opioid addiction from every angle, and this amendment should be part of a comprehensive approach.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I wish to speak in opposition to the Shaheen amendment No. 3345.
Of course, the opioid crisis demands resources, and significant resources are being directed to it. But this amendment is political gamesmanship by some of my Democratic colleagues for whom the Senate's advancement of CARA doesn't fit their preferred political narrative.
CARA is a bipartisan bill that addresses the clear and present public health crisis of heroin and prescription opioid abuse. Through the hard work of many on both sides of the aisle, it passed the Judiciary Committee unanimously. And just a few weeks later, we are considering it on the Senate floor. This is the Senate working in a constructive, bipartisan way on behalf of the American people, unlike the way it worked under Democrat control.
But that is not a narrative some Democrats want the American people to hear. So a controversy must be manufactured to create a distraction. And the controversy that has been manufactured today is that CARA doesn't appropriate any funds for this crisis.
CARA, of course, is an authorizing bill. It does many significant things that I talked about here on the floor earlier in the week. But it was never intended to appropriate funds.
That is what we have the Appropriations Committee for. That is why we have an appropriations process. We should follow that process.
In fact, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the fiscal year 2016 appropriations act passed in December provides more than $400 million in funding specifically to address the opioid epidemic.
This is an increase of more than $100 million over the previous year. None of that money has even been spent yet--it is available today. So there is simply no reason to leap ahead of the fiscal year 2017 appropriations process.
The reality is that this public health crisis festered while the Senate was in Democratic control for years. For example, heroin overdose deaths more than tripled from 2010 to 2014.
And all the while, no emergency supplemental spending bill was brought to the floor specifically to address it. In fact, no authorization bill like CARA was brought to the floor either during those years.
So I ask my colleagues to ignore this manufactured controversy. $400 million is available today to combat this crisis, an increase of $100 million. We should follow the appropriations process, which is just around the corner, where competing priorities and tradeoffs can be evaluated.
That is the best way to ensure both that adequate resources are directed to this epidemic while at the same time maintaining fiscal discipline.
I urge my colleagues to vote against the amendment.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I call up Donnelly amendment No. 3374, as modified.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source