Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am on the floor today to speak on the same subject, but before I do, I want to very briefly discuss two other subjects. Remembering Dylan Hockley

First, Mr. President, I noticed online today that today would be Dylan Hockley's 10th birthday. Dylan Hockley was one of the 20 first graders who were gunned down in a flurry of bullets at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

Dylan's mother Nicole has become a crusader for this body to do something, anything in the wake of that tragedy to lessen the possibility that it might visit another community.

Dylan was an amazing little kid, struggling with a fairly severe learning disability but loving every day that he went to school under the care of a great special education professional who died that day as well with Dylan in that classroom.

Dylan would have been 10 years old today. In the 3 years since his death, we have done nothing, absolutely nothing to honor his memory. Mental Health Legislation and the TREAT Act

Second, Mr. President, I want to note that we are moving forward in the HELP Committee on a very important markup next week on a mental health bill Senator Cassidy and I have been working on for over a year, and we hope that will eventually find its way to the floor of the Senate and in some measure be a very partial answer but an answer nonetheless to this epidemic of gun violence. We hope we will be able to have that debate this year.

I also note that we have a bill in the HELP Committee that I think is a very important complement to the discussion we are having now on the opioid crisis all across the country. As my colleagues know, there is a limit on the number of patients to whom providers can prescribe Buprenorphine, which is really the most effective, least addictive of the heroin substitutes. As a physician, you can only prescribe this drug to 100 clients. If you are a physician assistant or a nurse practitioner, you are not allowed to prescribe. In Connecticut, that is the biggest obstacle we have--we don't have enough physicians who can prescribe this very effective drug.

The TREAT Act, which is a bipartisan bill, removes that cap for physicians and allows nurses with higher levels of training and PAs to prescribe that drug as well. I hope the HELP Committee will take up this bill as part of our markup next week. If it were up to me, we would include it as part of our mental health initiative and move it to the floor en bloc. The CARA bill is very important this week, but let's be honest: There is no money in it, so there are a bunch of new programs but no new resources for us in Connecticut to try to take on this fight.

If we were to pass the TREAT Act next week in the HELP Committee and move it to the floor, that would be real, tangible relief for communities in Connecticut. It would mean that more addicts coming out of detox would have access to true elements of recovery--in particular, this very effective drug.

I am hopeful that the HELP Committee will move on this bill next week and that we can bring it to the floor perhaps as part of this broader mental health package. In one fell swoop, we could have a partial answer to the epidemic of gun violence that plagues this country and a passage of the TREAT Act or a version of it that by itself might actually be more substantive than anything in the piece of legislation that is before us today. Filling the Supreme Court Vacancy

Mr. President, I do want to spend a few moments talking about this crisis that is gripping the U.S. Senate with respect to a vacancy that looks to remain for the next year on the Supreme Court.

I have only been in the Senate for 3 years. This is my first term. I can't claim to hold any special status as a guardian of this institution, which has stood the test of time for over 200 years, but I am a student of history, and I did choose to run to be a Member of this body because of the enormous respect I have for it and its unique role in the unique system of U.S. Federal governance. That is why I do believe we are at a moment of crisis right now in which the Republican majority is blocking President Obama's constitutional responsibility to name a Supreme Court nominee, a ninth Justice.

I think this is a watershed moment for the U.S. Senate. I say that with a connection to a State that has had a particularly important role in the creation of this body. Right outside this Chamber, there is a relatively new painting above the door leading into the Reception Room of Oliver Ellsworth and Roger Sherman, who were delegates to the Constitutional Convention. They were the authors of what is referred to today as the Connecticut Compromise. Roger Sherman was the primary author of it; it is sometimes called Sherman's Compromise. This was the compromise that established the U.S. Senate, established the premise that this body would be made up of two Members from each State and that because of its 6-year term would be much more immune to the political tempest of the moment that often grips the Chamber down the road, that we would have a unique ability to rise above the partisan fray and make decisions that are in the best long-term interests of this country.

Frankly, those have been the best traditions of this body going back to the fifties and sixties when this Senate led the fight to expand civil rights laws or just 2 years ago when we were able to come together and pass an immigration reform bill, with the Presiding Officer's leadership, that I think will set the platform for resolving that issue in a commonsense way down the road. But the crisis that is gripping this place today, I fear, has no end because of the new rule that is being established. I just heard Senator Cornyn talk about the illegitimacy of a lameduck President making a nomination to the Supreme Court. Once something like that is established, it will be difficult to unravel.

If you accept that argument, then this Senate will never again act on the nomination of a President in his second term. I suppose a second- term President will be perceived by his lameduck status to be illegitimate for the purposes of nominating Justices to the Supreme Court, and by that argument, likely illegitimate for the purposes of nominating anyone to the Court because he is a lameduck, and thus the people need to have their say in the next election.

That is a radical transformation of the U.S. Constitution, and it sets up perpetual crises in which there could be long stretches of time equaling 4 years where we will have eight, seven or six Justices.

Just simply accepting the assistant leader at his word, we would be establishing a new precedent in which the Supreme Court would have less than nine individuals for enormous stretches of time. But I think this is about something more. This is about an unwillingness to allow this President, a Democratic President, to replace a Justice on the Supreme Court while Republicans are in charge. They say it is because it is the last year of his term--or perhaps the last 4 years of his term. But if this is simply about a Democratic President replacing a Justice on the Supreme Court who tended to be more conservative, then that precedent has no end either. I think Republicans are naive to believe that Democrats wouldn't avail themselves of the same precedent at some point in the future and hold up nominees being offered by Republican Presidents. That is certainly not our hope nor is it the stated intention of anyone on this side of the aisle. But once you cross that Rubicon, I think it would be very hard to come back. All of a sudden we will have entered an era in which no Senate will want to take up the nomination of a President of the opposite party.

Senator Cornyn talked about how there is very little precedent for this. Well, there is very little precedent because there are very few instances over the course of the last 100 years in which there has been a vacancy created in an election year. It is not because there is a history of past Senates blocking the replacement of a Supreme Court Justice when a vacancy occurs in an election year. It is because the very scenario we are faced with today has not happened. In fact, over the course of the last 100 years, the only time in which the Senate has not acted on a vacancy created in an election year was, A, very late in an election year and, B, with respect to the elevation to the position of Chief Justice. The reality is that in the last 100 years the Senate has taken action on every pending Supreme Court nominee to fill a vacancy, regardless of whether the nomination was made in a Presidential election year.

Over the course of our Nation's history, there have been 17 Justices confirmed in a Presidential election year. Not since the Civil War has it ever taken more than a year to confirm a nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy. The average, of course--we heard it over and over--has been 67 days from nomination to the final Senate vote.

But what Senate Republicans are proposing is that this President-- with over 300 days left in his term--will not even get the courtesy of a vote in the Judiciary Committee, never mind a vote on the Senate floor. They contend that this nominee will be rejected sight unseen, which is why we think all America is saying to Senate Republicans: Just do your job. Go through the hearing process, meet with the nominee, and bring that nominee to a vote on the Senate floor.

There were lots of Democratic Senators who opposed Clarence Thomas when he was nominated, but that didn't stop them from allowing a vote on the Senate floor. You can oppose this nominee once you take a look at their credentials and assess their suitability for the Court, but do your job and show the respect for the institution of the Presidency such that his choice will at least get a fair hearing in the Judiciary Committee and on the floor of the Senate.

I hope that for my sons' sake the effect of our actions over the next year doesn't effectively rewrite the Constitution and that pages don't need to be added to their textbooks in order to place caveats on the obligations of the President and the responsibilities of this body. I hope we don't all of a sudden create a new rule in which you only get a vacancy filled if the Senate and the Presidency happen to be of the same party or you only get a vacancy filled, as Senator Cornyn would suggest, when you have a nomination in the first 4 years of your potential 8-year tenure.

Lastly, what I worry about most greatly is the effect of this decision giving credence to the belief among some that this President is illegitimate. I don't think that is held by Members of this body, but I do know there are many in this country who don't recognize the legitimacy of this President, and the way in which we treat this office often gives purchase to those arguments. There is a standard of review that we have created for diplomatic agreements that we never held previous Presidents to. There is a furor over the Executive actions taken by this President even though previous Presidents have taken similar Executive actions--such as with the issue of immigration--and have taken far more Executive actions than this President has. I worry that, by disrespecting the institution and not even allowing for meetings to be held between this nominee and Members of the Republican majority, we feed this belief that this particular President doesn't share the legitimacy of previous Presidents.

For all of those reasons, I hope we can just make a commitment to do our jobs and begin the process of considering the Supreme Court nominee once the President makes this nomination.

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