Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, today I rise to address the responsibility of the Senate in its advice and consent role under the Constitution. Of course, the President's duty is to nominate a Justice when the vacancy exists for a Justice, and that responsibility is very clearly written into our Constitution. The Constitution also very clearly conveys the Senate's role in providing advice and consent. This is the vision of our founding document. Actually, our Founding Fathers wrestled with exactly how to best construct this nomination and confirmation process. They knew there had to be a way to appoint judges in the judiciary and certainly ambassadors and directors in the executive branch, how to go about that. In those early efforts to craft the Constitution, some argued that this responsibility should be with the Executive, with the President; others argued that, no, no, it is better given to the assembly, to the body. Well, that conversation went back and forth. We can read a little bit about the thinking through Alexander Hamilton's The Federalist Papers 76 because he laid out the conversation as it went back and forth. They recognized that there were certainly advantages to having the President make the appointments.

I quote from Alexander Hamilton's paper:

The sole and undivided responsibility of one man will naturally beget a livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard to reputation. He will under this account feel himself under stronger obligations and more interested to investigate with care the qualities requisite to the stations to be filled.

In short, direct your accountability to one individual who would be responsible for carrying that out.

But they were also concerned about some disadvantages of the Executive making appointments. Giving absolute power of appointment to the President could lead to unwarranted favoritism, as it was put, or incompetence in those appointed.

Well, then again they thought, how about the assembly? They recognize that you have certainly a rich makeup of views in an assembly and perhaps that could be of value. On the other hand, they also felt that there would be a lot of horse-trading over appointments and that they would just never get the job done, and indeed, as Hamilton noted, ``the intrinsic merit of the candidate will be too often left out of sight.''

So that was the dilemma, and they came up with a strategy to take the strength of the Executive and the strength of the assembly; specifically, that you would indeed have the power invested in one person, and of course the Executive, in creating nominations for the executive branch, wanted to make sure those--there was an inherent desire to make sure those folks were competent, but there was also still this concern about, what if there was too much favoritism and what if individuals of unfit character were appointed to the bench? So give the Senate the chance to review and provide consent or, as Hamilton wrote, ``to prevent the appointment of unfit characters.'' That is what it boiled down to. So the strength of the Executive and the strength of the Senate combined in order to solve this knotty problem of how you filled the key posts in the judiciary and the key posts in the executive.

All of this led to the exact crafting of article II, section 2, of the Constitution. It referred that the President--``and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court,'' and so on and so forth. Of course, this isn't, when there is a vacancy, the President can if he or she desires; no, it is shall. This is a responsibility. You have to fill the position. So the President has an obligation under this clause, and we in the Senate have an obligation to follow up with the advice and consent function.

That is where we stand and why this esteemed Chamber has operated now throughout the more than 200-year history in providing that check and balance on the Executive. It is the President's responsibility to nominate, and it is our responsibility to vet those nominees, to examine them, to see if they have the fit, the characteristics of both their own qualifications and their character. That is the basis: qualifications and character. That is the question that we have addressed in this Chamber century after century.

But here we are today with a unique circumstance in which the leadership of this body has said: We are not going to fulfill the responsibility that is given to us under the Constitution. We are going on strike. We don't want to do our job.

I think the American people are saying the opposite: Senate, do your job. Senate, you were assigned a job in the Constitution. Senators, you signed an oath to abide by that Constitution. You have a responsibility under the vision of our Government to make it work. You have a responsibility to fulfill that job, to do that job.

The Supreme Court is only the latest manifestation of the challenges we have had with nominations for the executive and for the judicial. I hope we can come together and develop a much more rapid system of vetting nominees and, if there is not a major objection, having those at lower levels essentially conveyed quickly into their posts, because this is something that we know will be the case.

We know that over time, there will be Republican administrations and there will be Democratic administrations. We know that under the vision of three co-equal branches of Government, it is not the role of Congress to systematically undermine the other two branches. That was not the design of our Constitution. So we wield a particularly sacred responsibility not to use our partisan inclinations as a tool to try to destroy the Presidency of a different political party or to pack, basically, the courts according to our own philosophy. We are not doing that now. As a body, we are failing our responsibility.

The Constitution says: Do your job. The people of America say: Do your job. The leadership here in the Senate is saying: We refuse to do our job. That is just wrong.

Our Court does play this critical role in making sure that our laws and regulations stay within the bounds of the Constitution. It is not since the Civil War that the Supreme Court has been left with a vacancy of more than a year. The Civil War is a very unique circumstance. Since the 1980s, every person appointed to the Supreme Court has been given a prompt hearing and a vote within 100 days. Since 1975, it has taken on average only 67 days to confirm Supreme Court nominees.

We can look at the list: Justice Kagan, 88 days; Justice Sotomayor, 67 days; Alito, 83; Roberts, 63; Breyer, 74; Ginsburg, 51; Thomas, 99; Souter, 69; and, on through the list, Kennedy, 65; Scalia, who just passed away, 85; and Rehnquist, 89.

You notice that these are nominations by both Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents. And in each case, the Senate--regardless of the party in control of the Senate--did their job, vetted these nominees, held a vote on them, and proceeded. But now we have more than 317 days still left in this administration, and the leadership of this body is saying that they are not going to do their job for 317 days. They are not going to meet with a nominee, not going to hold a committee meeting on the nominee, not going to report that to the floor, not going to hold a floor debate--not because of the standards set up in the Constitution, not because of this standard: Is this a fit character? Is he or she fit by qualifications? Is he or she fit by judicial temperament? The standard of unfit character--no, this is a strike, a job strike based solely on partisan politics. This is bringing partisan politics into the very place it should never be-- confirmation of our judges not at 100 days but more than 300 days, which is totally out of sync with the history of this Nation, totally out of sync with the responsibility that each of us is assigned to help provide advice and consent.

More than a dozen Supreme Court Justices have been confirmed in the final year of a Presidency. I want to emphasize that because there have been folks here in the Chamber who have said: Well, there should be some special rule. In fact, they even thought there was some special rule that you don't confirm a Supreme Court Justice in the final year of a Presidency.

That simply is not the case. More than a dozen Justices have been confirmed in the final year of a Presidency. Most recently, Justice Kennedy was confirmed in the last year of President Reagan's final term. It was not a Republican-led Senate that did that confirmation. It was a Democrat party-led Senate that did that confirmation because the Democratic Party leadership and Members said: This is not partisanship. This is a responsibility we have, and we are going to execute it.

But, unfortunately, we are hearing a very different story at this moment from the Republican leadership in this body, and it is an embarrassment. It is an embarrassment to this Chamber. It is an embarrassment to our responsibility. I certainly am appealing that it be remedied. There is time to remedy it. The President hasn't put forward his nomination yet. It is time to recognize that perhaps those comments that were put forward in the heat of the moment can be set aside and we can still do our job.

When people elect a President, they don't say to the President: Do your job for 3 years, but you get the last year off. When they elect us, they don't say: Well, do your job for 5 years, but you get the last year off. They certainly don't say: And by the way, after a couple of years, you can take a year off from your constitutional responsibilities. A President is elected for all 4 years. Our responsibility is to provide advice and consent, and it goes on continuously.

In the last 200 years, the Senate has carried out its duty to give a fair and timely hearing and a floor vote to the President's Supreme Court nominees--whether the President was a Democrat or a Republican, whether this body was led by a Democratic majority or a Republican majority. Let's not change that tradition. Let's not fail our responsibility. In fact, let's honor our constitutional responsibility.

I will close by calling on my colleagues: Let's work together to diminish the partisanship and improve the problem-solving. Let's turn down the rhetoric in terms of our back and forth during this campaign year and, certainly, turn it down enough that we can fulfill that core responsibility that provides advice and consent on nominations and certainly on what is probably the most significant and important nomination--that of an individual to the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

To summarize, the Constitution lays out the job before us. The American citizens expect us to do our jobs. Let's do our job. Genetically Modified Food

Mr. President, I am going to shift gears here to discuss a bill that has recently come out of committee and the way that we should consider responding to it. This conversation is all about defending Americans' right to know what is in the food they buy and Americans' right to know what is in the food they feed to their family and they feed to their children. I will also discuss the legislation I am putting forward to attempt to be a bridge between some very different visions on that topic.

Let me start by saying this is all about genetically modified food and the information provided to citizens on the package about that. This often turns into a debate: Well, GMO has done some wonderful things over here. Others say: Well, it has created some problems over here.

I am going to acknowledge that both of those are true. It has done some very positive things, and I will mention some in specific. But it has also created some challenges, some problems, and I will mention some of those. But after we recognize that that is the case, where do we come back to? Here is where we come back to: We should enable the individual in our beautiful Republic to make the decision and not have Big Government make the decision or suppress information. That is what happens in the non-``we the people'' world. That is what happens in dictatorships. That is not what should happen here in the United States of America, where individuals have the right to know what is in their food.

Let me go ahead and explain some of the benefits and some of the challenges. Let's start with the example of golden rice. Golden rice was developed by the International Rice Research Institute. It provides greater amounts of vitamin A in the rice to reduce the deficiency that exists in many diets around this planet for that essential vitamin.

That is a pretty positive development. I don't know at this point of any side effects or other things that have been brought to light. Nature is complicated, but for now, let's recognize that providing vitamin A where it is needed is a pretty positive thing.

Let's take a look at carrots. Carrot cells have been transgenically modified to produce a chemical that treats Gaucher's disease. Gaucher's disease is a metabolic disorder where people lack a specific enzyme which helps rid the body of certain fatty substances. Those fatty substances then accumulate, causing enlarged livers, spleens, bone damage, bruising, and anemia. These transgenic carrots are part of the answer, part of the solution.

Let's turn to sweet potatoes. Researchers are genetically modifying sweet potatoes to withstand multiple viral infections commonly encountered in South Africa, making this a much more successful crop and providing more food to people who need more food. So that is a positive development.

All of this is not a one-sided scientific picture. There are also scientifically documented concerns. We can call them scientifically documented problems that have occurred with transgenic crops.

Let me start by noting that the most common transgenic crops in America are crops that have been modified to be resistant to glyphosate. That is an herbicide. After the introduction of these resistant crops, which means you can put more herbicides or weed killers--you can put a lot more weed killer onto the acreage--you basically knock out the weeds much more easily and less expensively than with other strategies.

What happened? Well, basically, since 1994--early 1990s--several major crops have become almost 100-percent transgenic-glyphosate tolerant. The amount of glyphosate put on the crops has grown from 7.4 million pounds in 1994--let's round it off--to 160 million pounds in 2012, and the number keeps climbing. This is a huge amount of herbicide. Try to picture in your head 160 million pounds of herbicide. Well, it is so effective in killing everything except the GM corn, GM soybeans, and GM sugar beets. It is so effective in killing everything else that very few weeds survive. One of the weeds that doesn't survive, because most don't, is milkweed. Milkweed happens to be the food for the monarch butterfly. As we have seen the enormous increase of glyphosate applied to our fields, we have seen a crashing of the monarch butterfly ecology. It is not the only thing affecting the monarch. Several other things are affecting them as well, but it is--in scientific study after study--a very significant factor.

Let's also take a look at something else; that is, that all of this glyphosate doesn't stay on the fields. When it rains, it gets washed into our waterways. Our waterways are full of things that are affected by our herbicides, and so it has a big impact on the ecology of our streams and rivers. That is a serious scientifically documented issue that we are continuing to learn more about as time passes.

Let's turn to another issue. This is a fascinating story. It is about a pest that bores into the roots of corn. It is called the corn rootworm. The corn was modified so it would have a pesticide in the cells and would kill the rootworm when it bored into the corn, but guess what happened. If you do this on a vast scale, Mother Nature comes along and has a few genetic mutations here and there and suddenly that rootworm starts to propagate with others that are now resistant to this pesticide that has been put into the roots. So now more pesticide has to be added to the corn, and as a result of that we have an opposite outcome than what was expected.

The hope was that this would reduce pesticides, but now you have to put the pesticides back in it, and so now we have the evolution of superbugs. Here we have the adult beetle, and the rootworm is a reference to the larvae stage of this beetle. These are the type of concerns that are raised.

I say all of this just to explain that while there are benefits of transgenic crops, there are also issues that are raised in the natural world. So anyone who takes this floor and says that nobody should be concerned about bioengineered crops is simply refusing to look at the scientific literature that says, no, there are things we should be concerned about. That is why it comes back to the right of the individual to know what is in their food. They want to know if it is a transgenic crop, and they can look up the details and make their own decision. Why have Big Government say that we are going to make the decision for you? Why have Big Government say that we don't trust you with information and we are not going to allow you to know what is in your food? No. That should be in some dictatorship, not in the United States of America.

Well, we have a big battle now because out of committee last week has come a bill, and this bill is known as the DARK bill. It stands for Deny Americans the Right to Know because Big Ag says that we don't believe in this whole ``we the people'' model of a republic. No, we like to have a government that makes decisions for people and that denies information to people because we don't trust them, as consumers, to decide what they want to eat. We don't want them to know what they are feeding their children and their family. We want to make the decision for them. Well, 90-plus percent of Americans disagree. They want the information to make the decision on their own. They can find out about the benefits over here. They can find out about the concerns over here. Different foods have different transgenic crops in them. They should get to make the decision and not have Big Government making the decision for them.

This bill, the DARK Act, prohibits counties, cities, and States from any decision to provide information on a package to their citizens about what is in their food regarding transgenic crops.

I got together with the representatives of the food industry and advocates for consumer information. I tried to find out if there is an overlap so we can craft a bill that will bring these two communities together, and we made some progress on that, and so I will share that with everyone.

Basically, a big concern of the food industry--totally legitimate--is that they don't want 50 different standards in 50 different States or to have a bunch of counties decide to make up their own rules, which would result in hundreds or thousands of rules. If you operate a warehouse, you can't send different cans of soups to grocery stores across the country. No. So that makes sense. They want a 50-State solution. Furthermore, they want to have it acknowledged that there is nothing pejorative about the concept of bioengineering or transgenic. They want to know that people know this is a situation where there are some positive benefits, and I have mentioned some of those positive benefits. They don't want a label on the front of the package because they think it would be scary to consumers, and they want flexibility as to exactly what system they use to alert consumers.

The bill I put forward provides all of those goals for a 50-State solution. There is nothing on the front of the package, nothing pejorative, and provides flexibility for the food industry. It does not go to the final step that much of the food industry wants, which is no unpackaged labeling because then there is no compromise between the two sides.

The consumer side would like to have something mandatory so it is on each package of food. They want it clear so a person can pick up the food or the can or the sack and have it easy to identify on the package. That is the compromise bill I have put forward. It enables the food industry to either put an asterisk on an ingredient that is bioengineered and have it explained below or it enables an industry to put a symbol in parentheses after the ingredient or it enables an industry to just put a symbol on the ingredients panel. In Brazil they use a ``t.'' It is a very simple ``t.'' It is not scary, but for those who want to know, it is identified.

This approach of simplicity--nothing scary, simple access that is easy to see--this is the bulk of what both sides want to accomplish so we can have a 50-State standard.

It has been endorsed by a number of groups. Over the last few days my bill has been endorsed by Campbell's, Stoneyfield, and Nature's Path. It has been endorsed by Amy's Kitchen and Ben & Jerry's and Just Label It.

We can give up the ability of each State to have a separate labeling system if we do this simple symbol or parentheses or asterisk on the ingredients panel so a person who cares can look it up.

I think about it this way. My daughter has always wanted to buy products that don't have highly enriched corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup. Along the way, she read something and said: I am just not sure that is something I want to buy. So she picks up a package, turns it over, and often the ingredients on the package have tiny print, but she can figure it out. It is the same for this. Enable the consumer who is willing and wants to make the effort to be able to pick up a can-- again, it doesn't have to be on the front--and find out what is going on.

This is the world standard. There are 64 other countries, including 28 members of the European Union, Japan, Australia, and Brazil, that all require some type of indication on the ingredients panel or on the package. Do you know who else is in that group? China. China is a dictatorship. China doesn't deny its citizens the right to know. How is it possible that a bill in this Chamber has been introduced to take away the right of Americans to know what is in their food? Even China doesn't do that, and we must not do it either.

I appreciate the folks who have already signed up to sponsor this bill. Senator Leahy, Senator Tester, Senator Feinstein, Senator Sanders, Senator Murphy, Senator Gillibrand, and Senator Blumenthal, thank you. Thank you for standing up for your citizens' right to know. Thank you for standing up for a fair compromise that solves the big problem the food industry is facing with the potential of 50 different States having 50 different standards. Thank you for finding the area of compromise that works on both sides of this equation.

I appreciate the endorsements. I appreciate the sponsors, but what I really appreciate is that we have freedom of speech in our country to be able to carry on this conversation, but how is it consistent to have freedom of speech and then say that we want to ban information from our consumers? How is that consistent? This is like the mob that says that we don't want our citizens to read certain books so we are going to burn them, we are going to ban them--and that is what this DARK Act does. It has been introduced and went through the Agriculture Committee. It bans the ability of States to provide information to their consumers. That is just wrong. Even China doesn't go there, and we should not go there either.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

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