National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, thank you very much, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here on the Senate floor today with my colleagues.

I, too, have an amendment to strike section 1023 of this bill, the national defense authorization bill, S. 2943. This is amendment No. 4068. We will seek unanimous consent for this amendment to be considered, but what it does is strike section 1023, which provides for the design and planning related to construction of a facility in the United States to house detainees. This is part of the constant effort by some to close Guantanamo Bay and bring the detainees to the United States.

In my view, it is essential for the United States to maintain the ability to hold terrorists, both those who were captured in 2002, as well as those whom we may find on the battlefields of terrorism with ISIS today. Since 2008, the effort has been to close Guantanamo Bay with the objective of bringing those detainees to the United States. This Congress, this Senate has spoken time and time again both in the predecessors' legislation to this bill we are considering today, NDAA of past years, as well as the appropriations process in which we prohibit those detainees from being brought to the United States and housed in a facility in the United States.

In fact, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense have, on numerous occasions, confirmed that the President has no legal authority to close Gitmo or to transfer detainees to the United States. For some reason, the national defense authorization bill, as it came out of the committee, provides for the planning and designing related to construction of a facility here.

This amendment strikes that language, and it reaffirms what we have said before. In fact, in last year's national defense authorization bill, we said there had to be a plan provided by the administration that outlines, in significant criteria and detail, what would be involved in bringing those detainees to the United States. I am opposed to that in the first place. I am opposed to that in the second place. I would add that plan that we keep looking for, it has yet to be, in any specificity, granted to us to see in Congress.

Mr. President, I would ask my colleagues to allow, at the appropriate time, that this bill be made in order for consideration for a vote by the Senate as an amendment to this bill.

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Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, in a moment I am going to ask unanimous consent to address an amendment of mine to the national defense authorization bill, amendment No. 4066.

There is legislation I have introduced with a number of my colleagues that then is reflected perhaps identically in the amendment I hope we will consider this evening. This amendment is related to the National Labor Relations Act, which was enacted in 1935. That legislation exempted Federal, State, and local governments but did not explicitly mention Native American governments from the purview of the National Labor Relations Act. Despite that not being mentioned for 70 years, the NLRB honored the sovereign status of tribes accorded to them by the U.S. Constitution. In fact, there is a good argument that the reason tribal governments were not listed in the Labor Relations Act was because the Constitution made clear the sovereign nation of tribes. So for 70 years, they were not affected by the NRLB. Unfortunately, in my view, beginning in 2004, the NLRB reversed its treatment of tribes and legally challenged the right of tribes to enact so-called right-to-work laws.

The amendment I have offered to this bill is pretty straightforward. The National Labor Relations Act is amended to provide that any enterprise or institution owned and operated by an Indian tribe and located on tribal lands is not subject to the NLRA.

This narrow amendment protects tribal sovereignty and gives tribal governments the ability to make the best decisions for their people. The amendment seeks to treat tribal governments no differently from other levels of government, just like we treat cities and counties across the country.

Sovereignty is an important aspect of tribal relations with their tribal members. It is something tribes take very seriously, and in my view, it is something Members of the Senate should take very seriously, in part because it is the right policy, and perhaps even more importantly, it is the right moral position to have. And of equal value, it is what the Constitution of the United States says.

The legislation on which this amendment is based was passed by the House of Representatives in a bipartisan vote. Even our former colleague, the late Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, wrote in 2009 that ``Congress should affirm the original construction of the NLRA by expressly including Indian tribes in the definition of employer.''

This amendment presents Congress with an opportunity to reaffirm the constitutional recognition of tribes and the rights accorded to them under the supreme law of our land.

4066; that there be 10 minutes of debate, equally divided; and that following the use or yielding back of time, the Senate vote in relation to the amendment with no second-degree amendment in order prior to the vote.

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Mr. MORAN. I regret the objection from the Senator from Ohio and indicate that we will continue our efforts to see that this issue is addressed and the sovereignty of tribes across the Nation is protected.

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