National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to join in honoring Vice President Biden's lifetime of service and sacrifice to our country.

Throughout his career, Vice President Biden has carried out his work with a sense of humility, integrity, and authenticity that often seems missing in today's politics.

He served as either chairman or ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee for 17 years. In this capacity, he crafted the Violence Against Women Act, which provided critical new protections to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. The landmark bill also supported local law enforcement to help increase prosecutions and convictions of abusers. He has continued this legacy by serving as the White House Adviser on Violence Against Women.

Most recently, he led the White House's efforts on the Cancer Moonshot initiative, which seeks to hasten our advances in cancer research, prevention, and treatment. Earlier today, the Senate passed a bill to help make the Cancer Moonshot initiative a reality, which is a further testament to the Vice President's leadership and character.

The Vice President's involvement in the Cancer Moonshot initiative was born out of the death of his son, Beau, who lost his battle with brain cancer last year. The Vice President also grappled with tragedy at a young age when his first wife and his 13-month-old daughter were killed in a car accident. The poise, dignity, and humility that the Vice President has been able to maintain in the face of these tragedies speaks to his strength and his character. Through all this, he has continued to serve the American people with the utmost integrity and authenticity, which have undoubtedly contributed to his successful career in public service.

The Vice President has also consistently advocated for the leadership role the United States plays in the world. Over the years, Vice President Biden has lent his diplomatic hand to U.S. engagement in development and security in places like Eastern Europe and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America. He has worked tirelessly to strengthen our partnerships across the globe, in places like Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, in an effort to further U.S. interests and the values upon which our Nation has thrived.

When he was in Denver this past September to speak at the Korbel School, the Vice President warned against ``turning inward.'' Joe has no capacity to turn inward in any walk of life. His career is characterized by reaching outward to the American people and to the world, working to listen, collaborate, heal, and serve. We can all learn a lot from that open and inclusive approach.

We are grateful for the Vice President's leadership and example. I thank him and his incredible family for their service to our Nation.

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I will be brief.

I want to thank Mr. Wyden, the Senator from Oregon and the ranking member of the Finance Committee, for his leadership on this bill. I thank, as he did, Senator Hatch for his leadership on this bill and Senator Grassley for his leadership on this bill.

As the Senator from Oregon indicated, this bill passed unanimously in the House of Representatives. This bill passed with 500 groups supporting the bill from every geographic area in the United States.

There are groups from Oregon. There are groups from Colorado. There are groups from the Presiding Officer's State that have weighed in on this and said we should have this legislation passed. We have had testimony in the Finance Committee from people who were foster children who came to the Congress to testify about what had gone wrong in their lives as a result of the system we have in place today, who still made the time to come here to advocate on behalf of children all over the country who are situated in the same way they once were.

Now, because of a disagreement in the Senate, this bipartisan bill that passed the House unanimously, that has almost 30 cosponsors in the U.S. Senate, a bill that was supported universally by the testimony we had in the Finance Committee, somehow can't get done before we leave for the holidays. That would be a terrible shame, a terrible stain on this Senate.

Tonight there are 50,000 children in Colorado who are in foster care.

There are over 650,000 children in the United States of America. What we have heard from them, what we have heard from their advocates, what we have heard from people who serve them--Republicans and Democrats alike--is that the institutional settings that too many of them are consigned to because of the way the law is written today is not the best thing for foster children; that families who can support them and who can nurture them, when they get the benefit of some help, are a far better place for foster children to be than these institutions. When it comes to drug addiction, when it comes to graduation rates from high school, when it comes to attending college--all of these things are affected by the way the current law exists.

The Presiding Officer may know that half of the cases of foster children in the United States are related, one way or another, to the scourge of opium addiction that is happening in the United States. This bill allows us to recognize that. It allows the people who serve the children and the families best to be able to intervene in a way that can keep the families together longer. What we know from the testimony in the hearings is that is the best thing for foster kids, it is the best thing for our States, and it is the best thing for the country.

So I join my colleague from Oregon in saying we should not go home with this unresolved. We should not go home, with the kind of momentum that exists for this bill inside the Congress and, much more important than that, outside the Congress, without having addressed this vulnerable population of people who live in the United States.

It is my fervent hope that we in the Senate will find a way to come to our senses and do our job, just as the people who came here to testify did their job, expecting that the U.S. Congress would respond to their description of their life experience, and what went wrong in a foster care setting has been established by the U.S. Congress. It is up to us to fix it, and that is what we can do tonight or tomorrow morning, I hope, at the very latest.

With that, Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Oregon for his leadership on this bill. I thank, once again, the thoughtful chairman of the Finance Committee, Orrin Hatch from Utah, for his leadership on this bill, and I hope over the next 12 or 24 hours we find a way to get this through the Senate.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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