Senate Legislative Agenda

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, let me now talk about something related--the legislative graveyard.

Leader McConnell says: Let's move on and work together. There hasn't been a single bill put on the floor on issues we can debate, whether it is protecting preexisting conditions, making our education system better, dealing with the problem of the high cost of drugs, doing infrastructure--nothing. Just appointments have been put on the floor. And nothing has been done on election security at the very minimum.

I know the leader is afraid to debate what happened and explore what happened given the tawdry history of certainly President Trump and of Senate Republicans in responding to this serious issue, but at least he could move forward and we could put some bills on the floor and debate them to strengthen our election security, which everyone admits is weak.

So if Leader McConnell, as he says, is ready to move on to serious things, then how about bringing forward legislation to protect our elections? For 4 months, the Senate has been little more than a legislative graveyard, and election security is exhibit A.

The House passed important reforms to improve and safeguard our elections. No action here in the Senate. We have a bipartisan election security bill waiting in committee. No movement from the leader.

As long as this place remains a legislative graveyard, we are rolling out the welcome mat for foreign adversaries--not just Russia but Iran, Turkey, North Korea, China--to interfere in our elections. We are essentially encouraging a sequel to 2016 because the leader is sitting on his hands, because the leader is presiding over a legislative graveyard on election security and just about everything else. What about bipartisan background checks? What about paycheck fairness? What about election reform? What about even the Violence Against Women Act, which passed the House with 33 Republicans? None of those are being put on the floor so that we can act and debate.

Later this morning, my friend Senator Udall will come here to the floor to press our Republican friends to take up this bill and shed light on the fact that it includes long-overdue reforms to protect Native American women. The House is moving on legislation this week to protect our healthcare law and protections for Americans with preexisting conditions from the administration's efforts to destroy those protections. There is no reason for Leader McConnell, who says he wants to move on, to let these bills collect dust in the Senate. Even if he doesn't love every particular in these bills, why not bring them to the floor to debate and amend? Surely, we could find a way to agree on issues. Ninety, ninety-five percent of Americans agree on every one of these. But the Republican Party and Leader McConnell are so in the grasp of powerful special interests and lobbyists from the hard right that they are afraid to move any of this.

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