Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, the disability rights movement is one of the great civil rights achievements of our time, and Chicago's Marca Bristo was that movement's Rosa Parks.

Marca was a visionary and inspiring leader, who helped change Chicago and change the world when it came to the rights of the disabled, and she was my friend.

Sadly, Marca died last week in her adopted hometown of Chicago at 66 years of age.

In typical Marca style, she worked right on up to the few days before her death, trying to bend the arc of history just a little more toward justice before she drew her last breath.

I was happy to join my colleague Senator Tammy Duckworth this week in sponsoring a resolution honoring Marca's life and work.

I would like to take a few moments on the floor today to remember this amazing woman.

While most Americans have never heard of Marca Bristo, few lives went untouched by her lifelong quest on behalf of people with disabilities. She was a nationally and internationally acclaimed leader in the disability rights movement.

She helped to write and to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, which outlawed discrimination against the estimated one in four Americans with disabilities, and she spent the rest of her life making sure the ADA was faithfully implemented.

Along with leaders like Justin Dart, Marca changed the way Americans thought about disabilities. She persuaded us to view the disability experience as a civil rights issue, not just a medical issue.

To Marca's mind, what kept many people with disabilities from leading full lives was not their disability but the barriers they faced. What needed to change, she said, was not the person with disabilities but those obstacles that blocked their path. The problem was not that her wheelchair was too wide for certain doors; the problem was the doors were too narrow for her wheelchair. Remove the barriers, and people with disabilities can lead rich and full lives and make enormous contributions. That is part of what Marca taught me.

She was tough, smart, funny, determined, and fearless. She knew how to motivate others and how to build coalitions.

Her parents actually named her Marcia, but during her freshman year in college, a classmate called her Marca. She liked it, and it stuck.

She moved to Chicago and earned a nursing degree from Rush University College of Nursing in 1976.

In 1977, when Marca was 23 years old, working as a labor-delivery nurse at a Chicago hospital, she and her friend were sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan, when a dog grabbed her favorite pair of sandals and ran into the water with them. Marca dove in to retrieve her shoes, not realizing the water was shallow. She broke her neck and was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life.

Because of her paralysis, she lost her job, her health insurance, her home, her car, and the ability to navigate the city she loved. She thought she would never work again, but luckily the director of Northwestern University's Prentice Women's Hospital thought otherwise and convinced her to return to nursing.

At one point, she attended a work conference in San Francisco and saw for the first time an abundance of curb cuts--curb cuts that enabled people with disabilities to cross the street. It was an eye-opener for Marca.

As she later wrote:

No longer did I see curbs or stairs or inaccessible buses and bathrooms as a problem around which I needed to navigate. Rather, I saw them as examples of societal discrimination-- and felt a responsibility to get involved to help people with disabilities, in Illinois and beyond.

In 1980, Marca founded Access Living in Chicago, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people with disabilities live as independently as possible rather than warehoused in institutions.

Access Living led the fight to make public transportation in Chicago more accessible. Marca was not a shrinking violet. In 1984, she joined others, chaining themselves to Chicago Transit Authority buses. She ended up getting arrested, and they ended up filing a lawsuit in reply against the transit agency.

Her determination led to the installation of wheelchair lifts and critical changes to CTA buses and rail stations. Access Living became a disability leadership model for other cities around the country and around the world.

In 1992, Marca cofounded the National Council on Independent Living, which she led for many years.

In 1993, President Clinton named her to head the National Council on Disability. She was the first person with a disability ever to hold that post, and she held it until 2002.

She was elected president of the U.S. International Council on Disabilities and traveled around the world advocating for people with disabilities and their families.

She participated in the negotiation for the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a global accord based on the Americans with Disabilities Act. More than 160 nations have signed that treaty, including the United States. Sadly, this Senate has failed to ratify that treaty. I worked hours and hours with Marca to try to win the votes in the Senate for this bipartisan measure to help people with disabilities. We even brought former U.S. Senator Bob Dole, a World War II hero and a father of the ADA, to sit on the floor of the Senate when we cast the votes on this treaty. Unfortunately, it did not pass.

Marca called July 26, 1990, the day President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, ``Our Independence Day.''

On that day, she said:

This ragtag army of people who couldn't see, hear, walk and talk did what everyone said couldn't be done. We passed the most comprehensive civil rights law since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In a 2015 video interview for Rush University Medical Center, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Marca said: ``The law for the first time enshrined in federal law that disability is a normal part of the human condition, and the world needed to change.''

In July 2017, days before another ADA anniversary, Marca was again fighting for justice. She was 1 of more than 60 who were arrested for protesting against the proposed deep cuts in the Medicaid Program that had been included in a Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

As the Capitol Police wheeled her away, Marca raised a clenched fist and smiled. That is how I am going to remember her: optimistic, determined, even against long odds.

Days after her arrest, another American hero with a disability, John McCain, came to this floor and in the well of this Senate, shocked his party and the Nation by becoming the deciding vote against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. I like to think my colleague from Arizona, John McCain, saw in Marca Bristo and her determined friends the same courage he had witnessed so often in our military.

My wife Loretta and I extend our condolences to Marca's husband of 32 years, Bob Kettlewell; their two children, Samuel and Madeline; her granddaughter, who was born in June; to Marca's sister Gail; and to her countless friends and colleagues.

Marca made the lives of hundreds of millions of people better. I am going to miss her warm smile, her wise advice, her vision, and her courage. Emergency Funding

Madam President, I rise in opposition today to President Trump's continued efforts to move funding from our military in order to build his beloved wall on our southern border, and I rise as well in defense of the powers given to Congress in article I of the Constitution.

Last week, the President announced he was taking $3.6 billion from America's military to build his wall. He did so by canceling 127 military construction projects around the world and in 26 States and territories. Already, President Trump had taken $2.5 billion from our military earlier this year. Last week's decision brings the total to over $6 billion--$6 billion of investments in our American military and national security that the President of the United States has diverted so he can have a bragging point in the reelection campaign about his beloved wall.

This decision has rippled across the country and the world.

Remember the terrible damage Hurricane Maria did in Puerto Rico, which is still being repaired? Our military prioritized $400 million to rebuild National Guard facilities and the school for military children there. With the stroke of a pen, and without the approval of Congress, the President took away these funds.

Joint Base Andrews in Maryland needed a new childcare facility for military families. Some of the rooms in that current facility have been closed due to mold, which has created overcrowding. There are 130 children on a waiting list to get into this facility. Their parents are paying for expensive off-base childcare. It is unacceptable.

So Congress, on behalf of these military families at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, approved the money to upgrade the childcare center. Once again, with the stroke of a pen, President Trump took the military family childcare funds for his almighty wall.

Military children at Fort Campbell, KY, the home State of the Republican majority leader of the Senate, are forced to use overcrowded classrooms and a cafeteria so small that students are often shipped off to the library to eat.

With the same stroke of a pen, $62 million that Congress authorized for Senator McConnell's home State of Kentucky to fix the problem are gone, headed to the border of the United States for the President to be able to boast at a rally.

As if these stories weren't troubling enough, the Air Force is also sounding the alarm. A leaked internal review by the Air Force warns that President Trump's decision to cancel 51 Air Force projects poses serious national security risks to our country.

Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and the President were a member of my party, the Democratic Party. What would we be hearing from the Republican side of the aisle?

One of the projects that has been canceled for the Air Force by the President's effort to divert military funds to his wall is Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. They needed an upgrade for security on their main gate. The Air Force says that without this project, the base is ``vulnerable to hostile penetration in the midst of contingency operations and an increased terrorist threat.''

For goodness' sake. The President is building a wall in the middle of a desert that is not solving the problem we face with our southern border and taking money away from the main gate of an Air Force Base in Turkey that has been identified as needing to be rebuilt for security against terrorism?

The report also describes how canceling upgrades to a munitions site at an air base in Guam may impact the ability of fighter and bomber aircraft to operate properly.

I ask my colleagues honestly: Are these risks worth taking from our military so the President can have a walk-off line at one of his political rallies?

U.S. allies across the globe that are committed to our defense are starting to doubt if this White House is still interested in being the leader of the free world.

U.S. troops based in NATO ally countries like Poland, Italy, Germany, and Estonia expected $770 million in investments in training center and logistical support to push back on Russian aggression in Europe. I can tell you, having visited the Baltic States, how critically important these funds are to remind the people of that region that the United States and NATO allies still stand solidly behind them, as Putin threatens them with aggression on a daily basis, and now President Trump has removed many of these funds. Similarly, U.S. troops in South Korea and Japan were planning on $670 million to protect them from threats from North Korea and China.

The cancellation of all these projects is based on a national emergency declared by the President that was rejected by both Houses of Congress in bipartisan votes. Congress should not be silent when anyone dismisses the real needs of our men and women in uniform for politics. Nor should it sit back when the President of any party tries to undermine its constitutional duty to provide for the common defense of the United States.

I am greatly concerned that these events set a precedent that undermines the Appropriations Committee, which I have dedicated my Senate career to.

We all remember President Donald Trump's idea that we need a 2,000- mile concrete wall, as he said, ``from sea to shining sea,'' paid for by Mexico. He said it 200 times when he campaigned for the Office of President, but as we have seen, Mexico hasn't put up a peso. The President has decided the American military should pay for it instead. The resulting damage to our military and to the Appropriations Committee's constitutional authority continues to accumulate.

It has to stop, and it can stop if my colleagues on both sides of the aisle can come together to reassert their obligations under the Constitution and provide our military families with the certainty that they haven't been forgotten in the midst of the runup to the 2020 campaign.

I hope all of us think long and hard about the importance of this decision and our obligation to stand behind our men and women in the military.

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Mr. DURBIN. Harris), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), and the Senator from Massachusetts (Ms. Warren) are necessarily absent.

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