Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to honor a life lost, share in the grief of a family and a Nation in pain, and call for this body to take action to reform a system that has been broken for too long.

George Floyd should be alive today, but he isn't. He was murdered by police in my State--a death both horrifying and inhumane but not unique. We literally saw his life evaporate before our eyes. The whole country saw it. The whole world saw it.

We know that our African-American community in Minneapolis and across America has seen this horror before and has experienced injustice for far too long. They have had enough. They are angry and in pain, and they are calling out for justice.

Senators, we cannot answer with silence. That would make us complicit. We cannot answer with what the President called dominance. That would make us monsters. We cannot answer with using churches as props and Bibles as props and inflaming violence. We must answer with action. That is what makes us lawmakers.

For 13 years, here in Washington, change has come inch by inch when we should be miles ahead. I pick that time because that is when I first got here. That is when I first started doing work on crack cocaine and sentencing disparity, and I have seen those changes, but it is inch by inch.

First, there needs to be justice for George Floyd. There needs to be criminal accountability to the fullest extent of the law. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison, with whom I have worked closely for years, has taken over the investigation and the prosecution of the case. I have full faith in his conviction for justice in this case and beyond.

Sweeping reform starts with accountability in this individual case, but it doesn't end there. We all know that these officers work within a bigger system, so that is why I called for a full-scale investigation into the patterns and practices of racially discriminatory policing in the Minneapolis Police by the Department of Justice, in addition to ongoing local, State, and Federal investigations.

Senator Smith and I led a request with 26 Senators asking the Justice Department to conduct what is called a pattern-and-practice investigation. This afternoon, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights announced that they are going to investigate the police department as well.

The words engraved on the Supreme Court building, ``Equal Justice Under Law,'' we know have never really been true for millions of African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, and other minority groups. There is systematic racism at every level of our judicial system, and that calls for systematic change.

We must take action to end unconstitutional, discriminatory policing across the country. We can start by making sure that policemen's conduct is independently investigated and that we hold officers criminally accountable when they break the law and violate the trust that is needed between law enforcement officers and the people they have sworn to protect.

We also need strong Federal requirements for State and local police to collect and report data on the use of force. Right now, a patchwork of local policies, many of which allow local police to avoid accountability, make it far too difficult to identify and address patterns of discrimination and excessive force in police departments. Better data will help hold officers and departments accountable.

Broader criminal justice reform and the standard for use of force-- all of those things must change. As I mentioned, we have done something. We passed the First Step Act when it comes to sentencing, but now we need to take on the Second Step Act to create incentives for States to restore discretion for mandatory sentencing for nonviolent offenders and reform the conditions in State prisons and local jails.

We know these conditions have gotten even worse during the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier today, we held a hearing in the Judiciary Committee about the continued injustice we are seeing in our prison system during this pandemic. While some people, like Paul Manafort, have been transferred to home confinement, others, like Andrea Circle Bear or Andrea High Bear, who is serving 26 months for a nonviolent drug offense and had just given birth while on a ventilator--why? She was exposed to the virus. So the question is, Why did a pregnant woman with a preexisting condition--an American Indian woman who was there for a nonviolent offense--why was she there in the prison system and Paul Manafort gets out?

We should also create a diverse, bipartisan clemency advisory board-- one that includes victim advocates as well as prison and sentencing reform advocates--that would look at these issues from a different perspective.

We should strengthen post-conviction reviews with conviction integrity units across the country. According to data from the National Registry of Exonerations, there are currently fewer than 60 conviction integrity units in the United States, and many of those are too weak to be effective. Attorney General Ellison and I have been working with prosecutors in Minnesota to set up a conviction integrity unit in the Twin Cities with strong, strong standards for independence and transparency. This needs to happen nationally.

We should also expand post-conviction sentencing reviews. Ensuring justice isn't just looking back at a case to see whether the evidence was right; it is also looking to see whether the sentence was right in a situation.

All of this--expanding our Nation's drug courts, which is something that I have been leading on in the Senate for years, changing that conversation about drug and alcohol treatment, reforming the cash bail system--if there is anything we as a Senate can do to eliminate injustice within our justice system, we should do it, and we should do it now. Talk is no longer enough.

We know this pandemic has shed a light on the injustice we have already seen, as Senator Durbin, who was here, and I discussed about the prison system today. We also see it in the number of people dying. In Louisiana, African Americans account for nearly 60 percent of deaths but 33 percent of the population. In Georgia, a study of eight hospitals found that 80 percent of their COVID-19 patients were African Americans yet 30 percent of the population. The workers on the frontline, the people who are working not just in the hospitals, not just in the emergency rooms, but in the grocery stores, driving the public transportation, are getting this virus--this sometimes fatal virus--at a much higher rate. This calls for not only the reforms that I laid out and that I have been advocating for years but also calls for investment, like Jim Clyburn's plan to invest in underserved areas and impoverished areas that have been that way for a long, long time. Senator Booker is carrying that bill in the Senate.

Martin Luther King once said that we are ``all tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one of us directly, affects all indirectly.'' That means, in the long term, an economy that works for everyone, with fair wages, with childcare, and with retirement savings. It means closing the wealth gap. Black and Latino households have only about a tenth of the medium net worth right now of White households. It means voting rights.

The scene that we saw in Wisconsin where people were standing in the rain with homemade masks and garbage bags just to be able to vote, risking their lives and their health, while the President of the United States was able to vote in the luxury of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because he could get a mail-in ballot from Palm Beach, FL--that is a split screen for you. That is why people are out peacefully marching. That is what they are angry about. It is police misconduct. It is the murder of George Floyd. It is the longtime economic disparities, but it is also the longtime suppression of the vote and the unfairness of all of this.

This has been a devastating time for Minnesota, but as George Floyd's family, whom I had the honor to talk with at length this weekend, said: We cannot sink to the level of our oppressors, and we must not endanger others during this pandemic. We will demand and ultimately force lasting change by shining a light on treatment that is horrific and unacceptable and by winning justice.

That is what they are talking about in Minnesota today. That was the spirit that I saw when my husband and I went to drop off food, where hundreds of people were there with thousands of bags of groceries because their grocery stores in that neighborhood had been burned to the core and their stores had been looted, not by the peaceful, righteous marchers but the people who were hiding behind them.

I will end with this. A few years ago I went to Selma, AL, with Representative John Lewis, like so many Senators have done. I stood there on the bridge where he had his head beaten in. I was in awe of his persistence, his resilience, and his faith that this country could be better, if only we put in the work. That weekend, after 48 years, the White police chief of Montgomery handed his police badge to Congressman Lewis and publicly apologized on behalf of the police for not protecting him 48 years before and not protecting his freedom marchers.

I don't want to take 48 years for my city and my State to heal or for our Nation to fix a justice system that has been broken since it was built. I want justice now. The people of this country deserve justice now. Everyone has a role to play in coming back from these crises. The protesters are shining a light on injustice that we have pushed to the shadows for far too long. The frontline workers and volunteers are serving the communities they love, and they are looking to all of us to deliver the reforms we promised--not just in speeches, not just in campaigns, but in reality, and not just for George Floyd. His legacy should be so much more than those 9 minutes--or Philando Castile or Jamar Clark or Breonna Taylor--because we took an oath.

We took an oath, colleagues. We didn't wave a Bible in the air for a photo op. We placed our hand on that Bible, and we swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The enemy we face now is racism. The enemy we face now is injustice. I don't know what else to say because too many words have been said, and maybe it is time to stop talking. Maybe it is time to start acting. It is time to get to work. It is time to do our jobs.

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