Nomination of Amy Coney Barrett

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor to defend a woman's right to choose. I am beyond frustrated that this debate is even happening tonight. According to statistics from the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, there are over 433,000 victims of rape and sexual assault on average each year in the United States of America. They have found that every 73 seconds an American is sexually assaulted.

When someone wants to chip away at the rights of American women to have access to healthcare, my State is going to take it personally. My State has codified Roe v. Wade into law. They have fought for these rights in a vote by the people of our State in the 1990s. So with a process today that is unfolding here in the Senate where someone wants to roll back those rights and propose a different way of life in the United States of America, we women are going to fight back.

The truth is, the majority of Americans support a woman's right to choose. The majority of States support a woman's right to choose, in what their public believes. It is a minority and a minority on this floor who does not support that and would love to have a judicial process that shortcuts active debate about the issues that are in the mainstream views of Americans. These statistics and these issues are almost 50 years of law about a healthcare delivery system that allows a woman to make this choice. It is from those statistics I just read you. There are darn good reasons they want to make those choices.

The fact that people have been out here characterizing this debate and going back in history and talking about all of these things that have happened to previous judicial nominees--yes. Yes, there has been a lot of back-and-forth. But the main point is, the other side of the aisle wants to nominate people who are out of the mainstream view of America.

Any of my colleagues who came here and tried to argue that Judge Barrett and her views are in the mainstream, I guarantee you, the judiciary process that we had with the Senate Judiciary Committee definitely did not prove that. In fact, the President's words and the actions of this body in nominating people whose views are out of the mainstream--because this is 50 years of settled law, and you are trying to override it by putting somebody on the Supreme Court who will say otherwise.

Adding insult to injury to this whole process is the fact that we are not really doing our day job. We are not dealing with the economic crisis that is facing America. I am a little tired of that too. I am a little tired of every time we have a debate about our economy--whether it was the fiscal cliff or the big budget deal or last year's budget deal or any budget deal--we never can deal with our economy because the other side of the aisle wants an amendment to take away a woman's right to choose and limit it.

I couldn't even get language in the last COVID package to get Boeing workers more training programs because the Republicans were so concerned that the definition of a new healthcare proposal had to have a Hyde amendment attached to it because otherwise they couldn't support it because it is so Richter scale on our side of the aisle.

I will give my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--there are about 10 States that basically have a population that only 40 percent or maybe even less support a woman's right to choose. I get it. That is a hard State to come and represent here if the courts have already determined that this is settled law. It might be hard for you. But the majority of Americans and the majority of the States and the courts have already decided this.

Yes, you are going to continue to pursue judicial nominees who are out of the mainstream of the American people, and you are doing so instead of your day job--focusing on the economy of the United States during a COVID pandemic.

It wasn't surprising that this summer, as we were on recess, the Seattle Times said: What is happening? Wall Street is flourishing, but Main Street is struggling.

Basically, they raised a question while everyone was at home: What are we going to come do about the economic situation? We know we have had tremendous loss. Forty percent of restaurants are at risk of remaining closed and remaining closed permanently. We know that one in five small businesses could be closed by 2021--a devastating impact to our economy--and we know that 25 percent of those businesses need additional resources to survive.

All of those things were known, and they were known all summer long, and nobody wanted to discuss them because the other side didn't want to get serious about a robust package. The package they put on the floor so they could go home and say a week before the election ``Here is what we tried to vote on'' did not take care of small businesses that got left out.

It certainly didn't talk about the minority businesses that needed access to capital. The last bill did a decent job of helping businesses that had a connection to a banker, but if you didn't have a connection to a banker, you didn't get as much help. We should have sat down and fixed this.

We should have sat down and made sure that we were fixing what needed to be fixed to help our economy in the midst of a COVID pandemic, but, no, true to form to the other side of the aisle, it is way more important to go after a woman's right to choose. That is way more important than these economic issues

I am going to tell you that we are not going to lower our voices on the importance of our economy or how important it is to help women. We are not going to sit silently and talk about a minimal economic package to help American businesses. We are going to talk about what American businesses need, and we are going to talk about how we can help protect a woman's right to choose.

The nominee before us--I have listened to many speeches today. She has tremendous intellect. She does have tremendous intellect. Apparently, that is a strong suit of the President of the United States. He has strong intellect. Yet I have seen the most major assault on the rule of law by anybody in an administration in my time in the U.S. Senate--throwing out fact-based decisions, not guaranteeing due process, not making sure that we have freedom of the press, corrupt government officials whom they won't even get rid of, not supporting civil rights that should be enforced at the Federal level. It is not an issue to be left to the States. The Attorney General of the United States and the Members of this body should enforce the civil liberties of Americans. It is not an issue to ignore, and you certainly don't call out the military when they want to express their opinion and concern about this issue.

The President of the United States has a long record. He has great intellect, but he has run over the rule of law, and he has set a precedent for other people in his administration also not to follow the rule of law.

What I find so challenging about Judge Barrett's record and the issues before us is that women's issues and these issues that we face that are so important for us to get done are about a woman's access to healthcare. I can't even imagine going back to Griswold v. Connecticut--a time when we had to fight just to have contraception. That is what the privacy rights were all about. It was about a Court that decided and found in our Constitution that in multiple places, there are a penumbra of rights that give a privacy right to a woman to control her own body. Those privacy rights are about my constitutional rights. They are about what is guaranteed to me in the Constitution. It is about our finding out whether a nominee is going to hold them up, particularly at a time when we have had almost 50 years of laws that have protected those rights.

People want to have a rushed 30-day session--beginning to end--speed- court nominating in the Mansfield Room instead of hearing from groups and organizations about their concerns on this nominee. That is just not good for our overall system, it is not good for the issues that we face moving forward, and it is certainly not good for women in the United States of America.

I do not appreciate the rush to confirm Judge Barrett. Given my State--yes, my State codifying Roe v. Wade into statute in 1990 makes me a pretty active person who wants to see a judiciary that upholds that. I want to see and understand where this nominee is.

But anyone who comes to the floor and says that she is in the mainstream views Americans when we know what her views have been in opposition to Roe v. Wade and, as I said, having Griswold v. Connecticut be a correctly decided decision--even Justices Thomas, Alito, and Roberts have said it was correctly decided. Judge Barrett is out of the mainstream by not saying that.

She has been critical of the Affordable Care Act and its issues that we want so much to cover preexisting conditions. She refused to say whether Medicare and Social Security were constitutional; this issue of same-sex marriage, where two in three Americans support this; and refusing to say whether she thinks the Lawrence v. Texas decision, which struck down a law criminalizing consensual gay sex, was correctly decided.

These are issues about whether we are going to move forward as a nation with laws that people have come to expect and that they planned their lives around.

There are healthcare institutions all across the United States--even in States that don't fully support a woman's right to choose--that are delivering healthcare to women, and we are going to start down a process of taking those away?

Then there are some people who represent, on the other side of the aisle, States that are at 50 percent or 60 percent in support of a woman's right to choose. They are going to rationalize in their head that, oh, well, somehow I don't know where exactly Judge Barrett is going to be on these issues, or, I didn't get a confirmation that she truly believes that they are settled law, and I believe in the penumbra of rights in the Constitution.

When you say you believe in the penumbra of rights in the Constitution, you are saying you believe in my constitutional right to privacy. You say you believe that I have the right to make my own healthcare decisions.

With a few days before the election and a Supreme Court case in California v. Texas, where the ACA and other healthcare decisions are going to be on the table, it is not good enough to not understand the judicial philosophy of this nominee and whether that is in the mainstream views of people in the United States of America. Too much is at risk--too much that we deserve to know the answers to.

I am glad my colleague from Delaware brought up Justice Ginsburg's quote because that says it all. Everybody keeps saying that she didn't have to say anything, that she didn't take notes, that she is all good, that she didn't have to say anything. That is not what it is all about. That is not what Judge Ginsburg said. Judge Ginsburg told people exactly what she believed. She told people that she believed in a woman's right to choose. As my colleague from Delaware said, she told people that these issues were too important to a woman. So I don't understand, when Justice Ginsburg basically clarified what she believed, why Judge Barrett wouldn't clarify what her judicial philosophy is.

It is worth reading again.

Justice Ginsburg said that the decision of whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman's life, to her well-being, to her dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself, and when government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full human who is responsible for her own choices.

These women who have been the subject of the most heinous acts--and all women--deserve to make their own healthcare choices. We in this body should not be making this decision at this moment. We should be taking care of our COVID problem, moving forward with solutions that will help the American people, and letting them respond to this issue. This issue will continue.

I just ask my colleagues to think about what has already happened with the Affordable Care Act. Those States that didn't want to support the Affordable Care Act and didn't support the Affordable Care Act later, after it passed, then implemented it. A few States, just recently, made the switch and covered more people under Medicaid.

What you are really doing is holding your States back from having access to healthcare. Eventually, as I said, the general public in the majority of States will support a woman's right to choose. Eventually, this will be settled, with every State supporting this. The question is, How long are you going to hold up the healthcare choices of people in the United States?

I ask my colleagues to turn down this nomination. I ask my colleagues to stop nominating people who are out of the mainstream of the American view on healthcare, which is so important to their daily lives.

I yield my remaining postcloture time to the Democratic leader.

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