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Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I am not sure I will use all 20 minutes, but you never know on a subject this important and this vital to women and families across the America. It may take a little more than a few minutes to talk about this issue, and that is that 70 percent of Americans believe that we should not overturn Roe v. Wade or a woman's right to her own reproductive choice.

This is so critical that 70 percent of Americans are in agreement. This was part of a Pew Research report. Twenty-five percent don't agree, and about 5 percent are not sure what they think. But anybody who thinks this isn't about settled law or about mainstream views in America is wrong because it is about almost 50 years of settled law, and it is about what mainstream Americans believe are their constitutional rights. That is why it is so important for us to listen to those Americans and their long-held beliefs, starting with the laws that we got from England and baked into our Constitution, the right to privacy.

Yes, people are right. The word ``privacy'' isn't mentioned, but it is in various amendments believed to be rights within the Constitution. But we have a Supreme Court made up of men and Ivy League institutions who now discuss in a decision--we don't really know exactly where it came from--this notion that privacy and a woman's right to her own reproductive choice somehow doesn't deserve stare decisis--that is, predicated on previous law--and somehow isn't in the Constitution.

Well, I have got news for a lot of people. If you have a Supreme Court that is going to take a run and run from privacy in the Constitution, as this decision does--as this decision does--it barely mentions the case law predicated that made decisions about a woman's right to privacy based on those issues. It is barely mentioned.

Now, I am sure it is because those Justices decided, if they had to agree that privacy was really there as a right, which we as Americans believe it is--against the government's unwarranted search and seizure on you, the government spying on you, the government taking action against you that has not been followed in law--you know, I spent 2 years on the Judiciary Committee, and I really couldn't believe this.

Somebody told me--actually, a conservative judge passed this information on. If you ask them whether they believe in Roe v. Wade or settled law, they will tell you: Oh, yeah, it has been there. But if you ask them whether they believe in rights to privacy enumerated in the Constitution and do they believe in the penumbra of rights that basically give us this right that Griswold v. Connecticut, that Casey v. Planned Parenthood was decided on, a true, true conservative who wasn't going to uphold the law will tell you they didn't believe in that.

So that is the conundrum. We had a bunch of the smartest guys in the room from Ivy League schools who came here and hoodwinked the Senate, saying things like: Oh, I will follow or I think stare decisis is very important. Yet the same people are about to put their name on a document that says we don't really think there is any strong holding here. We don't think there is any strong case. Well, there is a case. There is a case for privacy.

I remember my first days on the Judiciary Committee, when John Ashcroft, then-Attorney General, tried to come before the committee and make light of the fact that the government was spying on Americans. When I said to him: Mr. Ashcroft, this is a serious issue of the FBI and others using software technology to spy on the lives of Americans, he said: You remind me of a joke.

I couldn't believe it. I remind him of a joke? And he went on to tell the story about how a little boy sat on Santa Claus's lap, and he said: I know whether you have been bad or good. And he says: Oh, you are not a Santa Claus; you are John Ashcroft. He thought this was hilarious, and I reminded him that not everybody in America was laughing.

Now look at where we are, 20-some years later, fast-forwarding on the rights to privacy that we have in the United States and how every day we have to fight for those rights to privacy.

I know the Presiding Officer knows this because he has joined me on these issues, particularly as it relates to children's online privacy issues and so many other issues that this body and this institution are going to have to decide on, but Americans know--70 percent of them agree that this is a mainstream, settled issue and now are shocked to find that, somehow, somebody is proposing something to overturn it.

I am not even sure people understand. I just had a conversation with somebody who said: Oh, you mean they are going to give some rights to men in determining the pregnancy and some rights for women?

I said: No. They are talking about making abortion illegal. They are talking about passing a law that takes the reproductive rights and choices of women and turns them back into the dark ages.

This person got it right away. They said: Who do you want caring for women--someone in a back alley or a trained healthcare professional?

That is really what we are talking about here. American healthcare technology has come to the point that women who do not want an unwanted pregnancy can have the choice of a morning after pill. There are lots of different ways for them to deal with planned and unplanned pregnancies. Yet this institution wants to tell them, by the Supreme Court, that they don't have a privacy right; that it doesn't exist; that Connecticut v. Griswold, which, if you think about it, was about contraception--it was really about whether women at the time had the right to have contraception and plan pregnancies.

I know the Presiding Officer knows about this time period. We both come from big families. We know all about big families.

All of a sudden, in that decision, in Connecticut v. Griswold, the right to privacy--the penumbra of rights within the Constitution--was determined to say that women have the right to control their bodies and have contraception. The fact that this is not the basis of upholding the law after almost 50 years--I can't even explain how unbelievable it is that somebody would not fully discuss and cite it. And if they don't believe in the penumbra--but I am guessing the reason they don't want to even discuss the penumbra of rights is because they know darn well we live in an age and time in which privacy needs utmost protection, and individuals need people like us to be voting for things that are going to protect individuals' rights of privacy in the era of big government, of big corporations, of undue intrusions in, yes, even our own healthcare. We need protection.

We are now here talking, though, about overturning these rights that affect the healthcare lives of women. We are not talking about the healthcare of men. We are not sitting here--I can't tell you how many times in the last 15 years that I have been here that every budget decision, every major almost-going-over-the-fiscal-cliff when John Boehner was the Speaker--oh, if we don't have a vote to get rid of a woman's right to choose--every budget issue down to the last wire is always about whether you are going to get rid of a woman's right to choose. It has been the fight of the other side of the aisle all along to try to say they are going to control women's bodies and women's healthcare choices.

We know that you are not going to get rid of abortions if you pass this law. You are not going to get rid of them. When we passed Connecticut v. Griswold and Casey, that is when we basically went down the road of making sure that women weren't killed in back alley abortions. We actually saved lives of women, and we started getting people to take care of planned pregnancies and make progress of having people on contraception.

We are not going to get rid of abortions by listening to the Supreme Court or passing something. They will happen. It will go back to any back alley approach or other issues to try to deal with it.

So I ask my colleagues: What are you thinking when you are advocating for a return to pre-Roe? What exactly do you think is going to happen in the United States of America? I can tell you, you are going to leave women without the ability to control their own bodies, without the ability for them and their doctor to make decisions.

So many of these issues are about that woman and her doctor making a decision. You know, we make laws to deal with the parameters and the exceptions to the rule. This is a process by which we have laid out what we think is reproductive healthcare choice and then directed people to deal with their physician on these issues. But the other side would like to take these issues to the extreme and say that women have gone too far on their own healthcare choices.

I guarantee you, there are many times where it is a decision between the life of the mother and the life of a child. Do we really want government making that decision, or do we want the physician and the individual woman making that decision?

I ask my colleagues: Do you believe the right to privacy exists within the Constitution or are you like the Supreme Court? You don't believe in the decisions of previous Supreme Court Justices? You don't think they have solid standing because you don't believe that privacy is a long-held view of the United States? I guarantee you, it is fundamental to who we are as a country, and it is fundamental to who we are today and why individual women should have that right and have that protection.

But people aren't even thinking about the broader impacts. Secretary Yellen testified today:

Eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades. Roe v. Wade . . . enabled many women to finish school and increase their earning potential.

No one has even talked about exactly how this would work. I am confused about how it would work State by State. I will also tell you, this Supreme Court really--I don't even know what to say about it except for when I interviewed one of the Supreme Court Justices, who I am pretty sure is making this decision--I said: This is very important to the State of Washington because the people of the State of Washington have voted to make Roe v. Wade the law of our State.

And he said: Oh, Senator, Senator, you are mistaken.

I said: I am mistaken about my State, about what happened?

He said: You mean your legislature voted.

I said: No, sir, the people in my State voted by initiative in the nineties to codify these rights into our State law because that is what the people of my State believe.

So the arrogance of this Court, you can see, continues not to listen to the views of 70 percent of Americans.

I believe that you should be able to ask Justices what their judicial opinion and philosophy is. They should tell you. If these Justices did not believe that this was the law of the land and should be upheld, if they didn't believe in these rights of privacy, they should have told everybody clearly.

But it is hardly in the mainstream view of Americans.

Tomorrow we will have a chance to say whether we believe in these privacy rights, whether we believe in a woman's reproductive choices, whether we believe that 50 years--just about 50 years--and 70 percent of the American people are worth listening to. I would listen and pass this legislation tomorrow because I guarantee you, if it is not just this privacy right, why are you going to trust them on any other privacy decision in the future if they are not going to be fighting to uphold your privacy rights on women's reproductive health?

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