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Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I rise in support today of Mary Boyle, the nominee to serve as Commissioner at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Mary will bring to this role more than a decade of experience on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, where she previously served as general counsel and currently serves as the Executive Director. She is deeply knowledgeable about consumer product safety and the functioning of the CPSC. I have every confidence that she will be ready to lead on day one.

But it is not just her professional background that makes her perfect for this role. As a mom who raised three kids, she knows firsthand how important it is for parents to be able to trust the products they use every day. She understands the stakes and the devastating consequences of unsafe products.

Just yesterday, the Commerce Committee took an important step forward toward protecting kids and infants by passing the STURDY Act, which will prevent harmful and ultimately heartbreaking furniture tip-overs. Senators Casey and Blumenthal and I have been working on this for quite a while. It resulted in the largest furniture recall ever in the history of America with IKEA. But we need standards in place across the board. I know that we can count on Mary to be another critical partner in preventing unsafe products from hurting our kids.

Mary is clear-eyed about the responsibility of the CPSC. In her words, it provides a safety net for the public, and in order to carry out that crucial task, it needs a full roster of Commissioners. Currently, four of the five slots are filled. To truly address pressing product safety issues, we have to fill that fifth seat. We can't afford to play politics here. This is about everything from the hazards posed by crib bumper pads to the use of toxic chemicals in everyday consumer products.

I got involved in this way, way back before I was a Senator, when we had a young child swallow a charm that he got with a pair of tennis shoes. It was a giveaway. He didn't die because he choked on that charm; he died over a period of days because the lead in that charm, which was from a foreign country, got into his system, and he died in just a few days. That is how I got involved in the lead standards on foreign toys, that is how I started working with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and that is when I saw the difference it can make.

We passed a bipartisan bill named after Jim Baker's granddaughter-- the Virginia Graeme Baker pool safety bill--after a young kid named Abigail Taylor in Minnesota was in a kiddy swimming pool and her intestines were ripped out just sitting in the pool because there were so many faulty drains in this country.

I went and visited her in the hospital, and she said: I don't want this to happen to any other kid.

She lived for a year, and during that time, we worked together.

Then Ted Stevens and I passed a much stronger pool safety bill. And I know that the last time I heard testimony from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, over a period of a decade, after we lost a number of kids every year, not one kid had died because of a simple change to how the pool drains worked. That is what the Consumer Product Safety Commission can do at its best--make sure it doesn't happen to any other kid again.

The American people are counting on us to get this right, and with Mary, we have the opportunity to do just that.

As Mary said in her testimony, consumers need to be able to go about their daily lives without worrying that products they interact with every day--washing machines, cell phones, batteries, toys, and treadmills, to name just a few--do not injure, maim, or kill them. Throughout her impressive career, Mary Boyle has shown that she is wholeheartedly dedicated to that mission.

I am voting in support of her, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. We worked together. I am a lead Democrat on this bill to get it through the committee.

I simply believe that this bill must go hand in hand with another bill that would look at this issue in a much bigger way; that, yes, this is about allowing State attorneys general to do their jobs and enforce the law, and that is why he and I have joined forces on this bill. But it is also about putting some rules of the road in place on a Federal basis.

We are very close to having a vote on Senator Grassley's and my bill, with a broad range of authors and support, which would be the only and first Federal competition response to tech monopolies since the advent of the internet.

I have been watching this movie for way too long. We have hearings, we throw popcorn at CEOs, we get sound bites on TV, but we don't do anything on a Federal basis. We had the Facebook whistleblower come forward, tell of the horror, the American people are with us, and we dither and do nothing. This is actually the first time that we have a coalition across the aisle of people who are ready to move forward on a Federal response.

So my view of this is that, as we work to get our enforcers more funds--that is a part of it; Senator Grassley and I have a merger fee bill that is moving as part of the competition bill, which is currently in conference committee--and as we work on Senator Lee's very worthy legislation to focus on allowing the State attorneys general to keep their cases in their own jurisdictions, we simply cannot pretend that we don't have some role in this.

If Members don't know about it, maybe they have talked to one of the 2,700 lobbyists whom the tech companies have hired or maybe they have been subject to the $70 million effort on the Federal level. And this is not Senator Lee that I am talking about; he is a true maverick and is willing to take on special interests. But what I believe is going on in this building is that there are a lot of people trying to wait this one out and hope we don't have a vote on this bill.

I appreciate Senator Schumer working with me and leadership on the Democratic and Republican sides of the Judiciary Committee to make sure that we get this vote.

So Senator Lee will have a vote on this bill. I would certainly not concede at this moment giving tech something they want in this bill when we can't even have a vote on the Federal legislation, but we will have a vote on Senator Lee's bill. I just believe they have to go hand in hand.

I think he is well aware of Senators doing all kinds of things procedurally to be able to get votes, but I think it is really important that we don't have a State-only approach when it comes to what is going on with tech.

To again remind my colleagues and those watching this, what our bill--this big, bipartisan, important bill--does, it doesn't tear apart the company. It doesn't even take on the fact that they are all monopolies--and they are monopolies. Google has a 90-percent market share. Apple and Google basically, when it comes to app stores, are duopolies in dominating the market.

While Europe is set to vote on their own digital market bill on Monday and move this ahead--I was just speaking with them--while Australia has taken on the issue of the news organizations, while Great Britain is moving ahead, we sit back. It is time to at least take on one issue.

As the Justice Department looks at what is a monopoly, is it a monopoly when you have 90 percent market share? The very least we can do is put some rules of the road in place.

What Senator Grassley's and my bill does--and we have taken several comments from Members and made changes to that bill--what the bill simply does is it says: Hey, monopolies or gatekeeper companies, if you own your own companies--which they are increasingly doing--you can't use your monopoly status to self-preference your own products in front of other products.

No. 2, you can't copy nonpublic data that you have because of the virtue of the fact that you are the gatekeeper and then rip it off and make your own products. That is exactly what Amazon did, as the Wall Street Journal reported, with a four-employee luggage organizer firm when they gave them the data. The next thing you know, it shows up on Amazon Basics.

The third thing you can't do is make companies, small businesses, buy a bunch of stuff just to put yourself at the top of the platform.

The American people are with us on this, poll after poll, including a poll that Google accidentally--accidentally--put out there before they were able to pull it back that showed 68 percent of people want to use the antitrust laws--68 percent of people in their own polling--to be able to rein in this problem.

This is a uniquely American approach, but it must be done hand in hand with State enforcement.

So, all I am asking my friend and colleague to do here--and we wouldn't be here if we could have reached an agreement on this--is, I will assure him that we will have a vote on his bill; but we must also have a vote and finally move ahead on what is only a slice of what we could be doing.

We are not doing some of the things I would want to do, which is look back at some of these mergers, which is actually take that email that Mark Zuckerberg wrote that said I'd rather ``buy than compete'' and look at what they bought in their zest to be able to avoid competition. Right now, that is going on with the Justice Department and the FTC. But we are simply trying to set some rules of the road, and it is more than overdue after an 8-month investigation in the House of Representatives--an 8-month investigation.

What Federal bills have we passed that would put any checks and balances on these companies? They just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I am so pleased that some of the State attorneys general are taking this on.

I am eager to get Senator Lee's bill and my bill up for a vote, but it will come close to when the vote on the actual Federal rules takes place.

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Again, I look forward to working with Senator Lee to pass this bill, and I also look forward to passing a bill on the Federal basis and not just deciding that this should be in the province of 50 different States, and I thoroughly plan to work with him to pass this bill, and I hope it will be soon.

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I thank Senator Blunt for his statement.

I join him in opposing this resolution.

As chair of the Rules Committee, with oversight of the Sergeant at Arms who helps manage the Senate Page Program, I know, like Senator Blunt does and everyone here does--I see Senator Leahy is here, the Presiding Officer, and Senator Paul--how hard the dedicated pages, who come from States across the country, work to help us do our jobs here on the Senate floor. We are so excited when we have someone from our States come and join us as a page. They are, too, as are their families.

As we continue to reopen the Capitol, which I strongly support, we must also take into account the health and safety of everyone who works and visits here, including our pages. This resolution would reverse the Page Program's--as Senator Blunt noted--current policy and prohibit any requirement for pages to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

It would also prohibit requiring pages to undergo COVID testing or wear a mask regardless of guidance from the Office of the Attending Physician or the CDC. This includes reversing the policy that all pages must wear a mask if one tests positive--a commonplace rule to protect healthy pages, who all live in the same dormitory, which, I think, is the defining part of this.

In light of recent events, we know that staff, Senators, as well as pages, have tested positive in the past few weeks. In light of these recent events, the Attending Physician, Dr. Monahan, has recommended that all pages wear masks. I believe in science. I believe we should listen to Dr. Monahan. Local public health officials have also decided, by the way, to require vaccines for certain eligible students in Washington, DC, including those attending our page school here in the Senate.

I agree with Senator Blunt in that the Page Program needs flexibility to set its own policies to protect the health and safety of pages. We should not put these young people who have come here to work in the heart of our democracy at risk unnecessarily.

We all know that the vaccine helps greatly if someone gets sick. I know that because my husband got really sick before there was a vaccine. He is healthy, and he ended up in the hospital for a week on oxygen. That might shape my response here, but I believe that if he had had the vaccine, we wouldn't have come that close to losing him.

I believe in science. And so I join Senator Blunt in this objection.

Thank you.

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