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Floor Speech
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Mr. MORAN. Madam President, I certainly rise this morning, going into this afternoon, in advance of a vote on a motion to proceed, a cloture vote, on the SFC Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022, and I would call upon my colleagues to do the same thing.
I appreciate what I just heard from the chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs and how he made the case for why this is important legislation and why we have little excuse not to see its success here in the next few days.
I mentioned last night when I spoke on the Senate floor that I am not a veteran. I mentioned that my experience in high school in seeing those who are just a year or two older than me returning from their service in Vietnam caused me to reach a conclusion that I would do everything I could in my life to compensate for the ill treatment those men and women returning from service in Southeast Asia received from their fellow Americans. I was going to pay respect. I was going to honor them. I was going to say thank you. That is what a 16-year-old kid thought he should do to make certain that we compensate for those who served our country and deserved something better than what they received.
I never envisioned being a Member of the U.S. Senate, never thought that was something that would happen to me in my life, but because I now serve in this capacity, I have an obligation to do much more than saying thank you. There is nothing wrong--it is a good thing to tell those who served ``Thank you. I appreciate your service. I respect you,'' but that is just the beginning.
Certainly, as a member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee and a Member of the U.S. Senate, I and all my colleagues owe those who served in Vietnam and every other battle of our Nation more than just saying thank you.
My guess is that nearly all of us, the 100 of us, probably said these words at services across our States on Memorial Day weekend. We have said it hundreds of times: ``Thank you for your service.'' I will continue to say ``thank you for your service'' hundreds and hundreds of times myself.
But this week we have the opportunity to do something significantly more and that is to actually provide the benefits that men and women who served in Vietnam and who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the globe--the benefits they are entitled to and the benefits which they desperately need.
We were with a group of veterans--certainly a group of veteran organizations--this morning on the Capitol lawn, and, to my knowledge, every veterans service organization, every organization that represents veterans is asking us to pass this legislation. But I also was surrounded by family members and veterans themselves who have experienced horrendous circumstances in their lives and their families' lives as a result of exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam and toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And you can see the challenge that people face in their lives because of their service. And we no longer have the capability, if we ever did, to say: No, we can't help you yet; we will wait for--we will wait for more science, more medicine; we will wait until the Department of Veterans Affairs completes another study.
We can't wait because they can't wait.
During my time at home over that Memorial Day weekend, a Navy veteran said he and his father were both exposed to toxic exposures in their service to their country and, to their knowledge, they have no consequences, no physical ailments that resulted from that. But they said: Every day we worry about it because we don't think--we don't know that if we do develop those symptoms, that the Department of Veterans Affairs and, really, the American people are going to be there to take care of us. So every day of our lives, knowing that we have been exposed to toxic substances during our military service--every day we wonder, if something does develop, what is going to happen to our spouse? what is going to happen to our kids? what is going to happen to me, the person who served, if we don't know that the VA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, is going to be there with the benefits that we need to care for ourselves, our health, and our family members?
The bill that we take up today is a culmination of years of work, and people across the country have come to their Congress over those years, knocked on our doors, made phone calls, and asked us: Please do something to take care of someone we love who has been exposed to these terrible substances and causing death and ill health in their lives.
So, across the Senate, many of us have introduced legislation over those years, legislation in recent years, and with the leadership of our Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, we had begun the process of sorting out bills that our colleagues were asking us to pass to deal with toxic exposure, and now we have combined the best of those pieces of legislation from many Members of our Senate, members of our committee, into the Heath Robinson Act.
We have incorporated important fixes to the House version of this bill. We have worked to make sure the mitigation--this has been one of my concerns from the beginning is how do we take care of a lot more veterans who desperately need to be cared for and not disadvantage other veterans who are already waiting in line for services at the Department? And we have worked to mitigate, to reduce, to eliminate those disruptions in VA operations.
We have streamlined the disability claims process for toxic-exposed veterans. We have prescribed a lasting framework for the future VA decisions that is transparent and driven by scientific evidence, all with the effort and hopefully the consequence of not negatively impacting veterans already in our system. This lasting framework is a win for veterans, requiring the VA to be proactive in evaluating diseases for service connections.
We have had the opportunity, over a long period of time, to say: Well, the VA has the authority to take care of you. That really wasn't a very good explanation because it never seemed to happen fast enough, and in the process of us waiting on the Department of Veterans Affairs to act, more and more service men and women became ill and too many died waiting for a result.
With this bill before us today, we are called to act for veterans, and we should answer that call. The Heath Robinson Act is a solution for a problem that has plagued veterans for too long and left way too many families either uncertain about whether they would be cared for or actually left them without the care they desperately need. This is a responsible approach to fix a broken system that has been cobbled together through decades of patchwork fixes. As we all tried to do something, we never got enough accomplished. But we tried, and we have put this patchwork system together that has failed those who need our help. This legislation is our chance to make certain that future generations of toxic-exposed veterans can get the healthcare and disability compensation that they deserve without delay.
Every member of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs has voted for the original bill in front of our committee, now nearly a year ago. The bill was passed out of committee with the understanding that Senator Tester and I would work to find some fixes to problems that people recognized. In my view, both Republicans and Democrats had concerns about certain aspects of this legislation, and we have now spent the last year and particularly the last several months trying to fine-tune this bill in a way that certainly reduces some damage and fixes the process, increases the assets in personnel and resources that the Department of Veterans Affairs has for determining disability claims and for providing healthcare for those who serve. This is a better bill as a result of our efforts, and I thank Chairman Tester and my committee colleagues for their partnership and work to get us where we are today.
There was a lady on the Capitol lawn this morning in the group that Senator Tester and I spoke to, and she was telling me that her husband was exposed to toxic substances in the Middle East, that he is experiencing growing symptoms of challenges as a result of that exposure. He is waiting to see whether this bill passes, and he is hoping that even if he is the last veteran alive to see the legislation passed that he will have accomplished something that is important for him because he will pass knowing that the problems he is creating for his family due to his service are being addressed.
There is sadness in that, that one who is challenged by these conditions wants to know that we have done our job so that he can know he has done his job as a father and a husband. Today begins the day in which we can demonstrate that we are capable of doing our job, and I ask all of my Republican and Democratic colleagues to join me in supporting this historic bill for our veterans today and for the generations of veterans to come.
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