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Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. 926 be at a time to be determined by the majority leader, following consultation with the Republican leader, on Thursday, July 20, with all provisions in the previous order remaining in effect.

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Mr. BENNET. 46 through No. 52, No. 82 through 107, No. 110 through No. 113, No. 130 through 139, No. 180 through No. 205, No. 224 through No. 226, No. 228 through No. 234, No. 236 through No. 246, No. 248 through No. 249; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc; the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to any of the nominations; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action; and the Senate then resume legislative session.

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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I am sorry that the Senator from Alabama has objected tonight again. I think this is the seventh time that we have been out here having this conversation, when I have been trying to move ahead the promotions of our Defense Department and he has, in an unprecedented manner, opposed it.

For 230 years, nobody in this Chamber has done what the Senator from Alabama is doing--putting a hold on the military promotions of people in uniform, of the flag officers of our Department of Defense, who ordinarily come through here in a customary way to get approved by the Senate, for obvious reasons--because we need them. They are for our national security. They have sacrificed their entire adult lives. They have sacrificed time with their families. They have sacrificed everything for this country. Now they have been put on a list to be promoted, and the Senator from Alabama has put a hold on them, which has never happened before in the history of the United States

For somebody who has put this Senate to a grinding halt month after month after month, he has picked an odd argument with which to defend his position. He has said, time and time again, that what he is doing actually doesn't matter, that what he is doing in the face of Democratic and Republican--not that it matters, because the Secretary of Defense, you know, shouldn't think of himself as a Democrat or a Republican. But the people who have served in Democratic and Republican administrations have said over and over again that he is compromising our national security, which is, of course, exactly the conclusion that anyone who is looking at this with common sense would believe, which is that our generals and our admirals actually make a difference and that the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually makes a difference.

If that is not the case, we are in worse trouble than I thought. If it is the case, if what he is saying is right and that it doesn't matter, that it doesn't make any difference, then how can he claim to be acting on this incredibly important principle since it doesn't matter?

As he says, these military positions are being fulfilled by acting officials--by acting officials. He says the generals, as I say, aren't important, that the admirals aren't important, and that they can be filled by acting officials because we don't need a Marine Corps Commandant. In his mind, it doesn't matter. We don't need an Army Chief of Staff. We don't need a Chief of Naval Operations. We don't need a nominee for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All of those positions are up for promotion right now, and every single one is being blocked by the Senator from Alabama and by the people in this Chamber who are supporting him on this unprecedented hold.

By the way, I haven't talked about this in the seven times I have been out here, but I have heard from people about this since, so let me just mention the incredible unfairness of this hold to the families who are supporting and serving with them, who are living with these members of the Armed Forces, many of whom have spent their entire careers working to get to the point that they are in right now--to be promoted to positions with the most significant responsibilities they have ever held.

As for the decisions that have been made on the way here--to miss the soccer games of their kids; to make a decision to accept a promotion that takes you to a foreign land that is distant from your family, that is distant from your community--there is a disruption in people's lives who now don't know where to put their kids in school because the Senator from Alabama has put on his blanket hold, which he says doesn't matter. These are people who wear the uniform of the United States. They are not politicians, not that that matters either, but they are people who wear the uniform of this country, who have given their lives and their careers to this country, and he says that holding up these promotions doesn't matter.

By the way, I am not going to get distracted by this, and I am not going to criticize his coaching career tonight or his football record, as he said. The Senator from Kansas, I know, won't let me get away with that, so I am not going to do it. I would even say the Senator from Kansas would have to admit, I hope, that this is an odd position for a coach to take--that the coaches don't matter in our military and that our admirals and our generals and the people who rally the troops don't matter.

You know, this is a little bit like saying the Denver Broncos didn't need Mike Shanahan to win two consecutive Super Bowls in 1997 and 1998 or that the Denver Nuggets, this year, didn't need Michael Malone to win their first NBA championship or--not to criticize his record--that the University of Alabama didn't need Nick Saban to win eight SEC championships.

Of course, it matters. Leadership matters. Leadership matters probably more in the Armed Forces than it matters anywhere else, and that is the reason that we are here. He knows exactly what he is doing, and he understands the damage that he has inflicted, and there is a reason he is the only Senator in 230 years who has done this.

What is it? What is it that he wants to bring the country's attention to? What is he asking the country to pay attention to? He is saying that he is standing up for the sanctity of life. He said that tonight. He is claiming that it is easy to describe these policies as the woke Biden administration distorting the Defense Department to serve their woke policy goals.

What he wants the American people to believe is that he is stopping the government from paying for abortions, and that is simply not what he is doing because that is not what is happening. That is not what is at issue here.

He says that the Dobbs decision doesn't have anything to do with what he is doing or with this case, and that is totally wrong.

Last year, as everybody in America knows, the Supreme Court of the United States, for the first time since Reconstruction, stripped the American people of a fundamental freedom, a fundamental constitutional right. That has not happened in this country since Reconstruction, but it happened this year.

It happened this year in the Dobbs case. It happened when Justice Alito, writing for the majority, said that if it wasn't a freedom in 1868, it is not a freedom today. And that was the most glorious--I would say inglorious, but he would say glorious--expression of his judicial ideology of originalism that we have ever seen on the Court. It came after 50 years--it is worth going through this history because he blew it off so quickly--after 50 years of a concerted political effort to overturn a woman's right to choose in this country; to run elections based on taking that freedom away, that right away; to pack the courts with judges who would take that freedom away; to create a judicial ideology that barely existed.

The ink was barely dry on the law review articles that Justice Scalia--then-Attorney Scalia--was writing when I was in law school that were claiming that these originalists had a fundamental understanding of what the Founders' perspective was and understanding was when they founded this country, when they wrote the Constitution. Now we have seen it manifested in this opinion by Justice Alito, where he says that if it wasn't a freedom in 1868, it is not a freedom today.

I don't want the pages or anybody else who is here tonight to be fooled just because they used the word ``originalism.'' That is the most brilliant political name, the most brilliant political label that has ever been attached to any ideology probably in the history of humankind--certainly in the history of our country--because it claims that they know what the Founders' actually wanted when they founded this country, which, of course, is ridiculous on its face for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the Founders had fundamental disagreements with each other about all kinds of things. Anybody who has studied our constitutional history to any degree knows that and knows the Constitution was a product of compromise and consensus and agreement and disagreement.

Some of the Founders, I am sad to say, owned slaves and fought very hard for the protection of human slavery in the United States of America, and their legacy will be with us to the end of our days because of what they did at the founding. There are other Founders who fought, who were abolitionists, who said: This is wrong. We should get rid of slavery.

The Constitution, just like our pieces of legislation around here, is littered with--is littered with--those kinds of compromises. Some of them are ones that are glorious, and some of them are ones that are inglorious.

(Mr. OSSOFF assumed the Chair.)

I dwell on this, Mr. President, because it is important for people to understand that this didn't come from nowhere. It is important to understand that we are at a moment when they have achieved their 50- year ambition, which is to create an originalist majority on the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse Roe v. Wade, among other things, but that is clearly the most important thing to them.

In a moment of maybe political distress, realizing that they had actually succeeded in their wildest dreams to achieve something that, I can tell you, speaking for myself in my advanced age, when I was in law school, would have been unimaginable, which is that in the United States, we would reverse Roe v. Wade in the year 2023--that I would travel the streets of Colorado with my daughters, and we would look up at the billboards advertising certain stuff in Colorado and realize that we live in a country that was legalizing marijuana on the one hand and making abortion illegal at the same time. That is something we couldn't have imagined. That is something we would not have foreseen.

But nobody, when I was in law school, would have believed that you could have gotten five Justices of the Supreme Court to agree with the logic that if it was not a freedom in 1868, when women didn't even have the right to vote in this country, it is not a freedom today, and it is as simple as that. It is as straightforward as that.

When that opinion was reached in Dobbs, then you started to hear people say: Well, don't worry about it. That is just a State's rights issue. You don't need to worry about that. Laboratory of democracy--we are just going to see what the States decide to do.

The first problem with that, of course, is that we are talking about a fundamental freedom. We are talking about a fundamental right. We are talking about, in my judgment, a civil right. That is the first issue. That is something that shouldn't be decided State by State by State. But it turned out that they actually meant what they said. This wasn't just an experiment in democracy; this was an attempt to ban abortion in the United States of America.

Since Dobbs was decided, 21 States have banned abortion or restricted access.

Last week, Iowa passed a 6-week abortion ban. Most women don't even know they are pregnant at 6 weeks.

The leading candidate for President on their side of the aisle, who is not named Donald Trump, signed an abortion ban in his State, the State of Florida, that 65 percent of Floridians oppose, that bans abortion at 6 weeks, and he did it at 11 o'clock at night. Why do you think he did that at 11 o'clock at night? Maybe because he knew that what seemed like the thing to do on rightwing radio was going to be a lot less popular with the voters in Florida and, I would say, the voters across the United States of America who are deeply concerned about protecting this civil right, who are deeply concerned about protecting freedom and a woman's right to choose and all the implications for equality that come to the fore when you are facing questions like this.

Those are the questions we are facing right now in the wake of the Defense Department in good faith trying to grapple with the change in the law brought about by the majority of the Supreme Court stripping away this fundamental freedom and stripping away this fundamental right.

There was a time when women serving in our military would have some assurance that they were going to have minimal access to reproductive healthcare no matter where they served. That was the law of the land before Dobbs. That is what Roe v. Wade said. But now they don't have that minimal access.

The Department of Defense, in the wake of the decision in Dobbs--not a decision, I assume, they would have wanted--is trying to grapple with that in ways that make sense for the men and women who serve in our military. They are basically trying to say: Let us treat women the same as everybody else who is serving in the military.

In response to Dobbs, the Pentagon released three policies.

Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something. We are going to have a debate in this country about what Dobbs means when it comes to access to a woman's right to choose, and the consensus that has existed around here for a long time has been upset by that. We are going to have a debate about that. I am sure about that. But I just want to say that it is absolutely false that the Defense Department has created a situation where--they are suggesting that they are funding--taxpayers-- abortions. That is what the Senator from Alabama says. I hope that people who are supporting him on this floor know that is false. They know that is not true. That is not what the Defense Department is doing. The Defense Department has not violated the Hyde amendment.

The Defense Department, faced with this decision in Dobbs, did three things. They said: If you need reproductive healthcare or if you need an abortion, we will pay for your travel to go from a State like Alabama, where you can get jailed, I guess, for up to 99 years if you are a doctor who performs abortion, to a State like Colorado that has enshrined Roe v. Wade, that we will pay your way.

That is not special treatment; that is the treatment everybody gets for a medical service that is not provided near their base.

The second thing they said was that they were going to allow paid leave while you are getting your reproductive healthcare, just like everybody else who is going to get a medical procedure gets. And we are going to give you a little bit of additional time on this--what can be a very difficult subject for the reasons everybody here knows--to talk to your commanding officer and inform them that you are pregnant.

That is it. That is it. That is it. It is not more than that.

So what I would ask everybody in this Chamber, whether you are pro- life or whether you are pro-choice or something else, where everybody across America who is suffering now because we are not able to promote the flag officers in the U.S. military--what I would ask you to consider, please, is what Senator Tuberville will win if he wins. What will Senator Tuberville win if he wins? He will ensure that women are going to be treated worse than men in the Department of Defense.

He will ensure that women will be treated differently, unequally, and unfairly because, unlike anyone else who needs a medical procedure, they will have to pay for their own travel out of, let's just say, Alabama or other States that have banned abortion, to be able to access an abortion. Unlike everybody else--unlike everybody else--they will have to take unpaid leave while they are trying to undergo that medical procedure or a medical procedure that could lead to an abortion.

I don't think most people in this country who are pro-life would think that women should be treated differently in that respect, discriminated against. I think they would take the view that, if you are serving in the U.S. Armed Forces and you are serving in a State that has banned abortion and you are pregnant, and you have decided-- you have made a judgment on your own or with your family or with your doctor--that the right answer for you and for your family is to go to another State and have an abortion--I think most people would say that you ought to have the right to do that, that you shouldn't be discriminated against if that is your judgment. That doesn't mean you are pro-choice or pro-life. It means that people can make that determination and that people shouldn't be discriminated against.

I have to say, Mr. President, it is almost as if he is punishing them for the rule that the Department of Defense has promulgated and that he wants to try to make this a case of the Biden administration overreaching, distorting the Department of Defense, bending DOD to its will, infusing the Department of Defense with some sort of woke strategy.

I think it is really important for the American people to understand what is at stake here. This is not a game. This is not a game when you are holding up every promotion of every single flag officer at DOD. This is not a game when all you are talking about is whether we are going to have a country that discriminates against people or whether people are going to be treated equally. This isn't a game when the question is, Are you going to have the ability to have your leave paid for, your travel paid for, to have a little extra time to talk to your commanding officer about the decision that you are going to have to face?

Why in the world would we want to make life more difficult for people who are in that condition or circumstance? Why are we blaming them for a rule that they had nothing to do with writing and that the DOD had the ability to promulgate? The Department of Justice has made that clear. It defies common sense. It defies common sense.

And tonight we heard him say that he is here because he is trying to defend the sanctity of life. That is what he said. And I have said out here and I will say again that I believe that people in this country have strong differences of opinion when it comes to a woman's right to choose and when it comes to abortion and that I think it is really important that people respect that. The Presiding Officer and I actually have had this conversation over the years about that, and I believe it. I think that people can have very different moral points of view here. I think that people can have very different religious points of view about this.

I have concluded, for myself, that I think this is a decision that is much better left--partly because it is such a difficult decision, it is a much better decision to be left to a woman herself, consulting with whomever she wants to consult with--her doctor, her family--than it is for Michael Bennet to impose myself on that decision or for Senator Tuberville to impose himself on that decision.

Tonight, we heard him say that he thinks that DOD--that somehow this money could be used to pay for late abortions in this country and who wouldn't be for stopping late abortions in America; everybody would want to stop late abortions.

I would think, if you studied the matter, if you asked the question, ``What is a late abortion in America? What does happen?'' that what you discover is, not surprisingly, that 1 percent of abortions in America, or less than 1 percent, are late abortions in America, and they are situations where women--moms, mostly moms--have made the decision I say it--because it is going to be moms and dads--but, often, mostly moms-- who have made the decision to have a child, to pick a name, to pick out the furniture for a bedroom, and then something has gone terribly wrong, something nobody in this Chamber would ever wish on anybody they knew. And sometimes those are circumstances where--against all expectations, against all promise, against all hope, against all joy-- somebody has to make a decision to have a late-term abortion.

Is that really the moment that we want Senator Tuberville helping to make that decision? Is that really when we want the Federal Government helping to make that decision? I don't think so. But I think we shouldn't be surprised that we are here with this extreme measure that he has taken in the Senate, a reflection of what is an extreme ideology.

He has called abortion ``infanticide.'' He has called abortion ``this generation's Holocaust.'' He won't be satisfied until he subjects women in his State to the draconian measures that Alabama has legislated. There are no exceptions for rape or incest in Alabama. If you are a doctor and you perform an abortion, you can go to jail for up to 99 years in Alabama.

Just today, Mr. President, we found out that the Alabama attorney general--like the attorney general from Mississippi, I think it was-- wants to record information and is demanding that information be supplied to the government on women who have traveled out of State to seek abortion services. That is a pretty dystopian view of where we are as a country. I don't understand how you could say you are on the side of freedom and be trying to hunt the information down for American citizens who are making a decision that is in their interest or the interest of their family, to collect information on a lawful medical procedure, to try to prevent women from traveling across State lines in this country--in this country--in this democracy, this Republic.

How do you say that you are on the side of freedom when you refuse to allow women to have the same opportunity to travel for medical procedures as men, unless you think that somehow women aren't entitled to the same freedoms as men? How do you make the case--I don't know-- that you stand for freedom? You might stand for something else than to stand for freedom when you say that you are in a better position, as an elected politician from a State, to make judgments about a woman's pregnancy than she is.

This is a freedom to discriminate. This is a freedom to oppress people. We are in a tough place tonight because of what the Senator from Alabama has done.

I acknowledge that his State is really different from mine. Colorado really values freedom, and Colorado really values privacy. By the way, I am sure the people of Alabama do too. I can't prove it here tonight, but I will bet you there are a lot of people in Alabama who think it is wrong to be holding up these flag officers and who, if they knew that this really was about paying, for example, for paid leave--not taxpayer-funded abortions, which is what we heard again tonight, which isn't true--that they would say: Man, this doesn't sound like the right battle that we are taking.

It is like the 65 percent of people in Florida who are saying: What? Our Governor signed a bill at 11 p.m. at night to create a 6-week abortion ban in our State when there are women in Florida all the time who don't even know that they are pregnant at that time?

Colorado has taken a different view. We are a libertarian State in some respects--a libertarian State, a Western State. We believe a decision about a woman's health belongs between a woman and her doctor and her family, if she chooses to involve them. We were the first State in America to decriminalize abortion before Roe v. Wade was even decided. We were the first State--Colorado--to codify the right to choose after Dobbs. And that is a totally different view of the world than Alabama has, and I accept that.

But the reason why we are here is we have got to figure out what to do in a post-Dobbs world, where that minimum threshold, that constitutional freedom on which so many generations of Americans-- especially American women, but Americans--have relied has been stripped away. And in my opinion, in the meantime, we ought to be willing to say that this is a decision that should be left to women, to make this decision in their interest and for themselves.

It is not my job or the Senator from Alabama's job to substitute his position, his decision, to effectively say that we are going to reward your service, your willingness to serve in the Department of Defense, when you have been sent, through no fault of your own or decision of your own, to a place like Alabama that has banned abortion in this country--we are not only going to allow you to make that decision, but we are going to say that you have got to pay your own way out of here; that, unlike any other person, you can't take paid leave.

I think that is an extreme position, Mr. President, and I think it is an absurd position to believe that we are not hurting our national defense by not confirming these generals and these admirals and these other people who are up for promotion and that it doesn't somehow degrade our military readiness, when it obviously does. And every single person in this Chamber knows that it does.

At a time when Putin is in Ukraine and China is saber-rattling in the Pacific, this is the last thing we need to do. There is a reason why our friends in Ukraine are working so hard to try to take out the leadership in Putin's army, for God's sake--because it matters who is in command, as a matter of your national defense, as a matter of your national security, as a matter of your willingness or your ability to be able to effectively fight.

So I am at the end tonight, Mr. President. I apologize to the floor staff, once again, for keeping us here as late as I have. I apologize to the young pages who are here, in particular, not just for that fact but because they are coming of age at a moment in American history when we are coughing up fundamental rights, instead of extending those rights to people.

But that is what this battle has to be about. That is what this battle is about. That is why it is so important that when something like this happens, that we call it out and that even people who are natural allies or otherwise would be natural allies of a particular political position might in this instance say ``Man, that tactic is really self-defeating'' or might in this instance say ``Please at least tell the American people candidly what it is you are doing.'' I think the American people, if they understood that, would say we should do our job and approve these nominations.

I think the American people, in the years ahead and the decades ahead, are going to fix the decision that the Dobbs Court just did. There is no doubt in my mind that the American people are not going to stand for Justice Alito's America where if it wasn't a freedom in 1868, it is not a freedom today. We have come too far for that to be our point of view. We owe too much to this next generation of Americans and even the generation that is coming after them, believe it or not, for that to be our point of view.

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