Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025
Floor Speech
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Ms. TOKUDA. Madam Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.
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Ms. TOKUDA. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Madam Chair, as the mother of two teenage boys in public schools, I understand and can appreciate the need for age-appropriate content to ensure our schools remain nurturing environments for our kids, but the kinds of content that make it into these curricula and classrooms are decisions best left to professional educators working together with parents to determine what is best for our students.
As a mom, it is important that our children see themselves and the situations they face in the books they read and the curriculum they are taught. This amendment is yet another attempt to broadly ban entire categories of books, forcing educators to second-guess and censor themselves.
Engaging with novel and challenging topics is essential to how kids grow as students and individuals. They need to be able to confront ideas and topics that may not always be comfortable to them.
This amendment is simply terrible policy in terms of providing our kids with the education they need to succeed in a complex and rapidly evolving world.
Ultimately, at its core, this is a discriminatory and offensive amendment in its targeting of our LGBTQ+ people. It separates the military children attending DODEA schools, some of which identify as LGBTQ+ themselves, from their peers in other school systems in the United States, isolating them and depriving their education of perspectives critical to their own self-identification, growth, and development.
This amendment makes it harder for DODEA teachers and counselors to support students with the materials they need if they question their gender identities or sexual orientation. This is an unwelcome intrusion on the trust between students and their teachers and counselors, who can play important roles for military children often moving from place to place at formative times in their lives, eliminating the ability for educators to provide resources and guides to help our military youth with complicated decisions and feelings that they have. This is absolutely unacceptable.
I have had conversations with young people back home who shared serious concerns about the impact of censorship of LGBTQ+ content in their schools and the mental health of themselves and their peers. This amendment would further that sense of isolation and lead to increased rates of depression and, tragically, as we have seen, suicidal ideation.
This amendment also sends a deeply hurtful and wrong message to LGBTQ+ servicemembers, some of whom may have children attending DODEA schools, about what this Congress and our government think about them and their loved ones. This amendment dishonors their service and commitment to our country.
We know that the people most hurt by book bans are ultimately students and kids, and this amendment undermines the quality of education and experience that military children receive at our DODEA schools.
It is reckless, discriminatory, and an attack on our LGBTQ+ students and servicemembers. As a mom, I think that all of our children deserve to feel supported, included, and seen in our educational system.
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Ms. TOKUDA. Madam Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Jacobs).
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Ms. TOKUDA. Madam Chair, may I inquire how much time I have remaining.
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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Chair, I yield to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Smith).
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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Chair, once again, it appears my colleagues fail to understand what critical race theory is.
Critical race theory helps us understand the past, while DEI, as they have often been against, helps us chart the path forward to acknowledge and rectify the systemic racism that still shapes the present. Let's not conflate or confuse the two.
Let me reiterate: Critical race theory is simply an academic and legal framework to recognize that systemic racism is part of our Nation's history. Yes, that is hard to hear, but sadly that is absolutely the fact and the case.
Systemic racism continues, quite frankly, to affect our society and individuals in it to this very day. These are hard truths for my colleagues that cannot bear to hear it.
However, there is no other way to explain the compromise enshrined for almost 80 years in our Constitution that count slaves as three- fifths of a person to determine matters like the number of seats allotted to States for this very body, the House of Representatives.
There is no other way to explain the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Asian Exclusion Act, which banned immigration of Asian people to this country for decades. Nor is there any other way to justify the grave historical injustices of Executive Order 9066 that interned over 100,000 Japanese Americans during the Second World War, including my great-grandfather, who was locked up against his will in Santa Fe, New Mexico, while my grandfather, his son, served in the military intelligence service for a country who saw and treated him and his loved ones as the enemy.
Systemic racism is a part of the history of our military, the Department of Defense, and this country. There is no other way to explain the fact that, even though they served bravely in the Revolutionary War, Black men were formally excluded from military service after the war until the Civil War.
Meanwhile, Filipino veterans of World War II waited for over four decades for the citizenship and benefits promised to them for their service under our flag and are still waiting to this day.
If my Republican colleagues believe we can compete with our adversaries across the globe by avoiding these truths, they are sadly mistaken.
While our adversaries will seek to whitewash and erase histories like that of the Ukrainians, the Tibetans, and the Uyghurs, we must do better. We should be better because this speaks to who we are as a Nation.
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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Chair, having our servicemembers learn about systemic racism and think critically about the role it continues to play in our society may make some of them uncomfortable, but it is not going to make them hate America. It will, however, help them understand why inequities persist in our country, including in the ranks of our military.
I hope it will remind them how far we have come and how much further we must go toward a more equitable future, one in which they, regardless of their background, can achieve their fullest potential.
We need to understand critical race theory for what it is, an opportunity for us to confront our past and work toward a better future.
Mr. Chair, for that reason, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment.
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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition to this amendment.
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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. To be clear, January 6 was an attack on America, our democracy, and this institution, which we have all taken an oath to serve. This shouldn't be controversial. Servicemembers who swear an oath to the Constitution should not try to overthrow the United States Government.
Yet, the latest report from the Department of Defense inspector general found that 78 servicemembers were alleged to have advocated for the overthrow of the government in the past year alone. That is likely an undercount given reported challenges in gathering and compiling data across the military departments.
Clearly, extremism in the military remains a persistent and serious issue, one that we should not take lightly, again, given the January 6 insurrection in which we know some servicemembers and veterans participated. This fact alone should be deeply concerning to every single one of us in this Chamber.
Instead of taking this problem seriously, this amendment prohibits the Department of Defense from implementing recommendations designed to counter extremist activity in our military. This undermines unit cohesion, the readiness of our forces, and ultimately public trust in our military.
My colleagues allege that the Department's efforts to counter extremist activities unfairly targets conservatives. There is nothing in the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group's final report to substantiate that allegation because violent extremism, regardless of its political or partisan leaning, is a danger to all of us and to this democracy.
There can be no denial that far-right extremism is surging across the country at a much higher level than that of leftwing extremism. A recent study showed that violent extremist acts in the United States were far more likely to be associated with far-right ideologies like white supremacy than with any far-left alternative. In fact, the level of violence perpetrated by rightwing extremists in this country is on par with, if not higher than, that of Islamist extremists.
In our country, where servicemembers have access to critical national security information and assets, individuals motivated by extremist ideologies can pose an outsize threat to our national security when they move beyond fair and legal expression of contentious issues and into subversive or even violent actions.
Tackling extremism in our military is not about promoting wokeness, which my colleagues continue to be obsessed about. It is about protecting our people and our country. That, sadly, also means preventing domestic terrorism and addressing the serious and persistent threat to our homeland. It is also about restoring public confidence and trust in one of the most important institutions in our history and society.
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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time to close.
First of all, let's be clear here. As we previously heard, we are not talking about DEI, which, once again, this is an obsession of the far right in this particular body. I will agree with you, though, in the same context of that conversation, I think we are in agreement. This is about how we should serve as one united Nation. How do we serve as a United States of America as a whole?
The bottom line is, when we take a look at the kind of extremist activity that is happening within our military that was found by the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group, this is not bringing our country together. This is not allowing us to stand under one common flag.
A 2020 Military Times poll found that more than half of minority servicemembers, servicemembers of color, say they have personally witnessed examples of white nationalism or ideologically driven racism within the ranks.
As we can recall, in June 2020, a servicemember of the 173rd Airborne Brigade with white supremacist leanings led classified troop movements to facilitate an attack on his own unit while deployed to Turkiye.
Let's be clear here. The recommendations of the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group are not controversial, and they include: Enhancing insider threat analysis and response, developing comprehensive training and education for departmental leadership, providing notice to personnel on prohibited activities, and improving internal information sharing and coordination.
I think we can all agree in this body, no matter what side of the aisle you sit on, this is good for us if we are truly trying to stand up to China, to Russia, and to North Korea. How do we make ourselves truly a United States Department of Defense, not one that is currently divided by internal risks, internal extremism that, sadly, we are seeing too often in the field and in our ranks.
Mr. Chair, I strongly encourage all of my colleagues to vote against this amendment and to make sure that we can, in fact, be a strong united presence standing against our adversaries across the globe. I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.
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