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Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I rise today to thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who have been involved in work with the Rules Committee.

I have led that committee as chair for the last 4 years and as ranking member before that.

As we look ahead to the new Congress, I would like to thank our ranking member, Senator Fischer, for her partnership in the last 2 years and the opportunity to do important work with her. And I look forward to continuing our work together next month on the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies that I chair.

I also want to express my gratitude to my friend, former Senator Blunt, for our work when we led the committee together and to congratulate our incoming chair, Leader McConnell, and Ranking Member Senator Padilla.

In addition, I want to thank the Rules Committee members for their service, and I look forward to continuing to serve on the committee. And that would be Senator Schumer and Senator Warner; Merkley; Senator Padilla, of course; Senator Ossoff; Bennet; Welch; Senator Schiff, who just joined the committee in place of Senator Butler--we also thank her; Senator McConnell; Senator Cruz; Senator Capito; Senator Wicker; Senator Hyde-Smith; Senator Hagerty; and Senator Britt, as well as the staff who have supported our work, including my staff director who is here, Elizabeth Farrar, who has been with me for a very long time as my counsel and judiciary and leg director, has done incredible work. I also want to thank former staff director Lizzy Peluso and Lindsey Kerr and the other members of our Rules Committee staff, some of whom are here today, including Steve Spaulding, who has done excellent work on elections; Ben Driscoll; Counsel Kristin Mollet; Allison Hunn; Kulani Jalata; Khalil Lee; and our clerks, Cami Morrison and Kasie Jones, as well as the staff for Senator Fischer and the nonpartisan staff as well.

The Rules Committee is a little different than some of the other committees, and if we have disagreements, we have tended to work them out. As Senator Blunt used to say: The chair and ranking member of the committee are kind of like the mayors of the Capitol, kind of getting involved in many issues regarding the building itself, regarding the personnel, regarding our Senators, and making sure that this place functions. And that means you don't want to have a lot of public brawls over how to fix things.

We have managed to get a lot done and made a lot of changes that are really positive over the last few years. What may be our committee's lasting contribution to the Senate and the country will be on display next month when we convene to certify the results of the election in line with the significant reforms that we have made to the Electoral Count Act.

Senator Blunt and I shepherded that bill through the Rules Committee and worked on the bill, along with, of course, Senator Collins and Senator Manchin.

We got a bipartisan vote on our committee of 14 to 1 to significant changes to make sure that the will of the voters prevails and that, in fact, we don't have situations where one Senator or one House Member can block the electoral count or that claims can be made that a Vice President can overcome the will of the people and the like. That was an old law that needed to be changed; we changed it for generations to come.

We also will see the changes as we see key security improvements that we have made, thanks in large part to Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, someone who we installed after January 6, and as well as the men and women of the Capitol Police who stand in defense of the Capitol every single day.

We also thank Sergeant At Arms General Karen Gibson for her good work. We had a final hearing of the Rules Committee last week involving Chief Manger. It was our eighth hearing on the Capitol Police, including two hearings that I held with the Homeland Security Committee--major, major joint hearings after January 6 in which our focus was on security failures and how they had to be fixed after January 6.

We also had our first joint hearing of the Capitol Police Board with the House, with Representative Steil--first hearing since 1945. As the Chief testified at our hearing last week, the Capitol Police have made significant progress in the last 4 years. In that time, the Department has made necessary enhancements impacting all aspects of work, including implementing the bipartisan security report that came out of those major, major hearings that were televised in which we called the former Police Chief of the Capitol Police, the former Sergeant At Arms at the House and the Senate, and major leaders in the FBI and in Homeland Security to figure out what went wrong.

On my mind is always the haunting voice of the officer on the police line that day that went over the police radio saying: Does anyone have a plan, does anyone have a plan; the horror story of 75 percent of the cops not having access to riot gear; that a number of their gears were actually locked on a bus that they couldn't access, with the insurrectionists sometimes having better gear than our police officers had.

Senator Blunt and I then led legislation, which has passed, to allow the Capitol Police to request immediate assistance from the National Guard in an emergency. It was like a phone tree they had to go through that led to significant delays. That legislation has passed and allowed the Police Chief to do that.

The bipartisan security report that Senators Blunt, Peters, Portman, and I put in the wake of our hearings, those changes have been made, and 103 recommendations from the Department inspector general have been implemented--all 103 recommendations. The way we know that is we had a hearing, and half were done. Then we had another hearing, and more were done. That is accountability. That is the bipartisan job of the U.S. Senate--to oversee these things and make sure they get done for the safety of our police officers, for the security of the people who work in this Capitol, and not just the Members but the court reporters and the people who are working in the cafeteria and the people who are keeping things clean around here. They need that protection. They were the ones hiding in closets.

(Mr. WELCH assumed the Chair.)

We also passed my bipartisan legislation with Senator Fischer to improve accountability and empower Congress to appoint and remove the Architect of the Capitol. We learned that day through hearings from the House of Representatives as well as our work in the Senate that the then-Architect of the Capitol didn't even come in that day. He said he was in his mobile van. That person has been terminated, but we found out in the course of all this that we didn't have the ability to terminate the Architect of the Capitol in the House and the Senate, so we passed the legislation that gave us the ownership of it. We hire this person on a bipartisan basis--with the Senate and the House, Republicans and Democrats--who supervises the work of thousands of employees in this Capitol, and we also have the right to terminate that person--not the President; us. As a result, we have our new Architect of the Capitol, Tom Austin, and he was supported with unanimous bipartisan and bicameral support.

With the support of so many servicemembers, veterans, and military families, our committee passed a resolution that paved the way--I see the Presiding Officer, Senator Welch, was part of this--to pass a rule that paved the way for an eventually voluntary agreement so that more than 400 military promotions would move forward after months and months of delay.

I thank my Republican colleagues that stood up on this floor to get those nominations through, as well as all the Democrats, and I thank the Democrats on the committee for working with me on this resolution so that we could pass it to change the rules, and that eventually put some pressure on to get this done.

During my time in the committee, thanks to our great members, we have taken on a whole host of issues: reopening the buildings after the pandemic; reforming the outdated process of the reporting and handling of harassment claims on Capitol Hill, which was something I did with former-Senator Blunt as well as Senators Schumer and McConnell--they showed great leadership, all of them; making closed captioning available for all Senate committee hearings.

We worked to ensure that the people we venerate in this Capitol more closely reflect the people of this country. It is not just about removing paintings and statues; it is about who you put up there so that when little kids come in, they see them and think, oh, that is someone who looks like me.

We passed my legislation, with Senators Murkowski, Collins, and Sinema, for two statues of two former, trailblazing Supreme Court Justices--one appointed by a Democratic President and one by a Republican--Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Once those are completed, there will be 21 women finally represented in statues in the Capitol. Of the 209 statues in the Capitol, 192 are men--but, OK, I am not counting--but I changed this one statue at a time. We have added five of those statues of women just in the time I have been chair.

We also dedicated the first rooms in the Senate wing of the Capitol-- this was sort of ironic. We had not one room in the Capitol named after a woman when I came in--not one; zero--when we had, in fact, many women leaders in the Congress. We dedicated those first rooms in the Senate wing in honor of women--I am talking about the Senate wing here--former Senators Barbara Mikulski and Margaret Chase Smith.

Margaret Chase Smith was from Maine, and she was the first Republican on the Armed Services Committee and the first major candidate for President on the Republican side.

The bust of Justice Taney, who authored the Dred Scott decision, was removed and will be replaced with one of Justice Thurgood Marshall-- that sounds like a pretty good trade to me--the first African American to serve on our Nation's High Court.

When our restaurant workers unionized, we fought to make sure they had a fair contract.

In one of my favorite moments--and this was one of my more fun things we worked on. I work on a lot of kind of detailed things which involve Senators telling me when there is too long of a line of visitors trying to come into the Capitol, sending me pictures, making sure we have people working at those gates, making sure Senators are able to get to and from, that they get offices they need, that they get their hideaways. Some of that isn't fun, but it is still important.

But what was really fun was when Senator Blunt and I worked to update the rules so that Senator Duckworth, who was just presiding over the Senate, and everyone in her wake are able to bring their babies onto the Senate floor. Before that, we only allowed dogs onto the Senate floor.

Senator Duckworth already had a toddler. She said that if there were late-night votes, she would have to bring her baby with her. The House already allowed for this.

What I most remember from that time is that I had to use a Dr. Seuss rhyme, which I am not going to use, about how we had to get this done because she wasn't going to burp the baby in the house; she would be as quiet as a mouse. It was really long. I am not going to go into the whole thing, but it was quite effective.

So out of that, after some of maybe the more senior Members of the Senate didn't want to change the rule and they didn't want to talk about breastfeeding and things like that--but none of that ever happened. We changed the rule. It is a good thing.

I will never forget the first day Tammy Duckworth brought her little baby Maile Pearl--now not so little but at the time, all 6 pounds of her--here onto the floor, wheeling her in on her wheelchair, with all the reporters looking down and not really a dry eye in the house, and it was kind of an amazing moment. So things have changed in little ways one thing at a time.

We have done important work, as I note, much of it behind the scenes to help so many of our colleagues with issues that impact their ability to do their work, regardless of party or ideology. We help to support repairs and updates to offices here in Washington. In their home States, we have implemented new security measures. We have made sure that constituents can be hosted and feel welcome in this place.

We strived to make sure the security lines to get in the buildings were moving along--there was some transition after the pandemic--and we literally have worked to make sure the trains in the basement were running smoothly. I got a lot of texts from Members about that.

As we look ahead to the new Congress, we have worked with the Secretary of the Senate, the Architect of the Capitol, and the Sergeant at Arms to welcome our newly elected colleagues on both sides of the aisle to the Senate and make sure they have what they need to run their offices on day one.

We also have worked tirelessly to support the safety of those in the Capitol, which I mentioned, especially the Parliamentarian's office, which was really at risk--as I look at some of my favorite employees in the Senate--that day of January 6, and we take their input and try to make changes whenever we can with those concerns.

We work to support the Agencies in the committee's jurisdiction here in our Nation's Capital. The Library of Congress has expanded public access to its digital collections, and its new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery opened to the public earlier this year, featuring special items from the Library's collection, like a draft of the Gettysburg Address, handwritten by President Lincoln; President James Madison's crystal flute; and the original handwritten lyrics from ``The Sound of Music.'' I thought that was cool.

We celebrated the arrival of the new pandas that will be ready to meet visitors at the National Zoo next month. I got to see them already. They are really cute.

Since two new Smithsonian museums were established with bipartisan support after legislation passed the committee unanimously in 2020, we are at this moment working to get those locations nailed down. The locations have been chosen, and tens of millions of dollars have been raised for both the Women's Museum and the Latino Museum.

We have 50 Republicans in the House of Representatives on the bill, on the joint bill, and we are doing everything we can to get this done at the end of the year. I really don't understand what people's issue is when this is not a money situation; this is a location situation. So they can raise even more money than they have already to build these museums. The Smithsonian is supportive of this. These will be very positive museums. People want to go see the Women's Museum, they want to see the Latino Museum, and this is our big opportunity to get this done on a bipartisan basis.

Fundraising is now at--private fundraising--$68 million for each new museum. Directors have been hired and staff working to build the collections because of Congress. Congress gave them the authority to move forward. They have done it, and they have done it incredibly well and found locations that both Senator Blunt and I have signed off on.

These two open sites on the National Mall will look even better to anyone who goes and looks at them and actually looks at it and thinks about it, and the Smithsonian Board of Regents has determined that.

Our work to get the needed waivers to begin construction, as I noted, is ongoing, with over 100 cosponsors, evenly split between the parties, on the House bill, led by Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York, a Republican, and Judy Chu of California.

As we are nearing the end of this Congress, we have two major challenges--one, getting the two new museums the waivers so they can continue progressing. Our leaders on both sides will decide the fate of the Women's Museum. The four men who are leading our Congress in the Senate and the House will make this decision. Many women have been involved in pushing this issue so we can finally move forward on this, and we appreciate Senator Schumer's strong support for this.

Through the past several years, we have not stopped fighting to protect our free and fair elections, the cornerstone of our democracy, which is our second challenge--to continue that work--supporting our State and local election workers on the frontlines, ensuring they have needed resources, and successfully urging the Election Assistance Commission to enable them to use funding to protect against threats. We held our first field hearing in 20 years in Georgia on the Freedom to Vote Act, which we are looking forward to reintroducing next year.

I am very focused on artificial intelligence in our elections and bipartisan work. I have one bill with Senator Murkowski and another with Senator Hawley to take this on.

In closing, I want to end my work on the Rules Committee with a story that Senator Blunt always loved to share with our colleagues. It is a story of a bust that he always had in his office called The Unknown Cleric, a statue, and it is a guy that looked very distinguished.

Senator Blunt did a bunch of research, and he could never figure out who this guy was. It was over 100 years ago that they made this beautiful statue of him, and no one could figure who he was except that he is a cleric, because of his collar, so he called him The Unknown Cleric.

At the time, they thought this man was so important, but today, as Senator Blunt likes to tell people who came to his office, whether they were Senators or school kids, today, no one even knows who he is.

So what is the message we learn from that? That what we do here is more important than who we are. Most people aren't going to remember who we are 100 years from now--and I like to remind my colleagues of that--but they are going to remember when we do good things that help them, that help their kids, that help their grandkids. They are going to remember, when they walk into that Women's Museum or that Latino Museum, that someone back at this point had the foresight to think, OK, these are pretty important things in American history, and maybe we should honor them. Or maybe they are going to think 100 years from now, I am sure glad we still have our democracy because somewhere back there, they changed an old law and made sure that we reformed our election process or that we protected our democracy or we stood up for democracy, because what we do is more important than who we are.

That is why this committee, which has been run on such a strong bipartisan basis over the last decades under both Democrat and Republican leadership, has been a big part of that.

I look forward to working with our incoming Rules Committee chair, Leader McConnell, and ranking member, Senator Padilla. I know they are both well suited to do this work. I think maybe Senator McConnell knows a little bit about the Capitol and how it is run. I look forward to working with them.

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