Cloture Motion

Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Washington and Senators Schumer and Durbin for bringing us together to condemn the pardons and what happened, but I also want to first express my dissatisfaction about what is happening with this administration in just the first week.

It was only a week ago that we gathered in the Capitol Rotunda, and, as I said that day, there is a reason we have three branches of government under the Constitution.

The first article is article I, which establishes the Congress and makes very clear our job to have people's backs. And what has happened with an order in the middle of the night--just a letter from a bureaucrat, in which one person can--what?--basically get ahead of the Constitution--I think we have gathered here today saying: No.

This has real consequences for people's lives. I think about the mom who didn't know this morning if she could send her kid to childcare. I think about the teenager--and I was contacted about this--in a cancer study, hoping that it is going to save his life. I think about the woman in an abusive relationship who has nowhere to go because her local domestic violence shelter couldn't take her in.

Our office heard today from a domestic violence organization in Minnesota that said it could not access critical funding.

We think about the first responders and the firefighters all over our country. We think about what we saw them doing in Los Angeles over the past month. Grants that pay for their equipment, funding that pays for them to allow them to hire firefighters--this is not acceptable.

It is not the executive branch's decision to make. It is Congress's job to direct funding through laws passed by both Chambers. In fact, the laws we are dealing with here clearly had bipartisan support. That is how they got in when we had one House that was Republican and one House that was Democratic. Now that switched, and they are both Republican. But the money and the funding were supported by both parties.

The American people have sent us here to represent our constituents, and that is what we are doing.

This chaos that we have seen today, with multiple groups and people not knowing what was happening, reminds me of the last Trump administration. We saw the same thing. January 6

Just a few days ago, the President issued blanket pardons for the insurrectionists who desecrated this very building on January 6, 2021. It is a shocking display of disrespect for the law enforcement heroes who defended our democracy.

I will say, I have been critical of pardons from Presidents of both parties. I think we desperately need pardon reform. While it is the power of the President, when you look at what Governors do across the country, which actually have commissions set up that make recommendations on pardons, you could still have the power to pardon, but you could make recommendations and more thoroughly look at these cases on a case-by-case basis.

So January 6 and the assault on our democracy, many of us were there. I was the one with Senator Blunt, the former Senator of Missouri. We were the leads on the Rules Committee, and we were the ones, at 3:30 in the morning, when everyone had gone home, that made that walk with Vice President Pence. It was just the three of us and three pairs of young women holding the mahogany boxes with the electoral ballots that one of the young pages had the wherewithal, and the Parliamentarian staff, to get out of the Chamber before it was invaded.

In the morning, when we made that walk, it was a celebration--pomp and circumstance--everyone following behind us. And then that night, at 3:30 in the morning, we had officers with scratches on their faces, over 100 of them injured, and we made that walk over broken glass and by pillars spray-painted with racist vulgarities.

We made that walk, and democracy prevailed. Part of that democracy was to make sure that those who violated the law, those who assaulted the police officers, those who had members of our staff--people always focus on the Members of Congress, but so many members of our staffs were hiding. My staff was hiding in the little kitchen downstairs, with knives in their hands, for 3 hours, behind a door. Two of them were in this little closet off the kitchen. That story was repeated throughout the Capitol.

These were assaults. This was a violent mob that attacked our democracy and attacked brave men and women of the Capitol Police who were defending it.

Over the last 4 years, I have led bipartisan hearings to examine the events and the security failures. I did that with Senator Blunt and Senator Portman and Senator Peters. We have worked. We have 103 recommendations that came out of the inspector general and dozens out of our committees, and Chief Manger has met the challenge--all 103 recommendations. We have increased morale. We have the fact that we have more police officers. We hired hundreds more.

Then came the gut punch of these pardons--the gut punch to justice, the gut punch to these police officers. They were the heroes that day, not the criminals that stormed the Capitol because they didn't like the election result. To pardon these criminals, many of them convicted of very serious felonies, is to endorse political violence. It is a slap in the face of the men and women of law enforcement who showed true patriotism that day, and it is truly an affront to our democracy.

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