Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations The Right To Appeal Act -- Motion To Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, as were most Americans, I was very disturbed by the scenes from Baltimore that unfolded on our TV sets across America--a place not too far away from here--during the last couple of weeks. The whole idea of a young man dying in police custody, followed by the confrontations with police and the looting and burning of innocent minority-owned businesses in their own neighborhoods--these are all scenes we would expect perhaps in other countries, somewhere else around the world, but certainly not here at home. But that is what we saw and not just last week but also last summer in Ferguson, MO.

So the question arises: What can we do? What can we do about it? What can we do as individual citizens? What can we do as parents? What can we do as neighbors? And then: What can we do as Members of the U.S. Congress? Perhaps more fundamentally, how can we as a nation unite to address injustice when it occurs? What steps can we take today to help the diverse fabric of this great Nation mend for future generations?

As I indicated, I am somewhat skeptical that Washington, DC, and particularly the U.S. Congress, can wave a magic wand and solve these problems. A lot of this is going to have to be worked out at the local level by communities, by families, by houses of faith, and by civic organizations as well. Obviously, they are closest to the situation. But the Federal Government does, I believe, have a role to play that I will speak about in just a moment. I will just conclude in speaking about Baltimore by saying that our prayers, I know, are with those involved, and I know they are carefully considering how best to move forward and heal as well. But we are doing a great disservice to ourselves and to everyone else so clearly frustrated by the status quo if we isolate Baltimore or Ferguson as just individual instances of civil unrest and if we don't step back and see how they fit into the broader issue of our entire criminal justice system.

I sometimes call myself a recovering judge. I was a district judge for 6 years, which is our main trial court in Texas, and I was on the Texas Supreme Court for 7 years after that. I also served as attorney general. I mention all of that just to say that I have had some exposure in my professional life and in my adult life with our criminal justice system. I have seen how it should work, and I have seen areas where we need to get to work to reform what is broken.

I believe Congress can and must play a role--even a small role; I say small but in a significant way--by correcting injustice where we can and making it less likely that situations such as those we have seen in Ferguson or Baltimore are repeated. While we cannot singlehandedly fix broken families or broken communities or deal with situations at the local level around the country, we can contribute to efforts to remedy the basic instability of those communities and particularly we can start to make real progress in our criminal justice system to lessen the burden on those communities that are struggling with these issues.

I know the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, Senator Grassley, is committed to doing what he can, through the Committee on the Judiciary, to pursue criminal justice reform. I am happy to say that under the leadership of Senator Grassley, many efforts are already underway to consider how we can do a better job of rehabilitating offenders, increase public safety, save taxpayers some money, and help rebuild that all-important relationship between law enforcement and local communities.

One example of how we are doing that is a piece of legislation I introduced in February with the junior Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Whitehouse, called the CORRECTIONS Act, which stands for the Corrections Oversight, Recidivism Reduction, and Eliminating Costs for Taxpayers In Our National System Act. That is why we call it CORRECTIONS, because that is such a long title, but I think it says a lot about what we are trying to achieve.

With about 30 percent of the Department of Justice budget spent on detaining Federal inmates and the costs of Federal prisons skyrocketing, this bill would actually take a number of constructive steps to reform our Federal prison system and would also make better use of taxpayers' money.

For example, the CORRECTIONS Act would allow eligible offenders--mainly low-risk or medium-risk offenders; certainly not high-risk offenders--to earn additional days of good time credit by participating in programs that will help equip them for life outside of prison. Texas is sometimes considered a tough-on-crime State, and that is true. After awhile, though, we realized we also need to be smart on crime because virtually all of the people incarcerated in our prisons will eventually someday be released. We need to begin to focus on what we can do to help them--those who want help and who will accept that help--and how we can do a better job of equipping them so they don't end up recommitting, reoffending, and ending up back in prison again. That is what this piece of legislation tries to do.

So the CORRECTIONS Act allows offenders to earn additional days of earned time credit by participating in programs that will prepare them for life outside of prison. Low-risk offenders, for example, could earn up to 10 days of earned time credit for every month in which they are successfully completing programs such as drug rehab, education, work programs, faith-based training, and life skills courses. It is astonishing. I was in East Texas at one part of the Texas prison system where I got to observe some of the prisoners, some of the inmates there attending some of these types of courses. It is shocking how poorly equipped so many of these inmates are for life outside of prison and why it is so important that we try to help those who will accept the help and who want the help to prepare for life outside so they don't end up back inside.

This legislation would allow these eligible prisoners to use this good time credit to spend the final portion of their sentences in home confinement or a halfway house.

Half-way houses have worked over time as a transition from prison to life in communities, and they work very well. Also, technology can even allow home confinement for nonviolent, low-risk prisoners who have earned the right to a less confining circumstance on the backhand of their sentence. This may sound like a little thing, but it is important for several reasons.

First of all, inmates need to learn valuable skills that can transfer to a lifetime of community engagement, instead of returning to a lifetime of crime. Second, it allows them to reconnect sooner with their families and the communities that need them most. Finally, this makes financial sense. It costs about $5,000 a year to keep a low-risk prisoner in home confinement, and it cost $30,000 a year to keep them in prison.

I am not one of those who say, well, we just need to save money, so let's throw public safety to the wind. That is not what this does. We focus first on public safety as we must, but we also try to be smart about it--not just tough on crime. We try to be smart on crime. The great thing is that we actually have States such as my State that have experimented with this sort of approach with great success. Texas has actually, over recent years, closed three prison systems. Crime has not spiked, and, in fact, many inmates who have taken advantage of this program have become resocialized and integrated back into society. So we actually know. Rather than the Federal Government trying to mandate for the entire Nation and adhering to some new experiment, we actually have the laboratories of democracy--otherwise known as the States--under our Federal system, trying things out to see if they will work, and we learn from that if we can. This is an area where we can learn, and we should.

So I look forward to working with Chairman Grassley and our members of the Judiciary Committee to get the CORRECTIONS Act passed. The last time it was considered, last year, it passed overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis through the Judiciary Committee.

As I said, fortunately, Chairman Grassley has made this a priority, and he has put together a bipartisan effort to look at some other consensus ideas that we might add to this prison reform bill, such as sentencing reform. Honestly, that is a little bit more controversial, because I am not one for just cutting sentences on the front-end indiscriminately or arbitrarily. We need to make sure we are smart about sentencing reform. I think this consensus-building effort that Chairman Grassley has undertaken will help us get in the right place. There are a number of targeted sentencing reforms I think we could all support to help address failures in our criminal justice system.

So we should not let the divisive, controversial proposals stand in the way of making real bipartisan progress on the issue of criminal justice reform. But this is sort of a chronic problem we have had around here when we try to do comprehensive everything. When we try to do comprehensive everything, we make mistakes. We also make it almost impossible to do, because there are so many different moving parts. It is complicated, and many people remain skeptical about its chances of succeeding. But when you have something such as the CORRECTIONS Act, which brings to the Federal level the successful pilot programs that have been undertaken in the States, it just makes sense that this should be the place we should start. Indeed, that is why it has such broad bipartisan support.

In order to make sure that the conversation about criminal justice reform extends to issues beyond prison reform and sentencing, there is another step the junior Senator from Michigan, the senior Senator from South Carolina, and I introduced just last week. This is another idea, because we realize the time that Congress has in our capacity, both on the floor and in committee, to deal with this complex topic in a thoughtful and deliberate way. So we need some help, and what we have introduced is something we call the National Criminal Justice Commission Act, which would create a commission to provide a top-down review of our entire criminal justice system.

After completing a review of the system, this bipartisan commission would work for a unanimous recommendation on how to strengthen it. Congress could--much as it did with the 9/11 Commission--take bits and pieces of it. We wouldn't need to embrace all of it--or any of it, for that matter. But at least we would have the good and thoughtful work product of some experts who would be able to make recommendations to us in a number of areas.

I was just at a meeting where somebody asked about the overcriminalization of a regulatory state, and that is a real problem. The fact that you can commit a crime without even intending to commit a crime if you happen to violate some regulation is a real problem. There are a number of areas I think we need to look at. As our attention was riveted by what happened in Baltimore and Ferguson, I think those incidents are symptoms of a much bigger challenge, and I think this commission would help us focus on building consensus and producing actionable results.

Importantly, the continuing dialogue and commission process will help us strengthen the relationship between law enforcement and communities and help us to build on consensus items such as the CORRECTIONS Act. I think the CORRECTIONS Act is a good place to start, and the National Criminal Justice Act, the consensus-based sentencing reform--all of these measures will help us improve our criminal justice system. It will help bring down some of the tension we witnessed across the Nation, and help us, again, be smart when it comes to dealing with our criminal justice system.

I hope my colleagues will join me in this important effort. I think this is the kind of big idea of a big challenge which will resonate with the people we represent in our States and across the country. When they see us coming together on a bipartisan basis and actually trying to solve problems, I think they feel that we are finally listening to them and doing what we should be doing here in the Senate.

I yield the floor.

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