Cory Booker

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I am grateful for that. Again, I thank my colleague for his partnership.

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I cannot tell you how grateful I am for those good words from my colleague. Truly, they resonate with my heart and my spirit. The gravity of this historic moment is not lost on me. It is a tribute to his character that he cosponsored this with me, as he understands, as he said so clearly, that American history is a beautiful mosaic, with contributions from every corner of the globe being made in this great country that we call the United States of America. It is with that spirit and that recollection of our past, with a commitment to forge an even brighter future, that I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 88, submitted earlier today.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I strongly support the nomination of Christopher A. Hart to serve as Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB. Today I joined the Commerce Committee's unanimous approval of his nomination and urge my colleagues to move quickly to confirm Mr. Hart as Chair of the NTSB. The NTSB plays a critical role in objectively evaluating accidents in aviation, railroad, highway, marine, and pipeline transportation services. The NTSB forms extensive recommendations on future enhancements in transportation safety and is a great asset in improving the national standard for transportation security. Given how critical the NTSB is to public safety, I cannot stress enough the importance of the full Senate approving this role. As Chairman, Mr. Hart will provide needed leadership to guide the NTSB's work. In New Jersey, the NTSB serves an essential role in improving public safety. Just last year, the NTSB moved quickly to launch a thorough investigation of a high-profile truck accident in June 2014. In addition, in response to the 2012 Paulsboro, NJ train derailment, the NTSB issued a comprehensive report with a number of needed safety recommendations. The NTSB's thorough analysis and review of these accidents significantly aids local governments, first responders, and Federal lawmakers in making important policy decisions to avoid future catastrophes. Given the importance of the NTSB to New Jersey and across the country, I am proud to support a nominee to lead this organization with a breadth of experience in senior leadership roles in aviation and highway safety. Mr. Hart's proven leadership of the NTSB makes him uniquely qualified to lead this organization. I am proud to offer my full support for Mr. Hart, who I am honored to note upon approval by this body, will serve as the first African-American Chairman of the NTSB. Mr. Hart continues the tradition of his great uncle James Herman Banning, the first African American to receive a pilot's license issued by the U.S. Government in 1926. As a pilot himself, and a true public servant, Mr. Hart will help the NTSB continue making a substantial positive impact on American public safety. Thank you.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Republicans control the next hour and that the Democrats control the following hour.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I support the Student Non-Discrimination Act, a bill first introduced in the 111th Congress and reintroduced again now in the 114th Congress. This bill represents a critical step forward in protecting the rights of our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth to receive an education free from bullying and harassment on account of who they are and who they love. I thank Senator Franken for his leadership on this issue, and I am proud to be an original cosponsor of this important civil rights legislation. Education is the cornerstone of our democracy. In order for our system of government to thrive we must promote the education of our citizenry. It is what allows voters to make informed decisions on who they think is best fit to serve as their Representative, Senator, or President. It is a critical element of public debate and the free flow of ideas and it is what drives our economy forward and makes our country strong. Given the importance of education, no student should be harassed in school. We must do all we can to make education accessible to all. We must ensure that schools are safe and welcoming to all children so that students can enter the classroom ready and able to learn. Bullying touches the lives of countless young people. Each school year, LGBT students in New Jersey, and across America, are harassed, bullied, and even assaulted based on their perceived or known status as LGBT. Occasionally, these youth even experience bullying from teachers and administrators. The very people that are supposed to educate and protect these children at times serve as the root cause of the problem. Bullying a student for any reason--but especially for simply being themselves--is simply unacceptable. The consequences of bullying can be devastating and potentially life threatening. Studies show that discrimination at schools is a major contributor to dropouts, absenteeism, and academic underachievement. LGBT youth are twice as likely as their peers to experience verbal harassment, assault, and exclusion. Suicide rates are disproportionately high among children and young adults that identify as LGBT. In fact, LGBT youth are four times more likely to commit suicide than their peers. Most alarmingly, we have seen bullying and harassment tragically lead to suicides in school districts across the country. Allowing discrimination of LGBT to go unchecked in our schools deprives our youth from the equal access to education that they deserve. Whether that discrimination is in the form harassment or assault, we cannot stand idly by and watch our children's lives be torn apart. The Student Non-Discrimination Act is a critical civil rights bill that would ban discrimination against any student on the basis of his or her actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. The legislation expands the Federal definition of harassment to protect the rights of LGBT students. The bill defines harassment to include severe, persistent, or pervasive conduct that would limit a student's ability to participate in a program or activity at a public school. The bill prohibits harassment of LGBT students as a form of discrimination that is Federally protected. All of these provisions provide the Federal Government with critical new tools to prevent the scourge of persistent and offensive bullying of youth simply because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. I am proud to be an original cosponsor of the Student Non- Discrimination Act. I urge my fellow Senators to support this bill and promptly pass it through the Senate.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about the Smarter Sentencing Act, which I believe is a very critical piece of legislation. I am pleased to be an original cosponsor of this legislation in this Congress, and I thank the bipartisan coalition of Senators who have come together, led by Senator Mike Lee from Utah and Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois. Their leadership on this issue has been absolutely critical. The Smarter Sentencing Act has essential front-end reforms. These are reforms for when a person gets to the point of incarceration. What they actually do is combat injustices in the Federal sentencing program. They address a real plague in our country; that is, mass incarceration. Think about this: We are the land of the free. We are a nation that believes in liberty and justice. But we are singular in humanity for an awful distinction: We have 5 percent of the globe's population but we incarcerate 25 percent of the globe's incarcerated people. That is unacceptable unless you believe for some reason that Americans have a higher proclivity for crime, unless you believe we have something in our water that makes us more likely to do wrong, and that is not the case. The challenge is that we have seen in the past three decades a profound over-incarceration driven by a drug war that has created unfortunate negative consequences to our society. I thank Members of Congress for stepping up in this Congress to speak to this issue. It is un-American that we should hold the largest amount of incarcerated people per population than any other country. It goes against the very strains of our society dedicated to liberty, dedicated to keeping government focused on what it should be doing, not overreaching, not becoming overly aggressive, not surrendering or taking the liberty unnecessarily of other Americans. I would like to talk for a few minutes about this broken system. What is broken in our criminal justice system? Well, when about three- quarters of our Federal prisoners are actually nonviolent offenders--I am actually one of those people who believe that if you do a violent crime, you should pay a very hefty price for that, that we as a society should have a place where we take stern action against people who promulgate violence, who undermine civil society. But as we look at this mass-incarceration problem where 25 percent of the globe's prison population is in our country, we realize that three-quarters of those people in the Federal prison system are nonviolent offenders. This is not our history. This is not our tradition. Over the course of all of our Nation's history, we did not have this problem. It has really been the last 30 years where we have witnessed the explosion in the U.S. Federal prison population. In those 30 years alone--think about this--in the last 30 years alone, the prison population at the Federal level has expanded by nearly 800 percent. That is a massive and unacceptable increase, especially when you realize this was driven by the incarceration of nonviolent offenders. This expansion of our prison population had a harmful effect when those people were released because once someone has a nonviolent felony offense, it is hard to get a job, it is hard to get business licenses, and they cannot get Pell grants. Often those people get caught up and go back to being involved in the drug war. So what happens is that two out of three of those people get rearrested within 3 years. We are paying for this broken system, this revolving door of arresting nonviolent offenders, releasing them, and bringing them back into our system. It is plaguing the Federal budget and, frankly, State budgets all around our country. Each year more than one-quarter of a trillion dollars is being spent on this broken criminal justice system--money that could be used to empower people to succeed, to repair our infrastructure, or, how about this, it could stay in taxpayers' pockets. What makes this system worse is that it undermines our American ideals. As I look across the way from the Capitol Building where I stand now and see the Supreme Court, written above the Supreme Court building, at the top, is this ideal of equal justice under law. The ideal that everyone will be treated equally under the law. But this broken criminal justice system has disproportionately impacted certain Americans and not others, which undermines America's core values of fairness and equal treatment for all. More than 60 percent of our prison system is comprised of racial and ethnic minorities. The painful reality is that if somehow African Americans or Latinos used drugs at different levels than Whites, that might explain the disparate impact. If they dealt drugs at different levels, yes, that might explain it. But that is not the case. African Americans engage in drug offenses at a lower rate than Whites but are incarcerated at a rate 10 times that of Whites. What is alarming about the mass incarceration is that people are actually not committing more and more crimes. The National Research Council recently released a report confirming what numerous other studies have actually shown: Incarceration rates are actually not tied to crime rates. We have seen incarceration rates going up and up, but now crime rates are coming down. What is perpetuating this explosion of our prison population? It is the war on drugs that has created over the last 30 years alone an over- criminalization of nonviolent individuals, which stacked our prison population full of Americans, disproportionately minority and disproportionately poor. Please understand that the people paying the highest price for this are the poor in our country. The New York Times yesterday published an article detailing how our jails have become warehouses made up primarily of people too poor to pay bail or to hire lawyers or too ill with mental health or drug problems to adequately care for themselves. If you look at our prison population, you will see that poverty, race, mental illness--those are the folks who are being disproportionately incarcerated. If we follow our core ideals of fairness, democracy, and justice-- then we know that mass incarceration is not who we are. That is not right. That the times demand that we examine this broken system and do those commonsense things that are needed to make our justice system just, to work first and foremost for our safety, to not be a gross waste of taxpayer dollars, and to make sure basic ideas of fairness are fulfilled. This is not just speculation. And what is so powerful about this moment in time, even though all I have said so far is compelling enough, is that we as Federal actors--the 100 Senators here, the 435 Congress men and women, the President and the Vice President--don't need to figure out a way forward, make it up, design legislation based on our own ideas. We actually only have to look at the pathway forward by looking at Governors and legislatures in the States. They are so burdened by the costs of this unruly system, a system that is now plaguing--the Federal Bureau of Prisons is plaguing our country with its cost. What the States are doing to bear that cost is they are finding pragmatic, commonsense, bipartisan ways to move forward. In fact, what gets me excited as a Democrat is that we just have to look at the red States and what the red States are doing to reduce their prison populations. Let me give an example. States such as Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina are leading on this issue, and the Federal Government should follow. Texas is a State known for law and order, and known for being tough on crime. Yet Texans realize that being smart on crime means saving taxpayer dollars, using that money efficiently and effectively, lowering crime, and guess what, hey, we can also lower our prison population and empower people to be successful in life and not slip down that slope back toward recidivism. They have made tremendous strides in Texas in adopting policies that are designed to reduce their prison population and lower recidivism. In 2007, Texas boasted the fourth largest incarceration rate in the country. Faced with a budget projection that estimated by 2012 the State would need an additional 17,000 prison beds--think about that for a second. They saw that they were going to need to build more prisons, house 17,000 more prison beds, and it was going to cost them $2 billion in Texas. The State's legislature said: Enough of this madness. Enough of this craziness. They enacted bold reforms that would act as a model for us in the Federal legislature. As a result, they passed this broad-based legislation. Texas was able to stabilize their prison population and avert that budgetary disaster. Texas State Representative Jerry Madden, a Republican, noted in a recent hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations that the crime rate is now at 1968 levels. They were able to close three prisons and six juvenile facilities, and remarkably the Texas prison system is now operating at a 96-percent capacity. Commonsense reforms. Georgia is another State. They have made remarkable progress. They are showing that reducing the prison population can lead to dividends for taxpayers, and can lower crime. In fact, over the past 5 years, in terms of the racial disparities in incarceration, Georgia has reduced the number of Black men incarcerated in the State by 20 percent. And they haven't seen crime go up--quite the contrary. They have seen it go down. These States are proving that they don't have to lock up more people to create that safety we desire. States such as New Jersey, Texas, California, Virginia, Hawaii, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Colorado, New York, South Carolina, Alaska, and Georgia have all seen drops in crime rates as they have been implementing commonsense criminal justice reform. So let's be clear. I am advocating for the Smarter Sentencing Act, but we should also be moving for bold, broad-based criminal justice reforms, copying the successes of red States with Republican Governors. We should be looking at their innovations and following their commonsense solutions and mirroring their success at the Federal level. I am speaking of reforms at the front end when people get arrested; reforms behind the wall--inside the prison system to address what goes on in prison and helping these people, and reforms on the back end when they come out of prison, to ensure they stay out of prison. Front-end reforms going on around our country are exciting, such as sentencing reform. What about radical ideas such as letting judges make decisions about sentencing and stop trying to legislate it? Judges are the experts. They know of the brutality of a person's circumstances. They can design sentences. These policy initiatives should address the entire system. Behind- the-wall efforts should focus on initiatives to change the way prisoners experience life behind bars. To get treatment and job training so they don't commit future crimes. This is commonsense stuff. We shouldn't send people to prison and have them become criminalized or undermine their ability to be successful adults when they come out. We should also focus on that back end, this idea that we need reentry policies to help people get jobs, reconnect with their families, and become strong, full-fledged American citizens. I am speaking of things such as parole reform. To move forward we need to think big. This is what I will be advocating for. We can tackle this by taking a systemic approach. We must look at a broad-based reform agenda. I love the fact that we have conservatives and liberals united on this issue--Republicans and Democrats, red Staters and blue Staters. Criminal justice reform is not a partisan issue, it is an American issue. In 2010, Senators on both sides of the aisle came together to improve our justice system by passing the Fair Sentencing Act, which the President signed into law. This was a bipartisan piece of legislation that reduced the sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine--drugs that are pharmacologically indistinguishable. They changed it from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, and I thank Senators Durbin, Grassley, Leahy, and Graham for their leadership on this issue. Last year I joined with Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky. I don't know how many sentences are used by people that contain the names Cory Booker and Rand Paul in them, but we agree on this issue. We have common ground, and we introduced the REDEEM Act. This legislation aims to keep juveniles out of the criminal justice system. We looked to stop acts that many other countries consider torture, such as taking juveniles and routinely putting them into solitary confinement where they are traumatized and often come out of those circumstances more likely to do harm to themselves or others. We are going to reintroduce that bill this year. Just last month I sat on a criminal justice reform panel right here in the Halls of the Senate, hosted by Van Jones on the left and Newt Gingrich on the right. In the last few months I have talked to Grover Norquist, I have talked to the Koch brothers' representative, their chief counsel, and I have talked to conservative think tanks and Christian evangelicals. All of us agree on this issue. This chorus of voices, this coalition, this courageous commitment to our country's ideals lets us know that whether you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative, whether you consider yourself moderate leaning, left or right, this is an area we can agree on. It will save taxpayer money, uphold our ideals of liberty and freedom, create safer communities, and empower individuals to be successful. Today I am excited to have joined with Senators Lee, Durbin, Leahy, and Cruz to support the Smarter Sentencing Act. We need to have this conversation about reducing Federal mandatory minimums. In fact, I love that the Urban Institute has stated that mandatory minimums for drug offenses is the single largest factor in the growth of the Federal prison population. Let me repeat that. Mandatory minimums for drug offenses are the single largest factor in the growth of the Federal prison population. A key factor in that 800-percent growth in the last 30 years has been driven by nonviolent drug offenders and mandatory minimums. This bill also would do other things. It would expand the Federal safety valve, giving judges greater discretion and allowing them to hand out their sentences. Those people who believe in separation of powers, let the judiciary have more space to hand down fairer sentences and not shackle them with laws made by legislators who don't know the particulars of a case. Many Federal judges have spoken out about mandatory minimums being unnecessarily restrictive for them in doing their job. The bill would also make the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive, which would allow persons convicted under the old crack-powder cocaine disparity to now receive a fairer sentence. With the crack-cocaine law changed in 2010, an individual arrested today would receive a lesser sentence. So making this law retroactive to impact people sentenced for crack cocaine offenses prior to 2010 is only fair. This bill could save a lot of money--hundreds of millions of dollars. It would give us some freedom not only to return some toward debt relief for this country--Lord knows we need to focus on that--but also to invest in other programs many people on both sides of the aisle support, such as reentry programs to help people stay out of prison and get back to a productive lifestyle. If enacted into law as the bill is currently scored, it would save $3 billion over the next decade alone. This is critically important. So this is a call to the conscience of the Congress. Every single day we pledge allegiance to our flag. That is not something anybody in this Chamber does as sort of a routine, perfunctory salute. We say those words because they mean something, and we end with this ideal that is a light to all of humanity--this ideal of liberty and justice for all. If we mean those words, then that, across the board, is what we should be pursuing in this body. We know in our country States are doing things to further uphold these ideals, that they are making commonsense reforms that are keeping people safe and lowering crime, commonsense reforms that are saving taxpayer dollars and relieving the burden on taxpayers and budgets, that they are passing reforms that liberate people from the shackles of an imprisonment that is unnecessary, that is directly addressing the painful disparities of race and poverty, and that it is empowering Americans, our brothers and sisters. In all of our holy texts it talks about the dignity of all people, whether they are behind bars or on our streets, the dignity of worth that empowers people to be successful, to have life and liberty and to pursue their happiness. So I say I support reforming our criminal justice system. More importantly, I say let's support our ideals. Let's be a nation of liberty and justice for all. Let's follow the lead of courageous governors and legislatures and let's make this Nation even better than it is today. I urge all Senators to promptly pass the Smarter Sentencing Act through the Senate.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about the Smarter Sentencing Act, which I believe is a very critical piece of legislation. I am pleased to be an original cosponsor of this legislation in this Congress, and I thank the bipartisan coalition of Senators who have come together, led by Senator Mike Lee from Utah and Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois. Their leadership on this issue has been absolutely critical. The Smarter Sentencing Act has essential front-end reforms. These are reforms for when a person gets to the point of incarceration. What they actually do is combat injustices in the Federal sentencing program. They address a real plague in our country; that is, mass incarceration. Think about this: We are the land of the free. We are a nation that believes in liberty and justice. But we are singular in humanity for an awful distinction: We have 5 percent of the globe's population but we incarcerate 25 percent of the globe's incarcerated people. That is unacceptable unless you believe for some reason that Americans have a higher proclivity for crime, unless you believe we have something in our water that makes us more likely to do wrong, and that is not the case. The challenge is that we have seen in the past three decades a profound over-incarceration driven by a drug war that has created unfortunate negative consequences to our society. I thank Members of Congress for stepping up in this Congress to speak to this issue. It is un-American that we should hold the largest amount of incarcerated people per population than any other country. It goes against the very strains of our society dedicated to liberty, dedicated to keeping government focused on what it should be doing, not overreaching, not becoming overly aggressive, not surrendering or taking the liberty unnecessarily of other Americans. I would like to talk for a few minutes about this broken system. What is broken in our criminal justice system? Well, when about three- quarters of our Federal prisoners are actually nonviolent offenders--I am actually one of those people who believe that if you do a violent crime, you should pay a very hefty price for that, that we as a society should have a place where we take stern action against people who promulgate violence, who undermine civil society. But as we look at this mass-incarceration problem where 25 percent of the globe's prison population is in our country, we realize that three-quarters of those people in the Federal prison system are nonviolent offenders. This is not our history. This is not our tradition. Over the course of all of our Nation's history, we did not have this problem. It has really been the last 30 years where we have witnessed the explosion in the U.S. Federal prison population. In those 30 years alone--think about this--in the last 30 years alone, the prison population at the Federal level has expanded by nearly 800 percent. That is a massive and unacceptable increase, especially when you realize this was driven by the incarceration of nonviolent offenders. This expansion of our prison population had a harmful effect when those people were released because once someone has a nonviolent felony offense, it is hard to get a job, it is hard to get business licenses, and they cannot get Pell grants. Often those people get caught up and go back to being involved in the drug war. So what happens is that two out of three of those people get rearrested within 3 years. We are paying for this broken system, this revolving door of arresting nonviolent offenders, releasing them, and bringing them back into our system. It is plaguing the Federal budget and, frankly, State budgets all around our country. Each year more than one-quarter of a trillion dollars is being spent on this broken criminal justice system--money that could be used to empower people to succeed, to repair our infrastructure, or, how about this, it could stay in taxpayers' pockets. What makes this system worse is that it undermines our American ideals. As I look across the way from the Capitol Building where I stand now and see the Supreme Court, written above the Supreme Court building, at the top, is this ideal of equal justice under law. The ideal that everyone will be treated equally under the law. But this broken criminal justice system has disproportionately impacted certain Americans and not others, which undermines America's core values of fairness and equal treatment for all. More than 60 percent of our prison system is comprised of racial and ethnic minorities. The painful reality is that if somehow African Americans or Latinos used drugs at different levels than Whites, that might explain the disparate impact. If they dealt drugs at different levels, yes, that might explain it. But that is not the case. African Americans engage in drug offenses at a lower rate than Whites but are incarcerated at a rate 10 times that of Whites. What is alarming about the mass incarceration is that people are actually not committing more and more crimes. The National Research Council recently released a report confirming what numerous other studies have actually shown: Incarceration rates are actually not tied to crime rates. We have seen incarceration rates going up and up, but now crime rates are coming down. What is perpetuating this explosion of our prison population? It is the war on drugs that has created over the last 30 years alone an over- criminalization of nonviolent individuals, which stacked our prison population full of Americans, disproportionately minority and disproportionately poor. Please understand that the people paying the highest price for this are the poor in our country. The New York Times yesterday published an article detailing how our jails have become warehouses made up primarily of people too poor to pay bail or to hire lawyers or too ill with mental health or drug problems to adequately care for themselves. If you look at our prison population, you will see that poverty, race, mental illness--those are the folks who are being disproportionately incarcerated. If we follow our core ideals of fairness, democracy, and justice-- then we know that mass incarceration is not who we are. That is not right. That the times demand that we examine this broken system and do those commonsense things that are needed to make our justice system just, to work first and foremost for our safety, to not be a gross waste of taxpayer dollars, and to make sure basic ideas of fairness are fulfilled. This is not just speculation. And what is so powerful about this moment in time, even though all I have said so far is compelling enough, is that we as Federal actors--the 100 Senators here, the 435 Congress men and women, the President and the Vice President--don't need to figure out a way forward, make it up, design legislation based on our own ideas. We actually only have to look at the pathway forward by looking at Governors and legislatures in the States. They are so burdened by the costs of this unruly system, a system that is now plaguing--the Federal Bureau of Prisons is plaguing our country with its cost. What the States are doing to bear that cost is they are finding pragmatic, commonsense, bipartisan ways to move forward. In fact, what gets me excited as a Democrat is that we just have to look at the red States and what the red States are doing to reduce their prison populations. Let me give an example. States such as Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina are leading on this issue, and the Federal Government should follow. Texas is a State known for law and order, and known for being tough on crime. Yet Texans realize that being smart on crime means saving taxpayer dollars, using that money efficiently and effectively, lowering crime, and guess what, hey, we can also lower our prison population and empower people to be successful in life and not slip down that slope back toward recidivism. They have made tremendous strides in Texas in adopting policies that are designed to reduce their prison population and lower recidivism. In 2007, Texas boasted the fourth largest incarceration rate in the country. Faced with a budget projection that estimated by 2012 the State would need an additional 17,000 prison beds--think about that for a second. They saw that they were going to need to build more prisons, house 17,000 more prison beds, and it was going to cost them $2 billion in Texas. The State's legislature said: Enough of this madness. Enough of this craziness. They enacted bold reforms that would act as a model for us in the Federal legislature. As a result, they passed this broad-based legislation. Texas was able to stabilize their prison population and avert that budgetary disaster. Texas State Representative Jerry Madden, a Republican, noted in a recent hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations that the crime rate is now at 1968 levels. They were able to close three prisons and six juvenile facilities, and remarkably the Texas prison system is now operating at a 96-percent capacity. Commonsense reforms. Georgia is another State. They have made remarkable progress. They are showing that reducing the prison population can lead to dividends for taxpayers, and can lower crime. In fact, over the past 5 years, in terms of the racial disparities in incarceration, Georgia has reduced the number of Black men incarcerated in the State by 20 percent. And they haven't seen crime go up--quite the contrary. They have seen it go down. These States are proving that they don't have to lock up more people to create that safety we desire. States such as New Jersey, Texas, California, Virginia, Hawaii, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Colorado, New York, South Carolina, Alaska, and Georgia have all seen drops in crime rates as they have been implementing commonsense criminal justice reform. So let's be clear. I am advocating for the Smarter Sentencing Act, but we should also be moving for bold, broad-based criminal justice reforms, copying the successes of red States with Republican Governors. We should be looking at their innovations and following their commonsense solutions and mirroring their success at the Federal level. I am speaking of reforms at the front end when people get arrested; reforms behind the wall--inside the prison system to address what goes on in prison and helping these people, and reforms on the back end when they come out of prison, to ensure they stay out of prison. Front-end reforms going on around our country are exciting, such as sentencing reform. What about radical ideas such as letting judges make decisions about sentencing and stop trying to legislate it? Judges are the experts. They know of the brutality of a person's circumstances. They can design sentences. These policy initiatives should address the entire system. Behind- the-wall efforts should focus on initiatives to change the way prisoners experience life behind bars. To get treatment and job training so they don't commit future crimes. This is commonsense stuff. We shouldn't send people to prison and have them become criminalized or undermine their ability to be successful adults when they come out. We should also focus on that back end, this idea that we need reentry policies to help people get jobs, reconnect with their families, and become strong, full-fledged American citizens. I am speaking of things such as parole reform. To move forward we need to think big. This is what I will be advocating for. We can tackle this by taking a systemic approach. We must look at a broad-based reform agenda. I love the fact that we have conservatives and liberals united on this issue--Republicans and Democrats, red Staters and blue Staters. Criminal justice reform is not a partisan issue, it is an American issue. In 2010, Senators on both sides of the aisle came together to improve our justice system by passing the Fair Sentencing Act, which the President signed into law. This was a bipartisan piece of legislation that reduced the sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine--drugs that are pharmacologically indistinguishable. They changed it from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, and I thank Senators Durbin, Grassley, Leahy, and Graham for their leadership on this issue. Last year I joined with Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky. I don't know how many sentences are used by people that contain the names Cory Booker and Rand Paul in them, but we agree on this issue. We have common ground, and we introduced the REDEEM Act. This legislation aims to keep juveniles out of the criminal justice system. We looked to stop acts that many other countries consider torture, such as taking juveniles and routinely putting them into solitary confinement where they are traumatized and often come out of those circumstances more likely to do harm to themselves or others. We are going to reintroduce that bill this year. Just last month I sat on a criminal justice reform panel right here in the Halls of the Senate, hosted by Van Jones on the left and Newt Gingrich on the right. In the last few months I have talked to Grover Norquist, I have talked to the Koch brothers' representative, their chief counsel, and I have talked to conservative think tanks and Christian evangelicals. All of us agree on this issue. This chorus of voices, this coalition, this courageous commitment to our country's ideals lets us know that whether you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative, whether you consider yourself moderate leaning, left or right, this is an area we can agree on. It will save taxpayer money, uphold our ideals of liberty and freedom, create safer communities, and empower individuals to be successful. Today I am excited to have joined with Senators Lee, Durbin, Leahy, and Cruz to support the Smarter Sentencing Act. We need to have this conversation about reducing Federal mandatory minimums. In fact, I love that the Urban Institute has stated that mandatory minimums for drug offenses is the single largest factor in the growth of the Federal prison population. Let me repeat that. Mandatory minimums for drug offenses are the single largest factor in the growth of the Federal prison population. A key factor in that 800-percent growth in the last 30 years has been driven by nonviolent drug offenders and mandatory minimums. This bill also would do other things. It would expand the Federal safety valve, giving judges greater discretion and allowing them to hand out their sentences. Those people who believe in separation of powers, let the judiciary have more space to hand down fairer sentences and not shackle them with laws made by legislators who don't know the particulars of a case. Many Federal judges have spoken out about mandatory minimums being unnecessarily restrictive for them in doing their job. The bill would also make the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive, which would allow persons convicted under the old crack-powder cocaine disparity to now receive a fairer sentence. With the crack-cocaine law changed in 2010, an individual arrested today would receive a lesser sentence. So making this law retroactive to impact people sentenced for crack cocaine offenses prior to 2010 is only fair. This bill could save a lot of money--hundreds of millions of dollars. It would give us some freedom not only to return some toward debt relief for this country--Lord knows we need to focus on that--but also to invest in other programs many people on both sides of the aisle support, such as reentry programs to help people stay out of prison and get back to a productive lifestyle. If enacted into law as the bill is currently scored, it would save $3 billion over the next decade alone. This is critically important. So this is a call to the conscience of the Congress. Every single day we pledge allegiance to our flag. That is not something anybody in this Chamber does as sort of a routine, perfunctory salute. We say those words because they mean something, and we end with this ideal that is a light to all of humanity--this ideal of liberty and justice for all. If we mean those words, then that, across the board, is what we should be pursuing in this body. We know in our country States are doing things to further uphold these ideals, that they are making commonsense reforms that are keeping people safe and lowering crime, commonsense reforms that are saving taxpayer dollars and relieving the burden on taxpayers and budgets, that they are passing reforms that liberate people from the shackles of an imprisonment that is unnecessary, that is directly addressing the painful disparities of race and poverty, and that it is empowering Americans, our brothers and sisters. In all of our holy texts it talks about the dignity of all people, whether they are behind bars or on our streets, the dignity of worth that empowers people to be successful, to have life and liberty and to pursue their happiness. So I say I support reforming our criminal justice system. More importantly, I say let's support our ideals. Let's be a nation of liberty and justice for all. Let's follow the lead of courageous governors and legislatures and let's make this Nation even better than it is today. I urge all Senators to promptly pass the Smarter Sentencing Act through the Senate.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BOOKER. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I stand to discuss what has been discussed by the previous two Senators, the urgent need for a clean bill to fund our Department of Homeland Security. I wasn't part of this body during the 9/11 attacks. I was living in Newark, NJ, and watched, as many in my city did, with a view clearly to the World Trade Center and saw that attack. What moved me afterward was the incredible unity of our country. There was no partisan politics. People pulled together. First responders from New Jersey, all over New York, and all over the country came together. What we did after that as a nation was we began to prepare to ensure we could prevent those attacks and have better systems in place should emergencies, crises, disasters or attacks happen again. What happened from that unity is evidenced by this body joining together not just to sing patriotic songs on the Capitol steps but to work in unison to create the Department of Homeland Security. That agency is tasked with the urgent need to prepare our country to meet crises if they come. This is not a partisan issue and should not fall prey to political fights between congressional Republicans and the President of the United States over immigration. There is way too much at stake. Let me cite a few examples. Something we have learned from past attacks is the urgency of coordinating between different layers of law enforcement and first responders. If we do not pass a clean DHS bill, resources for that coordination, getting everyone working together, will be put at risk. Let me cite another example. It is critical in this day and age that we stay on the cutting edge of technology, one step ahead of those people who seek to do us harm. We see clearly if we do not get a clean bill passed, we will not be able to stay on that technological edge. We see that in many areas. One great example is at our ports. New Jersey has one of the third busiest ports in America, and we need that critical technological equipment for upgrades that can help us to detect nuclear devices or harmful materials coming into our country. Without a clean bill, we will not have those resources. We also see the headlines from just the past few months about cyber attack after cyber attack. A critical agency that must be funded appropriately to protect our businesses and our infrastructure and our first-responding capabilities against cyber attack is coordinated and led from the DHS. Not to fund this agency adequately so they can prepare for those attacks is unacceptable. We are Americans and this idea of unifying together is our strength. We stand united against attacks. If we do it right, as we have learned not just throughout our country's history but in every aspect of our society--my college--high school coach used to talk about the five Ps: Proper preparation prevents poor performance. This, unfortunately, will so undermine our ability to secure ourselves, it is almost an insult that it will not even give proper funding to meet the weaknesses to the Secret Service, as we have seen their weaknesses exposed. As we go into a Presidential election, we must provide adequate security and protection for the next potential President. This also harms our businesses as well. Take for example the E-Verify system. This makes sure people who are hired by our companies do not have things in their background that would undermine our security. Those systems are harmed as well. This is an example where petty politics and recklessness is being placed above people, policy, and reason. We as a nation have stood in unity after the most horrifying of attacks. We live in a world where we have seen diseases such as Ebola, where we have experienced cyber attacks, and where we have had to recover from vicious weather events such as Sandy. We live in a world where people seek to do us harm, and we should do nothing to weaken our ability to respond, to prepare, to make ourselves more resilient for any such occurrences. The urgency is upon us. We cannot be a reactive nation unified after the fact. We must be a proactive nation, working together, above politics, to do what is right for the strength and the security of our country. I call for a clean bill in the critical, most important part, of our government to provide for the common defense. This is a time that should bring us together, not have us fall prey to every bit of Washington that people have grown tired and sick of. Let us pass a clean bill, as a bipartisan group of former Secretaries of Homeland Security has called for. This is not a time for recklessness; it is a time for reason. It is not a time for petty politics; it is time to put people first. I yield the floor.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. My amendment would change that and would preserve the applications of agencies to supplement the EIS. For example, if the proposed route of the pipeline was to change, it could mean drinking water supplies and other critical resources would have a higher risk of contamination from a spill. People should know that. When American companies are building projects, they comply with this important NEPA safeguard. Foreign companies should not be given a shortcut. If American companies do it, foreign companies should do the same. This amendment is supported by the Natural Resources Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, and a number of other organizations. I ask my colleagues to support this amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, my amendment No. 155 ensures that Federal agencies disclose to the public, landowners, and communities any significant new circumstances learned about the impact of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The National Environmental Policy Act--NEPA--is one of the most emulated statutes in the world. It is used as a model around the world. NEPA in fact is often referred to as the modern-day ``environmental Magna Carta.'' These are very commonsense ideas. NEPA regulations really do require agencies to actually supplement already issued environmental impact statements when significant new circumstances or information is found to exist relating to the environmental impacts of a project. The pending Keystone bill, however, would deem the final environmental impact statement issued last January to fully satisfy NEPA. In other words, if new circumstances come up that are germane and important, they do not get a chance to alter that statement. My amendment would change that.

Mr. BOOKER. I respectfully request 25 more seconds to conclude my comments.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I want to say that amendment No. 155 is a very important amendment. It is common sense. It is practical. The National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA as it is known, is one of the most emulated statutes in the world. It is something that many people see as valuable in other countries because NEPA, in fact, by many is referred to as the modern-day environmental Magna Carta. NEPA regulations require agencies to supplement already-issued environmental impact statements when significant new circumstances or information is found to exist relating to the environmental impact of a project. The pending Keystone bill, however--and quite surprisingly-- would deem the final environmental impact statement issued last January to fully satisfy this NEPA requirement going ahead. This would remove the obligation from permitting agencies to supplement any environmental impact statements if significant new circumstances or information is discovered. This amendment I am putting forward, No. 155, would change that and would preserve a commonsense obligation of agencies to supplement the environmental impact statement for significant new circumstances or information. In other words, if very pertinent information comes forward, it would require there be a need to supplement the environmental impact statement. For example, if the proposed route of the pipeline were changed, it could mean that drinking water supplies or critical resources would have a higher risk of contamination from a spill. This amendment would simply require consideration of significant changes so we don't go blindly and put natural resources at greater risk without understanding the impact. This bill is for me common sense. It says, basically, if circumstances change, we should make sure a new environmental impact study is considered. I would ask my colleagues to support this amendment and not provide special treatment to a foreign company that American companies don't get that could result in harm to fellow Americans. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BOOKER. First of all, I want to say how good it is to see the Presiding Officer, and also recognize that he is a member of the nascent Cory caucus, and I respect that quite a bit. Amendment No. 155 to Amendment No. 2 Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment in order to call up amendment No. 155.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. BOOKER. I am grateful that Senator Boxer will yield for a question. This is a question I have of Senator Boxer, and I wish to get her feedback because of her years of experience, her wisdom, and her depth of understanding on this issue. I think there needs to be an amendment for critical protection. The need for regulation requires agencies to supplement already issued environmental impact statements when significant new circumstances come about. When there is information about these new challenges to the environmental impact of a project, something really has to happen. So this pending bill deems that the final environmental impact statement issued last January would fully satisfy the NEPA, that this would remove the obligation of permitting agencies to supplement that EIS if any new circumstance or information is discovered. The amendment would change that and would preserve the obligation of agencies to supplement--if we had such an amendment, it could really protect that. I was told by a lot of people that NEPA is sort of referred to as the environmental modern day Magna Carta. In other words, it is such a critical set of protections. If we have a circumstance in which there is a significant change in the pipeline--say they just decide to change the direction or move it a little bit and it goes through an entirely new area--not to be able to take into consideration new information, new circumstances where an environmental impact statement abated, seems to be wrong. It actually seems to be giving this company, this foreign company, more information, more opportunity than our current American companies. I would love for the Senator to comment.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. I wish to thank Senators Bennet and Alexander for their work on this legislation. It is going to help our Nation's students make better, smarter, and more-informed decisions about higher education. Historically, the United States has been the leader globally in expanding college opportunity. We understand that an educated workforce is essential to our Nation's economic competitiveness. Without highly skilled workers, America will not be able to compete in the global economy. The average price of a college degree in the United States is climbing--about $13,856. Please put that in perspective with our competitor nations, nations that are keeping the cost of college low, knowing that their long-term competitiveness as a country depends on the education of their children, nations such as the United Kingdom, where a college education costs less than half of ours, and Germany, where kids pay a mere $933. The average American student now is graduating from college with around $29,000 in loans. In New Jersey, that is up from an average of $27,000 in 2011 and $23,000 and change in 2010. This is unacceptable. Mounting debt is undermining not only the success of our individual young people in our country, but it is undermining the long-term competitiveness our Nation has in a global knowledge-based economy. That is one reason why it is important that we work to make the process of obtaining financial aid simpler and more straightforward. We saw the ridiculousness which Senator Bennet held up in the length of the form and the explanation document. Well, this has to change. This is something I recognized when I was mayor of the city of Newark. We had classes. Literally we called it, I think, Financial Aid University, where we brought experts in just to try to help students navigate all of that. We spent so many resources knowing that for our kids from Newark to be competitive, we had to help them navigate this labyrinth of challenging questions and documents that it takes perhaps a college degree or even more to figure out. When I first came to the Senate about 13 months ago, one of the first pieces of legislation I offered, having had that experience, was a way of simplifying these forms. There is an urgency here because the College Board estimates that 2.3 million students do not fill out the FAFSA form, the free application for financial aid. Because the form is a gateway to financial aid, having 2.3 million being deterred from actually filling it out is a harm to our Nation, not just to those individual students. Many students who qualify for Federal aid skip the form because they find it--as we obviously saw--too complex. Because eligibility is currently based on income information for the year immediately preceding enrollment, financial aid deadlines mean that tax data is not yet available. As a result, students must determine how to fill out financial aid questions on the FAFSA form and take additional steps then to submit later the tax documents. We know more can be done to make this process simpler and accessible, which is why I am pleased. I was really rejoicing when Senator Alexander and Senator Bennet showed me there was a way we could work-- even further than the legislation I introduced in the last Congress--to reduce it to two questions--saving time, saving energy, saving stress but even more importantly empowering students to get their education and contribute to our economy so that we can compete with those other countries that seem to be doing a much better job than we are in keeping the cost of college low. This bill streamlines the financial aid system, simplifies the FAFSA form, discourages overborrowing--which is a problem--and, most importantly, gives students and families better information earlier in the process to enable them to make better decisions for them. This bill is a good step. This bill is a great step. I am looking forward to working with the higher education community as well as students and families in New Jersey on how we can be successful in simplifying this process, increasing access to college and boosting not only enrollment but the economic output of our citizenry. Again, I thank Senator Alexander and Senator Bennet for their work and leadership. I am pleased to be with them in this effort, and I look forward to continuing the conversation this year.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. I wish to thank Senators Bennet and Alexander for their work on this legislation. It is going to help our Nation's students make better, smarter, and more-informed decisions about higher education. Historically, the United States has been the leader globally in expanding college opportunity. We understand that an educated workforce is essential to our Nation's economic competitiveness. Without highly skilled workers, America will not be able to compete in the global economy. The average price of a college degree in the United States is climbing--about $13,856. Please put that in perspective with our competitor nations, nations that are keeping the cost of college low, knowing that their long-term competitiveness as a country depends on the education of their children, nations such as the United Kingdom, where a college education costs less than half of ours, and Germany, where kids pay a mere $933. The average American student now is graduating from college with around $29,000 in loans. In New Jersey, that is up from an average of $27,000 in 2011 and $23,000 and change in 2010. This is unacceptable. Mounting debt is undermining not only the success of our individual young people in our country, but it is undermining the long-term competitiveness our Nation has in a global knowledge-based economy. That is one reason why it is important that we work to make the process of obtaining financial aid simpler and more straightforward. We saw the ridiculousness which Senator Bennet held up in the length of the form and the explanation document. Well, this has to change. This is something I recognized when I was mayor of the city of Newark. We had classes. Literally we called it, I think, Financial Aid University, where we brought experts in just to try to help students navigate all of that. We spent so many resources knowing that for our kids from Newark to be competitive, we had to help them navigate this labyrinth of challenging questions and documents that it takes perhaps a college degree or even more to figure out. When I first came to the Senate about 13 months ago, one of the first pieces of legislation I offered, having had that experience, was a way of simplifying these forms. There is an urgency here because the College Board estimates that 2.3 million students do not fill out the FAFSA form, the free application for financial aid. Because the form is a gateway to financial aid, having 2.3 million being deterred from actually filling it out is a harm to our Nation, not just to those individual students. Many students who qualify for Federal aid skip the form because they find it--as we obviously saw--too complex. Because eligibility is currently based on income information for the year immediately preceding enrollment, financial aid deadlines mean that tax data is not yet available. As a result, students must determine how to fill out financial aid questions on the FAFSA form and take additional steps then to submit later the tax documents. We know more can be done to make this process simpler and accessible, which is why I am pleased. I was really rejoicing when Senator Alexander and Senator Bennet showed me there was a way we could work-- even further than the legislation I introduced in the last Congress--to reduce it to two questions--saving time, saving energy, saving stress but even more importantly empowering students to get their education and contribute to our economy so that we can compete with those other countries that seem to be doing a much better job than we are in keeping the cost of college low. This bill streamlines the financial aid system, simplifies the FAFSA form, discourages overborrowing--which is a problem--and, most importantly, gives students and families better information earlier in the process to enable them to make better decisions for them. This bill is a good step. This bill is a great step. I am looking forward to working with the higher education community as well as students and families in New Jersey on how we can be successful in simplifying this process, increasing access to college and boosting not only enrollment but the economic output of our citizenry. Again, I thank Senator Alexander and Senator Bennet for their work and leadership. I am pleased to be with them in this effort, and I look forward to continuing the conversation this year.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. I really appreciate the words of Senator Schatz, which are spot-on. People are so frustrated right now with Congress, and it does not take a Ph.D. in political science to figure out why common Americans of all backgrounds are frustrated with Congress. It is because people are frustrated with business as usual here in the Senate and the House. In this case, as Senator Schatz points to, here we are at the end of the 113th Congress facing a $1 trillion spending bill--a bill with funding that is critical to our national defense. It is critical to the health and well-being of Americans. It is critical to the strength of our community. I know the sincerity and passion with which Senate and House negotiators have been working to get this done. They have been focusing on making sure the American public has those critical services that we need. I give tribute to many of the leadership in this body for working on it. Senate leaders should get credit, also--Barbara Mikulski for holding the line on so many critical priorities, for putting in this trillion dollar spending plan some very important items that should arouse the gratitude of many people. They also stood up against, fought, and prevented from getting into this some very extreme proposals. But to the many people watching this unfold in New Jersey, in Hawaii, and across this country, what they are also seeing, unfortunately, is a bill passed with policies pushed by very connected special interests--special interests with armies of high paid lobbyists looking out for their own protection. There are special interests with armies of high-paid lobbyists looking out for their own protections and looking to roll back commonsense protections for people who cannot hire those high-priced lobbyists or make donations to political candidates and elected officials. This omnibus--this CRromnibus, as it is called--is a jagged, bitter pill for anyone to swallow. I will start with the provision that Senator Schatz mentioned, the provision that is rolling back aspects of Dodd-Frank. Risky transactions involving asset-backed derivatives were at the heart of a 2008 fiscal crisis. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimated that the financial crisis cost the United States between $6 and $14 trillion. This amounts to $50,000 to $120,000 for every U.S. household or the equivalent of 40 to 90 percent of 1 year's economic output. It was cataclysmic. I don't need economists to describe the pain that Americans felt. I saw it myself. I felt it as a mayor of a big city in America--Newark, NJ--New Jersey's largest city. When the Nation goes through a recession, rural and urban areas, vulnerable populations, people living at the margins go through a cataclysmic depression. Many Americans, even today, remain unemployed or underemployed and are still struggling to make ends meet because of the risky behaviors we saw within the financial industry. Now, Dodd-Frank--this Wall Street protection act--was passed to enhance consumer protection and increase safeguards against risky activities so we, as a country, do not go through this again. Dodd- Frank is not perfect. I am the first to admit there are ways to change it and improve it and implement its provisions, frankly, that still have yet to be fully implemented. Changes to financial regulations should be done through a much more transparent process and in the public eye. We should openly debate these issues on the floor of the House and the Senate. It should not be done like this was, behind closed doors and definitely through what they call a must-pass omnibus bill. This is wrong. Here we are in the last moments on an omnibus spending bill with a provision which goes to the heart of protecting American taxpayers from the risky, reckless schemes that helped to launch the crisis in the first place. This provision is literally called the Prohibition Against the Federal Government Bailouts of Swap Entities, which ensures taxpayer dollars will not be used for the more risky Wall Street speculation and gambling. It looks to make sure that Americans are on the hook for the risky gambling of a few people seeking to make extraordinary gains. I am outraged. I am frustrated that we are not on the floor debating this, and, instead, are having this put into a bill that everyone says must pass. There are arguments on both sides that we should be having. If the provisions of Dodd-Frank come up, we should discuss them. The public should see it and know about it. I will not condemn the entire financial services industry, and, indeed, we need in this country a robust network of financial institutions that support the vibrant economic activity in the United States. However, we must ensure that the necessary and important protections that shield taxpayers and our economy from the failures of 2008 remain in place. I rebuke the slick and secretive ways that this has been done, and I will echo the concerns of people all over New Jersey that this kind of business as usual must end. But there are other concerns that should be out in the public eye. Take, for example, truck safety. There is this ``hours of service'' language which protects America's highways, but now the language that protects us has been changed and altered in this bill. It was inserted through the appropriations process. This language suspends the administration's rules designed to prevent driver fatigue. I will read from the rule that is now being suspended under the omnibus. It states: Only drivers who drive nights and work more than 60 or 70 hours in a week will be impacted. . . . Drivers who will be impacted by this provision work heavy and irregular schedules that include some nighttime driving. . . . The limitation reduces maximum time during which a driver may drive up to an average of 70 hours in 7 days, a decrease from the 82-hour average allowed under the 2003 rule . . . Working long daily and weekly hours on a continuing basis is associated with chronic fatigue, a high risk of crashes, and a number of serious chronic health conditions. These right here are commonsense rules put in place to protect Americans who are driving to and from work with their families or to church to protect them against these heavy, irregular vehicles barrelling down the highway that might now have an overfatigued driver. These regulations were put in place to try to limit those drivers from straining human endurance, but now they are being suspended within this omnibus bill. These rules are based on years of sound scientific study, and I am outraged that despite the efforts of my colleagues and the safety community, the provisions to suspend these safety rules were included in this omnibus bill. Each year nearly 4,000 Americans are killed in truck accidents, and over 100,000 Americans are injured on our highways in truck accidents. These drivers who drive trucks are hard-working men and women, and they have, unfortunately, been pushed to tread on the limits of human endurance. The number of fatalities caused by truck accidents has risen 16 percent since 2009, and the number of people injured in these crashes has increased 40 percent. At a time when accidents are on such a savage rise, we are in no position to be crippling existing safety measures designed to keep our roads safe. For the sake of our Nation's security and the untold anguish and loss that comes from these highway accidents, this provision should be taken out of the bill. There is more in this omnibus, and I feel compelled to mention another objectionable thing. The very idea of taxation without representation and self-determination is at the core of our democratic ideals as a nation. Yet, despite this, Washington, DC, with a population larger than two of our States, sees the constant undermining of this very principle. I believe it is an offense to Americans of all States, to Americans in the District of Columbia, and to all those who believe in our cherished ideals that this is done so. When the District of Columbia votes, just as in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, to change marijuana laws--when Washington, DC, is grappling with the devastating impact of the drug war and sees the pain and the challenges and the struggles involved therein, when the people of the District come together and decide to try a different way forward--should we not honor their results? Should we not respect their self-determination as is going on in other States? This provision in this omnibus, undermining the democratic will of the District of Columbia--these great Americans--should be taken out. My list of concerns in this bill could go on. I could continue. We should be having a discussion and debate on issues of this magnitude. Take, for example, the rules on pensions that will slash benefits for thousands of retirees. Make no mistake. We need to address the state of multi-employer pension plans, and we need to discuss the tough choices that have to be made, but this is not the way to do it--not business as usual with no discussion and no debate. This bill also includes provisions that roll back protections for wildlife and endangered species. This is not how we should do this-- business as usual with no discussion and no debate it. There are provisions that keep the USDA from addressing an array of fraudulent, deceptive, anticompetitive, and retaliatory practices which will now undermine important protections for farmers against unfair practices. This is not the way to do it--business as usual, no discussion, no debate. When people wonder how Washington does things in such a manner that is skewed in favor of the connected, skewed in favor of high-priced lobbyists, and skewed in favor special interests, when they see how the common good and common sense gets undermined, this is how it happens. This is how it happens. I have been in this body for a little over 12 months, and the way we are doing this is offensive. The American people deserve better. We should do better. I object to so much being put in this that deserves to be on this floor, discussed and debated in the light of the public. This is no way to run the globe's greatest democracy. I yield the floor.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I can't leave the floor without speaking to Mary. Mary has been such an incredible inspiration to me. I have been in the Senate now for 13 months, and I have had a number of conversations with her, but the best way to teach somebody is to show somebody. Senator Landrieu is prodigiously persuasive, tirelessly tenacious, doggedly determined. Just to watch Senator Landrieu is to watch what every American should hope for in a Senator--someone who is unyielding in their work and service to them. If you look at the myriad of interests in the State of Louisiana, I was amazed by what I saw firsthand. Mary stood up and fought for the people who were loud and ornery but still had a good cause as well as the people who were voiceless and humble. Mary stood up for them. Mary stood up for people in her community who were from every different background and from every different race. Mary stood up to them in a way that is a model to my State. I heard my senior Senator mention you by name about how essential you were when my State had its back against the wall and crushed by a superstorm. When there were battles to get my State's funding, and Mary had no skin in that game, my senior Senator mentioned you as a champion for New Jersey and that is what blows me away about you. I yearn for a government that has moral courage, more than we have now, people who will risk popularity for purpose and will risk substance for some kind of celebrity. Senator Landrieu has done things against her political interests, but that were for the people. That is why I have a great deal of reverence for you and why I travel down to your State. Now the Senator knows this because I must have said it hundreds of times when I was down in Louisiana, that that is my ancestral State. I will end by saying this: My grandaddy was born in Monroe. He was born poor. As my family likes to say, he was so poor he couldn't afford to be poor, he was po, P-O. He was born to a single mama. He was born Black at a time of immense segregation, when people who walked the hallways of power couldn't give a damn about him. He taught me love for your State, and more importantly, the urgency to stand up and fight for those people that most folks won't fight for. I am telling you right now, my grandaddy died during my first big election, but if he knew you, he would be so proud of your service. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I yield the floor.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I rise to add my sense of gratitude and appreciation to someone who has become a dear friend. I am his newest colleague and have had the privilege of working with him for these past 13 months. I just want him to know and state very publicly that he was one of the anchors to me as I was getting to know a very different place from being a mayor of a big city. Your sense of fierce pragmatism was a light to me, coming down into a place known for partisanship and gridlock, and demonstrated to me your ability to bring people together and get things done, but even more than that, being a model for me, a role model for me in the early stage of my career in the Senate. I have to confess, and do it with pride, that I love this country with the depth and the core of my being. My parents taught me that sense of pride. But you expanded that, incredibly, by bringing me out to Alaska. Of all my experiences in these 13 months, that was one of the highlights. It taught me a lot when I saw that a Senator still had such a powerful touch and connection and knowledge and love of the people of that State. You have made me love Alaska even more and know Alaska in my heart. What was extraordinary to me, in knowing you in your short career, was how much you got accomplished, how steadfast you were in pursuing the interests of your State and this Nation. One thing I have to say, I felt uncomfortable as I saw you--I will never forget being at Bartlett High School, with the Bears, and seeing your love and connection to those kids. It made me feel very uncomfortable, the negativity that was being hoisted upon you during a campaign. It made me think of something as I was out there, and I thought about it again as you talked of history. There is a very famous poet named Maya Angelou, who said these words: You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I rise. The truth is, you are one of those people who are at your ascendency. You have risen above it all. You have risen above the things in Washington that try the spirits, not just of those of us here but of the Nation. You have risen to a level of accomplishment in your life that is extraordinary and as awesome as some of the vistas I saw in the State of Alaska. The beauty I have right now, the confidence and the joy I have right now, is the simple fact that I know that God ain't finished with you yet. Thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Madam President, I rise today to discuss an issue that I believe should be discussed and worked on so much more in Congress. It demands an urgency of action, a dedication, and a focus to address our shortfalls as a nation to live up to our ideals, liberty and justice for all. Equal justice under the law is written on the Supreme Court, and is a theme of our Nation. It is the source of anguish that I believe is driving protests all over our country right now. From Ferguson to Staten Island, from New Jersey to Oakland, citizens of all races and all backgrounds--Americans are joining together to call for change, and to have this idea that our legal system really should be a justice system. Now this is an anguish that is not simply the result and the reaction to specific incidents. Yes, there is much discussion about those specific incidents in places such as Staten Island, but it is a reflection of a deeper anguish, an unfinished American business that has lasted for decades. I feel in my own personal life this sense of gratitude for my unique upbringing. As a young man in 1969, my parents literally had to get a white couple to pose as them to buy the house I grew up in in New Jersey. They literally had to go through the indignity of trying to break barriers of race to move into a town that was all white at the time. I stand here to tell you I grew up in the greatest place. The citizens of Harrington Park, NJ, are why I am standing here right now. The love and caring that exists in my State is remarkable. I am also here today because of a city that is a majority Black city, Newark, NJ, that embraced me as a young professional, and where I eventually became mayor. Through my unique position, I have to say I am able to understand all corners of this country. In an intimate way, I see this anguish that I speak of with so many of my friends and colleagues. I heard it here in the Senate. I have had security guards pull me aside to talk to me about their anguish and frustrations about the criminal justice system. I have had the people who do the work in this body--those who clean our floors or tend to the needs of our Senators--and they feel this frustration about an American legal system that is falling short of American ideals and is not a justice system. I saw it with my own parents who, with agony and pain, talked to me about not having a margin of error when it comes to dealing with police officers. They would coach me on how I should speak and talk and what I should do with my hands because of the fears they had of the treatment I might have that would be different than other Americans. I stand today because this cannot simply be reduced to a racial issue. This is the larger questions of justice in our country. This calls to the consciousness of all Americans, and it is sourced by the realities we face in this country where we lead the globe in areas that no American who believes in freedom and liberty should want to lead. We have had over the last decades of my lifetime an explosion in incarceration that belies the truth of who we are. This Nation has seen this country have an 800-percent increase in the Federal prison population over the last 30 years. Think about that--an 800-percent increase. We now have the very ignominious distinction on the globe for leading the planet Earth in a country that incarcerates its own citizens. In fact, America is just 5 percent of the globe's population, but we have 25 percent of the world's imprisoned people, and I tell you that is not because Americans have a greater proclivity for criminality, it is because our legal system is not a justice system. This overincarceration and overcriminality anguishes this Nation, aggravates divisions, undermines freedom and liberty and costs taxpayers so much more money. It is an unnecessary burden and expense that is a self-inflicted wound in this Nation that undermines our prosperity and our success. We spend $\1/4\ trillion a year locking people up, and the majority of those people are nonviolent offenders. In fact, over the last decade, right now in America there are more people in prison for drug offenses than all of the people in prison in the 1970s. It is an extraordinary fact. Whether you are Black or White, if you get arrested and charged with a felony crime for doing some things that the last three Presidents of the United States admitted to doing, and then tried and convicted--I say ``tried'' with hesitancy because the majority of them are plea bargains. As the President knows, if you get convicted of that felony offense, the nondrug violent offense, the collateral consequences to your life are horrendous. We now live in a nation where the collateral consequences are profound. We now know that time behind bars, even for these nonviolent offenders, reduces people's hourly wages by 11 percent, their annual employment by 9 weeks, their annual earnings by 40 percent. It has a powerful economic impact. If a person is convicted for possession of controlled substances use, they become ineligible for so many benefits that we would often think we would want these very people to have. They can't get Federal education grants such as a Pell grant. They can't get loans or work assistance. They become ineligible for business licenses, outrageously so. A person convicted of a felony will be denied public housing, even the ability to visit their family in public housing. They could be kicked out of their current housing arrangements. Former inmates can't get jobs, shelter, or loans. They often feel that no option exists other than going back to that slippery slope toward more crime. That is for all the people within the criminal system. But what is anguishing so many is the clear and undeniable applications of this criminal justice system and the applications of this legal system in unequal ways to different portions of our population. In my life I have seen that firsthand--how the usage of drugs in different communities where there is no difference between Blacks and Whites is treated differently based upon their race or their socioeconomic status. Let me be clear. These issues are American issues, not simply race issues. They affect us all because we are a nation with a profound declaration of independence, but the truth of our country speaks also to an interdependence. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. I point out these facts to let you understand why we have to have such an urgency. African Americans and Whites have no difference in drug usage whatsoever, but an African American who chooses to use marijuana is 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for that usage than someone who is White. In fact, between 2007 and 2009, drug sentences for African-American men were 13.1 percent longer than those for White men. Usage has no difference, but arrest rates are dramatically higher for African- American men. In fact, for all crimes, when you start breaking the actual data down, you see patterns of discriminatory impact that are unacceptable in a nation this great. Even for police violence, we have to understand that today nearly 2.5 times more Whites are arrested than Blacks for crimes that are violent and nonviolent--2.5 times more arrests for Whites than Blacks, but somehow African Americans are 21 more times more likely to be shot dead by a police officer. This is data that should not shock us along racial lines but shock us along American lines. We are the Nation of liberty and justice for all. We are the country of equal protection under the law. African Americans make up just 13 percent of our population but 40 percent of the prison population. In New Jersey, African Americans are 13.7 percent of New Jersey's population but 62 percent of New Jersey's prison population. Much of that, as clearly the data shows, has come about through the persecution of the American drug policy that is applied to different groups and different effects. The reality for minorities is punishing. By the age of 23, 44 percent of Latino youth will be arrested. We know the sad reality that 1 in 3 black males born in America today can expect, if we make no changes, to be incarcerated at some point in their lives compared to 1 in 87 White males, ages 18 to 64, incarcerated, while 1 in every 12 Blacks is. I struggled with these issues my whole life. As a mayor of a city constantly working to fight to protect citizens, I know how complicated these problems can be. My police department, ourselves, we dug into the data. We saw that our practices had to be changed, that we had to find better ways of keeping our community safe, but we also knew something deeper. I will never forget when I sat with the head of the FBI in Newark, and I asked him about the violent crime problem: How are we going to solve this problem? He looked at me and said: You don't understand, Mayor. We--meaning law enforcement--are not going to solve this problem. What has to be done are changes greater than this. I watched how young kids get arrested for breaking the law, for smoking marijuana or being caught with possession. Teenagers find themselves--because they have marijuana on them of a certain amount and weight so the charges increase, to being in a school zone which is every place in many cities--now facing mandatory minimums of upwards of 5 years. These teenagers are scared, afraid, knowing they broke the law, but other folks like the last three Presidents have gotten away with it. They get offered it by the prosecutor, overworked, trying hard to serve the public and keep people safe. The prosecutor doesn't give them the mandatory minimum, they give them a deal: Just take time served or a month or 6 months, but they find themselves with a felony conviction. Now they find themselves in a world where they think they have no options. They can't get jobs. They can't get education grants. They can't get hope. Hopelessness is a toxic state of being, and those kids then often get caught up again into the underground economy, back into the world of drugs. What we saw in my time as mayor is that so many of the people who ultimately end up being violent criminals started as kids who felt all their options closed in on them because they got caught up in this world of drugs. One of the worst collateral consequences of the way we are going about prosecuting our criminal legal system is the violence we are seeing from people who think they have no options but to do what they are doing. I say this all to simply say we must find a way out. If we are America, a system that believes in elevating human potential and believes in ideas of liberty and freedom and deplores this concept that government should take people's liberty for no good means, we have to do something about this issue. We who believe in freedom, who tell the world to look at our light and our torch and our promise, should evidence something better than leading the globe in incarcerating our own citizens. We, this country, where generation after generation has conquered discrimination against Irish, has conquered discrimination against Italians, has beat back discrimination against Catholics, has stood up to discrimination against Jews, has fought against Jim Crow and slavery; advancing not toward Black ideals or Jewish ideals or Irish ideals, but the common ideals that bind us as brothers and sisters of justice, of freedom, of equality--we have to do better than lead the globe in incarceration, to have a legal system that subjects more of its people and minorities toward search and scrutiny than seizure and arrest. This we cannot tolerate. Why I stand so confidently with a faith in my Nation that we can do better does not just stem from this hallowed history. It also stems from the President. Right now in America there are States doing incredible things, incredible things, to change away this reality. I am proud of my State. We have gone far but not far enough. In New Jersey, between 1999 and 2012, we reduced our prison population 26 percent. Guess what. During that same period of time, New Jersey saw a 30-percent reduction in violent crime. We showed to America that we are better than this. We can give more liberty to people, lowering our prison population, having a disproportionate effect on minorities, and actually drive down crime as well. We are not the only State. New York's prison population is down 24 percent from the late 1990s. This is due almost entirely to reforms of the Rockefeller drug laws, policies that sent thousands of people to prison often serving sentences for low-level crimes. Over that same period, New York reduced its crime by more than half, lowering prison populations, disproportionately affecting African Americans and Latinos and lowering crimes. Texas reduced its prison population in 2013 dramatically and has seen decreases in both crime and recidivism rates. All of these States can do more, but why has the Federal Government done little to nothing to follow suit? I am proud of what is going on in the Senate with many of my colleagues. I came and joined this body when people pulled together to begin legislation such as the Smarter Sentencing Act or, more recently, the REDEEM Act I did in partnership with Rand Paul. I am so proud that this issue cuts across political sides, that we have Democrats and Republicans, red States and blue States, all beginning to say we can do better. I am here today to end my remarks with that call to the consciousness of our country. If we have an injustice in our midst with a legal system that is so far away from the justice system to which we should aspire, we have to do better. I was raised to believe that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. In the words of Langston Hughes: ``There's a dream in this land with its back against the wall; to save the dream for one, we must save the dream for all.'' I know in my heart that with anguish of millions of Americans being punished by a legal system that has gone way out of control, affecting Blacks and Whites, young people of all backgrounds, a legal system that patently has a discriminatory impact on minorities, a legal system that steals the people's liberty, we can do better than this. We can save taxpayer money. We can lower our prison incarceration rates. We can elevate the promise of so many now denied their promise, and we can celebrate our American ideals. We need to lead this globe, not in incarceration, by telling the truth of who we are; that America is a land of freedom, of justice, where there truly is liberty and justice for all. Thank you.

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, today I recognize the life and legacy of New Jerseyan and Newark city historian Dr. Clement Alexander Price, who was taken from us too soon on November 5. Clem was a mentor and valued friend to me, and he will be sorely missed by all who knew him. The foremost authority on the history of African Americans in New Jersey, Clement Alexander Price was born in 1945 in Washington, DC, to James Price, Sr. and Anna Christine Spann Price. He inherited his love of history from his parents and since then instilled in generations this love for history. After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Bridgeport, Clem came to Newark to teach at Essex Community College. He earned his Ph.D. at Rutgers University, became a professor at Rutgers University-Newark, and founded the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience. Clem was devoted to Newark, and he served not only as our leading historian but as a powerful spiritual force in our State's largest city. He was invested in Newark, and--ever generous with his time--was known to arrange tours for visitors that highlighted not only the city's rich history but its considerable promise. Clem always recognized the vital truth that charting a brighter course for the future requires a comprehensive understanding of the past. As a fervent believer in Newark's potential, Clem, with his unparalleled knowledge and thoughtful advice, was invaluable to me and so many others who were elected to serve the city. Clem's commitment to the city of Newark was surpassed only by his dedication to public service, and he lent his time and expertise to a multitude of causes and organizations. From serving as president of the Newark Education Trust to chairing President Obama's 2008 transition team for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Clem was always seeking opportunities to serve his community and his Nation. He believed in the power of civic engagement, and he dedicated his career to cultivating that engagement through historical literacy and unyielding activism in service of Newark and beyond. Clem was truly one of Newark's great statesmen. Most of all, Clem was kind. He touched so many lives and helped all who knew him to learn, grow, heal, and come together. Clem is mourned by his wife Mary Sue Sweeney Price, his sister Jarmila, and his brother James, and by friends and colleagues in the city of Newark, the State of New Jersey, and across the Nation. I ask that the Senate join me in remembering and honoring the extraordinary life of Dr. Clement Alexander Price.