John Cornyn

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, if the Senator will yield for a question, I wish to ask the Senators from Michigan whether they were aware that the Governor has made a request of the Michigan Legislature for at least $195 million to help the families and the community of Flint?

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), and the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan) would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I just want to ask the Senators from Michigan whether they are aware of the request that the Governor has made to address the crisis that they have identified in Flint and whether they feel like that money, the $195 million, would be applied to the same problem they have identified.

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I know all time has expired. I yield the floor, and we will continue this discussion at some other time. Cloture Motion

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), and the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my Marine Corps fellow, Capt. Matt Dalton, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of this legislative session.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague and friend from Louisiana. I want to talk a little bit about the work of the Senate Judiciary Committee because we have had a pretty extraordinary week this week in the committee under the leadership of the Senator from Iowa, Mr. Grassley. We have been focusing our efforts on our criminal justice system and how it has been transformed in recent years because instead of just being law-and-order courts, our criminal justice system is dealing with everything from heroin addiction to opioid addiction, mental health challenges, and the recognition that eventually many of the people who are in our prisons will get out of prison, and we have become more focused on what we can do to help those who are willing to accept some help to be better prepared for a life on the outside and not reengage in this turnstile that sometimes our criminal justice system has become, where they get in jail or in prison, they get out, and then they automatically end up back in prison. That is not good for society, for public safety. It is not good for the taxpayer who has to pay for it, and it really is a squandering of human capital when some people--indeed, a significant number of people--are willing to accept that help to deal with their drug or alcohol issues, to learn a skill, and to turn their lives around. We had a hearing yesterday that I want to make particular note of on a piece of legislation I have introduced called the Mental Health and Safe Communities Act. The Presiding Officer is well familiar with this and is sponsoring some important comprehensive mental health legislation himself, and we are working together to try to find common ground on that, but my legislation is designed specifically to address how do we equip law enforcement with the additional tools they need in order to address the mental illness crises they find in their daily work and in our criminal justice system. We made good progress, but the fact is I think most of us were shocked to realize our jails and prisons have become the de facto treatment centers for people with mental illness, and actually in most instances it is not diagnosed and not treated. People self-medicate with drugs or alcohol, exacerbating their problems, and we couldn't have had two better witnesses. One was the sheriff, Susan Pamerleau, from Bexar County, TX, San Antonio--my hometown--which has created a model program of how to divert people for treatment and to get them out of the criminal justice system and back on their feet but also to save tax dollars and make sure our jails and our criminal justice system is reserved for people who are bad actors and not just people who are suffering from a mental health crisis. Today we considered and passed a bill called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, known as CARA. This is another example of bipartisan work being done in the Senate, which is back doing the people's work with some notable accomplishments. More importantly, it addresses a real crisis in the country because we have all come to be aware of the fact that America is facing an epidemic of drug addiction, ranging from prescription drug painkillers to heroin, addiction that is ruining lives of Americans and taking the lives of far too many. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 47,000- plus Americans died from drug overdoses in 2014--47,055 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2014, more than any previous year on record and more than double the mortality record from the year 2000. That statistic cries out for further investigation and action. These 47,000- plus drug overdoses represent 150 percent more deaths than those caused by motor vehicles. I know we spend a lot of resources and a lot of time trying to improve safety for people on our highways driving cars down the road, but more than 150 percent more people died from drug overdoses than motor vehicles, and 61 percent of those deaths involved some type of opioid, including heroin. Fortunately, this legislation begins to establish a strategy to address this problem head-on. The bill would expand prevention and education efforts to help people learn the dangers of becoming addicted to prescription medication and the dangers of even experimenting with a drug as powerful and addictive as heroin. It would also reauthorize and expand Federal anti-heroin and anti- methamphetamine task forces, which are on the frontlines in the battle against drug trafficking organizations, many of whom operate south of the Texas-Mexico border and import their poison into the United States. This legislation would also promote treatment and recovery options for those struggling with deadly addictions and provide law enforcement and first responders the tools they need to help reverse overdoses as fast as possible by giving medication, which will actually restore people to health rather than see them die because of their overdoses. This legislation is another example of the fight that I think we all share in common without regard to partisan affiliation. I want to particularly point out the leadership of the Senator from New Hampshire, Ms. Ayotte, and the Senator from Ohio, Mr. Portman, together with Senator Whitehouse from Rhode Island, who have been leading the effort to make opioid addiction a national priority. I hope there are other ways in the future we can consider strengthening the hand of those fighting on the supply side of the drug addiction battle. The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act primarily deals with the demand side, people who have become addicted to prescription drugs and heroin, but as I indicated a few moments ago, we have tons of heroin, methamphetamine, and other drugs being imported into the United States by transnational criminal organizations, otherwise known as cartels. Earlier this week, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, testified before the Armed Services Committee. He touched on how significant this problem is in Latin America and where many of the drugs sold in the United States are grown or manufactured. Director Clapper noted that the production of heroin in Mexico has been increasing steadily in response to U.S. demand. Other illicit substances, such as cocaine, have been increasing in volume as well, but while the production and importation through illicit networks into the United States has been growing, our efforts to interdict or intercept these drugs and keep them from landing on our shores has not been keeping up. In 2014 alone, drug cartels successfully smuggled more than 250,000 pounds of heroin across our borders at a street value of about $25 billion. We need to have a real conversation about the budget shortfalls that allow this to happen and how it is impeding our ability to choke off the flow of these illicit drugs coming into our country. We have to do more to resource our military, particularly the Southern Command, which has as its area of responsibility Mexico and to the south, where many of these drugs transit. We need to provide those on the frontlines with the tools they need in order to combat and prevail over these transnational criminal organizations. Let me give you a quick snapshot. U.S. Southern Command, which I mentioned a moment ago, is our geographic combatant command that has responsibility for this region, but it has been given zero ships needed to conduct countertrafficking missions in the Caribbean. Why is that? Unfortunately, the Navy fleet is too small, and the Navy doesn't have enough ships to commit to this region in light of the growing array of national security threats around the globe. Even though the U.S. Coast Guard has stepped up and provided a variety of ships, their fleet also has limitations. It is aging and small. Other nations have noticed our hands-off approach in this region and around the world. Just like the Middle East, our adversaries, like Russia, are happy to fill the power vacuum left by an America that they see in retreat. At least four times last year Russia had more naval ships in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility than we did--four times. That is our backyard. What were those Russian ships doing there? Most likely they were conducting intelligence collection missions. This is simply unacceptable and an invitation to even further confrontation and perhaps even conflict. We have obvious national interests in this part of the world, and they include putting a stop to the trafficking of illegal drugs that end up poisoning and often killing Americans. If we can't even accurately patrol the Caribbean with our own vessels, we clearly have a problem. Let me be clear. We are not asking or talking about multibillion-dollar aircraft carriers or ballistic missile submarines but rather smaller ships that can help launch and recover helicopters to help interdict the growing shipment of drugs in the region. SOUTHCOM simply needs to be better resourced if it is going to make a dent in the rampant trafficking of drugs that ruin American lives once they reach our border. General Kelly, the former head of the Southern Command, has testified previously that too often his troops have to simply sit and watch the drugs come into the United States across the Caribbean because they simply don't have the resources to interdict it and to stop it. While the men and women of SOUTHCOM's Joint Interagency Task Force South are doing yeoman's work in this area, they can't fully succeed in taking down the trafficking networks if we don't give them the resources to do so. As we continue to work hard for the American people, I hope we will take a serious look at the shortfall in our military budgets for countertrafficking missions. We can't just look at the devastation wrought by heroin and prescription opioid abuse in the Northeast without looking at the supply of the very heroin that is killing Americans and addicting them to a miserable existence, one that threatens not only their life and their families but our communities. We need to focus on the supply side and better equip the men and women tasked with the difficult job of protecting our country and our people from these transnational threats. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), and the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 10, 2016, at 10 a.m., in room SD-226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Breaking the Cycle: Mental Health and the Justice System.''

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 10, 2016, at 10 a.m.

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 10, 2016, at 10:15 a.m., to conduct a hearing entitled ``U.S. Policy in Central Africa: The Imperative of Good Governance.''

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 10, 2016, at 10 a.m.

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 10, 2016, at 2 p.m., in room SD-215 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled, ``The President's Budget for Fiscal Year 2017.''

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 10, 2016, at 10:30 a.m., in room SD-215 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled, ``The President's Budget for Fiscal Year 2017.''

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Environment and Public Works be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 10, 2016, at 10 a.m., in room SD-406 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled, ``The Importance of Enacting a New Water Resources Development Act.''

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Special Committee on Aging be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 10, 2016, at 2:30 p.m., in room SD-562 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing entitled ``Do You Know What Is In Your Suitcase? How Drug Traffickers Are Deceiving Seniors to Smuggle Contraband.''

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Colorado, Mr. Gardner, for his leadership on this issue--together with the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Senator Corker--for bringing us to this moment. This is a rare bipartisan moment, where the Senate has come together and agreed to debate, vote, and pass an important bill that imposes sanctions on one of the most dangerous regimes in the world. Recently, I was in Hawaii at the Pacific Command and we asked Admiral Harris, a four-star U.S. Navy admiral who heads Pacific Command, to rank the areas of the world that he was most concerned about, the regimes that he thought represented the biggest danger to peace. He listed North Korea as No. 1. That may be because of the proximity of his area of responsibility to North Korea, but there is no question an unstable leader with nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles is a threat not only to the region but to the United States as well. We know over the weekend North Korea successfully launched a long- range rocket and put a satellite into orbit. This was done in defiance of sanctions and represents a dangerous trend of an increasingly hostile and unstable North Korea. It was particularly alarming for several reasons. First, the same technology that put that satellite in orbit can be used to deliver a nuclear weapon. Long-range ballistic missiles have the potential to hit the U.S. homeland. That is why North Korea has been considered a serious threat to our country, not just the region but our country as well. The timing of this launch was also very concerning because just last month North Korea claimed it had tested the components of a hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear weapon that is more powerful than an atomic bomb--which we knew they had, but this represented an escalation, if it is true. The idea that North Korea could soon develop advanced nuclear weapons, along with intercontinental ballistic missiles, and deliver them to our shores is a frightening proposition. Unfortunately, every day we grow closer to that reality. I will just pause for a minute to say this is another reason why our missile defense systems are so important, not just to the safety of our friends and allies but also increasingly to the United States. I know in Colorado a lot of those efforts are headed up to provide that effective deterrent and missile defense system to the threat of the intercontinental ballistic missiles. I have to be honest with you and say I am puzzled why the President hasn't done more on this issue to date, but while the President sits on the sidelines--I think somebody called it strategic patience--it has been a failure, not just patience. Patience I think of as a virtue but certainly not in this context. Nevertheless, the Senate will do its part to make sure the regime in North Korea feels some consequences for its belligerent, illegal actions. Today we will vote on the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act. This bill mandates new sanctions on North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile program, and, importantly, it will provide an overall strategy to help address North Korea's human rights abuses and combat its cyber activities. I don't think most people realize that in addition to its belligerence and its violating international norms, North Korea is a serial human rights abuser. Literally, because of its focus on its finances on military arms and its standing army, North Korea has seen many, many, many of its people starve to death for lack of an adequate food supply. So this is a rogue regime, it is a dangerous regime, and one we need to make sure feels the consequences of its actions. This bill will help hold North Korea accountable, which is more than we have seen from the administration. I want to point out that North Korea's provocative actions are just another symptom of the Obama doctrine gone wrong. I mentioned strategic patience, which is hardly a strategy for keeping the world safe. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Through his words and deeds, the President continues to discredit and undercut American leadership around the world. As a result, the world is even more unstable and conflict-ridden than when he assumed office. It is absolutely the fact that in the absence of American leadership, tyrants, thugs, and bullies feel emboldened, and our friends and allies question our loyalty and whether they can rely on us or whether they have to go it alone and build the capacity to defend themselves in the absence of a strong America. Many recall that when he ran for office, the President heavily criticized the foreign policy choices of his predecessor, particularly the surge in Iraq. I happened to be in the Senate during that time. I remember those debates. The Democratic leader, Senator Reid, said the surge would never work, and many were skeptical because frankly it represented a bold dramatic move. Well, not only did President Obama's decision to hastily withdraw in Iraq after the successful surge--not only did his decision to hastily withdraw from Iraq squander the hard-won progress achieved by the surge, that country is now one of a number of countries in the Middle East in shambles. We are seeing our friends and our allies--together with American advisers on the ground, special operations forces in a train-and-assist mission--trying to regain control of cities such as Ramadi that were won as a result of the blood and the treasure of the United States. Let's look at a few things where they stand today. Over the past 2 years, ISIS has captured city after city where American troops shed that blood, sweat, and tears to bring relative peace. The border that used to exist between Syria and Iraq is gone. It has literally been erased. In spite of President Obama's misguided nuclear deal with Iran, Iranian influence in Iraq has grown, not waned. I do find it interesting that speaker after speaker--even though we are talking about North Korea--is trying to come to the floor and speak about Iran after having allowed the President's ill-advised nuclear deal to go through, which guarantees a pathway for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. As a result of the administration's paralysis, Syria, too, has plunged deeper and deeper into chaos. Now we not only have a security problem on our hands, we have millions of Syrian and Iraqi refugees internally displaced or flooding across international borders into places such as Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Europe. I have visited some of those refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan. These people are doing what we all would do. They are fleeing for their survival because frankly, once the President drew that red line in Syria, when it came to the use of illegal weapons, the President never did anything to enforce it or make sure that Bashar al-Assad felt or suffered any consequences. So the President's inaction, time after time, place after place, has real consequences. The vacuum left as a result of the U.S. retreat in the Middle East has provided an open door for other countries to expand their influence there, as we have seen and as we continue to see on a daily basis. Russia is the prime example. It continues to extend its influence through indiscriminate bombing campaigns that yield little regard for civilian lives. The Russian bombing campaign doesn't distinguish between combatants and civilians. Russian forces are even actively fighting against American-backed groups and working to undermine them at every turn. Of course this doesn't even touch on Russia's aggressive actions along its own border with respect to Ukraine in NATO's backyard. Unfortunately, Russia has no reason to believe that the United States, under the current leadership of the Commander in Chief, will challenge it anywhere--not in the Middle East, not in Europe. I could go on and on about other countries that are feeling emboldened, like a belligerent China in the South China Sea, or, as I mentioned a moment ago, a newly financed and emboldened Iran, the No. 1 state sponsor of international terrorism. When the administration basically wrote a check for $50 billion to Iran, that Secretary Kerry, Vice President Biden, and others acknowledged could be used to finance international terrorism, it seemed to have no impact whatsoever because they were so determined to cut this bad deal with Iran. The point is that our retreat and our lack of leadership around the world only underscore the President's lack of a larger foreign policy strategy. We have asked him time and again: Please tell us what your strategy is. The President sends over a proposed authorization for the use of military force against ISIS, and we find out the real reason he did that is not because he thinks he lacks authority to do what he is doing now but because they want to tie the hands of future Presidents in terms of what that President could do under that authorization for the use of military force. But we keep asking, and all we hear is crickets--silence. We keep asking for a serious, comprehensive strategy to guide the foreign policy and national security efforts of the United States, and the President simply doesn't feel like it is his obligation to deliver one, opting instead for tactics that are guaranteed not to win, saying: Well, we bombed ISIS. Well, that is all well and fine. But at some point, once you bomb ISIS, unless you have somebody who can occupy that territory, the terrorists are going to come right back in. We have friends and allies, such as the Kurds and other countries in the Middle East that have said: Well, we will help be the boots on the ground if you will help supply us, to which they are not provided any sort of answer. I believe the American people do deserve better, and the men and women in uniform who have put their lives on the line deserve better. They deserve a strategy. They deserve the support to be able to accomplish the mission their country has asked them to accomplish. So I am glad that in the absence of leadership from the White House, the Congress has decided to take up some of the slack here to fill the gap left by the President's inattention to this important issue. If the President won't step up to the plate and take these threats seriously enough to come up with a strategy to actually defeat them, the American people can trust the Senate to address it, and we will do so today on a bipartisan basis, insofar as it applies to the threat in North Korea. So it is my hope that we will send a strong bipartisan message to North Korea that their repeated provocations will not go unanswered. Mental Health and Our Criminal Justice System Mr. President, I just came from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which was one of the most unusual hearings I have attended since the time I have been in the Senate--certainly on the Judiciary Committee. Usually on the Judiciary Committee the habit is for the majority to select witnesses and then the minority gets to select witnesses, and then witnesses come out and are proxy fighters for the particular policy differences that members of the committee have--not today. Today, thanks to Chairman Grassley, the senior Senator from Iowa, the Judiciary Committee had a consensus panel on the subject of mental health and its intersection with our criminal justice system. What we heard was that, increasingly, our jails and our prisons, our criminal justice system, and the homeless that we see on our streets are a product of a failed policy--one that said: Yes, we need to move people out of institutions and out of hospitals. But, of course, there is the promise--or at least it was the hope--that they would have somewhere else to go to get treatment and housing and the like. Today what we heard reaffirmed from the sheriff of Bexar County, TX-- San Antonio, my hometown--and from so many of the other witnesses from across the country is that now our jails, our prisons, and the criminal justice systems have become de facto warehouses for the mentally ill, completely ill-suited to deal with what they need, which is treatment, supervision, and help--and the families, too, who need additional tools available for them to turn to when they need help with a loved one who has become mentally ill. So I have introduced legislation that we talked about during the hearing today called the Mental Health and Safe Communities Act, modeled off of successful experiments and programs in places like North Carolina, which we heard from before, San Antonio, Virginia, and elsewhere. I am sure there are a number of good stories. This is the way I think Congress ought to legislate, rather than to dream up here behind closed doors some grand scheme--the masters of the universe trying to decide what is good for all 320 million of us in a one-size-fits-all approach. We have seen the disastrous consequences of that sort of thinking. Rather than that, let's look at what has actually proven to work in our cities, counties, and our States, and then scale that up, where appropriate, to apply more broadly after we have proven that it actually works. That is what my legislation, the Mental Health and Safe Communities Act, is designed to do. As we will look--I believe tomorrow--in the Judiciary Committee at the opioid and heroin crisis that is being experienced in so many parts of our country and as we look, as we have, at reforming our prison systems to provide more incentives for people who are low-risk and mid- level offenders, if they will accept the opportunity to help themselves to deal with their underlying drug or alcohol problem, to learn a skill, to get a GED, to better prepare for life on the outside based on the experiences in Texas and elsewhere, we can actually lower crime rates, lower recidivism rates, and save taxpayers a lot of money. So whether it is dealing with the mental health issue and its intersection with the criminal justice system or dealing with our prison system, which used to believe that rehabilitation was an important part of what their obligation was, or dealing with this opioid and heroin abuse, we have a lot to do to make sure that our criminal justice system is brought into the 21st century and that we no longer punish people who mainly need help. As somebody who is a recovering member of the Texas judiciary for 13 years, I certainly believe there are some people whom you can't help and whom you must punish. But there is a large segment of people-- whether it is drug or alcohol related, or whether it is mental health issues--who will accept our help and will turn their lives around if given that opportunity. I just wanted to say a few words about that because I feel so strongly about the importance of what we talked about at that hearing.

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham) and the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, this morning at 11 a.m., the President released the budget, his final budget for his Presidency. Unfortunately, rather than something that sends a signal that he wants to work with Congress, it is basically more of the same--a $4 trillion budget that is unserious, partisan, and contains reckless spending. In it, he does include several new proposals, proposals he knows will be dead on arrival here in the U.S. Congress. From my perspective, coming from an energy State, one pretty astounding measure he suggested was putting a $10 tax on each barrel of oil. What that would do is translate into 25 cents a gallon more for consumers at the pump. How in the world would that help American families who are suffering as a result of stagnant wages due to slow economic growth in this country as well as additional costs, such as ObamaCare, that have been imposed upon them by the administration? The simple fact is that it doesn't help the average American family get by. It is the opposite. At a time when our country is producing more energy domestically than it ever has and just beginning to export that energy to our friends and allies around the world, the President's budget reveals that he has little interest in growing our energy independence and little interest in jump-starting our economy. All he has to do is look at Texas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and other places to see how our domestic energy production has helped create thousands of jobs and helped grow the economy. Instead, the President makes these job- killing proposals, which will further burden hard-working American families, along with the tepid growth that we have seen here in our own economy--0.7 percent just this last quarter. The President's budget adds further insult to injury by adding to our national debt, which is already $19 trillion. Somebody is going to have to pay that back. In the meantime, what we will have to do is pay interest on that debt, which will continue to crowd out spending in other areas like national security where there is a national consensus. This is the number one priority for the American people. Strangely, but unfortunately predictably, rather than deciding to work with Congress and to listen to the concerns that are raised by those hard-working American families, President Obama went ahead and submitted a budget with no apparent interest in finding any kind of common ground. It is a sad testament to his go-it-alone legacy, which has been more ideological than actually solution oriented. We are here to try to solve problems, and the only way we do that is by working together to find consensus where we can. Understanding that there are people who serve in the Senate and the House from different points of view all across the ideological spectrum, it is only by working together--and that includes not just Congress but the President, too--that we can actually begin to help grow the economy to help create jobs, to help make America more secure. Given the fact that the President has decided to take the tack he has, I hope that Congress will lead the charge against this request for irresponsible spending and try to help get our economy back on track, to begin the process of reducing our debt and strengthening the hand of the American family.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, on another note, I wish to spend a few minutes talking about a very important hearing that we will be having tomorrow in the Senate Judiciary Committee, something that I feel very passionately about, and that is finding a way forward on mental health reform. As shocking as it is, our jails and our streets have become places where people suffering from mental illness basically are left without treatment and without recourse. Tomorrow I will have the honor of chairing that hearing where we will discuss the intersection of our mental health system such as it is and our criminal justice system, and hopefully we will be able to find a way forward to push toward real reform. The goal of the hearing is to better understand how to bring help and support for those who struggle with mental illness. This is an area where we can and we must do better. Too often, after the fact, we find out that families faced with the choice of allowing their loved ones' mental health to continue deteriorating, letting their illness spiral out of control until they become a danger to themselves or others--there are very few choices available to families whose loved ones are becoming more and more ill. True, they could go to court and seek a court order, seeking a temporary commitment to a mental institution, but that frequently exacerbates frayed relations among family members, and it stigmatizes the individual who is suffering from mental illness issues. We need to give those families more and better choices on how to deal with their loved ones, hopefully to keep them from becoming a danger to themselves and to the community. Thanks to the marvels of modern medicine, for many people suffering from mental illness, if they will just follow doctors' orders and take the medication that has been prescribed for them--frequently under some doctor's supervision--many of them can get much better and become more productive in society. One of our witnesses tomorrow will be Pete Earley who wrote a book called ``Crazy.'' He is not talking about a person. He is talking about our so-called system of mental health treatment. Pete Earley wrote this book because, as an accomplished journalist and writer, he knew of no other way than to write about the issue to help his very own son who had encounter after encounter with the criminal justice system because he had untreated mental illness. Sadly, the failure to adequately address mental health in the United States has led to a drastic increase in the number of mentally ill individuals being locked up in prisons and jails, still without adequate treatment. I don't think anyone would support the idea of turning our prisons and our jails into warehouses for the mentally ill, but that is what has happened by default. We need to provide better choices to law enforcement officials, to families, and to the individuals who suffer from mental illness. So often many of them will self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, compounding their problems, creating more and more of this turnstile effect within the criminal justice system where no one ever gets better and the illness never gets treated. As criminologists and mental health experts will tell you, locking up people with mental illness without treatment will make them only more dangerous and increase the risk of crisis, but unfortunately this is an all-too-common practice across our country. This is a shocking number to me when I read it, but one estimate suggests there are as many as 400,000 current inmates in our prisons across America who suffer from some form of mental illness. That is because, at least in part, the United States has witnessed a rapid decline in psychiatric and mental health hospitals over the past decades. The idea was that you couldn't institutionalize people so you had to let them out. Unfortunately, just letting them out without finding a way forward to help them deal with their mental illness resulted in many of them becoming homeless, living on our streets or in our jails and our prisons when they commit petty crimes such as trespassing and the like. Since 1960, more than 90 percent of State psychiatric beds have been eliminated--90 percent. But prison is a poor and often very harmful replacement for a treatment facility. Our goal in the hearing tomorrow is to work toward another solution, one that would give families greater flexibility, including actual treatment options for the people they love. A bill I introduced, the Mental Health and Safe Communities Act, offers one proven approach to treating mental illness. It borrows from a successful model of reform, put into place in my hometown in Bexar County, TX, more than a decade ago. Let me say a word about borrowing from these successful local and State models as opposed to imposing a one-size-fits-all approach at the national level, not knowing whether it would actually work in this big and diverse country we live in. I believe that taking successful examples of best practices at the local and State level--those are the best subject matter for us to look at in terms of scaling these up on a national level where appropriate. The Bexar County sheriff, Susan Pamerleau, a champion of mental health reform in San Antonio, will testify tomorrow about the San Antonio story. Bexar County's mental health program focuses on treatment of the mentally ill instead of just putting them behind bars and leaving them untreated. The results have been very impressive. These reforms have reduced the size of our overcrowded jails, which has been a perennial problem. It has saved tax dollars, and it has improved the lives of people who otherwise would be put behind bars and left to their own devices. I look forward to hearing from Sheriff Pamerleau tomorrow. I bet other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and anyone else who cares to listen will learn a lot about how we can bring these reforms to the rest of the country. Another part of this is to help equip law enforcement, teachers, judges, and people who work in the courts with the knowledge and skill set they need to spot mental illness early on. Wouldn't it be more helpful if teachers, parents, and counselors were empowered to help identify people who need help early on in school? Doesn't it make sense to train our law enforcement officials how to deal with a person suffering from a mental health crisis? Do you slap the cuffs on them? Do you get engaged in a violent confrontation? Or do you try to deescalate the incident in a way that is safer for the law enforcement official as well as the person being confronted? There are better ways for us to respond effectively at the early signs and help to train the people who are in the best position to identify people who need help early on. This legislation includes specialized training for those on the frontlines, such as law enforcement and judicial officials, so they are ready to respond and can react swiftly and safely should a mental health crisis erupt. The truth is that this is a difficult issue and one that raises hard questions. But I am grateful to Chairman Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee for not shying away from this topic but embracing it and having witnesses such as those we will have tomorrow who I think will open the eyes of many people to something they perhaps don't encounter in their daily lives because they don't go to our jails or our prisons or they don't have a loved one who suffers from mental illness. I think this will open a lot of eyes, and it will help us continue the conversation so we can find some common ground and work toward real solutions. Reform is long overdue. All you need to do is visit our jails, as I have done in Harris County, Bexar County, and Dallas County, to see that too often our jails are occupied by people who--yes, they may have committed petty crimes, nonviolent crimes, but they really need some help. If we give them the help, they can turn their lives around and become more productive. It will save taxpayers money, and I think it will be a much more humane and efficient system of dealing with people suffering with a mental health crisis. I am hopeful we can advance substantive legislation to help those struggling with mental illness and their families and, as a result, make our communities safer. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Idaho (Mr. Risch), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), the Senator from Nebraska (Mr. Sasse), the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey), and the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Blunt), the Senator from Arkansas (Mr. Cotton), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Nevada (Mr. Heller), the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Johnson), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. McCain), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), the Senator from Nebraska (Mr. Sasse), the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Tillis), the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey), the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter), and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Wicker).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask through the Chair if the chairman of the Energy Committee will yield for a question.

Mr. CORNYN. Since there is no plan announced yet, or in place, it strikes me as putting the cart before the horse to say that the Senate ought to vote on a $600 million emergency appropriations deal to pay for a plan that has not yet been created or disclosed to the American people. I ask the Senator through the Chair, isn't it a fact that the State itself has already appropriated $40 million to deal with this issue on an emergency basis and the Obama administration has made available another $80 million through the EPA that is available to the State of Michigan to help Flint deal with this problem, so a total of roughly $120 million has already been made available?

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask the Senator from Alaska if she would yield for one last question on topic.