Mike Lee

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, the stated mission of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is ``to enhance the health and well-being of all Americans.'' It is a laudable goal. The HHS Secretary is, thus, charged with overseeing all government healthcare and social services and protecting the health and the rights of the American people, a worthy goal, important job. Unfortunately, the history of the nominee before us, Mr. Xavier Becerra, poses grave concerns to our ability to carry out this goal and to our ability to oversee an Agency with such vast, far-reaching responsibilities. First, Mr. Becerra has repeatedly been on the record for wanting to eliminate private health insurance for millions of Americans even at a time when families need affordable, effective, and flexible healthcare and when healthcare workers need jobs perhaps now more than ever. What is more concerning, however, is that, while in public office, Mr. Becerra has repeatedly, deliberately undermined Americans' constitutional rights and waged political warfare on those who happen to disagree with his views. Take, for example, his views on abortion. Instead of supporting laws that protect and sustain the life and health of American women and unborn children, Mr. Becerra has supported laws that violently hurt them in his endorsing legal abortion up until and even during the moment of birth. As Attorney General of the State of California, he brought 15 felony charges against a reporter for exposing Planned Parenthood's role in trafficking the body parts of aborted babies--a prosecution that even the Los Angeles Times described as ``disturbing overreach.'' He defended a California law that required pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise for State-funded abortion clinics, a law that so egregiously violated free speech that the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, which, of course, it was and is. Not only that, but he has consistently and flagrantly taken hostile actions against the free exercise of religion. Perhaps the worst example of this can be found in his legal persecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Now, this is a religious order of Catholic nuns that cares for the elderly poor. Becerra waged a lengthy, difficult battle to force the sisters--again, this is an order of nuns--to pay for abortion drugs and contraception in their health insurance plan even though doing so violates their beliefs and even though they are nuns. Even after the Supreme Court ruled for the Little Sisters of the Poor in 2016 under a separate case and after the Trump administration granted them full conscience protections in 2017, Mr. Becerra still sued the Trump administration in an attempt to pierce those protections. Again, he wasn't comfortable with letting those protections stand in place with respect to the Little Sisters of the Poor. No. He was determined, even still, to make sure that they couldn't live according to their own religious beliefs and their teachings. During the pandemic, Becerra was the legal architect of some of the country's most strident, sweeping, and brazenly unconstitutional restrictions on church and on worship services, some of which were struck down by the Supreme Court last month, and he even tried to prevent COVID relief funds from going to religious and other private schools. Our Founders established the principle of religious liberty--the natural right of all human beings to freely hold and live out their religious beliefs--because they understood that man is not free unless his conscience is free. They thought that this principle was so important, so fundamental, that it was the first freedom articulated in the very First Amendment to the Constitution. In doing so, they sought to defend and preserve the space of our deepest convictions, a space upon which a State cannot and must never encroach In practice, that has meant that the government's job is not to tell people what to believe or how to discharge their religious duties but to protect the space for all people of all faiths--and of no faith at all for that matter--to seek truth and to order their lives accordingly. The American people deserve a leader at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who will uphold and strengthen this monumental tradition. They deserve a leader who will protect their fundamental rights, not trample them. Unfortunately, tragically, the record of this nominee demonstrates serious threats to the rights and the health and the well-being of the American people. They deserve better. In good conscience, I cannot support the nomination of Mr. Becerra. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I come to the Senate floor today in recognition of an anniversary of sorts. My late father, Rex Lee, died 25 years ago today after an extended and heroic battle with cancer. I prefer to remember my dad not as someone who was ill but someone who was full of life and healthy for most of his life--in fact, his entire life, even while battling with a significant illness. Rex grew up in the small town of St. Johns, AZ. It is a really, really small town. In fact, we used to joke that he may have been 21 years old before he realized that the true name of the town wasn't ``Resume Speed.'' It was a little dot along the highway in eastern Arizona. It was a place that he loved, and it was a place where he learned to love those dear to him and close to him, a place where he was taught in school and in church, where he learned to serve his fellow beings. He attended Brigham Young University as a freshman in the fall of 1953, somewhat under protest. He had wanted to attend the University of Arizona, like his cousins Mo and Stewart Udall before him. His parents told him: You can go wherever you want, but your first year needs to be spent at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT. He went there and was immediately smitten with the place and commenced a relationship that would extend for the rest of his life and would significantly impact his life in many, many ways. Halfway through college, he left to serve a 2\1/2\-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico. During that time, to say he became fluent in the Spanish language and the Mexican culture would be an understatement. It was a fluency that never really left him. While I was a missionary many decades later, he used to write me letters in Spanish, and even after I had been speaking and studying the language for some time, I knew I had to keep my Spanish dictionary close to me when I read letters from my dad, written in his adopted native tongue, Spanish. While serving as a missionary there, he briefly met Janet Griffin, whom he would later marry and who was my mother. Janet was the daughter of an employee of the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. Treasury Attache in the Mexican Embassy. While they didn't interact much then, they reconnected when they were both back at Brigham Young University about 6 or 8 months later. It wasn't exactly love at first sight for my mom, but it was for my dad. They went on to have seven children together, and I am grateful that they did. I am the fourth of those seven. My dad ended up going to law school at the University of Chicago. As it turned out, the law suited him well. He liked it, and it liked him back. He ended up finishing first in his class at the University of Chicago. He clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice White. Shortly after that, he joined the Phoenix law firm of Jennings, Strouss & Salmon and represented clients, both big and small, individual and corporate, mostly civil but also some criminal cases. But he loved the law. He loved the opportunity that he had to represent clients. He loved the challenge that each case brought him. He loved the opportunity to digest large volumes of information and condense it down into a single legal brief and then into a single oral argument that he could present in court. His enthusiasm was so intense that once in a while a judge would pull him aside afterward and ask him why he was so intense about the case, and he would respond by saying: OK, I will try to dial down the intensity next time. Little by little, he became more conversant in court, never to the point of being chatty or inappropriately familiar, but at a point where he felt he was able to have a conversation with the judge and able to communicate to the judge the facts and the law of the case in a simple way. As they were raising their seven children, there were a lot of things that were unexpected in life, including seven very loud, rambunctious children; including the fact that one day, as he was practicing law in Phoenix, he got a phone call informing him that Brigham Young University would be opening a law school and they wanted him to be its founding dean. I was just 1 year old at the time. That is how my family ended up in Utah. We ended up being connected to Brigham Young University basically for the rest of my life ever since then. My dad, in addition to serving as the dean of BYU's law school, served as the Assistant Attorney General during the Ford administration, over the Civil Division of the Department of Justice. And during President Reagan's first term, he served as Solicitor General. This is when I had my first real exposure to the law. I found during that era of my dad's service that I could miss school once in a while if I asked my parents if I could just go with my dad to court. He would go into court, and it felt a little bit like sitting in an extended session of church in a different language. It may not sound exciting, but I was impressed by the majesty of the whole event. As much as anything, I was impressed by how much my dad generally enjoyed being in court and making arguments. He had a way of making it fun. After serving as Solicitor General of the United States, he went back to BYU and resumed his teaching career while simultaneously continuing to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court as a private practice litigator. It was during that period of time, in June of 1987, that my father, while at the peak of physical condition, an avid runner and marathoner, got the news that he had stage IV non-Hodgkin's T-cell lymphoma, a pretty deadly and advanced form of cancer. With a young family still at home, this hit us pretty hard. We were afraid that we were going to lose him. Through the able help of some excellent doctors and as a result of a fortuitous set of circumstances culminating in him receiving some experimental treatment then going on at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health, they were able to prolong his life, and he lived nearly another 9 years. They put him into remission within a few months, very nearly losing him in the process, but then he came back. He had some of the best years of his life after that bout with cancer. It was just a couple of years after that that he was asked to serve as president of Brigham Young University. I still remember this happened shortly after I had been accepted as a freshman at BYU, just as I was graduating from law school. Later that summer, as I was preparing to enter as a freshman at BYU, I got a letter in the mail. The letter was signed by my dad. It was a letter that welcomed me to the university and then ended with the words: ``I look forward to meeting you on campus this fall.'' So I put it on the refrigerator with a Post-it note, saying: ``Dad, thanks so much for the really personal note.'' My dad had a great sense of humor, and notwithstanding his love of law and his professional accomplishments, at home, he was just our dad and our friend. In fact, calling him just our dad doesn't really even do it justice. He was someone who had so much energy and enthusiasm for life. When we were little kids, he would come home from work, and we played a great game. We called it ``run around dad,'' and we didn't know that that wasn't necessarily an entertaining game. We didn't know that it probably wasn't that fun for him, but we would run around him, and he would figure out ways to trip us, and it was hilarious every single time it would happen. My mom would watch patiently in the corner, realizing that after four or five trips, someone was going to cry, but it all worked out OK. Our dad taught us to work hard. He taught us to be kind to each other and to others, and he did that not just through the profession of his faith with words--and there was that. Of course, he was a devoutly faithful father and husband, and he taught us to pray and to read and love the Scriptures, but he also taught us those things through his very actions. I remember when I was a boy and decided that I wanted to set up a small business enterprise shoveling driveways, and after a couple of particularly heavy snowstorms, I wasn't sure whether I could complete all of the jobs that I had. He offered to be my indentured servant. I graciously offered to pay him, but he said: No, this one is on me. You are not going to pay me. You can get paid, in fact, for the fact that I am going to work for you. It was a fantastic deal. It was one of my favorite memories of my life because he had a lot of other things to do, but he chose to help me, not just to teach me to work but also so he could spend time with me, and it was a lot of fun. He loved amusement parks. He loved roller coasters, and he loved being really, really exceptionally, unusually, embarrassingly loud while going down said roller coasters. He loved to ride, and he loved every aspect of it, even when he knew how it was going to end. As my brother Tom once remarked, recalling the circumstance in which my brother Tom had asked my dad for the name of a particular tool that my dad was using while assembling a swing set, he said: Dad, what is that? My dad looked at it and couldn't tell whether it was a wrench or something else. It was a specialized tool used only for a swing set. My dad said to him: I don't know what it is called, but when you need one of those, nothing else will do. Tom later remarked, that same description can be used of my dad. There is not really a single word that you can place to describe him, but when you need one of him, nothing else will do. During most of the last 6\1/2\ years of his life, he was serving as president of BYU. He stayed exceptionally busy. He even managed to argue a case or two in front of the Supreme Court every single year he was serving as president of BYU, even though during most of that time his cancer had come back. It had come back in a slightly different form--slower growing but less treatable. Notwithstanding the pain that he was enduring and the discomfort caused by the treatment, he never lost his optimism, the zeal for his work, or his love for his family. He was such a blessing to all of us to watch him go through that. We didn't feel sorry for him as much as we should have, but part of the reason we didn't feel as sorry for him is that unless you really paid attention, you couldn't tell he was in pain. He didn't complain about it. It certainly didn't slow him down, not at least until the very end. I will always remember, as if it were yesterday, the moment when I took him to the hospital for what I feared would be the last time, and indeed it was. Just a couple of weeks before his death, I was in my second year of law school, and my mom and my wife let me know that things weren't going well and I needed to go and help my dad get to the hospital. As we were wheeling him into the hospital that day, I could hear him. He was almost unconscious. Once we got him into the hospital, they put an oxygen mask over him. His voice was muffled, but he was muffling something. I listened closely, and because I was, by then, a second-year law student, I recognized some of the legal vernacular that he was using, and I quickly discerned, based on some of his appellate briefs that I recently had read, he was preparing for what he hoped and expected and genuinely believed would be his next argument before the U.S. Supreme Court. And I thought: Way to go. There to the bitter end, he is ready for what is next. He is ready to stand for vindicating the interests of his client and for doing his job and doing it well. At no moment during any of this, notwithstanding his service in education, in government, and the practice of law, and his extended church service as a lay minister in my faith, did I ever feel that we were neglected as a family. To be sure, he was gone a fair amount of time. He was a busy man, but when he was home, he was 100 percent home. He was all in. He loved--or at least if he didn't love it, he at least had us convinced that he loved being at home and loved working with his kids, studying with them, and helping them with their homework. When someone serves you that well, that faithfully, and that consistently over that many years, it has an effect and a very positive one. To this day, I still, from time to time, hear his words echoing in my head reminding me to do things as best as I possibly can do them; reminding me, as a lawyer, when you are in court, when you have won your case and you know you have won it, he said sit down and don't say another word; reminding me that when you have got a choice between a ten-cent word and a three-dollar word, choose the ten-cent word every time if it will do the job; reminding me to be kind to others and that you will never regret doing so. He reminded me to give others the benefit of the doubt. Those are things that stick with all of us. So I know I speak certainly for myself and for my siblings--Diana, Tom, Wendy, Stephanie, Melissa, Christie, and my mom Janet--that we miss him. The State of Utah and the Western United States and the United States of America is a better place because of the fact that he was here. I will never forget, on the morning of March 11, 1996--again, exactly 25 years ago today--I saw the Sun rising over the Wasatch Mountains to our east in Provo, UT. It was at that moment when I realized that it would likely be the last time the Sun would rise with my father on the Earth. The Sun has risen and set on that same mountain range many, many thousands of times since then, but we remain better off for the fact that he was here. If he were here, I would tell him: I miss you, Dad. I love you, and I thank you. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1331 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 2 minutes of debate equally divided.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1381 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, there is a little known feature in our Tax Code created by the Tax Code and the way it interacts with our senior entitlement programs. It is called the parent tax penalty. It is very misunderstood, little known, but very, very harmful. Sadly, the changes made to the child tax credit in the reconciliation package are not the right way forward. They don't directly attempt to fix the parent penalty. In addition to this problem, the substitute changes to the child and dependent care tax credit would make the penalty on stay-at-home parents in our Tax Code nearly seven times worse. My amendment with Senator Rubio would ensure that the child tax credit is targeted to refunding Americans their income and payroll taxes and turning the child and dependent care tax credit, which discriminates against stay-at-home parents, into a young child enhancement to provide some additional help to parents during those critical first 2 years.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I call for the yeas and nays.

Mr. LEE. Welfare for the wealthy, that is what we have here. Expanding ObamaCare and its premium tax credit without limit would allow families making up to $500,000 a year to access Federal subsidies for health insurance. My amendment would limit this expansion so that no individual or family making more than 500 percent of the Federal poverty line could receive them. For a family of four, this cutoff would happen at around $132,000 a year. Any expansion of the ObamaCare premium tax credit must be temporary and limited. Look, regardless of how you feel about ObamaCare, regardless of how you feel about this expansion of it, I think we should all be able to agree that allowing those who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to access this form of government assistance, even in a pandemic--perhaps especially in a pandemic--is inappropriate.

Mr. LEE. I call for the yeas and nays.

Mr. LEE. I ask unanimous consent for 2 minutes of debate, equally divided.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, the bill before the Senate this week is not really about COVID relief; it is about politics. Before this, COVID relief has not been a terribly partisan issue. In fact, we have passed 5 relief bills, each with at least 90 votes. That means they are overwhelmingly broad-based and bipartisan efforts. So if this one were to pass, it would be the first of those to have passed that has been highly controversial. Why? Because, in the first place, it borrows and spends another $1.9 trillion when there are still hundreds of billions of dollars of unspent relief money from past COVID-19 relief packages. The new spending authorizes money to go to projects in States and local governments, including many that may not even need it. The fight against the pandemic has, of course, fundamentally changed in the months since this plan was first devised and proposed. It is already outdated. Now, as we are here, into the month of March, the circumstances have changed, yet the plan remains largely the same as it was. So it feels a little bit, to me, like we are fighting the last war using the last war's battle plan, leaving us unprepared for the battle actually in front of us. This is a bill that will worsen our national debt and weaken our economy in the long run without even doing much to help small businesses and American families in the short term. This is not without consequence. In fact, as the book by Drs. Reinhart and Rogoff, published nearly 10 years ago--a book known as ``This Time Is Different''--notes, once we get into this cycle, once we get accustomed to spending this much and acquiring this much of a debt- to-GDP ratio, we find ourselves in dire circumstances--circumstances in which it is even more difficult to raise the same revenue based on the same tax structure or even while tweaking that tax structure, it can be very difficult to pull out of the tailspin that could be produced when we start spending in sums this large and perpetuating a debt-to-GDP ratio that is, frankly, unsustainable. This $1.9 trillion package has very, very little to do with COVID-19. In fact, only 1 percent of the spending in this bill will go toward accelerating vaccine distribution; just 5 percent is focused on public health. Instead, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, three times as much money will go toward partisan priorities that are ``not directly related to the current crisis.'' What are some of the examples of this type of spending? Well, we have $1.5 billion more set aside for Amtrak, which is itself already sitting on $1 billion of unspent bailout money. What this has to do with the virus and why the virus somehow justifies giving them an additional $1.5 billion when they are already sitting on $1 billion of still unspent bailout money is beyond my comprehension. There is $50 million in funding for environmental justice projects, also difficult to connect that up to COVID; $200 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services; $135 million for the National Endowment for the Arts; $135 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities; $86 billion in a pension bailout for private sector workers. The list goes on and on, but you get the idea. You get money that goes to projects, as well as a significant amount to State and local governments. We will get back to that in a moment. When there is as much as $63 billion leftover in unspent funds, this money will not necessarily even help schools to reopen. And $350 billion in aid goes to State and local governments, even though total losses to date have mostly been covered by the $360 billion that Congress has already provided in aid for State and local governments over the last year. While there is some disparity among and between the States and how they have responded to the COVID pandemic and how they fared as far as their revenues, State and local revenue has mostly recovered, and while 26 States saw general revenue decline, 21 States actually saw revenue gains. In fact, my home State of Utah, as well as some other States, is running surpluses. Utah's sacrifice and good governance should not go to bail out other profligate States to the tune of $350 billion. I think about hard-working moms and dads in Utah, struggling to make ends meet while paying their Federal and State taxes. They are told over and over and over again that they have to be giving more. They are told that what they have spent and the time they have allotted--weeks or months out of every year just to pay their Federal tax alone--still somehow isn't enough, isn't nearly enough because, in addition to the money that they have worked so hard to earn and give to the Federal Government, there is so much more that has to be spent, like $1.5 billion going to Amtrak, even though it is already sitting on $1 billion of unspent bailout relief. These same moms and dads throughout Utah are not pleased when they are made to understand that, in addition to bailing out Amtrak again when Amtrak is already sitting on this $1 billion in unspent bailout relief money, they are also going to have to bail out other States; they are going to have to bail out State and local governments that haven't been managed well, as Utah's government has. This isn't fair to them. This is a matter of fundamental fairness to them and to countless Americans, not only in Utah but in every State. Some States still have unspent funding that they have gotten from previous COVID relief packages. California alone has $8 billion in unspent funding, and New York has up to $5 billion. In this bill, we are acting like States are facing a fiscal catastrophe that is specifically from COVID when they are not. At the same time, we are acting like the unprecedented magnitude of Federal debt is a nonissue. It is not. We have got this situation exactly backward. Look, any new relief funding just needs to be targeted, and it needs to be temporary, and it needs to be directly tied to COVID relief. This package is, instead, about fulfilling the political wish list of one political party over another and has very little, if anything, to do with the pandemic. It is offensive, and, yes, it is inappropriate for one political party--the political party that clings to the narrowest of margins of a majority in this body--to push its own political wish list onto an opportunity to provide COVID relief for the American people, and it would be equally inappropriate for Republicans to use it as an opportunity to push their own wish list. Look, we haven't seen this before. We haven't seen anything like this before. We didn't, in the past, see any of the previous COVID relief packages pushed through reconciliation. There are a number of reasons for that, one of which was it is wrong. It is not an appropriate use of reconciliation. Another was, it wasn't necessary because we made it bipartisan, not just mildly bipartisan with a few straggler votes here or there but overwhelmingly so. This one is different. I am not opposed to discussing what role government should play in providing actual relief from the pandemic. We can and should have that debate. I welcome it. I would love to have it right now. In fact, that is a question that I think merits its own debate. This bill is not about that, not anything close to that. It is riddled with poor economic reasoning and rank political favoritism. It will only worsen our debt and our economic health in the long run. It doesn't help America's small businesses and families in the short run. It doesn't do anything to materially advance the cause of getting our children back to school at a time when they have suffered so greatly, not only academically but socially and in so many other ways. That is where we ought to be focused. This bill comes nowhere close to addressing that issue, and, instead, it directs itself in other directions that are not only helpful, but in many cases they are the opposite of that. It is sad. It is disappointing. And on that basis, I can't support this bill but would urge my colleagues to figure out ways to make it better. We don't have to do it this way. It doesn't have to be a deeply partisan vote. We can still choose a different path. I, for one, hope we will.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I appreciate the thoughtful words of my friend and distinguished colleague, the Senator from Delaware. I am grateful anytime someone is willing to recognize that I have been a consistent champion of federalism and localism, self-rule. He and I agree that those principles are important. My friend from Delaware, being a former Governor himself, understands the sovereignty of the States and the need to respect their judgment. This is a different circumstance here than that. This would absolutely be inappropriate for us, in any other circumstance, to tell a State or any political subdivision of any State--a city, town, a county, any other subunit of one of our 50 sovereign States--it would be inappropriate for us to weigh in on a local policy issue like this. It is, in fact, part of our constitutional design that each State and each community within each State needs to be able to express itself and make its own decisions based on its own unique preferences. Here is a very significant difference with respect to the District of Columbia. It has its own provision of the Constitution--in fact, its own clause in article I, section 8, known as the enclave clause. This provision, found in article I, section 8, clause 17, gives Congress exclusive legislative jurisdiction over what we now call the District of Columbia. It wasn't called that in 1787, when they wrote this. It hadn't yet been designed, created, but it described the area to be created out of land donated by one or more States, no more than 10 miles square that would serve as the seat of our national government. There was an understanding the Founding Fathers had that the seat of government ought not be under the control of any single State, but rather it ought to be in a special status. To that end, the Founding Fathers put ultimate legislative jurisdiction in the hands of Congress, not in that district itself, not in the hands of the States that donated the land to create it, but in Congress. Now, the DC Home Rule Act, of course, gives substantial authority to the DC City Council and Mayor. As it relates to this legislation, it gives the DC government 30 business days after the passage and enrollment of this legislation, and in that 30 business-day period, Congress has the ability to disapprove of that legislation, which would stop it from being implemented when it is set to take effect on March 18. Let's remember what we are talking about here. We are talking about the most basic fundamental choice that a parent has relative to his or her child: the authority and the discretion to decide when, whether, how, and under what circumstances and what time certain medical procedures may be performed on the child. You might disagree with the medical judgment of a particular parent and at a particular moment, but I am not aware of any State that would make the decision on a statewide basis to take this choice away from parents and to say that a child as young as 11 years old could make his or her own choice and not only deprive a child's parents from being able to make that decision but also be able to deprive that child's parents from ever even learning about it. These things are sometimes not without consequence. Imagine, for example, a circumstance in which the parents are aware of some particular medical condition, a medical procedure that this child has recently had. Imagine circumstances in which a child's siblings or the child him or herself had previously reacted to a particular vaccination in a particular way or imagine a circumstance in which religious considerations come into play. Do we really want to deprive parents of the ability to make that decision? I am not aware of any State legislature that would make that choice. I certainly hope they wouldn't. But regardless, and even though this would not be our choice, this would not be within our authority if it were not within the District of Columbia and, therefore, within our plenary legislative jurisdiction under the enclave clause to make this decision from Congress. It is our decision here because, at the end of the day, the DC government itself is acting on authority delegated to it by the Congress. So whether you like it or not, whether you like, in the abstract, the idea of localism either as embodied in federalism or even more generally than that, you can't escape the fact that under our constitutional system, we are the lawmaker for DC, no less than any State's legislature is the legislative body for that State. If you choose not to decide here, you still have made a choice. You still have made a choice to approve of that legislative body stripping away critical protections, critical rights that parents have. We have made that decision not just because it sounds like the right thing to do, but anyone who has ever been a parent understands that it has to be the parent's choice. A parent has to be in a position of making these decisions and, at least, for crying out loud, be made aware of this. This takes away not only their authority or their rights but even their awareness of what has happened to their child. So, yes, I understand the concerns of localism. They simply don't apply here. Under our constitutional system, under the Constitution itself, the document to which we all have sworn an oath to uphold, protect, and defend, this is not a State decision. To the extent it is a decision for the DC government, for the DC City Council, and Mayor, that is authority that we have delegated to the District, and it is authority that is ultimately ours. We are ultimately answerable to the people, to those who have elected us, to make sure that is exercised responsibly. So if you don't like the fact that we are doing this--for that matter, if you don't like the policy of this, if you as a State lawmaker wouldn't be comfortable with this policy being adopted in your State--you have not only every right and every authority, but I believe you have a moral obligation to stand up to this piece of legislation. Do not let this kick in on March 18. This is wrong. It is not something we have to accept, and it is certainly not something that the Constitution even allows, much less compels. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE. Madam President, the Minor Consent for Vaccinations Amendment Act of 2020 is a measure adopted by the District of Columbia that would allow for children 11 years old and older to consent on their own, without their parents' knowledge or acquiescence or consent, to being vaccinated. They could receive a vaccine, contrary to the wishes of their parents or without them even knowing. Young children don't necessarily know their own medical histories, their families' medical histories, potential allergies, nor do they have the adult judgment that is sometimes needed to make an informed decision as to consent for a particular medical procedure or treatment or even vaccination, which is exactly why parents make healthcare decisions on behalf of their own children. Parents play the most important role in caring for the health of their children. Moms and dads are at the heart of their children's education and care, and it is crucial that they be able to make decisions about what kind of healthcare is best for them and about the timing of it and certainly that they be not only able to make the decision but also that they be aware of it in the first place. The DC legislation that I referenced a moment ago goes so far as to hide children's vaccinations from their own parents, even after it has occurred, in other words. This information is withheld from the parents. It requires doctors, nurses, insurance companies, and even public schools to conceal their children's vaccinations from their parents. It would also fly in the face of parents who may have religious beliefs causing them to object to vaccinations or who have made the decision for their children to forgo, either on a long-term basis or for a particular period of time, certain vaccinations--like the HPV vaccine, for example. Furthermore, it would pave the way for allowing children to consent to other types of medical treatment without parental knowledge down the road, other treatments in other contexts that might have long-lasting, significant impacts on their health. Look, as a parent myself and as someone who, as a parent, believes in vaccinations, I think it is imperative to realize that regardless of how you, in particular, feel about vaccines, even if, like me, you support the idea of being vaccinated and having your children vaccinated, remember that there are those who don't share those views, and remember that separate and apart from their views, there are some people whose family histories and personal medical experience might reveal some tendency toward a reaction, an idiosyncratic reaction that could be harmful. In some circumstances the timing of a vaccination can also be important. These are all considerations that a parent ought to be able to make, and in every jurisdiction that respects the independence of parental rights, these ought to be decisions that are made by parents and certainly ought not be decisions made by children as young as 11 years old without their parents' consent or even their knowledge. In light of these concerns, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be discharged from further consideration of S.J. Res. 7 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the joint resolution be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. I appeal the ruling of the Chair that debate is not in order.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I have a point of order. Mr. President, moments ago, House Manager Cicilline--

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I withdraw my appeal.

Mr. LEE. There is clearly a quorum.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to suspend the quorum call.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President.

Mr. LEE. I send a question to the desk.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President.

Mr. LEE. You are not the one being cited as a witness, sir.

Mr. LEE. Castro repeated it too.