Rick Santorum

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in adjournment under the previous order.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be authorized to meet during the session on Tuesday, March 11, 2003, at 10:00 a.m., to hear testimony on The Funding Challenge: Keeping Defined Benefit Pension Plans Afloat.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the matter be printed in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, the Senator from California suggested this procedure may be the safest one in the case of an emergency. I do not have a medical degree, but I do have common sense. I cannot imagine that any doctor, faced with an emergency such as preeclampsia, or any other kind of emergency to the health of the mother, would give a woman a pill and send her home for 2 days and say: Come back to me in 2 days so I can abort your child. And that is exactly what the Senator from California would suggest is necessary in the case of an emergency. Now, again, I do not have a medical degree. I agree with that. There will be a physician who does have a medical degree who will be here during this debate who will give you his opinion. That is our leader. But there is no way this procedure would ever be used in the case of an emergency. It is a 3-day procedure. You ask the doctors. I do not know whether the Senator from California did. Ask the doctor who designed this procedure. And it was asked, in hearing after hearing after hearing, and letters. The doctor said he did this for his convenience because it took him 45 minutes to do your average late-term abortion, but the partial-birth abortion only took 15 minutes--15 minutes after 2 days of the mother being home having her cervix dilated over time. So, please. And, by the way, I have had this conversation many times on this floor, where I have laid out very clearly this will never be used in the case of an emergency. You will find nothing anybody with a medical degree has ever written that says this will ever be used in the case of an emergency. But it does not fail that someone will come up and say: Well, you have to have this just in case of an emergency. You will never use this in the case of an emergency to protect a woman's health, life, or anything else. So let's just, if we can, try to stipulate to some facts, No. 1. No. 2, the Senator from California said this may be a medically necessary procedure to save the health of the mother. That is a statement I have heard numerous times. She was reading from some letter, which I am going to be anxious to read because I have not seen it. But for the past 7 years, for anybody who has questioned this procedure, I have asked one question: Give me a for instance. Give me one example where this procedure, which is not taught in medical schools, which is not done in hospitals--let me repeat this--not done in hospitals; it is done in abortion clinics, designed by abortionists--tell me, under what circumstances would this be a preferable medical procedure? Never--I underscore never--have I gotten a response. Why? Because there isn't an answer, other than never. Yet it doesn't dissuade anybody from coming here for years and repeating the same line. Oh, we may need this. This may be medically necessary. Give me a for instance--just one. Give me one. Never--not once, ever--has someone come here and given a for instance of when this was medically necessary to preserve health, life, or anything. So I ask the Senator from California, who has exited the floor, to give me an example. I have been asking for years. I am a patient man. Finally, she talks about how we are not doctors and we should not be here regulating medical procedures. I ask the Senator from California if she was a sponsor of a bill in which Congress banned, in 1996, a procedure known as female genital mutilation. I believe the Senator supported that legislation, as did I. It banned a medical procedure. I don't think the Senator from California came here and said we should not ban this procedure because we are not doctors. But we did ban that procedure. By the way, is the procedure in the medical literature known as female genital mutilation? Answer: No. That is what Congress called it. Does Congress have a right to label things what we want? Answer: Yes. It may be more descriptive and real in describing what goes on than the medical term, which is mumbo jumbo in some cases to us lay people. So the medical term for female genital mutilation is infibulation. If we came here and said we were going to ban that, everybody would look at me like I am looking at that word--having no familiarity with it. So we put it into plain language. Why? Because our job is to describe what we are doing. We don't want to keep secrets. We do enough of that. We want to accurately describe what is going on. The Senator from California voted to ban a medical procedure that was named in the legislation differently than the ``technical name'' used in medicine--the very argument she is making against this legislation. Not that we have to be consistent in the Senate, but I suggest if you are going to make arguments about what we are doing here, don't do it from a glasshouse. That is what the Senator from California is doing. I see a lot of broken glass on the floor. I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, how much time does each side have remaining?

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask the Senator from Washington if she would characterize something that has, in the most recent poll, 70 percent support among the American people as an extreme agenda item?

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, we are now on a piece of legislation known as the partial-birth abortion bill. It is a bill we have debated in the Senate in two previous Congresses on four different occasions. We debated it the first time and passed it. It was vetoed by the President, President Clinton at the time, back in 1996. Then we attempted to override the President's veto and fell just a few votes short. We came back the next session, went through the same process, sent the bill to the President, he vetoed it again, and we came closer but we still failed in overriding the President's veto. Subsequently, there were a whole series--actually, concurrent with that debate--of States, over half the States in the Union, that passed bans on this horrific partial-birth abortion procedure. That is the procedure where the baby is delivered--this is a baby at over 20 weeks gestation; in other words, halfway through the pregnancy. The gestational period is 40 weeks. This procedure is only performed on babies in utero after 20 weeks. So these are late-term abortions. The process is as follows: A woman shows up and decides she wants to have an abortion after 20 weeks. A doctor decides to use this methodology. The woman is given a drug to dilate her cervix. She is sent home. Two days later she returns, and the baby is then delivered in a breech position. Under the definition of this act as currently constituted, the baby has to be alive when it is brought in through the birth canal, the baby has to be in a breech position, has to be outside the mother at least past the navel, and be alive. Then the baby is killed in a fashion that I will describe in more detail later. That procedure, as I said, was banned by over 25 States. It was brought, obviously, to the courts by many in those States. There were a couple of circuit courts that found this to be constitutional, one that did not. The Supreme Court took one of those cases, the Nebraska case that was appealed to the circuit, and made a decision which I think was in error. It was a horrible decision, but a decision I think we need to contemplate here. It is a decision that said that an abortion past 20 weeks of a child that would otherwise be born alive is now encompassed by Roe v. Wade. You hear a lot of comments about Roe v. Wade, that Roe v. Wade only allows legal abortions within the first trimester and under limited circumstances in the second trimester. These are babies in the second and third trimester, where the courts have basically said, as many of us who have been studying this issue for a long time have said, that there is no limitation on the right to abortion. Abortion is a right that is absolute in America. There are no limitations, as a result of court decisions, on the right to an abortion. So they held, in this case, that the language of the statute was too vague and that--the description of the procedure was too vague, and that there needed to be a health exception to this procedure; in other words, to preserve the health of the mother. We have responded to that with a bill we introduced last year, in the last session of Congress. In the last session of Congress, we introduced a piece of legislation in the House that was passed. Steve Chabot, at the time chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee on the Judiciary Committee, passed a piece of legislation in the House that banned this procedure. It is identical to the bill that is on the floor today. We asked for its consideration last year. I came to the floor on a couple of occasions and asked for unanimous consent to bring this bill forward. I agreed to debate it on Fridays and Mondays, so as not to interrupt the rest of the Senate's schedule, I agreed to stay on the weekend if that was necessary so we could deal with amendments. Unfortunately, even though the bill passed in July of last year, it was not scheduled here on the Senate floor for debate and for passage--for action. That is why I believe this is unfinished business from last year and one of the reasons I advocated for its early consideration this year. I thank our leader, Senator Frist, for his willingness to bring this bill to the floor promptly, for us to be able to have this debate, to look at the issues involved with respect to this issue. We believe the issues the Supreme Court brought up with respect to the infirmities in the Nebraska statute have been addressed by this legislation. First, we have gone into much greater detail in describing this procedure, and either later tonight or tomorrow I will read the text of the bill and I will provide graphic illustration as to how this procedure is conducted. Second, we dealt with the issue of health. Roe v. Wade requires a health exception when the health of the mother is potentially in danger. We have included in this legislation a voluminous amount of material that shows clearly, without dispute, in my mind--without dispute, period, not just in my mind--without any medical dispute, that there are no reasons this procedure has to be available for the health of the mother because there are no instances in which this procedure is required for the health of the mother. There is no medical organization out there that believes that to be the case. While some do not support the legislation or have a neutral position, nobody has come forward and said this is medically necessary to protect the health of the mother, much less, by the way, the life of the mother. So, since there is no reason for a health exception because there are no instances where a health exception is needed, then Roe does not apply. So we have laid that out very clearly in this legislation. We believe as a result of that, Congress has the right--because we do a heck of a lot more exhaustive study, in our deliberations with hearings and other testimony, than the Supreme Court can. They have to rely on the record of the lower court and the arguments made to that lower court. In the case of Nebraska, frankly, the arguments were not particularly well put and the evidence was not particularly robust for either side. It was a very weak record, and the court made a decision based on that record. They will have a different record before them in this case when it is brought up to the court, and I believe the record will be clear and dispositive that no health exception is necessary. We have dealt with the constitutional issues. Now we are back to the focus of this legislation. Do you want to allow a horrific procedure that is not medically necessary, never medically indicated, not taught in any medical school in this country, not recommended, and which, in fact, major health organizations of this country have said is bad medicine, contra-indicated, that is so brutal in the way it is administered to a baby that otherwise would be born alive? Let me emphasize that it is a baby fetus--some will refer to it as the child in utero--that would otherwise be born alive. You don't want to allow this child to be brutally killed by thrusting a pair of scissors into the back of its skull and suctioning its brains out. This goes on in America thousands of times a year. The number of partial-birth abortions has tripled, according to the abortion industry that doesn't keep very good records. They admit that. It has tripled, they say, to 2,200. Oddly enough, back in 1997 when we were debating this, the Bergen County Record took the bother of asking the local abortion clinic how many they did just in Bergen County. The partial- birth abortion national number at that time was 600. In Bergen County, they did 1,500. I guess they dismissed that. The bottom line is that this goes on an enormous amount of times and they call it a rare procedure. If we had a procedure that killed 2,200 children in America every single year, we would not be saying it is a rare procedure in America. If we had a disease that affected 2,200 little babies every year, we wouldn't say this is a rare thing when we know, by the way, that the number is multiples of that. The people we have to rely on for that information are the people who want this to be legal and who don't tell us about the abortions they perform. This is something that needs to be done. I am hopeful that we can deal with this issue in an expeditious fashion, get this over in the House of Representatives and have them pass it, and have the President sign it, because he will sign it. I think there is broad bipartisan support for this legislation as there has been in the past. It is overwhelmingly supported by the American people. A very large majority support this legislation. Even those who do not consider themselves pro-life believe that at some point we have to draw the line on the brutal killing of a child literally inches from constitutional protection--inches from being born and being completely separated from the mother, being held in the birth canal and executed, having scissors thrust into the base of its skull and then to have a suction catheter inserted and the ``cranial content'' removed. Just to describe it here sends chills down your back. Yet people will defend this procedure and say that a civilized nation such as America believes this is proper medicine. Medicine, healing? I, frankly, don't know who is healed in that situation. I do not know who is protected in that situation when every credible medical core organization says it is not medically necessary; in fact, it is ``bad medicine,'' and it is harmful to the woman. I have just described how harmful it is to the little child. I ask my colleagues to join me in passing this piece of legislation and ending this outrageous procedure. Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. SANTORUM. So the Senator believes something that has 70 percent support among the American people is extreme. OK, I am interested in hearing that.

Mr. SANTORUM. I think you did. You reiterated your position you believe this is an extreme piece of legislation even though 70 percent of the American people support it.

Mr. SANTORUM. This legislation has been around 7 years. This has been written about, described in detail in the national press, and I do not think we do the American public a great service by suggesting they cannot read and understand very clearly what this procedure is all about. I would argue probably the 30 percent who have not heard of it have not read in detail exactly what goes on. I make the other argument. But 70 percent is a pretty good start on our side. Second, the Senator says the Government should not get involved in regulating the doctor-patient relationship when it comes to women's health. Did the Senator support the female genital mutilation bill which bans a medical procedure that interferes with the doctor-patient relationship between a woman and her doctor?

Mr. SANTORUM. This is a banned medical procedure that affects the reproductive system of a woman. I argue that you can make the case and you will ban things you agree with, but you do not want to ban things you do not agree with. That does not mean the Congress does not have a right, when we find something to be abhorrent, that we believe is not in the best interest of the medical profession and women in this country and particularly, obviously, the child in the process of being born, to step forward and ban what we believe are harmful and destructive procedures. That is what we have done in this case. The Senator from Washington spent 90 percent of the time talking about anything but this bill, which leads me to the old saw when I was a lawyer: If you cannot argue the facts, argue the law; if you cannot argue the law, pound the table. In this case, we are pounding the table.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the scheduled vote this evening on the Frost nomination now occur at 5:45, provided that debate time from 5 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. be equally divided as under the earlier order.

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

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, it is with great sadness that I rise tonight on the Senate floor to talk about the life of Fred Rogers from my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. Mr. Rogers died today of stomach cancer. It is a very sad time for all of us--at least to my generation--who remembers Mr. Rogers from public television, and certainly from my experience with him and the wonderful work that he did for children not just all over the country, frankly, but all over the world, certainly, and very importantly to the people of southwestern Pennsylvania. In fact, I had the pleasure and the honor of having lunch with him in the Senate dining room just a couple of months ago around Christmas before he found out that he was stricken with stomach cancer. He was here to talk about, predictably, what we can and should be doing to help create a culture that is more nurturing to children in the United States of America. In times when just about every figure in public life has some controversy surrounding them, he is someone who throughout his life escaped that controversy and stood as a beacon of caring, compassion, and thoughtfulness to parents and children alike. Mr. Rogers was born in Latrobe, PA, south side of Pittsburgh in 1928. He married his wife 51 years ago, back in 1952. His wife Joanne survives him today. Very early in his career he had a gift for the media and a heart for trying to reach children and touch children and educate and nurture children through the media. He worked in a variety of different things. But in 1966, he created and hosted ``Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.'' Before that, he worked on a series in Canada for the CBC. And he worked at WQED, which is one of the first public broadcasting stations in the country. We are very honored that WQED is in Pittsburgh. We are also very proud of the fact that the first radio station in the country was KDKA in Pittsburgh. We in Pittsburgh are very proud of WQED and the great work that Fred Rogers did in putting together the first children's program there. Even before it was on the air he started producing programming for that station. I think it was called ``The Children's Corner.'' It became known almost 10 years later, in 1966, as ``Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.'' It was actually created back in 1955. There were characters such as ``Daniel S. Striped Tiger,'' ``X the Owl,'' ``King Friday XIII,'' ``Henrietta Pussycat,'' and ``Lady Elaine Fairchild.'' For many of these characters, we have puppets in my conference room to celebrate the contribution Fred Rogers has made not just to the people of Pennsylvania but to the people of this country. And that program, ``Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,'' had the very famous song: ``Won't you be my neighbor?'' and Mr. Rogers coming in, and putting on that cardigan sweater and tennis shoes, inviting you into his home, the ``Land of Make Believe,'' and the trolley. All of those things are such wonderful memories for me and for generations, and which is continuing today. Even though the program has now been out of production for a couple of years, there are over 900 episodes of ``Mister Rogers' Neighborhood'' that PBS has and distributes on a regular basis all over the country. Mr. Rogers will continue to touch future generations of children, particularly young children, in that nurturing and reassuring way he had with the very young. In many cases, a lot of kids sit in front of television; mom is busy; dad is at work; or mom and dad are both at work. And there was always a reassuring and comforting voice, someone who reassured them of their values as a person, their own self-worth, their ability to accomplish things, to dream great dreams. Mr. Rogers--in a culture that is not always so positive, and certainly not very reassuring--was just that. He was a positive example of what a good father, a good parent, can and should be, and what good adults and what adults generally can be to our children in his neighborhood--I would argue, in our neighborhood--and that we, too, can learn from Fred Rogers, can learn from the kindness and the gentility and the wholesomeness he showed to America's children and to America's parents. We will miss Fred Rogers. I can tell you, Pittsburgh is going to greatly miss this legend in our town. All of those shows were filmed in Pittsburgh, PA, at WQED. And his neighborhood, which is the Oakland, Shadyside, and Squirrel Hill, which is where WQED is located, where much, I am sure, of his ideas came from, is a place that is lesser today than it was yesterday because of this great man passing. But the joy in getting up and talking about Fred Rogers is what he has left. Oh, that all of us could say we have touched so many and influenced, in such a positive way, literally millions of children in this country and around the world and have made a positive contribution in serving this country. Fred Rogers was a Presbyterian minister who found that God's calling to him was to serve children through the media. And I think God, this morning, when he arrived in Heaven, said: Well done, my good and faithful servant.

Mr. SANTORUM. I am happy to yield.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I send a resolution to the desk and ask unanimous consent that it be held at the desk.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 69 which was introduced earlier today.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to the resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Con. Res. 10 which was introduced today by Senators Gregg and Kennedy.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to this matter be printed in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask for its second reading and object to my own request.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in adjournment under the previous order.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to a period of morning business.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 5:30 on Monday, March 3, the Senate proceed to a vote on the nomination of Marian Horn to be a judge of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims; provided further that following that vote, the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in adjournment until 12 noon, Monday, March 3. I further ask unanimous consent that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate return to executive session and resume consideration of the nomination of Miguel Estrada to be Circuit Court judge for the District of Columbia.