Pat Toomey

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 20, 2015, at 10 a.m., room SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 20, 2015, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing entitled ``The Persistent North Korea Denuclearization and Human Rights Challenge.''

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a letter from the National Child Support Enforcement Association in support of the Child Support Assistance Act of 2015 be printed in the Record.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I rise to address this issue the Senator from South Dakota has been speaking on as well. I am extremely disappointed and frustrated, as the Senator from South Dakota is and many of us are, that 42 of our Democratic colleagues would choose to block the Senate from even being able to consider and have an up-or- down vote on whether we should proceed with this incredibly important, in my view, extremely dangerous deal with Iran despite the fact, as has been observed, that 98 Senators voted to create this very mechanism--a mechanism by which we could consider whether Congress wanted to pass a resolution of disapproval to prevent this dangerous deal from going forward. Nevertheless, they subsequently voted not to allow the Senate--and it is mystifying. We know what the outcome would be. We know there is a bipartisan majority in the Senate that opposes the deal, as there is a bipartisan majority in the House that opposes the deal, as there is a bipartisan majority across America that opposes the deal. But somehow we have to I guess pretend that is not the case and avoid a vote that would clearly manifest that bipartisan majority here in the Senate. If we did have that vote and we passed the resolution of disapproval--it has passed the House--it would go to the President, and he would veto it. He has made that clear. And those of us who disapprove of this deal don't have enough votes to override the President's veto. So in the end the President would still get his way. But somehow we have to hide from the fact that there is a clear bipartisan majority in both Houses of Congress that reflects the wishes of the American people about this. That is pretty frustrating and pretty surprising and strange, that my Democratic colleagues who say they are all for this deal nevertheless are afraid to acknowledge where the consensus really is. Well, I want to talk a bit about the specifics of the deal, but mostly I want to talk about the context of entering into a deal with a regime like the Iranian regime. There are a few things we should bear in mind when we are entering into negotiations with any other country, but first and foremost, let's remember that this isn't an agreement with Switzerland; this isn't an agreement with Canada; this is an agreement with the regime in Iran. The first point I would make about this regime is to remember how hostile they have been to the United States. Thirty-six years ago, radical Islamists in Tehran overran the U.S. Embassy, stormed the compound, and took 52 American hostages and held them for 444 days. And I would argue that our relationship with Iran has not improved a whole lot since then. They are still holding American hostages today. They have killed over 500 American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. They regularly call for ``Death to America.'' They call us the Great Satan. This is a very hostile regime indeed. The second point we should keep in mind is the consistent, demonstrated aggressive nature and the regional ambitions of this regime. This is, after all, the world's No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. They actively support Hezbollah. They actively support the Assad regime as he massacres his own people. And when the government in Yemen was cooperating with the United States--cooperating with us in attacking and killing terrorists who were trying to kill Americans-- during the midst of the negotiations, the Iranian regime decided that was unacceptable, so they essentially overthrew the Government in Yemen and launched a civil war, which rages to this day. Of course, they continue to consistently threaten the very existence of Israel. That has been a consistent message from this regime. The third point I would make is how fundamentally untrustworthy this regime is. They are currently in violation of over 20 international agreements; yet we think they are going to comply with this one? It escapes me why we think that history isn't going to repeat itself. Even during the negotiations, they were caught trying to buy nuclear parts. That is a violation of their own commitments. They were recently caught again using Hezbollah to supply arms to Assad in violation of agreements to which they committed. The bottom line is very clear: This regime in Iran cannot be trusted. Maybe the fourth point I want to make is the most important in some ways. It seems to me, in my experience in business and in life, in order to successfully complete a deal of almost any kind, to reach an agreement, it starts with a meeting of the minds. It starts with an agreement about a desired outcome. That is true in business, in multinational organizations, and it is true in negotiations we engage in here in Congress. The starting point is agreeing on a fundamental objective, and when two parties reach that agreement, then you can document it. You can draft the legal documents that then manifest and bring that agreement about. In my view--and I think this is a widely shared view--the Iranian regime has not decided to abandon their pursuit of nuclear weapons, and that makes all the difference in the world. I will take a contrasting point that I think is worth thinking about--the case of Muammar Qadhafi. We can probably all agree that Muammar Qadhafi was a very bad guy, probably a human being with no redeeming qualities at all. But after the United States went into Iraq and when our government presented him with the evidence we had about the Libyan weapon of mass destruction program, Muammar Qadhafi came to a conclusion. His conclusion was that it was in his interest to abandon his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction because he was afraid of what we would do to him if he didn't. He didn't become a good guy; he made a rational analysis of his situation and decided it was in his best interest. His ability to hold on to power would be enhanced if he gave up those programs, so he did. We reached an agreement, it was documented, and there is every reason to believe that would have succeeded because he had decided it was in his interest to make that agreement. I don't think the Iranian Government has in any way come to the conclusion that they have to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. They have been at it for decades, and the very conditions they insisted on in this agreement, in my view, make it clear they have every intention of continuing to pursue nuclear weapons. To summarize these points, when you are dealing with a country that is extremely hostile to the United States and our allies, that is aggressively seeking to dominate that region, that has demonstrated by its actions that it is completely untrustworthy, and that shows no evidence of having actually decided to abandon the pursuit of nuclear weapons, given those aspects, the reality we face, it is very difficult to complete an acceptable negotiation to ensure that country will be nuclear-free. At a minimum, you would need an absolutely bulletproof, airtight agreement in order to be successful. Instead, what do we have? We have an agreement where we give many tens, maybe over $100 billion virtually up front, which Iran will certainly use, at least in part, to fund their terrorist activities. The agreement allows them to retain an industrial-scale uranium enrichment program. You don't need any uranium enrichment to have peaceful nuclear energy. There is a very dubious inspection and verification process which allows up to 24 days before inspectors can get to certain sites. The whole deal is temporary. After Iran gets its money, Iran can walk away with the deal with 35 days' notice at any time. There is a little process they have to go through that is 30 days long, and then they can give 35 days' notice and just walk away. That is codified in the agreement. Of course, I think it is extremely dangerous for Israel and diminishes the ability of Israel to defend itself, and I think it is very likely to lead to nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East. Those are plenty of reasons, in my view, to oppose this deal, but those are the parts we know about. What is truly amazing, what is absolutely shocking to me is that we don't have all the documents. I don't know how anyone can support a deal when they know they haven't seen some of the important documents that are part of the deal, but we know that is the case. There are two documents, negotiated apparently between the IAEA-- which is responsible for enforcement of essential parts of this agreement--and Iran, that not only has Congress not seen, the administration hasn't even seen. Secretary Kerry has not seen them. Our negotiators haven't seen them. Nobody has. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have an additional 2 minutes.

Mr. TOOMEY. I thank the Chair. So it is shocking to me that we would proceed and that people would support an agreement when they know there are essential parts of enforcement and discovery about the previous military dimensions that are unknown to us. There is another point I need to make, and I will close with this. We had the minority leader, the Democratic leader, who was here last time we had this vote saying: This is over. You guys need to accept it, deal with it. This deal is going forward, and there is nothing you can do about it. It is done. I strongly disagree with that. This is not over. We are not finished with this. The reason we are not finished with this is because the President made a conscious decision. His decision was not to treat this as a treaty, not to respect the constitutional requirement to get two- thirds of the Senate to support this, and had he brought us in early on, we might very well have been able to get there. Instead, he decided to circumvent the Constitution, the Congress, the United States Senate, and the will of the American people. So the result is that if the President goes forward with this, which it certainly looks as though he will, this deal will not be binding on the United States past this administration. That is by virtue of the decision the President made. The President could have gone a different way, but he didn't, so the deal can be undone by the next President. And with bipartisan majorities in both Houses of Congress, that is entirely plausible. There is another consideration, and that is that the President will be doing so in violation of the law. The law--the Corker-Cardin legislation--clearly and unambiguously requires the President to turn over all documents to Congress before the 60-day window even begins, and only after that is he permitted to lift the sanctions. But the President has not given all the documents to Congress. In fact, he hasn't even gotten all the documents himself. This is a clear, explicit violation of the law we all passed. I know the administration says: But it is customary for the IAEA to enter into these secret negotiations. As the Senator from South Dakota indicated a little while ago, it is not at all clear that it is customary, but more importantly, that doesn't matter. The law of the United States of America is more important than whatever is customary between the IAEA and other parties. So I think this is a very dangerous deal. I am very disappointed that we don't have a chance to have a clean up-or-down vote on this as we should have. But it is important for companies thinking about doing business with Iran and countries around the world to realize this is a deal between the current administration and Iran and it does not necessarily succeed this administration. No. 2, if the President goes ahead and lifts sanctions, he will be doing it in violation of the law he signed. This is not over, and we should not be giving up. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I wish to take this moment for the Senate to recognize and honor the work of Terry Boston, who has contributed a lifetime of service to ensure that electricity in America is available reliably and at a reasonable price. By the end of the year, Mr. Boston will retire from the role of president and chief executive officer of PJM, a position he has held since 2008. PJM is a world-class institution that oversees the largest power grid in North America and employs over 600 people in Audubon, PA. PJM performs the critical function of keeping the lights on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for over 51 million people in all or portions of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and the District of Columbia. In addition to his work at PJM, Mr. Boston serves as president of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, Inc., and was the immediate past president of the GO 15, an association of the world's largest power grid operators. Mr. Boston was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest professional honors accorded an engineer, and is a member of the board for the Electric Power Research Institute. Prior to joining PJM, Mr. Boston was the executive vice president of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Nation's largest public power provider. In his 35 years at TVA, Mr. Boston directed divisions in transmission and power operations, pricing, contracts, and electric system reliability. Mr. Boston is a past chair of the North American Transmission Forum, dedicated to excellence in performance and sharing industry best practices. He also was one of the eight industry experts selected to direct the North American Reliability Corporation investigation of the August 2003 Northeast-Midwest blackout. Terry Boston is one of the most qualified engineers and leaders in the electric industry. I wish him well in his future endeavors.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I wish to congratulate Joseph M. Casey on his upcoming retirement as general manager of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, also known as SEPTA. Mr. Casey has served SEPTA in this position for the last 7 years and will officially retire on September 30, 2015. For those who do not know, SEPTA is the largest transit system in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the sixth largest in the Nation. Services including bus, subway, commuter rail, light rail, and electric trolleybus are provided to over 3.9 million people in and around Philadelphia, PA, including parts of Delaware and New Jersey. A lifelong resident of the Philadelphia area, Mr. Casey's first memories of SEPTA were riding the trolley to visit his grandmother in the city and to attend games at Connie Mack Stadium. Mr. Casey began his career at SEPTA in 1982. Before becoming general manager in 2008, he served for 6 years as chief financial officer and treasurer. In senior leadership positions at the Internal Audit and Finance departments, he received praise for his efforts to implement fiscal responsibility at the authority. As general manager of SEPTA, Mr. Casey oversaw 9,000 employees and instituted several necessary programs for the authority. He shifted SEPTA's customer relations focus to reflect the ``Four Cs''-- Cleanliness, Convenience, Courtesy and Communication--and implemented initiatives to reduce energy consumption on vehicles and at facilities. As a result, SEPTA received the 2012 American Public Transportation Association, APTA, Outstanding Public Transportation System Award. Throughout his tenure, Mr. Casey has focused on community engagement and policy reforms with the aim of helping riders and the overall transit infrastructure system. I applaud Mr. Casey for his work with SEPTA over the past 34 years and his service to the residents of southeast Pennsylvania. His leadership and determination should serve as an example for his successor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I rise to speak on an amendment that is offered by the senior Senator from North Carolina. It is an amendment that would change the formula for how title I funds are allocated among the States. So first by way of background, title I is the largest category of Federal financial assistance for K-through-12 education. So we are talking about a large pot of money. This is the biggest single source of Federal funding for primary and secondary education. Under current law, the formula for how that money is allocated to the school districts is based on two things. It is based on the number of children who live in poverty in these respective districts, but it is also related to the average amount that the various States spend on education. So let me be very clear. It is not a single, uniform amount per student. It was never meant to be. It still is not. There is a reason for that. The reason is it is meant--this correlation to not only the number of kids in poverty but also the amount of money States spend on education is designed that way in order to reflect the fact that there are different costs of living in different States. Nobody would dispute that, I don't think. In some States, the real estate on which you build the school is more expensive. Some States have a higher general wage level, so teachers get paid more. States just have different expenses. In addition, there is an incentive element. The incentive is, for States that are willing to commit more resources--that means taxing their residents more to fund education--then there is that little bit more that comes from the Federal Government. So this is a finite amount of money. What this amendment goes to is the question of how does this get allocated? The amendment originally offered by the senior Senator from North Carolina was very troubling to me because it would profoundly change the formula effective immediately. This is a zero-sum game. So some States would win a lot, other States would lose a lot. Pennsylvania stood to lose a lot of funding under the formulation that was originally constructed for this amendment--the gist of it being to convert the funding to an almost uniform amount per student. I can assure you, I was hearing loudly and clearly from the folks who run especially the large school districts in Pennsylvania about how concerned they were because it was a multimillion-dollar-per-year hit that they were going to take. I spoke with Dr. Hite, who is the superintendent of Philadelphia schools, and Dr. Lane from Pittsburgh school district, as they would have been hit the hardest in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In total, had the original amendment become law, it would have cost Pennsylvania over $120 million per year. Every one of Pennsylvania's 500 school districts, except one, would have lost money. So 499 school districts would have had to do with less and one would have had a little more. Many of them would have lost huge amounts of their funding. I first want to say I appreciate the fact that the Senator from North Carolina and other Senators worked with my office and other offices across the aisle to take a different approach. So the original amendment is no longer under consideration. My understanding is the unanimous consent agreement which was struck earlier abandons that approach, but it does still have an element of that direction that does concern me. I want to touch on that. So here is my understanding: Under the form that the amendment now takes, and which we will be voting on maybe later today, the current levels of funding will continue under the current formula. In fact, that funding level, as it naturally tends to grow each year because the Federal Government increases funding in this--for a while, that growth will also occur according to the current formulation. But at some point in the not-too-distant future, the total spending on title I funding will reach about $17 billion--now it is about 14.5. When it gets to $17 billion, from that point forward, prospectively, the increments each year will then be allocated according to the new formula, which is, by the design, the same design as the original amendment, which is nearly uniform spending per child, disregarding, in my view, the important consideration of the different costs of living in the various States. So this is a huge improvement, from my point of view, over what we were looking at before. Pennsylvania will not have a dime cut from its spending. The formula does not change next year or the year after. I am not sure exactly when we will reach that $17 billion figure. But at some point, if this amendment passes, this reformulated amendment from the senior Senator from North Carolina, if it does pass, then at some point we start to move incremental funding into this sort of uniform formulation, rather than the current formulation where we take into account the varying costs of education. So while this is a huge improvement over the original version of this amendment, it is still something that I think is very problematic and so I will be voting no on this. I would just summarize by saying that I think the amendment is mistaken in two respects: One, it fundamentally fails to recognize the varying costs of living in varying States. That is a very big difference. Secondly, it penalizes those States that are willing to ask their citizens to invest more in education by eliminating the current mechanism. So I would urge my colleagues to vote no on that amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I wish to speak about my amendment, which is part of the unanimous consent agreement that was just agreed to. I have a number of thank yous I need to go through. I will start by thanking the cosponsors of this amendment, starting with Senator Manchin, who has been with me in this battle for a very long time now. But I wish to thank the other cosponsors, including Senators McConnell, Alexander, Cotton, Capito, Gardner, Heller, Inhofe, Johnson, McCain, Roberts, and Vitter. I am on the floor of the Senate to explain to people what we have done and are going to vote on later today. I believe that this amendment is very constructive, and I am very optimistic and hopeful this will pass. This amendment is based on a bill that I introduced with Senator Manchin over a year and a half ago, which was called the Protecting Students from Sexual and Violent Predators Act. I have spoken about this a number of times because I feel very strongly about this. The fact is that while the overwhelming majority of our school employees across America are wonderful people and some of the great role models of our lives, it is also a fact that there are predators in our schools. That is a sad fact, but it is true. We know this for many reasons, not the least of which is that last year alone there were 459 school employees arrested across America for sexual misconduct with the kids that they are supposed to be protecting. So far this year we are on a path of arresting people at a rate that exceeds that of last year. We know this is a huge problem. It came to my attention because of the absolutely horrific story of a young boy named Jeremy Bell. Sadly, that story began in Pennsylvania, where a teacher was molesting the students under his charge. He was molesting little boys. The school figured out what was going on and reported it to the authorities. But as much as they wanted to, the authorities were never able to assemble enough evidence to mount a prosecution. So the school did something despicable. What the school decided to do was to make this predator someone else's problem. So they wrote a letter of recommendation and said: You just leave, take this letter with you, and find employment elsewhere. Well, this is a pedophile. This is a predator they did this for, and of course he left and became someone else's problem. He was hired in West Virginia as a schoolteacher. Eventually, he became principal, and of course, he serially molested the children in that school, finally culminating in the rape and murder of a little boy named Jeremy Bell. The practice of sending a letter of recommendation on behalf of a known predator is so appalling that most of us can't imagine anyone would do it. But the sad truth is that it has happened so frequently that it even has a name. It is called passing the trash. In prosecution circles and in the circles of people who are advocates for children who are victims of these horrendous crimes, they know this all too well. Passing the trash is all too common a practice as a way for schools to make these predators someone else's problems. Well, the initial amendment that I filed this bill, mirroring the legislation that Senator Manchin and I introduced, attempted to deal with this problem in two ways. One, in the first place, was to establish a thorough Federal standard for background checks for school employees, and the second was to have a prohibition against passing the trash--to make it illegal for someone to knowingly recommend for hire a sexual predator. As for the first part, the background check part, we have had disagreements among ourselves as to how to do that and whether to do that. There have been deep disagreements, and despite many conversations with my colleagues, we have not been able to reach an agreement on how to proceed on that. I am disappointed that we have not reached an agreement, but I understand that we don't have the votes to pass that portion. So I have agreed to put that aside for now. I have not agreed to abandon this cause of establishing the most rigorous possible background checks, but we will have that fight another day and hopefully at a time when we have the votes to pass it. What is really terrific news is that we have reached an agreement on the other part of our legislation, the part that prohibits this despicable, horrendous practice of passing the trash--the very action that enabled the predator to get the job that enabled him, in turn, to rape and kill young Jeremy Bell. Having reached this agreement, I am confident that we will be able to pass this amendment later today. If we do, it will be the first time that the Senate has established that this despicable practice will no longer be tolerated anywhere in the country. This is a huge victory for America's children. It is as simple as that. When we pass this in the Senate, and when it eventually becomes law, which I am confident it will, the fact is our kids are going to be safer. There are a lot of States that already have some legislation that prohibits passing the trash within their State, but no State can force another State to forbid this practice from coming across the line and into their State. That is why this always needed a Federal response, and I am really thrilled that today I think we are going to have that Federal response. I need to thank a lot of folks. I see my colleague from West Virginia has joined us, and I will start with him. Senator Manchin has been a great partner in this effort since we started over a year and a half ago. I am sure he will have something to add about this entire process. I also wish to thank the chairman of the committee, Senator Alexander, and Ranking Member Murray for all of the help they have provided in getting us to this place. In particular, I have to thank Senator Alexander and his staff, together with my staff. I also have to mention Dimple Gupta, who has worked tirelessly on this issue. We had many long and often difficult conversations. We started in what seemed like irreconcilable differences about this topic. But because we persisted and everybody approached this in a cooperative fashion, despite the stiff opposition that there was at times, we were able to find common ground. I also need to acknowledge some outside groups that made it possible for us to find this common ground: the National Children's Alliance, the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, many child advocate groups across Pennsylvania and across the country, law enforcement groups, and prosecutors. Even the American Academy of Pediatricians has been helpful in getting us here. I will close with this: This is exactly the way the Senate is supposed to work. This is the way it is supposed to happen. As people who share a common vision, we all want to make sure our kids are in the safest possible environment when they go to school. We started with wildly different views about how to get there. When the Senate is working well, it works exactly as it is working now with regular order on the Senate floor, going through the committee process, and having a ranking member and a chairman who are willing to work with individual Members on their priorities. People came together to figure out where their common ground was, how to get this done, and how to put the interest of their constituents, the American people--and in this case our kids and grandkids--ahead of political considerations. I am really thrilled that I think we have reached that point on this really important amendment. So I urge all of my colleagues to support this amendment. I hope it will have very broad support. I want to say thanks to all of the colleagues who helped to make this happen. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, this amendment is really very simple. It is designed to protect children from sexual predators. We know we have a problem because every year we arrest hundreds of school employees across the country for the sexual abuse of children who are supposed to be in their care. This measure will help that problem by a very simple requirement that States pass legislation to prohibit knowingly recommending for hire a teacher who has abused children. This is common sense. I am very grateful to my colleagues for helping us get here, especially Senator Manchin. He has been a great partner in this effort for a long time now. I want to thank Senator Alexander and Senator Murray for their work in helping us find the common ground that could get to a great bipartisan solution for a real problem. I yield to the Senator from West Virginia.

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

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I rise to speak on amendment No. 2094, which is based on legislation I have introduced with Senator Manchin called the Protecting Students from Sexual and Violent Predators Act. This has bipartisan support. This is a commonsense amendment that will protect children from child molesters and predators infiltrating our schools. We all know the overwhelming majority of school employees would never harm a child in any way, but we also know pedophiles know where the children are. They are in the schools. So schools can be a magnet for the very people we need to keep out of our schools. I have been fighting this for some time now--over a year and a half--since the legislation was first introduced. I am not going to stop fighting this. There are a lot of good reasons to make this fight happen, to secure the protections for our school kids from these predators. For me, the reasons begin with the three children I have, who are 15, 14, and 5 years old. When I put one of my children on a school bus in the morning, I have every right to believe I am sending my child to an environment where they are as safe as they can possibly be, and so does every other parent in Pennsylvania and every other parent across the country. We in Congress have the obligation to make sure we are doing all we can to make sure they will in fact be in the safest possible environment. Sadly, we know that is just not always the case. The motivation and the inspiration for this legislation that Senator Manchin and I introduced is a horrendous story about a little boy named Jeremy Bell, and that story begins, sadly, at a school in Delaware County, PA, where one of the teachers was repeatedly molesting young boys, raping one of the boys. The administrators of the school figured out what was going on. They reported it to authorities, but the authorities were never convinced they had enough evidence to mount a strong case. They couldn't confidently charge the predator. So the school decided they would dismiss this teacher for sexually abusing his students, but shockingly, appallingly, they gave him a letter of recommendation to make sure he could become someone else's problem. Well, given that he was a pedophile and a predator, he surely did become someone else's problem. He went to West Virginia, became a teacher--based in part on the recommendation he got--and rose, in fact, to the level of being a school principal. Along the way, of course, he continued to attack and abuse young boys, finally raping and killing young Jeremy Bell. Well, justice eventually caught up with that monster. He is serving the rest of his life in jail, as he should, but it was too late for Jeremy Bell. The sad truth is this is not as isolated an incident as we would like to think and as it should be. In fact, last year there were 459 arrests of school employees for sexual misconduct with the kids they are supposed to be taking care of. So far this year we are on track to have even more arrests than last year. Keep in mind that these are the cases where the evidence is so clear the prosecution is confident in making an arrest and pressing charges. How many more cases are out there where we just don't have enough certainty to actually make the arrest and press the charges? There are many more. So Senator Manchin and I decided we would introduce legislation that would take an important step towards the goal of protecting our kids. Our legislation has two big categories, two big features that together would go a long way toward ensuring greater security for our kids. One is a Federal standard for criminal background checks. Let me just respond to the comments made by the Senator from Illinois just a few minutes ago, suggesting that somehow my legislation requires a duplicative background check. That is factually and simply incorrect. There is no duplication. There is no redundancy. What we do in our legislation is to establish a Federal standard and say that all of the major criminal databases must be checked, but we don't ask anyone to check it twice. I don't know how that idea occurred. The checks are a sensible way to make sure nobody slips through the cracks. We do require there be a periodic review, at the frequency established by the States, so we make sure we are checking up on school employees periodically. That is not a redundancy. The second fundamental aspect of our legislation, after the criminal background checks, is that we would prohibit the practice of knowingly recommending for hire a predator, a violent abuser, a pedophile. This, unfortunately, has its own name. This practice is called passing the trash. That recommendation was exactly what allowed Jeremy Bell's killer to get a job as a teacher so that he could prey on Jeremy Bell. Our legislation would forbid that. Both of these protections have broad bipartisan support. The House of Representatives, by the way, unanimously passed a bill that is virtually identical just in the last Congress. And just last fall the House and Senate combined, by a combined vote of 523 to 1, adopted the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act, which has the same language. It has the same provisions to protect children in childcare centers from these kinds of predators. I fully support that protection for very young kids. I just fail to see why we shouldn't provide the same level of security and protection for slightly older kids. That is what this is about. So in addition to the bipartisan support, our legislation has been endorsed by many, many groups--child protection groups, law enforcement groups, prosecutors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Pennsylvania School Board Association. There is very broad support for this because it makes sense. Let me go a little bit more into detail about these two aspects. First, there is the criminal background check. Let's be clear. Every State does some kind of criminal background check on hiring for schools. The problem is many are woefully inadequate. In some cases they miss entire databases, and so they miss convictions. For instance, some States check only their State database. They do not check the Federal database so they do not know about the criminal convicted two States over who moved into their State postconviction. Another fact is that many States don't require background checks for their contractors. In our legislation, if you are an adult who has unsupervised contact with kids--whether you are a bus driver, a sports coach or the janitor in the school--you have to have the background check. Some States don't require that. We establish a Federal standard so that we are protecting all kids uniformly. So this whole background check component is what I consider the first part of the bill. The second part, which is really a distinct part but still every bit as crucial, is this prohibition against passing the trash that I alluded to earlier. This is a provision that would have perhaps prevented the murder of Jeremy Bell. We simply say if a school wishes to receive Federal funds, it has to ban this practice. This is so appalling--the idea that someone would knowingly recommend for hire a predator who is preying on children. It is so appalling that it is hard to believe it happens, but the fact is it does. Sometimes it happens across State lines, and there is nothing any State can do about the laws of a different State. This absolutely calls for a Federal solution. For example, recently in Las Vegas, NV, a kindergarten teacher was arrested for kidnapping a 16-year-old girl and infecting her with a sexually transmitted disease. That same teacher, it turns out, had molested six children--fourth and fifth graders--just several years before in Los Angeles, CA. Now, the Los Angeles school district knew about the allegations. In fact, not only did they know about the allegations, but they were so concerned that when a lawsuit was filed against them they recommended settling. The Nevada school district specifically asked if there had been any criminal concerns regarding the teacher who was a candidate for a job, and the Los Angeles school district not only hid the truth but provided three references for the teacher. I think that makes it abundantly clear that this is a problem that transcends State lines. There is nothing Nevada could have done about the dishonesty and the deceit of the people in the Los Angeles school district who allowed this to happen. Let me sum this up. The Toomey-Manchin bill offers a simple proposition. It says if a school district wants to use Federal tax dollars, it has to make sure those dollars are not being used to pay pedophiles' salaries. I don't think that is an unreasonable demand. To do that, it says there are two components. One is that you perform a criminal background check that is rigorous enough to catch people who have criminal backgrounds and a prohibition against passing the trash. Now, we have run into opposition on this, as you know. In fact, there was a letter signed by a number of organizations led by the National Education Association, the Nation's largest teachers union group. The basic thrust of the argument in the letter is that it is unfair to exclude even a convicted admitted child abuser from being a schoolteacher. Here is the quote from the letter: ``Individuals who have been convicted of crimes and have completed their sentences should not be unnecessarily subjected to additional punishment because of these convictions.'' Under this logic, an admitted convicted child molester can finish their prison term, walk out of a prison, go across the street to a school and be hired to be a first grade teacher. That is ridiculous. Our kids are not part of some social experiment to see how often convicted child molesters will repeat their crimes. I am not going to tolerate or risk trapping small children in a classroom with a convicted child rapist. That is unbelievable. We have a national sex offender registry for exactly this reason. As a society, we understand these people commit these crimes serially. Even after serving a prison sentence, very often they go right back to their old ways. So I think it is perfectly acceptable--in fact, it is incumbent upon us--to say that when someone has been convicted of this type of crime they are disqualified from being left in unsupervised contact with children. The same letter from the National Education Association endorsed an alternative amendment that has been proposed by Senator Whitehouse. He has proposed an alternative to my amendment, and I find it troublesome because, among other problems, the Whitehouse amendment actually would weaken the protections in existing State laws. There are 44 States that currently have a category of criminal conviction which precludes a person from ever being hired to teach in a school or to have unsupervised contact with kids. What Senator Whitehouse would do in his legislation is to require every State to give these individuals the legal right to challenge their being blocked from being hired. That does not exist in 45 States right now. So you have to ask yourself: What possible purpose could there be for mandating that States create these minitrials, some little judicial mechanism to challenge the notion that they should be precluded from a job based on their prior conviction for child abuse? The only purpose would be to get an exemption so they could be hired. Well, I am shocked Senator Whitehouse would propose legislation that would weaken the existing protections we have in 45 States, but that is what he does. I would point out that in the case of the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act--which passed 523 to 1 and was supported by every Democrat in the House and the Senate, by the way, the one vote being for unrelated reasons--that language that protected kids did not have this mechanism of creating a quasi-judicial entity so that convicted child abusers could nevertheless be hired. So if it wasn't a good idea then, when we were passing legislation that pertains to daycares, it is not a good idea now. So I hope we will oppose the Whitehouse amendment. I just want to underscore that there is urgency to this problem. Last year alone there were 459 teachers arrested for sexual abuse or misbehavior with the children they are supposed to be taking care of. We are on path so far, in the 6 months into this new calendar year, to have far more arrests than we had last year. Every one of these stories is not a statistic. Every one of these stories is a huge personal tragedy--a shattered life, a stolen childhood, often a family torn apart by grief and misery. How many more of these kinds of arrests are we going to tolerate before we establish a better system for preventing this from happening in the first place? I think it is time for no more excuses. The House of Representatives has already passed this legislation unanimously. All we need to do is pass this amendment on this bill, and it will find its way to the President's desk. It will be signed, and kids across America will be more secure. I urge my colleagues to support the Toomey-Manchin amendment-- Protecting Students from Sexual and Violent Predators Act. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, I am claiming my time. I want to thank Senator Alexander for the sincere effort we have been engaged in for some time to find our common ground on this. I appreciate his constructive efforts. I know they are continuing, and I hope we will be able to reach an agreement on this. I thank the Senator. Protecting Students from Sexual and Violent Predators Act I was talking about the second part of our legislation. The first part is requiring background check standards that would actually work. The second part is a provision that would forbid this terrible practice known as passing the trash. When we hear the idea that a school, a principal, a superintendent or a school district would knowingly and willfully recommend for hire a known predator, it strikes us as so morally repulsive that we think this couldn't really seriously happen except in the most bizarre and unusual circumstances. I wish that were the case. It is not the case. The fact is it happens. Let me give you an example. In February, WUSA News 9 reported some really shocking news on the public school system of Montgomery County, Maryland. Since 2011, 21 Montgomery County public school workers have been investigated for child sexual abuse or exploitation. The news station learned that the Montgomery County school system ``keeps a `confidential database' of personnel who demonstrate `inappropriate or suspicious behavior' toward children--a watch list of suspected abusers who are working in area schools.'' WUSA 9 learned that the school system has a record of passing the trash. For example, elementary school teacher Daniel Picca abused children for 17 years. The school system knew. What did they do? The teacher was punished. You know what his punishment was? It was to assign him to another school again and again--17 years of passing a known child molester from one elementary school to another. This is appalling. This has to stop. It has to stop now. The Federal Government can play a role in stopping it. Frankly, only the Federal Government can play a role because sometimes the passing the trash occurs across State lines, as in the case of Jeremy Bell. Or, for example, more recently, a Las Vegas, NV, kindergarten teacher was arrested for kidnapping a 16-year-old girl and infecting her with a sexually transmitted disease. That same teacher had molested six children, all fourth and fifth graders, several years before while working as a teacher in Los Angeles, CA. The Los Angeles school district knew about these allegations. In fact, in 2009 the school district recommended settling a lawsuit--a suit that alleged that the teacher had molested the children. The school district wanted to settle. When this teacher came across the State lines to Nevada to work, the Nevada school district specifically asked if there had been any criminal concerns regarding the teacher. The Los Angeles school direct not only hid the truth, not only hid what they knew about this molester, but it provided three references for the teacher. For those folks who suggest that States can solve this problem on their own, I have a question: What in the world can Nevada do about the behavior that is occurring in California? Since when can the laws of one State reach into and be enforced in another State? I know the answer. It can't. It doesn't work. The only way to deal with this cross-border abuse, this horrendous abuse of kids, is with Federal legislation. The Toomey-Manchin bill that we are going to be offering as an amendment to this underlying legislation has a simple proposition: If a school district wants to take Federal tax dollars, it can't use that money to hire convicted sexual offenders of kids. Is that really unreasonable? Is that really too much to ask? To accomplish that, the school district has to perform a criminal background check on those workers who have unsupervised access to children. The school district must prevent passing the trash. That has to be illegal. It has to be illegal to knowingly and willfully recommend for hire a pedophile who is molesting children. There is no one who can stand here and tell me these protections against child sexual predators are not urgently needed--not when more than one person is being arrested every day across America for committing sexual crimes against children and the rate at which these people are being arrested is accelerating. What is more urgent than that? The Protecting Students Act has overwhelming bipartisan support. As I said earlier, the House passed this legislation unanimously last Congress--unanimously. How many things can pass the House unanimously? This did. The entire Congress, the House and Senate together, adopted that virtually identical background check requirements be imposed for kids at daycares, younger children, by a vote of 523 to 1. We have already vetted this. We have already been down this road. This body and the House have expressed their support for this. I would remind my colleagues that the Protecting Students Act has been endorsed by many, many groups. I rattled off several of them: Child protection groups, law enforcement groups, prosecutors, the medical professionals at the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Pennsylvania School Board Association. The Toomey-Manchin proposal is the only proposal that is endorsed by these groups. We know there are going to be alternatives. There are going to be side-by-sides. Those alternatives do not have the endorsements of these organizations, for reasons that we may need to elaborate on later. Finally, there are 459 arrests--more than one a day. Every single one of those represents a tragedy--a childhood that has been shattered, a family that has been torn by grief, by self-blame, by betrayal. The numbers aren't staying the same. The numbers are growing. The problem is getting worse. How many more arrests do we need before the Senate decides that it is time that we do our part to protect these kids? Children of America have waited long enough, and I say no more waiting--no more passing child molesters into new schools so they can find new victims, no more defenseless children such as Jeremy Bell falling victim to a known child predator, no more excuses for not enacting a bill that the House of Representatives has passed unanimously over a year ago. I urge my colleagues to support the Protecting Students from Sexual and Violent Predators Act and to vote aye when I offer it as an amendment this week. Amendment No. 2094 to Amendment No. 2089 Madam President, I ask to set aside the pending amendment in order to call up amendment No. 2094.

Mr. TOOMEY. I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. TOOMEY. I will.

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, I rise to speak on S. 474, the Protecting Students from Sexual and Violent Predators Act. This is a bipartisan bill that Senator Joe Manchin and I introduced some time ago. We have been working on this for a while now, and we intend to offer this legislation as an amendment to the pending legislation, the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This is a commonsense bill, designed simply to protect children from child molesters and predators--predators who infiltrate our schools because they know that is where the kids are. The vast overwhelming majority of school employees, we all know, are people who care very much about kids. It would never occur to them in a million years to do anything to harm the children in their care. But the fact is there are pedophiles in our society--there are predators in our society--and they do in fact look to find opportunities where they will find their prey. So we need protections against these people as they try to infiltrate our schools. These are protections I have been fighting for, for some time now, and I am not going to stop until we get this done. There are lots of reasons to have this fight. For me, as for so many people, it is personal. I have three young children. They are 15, 13, and 5 years old. When I send my kids to school in the morning and watch my children get on the schoolbus, I have every right to know I am sending my children somewhere where they can be safe, where they can be cared for, where they can be in the safest possible environment, and every other parent deserves that too--every parent across Pennsylvania, every parent across America. Unfortunately, too many children and too many families have discovered this is not always the case. The horrific story which brought my attention to this cause and my passion for this was the story about a little boy named Jeremy Bell. The story begins in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. One of the schoolteachers was molesting boys. He was a serial pedophile. He raped a boy. The school officials discovered what was going on. They brought it to the attention of law enforcement, but law enforcement authorities never had enough strong evidence to make a successful criminal case. The school decided they would dismiss the teacher for sexually abusing students. But, appallingly, the school also helped this teacher get a new job in West Virginia, where he became a teacher, in part because he got a letter of recommendation from the school that knew he was preying on their students. But they wanted him to be someone else's problem, so they gave him a letter of recommendation. He went to a new school in a nearby State. Eventually, he became a principal. Along the way, of course, he continued his ways, culminating in the rape and murder of a 12-year-old boy named Jeremy Bell. Justice did finally catch up with that monster. He is now in jail serving a life sentence for the murder of Jeremy Bell, but for Jeremy Bell that justice came too late. We would like to think this is a bizarre and isolated event that could never happen again. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Last year alone, there were 459 school employees arrested across America for sexual misconduct with the children they are supposed to be taking care of--459--and those were the ones where there was enough of a case that the arrest was actually made. It is more than one per day. Twenty-six of them were in my State of Pennsylvania. Sadly, we are halfway through 2015 now, and we are doing even worse. In the first half of 2015, there have been 265 such arrests. We are on pace to have well over 500 school employees across America arrested for sexual misconduct with the children they are supposed to be taking care of. Every single one of these stories has a terrible tragedy at the center: a little girl whose sexual abuse began at age 10 and only ended when at 17 years old she found herself pregnant with the teacher's child, a teacher's aide who raped a young, mentally disabled boy in his care, a kindergarten teacher who kept a child in during recess, then forced her to perform sexual acts on him. This is hard stuff to talk about, but that doesn't make it go away. I think we need to confront it, and the cases are too many to ignore. Senator Manchin and I decided it is time for Congress to act, to do something to make it more difficult for these predators to carry out these appalling acts, so we introduced the Protecting Students Act. It has two important goals, two protections, designed to prevent convicted sex offenders from infiltrating our country's schools. The first is a standard background check process that will catch those who have been convicted. The second feature in our legislation would end this terrible practice we saw in the Jeremy Bell case--the practice of a school knowingly helping a child molester find employment in a new school, a practice called passing the trash. Now, both of these provisions, both of these ideas have very broad bipartisan support. The House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill including both protections last Congress, and just last fall Congress voted 523 to 1--both Houses combined voted unanimously, with only one dissenting voice--for even more expansive background check language enacted in the Child Care Development Block Grant that we all voted for, 523 to 1. In addition, Senator Manchin's and my legislation, the Protecting Students Act, has been endorsed by numerous organizations in various categories. First, child protection groups: National Children's Alliance, which oversees the Nation's Children's Advocacy Centers, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, the Children's Defense Fund, the Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children. Law enforcement organizations overwhelmingly support our legislation: the National Association of Police Organizations, the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. Prosecutors support Senator Manchin's and my bill. The Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and the National District Attorneys Association have both endorsed the bill. The medical professionals at the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Pennsylvania School Board Association, they all have endorsed this legislation, and they have said it has two essential features, two ways in which we would be protecting our kids. The first is the criminal background check. Let me be clear. Every State in the Union performs some kind of background check already. That is true. That is a fact. The problem is that many of them are woefully inadequate. For instance, several States fail to check all the school workers. They check teachers, for instance, but not nonteachers, and others will check certain criminal databases, but they won't check others, and so they miss convictions. Our legislation, Protecting Students Act, requires that if a school wants to accept Federal funds, it has to perform background checks on all adult workers who have unsupervised access to children. That would be both new hires and existing employees. Many States have only recently adopted background check policies. Many employees were hired before they put the background check policies in place, so many of these employees were never subject to a background check. Consider the case of 64-year-old William Vahey, who taught for decades across America and across the globe at some of the world's most elite schools. He would give his young students Oreo cookies laced with narcotics. While the boys slept, the teacher molested them and photographed them. Scores of children were sexually abused. This teacher had been convicted for sexual abuse of children in California when he was in his twenties, but he was hired before many States had background check requirements, and therefore he was grandfathered into the system. The Protecting Students Act ensures that convicted sex offenders like William Vahey will be discovered and they will not be hired. It also would include contractors. There are 12 States that don't require background checks for contractors at all. This fact recently gave Montana parents a rude awakening. An audit of Montana's busdrivers found that 123 drivers had criminal histories, including 1 driver whose conviction landed him on the Sexual and Violent Offender Registry and 1 with an outstanding arrest warrant. Running checks is really only helpful if the checks are thorough enough to find all convictions. So our legislation would require the four major databases to be checked: the FBI fingerprint check in the National Crime Information Center database, the National Sex Offender Registry, the State criminal registry, and State child abuse and neglect registries. These background check requirements constitute the first part of our bill. As I said, this was passed unanimously in the House. I wouldn't think this would be controversial. The second part of our bill is equally important, and that is the part which precludes passing the trash. It addresses the terrible acts that led to and made it possible for little Jeremy Bell to be raped and murdered. What this provision says is that if a school wishes to receive Federal funds, the school may not knowingly help a child molester obtain a new teaching job. I would think this would not be controversial. The practice, as I alluded to before, has become so common, sadly, that it has its own moniker. It is called passing the trash. It has become all too prevalent. I see that the Senator from Tennessee would like to address the body.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, last month I was here on the Senate floor to address the topic of the riots in Baltimore and the unfortunate and completely misguided scapegoating of police officers that has been going on far too often in parts of our country today. So I rise again today on the same topic because in just the last month or so there have been some more very harmful developments in this area. One of those developments is the dramatic decline in police arrests and a massive increase in violent crime and murders in the city of Baltimore. Now, some of my friends would say: Why is the Senator from Pennsylvania speaking out so often about these tragic circumstances that are happening in Baltimore? Well, first of all, as a U.S. Senator, I am concerned with what goes on in our entire country, not just my State. Baltimore is a great American city that is going through a very difficult period, and we should all be concerned about it. Second of all, Baltimore is, of course, less than 100 miles away from Pennsylvania. Most importantly, what is happening in Baltimore is not happening only in Baltimore. The scapegoating of police and the rise of violent crime is happening in New York City and in other places as well. And, frankly, it is a threat to public safety and security in every city. Some, including the police chief of St. Louis, MO, have described what has come to be known as the Ferguson effect. This can be traced back to the riots and lawlessness that followed the unfortunate death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, last August. As you will remember, in the Ferguson case, Officer Darren Wilson acted in self-defense and shot and killed Brown when Brown attacked him while he was resisting arrest. In the weeks and months that followed the incident, and after Officer Wilson was cleared of wrongdoing, violent protests erupted. Protesters, police, and bystanders were injured. Buildings were burned to the ground. Property was destroyed. But instead of placing the onus on those who were actually causing the havoc, it was portrayed by many as if law enforcement was somehow responsible for the violence and unrest. Anti-law enforcement sentiments were even expressed by some of the local officials in Ferguson. This endorsement of violent protesters empowered those who wished to turn peaceful protests into violent riots, and it also left the police feeling powerless. What has happened in Ferguson since is as tragic as it was predictable. The homicide rate in Ferguson increased 47 percent in the latter portion of 2014, and robberies in St. Louis County jumped by 82 percent. This really should be no surprise. This is what happens when a city puts these views of ``police as the problem'' into practice, such as when a city determines that police are the cause of the violence as opposed to the brave defense against it, when a city justifies lawlessness, stops law enforcement from doing its job, and allows law breakers to go unpunished. The results of those practices are that the innocent members of those very communities pay a horrible price. These tragic circumstances are now playing out in the city of Baltimore. On April 18 of this year, many Baltimore residents began peaceful protests over the injury and eventual death of Mr. Freddie Gray while he was in police custody. As I mentioned in my speech about this last month, in my view, Freddie Gray's death absolutely calls out for justice and calls out for a thorough investigation, and the judicial process is now proceeding and playing out exactly as it should. But what has happened in Baltimore since then is not about Freddie Gray. A week after the Baltimore protests began, on April 25, they turned violent. Over the next 5 days rioters damaged 200 businesses. They set fire to a newly constructed senior center, burned down a CVS drugstore and cut the fire hose of the firemen who were trying to put out the flames, and set fire to 144 cars. And 130 law enforcement officers were injured, many seriously. The chaos was so extreme that the city had to impose a curfew for 5 days and had to call in 3,000 National Guard troops. Now with all that mayhem, how did the public officials of Baltimore respond? On the first day of the violence, the mayor held a press conference in which she legitimized the violence. She said: ``We also gave those who wish to destroy space to do that as well.'' Seriously, space to destroy? Destroying other people's property, setting buildings and cars ablaze, attacking police officers? These are not legitimate acts, and no mayor should be accommodating those kinds of acts with ``space.'' In fact, they are criminal. They are harmful. These are exactly the kinds of activities that a mayor should be all about stopping and preventing. But that is not all. Next the Baltimore police were given a stand-down order, and they were forbidden from arresting the looters and the rioters. Then officials announced that half of all those arrested for the destruction and violence would be released without charges. Mobs would gather around police when they tried to enforce the law. All this is a clear illustration of the impact that the Ferguson effect is having on Baltimore. Lawbreakers are in control, and the city's residents are at the mercy of the lawbreakers. Law enforcement has been limited because of a lack of support from the community and the civic and the political leaders. Baltimore has seen the disastrous effects of this policy. The riots began to subside on April 30 when six police officers were arrested in the death of Mr. Gray, but the violence has continued. The month of May that just passed was Baltimore's deadliest month in over 40 years. There were 43 homicides in the month of May alone. Shootings have more than doubled compared to May of the previous year. These murders have nothing to do with anger over the death of Freddie Gray; they have everything to do with public policy that disparages police and turns a blind eye on criminal activity. You see, in Baltimore in the month of May, arrests were nearly 70 percent lower than the same month last year. Some attempt to portray this whole crisis in racial terms, but tragically all too often the victims of this surge in violent crime are innocent African Americans who live in cities in which the police are no longer permitted to do their jobs. Consider the case of an 8-year-old boy police found shot in the head on Thursday, May 28 at 8:20 a.m. He was lying dead beside his mother, who had also been fatally shot in the head. Take the case of 23-year-old Charles Dobbins, who was killed on Monday, May 25. Charles' cousin reports that Charles was killed in a robbery. Charles worked at BWI. He worked transporting handicapped people to and from the terminals. He loved kids. When he graduated from high school, he worked for Baltimore city schools as a bus aid assisting disabled children. Consider the case of 4-year-old Jacele Johnson. She was in a car with her teenage cousin when someone opened fire on the car, seriously wounding them both. These are not just statistics; these are real people who are now lost to us. Their lives matter. That 8-year-old boy and his mother, 23-year- old Charles Dobbins, a little 4-year-old girl, Jacele Johnson, and her cousin--their lives matter. The Ferguson effect, unfortunately, is not the only phenomenon that is at work here. Unfortunately, our President seems to have bought into the notion that the police are the problem and the solution is to deny them valuable tools. This last month, the President announced extensive restrictions on when local police may access lifesaving Federal surplus equipment. The gear we are talking about is almost all purely defensive. It is riot helmets, riot shields, armored personnel transport vehicles. This is surplus gear. The Federal Government has already paid for it but has decided it has no use for it. It has long been the practice that this surplus protective gear has been made available to local police forces. Why is this administration making it harder to send this purely defensive gear--gear that would otherwise go unused--to insufficiently protected police officers across the country? Why would the administration do that? Well, they released a report telling us why. Here is what they said in their own report. According to this report by the administration, the Federal equipment ``could significantly undermine community trust'' and that this concern outweighs the interest in ``addressing law enforcement needs (that could not otherwise be fulfilled).'' President Obama likewise opined that Federal equipment ``can sometimes give people a feeling like there's an occupying force'' and ``can send the wrong message.'' So this is the concern that justified keeping lifesaving gear from police officers. So, according to the administration, the need to save police officers' lives in the line of duty is something that should be weighed against and, in fact, sacrificed to the desire to prevent distrust or discomfort on the part of others. How many police officers' lives are we going to sacrifice? One? Twenty? One-hundred? This is outrageous. Each day across America, there are 780,000 law enforcement officers who put on a badge and uniform, and they answer the call of those in need no matter the danger. When others run away, they run to the problem. The rest of us in America rely on these law enforcement officers doing their job. The people who live in high-crime areas, often ethnic minorities living in high-poverty areas of our inner cities--these are the folks who most depend on those officers. When those officers are held back, we all pay a steep price, but the residents of those communities pay the steepest price. I just hope we in the Federal Government will stop putting obstacles in the way of law enforcement and start supporting them. I hope we as a nation will stop scapegoating law enforcement and start thanking them. If we fail to reverse the Ferguson effect, what we will see is more violent crime and more suffering of our people. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, I rise today to speak on H.R. 2048, the USA FREEDOM Act. I want to put it in some context and discuss why I voted the way I did today, but first, a little background. It has been now more than a decade since Al Qaeda launched its deadly attacks on U.S. soil that we all remember so well, killing 2,977 people in New York City, in Washington, DC, and just outside of Shanksville, PA, injuring about 2,700 more, and taking away far too many parents, children, wives, husbands, families, and friends. As we gather here today, we face other grave threats as well. One of the most grave threats is the threat of the Islamic State of ISIS. Secretary of Defense Hagel described it this way. He said ISIS is ``beyond anything that we've seen'' and constitutes an ``imminent threat to every interest we have.'' We know this is a brutal group. They behead people. They crucify people. They burn people alive. They systematically sell young girls into slavery. They control large regions in the Middle East now. They have their sights set on attacking the United States. We know there are radicalized ISIS sympathizers and adherents here in the United States. Many of them are eager to carry out this group's destructive ambitions right here in our own country. We know ISIS has the resources to carry out attacks on our homeland. Al Qaeda spent about half a million dollars. That is what it cost them to plan and execute the entire attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. ISIS has amassed a $2 billion fortune--4,000 times as much money as Al Qaeda spent on September 11. ISIS collects something on the order of an additional $1 million to $2 million every day through the variety of means it has because of the land it controls. So this is a very serious threat. Like any other threat, we have an obligation to protect the American people from this to the extent we can. In the process, we have an obligation to strike an appropriate balance between the national security we owe our constituents, the American people, and the robust civil liberties we ought to protect because they are enshrined in our Constitution and important to our country. In my view, section 215--the controversial part of the USA PATRIOT Act--appropriately struck that balance. The best policy we could have pursued this week would have been to reauthorize section 215 in pretty much the form it has been in. If we had done so, we would have been repeating what we had done many times before by overwhelming bipartisan majorities I think seven previous times. In 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010, and 2011, Congress reauthorized the USA PATRIOT Act, including section 215. Congress did that because there is nothing radical about section 215 or the PATRIOT Act. This--what became a very controversial section recently--simply gave our national security officials the same kind of ability to access documents, reports, and other tangible items when investigating a potential international terrorist attack that a grand jury has and has long had when investigating ordinary criminal events such as a car theft. It is important to note what section 215 did not authorize. It did not authorize the NSA to conduct wiretaps or listen in on any phone conversations. That has never happened. Despite that, there has been rampant misinformation about the telephone metadata program, as it is referred to, that was conducted under section 215, so I want to discuss that a little bit. I think one of the most important things to stress here is that this metadata program contained only information a third party had. It was not private information that an individual possessed; it was third- party information held by a telephone company. What is that information the phone companies have always had? It is a phone number. It is a date and time of a call. It is the duration of a call. It is the number being called. That is it. That is the sum total of all of the information in this so-called metadata program. Because that is all the information, it was completely anonymous. Not only did it not include any context of any conversation--that was not possible. Conversations have never been recorded, so the contents have never been captured. But it also did not contain any identifying information with the phone numbers. There are no names, no addresses, no financial information. There is no information that would in any way identify anybody with any particular number. So what did the government do with the metadata it had received? Well, it stored it all in a big database, on a big spreadsheet with all of those numbers. That is all it was, was a lot of numbers. When the government discovered a phone number from a known terrorist, when a group of special ops American forces took down a terrorist group somewhere and grabbed a cell phone, then the government could conduct a search of the metadata, but first a Federal judge would have to give permission. After running the search to determine whether in that metadata there had been phone calls between the known terrorists and numbers in that database, even after doing the search, the government still had no information identifying the phone number because that is not in the database. Of course, as I said before, certainly there was no content because content had never been recorded. But a link might be established--and if it were to be established, if Federal investigators discovered that the known terrorist was in regular phone communications, for instance, with someone in the United States, then that fact could be turned over to the FBI, and the FBI could conduct an investigation, which might be a very useful investigation to have. Well, we have had a number of officials who have told us how important this program has been, the intelligence value we have received. President Obama, himself, explained that had the section 215 metadata program been in place prior to 9/11, the government might have been able to prevent the attack. Remember, we learned afterward about our inability to connect the dots. This was a program that was designed to enable us to connect those dots. Even the critics of this program--which, as we know, there are many-- have never suggested this program was in any way abused, that any individual person had their rights violated, that there was any breach. That case has never been made, not that I have heard. Given the value of the program--as we have heard from multiple sources--and the complete absence of any record of any abuse of the program, in my view, Congress should have reauthorized this program, including section 215. But, instead, we have passed an alternative, and that is the USA FREEDOM Act. I voted against this measure today because I am concerned the USA FREEDOM Act does not provide us with the tools we need at a time when the risks have been as great as ever. Let me just mention some of these. First, under the USA FREEDOM Act, it is entirely possible that the government may not be able to continue any metadata program at all. I say that because the bill explicitly forbids the government from maintaining the database that we have been maintaining and instead the bill assumes that private phone companies will retain the data, and then the government will be able to access that data as needed. But there is a problem with this assumption. The problem is the bill doesn't require the phone companies to preserve any of this data. Under the USA FREEDOM Act, the phone companies could destroy the metadata instantaneously after a phone call occurs. They have a regulatory obligation to keep billing information, but a lot of bills are unlimited calls with a single monthly charge. They have no statutory or regulatory requirement to retain the records of these calls. As currently practiced, I am not aware of any phone companies that retain this data for the 5 years our intelligence officials believe is the necessary timeframe to provide the security they would like to provide. There is another problem, it seems to me, with the USA FREEDOM Act; that is, it is entirely possible the time period contemplated for establishing the software that will enable the government to query the many different private phone company databases--that timeframe will not be long enough. We don't know whether it is going to be long enough. We will just find out, I suppose, when the time comes. But this is a complex exercise that has to be carried out in real time, and the USA FREEDOM Act simply creates a deadline. It doesn't ensure that we will have this in place. A second concern I have is that the USA FREEDOM Act weakens other intelligence-gathering tools that are unrelated to any of the metadata programs which have received most of the attention. So the USA FREEDOM Act gives intelligence officials----

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent for 30 seconds to wrap up.

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, I conclude by saying that we are at least at as great a risk as we have ever been, and the first priority of the Federal Government of the United States is to protect people of the United States. I am deeply concerned that the USA FREEDOM Act diminishes an important tool for providing for this security, and I hope that in the coming months we can address this bill and try to correct the many flaws it has. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, I rise to speak about an amazing presentation I have had the privilege of witnessing twice now in the past several months at the University of Pennsylvania, at the medical center there. I want to speak a little about the work some scientists and doctors are doing that is extremely exciting and has great implications for all of us. Let me start with a little background and some facts. In 2014, over 585,000 Americans died from cancer. There were over 1.6 million new cases diagnosed. I think it is fair to say that every one of us has a family member, a very close friend or we know somebody closely who has been afflicted with some form of this terrible disease. The fact is cancer is on the verge of overtaking heart disease as the leading cause of death in America. Now, we have made a lot of progress on many forms of cancer, but we still have a long way to go. I want to speak a little about a very exciting new therapy, but let's start with talking about cancer a little bit itself. The fact is cancer cells have this protective shield, if you will. It is a shield that allows the cancer cell to hide from our immune system. If our immune system were able to function normally with respect to cancer cells, we wouldn't have cancer. The immune system would destroy the harmful cells, but that doesn't happen in cancer, and it is because of this protective shield. So imagine if we could develop a therapy that would penetrate that protective shield and allow our immune system to break through and destroy the cancer cells. Astonishingly, the very viruses that have been responsible for killing millions of people around the world--HIV, polio virus, measles--are now being used to create exactly this capability--this capability to break through cancer's protective shield. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania--a team of researchers led by Dr. Carl June--have developed a process to harness the body's immune system and enable it to identify, track down, attack, and destroy an important form of leukemia, a blood cancer that is most often found in children. In their trial, 90 percent of the patients with this relatively rare form of recurrent leukemia went into remission after they got this groundbreaking treatment and their cancer has not returned. Dr. June and his colleagues don't ever say this, but they may be on the verge of curing leukemia, and it is very exciting. So let me talk a little bit specifically about this form of leukemia. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most common cancer in children ages 1 through 7. For young children, this is the most common form of cancer that afflicts them. There are 60,000 cases in the United States alone of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It is hard to say, so it goes by ALL. This cancer results when abnormal white blood cells accumulate in the bone marrow. The leukemia cells then are carried through the bloodstream to other organs and tissues, including the brain, liver, and other areas, where they continue to grow and divide. Now, most ALL patients can be successfully treated with conventional chemotherapy, expensive and sometimes dangerous bone marrow transplants, and stem cell transplants. These therapies have improved enormously, and they work in most cases. I think about 80 percent of ALL cases can be cured with these conventional treatments. But the recurrent ALL--those who don't respond and are not cured by these conventional treatments--their prognosis is much worse. Approximately 3,000 pediatric patients relapse after the bone marrow transplant procedures, and most of these relapses are early relapses and, candidly, have a pretty dismal outcome--only a 15- to 20-percent survival rate for children with these kinds of relapses. This is where this new therapy comes in. It is called chimeric antigen receptor--or CAR-cell therapy. What happens is doctors remove T-cells from the cancer patient. T- cells are a type of white blood cell we all have as part of our immune system. They then take those T-cells and they insert new genes from an inactive, harmless component of the HIV virus. They actually use part of the HIV virus to get into the T-cells, which gives the T-cells a new capability. Specifically, they develop the capability to identify and link to a protein that is on the surface of the cancer cell. That is the shield that protects the cancer cell. This enables the T-cell, in turn, to then destroy that cancer cell. So that is the idea. The T-cell is taken out, it is modified with a component of the HIV virus, and it is then injected back into the patient, where it multiplies massively and begins this wonderful search-and-destroy mission--searching for the cancer cells it has been programmed to find and killing them. This treatment is specific to every individual patient and works in part because it works with a patient's own T-cells. So that creates a whole set of protocols and challenges. You have to make sure that you are withdrawing a person's T-cells. You can go through almost a manufacturing process whereby you transform them so that they can be used for this purpose. One of the most exciting things about this therapy is that after a patient has been treated, after they have gotten their modified T-cells put back into their body and after the T-cells have served their purpose, they don't just vanish; they remain in a person's system. They remain as part of the immune system, sort of on standby, ready and able to attack if the cancer should emerge. They are still in the trial phase of this new process. Dr. June and his team were willing to take on the most difficult cases. In fact, that is all they were allowed to take on initially. The first 30 patients they tried this therapy on had already undergone chemotherapy several times and the chemotherapy had failed. In fact, everything had failed for these patients. They had no treatment options left. By the time they got to Dr. Carl June and his team, these patients had weeks to live. In the first trial, 27 of the 30 patients were cancer free 1 month later--So 1 month after receiving the treatment, no cancer--and 78 percent of the patients were alive 6 months after the treatment. Now, 125 patients have received this personalized cellular therapy at the University of Pennsylvania for several kinds of leukemia. They have modified the treatment to address other forms of cancer, including non- Hodgkin's lymphoma, for instance. In more than 90 percent of the pediatric leukemia cases they treated, the patients are still in remission. Four out of five adults with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma have had complete remissions. This is amazing stuff. It is very exciting. Scientists, medical researchers, and doctors across the country who are following this have been blown away by the success, and they refer to it as ``a major breakthrough,'' as ``phenomenal,'' and it has been what ``we've been . . . hoping for.'' Just last year, the FDA agreed that the progress is so stunning that they granted what they call ``breakthrough therapy'' designation for this therapy, for this treatment, because of the success they have shown in the early trials. This designation is going to allow Dr. June's team to treat more patients more quickly who are in these very difficult circumstances. In fact, the University of Pennsylvania is already working with Novartis in anticipation of the time that they will be able to roll this out as a standard treatment, where it will one day--hopefully soon--no longer be considered experimental and no longer be the last resort for patients but an early resort. The conventional treatments-- chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants and stem cell treatments--tend to have very unfortunate adverse side effects. It has been necessary because they can be successful. But one of the wonderful things about this therapy is there are no lingering side effects. So it is enormously encouraging. It is very exciting. One of the things that are most exciting about this is that this technique conceptually could very well apply to any number of cancers, maybe all cancers. It is not a small matter. It is a challenge. But these guys are meeting this challenge. The challenge is to design the transformation of the T-cell in a way that will pierce that shield, that unique shield for each form of cancer, and they are making remarkable progress. They have also made tremendous progress on fighting multiple myeloma, which is another blood cancer that is very serious. I should point out that Dr. June and his team at the University of Pennsylvania are not alone in pursuing this general direction. MD Anderson in Texas is working to use the common cold virus--the virus that causes the common cold--to help fight brain tumors in a similar fashion. Penn researchers have already developed a way to engineer immune cells in mice to fight a very dangerous form of brain cancer, and that has been so successful in the animal trials that this fall they will be able to begin human trials on this as well. This kind of brain cancer that they will be trying to treat affects over 22,000 Americans. It is called glioblastoma. People who are diagnosed with stage IV glioblastoma are in very dire circumstances. The mean survival rate is less than 18 months. This is, in fact, the form of cancer that took the life of Senator Kennedy, a former colleague of so many of us. This is extremely exciting. And ``60 Minutes'' did a profile on some doctors at Duke University who are using a reformulated version of the polio virus. Instead of HIV, they are using the polio virus in a similar fashion to enable our immune system to attack this brain cancer, glioblastoma. I am, frankly, fascinated and incredibly excited about the progress these scientists and these doctors are making. But along the way, to get there, it costs money, and there has been a struggle for the funds to get this done. Dr. June's study has been supported by the NIH, by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's Specialized Centers of Research Grant Program, and a Stand Up To Cancer-St. Baldrick's Dream Team translational research grant. In 2008, the NCI had originally denied funding because they thought this was perhaps too risky. Fortunately, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy stepped in. After they treated the first several patients, despite their success, they ran out of money and they had to stop treating patients for over a year while additional funding was lined up. The fact is, this research funded by the NIH has given us tremendous strides in early detection and treatment methods and survival rates for a variety of cancers but especially for this work. I know my colleagues and I are committed to continuing to fund the kind of research that makes these breakthroughs possible in a responsible way. I wanted to come down to the floor today and talk about how important this is and how exciting this is. I personally think we are in an extraordinarily exciting moment for health care for our whole society. Technology is producing spectacular breakthroughs, and it seems to be happening on an accelerating basis. Some of the big, gigantic intellectual breakthroughs of recent years--the Human Genome Project, the gene sequencing--the technology that is available now wasn't even imagined a few years ago. The combination of these things is enabling us to make discoveries and breakthroughs and treatments that were beyond human imagination just a few years ago. So I think we could be on the threshold of some absolutely stunning and wonderful developments. Personalized medicine is a big part of it. Understanding how our genes contribute to the health care problems we have but also can be used to combat these problems--I think this is all readily within reach. I am very excited about it. In closing, I guess my message is that when we think about where we are and how close we are to these stunning cures for some amazingly devastating diseases, I think we should set our goal at curing these diseases. Our goal shouldn't be to figure out how we treat this, how we extend life for a few months. We will do that for as long as we have to, but our goal should be to cure. Our goal should be to cure cancer. Our goal should be to cure heart disease. Our goal should be to cure Alzheimer's. We are going to be able to do this. We should make this a goal. We should make this a priority. We have a lot of competing priorities for the limited resources available to the Federal Government. I can't think of any that are higher than this extremely noble effort, and I can't think of any reason not to support it. It is within reach. The progress is stunning and exciting, and it is happening all across America and very much in Pennsylvania. I am proud of the work that is being done in Pennsylvania, and I look forward to seeing it continue. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about the unrest we have seen, especially in Baltimore in the last week and to a lesser extent in several other cities around the country, including the city of Philadelphia in my State of Pennsylvania. There has been, of course, no shortage of discussions on this matter, going back to last year, to the protests in Ferguson, MO, and those surrounding other flashpoints that have involved law enforcement officials. We have in one way or another landed on a bit of a national conversation about police practices, and that is a good conversation. I think we should have that. I, for instance, think we should seriously consider body cameras for use by police officers. I think this conversation is closely related to some other things that we need to be talking about as well, including the problems of urban America that have a number of causes and that certainly deserve our attention and our action. For instance, I think we can and should be talking about how we can create better jobs, better economic growth, and a better economic climate in our cities, especially our big cities. We need to talk about how we can bring down the terrible rate of poverty that has been persistent for decades in our cities. We have to talk about how schools have been letting down too many poor families in our big cities. We ought to talk about family structure as well because we know that a breakdown of families contributes enormously to all sorts of social pathologies--involvement in gangs and drug use and drug dealing, criminality in general, and poverty itself. We can talk about guns, too. I remain proud of the work I have done across the aisle to try to make it more difficult for guns to fall into the hands of people who have no right to be using them--criminals and those with mental illness. These are all things we ought to be talking about in this great debate, and we should be acting on these things in the Senate and in State and local governmental bodies across the country. There is something in this discussion that we should also be willing to talk about. It is something that hasn't gotten as much attention during this national conversation about police practices, and it is something that has been bothering me for some time. I think it came to a head this week in Baltimore. I am going to talk about this now and I am going to continue to talk about this in the coming weeks and months because I think it is an important part of this national discussion. My concern specifically is over the growing scapegoating of police officers in America today. Before I go any further, let me be perfectly clear about one central point. If a police officer acts unprofessionally, acts outside the bounds of ethical standards or breaks the law, then by all means that police officer has to be held accountable and punished for his or her transgression. There is no excuse whatsoever for unlawful police conduct. That absolutely cannot be tolerated not even one little bit. I will be clear about another point. It is true that there are real and horrible cases of police misconduct. No one I know is trying to deny that or sweep it under the rug or pretend it doesn't happen. It does happen, and it should never be tolerated. Let's also keep this in perspective. There are doctors who break the law. There are accountants who break the law. There are lawyers who break the law. There are elected public officials who break the law. The fact is that there are bad actors in every profession, in every line of work, in every walk of life, and that is true of the police as well. But if you listen to many of the police critics we hear from today, you would think there is some sort of epidemic of crimes perpetrated by the police. That, I assure you, is not true. In my years in public life, I have spent a lot of time with police officers. I have gotten to know many of them. I have gone on rides with them. I have listened to their concerns. I have met with them. I have supported their community organizations. I have attended the charitable fundraisers they have held. By and large, I can tell you that I don't know of any group of people anywhere in our society who are more dedicated professionals than the policemen and policewomen across our country. Far from the epidemic of police misdeeds that some claim to be happening out there, I think just the opposite is true. The overwhelming majority of police are honest men and women. They have very high ethical standards. They don't have a racist bone in their body. Our police have incredibly difficult and often dangerous jobs to do, and it is an incredibly important job as well. Our communities--let's face it--we all depend on the police. That is probably more true in urban areas than anywhere else in the country. So we need to have a conversation about bad police practices, but we also need to have a conversation about what a great job the vast majority of police are doing across our country and how much they deserve our thanks and our support. Unfortunately, the scenes we witnessed in Baltimore last week certainly work against the kind of gratitude we ought to show to our law enforcement community. I am not talking about what happened to Freddie Gray. Mr. Gray absolutely deserves justice. If the police in the Gray case committed crimes, then they must be punished. I don't question that in the least. But what happened last week in Baltimore was not only about Freddie Gray. In scenes reminiscent of last year in Ferguson, last week in Baltimore we saw a great American city dissolve into utter lawlessness. We saw riots that destroyed a senior citizen center, a CVS drugstore, numerous cars, all kinds of property. We saw dozens of injuries, including injuries to over 90 police officers. We had a curfew imposed and the National Guard called in to restore order as though this were some kind of war zone. We even had Major League Baseball cancel two games and conduct one game where no fans were permitted to attend. They played before an empty stadium. How is that allowed to happen in a great American city? Some people excuse this lawlessness and point to the difficult underlying conditions in the local community, but let's ask ourselves who gets hurt the most by these riots. Well, we know it is the very poor people from these communities who now have no senior center to go to. They cannot go to CVS to get their prescriptions filled or to pick up necessities for their kids. And, of course, there is this big, red, flashing neon sign telling businesses, large and small--they could provide jobs and economic activity there-- to stay away. So where do the police come in on this? Well, President Obama called the looters and rioters in Baltimore thugs, and President Obama has received some criticism for that. I just would use an objective, indisputable term. These people are ``criminals.'' It is a serious crime to set a fire to a car or to a building. It is a serious crime to throw a rock or a bottle at a police officer. Assault and battery is a serious crime. It is a serious crime to engage in looting, and people who commit those acts are criminals. They should be arrested, they should be charged, and they should be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law, but in order for that to happen, we need the police. We need them to be actively engaged. The Baltimore police officers have reported that they were ordered to stand down last week as the city was being destroyed. That is pretty tough to take--especially, I assume, for the law-abiding Baltimore citizens who need that police protection. Instead of standing down in the face of wanton criminal acts, the police need to be allowed to do their job. They should make arrests. They should restore order. There should never be another American city that looks the way Baltimore did last week. Now, when six police officers were charged on Friday in the death of Freddie Gray, there were celebrations in the streets in Baltimore. At a certain level, that is completely understandable. Whatever Mr. Gray did on that day, the day he was arrested, he certainly did not deserve to die, and his death cries out for answers. We need to have answers to these questions. In the passions of last week, I understand why some people cheered the appearance that the criminal justice system was standing up for Mr. Gray. I totally understand that, but let me ask a question. What happens if these accused police officers are found to have not broken the law? What if one of them, several of them or even all of them are found not to have violated the law? What happens then? Will we see Baltimore, and maybe other cities, erupt in flames once more? That is already what appears to be forecast in some quarters. What about those six individual police officers? Well, we know what happens if they are found guilty. If they are found guilty, they are going to go to jail for a long time, and that will be appropriate. But what happens if they are found innocent? In the Ferguson, MO, case, a grand jury found there was no reason to believe a crime had been committed by the accused police officer, Darren Wilson. The U.S. Justice Department also did an investigation, and they decided not to bring civil rights charges against Officer Wilson. So Officer Wilson was found to have committed no wrongdoing, neither by the local grand jury nor by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. But what happened to Officer Wilson? Did anybody ask that question, What happened to Officer Wilson? Well, he faced multiple death threats. He ended up having to leave his job on the police force, the one job he had always wanted and he loved to do. He ended up having to move out of his home and go live somewhere else. He is only 28 years old. Now, the accused police officers in Baltimore have life stories too. One of them is police Sergeant Alicia White. She is a 30-year-old African-American woman who joined the Baltimore Police Department 5 years ago. She is engaged to be married. A local Baltimore minister, who knows Sergeant White, described her this way: She wanted to be a police officer because she is a Christian and wants to be a good role model for young black women. And she wanted to be that good cop in the community and bridge the gap between the police and the neighborhoods. Of the six arrested officers, three are African Americans, three are White. None of this means any of these officers necessarily acted appropriately or right in this case. It is quite possible they did not and, if so, the court system, our legal judicial system, will determine that. What I am simply trying to point out is that these police officers have human faces. They are human beings, and these officers are going to go through hell whether they deserve to or not. Their lives will never be the same whether they are guilty or innocent. There will be many people in the community who shun them, even if they are found to have done nothing wrong. What message does that send to all the tens of thousands of police officers all across America who risk their lives every day to protect their communities from criminals? Unfortunately, it says there are a lot of people out there who are looking to misplace a lot of social problems we face in our country on the backs of the police. It says they might not be allowed to do their jobs when their communities most need them to do their jobs, and it says that one day, should they find themselves accused of wrongdoing, there might be a public mob that clamors for their conviction and threatens to burn down the city if the legal system finds them independent. That is a sad state of affairs. I am not defending the officers in the Gray case. I don't know whether they are guilty or innocent. I expect the legal system to determine that, but that is not my point. My point is that while there are some police officers who act terribly and who must be stopped, there is no epidemic of police criminality in this country. We should absolutely discuss and act upon the issues that surround police and community relations, by all means, and we also need to acknowledge the critical role the police play in keeping our community safe, the overwhelming majority of police who conduct themselves honorably day in and day out. The next time there is a demonstration about police conduct, I hope it is a demonstration to thank the police for their dedication, their hard work, and their courage. That is a demonstration I will be honored to join. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, today I honor the life and service of Shawn Phillip Somits of Muncy, PA, a Federal corrections officer at USP Allenwood and a U.S. Army veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, whose life tragically ended on April 2, 2015. Shawn Somits was born on July 1, 1975, in Williamsport, PA, the son of John and Charlotte Somits, of Muncy. Shawn was a 1994 graduate of Muncy High School and attended both Penn College and Bucknell University. In 2003, Shawn married his wife, Daisy, and welcomed the birth of his first child, Faith. At this time, Shawn was dutifully serving his country in OIF/OEF in the U.S. Army, where he was deployed to both Iraq and Kuwait from February 2003 until April of 2004. Upon his return from deployment in 2004, Shawn entered into Federal service with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons as a corrections officer at USP Allenwood, where he would serve for nearly 11 years. Shawn Somits' life ended suddenly and tragically on April 2, 2015, following a long battle with post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, suffered as a result from his combat service. He is survived by his wife, Daisy, and their two children, Faith and Wesley. Today I express my condolences to the family of Shawn Somits and honor Shawn's service to his country both as a combat veteran and a Federal law enforcement officer. Tragic losses such as this provide us a chance to reflect on the sacrifices dedicated public servants like Shawn make in order to keep us all safe from harm. Shawn Somits was a dedicated soldier, officer, husband, and father. His loss leaves a deep void in the lives of those who knew and loved Shawn.