Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to urge my colleagues to vote against the nomination of Carlos Muniz to be the Department of Education's general counsel.

The Department of Education's primary responsibility is to help schools educate our students and prepare them to be successful in life. A good education can open doors of opportunity for children who may not have thought that their dreams were possible, and a good education can lift millions of families out of poverty and into the middle class. That is certainly what a good education did for me and for my family.

As many working families are struggling today, we should be working to make sure every child can attend a good public school in their own neighborhood. We need to do more to ensure that every student who wants to attend college can afford it, graduate, and find a good-paying job and is not saddled with a mountain of debt. It is critical that every student, no matter what age, learn in a safe environment, free from discrimination, harassment, and violence.

This should be at the core of our Nation--that everyone has the right to a high-quality education, no matter where they live or how they learn or how much money their parents make.

As general counsel to the Department of Education, Mr. Muniz would be responsible for providing legal advice and assistance to Secretary DeVos. Her first year in office has shown how much she needs it.

Secretary DeVos continues to push her extreme privatization agenda even though millions of students, parents, and teachers have stood up and rejected it.

Despite bipartisan agreement in Congress on our Nation's K-12 law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, Secretary DeVos is approving State plans that do not comply with all of ESSA's guardrails--guardrails that were agreed to by Republicans and Democrats in Congress to help ensure that no student falls through the cracks.

Secretary DeVos has rolled back protections for students and student loan borrowers, making it easier for predatory, for-profit colleges to take advantage of students.

Time and again, she has failed to uphold civil rights protections for students. She has tried to scale back the Office for Civil Rights, opened the doors for schools to once again discriminate against transgender students, and rolled back guidance for schools on how to investigate campus sexual assault. Especially in this moment when more and more women are coming forward and sharing their stories of harassment and assault, there is no excuse for those in power to attempt to sweep their stories under the rug. By rolling back this guidance, Secretary DeVos allowed schools to put the burden back on survivors. By making it harder for them to trust they will be believed, I am concerned that fewer women will come forward.

Mr. President, it is clear that Secretary DeVos needs an independent general counsel who will stand up to her when laws are being bent or broken. I am afraid Mr. Muniz has failed to convince me that is the kind of general counsel he would be.

He worked for a for-profit college company that preyed upon students and cheated them out of their education and their savings. He has a record of putting politics before students. He worked for the Florida attorney general, who came under fire for accepting a political donation from President Trump at the very time she decided against investigating Trump University--a sham university that defrauded countless students by promising them everything and leaving them with nothing.

Although Mr. Muniz and the Florida attorney general didn't stand up for students who were misled and defrauded by President Trump, many other States sued. Just last week--8 years after Trump University closed its doors--the $25 million settlement the President agreed to pay to his victims was finalized, meaning some of those cheated by the President will now start seeing relief. However, Mr. Muniz's involvement in the Trump University case gives me great concern that at the Department of Education, he will once again not stand up for student loan borrowers defrauded by other predatory for-profit colleges.

I am afraid Mr. Muniz at the Department of Education will only be more of the same. For those reasons, I will be voting against his nomination, and I urge my colleagues to do the same. Nomination of James Bridenstine

Mr. President, while I am here, I want to briefly comment on another nominee who is being considered today by the Senate, and that is Representative Bridenstine. Since he was nominated to be Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, I have been expressing very strong and very serious concerns, and I wanted to come to the floor today to once again call on my colleagues to reject this nomination and to call on President Trump to send us a nominee who is worthy of the great legacy and incredible potential of our civil space program.

My deep concerns with Representative Bridenstine fall into two categories. The first is his fitness for leadership of an agency that is seeped in science, given his clear lack of understanding of basic scientific issues, and the second is his ability to lead an inclusive and forward-looking agency, given his history of hateful, demeaning, and divisive comments and positions.

First, let me talk about his fitness to lead this agency. NASA is an agency that is committed to science, exploration, technology, and innovation. Over the years, it has employed some of the most brilliant scientists in the world focused on the most cutting-edge research, with an eye toward exploring new frontiers, expanding human knowledge, and increasing our understanding of this world and beyond. It was this commitment to science and innovation that allowed NASA to catch up with the Russians and launch a satellite into space. It was this openness to innovation that allowed NASA to cast humanity's eyes with greater clarity than ever before far beyond our solar system with the launch of the Hubble telescope. It was this focus on innovation and exploration that allowed NASA to put a man on the Moon--12 of them, in fact. The list goes on.

Without a commitment to science, NASA would not have succeeded, and if that doesn't continue, it will fail. That is why I am very concerned that Representative Bridenstine not only is not committed to science, he flat-out rejects clear scientific consensus. As I have said before, in a June 2013 speech he delivered on the floor of the House of Representatives, Representative Bridenstine repeated the debunked claim that ``global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago,'' and a March 2013 tweet from him failed to recognize the difference between local weather conditions and the broader planetary climate. That is a basic scientific concept.

Those are just a couple of examples. This may be just one issue, but it is very telling. I believe that Representative Bridenstine's failure to accept fundamental scientific truths about Earth's climate will make him an ill-suited and dangerous choice to lead an agency with science at its core.

Second is my concern about his ability to lead an inclusive and forward-looking agency, given his history of hateful, demeaning, and divisive comments and positions. I have noted this before, but it bears repeating.

Representative Bridenstine has openly expressed his opposition to the rights of LGBTQ individuals, of immigrants, and of women. In May 2013, he gave a speech and suggested that LGBTQ people were immoral. He said: ``Some of us in America still believe in the concept of sexual morality.'' In response to the Supreme Court's marriage equality ruling in 2013, he stated that he would keep fighting for ``traditional marriage.'' Representative Bridenstine has a history of supporting anti-Muslim groups and has consistently defended a number of President Trump's discriminatory policies on immigration, including the Muslim travel ban. He even defended President Trump's comments about sexually assaulting women, saying they were ``locker room talk.'' He has gone on shows and stages to stand with bigots and racists--not to debate them but to agree with them. And that list goes on.

Representative Bridenstine is not someone who should be put in charge of NASA's diverse workforce. In 2016, NASA announced that for the very first time, fully half of their new astronaut trainees were women. I mentioned before that NASA has sent 12 men to the Moon. Well, we may be on track for a woman to be the first American to plant her feet on Mars.

At a moment in our history where we want every student in this country--every one of them--to dream big dreams and to strive for high goals and explore careers in science, technology, engineering, and math, regardless of where they are from or whom they love or what color their skin is, sending someone like Representative Bridenstine to lead our Nation's space agency would send the absolute wrong signal and move our country in the absolute wrong direction. So I will be voting against that nomination, and I will be strongly encouraging our colleagues to do so as well.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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