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Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, I have already announced that I intend to support Judge Jackson's nomination. Her character and her qualifications are unassailable, but, unfortunately, that hasn't stopped a number of Senate Republicans from treating her disgracefully. Too often, behavior in the hearings was simply shameful.

It doesn't have to be this way, and it wasn't always this way. For example, even though I disagreed with him on plenty of issues, I voted for Chief Justice John Roberts, and he was treated very fairly by Democrats. Serious questions were asked and answered, and there wasn't anything resembling the over-the-line, juvenile theatrics like those shown for Judge Jackson.

Things changed when President Obama's final nomination was stolen by Republicans. They refused to even hold a hearing or consider the sitting President's nominee on just fabricated grounds.

Democrats are trying to maintain a sharp focus on legal questions and personal qualifications. Faced with sideshows and personal attacks, we stuck to issues. What was particularly striking about those attacks was they were attacks against somebody whom Senate Republicans had voted for unanimously when she was nominated to a lower level court.

My view is, the radicalization of the Court and the nominations process are just poisonous to our democracy, but that was what was on display when Republicans attacked Judge Jackson.

I want to start setting the record straight on several of the key issues.

First, Judge Jackson is squarely within the sentencing norm for cases involving child sexual abuse material. She was smeared anyway as going soft on predators. It was a gross and baseless accusation, more of a dog whistle to conspiracists than an attempt at honestly vetting a nominee. Even the National Review--nobody's idea of a liberal publication--published a column that called the comments of our colleague from Missouri, Senator Hawley--it called his attack ``meritless to the point of demagoguery.'' Those were the words of the National Review.

The fact is, on this hugely important issue, the whole question of kids' safety, as the Presiding Officer of the Senate knows, there is a big difference between talking about protecting child victims and actually doing the work. Far too many of our Republican colleagues just come down on the wrong side of the divide.

It is absolutely right that government at every level has failed to protect kids from exploitation online. That failure has a lot of causes. One is that the Justice Department, for reasons I will never understand, has consistently declined to put enough manpower and funding behind protecting these vulnerable kids. Another reason is that Members of Congress talk a really big game, but when there is serious legislation to protect vulnerable kids, they disappear.

Now, I have proposed an alternative. It is the Invest in Child Safety Act. It puts serious funds into tracking down the child predators and prosecuting these god-awful monsters and protecting the kids they target and abuse. It would create a new executive position, to be confirmed by the Senate, to raise this level of protecting kids and strengthen oversight.

Now, instead of supporting that legislation, where we put real prosecutors and real investigators to the task of protecting our kids, putting more law enforcement on the beat, a number of Senate Republicans spend their days going after section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. So, yet again, vulnerable kids are being used as pawns by politicians to advance their agenda.

I simply believe that child abuse and exploitation is too serious an issue for U.S. Senators to cheapen it with baseless accusations and ill-conceived legislation. This is the last subject--protecting our kids--that elected officials ought to be playing politics with.

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