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Floor Speech
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Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, yesterday, I spoke about a new law passed by the DC City Council. This law lowers penalties for crimes like carjacking and robbery. Thankfully, Congress is stepping in to stop this legislation.
DC, Washington here, should be an example of our American ideals. Sadly, it is becoming an example of the crime we are experiencing across the country in our larger cities. In Chicago, the Midwest, there are new records being broken in the wrong way each week, in New York, and even in places like my State capital of Indianapolis. It should be a wake-up call to crack down. Yet city governments keep going the other way.
The first priority of any government should be the safety of its citizens, especially at the local level, where you live each day. We know a big part of this is not about the laws we have. We have a lot of laws on the books. They are not enforced. In my State capital of Indianapolis, I have a prosecutor who will not enforce those laws, and even in the heart of our country, the Midwest, you have the same issue.
I guess the most disturbing part of all of this is the hatred for our police. They place their safety at hazard to protect ours. Too often, they pay the ultimate price in doing so.
(The remarks of Mr. BRAUN pertaining to the introduction of S. 459 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
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Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, we lost a Hoosier recently who spent 7 years fighting ALS. I was proud here, along with Senator Coons, to start the ALS Caucus. ALS is one of those diseases, when you are diagnosed with it, for which there is not a very good prognosis--3 to 4 years, maybe, sometimes.
Corey Polen from Indiana was able to stretch it out to 7 years and fought valiantly along the way. He was involved in trying to take his cause and help others. Currently, there is no cure, and there is severely limited access to treatment options.
Since I have been here, I have been trying to reform healthcare in general. That is a task when you have one side of the aisle that doesn't think there is anything to do there or isn't interested in it and the other side maybe wanting to have more government when I think we need to reform it in an underlying way and make it more transparent, more competitive, and remove barriers to entry so that you have doctors and nurses wanting to come into the profession.
Let's take this commonsense part of it. This is a disease, along with several other diseases, for which, once you are diagnosed, you do not have time, and you are beset by a cumbersome process that keeps people from getting into and even staying in treatment. We need to fix that to where, through the Promising Pathway Act, which I have had out there and which is gaining stride, we need to make an exception for those ailments that have treatments in progress and where the individuals suffering from them are willing to take the risk. They want to do that because there is no other option, especially when there are promising treatments that you are working with.
In Corey's case, his journey began in October 2015. He was hiking with his wife Jennifer in Arizona. On that hike, he kind of hurt his ankle and noticed more. He then returned to his hometown and wanted to look into it further. That is when he got that bleak diagnosis.
All along the journey, as his condition was getting worse, he was out there to help others with it. His main goal for us here in Congress was for us to get something like the Promising Pathway Act across the finish line, which would give hope to him and to all of the others with similar diseases who are frustrated by the fact that we can't move quickly enough, especially when there is stuff in the works that looks like it is going to be someday, if not a cure, at least a mitigation to the disease. We weren't able to get that done.
I would ask my fellow Senators and someone else in the House to carry it. We need to get this across the finish line. A panel of FDA advisers voted 7 to 2 that there was enough evidence to do something different. That gave hope to people like Corey and others that something would get done, but it hasn't happened. We have this under our own control to get it done, and it is well past time to get it done.
I have been here going on now into my fifth year, and we have been dragging our feet. I am going to roll up my sleeves and get it done, and we are going to keep pursuing this effort through our ALS Caucus. Senator Coons and I have done it, and we have made headway. But why wouldn't we, when we have been dawdling with this issue for so long, not give the benefit of the doubt to treatments that are promising and get this across the finish line for these individuals who have no other hope but for us to get it done?
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