[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 70 (Wednesday, April 26, 2023)] [Senate] [Pages S1370-S1377] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Date: 2023-04-26
Chamber: SENATE
Mr. BLUMENTHAL: I am so honored by that introduction and to be here on the floor with a great colleague--a champion in the House as well as now in the Senate--Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. I thank the senior Senator from Maryland--we are both senior Senators from our respective States--for yielding first to me. More importantly, I want to thank him for his leadership on human rights and civil rights here in the United States. He has been such a powerful advocate. But also, around the world, through the Helsinki Commission, I have had the great privilege of working with him and serving with him on that Commission, where he has put front and center the crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine as well as in other parts of the world where the rule of law, unfortunately, is lacking. So I am very, very proud to be with him on the floor today. Like my colleague Senator Durbin, who has been rightly lauded by Senator Cardin for his work on rights, I rise to ask this body and all who are hearing this message to commit to making the Equal Rights Amendment the law of our land--part of the Constitution. Outside of the right to vote, the Constitution has no mention of gender equality. It was enshrined--the right to vote--just over a century ago with the 19th Amendment, but the U.S. Constitution does not include an explicit provision on equal rights for women, and that is a sad omission that cannot be allowed to stand. We must fix it. The ERA, as you know, was introduced to Congress in 1923 by suffragist leader Alice Paul, who believed that after securing the right to vote, women needed legal protection against discrimination. That fact is no less true today than it was then. In 1972, the ERA was passed by Congress. In 2020, Virginia became the 38th and final State required by the Constitution to ratify it. In January 2022, we passed the 2-year waiting period. President Biden has supported making it the law of the land. We should heed President Biden and this body in doing so--in recognizing the importance of a resolution ratifying the ERA. Now, the hard, blunt truth here is that significant progress in sex equality has been made thanks to a generation of advocates--actually, several generations--but women and girls still face horrendous, life- changing barriers and challenges derived from structural sex discrimination every day. I became more aware of it as a dad to a young woman, listening to her, seeing the world through her eyes, as well as my wife, Cynthia--both of them strong advocates and, thankfully, my three sons as well, who are ardent champions of gender equality. In the workplace, the gender gap has hardly budged. You are, I am sure, aware that women now earn about 84 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is a statistic from the Department of Labor. The disparity is even larger for women of color. For every dollar a man earns, Native American women and Latinas earn 57 cents and Black women earn 67 cents. That is in the greatest country in the history of the world. We should be ashamed and embarrassed--ashamed and embarrassed. The ERA is a critical step toward ensuring equality and protecting women's fundamental rights, including the right to abortion and contraception. The Supreme Court overturned five decades of precedent and eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs saying Roe was wrong--a decision that will go down in infamy as one of the most destructive to the Court's credibility, as I mentioned today, and a tribute to the disingenuousness of three nominees before this body--the three most recent nominees--who said they would respect precedent and then voted to completely overturn Dobbs within a couple of years. About one in three girls and women in the United States of reproductive age are living in States where abortion is either unavailable or severely restricted, and the adverse consequences of poor women's health are already clearly visible. Amanda Zurawski today testified before the Judiciary Committee about how she nearly died, nearly perished from sepsis because of Texas's cruel, barbarous prohibitions against women's healthcare through abortion. Without the freedom to control their own lives, bodies, and futures, the true meaning of equality will remain elusive and out of reach. As Justice Ginsburg put it, full and equal citizenship ``is intimately connected to a person's ability to control their reproductive lives.'' The ERA would also provide additional tools against violence committed all too often against women. Gender-based bias is a form of sex discrimination as well as a violation of human rights. Thirty-five percent of all women who are killed by men are a result of violence from intimate partners with guns. One in three women has experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner. One in five women in the United States has been raped. You can dispute the specific numbers, but the overwhelming truth of sex discrimination in violence, in denial of healthcare, in job inequality, in pay discrimination is there for all to see. We all know it exists. We must act against it. That is why I am proud to stand here with my colleagues and argue that ratification is an idea long overdue. It is not an idea whose time has come; it came long ago. We have an obligation to act as a matter of conscience and conviction. If we care about women in the United States of America in the 21st century, we need to bring the law into the 21st century and do what should have been done long ago to protect women's health and security, as well as fundamental equality. Let me just close with a favorite quote of mine from Susan Anthony. She stated:  The true republic--men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.  Sex equality deserves a permanent home in the Constitution. The time to make it happen is now. I yield the floor to my colleague from Maryland, Senator Van Hollen.