mesut/congress_speeches huggingface dataset:
REMEMBERING OSWALDO PAYA
Ted Cruz (Republican, TX) \u2014 2023-3-1

I rise today to honor the memory of Oswaldo Paya, who would have celebrated his 71st birthday this week. His memory and his story have been an inspiration to dissidents across the world, and I would like to briefly retell it here today. prgtoken Oswaldo Paya was a dissident and a democracy activist in Cuba with unrelenting passion and dedication. He was someone who stood up against the Castro regime at very direct risk to his own life. He had incredible courage. He spoke up for human rights. He spoke up for free speech. He spoke up for democracy. prgtoken Eleven years ago, Oswaldo Paya was murdered. On July 22, 2012, Paya left his house with three other people to go visit friends. From the start of their journey, their car was followed. On the way, the Cuban police drove Paya's car off the road and killed him. The crash is widely believed to have been orchestrated by the Castro regime. prgtoken Paya had long been a thorn in the side of the Castros, even from a young age. He was the only person at his school who had refused to join the Communist Youth. As a teenager, he publicly opposed the communist crackdown on protesters in Czechoslovakia who were fighting for freedom, and he was punished with 3 years in prison. prgtoken Paya went on to found the Varela Project, which sought a referendum on Cuba's communist system. Their demands were simple: democratic government, religious liberty, freedom of expression, and the freedom to start businesses. Paya managed to get 11,000 signatures to petition the government to hold a referendum, and eventually 20,000 people supported the referendum. Twenty thousand people risked their lives by standing with Oswaldo Paya for freedom. But the Cuban Government refused to hold a referendum. prgtoken Paya's fight for freedom made him a target repeatedly of the Communist Party in Cuba. They harassed him, tried to intimidate him, and arrested him numerous times. And in 2012, they killed him. prgtoken Paya's friend and the driver of the car said that when he awoke after the crash, he was confronted at the hospital by a government operative, and the hospital was flooded with uniformed military personnel. Under extreme duress, drugged, and threatened with death by government officials, he signed a confession that directly contradicted what he knew to be true--that the communist regime had just murdered Oswaldo Paya. prgtoken I have met multiple times with Oswaldo Paya's daughter, Rosa Maria, who is an incredible, courageous, powerful leader in her own right, and we have discussed ways we can continue her father's fight for justice in Cuba. One of the things I have done is I have filed legislation to rename the street in front of the Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC, ``Oswaldo Paya Way.'' Renaming the street in front of the Cuban Embassy would send a powerful message to the communist regime. prgtoken During the Cold War, President Reagan followed this very same strategy. He
106TH ANNIVERSARY OF PUERTO RICO'S U.S. CITIZENSHIP
Jenniffer González-Colón (Republican, PR) \u2014 2023-3-1

. Madam , today I rise to celebrate the 106th anniversary of the people of Puerto Rico being granted their U.S. citizenship. prgtoken Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory in 1898. In 1906, President Roosevelt called on Congress to confer U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans. On March 2, 1917, the Jones Act was signed into law. prgtoken We are proud American citizens, and we are proud of the contributions we have made to this great Nation. More than 235,000 Puerto Rican servicemembers have served and have fought in every military conflict that our Nation has had since World War I. prgtoken However, although we are U.S. citizens, the Federal Government often treats us unequally. I live on the island, and I can tell you that we no longer want to be treated differently. prgtoken We want the same rights and responsibilities as our fellow citizens in the States, which can only be achieved with statehood. prgtoken Like Congress acted 106 years ago to grant us our cherished American citizenship, Congress has an obligation to act again and make us a permanent part of the Union as the 51st State.
REMEMBERING CLARENE LAW
Cynthia M. Lummis (Republican, WY) \u2014 2023-3-1

it is with a heavy heart that I rise today to share with you that Wyoming lost one of its finest residents on September 21. At the age of 89, God called up one of his most faithful servants, Clarene Law, up to heaven. I join with the rest of Wyoming in mourning this tremendous loss. prgtoken While she was born in neighboring Idaho, Clarene's journey to Wyoming began in 1959 when her husband at the time was hired to be a guidance counselor at Jackson/Wilson High School, which brought the family to Jackson, WY. In the early 1960s, Jackson presumably looked a whole lot different than it looks today. Of course, Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone were a short drive away, and the entire area is surrounded by so much natural beauty, but it was not the major tourist destination that it is today. prgtoken Once settled in Jackson, Clarene took what may be considered her first step in the hospitality business by working as a bookkeeper and auditor at the Wort Hotel in Jackson. In 1962, while working at the Wort, she overheard a conversation about the owner of the Antler Motel telling another person they wanted to sell it. After hearing this conversation, Clarene chimed in to say that she was interested. Clarene and her husband got together, scrounged up their money, were able to receive assistance from both sets of parents to make the necessary down payment to become owners of the Antler Motel. prgtoken The work at the Antler was tough, but it also gave her the chance to be a prgtoken working mother and watch her kids while doing all the remaining tasks necessary for running a hotel. She worked the front desk, cleaned the sheets, made the beds, did the books, and eventually even pumped gas at the station they later added. Business was certainly picking up, and it allowed them to start expanding the Antler. They were able to purchase several nearby properties which were rolled into the Antler itself and a location that once was a series of different restaurants to what is known today as the Pearl Street Market. prgtoken In 1973, Clarene remarried Creed Law who was a hard-working man who could do just about anything with his hands. Creed was also instrumental in the upkeep and expansion of the hotel operations. There were few things he couldn't fix and coincidentally put together. Case in point, they actually purchased what was the Settlers Best Western in Worland and took it apart only to put it back together in Jackson, some 250 miles away. prgtoken Clarene certainly knew what she was doing, and she was doing it extremely well. Over the years, they continued to expand, purchase new properties, update some of the old ones, and at the time of her passing, Clarene and Creed owned 6 lodges with 477 hotel units and employed numerous people to help manage and maintain them. One of the true special parts about that is that, over the nearly 60 years that Clarene was responsible for the hotels, you could r
China (Executive Calendar)
Marco Rubio (Republican, FL) \u2014 2023-3-2

no issue dominates our attention more these days than our growing rivalry with China, and rightly so. It is a historic challenge. It is one that I think we waited way too long to recognize, and now we are scrambling to make up for that. prgtoken But I think, in all the attention that is being paid to this, it is important that we remember or at least recognize that the core, the essential issue here is not China, per se, by itself; the core issue here is a decades-old, bipartisan consensus that is entrenched in our economics and our politics--a consensus that said that economic globalization would deliver, well, freedom and peace. It was almost a religious faith in the power of the free flow of people and money and goods across borders as the answer to virtually every problem that faced the world. That is how we built our politics. That is how we built our foreign policy. prgtoken You know what, for about 50 years after World War II, it generally worked. The reason why it generally worked is because we didn't actually have a global market. If you look at the economy we were engaged in, if you look at the free trade and the like during that period of time, it was primarily a market made up of democratic allies, of countries that shared common values and common priorities for the future. prgtoken Even when the outcomes during that time were not always in our benefit, even when maybe some industry left for a country in Europe or maybe during the time that Japan challenged us in some sectors from Asia, at least the beneficiary--even though it may have harmed us in the short term, the beneficiary of that outcome was not the Soviet bloc, the Soviet Union, or some geopolitical competitor; the beneficiary was another democracy and an ally in our confrontation with communism during that period of time. prgtoken The point is, it generally worked during that time because, by and large, the interests of the global market and the interests of our country never got out of balance too far. prgtoken Then the Cold War ended, and our leaders--and I say ``our leaders'' because this was really a bipartisan thing--our leaders became intoxicated with hubris. I remember the lexicon was, it is the end of history, and the world will now be flatter, and every country is now going to naturally become a free-enterprise democracy, and economic liberalization will always result in political freedom. You flood a country with capitalism, and that country will not just get rich, but they are going to turn into us or some version of one of our democratic allies. prgtoken So, in pursuit of that historic gamble, which had no historic precedent, we entered into all kinds of trade deals and treaties and rules and regulations on an international scale, and we invited into that all kinds of countries that, by the way, were not democracies, did not share our values, and did not have the same long-term goals for the world as we do. Th
Crime (Executive Session)
Mitch McConnell (Republican, KY) \u2014 2023-3-2

the American people are deeply concerned about the collapse of law and order in our country. Thirty- nine percent of New York residents say they feel less safe than they did 1 year ago. Last month, 63 percent of likely voters in Chicago said they felt personally unsafe from gun violence and crime. By the way, on Tuesday, those Chicago voters tossed out the incumbent mayor. Americans see this problem going from bad to worse. More than 70 percent of the country expects we will see crime rates rise even higher this coming year. prgtoken Unfortunately, my fellow Kentuckians know this as well as anyone else. In my hometown of Louisville, youth homicides tripled between 2018 and 2021. In fact, since the onset of the pandemic, Louisville has seen the second worst increase in youth homicides among more than a dozen similar U.S. cities. Total homicides have slightly subsided from their record high in 2021, but they are still sitting in the triple digits. prgtoken One Louisville couple whose 19-year-old son was murdered by a convicted felon in 2019 summed up the way everybody is feeling. Here is what they said: [Homicides] may be down, but it's not down enough. prgtoken Of course, crime is not limited to the most callous acts of murder; there is also a literal rash of brazen theft. Just 2 days ago, the town of Somerset in my State was stunned when their local car dealership was robbed point-blank. A group of masked thieves stormed the showroom and drove no fewer than six high-end cars right off the lot. prgtoken The nationwide decline in law and order hasn't been happenstance. Today's ic Party has made a deliberate decision to make public safety and innocent citizens a lower priority than repeat criminal offenders. This has happened at the Federal level, where prominent have spent years amplifying anti-police rhetoric that tangibly and provably hurts law enforcement and certainly leads to more crime. prgtoken It has happened at the local level, where liberal mayors and city councils around the country have waged rhetorical wars against their own police departments and sometimes actually followed through on cutting funding. prgtoken The left's ``soft on crime'' campaign has even infiltrated the legal system itself. Far-left political donors have worked to get radical district attorneys elected in and around major cities. Many of them have promptly instituted what amount to blanket amnesties to whole classes of crimes. prgtoken For example, in Los Angeles, the district attorney's refusal to go after major misdemeanor offenses has brought his office prosecution rate down to half of what it was under his predecessor. The Commonwealth's attorney over in Fairfax County has repeatedly declined to pursue justice against perpetrators of child sexual assault. The former district attorney in Boston who made headlines for declaring that charges involving 15 different serious crimes would be
Border Security (Executive Session)
John Cornyn (Republican, TX) \u2014 2023-3-2

during my time in the Senate and even prior, when I had the honor of serving as Texas attorney general, I spent a lot of time in our border communities working with the mayors, county judges, private land owners, nongovernmental organizations, and law enforcement at every level. The majority of these men and women have lived along the Texas-Mexico border for their entire lives. They have witnessed the impact of policies from Washington from different administrations. They have seen spikes and dips in migration. They have reaped the benefits of legitimate trade and commerce, and they have dealt with the consequences of security failures. In short, they have seen a lot. But virtually everyone agrees that they have never seen anything like President 's present border crisis. prgtoken Over the first 2 years of the administration, we have broken one record after another when it comes to migration. Here are some shocking statistics. U.S. Customs and Border Protection logged nearly 2.4 million border prgtoken crossings during a single year. During 1 month alone, the Agency encountered more than a quarter of a million migrants. prgtoken The scope and scale of this crisis is absolutely unprecedented, and it is having a major impact on our border security missions. When highly trained and professional Border Patrol agents are spending their time passing out meals and doing administrative tasks, they aren't able to do what they train for, what they want to do, which is to stop drugs like fentanyl, which killed more than 70,000 Americans last year alone. prgtoken I was able to meet with some parents who lost their teenage children to fentanyl poisoning last week in Hays County school district right outside of Austin, TX. It was among the most emotional events I have ever attended, because these parents had happy, healthy teenage children going to high school, who took something they thought was a relatively innocuous pill, only to find out it was contaminated with a minute amount of fentanyl, and it took their lives. These parents want us to stop the flow of these drugs across the southwestern border. prgtoken When the Border Patrol is not on the frontlines, they are not able to stop the transnational criminals, the cartel members, or other people on the terrorist watch list from sneaking into the United States. prgtoken A few weeks ago, I traveled with a bipartisan delegation of Senators to El Paso and then to Yuma--Yuma, AZ, a southwestern part of Arizona-- a sleepy, little agricultural community. The Border Patrol Sector Chief told us that they encountered people speaking as many as 200 languages from 176 different countries at that little, sleepy border community in southwestern Arizona. prgtoken As it turns out, there is a major airport in Mexicali, in northern Mexico, just across from Yuma, and people were literally flying there from around the world and turning up at the Border Patrol sector
Energy Policy (Executive Session)
John Thune (Republican, SD) \u2014 2023-3-2

if you ask any what kind of energy policy he or she supports, you will likely hear the phrase ``an `all of the above' energy policy.'' Today, I want to take a minute to talk about, first, what we mean by an all-of-the-above energy policy and second, why we support this kind of policy. prgtoken So what is an ``all of the above'' energy policy? prgtoken Well, as the name suggests, an ``all of the above'' energy policy is an energy policy that embraces the full spectrum of available energy resources, both renewable and conventional. It is important not to ignore the conventional part, as many of my colleagues across the aisle would like to do. It is not enough to embrace renewable energy, even multiple types of renewables. And, for reasons I am going to discuss, any energy policy that doesn't embrace conventional as well as renewable sources of energy is insufficient. It places both our energy security and energy affordability in jeopardy. prgtoken Back to my explanation, as I said, an ``all of the above'' energy policy is an energy policy that embraces the full spectrum of available energy sources. It embraces wind, solar, hydropower, biofuels, biomass, geothermal, nuclear, oil, natural gas, and more. That is the definition. prgtoken Now, why is an ``all of the above'' energy policy important? Why not, for example, eliminate fossil fuels from the mix? Or why not choose one or two renewable fuels and put all of our energies into advancing those one or two technologies to hasten the arrival of a clean energy future? prgtoken Well, there are a number of reasons why these options or those options and any option that doesn't embrace the full range of available energy technologies are a bad idea. prgtoken First of all, the fact of the matter is that we are simply not yet at the point where we can rely solely on clean energy technologies. We will still need conventional energy, and we are going to continue to need conventional energy resources and, in particular, natural gas for the foreseeable future. prgtoken My State of South Dakota actually derives a huge portion of our electricity generation from renewables, notably wind and hydroelectric, totaling about 82 percent of utility-scale production in South Dakota. But conventional fuels, nevertheless, play an essential role in electricity generation in South Dakota. prgtoken Wind, like solar and other renewables, by its nature is intermittent, even in places like South Dakota, where wind is a regular feature. And because technology has not yet advanced to the point where we can store up sufficient renewable energy to power an electric grid, even places like my State that rely heavily on renewables for electricity generation depend on conventional energy sources like coal and natural gas to keep the power on consistently. prgtoken California is another State with significant production from renewables, like hydropower and solar, but the availability
RECOGNIZING JILL'S HOMESTEAD
Joni Ernst (Republican, IA) \u2014 2023-3-2

as ranking member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, each week I recognize an outstanding Iowa small business that exemplifies the American entrepreneurial spirit. This week it is my privilege to recognize Jill's Homestead of Chariton, IA, as the Senate Small Business of the Week for the week of March 6, 2023. prgtoken Jill's Homestead is an example of the American entrepreneurial spirit at its finest. Before starting her own business, Jill Godby had a longstanding passion for leather crafting, and she had a special knack for creating trendy leather earrings that she often wore herself. Over time, her hobby grew as friends and family wanted their own leather earrings. Prompted by the demand from her family and friends, in 2018 Jill started to list some of her earrings on Facebook; shortly thereafter, interest in her products took off, and her hobby turned into a side hustle. Given her products' popularity online, Jill started to sell her earrings at local farmer's markets and at any trade shows she could find. Eventually, her hobby-turned-side-hustle led her to quit her day job and turn her passion into a small business. However, Jill did not foresee the once-in-a-generation pandemic that was right around the corner. When disaster struck and businesses were forced to close, Jill refused to become discouraged. She doubled down on her products and ideas and worked long nights to grow the business. Today, that hard work has paid off; Jill has been able to scale up the company to employ a small, all-female, workshop crew. Furthermore, she now has her own workshop to make her leather goods on the town square in Chariton. prgtoken In a world that emphasizes the mass production of goods, Jill's Homestead wants to craft products built to last a lifetime. They work to achieve this goal through using high-quality leather, experienced craftswomen, and an online shop to find customers that share their mutual values of sustainability, self-sufficiency, and natural living. Each member of her team of seven craftswomen are dedicated to creating the highest quality product possible. The business primarily sells their products online on their website created through the ecommerce platform Shopify. Additionally, they open their workshop once a month as they pride themselves on providing great customer service and thus want to form and maintain genuine connections with their customers in person. In fact, their commitment to customer relations is what initially grew the company, with Jill hosting weekly auctions on Wednesday nights of her products through Facebook Live. Jill's Homestead has grown from only selling earrings to now offering luxury handbags, accessories, and home goods inspired by the lifestyle of rural Iowa. prgtoken As a small business, Jill's Homestead recognizes the need to give back to the Chariton community. They are part of the Chariton Area Chamber/Main Stre