LIVE: Senate Democrat Leadership Hold Press Conferences (July 30) 2024-07-30 18:28

It's going to read you the Q&A, but I'm not doing that. So I want to thank you for coming. Now, more than anything, though, we're here today because of the countless parents who came here, met with us, cried with us, told us their powerful, compelling, and tragic stories. Today, the Senate keeps its promise to every parent who's lost a child because of the risks of social media. Today, after a lot of hard work, a lot of twists and turns, we'll pass COSA and COPPA. COSA and COPPA will be the most important updates to federal laws protecting kids on the Internet in decades, and a very good first step. For COSA, Blumenthal and Blackburn fought to give kids and parents the tools and safeguards and transparency they need to protect our children's health and well-being. For COPPA, Senator Markey and Cassidy worked to protect the personal information for children and teenagers and ban targeted advertising aimed at them. Now we call on the House to pass these common-sense, bipartisan, life-saving bills. The overwhelming vote we received here on the floor of the Senate should importune the House to act and act quickly, and we hope it will do just that. Now on the tax bill. Last night, I filed cloture on the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act, a very important piece of pro-family, pro-children, pro-growth legislation. Senators should expect to vote on this measure Thursday. Since becoming Majority Leader in 2021, I've tried my best to work first in a bipartisan way to get things done in this chamber. The Senate's record over the past three years bears this out. Democrats and Republicans have come together again and again and again to pass historic bills like the infrastructure law, chips and science, Ukraine and Israel aid, veterans health care, gun safety, and marriage equality. Today, we're getting another important bipartisan bill done through COPSA and COPPA. And I will continue this productive streak this week. I want to continue this productive streak this week with a vote on the tax bill to deliver so many benefits to American families. We all know that expanding the child tax credit will do immense good, taking more than half a million kids out of poverty and giving 16 million kids, mainly poorer, working class kids, $16 million in increased benefits. This bill shouldn't be difficult. It's bipartisan. It passed the Senate, the Republican House, with a vote of 357 to 70. It was mainly put together by the Republican head of the Ways and Means Committee, hardly a flaming liberal. This bill should remain bipartisan, as it has been up to this point. We hope that it will. We hope that it will. Look, there are a lot of difficult votes we have to take in this chamber, but this bill is not one of them. To my Republican colleagues, step up and support the bill. I've made clear throughout my term as Majority Leader, and even before that as Minority Leader, that Democrats will not shy away from moving forward on important issues when necessary, to fight for families, give them a chance to see where their elected representatives stand. Putting senators on the record is one way progress is made on important issues, and it's what we did on choice, IVF, and contraception last month. This week is a classic example of how we can do both in the Senate. Pass bipartisan legislation to get things done for the American people, like Cosa and Coppa, with a large bipartisan majority, but also put pressure on Republicans to show where they stand on important issues like the child tax credit, affordable housing, and R&D, particularly on a was drawn up by Democrats and Republicans. So this week, the American people will get a chance to see which senators in reality support tax relief for parents, for families, for small business, for housing, and then we're going to see who opposes it. Over the past few days, some Republicans have falsely claimed that Democrats somehow oppose the child tax credit. This vote should end that false argument once and for all. Oppose it? We don't. What are they going to do? Expanding the child tax credit is one of the most significant achievements Democrats have made under the Biden-Harris administration. If anyone wants to know who actually opposes expanding the child tax credit, go ask the 49 Republican senators who voted against the child tax credit when we passed the American Rescue Plan. Ask them, why did you oppose it? And then why are you voting against this bipartisan bill this week? Here's the truth. Democrats want to pass the tax package because it helps lift kids out of poverty, helps poor and working class families. It will also reward businesses that invest in R&D and create a lot of new jobs. And one of our greatest problems, housing, the low-income housing tax credit is one of the best tools we have for expanding the supply of housing. So Democrats are ready and raring to go. The American people deserve tax relief. The big question right now is, will Republicans follow their colleagues in the House and join us, or will they stand in the way? Senator Blumenthal. Thank you. Thank you, Senator Schumer, for your leadership on the child tax credit issue. But most importantly for today, thank you for giving us a vote and for your strong and passionate advocacy in giving kids and parents back control over their online lives. What took so long? Opposition from big tech. We have broken the grip that big tech has on this process. This vote was overwhelmingly bipartisan, as was co-sponsorship of the bill. At the end of the process, three quarters of the Senate, evenly divided Republican and Democrat, co-sponsored the Kids Online Safety Act. Democracy works if we have bipartisan support. And finally, I want to add my thanks to the parents and young people who were the main advocates here, the most effective advocates for this bill. I'm hopeful that in the next four weeks, they're going to continue this fight, cajole and convince our House colleagues that there is an urgency here that is unquestionable and undeniable. We need to pass this measure when kids go back to school and our congressional colleagues come back to Washington. I know that House leadership is very interested, and many in the House have expressed strong support for this bill. I'm hopeful that we'll have the same kind of overwhelming bipartisan support in the House as we did in the Senate. But overall, it is a historic, monumental day. The public interest has prevailed, the big tech business model here, more kids' eyes and eyeballs for longer periods of time, more advertising dollars, more revenues and profits. That's a business model that has to be abandoned after the Kids Online Safety Act, because we have given parents the tools and safeguards to disconnect from those addictive features and from the black box algorithms that drive content at them. Bullying, eating disorders, self-harm, fentanyl, sex exploitation. A lot of positive on social media, but the bad stuff is really scary and vile. So thank you to the parents and kids. We're counting on you. Thank you. And thank you to Senator Schumer for moving this legislation, for the leadership which he is giving to this all-important subject. Thanks to Dick Blumenthal. And I want to thank Bill Cassidy, my Republican co-sponsor of the Child and Teen Online Privacy Protection Act. We have a crisis in America. There's no bill more important than this bill for our country right now. According to the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, two years ago, one in three teenage girls contemplated suicide. One in ten teenage girls in the United States attempted suicide two years ago. One in five LGBTQ youth attempted suicide two years ago in our country. The CDC points the finger at social media as a big contributor to the mental health crisis in teenagers and children in our country. The Surgeon General has now issued a Surgeon General report pointing the finger at social media as a big part of this crisis in America amongst young people. Parents know it. The teenagers themselves know it. So what my legislation does is it lifts the age up to age 17 to be given protections. And the protections are, number one, if a teenage girl goes online to get information about bulimia, there cannot be a targeted ad now coming back from dozens, hundreds of companies towards that girl. That's prohibited. No targeting of ads towards these teenagers, these vulnerable kids, these children in our society. Number two, the teenager or the parent can say, erase all information that you've gathered about my child. Erase it. That post was a mistake. I want it all erased, not just deleted by the kid, but erased from the whole history of the company. Number three, no gathering of information in the first place without permission from the parents and the kids. Got to get permission to gather all this data because it's all about data. That's what all these companies are about. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, without information, they can't do any of this. So this is an historic bill. And again, I thank Chuck Schumer. We're doing it on a bipartisan basis completely because AI is going to take what we have today and put it on steroids. So they have a plan to even further accelerate the exploitation of the children in our country. And this is our plan to give protections to those teenagers and children and their parents in order to protect them. So it's a historic day today. And our hope is that the House will move as well so that we can put this bill on President Biden's desk. Okay. Questions? Yes. Look, the Supreme Court is a morass. It's a true morass, both ethically and substantively. Ethically, it is just outrageous that hard right wealthy people who are actually paying groups to go to the Supreme Court are at the same time giving gifts worth in total over millions of dollars, whether it be trips or buses or cars or hostel stays to those same Supreme Court justices. And Chief Justice Roberts has fallen down on the job. He should be much stronger. And it's also a morass substantively. This court is taking away people's rights, left and right, of course, a woman's right to choose, but so many other ways where they're helping the powerful big interests against the average person. Taking away democracy to give the president immunity for official acts is nothing short of outrageous. And I'm looking at legislation to undo that. I believe you don't need a constitutional amendment. You could do it by legislation. And so I think they need a lot of changes, and we're looking at a whole lot of things. I think I have total confidence that Vice President Harris will choose a great vice presidential candidate. I have complete faith in Vice President Harris's choice. Look, we want to get the NDAA done. It's complicated by the fact that the House filled their NDAA bill with huge numbers of poison pills and other things designed to defeat it. And so we're looking at it very carefully. We want to get it done for sure by the end of the year. Well, look, that bill was a great bill. It showed that Democrats want to be tough on border. It also showed that Republicans really don't care about the border. They much prefer to make it a political issue. A bill that was supported by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the border patrol guards, and lots of Republicans when they saw it before Donald Trump said he didn't want it to pass because he wanted chaos to win the election. We think that's a winning issue for us. So certainly we're going to have to deal with the border when Vice President Harris becomes President Harris, Schumer stays as majority leader, and Jeffries becomes the speaker. Last one. Look, there are lots of things we want to get done. I'm not going to speculate into the future, but we are going to have as productive, even a more productive two years should that happen than we had in the previous two. Thank you, everybody.