October 1, 2020 - Issue: Vol. 166, No. 171 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 2nd Session

[Pages S6015-S6017]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Cloture Motion

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before 
the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will state.
  The legislative clerk read as follows

                             Cloture Motion

       We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the 
     provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, 
     do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the motion to 
     proceed to Calendar No. 551, S. 4653, a bill to protect the 
     healthcare of hundreds of millions of people of the United 
     States and prevent efforts of the Department of Justice to 
     advocate courts to strike down the Patient Protection and 
     Affordable Care Act.
         Charles E. Schumer, Richard J. Durbin, Patty Murray, Tim 
           Kaine, Martin Heinrich, Jack Reed, Jeff Merkley, 
           Bernard Sanders, Jon Tester, Benjamin L. Cardin, Brian 
           Schatz, Debbie Stabenow, Richard Blumenthal, Angus S. 
           King, Jr., Michael F. Bennet, Edward J. Markey, Chris 
           Van Hollen, Sheldon Whitehouse, Kirsten E. Gillibrand.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate 
that debate on the motion to proceed to S. 4653, a bill to protect the 
healthcare of hundreds of millions of people of the United States and 
prevent efforts of the Department of Justice to advocate courts to 
strike down the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, shall be 
brought to a close?
  The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. 
Graham), the Senator from Utah (Mr. Lee), and the Senator from Florida 
(Mr. Rubio).
  Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. 
Alexander) would have voted ``yea.''
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from California (Ms. Harris) 
and the Senator from Montana (Mr. Tester) are necessarily absent.
  The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 51, nays 43, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 200 Ex.]

                                YEAS--51

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Brown
     Cantwell
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Collins
     Coons
     Cortez Masto
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Ernst
     Feinstein
     Gardner
     Gillibrand
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hirono
     Jones
     Kaine
     King
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Manchin
     Markey
     McSally
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Peters
     Reed
     Rosen
     Sanders
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Sinema
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Udall
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                                NAYS--43

     Barrasso
     Blackburn
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Braun
     Burr
     Capito
     Cassidy
     Cornyn
     Cotton
     Cramer
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Enzi
     Fischer
     Grassley
     Hawley
     Hoeven
     Hyde-Smith
     Inhofe
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Lankford
     Loeffler
     McConnell
     Moran
     Paul
     Perdue
     Portman
     Risch
     Roberts
     Romney
     Rounds
     Sasse
     Scott (FL)
     Scott (SC)
     Shelby
     Thune
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Wicker
     Young

                             NOT VOTING--6

     Alexander
     Graham
     Harris
     Lee
     Rubio
     Tester
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 51, the nays are 
43.
  Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted 
in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.


                   Unanimous Consent Request--S. 4756

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I want to talk just for a few moments 
about the internet and social media, and I want to make it clear, 
first, that I believe firmly in free will and responsibility. I believe 
that no matter what kind of day you are having or what is going on in 
your life, that you are responsible for your actions.
  But I think we all know, as a matter of experience and common sense, 
that there are things in this world that can influence our actions. 
Social media, which I consider to be an American invention, has many 
virtues and many advantages, and we know that. I think it has brought 
the world closer today. I think it has given many people a voice. I 
think it is an extraordinary source of knowledge.
  But like other innovations in this world, it has a downside. And one 
of those downsides is the fact that, too often, social media becomes an 
endless electronic brawl, and rather than bringing us together and 
exposing us to other points of view and causing us to test our 
assumptions against the arguments of others, it brings us apart. I 
think social media is, in part, responsible for that.
  We all know that many social media platforms are free. Let's take 
Facebook, for example. Facebook is a free service. You open an account; 
you go on Facebook; and you can find out what your high school friends 
had for dinner Saturday night. Now, we give up a lot from that 
privilege of watching what our high school friends had for dinner 
Saturday night. Facebook collects an enormous amount of information 
about us. And, once again, I am not just picking on Facebook. I am 
using them as an example because it is such a popular platform that we 
all know about. Facebook uses that information in a number of ways.
  First, Facebook uses it to make money. They know a lot of stuff about 
us from collecting information about us so they can sell advertisers' 
ads, and they can tailor those ads to the individuals who are on 
Facebook according to the information that the social media platform--
in this case, Facebook--has about them. You can even sell more ads if 
you can keep people who are on Facebook coming back and coming back and 
coming back.
  So this is what happens. Some see this as a virtue, and some see it 
as a vice. A social media platform like Facebook gathers an enormous 
amount of information about us, and they learn, in intricate detail, 
what motivates us and what our interests are. Another way of saying 
that would be they learn what our hot buttons are. And they continually 
show us--what is the word I am looking for--advertisements, 
information, and postings of other people on Facebook that reinforce 
our beliefs, and, in some cases, they show us very radical bits of 
information that really push our hot buttons.
  Now, why do they do that? Well, No. 1, it will keep us coming back to 
Facebook, and it will keep us on Facebook longer, which means that 
advertisers like us better because we are seeing their ads, and it 
means that Facebook can sell more ads at a higher price. I am not 
criticizing them. That is just the way the business works.
  But the downside of it is that we only see one point of view. Our 
point of view is reaffirmed. We never see other points of view. We are 
never encouraged to question our assumptions or to test our assumptions 
against the arguments of others.
  Now, how does Facebook do this? And, again, I don't mean to just pick 
on Facebook, but it is an example we are all aware of. They use 
algorithms. I am not going to try to explain algorithms, but that is 
how they show us information that pushes our hot buttons.
  The social media platforms contend that they are not involved in 
content and that they are just publishers. So when somebody pushes your 
hot button and you get angry and you say something that you probably 
shouldn't say--that is why Facebook has turned into an endless 
electronic brawl--Facebook says: Hey, it is not our fault. We are just 
a publisher. That is why, under the law, Facebook enjoys what we call 
section 230 liability.

  But as long as these algorithms are used to push our hot buttons, to 
reaffirm our points of view, to not show us

[[Page S6016]]

other points of view--one point of view is that Facebook and other 
social media platforms are not just publishers. They are clearly 
content providers, and they are having an impact on our behavior.
  My bill is very simple. It just says that if you are a social media 
platform and you use algorithms based on the information you, the 
social media provider, have collected about us, if you use that 
information to push our hot buttons by continuously showing us 
information that just reaffirms our point of view without showing us 
other points of view, that is fine. That is perfectly legal. That is 
your business model. But in return, you are no longer going to enjoy 
section 230 liability.
  This would not eliminate section 230 liability in a pervasive manner, 
but it would say that if you are going to use algorithms to push hot 
buttons and to keep other points of view away from us and monetize that 
practice, then you shouldn't enjoy section 230 liability. That is all 
my bill does.
  For that reason, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous 
consent that the Committee on Commerce be discharged from further 
consideration of S. 4756, which is my Don't Push My Buttons Act, to 
which I just referred, and the Senate proceed to its immediate 
consideration. I further ask unanimous consent that the bill be 
considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to 
reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all in the vein 
of, we have talked now for years about section 230 liability, and I 
think we ought to actually try to do something about it.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. WYDEN. Reserving the right to object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, this bill is, on its surface, a privacy 
bill. It appears to have been introduced 2 days ago, and the sponsor 
has arrived on the floor of the Senate and says that this bill ought to 
be passed immediately and without debate.
  My guess is that a small circle of beltway insiders have seen the 
text, but I just want the Senator to know that passing this bill this 
way would just make a mockery of the proposition that we ought to have 
open, public debate on significant laws. We are dealing with a rush job 
here.
  I will just tell you that based on what we have picked up, the 
legislation certainly leaves more questions than answers.
  First, who does the Senator from Louisiana intend to target with the 
bill? On a first reading, it could apply to anybody, from Glassdoor, to 
Spotify, to Cloudflare, to my neighbor's blog, to local media outlets.
  At a higher level, if my colleague wants to protect Americans' data 
from collection and abuse, this bill certainly doesn't do that. On the 
contrary, his legislation would push the platforms to simply force 
users to consent to their data being collected and used as a condition 
of using their service. That is already being done now, and this bill 
wouldn't change a thing for Americans' privacy.
  Very significantly, our reading is that the Kennedy bill only 
requires consent if user data is both collected and used by the same 
company, and it has a massive loophole for data brokers and other shady 
middlemen who are already compiling dossiers of Americans' sensitive 
data and selling it to just about anybody with a credit card.
  For the last several years, I have been blowing the whistle on these 
data brokers and these shady middlemen. We have investigated sector 
after sector where we are seeing these people who really adhere to some 
of the sleaziest business practices engaging in these tactics where 
they can get their hands on Americans' sensitive data and basically 
just sell it to anybody with a credit card.
  I guarantee you, there is not a Senator in this body who is going to 
go home this weekend and tell their constituents: Gee, I want those 
data brokers and those middlemen to be able to sell my sensitive data 
to hither and yon, whatever nefarious purposes somebody might want to 
buy it for.
  The Facebooks, the Googles, and the Twitters of the world have all 
the resources to pay these guys to outsource their data collection and 
be A-OK. Yet again, as I have said for some time, it is the startups 
and the little guys who are going to be left behind.
  I have been working on these issues since I came to the Senate, and 
the only person here, really, who knew how to use the computer was the 
wonderful Senator from Vermont, Senator Leahy. So as we began to write 
these formative laws, I said that my interest is the startup and the 
little guy because the big guys always do great.
  That is why, when we were on the floor talking about the change to 
230 before, who sold out the little guys? Facebook. And all that 
happened was the bad guys went off to the dark web.
  So this is another bill where the Facebooks and the Googles all have 
the resources to pay the guys to outsource data collection, as I have 
been talking about, and the little guy is going to be left behind.
  This bill does not require consent to collect your data. It doesn't 
require consent to use it and follow you around the internet. It 
wouldn't stop Chinese companies from harvesting American data and 
selling it to the Chinese Government.
  If the Senator from Louisiana wants to protect Americans' sensitive 
data, I have a bill for doing that. I have comprehensive privacy 
legislation. It is called the Mind Your Own Business Act. We have been 
soliciting input on it literally for years. It is the toughest bill in 
terms of holding the executives actually accountable, for example, if 
they lie about their privacy policy, if an executive of one of the 
major companies, generating billions in revenue, lies about their 
privacy policy.
  The Mind Your Own Business Act is the bill that is the toughest in 
terms of protecting the consumer. It sets tough privacy and cyber 
security standards for companies that collect Americans' private data, 
gives the Federal Trade Commission more authority to issue serious 
fines, and it is backed up with the strongest enforcement provisions on 
offer if a CEO lies to the government.
  It is not as if you can't write tough privacy proposals. It certainly 
can be done, and others have ideas on how to do it. But based on 
everything I have read, and particularly this provision that is going 
to be a holiday for data brokers and shady middlemen to be able to get 
people's sensitive data, for all of those reasons and, frankly, others 
that are too numerous to mention, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The objection is heard.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.


                  Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 451

  Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I rise today on behalf of the first 
responders in our country. Every day, brave women and men on the 
frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic rely on T-Band, a spectrum that 
makes it possible for them to communicate with each other.
  T-Band is the radio frequency that is set aside for these public 
safety officials so that they can talk to each other to keep all of us 
safe, all of us healthy. In 11 metropolitan areas, the T-Band system 
enables our courageous public safety personnel to work quickly and 
effectively during life-and-death situations.
  T-Band allows emergency medical service teams to relay important 
information about patients' conditions. T-Band permits 9-1-1 
dispatchers to send first responders to emergency scenes. Firefighters 
use T-Band to quickly coordinate strategy.
  After the Boston bombing, after the marathon bombing, first 
responders used T-Band to communicate with each other during the 
ensuing manhunt.
  This resource is nothing short of a lifesaver. T-Band really stands 
for ``trusted band.'' It is the resource public safety can rely upon.
  Unfortunately, the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 
2012 required the Federal Communications Commission to begin to auction 
off the T-Band, the trusted band, by February of 2021, but it would 
cost between $5 billion and $6 billion for first responders--police and 
fire--to relocate from the T-Band. That is much more money than an 
auction of that spectrum would ever generate.
  Plus, for many first responders, there is simply no alternative to 
the T-Band; this is their only option. That is why this body must pass 
the Don't Break

[[Page S6017]]

Up the T-Band Act, which repeals the requirement that public safety 
stop using this spectrum.
  The heroes who jump into action when we need them shouldn't have to 
scramble to figure out how they will communicate with each other. They 
shouldn't be left in limbo.
  My legislation has support from an inspiring coalition of advocates 
and public safety groups. The International Association of Fire Chiefs, 
the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National 
Sheriffs' Association, the National League of Cities, the United States 
Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Counties, the 
Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials, the National 
Public Safety Telecommunications Council, and many others are demanding 
that we preserve the T-Band.
  These groups and the people they represent are not asking for a 
favor; they are just asking to be allowed to do their jobs effectively.
  I thank Leader Schumer for his partnership on this issue and his 
longstanding commitment to the public safety community. I also want to 
thank Ranking Member Cantwell and Ranking Member Schatz for their work 
and dedication to this effort.
  But don't just take our word for it. Listen to what the current 
Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission recently 
said about T-Band. Earlier this year, Chairman Ajit Pai stated: ``An 
FCC auction of the T-Band is a bad idea.''
  This is not a partisan issue. It is a public safety imperative. There 
is no cost associated with stopping the T-Band auction, and Congress 
must ensure that the people who step up to keep us safe are taken care 
of.
  If we fail to act, the FCC will have no choice but to move forward 
and strip this resource from our first responders. To allow that to 
happen during a public health crisis like the one we face today would 
be reckless.
  First responders already face enormous strain economically and 
enormous pressure to address the pandemic, as well as deadly natural 
disasters across the country. The last thing we should be doing is 
saddling them with millions or billions of dollars in costs to 
needlessly alter their critical communications system.
  Congress can no longer drag its feet. We have run out of time. The 
FCC has called on this body to stop the T-Band auction, but the 
Commission has no choice but to start laying the groundwork to auction 
the T-Band. We can and we must resolve this problem today. Today is the 
day to do it.
  Mr. President, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent 
that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be 
discharged from further consideration of H.R. 451 and that the Senate 
proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the bill be 
read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be 
considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or 
debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  The Senator from Wyoming
  Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I am here 
today to object to this unanimous consent request on behalf of the 
junior Senator from Texas, Senator Cruz.
  As the Senator from Massachusetts knows, Senator Cruz is also deeply 
interested in this issue. Both Senators have complementary pieces of 
legislation. They have had the language of their legislation agreed to 
unanimously by both the majority and the minority of the Commerce 
Committee.
  So I would ask the Senator from Massachusetts to reach out to the 
Senator from Texas, and I understand he is fully willing to work with 
the Senator from Massachusetts on amending the House bill to ensure 
that it passes the Senate with the Cruz amendment that would not be 
objectionable to supporters of this bill.
  As a result, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I just think that we are missing an 
enormous opportunity here. It is a shame the Senate is not acting with 
the urgency it needs in order to help our brave men and women who are 
first responders in our country.
  We can work on issues of spectrum going to the private sector. We can 
do that in a separate bill, and we can do it together. But, here, we 
have an opportunity to help our first responders, the brave men and 
women who every day risk their lives, and we have to make sure they 
have the spectrum they need to communicate.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nebraska.
  Mrs. FISCHER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.