Senate Democratic leadership held their weekly press briefing on Tuesday.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Okay, I am joined by our two heroes, two of our heroes of the day, Senators Blumenthal and Abiy.
00:14Okay, it's good to be doing the Q&A, but I'm not doing that.
00:20So I want to thank you for coming.
00:23Now, 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.
00:38Today, the Senate keeps its promise to every parent who's lost a child because of the risks of social media.
00:48Today, after a lot of hard work, a lot of twists and turns, we'll pass COSA and COPPA.
00:56They will perhaps be the most – COSA and COPPA will be the most important updates to federal laws protecting kids on the Internet in decades.
01:06A very good first step.
01:09COSA, 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.
01:21For COPPA, Senator Markey and Cassidy worked to protect the personal information for children and teenagers and ban targeted advertising aimed at them.
01:31Now we call on the House to pass these common-sense, bipartisan, life-saving bills.
01:40The overwhelming vote we received here on the floor of the Senate should importune the House to act and act quickly, and I hope it will do just that.
01:51Now on the tax bill.
01:53Last night, I filed a cloture on the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act, a very important piece of pro-family, pro-children, pro-growth legislation.
02:04Senators should expect to vote on this measure Thursday.
02:08Since becoming Majority Leader in 2021, I've tried my best to work first in a bipartisan way to get things done in this chamber.
02:19The Senate's record over the past three years bears this out.
02:23Democrats and Republicans have come together again and again to pass historic bills like the infrastructure law, chips and science, Ukraine and Israel, veterans' health care, gun safety, and marriage equality.
02:36Today, we're getting another important bipartisan bill done through COSA and COPPA.
02:42And I will continue this productive streak this week.
02:46I want to continue this productive streak this week with a vote on the tax bill to deliver so many benefits to American families.
02:53We 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.
03:10This bill shouldn't be difficult.
03:13It's bipartisan.
03:15It passed the Senate, the Republican House with a vote of 357 to 70.
03:21It was mainly put together by the Republican head of the race, Eastman.
03:26Partly, it's mainly liberal.
03:28This bill should remain bipartisan, as it has been up to this point.
03:33We hope that it will.
03:35We hope that it will.
03:39Look, there are a lot of difficult bill votes we have to take in this chamber, but this bill is not one of them.
03:48To my Republican colleagues, step up and support the bill.
03:52I'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.
04:04To fight for families, give them a chance to see where their elected representatives stand.
04:09Putting 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.
04:19This week is a classic example of how we can do both in the Senate.
04:24Pass bipartisan legislation to get things done for the American people, like Cozencaffer, with a large bipartisan majority,
04:32but also put pressure on Republicans to show where they stand on important issues like the child tax credit, affordable housing, and R&D,
04:40particularly on a bill like this, which is bipartisan, was brought up by Democrats and Republicans.
04:48So, 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,
04:59and then we're going to see who opposes it.
05:02Over the past few days, some Republicans have falsely claimed that Democrats somehow oppose the child tax credit.
05:09This vote should end that false argument once and for all.
05:13Oppose it? We don't. What are they going to do?
05:17Expanding the child's tax credit is one of the most significant achievements Democrats have made under the Biden-Harris administration.
05:25If anyone wants to know who actually opposes expanding the child's tax credit,
05:30go ask the 49 Republican Senators who voted against the child tax credit when we passed the American Rescue Plan.
05:37Ask them, why did you oppose it, and then why are you voting against this bipartisan bill this week?
05:44Here's the truth. Democrats want to pass the tax package because it helps lift kids out of poverty.
05:50It helps poor and working-class families.
05:53It will also reward businesses that invest in R&D and create a lot of new jobs.
05:58And one of our greatest problems, housing.
06:01The low-income housing tax credit is one of the best tools we have for expanding supply of housing.
06:08So Democrats are ready and raring to go.
06:11The American people deserve tax relief.
06:14The big question right now is will Republicans follow their colleagues in the House and join us, or will they stand in the way?
06:26Thank you, Senator Schumer, for your leadership on the child tax credit issue.
06:33But most importantly for today, thank you for giving us a vote and for your strong and passionate advocacy
06:44in giving kids and parents back control over their online lives.
06:52What took so long?
06:55Opposition from Big Tech.
06:58We have broken the grip that Big Tech has on this process.
07:04This vote was overwhelmingly bipartisan, as was co-sponsorship of the bill at the end of the process.
07:13Three-quarters of the Senate, evenly divided, Republican and Democrat, co-sponsored the Kids Online Safety Act.
07:22Democracy works if we have bipartisan support.
07:29And 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.
07:42I'm hopeful that in the next four weeks, they're going to continue this fight.
07:49To Joel and convince our House colleagues that there is an urgency here that is unquestionable and undeniable,
07:58we need to pass this measure when kids go back to school and our congressional colleagues come back to the boardroom.
08:06I know that House leadership is very interested, and many in the House have expressed strong support for this bill.
08:15I'm hopeful that we'll have the same kind of overwhelming bipartisan support in the House as we did in the Senate.
08:22But overall, it is a historic, monumental day.
08:28The public interest has prevailed.
08:31The Big Tech business model here, more kids' eyes and eyeballs for longer periods of time, more advertising dollars, more revenues and profits.
08:44That's a business model that has to be abandoned after the Kids Online Safety Act.
08:50We have given young people and parents the tools and safeguards to disconnect from those addictive features
08:57and from the black box algorithms that drive content at bullying, eating disorders, self-harm, sexual, sex exploitation,
09:10a lot of positives on social media, but the bad stuff is really scary and fire.
09:19So thank you to the parents and kids for counting on it.
09:23Senator Martin.
09:25Thank you. Thank you.
09:26Thank you to Senator Schumer for moving this legislation, for the leadership which he is giving to this all-important subject.
09:37Thanks to Dick Blumenthal.
09:39And I want to thank Bill Cassidy, my Republican co-sponsor of the Child and Teen Online Privacy Protection Act.
09:48We have a crisis in America.
09:50There's no bill more important than this bill for our country right now.
09:55According to the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, two years ago, one in three teenage girls contemplated suicide.
10:05One in ten teenage girls in the United States attempted suicide two years ago.
10:12One in five LGBTQ youth attempted suicide two years ago in our country.
10:19The CDC points the finger at social media as a big contributor to the mental health crisis in teenagers and children in our country.
10:30The Surgeon General has now issued a Surgeon General's report pointing the finger at social media as a big part of this crisis in America amongst young people.
10:41Parents know it. The teenagers themselves know it.
10:45So what my legislation does is it lifts the age up to age 17 to be given protections.
10:54And the protections are, number one, if a teenage girl goes online to get information about bulimia,
11:01there cannot be a targeted ad now coming back from dozens, hundreds of companies towards that girl.
11:07That's prohibitive. No targeted ads towards these teenagers, these vulnerable kids, these children in our society.
11:16Number two, the teenager or the parent can say, erase all information that you gathered about my child.
11:26Erase it. That post was a mistake. I want it all erased.
11:32Not just deleted by the kid, but erased from the whole history of the country.
11:37Number three, no gathering of information in the first place without permission from the parents and the kids.
11:46You've got to get permission to gather all this data, because it's all about data.
11:50That's what all these companies are about. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube.
11:55Without information, they can't do anything else.
11:58So this is a historic bill. And again, I thank Chuck Schumer for doing it on a bipartisan basis completely.
12:07Because AI is going to take what we have today and put it on steroids.
12:13So they have a plan to even further accelerate the exploitation of the children in our country.
12:19And this is our plan to give protections to those teenagers and children and their parents to not protect them.
12:26So 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 bipartisan basis.
12:35Okay, questions? Yes.
12:38Following the President's announcement the other day about Supreme Court proposals, do you plan to bring any of these pieces of legislation to the floor before the election?
12:46Look, the Supreme Court is a mess. It's a morass. It's a true morass.
12:50It's a mess, both ethically and substantially.
12:53Ethically, it is just outrageous that hard-right, wealthy people who are actually paying groups to go to the Supreme Court
13:02are at the same time giving gifts worth in total over millions of dollars, whether it be trips or buses or cars, hostel stays, to those same Supreme Court justices.
13:14And Chief Justice Roberts has fallen down on the job.
13:17He should be much stronger.
13:19And it's also a morass substantive.
13:22This court is taking away people's rights left and right, of course, a woman's right to choose,
13:27but so many other ways where they're helping the powerful big interests against the average person.
13:36Taking away democracy to give the President immunity for official acts is nothing short of outrageous.
13:42And I'm looking at legislation to undo that.
13:45I don't want to go through the constitutional amendment.
13:48We can do it by legislation.
13:50And so I think they need a lot of changes, and we're looking at a whole lot of things.
13:55Would Mark Kelly be a strong vice presidential running mate for Kamala Harris?
14:01And if he was elected vice president, would it affect their ability to hold this until 2026 or 2028?
14:07I think I have total confidence that Vice President Harris will choose a great vice presidential candidate.
14:15Do you have any concerns that a potential Kelly selection could put a swing seat at risk for Trump?
14:23I have complete faith in Vice President Harris's choice.
14:27Yes.
14:28On the NDAA, do you plan to put it up for a vote before the election?
14:31Look, we want to get the NDAA done.
14:34It's complicated by the fact that the House filled their NDAA bill with a huge number of poison pills and other things designed to defeat it.
14:42There are prison provisions in that bill that put the whole thing down.
14:45And so we're looking at it very carefully, and we want to get it done for sure by the end of the year.
14:50Yes.
14:51If Vice President Harris was elected president, excuse me, of our district of Denver,
14:55do you anticipate giving the center-municipalty of Lenford or a vote?
15:00Well, look, that bill was a great bill.
15:02It showed that Democrats want to be tough on border.
15:05It also showed that Republicans really don't care about the border.
15:08They much prefer to make it a political issue.
15:11The bill that was supported by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Border Control Guards,
15:16and 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,
15:23we think that's a winning issue for us.
15:26So certainly we're going to have to deal with the border when Vice President Harris becomes President Harris,
15:34Schumer stays as Majority Leader, and Jeffries becomes the Speaker.
15:38Last question.
15:39If you are in fact Majority Leader and Harris is elected, will you renew your pledge to remove the legislative filibuster?
15:45Look, we're going to – there are lots of things we want to get done.
15:48I'm not going to speculate into the future.
15:50But we are going to have as productive, even a more productive two years should that happen than we had in the previous two.
15:58Thank you, everybody.
16:02We got the gold in gymnastics.
16:05Our American women's team won.