Opening Statement Of Senator Patrick Leahy
Conference On The PROTECT Act
April 8, 2003

It is always a pleasure to work with Chairman Sensenbrenner and Congressman Conyers.  We worked together successfully last year along with a number of our colleagues to produce an historic authorization for the Department of Justice for the first time in more than 20 years.  We have had successful conferences like that one, but we have also experienced other House-Senate conferences in which we met once and never completed our work.  Recently we had a conference in which we worked hard to achieve a fair result, but that conference report was not acceptable to the House and our work was not completed.  I am here along with Senator Kennedy and Senator Biden and have been working in good faith to construct a good conference report that will achieve many steps that will help the nation's children.  I start by thanking Chairman Sensenbrenner and his staff for working to this point in a bipartisan and open manner and for convening a real meeting of conferees in which conferees can be heard, can offer amendments and can work to resolve our remaining differences. 

As an original cosponsor of both the PROTECT Act, S.151, and the Senate's AMBER Alert bill, S.121,  I have done all that I can, as have others, to make it possible to enact them both as soon as possible.  Both were passed by the Senate last year and again early this year as separate and high-priority items.  The House has chosen to combine those items into one bill and to add a number of other items that the Senate has not previously considered.  Some are matters on which the Senate has yet to hold hearings or to adequately examine. 

With respect to one of the most controversial of these items added to these bills by the House -- the Feeney Amendment that was added to the House package on the House floor -- Senator Graham, the new chairman of the newly constituted Crime, Corrections and Victims' Rights Subcommittee has indicated that he is planning a series of Senate hearings.  Senator Biden is a former chair of that subcommittee and of our full Committee and will bring great experience and expertise to that endeavor.  This is an issue on which we have heard from the Judicial Conference, Chief Justice Rehnquist, other distinguished judges, the Sentencing Commission, the former chairmen of the Sentencing Commission, the ABA, the Washington Legal Foundation, the National Petroleum Refiners Association and a number of other business associations, all of which oppose the House language.  The House action has united a broad-based coalition against this proposal.  Indeed, one part of this provision would take away a federal judge's ability to depart and give a lower sentence based on extraordinary military service.  It seems inexplicable that we would be proposing and considering such a measure during a time of war when future veterans are literally risking their lives for America.  This House amendment will be a matter about which we may have a good measure of debate during the course of this conference.

I had hoped that our AMBER Alert bill and the Hatch-Leahy PROTECT Act, both passed twice by the Senate, would have become law by now.  In one of its first legislative acts of the 108^th Congress, the Senate passed S.151, the bipartisan Hatch-Leahy PROTECT Act on child pornography, by a vote of 84-0 and sent it to the House for action.  We had passed a similar bill by unanimous consent in the 107^th Congress under Democratic leadership.  This is an important matter on which I have worked closely with Senator Hatch and which our Chairman has termed his most important legislative priority this year.

The Senate passed the AMBER Alert bill by a vote of 92-0 early in this Congress, under Republican leadership, after passing it unanimously last year under Democratic leadership, after a hearing and within a week of its introduction by Senator Hutchison and Senator Feinstein.  

Because these two provisions enjoyed such widespread, bipartisan support, it was the hope of many of us that the House would simply consider these bills as passed unanimously in the Senate and send them to the White House to become law without delay.  That is not the course that has been taken.  Of course the House had the right to proceed as it deemed appropriate last year, and again this year.

To his credit Chairman Sensenbrenner has convened this open conference today and his staff has worked in good faith with all of the staffs of the conferees, House and Senate, Republican and Democratic, since beginning meetings at 9 a.m. last Saturday morning.  The staffs worked all through the weekend until 1 a.m. Monday morning and then resumed meetings through the day Monday until almost midnight last night.  We have tried in good faith to meet an ambitious schedule set by Chairman Sensenbrenner and have made some significant progress in narrowing our differences.  Regrettably, not all matters have been resolved.  We continue working in good faith to construct a conference report that can receive prompt consideration and approval from both bodies. 

In addition to the AMBER Alert legislation and the PROTECT Act, I thank the House for supporting measures included in the Protecting Our Children First Act, S.773, a bipartisan bill that I introduced in both this Congress and the last, joined by Senators Kennedy, Biden and Hatch, to reauthorize the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  We had proposed reauthorization through 2007 but have at least achieved agreement to extend its activities through 2005.  We were able to double the grants from $10 million to $20 million a year so that the National Center can help more children and families.  We also authorize the U.S. Secret Service to provide forensic and investigative assistance to the National Center, and we would strengthen the National Center's CyberTipline to provide online users an effective means of reporting Internet-related child sexual exploitation in distribution of child pornography, online enticement of children for sexual acts, and child prostitution.