The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“Afghanistan (Executive Session)” mentioning John Thune was published in the Senate section on pages S2501-S2503 on May 13.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
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The publication is reproduced in full below:
Afghanistan
Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to address what I believe is an urgent and fundamental issue of our policy in Afghanistan, and that is, what happens to the women and girls when the United States and NATO forces leave after 20 years?
Over the years, as I have talked to my constituents and people around the country, one of the things they have all been united on about our effort in Afghanistan has been the difference that our intervention has made for women and girls.
Before we went into Afghanistan in 2002, girls were not allowed to go to school, women were not allowed to work, and there was no freedom of movement for women and girls unless they had a male escort. They couldn't listen to music. They were required to wear burqas anytime they went out of their homes.
What we have seen has been safety and security for Afghan women and girls as the result of our intervention, but now all of these gains are at risk as we withdraw our forces. The lack of emphasis on the safety and security of Afghan women and girls in the peace process is what has brought us to this point.
We are leaving by September, and there is no plan to ensure that the rights that were achieved for women and girls are actually protected, even though we have legislation that says that in conflict areas like Afghanistan, we have a responsibility to ensure that women are at the negotiating table.
Well, as we rethink the role of the United States in Afghanistan, I want to put a face on what we are talking about, what it means if we don't prioritize women's rights there.
In March of this year, the State Department posthumously honored seven women who were given the International Women of Courage Award. These are all women who were killed in Afghanistan in 2020. They are pictured here. They were murdered--assassinated, really--for choosing to live their lives outside of the narrow confines of what the Taliban and other extremist groups deem acceptable for women, and they reflect the thousands of other women in Afghanistan who have been the targets of violence.
We have seen over the last months of 2020 and beginning of 2021 that women were deliberately targeted for assassination, particularly women in high-profile positions. These women have been murdered for going to school, for reporting the news, for delivering healthcare or running for public office. We talk about them as courageous, and certainly they are, but they should not have to be courageous to do the kinds of things that they were murdered for.
It should not require courage to be a journalist like Malalai Maiwand, who is right here in the lower left-hand corner. It should not require courage to stand up for basic human rights like Fatima Khalil, who is up here in the middle, or Freshta Kohistani, who is right here. Fatima was a human rights official. Freshta was an activist for women rights. Yet both of these women were killed by the Taliban for doing what they believed in, for trying to improve the lives of other women. Sadly, that kind of courage is what is required of all women in Afghanistan today.
I worry that this reality is only going to escalate after our departure. Indeed, we saw this over this past weekend when 85 people, most of them schoolgirls, were killed in a car bomb outside of a girls school in Kabul.
I saw them interviewing one young woman who, I think, was about 14, about why she thought they had been targeted. She said: ``I guess it's because we want an education.'' This is the future we risk if we don't have a plan for how we are going to continue to support the women and girls of Afghanistan.
I also want to talk about the other four women who are pictured here.
Fatima Rajabi, who is in the middle, was a 23-year-old prison guard. She was on her way home from work and was on a civilian bus when the bus was stopped by the Taliban. She was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, and 2 weeks later, her body was sent to her family.
Then there is Freshta, who is the daughter of Amir Mohamed. She was a 35-year-old prison guard who was killed on her way to a taxi to get to work--again, killed by a gunman.
At the bottom is General Sharmila Frogh. General Frogh was the head of the gender unit in the National Directorate of Security and was one of the longest serving female NDS officers in Afghanistan. She was assassinated when an IED explosion targeted her vehicle in Kabul.
Finally, I think the most horrific and barbarous of all of these murders was of Maryam Noorzad. Maryam was a midwife, and she was killed when the hospital in Kabul was attacked by the Taliban. She was there, helping a woman deliver a baby, and she refused to leave when they were attacked. She didn't want to leave the woman she was helping as a midwife, so the Taliban not only killed her when she refused to leave the woman, but they killed the mother, and they killed the baby. These are the Taliban whom we are being asked to join at the negotiating table.
I can tell you that I don't intend to support any political efforts that will allow the Taliban to continue to commit these horrific acts of violence. The agreement we made with the Taliban has already been breached by the Taliban. They have refused to cut ties with al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. They continue to escalate the violence.
What we are going to see over the next several months and what we do is going to impact the lives of women for generations to come in that country, which is why we must do absolutely everything in our power to support the women and those in Afghanistan who want peace and who want to see the country move beyond the extreme religious rhetoric of the Taliban.
These seven women didn't deserve to die, and those schoolgirls in Kabul didn't deserve to die. We owe it to them and to the generations who will come after them to do everything we can to prevent any more Afghan women from meeting the same fate.
This is not a partisan issue, and it is not a woman's issue. It is a human rights issue, and it is a security issue for the future of Afghanistan because, if women are empowered in that country, the potential for stability is so much greater. So I urge the Senate to do everything in our power to ensure that women are represented at the table in the future of negotiations and that their rights are preserved in Afghanistan.
We must remember these seven women and the thousands of women like them and the schoolgirls in Kabul--the girls who should have the opportunity to grow up in a world with the freedoms that their mothers fought to secure. The women and girls of Afghanistan are watching what we do, and we can't afford to let them down.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Shaheen). Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be able to complete my remarks before the vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered
For the People Act of 2021
Mr. THUNE. Madam President, on Tuesday, the Senate Rules Committee conducted its markup of S. 1, which is the Senate's version of the Democrats' election bill that is designed to increase the Democrats' chances of maintaining their currently tenuous hold on power.
We are told that passing this bill is urgent. We were told that in the last Congress, too, when the Democrats first proposed this legislation. They said the same thing--that there were serious election problems and that we needed to pass this legislation to address them.
Then, of course, we had the 2020 elections, which the Democrats won and which featured record voter turnout. In fact, it was the largest voter turnout since 1900. So it became just a little difficult for the Democrats to argue that there were grave problems with our electoral system. Yet they still really, really want to pass this bill--a bill that contains what one respected legal scholar has called ``some of the most blatantly partisan, most obviously unconstitutional, and most unwise provisions ever passed by a chamber of Congress.'' So they have had to come up with a new rationale for trying to jam through this legislation.
Now we are being warned about a new crisis: States, which under the Constitution, historically, have had primary responsibility when it comes to elections, are debating election administration measures that will return our Nation to the Jim Crow era, and so we have to pass S. 1 to prevent the damage these States are going to do. The only thing, of course, is that this crisis is as manufactured as the last one.
Take Georgia, the Democrats have made Georgia a poster child for the need to pass election legislation.
``Georgia's new voting law,'' the Senate Democratic whip asserted,
``is a deliberate effort to suppress voters, particularly voters of color.''
The President feverishly described the Georgia law as ``Jim Crow on steroids.''
The only problem with that argument is ``the law does not put up roadblocks to Black Americans registering to vote.''
Those aren't my words. Those are the words of The Washington Post Fact Checker, but the Democrats haven't allowed facts or reason to intrude when it comes to their characterizations of Georgia's election law.
The Democratic whip has come down to the floor and claimed that the Georgia law makes it a crime to give water to voters in line. In fact, while the law does place restrictions on activists' and candidates' handing out water and other items--an obvious conflict--it explicitly permits neutral election officials to offer voters water.
The President has repeatedly claimed that the law is designed to keep working Americans from voting, except it is not. The Washington Post, as I mentioned, gave the President four Pinocchios, a rating that the Washington Post reserves for ``whoppers'' for that claim by the President of the United States.
In fact, as the Washington Post Fact Checker's piece makes clear, there is reason to think that the law might actually--wait for it--
expand access to early voting. A fairminded piece in the New York Times--hardly a newspaper that carries water for Republicans--concluded that the voting provisions of the Georgia law are ``unlikely to significantly affect turnout or Democratic chances.''
Georgia's voting laws are actually, in some ways, more permissive than voting laws in some Democratic-led States. Georgia allows more early voting than both the President and the Democratic leaders' home States, Delaware and New York. Unlike Georgia, neither Delaware nor New York offers any no-excuse absentee voting. I look forward to seeing the President and the Democratic leader talk about how their home States are promoting voter suppression.
The fact of the matter is, Georgia's new election law is squarely in the mainstream when it comes to State election laws. The Georgia bill would likely have been barely a blip in the news cycle if the Democrats had not seen an opportunity to distort this bill to advance their electoral agenda. Yet I want to talk about the actual substance of the Democrats' bill and why every Member of Congress should be opposing it.
We are supposed to believe that this is an election integrity bill. In fact, it is the complete opposite. This bill would undermine election integrity in this country. It would do everything from making our election system more susceptible to fraud to undermining voter faith in our electoral system by politicizing election law.
Let me just highlight a handful of the bill's worst provisions. Note that multiple amendments to address these concerns were voted down by the Democrats at Tuesday's markup, which says a lot about the partisan nature of the Democrats' aims with this bill.
First, this bill would make the Federal Election Commission into a partisan body. Let me just repeat that. This bill would make the Federal Election Commission--the primary enforcer of election law in this country--into a partisan body. Instead of an independent Commission, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, which is what it is today, the FEC would become just a partisan arm of whichever President is in power.
Tell me how that is supposed to enhance voter confidence in our system. Every single FEC ruling would be suspect. No Democrat voter would trust a Republican FEC, and no Republican voter would trust a Democrat one.
Speaking of trust, let's talk about election fraud.
The bill takes aim at State voter ID laws, which are commonsense measures--strongly supported by the American people--to ensure that voters are who they say they are before they vote. The Pew Research Center reports that 76 percent of Americans, including 61 percent of Democrats, support voter ID requirements.
Now, I have always been at a loss to understand the congressional Democrats' passionate opposition to requiring people to provide identification before voting. I haven't heard the Democrats spend a lot of time complaining about requiring people to have a photo ID to drive or to fly or to go on a tour at the White House, but, somehow, asking people to provide an ID to vote is beyond the pale.
Great Britain is actually planning to implement a voter ID requirement to prevent--you guessed it--electoral fraud. In fact, many European countries, including France, the Netherlands, and Sweden, require a form of identification to vote. Canada requires a form of identification to vote. It is difficult to understand the Democrats' fierce opposition to this commonsense fraud prevention measure.
While we are on the subject of electoral fraud, let's talk about ballot harvesting.
In addition to effectively eliminating States' voter ID requirements, S. 1 would also require that States allow ballot harvesting, the controversial practice of allowing political operatives to collect and submit ballots. Needless to say, ballot harvesting opens up a lot of questions about voter fraud and election integrity, and that is to put it mildly. Yet the Democrats' bill would not just permit States to allow it; it would require them--require them--to allow it. I could go on and on and on.
S. 1 would allow the unprecedented regulation of political speech and issue advocacy. It would impose disclosure requirements for organizations, which would open up donors to retaliation and intimidation. It would spend taxpayer dollars--possibly tens of millions of taxpayer dollars per candidate--on the public financing of political campaigns.
That is right. With a soaring national debt and priorities like infrastructure to fund, the Federal Government would end up steering hundreds of millions of dollars to political campaigns. Perhaps the best illustration of that is Senator Cruz, here in the U.S. Senate, who pointed out that in the first quarter of this year under this law, the Federal Government would have had to cut him a check for $30 million for his campaign.
This legislation is not about voter integrity. It is not about preventing voter suppression. It is about permanently changing the electoral playing field to give Democrats a permanent electoral advantage.
It is the same reason Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court or admit DC as a State. Democrats want to use whatever political power they have to secure a permanent advantage for Democrat candidates and Democrat policies.
If Democrats were serious about protecting the integrity of our election system, they would be working with Republicans to develop bipartisan legislation, not pushing a bill that is unlikely to get a single Republican vote.
Passing a huge Federal election reform measure on a partisan basis would completely undermine one of the main purposes of election reform legislation, which is enhancing confidence in the integrity of our system.
I can assure Democrats that S. 1 would do nothing to enhance Republican voters' confidence in the integrity of elections. I suspect there are a number of Democrat voters and Independent voters who will also see this bill for what it is--a partisan takeover of our electoral system.
We are fortunate that our electoral system by and large seems to be operating well. As I mentioned, see the record turnout of voters in the 2020 election. It was the highest turnout since 1900.
But there are certainly measures we can take up to further enhance election integrity--not S. 1, which would do nothing to further election integrity, but there are other measures we could take up. But in order to have any degree of legitimacy, any election reform measures we consider should be taken up on a bipartisan basis, and if Democrats really wanted to enhance voter confidence and protect the integrity of our system, that is what they would be doing--taking up bipartisan legislation on a bipartisan basis.
It is unfortunate that their aims are more partisan than public-
spirited. S. 1 is a solution in search of a problem that would result in the unprecedented politicization of our electoral system. For the good of the country, every Member of Congress should oppose it.
I yield the floor.
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