I am on the floor this afternoon to mark 5 years since the unthinkable--since 20 6-year-olds and 7-year-olds and 6 of their educators were killed in an elementary school in Connecticut. It changed the town of Newtown. It changed this…

Thank you for your focus on data. I agree with Senator Cassidy that to the extent we can avoid duplication in requirements to the states on this, it is something we should work together on.

Should not every single school-based resource officer have some basic training in identifying mental illness?

Now, let us be clear, there is no inherent connection between mental illness and violence.

Often, your first interaction with the criminal justice system happens at school.

I hope that is something that you will help states try to overcome.

It represents the first comprehensive overhaul and reauthorization of our Nation's mental health laws in a generation.

Peers occupy a very specific and useful role in treatment.

It is an anachronism, the idea that we have one system of healthcare for your neck down and then you have to walk across town to find somebody that will treat the rest of your body.

I think the legislation's most important provision is the part that built upon the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act.

I think it continues to make a critical difference.

Our goal as the United States is to stabilize, provide security.

The dangers of excessive dependence on a single supplier were highlighted, as Senator Murphy noted, in 2006, 2009, and 2014 when Russia cut off gas supplies to and through the Ukraine.

Their future lies with the West certainly economically.

I would hope that you would encourage the White House to directly engage because the Ukrainians for the last 8 years were used to engagement directly from the White House.

this is a political initiative, meaning that most energy economists will tell you that this does not make sense as a financial endeavor moving this gas through a northern route pipeline

We are simply fooling ourselves as a Congress and as a country if we think we can protect this nation and our treaty allies with a 40 percent reduction to the Department that works primarily in the area of energy security.

Russia does not want to militarily own Ukraine. It wants to economically and politically break Ukraine, and it wants to use energy as a means of doing that.

We constantly, over the course of my time in the Senate, have underestimated the lengths that Russia will go in order to protect its interests in and around its periphery.

I hope that a clear-eyed calculation about what Russia will do will inform our policy going forward.

We need to do everything we can to help stabilize the situation.

The HELP Committee will meet again, December 13 at 10 a.m., for a hearing on the 'Implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act,' and its response to mental health needs.

I will hold myself to the same standard that Senator Alexander held others and thank you all for being here.

we've got to give you the funds to implement this act.

you've got another advertisement to put the money behind the legislation we passed.