Heidi Heitkamp

When you are in a hole, stop digging.

Was it unethical to do it?

An amazing woman, as all of you are amazing and really pretty remarkable women who are doing something incredibly difficult and who have been doing something incredibly difficult for a very long period of time, which is to stand up for the…

So it was OK to just sign your name on to them without doing the ethical--doing the appropriate investigation?

It takes enormous courage to stand up.

Do you really think that is something that has credibility here?

Just imagine the moon. Imagine the moon. They will do whatever we want to do.

I think what you hear is a sense of urgency in this room that if we do not do this fairly soon, we will not have the opportunities for reform, even in a year, that we have today.

If we are just always going to rely on repairing a victim, you are going to miss the statute.

Because it would seem to me that if people knew that there was a path forward for coming out of the shadows, there would be less of this kind of activity.

One of the things that we did in domestic violence is we began to prosecute cases without victim testimony.

I am trying to get at what is going to stop people from demanding these services or using the services of human beings who are trafficks.

Somehow we have to reduce the demand and the sense that it is OK to do this.

We need to take this problem out of the shadows.

We have learned from our work in domestic violence that there is a way to begin to have deterrence against those people who would participate on either end.

This is, in fact, human slavery. There is no other way to, I think, identify it.

We could use five FBI agents in Fort Berthold right now. We have 3,000 pending criminal cases in tribal court.

It is just so critically important that we get on top of this.

It is not just these victims. It is crime against every person in this country.

But you certainly can appreciate how dealing with this in a kind of broader context and designing new systems would create problems not only administratively but also huge uncertainties for the retirees and for the near retirees that are…

And I am just trying to kind of get a handle around these numbers.

This is always the danger of average, right?

We have to be able to pay our bills. We cannot be in the position of subsidizing other systems

I do not think that anyone in rural America anymore believes that is true or trusts it.

Do you believe that the highly rural areas of America deserve the same level of service as suburban and urban areas of this country?