On the recordOctober 16, 2019
I rise today to introduce the Reduce Impaired Driving for Everyone Act of 2019 or RIDE Act of 2019. I would like to thank my co-sponsor, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who joins me on this important bill--a bill that will help end drunk driving and prevent thousands of fatalities and injuries across the nation. While we have made progress over the last several decades to reduce drunk driving on our roads, it is still a national tragedy. In 2017, the latest year for which we have statistics, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 10,874 person were killed on American roads by a drunk driver. That's one death every 48 minutes. And most tragically: every single one of those 10,874 deaths could have been prevented. Traffic fatalities due to drunk driving account for one-third of all such fatalities. Yet, drunk drivers have only a two percent chance of being caught. And one study found that the average drunk driver has driven drunk 87 times before being arrested. The RIDE Act aims to make sure these drivers do not hit the road in the first place. I'm not new to this fight. When I was Attorney General of New Mexico in the 1990's, our State had one of the highest DWI rates in the Nation. Then, on Christmas Eve in 1992, a drunk driver killed a mother and her three young daughters as he sped down the highway the wrong way going 90 miles per hour. That tragedy galvanized me and many others in our State.…
