Political Quotes

“I rise today in support of S. Res. 377, which is a resolution to enforce a subpoena of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair. I will be joined shortly by my colleague Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who is the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee and whom I worked with as a partner on this issue over the past year. This is a subpoena that we issued to a group called backpage-- backpage.com. This resolution is intended to enforce that subpoena. Backpage and its chief executive officer, Carl Ferrer, have not been willing to cooperate with the committee. Unfortunately, we are at the point where we have to seek the enforcement of our subpoena. For nearly a year now, Senator McCaskill and I conducted a bipartisan investigation into the scourge of human trafficking on the Internet with a focus on sex trafficking involving children. In the past 5 years, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported an over 800-percent increase in reports of suspected child sex trafficking, an increase the organization has found to be ``directly correlated to the increased use of the internet to sell children for sex.'' They testified before our subcommittee about this. They are the experts. They see this huge increase being related to the Internet. In other words, the destructive crime of sex slavery has moved from the street corner to the smartphone. An adult can now shop for underaged trafficking victims from their computer screen.…”