[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 17 (Monday, February 2, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S703-S705]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY FUNDING

  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, tomorrow we will vote on whether to 
proceed to the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill, 
which fully funds the Department of Homeland Security and includes the 
law enforcement priorities that were agreed to on a bipartisan basis in 
the House. It is indeed a clean bill. The House of Representatives has 
voted to fund fully homeland security, as the President has requested.
  Now, it is not a perfect bill. Republicans and Democrats and 
individuals on both sides have different priorities on some matters, 
but they did come to an agreement to fund all of the programs of the 
Department of Homeland Security and on how much they were funded--
activities and actions that are authorized, however, by the laws of the 
United States.
  So this bill will not deny a penny of funding. In fact, it says: Mr. 
President, spend the money on enforcing and following the law. Spend 
the money on enforcing the Immigration and Nationality Act as passed by 
Congress--that is the law of the United States of America. Spend the 
money to let our law enforcement officers carry out their duties as 
prescribed by the laws.
  Yet our Democratic colleagues say they are going to block this bill--
that they will all stick together and not even let it come to the floor 
of the Senate. Why? Why would they do that? Because, they say, they 
want to give the President the funds, apparently, to spend on his 
unconstitutional and unlawful Executive amnesty. They will not allow 
the bill to even be voted on, and without a vote in the Senate, the 
funding for Homeland Security does not go forward. They are not going 
to allow it to be voted on because they want to protect the President 
in his assertion of an unconstitutional and illegal power to order 
duly-constituted enforcement officers of the U.S. Department of 
Homeland Security to carry out unlawful activity.
  The President is not entitled to spend taxpayer dollars to implement 
a system of immigration that Congress--representing the American 
people's wishes, let me add--rejected just last year. Surely our 
Democratic colleagues will not block the Senate from proceeding to this 
bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security. If they are unhappy 
with the language of the bill of the House of Representatives, if they 
think the President wrongfully or rightfully, using legitimate powers, 
could direct them to provide Social Security numbers, Medicare 
participation, earned income tax credit money from the Federal 
Government and the right to work in the United States when the law says 
they are not entitled to be employed in the United States, then they 
can offer an amendment to the bill and bring it up on the floor of the 
Senate to strike that language if they think it is so bad.
  Of course, if you think about it, that would be a stunning event; 
would it not be--the Senate taking language from a bill or striking 
language from a bill that restores the separation of powers as properly 
understood by the Framers and preventing the President from violating 
law and the constitution. They are going to vote against that? Maybe 
that is why they choose not to have this bill go forward. Maybe they do 
not want to confront the issue.
  I am going to quote Senator Reid in a moment because he said we ought 
to confront the issue square-on. All right, let's do so. I suspect 
Senator Reid, though, and his team are not so interested in having 
votes and being held accountable for their votes.
  Our colleagues would have the right to offer amendments. Senator 
McConnell is allowing amendments. He is going out of his way to allow 
amendments and changing the terrible state the Senate had found itself 
in under the leadership of Senator Reid. Consistent with the rules of 
the Senate, those amendments can be brought up, and a motion to strike 
this language is certainly appropriate.
  It is an untenable position--untenable constitutionally, untenable 
because it is contrary to the will of the Members of the House and 
Senate who oppose the President's action--Republicans and Democrats. 
Perhaps most importantly, it is untenable politically because the 
American people strongly reject it. So why would any Senator--Democrat 
or Republican--when the very integrity of the Congress is under assault 
by an overreaching executive branch, not want to assert congressional 
authority at this point?
  We are coequal branches of government, and the President does not 
have the authority to enforce a law that was never passed--indeed, a 
law that was explicitly rejected by the Congress of the United States--
and grant amnesty to people who are unlawfully here, provide them work 
authorizations, a photo ID allowing them to apply for any job in 
America, with Social Security numbers and the right to participate in 
Social Security and Medicare. That is what the President's actions are 
going to do.
  This is not prosecutorial discretion--nowhere close to prosecutorial 
discretion. It is an Executive fiat. It is an imperial act. As the 
President himself said repeatedly: I am not a king; I am not an 
emperor. When dealing with this very issue, he told people over a 
period of years--20 times--that he did not have the power to do this. 
But then he changed his mind. Under pressure from certain political 
interest groups and because he couldn't get Congress to vote for the 
bill he wanted, he just decided to do it on his own.
  This is an unthinkable overreach. It is a matter of great national 
importance. The American people were engaged in this. They were 
following this issue. The President couldn't get the constitutional 
process to give him the power he wanted, so he just did it anyway.
  Why can't it be stopped? I get asked that. What is the matter with 
you people in Congress?
  Well, we had seven Members on the Democratic side of the aisle, still 
in this Senate today, who said the President overreached. They said he 
shouldn't have done this, and it should have been done by the 
legislature, by the Congress, not by the President. Yet are all seven 
of them going to vote with Senator Reid and become part of

[[Page S704]]

the palace guard that protects the President in his unlawful act so the 
President can't be challenged?
  That is what it amounts to. There is no doubt about it. That is 
precisely what it amounts to--a palace guard circling around the White 
House to protect the President, even though Members of this Senate have 
said he overreached and what he did was wrong. They are, apparently, 
going to continue to vote for it. Out of what--party loyalty? Out of 
loyalty to Senator Reid, the minority leader in the Senate?
  Well, they say--and the media even is saying sometimes--Democrats and 
others are sometimes saying that the bill contains controversial new 
immigration riders, and therefore, it ought to be blocked. It contains 
unconstitutional or controversial new immigration riders, and that is 
bad. That is why it ought to be blocked.
  What new policy is in the bill? What new expenditure is in the bill 
that is not consistent with the laws of the United States? Not one. The 
bill passed by the House carries out the essential functions in the 
normal orderly way of Homeland Security. It doesn't add any pork, and 
it doesn't add any special expenditures for some controversial project. 
It doesn't do any of that.
  So if the President says that he will deploy his Border Patrol 
officers--no longer at the Mexican border where we have large flows of 
illegal labor--to Montana or Maine, where we have very few people, in 
effect, he is saying we are no longer going to enforce the border there 
or even attempt to, and he is going to reassign them. He is saying: I 
am the President. They work for me. I can do such things.
  Well, would it be a controversial rider for the Senate, or for the 
House of Representatives, to say no, we prohibit funds to do that? We 
are going to fund the officers' duty at the border with our Mexican 
neighbors where they need to be.
  The point is who is creating the controversy--not the House of 
Representatives. It is the President of the United States. He has 
overreached, without any doubt, and the situation is very grave.
  What if the next President of the United States decides to do 
something else? Senator Cruz, at the hearing for the Attorney General 
nominee, Ms. Lynch, asked her: What if Mr. Cornyn--whom he was sitting 
by, at the time, the Senator from Texas--were President and he didn't 
like certain labor laws that applied to people in Texas and he told his 
bureaucrats--who in effect work for the President of the United 
States--don't enforce labor laws in Texas?
  So Senator Cruz asked the nominee, Loretta Lynch, who wants to be 
Attorney General of the United States of America, whether under 
President Obama's Executive amnesty theory, the next President could do 
that and bar the enforcement of labor laws in the State of Texas. She 
said she would have to review it. She wasn't sure. Of course that is 
blatantly unconstitutional. It shouldn't have taken her 5 seconds to 
say of course a President can't do that. Have we gotten such a confused 
understanding of law in America that we are at that point that 
universal laws of labor are subject to the whim of a President of the 
United States, and even the Attorney General will not say it is wrong 
and even the Congress will not say no to the President on this?
  Well, the House did say no. They passed a perfectly responsible 
funding bill for Homeland Security. They said: We are not going to 
allow you to spend money to advocate a policy which we have rejected--
which they can do just that way: We don't like this action. We are not 
going to fund this action. The Executive of this country--the 
President--cannot act on it if he is prevented from spending money on 
it. It goes to the very core of the legislative process. It is what the 
American Revolution was about. It is what happened in England. They 
wrested this power from the King, and we adopted it in terms of the 
President and put the power in Congress. They had the power in 
Parliament. It is a big deal.
  I don't think we are at a point where we need to back down on this. 
It is not an overreach. Those great leaders, some at Homeland Security, 
so confident in their wisdom and policy ideas, having forgotten what 
the rule of law is, suggest that Congress should just roll over and 
forget it and go on and let it happen and not be controversial by 
standing up to it.
  Now, look. I like Senator Reid. We battle a lot. He is pugnacious, as 
this Politico article said, but I can live with that. I am glad he is 
back and I hope he is doing better and I hope he recovers fully, and I 
am confident he will. A Politico article by Mr. Burgess Everett earlier 
today quoted Senator Reid as saying:

       Why should we be dealing with issues that have nothing to 
     do with homeland security?

  Nothing to do with homeland security, Senator Reid said.

       If my Republican colleagues have some problems with 
     something the President has done on immigration, for example, 
     hit it head on. Don't hide it in homeland security.

  Well, the problem is Homeland Security. The President has directed 
the officials of Homeland Security to take money that has been 
authorized and appropriated for them to enforce the immigration laws of 
this country and to use those funds to carry out a scheme Congress has 
rejected.
  Under the laws of the United States it is illegal to hire somebody 
unlawfully in the country. There is no doubt about that. People 
unlawfully in the country are not entitled to participate in Social 
Security or Medicare. How could it be otherwise?
  So he told the Homeland Security officials to create a new office, a 
new building across the river in Crystal City. He directed them to hire 
1,000 new employees to process applications under his Executive 
amnesty, a policy Congress rejected. It is breathtaking. It is going to 
cost tens of millions of dollars just for that one office. That just 
begins to suggest how much money will have to be spent to execute his 
vision for immigration that the American people rejected.
  So how do we deal with it directly? How do we hit it on the head 
openly and directly? The Congress has the power of the purse. No money 
can be spent by this President that Congress hasn't authorized.
  So the House discussed this. They went into some detail about it, 
worked at it for some time, and the House decided they would not fund 
this action that contradicted laws they passed and execute a policy 
they didn't agree with. I think that is confronting it head on--no 
doubt about that--and it absolutely deals with homeland security. My 
goodness. So this is the kind of logic and weak arguments that are 
being put forth here.
  We will talk about a lot of things as we go forward with this debate 
that evidences the bankruptcy of the policies carried out by this 
administration.
  One of the things that came out today as part of the President's 
budget was his assumption that if his immigration policies are passed, 
we would save lots of money for the U.S. Treasury. Why would it save 
money? It would save money because we would collect more Social 
Security benefits, and this would create more revenue for the 
government and put us in a sound position to help balance the budget.
  We are not going to balance the budget. We are not going to come 
close to it, but he said a substantial amount of money would come from 
it.
  Colleagues, we have to understand what a misrepresentation of 
colossal enormity is at stake in that statement. Everybody knows Social 
Security and Medicare are on unsustainable financial courses. Anybody 
who knows anything about Medicare and Social Security knows the 
fundamental problem is people are not putting in enough money to take 
care of those who retire, and so the flow is not enough. Over time it 
is going to get worse. We are just now beginning to go into deficit for 
Social Security. The disability portion is in critical shape. It is in 
very bad shape, but what this calculation is based on is the next 10 
years.
  So it says we will have more income in the next 10 years, and that 
may be so. But every person who goes on Social Security today--and even 
more so in the future--are, under law, projected to take out more than 
they put in plus interest. So obviously add 5 million new people to the 
Social Security rolls and no change in the amount of money that they 
pay in, they make the long-term strength of Social Security even more 
weak. It makes the hole even deeper that we have to dig our way out of. 
There is no other way to analyze it.

[[Page S705]]

It is just unbelievable to me that they would make such a statement.
  Those of us in the Congress need to be thinking about the long-term 
financial course of America. We need to be trying to put not just 
short-term benefits here so Congress can spend more money, but also we 
need to be thinking about how to place this country on a sound long-
term path. Adding more people to Social Security--particularly lower 
income people as most of these are, who will draw out even more than 
the higher income people draw out as a percentage on the basis of what 
they paid in--is not a way to save Social Security.
  In a December 1, 2014 article in Investor's Business Daily entitled, 
``Obama's Amnesty will create a Fiscal Nightmare for Entitlements,'' 
Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at the Institute for Policy 
Innovation, and Mark E. Litow, retired actuary and past chairman of the 
Social Insurance Public Finance Section of the Society of Actuaries, 
wrote this:

       Obama's amnesty action greatly exacerbates the problem, 
     because retirees get back far more than they pay in.

  That is as plain and as simple as daylight following dark. They go on 
to write:

       But millions of Obama's newly legalized are working-age 
     adults with children, so many could be in their 40s or older.
       Thus, they could pay FICA taxes for the next, say, 15 or 20 
     years--less than the average American worker--and be eligible 
     for the full array of Social Security and Medicare benefits.

  This is going to be devastating to Social Security and Medicare. It 
is going to hammer those programs. It is going to make it harder for us 
to save them, which we have an obligation to do. There is no obligation 
to give Social Security and Medicare to persons who enter the United 
States unlawfully. People aren't entitled to come into the country 
unlawfully and demand the benefits of the country. The first thing we 
should do to confront unlawful immigration is not to subsidize it with 
taxpayer money.
  The article goes on to say:

       Using a basic simulation model, we believe the government 
     will receive about $500 billion in payroll tax revenue 
     (including Part B and drug premiums) and expect it to pay out 
     some $2 trillion in benefits over several decades.

  So they pay in $500 billion, but we are going to pay out $2 
trillion--four times as much. How does this make America more 
financially stable?
  On December 4 of last year, in an article in the Atlantic magazine 
entitled ``The Cost of Amnesty,'' senior editor David Frum wrote this:

       In the 2011 tax year, the average EITC payment to a family 
     with children was $2,905, according to the Center for Budget 
     and Policy Priorities. The Additional Child Tax Credit works 
     in much the same way, paying an average of $1,800 to 
     qualifying households.

  Earned-income tax credit--that sounds like some sort of deduction you 
might have, but it is not. So many of the persons who will be given 
this legal status will be eligible for the earned-income tax credit 
because they have a family--presumably--that is what the President 
tells us; these are for families--and their income is at a rate that 
entitles them to draw earned-income tax credit.
  But go to the budget of the United States of America and how the 
Congressional Budget Office calculates this--they don't calculate 
earned-income tax credit as some sort of tax deduction. They calculate 
it as an expenditure of the United States of America, and it absolutely 
is.
  The way it works is your income is so low you have a family of such 
that you don't owe any income tax, and they send you a credit and they 
call it an earned-income tax credit, and a tax credit is a cash payment 
to you. It looks something like a tax matter, but it is really a direct 
check from the United States of America to lower-income families. So 
this is going to be qualifying for large numbers of people that will be 
given a legal status.

  Citing the Center for Immigration Studies, Mr. Frum in the Atlantic 
article explains:

       About 14.5 percent of the native-born population of the 
     United States earns little enough to qualify for the EITC. 
     Almost twice as great a portion of the total immigrant 
     population, 29.7 percent, qualifies. But the specific 
     immigrant groups most likely to benefit from the President's 
     actions earned even less.

  So you have, on a percentage basis, twice as many in the immigrant 
population eligible for EITC as the average native-born American would 
be to qualify to receive that check from the United States.
  Mr. Frum goes on to say, ``The EITC will cost a shade over $70 
billion in fiscal year 2015.''
  That is a lot of money--$70 billion. A Federal highway bill is $40 
billion, moving up to $50 billion. This is $70 billion.

       The refundable portion of the child tax credit will cost 
     about $33 billion. That's $100 billion in total. Together, 
     they cost 10 times as much as traditional cash welfare. Soon 
     they will cost much, much more.

  He goes on to note:

       Quaintly enough, U.S. immigration law still forbids the 
     president to grant residency to aliens likely to become ``a 
     public charge.'' The list of exceptions, however, overwhelms 
     the rule. Here are the benefits that are ``not intended for 
     income maintenance'' and therefore exempt, according to the 
     Citizenship and Immigration Services. . . .

  And they list a whole lot of taxes.
  Well, I just want to wrap up by saying the House of Representatives 
can do time and order, pass the bill that fully funds the United 
States, and it does not contain riders and it does not contain pork 
spending. Well, maybe it contains it, but it is not being complained 
about at this time, and it is before the Senate. To fund the Department 
of Homeland Security the Senate has to pass the same bill with the same 
expenditures to do so. So all we have to do is fund the Department of 
Homeland Security but not approve the President's desire to transmit 
funds in Homeland Security to an illegal, unlawful policy of amnesty 
that Congress opposes and the American people oppose. Who do we 
represent?
  Since 2009, we learned today, the Obama administration issued 5.5 
million extra work permits--double the normal expected flow by over 
almost a million a year. We understood it to be 700,000. Now we 
understand there are so many more that have not been calculated in the 
numbers. His Executive amnesty will issue 5 million more.
  Since 2009 family incomes are down $4,000. There is no doubt about 
it, colleagues, that this incredibly large flow of immigrants into 
America exceeds the ability of the American economy to absorb them. It 
is pulling down wages. It is moving people out of the workplace. It is 
making it very difficult for lawful immigrants to get jobs in America 
because there will always be a new group coming in willing to work for 
less. It is eroding the middle class and middle-class values.
  So we are going to talk about this as we go forward. I believe this 
country will continue to be a nation that allows immigration. We don't 
dislike or hate or demean people that want to come to America and work 
here. But we need to send a clear message: If you are not coming 
lawfully, don't come. And if you come unlawfully, you are not going to 
be given amnesty. You are not going to be given Social Security, 
Medicare, earned income tax credits, and the right to go to any 
hospital in America and demand health care. We are just not going to do 
that.
  If we do that with clarity, colleagues, what will happen? The people 
who are coming here unlawfully will stop coming. The numbers will fall 
dramatically, and we will be in a position, then, to reestablish a 
lawful system of immigration that the American people have pleaded with 
us to establish--one that we can be proud of, that is just and fair 
where people apply and wait their turn and are accepted or not accepted 
based on the merits. If we do that, we will have served the American 
people with what they have asked us to do.
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

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