[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 196 (Wednesday, December 12, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7475-S7477]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           GOVERNMENT FUNDING

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, it occurs to me that if Americans had any 
doubt that President Trump is fixated on

[[Page S7476]]

wasting billions of tax dollars to wall off our 2,000-mile southern 
border, all they had to do was watch his jaw-dropping press conference 
yesterday in which he demanded another $5 billion of America's hard-
earned tax dollars for his political pet project, which, throughout his 
whole campaign, he gave his solemn word that Mexico would pay for.
  I have been here during the terms of eight different Presidents. I 
have never heard the words I heard from our President yesterday. I 
never thought that any President, Republican or Democrat, would use 
them. When President Trump boasted that he would be proud to shut down 
the government if Congress does not bow to his spending demands, I had 
to play it back, watching it two or three times, making sure that is 
exactly what he said. He was very proud of it. I must say it is one of 
the most reckless statements I have ever heard uttered by a President 
of the United States of either party.
  The President's job, like yours and mine--all of us--is to keep the 
Federal Government operating for the hundreds of millions of Americans 
who depend on government services every day, from our national parks, 
housing services for the elderly, the disabled, our veterans, and for 
assistance to our Nation's farmers. Just yesterday, we passed a 
bipartisan farm bill, and I praise Senator Roberts, a Republican, and 
Senator Stabenow, a Democrat. They came together and passed a 
bipartisan bill by an overwhelming margin.
  A lot of work went into that to protect our farmers, but if the 
President shuts down the government, there is not going to be anybody 
in local USDA--U.S. Department of Agriculture--offices to answer 
questions from farmers about what that new law means for them, just as 
farmers are making their plans for next year's planting season. They 
cannot just turn it on and turn it off. They have to plan months in 
advance.
  When I first came to the Senate 44 years ago, the idea of threatening 
to shut down the Federal Government as a negotiating tactic was unheard 
of. Now it seems we go through this every year, and neither party is 
blameless. But before President Trump, no one bragged about it. No one 
seemed to relish it. No one was foolish enough to call it good for the 
country, no matter what party they were from. No one treated shutting 
down the government as if it is some kind of reality show, some kind of 
game, without the slightest concern for the consequences for the 
American people and hundreds of thousands of Federal workers and their 
families over the holidays or for the huge amount of the taxpayers' 
money that would be wasted as a result.
  President Trump's performance yesterday amounted to throwing a temper 
tantrum on national television. He is either oblivious to what he is 
doing, does not know what he is doing, or he simply does not care about 
the real world consequences of a shutdown. Hundreds of thousands of 
Federal employees would be furloughed or working without pay 3 days 
before Christmas, and millions of Americans would be cut off from 
critical government services. Instead, the President eagerly offered to 
``take the mantle'' for shutting down the government over his pet 
project--a wall, which we do not need.
  What could be the driving fixation for building medieval wall along 
the southern border? Maybe he has actually begun to believe his own 
fearmongering and lies about migrants, asylees, and refugees. After 
years of demonizing and vilifying migrants to rally his most ardent 
supporters, perhaps his own demagoguery has finally gotten to him. 
Maybe he is actually believing the things he has been saying. Only 
that--a self-made, alternate reality in which vulnerable women and 
children have miraculously transformed into hordes of gang members and 
terrorists--could explain such an irrational obsession for a wasteful 
wall that does absolutely nothing to stop actual threats to our 
Nation's security. Only in an altered reality would one act as though 
teargassing little children in diapers makes sense.
  The President may not be able to tell fact from fiction, but he may 
be purposely blurring the lines between them. But as vice chairman of 
the Senate Appropriations Committee, it is my duty to ensure that 
taxpayer dollars go toward solving problems we know to exist in fact. 
So let's talk about the facts. It is time for a reality check.
  President Trump, justifying a litany of anti-immigrant policies, has 
repeatedly claimed that there is a crisis at our southern border with a 
``drastic surge'' of undocumented migrants attempting to flood into our 
country. That is false.
  The truth is that illegal border crossings are at historic lows. At 
the end of 2017, arrests of people attempting to enter the United 
States illegally dropped to the lowest level since 1971. Between 2000 
and 2018, border apprehensions fell sharply, from roughly 1.6 million 
in fiscal year 2000 to approximately 400,000 in fiscal year 2018--a 75-
percent drop. Now, we all agree that illegal immigration is a serious 
problem, and we should address it, but saying that we are experiencing 
a crisis-level surge of illegal crossings at the border is pure 
fiction. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the President 
would use pure fiction as a scare tactic.
  There is not a true crisis to point to, so the President is 
manufacturing one. Ever the reality TV showman, he opted to focus 
America's attention on images and videos of a caravan of migrants 
marching toward our southern border. In the runup to the recent 
elections, pointing at vulnerable migrants while they were thousands of 
miles from our border, President Trump immediately began warning of an 
imminent ``onslaught,'' ``invaders,'' an ``assault on our country,'' 
and a ``national emergency.'' Inconveniently for the President, these 
people were 1,000 miles from our border. Thousands of them are 
defenseless women and children. Most Americans just do not think of the 
word ``invaders'' when they see barefoot toddlers being pushed in 
strollers by their mothers. The sad reality is that many of these 
people are fleeing desperate situations in their home countries and are 
looking for sanctuary. They are not coming here to perpetuate violence; 
they are running away from violence.

  They do not want violence. They are not coming here to bring 
violence; they are trying to escape violence--violence against their 
children, violence against their families.
  When the pictures on TV actually began to be shown and were defying 
the President's narrative, he changed course. He began making the case 
that hidden among these families are stone-cold criminals and unknown 
Middle Easterners, as if anyone from the Middle East is inherently a 
danger to us. What is his proof? He has none.
  In fact, to quote the President's own words about the composition of 
the migrant caravan: ``There is no proof of anything.''
  Just yesterday, President Trump even claimed we needed the wall 
because we recently captured 10 terrorists over a ``very short period 
of time.'' This statement had fact checkers, actually people within his 
own administration, scratching their heads because nobody knew what he 
was talking about.
  A Homeland Security official claimed that President Trump was 
referring to a government statistic indicating that 10 people suspected 
of terrorist ties are prevented from entering the United States every 
day ``by air, sea, or land.'' What a multibillion dollar wall along our 
southern border would do to prevent a suspected terrorist from flying 
into JFK Airport I cannot figure out, but President Trump does not seem 
to know or care about the difference.
  The conservative Center for Immigration Studies issued a report last 
month, concluding that only 15 suspected terrorists have been 
apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border since 2001, and a suspected 
terrorist includes anyone coming from a handful of specific countries, 
like Syria. It does not mean they are, in fact, terrorists or have any 
connection whatsoever to terrorists.
  So President Trump's unsubstantiated vitriol against immigrants is 
matched only by his flamboyance about the wall. Despite his claims 
yesterday that wall construction is under budget, the largest component 
of fencing that Congress has funded, a 25-mile barrier in the Rio 
Grande Valley, has ballooned in cost from $445 million to $787 million. 
That pricetag for fencing is $31.5 million per mile. We American 
taxpayers are paying for that. Despite the President's claims that 
additional wall funding is an urgent need, the

[[Page S7477]]

Trump administration has spent only 6 percent of the $1.7 billion 
Congress has appropriated over the last 2 years to build or replace 
fencing on the southern border.
  Facts matter, Mr. President. The $5 billion he is clamoring for would 
be better spent on real homeland security, such as Coast Guard boats 
that can save lives, grants to nonprofit churches and synagogues to 
secure themselves against shootings like those in Pittsburgh and 
Sutherland Springs, more Customs personnel and technology to seize the 
fentanyl that is fueling our Nation's opioid epidemic and actually 
killing our citizens. Let's remember, fentanyl is mostly coming through 
our legal points of entry and our mail facilities, not between the 
ports where the President wants to build his wall.
  Perhaps in President Trump's alternate reality--where illegal 
crossings are at historic highs, migrant caravans of hardened criminals 
are invading our country, and terrorists are slipping past our Border 
Patrol agents every day--the need for a giant, concrete wall seems like 
an urgent necessity. But if, like everybody here, you live in the real 
world, where the facts and statistics mean something, his obsession 
with building a wall is exposed for what it is--a desperate attempt to 
please his base and protect his ego and to make us forget that he gave 
his word. He gave his word. He gave his word that Mexico was going to 
pay for it. Now we know that was a flatout untruth.
  As stewards of American taxpayers' hard-earned money, we have a 
responsibility not to throw away billions of dollars in a project that 
is built on a foundation of fact-free fearmongering. To be clear, this 
is not the way we appropriate money. This is certainly not the way we 
fund and run the U.S. Government. If the President wants to shut down 
the government because he cannot muster the votes to fund his wall, as 
he says he does, the American people will see that he cares more about 
his misguided campaign promises and misstatements than he does about 
doing his job--the job of making the government work for the American 
people.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Hyde-Smith). The clerk will call the 
roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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