Congressional Record, Volume 165 Issue 29 (Thursday, February 14, 2019)

[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 29 (Thursday, February 14, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1362-S1364]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

MAKING FURTHER CONTINUING APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITY FOR FISCAL YEAR 2019--CONFERENCE REPORT

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Chair
lay before the Senate the conference report to accompany H.J. Res. 31.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the joint resolution by
title.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

The committee of conference on the disagreeing votes of the
two Houses on the amendment of the Senate to the joint
resolution (H.J. Res. 31), having met, have agreed that the
House recede from its disagreement to the amendment of the
Senate and agree to the same with an amendment and the Senate
agree to the same, signed by a majority of the conferees on
the part of both Houses.

Thereupon, the Senate proceeded to consider the conference report.
(The conference report is printed in the House proceedings of the
Record of February 13, 2019.)

=========================== NOTE ===========================

On page S1362, February 14, 2019, first column, the following
appears: Thereupon, the Senate proceeded to consider the
conference report. (The conference report is printed in the House
proceedings of the RECORD of January 13, 2019.)

The online Record has been corrected to read: Thereupon, the
Senate proceeded to consider the conference report. (The
conference report is printed in the House proceedings of the
RECORD of February 13, 2019.)

========================= END NOTE =========================

Cloture Motion

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I send a cloture motion to the desk for
the conference report.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The cloture motion having been presented under
rule XXII, the Chair directs the clerk to read the motion.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

Cloture Motion

We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the
provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate,
do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the conference
report to accompany H.J. Res. 31, making further continuing
appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for
fiscal year 2019, and for other purposes.
Richard C. Shelby, Shelley Moore Capito, John Cornyn,
John Boozman, John Thune, Johnny Isakson, Lindsey
Graham, Mike Crapo, Thom Tillis, Kevin Cramer, John
Hoeven, Roger F. Wicker, Steve Daines, James E. Risch,
Jerry Moran, Mike Rounds, Mitch McConnell.

Unanimous Consent Agreement

Mr. McCONNELL. I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding rule
XXII, the cloture vote on the conference report to accompany H.J. Res.
31 occur at 3:30 p.m. today; further, that if cloture is invoked, all
postcloture time be yielded back and the Senate vote on the adoption of
the conference report.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, as someone who has been here for some
period of time, I was glad to see Republicans and Democrats, both in
the House and the Senate, come together in the past few weeks,
especially this week.
We ignored the distractions and tweetstorms coming from the White
House. We reached an agreement to fund our government and make
responsible investments for the American people.
Not one of us--none of the final four who did the negotiations,
sitting in that room, felt that this was an agreement that any one of
us would have individually written.
There are things in this bill that I support and things I disagree
with, but that could be said by all four of us, Republicans and
Democrats. You try to find as much common ground as you can. Everybody
had to give something, but we ended up with a bipartisan compromise. We
had to deal with facts that are based on reality, not rhetoric based on
political fantasy.
Democrats have always supported border security, but we support smart
border security, targeted strategies that address the real problems
facing us at our southwest border. That is what we tried to accomplish
here. We stood together. We rejected the toxic and hate-filled
immigration tweets coming from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
The agreement does not fund President Trump's wasteful wall. After
all, he gave his solemn promise to the American public that Mexico
would pay for it, so let them work on that. It does not fund President
Trump's requested deportation force, and it rejects the unjustified and
dramatic increase in the detention bed levels the President would have
used to enforce his extreme immigration policy.
But just as important as what this agreement rejects is what we were
able to accomplish.
We invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new technology to stop
the flow of illegal drugs through our ports of entry. All Republicans
and all Democrats supported that. We provide funds to hire more judges
to address the immigration backlog in our country. We provide more than
half a billion dollars to support Central American countries,
addressing the root causes of undocumented migration. We included $400
million to improve medical care and address the humanitarian concerns
at the border. Every one of us has seen enough of what is going on
there; we are trying to show that America--the greatest Nation on
Earth, also the wealthiest and the most humanitarian--will address it.
This is what a compromise looks like. This is how the American people
expect our government to function--not by tweets but by reasonable,
reality-based compromise.
Unfortunately, often lost in this debate over border security were
the more than 800,000 public servants and their families who were held
hostage by the Trump shutdown for weeks. They once again lived in fear
and uncertainty that their next paycheck may not come because the
President chose to use them as hostages. This agreement ensures that
these public servants remain on the job doing the important work of the
American people through the end of the fiscal year, and also all those
who are not on a government payroll but support all our different
Agencies that were involved in this. They weren't paid either.
This agreement funds nine Federal Departments. Keep in mind--it is
not just the borders; it is nine Federal Departments and their related
Agencies. I will give a couple of examples. It increases funding for
the Environmental Protection Agency. It supports our national parks. It
rejects the anti-science know-nothingism of the administration by
supporting research and our dedicated scientists.
This is extremely important to me because Senator Crapo and I wrote
the last Violence Against Women authorization. We wrote the expansion
of that law. Our bill today provides the highest funding level ever for
the Office on Violence Against Women to support programs that prevent
domestic violence. It also provides more than half a billion dollars to
combat the opioid crisis. In my earlier career, I saw too many deaths
because of the violence against women. I saw too many deaths of young
people from drug overdoses, and the numbers have only dramatically
increased from the days when I was a prosecutor. Supporting the
Violence Against Women Act brought Republicans and Democrats together.
The agreement invests in rural America, secures our interests abroad,
rebuilds our highways, and supports public housing.
This week, four of us met--first in Chairman Shelby's Appropriations
Committee office and then later into the evening several times in my
office here in the Capitol. Senator Shelby,

[[Page S1363]]

Representative Lowey, Representative Granger, and I proved that we can
set aside the political struggles in Washington to find a path to
progress for the American people--two Republicans and two Democrats who
are four of the most senior Members of the House and the Senate. I
thank them for their effort.
If I can go to a personal matter for just a moment, I want to thank
Senator Shelby for his friendship and his partnership. Senator Shelby
and I come from different parts of the country. We are much different
politically, but he is one of the closest friends I have here. He and
his wonderful wife, Dr. Annette Shelby, my wife Marcelle, and I have
traveled to so many places together. Some were very grim areas of this
world. But we understand how grownups have to act in the Congress and
how they have to work together. We worked together with our House
counterparts--the senior Democrat and senior Republican in the House--
on this conference. We worked together. We didn't pass just Homeland
Security; we passed all 12 appropriations bills on a bipartisan basis.
I hope we do the same thing for fiscal year 2020. I hope that we can
begin very soon, with Senator Shelby and me working together, to pass
the fiscal year 2020 bills. We passed the ones last year out of our
committee virtually unanimously. We were able to get Members of both
parties to join us. I thank him.
I also thank the Appropriations Committee staff on both sides of the
aisle for their hard work. I joke that Senators are merely
constitutional impediments to their staff. Evening after evening,
sometimes into the wee hours of the morning, weekend after weekend, I
saw dedicated men and women in the Appropriations Committee staff
working line by line to try to get us through this.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a list of their names be
printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

Charles E. Kieffer, Chanda Betourney, Jess Berry, Jay
Tilton, Hannah Chauvin, Dianne Nellor, Adrienne
Wojciechowski, Teri Curtin, Jean Toal Eisen, Jennifer Eskra,
Blaise Sheridan, Jordan Stone, Ellen Murray, Diana Gourlay
Hamilton, Reeves Hart, Scott Nance, Chip Walgren, Drenan E.
Dudley, Rachael Taylor, Ryan Hunt, Tim Rieser, Alex Carnes,
Kali Farahmand, Dabney Hegg, Christina Monroe, Jordan Stone,
Shannon H. Hines, Jonathan Graffeo, David Adkins, Margaret
Pritchard, Carlisle Clark, Patrick Carroll, Elizabeth Dent,
Hamilton Bloom, Amber Beck, Allen Cutler, Matt Womble, Sydney
Crawford, Andrew Newton, Lauren Nunnally, Brian Daner,
Courtney Bradford, Adam Telle, Peter Babb, Chris Cook,
Thompson Moore, Christian Lee, Leif Fonnesbeck, Lucas Agnew,
Emy Lesofski, Nona McCoy, Clare Doherty, Gus Maples, Rajat
Mathur, Jason Woolwine, LaShawnda Smith, Robert W. Putnam,
Christy Greene, Blair Taylor, Jenny Winkler, Hong Nguyen,
Clint Trocchio, George A. Castro, Elmer Barnes, Penny Myles,
Karin Thames, Shalanda Young, Chris Bigelow, Anne Marie
Chotvacs, Johnnie Kaberle, Gerry Petrella, Meghan Taira.

Mr. LEAHY. I conclude by saying it takes a lot of long days and it
takes a lot of long nights to produce a bill of this magnitude. I
appreciate their hard work.
I think we may have others who will want to speak.
Mr. President, how much time do we have before the vote?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Four minutes remains.
Mr. LEAHY. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic leader.
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, the Senate will soon vote on the
agreement by the conference committee to keep the government open. The
agreement was a product of a lot of hard work and long nights and
weekends by members of the conference committee and their staffs. I
want to salute Senator Leahy and Senator Shelby. I want to salute all
of the conferees.
When Leader McConnell and I met--as we moved to open up the
government for a short period of time--I suggested that we do a
conference committee because I had a great deal of faith in the members
of the conference committees on both sides of the aisle, and that faith
has proved to be vindicated. I thank Senator Leahy, Senator Shelby,
their staffs, and all the members of the conference committee for the
great job they have done.
The agreement will provide smart border security, increasing support
for technologies at our ports of entry. It will not fund the
President's expensive, ineffective wall. It will provide desperately
needed humanitarian assistance--medical support, transportation, food,
and clothing--for children and families in detention. It will provide
funding to our neighbors in Central America to fight the actual root
causes of migration--the violent gangs and drug cartels.
In short, it represents a fair compromise that includes priorities
from both sides of the aisle. I expect the legislation will pass this
Chamber with a significant bipartisan majority, pass the House, and be
sent to the President with plenty of time to avoid a government
shutdown tomorrow at midnight.
There is word that the President will declare a national emergency. I
hope he won't. That would be a very wrong thing to do. Leader Pelosi
and I will be responding to that in short order, but before that, I
just want to say that in order to reach this point, in order to attain
this bipartisan compromise, 800,000 public servants were forced to
suffer without pay for over a month as President Trump put the country
through a completely unnecessary shutdown that snarled airports,
delayed loans for farmers and small businesses, trashed our national
parks, and took billions of dollars out of our economy.
We still need to address the plight of government contractors who
still have not been made whole. Regrettably, we were unable to include
that in the agreement, but we are going to keep working and fighting
for Senator Smith's proposal to ensure our contractors are made whole
again.
The Senate was in the very same position just before Christmas, with
a deal in hand, when the President reversed himself and engineered the
longest shutdown in American history. After all of the pain of the
shutdown caused by President Trump, we are basically right back where
we started, with nearly the same parameters of a bipartisan agreement
we were ready to pass around Christmas. Leader Pelosi and I, for
instance, offered the President $1.37 billion for border security with
the same language that would have prohibited the wall then as is in the
agreement now.
Let this be a lesson. Government shutdowns don't work. I hope
President Trump has learned that lesson once and for all. I hope we
never go down the road to shutdowns again. The American people suffer
and very little is accomplished.
President Trump should sign this bill ASAP.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, I will be brief.
First of all, I thank Senator Leahy, the vice chairman of the
Appropriations Committee, who worked diligently for the past year to
get to where we are today in a bipartisan way and also, recently, in
the conference committee, which we thought last week had broken down. I
also thank Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and Chuck Schumer, the
Democratic leader. I thank everybody else who has contributed to get us
to this point.
Nothing is perfect, but we think this is a good bill for the American
people. It opens up all of the government--the 25 percent that we had
not addressed.
The conference report includes a robust and comprehensive investment
in border security, providing funding for personnel, technology, and
infrastructure that is critical to keeping our nation secure and our
people safe. Critically, the bill provides nearly $1,400,000,000 to
further construction of a barrier along the southwest border. But that
is only a down payment. More resources are required. Fortunately, the
President has at his disposal both constitutional and existing
statutory authorities that allow him to supplement the congressional
investment in border security that was made today. This bill preserves
those authorities, and I support action by the President to use them to
the fullest extent permissible to secure our border. In particular,
this bill does not restrict the President's ability to declare a
national emergency or to exercise emergency authorities under such a
declaration. Nor does this bill further restrict the Administration's
ability, previously granted by the Congress, to

[[Page S1364]]

transfer funds in support of efforts to gain operational control of our
southwest border and to cease the trafficking of persons and drugs
across it.
I am going to get on with the vote.
I want to say thank you to everybody, including Shannon Hines on our
staff and everybody else who contributed to this.
At this point, I ask unanimous consent to waive the mandatory quorum
call with respect to the cloture vote on the conference report to
accompany H.J. Res. 31.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Cloture Motion

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before
the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will state.
The bill clerk read as follows:

Cloture Motion

The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum
call has been waived.
The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the
conference report to accompany H.J. Res. 31, an act making further
continuing appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for
fiscal year 2019, and for other purposes, shall be brought to a close?
The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk called the roll.
Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from North Carolina (Mr. Burr).
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 84, nays 15, as follows:

[Rollcall Vote No. 25 Leg.]

YEAS--84

Alexander
Baldwin
Barrasso
Bennet
Blackburn
Blumenthal
Blunt
Boozman
Braun
Brown
Cantwell
Capito
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Cassidy
Collins
Coons
Cornyn
Cortez Masto
Cramer
Crapo
Daines
Duckworth
Durbin
Enzi
Ernst
Feinstein
Fischer
Gardner
Graham
Grassley
Hassan
Heinrich
Hirono
Hoeven
Hyde-Smith
Isakson
Johnson
Jones
Kaine
Kennedy
King
Klobuchar
Lankford
Leahy
Manchin
McConnell
McSally
Menendez
Merkley
Moran
Murkowski
Murphy
Murray
Perdue
Peters
Portman
Reed
Risch
Roberts
Romney
Rosen
Rounds
Sanders
Schatz
Schumer
Scott (FL)
Shaheen
Shelby
Sinema
Smith
Stabenow
Sullivan
Tester
Thune
Tillis
Udall
Van Hollen
Warner
Whitehouse
Wicker
Wyden
Young

NAYS--15

Booker
Cotton
Cruz
Gillibrand
Harris
Hawley
Inhofe
Lee
Markey
Paul
Rubio
Sasse
Scott (SC)
Toomey
Warren

NOT VOTING--1

Burr

The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 84, the nays are
15.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn having voted in
the affirmative, the motion is agreed to.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, all postcloture time
has expired.
The question is, Will the Senate adopt the Conference Report to
accompany H.J. Res. 31?
Mr. BARRASSO. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from North Carolina (Mr. Burr).
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 83, nays 16, as follows:

[Rollcall Vote No. 26 Leg.]

YEAS--83

Alexander
Baldwin
Barrasso
Bennet
Blackburn
Blumenthal
Blunt
Boozman
Brown
Cantwell
Capito
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Cassidy
Collins
Coons
Cornyn
Cortez Masto
Cramer
Crapo
Daines
Duckworth
Durbin
Enzi
Ernst
Feinstein
Fischer
Gardner
Graham
Grassley
Hassan
Heinrich
Hirono
Hoeven
Hyde-Smith
Isakson
Johnson
Jones
Kaine
Kennedy
King
Klobuchar
Lankford
Leahy
Manchin
McConnell
McSally
Menendez
Merkley
Moran
Murkowski
Murphy
Murray
Perdue
Peters
Portman
Reed
Risch
Roberts
Romney
Rosen
Rounds
Sanders
Schatz
Schumer
Scott (FL)
Shaheen
Shelby
Sinema
Smith
Stabenow
Sullivan
Tester
Thune
Tillis
Udall
Van Hollen
Warner
Whitehouse
Wicker
Wyden
Young

NAYS--16

Booker
Braun
Cotton
Cruz
Gillibrand
Harris
Hawley
Inhofe
Lee
Markey
Paul
Rubio
Sasse
Scott (SC)
Toomey
Warren

NOT VOTING--1

Burr

The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 83 and the nays are
16. The conference report is adopted. The majority leader.

=========================== NOTE ===========================

On page S1364, February 14, 2019, second column, the following
appears: The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.

The online Record has been corrected to read: The PRESIDING
OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 83 and the nays are 16. The
conference report is adopted. The majority leader.

========================= END NOTE =========================

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