[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 21 (Wednesday, February 2, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S469-S472]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                         Issues Facing America

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, during the last break in our voting 
schedule here in Washington, DC, I was grateful to have the time back 
home talking with my constituents about the challenges they are facing 
on a day-to-day basis and, like we all, I think, try to do, figuring 
out how we can be helpful to them here in the Senate.
  I must note that there is usually a huge disconnect between what 
seems to obsess the news media and folks living in the bubble of 
Washington, DC, and what I hear from my constituents back home, and 
this time wasn't much different.
  When I was back in Austin, I received a briefing on the ongoing 
pandemic response efforts. Like the rest of the country and the rest of 
the world, COVID-19 hasn't gone away, and we are trying to slowly but 
surely both adapt and deal with the pandemic.
  Thanks to an overwhelming response by the Federal Government 
initially back during the Trump administration, during Operation Warp 
Speed, we have access to vaccines on the fastest timeline that we have 
ever seen. Medical science and pharmaceutical companies and the 
government came together to produce effective and safe vaccines at a 
historic rate of speed. But even as the virus itself has morphed, as 
viruses, I understand, will likely do, we still continue to need things 
like personal protective equipment and additional tests and antibiotics 
treatments for people in my State.
  Ironically, President Biden ran in large part in 2020 based on the 
COVID response of the Trump administration and, as we all recall, was 
pretty harshly critical. But now he seems to have changed his tune. 
When asked about things like access to testing, he says: Well, those 
are really State responsibilities.
  Well, passing the buck is a familiar pastime here in Washington, DC, 
but I don't think anybody is fooled that this is an area where the 
Federal Government continues to play an essential role. Yes, our State 
leaders have done by and large, I think, a good job in their respective 
jurisdictions. The fact of the matter is, we still need a plan to deal 
with the testing and the ongoing effects of COVID-19.

  Interestingly, people who wanted to get access to things like 
therapeutics, anti-viral drugs, and monoclonal antibiotics were told 
that the Federal Government would not allow the States to use those 
particular modalities anymore because the Federal Government had made a 
decision that this was not effective against the current strain. But, 
as we know, this virus continues to mutate. We are hoping that we don't 
go all the way through the Greek alphabet in various forms of this 
virus, but the fact of the matter is, I think we have all now gotten a 
little glimpse out of what Washington-run healthcare would look like, 
starting with rationing based on decisions being made in Washington, 
DC, about what should be available to people when they get sick or when 
they see their doctor.
  I believe that those decisions are best left to individuals, in 
consultation with their healthcare provider to make those decisions. 
But we have gotten a little bit of a glimpse when Washington says no 
monoclonal antibiotics anymore, no therapeutic anti-virals because they 
don't work against the current strain of COVID-19, the Omicron.

[[Page S470]]

As I said, the virus is probably not going to stop mutating, and 
unfortunately, I think the Federal response--rationing access to these 
therapies and treatment--could well backlash on the government.
  I am appreciative of the dedicated work of all of our frontline 
healthcare workers. As we all know, they have been pushed to the limit, 
dealing with COVID-19. They are exhausted and, in many instances, 
burned out.
  There are not enough frontline healthcare workers currently. What 
that means is that many hospitals and healthcare providers have to 
contract with nursing services, which really are national organizations 
that hire nurses and then contract out as needed to local hospitals. 
What that usually means is, because there are not enough local nurses 
available at the going rate, they have to contract for prices for those 
nursing services that are many multiples of what ordinarily they would 
have to do, causing a lot of pain and strain on healthcare providers 
across Texas and across the Nation.
  On my travels, I went to Fort Worth, where I visited with the 
University of North Texas Health Science Center to discuss legislation 
that I have introduced, along with Senator Leahy, a senior member of 
the Judiciary Committee, called the Justice for All Reauthorization 
Act. As the name suggests, this is a reauthorization of very important 
tools that are needed at the local level to support victims and deliver 
justice and avoid wrongful convictions.
  This really focuses on the use of forensic techniques to test DNA and 
other samples--for example, in a rape kit, which is collected following 
a sexual assault, by a forensic nurse examiner who can collect a rape 
kit. Assuming it is done properly and it is provided to a lab that 
performs the appropriate test, you can identify with almost 100 percent 
certainty who the assailant is or was. So it is really important for us 
to make sure those tools remain available, including eliminating 
further that rape kit backlog.
  It used to be that the rape kits were not tested when the identity of 
the assailant was not in question, because, in fact, many times the 
identity of the assailant is known to the victim of that assault. But, 
as we found out, the power of these forensic tests is immense. And we 
can rule out somebody based on the DNA test. We can identify people who 
have perpetrated multiple sexual assaults because many of these sexual 
assault predators are serial offenders. And what we found out is even 
when the statute of limitations has run, let's say, against a 
particular sexual assault, many times you will be able to identify with 
virtual certainty the individual who committed a subsequent sexual 
assault for which the statute of limitations has not run. So that 
remains very, very important.

  In Houston, which is, we like to say, the energy capital of the 
world, I sat down with leaders to discuss legislation that I have 
introduced with Senator Coons, the Senator from Delaware, to expand the 
use of hydrogen technologies in energy-intensive sectors. Hydrogen is a 
unique energy source. As a matter of fact, Toyota, I believe, has 
developed a fuel cell technology where, if you use hydrogen in the fuel 
cell, you will not only get propulsion of a vehicle, you will actually 
get water out the tailpipe. So it is very clean, and it is very safe.
  But the problem is, of course, the expense of this new technology and 
trying to get it used in places where it makes the most sense because 
the infrastructure is critical both for the storage and the delivery of 
the hydrogen for use in these energy-intensive sectors.
  Texas is already the epicenter of energy production. We believe in 
all of the above when it comes to energy, and these investments in new 
clean energy like hydrogen can help us grow and diversify our State's 
energy portfolio even further while continuing to reduce emissions in 
many sectors that are currently big emitters of carbon and other 
emissions.
  So it was great to be back home, as I know we all feel when we get 
back home, and to listen and to learn from your constituents--not just 
the official talking points and the subjects that are always on cable 
news or social media but about the challenges and the needs and the 
hopes and the dreams of the people we represent, real people, the 29 
million people I am privileged to represent in the Senate from Texas.
  We also hear about some of their problems that they are dealing with 
like inflation, and we are hearing more about rising crime. And my 
constituents are looking to Congress for some leadership and some 
action. They want to see clear and decisive steps made to address the 
problems that Texas families confront on a regular basis. But, as I 
said, there isn't a whole lot of overlap, it seems, with the agenda 
here in Washington by the current majority in the House and the Senate 
and the priorities of my constituents back home.
  So the debates in Congress have largely been detached from their 
reality. It is like living in an alternate universe, where we spend 
more time talking about manufactured crises or political agendas than 
solving real problems.
  This year, it began with the $2 trillion partisan spending bill. Our 
colleagues abused the rules of the Senate to pass this legislation 
without a single Republican vote, and clearly they were hooked because 
partisan legislating became the rule and not the exception last year. 
Our colleagues scheduled votes on legislation that would exploit the 
cause of pay fairness in order to help trial lawyers, even though wage 
discrimination based on sex has been illegal for nearly 60 years.
  They scheduled a number of votes on varying versions of legislation 
to hijack America's elections because of an alleged voting rights 
crisis, even though last November 2020 94 percent of respondents to a 
Pew poll said it was either easy or very easy to cast a ballot in the 
2020 election.
  Now, I had an interesting exchange with the majority leader on this. 
I actually had a chart that talked about that Pew poll. And he said: 
Well, yeah, we agree everything was hunky-dory in November 2020, but 
then it all went down the tubes when States began passing new election 
laws.

  But I pointed out to him--or I asked him: Well, what is your primary 
concern?
  He said: Well, ballot harvesting.
  He thought that there ought to be more permissive ballot harvesting 
than is allowed in some States. But he didn't talk about the things 
like eliminating voter ID or making it harder to protect the integrity 
of the ballot by making sure that the person, whether they were mailing 
in their ballot or whether they were voting in person, was who they say 
they were and legally entitled to vote. But, again, we spend a lot of 
time on those multiple attempts to pass that takeover of State-run and 
local-run elections.
  And then there was the so-called Build Back Better bill. I am sure 
that was focus group-tested so that it would be appealing to people who 
maybe didn't know exactly what was in it, but then we found out that it 
was massive tax increases and massive spending at a time when inflation 
was as bad as it has been in my lifetime and where the dollar earned by 
working families goes less and less far and, in fact, diminishes their 
standard of living because of the effect of inflation.
  So the BBB bill--some have called it Build Back Better; I prefer 
``Build Back Broke'' or ``Build Back Bankrupt''--which clearly would 
have thrown gasoline on the problem of inflation, along with raising 
taxes and depress our economy and job creation, it was so expensive and 
unnecessary that our colleagues couldn't get all 50 Members of their 
own conference on board.
  And that is what happens when you have a 50-50 Senate with the Vice 
President breaking a tie. This isn't exactly like FDR's New Deal, where 
he had huge majorities and could basically move the country in any 
direction he wanted. What you would ordinarily think with a 50-50 
Senate is that requires bipartisan consensus building, not trying to go 
it alone in a purely partisan manner. And it is no surprise that it 
wasn't successful.
  Well, obviously, economists have something called opportunity cost, 
and what that means, as I understand it, is that if you are choosing to 
do one thing, that means there are other things that you necessarily 
cannot do, and that is an opportunity cost.
  And one of the obvious costs to the American people is the border 
crisis

[[Page S471]]

that has seen more than 2 million individuals encountered at the 
southwestern border. It is no secret to anybody that the drugs--
including fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cocaine, just to mention a few 
of the drugs--that took the lives of 100,000 Americans last year 
through drug overdoses, virtually all of those come across the 
southwestern border.
  And the cartels are not dumb. They are actually pretty shrewd. And 
they figured out that if you flood the zone, you flood the border with 
massive numbers of unaccompanied children and other vulnerable people, 
that the Border Patrol will have to leave their station on the border 
keeping the drugs and the cartels at bay, and that opens up huge 
avenues of opportunity to smuggling drugs illegally into the United 
States, in addition to the billions of dollars that they earn bringing 
people into the United States from more than 150 different countries.
  I know most people who don't live in a border State or who haven't 
been to the border, they think, well, these are economic migrants from 
Central America. That seems to be what the Vice President, who has been 
designated as the ``immigration czar,'' so to speak, by President 
Biden, what she seems to think. And, frankly, from the comments of the 
President himself, he doesn't understand the dynamic at the border.
  But, in reality, what Secretary Mayorkas, at the Department of 
Homeland Security, and the Biden administration have done is to lay out 
the red carpet for human smugglers and drug smugglers and migrants 
coming from around the world. Early on in the Biden administration, I 
went to the Del Rio Sector of the Border Patrol, and they told us that 
people who they detained had come from more than 150 different 
countries.

  So this is really a global phenomenon based on how much money you 
have and how much you are willing to spend--to the smugglers--to get 
into the United States. And, again, for everybody whom we have no 
record on, we don't know whether they have been sex offenders; we don't 
know whether they have been murderers or committed other crimes back in 
their home country. And we also know that, occasionally, we do catch 
people who have been deported from the United States because of 
criminal offenses who then come back into the United States because of 
the opportunities provided by the lack of border controls.
  This doesn't take into account all of the people whom the Border 
Patrol calls the ``get-aways.'' In other words, we know how many people 
turn themselves in and try to take advantage of the asylum system by 
flooding our immigration courts and creating a huge backlog and then 
melting into the great American landscape, but there are people who do 
penetrate our borders that the Border Patrol never encounters, and so 
it is really hard to know precisely what they are up to. But I can 
assure you, based on my observation and experience, they are up to no 
good if they are avoiding the Border Patrol.
  Well, in trying to be constructive, which I believe in trying to do--
Washington, DC, can be a pretty tough place, and for sure there are 
going to be things we disagree on, but there are also opportunities to 
do things on a bipartisan basis. So seeing what was happening at the 
border, I reached out to another border State Senator, Senator Sinema 
from Arizona; and she and I both reached out to a Congressman from 
Laredo, TX, Congressman Cuellar, and Congressman Tony Gonzales--
Cuellar, a Democrat, and Gonzales, a Republican.
  So we had, literally, a bicameral, bipartisan effort to come up with 
a piece of legislation that we thought that, assuming the 
administration wanted some help, this might be a good place to start. 
It is called the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act. But I am sorry to 
report that the administration--indeed, the Democratic leadership, 
particularly on the Judiciary Committee that has jurisdiction over 
immigration matters--has shown absolutely zero interest in any kind of 
measures to stop or to reduce the flow of migrants into the United 
States and solve this problem.
  Well, obviously, crime is still a big problem in America, and the 
border is part of the problem because of the unrestricted flow of 
people coming across the border. But we know last year, in 2020, 
murders--that is 2 years ago now, 2 calendar years ago now--murders 
rose by nearly 30 percent from the year prior, the largest single-year 
increase on record. So crime has definitely spiked, for whatever 
reason, and requires a forceful and effective response. We are still 
waiting on data from 2021, but so far the picture doesn't appear to be 
much brighter. A number of major cities have experienced their 
deadliest years on record.
  And Americans are taking notice. A poll in November found that more 
than half of those surveyed believe local crime has gotten worse--a 13-
point jump from the previous year. Concerns about national crime rates 
are even higher. Nearly three-quarters of Americans who were polled 
believe that crime is up nationally, and they are not wrong.
  This, of course, is bad news for our families, our communities, our 
businesses, and especially for our dedicated law enforcement officials. 
Within a 5-day span just last week, five Harris County police 
officers--that is Houston, TX--as well as a police canine officer were 
killed or injured. During a 5-day span, five were killed.
  An officer was shot and killed during a traffic stop. One was killed 
during a hit-and-run while off duty. Three officers were wounded in a 
shootout, and a police canine was stabbed with a butcher knife.
  Amid this surge of crime and concerning acts of violence against law 
enforcement and civilians, there is a clear need for Congress to step 
up and act. We need to pass legislation to ensure that our police 
forces are well funded, transparent, and held accountable. 
Unfortunately, this is not a priority for the majority party. The 
radical left and their base want to defund the police, and most 
Democrats seem to be intimidated about speaking up and speaking for 
their constituents when it comes to stopping or abating these crimes.
  As I mentioned, families are also being pummeled by the highest 
inflation in 40 years, and we have all seen prices going up everywhere, 
from the gas pump to groceries, to cars, to clothes.
  Business owners, of course, have been hit with a double whammy, as 
supply chain issues have made it even more difficult and costly to 
produce and sell and ship their products.
  As I mentioned, gas prices are perhaps the most easily identified 
area where inflation is eating away at people's paychecks. Drivers are 
now spending 50 percent more today than they were a year ago on a 
gallon of gas.
  That is not just the big, headline-grabbing crises the Biden 
administration has failed to address.
  The national defense authorization bill is one of the best examples 
of what we should do here in the Senate--an example of bipartisanship. 
A version of this bill has passed every year for 61 years, and, last 
summer, things appeared to be on track, even ahead of schedule. The 
Armed Services Committee passed a national defense authorization bill 
by a vote of 23 to 3. You don't get more bipartisan than that.
  Unfortunately, for some reason, the majority leader refused to bring 
the defense authorization bill to the floor and left the bill to 
collect dust on the Senate calendar before moving it. When he finally 
allowed it to come to the floor in late November, he tried to limit the 
normal amendment process by blaming the calendar. But to no one's 
surprise, that created a lot of issues and a lot of consternation. You 
simply can't sit on a bipartisan bill for months and then claim there 
is no time for a robust amendment process.
  But eventually the Senate did pass the Defense authorization bill 
before the end of the year. But we can't get in the habit of delaying 
bipartisan bills in order to meet a partisan agenda.
  Then there is government funding. We are more than a year into the 
Democratic-controlled majority controlling the government and not a 
single regular appropriations bill has passed. Our colleagues have 
kicked the can down the road.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Does the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. CORNYN. As soon as I am through with my remarks, I will be glad 
to yield.

[[Page S472]]

  

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. That was the question--how soon that might be, given 
that we have a 2:15 vote coming up.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas is recognized.
  Mr. CORNYN. So our colleagues kicked the can down the road when it 
came to keeping the lights on in the appropriations process in 
September and December, and now it looks like they are poised to do it 
again and will not meet the February 18 deadline.
  So with the focus on partisan politics rather than bipartisan 
opportunities, our colleagues in the majority have simply ignored the 
basic responsibilities of governing. They put the demands of 
partisanship ahead of the needs of the American people. Rather than 
reevaluate the strategy and perhaps make a course correction, our 
colleagues have doubled down. They scheduled another vote on their 
partisan election takeover bill. And when it failed, they attempted to 
blow up the rules of the Senate to create an easier pathway to purely 
partisan legislation.
  So there is a massive disconnect between what Democrats in the 
majority have been trying to accomplish here in Washington, DC, and 
what the American people are telling me--particularly my constituents--
that they actually need.
  Families in Texas are struggling to pay their gas and grocery bills, 
and they are worried about the increase in violent crime. But our 
colleagues are trying to convince them that they are wrong and that 
what is important is a Federal takeover of State-run elections and to 
provide additional tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires from 
blue States by lifting or eliminating the cap on deductibility of State 
and local taxes, as they attempted to do.
  So a lot of the time we have had this last year--the opportunity to 
pass good and meaningful legislation--has been lost, and thus the 
opportunity cost of this partisanship is things that really would make 
a difference and improve the lives of ordinary Americans.
  The American people are not asking for a radical transformation of 
the country. That was pretty clear by the 50-50 Senate that they 
elected in 2020, as well as a bare Democratic majority in the House. 
They want safe communities. They want an affordable standard of living. 
They want secure borders. They want the right to decide what is best 
for themselves and their families and not be dictated to or mandated by 
the Federal Government.
  So I continue to hope that our Democratic colleagues will abandon 
partisanship and use the remainder of this year to support what the 
American people actually want and need.
  Mr. President, I would be glad to yield for a question.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. No. My question was, simply, how long the Senator was 
going to proceed, given that the schedule for my remarks was at 1:35. 
So no further questions. I apologize for interrupting. I was just 
trying to sort out the timing.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.