[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 74 (Wednesday, May 4, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2311-S2312]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                        Issues Facing the Nation

  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to continue to talk about some of 
the challenges the administration is facing and the country is facing. 
Let me talk for just a little bit about the border, about the economy, 
and about our ongoing concerns on COVID.
  First of all, the border--we have had a number of people come to the 
floor and talk about the border, the problems at the border. Many of 
these problems were really self-inflicted on day 1. The President, on 
the first day of his Presidency--and I chaired the inauguration on 
January 20. Hours after that, the President decided to stop building 
the wall.
  I was never an advocate of needing a wall everywhere along the 
southern border, but we had a wall in lots of places already. It was 
doing some good, but it wasn't doing as much good as it needed to do. 
And just the idea that we--with the material on the ground and the old 
wall torn down--would decide to stop building the wall, I think, 
started these problems.

  And if that wasn't enough, then-President Trump had made 
arrangements, the State Department had made arrangements--everybody 
involved--with Mexico to have people who were applying for asylum wait 
for their court date in Mexico. It was my view at the time that we 
should do anything we could to help the Mexican Government make that 
work because the alternative was people would come into the United 
States and not show up for an asylum date later.
  In Mexico, they have learned that they weren't going to qualify for 
asylum because fewer than--9 out of 10 people, roughly, will not 
qualify. You found that out before you got into the United States and 
successfully had entered our country, even though you weren't eligible 
to. If you were waiting in Mexico and you found a lawyer to talk to and 
maybe even a way to hear your case in some way there, you would find 
out that you weren't going to qualify for asylum 8\1/2\ times or 9 
times out of 10, and that is where you should have found that out.
  To come in the country and wait for months to have a court date that 
you may or may not show up for just simply has not worked, and 
everybody that understands this system understands it doesn't work. And 
everybody that understands the obligation of a government understands 
that a government has some obligation to control its own borders, and 
you don't control your own borders by having people come into the 
country that aren't legally eligible to come into the country and then 
just stay here. So that policy produced real chaos.
  And then title 42, under the public health law, was another thing 
that we put in place, as we put all kinds of other COVID-related 
protections in place. And now we want to eliminate title 42. The only 
place, apparently--if you follow the CDC closely right now--that we 
don't need to up our game on COVID protection is the border of the 
United States.
  None of these things makes sense. We have too many people who have 
been encouraged wrongly and told: You come to the United States, you 
ask for asylum, they let you into the United States, and then you don't 
show up for your asylum hearing.
  I am for legal immigration. I am for solving the Dreamer problem. I 
am for doing a lot of things that we need to do to make our immigration 
laws work properly.

[[Page S2312]]

  We need to understand the workforce needs of the country. We need to 
understand what to do about people who came or stayed illegally. But we 
also need to understand how to secure the border. And that is where, 
for any of these other things to work, you have to do that.
  The COVID problem, as I said, appears to only be a problem at the 
CDC--well, actually, it appears to be a problem everywhere but the 
border. The CDC, just yesterday, had a new rule that even for domestic 
travel, people should now--their advice is have a test for domestic 
travel--before you get on an airplane to go domestically, to have that 
test.
  The efforts that we were working on and working hard on to replenish 
the categories that have been spent for research, particularly for the 
therapeutics that we need to have a stock of that haven't been fully 
certified yet--so they have to be the Government is the purchaser of 
those--we were working on a $10 billion bill. And even this morning 
again, the Secretary of Commerce, at our appropriations hearing, said: 
Well, that would just be a start. We need 10 or 20 or 30 billion more 
before the end of this fiscal year than we currently have, and it is an 
emergency--10, 20, 30 billion more than we have now.
  But at the border, no problem at all. At the border, this is no 
problem. We need billions of dollars to deal with it internally. We 
need to not only have fewer tests, which everybody agrees, fewer 
standards for domestic travel; we now need a new standard, they say, 
for domestic travel. Surely they will think about that. And while we 
are negotiating, again, spending, this issue comes out simultaneously 
that the border is a problem.
  And then, of course, everybody knows the economy is a problem. All 
you have got to do to find out the economy is a problem is go to the 
gas station or go to the grocery store, and most Americans do that and 
do it a lot. And when gas prices go up, when food prices go up, every 
family knows it.
  What we are seeing now is inflation that I think it is 8.5 percent. 
It may be settling in at 8.5 percent. But wherever it settles in, it is 
a whole lot higher than it was at any time during the Obama 
administration. The highest month in the entire Obama administration of 
inflation--that is not a year average--the highest single month was 3.4 
percent. Under President Trump, the highest single month was 2.9 
percent. We are now at 8.5 percent, and the Producer Price Index has 
been in double digits since December. That is usually a sign that the 
other index is going to follow that double-digit, scary number that is 
out there.
  So energy policies that produced exactly the result you would think 
they would: higher energy prices; spending policies: the American 
Rescue Plan. I thought, at the time, it was a final COVID bill, but 
when you looked at the bill before we had a chance to vote on it and 
saw it, it really didn't have very much to do with COVID. Maybe 6 
percent of the $1.9 trillion went to COVID. The rest of it went to 
things that put money in people's pockets to help them recover in an 
economy that was already recovering.
  You can't spend $1.9 trillion in a short period of time, even in the 
biggest and most vibrant economy in the world, and not drive up prices. 
So whether it is inflation, whether it is the economic stress--I talked 
to a group of Missouri realtors today, and, of course, they are 
beginning to see people wonder if they can afford a house at the 
interest rates that are out in front of us. It makes a big difference 
if the interest payment is based on 3.5 percent interest or 5.5 or 6.5 
or 7.5 or, as it was in the mid 1980s, 11 to 15 percent interest.
  These are issues we need to get under control. Most of these issues 
have an explanation that is rooted in confused policy decisions in the 
administration.
  I look forward to those confused policy decisions heading in a 
different direction. Let's look at the information. Let's be realistic. 
Let's not continue to see all of these things headed in a direction 
that makes no common sense in America today.
  I yield the floor.

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