[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 209 (Tuesday, December 19, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6063-S6067]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                UKRAINE

  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would like to start by thanking the 
Presiding Officer for being here at this late hour and for the staff 
who are here, the pages who are here, the others who are here late at 
night before the holidays. Thank you for being here and for your 
service. And I think we are coming to a point--maybe not tonight but in 
the next 24 hours--when we are going to conclude our business here for 
the moment or at least temporarily conclude our business.
  I wanted to come to the floor because one of the things that I feel 
very strongly about that we have not yet done is to pass the Ukraine 
funding, which I think is essential for Ukraine, essential for our own 
national security, and essential for Western democracy.
  I really believe that. I think it is of that importance, and I 
believe we should have gotten to a bipartisan agreement on this long 
ago. I think that we should have gotten it through the House of 
Representatives long ago. But I am not in charge of the Senate; I am 
not in charge of the House of Representatives. I am just one person in 
this body--like the Presiding Officer is--and sometimes democracy moves 
more slowly than one would like, certainly than I would like.
  I feel more optimistic today than I did last week about the prospects 
of our getting to the point where we have that bipartisan vote and 
where we can send a piece of legislation over to the House to fund 
this. The House is not going to start it, we know that, because of the 
politics over there.
  This body is the body that needs to lead and has, I think, a moral 
responsibility to lead. But for all those reasons, I wanted to come 
here tonight and say that I was going to lift my hold on the FAA, which 
is something that I have held up through the course of these 
negotiations as a way of keeping us here, to be really honest with you.
  I don't think we would have come back probably from our departure 
last week if we didn't have the unfinished business of the FAA to do, 
and while the FAA is unrelated to the Ukraine funding, it was a must-
pass bill, and it is a must-pass bill. We need to pass that bill.
  And it was something that could force us to come back here to 
continue to have the debate, to continue to have the negotiations, to 
listen to each other on this important issue and the other issues that 
we have got to deal with this week, including the judges we are 
confirming--hopefully, a judge from Colorado.
  I have been out here before on the floor to explain why I care so 
much about this. I was out here when we were passing what is called a 
continuing resolution here in, I think it was September, which is a 
temporary budget that is used to operate the Federal Government in the 
absence of what we should do, which is have a real budget.
  Sometimes we pass these things called continuing resolutions to kind 
of keep the lights on in this place, which I sometimes call the land of 
flickering lights because the standard of success at the end of the 
year often is whether we have kept these lights flickering for another 
year. That is not the standard that I wish for our Congress. It is not 
a standard that I wish for our democracy or for our country.
  That is sometimes the standard here, but every now and then, we 
surprise ourselves. Every now and then, the people who have been in 
this Chamber have taken on a responsibility for leadership. That has 
really made a difference in the world. That has made a difference not 
just to our country but to the entire world and especially to the free 
world, to democracy.
  I have been out here and talked--I won't do it at length tonight--
about my mom's own circumstances. She is--well, I won't say how old she 
is today, but you can do the math. She was born in 1938 in Warsaw, 
Poland--born a Polish Jew at the worst possible moment in human history 
to be born a Jew on this planet and in the worst possible place a 
person could ask to be born, in a city that was going to shortly 
experience the horrific invasion of Nazi troops sent there by Adolf 
Hitler to exterminate the Jews of Europe and many other people who 
lived in Eastern Europe at that time.
  Just in Ukraine and Poland at that time, there were 16 million people 
who were killed. They were killed by Hitler and killed by Stalin. The 
people in that region remember that experience like it was yesterday 
because it was. In human events, it was yesterday.
  My mom, as I said, is still alive. She can't believe she has lived 
long enough to see another shooting war break out in Europe, as she put 
it, but here we are. There is a reason why she can't believe it. I 
mean, part of it is that the freedom she experienced and my 
grandparents experienced and aunt, who is the only other person who 
survived the war in this country, were unimaginable to them because of 
what they had gone through in Warsaw.
  They were separated during the war. My mother was told that her 
parents had been killed, and she believed they had died. Then they were 
reunited after the war, and they went to Stockholm, Sweden, for a year 
after they spent about a year or two behind the Iron Curtain, because, 
of course, the Soviet Union had come in and taken over Poland after the 
war was over--had come in and taken over Warsaw after the war was over.
  Warsaw had been completely destroyed. More than 99 percent of its 
buildings were destroyed. Millions of people who lived in and around 
Warsaw had been killed. There was literally nothing left. It was 
rubble. It was rubble.
  Like many human beings who have experienced ethnic cleansing and 
ethnic battles like these, my mom and her parents probably never 
imagined that there could be a world where disputes could be resolved 
in some other way besides violence, besides political violence.
  Yet, after they stayed there for a couple of years, they realized 
they wanted something better than what they had, so they went to 
Stockholm, Sweden, for a year. They lived there. They started their 
small business again, which was an art dealership that they had in 
Warsaw, a gallery. Then they moved to Mexico City, and then they were 
fortunate enough to be allowed to come to the United States of America, 
and they immigrated.
  My mother was the only person in the family who could speak any 
English. I think she was about 11 years old. Even today, she speaks 
Swedish and Polish and Spanish and English, but then, she was the only 
person in the family who could speak any English. She was the only 
person in her

[[Page S6064]]

family who knew how to register herself in school, so she did. She 
registered herself in the New York City public schools. She graduated 
from Hunter College High School.
  I have never met anybody in my State--I have met a lot of immigrants 
all throughout Colorado and all throughout this country, and I tell 
people sometimes that I still haven't met anybody who has a stronger 
accent than my grandparents had. They didn't think they had an accent, 
but they had an unbelievably strong Polish accent.
  Their joy at being Americans was not because this country was 
perfect, not because this country was exceptional in some sense that 
confers the idea of perfection, but because it was a country that could 
correct its imperfections without resorting to violence and that they, 
as recent citizens to this country, as immigrants to this country, as 
people with strong accents and their Jewish heritage, could contribute 
to the United States of America when they arrived here, and they could 
help address the imperfections we had.
  All they wanted to do was fit into the country. I think they made a 
real contribution to this country. The country is stronger because they 
were here, and they benefited a lot.
  That was an era where there is no dispute about American leadership 
after considerable American failure, because there was a period of time 
when these Halls of Congress ignored the plight of the Jews in Europe 
and ignored that the Holocaust was going on. They knew it. They knew 
about the death camps, and there was nothing they did about it until 
the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, and then we 
entered the war. We never looked back, and the world never looked back. 
We became the arsenal of democracy. We supplied England and Europe with 
the--or Europe, England, and the allies with the materiel they needed 
to fight the war.
  Our economy was growing substantially after the Great Depression. As 
the arsenal dropped, we built those weapons here. We manufactured those 
weapons here. We sent them over to the UK in particular for them to 
deploy on the battlefields of Europe, and we won that war. The United 
States literally saved my grandparents' lives and my mother's life.

  Then, after the war, the question was, What will be done with the 
rubble of Europe? What will be done with the communities and cities and 
towns and rural areas that literally were smashed into smithereens by 
Hitler's tanks?
  We are now, in some ways, living in--not in some ways but actually 
living in the tyranny of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain, 
without the freedoms that people had in Western Europe.
  There is too much to talk about tonight, and I won't do it, but we 
engaged in a process of trying to win the peace after we had won the 
war. That was what the Marshall Plan was all about--the reconstruction 
of Europe, the reconstruction of Japan, decisions that were made on 
this floor by human beings in many ways just like us who had the vision 
to make some hard decisions, the consequences of which would last for 
generations. They had exactly the same concerns we have here today, I 
think, probably. They weren't able to predict the future, but they knew 
what it meant to be on the right side of history, and they were on the 
right side of history.
  The Marshall Plan began what was an era of institution building. They 
created the multilateral organizations that we still have, the rule of 
law, international law, the law of nations, the notion that any 
country's sovereignty shouldn't be attacked by another country.
  All of that came out of that era when my mom was a little girl, and 
it lasted for a long time in Europe. It lasted until 2 years ago when 
Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine. You could argue that it 
lasted until he had a trial run when he invaded Crimea a decade before. 
Until that time, every country in Europe and around Europe had 
respected the international arrangements that were created in the wake 
of the rubble of World War II because people knew how horrible the 
outcomes were in World War II. They knew how many lives had been lost. 
They knew the destruction of humanity, the destruction of churches and 
synagogues and people's faiths, entire religions and languages.
  People still had the memory of World War I, too, and that was the 
point of those institutions, that was the point of the commitment to 
the rule of law, and that was the point of establishing democracy in 
the international organizations I am talking about but also in all 
these countries as well that were on this side of the Iron Curtain.
  Over time, over those decades, our economies grew stronger, the 
democracies grew stronger. Ultimately, the Berlin Wall fell. There were 
people in the 1990s who were writing that this was the end of history, 
that liberal democracy had triumphed over any other form of human 
organization, that capitalism had triumphed over any other form of 
economic organization.
  We have learned a lot since then. We have learned a lot since we were 
attacked on 9/11 and a response that led us to two wars that lasted for 
20 years in the Middle East and then Vladimir Putin's invasion of 
Ukraine, of a free country on the border of Russia.
  The Presiding Officer is on the Intelligence Committee now. It is an 
excellent place to serve together.
  Before you got on there, it was really interesting to be there--not 
because you weren't there. It has gotten better because you have been 
there. But it was fascinating to be there in the lead-up to this war 
because we had the opportunity to see Putin make one mistake after 
another because of who he is, obviously, but also because of the 
totalitarian nature of his society.
  You know, when you live in a totalitarian society and you are the 
person at the top, nobody is going to tell you that what you are doing 
is crazy if they want to live very long. Nobody is going to tell you 
that what you are trying to do is wrong.
  I think one of the huge mistakes he made was imagining that all the 
money he had spent on his army, trying to strengthen his army, had been 
spent well when much of it was lost to corruption. Much of it created 
actually a weak army instead of a strong army. How do we know that 
today? We know that today because the Ukrainian people have basically 
smashed Putin's army.
  Let me tell you something. He didn't know that was going to happen. 
He did not know that was going to happen 2 years ago. Two years ago, he 
had no idea that the Ukrainian people would fight to the death. He 
didn't know that.
  We did. Our intelligence agencies sometimes make mistakes in their 
analysis of intelligence or in the intelligence they collect but not on 
this subject because they know the history of Ukraine; they know the 
history of the Ukrainian people; they know what they went through in 
World War II.
  They know what they went through in World War I. They know what they 
have been through in the last eon in that part of the world, and what 
they said was: They will never give up. They will never give up.
  Putin didn't know that. It turns out the intelligence community was 
right about that.
  They said: Well, we hope that free societies around the world will 
rally to the cause. And I don't think that is really an intelligence 
assessment, the assessment of our democracies. There has been a lot of 
worry--I have had a lot of worry; I have talked about it on this floor 
a lot--about the state of democracy both here and abroad. We are living 
in a time where there are all kinds of forces that are tearing at 
democracy at here and abroad. And there are politicians here and abroad 
who are claiming that democracy is not important or that democracy 
can't deliver for the American people or anybody else.
  That is not uncommon in human history. The reason I think it is 
happening here--there are a bunch of reasons, but a main reason is kind 
of the age-old reason, which is when people start to lose a sense of 
opportunity for themselves and their family. When they are working 
really hard and they can't get ahead; when they feel like they can't 
afford to work because childcare is so expensive, healthcare is so 
expensive. Higher education is going to mean a lifetime sentence in 
your parents' basement because of the amount of loans you are going to 
take out. Those kinds of things tear at people. When that kind of 
opportunity seems lost or obscure, that is when people show up all 
throughout human history, and they say: I alone can fix

[[Page S6065]]

it. You don't need a democracy; you don't need the rule of law. You 
should expect your public sector and your private sector to be 
hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly bankrupt. That is a dark vision. It is 
not an unusual vision in those circumstances.
  But just at the moment when we worry--we fear for our democracy--what 
we saw as a result of the courage and the bravery of the Ukrainian 
people, the skill of the Ukrainian soldiers and military, a country 
that--I still don't understand it--a country that was able to basically 
disable Putin's navy without any navy of their own and open up the 
shipping lanes in the Black Sea so people all over the world could 
benefit from grain that was otherwise not going to be exported--people 
all over the world in free countries saw this courage and said: We need 
to show up for the Ukrainian people. We need to do more for the 
Ukrainian people because they are in a fight that is our fight, and 
they are carrying off this fight in a way that they should be proud of 
and we should be proud of, that inspires us.
  And people all over the world, citizens living in democracies all 
over the world, called up their elected officials and said: Do more, do 
more, do more. And the United States found itself, once again, in a 
position that no other country in the world can occupy, which is the 
leader of the free world, the leader of every democracy around the 
world. And we put together a coalition of countries, largely led by 
NATO, that has supported the Ukrainian people through this fight for 
the last 2 years.
  It has been amazing to see it. I think it has given us confidence in 
our own democracy. I think it has given the Europeans confidence in 
their democracy and the democracies in Southeast Asia as well and in 
Australia, New Zealand, and places all over the world that have 
supported this fight and have been reminded how much more excellent it 
is to live in a free society; to live in a place that is committed to 
the rule of law, that is committed to fair dealing and not to 
corruption.
  That is not a place like where my poor mother and grandparents lived, 
where might made right; where there was no rule of law; where whether 
you survived or whether you didn't survive, whether you survived or 
whether you perished, was a matter of luck, not something you could 
ever predict.
  That has been a noble fight. It is not a fight any of us would have 
wanted, but Putin is a lot weaker today than he was 2 years ago. The 
Russian Army is a lot weaker today than it was 2 years ago. They are 
not a pushover. They have dangerous nuclear and chemical weapons that 
we have to worry about. But they are in worse shape today than they 
were 2 years ago.
  The Ukrainian people have succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. I 
mentioned the intelligence agency reports. You know, one thing they got 
totally wrong was they thought Kyiv would be invaded in 72 hours, that 
the political leadership would be killed or overcome. And President 
Zelenskyy is still there fighting to this day.
  I remember, Mr. President, when we had our first Zoom call with 
President Zelenskyy. It was sort of funny. It was back in--I think 
COVID was still going on, maybe. And I can remember there was a guy 
sitting in for him, just like on any regular Zoom call you would have, 
only he was sitting in for the President of Ukraine. And the President 
of Ukraine had some pretty serious business that he had to conduct; 
and, finally, when the meeting was ready to be started, all of a 
sudden, there he was. There he was. And he said to us on that day--the 
first day I ever heard him talk personally--again, it was on Zoom. He 
said: We are fighting to live our lives the way you live your lives. 
That is how he put it, and it was very simple. That is what we are 
fighting for. And he hasn't changed that tune for the last 2 years. 
That has been his focus.

  He told us the other day that if we fail to continue to fund the 
Ukrainian people, that they will lose. He said that if we fund the 
Ukrainian people and their military, they can win. They can win.
  I think they can win.
  He said that if we don't fund them, they will lose. But he said: But 
we will never stop fighting. We will never stop fighting because the 
Ukrainian people love freedom. And that is the difference between us 
and Vladimir Putin. And that is the difference between us and the 
Russian army.
  I would say, how dare anybody bet against the Ukrainian army or the 
Ukrainian people after what they have done? They have taken back half 
the territory that Putin stole from them. Nobody would have said they 
could do that. They have done that.
  I mentioned what they had done to his navy in the Black Sea--without 
even a navy. They have won battle after battle after battle that nobody 
thought they would have won. And now they are in a difficult winter on 
the frontlines. And it is sort of a stasis, which is not surprising. I 
have heard people out here say that that is somehow a failure for the 
Ukrainian armed forces and the Ukrainian people. And it is hard for me 
to see how that is anything but a success--an extraordinary success.
  We don't know what is going to happen after this winter when the next 
fighting season comes, but I would never bet against the Ukrainian 
people's ingenuity or their military's toughness or their society's 
resolve. I would never bet against freedom. I would never bet against 
democracy. That is the bet we have here. That is the choice that we 
have to make.
  It is a choice where our folks are not involved in the fighting. Our 
folks are not giving their lives in this fight, in this battle for 
democracy. But we are giving our treasure. We are giving our 
intelligence in this fight because this fight is as important for us as 
it is for Ukraine. I don't mean that rhetorically; I mean that 
literally.
  When I hear the isolationist people in this Chamber talking about 
their desire not to continue funding Ukraine, I want to say to them--
and, in fact, I do say to them--even if I accepted your premise, which 
I don't, but let's say I accept your isolationist premise that this is 
a moment in human history when we shouldn't support the Ukrainians 
because we have things that we have to do at home instead of things 
that we have to do in Ukraine, do you think that Putin will stop just 
because we decide to stop? Do you think Putin will just give up because 
we have given up? Do you think that the war will just come to an end, 
or do you think that Putin will roll back through the territory that 
the Ukrainians have seized from his army?
  Do you think that Putin will block the grain shipments in the Black 
Sea that are so important to feeding people around the world and 
stopping famine around the world?
  Do you think that he will threaten Eastern Europe? Do you think that 
he will never give up?
  If you believe that--and the odds are not even 50-50 that that stuff 
is true; it is 100 percent what is going to happen. If you believe that 
and you are an isolationist, you should be for continuing this funding 
because we want to keep our people out of this fight and because it has 
given us the opportunity to rebuild our military and our defense. And 
that is not a small thing because 90 percent of the money that we have 
sent to Ukraine has been spent here rearming the United States, 
restarting factories and supply lines that we are going to need to 
project strength throughout the world. That is not a bad thing; that is 
a good thing. That is what Ronald Reagan meant when he said, ``Peace 
through strength.''
  That is what he meant when he went up and said, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear 
down this wall,'' because you can't bottle up the human spirit and 
because your economy is getting crushed because you can't outcompete 
the United States in terms of our expenditures. We are in exactly the 
same position today.
  I really believe this: that the Ukrainian people can win on this 
battlefield. And that is not just from casually reading the newspaper; 
that is from being a member of the Intelligence Committee; that is 
seeing the intelligence that you are seeing. I don't know if they will 
win. I believe they can win. I think they have a chance to win. I think 
Putin thinks he could lose on that battlefield. On that battlefield, he 
thinks he could lose. And the battlefield he is counting on winning on 
is the battlefield of Capitol Hill, the battlefield of Western 
democracy.
  You don't have to take my word for it. He says it almost every day. 
He says: They are going to lose patience. He says: Their attention span 
is too short.

[[Page S6066]]

  It doesn't help that there are some American politicians, including a 
former President, who seem to be rooting for his success, who seem to 
be rooting against the Ukrainian people, who seem to be rooting against 
democracy. That certainly doesn't help, but even if you don't accept 
that, there is a reason that he believes that--because it is hard to 
sustain these efforts in a democracy. He doesn't have the inconvenience 
of a democracy. He has a totalitarian society that will do what he says 
it is going to do. We have a democracy where people stand for election, 
where sometimes people might say 2 years is enough or a stalemate on 
the frontlines isn't good enough or we have too much to do here to 
spend just a little bit more money to reequip our defense capabilities 
as well as to support Ukraine.

  He is counting on that. He is counting on winning on this 
battlefield. He is counting on the fact that there have been some 
elections in Europe where there have been people who have been elected 
who have the same sort of isolationist temperament that some people 
have here. We can't let that happen. We cannot let that happen.
  The Presiding Officer was there when I first addressed our caucus on 
this question. For me, this is personal. I didn't go through it. 
Obviously, I didn't go through what my mother went through. But nobody 
can escape history, and I think no one can escape history. It is really 
important for us to learn history, and it is really important for us to 
understand the stakes at this moment and what it looks like to be 
invisible to this Chamber; to be fighting on that freezing frontline 
and not knowing whether we are going to come through with the 
ammunition; to be suffering through another cold snap when your heat 
has been blown up by the Russians and not knowing whether the 
humanitarian aid is going to come; to be a politician in some Western 
European capital and wondering whether the United States is going to 
continue to provide the exquisite and capable leadership that has been 
provided by this Nation, in a bipartisan way, over the last 2 years. 
Those are the things that are at stake as we are meeting here tonight.
  In the course of human events, it is really easy to lose patience; it 
is really easy to have a short attention span, certainly a shorter 
attention span than a dictator who is acting out the imperialist 
impulses of Peter the Great, which Putin is, or who is going to be 
there, whether we leave or whether we don't leave, on the border of 
Ukraine for the rest of his life, one way or another, and he thinks for 
the rest of Russia's existence because that is how he thinks.
  So I am not here to say that we are going to end the Russian ambition 
for Ukraine, but I am here to say we have a chance to win this battle 
for democracy for us and for Ukraine, and we should. If somebody had 
set out 2 years ago or 5 years ago or 10 years ago to say, ``Let's have 
a plan to spend 5 percent of the DOD's budget, restart our defense 
capabilities in the United States of America, expose the weakness of 
Putin's Army, make Xi Jinping have to think once or twice or three 
times or four times about the advisability of invading Taiwan because 
of the chance that free countries around the world would all come 
together in support of a country that had been invaded'' or if we had 
said ``Please give us a strategy for the amount of money that we have 
spent and for the $90 billion that is in this request,'' there is no 
way we would have been as successful as the Ukrainians have been.
  So this is an easy choice, I think, for us to make, and it is a very 
important choice for us to make. We cannot allow Putin to win on our 
dysfunctional battlefield.
  I am going to finish just by observing that there are colleagues here 
who have said that they don't want to support this effort unless we 
deal with the situation at the border and unless we deal with 
immigration as part of this.
  By the way, I would mention that one of those people is not the 
leader of the Republican caucus, Mitch McConnell. I don't think there 
is anyone in America who believes more fiercely in the duty that the 
American people have and this Congress, as the representative of the 
American people, to fund Ukraine than Senator McConnell. I want to say 
that. I want to thank him for his steadfastness because it has made a 
difference so far, and I think it will make a difference if we can get 
this over the finish line.
  But there are some colleagues on the other side who have said they 
are unwilling to give their votes here unless we address the border. I 
would not have attached immigration to this debate. This debate is hard 
enough without introducing another issue that we have had so much 
difficulty grappling with. But I think what we have discovered in the 
course of this discussion is something that the Presiding Officer has 
made clear as a Senator from a border State; that the American people 
do not want our border policy dictated by transnational gangs. The 
American people do not want decisions made by smuggling enterprises 
that are violating people's human rights, that are dragging people all 
over the globe to come to the southern border of the United States. The 
American people want to make the decisions for our border and for our 
immigration policy.
  The President has said that our border is broken. The Secretary of 
Homeland Security has said that our border is broken. I spent 2 days in 
the Tucson sector on the border, and it needs a lot of work, and it 
probably needs changes of policy and money. There is a reason President 
Biden put $14 billion in the supplemental for the border. That is more 
money than is in the supplemental for Israel.
  So I would not have attached this to the Ukraine deal, but I 
understand the motivations of people who have attached it, and I 
believe that we can carry out a negotiation on this topic that helps to 
improve our border and improve our immigration system on behalf of the 
American people.
  We have a lot more that we need to do on immigration than we are 
going to be able to do in this negotiation and as part of the Gang of 
8, who passed the last comprehensive immigration bill that passed the 
U.S. Senate; that got 68 votes; that had a pathway to citizenship for 
the 11 million people who were undocumented in this country; that had 
the most progressive DREAM Act that anybody had ever written, much less 
passed, in the Senate; that had all of the visa issues that are so 
important to our universities, to our businesses, to our farmers and 
ranchers, to our farmworkers, to our ski resorts--all of them. There 
was $40 billion of border security in that bill that would have allowed 
us to see every inch of the border.
  We are a long way from getting to those policies issues, but I hope 
that this debate and discussion will lead to more bipartisan 
cooperation in the coming years--months and years--to remind us of 
something that I think we have forgotten for the moment, which is that 
immigration is an incredible strength of the United States of America.
  We have many headwinds in this country--the lack of quality of our 
education system, especially for kids living in poverty; our healthcare 
system, which costs twice as much as any industrialized country's in 
the world. We have to fix those. We have our massive income inequality, 
and we have to fix that. All of those things would strengthen our 
democracy.
  And we have to fix our immigration system. Immigration has been 
responsible for literally a third of our economic growth throughout our 
entire history. Immigration is how we get new talent and new ideas. 
Immigration is how my mom and her parents came to this country. 
Immigration is a dynamic force for good that countries like China don't 
have the benefit of. There is nobody crossing the Gobi Desert to get to 
Beijing, and there is a reason for that. There is a reason for that. It 
is because they want the same thing that President Zelenskyy wants. It 
is because they want the same thing that the Ukrainian people want: 
free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the opportunity 
to lend their talents to improving the society in which they live--no 
matter where they come from, no matter what language they speak, no 
matter what religion they have--for the benefit of their children and 
to know that their children are protected from political violence.
  We have a democratic way of resolving our differences and resolving 
our disputes. We live in a moment when there is a sort of a monopoly on 
wisdom and cable television stations at night that are telling you 
there is only

[[Page S6067]]

one way to think about any issue like immigration or like Ukraine, when 
that is not actually the way this is supposed to work.
  The Founders of this country did not create this country thinking we 
would agree with each other. It was the opposite. They knew what a 
society was in which everybody agreed with each other. That was a 
society where there was a tyrant in charge to tell you what to think 
and to tell you what to believe, like Putin's Russia, like Xi's China, 
like Iran, like North Korea. They knew exactly what those places were 
like. They knew that humans had lots of differences, experiences, and 
attitudes, but they knew that, in a society that was run by a tyrant, 
you weren't free to express those.
  Here, they thought the genius of what they were setting up would be a 
result of the disagreements we have, not of the agreements we have. 
They thought, out of those disagreements, like on this Senate floor, we 
would create more imaginative and more durable results than any King or 
tyrant could come up with on their own. That was the idea.
  I would say to the pages who are here: This may sound like some big 
philosophical thing, but I will bet the same thing is true for you. The 
worst decisions I make are the decisions I make at home, alone in my 
basement, not consulting with someone else's point of view, not 
consulting with someone else's experience or perspective. That is why 
there are 100 Members of the Senate--2 from every State. It is so that 
we can have that disagreement and we can have that discussion, and that 
is why people want to come to this country. It is because they know how 
rare that is in human societies, and that is why Ukraine is leading 
this fight on behalf of the rest of us and why they will never give up.
  I will say again that President Zelenskyy was clear when he came 
here. He said: With your help, we can win. Without your help, we will 
lose. But even if you don't help us, we are not going to give up 
because the Ukrainian people love freedom and we are going to continue 
to fight for freedom.
  Mr. President, I mentioned at the beginning of this speech that I was 
lifting my hold on the FAA because I felt like, even though I am deeply 
disappointed that we haven't passed this Ukraine funding and we haven't 
come yet to an agreement, I think we have made progress in the 
negotiations.
  I had the chance to consult with both the majority leader and the 
Republican leader. I know they have put out a joint statement tonight 
saying that we had made progress and saying that they were committed to 
having the Senate move quickly and, I hope, decisively in January on 
this issue. I think that is the best we are going to get out of this 
tonight.
  I hope it gives us a chance over the next few weeks for all of us to 
consider the example of people who have come before us and who have 
served in this Chamber, who themselves had no monopoly on wisdom--
people who were fallible but who took a risk on the future and 
understood that nobody else can play the role the United States of 
America can play. That was true on the way into World War II. That was 
true on the way out of World War II. And it is just as true today.
  I have found it amazing when we have been in the company of President 
Zelenskyy because you feel like you are in the company of the Ukrainian 
people, and you feel like you are in the company of the Ukrainian 
soldiers, for the reasons that I said earlier about why he is in this 
fight. But it is an amazing thing about human events that, 3 years ago, 
he was a television star of some kind or other, and, today, he is the 
President of a country that has been attacked by a tyrant, invaded by a 
tyrant.
  He is not a tall guy. He is not a strong guy. And the literal weight 
of the world is on his shoulders. And the literal weight of the world 
is on the Ukrainian people's shoulders, and it is on their military's 
shoulders.
  We can help lift that burden from them. We can't take that burden 
away from them, nor should we. They are the ones who are fighting on 
the frontlines, and they will be. But we should help lift that burden 
from them because their burden is our burden and because nobody else on 
this planet is situated in the same way as the United States, has the 
same moral responsibility that we have, and has the capability to lend 
the kind of support we can lend. Because the Ukrainian people have 
showed up and done their job, it is time for us to show up and do our 
job.
  In January, let's tell Vladimir Putin that he lost--he lost--the 
battle on this battlefield, and that he is going to lose the battle in 
Ukraine as well.
  I just want to thank the floor staff tonight for enduring this and 
the pages for enduring this. I want to thank you for all of your work 
during this entire year.
  I wish everybody a happy holiday.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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