[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 4 (Tuesday, January 9, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S32-S34]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Supplemental Funding

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, this is a new year, and we are now halfway 
through the 118th Congress.
  For those who are not familiar with the way Congress operates, we 
call a Congress, really, a 2-year period; and so far, we have completed 
the first half of that 118th Congress. But the sad news is we have 
embarrassingly little to show for what Congress has done so far in the 
118th Congress.
  Under Democratic leadership, we have drifted from one crisis to the 
next, doing just enough to avoid catastrophe without addressing the 
biggest problems that our country faces. Those failures are evidenced 
by the fact that the Senate is set to spend the first 4 months of this 
year working on the backlog of things we should have done last year.
  First is funding the government, keeping the lights on, paying the 
Border Patrol, paying our military, making sure that government 
services are available to all citizens.
  We are a quarter of the way through the current fiscal year, and 
Congress has not passed a single funding bill. Not one.
  Now we have until January 19--that is our first deadline--to advance 
4 of the 12 annual spending bills; otherwise, we will find ourselves in 
a partial government shutdown or, what is more likely, a continuing 
resolution of some uncertain duration. It seems inevitable, given the 
timing.
  Then we will only have 2 weeks until the next funding bill deadline 
arrives on February 2, when the remaining Departments and Agencies will 
run out of money.
  Several weeks later, the third deadline will arrive. The Federal 
Aviation Administration must be reauthorized by March 8. Failure to do 
so would result in complete chaos for air travelers.
  The next deadline is April 19. That is when the authorities of our 
intelligence community under the Foreign

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Intelligence Surveillance Act section 702 expire. This is what I have 
called the most important law that the American people have never heard 
of. This literally allows the intelligence community to identify and 
track threats to our national security. It doesn't involve the American 
citizens or anybody here on U.S. soil, but it will expire on April 19 
unless we act.
  Of course, these are just the most obvious tasks ahead in the weeks 
to come that have hard-and-fast deadlines.
  There are countless other items we can and should be doing and that 
deserve the Senate's attention. Chief among those are the national 
security supplemental that has been requested by the Biden 
administration.
  Around the world, conflicts are raging that have a major impact or 
will have a major impact on our own national security. There is a war 
in the Middle East; there is a war in Europe; and growing threats by 
the Chinese Communist Party in China against its neighbors, most 
notably Taiwan.
  Despite the fact that these conflicts are thousands of miles away, 
the outcome of each of these is, in some measure or other, important to 
our national security.
  For example, if Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, emerges 
from the war against Israel with nothing more than a black eye, it will 
send a message to Iran--its principal sponsor--as well as to its other 
terrorist proxies like Hezbollah, like the Houthis in Yemen, like the 
Shia militias in Iraq and Syria. It will send a message that their war 
has been successful, has been a resounding success, and they can not 
only continue but accelerate their attacks against Israel and the West, 
including American interests.
  Then there is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If Russia wins its war 
against Ukraine, President Putin will be emboldened to continue his 
quest to rebuild the Soviet Empire. He has called the failure of the 
Soviet empire back in the early 1990s as the single biggest 
geopolitical catastrophe of the century.
  If Russia is successful in Ukraine, it will not stop there. It could 
well continue on into the rest of Europe, involving the North Atlantic 
Treaty Organization, or NATO. If that happens, then the United States 
and our allies will no longer be able to stand on the sidelines of this 
conflict; we will be on the field by virtue of our treaty obligations 
under article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization treaty.
  In the Indo-Pacific, if China's aggression goes unchecked, it will 
threaten, intimidate, and, ultimately, invade its neighbors. It has 
threatened to do so; we just don't know what the timing is going to be. 
But the Chinese Communist Party will escalate its economic war against 
the United States by blackballing us from the biggest market in the 
world and starving our country of critical technology like advanced 
semiconductors that operate everything from your cell phone to the 
avionics on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
  Our adversaries are watching very closely. Our friends are watching 
very closely. They ask: Can we still rely on America's help? Can we 
still rely on America's leadership?
  We might wish it were so, but there is no country in the world that 
can do what the United States of America can do because of our 
leadership, because of our values, because of our strength. We might 
wish somebody would take our place so we didn't have to do it, but that 
is just wishful thinking.
  Our adversaries are seeing how far they can push the boundaries of 
international norms before members of the rules-based international 
order react. That is us and our fellow democracies that actually 
believe in a rules-based international order. Our adversaries do not. 
They believe in raw power and dominion.
  America cannot stand on the sidelines in the face of attacks on 
freedom-loving people, whether those attacks occur in Israel, in 
Ukraine, or the Indo-Pacific. And this is not just for them. We are not 
doing this as a favor for these countries; we are doing it for us 
because invariably the threat will continue to spread.
  I know that for years before the tragedy of 9/11, we thought we were 
protected by the two oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic, but we 
learned a sad lesson on September 11, 2001: The terrorist attacks 
occurring overseas came home to America, and 3,000 Americans were 
killed as a result of those attacks.
  We might wish this did not involve us--this is their problem, not our 
problem--but it simply is not borne out by the facts or by our hard 
experience.
  So the United States must continue to defend democracy against 
growing attempts to tear it down, and I hope we can do our duty through 
a security supplemental appropriation in the coming weeks.
  Of course, our support for our friends and allies around the world 
can't come at the expense of the threats we are facing here at home. 
The southern border--the Presiding Officer represents a border State. I 
represent a border State. We have a 2,000-mile southern border, and 
1,200 miles of it happens to be in Texas. It has been on fire for the 
last 3 years during the Biden administration.
  The United States has logged more than 6.7 million illegal border 
encounters during the Biden administration. That doesn't count the 1.7 
million ``got-aways''--people who are evading law enforcement. And you 
can imagine why. It doesn't take much imagination. In 3 years, we have 
experienced more illegal migration than we did throughout the entire 
Obama and Trump administrations combined. In 3 years, we have seen more 
than we saw in 12 years.
  Given the stress this places on our people and on our resources--the 
refusal to simply enforce the law by the Biden administration has 
created this welcome mat or this green light--pick the metaphor you 
like--saying that if you come to the border, you are going to be 
released into the United States. That has been a magnet for more and 
more and more people to come.
  According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration has 
released more than 2.3 million migrants into the country in the last 3 
years--2.3 million. That is higher than the total number of border 
crossings at this point in the previous administration.
  When the numbers are this high, it creates serious security and 
humanitarian risks. If law enforcement and detention facilities are 
overwhelmed, it creates an opening for dangerous people and drugs to 
slip through the cracks, and there are plenty of people out there who 
want to exploit these vulnerabilities, not the least of whom are the 
organized crime organizations. Sometimes they are called transnational 
criminal organizations. Sometimes they are called the cartels. But 
these are criminals who get rich and are getting richer by the day 
because of the open-border policies of the Biden administration. They 
care nothing about anything or anyone; all they care about is the 
money. They are getting richer by the day as a result of the Biden 
open-border policies.
  It is dangerous to our national security. Last year, the Border 
Patrol encountered 169 people who matched entries on the Terror 
Watchlist. Nineteen people participated in a terrorist attack against 
Americans on September 11, 2001, killed 3,000 Americans. So far, 169 
people on the Terror Watchlist were encountered just last year--169. 
That doesn't count the number of people on the watchlist whom we don't 
know about because they were part of the 1.7 million ``got-aways.'' 
That 169 people on the Terrorist Watchlist this last fiscal year is 
more than the previous 6 years combined.
  On top of that, the Border Patrol has arrested 600 known gang 
members. Customs and Border Protection personnel have seized roughly 
550,000 pounds of illegal drugs, including more than 27,000 pounds of 
fentanyl--one of the most potent and dangerous drugs on the planet.
  Strangely enough, sometimes I hear people say: Well, good; they got 
it all.
  They didn't get it all. We lost 108,000 Americans to drug overdoses 
last year, including 71,000 from fentanyl.
  A father of a young woman at the Carrollton-Farmers Branch 
Independent School District gave me this rubber bracelet in the memory 
of his daughter, Sienna, who took what she thought was an innocuous 
drug, like Percocet--relatively innocuous--or Xanax, but it was 
actually a counterfeit pill made to look like a pharmaceutical, like 
something you would buy at a drugstore. In fact, it was a counterfeit 
pill laced with fentanyl, and it killed her. That happened 71,000 times

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last year in America as a result of drugs coming across the southern 
border.
  President Biden has simply opened the border for anyone and everyone, 
creating a massive security gap at our doorstep.
  It is absolutely critical that the United States invest in our 
preferred outcome in each of these situations: the border; Israel, 
where Hamas and Iran want to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth; 
Ukraine against this invasion of this sovereign country by Russia, by 
Vladimir Putin; and the Indo-Pacific. All are vital to our security in 
one way or another.

  In October, President Biden asked Congress to provide funding for 
each of these priorities, but it is up to us to go through this request 
and to prioritize the funding and make sure that the tax dollars we 
will be spending are spent efficiently and with a purpose.
  In some places, the President's request was bloated; in others, it 
was wholly insufficient. Large portions of the bill--especially those 
related to the border--would actually make the problem worse. So the 
Senate cannot and will not rubberstamp the President's supplemental 
funding request. There is no chance. Instead, we need to be in the 
process of working through a bill that can deliver real, actionable 
results.
  As we know, the biggest sticking point in the negotiations on the 
border bill is the biggest remaining challenge. Immigration and border 
security are among the thorniest issues that we face here on Capitol 
Hill. But it is absolutely essential that we get this piece of the bill 
done correctly so that it makes a difference.
  I appreciate our colleague Senator Lankford, the Senator from 
Oklahoma, who is leading the charge on our side of the aisle in those 
negotiations. The good news is, he understands these policies in and 
out, and I appreciate his willingness to lead throughout this process. 
I hope that he and our Democratic colleagues and the White House are 
able to reach a deal that will actually have an impact on the flow of 
illegal immigration across our border and finally restore a sense of 
lawfulness on the southern border.
  I believe that legal immigration has been one of the great strengths 
of our country during our country's history--legal immigration; safe, 
orderly, lawful immigration. We naturalize about a million people a 
year, who become American citizens, who want what we have by virtue of 
the fact we were lucky enough to be born here. But illegal immigration 
has been an unmitigated disaster, and President Biden's outsourcing our 
immigration policies to the cartels has been the main reason for that 
unmitigated disaster.
  Well, as we know, there is a lot on the line here, which is why it is 
important that any security supplemental be done right. We can't pass 
something and simply check the box and move on.
  I hope we can reach an agreement on a strong security supplemental 
that addresses the range of security issues we are facing both abroad 
and here at home on our border. I know that negotiations are ongoing, 
but at some point, you have to vote. I hope we get a chance to see what 
those negotiations produce, give the Members of the House and the 
Senate an opportunity to debate and hopefully improve those negotiated 
products by virtue of the amendment process on the floor but ultimately 
do what nobody else in the country can do--only the 435 Members of the 
House and the 100 Members of the Senate. Those 535 people are the only 
ones in the Nation who can actually change the law by passing a bill 
and sending it to the President for his signature. So there is no one 
else who is going to fill the gap, no one else we can turn to and say: 
This is too hard for us. Will you please do it for us?
  There is no one else to do it. That is why we were elected. That is 
why we serve. That is why we take an oath to uphold and defend the laws 
of the United States.
  So it is important that we do our job. Unfortunately, we are going to 
be bogged down by playing catchup and handling the backlog of last 
year. But the world continues to spin on its axis. We have challenges 
that emerge on a daily basis. And this is not going to get any easier. 
So we need to act and to act as expeditiously as we can to do our duty, 
as difficult as it is.
  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.
  Ms. DUCKWORTH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Welch). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.