Congressional Record, Volume 170 Issue 25 (Saturday, February 10, 2024)

[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 25 (Saturday, February 10, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S805-S831]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

LEGISLATIVE SESSION

______

REMOVING EXTRANEOUS LOOPHOLES INSURING EVERY VETERAN EMERGENCY ACT--
Resumed

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the Senate will
resume consideration of H.R. 815, which the clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

A bill (H.R. 815) to amend title 38, United States Code, to
make certain improvements relating to the eligibility of
veterans to receive reimbursement for emergency treatment
furnished through the Veterans Community Care program, and
for other purposes.

Pending:

Schumer (for Murray) amendment No. 1388, in the nature of a
substitute.
Schumer amendment No. 1577 (to amendment No. 1388), to add
an effective date.
Schumer amendment No. 1578 (to amendment No. 1577), to add
an effective date.
Schumer amendment No. 1579 (to the language proposed to be
stricken by amendment No. 1388), to add an effective date.
Schumer amendment No. 1580 (to amendment No. 1579), to add
an effective date.
Schumer motion to commit the bill to the Committee on
Veterans Affairs, with instructions to report back forthwith
Schumer amendment No. 1581, to add an effective date.
Schumer amendment No. 1582 (the instructions (amendment No.
1581) of the motion to commit), to add an effective date.
Schumer amendment No. 1583 (to amendment No. 1582), to add
an effective date.

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority whip.

H.R. 815

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, many people who follow the Senate

[[Page S806]]

may be asking a basic question: What are you doing? Why is it that the
Senate is only voting once every other day or why does it seem like it
is every other day? Why aren't you in business? If you are here this
weekend, can't you have something to do of a positive nature for this
country?
It is a reasonable question. I would like to describe where we are at
this moment and where I hope we will be soon.
It started with the President of the United States asking for a
defense supplemental bill--a supplemental bill for military spending.
There were several major priorities in that major ask by the President.
One, of course, was the war in Ukraine and our continued support of the
Ukrainian effort to stop the ruthless invasion of Vladimir Putin and
the Russians. This has been going on for 2 years. We have been standing
by the Ukrainians, and they were running out of money, equipment, and
ammunition. President Biden stepped up and said: We are going to
provide assistance to Ukraine as part of this emergency supplemental.
The same thing is true when it comes to the Israelis fighting the
terrorist Hamas after the invasion of their country on October 7. There
is money to provide assistance to them in their effort to end that
terrorism that had such a dramatic, negative impact on Israel.
The third provision relates to Taiwan and the Asian theater. They,
too, are our friends and allies and need assistance from the United
States.
Equally important is a substantial humanitarian aid package needed in
many places around the world, including Gaza, that is part of this
package.
These are four critical priorities that, in the usual course of
business, would be approved on a bipartisan basis--but not this time.
This time, many of the Republican leaders in the Senate said: We will
not consider these important subjects without some provision dealing
with America's border security.
It is true--I think it is obvious--that the situation on our southern
border is currently unsustainable and needed to be changed. The
Republicans insisted this would be part of the package, and there was
no argument on our side of the aisle.
We sat down to find a solution. Now, solutions relating to
immigration are illusive. I know that as well as anybody. We have spent
three decades trying to come up with immigration reform legislation.
Virtually, both parties concede that our immigration system in its
entirety is a shambles and needs to be rewritten. So the suggestion was
made that we put together a bipartisan committee to put together an
alternative on border security to be added to this package that I just
described.
The Republicans said that they wanted James Lankford of Oklahoma to
speak for them. Several of them came to me and said that he has worked
on this long and hard; he is prepared to accept the task of brokering a
bipartisan solution to the border; and we trust him. We want him to be
the spokesman for the Republican side.

No objection on this side of the table.
Two Senators joined him in that bipartisan effort--Senator Chris
Murphy of Connecticut and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They worked for
weeks and weeks and weeks to put together a bipartisan border security
package, and they finally succeeded.
The Republicans said: We don't want to move on that type of a package
unless we have 72 hours to carefully review it before we take the first
vote. Senator Schumer, the Democratic leader, said that is a reasonable
request, and he filed the original version of this bill last Sunday, if
I am not mistaken.
Then, on the following Wednesday of this week we are closing, we
brought this matter to the floor. To our surprise, the Republicans
reversed their position on border security and, despite the best
efforts of James Lankford on behalf of the Republicans, decided that,
overwhelmingly, they were going to reject any border security measure.
Why the change of heart on the Republicans' side? The cause is very
obvious and very public. Donald Trump, the punitive Republican nominee
for President, announced that he was opposed to the package. Republican
Senators who were open to it or in support of it walked away from it
and, in walking away from it, did not produce enough votes for us to
bring the border security measure up as part of this package.
Think about that for a second. We were told for months that we
couldn't move on the underlying bill because we didn't have a border
security proposal. We put together a bipartisan proposal, and we
brought it to the floor. The same Republicans who were insisting on
border security as part of this package turned on it and opposed it.
We took the vote, which told the story. At that point, Senator
Schumer said: We will move forward with the rest of the package.
Those measures are now pending before the U.S. Senate and do not
include border security, at least in the package produced by the
bipartisan group.
I think what I have just given you is a rough summary of where we
stand at this moment. So we are going through the labored process,
under the Senate rules, of burning hours off of the clock--30 hours at
a time--until we can reach these seminal rollcalls to determine whether
we move forward. As Senator Schumer said just a few minutes ago, we
face the next one of those rollcalls tomorrow, at around 1 o'clock in
the afternoon. That is 30 hours after the last vote.
But there is a way to avoid this kind of inactivity on the floor of
the Senate and to really get to the questions at hand, and that is what
we normally do, that being a unanimous consent--both sides of the
aisle, Democrat and Republican--to take up certain amendments or
measures. We are at that point. We should be moving forward so that we
can finish our work on this important legislation and go home for a
break over the Presidents' holidays.
We don't know what is going to happen today. If we follow the book
and don't reach a unanimous consent agreement, there may be little or
nothing happening on the floor today, but if we can reach a bipartisan
agreement on a list of acceptable amendments on both sides of the
aisle, we can move forward, and the Senate can be the Senate as it
should be. That is what is pending.
So that is a rough summary of where we stand. I am disappointed that
a good-faith effort by these three Senators that produced a measure--
and I don't agree with it in every detail--which is a reasonable step
forward, has been summarily rejected by most Senate Republicans.
As for Senator Lankford, I listened to him on the floor. He spent 30
minutes explaining what was in this package. There are some things that
are absolutely necessary: resources at the border that we know that we
need; people--professional people--to deal with the onslaught of
refugees and asylees who are coming to our border; in addition to that,
money for technology.
Doesn't everyone concede, on both sides of the aisle, that we need to
do everything humanly possible to stop the flow of narcotics,
particularly fentanyl, into the United States? I don't think that is
even debatable. The bill that Lankford and the others proposed had
provisions in there and resources to accomplish that goal.
The same thing is true when it comes to resolving the status of
people who present themselves at the border. There are people who are
desperate and fearful for their lives, who are staying in certain
countries and escaping to the United States in the hopes that they will
be safe. For more than 50 years, we have honored that pursuit and given
a means for people to reach their goal. Now the standards are going to
be tougher under the Lankford legislation, and it means that people are
going to be held to a higher standard.
Also, there are provisions that those who are at the border will have
their cases ultimately resolved in a much more expeditious way. I think
we all agree that waiting 1 year, 2 years, 5 years or more really
creates a hardship on the system and an uncertainty that needs to be
resolved. It takes more immigration judges and people at the
administrative level for processing, and the Lankford bill did that.
What I have just described in the provisions of the Lankford
bipartisan bill was rejected by the majority of Republicans because
Donald Trump announced that he was against it. He went so far as to
say: Blame me if we do nothing on border security.

[[Page S807]]

Well, I certainly think he is deserving of blame. He stopped
Republicans who were positive of the subject from moving forward and
helping us to do something positive on the immigration front.
There is another part of this story that I want to speak to very
quickly this morning, and it relates to a measure that I introduced in
the Senate almost 20 years ago. It is called the DREAM Act.
Yesterday, Senators Padilla, Cortez Masto, others, and I filed an
amendment to offer the Dream Act as an amendment to this bill as part
of the package if we are going to have a bipartisan package of
amendments. I introduced this legislation, as I said, more than 20
years ago. It provides a path to citizenship for young immigrants who
were brought to the United States as children and allows them to remain
in the United States--their home.
These are kids brought here by their parents. There wasn't a family
vote or a family decision; they were kids, and they did what their mom
and dad told them to. They end up in the United States undocumented.
They went to school here. They stood up each morning in the classroom
and pledged allegiance to that same flag we just pledged allegiance to.
They believed they were part of this country. It wasn't until they were
usually 10 or 12 years old that their parents leveled with them and
told them: Your legal status is uncertain. You are undocumented. We
don't know what your future holds. Be careful. If you are not careful,
you could be deported, and we could be deported with you.
That terrible circumstance prevailed for hundreds of thousands of
young people in this country. The DREAM Act said: Give them a chance.
Give them a chance to earn their pathway to citizenship. That is what
the bill said when it was introduced. They have known no other home.
Yet, without congressional action, they spend every day in fear of
deportation.
Let me tell you about one of these Dreamers. Her name is Tatiana
Vasquez Lopez. She attends college in my home State of Illinois.
This is the 140th time that I have told the story of a Dreamer here
on the floor of the U.S. Senate. I can make speeches about the subject,
but if you meet these young people and hear their life story, it is a
much more convincing experience.
Tatiana was born in Guatemala. She came to the United States when she
was 11 months old. She grew up in Alabama and became an important part
of her community. She volunteered at her local church during the COVID
pandemic to help families in need. She also completed a teaching
internship, during which she visited schools across the school system
to support teachers and students. She did all of this while she was in
high school.
Tatiana is currently studying at Dominican University in River Forest
in my home State of Illinois. She is a leader in the Chicagoland
community as president of the Organization of Latin American Students.
What is her goal? A Ph.D. in psychiatry so she can work as a trauma
therapist helping families and children. She wants to continue giving
back to communities in need and helping provide lifesaving resources to
others--resources she wishes her family had received when they came to
the United States.
She is currently protected from deportation thanks to the DACA
Program. DACA stands for ``Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.''
The DACA Program was an outgrowth of the DREAM Act. When we couldn't
pass the DREAM Act on the floor of the Senate, former Senator Barack
Obama from Illinois, as President of the United States, was importuned
to consider doing it by Executive action.
I wrote a letter--the first letter--to President Obama, cosigned by
Richard Lugar, the late Republican Senator from Indiana, asking Barack
Obama to consider Executive action to protect young people like
Tatiana. Then I sent another letter with about 23 Democratic Senators
supporting the same goal. Fortunately for us, Obama was a cosponsor of
the DREAM Act and agreed with our goal in this legislation, and he went
to work to create DACA.
That program he established has changed hundreds of thousands of
young lives like Tatiana's. DACA has protected more than 800,000 young
people in America from deportation, and it has allowed them to pursue
higher education and enter our workforce.
Unfortunately, since President Obama established the program,
Republicans have waged a relentless campaign to overturn it and deport
these young Dreamers back to countries they may not even remember.
Last September, a Federal judge in Texas declared the DACA Program
was illegal, but the decision left in place protections for current
DACA recipients like Tatiana while the appeal is pending. All of them
live in fear that the next court decision will dramatically change
their lives.
Until a permanent solution is written into law, Tatiana's service to
her community is at risk, as is the service of Dreamers who work as
doctors, teachers, engineers, and so much more across America.
I introduced the DREAM Act, as I said, more than 20 years ago to
provide a solution, a path to citizenship for Dreamers. That solution
is long overdue and should be acted on as quickly as possible.
We should all be able to agree that Dreamers only make America
better, and we in Congress must do better by them. I urge my colleagues
to join me in supporting the Dreamers and to work with me to provide
them with a path to be part of America's future. This amendment would
do just that.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. LEE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Hassan). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. LEE. Madam President, I rise today because Senate Republicans
made a commitment last fall, not so very long ago, a commitment that we
made to each other and that we made to the American people.
That commitment was simple. It was one that said: Before we send
another dollar, another dime, another penny to Ukraine, let's do what
we can, even if it means harnessing the drive that some in this body
feel toward sending more money to Ukraine. And let's harness that to
make sure we can force the will within the administration to actually
enforce the border.
In truth, we have all made commitments sort of like this. We have all
made other commitments that should lead us to this conclusion, should
have gotten us there long ago, with or without Ukraine funding on the
mind, with or without anything compelling us to do it, because every
single Senator--every man, every woman--serving in this body is
committed to this sacred duty and did so implicitly when we raised our
hands, as required under article 6 in the Constitution, to take an oath
to ``support and defend the Constitution of the United States against
all enemies, foreign and domestic; [and] bear true faith and allegiance
to the same.''
Well, through time and through the efforts of a faithless few, we are
now poised to treat that commitment that we made to each other, to
Senate Republicans, and to Americans, sort of the same way that
President Biden has treated his own solemn oath to protect this
country's borders, treating them as somehow expedient, expendable, and
now, apparently, expired.
We cannot send billions of dollars to Ukraine, while America's own
borders are bleeding. This betrayal is all the more loathsome because
it occurs at a time when the eyes of the Nation are turned to sport and
family and fun, as well they should be. Heaven help us, the people of
America should not have to watch us every hour of every day lest their
own government stab them in the back. What, after all, have they done
to deserve such untrustworthy public service? What grudge does this
body hold against the very people who elected us and pay our salaries?
Today we witness the tragic dominance of what President Eisenhower--
one of our Nation's great patriots and great generals who later became
President--called ``the military industrial complex.''
This machine, to be clear, was not built by our brave men and women
in uniform who pledge their very lives

[[Page S808]]

every day for safety and independence, nor was it built by every
contractor, every person or entity out there that supplies our men and
women in uniform with weapons and cutting-edge technology that they
need to protect the United States against our adversaries.
Now, many of them are not at all part of the military industrial
complex, regardless of what they may do for a living, but I speak of a
subset of those individuals and entities when I speak of a machine
forged by the unhealthy union between their businesses and politicians
in Washington, DC, specifically to make business out of bloodshed and
do so in concert with politicians in Washington and across the world
who make bloodshed their business.
All of this is at the expense of our freedom, our honor, and our
self-determination, to say nothing that the time that Americans have to
spend paying to fund the military industrial complex. Now, make no
mistake, I am under no illusion that my time here today will itself
somehow be sufficient to jam the gears of this machine, nor is it
likely to stifle the anthems of those who worship it, but I intend to
give an account of how, in this instance, sadly, like so many others,
its acolytes have consumed resources meant for the security and welfare
of our own people to continue violence among people far away with whom
we are not at war and from whose suffering we, the American people,
will gain no victory.
And perhaps if I can sketch a blueprint of how this infernal engine
functions today, future generations may well succeed in loosening its
screws, cutting off its stolen fuel, and letting the whole corrupt
bargain come crashing, finally, to the ground.
As I do so, I need to go back for a moment and describe the
conditions last fall in which Republicans made the commitment I
described moments ago, a commitment to each other and to the American
people.
What we saw last fall was that there was yet another call from
President Biden and from many at the Pentagon and the military
industrial complex for yet another round of Ukraine funding, this after
we had already sent some $113 billion to Ukraine, a sum of money that,
last time I checked, was roughly double what Russia spends on national
defense in an average year and is perhaps 20, 25 times what Ukraine
spends on defense in a typical year.

It is a sum of money that exceeds what any other nation has spent on
Ukraine. These are phenomenal sums as a percentage of GDP by pretty
much any metric. And when we talk about the defense specifically, to my
knowledge, it is significantly higher than every other nation's
security assistance to Ukraine combined since the start of this war.
It is a large sum of money. Now, this request came at a time when the
American people were starting to realize, increasingly, the extent to
which excessive spending in Washington, DC, has affected their day-to-
day lives. They started to sense what we have long been warning of,
what was predictable, foreseeable, and, in fact, foreseen and warned of
since the outset of this administration; that when we spend too much
money, everything gets more expensive. And by ``everything,'' I mean
literally everything, including and especially basic living expenses.
If you take a look at what it costs to sustain a family, to sustain a
household for the average American household since the day President
Biden took office, just over 3 years ago, it costs about a thousand
dollars per month, per household, more than it did on January 20, 2021.
This is no small sum. It adds up to about $12,000 a year, this per the
average household in America.
Now, of course, it affects different people differently, but for
America's middle class and certainly for its poor, this can mean the
difference between living paycheck to paycheck and making it and living
paycheck to paycheck and then not making it.
This is felt by families throughout the middle class, throughout
America, in ways that leave no room for anything. This comes right off
of their bottom line. This, for many, means nothing other than what is
the bare minimum to live can be justified, can be afforded. Family
vacations for countless Americans, a thing of the past now. If they
were just getting by before Bidenomics, it wreaked havoc on their
paycheck and on what little savings they may have had. That cushion is
no longer there, if it was even there to begin with.
This is, to be sure, not just something that occurs out of nowhere;
this occurs because Washington spent too much money. Milton Friedman
warned of this many decades ago when, among other things, he explained
that the true cost of government is reflected less accurately in the
rate of taxation and more accurately in the rate of government spending
relative to the economy because, as he explained, the way our system
works, the way the Federal Reserve Bank and the Treasury interact with
our system in which the U.S. dollar, the world's reserve currency--all
of these things combine in such a way that when the U.S. Government
borrows more money, when it engages in more deficit spending, it has a
very similar effect as to what we would see if we just printed more
money--which, effectively, we are doing.
I have warned of this for many years over periods of time that have
spanned three different Presidential administrations, under two
different political parties, both as they have been in charge of the
White House, have been in charge of the Senate and the House of
Representatives. And I have warned of these consequences under Senates,
House of Representatives, and White Houses of every conceivable
partisan combination.
And each time the warning is something like this; that as we continue
to do this, it will make each dollar spend less money, and we will get
closer and closer to that day when our interests and our national debt
will start to eclipse other priorities.
When I started warning of this, I think our annual interest payment
on national debt was more in the range of 250 to 300 billion a year. It
is now more than double that. Some have expected that by the end of
this year will see interest on the national debt accruing at a rate of
a trillion or more a year. The difference between where we were just a
few years ago and where we could well be within the next 6, 8 months,
maybe the next year or two, could well exceed what we spend on national
defense.
This isn't sustainable. And in any event, as Milton Friedman
explained, the true rate of taxation is explained best by total
government spending as a percentage of GDP, even more than it is by the
rate of taxation. His explanation for this makes a lot of sense once
you fully consider what he is saying; that part of the rate of
taxation, as you have to imagine, ends up being the inflationary impact
of the government just printing more money when it refuses defiantly,
as it has been over the last few years, to acknowledge that there is
any limit on its ability to spend more.
Now, in the last 3 or 4 years, we seem to have taken that to a true
extreme with multitrillion-dollar deficits every single year. For the
last 3 or 4 years prior to that, we had been on a pattern of roughly a
trillion-dollar-a-year deficits.
And each moment before we turned down that ugly corridor, I noted
that this was happening and is happening today at the peak of the
economic cycle with really low unemployment. It is not one of these
circumstances where we are forced into this simply because, contrary to
all expectations, there isn't enough money for government to run, to
perform its basic functions, things that only a government can perform.
No, it is just this body can't control itself. It can't control its
ability to spend to the tune of trillions of dollars a year more than
we have. And it has gotten so much worse during this administration. It
was bad enough before then, but it has gotten so much worse since then
with trillions upon trillions of dollars a year being spent in excess
of what we bring in. So it shouldn't come as any shock that the
American dollar today buys a whole lot less than it did just a few
short years ago and that the average American family has to shell out
an additional $1,000 a month just to live--just to live. From gas to
groceries, from housing to healthcare and everything else--everything
costs more today because the government has flooded the market with new
cash.

So what does that do to ordinary people? You know, most Americans
live on

[[Page S809]]

a relatively fixed set of money. They are living on a salary; perhaps
on a pension; perhaps they are living off of wages or payments, if they
are independent contractors, that don't vary a lot from one year to the
next. And even if they are lucky enough to have gotten a raise since
January 20, 2021, nearly all of the time it is not nearly enough to
cover the difference in what they are having to shell out because of
Bidenomics and because of this chronic pattern of overspending that, of
course, predated Bidenomics but has become significantly worse since
President Biden took office.
The American people are suffering, and they are suffering badly.
Perversely, America's wealthiest don't suffer from this in the same
way--not at all, in fact. Quite the contrary, many of them get far
wealthier during periods of great inflation. Wall Street, you will
notice, has been elated, has reason to rejoice recently, but those
rejoices are not felt up and down the economic ladder, no. Quite to the
contrary, they are felt in ways that should not make this body or
anyone that has anything to do with dramatic, unjustifiable increases
in Federal spending feel ashamed.
And so the American people have understandably become more and more
leery of spending that isn't deemed essential and isn't deemed
something that goes directly to the benefit of the American people, any
spending that is not necessarily ours to have to be responsible for.
Not to say that there aren't plenty of Americans who are
understandably and justifiably concerned about Vladimir Putin. He is
not a nice man. He has not behaved well, especially with regard to
Ukraine.
At the same time, remember, we have sent over $113 billion already to
that country. Meanwhile, we continue to receive pressure from our
European allies, our NATO partners, who increasingly love to say things
like: All eyes are turning to the United States. We are relying on the
United States to solve this, to fix this; you have to spend more
money--apparently, feeling no sense of irony or responsibility on their
part as they say this. They just want us to turn on our printing
presses yet again, send more money over there yet again.
Well, why? Why is this? Why shouldn't they have to, at least, first,
match or exceed in not all dollars and a percentage of their combined
GDP, what we have sent? In fact, why shouldn't they have to far exceed
that? This is in their backyard, not ours. They have more at stake.
They have greater familiarity with the area, the region, than we do,
and it is closer to where they are than we are, and we have already
spent a whole lot more than any of them or all of them combined. So why
is this ours to do and not theirs? Why are all eyes turning to America?
Well, they are turning to America because America has, in the past--
especially the recent past--been far more willing to open its wallet.
And as long as you have got one party at the dinner table who is
perceived as the one most likely to pick up the check, sometimes the
eyes turn to that party. And, clearly, they are here.
But let's think about this for a minute. Separate and apart from the
fact that they are closer to the action and have more at stake, they
have also been the beneficiaries of a security umbrella funded
disproportionately by the American people, not just for years, but for
decades. In fact, for the entirety of my lifetime, we have been the
largest backstop, by far, of the security umbrella that our NATO
partners and allies in Europe enjoy.
There has been an understanding in recent years that everyone in NATO
should spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, and some have
tried to honor it. Most of them have not been consistent in honoring
it. Many, if not most, are not honoring it as we speak.
And so here again, it is understandable why their eyes would all turn
to us. We provided them security backstop for decades,
disproportionately providing the funds, the resources, the human
resources, the technological resources and otherwise to help ensure
their security.
Now, we have done this for decades in part because, you know, we have
seen it as a partnership. We have seen this as something that can
benefit the American people, but we always have to have that discussion
as Americans. We can't just continue to be that backstop unflinchingly,
without continuing to ask the question year after year, month after
month: What are we getting out of this, and are they also doing their
fair share?

The Senate, when looking at this, could credibly argue that the
American taxpayer has been not only making them more secure, more safe
by providing a significant portion of their defense umbrella but that,
by so doing, the American taxpayer has also funded all kinds of other
things in Europe that have nothing to do with European or American
national security. You see, those countries, buoyed up by our generous
support, consistent support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
have freed up budgetary resources within those member states to do
other things. So the Senate could argue: We have helped them not only
with their own national security needs, but also even with all kinds of
social programs. Whatever it is that they are spending money on over
there to do through their government, we made it easier. And it is
really hard for the American taxpayer to look at that, to see that, to
see that has been happening for decades; and their eyes are still
turned to us, their hands are still outstretched for us to do more than
they have been willing to do to protect themselves in their own
backyard.
The American people have seen this, and they have started to get the
sense that maybe, just maybe, their hands are still outstretched
because we have established this pattern, this expectation, that we
will do more than they will do in this war, that we will do more than
they would otherwise have to do simply because we are there and they
rely on us.
But the American people started asking: Why are we continuing to do
this when they are not pulling their share, and when their share is--
and properly should be--a lot more than ours, given their proximity to
the action and given their longtime reluctance to fund their own
security needs in their own nations. It is a reasonable question a lot
of Americans are asking.
This question becomes even more poignant and the answers to those
questions more important to address carefully and thoroughly when you
consider that as we are trying to help secure the border integrity of
Ukraine, our own border is in a state of absolute pandemonium, utter
chaos, and utter free fall. This is added to their concerns.
So this is part of that backdrop against the commitment Republicans
in the Senate made to each other and to the public just a few short
months ago, last fall, as we started talking about this Ukraine aid
package. Here are some of the factors that have been unfolding, factors
that have caused the American people concern.
Now, just a few short weeks ago, the House Judiciary Committee
released a report containing new data showing the severity of the Biden
border crisis. These numbers are shocking, and they also confirm the
numbers that Americans were seeing in smaller pieces, bit by bit last
fall, causing them, understandably, to feel real concern about this.
It was in--there was an article, I believe, in Time magazine just a
few months ago talking about the fact that between May or June of last
year and October or November of last year, support for additional aid
to Ukraine had plummeted dramatically to a point where it was what--
most Americans, at one point, supported it, a minority of Americans
that did by November, in part because they were aware of this
phenomenon unfolding on our border, the phenomenon that is laid out in
great detail in this report issued just a few weeks ago by the House
Judiciary Committee.
Since January 20, 2021, the day that Joe Biden was sworn in, the 46th
President of the United States, the Biden administration has released
into the United States more than 3.3 million illegal aliens. In fact,
in a January 2024 interview, Secretary Mayorkas, who runs the
Department of Homeland Security who is in charge of the Border Patrol
and Immigration and Customs Enforcement--protecting the American
homeland, as his departmental name implies--he admitted as much,
stating

[[Page S810]]

that the Biden administration has released, in his words, more than a
million illegal aliens each year--each year.
Those are just the ones that they released. These are not encounters
or known ``got-aways,'' which are at least another 1.7 million,
probably a lot more than that. And these are people they caught and
then released into your hometown, my hometown, into every hometown in
America.
Why? Why would they do this? We have an elaborate body of laws that
is designed to protect us against this. We have an elaborate array of
law enforcement entities whose job it is not to facilitate this mass
invasion but rather to oppose it, to slow it, to deter it, to halt it,
to reverse it, whenever, wherever possible in a myriad of ways.
By the way, who exactly are these people they are just catching and
releasing? Here is how the House report describes it: People from all
over the planet are taking advantage of the turmoil at the southwest
border. In fiscal year 2023, Border Patrol encountered illegal aliens
from roughly 170 countries, including--this is interesting--24,048 from
China; 15,429 from Turkey; 15,000 from Mauritania; 10,368 from
Uzbekistan; 7,390 from Russia; 5,604 from Afghanistan; 3,087 from
Egypt; 1,270 from Pakistan; 1,122 from Kyrgyzstan; 457 from Iran; 375
from Syria; 81 from Iraq; and 74 from Yemen.

That was a quote from a report. Those are actual numbers.
We have countries that are not exactly friendly to the United
States--quite to the contrary--country after country whose own people
have entered our country, entered our borders without documentation,
and then have been released into our own country by our own government.
Why?
We have them coming in in numbers from some specific countries that
are larger than the towns and entire cities of voters in each of our
States. In each of our States, we have people living in cities, in
towns, and in communities that are much smaller than these numbers--
than the more than 24,000 from China, 15,500 from Turkey, and 15,263
from Mauritania. Why do we have that many coming in from Iran, that
many from Syria and Iraq and Yemen, that many coming in from
Afghanistan?
The numbers are concerning, and it should concern everyone. Why is
this happening? More importantly, why is our own administration and why
is our own President and his administration so determined to facilitate
this and to not stop it?
Those numbers are just from fiscal year 2023, by the way. They don't
take into account people who have come in since then, and we know that
since then--the fiscal year 2023 ended at midnight at the end of
September 30, and we know that since September 30 of last year, we have
seen record after record after record broken for daily migrant
encounters. One can imagine that it has only gotten much worse since
then.
Think about all that at the same time that we are handing over our
weapons reserves to Ukraine--reserves that could take a decade or more
to replace--just allowing people into our country, catching and
releasing military-age males from China, from Russia, from Afghanistan,
from Iran, from Syria. Why? What sane, nonsuicidal nation would do
this? America as a nation wouldn't. The American people wouldn't.
The American people are not the same as those who administer their
government. They should be. They should be accountable. The one should
be accountable to the other, but lately they are not. Lately, they are
doing things that I think, if you randomly selected people from the
phonebook--I don't even know if phonebooks exist anymore. If you
randomly selected them from, say, voter rolls and called them and said:
What do you think? Should we release 24,000 Chinese nationals who have
crossed into our border without documentation, having paid, each of
them, many, many thousands of dollars?
In the case of Chinese nationals, it is probably well into the tens
of thousands of dollars per person to be smuggled into the United
States.
Should we release them?
Well, I can't imagine that many randomly selected Americans would do
this, so why is our own government doing it? It is baffling. Why would
it do this and at the same time say: This is nothing to worry about,
and let's give a lot of our weapons stockpiles to another sovereign
nation to fight yet another nation half a world away.
Those two things coming at the same time seem rather dangerous. It is
analogous, you might say, to drinking and driving. If one drinks and
remains in one's home and doesn't handle any dangerous equipment, one
might be relatively safe. If one drives without drinking, then driving
can be done safely, especially if the person is not inebriated. But if
you put those things together, you drink and then you drive, you can
have some real problems.
Here, I don't think either of these things would be safe to do. I
don't think it is safe to release many tens of thousands of foreign
nationals even if you just limit it to these countries, to say nothing
of the millions of total foreign nationals who have been released into
the United States after crossing our borders without documentation.
When you take into account the many tens of thousands of people
coming from countries where we have a lot of enemies, where in many
cases the regime in power in those countries is itself our sworn enemy
and may well be behind efforts to get these people into the United
States for purposes that are hostile to our interests, I can't imagine
why we would want to do this.
Why would we want to do this at all, and then why would we want to do
this at the same time we are depleting our own weapons reserves,
including reserves of some very sophisticated weaponry that could take
us years, if not a decade or more, to replace? It is baffling.
In January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection watered down the
screening process for Chinese asylum seekers amidst a record surge of
such cases. The Biden administration, for its part, ``streamlined''--
word in quotes, ``streamlined''--the process by slashing the number of
questions officials are required to ask of Chinese nationals from
almost 40 until just a few weeks ago down to 5.

So the Biden administration is giving away reserves of our weapons to
be used for our own self-defense while simultaneously making it easier
for bad actors from countries like China to embed themselves into our
country, contrary to our laws. This does not sound like national
security. This sounds like the exact opposite of national security.
Of the nearly 6 million illegal encounters that have occurred from
January 20, 2021, through September 30, 2023, which was the end of
fiscal year 2023, at least 3,095,577 illegal aliens had no confirmed
departure from the United States as of the end of September. In fact,
according to the House report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement--
ICE, as it is known--ICE's nondetained docket swelled to a record of
nearly 6.2 million illegal aliens as of the end of the last fiscal
year.
There are at least 617,607 aliens on ICE's nondetained docket who
have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, meaning more
than half a million criminal aliens are on the streets of the United
States and therefore free and somewhat likely to reoffend in U.S.
communities.
This is not hypothetical. It happens every day. This is not paranoid
fantasy. This is the sad, tragic reality of America in 2024.
Let me say that again. Over half a million people, over 500,000
criminal aliens are in our communities.
As of December 10, 2023, there were 1,323,264 illegal aliens with
final orders of removal who remain in the United States. The Department
of Homeland Security placed only 6.8 percent of illegal aliens
encountered at the southwest border into proceedings to even be
screened for asylum eligibility.
Remember, one of the ways this thing started, one of the ways it
began--it has mushroomed into something much bigger than that--but at
the end of the Trump administration, we had secured our southern
border. Sure, there were still a few people trickling across, but it
was in numbers low enough that they were able to catch them, apprehend
them, and deport them with sufficient regularity that the numbers were
slowing month after month.
Once that happened, the international drug cartels that, between
them, make many tens of billions of dollars every single year off of
this

[[Page S811]]

human smuggling, human trafficking, and in many instances human sex
slavery operations, all connected to these caravans of people migrating
into the United States--they were able to see that this was becoming a
less profitable business. Why? Because people won't pay many thousands
of dollars, in some cases.
People from some countries, particularly high-risk individuals, might
end up paying many tens of thousands of dollars, but the ones who pay
the least I believe are paying $5, $6, $7,000 to be brought across.
People will stop paying that when they see that their chances of
getting across the border are relatively low. Their chances of being
detected, apprehended, detained, and deported are relatively high. That
business is going to dry up, and this self-licking ice cream cone, this
self-perpetuating machine suddenly stops having success at one's hand.
That is where we were as of the end of 2020, but as of January 20,
2021, the Biden administration made it clear that these things were
going to change. He made clear among other things that the Biden
administration would be abandoning, ultimately ending the so-called
``Remain in Mexico'' program under the official title of the migrant
protection program, as well as safe-third-country agreements entered
into with other Latin American nations.
The idea behind these programs was that if you crossed into the
United States on land on the southern border--obviously crossing in
from Mexico--the idea was that if you crossed in, you would be sent
back to Mexico. If you applied for asylum, as many illegal immigrants
do--many who show up without papers, without documentation, therefore
illegally in the United States--historically, many of them have filed
immediate applications for asylum.
Now, the numbers vary, but estimates out there are that at least 90
percent, and some have said it is more like 98 percent--I don't know
what the true figure is, but it is fairly overwhelming--that if you
apply for asylum, you are probably not going to get it after crossing
illegally into our country. There are certain statutory criteria that
they have to meet. They have to establish that they are eligible for a
grant of asylum, and it has to do with establishing a credible fear of
persecution within and by their home country pertaining to one of the
protected classes identified in the statute.

Historically, a lot of the people who come into our country without
documentation--illegally, in other words--have applied for asylum, but
at least 9 out of 10 of them--sometimes the numbers, depending on whose
statistics you put the most faith in, say it is closer to 10 out of 10
of those individuals--will, on average, be denied asylum. They won't be
able to stay here.
Problems arose, though, when this administration took control. It
ended the ``Remain in Mexico'' program. That program, again, said that
if you cross into the United States by land from Mexico without
documentation and, thereafter, claim asylum, you will have to remain in
Mexico. You will have to be deported back to Mexico where you will wait
regardless of where you are from. In some cases, you might be able to
be deported to your home country. Regardless, at most, you will be sent
back to Mexico, where you will have to wait and wait and wait to see
whether your asylum application has been adjudicated by an immigration
judge as meritorious. Then and only then could you enter the United
States.
When the Trump administration put this program in place, waves of
illegal migrants and these caravans, once a torrent, once a raging
river, slowed down to a trickle. Why? Well, because people knew it
wasn't worth spending the time and the money, to say nothing of the
risk to life and limb, to say nothing of the fact that--by some
accounts, it is 30 percent; by other accounts, it is 60-some-odd
percent--women and girls and, in some cases, also men and boys were
trafficked on these caravans. They were sexually assaulted along the
way. Countless of them were subjected to human sex trafficking, to sex
slavery.
During my most recent visit to the U.S.-Mexico border at the McAllen,
TX, area, an area where I spent 2 years--2 wonderful years--as a
missionary 30-some-odd years ago in the early 1990s, during my most
recent visit there just a few weeks ago, I was told something stunning
by the Border Patrol personnel there, who said: You know, for the first
time since the 1860s, for the first time since the end of the Civil War
and then the ratification of the 13th Amendment which prohibits slavery
and indentured servitude, we now have significant numbers of people--
for the first time since the Civil War--who are living in indentured
servitude, many of those in sex slavery. It was ground to a halt once
``Remain in Mexico'' was instituted, but one of the first things
President Biden did when he came into office was to get rid of it.
Now, a number of court battles have erupted since then. They have
been boiling, simmering, boiling over, and coming back again at times.
President Biden lost multiple rounds of that litigation. He is still
dragging his feet, doing everything he can, kicking and screaming to
make sure he doesn't have to put it in place. Why? Why? Why would he
want to do that?
Well, for reasons that I cannot fathom, he has decided he wants kind
of an open borders environment. It is not what our laws say. It is not
what the American people want or accept. It is not what any sane nation
would do. Part of what makes a country a country is that we know what
the country is and what the country is not. It is defined by its outer
bound limits, sort of as the saying goes, ``If everyone is family, no
one is.''
If everyone is an American, what is America, after all--to say
nothing of the lawlessness that you invite when you bring in people who
are not vetted, whom we know nothing about, who overwhelmingly not only
don't speak English but aren't familiar with our customs, our culture,
our laws?
That is why many people have said that this is tantamount to an
invasion when you have millions of people crossing another country's
borders contrary to the laws of that country. That is an invasion.
Whether they are an armed, organized military force or not, it is still
an invasion. Throughout history, there have been countless instances of
things like this that were an invasion regardless of whether there was
a single state organizer of that activity, whether they were armed,
whether they were organized as a military force. Why would he want to
make it easier? But he did.
You know, I remember the first week or two of the Biden
administration. Secretary Mayorkas, who, I believe, had just been
confirmed or, maybe, was about to be confirmed, said this when some
reporter asked him what he would say to the migrants and the migrant
caravans that were then making their way through Guatemala and into
Mexico and across southern Mexico, heading north. What would you say to
them? I don't remember the exact words, but I think he uttered words to
the effect that we probably won't be quite ready for them for another 2
or 3 weeks. We need a little bit more time to get ready.
What is this? What does that mean? Why would you be that welcoming?
Why not send the signal right then: ``Don't do it''? It is not worth
the risk to life and limb. It is not worth being indentured servants or
sex slaves. It is not worth coming into this country contrary to our
laws, and if you do that, we are going to send you back to Mexico,
through which you will have crossed, to await an adjudication of your
asylum claims. Why? Why do that? Why make that statement that he made?
One can only conclude that this is what they wanted to do. They
wanted to invite this invasion. They have nurtured it. They have
fostered it. Over time, not only have they abandoned these safe third
country programs and the ``Remain in Mexico'' program, they have
adopted a particularly odd practice that, years ago, if somebody had
predicted it, would have said: That is absolutely crazy. That would
never happen.
They are given airplane tickets after they spend a few days being
processed. They are told: OK. Yes, you came into our country in
violation of our laws, but you have applied for asylum. You have
applied for asylum, so we are going to let you in anyway, and we are
going to give you an airplane ticket. We will fly you to the U.S. city
of your choice. By the way, you can get on that airplane. Even though
every American

[[Page S812]]

citizen has to show ID in order to get on one, you don't have to worry
about that as far as we are concerned. Just get on the plane and have
fun.
Eventually, they started saying: By the way, within 6 months, we will
send you a work permit. You can use that work permit while you are
here. All we ask is, when you get a notification that it is time for
your immigration hearing before an immigration judge to adjudicate the
validity of your asylum claim, that you report to that; that you show
up to that in person. We are asking nicely, so we ask that you do that.
Oh, by the way, many of you won't even have an immigration hearing
before an immigration judge until the 2030s, possibly 2035.
That is how insane this is. Why are we doing that? Once we started
doing that, things really started heating up. The drug cartels
realized: This is the season; we are going to make a ton of money on
this. And they have. As anyone could have predicted, the border surges
have increased dramatically.
By the way, it bears noting here that our asylum laws don't give any
one of these people--not a single one--a right to be here. There is not
a statutory right; there is not a constitutional right that any
particular immigrant has to receive asylum. It is not a right. It is a
grant of authority to the executive branch of the U.S. Government. It
uses ``may'' language. If the following criteria for asylum are met--I
referred to those a minute ago--then the Secretary of Homeland Security
may grant asylum to such a person as meets those criteria. There is no
language that says he shall, he must--only that he may.
There are other laws that contemplate--as I read them, require--that
people be detained while their asylum applications are pending. They
are detained; but these days, it is for a few days. Then they are
released with a plane ticket, with the promise of a work permit, as I
described a moment ago.
But there isn't a right--not a statutory right, not a constitutional
right--that any one of them has to be here. So, you know, I would
imagine that, if Secretary Mayorkas were here, he would say: Yes, we
don't detain them because we can't detain them because we ran out of
bedspace a long time ago. We are so full. We are always so full. We
don't really have the ability to detain them for more than just a few
short days while we process them. At least we know who they are. Then
we release them.
Why is that the solution? Why just release them and then give them a
work permit and then tell them we hope that they will act in good faith
and go to their immigration hearings, which may be more than a decade
from now? Why? That makes no sense when, all along, the Secretary has
the authority to shut down the asylum application process and say: We
are not taking any more asylees. If you want asylum in the United
States, apply from somewhere else. Go to a U.S. Embassy in a foreign
country. Submit an application there. Remain in that country or in some
other country until such time as your asylum application can be
adjudicated. But, if you come across our southern border, you will not
be admitted. If we find you, we will deport you; and if you return
again, that is a Federal felony offense, and you will be imprisoned for
years.
Why isn't that the solution? These things would come to an abrupt
halt if you did that, but he didn't.
What did he do?
Well, as things heated up, he started looking for more and more
creative ways to let people into the country. I won't bore you with all
the details, but he relied, among other things, on a feature of U.S.
immigration law--a statutory provision--known as parole authority. The
context of immigration parole authority is that it is there to be used
on a case-by-case basis only and is never to be used on a categorical
basis for a broad category of persons but only case-specific needs that
fall into one of two categories, either humanitarian compassionate
relief or public purpose.
On the humanitarian and compassionate front, an individual can be
admitted for a short duration. For example, if he or she is coming in
to attend the funeral of a family member, it is with the expectation
they will go to the funeral and then they will go back out or if it is
to attend to the needs of an acutely ill relative or something like
that.
On the public use front, that can be used for things like--I don't
know--if some government entity has the need for, for example,
interpreter services for an obscure language and can't find a suitable
interpreter in the United States, so they look outside the United
States. They can bring them in for that public use, for some purpose
relating to things like the aiding and assisting in government
operations here.
But the statutory framework makes it very clear that those are never
to be used on a categorical basis. You can't just bring in large swaths
of aliens simply by virtue of a common characteristic they have of
being from this country or that country. The Biden administration--to
make a long story short--has, I think, in the last year or two alone,
brought in about 3 million people under this parole authority. They
have used that a lot. They have also resorted to withheld removal.
All these things are discretionary, by the way. There is nothing
requiring the Department of Homeland Security to let these people in,
but they do it anyway because they want to. And this problem becomes
self-propelling, self-perpetuating, and self-magnifying. And our
government's efforts to not enforce our border become self-defeating of
the very purposes for which the Department of Homeland Security and its
various Agencies--a number of its Agencies, at least--were created in
the first place.
So make no mistake, this is part of a deliberate choice. This is not
something that was just out of our control, that the U.S. Government
had no involvement in.
There are people out there who come up with all kinds of crazy
theories to explain why this was inevitable, that this had nothing to
do with the Biden administration or any of its policies. If you believe
that, I have got a bridge to sell you. It is just not plausible.
There are those who are even claiming that this is somehow about
climate change, that climate change forced them into our hands.
Whatever caused them to want to make the dangerous journey north and to
pay many thousands of dollars and, in many cases, subject themselves to
forms of indentured servitude or slavery or sex trade, it doesn't mean
that our country had to aid and abet in that.
By the way, another of my colleagues just returned in the last few
days from our southern border and was told something really alarming by
the Border Patrol personnel there. As I understand it, they told them
the average time for those women and girls who can't afford the $5, $6,
$7, $8,000--sometimes a lot more--they have to work it off. Both men
and women are subjected to this indentured servitude, but they can't
pay it. A lot of these people can't pay it. These people are dirt poor.
The drug cartels are taking advantage of those who are already
vulnerable. They can't just go take out a line of credit somewhere, or
they can't just dip into their savings that they don't have. Even if
they are paying drug cartels at the very lowest rates, they still don't
have that kind of money. So they have to work it off.
My colleague was informed that the average period of time it takes
for women and girls subjected to sex slavery as part of their
indentured servitude, how they pay off the journey, is like 7 or 8
years, and that one of the reasons it takes this long is that they are
charged for everything while they are kept in these conditions against
their will, held as captives.
They are forced to pay room and board, for their food, their housing,
their clothing. They have got everything worked out to a fee schedule.
There is even an established fee of, I believe, $30 that the cartels
charge for the removal of an ankle-monitoring bracelet. That is why it
takes so long for them to work off this debt of a few thousand dollars
that they pay for the cartels to smuggle them in.
The work of these cartels and the human smuggling operations extend,
of course, beyond human trafficking and those humans whom they traffic
and whom they subject to these horrific conditions--conditions that we
haven't seen, and should never see in this country again, since the
Civil War.
A lot of these conditions would never exist in this country but for
the fact

[[Page S813]]

that we have a government that is facilitating it. It is not humane. It
is not compassionate. It is not nice to invite and allow and perpetuate
this kind of trade. It is corrupt. It is immoral. It is evil. But
people do it because they are desperate, and they believe that this
gives them a chance. They are preying on vulnerable populations.
As of December 10 of just this last year, there were still 1,323,264
illegal aliens with final orders of removal who remained in the United
States--think about that one for a minute--in addition to the fact that
we now have millions of people--many millions--who have been released
into the United States by our own government and told: We hope you will
show up to your immigration hearing before the immigration judge. By
the way, that may not--probably won't--occur until the mid-2030s. But
you can have a work permit between now and then, which you will have
within 180 days of your arrival at your destination, or at least that
is when you can apply for it, and it will be granted.
On top of all of those people, we are so busy processing those and
getting them to their destinations in the United States that,
apparently, we are not doing the removal. We are not executing on those
who have been deemed deportable, removable, and therefore need to be
removed from the country because we have got almost a million and a
half people who have been ordered deported who are just out there on
the streets. They are not doing that.
That is why the failure to enforce the law begets more lawlessness,
and that makes it harder and harder to enforce the law. That is why our
whole system is built on what is supposed to be a never-ending
succession of good men and women throughout each generation, across one
generation to another, regardless of the political party of the
President in charge, of people enforcing the law, because, once you
stop enforcing it, especially in an area that involves immigration and
illegal immigration--and criminal activity accompanying illegal
immigration, in particular--it is very difficult. You can't just walk
in and turn on a switch, turn it all around, because the backlog itself
makes it so daunting.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security placed only 6.8
percent of the illegal aliens encountered at the southwest border into
proceedings to even be screened for asylum eligibility. So, as I said a
few minutes ago, what started out as a predominantly asylum-
application-centered illegal immigration crisis, has expanded into
something very different, where they are not even doing the initial
screening to find out whether they are going to claim asylum. They have
stopped bothering with that, and they are sort of just letting them in
on other bases, like immigration parole without removal or something
else.
Of the at least 3.3 million illegal aliens released into the United
States since January 20, 2021, the Biden administration failed to
remove through immigration court removal proceedings roughly 99.7
percent of those illegal aliens.
Now, look, for our system of laws to be enforced and to be followed
widely, there needs to be some--you know, you don't always have to
catch, apprehend, charge. In the case of illegal aliens, remove them or
charge them if they have committed a crime. You don't have to get every
single person who violated the law, but there does have to be a
significant possibility of detention, of apprehension, and of
consequence.
But when you are looking at numbers like that--99.7 percent don't
have any consequence like that--well, of course, it is going to
continue.
As of December 10, 2023, there were 1,323,264 aliens with final
orders of removal--that is, deportation--who remained in the United
States. And even though they were barely deporting anyone--apparently,
about 0.3 percent of illegal entrants--the Biden White House has
threatened to stop all deportations if we don't pass the supplemental
aid package for Ukraine.
I don't even have words for that, and if I could think of words for
that, it probably wouldn't be appropriate in my hometown of Provo, UT.
This is staggering--that President Biden would use this kind of threat.
Well, according to the Supreme Court of the United States, the term
is a legal matter. It doesn't apply against the Federal Government. If
this were anything outside of the U.S. Government, we would call this--
there is a word for this, and the word is ``extortion.'' Extortion
occurs whenever somebody tries to get something out of you. They try to
get something out of you by saying what they will or won't do that will
end up being harmful to you. Others would describe it as blackmail.
Either way, they are trying to--``extortion'' is the word I would use
because they are trying to get out of Congress something that Congress
is reluctant to do by leveling a threat, and the threat is: I will
enforce the border even less than I have been. I will make this even
more chaotic if you don't pass the Ukraine supplemental aid package.
The Biden administration has removed only 1 illegal alien for every
26 illegal aliens it allows to enter into the United States. As of
August 31, 2023, the Department of Homeland Security had removed only 2
percent of illegal aliens who failed to appear--just those who failed
to appear--at their immigration court hearings, after successfully
establishing a fear of persecution at the border, which is the standard
for claiming eligibility for asylum. Ninety-eight percent of those
illegal aliens remained in the United States as of the end of August of
last year, August of 2023.
In fact, in early December 2023, the Department of Homeland Security
officials admitted that ``an average of 5,000 illegal aliens are
currently being released into the United States each day at the
border.'' And then, throughout the month of December, we saw daily
record after daily record being broken for those apprehensions, migrant
encounters.
These are not the kinds of records we want to be breaking. We want to
break records in the Olympics. We want to break records in areas that
are signals that America is doing well, that it is healthy, that our
government is serving its people well, or that Americans are able to
thrive and succeed. This is not the kind of record to which we should
aspire.
Yet the Biden administration seems to want more of those records. It
wants to spike the football and celebrate those, although, interspersed
into all of this, are some contradictory, eyebrow-raising expressions
of momentary awareness that something is terribly wrong. Even Secretary
Mayorkas has acknowledged the high rate of releases, telling the Border
Patrol:

The current rate of release for illegal immigrants
apprehended at the southern border is above 85 percent.

I want to think that that is an acknowledgement that something is
terribly wrong, but, these days, I don't know. His actions, since we
started breaking those records, almost seem to suggest that maybe he
was bragging about that.
Let's back up for a minute. We have talked about the circumstances
when, last fall, some early discussions began after President Biden
asked for another $60 billion or so to be sent to Ukraine.
(Ms. SMITH assumed the Chair.)
Those discussions among Senate Republicans, in particular, on
something like this, many of us are hearing from our constituents--and
we ourselves share those concerns--that it seems wrong, vindictive
toward our own citizens, whom we are asking to pay for this--our own
citizens who are increasingly living paycheck to paycheck.
The cost of living increases that have been inevitable, foreseeable--
in fact, foreseen--and warned of consequences of Bidenomics, coupled
with Americans' understandable fear about who is coming across our
borders illegally, from what countries and with what purposes in mind,
with apparently not just the tacit acquiescence of our own government
but with the assistance of our own government, causes us to feel uneasy
about this.
Many Senate Republicans expressed legitimate concern that their own
voters would be very unhappy with them if they just, under those
circumstances, voted to support another $60 billion or so to support
Ukraine when we spent more on Ukraine than anybody else, on military
aid than everybody else combined. And at the same time, as we are doing
all that to help Ukraine shore up its own border integrity, we are not
doing anything for ours.
So discussions ensued back and forth. Republicans came up with a
nascent

[[Page S814]]

idea, more or less a plan. The idea was, say, look, there is pretty
uniform support among Senate Democrats for more Ukraine aid. We have
got a Democratic President in the White House. He really wants this.
They tend to support him, and they do appear to support him on this.
This is an issue that definitely unites Democrats, probably all 51
Democrats in the Senate--at least as we perceived it at the time, at
least as it related to Ukraine aid. I still think that is true as to
Ukraine aid, but it sharply divides Republicans. Some Senate
Republicans--a minority of Senate Republicans--would have, at the time,
perhaps been OK passing a Ukraine aid package without doing anything
for our border, but most members of the Senate Republican conference
didn't want to do that.
Among House Republicans who--only a third of us are up for reelection
every year, but every Member of the House of Representatives is up for
reelection every 2 years. The sentiment among House Republicans was, I
believe, also one that included a lot of skepticism, a lot of skeptics
such that it was unclear that you could get a Ukraine aid package
passed through either House of Congress, much less both, given that in
the Senate, even though Democrats have the majority and even though the
Democrats uniformly support more aid to Ukraine, while only some
Republicans do, at least without qualification, without restriction,
there was, in short, overwhelming support among Democrats for Ukraine
aid, not among Republicans.
But what Republicans do want, rather uniformly, is more border
security. So we came up with this idea. Why not see if we can come up
with a bill that would harness the appetite on the left for more
Ukraine aid in order to adopt legislative text that would, in effect,
force an end to the border crisis that would tie the Biden
administration's hands to the point that the Biden administration would
have no choice but to enforce the border.
And so the idea was hatched. Not everybody loved it, but most people
thought it was a sensible approach to at least undertake. In theory, I
think it would get--if you wrote that bill right, you could get a whole
lot of Republicans on board, possibly even most of the Senate
Republican conference.
What ensued over the next 2, 3, 4 months--depending on where you
measure it as having started--was a series of negotiations,
negotiations from which nearly all Senate Republicans were excluded. We
weren't permitted into that. I still don't entirely understand why. I
mean, I do know that sometimes for a few days at a time, you have to
have a chance for negotiators to negotiate and figure things out before
they are ready to share language, but whenever someone is negotiating
on behalf of 49 people, it is imperative to give them at least regular
updates and share with them such statutory text as you are able to
share as a draft of the bill.
Unfortunately, we didn't see that. We didn't see anything beyond
being told regularly: We are trying come up with a deal to get the best
deal we can. We will give you details as soon as we can.
Finally, in the second week of January, we were given a few bullet
points--just a few bullet points--no legislative text. Based on those
bullet points, a number of us expressed our concern, that unless there
was more meat on the bones of this legislation, it wouldn't do what we
as Senate Republicans thought we were committing to, what I think most
of us thought we were committing to, which is--it is not enough to go
and negotiate a Ukraine aid package with an immigration bill tacked
onto it, just a few immigration reforms. Even if those immigration
reforms include a few provisions that might help, it doesn't solve the
issue here. They have to be sufficiently strong and unambiguous that it
would more or less force the issue to the point where the President
would no longer just facilitate the drug cartels and their business
that makes them many tens of billions of dollars every year human
trafficking into the United States.

And, by the way, we know it is not just human trafficking because
those humans they are trafficking are also carrying other things, most
notably enough fentanyl to kill every American, distributed in the
right doses to the right number of people; that have, in fact, killed
more than 100,000 Americans for the last 2 or 3 years in a row.
So, yes, when those details leaked out but still without the benefit
of seeing text, a number of us started to express concern. We started
not at that point trying to kill the deal because there was no deal
that we had seen. We had no ability to ascertain the full impact of it.
We hoped that maybe--just maybe--there was something in there we
weren't seeing. Maybe it was better than how it had been described to
us, at least the few details we got in the second week of January.
The first time Senate Republicans were able to see the package was
this past Sunday, almost a week ago. This past Sunday, at 7 p.m.,
eastern time, we received it, not from our colleagues who have been in
the negotiations, but from a reporter who apparently got to see it
before we did and released it to the entire public.
By the way, for weeks leading up to this moment, before the bill we
were told even existed, we did have a number of people in the media who
had made up their minds. I don't know how they made up their minds on a
bill that didn't yet exist. But, for example, the Wall Street Journal,
in the second week of January--it could have been the third, but I
think it was the second--published an editorial, an editorial backed by
the whole editorial board, basically saying that any Republican who
didn't support this deal, this border security deal, coupled with
Ukraine aid, was just trying to score cheap political points at the
expense of border security and, thus, national security.
I was shocked, dismayed, and, yes, even offended by this because on
the one hand, we were being told by our own Senate Republican
leadership the bill didn't yet exist. That is why we couldn't see it,
because it didn't exist yet. Nobody else got to see it, so we didn't
either.
If that were true, then the Wall Street Journal's editorial board--
ordinarily cautious, careful, thorough, insightful--was just operating
on rank speculation as to what might be in the bill. That is offensive
to insult us for not supporting a bill that we hadn't seen yet because
it didn't exist yet and we wouldn't see for weeks.
On the other hand, equally offensive--perhaps even more so--would
have been the possibility that they had seen the bill, they were
permitted an inside glimpse into what we would be forbidden from seeing
for weeks to come.
Either way, this is offensive. And it is not like the Wall Street
Journal was the only source in the media. It is not like the Wall
Street Journal was the only voice publicly clamoring for this, publicly
chastising Republicans who had expressed concerns with it based on what
few breadcrumbs they were allowed to receive about its contents--just
bullet points, summaries of what might be in it.
We finally did see it at 7 p.m., eastern time, this last Sunday. I
immediately devoted hours upon hours to reading it, as did members of
my staff. It was 370 pages long. And in that 370 pages, there is a lot
of detail, a lot of statutory cross references.
And while I respect and consider as friends those who have negotiated
it, including and especially my friend James Lankford from Oklahoma--a
good man, a dear friend--we agree on most things. I appreciate his work
on this. It is not easy. I think he did the best job he could with the
cards he was dealt. Nonetheless, it became increasingly apparent to me,
the more I read in this bill, that it didn't live up certainly to my
expectations about what we had I agreed to, what I thought we had
agreed to among Senate Republicans last fall, which was that if we were
going to send another dime to Ukraine, we really should do something
that would force the end to the current border crisis.
Now, sure, there were provisions in there, in that part of the bill,
dealing with border security that I can fairly characterize as an
improvement, that I can certainly fairly characterize as tools that
could be used in future administrations, by future Presidents and
future Homeland Security Secretaries and the Agencies operating within
that Department to bring about a more secure border. But in each
instance, I could find myriad ways in which this

[[Page S815]]

administration could--and I believe inevitably would--exploit loopholes
within that legislative text, were it to be passed into law, to not
only avoid the more restrictive text but in some cases even possibly to
make it worse. It wasn't nearly enough.
Much has been said about what those provisions would do. Less has
been said about what they would not do. There is nothing in there that
would have required a return to the ``Remain in Mexico'' program. There
is nothing in there that would have prohibited the Biden administration
from just putting people on planes to the destination of their choice
within the United States and telling them: We hope you will show up to
your yet-to-be scheduled, yet-to-be-dreamed-of immigration judge
hearing, which may not occur until 2025 or later, and, by the way, you
will be eligible for a work permit within 180 days.
It didn't contain anything like that. It didn't contain anything
reinforcing the authority of the President at any moment to go back to
the ``Remain in Mexico'' program. In fact, he should have done it all
along. That is why he litigated. He lost that litigation. Nothing
required that. In fact, under certain circumstances, it allowed some
aliens crossing into our borders without documentation--they are
applying for asylum--to get work permits under the right circumstances
without even having to wait the 180 days that they currently have to
wait.
It is things like this that may well have increased the draw,
increased the allure for those willing to subject themselves to grave
risks of life, liberty, and property, to pay the drug cartels, put
themselves at the mercy of those vicious monsters who engage in human
trafficking and trafficking of controlled substances across multiple
international borders. If anything, this would have increased the
appeal of that because they could have gotten more permits without
having to wait the 180-day period for this--at least for certain
classes of individuals coming in this way.
So a number of us, after reading it, said: This is not what we agreed
to. This was not part of the plan. This isn't what we wanted.
While we appreciate the hard work that Senator James Lankford put
into it on our behalf, and I believe he was acting selflessly and,
again, dealing with a really tough hand he had been dealt, this is the
inevitable, foreseeable, and avoidable consequence, what happens
whenever you are forced to negotiate something on behalf of 49 people
without what would ordinarily be assumed would be customary, would be
just a matter of collegiality--to keep them updated and informed as to
what you were negotiating on their behalf. Again, I don't mean to
suggest any bad faith on his part. I think he was acting within very,
very tough parameters.
I raise that only to explain that it is not surprising that over a 2-
, 3-, 4-month period from concept to proposal, when people are not
informed, and there is not able to be the more or less continual
feedback between the negotiator and those on whose behalf he is
negotiating, and they are not able to communicate regularly about the
contents of the deal, you run a grave risk that that deal is going to
be pretty far apart from what people are expecting.
So a lot of us came out right away and said: I have concerns with
this.
The Senate Republican conference met less than 24 hours after that
bill was released at 6 p.m. on Monday. By the end of this meeting, we
were starting to surmise that this bill wasn't going to make it, that
there wasn't support for it.
At the end, there were only four Republican Senators who supported
that iteration of the Ukraine aid bill--that is, the Ukraine aid bill
with the border security immigration provisions tacked on to it. Just 4
out of 49 Senate Republicans voted to even end debate on the narrow
question of proceeding to that bill. So, yes, that is itself proof
positive that something had gone dangerously wrong between the moment
we first discussed and negotiated the understanding or the agreement
that we had among Senate Republicans as to what we wanted to accomplish
and as to what was accomplished.
But in no way, shape, or form did that failure to satisfy
expectations--that pretty significant departure from expectations--
overtake, supersede, obviate the need for, much less erase the concerns
of Senate Republicans and those we represent and the many hundreds of
millions of Americans who are concerned about the full-scale invasion
being carried out, unfolding across our southern border with massive,
dire ramifications or the humanitarian needs of those individuals. It
didn't undo our concerns. It didn't undo the whole reason we had
reached this agreement. Therefore, many, if not most, of us who had
these concerns started saying: Look, the fact that this won't do the
job, that this won't secure the border, that this doesn't make it
sufficiently more likely that the border will be enforced and this
crisis will come to an end during this administration--the fact that we
don't feel good about this bill doing that doesn't mean that we are
enthusiastic about simply providing our votes to fund Ukraine to the
tune of another $55 or $60 billion. It shouldn't do that. It doesn't do
that.
For the same reasons that we decided months ago--I believe it was all
49 of us--to oppose cloture on the motion to proceed to an earlier
version of this bill--actually, a shell of an earlier version of this
bill, one that involved only these foreign military aid and nonmilitary
aid issues--the same reasons are still alive today. So a lot of us
started suggesting that we should deny cloture on the motion to proceed
not only to that bill but also to what was put forward as the text of
the original bill or what was to become the original bill, which was
just the foreign supplemental aid package without the border security.
For those of us who in the first instance said that we don't want to
fund Ukraine again without securing our own border and then said--all
but 4 of the 49 Senate Republicans said that border security package
added to the Ukraine deal doesn't satisfy our concerns. It shouldn't
have meant, OK, let's just have Republicans supply the votes now to get
this passed. No.
Something we all have to remind ourselves about Senate procedure:
Legislation, absent unusual circumstances, like a veto override or
ratification of a treaty, for example, involving two-thirds
supermajority vote, as required by the Constitution--absent special
circumstances like that, passage of legislation in the Senate is by a
simple majority, 51 votes out of 100. It could be less than that
depending on who is here, how many Senators we have.
But in order to get to final passage, in all but a very narrow set of
circumstances that are seldom at play, circumstances involving a rarely
used procedure known as budget reconciliation--not present here--all
legislation, before it can be passed into law, has to endure multiple
cloture votes.

``Cloture'' is an old-fashioned, Senate-specific word that we use
that involves bringing debate to a close. It takes 60 votes to bring
debate to a close. It takes 60 votes to bring debate to a close
regardless of how many people are present at the moment. It requires
the support of three out of every five Senators who are in place at the
time. We have 100 Senators; that means 60 votes regardless of how many
are here. That is what you have to do in order to bring debate to a
close.
You have to bring debate to a close on multiple occasions. Normally,
you will see this in multiple respects--at least two, sometimes more,
depending on whether you are dealing with a substitute amendment or
something like that--but at a minimum, you will have, in most
circumstances, to bring debate to a close prior to the motion to
proceed to the bill before you formally consider it. Then you have
cloture on the bill, bringing debate to a close at the end of that
process. Either way, it takes 60 votes.
What that means is that the whole reason this bill--the version of
the bill that included the border security language--the whole reason
that failed is because they couldn't get to 60. They couldn't get to 60
votes on that one.
As I mentioned a moment ago, the Ukraine aid I think was intended in
the past to unify all 51 Democratic votes in the Senate. As this was
brought forward, I think they had one dissenting Democrat earlier this
week on the combined foreign aid supplemental package and this border
security provision--one dissenting Democrat, as I recall. So that
means, with 50 Democrats supporting it, you would have to get 10
Republicans, or this thing couldn't go

[[Page S816]]

anywhere. You received four Republicans who supported cloture on the
motion to proceed to that bill, with one Democrat also opposing
cloture. So you had 54 votes--6 shy of the 60 you needed--so that part
was finished.
Then they had another cloture vote, a vote on cloture on the motion
to proceed to the supplemental aid package without the border security
language.
Interestingly, they had--I believe it was 17 Republicans who voted
for that, the same people--most of whom had just voted against the
border security language being included. As I recall, there were 17 of
those.
As I recall, last fall when we made this decision, I thought we were
united on this point that we needed to try to force through legislation
that would compel the President--leaving him no easy out--to actually
secure the border. I thought that is what the plan was. Maybe some were
never on board with that altogether.
It just makes no sense to me that what we were as a whole conference
against just a few months ago, they voted for this week even though
there is now nothing in there to secure the border.
Now, we could have--should have--instead come up with a simple set of
things--maybe we should have done that last fall, but the need for it
has become even more pronounced ever since then--to just say: OK, we
know a border security deal will pass the House of Representatives
because it has passed the House of Representatives, and we know that I
believe all 49 Republicans have been supportive of another context of
this bill passed by the House of Representatives in the border security
context called H.R. 2--or at least the essential elements of it. We
could have added that to it, maybe added a couple of other provisions
or maybe not--just put that forward.
H.R. 2 would make a big difference. It would really tie the
administration's hands and make it much more difficult for the
administration to continue being an active accomplice in this full-
scale invasion taking place across our southern border that, according
to many, has let in 10 million people or so, maybe more, just since
January 20, 2021.
Why didn't we do that? I suggested again even this week and I have
been suggesting from the beginning that we add language there.
Then a number of my colleagues made another suggestion at the time:
In addition to H.R. 2, why don't we add something--just to make sure
that this actually happens--that would require the Biden administration
to achieve certain border security measures, to achieve a secure
border, to achieve actual operational control of the border as defined
by law, before all the Ukraine aid could be released?
Many, if not most, Republican Senators ended up echoing that belief.
I believe I first heard it suggested by my friend and colleague from
North Dakota, Senator John Hoeven, himself a former Governor--a
Governor of a border State, albeit a northern border State. The
dynamics up there are a little bit different.
Had we done something like that, I think that could have and should
have been able to unite, at least, nearly all Senate Republicans. To my
knowledge, it would have. We would be in a much better position if we
had a package supported by Republicans--that was supported by most
Republicans. Instead, what we have gotten is something that has become
far too common these days. I take no joy in describing it this way:
circumstances in which our own Senate Republican leadership has
tragically chosen to support legislation that unites all or nearly all
Senate Democrats, while sharply dividing Republicans.
That almost doesn't even capture not just sharply dividing Republican
Senators but securing the, you know, anywhere from 9 to sometimes 19 or
20 Republican votes to join with Democrats to advance Democratic policy
overwhelmingly favored and championed by Democrats that most
Republicans in the Senate and in America overwhelmingly oppose.
This is far from the only example of this happening--far from the
only example of this happening even throughout the duration of the
Biden Presidency, far from the only example of this happening then or
in the prior administration or in other administrations, since I have
been a U.S. Senator, since I became a U.S. Senator in 2011.
Why does the Senate Republican leadership sometimes try so hard to
get a handful of Republicans--a minority of Republican Senators--to
join in an effort that unites most or, in many cases, all Senate
Democrats on an issue so aggressively opposed by most Republicans in
the Senate and in America, if not most Americans themselves?
I don't know that I can fully answer that question, but I don't know
that I need to here because what I do know is that it is happening
here. When you saw 17 Republicans at the urging of Senate Republican
leadership joining with a near-unanimous Senate Democratic caucus to
advance a bill important to President Biden that overwhelmingly is
supported by Democrats--and, yes, some Republicans do support it, but
it is a slim minority of them among Americans, and even more of a slim
minority among Republicans at large than it is among Senate
Republicans. But it is still a slim minority among Senate Republicans.
Why do we do this?
We shouldn't. We certainly shouldn't here, not where our own border
security presents such a clear and present threat to American national
security.
One of the things that I find so galling and so difficult to accept,
much less understand, is the fact that we are told by our few
Republican colleagues who aggressively support this bill that we have
to support it, and that they support it, because our own national
security depends on it. That is hard for me to understand, and I
genuinely do like to understand other people's arguments when
addressing them. And, as a lawyer, it was my job to thoroughly
understand my opponent's argument. Nothing works as well if you don't
understand your opponent's argument, and, when you understand it, the
debate can become crystallized; it can become clearer.
It is hard to understand it here because it is hard to understand a
coherent defense of it, especially when they are telling us that the
war in Ukraine and our ability to fund it is kind of a ``without which
not'' component of our national security, even though we would have the
ability, if we held off for a while and if we said to our Democratic
colleagues: With all due respect, we do need to present you with
another option, and we present something that would actually secure the
border in meaningful ways. You will get enough Republican votes to move
forward if you do this; you won't get those votes if you don't.
It seems a much better way forward than for us to claim that we are
going to do that, only to not do that at the end of the day.
And at the first sign of trouble of a border security deal that
failed to secure the border to our satisfaction, 17 of our Republican
colleagues joined with the Democrats and abandoned the commitment that
I thought we had made a few months ago to each other and to our voters
and to the American people generally.
It is baffling. It is troubling. But, more importantly, it is not too
late. It still isn't done. We haven't passed the bill. And still,
tomorrow--at 1 p.m. tomorrow--we are scheduled to vote on cloture on
the bill; that is, bringing debate to a close on the bill. If enough of
those Senate Republicans changed their position between now and then,
and voted against cloture on the bill, then we could have a chance,
again, to say: Let us take another shot at it. We can come up with
language.
Probably in a few days, we could propose--I think we could unite at
least nearly every Republican in the Senate--maybe not everyone, but
probably 80 or 90 percent of us easily--as opposed to a bill that they
seem inclined to support that most Republicans in the Senate and in the
country strongly oppose. I hope that they will reconsider, especially
when they learn or are apprised of the feelings of their constituents
about this and especially as their constituents learn about some of the
details of this bill.
So let's talk about a few of those details now, considering, as we
now have a backdrop of this legislation, how we got here, and why it is
that Senate Republicans overwhelmingly oppose this bill and why it is
that, quite arguably, inconsistent with the commitment that Senate
Republicans made to each other and to the public, that 17 of them

[[Page S817]]

now seem to have indicated that they are not supportive of.
So what remains in the bill? Let's talk about that for a moment.
Among its many other features, among the many tens of billions of
dollars that it sends to Ukraine, there are a few provisions that I
feel the need to highlight here. One provision gives $238 million--so
close to a quarter of a billion dollars--for increased U.S. troop
deployments to Europe.
What does that mean? Well, I am not sure, but I am pretty sure it has
a lot to do with the conflict in Ukraine and other things surrounding
it.
Does this mean--could this mean--that we are preparing to involve
ourselves more directly, more kinetically, in the war between Ukraine
and Russia, whereas, up to this point, we have been acting through a
proxy, Ukraine?
If so, the Senate ought to begin debate on an authorization for the
use of military force or a declaration of war to that effect, but we
haven't. So why then are we deploying so many troops there? Well, the
skeptic, the cynic would argue that whenever we do that, whenever we
deploy U.S. military personnel into a zone of hostilities, into a zone
in which hostilities appear to be imminent, based on the circumstances,
we are more or less acknowledging that what any of us would consider
actions tantamount to warfare are, if not inevitable, somewhat likely.
So when we increase our troop deployments into that area, perhaps
anticipating that war may spill over or that we might become more
further or more directly involved--or to an area covering more of a
surface area, where there is a bigger target on us--at that moment, we
become a little bit more committed, a little bit more likely to go to
war.
And we put them there so that if they do things that impact our
troops, our U.S. military personnel, as various Iranian proxies in the
region in and around the Middle East have done in recent weeks, we
become that much more likely to be involved in armed conflicts. See
when they fire on our people, the President has some immediate
authority to repel an attack as it is occurring. That, in turn, can
quickly lead into full-scale warfare.
We ought to be having more of those discussions. Instead, we are just
spending more money, quietly sending more troops there. I don't think
that gets enough airtime.
Different people might have different feelings about the extent to
which we ought to be involved in that conflict, but we are not having
it. And this is a conflict, after all, that involves some major
adversaries, that could involve not only Russia but Iranian proxies
and, ultimately, Iran. And all of this has been stirred up at about the
same time. We ought to be concerned about that. We ought to be having
conversations about where this can take us, and we are not.
It also allows an additional $7.8 billion worth of weapons to leave
U.S. military stockpiles immediately. Now, keep in mind, we are still
looking at years before those stockpiles are fully replenished. And, if
we have to engage elsewhere--let's say, if we have to engage in the
Indo-Pacific region in the near future, for example, if Beijing were to
attack Taiwan and we needed to, wanted to supply Taiwan with weapons
that it could use to deter that action, to make it less likely, we are
making it, through this action, that much more difficult for us to do
that, because I am told that many are the same weapons, according to a
number of foreign policy and military experts.
People like my friend Elbridge Colby have pointed out that a lot of
the same weapons that are being given to Ukraine now are the same
weapons--the same types of weapons and weapon systems--that would be
needed in Taiwan to deter an attack on Taiwan from Beijing. So that
ties our hands there.
Some would also add that a lot of those same weapons were the same
things, at least in some cases, needed by Israel, and yet we are giving
up an additional $7.8 billion worth of this stuff.
Now, it would be one thing--it would still be significant given the
cost, but it would be one thing if we could just turn on a switch and
say, ``Make more of these weapons''--weapons with names like Javelins,
ATACMS, HIMARS, among many others. If we could just flip a switch and
say, ``Make more of those''--but that is not really how it works.
This stuff is really sophisticated. It is really complicated. And
some predict that we may not be able to replenish our stockpiles until
the 2030s--in some cases, until many of the people entering our borders
unlawfully today might have their ultimate immigration judge hearing,
and well after the time in which many people fear Beijing might be most
tempted to make a move on Taiwan.
But even more concerning, we don't know what other threats the United
States might be facing over the next--I don't know--decade or so. There
may be other threats to our national security out there, threats that
we might not even be focused on right now, that might require those for
use by our military forces in protecting the American homeland.
When we release this many of these very sophisticated, complicated,
tough weapons, which, together with the bravery of the best men and
women any military could have and that we have in the United States--we
also achieved a degree of military success and prowess, not only
because of the bravery and the expertise and the knowledge and the
dedication and the patriotism of our brave men and women who serve in
uniform, but also because we developed a really impressive arsenal of
weapons--unmatched classes of weapons that have helped bring safety and
security to the United States in a way that we have all benefited from
in a meaningful, material way. What happens, though, when we run out of
those? When we have given them to other countries to such a degree, at
such a pace, that we can't produce them fast enough? Will we find
ourselves flat-footed, unable to protect the American homeland? The
fact that that question hasn't really been asked much less answered to
my satisfaction ought to concern all of us. I am not the only one
asking the question. This needs to be discussed more than it is.

It is for this reason that this legislation even has to include that
language to begin with. We have had existing law, background
legislation, in place long before this war started between Russia and
Ukraine, at least the current one. It provides that absent Congress
passing legislation saying otherwise, the President has a maximum of
$100 million of what they call Presidential drawdown authority; that it
can draw down existing caches of weapons, ammunition, things like that
$100 million without additional permission from Congress.
(Ms. BALDWIN assumed the Chair.)
So we have increased that threshold seventy-eightfold in this one
provision. There is a good reason why we have the $100 million
Presidential drawdown authority cap, a very good reason indeed, and
that reason has a lot to do with not wanting to leave the United States
flat-footed by a President who chooses, perhaps shortsightedly, to give
too many of our weapons away.
So we are multiplying that limit by 78 times at a moment when we have
already given even more than that to Ukraine, at a time when our
weapons cache, all kinds of weapons systems that we need to rely on,
have been depleted substantially.
This is scary. We should be concerned. It was not just that this bill
doesn't protect American national security on the homeland by fixing
the border crisis and ending the invasion, it is that it also depletes
our weapons and makes us less able to protect our homeland and our
allies when needed.
This bill also allows the Department of Defense to enter into
contracts for $13.7 billion in new equipment for Ukraine through the
Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative--this with no requirement
whatsoever for the Biden administration, for the Pentagon to prioritize
contracts that are necessary for our own readiness. In other words, the
Biden administration is free, under this legislation, as it may
choose--and is widely expected to choose--to prioritize this new series
of weapons contracts to the tune of $13.7 billion for Ukraine over
weapons procurement needed to protect the American homeland. That is
concerning. That ought to worry the American people.
The bill also funds the Ukrainian National Police and, get this, the
Ukrainian State Border Guard to the tune of $300 million. Just let that
sit for a minute: $300 million going to protect Ukraine's border, the
Ukrainian National Police, and the Ukrainian State

[[Page S818]]

Border Guard, while the Biden administration refuses to enforce and
secure our borders.
Is this a good idea? Well, it is a great idea if you are Ukraine. And
make no mistake, I want Ukraine to win. I want Ukrainians to be free. I
bear them no ill will, but this is a really good deal for them. It is
much less of a good deal for the United States and for the American
people. This ought to be concerning to every one of us. Republican,
Democrat, Libertarian, Independent, whatever you are, this ought to
worry you more than just a little bit.
Here is another galling feature of this legislation: ensuring that
Ukrainian bureaucrats, rest assured, won't miss a paycheck, not a
single one, for the next year, courtesy of $7.8 billion in budget
support from U.S. taxpayers. So we will be meeting their entire
government payroll, my understanding is it is for an entire year, no
questions asked, courtesy of the American people--courtesy of the
American people, while their own people, the Americans funding this
through their hard-earned taxpayer dollars and through the
corresponding increases in the prices of everything they buy--from
housing to healthcare, from gas to groceries and everything else--that
on top of their already hefty tax bill is paying for this. Now, that is
great. I am happy for them that their paychecks will be secure.
But what about the American people? Isn't our first job to do no harm
to them? Isn't our first job to make sure that when we fund somebody
else's priority, we take care of our own first? And if those two are
incompatible, we side with our own people, our own homeland? Call me
crazy, but I always thought that was how it should work around here and
how it would work, how it typically worked in the past. But this seems
crazy to me.
Again, getting back to the idea of selecting people randomly out of
voter registration rolls, if the phonebook still exists, out of a
phonebook, I think most Americans would be really surprised and not in
a good way upon learning facts like these about how this is going to
impact American national security.
I think they certainly wouldn't want us to rush this through without
adequate opportunity to debate this and in the light of day, in front
of the American people, with a full opportunity to offer amendments,
perhaps to clarify a few points.
Sure, I am not wild about this bill. I make no secret about that. It
is still, nonetheless, my right procedurally and my obligation morally
to try to make the bill better, to try to make it inure more to the
benefit of the American people than it currently does and less to their
detriment.
Shockingly, a number of my colleagues--and, right now, I am speaking
just of Republican colleagues. This isn't even about Democrats. A
number of my Republican colleagues have said in recent days things that
suggest that they don't think those of us who have concerns with the
bill who are, as they put it, ``never going to vote for this bill
anyway,'' that we shouldn't get to decide what is in it; that we
shouldn't have the opportunity to review it, to debate at length, much
less to amend it.

I am sorry. I find that one really difficult to take, especially from
fellow Republican Senators. There is absolutely nothing in the rules of
the Senate or of any legislative body that I know of, any civilized
nation on Earth or in the history of time, that says that unless you
are going to swear to support the finished product no matter what is in
it, that you can't support amendments to it; that you shouldn't be
allowed to fully debate it and adequately have the opportunity to
introduce and vote on amendments to improve it.
That is your obligation. And I find it shameful that any Member of
this body would say that. I find it especially troubling that
Republicans, particularly the slim minority of Republicans who have
chosen to unite Democrats, sharply divide Republicans on a policy that
is embraced by the Democratic Party and overwhelmingly opposed by
Republicans, would say that to a fellow Republican standing up for what
most Republicans in this body and in America believe.
This has become far too common. It is not the first time I have heard
that argument, which is not only uncollegial, it is unpatriotic. It is
incompatible with our system of government, and I look forward to the
day when that argument will no longer even be raised by Members of this
body because it is completely contrary to the cause of good government.
The bill also contains funding to the tune of billions of dollars
that can be used for all sorts of things, all sorts of economic aid-
related purposes out of the $7.8 billion in economic assistance; can be
used for all sorts of things and has been used in the past, in previous
iterations of it, to subsidize things like clothing stores, Ukrainian
clothing stores, and to buy concert tickets for people going to
concerts in Ukraine, all while families living here in the United
States are living paycheck to paycheck and not having their government
fund their clothing stores or buy their concert tickets. The fact that
that wasn't excluded from this bill when we know that things like that
have been an issue is insulting to the American people.
This legislation begins Ukrainian reconstruction using U.S. dollars.
In this bill, it is $25 million for the transition initiatives account
at the U.S. Agency known as USAID for ``frontline and newly liberated
communities reclaimed from Russian occupation.''
Now, trying to figure out how best to put this, but at once one could
say that is only $25 million. In the grand scheme of this bill and in
the grander scheme of what Congress spends in any given year or grand
scheme of U.S. GDP, yes, that can appear like a drop in the bucket. But
that $25 million didn't come from nowhere. It came off the bottom line
of poor and middle-class Americans. Again, the wealthy can absorb
something like this. In many circumstances, the wealthy even grow
richer still under the yoke of inflation that is crippling to poor
middle-class Americans.
The kind of inflation that 25 million here, 7.88 billion there, 13.5
billion there--you throw those numbers around. Before long, it really
does start to add up, and it becomes part of the $34 trillion in debt
that we have accumulated which, within this year or perhaps next at the
latest, we will be paying interest at the rate of a trillion a year.
Yes, we will soon see America spending more on interest on our
national debt than on defense, itself creating one of the greatest
threats to American national security that we have ever known, and we
have done it ourselves, here, because of things like this, bit by bit.
I am sure those reclaimed communities in Ukraine, the people who live
there, the frontline and newly liberated communities in Ukraine--I am
sure they will be happy with this. I am sure they are good people,
freedom-loving people who just want to live and be free, and they want
to restart their lives. And my heart goes out to them.
This is not to say that anyone who benefits from this is undeserving
or bad, what I am saying is: Where does this end? If you accept the
premise that this is only $25 million, let's exam that for a minute.
Separate and apart from the fact that I just mentioned that is a lot
of money to the people who have to pay for it, but if it really is only
$25 million, meaning it is only $25 million now--but we are setting a
predicate now that apparently we are going to be responsible for
reconstruction throughout Ukraine. It is going to be our responsibility
from half a world away to fund and oversee the reconstruction of
territory reclaimed, as it is reclaimed, liberated from Russian
control.
Why, again, is this us rather than the Ukrainian people? Why is this
us rather than Ukraine's neighbors, especially when we have already
given so much more than any of them or, in some cases, all of them
combined for the military aid--why is this us, and why are we setting
this predicate now? You would almost have to strain with a magnifying
glass to find those communities on the map in Ukraine that would be
affected by this. And I think that is why it is ``only'' $25 million;
but when you set that predicate now, what is this going to amount to?
If what we hope to see, which is Ukraine winning this war and more and
more communities being liberated, are we in charge of all those, too?
This bill would seem to set that predicate. That is concerning.

[[Page S819]]

How has this gone elsewhere when we have put ourselves in charge of
nation-building in countries half a world away? It hasn't ended well.
In many cases, it ends up funding all the wrong things. We ought to be
concerned about this.
The legislation asks for a multiyear strategy for Ukraine that places
the United States at the helm of things like I just mentioned--things
like the $25 million reconstruction plan--for lack of a better word--as
a gift to these woke and complacent European allies that have refused
to own the responsibility of securing their continent, of securing
their own backyard. They would rather have us to do it because they
know we are just crazy enough to hit the printing presses rather than
to ask them to carry their share of the burden, which should be much,
much greater than ours given that we went first. We have already given
an extraordinary sum to half a world away, where this is at their
doorstep. And we have been carrying a disproportionate share of all of
their security burdens for decades anyway.
The bill blatantly acknowledges that the nearly $10 billion of
humanitarian aid in the bill may very well be diverted by Hamas or,
perhaps, other terror groups in Gaza. And I have linked two different
accounts that add up to between $9 and $10 billion. There is Ukraine,
laid out. I believe the language is something to the effect of ``in and
around Ukraine'' and ``in and around Israel.'' These two accounts that,
when added together, come up to somewhere between $9 and $10 billion--
nothing in there that restricts that aid in a way that we can be
certain won't end up helping Hamas. In fact, we can be quite confident
that it will, based on past practice, based on what we have learned
from other parts of the world, and based on the fact that it is hard
for us to relate to what they face in Gaza. But to say, yeah, we are
going to send up to $9 or $10 billion in humanitarian aid which, as far
as we know, this administration has discretion under this legislation
such that if it is passed, we have to assume--at least the
possibility--that they devote all or nearly all or at least a
substantial portion of those funds to humanitarian relief in Gaza.
Now, I am sure that we will hear, not if but when that happens: Don't
worry, have no fear. This is only going to people in Gaza. It is not
going to Hamas or any other terror group.
It is difficult for us to imagine a world like Gaza from our
comfortable, secure, heaven-blessed land. We don't live like that. But
to describe it as a dictatorship doesn't capture it. That implies the
existence of an organized state. It is so much worse than that. It is
the entire country lives under the iron, brutal, punishing,
threatening, retaliatory bloodthirsty, iron fist of this organization
Hamas.
It is not possible--you cannot send aid to there and say, don't
worry, it won't go to Hamas. It is hard to even think of an analogy
that captures it. I mean, it would be more defensible to say we are
going to send $10 billion to the United Kingdom, but don't worry, it
will not end up--none of it will end up in the hands of the British. It
is just not plausible. But that is a gross understatement compared to
the reality of this. Hamas is Gaza, and Gaza is Hamas. You send
humanitarian aid there, you will be supporting them, just as other aid
packages approved by this administration and by international bodies to
which we are huge contributors, have spent countless billions of
dollars sending there, and that has been used by Hamas. Although it was
supposed to go to humanitarian relief, it has been used by Hamas to
prepare for and execute this horrific attack that we saw on October 7--
a horrific attack that, according to those in Gaza, according to Hamas
itself, was just a preview of much bigger, grander, more ambitious,
more bloodthirsty plans to come.
The bill also perpetuates a cycle of endless and unconstitutional
wars in the Middle East bought and paid for by the United States. We
get involved in these things, we stir up trouble, we arm those who we
perceive to be our allies, not knowing how long they might be our
allies or to what extent they might actually be our allies. We are
assuming that just because we consider them our allies today, that they
won't turn against us tomorrow or that they will necessarily use what
we give them to our own people's benefit.
It encourages escalated conflicts in the region to the tune of $2.4
billion, risking direct engagement with Iran.
Look, we have a crisis of never-before-seen proportions on
our southern border, and we are doing all of this stirring up other
conflicts, making it more likely to end up impacting Americans and
America's brave men and women in uniform.

So it saddens me to recall that Republicans, just in very recent
months, demanded meaningful border security; specifically, the House
passed the Secure the Border Act, H.R. 2, and perhaps other provisions
demanded by the majority of the Senate Republicans suggesting that
Ukraine aid ought to be made contingent on President Biden utilizing
those resources in H.R. 2, for example, or other existing law, as he
could do and should do and, by law, is required to do before the
Ukraine aid is released. Notwithstanding the fact that Republican after
Republican insisted on that, the lead Republican negotiator was, we
learned recently, instructed not even to raise the issue, even though,
by my count, most Senate Republicans liked the idea. Inexplicable.
We demanded that as a condition with supporting aid to Ukraine. We
didn't get it. What they produced didn't do what it was supposed to do,
which was make it much, much harder for the Biden administration to
continue to facilitate the ground invasion taking place at our southern
border over the last 3 years.
We waited for months with no meaningful news on the negotiations,
no--apparently no input that was really heard and embraced into the
negotiations and no confirmed details of legislative language until
less than 6 days ago.
The border package produced by the sponsors of this bill did not
secure the border. It contained other features that, perhaps in future
administrations, might prove helpful at the margins, but it also
included a lot of things that an administration--whether it is this one
or one in the future--bent on not securing the border might use to its
great advantage in keeping the border open.
Well, it didn't harness, as it was supposed to, the bipartisan--the
overwhelming Democratic support for more Ukraine aid in order to use
that support on the Democratic side as leverage for actually making the
border more secure in this administration. It didn't do that.
So that is why we said: This one won't suffice. Let's offer up
something that actually will. As you know, that doesn't offer any real
consequence when you say that unless you are willing to walk away from
the deal. And because just enough Senate Republicans--well, a little
more than just enough--but a minority, a slim minority of Senate
Republicans, just 17, decided to support this bill that we in
conference said a few months ago we wouldn't support without something
forcing border security, because they came back and said: Never mind,
we will do it anyway, even though we said beforehand we won't. Because
they did that, of course, the Democrats don't want to negotiate
something that would force border security. I wish they would. They
should. It should be a bipartisan issue. It shouldn't be deeply
partisan, securing the border; but for whatever reason, they feel that
way. And so given that they feel that way and want to support this
administration's lawless approach to our southern border, of course,
they are going to take the lowest price that they can get Republican
support for. And if 17 Republicans are willing to give them that
support without anything forcing border security in this administration
as a condition of their ability to fund Ukraine aid, then, of course,
they are going to take the easier path. Why would they do anything
else? That part makes sense.
What I can't understand is: Why would Republicans do this? Why would
Republicans, having taken that stand, do an about-face and say ``never
mind,'' as though we walked into a car dealership saying: We want to
buy this car, but we won't pay more than this price for it. But later,
when the dealer didn't accept the deal, we--I say ``we'' speaking for
Senate Republican leadership--said: Never mind, we want to buy the car.
We don't care the price. We don't

[[Page S820]]

care what concessions you give us on our end. We will take the original
high price with little in it for us. We will take that deal.
When you go into a car dealership and say: I will pay any price for
this, even if it is an exorbitantly high price, you are not going to
get a great deal. And that is what happened here. It really is
unfortunate.
My Democratic colleagues and many in the corporate media have made a
great show pretending that just because we were given a so-called deal,
a deal that contained the word ``border'' in it, that our demands for
real border security have been met. This is laughable. It is laughable
nonsense, in fact, as the language of that bill showed.
I don't mean that every provision of it was laughable, and I don't
mean this as an insult to those who negotiated it, who I like and
respect on a personal level and with whom I have worked on other
projects. But, I mean it is laughable--it is laughably incompatible and
unresponsive to the demands that we made, the deal that we made with
each other and with the American people, as the language of that bill
showed and as the American people's reaction to that bill also
confirmed.
If our colleagues would truly secure the border, I would love to give
them the opportunity to do so. The chance to do so right now wouldn't
necessarily fix everything, but it should go a long way to fixing the
problem with material change, a material enhancement in border
security.

Unanimous Consent Request--Amendment No. 1531

Madam President, I am proud to introduce the Stopping Border Surges
amendment, which would make discrete, commonsense changes to our
immigration law to protect our border. It would prevent traffickers
from using toddlers and babies as a means to ensuring their customers
easy admission into the interior of our country. It would allow minors
from any nation, if they do not have a credible fear of persecution, to
be safely returned to their home countries. It would expedite the
hearing process for children trafficked across the border--often used
as chattel, temporary chattel--just for the benefit of those trying to
cross illegally.
It would require, if enacted into law, asylum seekers to apply for
asylum in at least one safe country on their route to the United
States. It would help eliminate the overwhelmingly fraudulent asylum
claims that we see being brought. It would require asylum seekers to
arrive and present themselves at a point of entry, and it would expand
the time from claiming asylum to receiving a work permit, which would
help curb the incentive to come here illegally.
I ask unanimous consent to set aside all pending amendments and
motions and to make my amendment, Lee No. 1531, pending to the text of
Murray No. 1388.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The junior Senator from Illinois.
Ms. DUCKWORTH. Madam President, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
Mr. LEE. There we have it.
Keep in mind, what you have just witnessed is my making a motion not
to pass this into law, not even a motion to accept this as an amendment
to the text. I just asked for consent to call up the amendment and make
it pending so that it could be one of the items that we consider, one
of the matters to be voted on, one of the matters that we would at
least have the opportunity to consider and debate on; to, hopefully,
ultimately, vote on; and to ultimately resolve. But I guess that was
too much.
My friend and colleague from Illinois, in acting, undoubtedly, at the
direction of the Senate Democratic leadership, made an objection even
to calling that up and to making the amendment pending. This is what
the rules of the Senate--more than two centuries old--have evolved to
over time. This is what they are there to do. All of these odd terms
like ``cloture'' and all of these procedural votes that we have are
really designed to maximize the opportunity for each individual Senator
to make sure that we have robust debate and to consider possible
improvements to be made to a bill.
In the past, this wasn't such a difficult thing to do. I have been in
the U.S. Senate for 13 years now. I arrived in 2011. Things weren't
perfect by any means, but, at the time, it was fairly common, when we
were considering a major piece of legislation--or even some relatively
minor pieces of legislation and while that legislation was pending--to
direct time set aside to debate the measure. It was quite commonplace.
It was considered a routine practice that Members could go down to the
floor, call up their amendment, and make their amendment pending.
It didn't guarantee its passage into law. It didn't guarantee that
their amendment would be adopted into the legislative text for final
consideration along with the underlying legislation. No, it just meant
that it could be made pending so that Senators could have an
opportunity to debate it, discuss it, and, ultimately, vote on it or
maybe have it fall with a motion to table.
In the event it was a germane amendment, it could still be considered
after cloture but not if it were not germane, meaning tightly connected
to the bill. A good example of an, obviously, germane or a very likely
germane amendment is one that strikes a provision that is in there. You
could still get a vote on that after cloture was achieved, but
nongermane amendments fall out after cloture.
It wasn't that big of a deal--meaning it didn't grind the Senate to a
halt. In fact, the Senate operated for more than two centuries really,
really well with this practice in place.
The Senate rules still allow for this. They still call for it. They
still contemplate it. Our history and tradition are such that, until
very recently, this was the norm. But you see it. The one time of the
week--prior to just a few hours ago, prior to 1 o'clock today, or at
least prior to the vote that the Senate took last night and shortly
before it adjourned for the evening, before it recessed for the
evening--we had a vote. Prior to that time, it wouldn't have been in
order to make an amendment pending. It is now in order. It is in order
now, and I believe it will be until we vote on cloture, which is likely
to occur sometime tomorrow. But this is the time we are supposed to do
that.
Sometimes, in the past, if there were too many amendments, some
Members would get concerned about that and say: Let's not call one up
and make it pending.
It was still relatively rare, even when that happened. But look
around. It is not like--I mean, to my knowledge, I am the first Senator
who has offered up a single amendment to this today to try to make it
pending; yet that is too much.
What? Are we all too busy that we can't debate something this
significant as our Nation's border security? Have we really devolved to
the point that Republican Senators can't operate in any manner without
the support of Senate Republican leadership, and unless they support
the amendment, we don't get it considered? Even if most Senate
Republicans and the overwhelming majority of Republicans at large want
to see something like this debated, we can't do it. It is sad.
Look, when given the chance to agree to a real border security
provision--and my amendment, the Stopping Border Surges amendment,
would do that--this is a real border security provision, one that could
actually make a difference during this administration, this year, and
stop the invasion of our southern border. But our Democratic colleagues
rise to stop it. They won't even allow us to get onto the amendment to
the point that it would have to be debated and ultimately disposed of
one way or another.

So we now see who in the U.S. Senate is truly serious about securing
America's borders. If we won't even allow people to debate measures
that would, unlike the provision rejected earlier this week, actually
force border security, in connection with harnessing the will power--
the substantial will power--especially among Senate Democrats, to fund
Ukraine, we don't have that opportunity.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, it is easy for me to understand why
Democrats, who, for reasons I cannot understand, are hellbent on not
securing the border and on insulating President Biden and his team from
the consequences of not taking such steps as he could and should take
to secure the border. That part I can understand. At

[[Page S821]]

least it is consistent with the positions they have been taking.
What I can't understand is why 17 Senate Republicans, having
initially committed to using this as an opportunity to force
legislation that would actually secure the border--why those people,
those Senate Republicans, those 17 Senate Republicans--support cloture
on this bill when I can't even offer up so much as a suggestion that we
should vote on a border security amendment.
So, to any Senate Republicans who are part of that group of 17, we
saw what just happened. I would urge them--I would implore them--to
take that into account. Don't support cloture tomorrow, not when they
have shut us out like this. You don't want to be part of that. You
don't want to be part of the problem that is off the charts in terms of
its ramifications for human rights, humanitarian concerns, the rule of
law--all kinds things that are supposed to be important to our people
and that Republicans all claim to support.
If you want to support the bill, I may disagree with you on that, but
at least don't vote tomorrow to bring debate to a close and, in the
absence of real debate, not be able to have the real changes that could
actually do what we as Republicans claim to want. Otherwise, we will
see that the U.S. Senate will be perceived correctly as not being
serious about forcing the border security issue now.
All right. Perhaps, if a secure border isn't enough to make them
happy--it isn't to their tastes--my colleagues who insist that they
really are trying to solve this problem should approve of my next
amendment.

Unanimous Consent Request--Amendment No. 1530

Madam President, currently, under Federal law, it is illegal to vote
in a Federal election if you are not an American citizen, but as you
scour the United States, there is no real mechanism to enforce that
law. This amendment would make very clear that proof of American
citizenship is required when registering a person to vote in a Federal
election.
The amendment would make it very clear that there are criminal
penalties for knowingly registering an illegal alien to vote--criminal
penalties, as well there should be--because if you register people to
vote who are not citizens, you are putting non-Americans in charge of
our own government. You are changing who gets to decide the direction
of our government. Rather than being a government of, by, and for the
American people, it becomes something else. So this amendment would
make it very clear that an illegal alien who knowingly registers to
vote would be subject to criminal penalties, and so will a person who
knowingly registers someone to vote who is not a citizen.
For the next Presidential election--the one coming up this year--and
for every election beyond that, we have to take into account that we
now have at least 8 million--quite probably 10 million, quite possibly
more than 10 million--illegal aliens who have come into this country in
the last 3 years alone, on top of those who have been here before then,
who will now be prime targets for voter manipulation. Given the way
many States operate their voter registration rolls, they may well be
enrolled and, in some cases, automatically as they register for a
driver's license or something like that.
So we should be concerned about this, significantly concerned, and I
don't know that many Americans--you know, I have heard even a lot of
Democrats say that only citizens are and should be able to vote. So it
should be a very bipartisan issue. I don't know who would want
noncitizens to be able to vote. Especially in light of the 10 million
or so who have come in illegally recently, we can't discount the very
real probability that a significant portion of these people might end
up voting unless we put in place mechanisms for enforcing existing
Federal law that makes it unlawful for noncitizens to vote.
For the next Presidential election and beyond, we will have these 8
to 10 million--maybe more--illegal aliens in the country. Whether or
not they vote may be dependent entirely on what we do here and whether
we take this action.
This ship may not pass again between now and the November 2024
election. We have got to protect our Republic and the integrity of each
and every American--American vote--against a wave of possible illegal
aliens and other noncitizens trying to vote.
I ask unanimous consent to set aside all pending amendments and
motions and make my amendment, Lee No. 1530, pending to the text of
Murray No. 1388.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The junior Senator from Illinois.
Ms. DUCKWORTH. Madam President, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
Mr. LEE. That is too bad, Madam President. As we just saw, my
Democratic colleague just blocked an amendment--not just blocked the
amendment from becoming law, not just blocked the amendment from
becoming a part of the bill that we are debating, but blocked it even
from being made pending so that it could be thoroughly debated and
disposed of by a vote, a point of order, or otherwise. It is an
amendment that would prevent illegal aliens--people who are not
American citizens, one way or another--from voting in our
elections. What possible reason, what possible justification could
there be for opposing the integrity of our ballot box in that specific
way?

Again, back to the phonebook--if phonebooks still exist--if you pull
people randomly from the phonebook or some other source and ask people,
I think you would struggle to find many who would say, yes, it is just
fine for illegal aliens to vote in a Federal election, because, in
fact, it is not legal; it is just that we don't have the tools in place
that we need to make that law effective, to ensure compliance, to
enforce the law. So I still wonder what possible reason there could be,
what possible valid reason there could be to oppose that.
I suppose we really do need--as some would say, we need more
immigrants to come into this country to do jobs that Americans don't
want to do. I have always found that argument offensive on multiple
levels. I don't even really know what that means exactly. But certainly
whatever job people who say this sort of thing have in mind that a
noncitizen would do, that an illegal alien would do that a U.S. citizen
or somehow otherwise lawful inside the United States wouldn't do--of
the many jobs they have in mind for them, voting isn't one of them;
voting in Federal elections and determining the course of our
government shouldn't be one of them.
Is there a perception, perhaps, that if we don't put any teeth behind
this law prohibiting noncitizens from voting in a Federal election,
they will be more likely to vote for Democrats? The fact that we even
have to ask this question is itself troubling, and the fact that we are
not even allowing this to be made pending is incredibly troubling.
I have introduced amendments that would actually ensure border
security and protect America's Federal elections from foreign
interference--things that I think all of my colleagues at least profess
to care about, but now they have objected even to making these
amendments pending.
I am glad that the American people now have the opportunity to
witness this disaster on full display, to witness the dysfunction in a
body that until recently prided itself as the world's greatest
deliberative body into something that is divisively nondeliberative.
You see, that practice I referred to a few minutes ago that was fully
in place not just for years, not just for decades, but for centuries
before I got here--once you got onto a bill and the bill was on the
floor, Members could routinely come to the floor, call up their
amendment, make it pending, and the Senate would dispose of it. Yes, it
takes time, but it is what we are supposed to do to make sure that it
is thorough.
In recent years, sadly, with the assistance of leadership of both
political parties, increasingly they won't let you do that unless you
have--it is called a unanimous consent agreement to bundle up a whole
bunch of amendments, those that everyone decides--particularly
Republican and Democratic Senate leadership decide were acceptable to
them to be voted on.

[[Page S822]]

This often entails surrendering--limiting the amount of time that can
be used to debate those things. You have to get somebody else's
permission before doing that and then get Senate Republican and Senate
Democratic leadership to bless that and come to the floor and propose
it in a unanimous consent agreement.
It was much simpler when we would just come down and ask for consent
to make an amendment pending one at a time. Simple principles of
collegiality demand that we do that.
Again, I understand that sometimes there might be circumstances where
someone concludes that there isn't enough time. By the way, when those
circumstances arise, I believe that it is more important, not less
important, to let every Senator call up, debate, and ultimately vote on
amendments they deem necessary.
Let the basic principle of exhaustion and the informal, unwritten
social rules that govern interpersonal human interactions in the Senate
be the limiting force on this. Ultimately, that is what governs it.
Ultimately, these things tend not to be abused.
Even in circumstances where any Senator can introduce as many
amendments as they want during a period of time known as budget vote-
arama--when we are passing a budget or a budget reconciliation act,
there is a period of time in which any Senator may offer any amendment
and have that voted on. Even then, those tend not to last more than 24
hours. Usually we don't even make it that long because the principle of
exhaustion kicks in, and the social pressures associated with a body
where everybody knows each other also kick in.
Here, we have none of the excuses that one might otherwise offer--
disingenuously, I believe, but offer nonetheless--that we can't do
this.
Again, to my knowledge, I am the only Senator who has offered to make
a single amendment pending this entire day. The Chamber is almost
empty. Most of my colleagues are not here. If they are in Washington at
all, they are not in this Chamber.
We ought to be able to continue debating. There is no time crunch I
am interfering with. This is a chance for us to debate, discuss,
introduce, call up, make pending amendments, and ultimately vote on
them.
This is a fleeting opportunity because unless those 17 Republicans
decide to change their vote between now and tomorrow when we vote on
cloture on the bill, where we won't have an opportunity to do it
anymore, this is our only chance. This is our only shot.
Look, make no mistake, I understand that there are a lot of Americans
who like this bill, who want it to pass as is. I get it. They have
every right to feel that way. I disagree with them, but I nonetheless
defend their right to take that position. But there are also a whole
lot who are not satisfied with this bill and who are downright
offended, disgusted, hurt, or scared that we would consider voting
on something like this without even considering a single change to it.

So, what, you put up a few negotiators in a room, a very small
handful, and you say: You iron it out; you write it. Keep it secret
from everybody else until days before the Senate will even debate it.
Then you limit--as they may do if they decide to support cloture
tomorrow--limit to only about, effectively speaking, maybe 24 hours the
period of time in which amendments could be called up and made pending,
debated, voted on, and considered. If they support cloture tomorrow,
they are saying: Forget that. You don't matter. Your views don't
matter. Those who embrace your views, who are trying to champion them
in connection with this bill, don't matter because they don't count. If
you are not a super-Senator, if you are not part of the law firm of
Schumer and McConnell, if you are not closely tied to them or in
alignment with their views on this legislation, then no matter how many
hundreds of millions of Americans disagree strongly, your views don't
count. They can't even be voted on here.
That is really tragic--something that we are losing as an
institution, something we are losing as a country.
So I put forward these amendments to protect our elections and to
protect our borders. These are things that most Senators do claim to
care about, but they have objected to these amendments. I am glad the
American people now finally have the opportunity to witness that
strange resistance to even having to debate a slightly different
approach on full display.

Unanimous Consent Request--Amendment No. 1449

Madam President, I am now going to address some other issues with the
other major problem in this bill, and that is the reckless, wasteful,
bloody expense to the American taxpayer to fund a proxy war on the
other side of the world.
On this front, the Biden administration's posture of ``as long as it
takes and as much as it takes in Ukraine''--it is not a real strategy.
It is not a strategy at all. In fact, it is a blueprint for yet another
forever war.
We have blindly sent over $113 billion for Ukraine with no plan, no
mission, no clear objectives on how U.S. engagement directly benefits
our own national interests or how it makes individual men, women, and
children in America any safer. This blind spending needs to stop, and
it must stop today. We really shouldn't be sending one more dollar, one
more dime, one more penny without a plan.
The Biden administration needs to put pen to paper to deliver a
strategy that aligns our national interests with specific time-bound
objectives.
I have an amendment--my Define the Mission Act amendment--that would
allow only 2 percent of funds intended for Ukraine to be released until
the President delivers a strategy with specific objectives and precise
timelines to Congress so that Congress can make an informed decision
about these weighty matters and very impactful measures within the
bill.
So I ask unanimous consent to set aside all pending amendments and
motions and make my amendment, Lee No. 1449, pending to the text of
Murray No. 1388.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The junior Senator from Illinois.
Ms. DUCKWORTH. Madam President, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
Mr. LEE. Well, that is too bad.
This time, with this amendment, we see an objection, and with this
amendment, we are talking about something that is a core part of what
the bill actually does. In no way is it extraneous. In my view, we
shouldn't consider the border security and election integrity
amendments either--I don't think they are ancillary to this. I don't
think we should take another step in this direction without things like
that. But this one relates directly to the subject matter at hand, so
it would be hard for them to say: Well, you are going too far afield
from where this bill treads. This is a complement to existing
legislation, and it is basic, commonsense reform to what we have now.
How weird is that? Apparently, the solid goals and the timelines and
the expectations that we are requesting in this are just too much to
ask of those who spent hundreds of billions of American taxpayer
dollars on proxy wars overseas. Those same masters of the universe,
self-appointed here in the U.S. Senate, who are so hell-bent on doing
this notwithstanding understandable fear, reluctance, trepidation on
the part of the American people, when asked to even defend themselves
against why we are not demanding a plan, say no.
We are not even going to consider that. We won't even let you make it
pending. We understand that you, Mike, are not even asking us to pass
this. You are not even asking us to adopt it into the bill. You are
just asking for the chance to have it pending on the Senate floor
during the one time--the one period of time--in which we could consider
such things on matters impacting national security and how much every
dollar spends, and the answer is no.
I suppose the plans must be in their heads. It must be in the heads
of the wise sages over at the Pentagon, at the White House, and the
wise sages among Senate Democrats and the wise sages among the 17
Senate Republicans who are willing to vote yes on cloture on the motion
to proceed to this bill. But I hope, I expect, I ask, I beg, I plead
that the 17 Senate Republicans--each of them--who voted for front-end
cloture on this bill will reconsider their

[[Page S823]]

back-end cloture on this bill, which could come as early as tomorrow
because debate has been shut down.
Bad things happen when we take debatable matters--especially
important, essential, debatable matters--and render them beyond debate
because a select powerful few refuse even to debate them. It is
appalling. It is un-American. It is undemocratic. And the American
people deserve better. And we all know that to be true.
I suppose American families are just supposed to trust the military
geniuses behind this aid package, just like America trusted its leaders
when we went to Vietnam, just like when America trusted its leaders
when we went to start a war over weapons of mass destruction when those
weapons weren't there, just like America trusted Barack Obama to arm
only moderate rebels, only people who would never turn against us in
Syria.
This is the kind of trust that Joe Biden and the U.S. Senate ask for
now. Why would the American people and those they elect to represent
them at this body fall for this yet again? It is like Charlie Brown
kicking the football that magically disappears upon Lucy's action over
and over and over again. You know what they say about insanity. I think
it is safe to say that what we are doing is insane by that or any
reasonable definition.
Don't worry, America. I am sure this time it will be different. I am
sure this time nothing will go wrong. Never mind the fact that we are
picking a fight for a proxy war with a nation that has enough nuclear
weapons to kill us many, many times over. Never mind the fact that we
are $34 trillion in debt. Never mind the fact that we are being invaded
across our southern border. This time it is going to be OK. Don't worry
about it. Never mind the fact that we have the world's reserve currency
and that every man, woman, and child in America alive today has
benefited materially from that status and that we are jeopardizing that
very status.
And when we jeopardize it more and more and more, eventually that
falls. And we fall with it. And that fall will be unlike anything
anyone has ever experienced in this country. Yet we continue to trust.
Our founding document--a document to which we have all sworn an
oath--the U.S. Constitution, certainly contemplates a society in which
we can trust each other. We trust but verify. And especially where our
government, particularly our national government, our Federal
Government is concerned--this government based here in this city for
which we are the sovereign lawmaking authority--we are instructed not
to just engage in blind trust, in putting faith in that government as
if it were some sort of deity, as Americans, we trust, but we also
verify.
This should be the verification platform. If not us, who? And if not
right now, in the next 24 hours, before this thing proceeds after what
the bill's proponents hope to be a successful back-end cloture vote,
beyond which no real significant debate, no real significant amendments
will likely be possible, who will do it? When will it happen? It
doesn't materialize automatically. We have to do it right now.
And what excuse do they have for not doing it? This Chamber is empty.
Nobody else is lining up. Nobody else is trying to make their
amendments pending. And yet the Senate can't be bothered. The Senate
Democratic leadership, with the active open support, the complicity of
the Senate Republican leadership, can't be bothered to stand up for
this, to say this makes no sense; we need to consider amendments to
make this better, if nothing else, to show the American people that we
give a darn; that we care enough about them. And yet it doesn't happen.
I am told that I can't even make these pending. Shame on us.
We must define our mission. We must, and yet apparently we won't. We
won't even debate requirements to define our mission.
Next, I want to note that every dollar of economic aid in this bill
for Ukraine is a slap in the face of every hard-working American
battling the cost-of-living crisis created by Bidenomics right here at
home. Economic aid is not going to just magically win the war for
Ukraine, much as I think all of us would like to see Ukraine just win.
We can't wish it into existence. We can't just dump enough money into
it to make it happen.

On the contrary, economic aid by some measures is proving to be a
colossal waste of money and, according to some critics, may be
prolonging the war by forestalling a negotiated peace. Americans will
be furious to learn that billions of dollars out of their paychecks are
subsidizing clothing stores and concert tickets for Ukrainians while
families here in the United States are living paycheck to paycheck. No,
their clothing stores aren't getting funded, nor should they be. That
is not the role of government.
The role of this government is to protect life, liberty, and property
for its people. It is not to fund concert tickets a continent away in
somebody else's war just because they are at war. It is not to pay
somebody else's civil servants their salaries for an entire year just
because they are at war.
Some of my colleagues called the billions of dollars in economic
assistance, which we are providing to Ukraine, a small amount. A small
amount--really? Economic assistance makes up 34 percent of the roughly
$113 billion in assistance that the United States has already, prior to
this bill, provided directly to Ukraine. Calling that a small portion,
that is an insult to every American struggling to put food on the table
and gas in the car and a roof over their heads.
The leaders of both parties--at least the leaders of both parties in
the Senate--will tell you that this bill cut economic aid to Ukraine
and that we should be grateful for that. Well, thanks. The only problem
is, it is a lie; it is a complete lie.
Let's be clear. Providing ``only'' $7.8 billion in economic
assistance instead of what President Biden had previously proposed in
his boondoggle request of $11 billion is not a meaningful cut. In fact,
it is not a cut at all. That is not cutting. It is adding to what we
have already given, just adding to it a little bit less than he had
originally supposed. That is not a cut. Don't insult our intelligence,
especially the intelligence of the American people, by calling that a
cut when, in fact, it is not--and you know it is not.
The bill prohibits--mercifully, it prohibits pension payments. That
was part of the original plan, you see. President Biden, in his eminent
wisdom, wanted also to support pension assistance. I think that is why
it has been reduced from the original request, somewhere in the
neighborhood of $11 billion down to $7.8 billion, what this part of the
bill now spends because they cut out support for more Ukrainian
pensions. That is great. It is merciful, I guess, that you are not
requiring Americans to do that. It still doesn't change the fact that
you are saddling Americans with an obligation that is not theirs. It is
not ours. It is somebody else's.
It is money that is going to continue to pay the salaries of
Zelenskyy and his bureaucrats, whom every reputable news source in
America acknowledged for their notorious corruption, even before this
war started, long before the United States of America started pouring
money into this corruption-saddled country to the tune of 12 figures.
Twelve figures, that is where you get into the hundreds of billions of
dollars.
So with a country that already has an endemic, systemic problem with
money laundering, with corruption, what do you think happens when you
dump $113 billion into that country? What do you think happens when you
then dump another 55-, 60-plus billion dollars on top of that? I can
give you a hint. It hasn't gotten better.
And as many experts in the region will tell you, there has been
example after example where we can't account for billions of dollars at
a time. A big mystery there. Big shock there. And yet the American
people are asked to continue to pay the salaries of Zelenskyy and his
bureaucrats, everyone who works for the Government of Ukraine. What
could go wrong?
My colleagues have also said cutting economic aid to Ukraine--again,
``cutting'' in air quotes--again, it sends the message to our European
NATO allies to ``step up'' and do more.
This reminds me of a story I heard in college--I don't know whether
it is true, maybe it was apocryphal--of a rich kid who got into trouble
while in college. And his parents did what many rich parents do in that
circumstance. They took away his Porsche. And in

[[Page S824]]

place of the Porsche, they gave him a brandnew Jeep Cherokee. That was
not punishment, as I perceived it at the time. Whether that story was
real or imagined, this is certainly not telling Ukraine to get its game
in gear. We are not even taking away the Porsche. They have already got
the $113 billion we have already given them. We are letting them keep
the Porsche, and we are giving them the brandnew, top-of-the-line,
fully loaded Jeep Cherokee. That is not a cut. And it certainly doesn't
send a message that you better get your game in gear, not at all.
Make no mistake, this really is a laughable attempt at burden-
sharing. The woke bureaucrats in NATO and the European Union are
completely content with allowing the United States to pick up the tab
for Europe's security. The bulk of assistance sent by European allies
is humanitarian and economic, despite possessing the capacity and the
incentive and, I believe, the need and the moral imperative to send
weapons.
The only way to get Europe to do more is for the United States to
actually do less. And this means no economic aid and no military aid,
especially after all we have done and how little they have done over
there. That is the only way to get them to tighten their belts. That is
the only way to get our European allies in the game. That is why I am
introducing an amendment prohibiting any funding for economic support
of Ukraine, for paying the pensions or the salaries of Ukrainian
Government bureaucrats, as well as paying for any Ukrainian welfare
programs.
Again, this legislation originally was expected to also pay the
pensions. President Biden wanted it to do that. It is an act of mercy,
I suppose--although, penuriously doled-out mercy, I would add--that, at
least, they prohibited this from going to pensions. But this would add
to pensions in addition to saying this may not go to pay their pensions
but also say they can't use it for their welfare programs or for their
salaries.

Unanimous Consent Request--Amendment No. 1445

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside all pending
amendments and motions and make my amendment, Lee No. 1445, pending to
the text of Murray No. 1338.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The senior Senator from Nevada.
Ms. CORTEZ MASTO. Madam President, reserving my right to object, MAGA
Republicans had their chance to work in a bipartisan fashion, and
rightwing extremists in the GOP said no. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
Mr. LEE. Ah, here we see it. So on the ``MAGA extremists''--an
extremist for saying that maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be paying the
salaries of Ukrainian bureaucrats to the tune of $8 billion for an
entire year; maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't give them an assistance
program that will also enable them to continue whatever welfare
programs they have, whatever economic assistance programs they have in
place to buy concert tickets, to keep clothing stores running as they
see fit. If that is what passes for extremism in America, then I think
you have just labeled all Americans extremists or, at least, the
overwhelming majority of us.
Keep in mind, once again, I am not even asking that this be adopted.
That is not what she objected to. I am not asking that it be passed
into law, not asking that it be adopted even into the bill. I am just
asking that it be made pending so we can debate it, we can discuss it,
and we can vote on it.
You know what we heard the other day from these Republicans in the
Senate who voted on cloture on the motion to proceed to the bill so we
could get on the bill? What we heard from them was: Don't worry. We
will have an amendment process. You will be able to offer up
amendments, have them voted on, have them debated. You will be able to
do that.
Well, that is not really materializing, is it? It is not. It is not
materializing. I just asked to make this pending, and it didn't happen.
For that, I am called an extremist.
Good heavens, what have we come to? I see that some Members of the
U.S. Senate object to even modest measures protecting Americans,
protecting their money from being wasted, stolen, or misused for
nondefense-related purposes, for purposes that are very, very difficult
to connect to any benefit on the part of the American people. If that
makes me an extremist, what have we come to? It doesn't. My colleagues
know that. And my colleagues know that most Americans would be
concerned to know that we can't even make an amendment like this
pending. It is a pretty modest reform. It is not too much to ask.
Oh, we are a fine, fine steward of America's finances. No wonder our
country is $34 trillion in debt, much to foreign adversaries like
China.
What a disgrace.
Proponents of never-ending U.S. support for Ukraine, including many
of my colleagues--including, unfortunately, apparently, 17 of my
Republican colleagues--want America to pick up the tab for the
rebuilding of Ukraine postwar. We know this bill perpetuates something
we have seen before, which is a really dangerous and vicious cycle of
obligation for the United States on rebuilding Ukraine and leaves U.S.
taxpayers on the hook for massive corruption.
How do we know this? Well, because the same model was used to keep
the United States entangled longer than we should have been in places
like Iraq and Afghanistan. How did that turn out, that regime change,
turn out for us, for example, in Afghanistan? A fail. A subtle
democratic change, a stable democratic government favorable to U.S.
interests toppled. It didn't happen.
By the way, in those circumstances, I suppose one could have even
made a slightly better argument for nation-building. I still didn't
support that then, and we shouldn't have been doing it, but at least I
understand the argument better for that kind of nation-building,
reconstruction postwar in a nation where we had actually been waging
war ourselves as Americans.
Here we are, not even the people at war. We are just the people
perpetuating that war, funding that war. We are funding it to the tune
of 12 figures, money we won't ever get back and money, if we keep
feeding it, that is probably going to obligate us even more. Waste,
fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars was rampant in those countries. It
will be even more rampant here.
So I am introducing an amendment that would prohibit any funds of
this act being used for reconstruction and activities in Ukraine.
Democracy is a result of dependency on the United States. It doesn't
work out so well. I am not sure it ever does. Let's not ignore this
history lesson yet again.

Unanimous Consent Request--Amendment No. 1443

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside all pending
amendments and motions and make my amendment, Lee No. 1443, pending to
the text of Murray No. 1388.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The senior Senator from Nevada.
Ms. CORTEZ MASTO. Reserving my right to object, Republicans had a
chance to work in a bipartisan fashion, and rightwing extremists in the
GOP said no. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
Mr. LEE. OK. There are serious problems with that. Again, we hear
words like ``MAGA'' and ``extremists'' coming out. I resent both
characterizations. I even more resent the notion that because she
disagrees with the views of some Members of this body, that it is
appropriate, it is acceptable, that it somehow passes for legitimate
argument to brand us using slurs that some of my colleagues have chosen
for a while.

Let's not ignore something else here. This has absolutely nothing to
do with the border security provisions--the border security provisions
opposition to which my colleague said somehow disqualify me from
raising a suggestion that maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be involved
in reconstruction of Ukraine. It has nothing to do with the border
security provisions.
Moreover, unravel that argument for a minute. Think about what they
are saying. Even if it were being raised--which is it is not--as my
prior amendments I tried to bring up a few minutes ago dealing with
some border security issues--even if they had been, on what planet is a
U.S. Senator disqualified from debate simply because of a bill
negotiated in secret by people not of

[[Page S825]]

their own choosing, on terms that they never approved of, producing a
bill, ultimately, that was not to their satisfaction--on what planet
does that vitiate the procedural rights of U.S. Senators to offer
improvements to a bill? It doesn't. It never has. I hope and I pray it
never will.
And it is insulting to the American people to suggest that a
condition precedent for being invited into the exclusive club of those
allowed to offer improvements to an amendment are those who kiss the
ring of the Senate Democratic and Senate Republican leadership in this
body, the law firm of ``Schumer, McConnell, and Its Acolytes and
Associates.''
This is wrong. I have seen it accelerate during the entirety of the
13 years I have been here. I can deal with it when I think about it
only in terms of what it does to me personally. It is what it is. I get
really angry when I think about what it does to the American people, to
those people I represent, the 3.5 million people I represent in Utah
and the hundreds of millions of others represented by colleagues who
are not one of the precious few. I could, most of the time, count on
one hand those who are privileged to see those documents to which she
referred; documents that were negotiated against the wishes of the
majority of the Senate Republicans, directly contrary to what we had
committed to each other and to our voters to support. And now, somehow,
we get to the floor of the U.S. Senate and because I expressed concern
on that, I am apparently disqualified, along with any other Senate
Republican who had concerns with that border security language. I am,
therefore, disqualified to somehow offer improvements, amendments to
improve this bill, to make it less bad simply because I objected to it
because it was not at all what any of us agreed to. That is stunning.
Here we sit in an empty Chamber with no other amendments offered
today, no other amendments made pending today, but we can't do these
ones. Why? Well, those who supported this bill of both parties
apparently believe that we are disqualified from having a voice here if
we won't unflinchingly bow to them in what they negotiated, as if it
were conical scripture, as if it were carved on the stone. Shameful.
Apparently, those objecting to this not only believe that Americans
should have to pay for proxy wars on other continents, on behalf of
other countries, against yet other countries, but also that we should
more or less irrevocably, open-endedly commit to rebuilding them.
Can somebody tell me when Ukraine was admitted as the 51st State? I
must have missed that day.
Madam President, even if my colleagues disagree with me and disagree
with dozens of other Senators who harbor these concerns and hundreds of
millions of Americans who feel the same way that are being asked to
fund all of these things against their will and their wishes; even if
they believe that somehow we in the Senate have perfect wisdom and
knowledge and virtue to send billions of dollars overseas to do nothing
more than stop and harm and kill evil people doing evil things so that
those evil things are no longer going to be done; even if you could
assume all of that--which you can't; we know that you can't, and you
shouldn't--surely, they would agree with me that we should not send aid
to the terrorist perpetrators of the October 7 massacre in Israel.
Surely, they would agree with me that we should not send aid to the
terrorist perpetrators who, having carried out those heinous
atrocities, still have ambitions that would make those heinous
atrocities of October 7 look like a Sunday picnic.
I think many Americans would be shocked to learn that Congress has
almost no visibility into how our funds are used within the United
Nations and within other multilateral globalist organizations funded by
the United States. With Ukraine alone, our own government admits the
following:

[That] routing U.S. assistance funds to Ukraine through
multilateral institutions . . . where U.S. donations will
merge with funding streams from other international donors--
has the potential to reduce transparency and oversight.

Well, that is the understatement of the year: ``To reduce
transparency and oversight.'' You think? You think that when we give
money to the U.N. and the U.N. gives money to another U.N. entity and
somebody gives money to somebody else--it changes hands multiple times,
commingled with funds from other countries--you think that will reduce
transparency and oversight? You think so. You know so. We have every
reason to believe that. We are fools if we don't admit it.
The American people aren't fools. They have every reason to be
concerned about this. Why would we expect--when we know what we know
and we know what our own government has admitted very recently is the
case, why on Earth would we expect routing our assistance for Gaza
through the United Nations will be any different?
Referring back to that definition of insanity, here we go again.
Look, decades of U.S. payrolling the U.N. system as the largest donor
nation, both on the mandatory and on the voluntary portions of the
funds that we pay, these have made taxpayers unknowingly, unwillingly
but, nonetheless, very complicit in terrorism and anti-Semitism in the
indoctrination of generations of children living in Gaza who have been
taught to hate and harm and kill Jewish people just because they are
Jewish and they happen to live in Israel.
The American people don't want any part of that. They certainly don't
want to add to it, knowing what we know now, what we have learned,
about the catastrophic consequences of ignoring what happens when we
ignore the problem.
That is why I am introducing an amendment to clarify that not only
will our donors stop the funding of UNRWA--this is the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency--an agency that has itself been responsible for
fomenting a lot of this hatred and this indoctrination, anti-Semitic
indoctrination, and otherwise have proven to be of material
assistance--one could say an accomplice to the crimes involving but
culminating in and not limited to the attacks of October 7.
But mercifully, I suppose, the authors of this bill decided to write
out UNRWA--the U.N. Relief and Works Agency--saying: No soup for them.
No benefits for them. They can't have it.
But my amendment would add to that, acknowledging that the agencies
supported by the United Nations are all part of a network. There are
close to two dozen of them operating in Gaza, and if you exclude only
UNRWA from that network, that money will just go somewhere else,
inflicting many of the same harms that have come through UNRWA. So my
amendment would clarify that not only will our dollars stop funding
UNRWA, but they will no longer fund any U.N. organization operating in
Gaza.
Look, we have been down this road before, funneling our aid dollars
through multilateral institutions, and we know exactly how it ends: in
tragedy, in savage brutality in which we have been complicit through
our financial support.
Without my amendment, there is nothing to prevent the administration
from taking funds that could have, would have otherwise gone to UNRWA
and redirecting them to the nearly two dozen other U.N. entities that
operate in Gaza, where we lose all visibility and all control over
where our dollars end up and how they are used and what they fund.
Enough is enough.
Like most multilateral institutions, the U.N. is a bloated, corrupt,
and really woke system, one that is far past its prime, and it has
proven adversarial to the United States and overtly hostile to our ally
Israel. It is a platform for tyrants to mock us, for brutal
dictatorships to sit on human rights committees, and for terrorists to
receive aid. We can't trust this administration not to fund U.N.
programs in Gaza, and we can't trust the U.N. not to fund terrorists
and foment their acts of brutality, which is exactly why my amendment
is so urgently needed.

Unanimous Consent Request--Amendment No. 1448

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside all pending
amendments and motions and make my amendment Lee No. 1448, pending to
the text of Murray No. 1388.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The senior Senator from Nevada.
Ms. CORTEZ MASTO. Reserving my right to object.

[[Page S826]]

Republicans had a chance to work in a bipartisan fashion, and
rightwing extremists in the GOP said no. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
Mr. LEE. Madam President, what else is there to say? We shouldn't be
doing these things. We certainly shouldn't be doing them with reckless
disregard for the very serious problems that we are creating, for the
very serious existing problems that we will be exacerbating through
this legislation. We certainly shouldn't be doing this in a way that
excludes a very significant percentage of the composition of the U.S.
Senate from having any input.
Did you hear what she said? Yet again, on a measure that has
absolutely nothing--nothing at all--to do with the border security
measures, that were rejected, with good reason, by nearly all Senate
Republicans, she is on that basis calling us extremists and on that
basis excluding us from even making our amendments pending. This is
insane. This has nothing to do with border security provisions. This
has to do with this bill.
For that matter, this is a germane amendment to this legislation, to
exclude us simply because we wouldn't bow and kiss the ring of the law
firm of Schumer & McConnell and its acolytes and associates is a
disgrace to this institution. It is essentially saying: You must agree
with the machine; you must agree with the firm; or you will be shut
out. You won't have anything to say.
This is unacceptable. What will be even more unacceptable is if those
same Senate Republicans, who just a couple of days ago and just a few
feet from here on the same floor of the same building here in the
Capitol, the same Senate Republicans told us: Don't worry. You will
still have the opportunity to offer up amendments and make them
pending, to have them disposed of by the Senate after we get on to the
bill. And that is why they--those 17--voted that way. We will see
within the next 24 hours whether they meant what they said because, if
they did, they should be voting against this.
Look at what has happened today. The only amendments that have been
called up and they have drawn objections, every single time--and oddly
enough, as they become more relevant, more obviously germane to the
bill, they have drawn more vicious objections, dismissing those of us
who have concerns with this bill and with the border security
provisions negotiated without our knowledge or consent over a period of
3 or 4 months, was rejected by many of us with good reason because it
didn't do what we promised each other we would try to accomplish. We
are told we are shut out of the process now; that is, most Senate
Republicans are now shut out of the process.
So I ask, I implore, I plead with my Senate Republican colleagues at
least, it is sad that the Democrats have gotten to this point. Senate
Democrats, when I first started here, didn't do that. We didn't do that
to each other generally. They are fully bought in on this now
apparently.
But I at least plead with my Republican colleagues, if you voted for
cloture on the motion to proceed, front-end cloture, I implore you,
tomorrow, please don't support cloture. They have shut this down. They
shut down the very process that you told us we would have access to,
the very process that the American people have come to expect and
demand, especially when we are going to spend some $95 billion in
legislation, sending out--I don't know--$55-$60 billion more to
Ukraine, after we have sent $113 billion to Ukraine already.
No, the American people demand more. They should demand more of all
of us, but certainly, the Republican voters demand more of Republican
Senators, especially given that Republican Senators as a whole, as a
conference, we made a decision to try to use this as an opportunity to
force the border security measure, and now, we are told: No soup for
you.
So, you know, without that amendment--it is just rejected even being
made pending--there is, to be clear, nothing to prevent the
administration from taking these funds, taking these funds that would
have otherwise gone to UNRWA and just following through some other U.N.
entity or some other body than UNRWA.
My colleagues have rejected every safeguard, every limit, every
improvement, every condition that I have offered that we may be good
and faithful stewards of America's resources and the taxes taken from
hard-working families, taxes that, at the very least, they should
expect not to be used to kill Israelis, to threaten Americans, to
undermine American national security, to say nothing of the missed
opportunity here to secure a genuinely bipartisan agreement on
something where there is not agreement in both parties as overwhelming
as some would wish, but where there could be if you matched up adequate
border security provisions with provisions giving aid to Ukraine.
We will find out tomorrow whether those Senate Republicans who voted
to get on to the bill--notwithstanding the absence of the conditions
that we demanded months ago--we will see how they feel then. I really
hope they will reconsider. They have every reason to reconsider their
vote and to do it differently in light of the fact that they are just
shutting us out of amendments, shutting us out with the excuse that
anyone who disagrees with them, anyone who takes a different position
than the firm and its acolytes and associates can't even have a voice
on a measure like this.
Today, we have explored the utter arrogance of politicians who
believe that they--and they alone--can determine the risks and the
rewards of proxy wars across the globe. They believe that they are
playing a grand game of geopolitical chess. But as millions of
Americans have seen, they are just playing with fire.
We can't throw more of America's treasure into these bloody conflicts
across the globe without maintaining visibility, transparency, access,
and control over that funding. We can't do that and pretend that we are
not harming hard-working families who find it hard to put food on the
table and a roof over their heads because of Bidenomics, because of
reckless spending like this.
We cannot simply blindly dance with nuclear powers, without
forethought, without even so much as a plan. Remember, before even
getting on to this bill, the majority leader assured us that the
amendment process would be, as I believe in his words, ``fair and
open.'' But then--then--once Republicans decided to get on the bill,
enough Republicans to get him past that critical threshold of 60 votes
to bring debate to a close on getting on to the bill, to give the votes
to consider it, then and only then did the majority leader change his
language when he said that it would be a ``fair and reasonable''
process, not fair and open, but ``fair and reasonable.''
Reasonable is apparently in the eyes of the beholder, the eyes of the
beholder being one who views anyone who disagrees with him as an
extremist whose views are not worth considering. It is not extremist
for the American people to ask that noncitizens be prohibited from
voting in their elections. It is not unreasonable for the American
people to ask that the government for which they work months out of
every year just to pay their Federal taxes, only to be told that is not
nearly enough because we are $34 trillion in debt, so we are going to
print more money to make every dollar spend less--spend and go less far
and buy less things.
It is not fair to those same people to say that those same people are
extremists insofar as they have concerns, concerns that tell them that
they should want a secure border and they should want their elected
lawmakers in Washington, DC, to be demanding a degree of border
security be forced on the Biden administration because it apparently
has to be forced on them, because they are quite unwilling to do it on
their own.
It is not unreasonable for them to ask those things. It is not
unreasonable for the American people to ask and not have to fund acts
of terrorism through agencies that have indoctrinated so many people in
the hateful, hateful marinade of anti-Semitism. It is not unreasonable
for them to demand that these things at least be considered or that we
at least have a plan relative to Ukraine. That is not unreasonable
either.

These goalposts are already shifted. So who decides what is a
reasonable amendment process? The three or four

[[Page S827]]

Members of the Senate who wrote this bill in secret? The leadership?
The law firm of Schumer and McConnell and its acolytes and associates?
The leadership and bill managers who gave us just days to read the bill
before forcing us to vote on it, requiring us to scramble?
As my staff and the staff of many of my Republican friends and
colleagues have done in a short period of time, they have put together
amendments. It is difficult to draft amendments for a bill before you
see the bill. We weren't allowed to see the bill until Sunday night at
7 p.m., eastern standard time. So my hat goes off to my staff and the
staff of many others who have burned the midnight oil--sometimes quite
literally--throughout this whole week in order to get us ready to at
least offer amendments. And now we are told: No such luck. No soup for
you. You didn't kiss the ring of the firm. Sorry, you lose.
But it is not ``we'' who is losing that I am concerned about. It is
not ``we'' in the sense of a few Senators. It is those whom we
represent. It is the hundreds of millions of Americans who were told
that their voice doesn't matter because they are concerned about such
frivolous things as actually securing the border or actually making
sure that we have a plan before funding yet another proxy war, this
time involving an adversary with enough nuclear arms to kill the
American people many times over.
What about the other 96 Members of this body? What about the States
they represent? Are they given a voice in this process? Even those who
voted for cloture to get on the bill, cloture on the motion to
proceed--front-end cloture, as we describe it--most of them were
excluded, if they were being honest. If they were administered truth
serum, they would have to admit that they had little to no say in what
went into it. This was written by a very small handful of people, under
cover of darkness, over many months. And now, after being told there
was a fair and open process that magically transformed into a fair and
reasonable process, which, apparently, means nothing--apparently, it
means if you disagree with the firm and its acolytes and associates,
then you lose. You are excluded, and so are your voters.
On Thursday, we compared notes and gathered information from a dozen
or so of my colleagues. This isn't even all of my Republicans
colleagues, just a dozen or so of us who had been talking about what
amendments we felt were appropriate to be introduced. And just a dozen
or so of us submitted over a hundred amendments to our leadership team
for consideration.
Now, in good faith, we, as a group, we whittled that down, and we
have whittled down that list of over 100 amendments down to 28
priorities. We have worked in good faith to reduce what we are asking
for.
So far, I am still the only person today who has offered up and tried
to make pending even a single amendment, and even that is apparently
not in order.
Over time, it has just become the new normal. The American people
have been asked to settle so many times, to settle for a process that
disenfranchises them by excluding those they elect to be part of the
law-making process. Unless they are part of this elite cabal called the
firm and those who manifest unwavering allegiance to it in moments like
this, they are excluded.
This is why we are $34 trillion in debt, by the way. This is why we
are now swimming in a sea not only of the $34 trillion in debt--which
soon is going to be producing enough in interest payments alone to
swallow up other priorities, including priorities that only we can take
care of, like national defense--but it is also subjecting the American
people to a Byzantine labyrinth of Federal regulations and laws made by
men and women not of their own choosing, Federal bureaucrats, whose
names will never be known, much less appear on the ballot to anyone in
America, who write laws that collectively add to the expense of
government to the tune of $2 or $3 trillion every single year, with no
ability to elect them.
And now, on top of all of that, they are told that even those they do
elect aren't able to help them unless they are part of this cabal, of a
very tiny handful of people that draft the bill.
This is wrong. We all know it is wrong. We have got the procedural
tools available at our disposal to allow us to get around it. We cannot
say--not credibly, not honestly--that we just inherited this: Awe
shucks, there is nothing we can do about it.
We know that is absurd. We know that is not true. We know that is not
true because the rules themselves give us protection against that.
And so I say--I implore--whether you are a Republican or a Democrat,
but especially if you are a Republican--and especially if you are
Republican, any of the Republicans who, I think, all of us said we
should use this as an opportunity to force border security, to harness
what support there is behind providing additional assistance to Ukraine
to force security of the border with an administration bent on the
opposite of that.
When we got a draft of the bill, it just didn't do that. Despite
whatever nice things you might want to say about the language or its
drafters or the intentions of those who were trying to produce
something, it didn't do that. It didn't do that to the point where all
but four Republicans voted against it.
So the fact that we are now being told that the default to that is
that Democrats win, Democrats get the support of 17 Republicans who
will support not only the legislation crafted in secret that unites
Democrats and sharply divides Republicans but also alienates,
overwhelmingly and with good reason, most Republican voters--that they
are going to be accomplices now in shutting out the base. I ask, I beg,
I plead of all of my colleagues, especially those Republicans who
purportedly share that concern--whether they express that concern or
not--regardless of how they feel about border security, for that
matter, regardless of what political party they belong to, they should
care about making sure that our money is not going to fund interests
hostile to the American people, hostile to their interest, to make life
more burdensome to them.

We have a certain implicit obligation that we take on when we take
our oath of office, and the obligation is to ensure that we first do no
harm. This bill violates that. And deep down--deep down--a lot of my
colleagues realize that.
Remember, it only takes 41 votes. Madam President, 41 votes opposing
cloture stops the bill, stops it either indefinitely or until such time
as these concerns can be resolved. They are not insuperable concerns.
They are not unreasonable concerns. They are certainly not concerns
that should be shut out from debate. So I ask, I plead to any of my
colleagues who happen to, for whatever reason, be listening to my words
at this moment and for any voters out there who, for whatever reason,
happen to be listening to me on a nice Saturday afternoon, if you share
these views, share them with your Senators and encourage your Senators
to allow the American people into the dark and secret tent in which
these things are being negotiated to the exclusion of every American.
We are a nation of laws. I hope we always will be. Despite our flaws,
our country is the last great hope in a world that is increasingly
hostile. I hope we will always be available to be that. We can't do it
when we treat our own people this way. We can't do it when we ignore
risks like those that we are ignoring today as long as we continue
this. So I implore my colleagues and I implore voters out there who
have the ear of any of my colleagues to oppose cloture tomorrow. We
haven't had a fair and reasonable process. We haven't had a fair and
open process or any kind of process on amendments because the firm is
determined to exclude us, determined to exclude us in a way that
benefits the military industrial complex, will earn pats on the head
for a small handful of politicians in America, but otherwise undermines
American interest, especially when we refuse even to consider
opportunities to make the bill better or at least less bad. That is not
too much to ask.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The senior Senator from Minnesota.
Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to
pass the national security legislation that is in front of us. It
reaffirms our commitment to our partners across the globe.

[[Page S828]]

Now, earlier this week, we had an opportunity to move forward with
this bill, plus provisions--important provisions--that have been
negotiated by Senator Lankford of Oklahoma, Senator Murphy, Senator
Sinema, and many others, that would have focused on border security--an
issue that Senator Lee has been raising in his objections today.
I think it is important that people understand the many opportunities
we have had to move on border security, but this was a gleaming
opportunity because it was negotiated by a conservative Republican from
Oklahoma who had been designated by his caucus, someone many in this
Chamber have deep respect for. And, unlike other pieces of legislation
that I strongly supported, this actually wasn't comprehensive reform.
We have had many opportunities in the past, including passing a bill
through this Senate that would have created legal paths to citizenship
while strengthening our border, and I hope we continue to have those
opportunities.
The provision that was voted down by our Republican colleagues would
have strengthened the border security in a major way, giving the
President emergency powers that he could have exercised at the border.
It also would have done something about fentanyl.
A sheriff in my State, in our biggest county, in the last year,
seized enough fentanyl to kill every single person in that county. This
legislation would have actually provided the resources for technology--
cutting-edge technology--to detect the fentanyl coming over to our
country from ports of entry--whether they be right on the border,
whether they be on the Canadian border, something of concern to the
Presiding Officer and myself, or whether they be in airports and the
like. Sadly, our colleagues voted that down. So originally, this
combined piece of legislation was about standing with our allies around
the world, but it was also about our own security--border security,
economic security. It actually contained a number of visas and work
permits for those who come to this country legally and would like to
work. And sadly, that was turned down.

I know that in the rural areas of my State, where we don't have
enough workers in our nursing homes and in our hospitals, where we
don't have enough doctors in those hospitals, where we don't have
enough people to work in manufacturing and in our agricultural
communities, that actually would have been a big game changer for us,
as I know it would have been in a lot of the Northern States, but that
was turned down by our colleagues.
So we have the package in front of us, and the package in front of us
is about national security. As we work to try to get them to join us
and strengthen border security, at least we must stand by our allies
around the world.
There is one ally that I especially want to focus on, and that is
what is happening in Ukraine. I have been to Ukraine twice in the last
few years, also to the border right after the invasion, in Poland,
standing there with Senator Wicker and Senator Blumenthal, meeting with
our troops and the NATO troops that were stationed in Poland. But
seeing people fleeing from Ukraine, when that invasion began, always
indelibly marked in my mind would be the grandma who was 90, in a
wheelchair, being pushed over the border from the only country that she
had ever known, into Poland; and the little kids with nothing but
backpacks with their stuffed animals. They had to leave so fast because
there had been a bombing of a training facility. And we happened to be
there that day, only weeks after the war started.
And since then, Vladimir Putin's unprovoked, unlawful, unjustifiable
invasion, the largest land war in Europe since World War II rages on.
This is not only a battle for Ukrainian sovereignty, it is a battle
for democracy itself. And just as Vladimir Putin has shown his true
colors, razing cities to the ground, slaughtering innocents, abducting
children, the Ukrainian people have shown theirs, defending their
democracy in brilliant blue and yellow. They have succeeded, even taken
back some territory because of their unbreakable resolve, but also
because countries across the globe as far away as Japan and South
Korea, their neighbors in Europe, the United States, Canada, have stood
with them. And now is not the time to give up.
Over 100,000 Ukrainians have been wounded and 70,000 have been
killed. In the words of the NATO Secretary-General, the war has become
a battle for ammunition. Russia is firing nearly 10,000 rounds a day,
while Ukraine is only managing 2,000.
It is not just the U.S. that has stood up to this challenge with not
only military aid and expertise but also, of course, humanitarian aid.
And the humanitarian aid in this agreement, of course, will give much-
needed humanitarian assistance to those innocents in Gaza. And we all
mourn what is happening there right now. It will help people throughout
the world.
But it is important to note that it isn't just the U.S. standing up.
Our European allies are standing up to this challenge. The British
Prime Minister visited Ukraine in January and promised to increase
funding to over $3 billion by next year. Latvia, a tiny Baltic State of
less than 2 million people, is providing military support to Ukraine
that is equivalent to more than 1 percent of its GDP. They have also
trained 3,000 Ukrainian troops and plan to train more as the fighting
continues. And Finland, which shares more than an 800-mile border with
Russia, has given Ukraine over $2 billion in aid since the fight began.
These countries know that freedom is at stake. These border countries
that I once visited with Senator McCain during the first invasion--and
I have heard the stories of Estonia, where, when Russia was mad at them
for moving a statue, they turned off their Wi-Fi. Or in Latvia and
Lithuania, when people would stand up for democracy, they would hack
into their phones--or the kinds of false advertising and interference
on the internet with misinformation that we first saw in those border
countries, in places like Finland and places like Sweden, as we now
know, the Russians have tried and are trying it over here.
The Ukrainian people, though--they are on the frontline. While we
deal with this over the internet, as hard as that is, they are dealing
with it on the frontlines--shedding blood, killing hundreds of
thousands of Russian soldiers, standing up for their homeland; the chef
cooking meals for the troops on the frontline; the nurse who traded in
her scrubs for camo and now serves as a field medic; the martial arts
teacher leading an 11-man recon unit to keep his village safe. These
are the lives at stake.
As President Zelenskyy said in September, ``There is not a soul in
Ukraine that does not feel gratitude to you, America.'' I saw this
firsthand when I was there with Senator Portman in the middle of the
war. We were the first ones to go over officially after some of the
leaders in the Senate and House had gone there. The U.S. Embassy
officials in Kyiv told us that one evening when they picked up a take-
out order, a restaurant employee had written ``Thank you for the
HIMARS'' on the back. They didn't even know they worked at the Embassy.
U.S. aid has empowered Ukraine to take back half of its country and
saved lives. It has given families hope that there will be a future.
When you think of the numbers, today, more than 6 million Ukrainians
have been forced to flee their homeland--6 million Ukrainians. Just as
our Polish allies and other countries in the region have taken in
refugees, America has, too, especially in my home State of Minnesota
that has always had a proud Ukrainian-American population. I have met a
number of refugees. Sometimes, it is flower farms, where the Ukrainians
would come to work in the summers and bring back that money home. Now,
they are staying there and bringing their families, and the farmers
have taken in their families.

Sometimes, it is people who simply had no place to go; and the
relatives, the distant relatives, took them in. I met them at the
Ukrainian churches, and I have met them in their workplaces. It is a
very hard situation. And to a tee, every single one of them says, ``I
just want to go home.''
Throughout our history, America has never failed to defend our
friends in this manner. If we were just to simply withdraw, just like
that--just because of the dysfunction in this place? How could we ever
explain that and hold our heads high with the rest of the world?

[[Page S829]]

The question is, as Vladimir Putin seeks to wipe Ukraine off the map
and march right in and could easily march right into a NATO country and
put America and our military right in the middle of a major war, the
question is, Will America answer the call of the Ukrainian people?
To me, it is not a question, it is a must. We must be here for
Ukraine, for the moms, dads, grandmas, grandpas, kids, and grandkids
who are counting on us. We must say as President Zelenskyy said on the
first day of the invasion when he went down to the street corner and
said three simple words: ``We are here.'' It is now our moment to say,
``We are here.''

Afghan Adjustment Act

Madam President, one other topic, that I wanted to discuss today is
the work we are doing on the Afghan Adjustment Act amendment. We don't
know if there are going to be amendments, but if there are, I hope,
with the strong bipartisan support that we have for this measure, that
we will be able to have a vote which we know will pass on this
important measure.
This is an obligation--a security obligation. Just as I talk about
the border and our obligation to do something on the border and to make
sure we have a strong legal immigration system, just as I talked about
Ukraine and the importance of standing with that ally, just as I talked
about the importance of humanitarian aid to Gaza and places around the
world, we also have an obligation to stand with those who stood with
us. That is about keeping promises. That is about keeping our covenant.
So yesterday, I filed a bipartisan amendment based on the Afghan bill
that Senator Graham and I have long put forward. This is an amendment
that Senator Jerry Moran--the highest ranking Republican on the
Veterans' Affairs Committee in the U.S. Senate--and I have put forward.
Senator Graham is also a cosponsor of this amendment. Our cosponsors
include Senator Wicker, who is the highest ranking Republican on the
Armed Services Committee; Senator Cassidy, Senator Mullin, Senator
Tillis, Senator Murkowski, Senator Crapo--I note that Senator Graham is
the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee for the Republicans--
Senator Rounds, Senator Capito; of course, many Democrats, including
Senator Coons, Senator Shaheen, Senator King, Senator Blumenthal. This
is about doing right by those who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with our
troops. This amendment is supported by so many of the groups that stand
with our veterans.
And I know when I--and I am sure the Presiding Officer and Senator
Kaine who is with us today in the Chamber--when we go and talk to our
veterans and meet them wherever they are, they talk to us about things
like exposure to burn pits. Oftentimes, it is not those who are exposed
to the burn pits, but they know someone that was or someone's husband
that was or someone's wife that was, and they are looking out for them.
And all the times when they talk to me about benefits, it will be about
someone they know that has PTSD or someone who has mental health
issues. It is very rarely about their own problem.
That is the same thing going on here. This is legislation, and I have
never seen so many vets come up to me about something where they get so
emotional, because it is about the people that stood with them on the
frontline, the translators, the people who gather intel, the people
that were willing to take a bullet.
That is why this bill--this amendment we put forth--has the strong
and never-ending support of groups like With Honor, No One Left Behind,
Operation Recovery, the American Legion, the VFW, I would add the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce; as well as many of our Nation's most revered
military leaders, including Admirals Mike Mullen, William McRaven,
Generals Richard Myers of the Air Force, Joseph Dunford from the Marine
Corps, Stan McChrystal from the Army, and the list goes on and on.
I literally have hundreds of generals who have commanded troops all
over the world in many different conflicts who say this is a fight
worth having because, when the Vietnamese and the Hmong stood with our
troops in Vietnam and when we were through and so many of them fled to
our country, we didn't just leave them in legal limbo. We didn't just
leave them as what happened to, as Senator Kaine is aware, one of the
Afghan interpreters who was working double shifts as a driver with Lyft
and Uber and ends up getting murdered. We didn't leave them back then
in legal limbo. We made sure they had a path to permanent residence. We
made sure they were able to live in this country with dignity.
And what did we get out of it, besides the obvious national security
implications that others will want to stand with us because they know
we keep our promises? What did we get out of it? A thriving Hmong and
Vietnamese community in this country, just as we have with others who
have stood with us. They are now nurses and doctors and firefighters.
They are teachers. My daughter went to elementary school. Half of her
class were Hmong.
That was what we did for those communities, and now, they are a part
of America because, in America, we know that immigrants don't diminish
America, they are America. This covenant, for so many reasons, with our
Afghans must be kept.

So what am I talking about here?
Well, I am talking about nearly 80,000 Afghans who sought refuge in
our country after the withdrawal. They are here in our country. So
let's think about this. They are actually in our country.
What our bill does, which was negotiated with many conservative
Senators--it actually has strong provisions for vetting, to go back and
to see what the people who are here have done while they were here.
Many of you can imagine that there are work permits, that they are
finding ways to work. They are trying to raise their families. They
have more people who will vouch for them. Over half the people have a
letter from the head of mission in Afghanistan. They have letters from
our own military about what they did and how they saved their lives. In
addition, there are those who are still in hiding who stood with our
troops in places around the world--brave translators, humanitarian
workers, courageous members of the Afghan military. That is what is in
the bill.
What are we talking about here?
Well, we are talking about the female tactical teams of Afghanistan I
got to meet within the last few months. They had our troops' backs as
they pursued missions hunting down ISIS combatants on unforgiving
terrain and freeing prisoners from the grips of the Taliban. The entire
purpose of the programs that we have in place and that we are working
to expand and extend to the Afghans is to provide residency to those
who have supported the United States abroad, not just to be here with a
trapdoor under them, not knowing when someone is going to take away
their residencies and send them back to a certain death, but actually
make a place for them in our country when we need them.
Let me just give you some examples of the people I have met.
Mahnaz--and they don't want their last names mentioned. Why don't
they want their last names mentioned? Because they still have family
back in Afghanistan. Mahnaz is a commander of the Afghan National
Army's female tactical platoon who worked closely with our military
support team to facilitate discussions between our soldiers and the
Afghan women when they crossed their paths in the field.
Ahmad is a pilot whose helicopter was shot down, not once but twice.
In speaking of his work with our troops, he said:

In the face of danger, we were united. We were relentless.
We were resilient.

Another pilot, who didn't even want his first name mentioned and who
spent 10 years helping American soldiers identify Taliban positions in
the mountains of Afghanistan, said his job was to capture the bad guys.
Nangialy, an Afghan interpreter, put his life on the line to support
our troops. Why? To use his words:

Same goals. Same target. Same achievement.

The next is a helicopter fighter pilot who worked with our troops to
combat the Taliban in remote areas of Afghanistan for 8 years and
survived being shot in the face by a flying bullet. So we are going to
tell this guy: Well, we are having fights, and even though we have
enough votes for this, eh, it is kind of inconvenient to vote for this
right now.

[[Page S830]]

Reggie is another Afghan interpreter. Now, remember, in Afghanistan,
being an interpreter wasn't a desk job. They weren't like when you see
the diplomatic meetings and they have got the things on in the U.N. and
they are interpreting meetings and you wait and you stand, as all of us
have done, where you talk and they interpret from a stage. No. They--
and if you haven't seen the movie ``The Covenant,'' I suggest you see
it. It explains one story--a true story--of one translator and what he
did for an American soldier. They worked soldier to soldier with our
troops while they were on foreign soil. Where the troops went, the
interpreter went. If the troops got ambushed by bullets, the
interpreter got ambushed by bullets. If the troops got bombed, the
interpreter got bombed. This was a risk that Reggie took every day.
On August 8, 2012, Reggie was working on patrol with a group of
servicemembers, including Army CPT Florent Groberg. Suddenly, a suicide
bomber approached. Groberg acted fast and protected other members of
his unit by shoving the bomber aside, but the vest still detonated,
leaving Groberg and Reggie--the Afghan interpreter--bloodied and
fighting for every breath. The explosion left Reggie, the Afghan, with
23 pieces of shrapnel lodged in his own body; but even still, he used
the energy he had to go to Groberg's aid and help him stop the
bleeding.
To this day, as a result of that attack, Reggie has problems with his
left ear, and he sometimes can't control his body. That is what he
sacrificed for our troops. That is the depth of his commitment and
covenant.
Reggie and the captain survived that attack; but, tragically, several
men did not. One of the men we lost that day was U.S. Air Force Maj.
Walter David Gray. He left behind his kids and his wife Heather.
In August 2021, 9 years after the attack, Heather learned from an NPR
reporter that Reggie was being targeted by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
She wrote about that experience in an essay for the Dallas Morning
News. I will share her words with you now, and I want you to think
about the bill that is before us, supported by multiple Republicans and
Democrats, supported by commanders and generals across the country,
supported by every major veterans group.
Listen to what she said:

Turmoil is a good way to describe the emotions I felt when
I listened to that radio interview. It was ``Reggie'' in
Afghanistan on the NPR broadcast describing his service as a
linguist for our military and the danger his family was in if
they didn't get out.
Reggie served with my husband, Maj. Walter David Gray, in
the Air Force, and was with him when David and three others
were killed by suicide bombers in Kunar Province on August 8,
2012.
After listening, I called my friend CPT Florent Groberg,
who . . . confirmed that the man we were hearing on the
radio--

That is Reggie telling about how scared he is for his family--
was indeed ``our guy.''

With that confirmation, my family spun into action, working
with others, both stateside and in Afghanistan, to get
Reggie, his wife, and their four young children through the
gauntlet outside Kabul's airport and onto a military plane.
It would be nearly November before Reggie's family was
resettled in Fort Worth where his brother lives.

Heather's story continues. She wrote:

My family traveled four hours to Fort Worth to meet them.
As we worked alongside each other assembling furniture,
Reggie showed me scars from the battle that killed my
husband. As he recounted stories of the many battles in which
he fought alongside our servicemembers, a car backfired
outside, and he instinctively lowered to the floor. He still
struggles with traumatic brain injury and PTSD.
A few weeks later, I brought my new husband and kids up to
spend Thanksgiving with Reggie's family. Despite the language
barrier . . . we celebrated as one big family because that is
what we are.
Reggie is now gainfully employed. His children are in
school and their English gets better every day. He is among
the Afghan allies who needs Congress to pass the Afghan
Adjustment Act.

Heather shared one more detail that stuck with me. She said:

Every time we see Reggie, he reminds my children that their
father died a hero.
I'm certain [that my husband] would say he was just doing
his job and that Reggie was the real hero for risking his
life to serve alongside our military.

In honor of these heroes, our U.S. military but also those who served
with them, we must pass this amendment.
Maj. Walter David Gray died on the battlefield. Captain Groberg flung
his body at a suicide bomber; but after the explosion, a bloody Reggie
focused his energy on taking care of the captain.
That is why we have this broad support of people who are not going to
let this go--the American Legion, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of
America--as they wrote in a letter:

America's veterans served with Afghans for two decades in
Afghanistan. We fought side by side with them, and we saw
firsthand their courage and dedication. They risked their
lives to help us and made significant contributions to our
mission.

This is about the original bill, which has been slightly modified,
actually, by our Republican colleagues, but it still has the same
purpose and will have the same effect.

We urge you to support the Afghan Adjustment Act as soon as
possible. We promise to stand by our allies who often, at
risk to themselves and their families, served in uniform or
publicly defended women's and democratic rights. The U.S.
Government made a similar promise; keeping it assures that
the American commitments will be honored.

Or listen to national security experts from Republican and Democratic
Presidents.
They wrote this:

The bipartisan Afghan Adjustment Act honors our nation's
commitment to its wartime allies by providing a path to
permanent status for Afghan evacuees. It also ensures these
evacuees are properly and scrupulously vetted--

And, by the way, they are in the country already--

prior to considering them for such status.
The status quo leaves tens of thousands of evacuees in
legal limbo while failing to put to rest security concerns
raised in the OIG reports. No action is not an option--we
urge you to act to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act.

``No action,'' say our security experts, ``is not an option.''
It is not just military groups and national security experts. Eight
former U.S. Ambassadors to Afghanistan called on us to pass the Afghan
Adjustment Act. Those Ambassadors served under President George W.
Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, and each has an
intimate understanding of the diplomatic stakes of getting this right.
They said this:

We are a group of retired Ambassadors, all of whom served
as Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan, who
have dedicated our professional lives to furthering America's
interests in the world. We are writing today because we are
convinced that the Afghan Adjustment Act furthers those
interests. The need is urgent and time is short.

Let me list some of the military leaders: Gen. Dunford, ADM Mike
Mullen, who support this bill, who have made this a major priority, who
have made calls about this bill.
Maybe, just maybe, it is worth listening to them and simply getting a
vote on this piece of legislation that has been vetted itself through
multiple Republican Senators. It is not the original bill, which was
good enough to get the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee
and the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee; but it is actually
the bill that was negotiated with Senator Lankford that was included in
the original package.
Why am I calling on an amendment here? Because this is a national
security package, and this is a national security issue to keep our
covenant.
Dunford, Mullen, Myers, Stavridis, GEN Peter Chiarelli, GEN Stan
McChrystal, GEN David McKiernan, ADM William McRaven, GEN Austin
Miller, GEN John Nicholson, GEN M. David Rodriguez, GEN Curtis
Scaparrotti, GEN Raymond Thomas, GEN Joseph Votel, Gen. Mark Welsh. The
list goes on.
What did their letter say?

If Congress fails to enact the Afghan Adjustment Act, the
United States will be less secure. Potential allies will
remember what happens now with our Afghan allies. If we claim
to support the troops and want to enable their success in
wartime, we must keep our commitments today.

To conclude, we have Republicans, Democrats, military and veterans
groups, national security leaders, retired leading U.S. Ambassadors to
Afghanistan, and flag officers all on the same page. We have worked on
this bill and made changes for multiple Senators over the years. There
is actually not that much controversy about the language of the bill.
And we have the

[[Page S831]]

votes to get it passed. I don't believe there are any more excuses.
The way I see it, this is about our national security--that is what
this package is--a moral example for the world, and showing people
everywhere in every corner of the Earth that when America makes a
promise, when America makes a covenant, it will be kept.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The junior Senator from Virginia.
Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I had not intended to speak today, but I
had the good fortune to be on the floor to hear my colleague from
Minnesota describe this urgent amendment, which we do need to take
action on. I want to commend her for the work that she has done for our
Afghan allies over a number of years. I do believe that if this is
offered as an amendment, it will get an overwhelmingly positive vote in
this body.
I wanted to just share a little bit about these Afghans in Virginia.
In 2021, when Afghans were coming to the United States at the end of
the war, they came to Virginia. Almost all of the Afghans who came to
the United States came to Dulles Airport. They were then taken to a
facility that was a Dulles conference center, where they were
processed. I had the opportunity to see them both at the airport and at
the Dulles convention center.
After initial processing, these Afghans were distributed to eight
military bases across the United States, and three of those bases were
in Virginia: Quantico, Fort Gregg-Adams, and Fort Barfoot. In those
months, October and November of 2021, I visited each of the bases to
interview the Afghans and hear about their journey but also about their
hopes for life in this country. It was tremendously inspiring.
When Afghans would arrive at these bases on a bus from the Dulles
conference center, they would be met by our troops standing outside the
bus, waving American flags. That was their welcome.
I had a chance to visit with Afghans when I visited Fort Barfoot in
southern Virginia. I happened to be there the day before Veterans Day.
I went around to all these families, and I said: I am giving a Veterans
Day speech tomorrow. What do you want me to tell American troops,
veterans, and their families?
Over and over and over again, what I heard from these Afghans was
their descriptions of their love and affection for American troops,
their love and affection for this country, the perils of the journey to
get here but their excitement that they might now be opening a new
chapter of free life in the United States.
More Afghans have chosen to settle in Virginia than any other State
by raw numbers and certainly per capita. In those years since 2021, I
have visited with Afghans all around our Commonwealth. About a year
after they arrived, we did a welcome celebration at Mount Vernon. I had
a chance to interview so many Afghans who were settling into life in
the United States and hear what they were doing.
My colleague from Minnesota described some of the things they are
doing to already improve their community. I talked to young activists
who were using the internet to try to help family members still in
Afghanistan or gain reports about human rights or the treatment of
women in Afghanistan or work on community support for Afghan
communities around Virginia and around the United States.
Just recently--just recently--I paid an amazing visit to a small city
in southern Virginia, Danville, VA. I went there because of another
part of this national security package.
In the national security package, there is an investment in something
called AUKUS--the United States-Australia-UK cooperative defense
agreement in the Indo-Pacific--whereby the United States will help
train Aussies to build nuclear subs, sell Virginia-built nuclear subs
to Australia during the 2030s but eventually enable Australia to build
their own nuclear subs in the 2040s.
The Navy, at my urging as a member of the Armed Services Committee,
has helped stand up a training program in Danville. Danville is a great
manufacturing city but then lost a lot of manufacturing, tobacco,
textile, furniture during the 1990s, but it has fought back strong.
Danville is experiencing a renaissance. About a year ago, the Navy
opened up a facility in Danville to train the next generation of
shipbuilders and sub builders in this Nation. On the Armed Services
Committee--as chairman of the Seapower Subcommittee, I wanted to see
this innovative program.
It is an 8-week program, five different disciplines. People come from
employers all over the United States to train together to help meet the
requirements of our own defense and these AUKUS commitments that we
have made.
As I walked in each of the five classes and looked at who was there
learning, it started to dawn on me: It was youngsters from Danville. It
was people from all parts of the United States whose employers had
decided they wanted to send them to this training program. It was
Aussies, Australian shipbuilders. Those who built the current diesel-
powered subs in Australia were sending people to Danville, VA, for 8
weeks so they could learn side by side with their American
counterparts. But it was also Afghans. It was Afghans who have been in
this country less than 2 years but who have already sacrificed to
support the defense of this Nation and who decided when they heard
about this opportunity: You know what, why don't I be a shipbuilder?
Why don't I be a part of the submarine industrial base?
Watching Afghans sit next to Australians standing next to kids from
Danville, VA, to train, to build, and to manufacture the most
complicated items that are built on the planet so that they could
defend this country and defend freedom around the world--these are not
only people who have sacrificed for us; these are people who are
already becoming good citizens in this country, contributing to the
Nation, contributing to their communities. They don't deserve to be
held in a legal limbo, where every day they question what their status
will be tomorrow.
That is why supporting the Afghan Adjustment Act, as negotiated into
an amendment on this bill, might be one of the very best pieces of this
bill. It is my deep hope that we can get this done before we leave
here, and pass the supplemental.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Ms. KLOBUCHAR. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Order of Business

Mr. SCHUMER. Now, Madam President, for the information of Senators,
the Senate will gavel back into session tomorrow, Sunday, February 11,
at noon. At around 1 o'clock, we will hold the cloture vote on the
substitute amendment, which has the text of the supplemental. We still
hope our Republican colleagues can work with us to reach an agreement
on a reasonable list of amendments so we can speed this process up.
Again, as I have already made clear, we will keep working on this
bill until the job is done.

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