[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 27 (Monday, February 12, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S859-S953]
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 ACTING 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.

                   Recognition of the Majority Leader

  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority leader is recognized.


                 15th Anniversary of Flight 3407 crash

  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, before I speak about the supplemental 
and our upcoming business, I am going to say a few words about Flight 
3407, the tragic flight where over 50 people died in a cold winter's 
night in Buffalo. It is the 15th anniversary. I can't be in Buffalo 
with the families; so I am going to say a few words here first.
  Later this afternoon, at a memorial on Long Street in Clarence, NY, 
the families of Colgan Air Flight 3407 will mark 15 years since their 
loved ones tragically perished in a devastating plane crash.
  In the blink of an eye, every single passenger, every single crew 
member, and one New Yorker on the ground were killed on a freezing 
Thursday evening. It pains me that I can't be in

[[Page S860]]

Western New York today for their vigil, but I want to tell the families 
who have lost loved ones: I am with you in spirit and will always be by 
your side.
  Working with the families to strengthen America's aviation laws has 
been one of the most satisfying and inspirational things I have done in 
my entire time of Congress. I have laughed and cried with the Kausners, 
the Eckerts, and so many of these wonderful people more times than I 
can count.
  Today, from here on the Senate floor, I join with the families to 
remember those that we lost and to honor their legacy, which has 
changed the course of American history when it comes to the safety of 
our skies.
  The Scripture says, in moments of darkness, it is natural to turn 
inward, to curse the darkness, but that if you are able to light a 
candle instead, that is saintlike.
  These families are saintlike. They lost loved ones. The holes in 
their hearts exist every single day. But instead of turning inward to 
the darkness, they decided to light a candle and work diligently and 
persist and change the laws so it wouldn't happen to others in the 
future. For 15 years, instead of cursing the darkness, these families 
of Flight 3407 lit a candle. In their grief, the families came 
together. They organized and raised their voices.

  I was proud to be their champion in the Senate to help pass the most 
significant aviation law of the 21st century, in 2010. I was moved by 
the families from the beginning. We worked hand in hand after the crash 
to fix our aviation safety laws to make them the strongest in the 
world. When I became majority leader, I vowed to ensure these safety 
provisions the families fought for would not be rolled back.
  Because of these families, airlines across America are safer. Praise 
God, we have not had a single fatal crash of a major airline in America 
since 2009.
  These families helped establish the 1,500-hour training rule that 
pilots must follow. They helped create a pilot records database and new 
rules around pilot fatigue to help ensure that what happened on 3407 
never happens again.
  These families' advocacy is just what the Founding Fathers 
envisioned: average citizens, with heartfelt convictions, persisting in 
getting it done. These families didn't have campaign contributions, 
deep pockets, or super-PACS. All they had was their convictions.
  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton would all 
be proud because these families made Congress listen. They made 
Congress act. They changed the law. Their efforts have undoubtedly 
saved lives.
  I want to thank so many of my colleagues, particularly Chair Cantwell 
and the head of the subcommittee, Senator Duckworth, for working with 
us to preserve this law.
  So, today, we honor these families and remember their loved ones. But 
we also acknowledge the fight is not done. The fight is one that will 
always continue.
  The Senate Commerce Committee advanced the bipartisan FAA 
reauthorization bill that protected the rules for the safety of pilots, 
crew, and passengers that the families pushed for--again, thanks to 
Chairman Cantwell for her leadership and Chair Duckworth for her 
leadership as well.
  We went through the text with a fine-tooth comb to make sure the 
safety rules were not touched, working hand in hand with the families, 
talking to them every week. I am glad we succeeded and look forward to 
moving on the FAA bill reauthorization as quickly as possible. It is 
vital the FAA reauthorization be passed by Congress.
  In conclusion on this issue, we will remember those who are lost. We 
also say thank you to all the families for lighting a candle, finding a 
better way--a safer way--for the future.
  Thank you, families, for your courage, your brilliance, and your 
grace. You changed the history of aviation, something very few can say.


                                H.R. 815

  Madam President, now on the supplemental, over the weekend, the 
Senate took the significant step toward passing the national security 
supplemental by voting last night on cloture on the substitute, 67 to 
27.
  By now, we have taken numerous procedural votes that prove beyond a 
doubt that there is strong support behind this bill. It is time to 
finish the job and get this critical bill passed.
  If we want the world to remain a safe place for freedom, for 
democratic principles, for American prosperity, then elected leaders 
need to put in the work to make that happen. We need to improve the 
investments that ensure our people's security, ensure the security of 
our partners, and prevent our adversaries from gaining an edge over us.
  These are enormously high stakes of the national security package: 
our security, our values, our democracy. It is a downpayment for the 
survival of Western democracy and the survival of American values.
  The entire world is going to remember what the Senate does in the 
next few days. Nothing--nothing--would make Putin happier right now 
than to see Congress waiver in its support for Ukraine. Nothing would 
help him more on the battlefield. And if some people think Putin is 
going to stop at Ukraine; if they think it is somehow better to reason 
with him, to appease him, to hear him out; then these modern-day 
Neville Chamberlains ignore the warnings of history: The appetites of 
autocrats are never ending.
  Make no mistake, the war in Ukraine is not some regional struggle. 
Its effects will reverberate around the world. The Chinese Communist 
Party, the Iranian regime, and all of our adversaries are going to take 
note if America fails to defend a democracy, an ally in need. They will 
conclude that, if America fails one of our friends, it will fail others 
too, and they will act accordingly.
  Imagine what kind of message failure by Congress will send to NATO. 
Imagine what it sends to our partners whose troops fought with us and 
bled with us and died with us after 9/11, even though it wasn't them 
who were under attack.
  Imagine what message and action it would send to Taiwan or the 
Philippines or other places around the world. The message, if we fail, 
would be that America can't be trusted. We, as a body--as a Congress--
and as a country cannot afford to send that message.
  Protecting democracy is not for the faint of heart. Sometimes it 
requires us to make difficult choices in this Chamber, but that is 
precisely what the American people sent us here to do.
  In generations past, Democrats and Republicans would have moved 
Heaven and Earth to stand up to Russian autocrats. We would have balked 
at the mere thought of showing weakness to thugs who attack our friends 
and villains who seek America's demise.
  We find ourselves, yet again, in a moment of history when democracy 
is under siege. We heard directly from President Zelenskyy what is at 
stake if we fail. So fail, we must not. It has been long enough--long 
enough.
  I urge my colleagues to come together and finish working on the 
supplemental. We will not rest until the job is done.


                              Quorum Call

  Madam President, for the information of Senators, we will have a live 
quorum. I ask Senators to stay close to the floor until we get this 
bill done.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll, 
and the following Senators entered the Chamber and answered to their 
names:

                             [Quorum No. 1]

     Barrasso
     Bennet
     Blackburn
     Blumenthal
     Boozman
     Britt
     Brown
     Butler
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Collins
     Cornyn
     Crapo
     Daines
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Ernst
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hagerty
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hickenlooper
     Hirono
     Hyde-Smith
     Johnson
     Kelly
     Kennedy
     King
     Klobuchar
     Lankford
     Lee
     Lujan
     Manchin
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Moran
     Mullin
     Murphy
     Padilla
     Peters
     Reed
     Romney
     Rosen
     Schatz
     Schmitt
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Sinema
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Thune
     Vance
     Warner
     Warnock
     Warren
     Welch
     Young
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. A quorum is present.
  The Senator from Maine.
  Ms. COLLINS. Madam President, for the information of our colleagues, 
I want to bring everyone up to date on where we are.
  For the past few days, the leadership on both sides of the aisle, as 
well as the bill managers on both sides of the aisle, have been working 
diligently, night

[[Page S861]]

and day, to try to get agreement to consider debate and to have votes 
on a series of amendments offered by Senators on both sides of the 
aisle.
  Obviously, in order for that to occur, we would need the cooperation 
of all Members; and we would need to have time agreements because the 
number of amendments is considerable. Regrettably, I have to inform my 
colleagues that there have been objections on both sides of the aisle 
that impede our work going forward.
  So, at this point, unless these objections are withdrawn, it is going 
to be very difficult to have the robust amendment process that many of 
us--most of us--want to have. And I just wanted to let my colleagues 
know where we stand.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Alabama.
  Mr. TUBERVILLE. Madam President, I come to the floor today in 
opposition to the Senate's effort to give away 60 billion more of our 
taxpayer dollars in weapons to Ukraine. We should not give another dime 
to Ukraine until we secure our border for our citizens. That is what we 
are here for.
  In December, all 49 Republicans voted to defeat similar legislation 
because it did nothing for our southern border.
  Senate Republicans were unanimous. We had a consensus in the 
Republican conference that we should not give more money to other 
countries until we secured our southern border. I still believe that. 
My position has not changed since December. The 17 Republicans who 
voted to take up this legislation can explain their change of heart 
themselves. It is up to them. My demands have not changed. We should 
not send a dime to Ukraine until our borders are fully secured. We have 
already given Ukraine more than $120 billion. This is more than enough 
money to secure every border in our country.
  Unfortunately, but predictably, the $120 billion we sent to Ukraine 
has resulted in a yearslong stalemate that has cost hundreds of 
thousands of lives, both Ukrainian and Russian.
  This money is in addition to the Executive actions that Joe Biden has 
taken to isolate Russia from the global financial system. None of this 
has worked to either deter Russia or force parties to the table to 
negotiate a diplomatic solution. Yet some of my colleagues think that 
another $60 billion--another $60 billion--of what $120 billion failed 
to do will do the trick. It doesn't make sense.
  Now should be a time for diplomacy--what a thought. Bring this war to 
an end. Stop the killing and bloodshed. When Joe Biden took office, he 
went to the State Department and claimed ``Diplomacy is back.'' That 
turned out to be a lie. We have yet to see a diplomatic effort from 
this administration. Joe Biden's idea of diplomacy is sending Anthony 
Blinken to Israel to tell Israel to slow down the war in Gaza. That is 
not diplomacy. We need some real diplomacy in Ukraine.
  Right now, we are facing the possibility of a regional war in the 
Middle East. There have been 160 attacks on our troops in the Middle 
East since October 7. We are also facing the possibility of war in the 
South China Sea, with China threatening Taiwan.
  A real leader has the right priorities. We cannot get involved in 
every conflict around the world. Last year, there was a war in 
Ethiopia. I ask my colleagues who support Ukraine, should we have paid 
for that? Last year, there was a war in Armenia. I ask my colleagues, 
should we have paid for that? No one was clamoring for billions in 
weapons for those two wars. Yet our entire defense industry is now 
being largely put in service to Ukraine.
  Under Joe Biden, Americans' foreign policy is no longer dictated by 
American interests. It is not even dictated by American ideals. 
Instead, it is dictated by simplistic moralism with no depth or 
intellectual heft.
  A land war in Europe is not America's top priority. Even President 
Obama said 13 years ago that we needed to pivot to Asia--13 years ago. 
Can there be any doubt that our No. 1 rival and adversary is China? It 
is not Russia. China is watching us. President Xi is watching America 
bankrupting ourselves for a war that gains us absolutely nothing. We 
can have a conversation about shifting Ukraine aid to somewhere high-
priority, like Taiwan, but right now, aid to Ukraine is two-thirds of 
this bill.
  The bill also includes money for Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. 
The vast majority of Gaza supports Hamas. They elected Hamas as their 
leaders. The bill would send billions to Gaza. Can there be any doubt 
that some of that will end up in the hands of terrorists? I don't think 
there is.
  Much of what we have sent to Ukraine has been stolen or wasted. There 
has been a complete lack of oversight. In this year's Defense bill, we 
finally got an inspector general for Ukraine aid, but it is a little 
too late. There has already been enormous theft and money laundering of 
our tax dollars in Ukraine. You don't have to take my word for it; 
Zelenskyy fired his own Cabinet members for corruption. Ukraine has 
been one of the most blatantly, notoriously corrupt places in the world 
for a long, long time.
  We are paying Ukraine farmers, and yet we just punted the farm bill 
for American farmers to next year. We have been paying Ukrainian 
pensions. We can't even pay our own pensions in this country. We have 
paid more than $6 billion for Ukrainian pensions. That is enough money 
to pay for President Trump's border wall, an amount that the sitting 
Vice President said was too expensive.
  We don't have a plan. We do not have a plan to win the war in 
Ukraine. We also don't have a plan for Ukraine if it loses. The Biden 
administration simply says ``as long as it takes.'' Hell, that is not a 
strategy; that is a blank check from the American taxpayers to another 
country. It would be irresponsible to give a blank check to any other 
country.
  Three out of four dollars of Ukraine aid in this bill are for after 
the current fiscal year. It is not now. We keep hearing that we can't 
wait 2 weeks. This money is not going to Ukraine for months. And they 
say they are running out of aid. In other words, this money is for the 
next President. It is intended to force the next President to continue 
this war.
  So I stand opposed to this legislation. I am not the only one. This 
bill could not pass the House of Representatives. Therefore, this bill 
is not going to become law. Passing this bill is purely an exercise in 
messaging. What message does this bill send? It says that those elected 
to represent Americans care more about the borders of countries halfway 
around the world than our own. It is not a winning message.
  The American people are opposed to a blank check to Ukraine. The 
American people are saying enough is enough.
  The arguments for this bill have been utterly lacking. Some of my 
colleagues have argued that Vladimir Putin wants to conquer the world. 
This is absurd. He can't beat Ukraine. Russian tanks are not going to 
conquer Europe if we don't pass this bill.
  Another argument that has been made is that this money will stay in 
the United States to support defense contractors. In fact, a Washington 
Post columnist tweeted at me yesterday, claiming that we should pass 
this bill to give more money to Alabama's defense contractors. You 
know, it wasn't long ago that this would be referred to as corruption, 
but that is the kind of thing that gets published in the Washington 
Post these days.
  Simply put, his argument is more about people should die so that we 
can increase profits for a few American companies. It is disgusting. 
These are the same people lecturing us about the morality of supporting 
Ukraine.
  Alabama is deeply, deeply proud to be the top State in America when 
it comes to the defense industry. I strongly support Alabama's defense 
industry. I support funding Alabama's defense industry to strengthen 
our military. I support funding to replenish our stockpiles. It will 
take months, if not years, to do that. We are far behind. We couldn't 
fight one war right now, much less three.
  The arguments from the other side just don't add up, so it is no 
surprise that they have resorted to personal attacks and name-calling. 
One of my colleagues accused opponents of Ukraine aid of getting their 
``messaging from Russia.'' This is the best argument they can come up 
with--name-calling. If you oppose a blank check to another country, I 
guess that makes you a Russian.

[[Page S862]]

  We are $34 trillion in debt. We are borrowing $80,000 a second, $4.6 
million a minute. American taxpayers, listen to that one more time. We 
are borrowing $80,000 a second, $4.6 million a minute. Does that make 
any sense when you are $34 trillion in debt? We cannot afford to keep 
giving any money to any countries or any illegal immigrants flooding 
our border. We don't have it. We are taxing the future of this country.
  There is no moral, economic, military, or political argument in favor 
of more Ukraine aid. Our country--our country--has serious problems of 
its own, and we need to solve them. But there is no solving any of 
those problems in this room. It is about spending.
  The top of that list is the southern border. If we are so worried 
about Russia, what about the actual Russians who are entering our 
country on a daily basis through the southern border? What about that? 
Is anyone in Washington worried about the Chinese coming in this 
country every day? It doesn't seem like it. Day after day, month after 
month, we are failing to meet that crisis with the seriousness it 
deserves.
  Earlier this week, Senate leadership on both sides of the aisle laid 
out our border giveaway bill that had been written in secret by three 
Senators over a period of months. We were not allowed to see it until 
last Sunday night. For weeks--for weeks--there were leaks coming to the 
press about what it was. When my colleagues and I expressed concerns 
about these leaks, we were attacked. The authors of the bill said that 
it was fake news and wouldn't let us see the bill until last Sunday. 
However, once we got the text, we found out these leaks were true. The 
bill was even worse than we had feared.
  Senators from across the spectrum of the Republican conference came 
out in opposition. Even some of the Senators who were initially 
involved in writing the bill opposed it.
  After the bill was rejected, we were told that we were ``playing 
politics'' if we weren't from a border State. Here is the reality: 
Under the Biden administration, every State is a border State.
  I met with some Alabama sheriffs last week from across our State. 
They are being absolutely overrun--overrun--by drugs, crime, criminals, 
illegal aliens. Every single part of every single State is being hurt 
by this border crisis. Do you think this body cares? No.
  I won't belabor the point, but the border bill is a giveaway--is a 
giveaway. This bill did not attempt to address the seriousness of the 
crisis. This is the worst border crisis in the history of our country. 
It is worse than any natural disaster we have ever seen. Yet the 
response from Senate leadership to this crisis has been superficial, 
uncaring, and dismissive. The so-called border bill was more of a 
border giveaway than the actual border bill.
  Remember, President Trump had the same laws on the books as President 
Joe Biden does. President Trump secured the border. It was a priority. 
Joe Biden opened it up his first day in office. So new laws are not 
absolutely necessary, but certain new laws would be very helpful.
  I have proposed an amendment to the Ukraine bill that would actually 
truly secure the border. This amendment, the Border Safety and Security 
Act, would simply suspend all illegal entries completely until DHS has 
operational control of the border. They have no control--no control 
whatsoever.
  My amendment prohibits mass parole programs. This Schumer border 
giveaway bill would have allowed parole programs to continue.
  My amendment prohibits catch-and-release and requires detention. The 
border bill required the release of illegal aliens if we had passed it.
  The Schumer bill would have allowed thousands of illegal border 
crossings a day. My amendment would mean zero illegal crossings. It 
also allows States to sue the administration if it doesn't do its job 
and enforce the laws.
  We should not pass the Ukraine bill until we first pass a border 
bill. That is my position, that was my position in December, and it is 
my position again today.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
  Mr. PAUL. Madam President, open the champagne, pop the cork, the 
Senate Democrat leader and the Republican leader are on their way to 
Kyiv. They have got $60 billion they are bringing. I don't know if it 
will be cash in pallets, but they are taking your money to Kyiv.
  Now, they didn't have much time, really no time and no money to do 
anything about our border. We are being invaded. A literal invasion is 
coming across our border--800,000 people came illegally last month--and 
all they had time to do in the Senate was get the money, get the cash 
pallets, load the planes, get the champagne ready, and fly to Kyiv.
  On Friday, they will take the $60 billion to Kyiv, crack the 
champagne; and meanwhile, each day, between 5 to 10,000 people come 
across the border illegally.
  Now they put up a sham bill, and they said: You should have taken the 
sham bill. You should have taken the ruse. We gave you a border bill. 
But the border bill would allow 5,000 people a day to come across, and 
then they would declare an emergency.
  Guess what? The emergency is already here.
  Madam President, 700,000 people in 2 months is an emergency. Nearly 
800,000 people in 2 months is an emergency. But they gave lie to the 
ruse when they tweeted out their great bullet points on how great this 
deal was going to be. They tweeted out: The border never closes.
  So they were putting forward this great border bill that the 
President would use to stop illegal immigration, but they tweeted out 
that of all the main points that this would do, the border never 
closes. And this is actually true, because what would happen is they 
would close the illegal crossings, but leave the legal crossings open.
  It is like, why wouldn't we have the illegal crossing always closed? 
Why wouldn't we, after having 750,000 people come in illegally, close 
down the illegal crossings immediately? And what also gives lie to 
their assertions is that we have the same laws we had under President 
Trump and President Trump controlled the border.
  So how could President Trump do it with the same set of laws, and now 
they are saying if you only gave us power, we would do something? But 
what gives lie to this assertion is that they are in court every day 
trying to dismantle the barriers that Texas puts up.
  Texas and 30-some-odd Republican Governors have said: Enough is 
enough. They have put cargo containers and razor wire on the border to 
say: No more illegal crossings. So the Biden administration, who says 
just give us more power and we will do something about the border, went 
all the way to the Supreme Court to get the power, and they have it 
temporarily--they may not keep it--but they have fought tooth and nail 
to remove the cargo containers, remove the razor wire, and remove the 
border barriers.
  So which is it? They want more power to shut down illegal 
immigration, or they want to remove the border obstacles to illegal 
immigration? They can't have it both ways.
  Well, some would argue that this appears to be that you don't want 
immigrants in your country. Nothing could be further from the truth. We 
admit a million immigrants to our country every year, and I am for 
that. In fact, I am cosponsor of a half dozen bills to increase lawful 
immigration. I think it would be difficult for America to do a lot of 
things, including building houses, apartments, and commercial 
construction, without new people coming to the country.
  I think some of the best Americans just got here. Many of them are my 
friends. Bowling Green, KY, is known for people from all over the 
world. We have a hundred languages being spoken in our schools. This 
has nothing to do with not wanting immigrants.
  It has to do with not wanting 750,000 people to come across who we 
don't know who they are. Most of them are males of a military age. And 
we are doing nothing. So we come to an inflection point. That is where 
we are, an inflection point, and we had a chance.
  Madam President, 41 of us--41 Republicans--could have stood and said, 
no, we want something better. There is an emergency on the border; we 
will not settle for anything until we get a border security bill.
  Instead, it folded. Why? Because Republican leadership is flying with 
the

[[Page S863]]

Democratic leadership to Kyiv because they have prioritized Ukraine 
over the southern border. There is no other way to put it.
  We have a disaster at our southern border, and the ranking 
Republicans and the ranking Democrats, there is no difference, they are 
on the same team. They will be on the same plane to Kyiv--Republicans 
and Democrats, same plane, pallets of cash, your money, to Ukraine.
  Even if you could make the argument--and I think there is an argument 
that there is a noble cause, that these people are fighting for their 
independence, and they are fighting against aggression. All of that is 
true--but there is no money to give them. We are out. We are flat out 
of cash. Not only are we flat out of cash, we are $34 trillion in the 
hole. We are borrowing money like it is going out of style.
  We have never ever borrowed money at this alarming rate. It is hard 
to even fathom the billions of dollars that goes out the door. It has 
been said before, but people have asked: How do you imagine--how do you 
put into perspective a billion dollars? What is a billion dollars?
  If you put a million dollars in the palm of your hand in thousand-
dollar bills, it would be 4 inches high. But a billion dollars is 
difficult--more difficult to visualize. To put a billion into 
perspective, a billion seconds ago, Reagan was starting his second 
term. A billion minutes ago, the Pantheon was being completed in Rome. 
A billion hours ago, we were in the Stone Age, over a hundred thousand 
years ago. But a billion dollars ago, just a couple of minutes.
  In the time that I will speak, the government will spend billions 
upon billions of dollars, virtually a billion every 2 minutes, $30-some 
billion in the space of an hour. It is out of control.
  If you look at the debt that is being incurred, people say: What does 
it matter? You could be like Dick Cheney and some of these Republicans: 
Eh, deficits don't matter. We don't care about the deficits.
  Well, you should, and you see the results of the deficit every time 
you fill up your car, every time you go to the grocery store, every 
time you buy something, you are seeing the results of the debt.
  The way we pay for the debt is we print out money. The Federal 
Reserve buys the debt, but the Federal Reserve has no money, so they 
print up the money, and they dilute the value of the existing currency. 
What does that mean? Inflation. Prices go up. But so does the cost of 
the government. People have cost-of-living increases, and I don't 
begrudge that, but it is 9 percent in the last year or so, so the costs 
of Social Security are going through the roof. The costs of Medicare 
are going through the roof. But do you hear a peep? Not one peep about 
the problem paying our own bills. We are basically like renters paying 
for our apartment.

  In what kind of world do you borrow money to send charity? If you see 
a homeless person and you want to help them but you have no money, 
would you go to the first corner and go into the bank and say: I want 
to help homeless people. Will you give me a thousand dollars so I can 
help homeless people? No one does that.
  If you are paying the rent for your apartment, do you go to the bank 
and borrow the rent for your apartment? No, there are times at which 
you borrow against things of value. You can borrow against a home that 
you have a downpayment on. You can borrow for capital improvements like 
schools or roads, but you don't borrow for your daily expenses.
  That is what is going on here. Realize that two-thirds of the 
spending is entitlements: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and food 
stamps is two-thirds of all spending. That is all we have enough money 
for. Tax revenue pays for that; everything else is borrowed.
  You will hear people talk about a budget. They say, Congress votes on 
a budget. Well, the budget we vote on is equal to about $1.5 trillion, 
that is the debt. Every bit of the budget we vote on is borrowed. Last 
month we borrowed $210 billion, so we are on course to borrow over $2 
trillion at that rate.
  People are alarmed by this. The head of the Federal Reserve, Powell, 
said the other day that the problem was ``urgent,'' and these are the 
kind of people that pick their words carefully. The debt is urgent. The 
need to restrain spending is urgent.
  And so how does leadership respond? The Republican leaders and the 
Democratic leaders have gotten together to send $100 billion to another 
country while they can't pay the bills for our country.
  We are borrowing money to pay our rent as citizens in our own 
country, and we are sending $100 billion to another country. Under what 
world is that a good idea? It is a terrible idea. The Federal Reserve 
Chairman has said the problem is urgent. Jamie Dimon, the head of JP 
Morgan Chase, has said the problem is urgent.
  Nassim Taleb, the author of ``The Black Swan,'' has said it is 
urgent. You have all of these people, some who predicted the crisis in 
2008, saying it is an imminent crisis. The debt crisis hangs over us. 
There is a danger of destroying the dollar and destroying our country, 
and leadership is concerned about making their plane to Kyiv.
  The Republican leader and the Democratic leader will be on a plane to 
Kyiv--I am assuming with champagne and pallets of cash. Have you ever 
seen the pictures when they unload the pallets of American cash? When 
they did it in Iraq? How much oversight do you think there is on 
pallets of cash? How much is stolen? We will never know because they 
have refused to have an inspector general.
  I have forced at least two votes on this. I have been advocating for 
over a year. I am not for sending your money to Ukraine, but if you are 
going to send it, can we at least count how much is being stolen?
  Ukraine has been on the top 10 list for one of the most corrupt 
countries in the world, and nobody is watching the money.
  Now journalists in Ukraine have actually caught a few people. We 
haven't caught anybody. If you ask our people from our Defense 
Department, they will say: Oh, nothing to see here.
  You realize our Defense Department has never been audited. We have 
been trying to audit the Pentagon in our country for two decades. Do 
you know what the Pentagon tells Congress? We are too big to be 
audited.
  You know what my response is? You are too big then. You should be 
smaller if you can't even audit the money we are spending. They 
routinely lose billions of dollars. They routinely have billions of 
dollars paid where they have no idea where the dollars went.
  And so in the midst of this, in the midst of a $1.5 trillion deficit 
this year, at least, the leadership has come together. People say they 
want compromise, well, you are getting it today, but it is the wrong 
kind of compromise. It is compromise to loot the Treasury. It is 
compromise to spend money we don't have. We have not one penny saved. 
There is no savings; there is no rainy day fund, they are shoveling out 
borrowed cash.
  Essentially, they have to borrow this from China. They either borrow 
it from China or they print it up, but there is no money. There is no 
money sitting around; it has all been spent. There isn't enough money 
to take care of the stuff they have already promised. So everyone on 
the other aisle and half the people on this side that are wanting to 
send more cash over there have also promised they are going to take 
care of you, so all the entitlement programs are out there.
  Well, the entitlement programs consume all of our tax revenue. There 
is no money beyond that. So the military and the nonmilitary discretion 
that is about a third of the overall spending, there is no money for 
it. It is all borrowed. So we are going to add to that.
  Now, I have often asked the question: Couldn't we maybe set 
priorities, and if you really believe that Ukraine is part of our 
national security--which is ludicrous--but if you believe that, maybe 
the money should come out of the defense budget.
  If this is truly defending Ukraine is defending our country--which is 
ludicrous--but if it were, we are at $880 billion in our military 
budget. This is more than the next 10 countries in NATO combined.
  If you really want to send your money to Ukraine, take it out of the 
military budget. Take it out of something. This is a perpetual problem, 
but I think the American public needs to know as Republican leadership 
and Democratic leadership jet off to Kyiv,

[[Page S864]]

cracking the champagne, and delivering pallets of cash, they need to 
know that there was opposition to this.
  People say, why do you come to the floor? Why do you make the poor 
Senators be here over the Super Bowl weekend? Why do you make them 
cancel their vacations?
  Do you think I do it just to be mean or out of spite?
  I do it because I care about our country. I care about the 
bankrupting of America. I care about the looting of our treasury.
  (Ms. BUTLER assumed the Chair.)
  There can be an honest debate over national security or what is in 
our vital security, but there never is a debate. If you look closely at 
what people say, they will simply declare it is in our national 
security to send money to Ukraine. There isn't really a debate.
  I actually think it is the opposite. I think sending money to Ukraine 
actually makes our national security more endangered. I think it 
threatens our vital national security to send more money to Ukraine. 
Why? Because I think it threatens the fiscal solvency of our country. I 
think it, along with so much of the rest of the spending, is dragging 
America down and threatening a day of destruction.
  There have been civilizations that have destroyed their currency, 
and, typically, this happened on the heels of war. After World War I, 
Germany destroyed their currency. After World War II, England was in 
arrears to such an extent that they no longer were the dominant 
currency after World War I and II, and the United States became the 
dominant currency.
  I think that we should think twice before sending our money overseas. 
I think we should think twice about the problems we have here at home.
  But I think the American people ought to look at those here in this 
body who are willing to prioritize another country over our country. I 
think they need to look at that and decide: Is this what you want? Is 
this what the American people really want? Did you elect these people 
to ignore the southern border and to send money to look at Ukraine's 
border--to prioritize Ukraine's border over the U.S. border? Is that 
what you elected these people to do? And, if you did, do you not care 
about the bankrupting of America? Do you not care about the destruction 
of the dollar?
  It is happening every day, and it is happening sort of gradually--5, 
10 percent a year of lost purchasing power. But there are people who 
are left behind, the people whose salaries aren't adjusting with 
inflation, people who are being squeezed by this inflation.
  And people say: Whose fault was the inflation, Republicans or 
Democrats?
  And I say: Both. Really, there is only one party when you get down to 
it. They all want to spend money.
  The leadership in the Republican party is really not a great deal--
this is a secret you are not supposed to expose in Washington, but 
there is not a lot of difference between the Democrat leadership and 
the Republican leadership. They kind of want to spend money sometimes 
for different things. Sometimes Republicans want to spend more on the 
military enterprise, and Democrats maybe more on welfare. But they get 
together.
  You say there is not enough compromise in Washington? There is way 
too much compromise. Why? They compromise to spend money we don't have. 
So in order to raise military spending, they have got to promise that 
they will raise the welfare spending as well.
  There is one particular argument that has been made by Republican 
leadership as well as Democratic leadership, as well as the White 
House. I find this argument particularly reprehensible, particularly 
disgusting and disturbing. They make the argument that it is really not 
so bad to send money to Ukraine because it increases the profits of the 
arms merchants, and most of the arms merchants selling the arms into 
this war are Americans. They say: Oh, it is a win-win. We send the 
money overseas to Ukraine, but Ukraine then buys our arms, and the arms 
merchants are enriched.
  I don't know. I know there are no American soldiers yet in this war. 
But have some sympathy for the young men and women involved in this 
war--that the argument that we should perpetuate the war, that the war 
isn't a bad thing, and that war is not a hell on earth, is because we 
make some profit off of it. I find that disgusting. I find it really 
disturbing that there are people out there making the argument on both 
sides of the aisle: No big deal. It is helping our defense industrial 
base.
  That is another word for the military-industrial complex, because 
even Eisenhower warned 70-some years ago--he warned that there was a 
danger that the military-industrial complex would get so big that it 
wouldn't be policy led by Congress, that the corporations would become 
so big--trillion-dollar corporations grabbing up money--that they would 
direct policy; that it would no longer be you voting or no longer be us 
voting, but it would be the corporate interests that make the profits 
that would be driving this. And I think we have become eerily close to 
that.
  This is sort of the quiet part they used to not say out loud. They 
used to keep it kind of on the q.t.: We are just going to not talk 
about the profits going to the arms merchants.
  But now they are bragging about it: The defense industrial base--we 
are going to enhance the defense industrial base.
  Really? The meat grinder of war is now justified by expanding the 
profits of arms merchants?
  Some estimates are that 500,000 people have died in that war. So if 
we keep it going for another year or 2, maybe a million will be dead in 
the war. That will be good for arms profits. So is that what our 
advocacy is? Not to shorten the war, but it is not so big a deal to let 
the war go on and on.
  The head general in Ukraine has said that the war has come to a 
stalemate.
  And I am the first to acknowledge: Look, the whole war was started by 
Russia. Russia is the aggressor. There is nothing good to be said about 
Putin doing this. He is the aggressor. He is in the wrong.
  But that doesn't really change the situation on the ground. It is at 
a standstill, and 500,000 people have died. It is at a standstill. In 
some towns in Ukraine, you can't find young people anymore. They are 
either dead or have gone off to Europe to avoid the war.
  So Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, fired his major general 
because the major general admitted to the truth, which is that this is 
at a stalemate.
  Many people in this body, to justify foreign aid, will say: We are 
spreading and projecting American power and American values. We are 
trying to teach and show to the world the nobility of democracy. Yeah, 
if you watch one of the networks, that is all you hear: democracy, 
democracy, democracy.
  Well, guess what. Ukraine is not a democracy. They don't have 
elections. So they stopped having elections several years ago, and 
there is no plan to have elections. Zelenskyy had one, and I am not 
saying he didn't win. In all likelihood, it was a legitimate election. 
But it is sort of one and done. He is not going to have more elections.
  And so we are bending over backward--not we--the Republican 
leadership and all of the Democrats are bending over backward to send 
money to a country that doesn't have elections.

  This is a country that has banned media criticism. There is no media 
criticism. And you would think that the defenders of the First 
Amendment would be irate at the fact that there is no objective media 
criticism in Ukraine.
  But the reason why the other side is not standing up and why they are 
not crazy at arms about this is they actually want that now in our 
country. They actually are for censorship. They believe in the Homeland 
Security of the United States censoring and telling people they can't 
tell you.
  So if I were to say--which I have said a million times--that it is a 
mistake to vaccinate your kids for COVID because they already have 
immunity and that there are some risks to that vaccine, the other side 
will say I don't have the right to say that. They say it would be OK 
for government, in league with corporations, to censor my speech.
  If I were to tell you masks don't work--and they don't. All of the 
studies--78 randomized control studies--say masks don't work. You can 
wear one. I am not going to forbid you from wearing one. I will just 
tell you the truth. They will say I shouldn't be allowed to say that. I 
can still say it on the Senate floor, but if I say it on some of the

[[Page S865]]

Big Tech platforms, we have the FBI and Homeland Security under the 
Biden administration sitting down and meeting with Big Tech on a weekly 
basis to encourage them to take down my speech.
  So when Ukraine limits speech, you don't hear much of a criticism. It 
is just: Send them money--because they are no longer opposed to 
censorship. They are no longer for the First Amendment.
  They are for the First Amendment, unless you are spreading 
misinformation. But what is misinformation? It is their definition and 
their idea that they don't like what you are saying.
  I would be perfectly willing to acknowledge that there are arguments 
on the other side of what I am saying: whether masks work, whether you 
should vaccinate your children. I think the arguments are stronger on 
our side, and I will debate anybody on these subjects. I think they 
should be debated, and then you should make your own choice. In a free 
country, you make the choice: Wear a mask; don't wear a mask. Vaccinate 
your kids; don't vaccinate your kids.
  But to ban the speech is a very dangerous precedent. This is the kind 
of speech that they are in favor of banning in our country. So they are 
not too troubled when speech is banned in Ukraine.
  There has also been banning of religious authorities in Ukraine as 
well. So we don't have elections in Ukraine. We have banned speech. And 
there has also been a banning of religion as well.
  And yet the fervor--the fervor of people to send the money, to load 
the plane--the plane is likely loaded. Now, I may be exaggerating that 
there are going to be pallets of cash. There is probably going to be a 
computer entry. But it is much more visual to imagine the pallets of 
cash.
  But there will be a plane that will leave this weekend, and it will 
have the Republican leader on it and the Democrat leader, and they will 
be celebrating $60 billion of your money going to Ukraine--$60 
billion--$60 billion we don't have.
  And, also, at the same time, they had no time to discuss the invasion 
coming in from the southern border. We didn't have 1 minute.
  We haven't had an amendment. We have several amendments that would 
actually put border security back into the bill, and some on the other 
side--I love this--they have said: Well, because you opposed the bill, 
you don't deserve to have amendments.
  I love the definition and the idea of what their concept of democracy 
is. If you agree with me, you get to have speech. But if you don't 
agree with me, you--my goodness--you are a deplorable, and you don't 
deserve to have your speech or to have amendments. That is what they 
have said, basically.
  So, right now, there have been no amendments on border security. 
There is an emergency at the southern border. I am all for more legal 
and lawful immigration. I have several bills that would do exactly 
that. I have bills that would expand employment-based immigration. It 
used to be that, when you came to our country, particularly when we had 
the big waves of people coming in toward the end of the 19th century, 
you had to have a sponsor and you had to work. I don't have a problem 
with that. Even for some of the people who have already come here and 
didn't follow the rules, I would probably be in favor of allowing work 
permits.
  But the thing is, I am not in favor of 780,000 people coming, en 
masse, across the border. People are coming from China. People are 
coming from Venezuela and Colombia and Paraguay. They are coming from 
all over the place.
  There was a Pew study a few years ago that did samplings of people: 
Who would come to America if you could? It was estimated that 750 
million people would. Do you think we can take 750 million people all 
at once? Do you think we can double our population? No, there has to be 
some planning. There has to be some periodic sort of obstacles. There 
has to be a lawful way to come into this country.
  So I have been for expanding the lawful paths. I have been for 
expanding employment-based immigration. Most people I know who are 
first generation are great workers. Like I say, some of the best 
Americans just got here. But we can't have a wide-open border. We can't 
allow the invasion to continue.
  What has transpired here over the last few days and will continue to 
transpire is basically ignoring the people. There is an elite class in 
this country that think that Americans aren't smart enough to figure 
these things out. They think that Americans aren't smart enough to 
really figure out whether they want to vaccinate their kids, whether 
they want to wear a mask, or whether or not 6 feet of distance works.
  Did you hear the one recently, when they interviewed Fauci? They 
asked him where the 6 feet of distance came from? He is like: I don't 
know. I think we just made that one up.
  Really?
  I went to my son's university for graduation. They had white circles 
drawn on the ground outside. You had to stand in another white circle, 
6 feet from people outside.
  There is zero science behind that--zero. They don't even know where 
their supposed science came from. I said: I thought you came up with 
the science.
  No, I thought you did. I thought it worked.
  It doesn't work, and you don't catch a disease outside.
  All of those things--we went through graduations with people with 
masks on and the chairs 6 feet apart.
  My favorite is this, though. These people are so obsessed and think 
masks work that you will see them on the floor now--and not all of 
them. I am just guessing. But I know at least some of them on the 
floor, when they are wearing a mask, it is because they have COVID.
  And it is like, they used to teach the common sense. When I went to 
medical school and when I was growing up, you stayed home when you were 
sick. If you had an infectious disease, you stayed home. Now they tell 
you to just keep going and confronting people while wearing a mask that 
doesn't work.
  Why don't the masks work? Because the pores in the mask are 600 times 
bigger than the virus, and the virus is aerosolized--not just on 
droplets of water, aerosolized, moving freely throughout the air.
  Probably, the most imbecilic thing we did--which rivals maybe the 
Middle Ages--is plexiglass. These morons told you that plexiglass would 
stop the virus. Only a moron would say that. There is no truth to that. 
There is no science to that. It is ridiculous. It should be a 
``Saturday Night Live'' skit. Plexiglass that is this high? The virus 
can't go over it? The virus can't go around it?

  A group of engineers at MIT looked at this and looked at patterns of 
flow, and I can't say that I know that this is right or not, but they 
conjectured, actually, that the plexiglass actually made it worse 
because the laminar flow of air was actually disrupted by these things, 
and your filtration systems, which actually probably do serve some 
value, were interrupted by the plexiglass. But that is what we lived 
through. But these are the people--the people who inflicted these 
things on you believe you are not smart enough to make your own 
decisions.
  When you tell people at home what is going on up here--and I go home 
every weekend, go to the grocery store, go to church--when I tell 
people at home that they just sent $60 billion overseas, they are 
aghast. They say: How can that happen? They say they know of no one--if 
I am in Eastern Kentucky, I could be talking to a fireman, a policeman, 
a city councilman. They come up to me spontaneously and say: We have 
problems here in our country.
  We can't pay for the basic functioning of our country. Only two-
thirds of the spending in Washington is paid for, and an entire third 
of it is borrowed. Yet they want to send money to a foreign country to 
deal with their problems? Shouldn't we try to take care of our own 
country first? Shouldn't we try to do something to actually quit the 
destruction of our own currency?
  How do they get away with it? It is incredibly unpopular. If you were 
to take this position in my State and ask everybody in Kentucky ``How 
many of you think we should send $100 billion overseas and do zero for 
the southern border--not a penny, not one policy change, nothing for 
the southern border,'' how many people believe that? In my State, it is 
close to zero. Very few people believe that.

[[Page S866]]

  So how does it happen up here? It happens because there is not enough 
sunlight. There is not enough transparency. So that is part of what a 
filibuster is. This is a talking filibuster today, and the reason we 
talk is to try to broadcast this message, to get the message home so 
they can send us better people.
  Madam President, can you tell me how much time I have remaining in 
the hour of speaking?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 27 minutes remaining.
  Mr. PAUL. All right.
  So one of the proposals I have had--I think it is a modest proposal 
and you would think it would be a no-brainer and should have been 
adopted unanimously, and that is to have an inspector general oversee 
the money.
  We have been doing this in Afghanistan for 20 years, but we still 
spent nearly $2 trillion in Afghanistan over 20 years. But at least 
there was someone trying to watch because in times of war, a lot of 
things happen.
  You talk about the fog of war? Sometimes there are atrocities, 
sometimes there is killing of civilians--almost always--but there is 
also a lot of stealing. They have a name for it. It used to have a bad 
connotation--``war profiteer.'' But it happens.
  In Afghanistan, there was a hotel being built, and it was being built 
across the street from our Embassy. It was framed out. It was halfway--
it was at least started. You could tell it was going to be a hotel.
  As it was being built, somebody said: Wow, looks like they will look 
right down into the courtyard of our Embassy.
  Somebody said: Wow, wouldn't that be a safety risk?
  The other one said: Yes, I think you are right.
  So the construction slowed down when they evaluated the possible 
safety risk of building a tall hotel looking down on our Embassy.
  Meanwhile, the guy who had the money fled to Jordan with $60 million. 
It was going to cost $80 million, and they put about $20 million into 
it. It was left there as an eyesore. My understanding is that it was 
eventually torn down.
  How did we know about this? Because we had an inspector general. The 
inspector general is called SIGAR, Special Inspector General for 
Afghanistan Reconstruction.
  So I had a proposal over a year ago. I said: Why don't we take the 
inspector general who has been doing this in Afghanistan, already has a 
budget--because I just happen to be conservative with everything--and I 
said: We don't even need a new budget. The guy already has a budget. He 
has $10 or $15 million in his budget. Why don't we switch him over from 
Afghanistan to Ukraine?
  I told absolutely everyone I know about it, and when I go home, I 
mention it. People mention it to me. I have not heard of one person who 
is opposed to it. I have not heard of one person who would be opposed 
to having an inspector general.
  So we voted on it. The other side almost universally voted it down, 
and some on my side voted against it. Why? Because the inspector 
general has a history of finding waste. They don't like it. I picked 
him because he apparently is good at his job. He has a whole series of 
maybe 50 to 100 economists, accountants, people who are used to looking 
at war spending, and he finds the people wasting it. He writes a book 
on it every year.
  One of the waste projects he found was a natural gas gas station.
  This is the kind of ludicrous stuff that people at home don't know 
about, and this is the stuff the other side sticks in everything. 
Everything has to be green. We are going to make the military green.
  So they decided they wanted to have s natural gas gas station in 
Afghanistan. You have to realize this is a country where a lot of the 
food is still cooked on open fires, and people ride burros, not natural 
gas cars. But they built it. They spent $45 million building a natural 
gas gas station 30, 40 miles out from any military site--couldn't be 
protected. But then they discovered another problem, and I guess maybe 
they hadn't thought this through. They wanted to go green. They wanted 
to get rid of the internal combustion. They wanted to go to natural gas 
and away from gasoline. They were going to solve climate change in 
Afghanistan, a country of open fires.

  So they built this natural gas gas station for 45 million bucks, but 
lo and behold, do you know what they discovered? Nobody had a car that 
ran on natural gas. So, never to be deterred, the wastefuls of American 
spending said: Let's buy them cars that go on natural gas. We have a 
gas station. We have to get them cars that run on natural gas so we can 
cure global warming in Afghanistan.
  So they bought them I think 24 cars that ran on natural gas, but they 
didn't think this one through, either. The people now had a gas station 
that delivered natural gas to their cars. We gave them a couple of cars 
that ran on natural gas. But they didn't have any money. So they said: 
Let's give them a credit card. So they got them credit cards to buy 
natural gas. We have a gas station with natural gas, natural gas cars, 
but now here is your credit card.
  But they didn't think that all the way through, either. It turns out 
that people were still killing each other in that part of the world, 
and it was too dangerous for our soldiers to protect. So when one of my 
staff members asked to see the natural gas gas station, he was told by 
our soldiers: Too dangerous to see it.
  So, as you can imagine, this natural gas gas station now looks like--
if you can imagine an inner-city gas station with the copper pipes torn 
out, you know, anything that is of value torn out of the ground, that 
is your natural gas station in Afghanistan. That is your 45 million 
bucks. And that is war even with an inspector general who found out 
about it. Can you imagine what war is like with no inspector general?
  Now, the other side would say: Oh, well, the Department of Defense 
has an inspector general.
  Well, yes, they do. This is the Department of Defense that is missing 
a couple of trillion dollars' worth of equipment. This is the 
Department of Defense that says they are too big to be audited. So I 
would say that you have to be a little bit wary of just saying: Well, 
the Department of Defense will watch this money.
  I mentioned earlier about a billion dollars. You know, what is a 
billion? So a million dollars in the palm of your hand is thousand-
dollar bills--if you had thousand-dollar bills, 4 inches high would be 
a million dollars.
  A billion dollars is more difficult to visualize, but to put a 
billion into perspective, a billion seconds ago, Reagan was starting 
his second term. A billion minutes ago, the Pantheon was being 
completed in Rome. A billion hours ago was the stone age, over 100,000 
years ago. But a billion dollars ago, at the rate we are spending 
money, was just a little more than 2 minutes ago.
  Now, that is a billion. See, you wonder how bad things are around 
here? We used to think a billion was a lot of money, but now we have 
trillion--$34 trillion.
  I remember when George W. Bush was President, it was $5 trillion, and 
it went to $10 trillion. I was, like, gosh, this is terrible. This is a 
Republican administration. Then when Obama was President, it went from 
10 to 20. Then when Trump was, it went up 7\1/2\, 8, in 4 years--even 
at a more alarming rate. Each President has been worse. They have all 
been bad. Congress deserves some of the blame, too. It doesn't happen 
without Congress.
  But the money is going crazy. We are up to about $1.5 trillion. I 
looked this up this morning. I wanted to know, if you stacked one-
dollar bills and you wanted to know how big $1.5 trillion is. Well, if 
you take 2 years' worth of debt--that is $3 trillion--and you want it 
in one-dollar bills? The one-dollar bills would stack all the way to 
the Moon, over 230,000 miles away.
  We are starting to talk about a bit of money here. But it is not just 
the overall debt. When they pay for the debt, the Federal Reserve 
dilutes the currency, and the currency becomes worth less and less. But 
also what happens is that our interest rates increase over time.
  So under George W. Bush, we went from $5 to $10 trillion, we doubled 
the debt from $5 to $10 trillion. In that period of time, the interest 
rate was cut in half, so the interest rate really wasn't a lot worse. 
But we finally, I believe, have lost the ability for the Federal 
Reserve to suppress interest rates.

[[Page S867]]

Interest rates have risen, and interest payments have doubled.
  We are on course within the next year or so to have interest rates 
become the largest item, pushing out and crowding out other spending in 
the budget. Mark my words--this $100 billion will add to that problem, 
and I think it is absolutely an utter mistake and an insult to every 
American that we ignore the invasion on our southern border in order to 
send money overseas.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  I ask the Parliamentarian how much time remains.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 17 minutes remaining.
  Mr. PAUL. Thank you.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.
  Mr. LEE. Madam President, more than 3 months ago, the Republican 
Members of the United States Senate--more than 3 months ago, the 
Republican Members of the United States Senate made a commitment--made 
a commitment to each other and to our voters and to the American 
people. We agreed not to send one more penny of their hard-earned money 
overseas to support conflicts in foreign nations until their own 
homeland--America's own homeland--was secured.

  Well, through the efforts of a faithless few, we are poised to treat 
our promise to Americans the same way President Biden has treated his 
solemn oath to protect our country's borders--expedient, expendable, 
and now, apparently, expired.
  We cannot send billions of dollars to Ukraine while America's own 
borders are bleeding. Heaven help us. The American people should not 
have to watch us every hour of every day, looking over our shoulder, 
just to make sure that their own government doesn't stab them in the 
back. What have they done, after all, to deserve such contempt? Such 
untrustworthy public servants? What grudge does this body hold against 
the very people who elected us?
  On Saturday, I spent many hours trying to make six different 
amendments to this legislation pending. Most of them, in fact, were 
germane to this bill. They dealt specifically with them and met the 
tight legal definition that we use in this body to decide whether it is 
pertinent to the bill. It has certain procedural benefits and 
protections if it is germane. Most of mine were. Yet, again and again, 
I was shot down. I was told that Republicans had forfeited our right to 
offer any improvements, any changes to this bill because we rejected 
the border proposal--the border proposal that we had received just a 
few days earlier--a week ago Sunday, at 7 p.m. eastern standard time.
  Now, my request was simple. It was not that each of my amendments be 
made law--no, it wasn't that--nor was it even that I was asking that 
each of my amendments be included in the base text of the bill or be 
considered adopted as part of this as an amendment. It wasn't that 
either. No. It was much, much simpler. It was that each amendment 
merely be permitted to be considered, debated, and possibly voted on. I 
came to the floor and asked consent to do this because the Senate 
majority leader, Chuck Schumer, had utilized a procedure that has, 
unfortunately, become all too common in this body, known as filling the 
tree.
  To make a long story short and to make a complicated system sound 
simpler, filling the tree is the means by which you say: There is no 
space to consider amendments to this bill. We can't even make them 
pending because all of the slots are full. So majority leaders have, 
over the last few years, become increasingly fond of filling the tree. 
They will plug in a handful of amendments to the proverbial tree: one 
amendment changing a comma into a semicolon; another amendment changing 
a date, say, from September 29 to September 30. It is usually something 
fairly immaterial. They are just there as space fillers, as amendment 
blockers, so that the Senate can't consider other amendments.
  There are still ways around that, and I was exploring one of those 
ways. You come down to the floor. You call up your amendment. You ask 
consent to make your amendment pending and to set aside one of the 
tree-filling, one of the amendment-blocking amendments that have been 
put in there by the majority leader just in order to obstruct others 
from having the opportunity for amendments. So that was the simple 
request--merely being permitted to have these amendments considered, 
debated, and possibly voted upon. I had a number of amendments. There 
are seven I talked about that day. There were six I offered up and 
asked consent to have made pending.
  Here is some of what they would have accomplished had we adopted 
them.
  One proposed to make discrete, commonsense changes to our immigration 
law in order to protect our border and to prevent traffickers from 
using toddlers and babies as a means to ensure their customers easy 
access into the interior of our country, notwithstanding the fact that 
they are entering our country illegally. That, in fact, describes a few 
of my amendments.
  I had at least one amendment that would make it very clear that an 
illegal alien who knowingly registers to vote would be subject to 
criminal penalties. Right now, it is not only against the law to vote 
if you are not a citizen, but there are far too few teeth in that law, 
and this would provide some of those teeth.
  Now, who could be against making sure of this, especially when we 
have had a record number of people entering our country without 
documentation--entering our country illegally--10 million, according to 
some estimates? Some would say that it is higher than that; some would 
say it is a little lower than that. Either way, we are talking about 
something in the neighborhood of 10 million or so entering this country 
just since Joseph R. Biden became the 46th President of the United 
States on January 20, 2021.
  It is not unreasonable, as we approach a very important, a very 
consequential election, to say: Let's make sure that it is citizens who 
are voting, and let's say, in the case of an illegal alien who 
knowingly registers to vote, he would face some penalties for that.
  These and other amendments that I had prepared would actually ensure 
border security and protect America's elections from foreign 
interference, things that, I think, many--probably most--of my 
colleagues profess to care about, things that we all, certainly, should 
care about. Nonetheless, these amendments drew objections--all of them 
objections imposed by Democrats in the Senate to the mere consideration 
of these amendments. We couldn't even make the amendment pending. We 
couldn't even consider them.
  I also asked that the following amendments be considered: an 
amendment that would allow only 2 percent of the funds intended for 
Ukraine to be released until the President delivered a strategy to 
Congress with specific objectives and specific timelines. This is not 
too much to ask. It is not too much to ask when we have already sent 
$113 billion over for that war effort and when we have got a lot of 
additional funding that, if this bill is enacted, would also be sent to 
Ukraine.

  If we are going to do all this and if we are going to put American 
weapons on the line, if we are going to put the additional strain on 
those who produce our weapons on the line, if we are going to reduce 
our stockpiles even further, if we are going to tax and inflate the 
dollar additionally--as this will require us to do because we are 
talking about borrowed money here--then, the American people should 
have the benefit of knowing what the strategy is. We don't have a 
comprehensive, coherent strategy from the administration on what they 
want as the outcome of our efforts, of our assistance. What does this 
look like? How does this conflict get brought to a peaceful, lasting 
conclusion? What does Ukraine look like after that long, hoped-for 
conclusion?
  These are reasonable things for us to expect. These are, certainly, 
reasonable things for us to debate regardless of how eager any 
individual Senator might be or, alternatively, how reluctant any 
individual Senator might be about providing additional funding to 
Ukraine.
  There was another amendment prohibiting any funding for economic 
support for Ukraine from paying the pensions and the salaries of 
Ukrainian Government bureaucrats as well as paying for any Ukrainian 
welfare programs. We were pleased, of course, that the language of this 
bill contains a carve-out that prohibits the use of the, roughly, $8 
billion we are sending over

[[Page S868]]

in economic support to the Ukrainian Government, saying that it 
couldn't be used to shore up Ukrainian pensions. That was a good thing. 
We are glad to see that. We had feared that that would be in there. 
That was in the original proposal, in that original suggestion, by 
President Biden that it should be in there. That economic relief 
package was originally somewhere in the neighborhood of $11 billion or 
$12 billion. It was brought down, I think, in part because of this 
prohibition against using it to back up pensions in Ukraine; but there 
is still nothing in there that prohibits Ukraine from using that for 
its own social welfare programs or to pay the salaries of Ukrainian 
bureaucrats or other civil servants. By the way, it is my understanding 
that this is enough money to pay them for an entire year.
  Now, a lot of Americans have questions. Even a lot of Americans who 
might be OK with sending some additional military assistance to Ukraine 
have reservations about paying the salaries and the social welfare 
benefits of the Ukrainian Government for an entire year.
  There was another amendment that I tried to make pending that would 
prohibit putting American taxpayers on the hook for any reconstruction 
activities in Ukraine. It is understandable here, too, why there would 
be some concern. When we engage in nation-building, this is often how 
an effort that begins with a promise that we will be there for maybe a 
year or two--that we will be in charge of reconstruction activities for 
a year or two--can stretch into two decades really quickly before we 
know it. Unlike wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places where we 
have engaged in nation-building--that took way too long and way too 
much money from the American taxpayer--this isn't even a war that we 
ourselves are fighting. This isn't even a war as to which we have 
enacted an authorization for use of military force for Americans to 
fight or a declaration of war. So it makes it even more inappropriate 
for us to just assume that nation-building is going to be our focus.
  Now, sure, there is only $25 million in this bill for that effort, 
identified as such, within that particular project of newly liberated 
communities--or words to that effect--but this is the nose in the 
camel's tent. Once that begins and if this war concludes where, I 
think, all of us in this body will want it to conclude, which is with 
victory for Ukraine, there is going to be a lot more of this to go on. 
There was a recent estimate by some global authority--it could have 
been with the World Bank--suggesting we are looking at something like 
$300 billion or $400 billion for Ukrainian reconstruction.
  Why would the United States put itself in a position here to be on 
the cutting edge of that, to be at the epicenter of that, as far as 
organizing funding, et cetera? It is a dangerous thing to move forward 
without even having a debate on a single amendment to try to limit what 
we would do on that front.
  There was also an amendment that I tried to make pending that would 
clarify that, not only would our American taxpayer dollars stop funding 
UNRWA--UNRWA is this singularly offensive, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel 
agency within the U.N., and, I am, here again, grateful to those who 
crafted the bill that at least UNRWA was excluded from U.S. funding 
because UNRWA, as we have discovered in recent weeks and as many of us 
have worried about for years, has been involved in all kinds of 
horrible things, not just the indoctrination of young children in Gaza 
such that they were taught in UNRWA-run schools to hate Jewish people, 
but it has also encouraged them to engage in acts of violence against 
them, and they have been for years--in fact, for the better part of a 
couple of decades. More recently, it appears that a number of UNRWA 
personnel and facilities and other resources were used actively to help 
these attacks and those responsible for the attacks.
  It is a good thing that the bill, as written, excludes UNRWA. But 
what about the other agencies? I believe there are 19 U.N. agencies 
operating within Gaza. What about those? My amendment that I introduced 
last week and that I tried to make pending on Saturday would clarify 
that not only would U.S. taxpayer dollars not be available to send to 
UNRWA specifically, but they would also no longer fund any U.N. 
organization, any U.N. agency operating in Gaza, ensuring that the 
American taxpayer dollar does not end up in the hands of Hamas.
  Look, these U.N. networks are very sophisticated, and those that 
operate in Gaza have, of course, worked closely in concert, one with 
another. To say that we are going to get rid of any risk of funding the 
same problems that were facilitated and materially advanced by UNRWA in 
the past just by funneling them through another U.N. agency is folly. 
To suggest that simply by funneling it through the U.N. to send aid to 
Gaza we are somehow going to prevent any situation in which we 
materially assist Hamas, that is not going to happen.
  I mean, look, it is difficult for us to grasp this here because, 
fortunately, those who have grown up in this country and lived here our 
whole lives have never experienced anything like Gaza--present-day, 
21st century Gaza--in which there is no state--to say it is a failed 
state is almost an insult to failed states everywhere. But this is just 
a failure at every end. There essentially is no state.
  In part, because there is no state and because of the way that it 
rules--Hamas rules Gaza with an iron fist. Iron fist in a glove, it is 
in control of everything. So no matter who you funnel it through, even 
if you don't funnel it through UNRWA--because you can't under the text 
of this bill--you give it to some other U.N. entity, it is still going 
to be helping Hamas. We don't want to do that.
  We know that October 7--absolutely grisly. It was a sobering wake-up 
call to all who have witnessed it. And for those of us who have visited 
those areas in Israel, in southern Israel next to Gaza--as my wife and 
I have in recent weeks--it is sobering, heartbreaking, breathtaking. 
There are not enough adjectives associated with misery and shock and 
horror to describe the atrocities that were carried out that awful day 
on October 7. Yet October 7 is--and was--the tip of the iceberg 
compared to what they have planned.
  What they have planned, what they want to do--what Hamas and other 
Iranian proxies want to do in the region and will do, when given the 
chance, will make what happened on October 7 look like a Sunday picnic. 
We don't want to be funding that. Yet on two different accounts under 
this bill, there is money that could go there. Those two accounts added 
together total between $9 and $10 billion. That ought to be something 
we are concerned about.
  For my colleagues who might disagree with me on this amendment, I 
would ask them this: Shouldn't this at least be something that we 
should debate? Shouldn't this at least be something we should vote on 
before we send it?
  This, like the other amendments that I have just described, the other 
germane amendments that I have just described, they are not dilatory. 
These are not reckless. These are not there to try to serve any purpose 
other than to, No. 1, make the bill less likely to inflict harm, which 
I think should be our first job in all of this; and also to sharpen the 
debate, sharpen our analysis of what it is that we want to happen. It 
is not too much to ask for those things to be considered.
  But, disturbingly, my colleagues--those of them who objected and 
those who have supported the objectors and those who have supported 
cloture, even after it became clear that there is to be no debate on 
any of these things--persisted in moving forward. And they have 
defended those who have done it--defended those who have ensured that 
we will have no meaningful debate on any of these issues, no 
opportunity to vote.
  They have rejected every safeguard, every limit, every condition that 
I have offered so that we may--if we adopt them, I think these are 
things we can do to make sure that we are good and faithful stewards 
over U.S. taxpayer dollars.
  You know, these taxes that we spend all too freely here are not free. 
They are taken from hard-working citizens. They are taken from hard-
working men and women who are just trying to put a roof over their head 
and food on the table, finding these days--since January 20, 2021--it 
cost them $1,000 a

[[Page S869]]

month every single month just to put food on the table, gas in the car, 
groceries in the fridge, in the pantry just to live.
  Everything from housing to healthcare, from gas to groceries, and 
everything in between, that has all become more expensive, in part--in 
large part, mostly--because our government spends routinely trillions 
of dollars a year now, more than it takes in every single year. You 
can't do that, even when you are the world's reserve currency, which 
the U.S. dollar is.
  By the way, we should worry about whether we are jeopardizing that, 
too. So far, we have gotten away with it because the dollar is still 
the least bad deal in town. And by ``in town,'' I mean on the planet. 
But the more we test the limits of that, the more I think we shouldn't 
test the limits of it. But in any event, even when you are the world's 
reserve currency, there are still consequences to multitrillion-dollar 
deficit spending year after year after year.
  It is one thing to do that in the middle of a pandemic--we now should 
doubt the wisdom of a lot of that, but especially because it then led 
to a pattern of multitrillion-dollar deficit spending year after year 
since then, including this year, including times like now, when we are 
kind of at the peak of an economic cycle. We have got relatively--we 
have got really low--often record low--unemployment as we have been 
doing this. You print and borrow and spend that much money all at once, 
it has the effect of just printing it; every dollar buys less.
  So through the combination of taxes that many American families work 
weeks out of months--or if not months, often months out of every year 
just to pay their Federal taxes--on top of that, they are taxed again 
when every dollar they make or have saved buys a lot less precisely 
because we borrow and spend too much money.
  You add insult to injury to that, after making them work that long to 
make the money, after then taxing them again because you spent too much 
money, you make it so that their money doesn't spend as far, doesn't 
buy as much as it used to, you add insult to injury by not even 
debating an amendment to make sure that their hard-earned tax dollars 
aren't used to kill Israelis and threaten, intimidate, perhaps kill 
Americans and our allies. This is really concerning. I don't understand 
why we would want to do this.
  We have got to make sure that we have undertaken our due diligence 
work properly, that we have done so faithfully. If we don't do it, the 
American people will be disappointed, and they should be.
  Look, I have not been quiet about my opposition to this bill. I do 
believe it betrays a promise that, as I understood it, the Members of 
the Senate Republican conference made to each other and made to our 
constituents and made to our colleagues across the aisle and our 
counterparts over in the House a few months ago--a commitment that, as 
I understand it, was not just made months ago but also reiterated 
pretty consistently over the last 2 or 3 months.
  If we stayed to that, then this body wouldn't consider sending 
another dollar, another quarter, another dime, another nickel, another 
penny to Ukraine until we had passed something that actually would 
secure the border; that would force the issue of border security so 
that the issue of border security and a secure border could be realized 
in the near, short term, in this Presidency and not at some 
aspirational moment somewhere in the future.
  We were told for months that this was the plan and something was 
negotiated on that. I have great affection and respect for those who 
were involved in that on both sides of the aisle. Senator Lankford is a 
dear friend, and he worked really hard on that. I know the other 
negotiators did, too. But they were in that room; we weren't. For many 
of us, most of us--in fact, I think it ended up being all but four 
Republican Senators--after we first saw that bill at 7 p.m. eastern 
standard time a week ago Sunday, looked at, decided that we couldn't 
support it.
  Once that happened, it didn't somehow expunge the previous 
commitment. It didn't release us from the obligation we had to each 
other and to our voters to try to make sure that before we sent another 
dime to Ukraine, we made sure that this border is secure at home, that 
we force the issue of border security, even against an administration 
led by a President not willing to secure the border--in fact, one that 
is openly hostile toward border security. For reasons I cannot fathom, 
that is the position they are taking.
  Were there positions in that bill that could have made a difference? 
Of course. Of course, there were. There were things in that bill that I 
think could have proven useful within an administration that wanted to 
make the border secure. But with an administration bent on not doing 
that very thing, that very thing that was the object of the entire 
monthslong negotiation process to begin with--there were enough 
loopholes in it that I and nearly all of my colleagues didn't believe 
it got us to that point.
  Once that happened, I believe what could and should have happened was 
that we, as Senate Republicans, would unite--unite, again, behind the 
idea of getting something done. Put a few things, concrete things, on 
the table--something like one of the amendments that I offered up the 
other day, my Stopping Border Surges Act, which would make some 
surgical adjustments to immigration law, particularly those dealing 
with border security issues. They are narrow. They are finite. They 
should be things that every Republican should be able to support.
  We presented that and a couple of other provisions. I know I have got 
a colleague or two who have expressed interest in it and I think a 
majority of Republicans who have indicated that they would support 
language that would even tie the spending of Ukraine aid to the 
achievement of certain objectively verifiable border security metrics.
  Others have suggested attaching legislation passed by the House to 
secure the border, H.R. 2--not a bad idea, since we know that has the 
support of every Republican in the House of Representatives.
  Others have said: Well, we know that can't pass in the Senate.
  Well, yes. Alone, it couldn't. Alone, I think every Republican over 
here has expressed support, at least, for the core provisions of that. 
I think every Democrat has expressed opposition to it as a whole. But 
once you attach it to this and make it a condition precedent for 
sending another dime to Ukraine, that might change.
  The whole idea from the beginning was to harness the Democrats' 
overwhelming support for sending more Ukraine aid and combine that with 
Republicans' overwhelming support for securing the border.
  Neither party would, perhaps, be pleased with the outcome and that it 
would involve giving up something that we didn't want to provide, but 
nonetheless it would be a way forward.
  So if we were standing by that, if after--you know, 24 to 48 hours 
after the border deal, as it has been described in the public, was 
released to the public for the first time through the news media at 7 
p.m. eastern standard time a week ago Sunday--we knew within 24 to 48 
hours it wasn't going anywhere. Within 72 hours, all but four 
Republicans had voted against it.
  Once that happened, the logical next step, consistent with the 
commitment we made to each other and to the public months ago, would 
have been to negotiate something else--perhaps including something like 
H.R. 2, perhaps including something like what most Republicans have 
said they think would be appropriate in addition to that, which would 
be conditioning the release of Ukraine aid to the achievement of 
certain objectively verifiable border security metrics. But, no, rather 
than having any of this, we have a handful of my Republican 
colleagues--a dozen and a half of them now--who have chosen to move 
ahead with the bill, to move ahead with the quid without the quo, to 
move ahead with what the Democrats want, what unites Democrats--not 
only Democrats in the Senate but Democrats across the country, 
Democrats in the House--with what they want but without Republicans 
having any of what they want, at least most Republicans.
  So you can understand my frustration here that if we can't have the 
bill we want, the next best thing would be to at least have the chance 
to try to amend this bill. Without something that actually forces fully 
the issue of

[[Page S870]]

border security, it is hard for me to imagine how I could even consider 
voting for it for my own purposes, to say nothing of the commitment 
that we as a conference made to each other and to the public months 
ago. But if I can't defeat the bill, the next best thing I can do is to 
amend it to improve it.
  Now, some have cynically denigrated this by saying that a lot of 
those wanting to offer amendments are doing so merely for dilatory 
purposes or doing so for purposes that are themselves cynical, trying 
to destroy the bill. In any event, these are people who don't support 
the bill, are not going to vote for the bill at the end of the day, and 
therefore shouldn't get a chance do so.
  I find this argument utterly lacking a logical foundation. I find it 
incompatible with the Senate rules, with two-plus centuries of 
established tradition, with principles of basic collegiality that ought 
to purvey to anybody, much less certainly at least anybody who fancies 
itself the world's greatest deliberative legislative body.
  Think about it for a minute. If you say: Unless you agree with this 
bill exactly as it is, and unless you are willing to agree to support 
the bill regardless of which amendments pass and which do not, unless 
you are unequivocally willing to sign on to whatever becomes the 
finished product of this bill, we are not going to take into account 
your desire to have us consider amendments. You lose. You are excluded 
from the process. You are not part of the cool kids club, and you have 
no say in it. We won't even let you offer amendments, and when you try 
to do so, we will question the sincerity of your desire to do it.
  That is not fair, that is not accurate, and it completely ignores the 
way this or any other legislative body in any civilized society that I 
know anything about should operate.
  But, look, the fact is that I and others have not been allowed to 
amend the bill--not just to amend it, to achieve the amendment, to 
achieve passage of the amendment; we haven't even been allowed to make 
a single amendment pending, thus putting it in line for eventual 
disposition either by a rollcall vote, a voice vote, a point of order, 
a motion to table, or any of the other myriad means by which an 
amendment, once pending, can be disposed of.
  None of my colleagues, neither Democrat nor Republican, have been 
allowed to amend it. Why not? Well, there is this misinformation 
circulating about why we can't amend the bill, so I would like to 
correct the record.
  This morning, it was reported by a Hill news outlet that there is 
still no agreement on amendment votes, in part because of Senator Rand 
Paul of Kentucky. Is that really what is happening? Honestly? What that 
same newsletter failed to note is that I spent 4 hours on the floor on 
Saturday asking unanimous consent for six amendments merely to be made 
pending--not to pass them, not to have them adopted, merely to make 
them pending. I was not asking for these amendments to be passed or 
voted on immediately; I was just asking for them to be brought up 
before the Senate for consideration.
  The objector to my request was not Senator Paul, as this morning's 
reporting might have led you falsely to believe. Senator Paul was not 
the one blocking an amendment process. It was Senate Democrats who 
objected every single time to even considering any kind of amendment, 
even my germane amendments, which were most of the amendments that I 
tried to make pending.
  Again, a germane amendment is one that, under the rules of the 
Senate, is very closely connected, tightly and inextricably connected 
to the subject matter. It is not some extraneous thing.
  My Democrat colleague said that ``MAGA extremists had their chance.'' 
This is what they said while objecting to the mere consideration of my 
amendments, implying that when Senate Republicans rejected the border 
bill that we saw for the first time at 7 p.m. eastern standard time a 
week ago Sunday, that we forfeited our right to offer amendments of any 
sort--apparently not just amendments related to border security or 
immigration or whether or not we should allow illegal immigrants to 
vote without facing some sort of penalty but also amendments regarding 
where exactly the money is going to Ukraine; whether they should be 
able to use it for their own social welfare programs; whether or not 
they should be able to use it, as they have in the past under similar 
programs, under similar money we sent them in the past, to pay for 
concert tickets for Ukrainian concertgoers, to pay for economic 
stability of clothing stores in Ukraine, and to pay the salaries for 1 
entire year for every single government employee of the Ukrainian 
Government.
  When did that become the principle of this body, that because 
something like this happened here, that Republicans rejected--all but 
four of us--opposed the border bill that we saw for the first time a 
week ago Sunday at 7 p.m., we forfeited all of our rights to even offer 
any amendments and have those considered? When did that become the 
principle of this body? What insane human being commandeered our system 
and all of a sudden inserted that new rule? It is not in my rule book. 
It is not in any of the books that outline the precedents that have 
unfolded over the last 2\1/2\ centuries in this country--no, not at 
all.
  When did we accept that if you disagree with the legislation before 
the Senate, you can't offer any amendments to make the bill better than 
it otherwise would be? Where is that written in the Senate rules? When 
did that become a custom of the Senate?
  I hope that my Republican colleagues would unite--if not on this bill 
but at least unite to completely disavow this view, to disabuse the 
press and anyone watching from thinking that this is how we roll now. 
We really should be able to unite to completely disavow this view. Why? 
Well, because it will completely trample on the rights of the minority 
party and disenfranchise the voters who put us here to begin with. That 
is a really good reason--really good reason--to make clear that it 
doesn't matter where you are leaning on a bill or where you might vote 
on the ultimate package before the Senate; you still have no less a 
right to try to improve the bill, to try to make sure it is better than 
it is now.
  But I am afraid that some of my Republican colleagues are 
entertaining this view. In fact, one of my Republican colleagues who is 
here in the Chamber today reportedly said yesterday--I hope he was 
misquoted:

       You don't put forth 80 amendments and say that you won't 
     negotiate on time agreements and be taken seriously. . . . 
     That is what is happening here. Those folks are going to vote 
     against it no matter what.

  Look, maybe there is more to the context of this. I hope there is. 
Perhaps there is something I am misunderstanding.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. TILLIS. I rise to see if the Senator from Utah will yield with 
the knowledge that I will provide some of my unallocated time so he can 
continue his comments beyond that required to answer my questions.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Will the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. LEE. Without surrendering the floor, I will yield for a question.
  Mr. TILLIS. Thank you, Senator Lee.
  Senator Lee, first, I want the thank you for putting forth 
amendments, many of which I would like to vote for. I also want to 
thank you for not having the proviso that all of these amendments must 
be voted for without yielding any time.
  But, Senator Lee, you mentioned about how the Senate works. I have 
only been here for 9 years. You have been here longer than me. But I 
thought it was custom, whether Democrats were in control or Republicans 
were in control, that when we reached a point to where we are on the 
bill, that a part of the process was making good-faith offers of 
amendments, like you have, and then the majority, which actually 
controls what we take up on the floor, would then look for at least 
some concession on time. But I understand that we have some Members who 
have said that no matter what, they would not be conceding any time.
  So just to be fair to the couple of dozen people watching C-SPAN and 
some of the people in the Gallery, I am just trying to understand 
whether or not it is clear that we have Members who said ``Under no 
circumstances would we negotiate any time,'' and it is, in fact, that 
intransigence that is

[[Page S871]]

making it less likely that any of the good bills that my colleagues 
have offered up in the Republican conference are going to get voted on? 
Is that your understanding?
  Mr. LEE. Yes. I think so.
  Mr. TILLIS. OK. May I ask another question?
  So I just want to be clear that, generally speaking, Senator Lee, I 
have observed you do some extraordinary things on the floor and managed 
to get some very helpful measures--amendments--voted on, including some 
of the ones today. But I do want to be clear that we are likely never 
going to have an opportunity to vote on those because we do have some 
of our colleagues who have made it very clear that they are not willing 
to have the puts and takes that are necessary in the world's most 
deliberative body to actually get an opportunity to take those votes. 
Is that your understanding?
  Mr. LEE. Yes, essentially. I would like to respond. I hope to get the 
floor back soon.
  Mr. TILLIS. I yield back.
  Mr. LEE. Thank you.
  In the first place, yes, you are right to point out I have not been 
objecting to those. It is a common agreement and understanding that we 
will reach. Not always but much of the time, we can pool together a 
list of amendments, put them together on a raft, so to speak--a raft 
that you can send forward, send out among all Senate Republicans. If no 
one objects, you can vote on a handful--maybe it is 4, maybe it is 40, 
maybe it is somewhere in between--of amendments. Then you will set up 
some agreements surrounding the amount of time for each of those.
  I am not sure of exactly all the details or all the reasons of those 
objecting, but I do understand there have been some of my colleagues 
who have objected to those.
  But I will say this: The fact that there are some who object to that, 
my understanding is--at least for some of them--I can't purport to 
speak for all of them but at least for some of that--what they were 
concerned about is making sure that any such raft of agreements not 
culminate in or create an expectation of a scenario in which we would 
limit the total number of amendments that could be offered, considered, 
and voted on or the total amount of time in which amendments could be 
considered. And that on that basis, they were objecting.

  I didn't harbor that particular view and wasn't making those 
particular objections. Nonetheless, those colleagues were not objecting 
to what I was doing all day on the floor on Saturday, which is calling 
up, again and again, amendments, most of which were germane to the 
bill, that no one on the Republican side was objecting to--not one--to 
having them made pending.
  And the only reason given that I heard on Saturday as to why they 
weren't allowing amendments--it is funny about this point--the 
objection, as it was made, was usually occurring in response to 
something that had nothing to do with border security, as far as my 
amendments went. The objection I got from the Democrats who objected 
over and over and over again was: Look, MAGA Republicans are to blame, 
and they rejected the border package. Therefore, they don't get any say 
in this bill.
  So that is entirely afield from that objection, entirely afield from 
what my friend and colleague--I mean that sincerely, when I call him a 
friend--from North Carolina was mentioning. This is different than 
that.
  These were--nobody else was here. No other live requests were being 
made for people who wanted to make their amendments pending. There was 
no reason in the world why we couldn't at least make those pending. And 
the fact that, yes, some were objecting to having them pass en bloc, 
that is their business. I can't answer for that. But they had their 
reasons, and they did not object to what I was doing there.
  It really leads me to wonder why it is that anyone would imply that, 
if you don't support the final bill, you don't get any say in the bill. 
You can't make your amendments pending. You can't even have your 
amendments considered. You can't even tee them up for consideration, 
for disposal, as I say, either for a rollcall vote or a voice vote or, 
alternatively, a motion to table, a motion to commit, or a point of 
order, or something like that. You cannot make them pending, 
apparently, unless you swear allegiance to the finished product, which 
can't yet be seen. But you are asked to assume it consists of that 
which has been foreordained by whatever very, very small group of 
Senators happen to be the privileged ones to have written that.
  Mr. TILLIS. Madam President.
  Mr. LEE. I would like to continue my remarks, if I could.
  Mr. TILLIS. I would ask if, at the end of Senator Lee's remarks, if 
he would yield for a question.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah has the floor.
  Mr. TILLIS. My inquiry to Senator Lee was whether or not he would 
yield at the end of his comments for a question.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. LEE. Go ahead and ask your question. At some point, I would like 
to be able to continue my thoughts without being interrupted. Go ahead.
  Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I just want to make a point that I have 
actually seen a number of amendments Senator Lee has made that I would 
like to vote on, and I don't believe that there is anyone here who is 
making a judgment about whether or not he should get the amendments, 
whether or not he is going to vote for the final passage of the bill.
  I just want to restate, again, whether or not he is aware that we are 
not getting on any amendments, probably a handful that would be his, 
because of objections offered by our colleagues. I just want to make 
that point. It has nothing to do with where he will ultimately vote on 
the bill. It has to do with the intransigence of some of our Members 
who simply won't seek agreement, which is how we operate in the Senate.
  Thank you, Madam President. Thank you, Senator Lee.
  Mr. LEE. A couple of things: First of all, it is still beside the 
point. I appreciate the observation made by my friend the Senator from 
North Carolina. It still misses the point.
  I was still here. I still sought to have my amendments made pending 
on half a dozen amendments, most of which were germane, on Saturday. 
There is no reason we couldn't make those pending. There was nobody 
objecting. The same Senators objecting to other amendments were not 
objecting to these. I don't know what that has to deal with this.
  Secondly, it was my understanding, when I agreed to entertain the 
first of those questions--to yield for a question--that it would not 
count against my time. I would ask consent that it does not.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. LEE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that any Republican 
Senator be allowed to call up amendments and that the tree be set 
aside.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. MENENDEZ. I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. LEE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent any Senator from 
either party be allowed to call up amendments and the tree be set 
aside.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. MENENDEZ. I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. LEE. I ask unanimous consent that any Democratic Senator be 
allowed to call up amendments and the tree be set aside for that 
purpose.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. MENENDEZ. Objection.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. LEE. This is interesting. This is interesting what has happened. 
They are now opposed to even Democratic Senators calling up amendments 
and making those pending. Why is that? Well, it appears to be, again, 
this consolidation of power.
  The American people have lost enormous power in recent years. Power 
has been taken away from them in at least three steps.
  First, it is taken away from them as power is brought away from 
States and local governments, where most of the power under our Federal 
system is supposed to reside, consistent with both

[[Page S872]]

the original text of the Constitution and the 10th Amendment.
  Second, once that power has been brought here to Washington, it has 
been outsourced, moved away from the American people. In yet another 
step, the lawmaking power gets shifted from elected lawmakers to 
unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.
  Third, even when the power resides and remains within this body, once 
it has been moved here--in many cases where it shouldn't be--it has 
been consolidated excessively to a few. Here in the Senate, I often 
refer to this as the firm--the law firm of Schumer and McConnell.
  Very often, we consolidate power in the hands of a few legislative 
leaders to put together a bill, a bill very much like this--in fact, 
this very bill. And then nobody allows, apparently by agreement, for 
anybody to get votes on anything, even when we try to throw it open. We 
try to say anybody in this body gets to have their amendments made 
pending. They are told no. Even after we make a request that just 
Democratic Senators have that time, they are told no.

  Look, this is not how it is supposed to work. This is not how it is 
supposed to work at all. The American people are excluded from a 
process insofar as we all point to someone else. The American people 
must not be excluded from this process, and, when they are, bad things 
happen.
  Today, this might be a bill that you like. Tomorrow, it might be a 
bill you don't like. Majorities can change. Republican Senate 
leadership within the Senate may change. And, when it changes, you 
might not like the precedent you yourself have set when you try to 
exclude people just because they disagree with your ultimate outcome of 
the bill.
  This just isn't right. The Senate was set up to be a different sort 
of deliberative legislative body. Part of what makes it deliberative is 
that each State is represented equally. There is a type of comity that 
naturally arises out of that understanding of what differentiates us 
from the House, a type of comity that survived and thrived for more 
than two centuries. It has been eroded materially in recent years. And 
by recent years, I mean very recent years. It has gotten significantly 
worse even in the time--the 13 short years--that I have spent in the 
U.S. Senate. I hope we can turn it around.
  May I ask how much time remains on my account after the deduction for 
the interruption?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 8 minutes remaining.
  Mr. LEE. I have 8 minutes remaining. I would like to reserve the 
balance of those minutes so that I can come back as necessary.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. VANCE. Madam President, I come to debate and to make an argument 
about whether we should continue funding Ukraine indefinitely, because 
this country and this U.S. Senate has not actually had much of an 
argument about whether we should continue to fund Ukraine indefinitely.
  It has become extremely commonplace, among advocates for further 
Ukraine funding, to frame this as the courageous against the partisan; 
those who, in America's and Ukraine's, apparently, moment of need, are 
expressing the great spirit of patriotism that animated us in World War 
II and other moments of great world conflict; and that those who don't 
want to send another $61 billion to Ukraine, well, we are just knuckle-
draggers. We are the people who are listening to the base; we are the 
people who are listening to the media--ignoring that so many of us have 
been criticizing America's Ukraine policy from the get-go, when both 
the media and the base were much more supportive than they are today.
  One of the most preposterous arguments that I hear in defense of our 
policy in Ukraine is that it is bipartisan, that the experts know 
better. Perhaps, Senator J.D. Vance doesn't know what the Joint Chiefs 
of Staff do. Perhaps the Republican base doesn't know what the experts 
in national security do. Maybe, they, with their knowledge and their 
training and their intelligence briefing access, know something that 
the American people don't. So while the American people have grown more 
and more skeptical of this conflict, perhaps it makes sense that we 
should actually listen to the experts.
  Where have we heard that argument? So many times in the last many 
decades have we been asked to listen to the experts, and yet we never 
actually ask what the track record of those experts is in matters of 
foreign policy.
  The experts--the bipartisan consensus, of course--got us into 
Vietnam, a war that lasted nearly 15 years that saw the destruction of 
nearly 60,000 American lives; and for what?
  It was the bipartisan foreign policy consensus--the experts--that got 
us into a 20-year war in Afghanistan, where American taxpayers, for two 
decades, funded things like how to turn Afghanistan into a flowering 
democracy or how to ensure that the Afghans had proper American 
thoughts about gender in the 21st century. Well, maybe that was a waste 
of money and maybe the experts were wrong.
  Those same experts, of course, counseled us that we must invade Iraq 
because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Yet Iraq had no weapons 
of mass destruction, and the war led not only to the destruction of 
5,000 American lives, and many, many hundreds of thousands of innocent 
people beyond that, but also led to the regional empowerment of Iran, 
which now we are told, by those same experts, is the biggest problem 
that we face in the Middle East.
  Now those experts have a new crusade. Now those experts have a new 
thing that American taxpayers must fund and must fund indefinitely, and 
it is called the conflict in Ukraine.
  Now, we--at least most of us, I think, in this body; nearly all of 
us, I hope--do not think Ukraine deserved to be invaded. We don't think 
what has befallen the innocent civilians of Ukraine was deserved. We 
condemn it, as we should.
  But we have to ask ourselves: ``What are we doing there?'' not how we 
feel about it. ``What is our objective there?'' not how sad we feel 
about what has befallen the innocent civilians. We have to engage in 
what the bipartisan experts have failed to engage in for 50 years: a 
conversation about strategy--asking very specific, very discreet 
questions about what it is that we are doing there. What are we trying 
to accomplish? How long will it take to accomplish these things? And 
for how many millions or billions or trillions of dollars are we in for 
before we can accomplish these things?
  Now, I have heard any number of explanations from my colleagues who 
support our policy in Ukraine about what it is that we are trying to 
do. At the beginning of the war, especially--you hear this argument far 
less--but at the beginning of the war, especially, you would hear an 
argument that we had to throw Vladimir Putin back to the 1991 borders. 
Well, we don't hear that argument so much anymore. Why? Because it was 
preposterous then, and it is preposterous now.
  Ukraine is a country that now has about 28 million people. That is 
after many hundreds of thousands have died in the war and many, many 
millions have left the country, probably permanently, beyond that. 
Russia, by comparison, has 160 million people and has the industrial 
capacity to make many, many more times artillery shells and other 
critical weapons per day. So against that leviathan in Eastern Europe, 
we are told, somehow, the Ukrainians can win.
  Well, again, what is victory?
  We know now that throwing Russia back to the 1991 borders is 
preposterous. No one, not even the inner circle of Zelenskyy's own 
Cabinet, makes that argument. They did a few months ago, but they don't 
make that argument any more. So what is victory? And when you talk to 
people, both in public and in private, the actual thing that you can 
piece together that we are trying to do is to send enough weapons and 
send enough money to the Ukrainians until something good happens; 
until, maybe, the Russians get sick of the conflict, and they come to 
the negotiating table. That is one opportunity to end this war.
  That is one opportunity to end this war that we are told is that if 
we just keep on going and we show our resolve, then Vladimir Putin will 
come to the negotiating table.
  And yet if you listen to former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder or 
you listen even to some of the ministers in Zelenskyy's government or,

[[Page S873]]

certainly, if you listen to a number of other Western European allies, 
they will say that Russia was willing to come to the negotiating table 
at the beginning of 2022, after the war had stalemated from the Russian 
perspective and after the Ukrainians had shown some real bravery and 
some real resolve.
  Now, it is not just Vladimir Putin who says this; it is virtually 
everyone who has ever talked about this moment in the conflict. And 
they will say that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, backed by any 
number of leaders within the American security apparatus, basically 
said: Tell Vladimir Putin to shove it. The Ukrainians are winning, the 
Russians are losing, so we will just keep this war going for as long as 
it takes.
  So we had the opportunity to negotiate back in 2022, and if we had 
taken it, here is what would have happened: Many fewer hundreds of 
thousands of Ukrainians would have died. Many fewer innocent civilians 
would have lost their lives, their homes, their livelihoods. And a war 
in Eastern Europe that has put stresses on everything from food supply 
to energy prices would have concluded.
  So, we are trying to get Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. We 
don't have a pathway for how to do it, by the way; we just think that 
is a good thing, and we are going to try to do it if we continue to 
throw money. But yet that same negotiating table was on the offer about 
18 months ago, and we told them to go shove it.
  OK, so negotiating table, that seems to not be a realistic end goal 
if we just continue to funnel money and resources. So what is the end 
goal here? It is astonishing that not a single person from Joe Biden on 
down can actually articulate what another $61 billion can do.
  They will tell you what it won't do. They will tell you what the 
absence of $61 billion will do, but how weird is it that they want to 
send $61 billion to America's ally, Ukraine, and they can't actually 
tell you what it is supposed to accomplish--what this will accomplish 
that the previous $120 billion didn't.
  So, first, we have a complete absence of strategy, a complete failure 
for the President of the United States to articulate what we are going 
to do.
  I try to imagine what it would have been as an American citizen if on 
December 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt stood before the country and said: 
The Japanese have attacked us. It is a day that will live in infamy, 
and so we are going to send money for as long as it possibly takes, 
with no articulation of what we are going to do, of what the battle 
plan is, of where we are fighting, of what we were going to have our 
manufacturing base try to accomplish. We are just going to send money 
and hope that, eventually, these guys come to the negotiating table. 
That is the equivalent of what we are doing at this moment in time with 
this particular conflict.
  Now, I mentioned just now our manufacturing base. So let's talk about 
the costs of this conflict. We know there is no strategy. We know there 
is no plan to do anything other than just to funnel more and more money 
and more and more resources.
  What are the costs of continuing our posture in Ukraine? Well, let's 
go through them. Now, let me just make an observation about costs, 
about actually thinking about costs and considering the consequences of 
our actions. It used to be common in American statesmanship that we 
hear this phrase, ``Speak softly and carry a big stick.''
  The idea was be smart in your strategic decisions, be willing to hit 
back and hit back hard if you have to, but don't bluster. Don't brag. 
Don't pretend that you can do things that you can't. And a fundamental 
part of American statesmanship, I think, is asking ourselves: What is 
it that we are costing ourselves by continuing to fund this war?
  Well, you have heard some of my colleagues talk about this already. 
We have $61 billion on top of $34 trillion in debt. Can we actually 
afford to send another $61 billion to Ukraine? Can we afford to send 
the $100 billion that will be requested at some point next year? Can we 
afford the hundreds of billions of dollars of reconstruction costs that 
we have effectively committed ourselves to by funding the war in 
Ukraine indefinitely?
  You already hear these people like vultures with a carcass talking 
about how much money they are going to make on the reconstruction of 
Ukraine. And I ask myself, why are we destroying the country in the 
first place, given that we know the war is at a stalemate and American 
diplomacy could plausibly bring it to a close.
  Now, here is another thing that this is costing us, something that 
doesn't get talked about nearly enough in this Chamber. But I am 
reminded of the only time that I have ever been in the White House with 
a sitting President of the United States. It was about a week before 
the inauguration of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and so I was there 
with President Barack Obama.
  I think it is important to never reveal confidences of private 
conversations. But he said something then, said something that was 
extremely interesting and I didn't expect to hear from a Democratic 
President. What he said is that the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015 
would take down a number of liberal governments.
  Now me as a conservative, I might not care about liberal governments 
going down, but I thought it was interesting that a theoretically pro-
immigration guy--a guy much more committed to the cause of open borders 
than almost any Republican I know--would say that when you have wide, 
open borders and when you have uncontrolled migration, it destabilizes 
governments.
  Well, of course, the former President was exactly right: Refugee 
crises do destabilize governments. Why are we not talking about the 
fact that in multiple countries in southern Europe right now, they are 
being overwhelmed with people--not bad people, by the way; most of them 
are just looking for food to feed their family or a job with a decent 
wage. But we are witnessing the beginning of what I believe will become 
the biggest refugee crisis in the history of the world. Why?
  Because in Africa, which has 1.5 billion people, most of whom have a 
standard of living much lower than what we have in the United States of 
America, you have grain prices through the roof, wheat prices through 
the roof, barley prices through the roof. And if anybody who is 
advocating an endless war in Ukraine asks: What happens when 1.5 
billion starving people start to move north to look for some food? You 
don't have to make any moral judgments about the plight that they will 
go on. You should make a moral judgment about the people in 
this building who refuse to think about the unintended consequences of 
their actions.

  Are we really willing to have over a billion people, starving, trying 
to pour into the borders of Europe and the United States of America? 
Are we really willing to set up a refugee crisis, the likes of which 
the world has never seen? And if we do that, what effect will it have 
on our allies in Europe? What effect will it have in our own country? 
What effect will it have for millions of American citizens who are 
already dealing with the consequences of an overwhelmed southern 
border?
  And I want to talk about that overwhelmed southern border in a 
second, but I want to keep talking about the unintended consequences of 
the war in Ukraine. Another unintended consequence is, What do energy 
prices look like all over the world?
  We have no idea who blew up the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline. We can have 
some guesses. But isn't it kind of weird and isn't it unusual for our 
European allies to have had their most important fuel artery destroyed 
and they seem totally uninterested in asking questions about it?
  We already know that governments like those in Poland, like those in 
Slovenia, like those in a number of other allied countries across 
Europe are under an extraordinary amount of stress because fuel prices 
are so high.
  The country of Hungary, which has 10 million people, took in nearly a 
million Ukrainian refugees, an important American ally by any standard, 
and yet they are facing skyrocketing energy prices because of the war 
between Russia and Ukraine.
  What effect does it have on the many millions of people who are 
living over there? What effect does it have on America's national 
security when we take down a number of allied governments because the 
people there can't

[[Page S874]]

afford food and can't afford energy? That is another unintended 
consequence.
  And while we are talking about the unintended consequences of energy 
prices in Europe, let's ask the very important question about why we 
are here.
  Now my Democratic friends on the other side of the aisle act like 
Ukraine is the most significant issue confronting our country. You see 
the Ukrainian flag lapel pins. You see the way people talk about it on 
social media. There is a species of American liberal who thinks that 
the Ukraine war is the most important thing confronting our country, 
but it is not so important that they will pursue commonsense American 
energy policies.
  The reason--the reason--why Russia is so powerful on the world stage 
today is one reason: because of stupid American and European energy 
policies, preposterous energy policies that drive up the cost of 
natural gas.
  So while we, with the one hand, send $61 billion to Ukraine, we 
pursue a set of energy policies that drive up the cost of natural gas 
and enrich the Russian oligarchs who are paying for the war. We are 
literally paying for both sides of the war--the Russian side with our 
energy policy and $61 billion to Ukraine direct with American taxpayer 
subsidy. That is another unintended consequence.
  And my Republican friends, who I assume all of them agree with me on 
the idiocy of our modern energy policies in 2023 and 2024, why are they 
supporting a conflict that, in fact, is a cover for those energy 
policies?
  If they really cared about Ukraine as much as they say they did, 
perhaps they should force the President of the United States to stop 
enriching Russian oligarchs with terrible energy policies. But we are 
not doing that; we are going to continue to fund both sides of this 
war, and I guess that is just the way that it is going to be.
  Let's talk about another unintended consequence of our Ukraine 
policy. We are, at this very moment, incredibly stressed in how many 
weapons we can manufacture. I tell this to people, and they are 
sometimes surprised by it. The first time that I heard it, I was 
surprised by it.
  America, if you measure it by GDP, is, of course, the largest economy 
in the world, and we are 10 times the size of the Russian economy. And 
yet the most important weapon in Eastern Europe today are 155-
millimeter artillery shells. It is one of the reason why 400,000 
Ukrainians--that's the best estimate--have died during this conflict is 
because the Russians have an incredible advantage in artillery.
  So you ask yourself: We are 10 times the size of the Russian economy, 
how many artillery shells do we make in a month, and how many artillery 
shells do the Russians make in a month? Well, we make, in a month, 
about 30,000 artillery shells. That is up from about 20,000 artillery 
shells a month at the beginning of the conflict. Guess how many the 
Russians make? They make about 25,000 artillery shells a day.
  So in a month, the United States, the biggest economy in the world, 
makes weapons at a rate per month that the Russians are able to meet in 
a single day. Well, one thing that suggests to me is the GDP numbers 
are awfully fake. If you can't produce weapons to defend your own 
people, then you can't pretend that your economy is as strong as you 
might like to think.
  Unfortunately for Wall Street, we cannot fight wars with dollars and 
derivatives; we need weapons, we need bullets, we need artillery 
shells, we need missiles. And America doesn't make nearly enough of 
those--not for our own security and certainly not enough to support 
both the Ukraine conflict and, God forbid, a conflict that might occur 
in east Asia.
  So let's specify that a little bit more. We are, right now, depleting 
critical munitions, missiles, artillery shells, and bullets faster than 
we can replenish them, and then we send them to Ukraine.
  I am sorry, why does that make an ounce of sense for our own national 
security? Shouldn't we rebuild our own manufacturing capacity before we 
spend all of it on Ukraine? Shouldn't we make more of our own weapons 
and gain some self-sufficiency in weapons manufacturing before we send 
all of those resources to Ukraine? The answer of the U.S. Senate is: 
Apparently not.
  So on issue after issue after issue--
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I am inquiring to see if the gentleman 
from Ohio would yield to a question about the subject matter.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. VANCE. Madam President, I am happy to yield.
  Mr. TILLIS. Senator Vance, this appropriations bill that is before 
us, I just want to make sure that I have my facts right. I believe that 
there are $35 billion to restore U.S. military readiness and 
modernization. I also believe--and, please, correct me if I am wrong--
that for every dollar we are sending to Ukraine, we are appropriating 
about $2.50 to make sure that we backfill and cover--there are a lot of 
bad, unintended consequences to this conflict. One of the good ones is 
learning, before we have to defend ourselves, that we are grievously 
out of step with manufacturing capacity.
  And it is my understanding that $35 billion, about half of the money 
that is being appropriated to Ukraine, is actually being appropriated 
back to the industrial base and for Patriot missile manufacturing, a 
number of other vulnerabilities that we have found, we are trying to 
address it. Do I have a correct understanding of that?
  Mr. VANCE. To my colleague from North Carolina--before I answer that 
question, Madam President, can I inquire how much time I have?
  Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I would also like to state that I have 
time that I will--in response to my question, I will yield my time for 
the purposes of you allowing to have time beyond the answer of the 
question.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio has 40 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. VANCE. So, Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the only 
time used by the Senator from North Carolina be debited to his 
postcloture time and that, to answer his question, we not have time 
deducted from my account.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. VANCE. Madam President, to my colleague and friend from North 
Carolina, I want to answer that question. So the Senator is right that 
this legislation contains a lot of resources, and I think $35 billion 
is the number that he used to rebuild the American industrial base, and 
I have no reason to object to that number. I know that some people have 
had more time with this legislation than I have, but I believe, based 
on my own review, that number is correct. But we have to ask ourselves 
not just how much money is going to rebuild our industrial base, but 
combined with Presidential drawdown authority, how much of that will 
then be just redirected to Ukraine?
  My understanding is that given the current authorizations and given 
the current appropriations, while a lot of this money will go--and I am 
glad that it will go--to places like Ohio and Alabama to manufacture 
weapons, those weapons will then be mostly sent to Eastern Europe 
because we are currently spending resources and munitions in Eastern 
Europe at a rate that is far faster than our own industrial base's 
ability to replenish them.
  So what will happen, in effect, is that we will make the weapons, and 
literally faster than we can make them, they will then go out the door 
to Eastern Europe, unless, of course, in the next few months or the 
next couple of years, the conflict ends.
  So the gentleman's question is well-taken, but it actually doesn't 
address the core concern that we are depleting munitions much faster 
than we can replenish them.
  I want to just--on one final point here, if I may, and I will be 
quick because I know I am on borrowed time here. The question of 
whether we should rebuild our industrial base is something my friend 
and I agree on and I think most of my colleagues here in the U.S. 
Senate agree on. The more difficult question is, What do we do in the 
interim?
  It will take years to get our industrial base to the point--maybe 3 
years, maybe 5 years to get our industrial base to the point where it 
can support a war in Eastern Europe and a war in East Asia 
simultaneously.

[[Page S875]]

  We don't debate the need to rebuild our industrial base; the question 
is, What do we do in the interim? And I think, in the interim, 
continuing to support the Ukraine war indefinitely is a terrible, 
terrible mistake.
  Madam President, I suppose I could go back on my own clock. I don't 
know what I am supposed to say here.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator will resume.
  Mr. VANCE. Madam President, I appreciate your charity, and I 
appreciate you having to sit up there and listen to me. Members of our 
Gallery chose this, but some of us did not, so I appreciate you and my 
staff.
  Let me keep on going here on how we got here. I have articulated to 
the best of my ability why I think we don't have the strategy here and 
why I think it is important for us to actually articulate a strategy, 
what it means for us to not have that strategy, and importantly the 
unintended consequences of continued conflict in Eastern Europe 
backstopped by the American taxpayer.
  But I want to talk about the politics of this. Not long ago--or I 
should say, excuse me, not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, I made an 
observation that frustrated a lot of my friends who advocate for 
continual conflict in Ukraine. I said: How can we support a war in 
Ukraine? How can we defend Ukraine's borders when we are not even 
defending our own American border under the Presidency of Joe Biden?
  The response that came back went something like this, and I will 
paraphrase it as much as I can: America can walk and chew gum at the 
same time.
  A great power should, in theory, be able to support an ally in 
Eastern Europe while at the same time securing its own southern border.
  I think the events of the last week have revealed just how 
preposterous that argument is. We clearly are not able to walk and chew 
gum at the same time, and, in fact, if we were able to walk and chew 
gum at the same time, we would secure our border first, and we would 
have done it weeks or months ago, but certainly we would have done it 
this past week.

  Now, here is the basic political dynamic that unfolded, and I know my 
colleague from Kentucky has discussed this. So have others. The basic 
political dynamic that unfolded is the Republicans in the Senate said: 
We want border security. That is the issue around which Republicans are 
unified. We want border security.
  Of course, the Democrats are in charge. The Democratic leader is the 
majority leader of the Senate, and we have a Democratic President. So 
what do the Democrats want? What unites the Democrats that doesn't 
unite us? And the answer came back: Ukraine.
  The Democrats want to send $61 billion to Ukraine. The Republicans 
want to secure the border. There was the root of a potential 
compromise. In divided government, sometimes you have to make 
compromises. Nobody is happy, but there was a potential compromise that 
could be made.
  Here is how the argument went: If we are going to send $61 billion to 
Ukraine, we should do it first in tiers. We shouldn't send it all at 
once; we should stagger it out a little bit. The reason we should do 
that is to ensure that Joe Biden actually keeps his promise and 
enforces the American southern border.
  In other words, we tell the President: You don't get another dime of 
American taxpayer money for Ukraine unless you bring illegal border 
crossings to the level that they were during the Presidency of Donald 
Trump.
  That, to me, was the negotiation as it was set up by the Republican 
conference. That was the understanding that I and so many of my 
colleagues in the Republican conference had.
  Of course, that negotiation could go many places. It could go a place 
that might make Democrats uncomfortable. It could go to a place that 
might make some of my Republican friends uncomfortable. In theory, to 
get a deal, it would sort of get everybody a little uncomfortable, but 
you would be able to get 60 Senators to pass it and send it on to the 
House.
  Well, that is not what happened. What was produced instead was a 
secret negotiation where Republican Senators by and large had very, 
very little input in the process and where we had no idea what was 
actually in the final package. We heard it through rumor and through 
conversations with friends. But immigration law is complicated. What a 
colleague--even a well-meaning colleague--tells you exists in a piece 
of immigration law doesn't matter nearly as much as the text of the 
actual immigration law.
  So that text finally dropped on Sunday of last week. I believe on 
February 4 that legislation dropped, a 370-page piece of legislation 
that would commit many, many billions of dollars to Ukraine, a few 
billion dollars to East Asia, a few billion dollars to Israel, and a 
few billion dollars, combined with some policy changes, to the American 
southern border.
  Now, here is the problem: It actually inflamed some of the worst--
when you read the text, you realize that it inflamed some of the 
problems that make the southern border crisis the worst. Let's just 
walk through a few of those.
  No. 1, parole. The last Democratic President, Barack Obama, paroled 
approximately 5,000 illegal aliens per year; that is 5,000 per year. 
Joe Biden, in 3 years, has paroled between 600,000 and close to 1 
million illegal aliens per year. That is not a typo or an 
overstatement. So Joe Biden radically increased parole authority, and 
that doesn't just have the direct effect of making nearly 1 million 
illegal aliens legal, it also has a secondary effect, because if you 
are in Central America or you are anywhere in the world and you would 
like to come to America and not go through the proper channels, now, 
all of a sudden, the clarion call has gone out. Joe Biden has thrown 
open the southern border, and if you come across illegally, he will 
parole you close to a million times per year, when the last Democrat 
did it 5,000 times per year.
  That is the first effect of Joe Biden's parole, and our great border 
compromise did nothing to limit Joe Biden's parole authority.
  No. 2. Another problem with our border law is that it has been 
manipulated so that we turn so-called illegal aliens into so-called 
asylum seekers. Here is how it works. We, of course, want to be a 
country that is welcoming to those who are fearing persecution. So if 
you come into this country as an economic migrant and you come 
illegally, you come having not followed the laws of this country, you 
can claim asylum. If your asylum claim is granted, you immediately 
receive amnesty, and you are on the track to becoming a citizen of this 
country even though you never followed the law to get into the country 
in the first place.
  The other effect of our jacked-up--excuse me--the other effect of our 
problematic asylum laws is that even if the asylum claim is not 
granted, you can be released into the country for a period of years, 
sometimes even decades, before an immigration judge hears your claims.
  So let's say you are an economic migrant. You show up at the American 
southern border. You say: I am an asylum claimant fearing persecution.
  An administrative official from Customs and Border Patrol says: Well, 
we have to adjudicate your asylum claim. You can't do that right now, 
so what we will do is ask an immigration judge to hear that claim in 12 
years. You are free to hang out in America for the next 12 years.
  Well, that is an effect of amnesty, and, again, it sends a message 
all across the world that America is open for business, and we can have 
a wide-open southern border. That is what it does.
  This particular legislation actually made that problem worse. Now, on 
the one hand, it tried to increase the standard for granting asylum 
from a credible fear standard to a reasonable fear standard, but, 
importantly, it changed the people who were enforcing that standard 
from immigration judges to CIS officers at United States Citizenship 
and Immigration Services. These are people who are widely believed to 
have some of the most pro-asylum views within the U.S. Government.
  So millions of people could come across the southern border, claim 
asylum, and have their claim granted unilaterally. That would put them 
on the pathway to citizenship. That would put them in a competitive 
posture with American citizens for jobs and for

[[Page S876]]

other important benefits. Yet this legislation trying to fix the border 
actually made the asylum process worse. So here we are with a border 
compromise that actually makes the border security problems in this 
country worse.
  Let me just say that what we would need to do if we really wanted to 
secure the border is very simple: We just have to make Joe Biden do it. 
He has the tools necessary. He has the legal authority necessary to 
secure the border. The real debate, whether you are using Ukraine money 
as leverage or something else, is, how do we force Joe Biden to do his 
job? This legislation didn't do that. It didn't even come close to 
doing that, and so most Republicans rejected it.
  So now here we are an hour after the first foray of border security 
negotiations, the first volley where Democrats give us border security 
and Republicans give $61 billion to Ukraine, and what happens? It 
doesn't succeed. For the reasons I just articulated, the gross majority 
of my Republican colleagues didn't like that proposal, and so it got 
dropped.
  What you might expect to happen in a good-faith negotiation that was 
actually about the border, if we were actually trying to secure the 
border, you might have said: This is not the Democrats' best offer. 
Let's go back to the negotiating table. Let's continue to push for 
border security because that is the most pressing crisis that we face 
as a country.
  What happened instead is, after an hour, Senate Democrats and even 
some in Republican leadership decided that we should move on from 
border security. They had checked the box. Now let's move on to their 
real priority, which is sending another $61 billion to Ukraine.
  It stinks to my high heaven, ladies and gentlemen. No one who watched 
this process unfold believes that Republican leadership negotiated in 
good faith for border security or that Democrats did the same. It was 
always kabuki theater. It was always an excuse to say: We tried on the 
border. Now let's move on to the thing that really matters, which is 
the money for Ukraine.
  That failure, the way that it blew up in the faces of our leadership, 
and the appearance gave lie to the idea that this was ever really about 
border security.
  By the way, it alienated millions of Republican and Independent 
voters who want their government to focus on the most pressing problem 
for this country, and that is the border.
  When I go back home to Ohio and I talk to audiences about their views 
on Ukraine, most people agree with me, but some people disagree with 
me. But if you go to an audience in the State of Ohio--a State that is 
affected tragically by the fentanyl problem, where you will drive on 
highways and see billboards for sex trafficking victims to call the 
hotline because they are being sex trafficked in the State of Ohio by 
Mexican drug cartels who have been given free reign at the southern 
border--if you talk to people and ask them ``What are the most pressing 
problems the country faces?'' none of them will say Ukraine, even those 
who would like to send more money to Ukraine. None of them will say 
Ukraine.
  So what are we doing? Why did we give up so easily? Why did 
Republicans stab their voters in the back? Why did we not fight for 
border security, ladies and gentlemen? That is exactly what we promised 
we would do.
  Many of us did, by the way. Even some of my colleagues who disagree 
with me on the Ukraine question at least have the courage to stand and 
fight for border security. But unfortunately far too many Republicans 
refused, and so we are where we are.
  Now let me just make an argument about where we are on this 
particular border situation. We have millions of people coming into the 
country illegally every single year. We have hundreds of thousands 
dying just in the first 3 years of Joe Biden's term from fentanyl 
overdoses. We have a President who has invited the opening of the 
American southern border, and now we are living with the consequences.
  The American people know that this was the direct result of Joe 
Biden's policies, and they know he could stop it. So let's debate real 
border security--border security that actually forces the President to 
do exactly that.
  There are a number of options on the table. You will sometimes hear 
some of my Democratic colleagues and even some in the Republican 
leadership say: We can't have a bill because Donald Trump doesn't want 
us to have a bill; that if we advance commonsense border security, 
Donald Trump would destroy it.
  That is the furthest thing from the truth. In fact, just last week, 
Donald Trump proposed a border security bill that would force Joe Biden 
to secure the southern border. You may agree or disagree with the 
policy, but the idea that there is no policy that would get Republican 
buy-in, including at the top of the Republican ticket, is preposterous. 
It is something that does not exist in reality.
  Madam President, how much time do I have left?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 25 minutes remaining.
  Mr. VANCE. Great.
  So I have given my spiel here, and I want to get a little bit into 
the details of what we are trying to accomplish here and how we might 
try to accomplish it. But, first, let's start with a conversation about 
the American southern border.
  I want to read a piece from the Washington Post, an argument that I 
want to read and that I want to respond to:

       Having failed to convince the American people that a blank 
     check to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in their 
     interests, the Ukraine First caucus now claims the aid 
     primarily benefits American workers. Mark A. Thiessen's [who 
     drafted an] op-ed [on this point] exemplified the pivot.
       This is disingenuous and dangerous.

  And this is partially in response to some of the arguments that I 
have heard earlier. We cannot rebuild our industrial base by building 
capacity and sending all of it to Ukraine. It doesn't make sense.
  Now I support--

       We support increasing defense spending and building up our 
     defense-industrial base. An expansion of our military 
     manufacturing capacity benefits American workers and bolsters 
     our national security. Washington is more focused on sending 
     our limited military stockpiles to a conflict in Ukraine with 
     no clear path to victory.
       The Biden administration's new message fails to account for 
     grave shortages in our stockpiles. Thanks to nearly two years 
     of mission in Ukraine, the United States is perilously 
     unready for any additional contingency. Anything with a solid 
     rocket motor is in short supply--
       1Solid rocket motors are the rocket motors that power so 
     many of the critical missile systems that we need. And 
     whether it is Javelins or Stingers or Patriot missiles, we 
     are critically in short supply of not just the missiles 
     themselves but of some of the components that are necessary 
     for building those missiles--

     including the SM-6s that would be needed in the Pacific. The 
     high demand for Stingers, Javelins and Patriot interceptors 
     in Ukraine means we are desperately short of the weapons that 
     would be needed in Taiwan. Replenishing them is going to take 
     years.

  I want to just pause here to make an observation. One of the 
arguments my friends make in defense of $61 billion to Ukraine is that 
we need to send a message to Vladimir Putin that if we give up and walk 
away from the Ukrainian battlefield--even though the leader of 
Ukraine's own military, until recently, said they had no chance of 
victory on that battlefield--if we give up, then it will send a message 
to Xi Jinping, the leader of China, that we are not a steadfast ally.
  What they are arguing, in effect, is that it will weaken American 
deterrence, that process by which we prevent our enemies and our 
adversaries from doing things we don't want them to. Well, in classical 
foreign policy circles, deterrence is the combination of, on the one 
hand, resolve and, on the other hand, capacity. And they are making an 
argument about resolve. They are saying that if we show weakness to Xi, 
we will be showing a weakening of American resolve. We will show that 
America can't stand in there and fight the fight. And, look, I am 
obviously a critic of further aid to Ukraine, but it is true that 
American resolve is important, and we should do everything we can to 
show American resolve.

  But you know what is more important than American resolve? Do you 
know what is more important than thumping our chests like eighth 
graders on a playground and saying we are tough, we are strong, we can 
do it? What is much stronger than that is to

[[Page S877]]

actually have the capacity to defend ourselves and our allies. And that 
is what is so weak.
  Xi Jinping does not care how tough America acts. He cares how strong 
America is.
  And if we use our ammunition, our missiles, our artillery, on a war 
in Eastern Europe when we don't even have the bullets to defend 
ourselves or our allies, it doesn't matter how tough we act, Xi will do 
whatever he wants all over the world. And that is what this is 
ultimately about. We are trying to rebuild our country. What do we do 
in the interim? What do we actually do when our country is in a weak 
enough place because of decisions made over 30 or 40 years?
  I find it interesting that so many of the people, from the news 
commentators to my Senate colleagues, Republican and Democratic, who 
actively advocated shipping our industrial base to East Asia and Mexico 
are now the people who are most fervently advocating for endless war in 
Ukraine.
  Here is the game they played: Send all of our weapons manufacturing; 
send all of our industrial base; send it everywhere but the United 
States of America. And now that America is in a tough spot, we should 
fight every conflict everywhere, even though we don't make the weapons 
that we need to support those conflicts. And why don't we make those 
weapons? It is because these guys encouraged us to ship our industrial 
base overseas.
  Those of you who are students of history will have heard the term 
``arsenal of democracy.'' America was ``the arsenal of democracy.'' We 
won World War II, not because of chest thumping, not because we showed 
the strongest resolve, but because we had the strongest people and the 
strongest economy in the world.
  So at a time when America faces a number of problems--including the 
southern border here at home, at a time when we are weaker in 
manufacturing capacity than we have been at any time in the last half 
century, this is the point when these people want to send unlimited 
weapons to Ukraine? This is the point where they want to send weapons 
not just to Ukraine but to many theaters all across the world?
  Let's have an honest conversation about the decisions that have been 
made and how they have made this country weaker. Let's not pretend that 
weakness doesn't exist and send an unlimited number of weapons to 
Ukraine in the interim.


                     ``Oh, The Places You'll Go!''

  Now, I want to move on to another argument. But before I do, I am 
mindful of something that is very close to my heart personally. I have 
three beautiful children. I have a 6-year-old baby boy named Ewan--not 
so much of a baby anymore. I have a 2-year-old baby named Mirabel who 
is still very much a baby, and I love her very much. And I have a 
little guy named Vivek Gabriel Vance who was 3 years old yesterday but 
turned 4 today.
  And I am sorry, Vivek, that I can't be with you for your birthday 
dinner, but I want you to know that Daddy loves you very much. And I am 
going to read this into the Record because maybe you can watch it at 
home.
  ``Oh, the Places You'll Go!'' by Dr. Seuss.
     Oh, the Places You'll Go!
     Congratulations!
     Today is your day.
     You're off to Great Places!
     You're off and away!
     You have brains in your head.
     You have feet in your shoes.
     You can steer yourself
     in any direction you choose.
     You're on your own. And you know what you know.
     And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.
     You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.
     About some you will I say, ``I don't choose to go there.''
     With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
     you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.
     And you may not find any
     you'll want to go down.
     In that case, of course,
     you'll head straight out of town.
     It's opener there,
     in the wide open air.
     Out there things can happen
     and frequently do
     to people as brainy
     and footsy as you.
     And when things start to happen,
     don't worry. Don't stew.
     Just go right along.
     You'll start happening too.
     Oh, the places you'll go!
     You'll be on your way up!
     You'll be seeing great sights!
     You'll join the high fliers
     who soar to great heights.
     You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed.
     You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead.
     Wherever you fly, you'll be best of the best.
     Wherever you go, you'll top all the rest.
     Except when you don't.
     Because, sometimes, you won't.
     I'm sorry to say so
     but, sadly, it's true
     that Bang-ups
     And Hang-ups
     can happen to you.
     You can get all hung up
     in a prickle-ly perch.
     And your gang will fly on.
     You'll be left in a Lurch.
     You'll come down from the Lurch
     with an unpleasant bump.
     And the chances are, then,
     that you'll be in a Slump.
     And when you're in a Slump,
     you're not in for much fun.
     Un-slumping yourself
     is not easily done.
     You'll come to a place where the streets are not marked.
      Some windows are lightened. But mostly they are dark.
     A place you could sprain both your elbow and your chin!
     Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
     How much can you lose? How much can you win?
     And IF you go in, should you turn left or right . . .
     Or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
     Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
     Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find,
     for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.
     You can get so confused
     that you'll start in to race
     down long wiggled rocks at a break-necking pace
     and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
     headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
     The Waiting Place . . .
     . . . for people just waiting.
     Waiting for a train to go
     or a bus to come, or a plane to go
     or the mail to come, or the rain to go
     or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
     or waiting around for a Yes or No
     or waiting for their hair to grow.
     Everyone is just waiting.
     Waiting for the fish to bite
     or waiting for the wind to fly a kite
     or waiting around for Friday night
     or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
     or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
     or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
     or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
     Everyone is just waiting.
     NO!
     That's not for you!
     Somehow you'll escape
     all that waiting and staying
     You'll find the bright places
     where the Boom Bands are playing.
     With banner flip-flapping,
     once more you'll ride high!
     Ready for anything under the sky.
     Ready because you're that kind of a guy!
     Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done!
     There points to be scored. There are games to be won.
     And the magical things you can do with that ball
     will make you the winning-est winner of all.
     Fame! You'll be famous as famous can be,
     with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.
     Except when they don't.
     Because, sometimes, they won't.
     I'm afraid that some times
     you'll play lonely games too.
     Games you can't win
     'cause you'll play against you.
     All Alone!
     Whether you like it or not,
     Alone will be something
     you'll be quite a lot.
     And when you're alone, there's a very good chance
     you'll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.
     There are some, down the road between hither and yon,
     that can scare you so much you won't want to go on.
     But on you will go
     though the weather be foul.
     On you will go
     though your enemies prowl.
     On you will go
     though the Hakken-Kraks howl.
     Onward up many
     a frightening creek,
     though your arms may get sore
     and your sneakers may leak.
     On and on you will hike.
     and I know you'll hike far
     and face up to your problems
     whatever they are.
     You'll get mixed up, of course,
     as you already know.
     You'll get mixed up
     with many strange birds as you go.
     So be sure when you step.
     Step with care and great tact
     and remember that Life's
     a Great Balancing Act.

[[Page S878]]

     Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
     And never mix up your right foot with your left.
     And will you succeed?
     Yes! You will, indeed!
     (98 and \3/4\ percent guaranteed)
     KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!
     So . . .
     be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
     or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea,
     you're off to great places!
     Today is your day!
     Your mountain is waiting.
     So . . . get on your way!
     --Dr. Seuss

  I love you.
  Returning to the matter at hand.
  Mr. President, how much time remains?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Durbin). Thirteen minutes.


                                H.R. 815

  Mr. VANCE. Thank you, Mr. President.
  I want to read this piece, which articulates my argument for peace 
very well, written in Responsible Statecraft, published on July 6, 
2023. We are now--think about it--nearly a year since this piece was 
published, and its arguments are, if anything, more prescient today 
than they were last summer:

       Last year, referring to the possibility of escalation that 
     the Russo-Ukrainian war entails, President Joe Biden 
     announced that America and the world are closer to a 
     destructive nuclear war than ever since the Cuban Missile 
     Crisis in 1962.
       Perhaps no other statement from the highest level of 
     government could so directly affirm the failure of American 
     grand strategy and foreign policy in the post-Cold War world. 
     What seemed to be a Hollywood sci-fi scenario that the 
     average American in the 21st century did not even think about 
     is now a possibility that experts, policymakers, and world 
     leaders like President Biden discuss regularly.
       As America and the world grapple with the tectonic shifts 
     that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has unleashed, war 
     budgets around the world keep increasing. In 2022, global 
     spending on defense reached an all-time high of $2.24 
     trillion. The U.S. defense budget accounted for almost 40 
     percent of the total, surpassing the next 10 countries 
     combined, including China, Russia, India, the United Kingdom, 
     France, and Germany.
       Yet, America's ever-increasing military expenditures have 
     hardly translated into success stories in the 21st century. 
     The trillions of dollars pumped into questionable military 
     adventurism abroad, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, 
     have yielded equally questionable results not only for U.S. 
     interests and national security, but also for global 
     security. America's overreliance on the military to achieve 
     policy objectives and the unilateral actions pursued without 
     an international mandate have backfired in the form of a 
     growing coalition of dissatisfied states that refuse to 
     accept a world order that they see as unjust and 
     hierarchical.
       In April of 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered 
     his famous ``Chance for Peace'' speech in which he compared 
     the enthusiasm for a just and peaceful world after World War 
     II to the unstable, hostile, and unpredictable environment of 
     the Cold War. ``The eight years that have passed have seen 
     that hope waver, grow dim, and almost die. And the shadow of 
     fear again has darkly lengthened across the world,'' he said, 
     before laying out his vision of a just and peaceful order and 
     warning against the unbalanced political influence of 
     military interests.
       Today, 70 years later, the world faces the same ``shadow of 
     fear'' as the unpredictable war unleashed by a revisionist 
     Russia shakes the international system. Biden's promised end 
     of ``America's forever wars'' that was supposed to bring 
     stability and predictability back to the realm of 
     international affairs while also allowing the United States 
     to reorient its resources towards a much-needed domestic 
     revival did not materialize.
       While the war in Ukraine poses a significant threat to U.S. 
     national security interests and necessitates an appropriate 
     policy response, including security assistance to Ukraine for 
     self-defense, U.S. military spending was growing even before 
     Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This pattern should raise 
     questions about whether the United States should have 
     increased spending on the military in response to the crisis 
     in Ukraine.
       The war has also turned into a talking point for those 
     whose direct interests tied to military spending overshadow 
     the actual interests of the American people. Many are now 
     pushing for the concept of a long standoff with foreign 
     rivals, without accounting for the real costs and 
     implications that will be borne by ordinary citizens, both in 
     America and abroad.
       In foreign affairs, discourse and reality are sometimes 
     interwoven in complicated and nuanced ways. Conflict can 
     arise as much from actual strategic disagreements, security 
     considerations, and national interests as from discourse and 
     perceptions. In this context, embracing conflict and 
     promoting discourse that emphasizes a long-term confrontation 
     is a dangerous path for America to follow. The very cause of 
     World War I has been attributed to the perceptions of threats 
     and the interpretation of actions by states as ``hostile,'' 
     leading some scholars to argue that European leaders 
     ``sleepwalked'' into a conflict they neither desired nor 
     expected to win easily.
       The question for Americans today, especially the new 
     generation that will be inheriting a more unstable and 
     dangerous world, is whether they will allow America to 
     sleepwalk into a conflict that the United States neither 
     needs, nor can afford to win. Traditionally, American voters 
     do not attach much importance to foreign and defense policy 
     issues. Yet, the citizens of a country that will be spending 
     a record $842 billion on the military cannot afford to close 
     their eyes on such critical policy issues that, in fact, 
     profoundly affect their livelihoods.
       The question is not whether America should abandon its 
     legitimate security needs and interests, nor neglect the 
     foreign threats that necessitate spending on the military. We 
     must understand how much of the current spending is actually 
     justified. We also need to assess the efficiency of the 
     military to protect the American people and interests abroad 
     without overextending resources wastefully and prompting a 
     dangerous arms race that will paralyze growth, development, 
     and more importantly--the long-term prospect for peace and a 
     new, more just world order.
       This is why young Americans should be especially concerned 
     with the unchecked influence of special interests that seek 
     to inflate threats, instill the inevitability of long-term 
     conflict confrontation in the world, and justify ever-
     increasing spending on the military. The new generation 
     will be the primary bearer of the burdens, costs, and 
     consequences that decisions taken in Washington today will 
     have. Ultimately, it boils down to a simple question of 
     the kind of vision young Americans have for their country 
     and for their world.
       This question is especially critical given America's own 
     undeniable internal strife. Those seeking to downplay the 
     legitimate critique of the overreliance on military forget or 
     deliberately neglect that foreign policy is ultimately 
     dependent on domestic policy. Both experts and the general 
     public now agree that the once-hailed American democracy is 
     threatened. The inflection point for America is serious: the 
     country is facing a crisis of identity, social cohesion, a 
     growing discontent with the economic model that has 
     marginalized an ever-growing segment of the population, and 
     what is more concerning--a waning belief and trust in the 
     country's most foundational institutions.
       Those championing a new age of unnecessarily militaristic 
     and confrontational foreign policy that relies on growing and 
     unbalanced defense budgets should rethink the use of those 
     resources. A stroll in the streets of Portland or in the 
     infamous Skid Row in Los Angeles could be beneficial to re-
     evaluate priorities and distribution of limited resources to 
     deal with the most pressing issues America faces. Ultimately, 
     the strength and attractiveness of the United States on the 
     global stage and America's competitiveness vis-a-vis its 
     rivals depends on the domestic revival of a country that has 
     been decaying silently for decades in virtually all key 
     aspects.
       This is why a new generation of Americans must step in to 
     seize the new chance for peace before it is too late. As the 
     world order continues to fracture, only a wave of 
     democratization of the most undemocratic sphere of 
     policymaking in Washington can trigger the kind of 
     reassessment and accountability the American people should 
     expect from their elected leaders.
       Unless we take steps now to usher in an overdue reckoning 
     in Washington, we may miss, as President Eisenhower said, ``a 
     precious chance to turn the black tide of events.''

  That was by Martin Makaryan, and that, again, is from ``Responsible 
Statecraft''--an important argument and an important piece.
  Let me address just a couple of points brought to mind by that piece 
and by that argument.
  You will hear--especially in the last couple of days after former 
President Donald Trump criticized NATO, you will hear a strong argument 
about what NATO means to the United States of America. I think it is 
important for us and for our citizens to be honest not just about the 
problems inherent with NATO and the lack of burden-sharing but also the 
problems that exist in NATO's own countries--countries that most of us 
love, that most of us see as important allies, but that have deep, deep 
pathologies and problems that must be addressed.
  Something that is often said is that in this particular conflict of 
Ukraine versus Russia, NATO is actually carrying its fair share of the 
burden. You will see charts that make an argument that NATO, which has 
the economy approximately the size of the United States of America, is 
spending, actually, more resources on Ukraine than the United States of 
America. Now, that argument has a few critical flaws. Let's walk 
through them.
  First of all, NATO is providing a large amount of humanitarian 
assistance, and of course they are absorbing a large amount of 
refugees; they are doing it because Ukraine is in their backyard. But 
the critical weapons and

[[Page S879]]

munitions that are being provided are overwhelmingly the responsibility 
of the United States of America. NATO is not carrying its fair share of 
the burden when it comes to weapons, and that is the most important 
thing that the Ukrainians need to win.
  Second, even if we assumed--and it is wrong--but even if we assumed 
that NATO was carrying its fair share of the burden over the last 18 
months, NATO has failed to carry its fair share of the burden for 
literally decades, ladies and gentlemen. Look at just how much money 
the United States has spent on defense since 1992 and compare that to 
our NATO allies. Ladies and gentlemen, we have been subsidizing 
European security to the tune of trillions of dollars. It might feel 
nice when we go to Munich and the Europeans thank us, and it might be 
great to get a pat on the back from a European head of state, but the 
American people demand that NATO carry its fair share of the burden.
  Germany is the largest economy in Europe. They have promised for 
decades and especially over the last years that they would meet the 
NATO threshold of 2 percent of GDP spent on defense. They are still not 
there. Italy--a massive economy--still underspends on defense. In fact, 
most of the economies of Europe--outside of the UK and France and some 
economies in Eastern Europe--most of the economies of Europe massively 
underspend on defense, and that has invited aggression not just from 
Vladimir Putin but from other places as well.
  At the same time that world leaders play armchair general with the 
Ukraine conflict, their own societies are decaying. Not a single 
country--even the United States--within the NATO alliance has birth 
rates at a replacement level. We don't have enough families and 
children to continue as a nation; yet we are talking about a problem 
6,000 miles away. We are being invaded by up to 10 million illegal 
migrants over the course of Joe Biden's term in office, and we have 
apparently no President with the willpower to stop that problem. We 
have a fentanyl crisis that has led to the deaths of over 100,000 
people per year in the last few years of our youngest and brightest 
people. Mental health crises are skyrocketing. Youth suicides are 
skyrocketing. Every single place--not just the United States but every 
single one of the countries in the NATO alliance sees similar or in 
some cases even more troubling dynamics on most of those metrics, from 
migration to economic malaise.
  What are we doing, ladies and gentlemen?
  China and Russia. If we want them to fear us, we need to rebuild our 
own countries. We need to rebuild a strong Europe and a strong America. 
We need to rebuild a civilization that can support conflicts instead of 
just run away from them because right now we don't have that. We do not 
have a country and we do not have a NATO alliance that is strong enough 
to do the things that need to be done.
  So our message to the Europeans needs to be simple: Fix your own 
country. Share your own burden. Spend more on defense. Fix your own 
problems.
  That will deal with the problem in Russia far more than a $61 billion 
check to Ukraine will. In fact, we are subsidizing them. We are 
enabling their refusal to spend enough resources on defense.
  I see that my time is up. Thank you.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, I know that we have Tennesseans who 
are watching, and many people are saying: Why is it that you all are 
here? Because this was to be a week where we were working in our 
States. Of course, many of us have set meetings in our States, but here 
we find ourselves looking at this piece of legislation that, all of a 
sudden, has become a must-pass.
  Now, the schedule for when we were going to be in and out of session 
came out in December, back around the 1st of December. So that is when 
we decide how we are going to organize our year and our work periods 
and meet those obligations to our constituents.
  But what we find out is there is all of a sudden this deadline that 
has to be met because there is the Munich conference, and we have a 
delegation that is going, and they don't want to go emptyhanded. They 
want to take this bill that is going to be more money for Ukraine.
  Now, there are some of us who have said: Hey, wait a minute. We have 
these problems at our southern border, and we really can't help others 
until we deal with the crisis at our southern border.
  There are some of us who remember what happened on 9/11, and we 
remember the impact that had on our Nation, and we will never forget 
that. We realized how important it was to get our country back on 
track, and we did that. We moved forward aggressively not only 
militarily but in getting our economy back on track, stabilizing our 
country, changing how we looked for terrorism, and taking the steps 
that were necessary to protect the citizens of this country, to protect 
individuals in their communities, in their places of work, and to make 
certain that they knew we were going to be there to put them first and 
the protection of this country first.
  Well, of course, deadlines and work periods have a way of forcing 
issues, of saying: Well, this has to be done, and we have to meet this 
deadline.
  I would suggest to all of my colleagues that after we return from 
this work period, guess what. There is all of a sudden going to be this 
deadline and this push: Oh, we have the CR coming up. We have to take 
action right now, so everybody has to get in the same boat and vote for 
things that you really don't want because we just cannot have a 
government shutdown. That is going to be the message that is there.
  Bear in mind, I think it has been now 103 days since the Democratic 
leader has allowed an appropriations bill to come to this floor for 
consideration.
  Because of the good work of Senators Collins and Murray, the Senate 
appropriations bills came out of the Appropriations Committee in July. 
But, no, they are not coming to this floor because, then, the 
Democratic leader would have to give up the ability to jam it and to 
get what he wants right at the very end, just like there is this jam to 
get this bill passed before the Munich Conference, so there can be 
smiles, handshakes, and back slaps when they get there.
  But I think our allies would like for us to take care of ourselves 
and secure our border so that, indeed, we are going to be able to 
continue to help them, because this is a dangerous place. This world is 
a dangerous place. There is an axis of evil--Russia, China, Iran, North 
Korea--that is working overtime trying to destroy the United States. 
They don't hide that that is their goal. They are really pretty open 
about that being their goal.
  China, they want global domination. Russia, they want to be able to 
sell China oil. Iran wants to sell China oil. Indeed, Iran is making 
billions of dollars every single month selling oil to China because 
this administration withdrew the sanctions on Iran--the sanctions that 
President Trump and his administration had put in place that prohibited 
them from selling oil.
  But instead of the President putting those sanctions back on Iran and 
prohibiting that--and that is what is giving them the money they need 
to go out here and fund their proxies. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, 
ISIS-Syria, ISIS-Iraq, the IRG--where did they get their equipment, 
their training, their missiles, their rockets? Courtesy of Iran. That 
is where they get it.
  But let's not talk about that. Let's talk about: We have got to pass 
this bill. We have got to do it right now because the happy handshakes 
are going to depend on it when they all get over to Munich.
  But what we need to be doing is paying attention to what is happening 
here on our own shores.
  Are we concerned about Israel? You better believe we are. We know 
that they are in a fight for survival. We also know that Iran is who is 
funding Hamas.
  Taiwan, are we concerned about them? Absolutely, and we want to make 
sure that Taiwan has what they need.
  I have even introduced legislation that would authorize a defense 
Lend-Lease Program for Taiwan. It is important for them to have that. 
It is important for people to be able to pay back what we give them.
  Another thing that we need to do is look at the expectations of our 
enemies. We have got enemies that expect us, at this point in time 
because of

[[Page S880]]

this President and his administration, to be weak and to give them 
running room. They like that. They think that is a good thing. They 
think that because this President is weak when it comes to our southern 
border, that they can push people into our country.
  From October to the end of the year, 24,000 Chinese, I think it was, 
came in through our borders. You are talking about people, according to 
the Border Patrol, from 170 different countries who were coming across 
our border. We know that these 8.8 million illegal immigrants who have 
entered this country under President Joe Biden's watch are not all 
individuals who are coming here for a better life. We know some of them 
are coming here to do us harm.
  Indeed, the FBI Director, in December, when he was before our 
committee, responded to Senator Graham's question about what he saw 
with the terrorist threat. And, indeed, in paraphrasing his comments, 
he talked about how he had never seen such broad-based threats, and 
that everywhere he looked, he saw red lights flashing.
  The world is a dangerous place, and it is coming to our border.
  There are some things that we had wanted to get done in this bill 
that are not going to be done. I will note for my colleagues that H.R. 
2--I know my Democratic colleagues do not like that bill. I know that. 
I understand that. We have a difference of opinion on that. But H.R. 2 
is the House border security bill--border security, what people are 
demanding that we do: secure our southern border--that landed on our 
desk at the Senate Judiciary Committee. And, of course, Homeland 
Security has part of that, and HHS has part of that, and the Senate 
HELP Committee. But it landed on May 15.
  We have had over 80 meetings--80 meetings--of the Senate Judiciary 
Committee since that bill landed. Not once have we even looked at 
taking it up, amending it, letting regular order take place, letting 
people amend that bill and make it a work product of the committee.
  That is not what has happened, but it is what should have happened--
allowing regular order to take place and people to be able to weigh in 
and speak on this bill. But there was a decision not to move forward 
with that. Instead, it was pushed to the side and a special committee 
put in place, and they were tasked with solving what was going to be a 
border and national security bill.

  Interestingly enough--and I know that they all worked hard, and I 
know that Senator Lankford put his best efforts into that. But, you 
know, I think there is a lot to be said for going by regular order--
letting the committees take up a piece of legislation, letting the 
committees do their work on that piece of legislation. But that did not 
happen.
  When I talk to Tennesseans, they are terribly concerned about what is 
happening with the open border because they see the impacts in their 
communities every single day.
  The impacts are undeniable when you look at the tens of thousands of 
U.S. citizens who lose their lives every year to fentanyl poisoning. 
Right now, the No. 1 killer of U.S. citizens in the 18- to 45-year-old 
age bracket is fentanyl.
  We know the Chinese are working hand in glove with the Mexican 
cartels, especially the Sinaloa Cartel, which is right there on the 
Mexico side, across from that Arizona border. They are working 
overtime. They are pressing those pills, and then they are pushing them 
across the border. That is what they think is going to help them attack 
us and harm our citizens.
  The drug trafficking, the human trafficking, the sex trafficking that 
are taking place every single day--local law enforcement--I visit with 
each of our 95 Tennessee counties every single year, and, to a county, 
law enforcement tells me they can't deal with the drugs and the human 
trafficking and the gangs and the crime until we secure the southern 
border. They are trying, but it continues to grow every single day.
  Another thing that concerns everyone--and this ties us back to the 
FBI's comments about seeing flashing red lights--that is the number of 
people who are special-interest aliens who are coming from countries 
like Iran and Afghanistan and Syria. They are flooding into our 
country. As I said, people from 170 countries is what the Border Patrol 
tells us came across our border last year.
  Think about that. These are people who are making a choice to come 
across our southern border--paying a cartel to come across that border, 
instead of legally coming into this country. That is the choice that 
they are making.
  Also, the Terrorist Watchlist--in addition to those hundreds who are 
coming from special interest countries, you have got 49 Terrorist 
Watchlist individuals who have been apprehended at the border since the 
start of fiscal year 2024.
  We know that this danger is there. We know these individuals are 
coming into our country, and we know that our law enforcement 
professionals are telling us--they are telling us--it is not a question 
of if we have another terrorist attack on U.S. soil; it is a question 
of when.
  So when you look at what has transpired with this security 
supplemental and the $113 billion that has already gone to Ukraine--
and, by the way, some of us keep asking for a whole accounting of where 
that money is. Some of us continue to ask for what we consider a win 
with Ukraine. We continue to ask what is the strategy that is being 
implemented there. But what we get back at us is crickets.
  So some of us have had amendments that we think would make the 
legislation before us, the security supplemental, a stronger piece of 
legislation. I had several amendments that I have proposed.
  No. 1540 would limit the number of aliens who can be paroled into the 
United States every year, because, if you look at the numbers from 
previous administrations--Democrat and Republican--you see that many 
multiples of those numbers are what the Biden administration is waiving 
right on into the country.
  I also had an amendment No. 1534 that would prohibit any of our 
taxpayer dollars going into Gaza until all the hostages have been 
released. There again, our citizens do not want their tax dollars going 
into Gaza being scooped up by Hamas through UNRWA and that being pushed 
forward.
  Now, my amendment No. 1535 would accelerate deportations for illegal 
aliens who physically assault first responders. Indeed, we have seen 
more of that than we would like to see in this country. So they should 
be immediately deported.
  I also have 1547, which would prohibit the President and his 
administration from selling or removing any of the existing border wall 
or the components that are out there for the border wall.
  It was distressing to us to hear that the President was choosing to 
sell off the border wall when Border Patrol tells us they need a 
physical barrier, they need better technology where they cannot have a 
physical barrier, and then they need more officers and agents. Giving 
them that physical barrier should be something that we agree to do.
  No. 1548 would put back in place the President Trump-era Migrant 
Protection Protocols: Stay in that safe third country; execute your 
claim for your asylum there. That is something that would be an 
assistance to our Border Patrol.
  (Ms. DUCKWORTH assumed the Chair.)
  Now, my amendment No. 1539 should be something that we would all 
agree on. This would allow the border States to place temporary 
barriers on Federal land to protect their communities.
  Now, for those of us who have been to the border many times, we have 
walked along this border, and we have met with ranchers, and we have 
met with farmers, and we have met with property owners who say: You 
know, we are losing the right to private property.
  They can show you pictures of dead bodies they have found on their 
ranches. They can show you pictures of fields of melons and tomatoes 
and produce that have been literally trampled by people who are coming 
across.
  So allowing them the right to protect their property--everybody 
should agree someone has the right to protect their property. A 
homeowner backing up to the border there in Arizona need not worry that 
they are going to walk out their back door and find illegal aliens 
napping in the backyard or taking a dip in a swimming pool or leaving 
clothes and water bottles strewn right around their back porch.

[[Page S881]]

  Now, one that I have worked on for quite a while, No. 1536, is the 
END Child Exploitation Act. What this would do is end that horrible 
practice of child recycling.
  Now, Madam President, you and I are moms. I am a grandma. And this 
legislation would require a DNA test for adults and children to 
determine the familial relationship between an alien and an 
accompanying minor. This is important to do.
  During the Trump era, we did DNA testing at the southern border--not 
a difficult task. It is a 45-minute test, and this will save a child's 
life, because we found that fully a third of those children were being 
trafficked.
  We also have learned from Border Patrol that many times a child will 
present with an adult. They get across the border, and then the child 
is cut loose. And on the child's arm or on their back is written a name 
and phone number, whom to call to send the child back across the 
border.
  Border Patrol tells us some of these children have been recycled 
eight or nine times. There is a way we could end that. The PRINTS Act 
would also help us to end this recycling by fingerprinting noncitizens 
under the age of 14.
  Now, there is another issue that I have been working on for about a 
year, and it is to find out what has happened with the unaccompanied 
alien children who have been released to sponsors who have not been 
properly vetted. Right now, we have 85,000 children that we do not know 
where they are--if they are dead or alive, if they are trafficked or 
not.
  My amendment No. 1537 would have addressed this issue and required 
HHS to report back to us. We should all agree that these unaccompanied 
alien children should be protected. They ought not be being sex-
trafficked. They ought not to be in labor gangs and crews. They ought 
not to be unprotected.
  We found out about this through a reporter who was working in a meat 
processing facility. And there were children there who were illegally 
in the country, brought across. They had been turned over to a sponsor 
by our Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is a part of Health and 
Human Services, and they were in a labor gang.
  We can't get an answer from HHS about this. So that amendment, plus 
1538, which would require in-person home visits so we can find out 
where these children are--those should be things that we agree with--
that we agree with. And that ought not to be a partisan issue. That 
should be something that is a part of a homeland security bill.
  Now, 1533 would require any funding to the U.N. to be contingent on 
the organization placing Hamas, Hezbollah, and other foreign and 
Iranian proxies and groups designated as foreign terrorist 
organizations on the U.N. Security Council Consolidated List. Terrorist 
organizations ought not to get the money that is coming from U.S. 
taxpayers.
  There are so many concerns about this process, about this 
legislation. And the fact that we would rush to pass this so we can go 
have a good ``shake and howdy'' in Munich, I think, is so disrespectful 
of the American taxpayer. It is disrespectful of Tennesseans.
  We should have taken up H.R. 2. We should have amended and debated 
that. And we are here when we have a week where we would be working in 
our States, and we know that this legislation that is in such a rush to 
be passed for the celebratory moment is dead on arrival in the House.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
  Mr. SCHMITT. Madam President, I rise to bring attention to the 
process which this body is considering, not just this massive spending 
bill but the way in which we have handled all the very limited business 
that has come before this Chamber this entire year.
  Before I do that, I would like to say we have some folks in the 
Gallery, and we have people tuning in. And I am sure everyone watched 
the Super Bowl last night, where the Kansas City Chiefs won in 
overtime. I think it is only the second overtime win. Patrick Mahomes, 
anytime he has the ball--the last guy to have the ball usually wins, 
and in big games this is becoming a thing. And the Chiefs essentially 
now are in a dynasty.
  So Patrick Mahomes has been in the league for 6 years. He has won 
three Super Bowls, three out of four trips--three in the last 5 years. 
So it was a great game, and I am certainly glad our Kansas City Chiefs 
won, with my not sincerest apologies to the California Senators. I 
would probably be disingenuous if I said that. But it was a good game, 
and congratulations to the Chiefs on another well-deserved 
championship.
  Right before that game, yesterday--and I finished just in the nick of 
time, essentially, for the kickoff--I rose on this floor to talk about 
what has happened at our southern border.
  Now, in this bill that we are considering now, there is nothing in 
there for our southern border. It is gone. To the extent there ever was 
anything, this is now an exclusively foreign aid package. And I can't 
probably make the case strong enough of what a disconnect that really 
is from what the American people care about.
  And I know that there will be some people in this Chamber who will 
say: As much as we tell them, they just don't understand.
  Now, I think they do understand. I think they do understand. They see 
a Federal Government that is $34 trillion in debt, with a President who 
wants to spend trillions and trillions more this year than we take in. 
No real sanity in sight and no real process for Senators to actually 
weigh in on these important matters.
  I went through the laundry list of how we got here. The punch line 
is--not to recap that, and maybe I will tomorrow--but the punch line 
is: Joe Biden has every authority he needs right now under existing law 
to secure our southern border. He just doesn't do it; he doesn't want 
to, because on day one, the executive orders that were in place that 
were effective under President Trump, he got rid of, whether it was 
``Remain in Mexico'' or title 42. A number of them we rolled through 
last night. Even right now, as we stand here, talk here, Joe Biden 
could do all those things; and he actually could stop abusing the 
parole process, where those are supposed to be individualized 
adjudications. But instead, millions of people--millions--are being 
released en masse because they are from a particular country or 
category. That is illegal.
  So if you wonder how we got here, that is how we got here, and you 
don't need another bill to fix that. You need a President who wants to 
fix it.
  Now, we could have a real debate on the Senate floor with all of us 
about how we go about improving existing law, but we don't do that 
either. We have secret negotiations with a couple of Senators. Some 
people liked the product; some people didn't. But the process--there is 
no doubt about it--is totally broken, and that played out last week.
  So that is what I want to talk about. It turns out that there are a 
few other Senators--I know Senator Lee, Senator Blackburn; I think, 
probably, Senator Vance touched on this, and there are a lot of other 
people, and not just Republicans, by the way--who feel that this 
process that is in place now is broken and people don't have an 
opportunity to weigh in.
  Before I leave the border, though, I do want to mention one thing. If 
there is one thing that could crystallize the lunacy of this 
administration's policy, there was something under President Trump 
called Operation Talon. You didn't hear much about it because it was 
canceled very early on.
  What is Operation Talon? Operation Talon was an effort to deport 
previously convicted sex offenders from other countries. There is a lot 
that divides us. I don't know. I would think that is something we could 
come together on. Maybe we want to deport people who have been 
previously convicted of sex offenses--evidently not. That was too 
difficult for the Biden administration to accept, probably because 
Trump did it.
  That reflexive desire to undo success to appease the group clamoring 
for more compassion at the border has completely backfired. Women and 
children are being raped on their way to the southern border. The 
cartels are in control. Fentanyl is streaming across. Human trafficking 
that, when I went down to the border when I was attorney general of 
Missouri, was valued

[[Page S882]]

then at the time--you probably saw two-thirds of the level of illegal 
immigration that we see right now--was valued at $100 million a week--
$100 million a week--for the human trafficking alone.

  Some of that is the worst stuff that you could possibly imagine. But 
some of it also was people being trafficked across, being placed in 
employment in cities across this country, being taken advantage of. And 
if they ever expressed any concern, their family might get killed back 
home.
  There is nothing compassionate about what is happening at our border. 
The media won't cover it. My suspicion is if it was happening under the 
previous administration, NBC ``Nightly News'' would be camped out for a 
year at the southern border. But that is not what we see.
  What do we see here? We see 98 Senators--96 Senators--locked out. And 
I mean this as a call to any colleagues who are listening, and I have 
had many of these conversations already: There is a better way. We can 
strike some real reform in the way that we handle things.
  Regular order is talked about. An open amendment process is talked 
about. There are a couple of people who don't want to see that happen. 
Senator Schumer certainly doesn't want to see that happen. Think about 
the power he gets to wield: Come to me. I am the one that gets to come 
down from the mountain and unveil the tablets. You will be cast aside 
if you dare try to change what has been carved into stone.
  That is not what our Republic is supposed to be like. Each one of us 
is from different States. Madam President, our States share a border 
along the Mississippi River. There are a lot of things we have in 
common as Missourians and Illinoisans. My wife is from Illinois. She 
has family there we get to visit. There are a lot of things we get to 
agree on, but there are also things that are different.
  We have a system of federalism. And the Founders had a really unique 
opportunity at the time, 240-some-odd years ago. They decreed a 
government from whole cloth. They got the unique opportunity to create 
structural safeguards to protect individual liberty. They were students 
of human history. They understood the dangers of consolidation of 
power, of what it meant to have a single person in charge of too many 
things. They had seen it play out, and it plays out in the world today.
  So a system of government was created to spread out that power, 
vertically and horizontally. The States came together and unanimously 
agreed on the very limited powers they wanted the Federal Government to 
have, and the States retained the rest. The States were sovereign. They 
made this compact. The first one didn't work with the Articles of 
Confederation, but the Constitution stuck. Thank God.
  In that Constitution, the Article I branch is the first one 
mentioned, of course, because what we do here has enormous impact on 
people. We are supposed to be connected to the people, not cloaked 
away, telling everyone we know better than them.
  The idea that as a U.S. Senator, you cannot come to this floor and 
say, I have an idea, I have a way that I think would improve this bill, 
and then offer it and have people vote on it is totally insane to me. 
Maybe I have not been here long enough to have that idealism beaten out 
of me, but I will never lose that. I will never lose that desire--
sincere desire, no matter your political party--to have the ability to 
come out here and try to persuade--or your willingness to be persuaded.
  Unique coalitions can be formed from that. All of that is taken out. 
So for me, I want some diagnosis of why this place is so dysfunctional. 
There are zero vehicles--or there are very limited vehicles.
  To the folks in the Gallery who are coming here today or the people 
listening, what you think happens here doesn't happen here. I mean, I 
think back a little over a year ago when I was sworn in or before I got 
sworn in. There is an orientation we go through, and you meet the 
people that are going to have this shared experience with you as a 
freshman Member of the U.S. Senate.
  I mean, it is humbling. I speak for myself and I think all the 
freshmen Members--Republicans or Democrats--understand what a unique 
privilege this is to serve in this Chamber. When I signed my name in 
that book, I was No. 2,000, which is kind of cool.
  And you learn a lot. You are actually given some reading materials. I 
have always kind of had an interest, particularly in this Chamber, in 
the unique role that it plays in our Republic. There is a reason why 
they take 60 votes to get to move. It is not supposed to be a place 
where simple majority rules. That is for the House of Representatives 
which, of course, every 2 years has elections. It is supposed to be 
more rooted in the kind of changes that could happen every couple of 
years.
  The Senate--with staggered terms, every 6 years--is supposed to be 
more deliberative. This body is not deliberative. It is deliberately 
exclusionary.
  Anyway, you read about how the Senate used to operate. I am not 
talking about ancient history. I am talking about a couple of decades 
ago. I mean, in the course of a republic, it is certainly not that big 
of a reach in time. A Senator would have an amendment, and it would get 
voted on.
  There is something that happens in that process. If a Senator has 80 
amendments, the colleagues are going to come up and say: You know, 
Senator from Nebraska, or whoever it would be, we get it. Are you sure 
all of them are necessary? Maybe they are; maybe they are not.
  There is sort of a social pressure that comes into play, and you 
start figuring out what are the most important things. You start to see 
where the body might be, if you have similar issues that have come up 
on amendments. There is a flow to it.
  Right now, there is no flow. We come in here a couple of times a week 
in a 45-minute window to say yes or no to some judicial nominations 
because Chuck Schumer--you better go to his office. If you want 
anything to happen, if you want some glorious omnibus monstrosity, that 
is where you head.
  It is worth pointing out that we have already done a couple of these 
CRs. We are headed to another. And guess how much time we dedicated to 
appropriations bills? In almost 14 months since I have been here, we 
have spent a grand total of 8 hours on one piece of legislation that 
combined three appropriation bills. That is it. So for a government 
that is bankrupt, borrowing money to spend, that is the kind of respect 
that the majority leader has given to the American people on perhaps 
the most important thing we are supposed to do every day or every year, 
which is to kind of sift through our priorities. That has been robbed 
from this place.
  It is my sincere hope that in this place, a group of us can come 
together, a bipartisan group together, and demand real reforms. This 
idea of filling a tree is totally antithetical.
  I mentioned the Founders created a system. They were weary of and 
concerned of aggregations of power. I can't think of a greater 
aggregation of power in what is supposed to be a place where power is 
diffused among the 100 of us than one person getting to decide that 
amendments don't--look, by the way, this is a point made from my 
Republican colleagues and Democrat colleagues about objecting and 
withholding consent. I think there is a lot of muscle memory that needs 
to get back into this place where we are allowed to vote.
  You see the frustration. You don't need to be a social scientist to 
figure out where the frustration comes from. There are not that many 
vehicles. Something gets bounced of yours--human nature--they maybe 
want to bounce something from somebody else.
  I guess my plea here is that we use this--regardless of how you feel 
about this particular bill--this slow-moving train wreck of how we do 
business here, where everybody privately looks at this and says, This 
is not the way, this can't be the way. And then you have a bubbling up 
among Members, rank-and-file Members, to demand something different.
  But we can't get there if we just go along with this stuff every time 
because somebody says this is how you are supposed to vote. You will 
get out of here in 3 hours. Every time that happens, individual 
Senators cede really important autonomy to help shape legislation that 
will affect people's lives or refuse, in this instance, to get serious 
about potentially demanding our southern border is secured before we

[[Page S883]]

send another $61 billion to another country.
  The appropriations process. I know there has been some progress made 
in that committee, and I commend Senator Collins and Senator Murray for 
the work they put in it. It doesn't necessarily mean I agree with all 
of the work product, necessarily, but that process that they went 
through is very important.
  Then what is supposed to happen is--it is like the old ``how a bill 
becomes a law.'' Those bills, each one of them, are supposed to come 
out on their own. Senators would have an idea, amend it or not. We send 
it over to the House--or, more appropriately, those bills come over 
from the House, and we have a vehicle to do something on it in the 
Senate.
  Something happens in that process, too. There are going to be 
disagreements. I don't care who is in charge or if different parties 
are involved in the two Chambers. There are going to be different 
priorities; there are going to be different ideas. That is healthy. 
Then you work it out in a conference committee. And then it goes back 
to each Chamber for an up-or-down vote. That is how it is supposed to 
work.
  That is not how it works, not even close. I mean, we are already sort 
of creeping towards--again, talk about an embarrassment of riches for 
Chuck Schumer. He has another couple of CRs coming his way. Then what 
you get to is a couple days before or a day before or 5 hours before: 
Here it is. You need to support this, Senator Schmitt or Senator Scott 
or whoever, or you are in favor of shutting down the government. And 
let me read off the parade of terribles of the things that will happen 
that you will be responsible for if you don't vote for this thing that 
I came up with in my basement 4 hours ago.
  It is crazy. And I know that many of my Senator friends agree. I have 
had these conversations. If you are in your office and agree with me, 
blink twice. We are all being held hostage here.
  I guess in the limited time that I have here--and if we have more 
time later, I will continue to talk about this--but I just think there 
is real opportunity for reform. I mean that sincerely. I mean that as a 
gesture of good will. It doesn't need to be the stuff--it doesn't even 
need to be my amendment.
  I am prepared to win. I am prepared to lose. I just think it is 
healthy for this place to have vehicles where people can offer these 
sorts of amendments, where they can have regular order.
  But I want to talk specifically about sort of where we are at with 
this one. We had a negotiation among a few people who produced a 
product that a lot of people didn't support. And that is not a personal 
attack on anyone--quite the contrary. I appreciate the effort. Senator 
Lankford worked very hard.
  There were a lot of things that were very problematic, from my 
perspective--not to relitigate that but only to say that I think part 
of that, the lesson from it is that there has to be more buy in, there 
has to be more input, and that all shouldn't happen, you know, where 
nobody can see it or there are broad strokes because, you know--I am a 
little biased here as a lawyer--language actually does matter.
  I think from the get-go--by the way, my position on this has been, I 
think, consistent. You could roll the tape from when I was on this 
floor talking about it. I think these issues should be spread out 
separately. I don't think Ukraine money should be tied to Israel money 
should be tied to Taiwan money. I think it is a mistake. Again, I think 
it robs the ability of individual Senators to say: You know, that 
situation is different.
  Take the difference between Ukraine money and Israel money. There are 
different levels of support in this place. There are different 
likelihoods of success. There are different needs. There are different 
coalitions of allies around the world that can step up or haven't 
stepped up. But to continually come back to the American people without 
an articulated plan here or what victory looks like as it relates to 
Ukraine, you are denying the reality of the justified skepticism.
  I will just speak for my State. Missouri is the ``Show Me'' State. 
Missouri has always been skeptical, and I don't care if it was Harry 
Truman or Kit Bond or whoever--who, by the way, stood at this desk--
skeptical of a government a thousand miles away telling them how to 
live their lives or in this instance the Federal Government saying to 
Missourians and the American people: Securing the southern border isn't 
a priority, but sending $60 plus billion to Ukraine is today.
  It is so important, we were here all weekend--I don't care about 
that. But all business aside, here we are, and we are going, and we are 
going to the mat, and you don't get amendments. The American people are 
smart. They see right through that. And you can try to explain it away, 
but that is the reality.
  The truth is, Joe Biden can secure the border with existing law--the 
same law that existed under President Trump--but refused to do so.
  Part of what that negotiation was supposed to be about, I guess, was 
that if you were going to tie this stuff together, you weren't going to 
have that unless the southern border was secured. Well, we didn't get 
that, but here we go immediately confirming the worst fears of the 
American people: that this whole debate, all of it, the center of 
gravity all along has been about the Ukraine money; the rest of it, 
window dressing, maybe to get a couple more votes to make it look like 
it had a broader bipartisan coalition--or not. I think if people were 
being honest in this place, that is what it was about.
  So here we are now with the center of gravity at center stage, but 
instead of Senators having an opportunity to maybe affect that in a 
particular way--maybe the $8 billion to pay for the Government of 
Ukraine might be amended out. I know Senator Cotton from Arkansas has 
an amendment about that. We are not going to have a chance to vote on 
that, I don't think.
  I had an amendment to separate out aid for Israel. We are not going 
to get to vote on that.
  By the way, I don't think it necessarily changes the result too much 
on the floor if you separated out Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan. I 
don't think that it does. But it does certainly harm, again, people's 
trust and their faith in the process.
  So the two main points I suppose I wanted to bring up in this 30 
minutes before I yield back and reserve the remainder of my time--I 
think we have to be honest about the disconnect between what we are 
doing here and what is happening in real America and what people really 
feel about all this. We can keep bulldozing right through that, but I 
think it is insulting and disrespectful to the American people.
  Secondly and more broadly, we have to come together as Senators and 
decide that no matter who is in charge, people are going to have a say. 
They get to vote. They get to offer ideas. And all these little tricks 
and procedural roadblocks that have been set up by both parties over 
the last 40 years--20 years probably more specifically--are not healthy 
for our Republic, and it certainly diminishes our power as individual 
Senators to fight for the people of our States.
  Madam President, I reserve the remainder of my time.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam President, earlier this week, I came to the 
floor to discuss the horrific terrorist attacks committed by Hamas 
against Israel on October 7, the brutal murder of about 1,200 people 
and the seizure of 240 hostages. I underscored the fact that Israel not 
only has the right but it has the duty to defend itself against those 
heinous acts and prevent any future October 7s. Never again. I also 
repeated my calls to prioritize the release of hostages, including 
American citizens. I also pointed out that while Israel is conducting a 
just war, it must be waged justly, including taking all necessary 
measures to protect innocent civilians.
  Last week, Secretary of State Blinken made his fifth trip to Israel, 
where this time he urged Prime Minister Netanyahu not to launch a major 
military operation against Rafah, a city in southern Gaza whose 
population has increased fivefold since the beginning of the war 
because Palestinian refugees fleeing from northern Gaza and other parts 
of Gaza were told by the Netanyahu government that Rafah was a safe 
place for them to go.
  Within hours of meeting with Secretary Blinken, Prime Minister

[[Page S884]]

Netanyahu rebuffed that request and announced publicly that he had 
decided to launch just such an operation against Rafah. Yesterday, as 
if to rub it in, Prime Minister Netanyahu appeared on ABC Sunday 
television here in the United States to say that despite the requests 
from the United States, he had decided that Israel will launch a 
military operation against the city of Rafah.
  This is part of a pattern--a pattern where Prime Minister Netanyahu 
thanks President Biden and the United States for our substantial 
military assistance but then mostly rejects our request to take 
measures to protect civilians and to facilitate desperately needed 
humanitarian assistance to people in need.
  President Biden has called the bombings in Gaza ``indiscriminate,'' 
and the United States has repeatedly called upon the Netanyahu 
government to take steps to end the huge number of civilian deaths from 
bombing, artillery, and other weaponry. The death toll now stands at 
over 28,000 people, over two-thirds of them women and children. What 
does Prime Minister Netanyahu say? He says Israel is already doing all 
it can.
  President Biden recently called Israel's actions in Gaza ``over the 
top.'' Prime Minister Netanyahu said he didn't know what President 
Biden was talking about.
  Every major international aid organization I have spoken to--and I 
have spoken to virtually every one--says that the humanitarian crisis 
in Gaza is the worst they have seen in the world, ever, in their 
decades of experience, as over 400,000 people are on the verge of 
starvation, and the entire population of over 2 million is at crisis 
levels of food insecurity. Meanwhile, Israeli authorities in Gaza, 
COGAT, say, ``There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.''
  The Biden administration has repeatedly urged the Netanyahu 
government to allow for more humanitarian assistance into Gaza, only to 
be mostly ignored. The overriding message to the United States from the 
Netanyahu coalition is this: Thanks for giving us all the weapons. 
Thanks for your taxpayers' support. But don't lecture us about civilian 
casualties or the need to better facilitate the delivery of 
humanitarian assistance.
  For example, on his trip to Israel last week, Secretary Blinken 
pointed out that ``Israelis were dehumanized in the most horrific way 
on October 7th, and that the hostages have been dehumanized every day 
since.'' I agree. Secretary Blinken then went on to say ``but that 
cannot be a license to dehumanize others.''
  A former Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, responded by 
essentially saying: Thank you, Secretary Blinken, for the ammunition, 
but don't accuse Israel of dehumanization because that delegitimizes 
Israel and makes it harder for us to use that ammunition or to defend 
ourselves and exercise our right to self-defense.
  In other words, former Ambassador Oren was saying: Keep sending us 
the weapons, but don't suggest that we are dehumanizing innocent 
Palestinians.
  I would suggest that rather than criticizing Secretary Blinken for 
his comments, Michael Oren and others should condemn the dehumanizing 
statements about Palestinians that have been made by members of the 
Netanyahu coalition and other Israeli Government officials during the 
war in Gaza. Here are just some of them:
  One said: ``There is no such thing as innocence in Gaza.''
  Another Minister described the campaign in Gaza as ``rolling out the 
Gaza nakba. Gaza nakba 2023,'' nakba being a reference to the mass 
displacement of Palestinians back in 1948. And that statement was 
echoed by other members of Netanyahu's Likud Party.
  Another member of Likud said: ``There is no place for any 
humanitarian gestures--we must erase the memory of Amalek,'' referring 
to members of a biblical tribe that was an enemy of Israel--in fact, 
such an enemy that Scripture said the Israelites should put to death 
every man, woman, and child.
  Indeed Prime Minister Netanyahu himself said: ``You must remember 
what Amalek has done to you,'' a reference, scholars say, that has long 
been used by the Israeli far right to justify the inhumane treatment of 
Palestinians.
  Even President Herzog, considered by many to be a more moderate 
voice, painted all Palestinians with a broad brush, saying: ``It's an 
entire nation out there that is responsible. It's not true this 
rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it's absolutely not 
true.'' President Herzog.
  These are just a sampling of the many statements made by government 
officials and Netanyahu coalition members.
  So what should the United States do? What should we do when bombs and 
artillery that we have provided and paid for are being used to kill 
large numbers of innocent Palestinian civilians and we are told to go 
mind our own business? What should the United States do when over 2 
million Palestinian civilians, who have nothing to do with Hamas, are 
facing a humanitarian catastrophe, but the Netanyahu government refuses 
to open the Eretz crossing or take the other measures that 25 Senators 
wrote to President Biden about last week, asking him to push the 
Netanyahu government to do them? What should the United States do when 
the Netanyahu government refuses to prioritize the release of all the 
remaining hostages, including American citizens?

  What should we do when extremist settlers in the West Bank, in many 
cases with the IDF standing by and in some cases with their active 
participation, attack Palestinians with impunity and push them off 
their land? What should we do?
  What should we do when we have made clear that the United States 
opposes the launch of a new military operation in the city of Rafah 
because it will turn into an even bigger humanitarian disaster, but 
Prime Minister Netanyahu goes on American national TV to say he is 
going to do it anyway?
  Rafah is a city in southern Gaza. Before the war started, it was a 
city with a population of about 300,000 people. Its population has now 
multiplied in size by 5 times. About 1.3 million people are there now, 
over 1 million of them having fled death and destruction in other parts 
of Gaza because they were told by Prime Minister Netanyahu and others 
that they would be safe there.
  I visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah gate about 5 weeks ago, 
along with my colleague Senator Merkley, to better understand the 
humanitarian situation in Gaza. We talked to people. We listened to 
people. We got fully briefed. The humanitarian situation was a 
catastrophe then, and, by all accounts, the situation in Gaza has gone 
from nightmare to pure hell, even more so in the north than in the 
south.
  When asked on national television on Sunday where all of these 
civilians now seeking refuge would go, Prime Minister Netanyahu 
breezily stated:

       You know, the areas that we've cleared north of Rafah, 
     plenty of areas there.

  That is what the Prime Minister said on American TV. Now, unless he 
is talking about areas that were cleared through bombing and have been 
reduced to rubble, it is simply not true.
  Don't believe those who claim that there is an easy path to caring 
for the 1.3 million people in Rafah. It wasn't that long ago that Prime 
Minister Netanyahu claimed that there was no humanitarian crisis in 
Gaza--no humanitarian crisis there. In fact, he boasted that he was 
allowing into Gaza the minimal amount of humanitarian aid to avoid a 
humanitarian disaster. Well, the claim that there is no humanitarian 
disaster doesn't pass any credible test, and we know that.
  For weeks, the United Nations and international aid organizations 
have warned that Palestinian civilians are on the verge of starvation. 
Those warnings have been ignored and dismissed by Prime Minister 
Netanyahu and his extremist government.
  Just recently, the World Food Programme, together with UNICEF, which 
is the U.N. organization to look after the well-being of children 
around the world--both of these organizations, by the way, currently 
headed by Americans--they, WFP and UNICEF, issued an analysis recently 
on the deterioration of the nutrition situation in Gaza during the 
first 120 days of the war. Here are some of the things that they 
concluded: In northern Gaza, more than 90 percent of children age 6 to 
23 months and pregnant and breastfeeding women and girls faced severe 
food poverty. The food they do have is of the lowest nutritional value. 
More than 90 percent of children age 6 to 23 months

[[Page S885]]

and more than 95 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women and girls 
are eating two or fewer food groups. And 95 percent of households are 
limiting meals and portion sizes; 64 percent are only eating one meal a 
day.
  They indicated that health screenings show a rapid deterioration of 
the nutrition situation for children age 6 to 23 months in northern 
Gaza, with global acute malnutrition at over 15 percent.
  WHO, the World Health Organization, classifies global acute 
malnutrition over 15 percent as a critical emergency.
  Yesterday, I began to hear reports of people who have actually 
starved to death in Gaza. So, earlier today, I asked the head of the 
World Food Programme, former American Ambassador Cindy McCain, about 
these reports. I sent her a note--a text message--asking about reports 
that some children have now crossed the awful threshold from being on 
the verge of starvation to dying of starvation.
  She wrote back:

       This is true. We are unable to get in enough food to keep 
     people from the brink. Famine is imminent. I wish I had 
     better news.

  I want that to sink in. Kids in Gaza are now dying from the 
deliberate withholding of food. In addition to the horror of that news, 
one other thing is true: That is a war crime. It is a textbook war 
crime, and that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.
  So now the question is: What will the United States do? What will we 
do? What will President Biden do?
  President Biden must take action in response to what is happening. 
First and foremost, the President must demand that the Netanyahu 
government immediately allow more food and water and other lifesaving 
supplies into Gaza and make sure it reaches the children and other 
people who are starving, including in the north.
  A few weeks ago, 25 Senators wrote the President a letter outlining 
some of those steps. To my knowledge, none of those five steps have 
been implemented by the Netanyahu government.
  Second, unless and until the Netanyahu government allows more relief 
into Gaza, President Biden needs to invoke section 620I of the Foreign 
Assistance Act. Here is the exact language of that section of the 
Foreign Assistance Act:

       No assistance shall be furnished under this chapter of the 
     Arms Export Control Act to any country when it is made known 
     to the President that the government of such country 
     prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the 
     transport or delivery of United States humanitarian 
     assistance.

  Now, about 3 weeks ago, I asked senior State Department officials to 
tell me why this law--section 620I, Foreign Assistance Act--has not 
been applied. Tell me how it is not the case that Prime Minister 
Netanyahu is not restricting, directly or indirectly, the transport or 
delivery of United States humanitarian assistance, when we have the 
humanitarian horror show that I just mentioned.
  Well, I haven't gotten an answer to the question I posed about 3 
weeks ago. And the answer is: There is no good answer to that question.
  Now I applaud the President of the United States for issuing National 
Security Memorandum No. 20 a few days ago. National Security Memorandum 
No. 20, which now has full legal force, is based on an amendment that I 
and 18 of my fellow Senators filed on this national security bill that 
we are considering right now, and I want to thank the President and his 
team for putting the terms of that amendment into action, into law, 
through the national security memorandum, which gives the President of 
the United States additional tools to require that countries--all 
countries--that receive and use our military assistance do so in 
accordance with international humanitarian law. In fact, here is the 
wording of the national security memorandum, which is now the law of 
the land.

       The Secretary of State shall . . . obtain credible and 
     reliable written assurances from a representative of the 
     recipient country as the Secretary of State deems appropriate 
     that, in any area of armed conflict where such recipient 
     country uses such defense articles, consistent with 
     applicable law, the recipient country will facilitate and not 
     arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede, directly or 
     indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States 
     humanitarian assistance and United States Government 
     supported international efforts to provide humanitarian 
     assistance.

  That is now the law of the land.
  The bill before us does a number of things. It provides military 
assistance to Ukraine, to Israel, and to our partners in the Indo-
Pacific. It also contains lifesaving humanitarian aid that, if it can 
actually be delivered to those who need it, would save lives in Gaza, 
the West Bank, Sudan, and other places around the world facing 
desperate humanitarian situations.
  As I have said before on this floor, I am supporting this bill 
because of the vital military assistance it provides to the people of 
Ukraine, and I will vote for it because, without that assistance, they 
will not be able to sustain their courageous effort to fight off the 
onslaught against their democracy and their sovereignty from Vladimir 
Putin. And I support the vital humanitarian assistance in this bill, 
and I fully support the funds to supply Israel with the Iron Dome 
system and other defensive systems that have been essential to protect 
the people of Israel from Hamas rocket attacks and are there to protect 
them from other incoming missiles.
  With respect to the lethal, offensive portion of that assistance, I 
am asking President Biden to make sure that it is provided in strict 
adherence to National Security Memorandum 20 that he just issued and be 
used only in accordance with international humanitarian law. That 
memorandum provides the President with substantial new leverage to make 
that happen, if he chooses to use it.
  I hope he will because the U.S. Government has an obligation on 
behalf of the American people to make sure that our military support 
aligns with our values and interests. There should be no blank checks 
for any country.
  We cannot continue the pattern where Prime Minister Netanyahu says, 
``Thank you, Mr. President, for America's generous military 
assistance,'' and then thumbs his nose at America's legitimate 
requests.
  This is a huge moment in history with what is going on right now in 
Ukraine, but it is also a critical question for our country with 
respect to what is going on in Gaza. And I hope and I pray that the 
President of the United States will make sure that the United States 
conducts itself in a manner that is consistent with our values and with 
our interests.

  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Butler). The Senator from Florida.
  Mr. SCOTT of Florida. Madam President, some of my Democratic 
colleagues, unfortunately, will want you to believe that any opposition 
to their agenda is evil and unjustified. They have claimed for weeks 
that mere questions about the $95 billion bill that the Senate is now 
considering are rooted in some radical rightwing anti-democracy 
conspiracy, and the liberal press prints these lies as gospel. I think 
this process has destroyed the Senate and ignores the history of our 
great Nation.
  One of the first decisions facing our new Republic was whether to 
engage in the conflict raging between French Revolutionaries and an 
alliance of European nations led by Great Britain.
  As we know, President George Washington ultimately decided to remain 
neutral in that conflict, knowing that our new Nation was not prepared 
to assume the grand responsibilities of supporting a cause, no matter 
how noble, while properly attending to the pressing matters facing his 
new government here at home.
  America was cash-strapped and war weary.
  In the centuries that have passed since that moment, our great Nation 
has evolved. The United States has grown to be the leader of the free 
world--the true global superpower--representing the ideals of liberty, 
freedom and democracy, and standing staunchly against oppression and 
tyranny wherever it is found.
  We no longer must wrestle with these decisions in the ways our 
Founders did, but we still face tremendous domestic challenges that I 
am sure Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson could never have imagined 
in April of 1793.
  Today, we are once again cash-strapped and war weary. Like never 
before, Americans are questioning whether their Federal Government has 
lost its way and now fails to represent the people they elected. Less 
than 25 percent of the country believes we are on the right track.

[[Page S886]]

  Decades of politicians in Washington being addicted to earmarks and 
pushing reckless fiscal policy have decimated the financial health of 
our great nation. The United States has more than $34 trillion in 
debt--soon to exceed $35 trillion--and a budget deficit projected this 
year of nearly $1.8 trillion.
  Since 2019, the U.S. population has increased just 1.8 percent, but 
our Federal budget is set to increase by 55 percent. Federal revenues 
were down over 9 percent last year. In the last 3 months, we have lost 
nearly 1.6 million full-time jobs. Part-time jobs are up more than 
850,000 as more Americans can't find full-time work and have to work 
multiple jobs to make ends meet.
  Biden's bad economy and reckless policies have created massive 
inflation. It is up 17 percent since he took office. It is causing 
immense pain for families every day, especially our poor families like 
mine growing up.
  Unfortunately, the world's evil regimes and tyrants do not wait for 
the United States to be in top fighting and fiscal shape to launch 
their attacks. And the weakness and appeasement of the Biden 
administration has emboldened them to sow chaos in every corner of the 
world.
  Iran and its proxies, like Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah, are 
waging war against Israel, fighting to destroy the Jewish State and its 
people. Russia continues its war in Ukraine, creating instability not 
seen in Europe since World War II. And Communist China continues to 
threaten the United States and prepare for an invasion of Taiwan that 
will upend world trade and destabilize the Indo-Pacific even further.
  While chaos continues abroad, America's national security is also 
being threatened every day by invasion of single adult males at our own 
borders--one that President Biden's lawless actions have created and 
encouraged and maintained.
  This is the sad reality for our Nation under the weak leadership of 
Joe Biden. It has forced this body to deal with world events in a way 
that I am sure many of us completely dislike.
  I say all of this to put the moment we find ourselves in today into 
the honest context that it deserves but that is so often ignored or 
purposely manipulated by Democrats and their allies in the mainstream 
media. The United States cannot ignore the massive threats we face to 
our national security and prosperity that I have just outlined. On 
that, I hope that we can all agree.
  But as this body so often does, especially under the control of our 
Democratic colleagues, the Senate is about to again fail to meet this 
moment with responsible and appropriate legislation.
  Rather than negotiating a bill for border security in the public, we 
are kept in dark for months and, ultimately, failed to negotiate a 
border security deal with Democrats that could actually get Republican 
support and pass because it did not require Biden to secure the border.
  This bill completely fails to deliver what most of our conference 
supported in tying the disbursement of Ukraine aid to real reductions 
of illegal immigration at the southern border. It is the only way we 
knew to make Biden do his job.
  Voters in Florida want a secure border today, inflation to cease, and 
better paying full-time jobs.
  Our conference demanded a secure border before we helped Ukraine 
secure their border only because we thought it was the only way to get 
Joe Biden to do his job and secure the southern border.
  Our conference supported tying the disbursement of Ukraine to real 
reductions of illegal immigration at our southern border.
  I remain interested in negotiating voting for a bill that secures our 
border now, stops the flow of drugs across our border, and stops more 
criminals and terrorists and human traffickers from coming into our 
communities now in a fiscal, responsible manner.
  When I was in business, I negotiated and closed a lot of deals. And I 
knew that if I could not walk away from the table, I would never get a 
good deal. I also knew that I would never get a good deal if the people 
sitting across the table from me didn't want the same outcome I did. We 
have to walk away from the table until we are negotiating with people 
who share the same goal as our conference, a secure border today.
  The result is what we have before us today--a wildly unaccountable 
foreign aid package that does absolutely nothing to secure the U.S. 
southern border and could funnel billions in borrowed money to Hamas 
terrorists and into the salaries of Ukrainian politicians.
  This bill claims to address the invasion of Ukraine while ignoring 
the invasion we face right here in the United States. This bill could 
send billions in borrowed money into Gaza, which is still dominated by 
the Iran-backed Hamas terrorists who killed 1,200 Israelis and more 
than 30 Americans and are still holding Americans hostage.
  I am unapologetically pro-Israel. I have had the honor of visiting 
Israel five times as both Florida Governor and as a U.S. Senator. What 
happened on October 7 horrified the world, and it struck me personally.
  In 2019, my wife Ann and I visited Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutz that 
was site to a complete massacre. As the early reports were coming out, 
I was really worried about the kibbutz because of its proximity to 
Gaza, about a half mile away.
  When I heard the news that it was the site of some of the most 
horrific and barbaric activities, my heart just sank. I wanted to 
vomit. We had spent an afternoon there in Kfar Aza. It was the most 
peaceful place. I kept thinking about the moms and kids who were 
playing outside and enjoying the warm summer weather. It is gut-
wrenching to think of the fate of the families we met that day.
  I spoke with Chen, the lady who led our tour of the kibbutz who, 
fortunately, was traveling outside of Israel that day and survived. I 
was able to talk with her, and she had not yet been able to go home. 
She said it was unclear if she will ever be allowed to go back to her 
home.
  I can't imagine.
  So many of us in this Chamber are so deeply connected to Israel, and 
I bet many of you have a story like mine.
  We know people in the IDF who have been called to serve. We have 
friends all over Israel who have spent days in bomb shelters as rockets 
have been launched by terrorists intent on wiping Israel and Jews off 
the face of the Earth.
  I have met with survivors and the hostage families. I have a poster 
outside my office that features the faces of the hostages being held by 
Hamas. I am not going to take it down until they are home. I have been 
clear that we cannot see a cease-fire until every Hamas terrorist is 
dead. I want every single one of them dead. These monsters beheaded--
they beheaded--children and babies. They raped girls and burned 
innocent civilians alive. They dragged innocent people through the 
streets and are now holding them as hostages in Gaza, which these 
terrorists absolutely control.
  It is unimaginable that the United States would ever consider sending 
money to a place where we know that it will be used to help terrorists 
who are holding American hostages. And that is exactly what this bill 
does.
  I have heard a lot of my Democratic colleagues talk about what is 
happening in Gaza, and your heart goes out to anybody impacted by war. 
I wish everybody would start talking more about the hostages. We still 
have American hostages.
  I want to make sure everyone understands exactly what I am saying 
here, which is the fact that every dollar that goes to Gaza directly 
benefits Hamas.
  I have spent every day since October 7 telling the stories of those 
being held hostage in Gaza by Iran-backed Hamas terrorists. I have 
pictures of the faces of the hostages, and I am not going to take it 
down.
  Unfortunately, President Biden has not done the same. I can't imagine 
why the President of the United States isn't speaking every single day 
about Americans--Americans--being held hostage by Hamas terrorists and 
what he is doing to get them out.
  The IDF just rescued two American hostages in a mission that the 
Biden administration urged them not to do.
  What has Biden done to rescue any hostages?
  Many of my colleagues will recall the name of 9-year-old Emily Hand. 
Emily and her father Thomas lived in a small kibbutz of Be'eri, which 
was ruthlessly

[[Page S887]]

targeted and destroyed by Hamas during the attacks. In the days 
following the attacks, Emily's dad was initially told that his 
daughter, who had spent the night at a friend's house just a few doors 
down, was killed.
  I am a father of two daughters and a grandfather of seven 
grandchildren. Watching this father speak about the murder of his 
daughter was heart-wrenching.
  He said to CNN at the time:

       They just said, ``We found Emily, and, she's dead,'' and I 
     went ``Yes.'' I went ``Yes,'' and smiled because that is the 
     best news of the possibilities that I knew . . . She was 
     either dead or in Gaza, and if you know anything about what 
     they do to people in Gaza, that is worse than death.

  Those are the words of Emily's father. Soon, to his relief and 
horror, Thomas learned that Emily was, in fact, alive and being held 
hostage by Hamas.
  This beautiful, innocent little girl spent 50 days as a hostage in 
Gaza.
  While I am sure that Thomas thanks God every day to have his little 
girl back in his arms again, he knows that the child he had on October 
6 is long gone. Emily will never be the same as she was before she was 
taken.
  It has been more than 120 days since the attacks, and some parents 
are still waiting for their children to come home. Little baby Kfir 
Bibas' first birthday was spent as a hostage in Gaza. His 4-year-old 
brother Ariel is also still being held hostage. I have a picture of 
Ariel on a milk carton. I have four or five milk cartons in my office--
just a beautiful little boy. Kfir and Ariel's parents have been waiting 
for more than 4 months to hold their babies again.
  Can you imagine?
  Now we have heard horrible reports that these innocent children may 
no longer be alive.
  Why is Biden giving money to Gazans who are holding American 
hostages? Why would we allow Biden to give more money to Gazans who are 
holding American hostages?
  They are holding Americans hostage. When will this stop? Why the heck 
are we allowing Biden to send more money to Gaza in this bill when we 
know that every dollar that goes to Gaza funds terrorism or Hamas?
  What are we doing to get American hostages released?
  I am not going to stop talking about this fact: Every dollar that 
goes into Gaza directly benefits Hamas. That is the undeniable truth, 
and that is why I have been fighting for years to pass my Stop Taxpayer 
Funding of Hamas Act, which prevents U.S. tax dollars from going to 
Gaza unless the Biden administration can certify that not a single cent 
will go to Hamas. Any of my colleagues that are interested in having 
money going to take care of the children in Gaza should want this bill 
to pass. They shouldn't want any money to go to Hamas. They should want 
it to go to these children.
  This isn't a solution in search of a problem--it addresses a very 
real threat of taxpayer money funding Iran-backed terrorism that seeks 
to destroy Israel.
  We cannot allow American families with a family member being held 
hostage to see their tax dollars going to the same people who are 
holding their family member hostage. We have seen reports that the 
Palestinian Authority has been paying over $300 million each and every 
year in monthly salaries to secure its prisoners and in monthly 
allowances to families of dead terrorists. The Palestinian Authority, 
who pays terrorists and their families, should not receive U.S. tax 
dollars. And this bill will allow more of that.
  That is insane.
  In 2021, President Biden's State Department said:

       . . . We are going to be working in partnership with the 
     United Nations and the Palestinian Authority to `kind of' 
     channel aid there in a manner that does its best to go to the 
     people of Gaza.

  The official went on to say:

       As we've seen in life, as we all know in life, there are no 
     guarantees, but we're going to do everything that we can to 
     ensure that this assistance reaches the people who need it 
     the most.

  The Biden administration thinks that the risk of resources going to 
Hamas terrorists is OK because ``in life, there are no guarantees.'' I 
completely reject that. I will not leave anything to chance when it 
comes to preventing U.S. taxpayer money from being sent to the brutal 
terrorists who have slaughtered so many Israelis and Americans.
  That is why I wasn't surprised in August 2021 when the Senate voted 
99 to 0 for my amendment to a budget bill that would have made the Stop 
Taxpayer Funding of Hamas Act the law of the land. But, as we would 
learn soon after this vote, the Democrats only voted for it because 
they knew that, in the final text of the bill, written by Democrats, my 
language would be mysteriously missing. I have tried twice more since 
then to pass this legislation in the Senate, and the Democrats have 
blocked it twice.
  I know that the left has a big problem on its hands as so many 
Democrats rally for Hamas and against Israel in the streets of liberal 
cities and on the campuses of America's universities. You would think 
my Democratic colleagues would be eager to show that Democrats don't 
support Hamas. Instead, they blocked my bill, proving that there is no 
interest in the Democratic Party to stand up to these people who hate 
Israel.
  That is why I will be asking today to make my amendment to add my 
Stop Taxpayer Funding of Hamas Act to this bill. I hope Democrats don't 
again oppose simply going on the record to vote on my commonsense 
measure. I hope we get a vote, and it passes.
  We have also tried twice to pass a stand-alone Israel aid bill that 
would not send money to Gaza, but Democrats blocked that, too. Each and 
every Democrat voted against aid to Israel. So don't tell me or my 
colleagues who oppose this bill that we don't stand with Israel when 
Democrats twice blocked our bill and then all voted against it--which 
has already passed in the House--to immediately send money to Israel.
  Let me be clear about one more thing: Since the day that Vladimir 
Putin launched Russia's unlawful invasion of Ukraine, I have stood 
strongly on the side of the Ukrainian people, but there are clearly 
numerous unanswered questions.
  What has happened to the more than $100 billion of aid that has gone 
to Ukraine? What is our plan to win? Why are we paying the salaries of 
Ukrainian politicians? Will Biden give Ukraine the weapons they need? 
Why can't Congress pay for this with savings from other areas? Why is 
the Ukraine border more important than the U.S. border?
  Ukraine must win, and Russia must lose. There is no question that is 
what is in the best interest of America's national security, and that 
is why I have said that we should continue to provide lethal aid to 
Ukraine, paid for with seized Russian assets so it can win its war and 
have a clear plan for how Ukraine will win. We need to answer these 
questions and be strategic about how we protect our interests, 
especially as we add to America's $34 trillion in debt.
  The American people will not tolerate borrowing billions of dollars 
to pay the government expenses and salaries of Ukrainian politicians, 
nor will they tolerate this government having no plan for how Ukraine 
will win, how American resources will help it win, and how we are 
making sure that every dollar spent is with one mission in mind: 
defeating Russia.
  Concern grows when we see that Ukraine has fired another top military 
official and seems to be struggling to show a clear path to victory. 
Without more information, we are left to assume the worst--that this 
entire bill has no clear mission but to accomplish the appearance of 
unity so that American politicians can fly over with a giant check and 
deliver hollow speeches about moral righteousness.
  It doesn't soothe our concerns when we hear the majority whip say on 
this floor that we must pass this bill now so that he can go to Munich 
this week and pontificate about a bill that the Speaker of the House 
has repeatedly stated will never become law. That accomplishes nothing. 
If my colleagues were serious about aiding Ukraine and its war against 
Russia's invasion, they would work with us in good faith to produce a 
bill that can pass here and in the House.
  As I said, I want Ukraine to win, and I want Russia to lose, but that 
does not mean that I am or should be willing to simply accept any offer 
thrown down by the Democrats that they claim--but

[[Page S888]]

cannot prove--will advance that cause or while America is being invaded 
as a result of our open border. I will not accept anything that ignores 
the most urgent threat to U.S. national security: Joe Biden's wide open 
border. This should not need to be said here on the floor of the U.S. 
Senate, but securing America's border is more important than securing 
the border of any other country. We should be able to do both.
  The fact that we aren't using revenue generated from seized Russian 
assets to pay for Ukraine aid is ridiculous, but that is how things 
work here. Your Federal Government cannot continue to write massive 
checks and borrow more money while providing zero accountability to the 
American people. I know the people of Florida are sick of it. We are 
all sick of it, and I think just about every American is sick of it.
  The deal has always been Ukraine aid for border security--not 
immigration policy but real border security now. Florida families are 
feeling the impact of this administration's lawless border policies 
every single day as deadly fentanyl, criminals, and terrorists pour--
pour--across Biden's open borders. There are 1,145 children between 14 
and 18 years old who died from fentanyl in 2021. What is the plan to 
stop that? That is a classroom of students dying every week.
  In 2022, I heard from a mom in Kissimmee, FL, whose son had a future 
in the Air Force and came home to visit her on Mother's Day weekend and 
surprised her. He, unfortunately, visited an old friend who he didn't 
know had begun dealing drugs. The friend convinced the young man to 
take a Xanax which was unknowingly laced with fentanyl, and the mom 
found her wonderful son dead. It is heartbreaking, and there are more 
stories like this.
  There are 100,000 Americans who died from drug overdoses in 2021 and 
72 percent of those from opioids like fentanyl. Families in Florida and 
every State across the Nation are being torn apart by these deadly 
drugs coming across the border. What is Joe Biden's plan to stop these 
drugs from coming across the border?
  My Democratic colleagues seem to finally be acknowledging this crisis 
on TV. Unfortunately, they are still unwilling to stand up to the 
President and force him to do what is right. We all know what is right: 
Secure the border. I can't imagine why. It is obvious to everyone that 
the invasion of our southern border is what Biden, unfortunately, 
wants. Just take a look at the numbers.
  On January 20 of 2021, Joe Biden took office and inherited the most 
secure U.S. southern border in modern history. In some of his first 
acts as President, he used his Executive power to dismantle the 
policies that President Trump used to secure the border and sent a 
clear message to the cartels: The border is now wide open for 
smuggling, and I won't do anything to stop you.
  The surge of illegal immigration started almost immediately.
  In February 2021, right after Biden was inaugurated, there were more 
than 101,000 encounters--101,000 encounters--of illegal aliens 
attempting to cross our southern border between ports of entry. If you 
go to the southern border, what you will see on the Mexico side are IDs 
everywhere. They want to come, but they don't want anybody to know who 
they are. If you had a stellar background, would you be doing that? No.
  That February, there was a massive increase from what we saw just the 
prior month. From there, the numbers continued to skyrocket. March 2021 
saw 173,000 encounters with illegal aliens between ports of entry. By 
July 2021, encounters with illegal aliens between ports of entry 
skyrocketed to more than 213,000. That is more than 213,000 people 
attempting to illegally enter the United States in just 1 month.
  I point this out to make something very clear: The border was secure. 
Then Joe Biden took office, and the cartels got his message loud and 
clear. The invasion hasn't stopped since. In fiscal year 2022--the 
first full fiscal year under the Biden administration--there were more 
than 2.3 million encounters with illegal aliens between ports of entry.
  These aren't families searching for a better life. They are mostly 
single adults. Of those 2.3 million encounters with illegal aliens at 
our southern border, more than 1.6 million were single adults, most of 
whom were military-aged men. That is 70 percent of all people who are 
trying to illegally enter the United States. Even more terrifying, 98 
of the people caught trying to illegally sneak into our country in 
fiscal year 2022 were on the Terrorist Watchlist.
  Here is another terrible stat for you from that period: The CBP 
seized more than 14,000 pounds of fentanyl along the southern border. 
Just 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be a lethal dose, and they seized 
more than 14,000 pounds. That is enough fentanyl to kill 3 billion 
people. This is how much fentanyl has crossed the border. Think about 
how much fentanyl has crossed the border without being seized.
  In fiscal year 2023, things got worse with more than 2.4 million 
encounters with illegal aliens between ports of entry. Again, these 
aren't mostly families searching for a better life; they are mostly 
single adults. Of these 2.4 million encounters with illegal aliens at 
our southern border, 60 percent, or more than 1.5 million, were single 
adults--again, most of whom are military-aged men. There were 169 
people on the Terrorist Watchlist who tried to illegally sneak into our 
country during fiscal year 2023, and we don't know where they are.
  The drugs continue to flow into our country. Last fiscal year, the 
CBP seized nearly 27,000 pounds of fentanyl along the southern border. 
That is enough fentanyl to kill 6 billion people.
  Last December, more than 300,000 illegal aliens were encountered 
trying to unlawfully enter the United States. This is an invasion and a 
clear and present danger to the safety of every American. Even Al 
Sharpton called it an invasion on his MSNBC show last week, but Senate 
Democrats and Joe Biden still won't do what is needed to fix it. Let me 
say that again: Biden's open border is a clear and present danger to 
every single American.
  In a hearing of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs 
Committee last October, I questioned FBI Director Christopher Wray 
about the threats that we are facing because of Joe Biden's open 
border.
  In his response to me, Director Wray said:

       We went through a period where the traditional-structured 
     Foreign Terrorist Organization threat in the U.S. subsided 
     some in favor of this inspired, ISIS-inspired, let's say, 
     attack . . . to be clear that threat has not gone away. What 
     has now increased is the greater possibility of one of these 
     Foreign Terrorist Organizations directing an attack in the 
     United States.

  In the United States.
  He went on to say:

       It is a time to be concerned. We are in a dangerous period.

  Since Joe Biden took office--this is Director Wray--``The terror 
threats have elevated.''
  I refuse to ignore this threat or pretend that it is OK to take care 
of the border in Ukraine while doing absolutely nothing to stop the 
invasion we have right here in the United States.
  I want to get something done, and I will always believe in the 
ability of our great Nation to answer the call and defend freedom and 
democracy wherever it is threatened by tyranny. I care deeply about 
protecting the national security of the United States. At 18 years old, 
I enlisted in the Navy to defend my country. My adoptive father was 1 
of 3,000 American soldiers who did all four combat jumps with the 82nd 
Airborne and then fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
  I know there is evil in the world and that America must be the leader 
of the free world. There is no one else to rely on, but we have to take 
care of the families we represent first. We have to secure our border 
today. This bill does not secure our border, and it has too many 
failures to say it will do what is needed to protect America and our 
interests. This bill allows Biden to send billions to Gaza, which would 
go straight to Hamas terrorists, and sends billions to pay the salaries 
of Ukrainian politicians. That is wrong.
  We all know that no bill is perfect. It is nearly impossible to write 
something that all 100 of us love and have no concerns about, but this 
isn't a situation where we can ignore some parts we don't like. The 
truth is that the things I have just outlined not only fund threats to 
U.S. national security by

[[Page S889]]

giving billions to Gaza that could go to Hamas, but they also 
recklessly force American taxpayers to borrow billions to pay for the 
salaries of foreign politicians while U.S. debt skyrockets to more than 
$34 trillion while doing nothing to secure our border--nothing to 
secure our border--nothing to secure the border of the United States 
where we have drugs, terrorists, criminals, and human traffickers 
flowing across. That could impact every one of our families. That is 
unacceptable. We can and must do better.
  So, today, I am once again going to ask that the Senate be given the 
opportunity to vote on my amendment to add the Stop Taxpayer Funding of 
Hamas Act to this bill. I am asking for a vote on my amendment.
  We have heard from colleagues that they were rightly concerned about 
the citizens of Gaza. If they were concerned about the citizens of 
Gaza, they should want this bill. They shouldn't want a dime to go to 
Hamas. They shouldn't want a penny to go to Hamas. They should want 
every dime--every dime--to go to the children who don't have the food 
they need.
  But in the meantime, shouldn't we spend more time thinking about the 
American hostages? Where is the conversation about the hostages? Where 
is the conversation about what we are doing to get the hostages home? 
What have we heard from Biden? What have we heard from my Democratic 
colleagues? Nothing.
  As I have said before in this Chamber, in August 2021, the Senate 
voted 99 to 0 for my amendment to a budget bill to ensure that U.S. tax 
dollars do not benefit terrorist organizations such as Hamas. It is a 
no-brainer. The vote was 99 to 0. Everyone in this body seems to agree 
that American taxpayers should never fund Hamas terrorists, but they 
don't want to do anything about it. They want to say it but do nothing 
about it. The final text of the bill written by Democrats does not 
include my language.
  We all know that Hamas controls Gaza. Every dollar that goes to Gaza 
comes under the control of Hamas, who decides what to do with it.
  We must make sure American tax dollars aren't funding terrorists. 
What my Stop Taxpayer Funding of Hamas Act does is make it so that no 
funds will be authorized for the territory of Gaza until the President 
certifies to Congress that these funds can be spent without benefiting 
terrorist organizations.
  It would also ensure U.S. funds are not authorized for expenditure in 
the territory of Gaza through any United Nations entity or office 
unless the President can certify that--the President will have to 
certify that it is not encouraging or teaching anti-Israel or anti-
Semitic ideas and propaganda.
  Finally, this bill mandates that the President certify that there are 
no hostages held in Gaza by any terrorist organization.
  Senate Democrats have both overwhelmingly supported this commonsense 
measure and blocked its passage in the past. Can anybody explain that? 
What will it be today?
  I sincerely hope that Democrats will stand against taxpayer money 
flowing to terrorists who want to destroy Israel and are still holding 
Americans hostage in Gaza.
  Let me just read the language that some people say prevents the money 
going to Hamas, and tell me if you come to the conclusion this doesn't.

       The Secretary of State shall certify and report to the 
     appropriate congressional committees not later than March 1, 
     2024--

  It is just a report. It doesn't mean they have to stop; it is just an 
after-the-fact report--

     that oversight policies, processes, and procedures have been 
     established by the Department of State and the United States 
     Agency for International Development, as appropriate, and are 
     in use to prevent the diversion, misuse, or destruction of 
     assistance, including through international organizations, to 
     Hamas and other terrorist and extremist entities in Gaza; 
     and--

  It doesn't stop it. They will just say: We will have policies and 
report on the policies--

     such policies, processes, and procedures have been developed 
     in coordination with other bilateral and multilateral donors 
     and the Government of Israel, as appropriate.

  The easy thing is none. The only policy you should have is, no money. 
Don't give a report that you had a policy and it wasn't enforced. Tell 
me that it never happened.
  Then it goes on to say:

       The Secretary of State and the USAID Administrator shall 
     submit to the appropriate congressional committees, 
     concurrent with the submission of the certification required 
     in subsection (a), a written description of the oversight 
     policies, processes, and procedures.

  We don't sign off on them. They are just going to give us a written 
description of them. We don't get to sign off on them. We don't get to 
question them. We don't get to change them. We don't get to vote on 
them. All it is is a written description of ``procedures for funds 
appropriated by this title that are made available for assistance for 
Gaza, including specific actions to be taken should such assistance be 
diverted, misused, or destroyed, and the role of Israel in the 
oversight of such assistance.''
  Israel doesn't have to sign off on it. It just says: What role did 
Israel play? The answer could be that Israel played no role.
  There is nothing in this--there will be nothing in this bill that is 
going to stop money from going to Hamas. There will be absolutely 
nothing. So anybody who says they are worried about the children in 
Gaza, there will be nothing to prevent money from going to Hamas 
instead.
  And I always say the first thing we ought to be talking about is how 
we get our hostages home.


             Unanimous Consent Request--Amendment No. 1542

  Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside all pending 
amendments and motions and make my amendment No. 1542 pending to the 
text of Murray 1388; I further ask that there be 2 minutes of debate 
equally divided between the proponents and opponents and that following 
the use or yielding back of that time, the Senate vote on adoption of 
the amendment, with a 60 affirmative vote threshold required for 
adoption.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  The Senator from New Hampshire.
  Ms. HASSAN. Madam President, reserving the right to object, we all 
share the grief and horror we saw unfold when Hamas committed the 
atrocities against the people of Israel. We all continue to work, as 
the President and his team have been doing, to find a way to get the 
hostages released while also addressing the humanitarian crisis in 
Gaza. But to cut off all humanitarian aid at this point in time would 
mean that innocent civilians and children in Gaza would be irrevocably 
harmed.
  We need to continue, as the administration is doing, to develop this 
framework, to get the hostages out, and to get a pause in the fighting 
while we do, but we also need to address the humanitarian crisis.
  I would also note that if my colleague from Florida is interested in 
securing the border, there was a bipartisan agreement to secure the 
border that Republicans turned and walked away from last week because 
they would rather keep this as a problem and a political issue than 
actually work to pass a solution. They could have, of course, after we 
had gone to the bill that included a border security package that was 
supported by the National Border Patrol Council, representing 18,000 
Border Patrol agents, because they knew it would make our border 
secure. They walked away from it.

  The last thing I will just say is that if we are interested in 
standing up to authoritarians and standing for freedom, as my father 
did in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and as I just heard my 
colleague speak of how his father did the same, then we need to make 
sure that we make clear to Iran and to China and to North Korea and to 
Vladimir Putin that the United States of America stands for freedom.
  If my colleagues are serious about that, they will be supporting this 
bill.
  With that, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The objection is heard.
  The Senator from Florida.
  Mr. SCOTT of Florida. Madam President, what we have just witnessed on 
the Senate floor, I think, is disgusting.
  All I ask for is a vote. By blocking the Senate from even voting on 
my amendment to add the Stop Taxpayer Funding of Hamas Act to this 
bill, Democrats have done the work of

[[Page S890]]

Hamas here in the U.S. Senate. Senate Democrats just made clear they 
are so terrified of losing the votes of radical, Hamas-loving leftists, 
they cannot bring themselves to vote on an amendment--all I want is a 
vote; if I can't win it, it is my problem--to vote on an amendment that 
simply states that we are not going to send money to thugs who brutally 
murdered 1,200 innocent people, including more than 30 Americans, and 
are still--they are still holding American hostages.
  We are giving money to Gazans that can help Hamas. They are holding 
American hostages, and we are going to give them money.
  I can't imagine this is where we are, and this bill is going to do 
nothing to address this, while approving billions of dollars of aid. We 
have an open southern border, we have hostages in Gaza, and we are 
going to give Gazans aid that we know is going to go straight to Hamas. 
If you look at the text that I read, there is nothing that is going to 
prevent this money from going there.
  All my bill says is that all the President has to do is certify that 
the money is not going to go to Hamas, and the money can go to Gaza.
  I am disappointed.
  I wish to retain the balance of my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas.
  Mr. MORAN. Madam President, I come to the floor today as we debate 
really difficult, challenging, and serious issues. I am reminded that I 
didn't seek to be a U.S. Senator to do what we have been doing month 
after month--mostly spending each day dealing with confirmations and 
nominations. These issues we are debating and will ultimately vote on 
this week have consequences well beyond the things we have been 
normally dealing with in the U.S. Senate.
  Secretary Gates, a fellow Kansan, warned of the government's 
dysfunction at a moment in history in which he argues that our Nation 
``confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, 
perhaps ever.'' I agree with this assessment. We live in a dangerous 
time in a very dangerous world.
  I underscore to my colleagues the importance of doing the work we 
were elected to do. Americans will be directly impacted by our 
decisions but so will our adversaries and our allies. The United States 
must be a steadfast and reliable partner in the midst of so many 
dangers that threaten our Nation's peace and prosperity. The dangers 
are certainly to other people--other people within the world and other 
nations--but what we are dealing with are threats to our own national 
peace and prosperity.
  The national security crises abroad are challenging, and they are 
ever-increasing.
  China is rapidly modernizing its military, with the goal of being 
ready--ready--to invade Taiwan by 2027.
  Putin continues Russia's aggression in Ukraine, putting strain on 
European allies and on food supplies around the world.
  Iran is providing support for terrorism that is attacking our ships 
and bases and killed three servicemembers last month.
  Hamas has stated its attempt to wipe Israel off the map, even saying 
the terrorist attack on October 7 was just--was just--the beginning.
  North Korea's expansion of its nuclear arsenal places risk to us here 
in our homeland.
  In a joint FOX News op-ed that I penned with former Secretary Mike 
Pompeo, we stated this:

       The preservation of freedom requires enormous efforts; 
     indeed, liberty demands the marshaling of every resource 
     necessary in its defense against those who would see it 
     destroyed.

  Putin has chosen to pursue the reconstitution of the Russian Empire 
according to his own warped vision of Russian history, and he has made 
it clear that he has aspirations beyond Ukraine and that he views NATO 
as Russia's enemy.
  Under Putin's leadership, Russia has increasingly collaborated with 
other nations that oppose us--Iran, Syria, and our most powerful 
adversary, communist China.
  Allowing the war in Ukraine to fester will only prolong and deepen 
the instability already wrought, and it puts at greater risk 100,000 
U.S. servicemembers defending NATO's borders, including those from Fort 
Riley, KS.
  It is in America's national interest to assist Ukraine in repelling 
Russia's invasion.
  I thought about wearing a tie the color of Ukraine's flag. We see 
those every once in a while. I thought to myself, that is a mistake. 
While this has something to do with Ukraine, this is really about 
America, about the United States of America.
  We are doing what is necessary for our own well-being and our own 
preservation. Ending the war on terms favorable to Ukraine will leave 
Ukraine and NATO's front in a stronger and better position to deter 
further Russian aggression. By treaty--by NATO agreement--we have no 
choice that should Putin take the next step and invade a NATO member 
country, we will not just be supplying aid, but we will be supplying 
military young men and women.
  Allowing the war to continue is damaging. Allowing Ukraine to not be 
successful is damaging our own security and well-being. We must project 
strength. Failure to do so undermines our credibility, and that 
resonates around the globe.
  A large majority of the funding provided in this legislation to 
Ukraine--this legislation that says it is to Ukraine--has really been 
directly injected back into the United States economy. This bill 
provides $35 billion to replenish American stockpiles and develop and 
produce and purchase American-made weapons. This is not a blank check 
for Ukraine. It is not a blank check for Israel. It is not a blank 
check for Taiwan.
  There is nothing free about this. We are spending a lot of money. It 
is hugely expensive. However, in the absence of spending this money, we 
are going to be spending more later as the world continues to crumble.
  There is no path forward for Ukraine, there is no path forward for 
other countries that are looking for a brighter future, if the United 
States is disengaged from the world. I wish it wasn't true.
  I remember the first graduation speech I gave as a new Member of 
Congress. It was to a small town in West Central Kansas. And I said: 
Growing up, all we paid attention to was the price of grain at the 
grain elevator.
  What we had to know and what affected us in our lives in rural Kansas 
was something very local. I wish it was still that way. But we have 
no--no--alternative. We must engage in the world to protect our own 
selves. It isn't free, and it is spending a lot of money. But it is 
less expensive than the alternative.
  The price tag is overwhelming. The debt is damning to the future of 
our Nation. But in the absence of taking a stand now, we have to take a 
stand tomorrow. And that stand will be even more costly.
  The disastrous, chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, one of the 
saddest days or few days of my life--certainly in my life as an elected 
official--was watching the way things unfolded there. Certainly, it was 
damaging to people who were there, but it also has been damaging to our 
country in huge and significant ways.
  The whole world watched as a void in leadership resulted in the death 
of American servicemembers and stranded thousands of our Afghan 
allies--those who helped our service men and women, stranded them 
behind enemy lines, perhaps to their certain death.
  I was critical--and remain critical--of the Biden administration for 
the manner in which we came out of Afghanistan. And many of my 
colleagues--especially Republican colleagues--joined me in that 
criticism. But our failure to support our allies and partners around 
the world is a replication of what happened and what we did, what we 
didn't do, when we departed from Afghanistan in such an unthoughtful 
and haphazard way.
  We have an opportunity to partially remedy the situation by passing 
legislation to protect those Afghan citizens who helped save the lives 
and promote the success of American servicemembers.
  As we debate how to proceed in this national security supplemental, I 
would take this moment to remind my colleagues of the importance of a 
bill--the Afghan Adjustment Act--as we seek to attain a vote on an 
amendment

[[Page S891]]

to this bill to assure that those Afghan allies are not forgotten.
  As Kabul fell to the Taliban--and while I can certainly see the 
importance of this to those Afghans, this issue comes to me as a Member 
of this body who spends and devotes time to our veterans, to our 
military men and women--our veterans extended the creed ``leave no man 
behind,'' as they helped their Afghan partners flee to the United 
States for safety.

  I don't have the ability to undo what the Biden administration didn't 
do or what it did. I don't have the ability to change the outcome of 
their inept ability to lead on a global stage and defend the country. 
But we as Members of Congress can rein them or push them in a certain 
direction. The reality is the decisions made by the administration in 
Afghanistan have come back to haunt us. We sent a message to the world. 
In my view, it is the same message we would send if we failed to pass 
the emergency supplemental--hopefully--as amended.
  The administration continued its inaction at the border, and it is 
terribly frustrating. This administration has many tools it needs to 
improve the situation at our borders and, particularly, our southern 
border.
  I am disappointed we couldn't move forward on border policies as part 
of this package and to mandate the President to enforce the law. But it 
turned out there was no path forward on the border deal that would get 
the necessary votes in the Senate. And we wanted to succeed in having a 
border provision that not only worked and addressed seriously the 
problems on our border, but we also wanted to send a message to the 
House of Representatives that it is a piece of legislation that they 
could support. And, unfortunately, we never got there.
  Senator Lankford demonstrated leadership. He did what he was asked to 
do. I was in those meetings in which we talked about having a border 
provision of serious and significant magnitude before we moved forward 
with help to any other country. I continue to believe that that is the 
right course of action. But now it doesn't seem to be a course that we 
are able to succeed and put into effect. It will take a different 
Congress and a different administration.
  Kansans are right to be upset when their government does not enforce 
the laws, and they are right to be upset when we spend too much money. 
I am reluctant, as many of my constituents are, to spend more or to 
engage further in the world. But while I and many Kansans are angry and 
frustrated, our enemies abroad are on the march.
  There is not a day that goes by that I don't worry about what is 
happening elsewhere and not so much about what is happening elsewhere 
to people who are there but what happens in our own country if we don't 
deal with those circumstances today.
  It is always easier, I suppose, to look the other way. But often, 
when we do that, the end result suggests that we should have looked 
right in the face of the problem and taken it on. Our enemies are on 
the march.
  I try never to use my membership of the Senate Committee on 
Intelligence to say I know something that nobody else knows. I 
certainly never want to suggest to Kansans that I know something that 
they don't know. I trust their judgment and believe in them. But China, 
Russia, Iran, Iran and its proxies, North Korea are collaborating to 
weaken, to harm, and to attempt to make the United States abandon its 
leadership role.
  There is some morality to the decisions we make here. And I suppose 
there is an argument that can be made about the morality both ways, 
regardless of what we do. Morality--there actually is a right and 
wrong. I think we forget that in our country. Some things are right, 
and some things are wrong. And we try to finesse so that we never have 
to make the decision about which ones are which.
  I suppose right and wrong comes from, really, your soul, who you are 
as a person, how you grew up, what your parents taught you, what you 
learned in church or synagogue. I care about how my constituents feel.
  I indicated to my colleagues recently that we spend so much time 
doing next to nothing here, why do you take me away from my family, and 
why do you take me away from Kansans where I love to be? I would always 
prefer to be in Kansas. But every so often, there are issues that come 
before us that seem to be ones that explain why we are here. This is 
one of those moments in which we are finally escaping the drudgery and 
dissatisfaction of doing little.
  When I came to the U.S. Senate, I was welcomed here by then-Majority 
Leader Harry Reid. Senator Reid was polite and pleasant to me and 
always was; but on that day, on the first meeting as a new Senator here 
on the Senate floor, in that well, he said: Jerry, welcome. How do you 
like being here? My response was to Senator Reid: I was really honored 
that Kansans gave me the chance to do this job. But, sir, it doesn't 
seem like we are ever going to do anything.
  There is nothing about my life that would suggest that I would be a 
Member of the U.S. Senate; nothing in my background, nothing in my 
family. I wanted to come to the Senate to do something; to do something 
right; and to do it well.
  Senator Reid's response to me was: Jerry, you just need to 
understand, we are not going to do anything. You just need to know 
that.
  Here, I had just worked my way to the U.S. Senate only to discover 
that the job description was: ``Let's not do anything.''
  So I tried from that day to take what Senator Reid said and use the 
opportunity that I have been given by Kansans to do something--to do 
something right; to do something in cooperation with my colleagues; and 
to provide meaning for all those days away that me and my colleagues 
are away from home and family.
  When this is all over, I think we all want to actually do something 
that matters. Today, I tell my colleagues and my constituents and 
Americans that the challenge we face will not resolve themselves, and 
the preservation of freedom requires an enormous effort. It is a 
special place we live in--a special place we call home. And the freedom 
and position that we enjoy, we too often take for granted.
  It has been a while since--in fact, many in this body--many in 
Congress--no longer have served in the military. We tend to forget what 
that burden of serving means.
  We owe something to those who served. We owe something to a 
generation of hard-working men and women who have come before us. In my 
view, we owe them to live up to our responsibility to preserve what 
they have defended and protected and made available to me, to Americans 
today, and to our generation, our children and grandchildren, and 
Americans that we will never know.
  I believe in ``America First.'' But, unfortunately, ``America First'' 
means we have to engage in the world. Taking a sober view of history, 
there should be no doubt of the importance of the outcome in Ukraine, 
the Middle East, in China, in the South Pacific, and what it means to 
the United States.
  I go back to what Secretary Pompeo said with me in that FOX News 
opinion piece:

       The preservation of freedom requires enormous effort; 
     indeed, liberty demands the marshaling of every resource 
     necessary in its defense against those who would see it 
     destroyed.

  I am not the articulate individual that President Reagan was, but he 
said it well, perhaps better, than what I and Secretary Pompeo said. 
President Reagan said in his first inaugural address--his first 
inaugural address to become President:

       The crisis we are facing today does not require of us the 
     kind of sacrifice that . . . so many thousands of others 
     [have been] called upon to make. It does require, however, 
     our best effort and our willingness to believe in ourselves 
     and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds, to 
     believe that together with God's help we can and will resolve 
     the problems which now confront us.

  I am tired of telling people when they ask me how I am--I say: Well, 
I am fine. My family is fine. The world is a mess.
  You can't differentiate the two. Your family, you can't be fine if 
the world is crumbling. That is me, not Reagan.
  President Reagan concluded:

       Together with God's help, we can and will resolve the 
     problems which now confront us.
       And after all, why shouldn't we believe that? We are 
     Americans.

  I reserve my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I want to thank my friend and colleague

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from Kansas for the speech that he just gave. I would like to associate 
myself with every single word.
  Madam President, last Thursday, I came to the floor to explain to the 
pages who were on duty then--I think they are different now--and to a 
few people in the Gallery what was about to happen. Then I told them 
what was about to happen was that a lot of people were going to file a 
lot of amendments. There were going to be some people who wouldn't do 
time agreements. And then we would come to the floor, and we would hem 
and haw about how either Leader Schumer, the majority leader, or Mitch 
McConnell, the minority leader, somehow blocked them. Well, that is 
fiction. I am not a fortuneteller. I have seen this play before. And 
what played out over this weekend is exactly what happened in the past, 
where people are making objections without any good-faith offer to 
negotiate time, et cetera.
  So what happens? Great amendments, like those that are being offered 
by Senator Lee, are likely not going to get a vote. Great amendments by 
Tom Cotton, Rick Scott, and other Members are likely not going to get a 
vote. I hope, maybe, that changes, but unless we decide to negotiate in 
good faith--and I don't know why anybody thinks that they will. So it 
is disappointing, but it is not surprising, and that is exactly what I 
was thinking on Thursday.
  And, now, here we are on Monday.
  I have one other thing.
  I had some of my colleagues come to the floor. They referred to the 
fact that I made a statement that says: I feel like it is on me to vote 
the way I think I need to vote, and then go back home and explain it.
  Why? Well, because a lot of people, when they hear a Senator speak, 
they believe that it is the truth. They heard somebody say that, if we 
pass this bill, we are all going to go ride to Kyiv with buckets full 
of money and let oligarchs buy yachts.
  I wonder how the soldier in a trench right now in Ukraine, defending 
against Russians, feels about that. I wonder how the spouses of the 
estimated 25,000 soldiers in Ukraine who have died feel about that. I 
mean, really, guys, sending billions of dollars to Ukraine so Ukrainian 
oligarchs can buy yachts; is that the best you have?
  What we are talking about is funding for the next 10 months. Then we 
have other people say a forever war--a forever war. Well, the last time 
I checked, this appropriations runs out at the end of this calendar 
year. And then, next year, we will have to fight again, either under a 
Biden administration or a Trump administration, to continue to do the 
right thing.
  A lot of people say we are sending $70, $80 billion to Ukraine. 
Really? Well, the last time I checked, about half of it is going to the 
military industrial base here to replace the inventories we sent to 
them, to replace and aid the modernization of our arsenal. We have 
billions of dollars in this bill to actually build up our defense 
industrial base that we now know--thank goodness this is not against a 
NATO ally because we would be desperate trying to actually support all-
out war now.
  Thank you, Vladimir Putin. If anything good came from this, we know 
how weak your military is--a 10-to-1 ratio of Ukrainians to Russian 
soldiers dead. I feel bad for every one of those Russian families who 
lost somebody in this war they didn't want to be a part of--87 percent 
of their ready forces when Putin started this war.
  Putin is losing this war, folks. This is not a stalemate. This guy is 
on life support. He will not survive if the 50 nations that have come 
together in the Ramstein process to support Ukraine stick together. He 
will not survive if NATO becomes stronger.
  NATO already has one and is about to have a second ally that is only 
here because of Vladimir Putin. He has made NATO stronger. He has 
demonstrated that he is weak. He has demonstrated that he is losing.

  We all heard the classified reports that are now public that we 
thought that Russia was going to have air superiority within a couple 
of days and control all Ukraine that they wanted to control within a 
couple of weeks. Folks, that was 2 years ago. Ukraine is winning, and 
Ukraine is winning because the Western world, the NATO allies in 25, 
some two-dozen other countries have come together and made it very 
clear that Putin's desire to reestablish the Russian Empire is 
inconsistent with the democratic world order.
  Putin is losing. This is not a stalemate. A 10-to-1 kill differential 
between Ukrainians and Russians is indisputable. The platforms that he 
is leaving on the battlefield are indisputable. The fact that we need 
to modernize and build up our industrial base is indisputable. Thank 
you, Vladimir Putin, for bringing that to our attention.
  And guess what else. China is watching. I am less concerned about 
Vladimir Putin than I am about China and our retreat from leading the 
Western world.
  Guess what. We are an exceptional Nation, and we are the beacon of 
hope for democracy. When we step away, who fills the void? You would be 
hard-pressed to find any nation that has the scale and the ability to 
do it but the United States, with all due respect to my friends in 
NATO.
  China is watching.
  Why am I so focused on this vote? Because I don't want to be on the 
pages of history that we will regret if we walk away. You will see the 
alliance that is supporting Ukraine crumble. You will ultimately see 
China become emboldened, and I am not going to be on that page of 
history.
  I believe that we have to vote today, and we have to respect some of 
the priorities--maybe the concerns of the House as they move this 
through--but let's let this Chamber be the Chamber that stands with the 
free world. That is what we can do today. That is what we must do 
today.
  And what I must do is go to my great State of North Carolina, and, if 
I have friends who think otherwise, I owe it to them to share every bit 
of knowledge that I have, to have them understand that I don't love 
where we are today, but I hate where we will be if we don't move 
forward with this vote.
  I reserve the remainder of my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Heinrich). The Senator from Kansas.
  Mr. MARSHALL. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the supplemental 
bill that is before us, but what should be appropriately called the 
``Ukraine funding bill.''
  It is only in America where we try to fund other nation's problems, 
to fight other people's wars for them, before we fix our own budget.
  We are just weeks away from our own government funding ending. We had 
the President's budget, which was due several weeks ago--we don't have 
that budget. We have not done the funding for this year yet. Yet we are 
moving on to a supplemental bill, of course, all in the background of 
$34 trillion of debt.
  A couple of things to point out about this supplemental bill. Stating 
the obvious, there is no border security in this bill--nothing to 
secure our border. We are about to send almost $100 billion overseas 
without addressing our most imminent national security threat that our 
Nation faces: our open southern border.
  I want to start also by saying this. I am not apologetic about being 
a patriot. A patriot is a person that puts America first. Look, I am 
always going to root for my home team, the Panthers. I am always going 
to root for the Kansas City Chiefs. I don't wish other players any ill 
will, but I will always be an American first. When the American hockey 
team is playing the Russian hockey team, I am going to root for the 
American hockey team. If the American soccer team is playing the German 
soccer team, I am going to root for the American team. I don't have ill 
will toward the others. I will be American first and set American 
priorities first.
  I think the next thing we need to point out about this bill is that 
two-thirds of Republican Senators voted against it. Two-thirds of 
Republican Senators have voted against proceeding with this 
legislation. In a Republican-controlled House, I don't see how you are 
going to find more than 50 percent of those Republicans to pass this 
bill. It just isn't going to happen.
  As I take a look at these last 4 months up here, I realize that the 
White House negotiating on securing the border was actually a charade. 
They were never serious about it. And, of course, it never made sense 
to the folks back home. Why would we have

[[Page S893]]

to beg the President of the United States to secure our own border? Why 
would we have to negotiate over that? Why would we have to give them 
Ukraine funding in return for a secure border? It makes sense to 
nobody.
  I want to take a second and talk about why this is important--why 
this issue is important--why are so many of us standing up and fighting 
against this $95 billion to never-ending wars.
  I think, as I even consider the 300 people who die from fentanyl 
every day in this country, this is important. The fact that we don't 
secure our border is going to allow more of that fentanyl into this 
country. We are seeing just upshots and upshots of human trafficking, 
sex trafficking going on across our Nation. As FBI Director Wray said, 
he sees warning, blinking lights everywhere he looks for the first time 
in his career.
  Why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we when we have over 10 million people 
who have crossed our borders illegally in the last 3 years?
  So I think it is important from a national security standpoint. This 
is important to secure our Nation and to make our families safe again.
  I want to talk for a moment about whom we are fighting for. This is 
no longer just our own border issue. I am fighting for families back 
home. Every State is now a border State. Fentanyl poisoning kills a 
person almost every day in the State of Kansas.
  So I am fighting for all those people who died. You know, I just read 
this week about a young lady in Kansas who has lost four members of her 
family from fentanyl poisoning and most recently, over the past several 
weeks, lost a child to fentanyl poisoning. So I am fighting for all of 
those who lost a loved one to fentanyl poisoning.
  For all those people who are being human-trafficked as we speak, are 
being sex-trafficked as we speak as well, I am fighting for all of 
those people.
  I think it is important to take a second and talk about how we got 
here, you know, how we got to these open borders. This President likes 
to create a crisis, and then he tries to solve it. In this situation, 
the President of the United States created this open border crisis.
  This President penned over 90 Executive orders that opened that 
southern border, to go from less than 1,000 crossing a day to now, many 
days, having over 10,000 a day. These were Executive orders. It was 
policies that changed. The President created this crisis. Even today, 
the President could end that crisis. The President could shut down the 
border. He has the legal authority today to shut down the border, to 
secure the border.
  How did we get thrown into the Ukraine war? Another crisis created by 
our current President.
  You know, I would go back to Afghanistan. When America ran with her 
tail between her legs out of Afghanistan, we lost our reputation. This 
President lost his reputation, and, as I have been taught by so many 
physicians in my own practice, once a professional loses their 
reputation, you can never get it back.
  Then you fast-forward, and you see that this President will not 
respond to Iran's attack on Americans through their puppets with any 
type of significant response. I think it just basically allows our 
enemies to push us around and to shove us.
  How did we get to the Israel situation where Hamas came to be--where 
Hamas had the courage to cross the borders to brutally attack and 
murder thousands of Israelis? I think, again, it is this lack of 
respect. It was a lack of respect.
  It was this President's policies that allowed Iran to increase their 
sales of oil, to allow their economy to grow, to allow them to fund and 
to ship weapons to these puppets of theirs, these terrorists.
  I think an even bigger picture of how we got here is just the 
lawlessness in America today. The lawlessness started with an open 
southern border, cashless bail, turning our heads away from riots, the 
smash-and-grabs, turning our eyes away from these to see the 
lawlessness grow and then to see the fentanyl explode. As my dad, the 
police officer, taught me, wherever there are illegal drugs, crime is 
certainly going to follow it as well.
  So I think in this backdrop of a lawless America, where our 
constitutional rights are being attacked and where, on the world stage, 
a President lost his reputation, it allowed Russia to have the courage 
to attack Ukraine, and it allowed Hamas the courage to attack the 
people of Israel.
  As I look at the big picture of this legislation--$60 billion for 
Ukraine--I think of what else we could do with that. Do you realize 
that the entire annual budget of the Marines is only $53 billion? How 
much more national security would we have if we invested the money in 
our Marines as opposed to sending this money abroad? We could have 
built three walls on the southern border easily with this amount of 
money, maybe much more.
  As leaders, we need to focus on priorities, and I think that is what 
America is seeing right now. I think they are seeing these two-thirds 
of Republicans who voted against proceeding with this supplemental 
bill--we were folks who put our own national security first, put 
securing the border first. But up here in DC, my friends across the 
aisle and the White House--they continue to put Ukraine funding as 
their priority.
  Of course, add to that the complexity of the situation. Each one of 
these issues, even by itself, has merits. There are reasons to push 
them, and there are reasons that you wouldn't do it certain ways. But 
when you throw them all together, it is next to impossible to solve 
this Rubik's Cube, if you will, just seemingly next to impossible.
  You know, one of the things that the national media especially likes 
to do up here is declare within hours of a vote who was right and who 
was wrong. I think it is important to realize that oftentimes we don't 
know who is right or wrong for years, for decades after. And even 
sometimes they write the history books, and they don't get it right.
  I certainly have empathy for those who support Ukraine funding right 
now. And I could be wrong. I could be wrong that this is not the proper 
time to do it. But what I am not wrong on is securing the border, that 
that should be the top priority. Once we secure our own border, then 
let's look abroad and see what we can do to help with Ukraine as well.
  As I think about the border and the significance of the problem, I 
think about the number of people who have died from fentanyl poisoning. 
I know I keep bringing up this fentanyl poisoning, but it is so 
significant--300 people, 300 young adults, young Americans, dying every 
day from fentanyl poisoning.
  You try to put that into historical perspective. Pearl Harbor--a day 
that lives in infamy--2,400 American soldiers died. So that would be 8 
days in February that the same number of people died from fentanyl. 
Every 8 days, we lose the same number of Americans we lost in Pearl 
Harbor, a horrible tragedy.
  Of course, 9/11, some 3,000 people died there. In 10 days--you know, 
just this month of February alone, we have lost more Americans to 
fentanyl poisoning than we lost to 9/11.
  D-day, 2,500 Americans died. Again, in just the month of February, we 
have lost more Americans to fentanyl poisoning than we did to D-day.

  So I think that is what we should be focused on. We should be 
securing our border to stop the flow of fentanyl into this country, to 
stop the human trafficking, to stop the sex trafficking, for all those 
reasons.
  I want to talk a little bit more about what border security looks 
like. Many of us have been to the border multiple times. You know, the 
Border Patrol officers, I think, would be one group of credible people. 
At my last visit, what they focused on was that they need policy 
changes.
  I think it is important that Americans realize that we would have 
proceeded with this bill if there was meaningful border security in the 
original legislation. Again, all the border security has been stripped 
out of this bill, but it is important for Americans to know what was 
missing.
  The Border Patrol officers themselves said that this bill--to make 
America truly secure, we needed more work on asylum, more work on the 
parole issue, and then this magic number of 5,000 and the border shuts 
down--not that it really ever did under this legislation, of course; 
the border never really shut down--that that 5,000 was way

[[Page S894]]

too high and to codify that into law would almost make that the norm.
  Again, the Border Patrol would say: We really can't deal with more 
than 1,000 people crossing the border a day. And even 1,000 is a huge 
stress, and they recommended that whenever we hit 1,000, we would 
literally shut the border down.
  So, again, if this bill would have been negotiated in broad daylight, 
if it would have gone through the Judiciary Committee, went through 
some type of a process where we could have addressed that particular 
number on the parole situation--I think it is so important that 
Americans understand that under President Obama, he was paroling 5,000 
people per year. Barack Obama, President Obama, was paroling 5,000 
people per year. President Trump, 5,000 people per year. Joe Biden, 
700,000 people per year. So this President was illegally or is 
illegally paroling over 700,000 per year.
  Now, what is the magic number that should be? Is it 5,000? Is it 
10,000? I think that we in the Republican caucus were willing to 
negotiate that number and that if there were some extenuating 
circumstances, then the President could come to this body and say: Hey, 
we need more than that number. But just to say that as long as they are 
flown in--and by the way, the vast, vast majority of those parolees are 
flown in on, of course, American taxpayer dollars. So think about that. 
Two million people have been paroled under President Biden--2 million 
people flown into this country for the most part on American taxpayer 
dollars and given a work visa. I wonder how that makes my union workers 
feel--like 2 million people entering the workforce here, willing to 
work for minimum wage or less.
  So this bill did not correct the parole situation, that they could 
continue to come into this country as long as they were flown in.
  Then there is the asylum issue. What this legislation did, again, was 
basically codify catch-and-release. Yes, some of the people were being 
caught and retained, but a significant number were still being caught 
and released for who knows how long.
  So that is the bare minimum that needed to occur on this bill to make 
it palatable because we wanted meaningful border security. We wanted to 
address asylum, address parole, and then this magic number of 5,000 
when people cross the border, and those number of encounters, that we 
would change it, that that would shut down the border.
  So I hope that dispels any questions or concerns about what we would 
like to do with border security.
  I want to talk about Ukraine for a second a little bit more as well.
  As I assess Ukraine, I certainly feel for the folks there. You know, 
this has been a battle for thousands of years over the borders of 
Ukraine. But where we are today, I think it is very disingenuous--very 
disingenuous--to say that this war is anything but a stalemate.
  Look, the war front has not moved in over a year's time. It is a 
quagmire. But meanwhile, 200,000 Ukrainians have died, and maybe twice 
that number of Russians have died, probably 1 million casualties with 
no end in sight. This is a never-ending war, just like the Afghan war. 
I am not sure how long Russia was there but for years and years, and 
then America was there for years and years. But just due to the 
terrain, due to all the circumstances there, there appears to me to be 
no end in sight, and anyone who says otherwise I think is just not 
being intellectually honest with themselves or with Americans.
  I think the focus should be on some type of peace talks right now, 
not on fueling this fire, not on throwing more gasoline on this fire, 
not sending them more and more weapons. I think that if there is a 
will, there is a way, and that if America was leading on some type of a 
peace talk, I think we could have already been there by now.
  But one of the challenges we have with a President who has lost his 
reputation is trying to slow Putin down. So he is in this for the long 
haul. He is not going to step down. He is not going to step back when 
he sees a weak President that we have who is even afraid of Iran.
  So for all those reasons, I cannot support funding to Ukraine at this 
point in time. I think we have to secure our border first, and then I 
am willing to talk about funding for Ukraine. But I need to know what 
is the path to victory, what is our goal here, what some type of a 
realistic schedule looks like for that war coming to a conclusion.
  This legislation before us even promises money for future years--
again, misinformation being passed around by some of my colleagues. So 
this bill commits future Presidents to funding this Ukraine war. And by 
the way, there are a lot of Americans back home who don't think this is 
a good idea at all.
  Look, I grew up in the Vietnam era. I remember what it was like on my 
way to my grandparents to drive by the cemetery and see coffins draped 
with the American flag and the bugler playing ``Taps'' on a regular 
basis--too often a person I saw playing high school football last 
season, and here their life had ended.
  I don't want more wars; I want less wars. But right now, we are 
projecting weakness. Joe Biden has given us war through weakness 
instead of peace through strength.
  Let's turn our attention to Israel and Iran--Hamas as well--just for 
a moment.
  First of all, I want to remind everybody, four times we came to this 
floor and asked for unanimous consent for stand-alone funding for 
Israel.
  And I would do that again tonight if I thought it would be of any 
benefit, if I thought that it had a chance.
  I support funding Israel. Israel has been one of America's--if not 
their best ally, certainly one of their top allies of all times, 
faithful to us, a great source of intelligence. They have stopped so 
many foreign attacks on this land that we--many Americans--owe their 
life to the work that the people of Israel have done. And then, just in 
general, they are being attacked by a terrorist group that not only 
wants to destroy Israel but destroy America.
  Why wouldn't we support Israel?
  But, of course, the issue of Israel now tears the Democratic Party 
apart. It divides them. You know, it looks like, to me, many of them 
are very concerned about supporting Israel, that they have become this 
pro-Palestinian caucus rather than a pro-Israel caucus. They support 
Iran, but not Israel.
  Look, in the world of the Middle East, you can't do both. I don't see 
how you could possibly support Israel and Iran. I don't see how you 
could support Israel and support Hamas. I don't think it is possible. I 
think sometimes you have to choose and support who your friends and 
allies are. And, for me, I believe we should be standing firmly beside 
Israel and eliminating Hamas.
  Again, Hamas wants to destroy Americans. That is their goal. That is 
their stated purpose.
  So we would have--almost to a person, we would have supported some 
type of stand-alone funding for Israel, if given that chance.
  We talked about Israel. We talked about Hamas. We have to talk about 
Iran. There is so much more that this President could be doing right 
now, besides just funding Israel. Look, Hamas is the head of the snake. 
They are the ones that fund, train, support, plan these attacks by 
these puppets of theirs, these terrorist organizations in so many ways.
  So what could the President do besides, you know, funding more wars 
and more battles? I think that there is a military approach. There is 
an economic approach, and there is a diplomatic approach.
  Let's talk a minute about the diplomatic approach. The Abraham 
Accords are making great progress in the Middle East, and perhaps one 
of the most precipitating factors of Hamas attacking Israel was the 
progress of these Abraham Accords, that Israel was close to working out 
an agreement with our friends from Saudi Arabia. And if they would have 
done that, it would have put so much pressure on Iran.
  Well, basically, Hamas attacked on October 7, and now those talks 
have been cut off. But, if somehow, some way, those negotiations, those 
talks could be rekindled, that would indirectly put a huge amount of 
pressure on Iran. So there are huge opportunities for a diplomatic 
approach.
  Economically, let's talk about what we could be doing. Recall when 
Joe Biden was sworn in, Iran had about $6 billion of currency left--$6 
billion in their treasury. Well, today they have

[[Page S895]]

got over $60 billion. Why? Because the sanctions that we had on, under 
the Trump administration, were lifted, and now Iran easily is selling 
all this oil, and, among other things, they have a fleet of 500 ghost 
ships.
  So they take these ships that are owned by foreign countries. They 
use that foreign flag then to smuggle either Russian oil or Iranian oil 
to people, ignoring the sanctions. We should be punishing not just Iran 
but also punishing those countries that lend them their flag, so to 
speak.
  What else could we do economically? I think that we could be 
putting--double-down on all the previous economic sanctions that we 
placed on them, including bank sanctions. And, again, anyone that is 
doing business with Iran, we could be shutting them down as well.
  Militarily, what could we do? I think back to what President Reagan 
did in 1988 when an American warship was attacked. I believe it hit a 
mine, if I recall properly. And what President Reagan did is he ordered 
an attack on Iranian oil platforms, and I think we also sunk three of 
their battleships as well. So without going inside of Iran proper, we 
sent a loud and clear message to Iran. And guess what. It worked.
  Instead, what the Biden administration has chosen to do are these 
fairly innocuous attacks on empty sheds, and maybe sometimes there is 
some old ammunition there. But something more than that needs to be 
beefed up.
  We need to shut down Iran's ships as they are crossing through the 
seas as well. Iran launched three military satellites recently. We 
could take out those military satellites. So there is a lot we could 
do, but this idea of passivity, this idea that if we just watch what 
Iran is doing and thinking that they are going to stop doing it, 
doesn't work. Anyone that has faced a bully in third grade out at 
recess knows being passive never works, and, eventually, you have to 
stand up and smack the bully in the nose. Otherwise, he is going to 
keep pestering you.
  It is that clear. That is what we should be doing in the Middle East 
right now. It is a military action on Iran, economic and diplomacy as 
well. You can't look at that in just a little silo. We should be 
supporting Israel, but all those other things would help Israel 
significantly as well.
  There is funding in this legislation for Taiwan. And, again, I think 
if that was standing alone, I could support it.
  I think back to pre-invasion of Ukraine by Russia. We begged the 
White House to make Ukraine some type of a porcupine, so to speak. That 
would have been our goal--that we should have been getting all the 
military aid in there before this all happened, not after. We could 
have gotten them A-10s that we were mothballing.
  Pardon me. I don't know what is going on, Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. I don't know either.
  The Senate will be in order.
  Would the person in the Gallery please sit.
  Mr. MARSHALL. Thank you, Mr. President. I didn't know what type of 
security situation there was there. So we felt that we had better just 
pause as well.
  So if we were talking about Taiwan, I think we can compare Taiwan to 
where Ukraine was a couple of years ago. We begged this administration 
to arm Ukraine so that they could protect themselves. If we could have 
gotten them those A-10 Warthogs--think about how that war would have 
changed if Ukraine had these A-10 Warthogs, as all of these Russian 
supply automobiles were stuck there trying to enter from the north. 
There is so much more that we could have done. It seems like this White 
House has just slow-walked the entire response.
  So, yes, I think many of us agree that we should help arm Taiwan to 
make them a porcupine. And, by the way, they have been a great ally, 
too, a great business partner. They seem to be a good player, a country 
that we greatly respect and want to help protect.
  But, at the end of the day, when you bundle this funding without 
giving us our own border security, that doesn't make much sense to us.
  And, of course, there is funding in here for humanitarian aid as 
well, I think to the tune of--goodness, I think it is close to $10 
billion for humanitarian aid. This is in addition to what we typically 
are doing. We would remind everybody that USAID has a budget of over 
$60 billion a year, that we are all doing much of this humanitarian 
work already.
  And, of course, our fear--and I don't know how to answer Kansans 
thoughts on this when they ask me: How are we going to make sure that 
that humanitarian aid gets to women and children, the people that 
really need it, as opposed to--will Hamas intercept it?
  Again, I made several trips to the Middle East, and what I have seen 
is corruption. I have seen the terrorist groups grab the humanitarian 
aid, and it doesn't get to the people that we want it to get to there. 
So I am not convinced on the humanitarian aid part of this that we 
would accomplish what our goals truly, truly are.
  I don't think that this humanitarian aid should be going to support 
Hamas. I am all for helping those that need it, but very concerned 
about where it actually ends up being.
  I want to go back to the budget process just for a second as well. I 
have never have been part of an organization that functions quite like 
this. Most of us have run businesses before or have been on a church 
board or a school board. You know, typically, the fiscal year is going 
to be starting 4 or 5 months from now. We want our CFOs giving us a 
budget outline. We want to be presenting those budgets to the board at 
least 6 weeks before that new year kicks in and certainly ready to go 
before the new year starts.
  This body seldom does a budget. They seem to just fly by the seat of 
their pants. They do a cost-plus system. Whatever we spent this year, 
we are immediately talking about adding 5 or 10 percent to that budget, 
regardless. As opposed to that, I think we should go back to a zero-
based budgeting process. I think we should go back exactly to the way 
the budget of the law of 1974 says we should be doing and then put some 
teeth on it, so if the President doesn't get his budget here on time, 
that there is some type of punishment, if you will, for the White House 
not getting that here on time, within the realms of the Constitution. I 
know there are some certain things we can't do, and I really think a 
President--a responsible President--could have that budget to us 
before--you know, months before the fiscal year ends as well.
  And then I think we should hold the Senate Budget Committee to the 
test and make sure that they get a budget out in time. And then we 
communicate that to the House, and they work on a budget, and we go 
back to this regular order that we have all talked about.
  And my compliments to the Appropriations Committee here in the 
Senate. I think they have done an incredible job, especially with the 
time presented to them, to at least giving us something. It has been 
through subcommittees; it has been through committees--for the most 
part, with large bipartisan support. We would have loved to have had 
them out here by now. We would have loved to have taken those 
packages--there are 12 buckets--taken them one at a time and gone 
through them and shine the light on the bridges to nowhere. Maybe there 
are places we need to accentuate, things that we could cut back.
  In a Federal budget of--goodness, I guess we are at $77 trillion a 
year now. You would think there would be some ways--there would be some 
programs that we could shut down, as opposed to, again, just this cost-
plus system that we do up here: Whatever is last year's budget, let's 
just add 5 percent; let's just add 10 percent as well.
  And it still amazes me that, again, having a $900 billion military 
budget, we are going to have to go back now and spend even more to fund 
these never-ending wars overseas as well.
  So I do think that we need to pay attention to what is going on with 
our budget process.
  I had some folks back home send me some questions, and I thought I 
would try to answer them. Some of them I have covered already, but I 
think this is a good opportunity to talk about some of their questions 
as well.
  The first question: Were the Democrats ever serious about border 
security?
  Listen, I think there are folks in the Democratic Party that want 
border security. I don't know if it is as much of

[[Page S896]]

a priority as it is to me. I would like to assume that they do.
  But, on the other hand, it feels like, for the White House, that is 
not their priority. I think I have never heard from the White House 
that border security is a priority. They talked about an immigration 
system, wanting to grease an immigration system, but I never really 
heard that commitment from the White House that they wanted border 
security.
  Next question: Why is it so urgent to send Ukraine this largest lump 
sum of money right now when the war started over 2 years ago?
  I think that is a great question. Again, I would just point out that 
the situation there is a quagmire. I know that Ukraine is starting to 
launch offensive weapons into Russia, which concerns me. It concerns me 
about escalating a war as well. I think we need to realize that, in the 
stalemate situation, I am not sure why we need to be sending them more 
and more weapons. Again, the focus, I believe, should be on some type 
of peace talks.
  Next question: Has Israel been used as a pawn in these negotiations, 
and what message does this send to our allies like Israel?
  Well, Israel has been used as a pawn. As I pointed out before, Israel 
divides my friends across the aisle, so that much of their base no 
longer supports Israel. So when their base sees them thinking about 
funding Israel, it creates division. It creates havoc. It hurts the 
President's poll numbers.
  So I think that Israel has felt like a pawn. Again, what some will 
say is that the President is using the Ukraine funding as an excuse to 
include the Israel funding.
  Next question--again, these are questions from folks back home that 
wanted to make sure that I answered this: How does funding Ukraine 
address our No. 1 national security concern, the border crisis, as well 
as our long-term concern of our national debt crisis?
  You know, I couldn't agree more. Our No. 1 most immediate threat to 
our national security is an open southern border. The greatest threat 
to our long-term national security is our $34 trillion national debt.
  Look, we are going to spend more money on interest this year than we 
do on the military. When any business is spending that significant 
amount of their budget--probably, I am going to guess around 1/7th of 
our budget this year--1/7th will be spent on interest. I think, 
whenever that happens, that threatens our education programs. It 
threatens our roads and bridges. Any type of long-term infrastructure 
that we could be investing in, if we are going to be spending $900 
billion or trillion on interest, we know that is a tough row to hoe. 
Any business that is ran, when you are that far in debt, spending that 
much in interest soon ends up in some type of bankruptcy.

  So this bill does not address--actually, it worsens our long-term 
national security crisis with the national debt. It certainly does not 
address the border in any way.
  Next question: When will the President realize that deterrence 
doesn't work after the fact?
  Well, I think, again, that is the difference in our philosophies 
here. I always believed President Eisenhower actually said it first. He 
said he believed in ``peace through strength.'' President Eisenhower 
said he hated wars as only a soldier could, as a soldier who has lived 
it and seen its brutality and futility as well.
  As a veteran myself and the brother and son of a veteran and uncles 
who were soldiers and a child who is now in the Active-Duty military, I 
certainly understand the importance of peace through strength and hope 
that we can regain some of that strength as the military begins to 
focus once again on military strength and readiness, as opposed to some 
of the other diverse issues.
  Next question: Why is putting America's safety and security so 
controversial?
  I can't answer that question. To me, it is not controversial. Of all 
my tasks up here, again to our priorities, I think my No. 1 priority is 
to make America safe and secure--I think physically safe with secure 
borders and then financially secure would be right behind that as well.
  Next question: Who within the American Government is responsible for 
overseeing how this money is spent in Ukraine? Whose job has it been to 
this point?
  Well, look, I think many of us have been concerned that there wasn't 
an individual person, an inspector general, focused on this $113 
billion we have already spent. We know that whenever you send over 
large amounts of money at one time, the opportunity for fraud and abuse 
is there. Many leaders of our own country are concerned about the fraud 
in Ukraine as well.
  So I cannot look Kansans in the eye and say, Hey, we know where all 
this money is going. For heaven's sakes, the Department of Defense 
doesn't know where most of its assets are either. It has gotten so big, 
they can't keep track of what they have or where they have it.
  Next question: Why don't we bring Russia and Ukraine to the 
negotiating table to bring peace, instead of funding death and 
destruction indefinitely?
  I couldn't agree with you more. I think we have the leverage. I think 
we have the economic leverage. Even our trade with these foreign 
countries alone gives us a leverage that most people don't have to 
bring them to the negotiating table.
  Next question: How can we be sure that humanitarian aid to the Gaza 
Strip can be used to help civilians and not fall into the hands of 
Hamas terrorists?
  I can't. I cannot be sure of that. We know if history repeats itself, 
that significant amounts of aid have fallen into the hands of these 
terrorists.
  Next question: What is the end goal of Ukraine?
  That is a great question.
  It wasn't too long ago that Ukrainian leadership was here saying they 
wanted to go back to pre-Crimea. Basically, they want Crimea back, as 
well as the other territory that Russia has invaded and controls as 
well. I don't know that that is feasible or not, to think that they are 
going to get Crimea back. Crimea is so important to Putin. Folks don't 
realize the challenges that Russia had in getting their oil and getting 
their crops and their commodities out to a warm water port. Crimea is 
vitally important to their economy and militarily as well.
  I think that is another great point and another great question as 
well. What is the end goal in Ukraine? I don't think America has been 
given the answer to that. Again, I just think back to Vietnam and being 
a young child, listening to Walter Cronkite on ``The Nightly News,'' 
and my parents asking that same question: What is the goal? What are we 
trying to do in Vietnam? Where are we going with this?
  And as we saw, my goodness, the Agent Orange and all the atrocities 
that were coming out of Vietnam. Our soldiers were vilified. Americans 
didn't welcome them back home. It was a horrible time in America. And I 
think there was never a clear purpose of what the end game was in 
Vietnam. Let's don't repeat that same mistake.
  Next: What are we doing to ensure that Europe is doing their part as 
well?
  Listen, it is almost impossible for me to understand exactly how much 
Europe has committed and then actually followed through with. In my 
humble opinion, they have made some very bravado claims that they are 
going to do, and I don't think they have adequately followed up on it 
yet.
  I am still waiting for a report that I can trust and verify that 
Europe is doing their part. I do think that they should be more 
motivated than we are to secure the situation there. They are willing 
to help, but once again, I think it is about priorities for me. Let's 
secure our own borders first.
  Next question: Is there corruption happening in Ukraine?
  Look, I think that there is, unfortunately. I think that there is 
corruption in Ukraine. The largest telecom company in Ukraine is being 
threatened to be nationalized by Zelenskyy. Let me say that again. 
Zelenskyy is threatening to nationalize the largest telecom company in 
Ukraine.
  This particular company is on NASDAQ--American ownership, many 
Americans have ownership on this stock as well. It is sitting on a fair 
amount of cash, and the plan was when this war settled, that they would 
go back and reinvest that cash and reinvest that money through the 
telecom to help Ukraine's economy recover. But it appears to me that 
President Zelenskyy wants that cash.

[[Page S897]]

  And just think what he can do from a political standpoint. It would 
be like if the White House could control two or three of the largest 
telecom companies in America; what an unfair advantage that is to other 
political parties as well. So there is political issues with it, as 
well as I think economic issues, and for Zelenskyy to threaten 
Americans, to threaten our leadership that if we don't give him the $60 
billion, he is going to nationalize this American company, I think is 
hitting below the belt. It is not right. It is not fair. I don't like 
to be threatened. Americans don't like to be threatened.
  So those are some of the questions that folks back home in Kansas 
have asked us. I hope we have adequately addressed them.
  What time I have got left, Mr. President, I think I will talk about 
being a patriot, what it means to be a patriot. And I would just ask 
the folks in the room, Are you a patriot? or when did you become a 
patriot? And maybe if I could, I would just like to share my moment 
when I became a patriot.
  My wife and I got married about 2 weeks before medical school 
started. A year and a half later, in the second year of medical school, 
we had our firstborn. We brought her home to a little studio apartment. 
I took my desk and made a little spot for a crib for her. My wife was 
going to give up her job to take care of the baby, which I was so 
forever grateful for the sacrifices that moms make. And already, we 
were having a rough time making ends meet.
  So I knew I needed to do something economically. I said, This is no 
way to take care of a family. It was one of those moments when I was 
considering what I needed to do. I thought about my forefathers. My dad 
had served in the military. My brother had served. As a matter of fact, 
going back to the Civil War, every generation in my family had somebody 
who had served in the military. Four grandfathers of my grandparents 
served in the Union Army, a few gave their life, made the ultimate 
sacrifice preserving the Union.
  My wife had an uncle who served in World War I, suffered from nerve 
gas exposure in the Argonne Forest. Two of my dad's uncles were part of 
the D-day invasion. My dad served; my brother served; and I served, and 
my son served. Anyway, in that moment, I said, This is what I need to 
do; I need to go in the military, rather than borrow money. I wanted to 
check that box as well. So my wife and I signed up, and officer's basic 
training was in Fort Belvoir, VA, just 30 minutes from where we are 
standing today.
  Most people don't take their wife and newborn with them to basic 
training, but we decided to do that. And even though my wife stayed in 
a different place than I did, I was so glad that she got to come. Every 
spare moment that we had, though, we enriched ourselves in the many 
cultural opportunities that our Nation's Capital gives us.
  We spent a day at Monticello. We spent a day at Mount Vernon. We 
spent a day going through the National History Museum, spending days on 
end at all the different Smithsonians on the Nation's Mall, sucking up 
the history, the nectar of life in this great country, stopping at each 
one of the monuments and reading and learning and going on tours about 
the sacrifices that our forefathers, our Founding Fathers had done for 
all of us.
  Now, as a pre-med student--biochemistry, nuclear engineering--I 
didn't get to spend much time on history, so it was truly a great 
awakening for me. But sometime in that process that summer, between 
taking an oath to defend the Constitution and learning all this 
information about our Nation's history, I became a real patriot, 
dedicating myself to make sure I leave this country better for the next 
generation.
  And as I look at legislation like this--complicated legislation. My 
goodness, trying to do something in Ukraine, something in Israel, in 
Taiwan, in humanitarian efforts, and to think that we have left behind 
this opportunity to secure our border, it is very troubling to me--
horribly troubling to me--that we squandered this once in a generation 
opportunity to fix this problem.
  And that is why I have been willing to go forward. I wanted to go 
back and work. Let's work on this border security issue until we get it 
right, and then we can move on to this, but that opportunity was not 
afforded us, and here we are today.
  But as a patriot, I stand before you and I stand before the people of 
America saying the right thing to do would be to secure our border 
first. There is going to be those who today and tomorrow judge us and 
say that I am in the wrong, but it will take decades. It is going to 
take decades for history to figure out who is right here and who is 
wrong here. And as I have said before, I may be wrong on Ukraine, but I 
am darn secure and darn confident that securing the border should be 
our top priority right now. It is our No. 1, most immediate threat to 
our national security.
  So as this debate concludes, it is with an ill heart that I will go 
home having lost this battle, and Americans are not going to understand 
that. But they are going to hold people accountable. Americans are 
going to hold people accountable that chose to move on from border 
security and fund foreign nations before we took care of our own homes.
  I can promise the Presiding Officer that I am always going to be a 
patriot first.
  Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.


                 Congratulating the Kansas City Chiefs

  Mr. HAWLEY. Mr. President, I am here tonight to talk about the 
foreign aid supplemental that is the pending business on this floor, 
but before I do that, I have to take a moment of personal privilege, if 
my colleagues will allow me, in light of recent events, just to say a 
word about the Kansas City Chiefs, which last night, in dramatic 
fashion, won their third Super Bowl in the last 5 years. Now, as a 
lifelong Kansas City fan, it is an incredible privilege to get to 
congratulate the Chiefs again on this floor just as I did last year.
  For those who missed the game, the Chiefs beat the 49ers in a 
terrific, terrific game, with a final score of 25 to 22, in an overtime 
thriller. It is only the second time, I think, in Super Bowl history 
that a Super Bowl has gone into overtime. Yet again, the Chiefs came 
back from a double-digit deficit. They were down 10 points at one point 
in the first half, coming back to win the game again by a score of 25 
to 22.
  This is the first time in 19 years now that a team has won back-to-
back Super Bowls. Already, we in the Kansas City area and Chiefs 
Kingdom are ready for a three-peat as we gear up for next season.
  I just want to call out a few folks who had particularly outstanding 
performances.
  I have to start by highlighting my good friend Harrison Butker, the 
Kansas City Chief's stellar kicker and best kicker in the league. 
Harrison, last night, set a new Super Bowl record with a 57-yard field 
goal at the end of the first half. He scored more than half of the 
team's total points, being 4 for 4 in field goal attempts and, of 
course, 1 for 1 in his point-after attempts. He made a crucial field 
goal there at the end of the fourth quarter that tied the score and 
sent the game into overtime.
  This Super Bowl performance of his underscores a phenomenal season in 
which he was perfect in the postseason and missed only two field goals 
the entire regular season. I will just say that what happened last 
night was typical of Harrison's performance the entire season in terms 
of scoring points for this team. He has truly been an outstanding, 
outstanding, outstanding player this season and absolutely key to this 
team.
  Of course, what can you say about Patrick Mahomes, the best 
quarterback in the league, the best quarterback of all time?
  Andy Reid--another phenomenal coaching game. His end game adjustments 
were absolutely unbelievable.
  A terrific defensive play from Steve Spagnuolo's unit and everybody 
involved.
  Tight end Travis Kelce led the team in receiving last night--9 
receptions for 93 yards.
  Pacheco rushed 18 times for 59 yards, had 6 receptions for 33 yards.
  Mahomes--34 of 46 pass attempts, 333 yards, rushed nine times for 66 
yards and, of course, was named the Super Bowl's Most Valuable Player. 
That makes him only the third player to have won that honor three 
times, joining Tom Brady and the great Joe Montana.

[[Page S898]]

  This was a terrific, terrific game, and I hope that we will soon pass 
a resolution here on the floor to honor the Chiefs' terrific victory 
and to prepare for what I think will be its terrific season next 
season.
  Let me just say two more things on this score just personally.
  First, to Clark and Tavia and to their three kids, thank you for your 
leadership. Thank you for putting your faith at the center of all that 
you do. You have made your faith the center of the family. You have 
made your faith the center of your organization, and it shows. The 
excellence that you have brought and have continued with this program 
in Kansas City, with the organization that your family has built, that 
you have carried on, the legacy that you have passed along, is truly 
incredible.
  So thank you, Clark and Tavia. Thank you for your friendship. Thank 
you for your leadership. Thank you for what you have done for this 
organization.
  On a personal note to Harrison Butker and Isabelle, congratulations. 
Thank you for your bold witness, for your faith. Thank you for the way 
that you lead your lives. Thank you for being a terrific ambassador, 
Harrison, and terrific ambassadors as a couple for the Kansas City 
Chiefs, for Kansas City, for the region, but most of all, for your 
faith and for the faith we have in common. It is an honor to get to 
call you a friend. It is an honor to get to see you play.
  This was such a terrific, terrific game last night, such a fantastic 
game. Congratulations to all the Chiefs.
  Senator Marshall and I and others have offered a resolution honoring 
the team, which I hope will pass the Senate with unanimous consent. We 
look forward to sharing that with all of the team members, Andy Reid, 
Clark and Tavia, as well as the entire State of Missouri.
  Since my good friend Senator Marshall is on the floor, I will just 
say that we in Kansas City of Missouri--you know, the Chiefs in 
Missouri football team--are so proud to have the Chiefs in Missouri, 
but, hey, we welcome fans from Kansas and all around the country. So it 
is a great day for Missouri but also for Chiefs' fans everywhere, and 
you are sure welcome to cheer for them in the great State of Kansas as 
well. So thank you for that.
  I thank the Presiding Officer for indulging me in making those 
remarks and in honoring this terrific football team.
  I will just say, as a guy who grew up--as a young guy watching the 
Chiefs play, I still remember exactly where I was--maybe Senator 
Marshall can relate to this--when Joe Montana took the Chiefs to the 
AFC Championship game. Montana played for the Chiefs, of course, for 3 
years toward the end of his career. I still remember right where I was 
while watching Montana in that first season at the AFC Championship 
game. It was the farthest the Chiefs had ever gotten in my lifetime. We 
lost that game, unfortunately. But I was sitting in a Maid-Right in 
Lexington, MO, where I grew up, watching them on a little TV that was 
kind of up in the corner there, and I thought to myself, man, it 
doesn't get better than this. But, as we found out, it does get better 
than that. It gets better than just going to the AFC Championship game. 
It gets better when you win the AFC Championship game and when you win 
the Super Bowl year after year after year.
  Congratulations to the Chiefs and the dynasty that they now have 
created in the National Football League, and I think they are just 
getting started.


                                H.R. 815

  Mr. President, on a more serious note, in turning now to the topic of 
conversation that is before us on the floor tonight, we are considering 
the national security supplemental, and it is absolutely true that 
America faces no shortage of threats to our national security.
  Our own borders, which, to begin with, as we sit here and speak 
tonight, are wide open. The number of border crossings continues at 
alltime highs. There were, in fiscal year 2023, 860,000 illegal ``got-
aways'' and 302,000 encounters with illegal aliens in December of this 
last year alone. That is an alltime high for a single month. The number 
of Chinese migrants at the southwest border jumped more than tenfold, 
from 2,176 in fiscal year 2022 to 24,314 in fiscal year 2023. CBS News 
reports today that migrants in Mexico have made 64 million requests--64 
million requests--to enter the United States using the CBP One app. 
That is an app that the Federal Government developed with your tax 
dollars for the phone that illegal immigrants can now use to get 
concierge service to cross the border. There are 64 million illegal 
immigrants who have asked to set up appointments to enter the United 
States using this app. I laugh, but it is not funny. It is not funny at 
all. It is deadly serious. The threat across our southern border is 
deadly serious.
  The threats that we face on all sides across the world are deadly 
serious. China--Imperial China--is now twice as powerful relative to 
the United States as the Soviet Union was at its peak, and China 
explicitly seeks to dominate the world's largest economic area and to 
displace this country as a global power. That would have monumental, 
unprecedented implications for America's interests, and we cannot allow 
that to happen.
  But right now we are considering a so-called security supplemental 
that puts those pressing concerns last, not first, and that does not do 
anything for our border at all. In fact, we were first served up a so-
called border bill that would have made the problem worse not better--a 
border bill that I think of as the full employment act for illegal 
aliens.
  The border bill, so-called, that was before this Chamber a week ago--
of that border bill, its central feature, from my point of view, was to 
give illegal aliens already in the country expedited work permits--
expedited work permits now to millions of illegals, almost none of whom 
will ultimately qualify to remain here permanently in the country, 
including for asylum claims. Over 80 percent of asylum claims fail, we 
know, statistically. Yet that bill would have given those illegal 
aliens here expedited work permits to go enter our labor force right 
now.
  We are looking at the flatlining of wages in this country for working 
people. Blue-collar workers, A, are having trouble finding a job, and 
B, haven't seen a real rise in their wages in years. Over the last 30 
years, blue-collar wages have declined. Yet the solution of this body 
would be to create even more cheap labor in this country?
  We know why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street love that 
bill. It is a cheap labor bill. They love cheap labor. Their first 
preference would be to have overseas cheap labor, but if they can't get 
that, then why not subject Americans and those who are here illegally 
to even more illegal cheap labor? It makes absolutely no sense at all, 
none at all, which is why I voted against it. Yet that was what we were 
offered as a solution to the border.
  As to a solution to China, this body has dragged its feet and 
neglected its responsibilities toward China for years--one is tempted 
to say decades--and the current supplemental does nothing meaningful in 
that regard. In fact, the focus is entirely almost--certainly heavily--
on Ukraine, more money for Ukraine. We have spent $115 billion almost 
in Ukraine so far. This bill would commit tens of billions more--and to 
what end?
  Let me just offer a contrast. Not long ago, I was on this floor, 
discussing the need--discussing the cries--for justice for Americans in 
my State, in Arizona, Idaho, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Tennessee, 
Kentucky, and Alaska. These are Americans who have been exposed to 
nuclear radiation or radioactive waste by their own government that 
goes back decades.
  In my State, the city of St. Louis was used as a uranium processing 
facility at the very beginning of the Oppenheimer project, the 
Manhattan Project. We have all learned about this in greater detail 
thanks to that movie, but have we yet learned about the brave men and 
women in this country who gave their health and, in many instances, 
yes, their lives to see that project come to fruition? Well, we haven't 
when it comes to the brave men and women of Missouri. I can tell you 
that.
  St. Louis was a secret uranium processing site for years. When the 
Federal Government shut down its uranium processing work in St. Louis, 
what did it do? Did it clean up the uranium? Did

[[Page S899]]

it clean up the nuclear waste? No, it didn't. Here is what it did: It 
put the waste into canisters--metal canisters, unsecured--and set them 
out in open parking lots and other facilities, exposed to the 
elements--exposed to the wind and the rain and the weather--for years 
on end and then watched as those metal drums leaked nuclear waste right 
out of the drums and right down into the soil and right into the water, 
right into a creek--Coldwater Creek is its name--that runs through the 
greater St. Louis area, from the center of the city out into the 
suburbs.
  Just as this was happening in the 1950s into the 1960s, what was 
happening to those suburbs? Well, people were moving out of city 
centers. They were moving to the suburbs, and they were building homes. 
Where were they building their homes? It was along this beautiful, 
picturesque creek that just so happens to have been contaminated from 
the fifties forward with nuclear waste. Where did the waste come from? 
From the Federal Government.
  But that wasn't the only place in St. Louis that was contaminated, 
no. The Federal Government also then decided: Do you know what? Maybe a 
way to get rid of this would be to just dump all of the waste in a 
public landfill.
  So that is what they did. They took the waste, some of it, to a 
public landfill--without any controls, without any appropriate cleanup, 
and by the way, without informing the public--and they dumped it into 
the landfill, along with everything else that was there, taking no 
precautions and exercising no appropriate cleanup.
  They dumped it in another location called Latty Avenue, and then 
there was yet another location called Weldon Spring, such that there 
are now multiple locations all of these years later in the city of St. 
Louis.
  We are talking now about, in just one metropolitan area in this 
country, there are multiple locations where nuclear waste has been 
dumped into the soil, dumped into the water, exposing people--into the 
air, and for 50-plus years, it has been going on. It continues as I 
stand tonight on this floor--because how much of it has been cleaned 
up? None of it. Has the creek been cleaned up? No. Has the landfill 
been cleaned up? No. Has the second landfill at Weldon Spring been 
cleaned up? No. Has Latty Avenue appropriately been cleaned up? No. No, 
it has not.
  But what has happened is generations of residents in my State--in St. 
Louis and then in St. Charles--have played in that creek, and they have 
gone to those schools. They have been exposed repeatedly to this 
nuclear radiation and waste, and they have developed cancers of many 
and various kinds such that we lead the Nation now, in St. Louis 
County, in breast cancer and in various childhood cancers. It is not 
natural, Mr. President. There is nothing normal about it. It is because 
of what the Federal Government has done and done for decades.

  Why do I mention it? Well, because the program that this government 
set up some years ago to compensate those Americans who have been 
exposed by their government to nuclear radiation is about to expire, 
and just a few months ago, I secured the approval of this body to renew 
it.
  We passed here on the floor of this body, with a strong bipartisan 
vote, a renewal measure to make good on our promise to those Americans 
who have been exposed to nuclear radiation by their government, who 
have grown ill because of nuclear radiation by their government, who 
have died because of nuclear radiation by their government, to make 
good on our promise to help them. We passed it. We also included in 
that legislation relief for the people of St. Louis and St. Charles and 
others in Missouri, relief for people of New Mexico and Arizona and 
Utah and others who were downwind of these tests that we saw so vividly 
portrayed in the ``Oppenheimer'' movie and elsewhere.
  Then what happened, Mr. President? I will tell you what happened. The 
National Defense Authorization Act--the Defense bill--went to 
conference, and there, despite the strong bipartisan vote on this 
floor, it was removed in a backroom deal. Senator McConnell and others 
led the charge to remove this provision.
  What was the rationale? What were we told? Why was it that nuclear 
radiation victims from Missouri to Kentucky, to Tennessee, to Alaska 
cannot be compensated, according to so-called leadership? What was the 
rationale, Mr. President?
  I remember it vividly. I heard it. It rings in my ears every day. The 
rationale is, we don't have the money. The rationale is, it is too 
expensive to do right by the American people who have suffered and died 
because of their government's nuclear radiation program. The rationale 
was, we can't possibly afford it. That was the rationale.
  Now, lo and behold, I turn, Mr. President, to this bill before us, 
and I find we seem to have unlimited sums of money when it comes to 
foreign wars. Good Lord, when it comes to funding the machinery of war, 
we have money; we have money; we have money that we couldn't possibly 
dream of. We can run the presses indefinitely if it is going to go 
overseas, if we are going to be paying foreign governments. Why, we 
have got enough money apparently to send $8 billion direct to the 
treasury of Ukraine. My goodness, we have enough money to make hundreds 
of millions of dollars of our taxpayer funds available to the private 
sector in Ukraine. We are now literally funding their businesses, their 
banks--Lord knows what. We have got money without end. We have got 
enough money to pay for bureaucrats' salaries. We have got enough to 
pay for Ukrainian Government officials' pensions.
  We have got enough for so-called humanitarian aid that gets funneled 
away from, siphoned off into any manner of corrupt uses. We won't know 
because we don't have a special inspector general to oversee this 
money, but that is a different story. Oh, no, we have got plenty of 
money.
  I have listened carefully--carefully--to colleague after colleague of 
mine come to this floor, stand where I am now, and say: It is so 
important that we spend this money on these overseas wars. We must 
spend the money. If we don't spend this money now, why, it may cost us 
more money in the future. No, it is imperative--it is imperative--that 
we spend this money.
  Meanwhile, these same people turn to the citizens of Missouri and 
say: You are not worth a dime. They say: You can't have a penny. They 
turn to the residents of Kentucky and Tennessee and Alaska and New 
Mexico and Arizona and Utah and Texas, and they say: We don't care that 
you were poisoned; we don't have a dime for you. We have unlimited 
money for Ukraine. We are going to rebuild the borders of Ukraine--that 
is in this bill--but we don't have anything for you.
  We are probably, for all I know, paying for radiation exposure 
compensation for Ukrainians in this bill. We very well could be, Mr. 
President. We will never know because there will never be an 
accounting. But the contrast strikes me as not only stark, it strikes 
me as absurd. It strikes me as absurd. It is worse than that; it 
strikes me as grossly unjust.
  Listen, if you want to give money to overseas military operations, I 
think you are making a mistake when it comes to Ukraine. I think doing 
it without oversight is a serious mistake. I think doing it in a way 
that seriously harms our position in the Pacific, which is our most 
important foreign policy challenge, is a serious mistake. I think doing 
it before we secure our own border is a serious mistake.
  But given all of that, if you want to give money to foreign wars in 
Ukraine, that is one thing, but to turn around and say we have plenty 
of money for that endeavor; we have unlimited sums of money for that 
endeavor, but we have nothing for the people in the United States of 
America; we have nothing for those who are sick and dying of cancer 
because of their government's action--to say that, Mr. President, is 
not only a juxtaposition but strikes the mind to say that is manifestly 
unjust, to say that is wrong, to say that cannot be sustained, Mr. 
President, to say that is a scar on the conscience of this body.
  It cannot be that we have unlimited sums of cash for foreign wars but 
we have nothing for the needs of our own people whom our own government 
has hurt and poisoned. That cannot be true in this country. It cannot 
be, which is why I will soon demand again that this body vote to make 
good on this government's commitment to help those whom its government 
has poisoned.
  But I hope and expect that when that time soon comes, we will not 
hear talk

[[Page S900]]

about how expensive it is to clean up after the Federal Government, how 
expensive it is for all of these Americans--hundreds of thousands of 
them who have been poisoned by the government--how expensive it is for 
them, after we have been treated to speech after speech, hour upon 
hour, day upon day, on just how important it is to spend this money on 
Ukraine. If it is good enough for the Ukrainians, surely it is good 
enough for the American people. Surely, Mr. President, it is good 
enough for the American people.
  What of those in East Palestine? Here we are a year now since the 
train derailments, the explosions, the chemical spill in that State. It 
is not just, of course, the residents right there, as devastating as it 
was for East Palestine, but that those chemical agents spilled into the 
waterways, eventually meeting up with the Mississippi, carrying those 
toxic agents all the way down, including to my State of Missouri, 
affecting everybody who lives along the river and at the greater 
watershed area.
  I just note again, Mr. President, what is it that this body has seen 
fit to do for the residents of East Palestine? Has that crisis been 
addressed? Has that spill been cleaned up? Has our river been cleaned? 
No. Have we voted on a railway safety bill? No. No. We haven't lifted a 
finger--this body hasn't--to do anything to help the residents of East 
Palestine or anybody else downstream from that crisis. Certainly, the 
people of Missouri haven't gotten an ounce of relief--nothing. Nothing. 
But we have unlimited time, unlimited resources, and unlimited rhetoric 
for our foreign wars.

  There is a moral incongruity here that cannot be sustained. It cannot 
be that the American people will constantly be asked to be fodder for 
our foreign wars and adventures, while their needs are overlooked, 
overshadowed, and put to one side. It is not sustainable. It is not 
right.
  Whether we are talking about St. Louis or St. Charles, MO, or East 
Palestine, or any other State in this Nation, it is not right that this 
body's priority is time and again overseas wars, the machinery of war, 
foreign adventurism, and, of course, let's not forget the priorities of 
Wall Street. Let's not forget that. Right. Who is it that always gets 
paid?
  In the national Defense bill, we were told over and over that there 
is just no money available for Americans poisoned by their government, 
but I noticed that we had $1 trillion of funds available for defense 
contractors. Wall Street always gets paid. The defense contractors 
always get paid. And this body always hops to do their bidding. I have 
seen it over and over in my short time in the Senate. It doesn't take 
long, if you are paying attention, to see who really calls the shots 
around here. The big corporations, the defense contractors, the Wall 
Street banks--they call the shots. Both parties--let's be honest. That 
is why we call it the uniparty, because at the end of the day, there is 
one set of interests that play the tune and that call the shots, and 
they are the ones who get paid.
  The American people have to take a back seat to that. If the working 
people of my State and Ohio have to get nothing, then that is just how 
it is. But Wall Street will certainly get paid. The defense contractors 
will certainly get paid. They will certainly have their way. And so 
here we are again.
  I am sure they love this bill. They love this bill, which makes me 
think, Mr. President, maybe one way to help clear the eyes and focus 
the mind on this body is, maybe we ought to pass a law that says that 
no Member of Congress can hold stock or trade stock in corporations 
that have contracts with the defense industry. Wouldn't it change 
things around here if no Member of Congress could turn a profit on the 
machinery of war? My goodness, what a difference that would make. My 
goodness, how the debates in this Chamber would change. My goodness, 
might it be, Heaven forbid, that Members might ask themselves, what 
should we do for the workers of this country as opposed to the defense 
contractors who are making hand-over-fist money in Ukraine?
  I keep hearing all this talk about how this bill is really all about 
renewing our industrial base. What that really means is it is about 
sending more money to defense contractors. They have already gotten 
paid once this year. Now they are going to get paid again and I am sure 
again and again and again. But mark my words, in just a few weeks' 
time, we will be hearing about how we have no funds--no funds--for 
anybody who is a victim of nuclear radiation, no funds to do anything 
for East Palestine, no funds to clean up any of the disasters this 
government has created. No, we have no money. We have no money. It has 
all gone to Ukraine.
  I think that the moral contrast is clear, and all I can say is, I 
don't think it is lost on the American people, who want to see a 
Congress that actually puts their interests first, to see a Congress 
that actually invests in them ahead of all others, to see a Congress 
that says: If there is going to be a conflict between what we can 
afford to do overseas and at home, we are going to prioritize home. If 
it is between rebuilding another nation or rebuilding this one, we are 
going to rebuild this one. If it is between securing another nation's 
borders or our own, we are going to secure our own. But at the very 
least, if we are going to invest in all of these foreign wars, we are 
at least going to take care of our people in this country--at the very 
least.
  Mr. President, I think it is not lost on them, which is why here we 
are passing this bill probably in the dead of night--another exercise 
in this body's monumental detachment, disconnect, and, frankly, 
contempt for the American people.
  I will be voting no, Mr. President, but I will be here to stand and 
speak for and say yes to the people of my State and other States around 
this Nation who want to be prioritized, who want to be heard, who want 
to be put first by their government.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Smith). The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. BUDD. Madam President, we meet this week at a critical time for 
our country and for our world. There are wars raging in Europe and the 
Middle East.
  China poses a growing threat to the United States and our interests 
in the Indo-Pacific, and we are currently facing the worst border 
crisis in U.S. history. We are feeling the consequences of this crisis 
all over the country.
  In New York City, we witnessed illegal aliens attack members of law 
enforcement and then brazenly flaunt obscene gestures on camera to all 
of America. In Boston, an illegal alien who crossed the border in 
December 2022 was arrested by ICE after raping a handicapped citizen. 
Pick your city. Pick your State.
  In my home State of North Carolina, we have seen a 22-percent 
increase in drug overdose deaths--the highest level ever recorded. This 
is primarily due to deadly fentanyl that was produced in China and then 
transported into our country through an open southern border on 
President Biden's watch.
  Police departments from Charlotte to Raleigh have uncovered tens of 
thousands of pounds of fentanyl, enough to kill every man, woman, and 
child not just in my home State of North Carolina but in this whole 
country.
  Now, in order to tackle the challenges both at home and abroad, the 
Senate and the White House attempted to craft an agreement to deal with 
this border crisis.
  The Senator, my friend and colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Lankford, 
did the best he could considering the ideologies of those he was 
negotiating with. But unfortunately, Senate Democrats are still 
beholden to progressive ideologies and ideologues who believe in open 
borders.
  Now, this term ``progressive'' is a perversion of the term 
``progress,'' isn't it? Especially since it leads the other side of the 
aisle down a path of chaos and tragedy. For example, President Biden 
has taken 94 Executive actions that transformed the border from a place 
of relative security to a place of lawlessness. That might be 
progressive, but, friends, that ain't progress.
  It might be progressive, but it is not progress to live in a nation 
where children die of accidental fentanyl overdoses before they even 
learn to drive a car. It might be progressive, but it is not progress 
to allow terrorists, cartel members, and human traffickers to roam 
freely in communities around this country.
  But when it comes to our side's recent history, the Republican House

[[Page S901]]

acted. They passed H.R. 2. But at the end of the day, it is Democrats 
who refuse to agree to any provisions that would meaningfully secure 
our border.
  At the same time, the threats we face on the world stage demand our 
attention as well.
  We have an opportunity to rebuild the arsenal of democracy, make 
significant investments in our national defense, and prepare ourselves 
for the threat from the Chinese Communist Party. Right now, our defense 
supply lines are brittle. Our manufacturing base is not prepared for 
future conflict, and it has to be modernized.
  Our allies and our partners, like Israel and Taiwan, need our help--
especially our friends in Israel. They are in a fight for survival. We 
need to send them the aid they need to finish the job and to free the 
remaining hostages, one of whom is a North Carolinian.
  At the same time, we should share Israel's military objectives: to 
destroy Hamas, to demilitarize Gaza, and to deradicalize the 
Palestinian population.
  We don't need President Biden's virtue signaling to a Democrat base 
that is increasingly becoming pro-Hamas. We need to let our allies in 
Israel and around the world know that we are on their side and that our 
resolve is, indeed, strong.
  If we let our own defense atrophy and we leave our allies high and 
dry, forces of evil and instability will be even more emboldened, and 
our world will become even more dangerous.
  Remember, it is American strength that deters aggression, and it is 
weakness that provokes it. But in order to be a strong nation, we first 
have to be strong right here at home. We must secure our own border 
before we can help other countries protect theirs. I believe that this 
position is reasonable, and I am going to mention a quick example to 
make my point.
  On one of my recent telephone townhalls, I asked a poll question to 
thousands of people who were on the call. I asked: If you could be 
assured that the southern border was secure, then would you support 
sending support to our allies and our partners?
  I will say that again.
  If you could be assured that the southern border was secure, would 
you then support sending support to our allies and our partners?
  Roughly two-thirds of the respondents said yes. I bet it is the same 
in other States around this country. Most folks aren't opposed to 
helping our friends; they just think we need to take care of our 
country first. And ``America First'' doesn't have to mean ``America 
Only.'' But as I watch the process play out here in this Chamber, I 
can't blame folks back home who really feel frustrated.
  The Senate's initial deal, which at least attempted to address the 
border crisis, was then replaced with a bill with zero border 
provisions at all, and to date, there has not been a full amendment 
process, as was promised.
  For example, I think it would be outrageous to allow a single U.S. 
taxpayer dollar to flow to Gaza while Hamas terrorists hold American 
citizens hostages. This amendment and many others are not even going to 
be considered.
  The truth is that this entire process is not working. The only viable 
path forward is for Congress to force President Biden to get serious 
about border security and then for the American people to see the 
situation at the border start to get better. Until that happens, we 
find ourselves locked in a stalemate as the world burns.
  We can't accept this. Yes, we want to help our allies and our 
partners, but to keep our Nation strong, we must always put America 
first.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
  Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, what we have here is a ``Ukraine First'' 
bill. This bill was never really about securing our border but about 
securing another country's border. What we have here is a failure of 
the elites of Washington on both sides of the aisle--the leadership of 
the Democratic Party, the leadership of the Republican Party--what we 
have here is a failure of these elites to understand that the American 
people want to put America first.
  Sixty-one percent of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, and 
they want to put Ukraine first. I want you to talk to your constituents 
at home, the ones who live paycheck to paycheck, and tell them why you 
are shipping $60 billion to Ukraine. This will be $170 billion. We have 
never before in the history of the United States flooded so much money 
into another country.
  Sixty-one percent of our country lives paycheck to paycheck. Eight 
out of 10 families who make $50,000 or less won't have enough money to 
pay their bills in 2 weeks if their check doesn't come. If they have 
one interruption in their family, one thing that sets them back, one 
unexpected expense, they won't have enough money to pay their bills, 
and you want to put Ukraine first.
  This is why the Democratic Party is losing the working man. This is 
why the Republicans have become the party of the working class. This is 
why many, if not most, members of the unions are now looking at 
Republicans--because we support the working man and we support the 
working women of America, and we recognize that they do not want to 
send their hard-earned money and taxes halfway across the world.
  What does their money go for? Do we know what they are doing with 
their money in Ukraine? Well, we do know that the money went to fund 
six fashion brands to go to the Paris fashion show. We do know that it 
is funding small businesses to sell ladies' handbags. We do know that 
it is paying for the salaries of 57,000 first responders. What about 
the first responders in our country? What about the people who get in 
an ambulance and have a $35,000 bill in our country? What about 
tackling the problems of America first? Instead, this bill is a 
``Ukraine First'' bill. It is a ``Ukraine First'' policy.
  According to the ``Ukraine First'' party, which includes elites of 
both parties, war is good; war is useful; war profits make us stronger. 
It sounds a bit Orwellian. They say that war profits will build the 
defense industrial base. This is the part they used to say quietly. 
They used to whisper this. They used to never say it out loud, that war 
profits fund the defense industrial base. And by golly, we are going to 
be stronger the more war profits there are. According to the ``Ukraine 
First'' party, war is not so bad. More profits make us stronger.
  Lost in this reprehensible argument is any sense of grief over the 
500,000 dead, for the mothers and fathers weeping graveside. Little 
sense of grief, little sense of understanding that supporting and 
lauding grief is supporting and lauding the death of war. Missing from 
the ``war profits are good'' argument is any sense of compassion for 
the thousands of lives that will yet be lost by the prolongation of 
this war.
  If military contracts for 100,000 rifles are good, what about 1 
million rifles? If military contracts for 1,000 tanks are good, what 
about 1 million tanks? If military contracts for 500 bombs are good, 
what about military contracts for 5,000 bombs?
  Missing from the argument that war profit is good, that the more 
armaments we sell, the better, is compassion for the deaths that we are 
talking about, the prolongation of war.
  You know, war doesn't end typically in victory. Almost all wars end 
in negotiated settlement. The longer there are unlimited war profits, 
the longer there are unlimited weapons being sent to Ukraine, the 
longer the war goes on, the more people who die.
  This is a grinder. It is a meat grinder over there. There are whole 
towns without young men.
  Do I think Russia is in the wrong? Of course they are. Are they the 
aggressor? Of course they are. Do I have sympathy for Ukraine? 
Absolutely. But we also are now funneling money to a country that has 
no elections. They have canceled their Presidential elections. They 
have suppressed speech. They have banned certain opposition parties. 
They have banned certain opposition press. They have banned officials 
of opposition religion.
  Now, this should bother people because it is said that American might 
and foreign aid is to express our power and our values. Are our values 
no elections? Are our values suppressing speech?
  What has become confusing even in our country is the Democratic Party 
has become the party of censorship. They are the party that agrees that 
the Biden administration is OK to meet

[[Page S902]]

with the FBI, to meet with Homeland Security, and to meet in the 
offices of Twitter, meet in the offices of Facebook. They suppressed 
for over a year anybody who is willing to say that it looks like the 
virus came from a lab in Wuhan. That was suppressed for over a year not 
just by private business but by the government, by the Biden 
administration meeting the FBI, Homeland Security, meeting with the 
tech companies. So it doesn't surprise me that they don't care too 
much; just get the honey out the door even though, in Ukraine, they are 
living under a regime where speech has been suppressed.
  What the ``American Firsters,'' what the ``Ukraine Firsters'' are 
really arguing for is an ``America Last'' policy. They are really 
arguing for a longer, bigger, more deadly war because it expands the 
profits of the defense industrial base. How despicable. How absolutely 
disgusting. They are saying the quiet part out loud. They are OK with 
war. The longer the war, the more profits, the stronger the American 
defense base.
  It is a circular argument: We are not sending the money to Ukraine; 
it is coming right back. It is coming back in the form of profits to 
the American arms merchants. It is OK. We are really not going to lose 
$170 billion because it is coming back in profits. We will make more 
bombs.
  What ever happened to the progressive left? Wasn't it great when 
there were people on the left who actually were progressive on things 
such as war? How absolutely disgusting to argue that war profits are a 
benefit, a benefit that somehow overshadows the awful specter of war's 
death and carnage.

  The amount of money going to Ukraine in this bill is more than we 
spend on the entire Marine Corps. Think about it. We are going to send 
to Ukraine more money than we spend on our own Marine Corps. This is a 
bill about ``Ukraine First.'' This is a bill that makes us weaker.
  There is no money to give to Ukraine. It is not like we have a pot of 
money. There is no surplus. There is no rainy day fund. This money will 
be printed up or borrowed from China to send to Ukraine. It makes us 
weaker.
  Once the border bill failed and they decided that this wasn't really 
about the border, that this was about Ukraine's border, the ``America 
Firsters'' plowed on but with a more intellectually honest proposal: 
Nothing for America, everything for Ukraine. That is what this bill is: 
nothing for America; nothing to stop the invasion of nearly a million 
people across our southern border. They offered a border bill that 
would have said: Well, if we have an emergency. The emergency has 
already happened. Nearly a million people came in the last 2 months. 
That is the emergency. This is a bill that is ``Ukraine First'' and 
America last and ought to be defeated.
  I notice my colleague from Alabama is here. I reserve the remainder 
of time.
  Can you tell me how much time I have left?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 8 minutes remaining.
  Mr. PAUL. Thank you.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.
  Mr. TUBERVILLE. Madam President, reclaiming my time, I come to the 
floor to sound the alarm, as a lot of my colleagues are, about the 
crisis at the southern border.
  I have been here over 3 years, and I have never seen this group try 
to do more for people out of our country than within our country. It is 
amazing.
  But this is the worst border crisis in our history. Since Joe Biden 
took office, there have been at least 8 million illegal crossings at 
our southern border--that we know of. This is in addition to the 2 
million ``got-aways.'' These are the illegals that we know of. The real 
number is probably much, much higher.
  Border crossings are at a record high. Deportations are at a record 
low. Why is this happening? You know, it didn't come out of the blue. 
This is a policy choice by President Biden and his allies here in 
Congress. We have been talking about this now for 3 years, asking why; 
and we have not gotten one good answer yet.
  Why is our border open? Joe Biden campaigned on opening up our 
borders. He campaigned on giving free healthcare to illegal aliens. So 
it is no surprise that he is keeping his promise.
  Since taking office, President Biden has taken 94 Executive actions 
related to immigration--94. We have the same laws on the books as we 
did when President Trump was in office, but President Trump secured the 
border. Joe Biden has opened our border more than it ever has been in 
the history of this country.
  Let's take a look at just a few of these Executive actions. First, 
President Biden stopped building the wall. In fact, he has been selling 
all parts of the wall for pennies on the dollar. I know people in 
Alabama who have bought stacks of steel that the American taxpayers 
paid in lots--$300,000 for these certain lots; $300,000 of American 
taxpayer money. These people now can go online at an auction and buy 
these lots for 10 cents on the dollar. I know people who have bought 
$300,000 lots for $30,000, just throwing taxpayer money down the drain. 
The same thing with razor wire, same thing for other parts of the wall 
that are being sold. They are just, basically, being given away. So we 
have been selling parts.
  President Biden--nobody told him to do it. He did it on his own. He 
chose to do it. President Biden got rid of President Trump's ``Remain 
in Mexico'' policy. That was the most effective policy we have seen in 
discouraging the abuse of our asylum system in years. I have been down 
the border several times. Border Patrol has told me time and time 
again: Finish the wall. That is the best thing we can do here. It won't 
stop it, but it will give us an opportunity to police the wall, make 
them come in through certain sections of the wall, and allow us to have 
some kind of border security.
  President Biden is currently suing the State of Texas to get them to 
stop securing the border. Let's think about that for a second. The 
President of the United States is suing a border State for stopping 
illegal immigrants from coming into our country. That doesn't sound 
quite right.
  I am proud that my State of Alabama has sent Texas hundreds of 
National Guardsmen to help them police Texas' borders. Unfortunately, 
President Biden is trying to stop them from doing that.
  As I mentioned, Joe Biden has essentially stopped all deportations 
right now--completely stopped it. He is not letting ICE do their job, 
immigration police. All these policies have led to this unprecedented 
crisis. They have also sent a message to the world: If you can get 
here, you can get in, and you will never, never have to leave. That 
message has been heard around the world loud and clear. There are 193 
countries around the world, and we know of 190 countries that have been 
accounted for coming across our southern borders. Illegal aliens have 
literally crossed our border wearing Joe Biden T-shirts. I would 
imagine the American taxpayers somehow paid for those.
  TV reporters have asked people coming across our borders why they 
came across. Time and time again, they say because President Biden 
invited them. That is on television. FOX News recorded one illegal in 
Tucson saying, ``I love you, Joe Biden. Thank you for everything.'' 
That migrant was not from Mexico. He was from Africa. People are coming 
from every corner of the globe. People are flying to Mexico and then 
walking across our border. The whole world knows that our border is 
open.
  These illegal aliens are criminals, drug traffickers. Just last year, 
nearly 500 people on the Terror Watchlist were caught trying to cross 
our border--500. You would think that would open somebody's eyes. You 
would think it would go all the way up Pennsylvania Avenue, but nobody 
seems to care.
  Just a few weeks ago, Christopher Wray, the FBI Director, said 
something bad is going to happen. This is Christopher Wray, the guy 
that runs our FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, said something is 
going to happen. He seemed like in his voice, he was begging somebody 
to do something. Nobody has. But just imagine, if 500 have been caught, 
how many more terrorists have come across the border unchecked. It 
doesn't take many; it only takes a few--9/11 was committed by 19 
foreigners here on visas--19. It only takes a small group to do 
terrible, terrible damage.
  But Americans are already dying because of the border crisis. We all 
know that. We are here to protect American

[[Page S903]]

citizens, but we are losing. We are losing that battle. More than 
300,000 Americans--300,000 Americans--have died from drug overdoses 
since Joe Biden took office--300,000. I met with a police chief of 
Montgomery, AL, not too long ago. He said: Coach, I had never heard the 
word ``fentanyl'' until 2 years ago; and now, it is 95 percent of what 
we have on our streets here in Montgomery, AL, killing young people. 
That is roughly half of the Americans killed in the Civil War--300,000. 
And that was the deadliest war in American history. The Governor of 
Oregon recently declared a state of emergency over fentanyl. The 
Governor is a Democrat. But she declared a state of emergency. Where 
does she think the fentanyl is coming from? She should demand that the 
people that represent the constituents in her State do something about 
what is happening.
  Federal law enforcement has said for years that almost all of these 
drugs are coming over the southern border. You don't have to take my 
word for it. That is what the DEA has said for years. Under Obama, 
under Trump, and under Biden, they said that most of the drugs that 
come into our country come across the southern border.
  Every day we fail to secure our border, another 150 Americans die 
from overdoses--150 a day--a planeload of people. This is in addition 
to Americans who are victims of crime committed by illegals. A few 
weeks ago, we saw the video of illegal aliens attacking New York City 
police officers. New York City is a sanctuary city. In fact, New York 
City is giving out free money on debit cards to illegal aliens as we 
speak. American citizens don't qualify for this money that the New York 
City government is giving out. If you are a citizen, you don't qualify 
for it. American citizens just have to pay for it.
  Yet New Yorkers wonder why there is a magnet pulling illegal aliens 
from all over the world into their city. You wonder why that is? New 
York State is also a sanctuary state. That was a policy choice by the 
current Governor. That means they do not cooperate with ICE. That is 
what a sanctuary city does. When an illegal commits a crime in New York 
or Philadelphia or Boston, they do not get sent to ICE when their jail 
time is up. It doesn't matter what crime they commit. My Democratic 
colleagues want these criminals to stay in our country because they 
don't want them to have to be sent home because that is exactly what 
ICE would do.
  In the New York case, these illegals who attacked the NYPD officers 
were jailed and then released without bail. They were let back on the 
street where they can continue to commit crimes against Americans. This 
case shows you how much Democrats care about our police officers. 
``Defund the police'' is all I have heard since I have been here. 
Really? They want police to go out and arrest the same people over and 
over again. Police are risking their lives every day. Every time they 
arrest someone, every time they kick in a door, they are risking their 
lives. Yet liberal judges and leftwing prosecutors will just let 
criminals go back on the street again, again, and again.
  Democrats like President Biden talk about a lot of compassion in our 
immigration system. We have to be compassionate. They don't have any 
compassion for Americans. They don't have compassion for Americans like 
Kate Steinle who was murdered in San Francisco. They don't have 
compassion for the woman who was raped by an illegal on a train 
recently in Philadelphia. They don't have compassion for the mother and 
daughter killed by a drunk driver who had allegedly been deported four 
times.
  When Americans get attacked or even killed by illegals, Democrats 
just see that as collateral damage. It is just the price of open 
borders. It is clearly more important to them to keep the border open 
than to bring justice to the victims.
  Protect American citizens. What an idea. Just weeks ago, the House 
voted on legislation to deport illegals who have been caught driving 
drunk--deport them.
  Madam President, 150 House Democrats voted against deporting anybody 
that was illegal caught driving drunk--150. The House also voted on 
legislation to deport illegals who committed Social Security fraud; 150 
House Democrats voted against it. Democrats won't even do the most 
basic things to secure our border--won't do anything.
  Now that it is an election year, obviously, now that we have gotten 
to this point and people have to have votes, we are supposed to believe 
that our Democratic colleagues have had a total change of heart--
because I have not seen anybody down there in 3 years and 2 months, and 
I have been going once or twice a year. I have not seen any of my 
Democratic colleagues down there. I wouldn't be shocked if I didn't see 
somebody down there in the near future because it is an election year.
  They are paying lip service to the crisis at the border. They don't 
listen to their rhetoric. Look at their actions. Democrats are not 
doing anything of substance that would actually help. President Biden 
could start by undoing all 94 Executive actions on immigration. We 
didn't need to do that, but he did it because he wants open borders.
  Earlier today, I spoke at length about why the Schumer-Murphy border 
bill is not good enough. I won't belabor the point, but, as Senator 
Murphy said, under their bill, the border never closes. That gets 
pretty much to the point. Even at 5,000 crossings a day, we would still 
process 1,400 illegals per day--1,400.
  This is like putting a bandaid on a bullet hole. Why even worry about 
it?
  The acceptable number of illegal crossings is not 5,000. It is not 
4,000. It is zero. In a TV interview a few days ago, Chris Murphy said:

       We failed to deliver for the [American] people we care 
     about most.

  No, they care more about the undocumented Americans.
  What is an undocumented American? Undocumented is just a leftwing 
code for illegal. They don't like using the word ``illegal.'' The term 
used in Federal law is ``illegal alien.'' That is who we are talking 
about.
  These are not Americans who lost their paperwork and just can't find 
their documents or lost their passport. These are illegal aliens who 
have no right--no right--to be here. First, we stop them from coming 
in, and then we deport the ones who are here.
  For decades, we have been told that there are about 11 or 12 million 
illegals here right now. I would say that is very, very short on 
numbers, but this is a huge problem. Alabama's population is 5 
million--my home State. So there are two States of Alabama's worth of 
illegals already here before Joe Biden let in the other 8 million. This 
takes away power from American citizens.
  They are overrunning our hospitals, our schools. They are even 
affecting the balance of power in Congress and the electoral college. 
Seats in the House of Representatives are divided up based on census. 
Votes in an electoral college are based in votes on Congress. Right 
now, illegals are counted as part of the census.
  A Democratic Member of Congress went on TV recently and said:

       I need more people in my district just for redistricting 
     purposes.

  The presence of tens of millions of illegals in this country is 
tipping power to blue cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and 
Los Angeles.
  It is watering down the power of the American voter. I joined with 
Senator Hagerty to introduce legislation to fix this. Only American 
citizens should have representation in Congress. We ought to count 
citizens only. Otherwise, our voting system is not equal for all 
Americans.
  This shouldn't be a partisan issue. This should be an American issue. 
But it looks like a partisan issue when Democrats in Congress go on 
television and say they need more illegals in their State for 
redistricting.
  Democrats have shown no willingness to stop this crisis--none. They 
put out some press releases and a few vague statements in the press, 
but they have taken no meaningful action in 3 years. Actions speaks 
louder than words.
  Remember, President Trump had the same laws on the books as President 
Biden, but President Trump secured the border. He went with the law. He 
went with the Constitution. Joe Biden opened it up.
  And so new laws are not absolutely necessary, but certain new laws 
would be very helpful. And so, right now, I would like to propose an 
amendment to the Ukraine bill that would actually secure the border. My 
amendment is still a bill. It is a bill I have introduced called the 
Border Safety and Security

[[Page S904]]

Act. The bill would simply suspend all illegal entries, completely, 
until the Department of Homeland Security has operational control over 
the border.
  My amendment also prohibits mass parole programs. The Schumer border 
bill would have allowed parole programs to continue at an unlimited 
pace.
  My amendment prohibits catch-and-release and requires detention. The 
Schumer bill would require release of illegal aliens.
  The Schumer bill would have allowed up to 4,999 border crossings a 
day. My amendment would mean zero crossings as soon as it is signed 
into law.
  It also allows States to sue the administration if it doesn't do its 
job and enforce the laws.
  We should not pass a Ukraine bill until we first pass a border bill 
worthy of the name. That was my position in December, and it is my 
position now. Either we will end this border crisis, or this border 
crisis will end us.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
  Mr. PAUL. Madam President, often the titles of bills before the 
legislature don't really represent what the bill stands for. The title 
of this bill should say ``Ukraine First, America Last'' because that is 
what this is really about.
  Now, bills in the legislature, bills that come before the Senate, 
don't have pictures or covers on them like a book would have or a 
magazine. But if this bill had an image or a cover on the front of the 
bill, the image would be the migrant in New York who assaulted a police 
officer, was freed from jail on no bail, and gave the middle finger of 
both hands to America.
  That is what this bill is. It is the middle finger to America. This 
bill is the middle finger to every working man and woman in America, 
every struggling American family. This bill gives them the middle 
finger and says: We don't care about you. We care more about Ukraine 
than we care about our southern border.
  We don't seem to care or these ``Ukraine Firsters'' don't seem to 
care about the crime that is happening. They don't seem to care about 
the assault on a police officer in New York. They are intent on more 
coming in. Just that one image of that man, that migrant, that illegal 
immigrant who came across the border and decided to assault, with a 
whole group of other thugs, to assault a police officer in New York--
just that image alone ought to be enough for us to say: Enough is 
enough.
  Enough is enough. We really have to control our border. Guess what. 
From now on, the only people who can come into America are legal 
immigrants. But this bill--this bill--ignores the southern border. 
Almost a million people came over the border in the last 3 months, 
almost a million people. And the ``Ukraine Firsters'' are saying: We 
don't care about the southern border; we care about Ukraine first.
  And so the picture, the image that every American should have when 
they see all of these billions of dollars--$60 billion being shoveled 
out the door, being loaded on the plane--as you see the smiling 
politicians gleefully dropping off the pallets of cash over there, 
every American should remember the image of the young man giving 
America the bird after he assaulted a police officer.
  That is the image of this bill. That is the image of the ``Ukraine 
Firsters,'' and nobody should forget about it.
  When we look at the problems that we face, we need to be fully aware 
that there is no pot of money. There are no surplus funds. There is no 
money to give to Ukraine. We don't have enough money to pay our bills. 
We do not have enough money to pay for what we budget every year. In 
fact, the entire budget that Congress votes on is borrowed.
  Let me make that very clear: The entire budget--not a little bit of 
it, not half of it, the entire budget--is borrowed. This would be like 
someone saying: Well, yeah, I don't have any money for rent, and I 
don't have a job. I am going to borrow the money for my rent.
  That is essentially where we are.
  Two-thirds of spending up here is entitlements. All of the tax 
revenue from every source that comes into the Federal Government is 
only enough to pay for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and food 
stamps. Everything else is borrowed. And we don't vote on the 
entitlements. The entitlements are on autopilot.
  What do we vote on? We vote on what is military discretionary and 
nonmilitary discretionary--$1.5 trillion.
  So people talk about: What is a trillion dollars? Well, we are 
running a $1.5 trillion deficit in 1 year. So in 2 years, $3 trillion 
is accumulated. How much is a trillion? How much is $3 trillion? If you 
take a trillion in $1 bills and you stack them up, $3 trillion would 
reach to the Moon. So 240,000 miles high would be the stack of $1 
bills. That is what we borrow in a 2-year period.
  But it is accelerating. Just in the last week, the Federal Reserve 
Chairman said the debt problem is ``urgent.'' Jamie Dimon, head of one 
of the big banks, JPMorgan Chase, says: The problem is urgent. Some of 
the economists and authors that wrote about the collapse in 2008 that 
predicted it coming have said that the debt is an urgent problem.
  So how does the Senate respond to some of the keenest minds in the 
country saying that we have a debt crisis? They respond by sending $100 
billion of your money overseas.
  And it is not money we have got on hand. It is not cash on hand. We 
don't have any money. We are flat broke.
  People say: It is for our national defense. We have these ``Cold 
Warriors'' who still believe in the domino theory, and they say we are 
going to be somehow overrun by communists if we don't do this.
  But we have no money. There is no money to be sent over there. It all 
has to be borrowed.
  The title of this bill should be ``Ukraine First, America Last,'' if 
they were being honest.
  Sixty-one percent of Americans work paycheck to paycheck. Eight out 
of 10 Americans who make $50,000 don't have enough money on hand to pay 
their bills. If something goes wrong for them, do you think they are 
excited about having their tax dollars shipped off to Ukraine?
  Ukraine first, America last--that is what this bill is about. It is 
about giving the middle finger to America. It is about giving the 
middle finger to every working-class man and woman in America. It is an 
insult. It should be rejected. It should be soundly rejected, and we 
should get back to the business of this country, which is protecting 
our borders.
  We have got a real problem. Democrats didn't even seem to think there 
was a border problem until a few hundred of them were shipped to New 
York, and, all of a sudden, they think there is a problem now. So they 
put them up in a fancy hotel, and they spend millions of dollars 
coddling them.
  But, mark my words, the American people are smarter than the elitists 
up here. The title of this bill is and ought to be if they were honest: 
``Ukraine First and America Last.'' That is what the authors should 
have called this bill.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  How much time do I have remaining?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 1 minute remaining.
  Mr. PAUL. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.
  Mr. LEE. Madam President, there are a number of things that make the 
U.S. Senate unique as an institution. We have got every single State in 
the Union that is represented equally. If you are a big State or a 
small State, a huge population or a tiny one, you have got two 
Senators. That makes our work more important and all the more unique. 
We need to represent our States, looking out for the people of our 
States, and our States sometimes as States.
  I can make a case that voting to pass this bill under these 
circumstances, without amendments or any language whatsoever forcing 
the issue of border security, forcing the border to be made secure by a 
reluctant, recalcitrant, willfully disobedient administration hellbent 
on not enforcing the border-- this is a decision that empowers drug 
cartels, dissolves our borders, and spends insane amounts of money that 
we don't have on priorities of foreign countries--all at the same time.

  Now, look, Senators here today, as always, have an obligation to vote 
no on bills that do bad things. We have an obligation to vote no today 
on bills--including and especially this bill--but

[[Page S905]]

all bills, certainly, that prioritize gangs above Governors, cartels 
above courts, encourage breaking the law over enforcing the law.
  Voting yes on this bill is a capitulation. It is a surrender. It is a 
vote for flooded classrooms and crowded hospitals. It is a vote for 
increased homelessness, deaths by overdose. It is a vote that 
undermines law enforcement; puts citizenship itself at risk and in 
doubt; adds burdens to teachers, food banks; undercuts safety in our 
community parks; and threatens the first jobs that lead to the second 
jobs that, ultimately, culminate in the best jobs for our younger 
people.
  Those who vote yes undermine what Senators are elected to do first 
and foremost, which is to represent our States, not sides. Every 
Senator has the chance--the chance today, the chance tonight, this very 
evening, to vote no on this bill and, by so doing, vote in support of 
Governors, schools, hospitals, churches, playgrounds, clean streets, 
and safe neighborhoods.
  By voting against more funding for Ukraine tonight in this bill 
without any language finally compelling President Biden to enforce the 
border, Senators have a chance to vote against more border chaos, no to 
sanctioned corruptions, and no to shifting our burden of representation 
onto the shoulders of families, police officers, charitable 
organizations, school principals, judges, doctors, and parents.
  Look, at the end of the day, everyone wants peace. World peace, 
however, isn't always within our grasp. World peace isn't our principal 
business. All we can do is world funding, and that is all government 
can ever do is tax, spend, print, and force.
  Our economy is our business; our debt reduction is our business; our 
leadership, due to our multilateral strength, is essential.
  But this, alas, undermines what makes us strong in an attempt to 
prove our strength. And, in trying to do that, we will become less 
strong.
  We are not helping any group of people whenever we prolong a war in 
which they are involved. It doesn't help the Ukrainian people to 
prolong their suffering in this war, and it doesn't help our people to 
refuse to finally--after the Senate Republican conference has come to a 
conclusion, after Senate Republicans have made a commitment to each 
other, to our counterparts in the House, to voters in our respective 
States and across America, we use this as an opportunity to force a 
bargain, a real bargain, a bargain that harnesses appetite more 
prevalent on the left to fund Ukraine and an appetite, sadly, existing 
almost exclusively among Republicans to force the issue of border 
security.
  We committed to that some 3 months ago. We got a bill Sunday night, a 
week ago Sunday night at 7 p.m. eastern standard time that, 
unfortunately, didn't do that. It did other things. It contained some 
provisions that might prove helpful here and there, but it contained a 
lot of other provisions that made clear it wouldn't force this 
administration to do what this administration could already do.
  That was the essence of the bargain that we struck, the agreement, 
the commitment that we made to each other and to our voters months ago. 
Republicans stand for border security and the rule of law.
  Regardless of where they come down on Ukraine aid, they should 
realize that we are forfeiting that leverage, that bargaining power 
tonight if we vote for this. I encourage my colleagues emphatically to 
oppose cloture tonight. And by opposing cloture, to vote for America's 
communities and for the rule of law.
  I yield the floor and reserve the balance of my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.
  Mr. ROMNEY. Madam President, the vote we will soon take to provide 
military weapons for Ukraine is the most important vote we will ever 
take as U.S. Senators. We are not being asked to send American troops 
into war. We are asked to help the Ukrainians defend themselves.
  If we fail to help Ukraine, Putin will invade a NATO nation. He may 
delay his next invasion until he rebuilds his decimated military, but 
we must be clear-eyed. Ukraine is not the end; it is a step.
  If we fail to help Ukraine, China will eventually absorb Taiwan. If 
we fail to help Ukraine, we will abandon our word and our commitment, 
providing to our friends a view that America cannot be trusted.
  The Chinese Communist Party is already spreading propaganda, using 
our delay as a warning to Taiwan that the United States will not be 
there to help in the face of China's threat.
  If we fail to help Ukraine, NATO, the alliance that has prevented 
great power conflict for over 75 years, will falter and eventually 
disintegrate.
  If we fail to help Ukraine, America will cease to be the arsenal of 
democracy. It will cease to be the leader of the free world. We will be 
replaced by the authoritarians: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
  If we fail to help Ukraine, we will be known not as our fathers and 
mothers were, the ``greatest generation,'' but as the worst generation.
  Now, for months, I have listened to the arguments for denying help to 
the Ukrainian people. I have observed that the reasons have evolved 
over time. First, it was claimed that Europe was not paying their fair 
share. That was proven incorrect. Our allies have already contributed 
more than $96 billion in aid, and the EU earlier this month agreed to 
provide $54 billion more over the next 4 years.
  Next, it was argued that we should, instead, focus on the Pacific and 
Taiwan, but Taiwan and Japan and South Korea tell us that the single 
best thing we can do to dissuade China's aggression is to support 
Ukraine.
  Next, we were told that we couldn't afford $60 billion for Ukraine-
related funding. But, somehow, we can afford an $850 billion annual 
defense budget, an annual trillion-dollar deficits--which has happened 
under both former President Trump and President Biden.
  Next, it was claimed that we would have insufficient weapons to 
defend America and Israel if we send more weapons to Ukraine. But the 
Department of Defense has explained that helping Ukraine will actually 
strengthen our national security by helping to rebuild our depleted 
military-industrial base.
  The latest excuse for denying aid to Ukraine is that this bill is a 
clever disguise to set up an impeachment of Donald Trump at some point 
in the future. Under this so-called logic, Trump has to be elected, 
Democrats have to win the House, and those Democrats have to be unable 
to find any other discretion of Donald Trump's upon which to base an 
impeachment.
  Now, I know that the shock jocks and online instigators have 
effectively riled up many in the far reaches of my party. But if your 
position is being cheered by Vladimir Putin, it is time to reconsider 
your position.
  Now, I can't see into the future. But there are no guarantees that 
Ukraine will defeat Russia, but that does not mean that we should stand 
back and let Putin have his way with Europe.
  What sending weapons to Ukraine does do is help discourage further 
Russian and Chinese invasions, which could draw us in. It helps 
preserve NATO. It allows America to remain the leader of the free 
world, and it shows that we honor our word to our friends and allies.
  Lech Walesa, the first democratically elected President of Poland 
since 1926 and someone I have been fortunate enough to meet with, 
recently wrote to all the U.S. Senators. He said this:

       You are obliged to assure a peaceful future for your 
     children. Our grandchildren will never forgive us if we fail 
     to stop Russia now. If the U.S. does not lead, nobody will.

  I couldn't agree more. Helping a free people defend their freedom is 
simply the right thing to do.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
  Ms. COLLINS. Madam President, last week, General Kurilla, the 
Commander of U.S. Central Command, gave me a briefing that was directly 
relevant to the national securities supplement that we are now 
considering. During the course of that briefing, the general told me 
that this is the most dangerous security situation in 50 years. The 
threats that the United States faces from an aggressive Iran and its 
proxies, an imperialistic Russia, a hegemonic China, are 
interconnected, and they require our immediate attention and a strong 
response.
  That is why this bill focuses on fortifying our military, rebuilding 
our

[[Page S906]]

own defense-industrial base, and strengthening and defending our 
partners and allies.
  This legislation would send a strong message to Putin that his goal 
of capturing free democratic nations will not be allowed to succeed. It 
would reassure our closest ally in the Middle East, Israel, that 
terrorists will not achieve their goal of wiping that nation off the 
map, and it would counter ever-growing Chinese aggression.
  I urge our colleagues to recognize the perilous times in which we are 
living and vote for this absolutely essential national security bill. 
The world is watching to see if the United States is still the leader 
of the free world.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The President pro tempore.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, we all understand we cannot leave our 
job here unfinished. The clock is ticking right now, and there is so 
much at stake. We have a strong, bipartisan package to support our 
allies in Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific and provide 
humanitarian aid to civilians who are caught in conflict. By passing 
this bill, we would show our allies we stand by our word and we will 
help them in the time of need. We will show dictators that their 
flagrant attacks will not go unchecked and they cannot steamroll our 
allies. And we will show the world that American leadership is still 
alive and well and that we are still a strong protector of democracy 
and provider of humanitarian aid.
  Given all the stakes of this moment, now--right now--is a critical 
time to send that message, which is why I am glad we are here on the 
cusp of passing this bill in the Senate.
  And to my colleagues who have been holding this up and dragging the 
process out, we can disagree. You can vote against this. That is how it 
works. But one way or another, this aid will get to our allies. We 
spent months going back and forth to try and get a bill to the floor, 
and now we are here. We are not going to let a few more hours or a few 
more days wear us down.
  However, what is an inconvenient delay for the U.S. Senate is a 
dangerous one for our allies in Ukraine. Putin's forces are on the 
march as we speak. Ukrainians are fighting bravely to defend their 
homeland, but they are running lower and lower on bullets, air defense 
missiles, and more every day.
  We measure time in hours; they are measuring it in how many bullets 
they have left, how many more missiles fall on their cities, and how 
much closer Putin's tanks are getting. The question for us is: How long 
is this going to take? The question for them is: How much longer can 
they hold out?
  We cannot leave them waiting. So I urge my colleagues to support 
moving forward on these votes, vote to waive the budget point of order, 
and let's keep this bill moving.
  And once we get it through the Senate, we are going to push every way 
we can to get this to the President's desk and signed into law.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.


                   Motion to Table Amendment No. 1579

  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I move to table amendment No. 1579.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion to 
table.
  The motion is agreed to, and the amendment is tabled.
  The motion was agreed to.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.


                   Motion to Table Amendment No. 1577

  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I move to table amendment No. 1577.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
  The motion is agreed to, and the amendment is tabled.
  The motion was agreed to.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.


                             Point of Order

  Mr. VANCE. Madam President, pursuant to section 314(e) of the 
Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order against all 
emergency designation provisions contained in Senate amendment No. 1388 
to H.R. 815, a list of which I am sending to the desk.
  The list is as follows:

        S.A. 1388 to H.R. 815, Emergency Designation Provisions


               Division A. Title I--Department of Defense

     Military Personnel
       1. Military Personnel, Army
       2. Military Personnel, Marine Corps
       3. Military Personnel, Air Force
       4. Military Personnel, Space Force
     Operation and Maintenance
       5. Operation and Maintenance, Army
       6. Operation and Maintenance, Navy
       7. Operation and Maintenance, Marine Corps
       8. Operation and Maintenance, Air Force
       9. Operations and Maintenance, Space Force
       10. Operations and Maintenance, Defense-Wide (including 
     transfers of funds)
     Procurement
       11. Military Procurement, Army
       12. Procurement of Ammunition, Army
       13. Other Procurement, Army
       14. Weapons Procurement, Navy
       15. Shipbuilding and Conversion, Navy
       16. Other Procurement, Navy
       17. Procurement, Marine Corps
       18. Missile Procurement, Air Force
       19. Other Procurement, Air Force
       20. Procurement, Defense-Wide
       21. Defense Production Act Purchases
     Research, Development, Test and Evaluation
       22. Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Army
       23. Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Navy
       24. Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Air Force
       25. Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-
     Wide
     Other Department of Defense Programs
       26. Office of the Inspector General
     Related Agencies
       27. Intelligence Community Management Account
     General Provisions--This Title
       28. Section 104
       29. Section 105


               Division A, Title II--Department of Energy

     Energy Programs
       30. Science
     Atomic Energy Defense Activities National Nuclear Security 
         Administration
       31. Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation
       32. Federal Salaries and Expenses


         Division A, Title III--Department of Homeland Security

     Protection Preparedness, Response and Recovery
       33. Federal Emergency Management Agency Operations and 
     Support
       34. Federal Assistance


     Division A, Title IV--Department of Health and Human Services

     Administration for Children and Families
       35. Refugee and Entrant Assistance
     General Provisions--This Title
       36. Section 401--


               Division A, Title V--Department of Defense

       37. Military Construction, Navy and Marine Corp


      Division A, Title VI--Department of State and Related Agency

     Department of State
       38. Administration of Foreign Affairs Diplomatic Programs
       39. Office of Inspector General
       40. Emergencies in the Diplomatic and Consular Service
     United States Agency for International Development
       41. Funds Appropriated to the President Operating Expenses
       42. Office of Inspector General
     Bilateral Economic Assistance
       43. Funds Appropriated to the President International 
     Disaster Assistance
       44. Transition Initiatives
       45. Economic Support Fund
       46. Assistance for Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia
       47. Department of State Migration and Refugee Assistance
       48. Department of State International Narcotics Control and 
     Law Enforcement
       49. Nonproliferation, Anti-Terrorism, Demining and Related 
     Programs
       50. Peacekeeping Operations
       51. Funds Appropriated to the President Foreign Military 
     Financing Program
     International Assistance Programs
       52. Multilateral Assistance Contribution to the 
     International Development Association
     General Provisions--This Title (including transfers of funds)
       53. Section 612(c)

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.


                            Motion to Waive

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, pursuant to section 904 of the 
Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive all applicable 
sections of that Act and any other applicable points of order for the 
consideration of H.R. 815.
  And I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There is a sufficient second.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.

[[Page S907]]

  

  Mr. THUNE: The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Wyoming (Ms. Lummis).


 =========================== NOTE =========================== 

  
  On page S907, February 12, 2024, first column, the following 
appears: Mr. THUNE: The following Senator is necessarily absent: 
the Senator from Wyoming (Ms. Lummus).
  
  The online Record has been corrected to read: Mr. THUNE: The 
following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Wyoming 
(Ms. Lummis).


 ========================= END NOTE ========================= 


  The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 66, nays 33, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 45 Leg.]

                                YEAS--66

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Brown
     Butler
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Ernst
     Fetterman
     Gillibrand
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hickenlooper
     Hirono
     Kaine
     Kelly
     Kennedy
     King
     Klobuchar
     Lujan
     Manchin
     Markey
     McConnell
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Ossoff
     Padilla
     Peters
     Reed
     Romney
     Rosen
     Rounds
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Sinema
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Tester
     Thune
     Tillis
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warnock
     Warren
     Welch
     Whitehouse
     Wicker
     Wyden
     Young

                                NAYS--33

     Barrasso
     Blackburn
     Boozman
     Braun
     Britt
     Budd
     Cotton
     Cramer
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Fischer
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hagerty
     Hawley
     Hoeven
     Hyde-Smith
     Johnson
     Lankford
     Lee
     Marshall
     Mullin
     Paul
     Ricketts
     Risch
     Rubio
     Sanders
     Schmitt
     Scott (FL)
     Scott (SC)
     Tuberville
     Vance

                             NOT VOTING--1

       
     Lummis
       
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 66, and the nays 
are 33.
  Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn having voted in 
the affirmative, the motion is agreed to, and the point of order falls.
  The motion was agreed to.


                       Vote on Amendment No. 1388

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to amendment No. 
1388.
  The yeas and nays were previously ordered.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Wyoming (Ms. Lummis).
  The result was announced--yeas 66, nays 33, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 46 Leg.]

                                YEAS--66

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Brown
     Butler
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Ernst
     Fetterman
     Gillibrand
     Grassley
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hickenlooper
     Hirono
     Kaine
     Kelly
     Kennedy
     King
     Klobuchar
     Lujan
     Manchin
     Markey
     McConnell
     Menendez
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Ossoff
     Padilla
     Peters
     Reed
     Romney
     Rosen
     Rounds
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Sinema
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Tester
     Thune
     Tillis
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warnock
     Warren
     Welch
     Whitehouse
     Wicker
     Wyden
     Young

                                NAYS--33

     Barrasso
     Blackburn
     Boozman
     Braun
     Britt
     Budd
     Cotton
     Cramer
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Fischer
     Graham
     Hagerty
     Hawley
     Hoeven
     Hyde-Smith
     Johnson
     Lankford
     Lee
     Marshall
     Merkley
     Mullin
     Paul
     Ricketts
     Risch
     Rubio
     Sanders
     Schmitt
     Scott (FL)
     Scott (SC)
     Tuberville
     Vance

                             NOT VOTING--1

       
     Lummis
       
  The amendment (No. 1388), in the nature of a substitute, was agreed 
to.


                             Cloture Motion

  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Padilla). Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair 
lays before the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will 
state.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

                             Cloture Motion

       We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the 
     provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, 
     do hereby move to bring to a close debate on Calendar No. 30, 
     H.R. 815, a bill 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.
         Charles E. Schumer, Patty Murray, Brian Schatz, Margaret 
           Wood Hassan, Angus S. King, Jr., Sherrod Brown, Mark R. 
           Warner, Jack Reed, Richard J. Durbin, Catherine Cortez 
           Masto, Christopher A. Coons, Michael F. Bennet, Sheldon 
           Whitehouse, Mark Kelly, Martin Heinrich, Richard 
           Blumenthal, Benjamin L. Cardin.


                              Quorum Call

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair now directs 
the clerk to call the roll to ascertain the presence of a quorum.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll and the 
following Senators entered the Chamber and answered to their names:

                             [Quorum No. 2]

     Baldwin
     Barrasso
     Bennet
     Blackburn
     Blumenthal
     Boozman
     Braun
     Britt
     Brown
     Butler
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Cotton
     Cramer
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Ernst
     Fisher
     Gillibrand
     Grassley
     Hagerty
     Hassan
     Hawley


 =========================== NOTE =========================== 

  
  On page S907, February 12, 2024, second column, the following 
appears: [Quorum No. 2] Hawky
  
  The online Record has been corrected to read: [Quorum No. 2] 
Hawley


 ========================= END NOTE ========================= 

                                Heinrich
                                 Hirono
                                 Hoeven
                               Hyde-Smith
                                Johnson
                                 Kaine
                                 Kelly
                                Kennedy
                                  King
                               Klobuchar
                                Lankford
                                  Lee
                                Manchin
                                 Markey
                                Marshall
                               McConnell
                                Menendez
                                 Moran
                                 Mullin
                                 Murphy
                                 Murray
                                Padilla
                                 Peters
                                  Reed
                                 Romney
                                 Rosen
                                 Rounds
                                 Rubio
                                Sanders
                                 Schatz
                                Schmitt
                                Schumer
                                Shaheen
                                 Sinema
                                 Smith
                                Stabenow
                                Sullivan
                                 Tester
                                 Thune
                                 Tillis
                                 Warner
                                Warnock
                                 Warren
                                 Welch
                               Whitehouse
                                 Wicker
                                 Wyden
                                 Young
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. A quorum is present.


                         Vote on Cloture Motion

  The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on H.R. 
815, a bill 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, shall be brought to a 
close?
  The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Wyoming (Ms. Lummis).
  The result was announced--yeas 66, nays 33, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 47 Leg.]

                                YEAS--66

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Brown
     Butler
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Ernst
     Fetterman
     Gillibrand
     Grassley
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hickenlooper
     Hirono
     Kaine
     Kelly
     Kennedy
     King
     Klobuchar
     Lujan
     Manchin
     Markey
     McConnell
     Menendez
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Ossoff
     Padilla
     Peters
     Reed
     Romney
     Rosen
     Rounds
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Sinema
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Tester
     Thune
     Tillis
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warnock
     Warren
     Welch
     Whitehouse
     Wicker
     Wyden
     Young

                                NAYS--33

     Barrasso
     Blackburn
     Boozman
     Braun
     Britt
     Budd
     Cotton
     Cramer
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Fischer
     Graham
     Hagerty
     Hawley
     Hoeven
     Hyde-Smith
     Johnson
     Lankford
     Lee
     Marshall
     Merkley
     Mullin
     Paul
     Ricketts
     Risch
     Rubio
     Sanders
     Schmitt
     Scott (FL)
     Scott (SC)
     Tuberville
     Vance

                             NOT VOTING--1

       
     Lummis
       
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 66, the nays are 
33.
  Three-fifths of the Senators, duly chosen and sworn, having voted in 
the affirmative, the motion is agreed to.
  The Senator from Kentucky.


                                H.R. 815

  Mr. PAUL. This filibuster now enters its fifth day. For many people 
across America, they may not understand the Byzantine rules of the 
Senate, but they allow for sufficient debate on important questions. 
Often the rules of the Senate are abbreviated, and bills are passed in 
a quick fashion--sometimes too quickly, sometimes without sufficient 
discussion, sometimes without sufficient review.
  But this bill will take a while to pass. We have been here through 
the weekend; we were here on Super Bowl Sunday--none of it because of a 
desire to punish or a desire to inflict pain on those from the other 
party or another persuasion, but with the desire that

[[Page S908]]

there be a full and sufficient airing of the pros and cons of this 
legislation.
  This is not the naming of a post office. This is a profound question 
about where our priorities are as a nation. Are our priorities as a 
nation the borders of Ukraine or the borders of the United States?
  We had a chance, in the beginning, to perhaps discuss both, but 
immediately that chance was lost when the proposal to control the 
border was inadequate. It would have actually been less than the 
current law. It would have actually allowed 1.8 million illegal 
immigrants to continue to flow into the country.
  The battle to attach border security to this bill was lost, frankly, 
when the Democrat cosponsor tweeted out to the public how proud he was 
that the bill would never close the border; that even under an 
emergency, as the bill defined it, even with 5,000 people coming across 
illegally, that the ports of entry would always be open.
  And the American people reacted, and they called us, as they have 
called us by the thousands today, to say: Continue the debate. Don't 
give up. The debate is worth it.
  Our phone lines have been jammed all day. People have been texting 
and messaging saying: Don't give up the fight. The fight is worth it.
  The fight is worth it on many levels. Most profoundly, the fight is 
worth it because we have no money. More than the debate over the 
border, more than the debate over whether we should fund Ukraine, the 
fight is over whether or not we are going to stave off calamity by 
controlling our expenditures; and when we have priorities, when we set 
those priorities, where we spend the money, where it is most needed.
  I will never forget being in a committee hearing and a member of the 
opposite party looked at me and said, ``We shouldn't have to make 
choices,'' because I said: Shouldn't we set priorities? Shouldn't we 
spend money on what is most important and leave those things not as 
important for another day when we have more money?
  Because, you see, this is the way government operates at every level 
other than in Washington. If you go to your city council, at any city 
anywhere in the country, or you go to your county magistrates, or you 
go to your State government, they are all constrained by spending that 
which comes in.
  We are the only government in America--unfortunately the biggest and 
most expensive--but we are the only government in America that is not 
constrained by their budget.
  In fact, we don't even have a budget most years. We don't operate 
under a budget currently. They can't even take the time to pass a 
budget.
  But even if there were a budget, it is not constrained by the amount 
of money that comes in. We just spend.
  There are never any priorities set saying: Well, this is more 
important than this. So we will have to wait until next year to spend 
the money on this.
  So it is always just spend it on everything.
  But as we come to this crisis in our country with $34 trillion of 
debt, we are adding between $2 and $300 billion in debt every month. 
Our interest payment has doubled. We are basically borrowing to pay the 
rent. This is a disaster unfolding before us.
  There are some who describe a ``black swan'' event. Nassim Taleb 
wrote a book called ``The Black Swan.'' It is an unexpected big event 
that just sort of consumes, like the 2008 crisis we had. Some predicted 
it, but it was still a ``black swan'' that arose out of nowhere and was 
enormous.
  But many people are calling this more of a ``white swan.'' It is a 
big event. It is an important event, but it is unfolding in slow 
motion. It is unfolding with all kinds of warning signs.
  Federal Reserve Chairman Powell recently said, in the last week or 2, 
that the debt is urgent, that somebody must do something about it. But 
when you tell that to many Members of this body--that it is urgent that 
we deal with the debt--the response to the debt wouldn't be sending 
$100 billion to another country. The responsibility of dealing with the 
debt, the urgency of the debt, would be to do something about 
controlling the expenditures. And yet the response of this body, upon 
hearing from the Federal Reserve Chairman; upon hearing from the 
chairman of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, that he was concerned about 
the accumulation of debt; upon hearing from economist after economist 
that this is unfolding, that the interests rates are rising, that 
interest rates are going to squeeze out other spending, and that there 
may come a day in which we destroy the dollar, the response is to send 
$100 billion to Ukraine?

  So while superficially and initially the debate here has been about 
whether Ukraine comes first or America comes first--so many bills here 
are inappropriately titled. Many of them say they are going to do all 
of these great things, but in the end, there is a more accurate title 
for so many bills, and the more accurate title for this bill would be 
``Ukraine First, America Last'' because they are prioritizing the 
border of Ukraine over the border of the United States.
  This isn't someone alleging a problem. This isn't us making it up and 
saying there is a border crisis. This is us seeing it in person--
785,000 people coming across illegally.
  People say: What is it? Do you have a problem with immigrants?
  I say: No. I am for lawful immigration. We bring in about 1 million 
people a year--that is pretty many. I am actually a sponsor, with some 
on the other side of the aisle, to bring in more people lawfully. I am 
pro-immigration. I am proud of saying that some of the best Americans 
just got here.
  I live in Bowling Green, KY. We have over 100 languages spoken in our 
schools. We have a large population of people from Bosnia. I remember 
treating my first patients from Bosnia and trying to learn a little bit 
of the language. Their language is Serbo-Croatian, so I speak exactly 
about 10 words of Serbo-Croatian. But I found the language sort of very 
logical and easy to pronounce, and I enjoy knowing a few words to try 
to communicate.
  Many of the people from Bosnia in my town own restaurants. One owns a 
trucking company. They have been very successful in our community, and 
we welcome them. Our church has invited many of them to begin with.
  So there is something great about America and accepting immigrants, 
but accepting immigrants lawfully who take the time and pledge to work 
and have a sponsor and come in in an orderly fashion is not the same as 
the people marching up through Central America. Some of them are coming 
from China. Some of them are coming from the Middle East. Some are on 
the Terror Watchlist. Many of them probably want a better way of life 
but apply to get in. We can't let everybody in all at once.
  There was a Pew or Gallup poll a few years ago, and it asked people: 
Would you want to come to America if you could? If they let you come 
in, would you come? And they estimated the percentages by country, and 
they added it up, and it was about 750 million people would come. That 
might be too many, particularly if they all came in a 2- or 3-year 
period.
  We are talking about millions of people coming across the border at a 
time, undocumented, unprocessed. I think it is a mistake. And I think 
we have made a huge mistake in this body today. And I know I won't 
convince any minds in Washington--nobody in the Senate is going to be 
of this mind--but I do truly believe the Senate is out of step.
  I talk to people at home. I go to the grocery store. I go to my 
church. I see people at home. I don't meet anybody who is saying: 
Please prioritize Ukraine. Please make sure Ukraine gets their money 
before you do anything about our southern border.
  I meet nobody saying that. I meet everybody who says the opposite, 
and these are people from all different parties--Republican, Democrat, 
Independent, Libertarian, you name it. The people I meet say: We can't 
just leave the door wide open. We have this enormous welfare state. 
There has to be a wall either around the country or around the welfare 
state. We have to do something.
  But they certainly don't beg me and plead with me to send the money 
to Ukraine. They would never support a ``Ukraine First, America Last'' 
bill, and that is what this is.
  Now, many in the blue States have sort of refused to see this for so 
long. They just have completely ignored the problem because it has 
mostly been Texas's problem--California, too, but

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Texas in particular. The tens of thousands of people coming across the 
border overwhelm the hospital system, overwhelm the city system, 
overwhelm--you name it, it is being overwhelmed by so many people. So 
it is intriguing that the only way we have gotten anybody on the other 
side--particularly in these cities in the Northeast--to at least be 
aware of the problem is to let them have some of the immigrants.
  You know the people who have ``love'' on a yard sign in their yard? 
They love everybody? They love everybody until they have all these 
immigrants in their city and say: Oh my goodness; we can't pay for it. 
They are putting them up in hotels and giving them free credit cards. 
They are just giving--you know, they go: We have 100; we will give them 
$10 million. What happens when you have 1,000 or 5,000?
  But even worse, what happens when they begin to commit crimes? 
Because, see, lawful immigration selects out for the people who want to 
work and are willing to obey the law. If you are a scofflaw, if you are 
a potential criminal, or if you got let out of a prison in Venezuela, 
guess what--that is part of what is coming across unlawfully.
  So when some of these people made their way to New York, New Yorkers 
are starting to wake up and say: My goodness, maybe we can't afford 
this. Maybe there ought to be some, you know, criminal justice applied 
to people breaking the law.
  But everybody saw the pictures. Everybody saw the pictures of a gang 
of migrants attacking two police officers, kicking them and beating 
them, kicking them to the ground--awful images. But then everybody in 
America saw the images of a migrant let out without parole a day later, 
after kicking a policeman in the face, kicking and bludgeoning a 
policeman, let out of jail with no bail. What does he do? He flips the 
finger to America, both hands, holds them high and proud, walks on by, 
and New York let him go. Nobody put him back in jail. Nobody rearrested 
him. He gave the finger to America.
  Well, guess what. This bill gives the finger to American taxpayers. 
This bill gives the finger to all of America. This bill is ``Ukraine 
First, America Last.''
  Even more than the border issue, which I think is about setting 
priorities, whether or not the priority should be America's border 
versus the Ukrainian border--I think that is a big issue, and for me, 
it is an easy one. This ought to be an ``America First'' legislature. 
We ought to be taking care of American problems before we think about 
trying to solve the world's problems.
  Now, this doesn't mean I have no sympathy for Ukraine. I hope Ukraine 
kicks Russia's butt. I hope Ukraine wins. I hope Ukraine can stave them 
off. And the battle has been somewhat fought to a standstill. But I 
know that my first oath of office and my first responsibility is to my 
country, to America.
  If we are to send $100 billion overseas, this will be a total of $170 
billion. Never ever in the history of the United States have we ever 
sent so much money to one country--$170 billion. This is about 1\1/2\, 
almost 1.75 times the entire economy of Ukraine. Never before have we 
done that.
  But the thing is, it is not like we have the money sitting around. It 
is not like we have a rainy-day fund or a surplus fund or, hey, here is 
a bunch of money we are not doing anything with. Our money is all gone.
  See, we have responsibilities. And the really I think disturbing 
thing this legislature has done--not just this one but over decades--is 
they vote for everything for everyone. Everybody's got a need, we will 
give it to you. We are not going to set priorities and spend what comes 
in; we are going to give everybody everything they want. Everybody who 
ever comes to Washington with their hands out, we are going to give you 
what you need regardless of whether we have the money to pay for it.
  So this legislature, this Senate, this Congress, has made all of 
these promises to people. They started these things. They started 
Social Security in the thirties. They started Medicare in the sixties. 
They added on to all of these problems--Medicaid, food stamps. They 
have all of these problems.
  But in being everything to everyone, in saying that you can have free 
stuff and it won't cost you anything, it has been a big lie. This big 
lie to America is that you can have your cake and eat it too. You can 
have stuff for free. We are going to give you free government stuff, 
and you won't have to pay for it. You don't have to pay taxes.
  We still have taxes in this country, but the taxes in this country 
pay for only about two-thirds of the spending. So we spend about $6 
trillion a year, and we bring in $4 trillion. In no world will that 
work. There are repercussions to that. Eventually, if you spend $2 
trillion more than your revenue, you will go into this massive debt and 
potentially a debt spiral.
  People say: The debt is meaningless. We owe it to ourselves. It 
doesn't mean anything.
  Tell that to the person who goes to the grocery store. Anybody bought 
a steak lately at the grocery store? I saw a steak in Kroger less than 
a month ago--$20 a steak. I didn't buy it.
  So the thing is that there are all kinds of problems people are 
facing. There are people with ordinary incomes that are not going up 
with inflation who are being hit by the price of food, being hit by the 
price of gas.
  Think about what has really happened when the money gets printed by 
government and it goes into these programs. The last people to get it 
are the working class. The people who get an advantage to inflation in 
the early stages are the rich people. These are the people who have 
stocks and mutual funds and retirement funds. Those people have been 
kicking butt for the last several years. The stock market is doing 
this, and they are all getting wealthy. It is the ordinary citizen in 
our country, it is those on fixed income or working class who just get 
creamed by inflation.
  But inflation isn't a mystery. They come to us, and they say: Oh, 
well, inflation--it could be transitory. It is probably over, and maybe 
it has something to do with greed.
  I say: Really? Inflation is caused by greed? Did people just become 
greedy? They haven't been greedy since the beginning of time? It is 
greed that causes inflation?
  No. It is debt that causes inflation. Inflation comes when the 
Federal Reserve buys the debt. So when we run a deficit each year, we 
spend $6 trillion and we bring in $4 trillion, the $2 trillion in debt 
has to--somebody has to finance that. So we print up Treasury bills, 
pieces of paper--that is basically what they are--and we sell them. 
Some are bought by foreigners. Some are bought by private funds in the 
United States. But then at least about one-third and sometimes more are 
bought by the Federal Reserve.
  You say: Well, that is fine. They are a big bank. They are the 
country's bank, the central bank.
  Well, but they don't have money; they own debt. And it has always 
been boggling to me. They call this the asset sheet, but it is really 
just a sheet full of debt.
  But they buy Treasury bills by printing up money, by creating money, 
and so when they do that, it dilutes the value of the currency.
  So people who say the debt is just a number and doesn't affect 
people--no. The debt causes inflation. The Federal Reserve causes 
inflation when they buy the debt, and it causes the prices to rise.
  But inflation disproportionately hurts the poor and the working 
class. Rich people can get by. You know, if the steaks cost more, the 
food costs more, their gas costs more, rich people get by. They have 
extra income. But if most of your income is going toward your rent and 
your food, you get creamed by inflation.
  Inflation is part of a bait-and-switch problem. So many of the people 
got elected here because they promised something for nothing. 
Government will be Santa Claus and will give you a free education. We 
will give you free electric cars. We will give you free electric car 
stations. We will give free money even to other countries. We will let 
people come in for free and take stuff for free. Everything is going to 
be free, but it is a bait-and-switch. It isn't really free. Nothing is 
really free. You can either pay for it through taxes--and we tax the 
heck out of everybody. Some would tax them even more. But, really, a 
third of it is left over, and it is not taxed. It ends up being this 
deficit that rolls forward, and then it is financed by the Federal 
Reserve and causes prices to rise.

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  So think about this when you think about the bait-and-switch that is 
American politics: Politicians offer people something for free. They 
say to the working class and to the poor: We will give you free stuff.
  Many people accept that, and they say: I want free stuff. I am 
struggling. I need some extra help.
  But then they don't realize that the free stuff comes with a price. 
The free stuff comes with a price, and it is an inflation tax. And the 
inflation tax hurts the very people you tried to help.
  So it is a catch-22. They are behind the eight ball. They are poor, 
and they want some help from government. But that causes the prices to 
rise, which traps them in the same place that they started with--maybe 
worse.

  So when we get a bill like this, it brings things into stark 
perspective for everyone, because what we are finding is, this isn't 
just a priority about whether we borrow the money or spend the money, 
this is about whether we spend it across the ocean or whether we spend 
it in our country.
  It is also a very visible problem that we have 785,000 people who 
came in, in the last 2 months. So we are looking at a couple of million 
people that have come in. We are close to a million already in 2 
months. So we are looking at a problem that is not something that can 
easily be pushed away.
  So this problem arose, and there was a decision to try to match up--
the Democrats really, really want to send your money to Ukraine. I 
can't tell you how much they really want to send your money to Ukraine. 
They want to send your money to Ukraine. They are hot and heavy--so hot 
and heavy to send your money to Ukraine that almost nothing would stop 
them. It was sort of the perfect situation for sort of putting up some 
leverage and saying: OK. We know you want to loot the Treasury. We know 
you have these economic theories that debt doesn't matter. We know you 
think you can just send all this money, but what about this? We won't 
let you do it unless you secure the border.
  So that is how the debate sort of began. And a lot of people say: Why 
don't Republicans stand up more?
  See, in the Senate--the unusual and really creative thing that our 
Founding Fathers did was, in the Senate they didn't make it a majority 
rule; it is a supermajority rule. So if you ever have 41 votes in the 
Senate, you can block anything the majority wants to do.
  So we have 49 Republicans. That means we have the power of 41. If we 
had interested leadership that wanted to use the strength of our 41, 
who wanted to use the strength of the minority to say: We will only let 
them shovel the money and flush it down the toilet and throw it away 
and give it to other countries--we will only let that happen if you 
secure the border. We have the leverage.
  What ended up happening is we ended up getting what I would call fake 
reform. It was reform negotiated--and the mistake was doing it, I 
think, behind closed doors and with only one individual. Not that it is 
really all that individual's fault, but the individual really needed to 
come back to the caucus and say: Do you guys think--you men and women, 
you think you might support this border bill we are putting together? 
Instead, it was just sort of an all-done deal: Here it is. And almost 
of all of us said it is not accurate. Almost all of us said it is 
actually worse than the existing law.
  So we were stuck in a conundrum, and then our leadership advocated 
it. They basically just punted. Our leadership said: We are not going 
to use the power of the minority, because we want and salivate to send 
the money to Ukraine also. This is the problem now.
  In our country, some people say there needs to be more compromise.
  Here is the compromise. You got it. You got 10 or 15 Republicans who 
side with the Democrats. They believe in Ukraine first and America 
last. They believe that we should borrow $100 billion, whether it comes 
from China or whether the Federal Reserve prints it up. We are going to 
take $100 billion we sent over there on top of the $113 billion we have 
already sent.
  And some might say: Well, you know, it is for a good cause.
  Well, shouldn't we examine what they spend it on?
  Shouldn't we have like a special inspector general, someone who is 
trained to look for waste? Shouldn't we have that person appointed to 
look at the waste?
  I have advocated for it for over a year. I forced them to vote on it. 
The Democrats all voted no, and all the Big Government Republicans who 
love this money, they voted against it, too. They don't want scrutiny 
in how the money is being spent. I even helped them to pick who would 
be the inspector general--somebody who has been doing it for 10 years.
  The inspector general that is in charge of Afghanistan is called the 
SIGAR, Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. He has done 
a great job. He has a team of over 100 people that work for him--
accountants and economists and people who look at this war spending and 
they know how to look at war spending and they know how to do war 
contracts and they know how to look for malfeasance. And he has found 
billions of dollars' worth of it.
  Now, we spent a couple trillion in Afghanistan. That is not the 
inspector general's fault; that is Congress's fault. But he has done 
his best to try to police this. He has written entire books on the 
waste. As a consequence, the people who love sending your money 
overseas, they hate him. They hate the idea. They hate the idea so much 
they voted it down with a vast majority. They don't want an inspector 
general. But if you ask them: You don't want to oversee the money? They 
would say: Oh, no. The Pentagon or the State Department or somebody who 
already has an inspector general, they will do it. And I said, Oh? You 
mean the Pentagon that can't be audited? The Pentagon that refuses to 
be audited? The Pentagon that says they are too big to be audited? You 
trust them to now oversee the money going to Ukraine, when Ukraine has 
a history of being in the bottom 10 percent as far as corruption--
meaning they have had more corruption than the other 90 percent of 
countries?
  I think that is kind of crazy.
  Even if you were for the money, you would think the power of 41--41 
supposedly conservative Republicans--could simply look them in the eye 
and say: We are giving you the money, but we want this, this, and this. 
We have the power to do it.
  They have completely abdicated the power. They threw in the towel, 
and they said: We aren't going to do anything on the border, but we are 
not even going to ask for an inspector general on this. We are just 
fine. Just shovel it out the door.
  So where is some of the money going? Inevitably, some of it is buying 
weapons. And to listen to the supporters of this bill, they are proud 
of the weapons and the profit that will go to the people who sell 
weapons.
  This, to me, just boggles the mind.
  They actually have a new name. They now call it the defense 
industrial base. Since the time of Eisenhower, it was known as the 
military-industrial complex, but they have renamed it the defense 
industrial base, and we are going to rebuild ours with war profits from 
Ukraine. So we are really not giving it to Ukraine. We are giving it to 
Ukraine, but they are giving it right back to American arms 
manufacturers.
  See, it is this sort of mercantile, sort of--oh, yeah, looks like it 
is good for business. It is good for money. And it is like: Are these 
people not realizing we are talking about a war? A war that some 
estimate some 500,000 people have died. And they are thinking: Well, 
gosh, if instead of 100,000 rifles, we send them a million, that will 
be more profit and our companies will be bigger and more profitable and 
they will be able to make more weapons for us then--not acknowledging 
that a million rifles might kill more people than 100,000.

  Or let's say we have 1,000 tanks. What if we give them 10,000 tanks? 
That will be more profit for the arms merchants. Wouldn't that be good? 
That would be great. We are reinvigorating the defense industrial base.
  Really? You are going to make the argument that war is good? Or maybe 
war ain't so bad? Or maybe just a little war here and there? If we can 
get more profit for these guys, the big companies, the large 
multinational arms manufacturers--if they just get a little more 
profit--a little more profit will be good because that will reinforce 
the defense industrial base.
  This is saying the quiet part out loud. This is saying something they

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should be embarrassed by. This is saying something so reprehensible and 
so disgusting. But it has happened to the leadership on our side, the 
leadership on the other side. It has happened also with the Biden 
administration. In committee, they come to us and they brag about how: 
This isn't really money to Ukraine; this is money to America. We are 
giving it to Ukraine, but it is sort of a conduit. It is sort of a 
laundering scheme to get the money back to America, to our arms 
manufacturers.
  So, under this logic, the longer the war goes on, the more weapons we 
sell, the better it is for our defense industrial base. So a 1-year 
war--let's say--we are closer to, I think, 2 years--a two-year war that 
has lost 500,000 people--which would be better for the defense 
industrial base, a 2-year war that loses 500,000 people or a 3-year war 
that loses 750,000 people? Well, it is a lot better for the defense 
industrial base to have a 3-year war.
  And we ask ourselves: What would be the ultimate result of the war?
  And I am going to say my sympathies are with Ukraine. Russia is the 
aggressor and Russia should be repelled and if I were Ukrainian, I 
would fight for Ukraine against the Russian aggressors. But the thing 
is, as they fight and as this war goes on, how many wars end in 
unconditional surrender? Virtually zero. World War II ended that way, 
but it was one of the few wars that ended that way. It ended in utter 
defeat through the drop of the atomic bombs on Japan, and there was 
complete and unconditional surrender, and I believe the same with 
Germany as well.
  That is a rare war that ends that way. Most wars are fought to 
somewhat of a standstill and there is a negotiated settlement.
  So, recently, the Commander in Chief in Ukraine reported to the 
public that he felt like the war was at a standstill.
  Typically, when that is said, it doesn't mean he is willing to--I am 
sure he is a very brave soldier and is well-liked by the troops. But 
when that is said, that is an indication that, perhaps, negotiations 
can start. That doesn't make him a coward or weak; it actually makes 
him strong, because he knows that another year of war will grind--will 
be this meat grinder that will grind and torture and maim another 
group--another group of thousands of young men of Ukraine.
  And if he felt it would be an imminent victory and that Ukraine could 
win and Russia would be defeated, then I am sure he would want to fight 
on. And he probably still wants to fight on, but I think what the 
indication is, is that there has to be some openness to negotiation.
  I don't think Russia is strong enough to take Ukraine. Likewise, I 
don't think Ukraine is strong enough to push Russia out. They fought to 
a standstill. And the thing is, is that if our promise is unlimited 
weapons and unlimited money to Ukraine, I think it makes it less likely 
that people will look for an exit ramp, will look for a possibility of 
a peaceful outcome for this.
  There will be no complete victory in Ukraine. There is an infinite 
amount of money that can be sent--$170 billion is getting close to 
infinite. We never sent that much money to any country ever. If we go 
another year and they burn through about $10 billion a month--and they 
already think they are a couple months behind on that--within 4 to 6 
months, they will be asking for more money again.
  But shouldn't we, at least, ask where it is being spent?
  Sure, some of it is being spent on arms, tanks, guns, this, that; but 
some of it is going to pay their government's salaries. Some of it is 
going to pay for welfare, disability, healthcare, first responders. I 
think we pay the salaries of 57,000 first responders. Do we have enough 
money to pay for the entire government of another government, plus all 
of their weapons? In addition to their government, we had been paying 
their pensions.
  That embarrassed some of the people until they said, finally: Well, 
we will pay for everything else. We will pay for all your government, 
but, by golly, we draw the line at pensions.
  So they excluded pensions on this after paying for the pensions for 
over a year. But billions upon billions are going to pay for their 
government. Look, most of us over here want a smaller U.S. Government. 
Now they want to ask us to pay for a bloated Ukraine government?
  But it is worse than just paying for their government and all their 
programs. We are giving small business subsidies to Ukraine.
  If you watched ``60 Minutes'' not too long ago, what you saw was a 
lady's bag--you know, a lady's handbag business getting subsidies from 
us.
  Look, I am not even for subsidizing U.S. businesses. I am for profit 
and loss. You sell something good that somebody wants to buy, you 
become successful in business. I don't think we should subsidize 
American businesses. But now they are not asking me just to subsidize 
American businesses; they want me to subsidize Ukrainian businesses.
  I think that is obscene. I think that is absurd. I think when I go 
home and I ask people: Can you believe they are sending money to a 
handbag factory, to a handbag shop in Ukraine? People are aghast. They 
are livid. They are like: Who are these people? We will vote them out.
  And that really is what should go on. It is part of what this debate 
is about. People at home need to know who these people are. Every 
Democrat, save one, and about 15 Republicans. People need to pay 
attention. They need to look how their Senator votes on this or how 
their Congressman votes if he gets to the House of Representatives, 
because this is about people who are prioritizing Ukraine first and 
America last.
  Some of the money that is going over there, in addition to going to 
small businesses, actually went to send six contestants to Paris 
Fashion Week for the famous fashion show of Paris.
  So in the midst of this war, we are sending money to send some 
fashion brands--or whatever that is--from Ukraine to the Paris fashion 
show. In the middle of this war, their President had time to take some 
fancy pictures with Vogue. I don't know, but I think that kind of looks 
bad. I think that sort of just--you know, that one doesn't pass the 
smell test when we are in the middle of a war. Sure, he is wearing his 
great T-shirt and everything, but he is in Vogue, all right? He is at 
war.
  About a month ago, he was in Argentina for the victory party for the 
new Prime Minister--no doubt, asking for money. But the thing is, I am 
a big fan of the new Prime Minister of Argentina, too, but I didn't go 
down there on the taxpayers' dime, and I won't take the taxpayers' dime 
to go down there. But the thing is, he is in the middle of a war. What 
the heck is he doing in Argentina? He is everywhere, all around the 
world, asking for our money.
  My oath of office is to my country. It doesn't mean I don't have 
sympathy for Ukraine. It doesn't mean I don't want them to win. It is 
just that my oath of office is to my country.
  This would be a different debate if we had a big pile of money and we 
ran a surplus, but I can't in good conscience send money to Ukraine 
that we don't have. That $100 billion that is going out in this bill, 
in addition to the previous $110 billion, is all borrowed. It makes 
America weaker; it makes us less strong.
  You will often hear the debate, and you will hear people say: It is 
in our vital national interest to give money to Ukraine.
  Well, that is merely an opinion. There is a debate on both sides of 
it, and I will give you the debate on the other side of this.
  They say: We must support Ukraine or the dominoes will fall.
  Well, that was a theory from the Cold War, which didn't turn out to 
be true even during the Cold War. The interesting thing is, it is 
useful to understand how the Soviet Union lost, and to my mind, it is 
very clear how the Soviet Union was defeated: The engine of capitalism 
defeated the engine of socialism, the engine of communism. There is no 
comparison. Capitalism, which is freedom--the freedom to exchange 
goods, the freedom to trade goods across boundaries--is so incredibly 
powerful that it has driven our success, but the Soviet Union couldn't 
keep up in the arms race because socialism just frankly doesn't work. 
It doesn't work for developing a strong military--they were always much 
weaker than we actually thought they were--but it also doesn't work for 
charity or anything else.
  One of the great things about our country is its incredible wealth, 
all the

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way down to our middle class, which exceeds the middle class of any 
country on the planet, but also because that great wealth has allowed 
such an amazing amount of charity.
  Even our national parks--as you look around and see most of our 
national parks, a huge percentage of the land in our national parks was 
actually donated by capitalists. A lot of the land is being set aside 
in the Western States, and very wealthy people are buying the land so 
it won't be developed, and it will remain pristine. But that is 
capitalism. That is a result of capitalism. Socialism doesn't work.
  The stories of socialism abound. There was a story in Poland of how 
price controls worked and how they always inevitably led to shortages.
  A guy goes in to buy eggs, and he says: Are you the store that 
doesn't have eggs?
  The guy says: No. We are the store that doesn't have toilet paper. 
The store across the way is the store that doesn't have eggs.
  That is the story of socialism. It is scarcity; that is the story of 
price controls.
  There has been a debate for a long time in our country about whether 
or not you can have a free market, a capitalist society, and have a 
large military industrial state. This was some of the division after 
the war between the Libertarians and the Conservatives, a little bit 
between Buckley and Murray Rothbard among the Libertarians. Rothbard 
and the other Libertarians were worried that if you had a big military 
state, the amount of money that went into it would cause us to lose our 
freedoms; that you couldn't have both; that really you need not have 
this massive military state. That argument still goes on.
  I am one of the ones here who say that balancing our budget, spending 
what comes in, is so important that we should look at spending across 
the board. That spending would include military spending, and it would 
include entitlement spending. But it is part of the problem, and I will 
be very ecumenical in my criticism in that the debt is the fault of 
both parties. The Democrats are just completely oblivious. They don't 
care at all. The Republicans kind of pretend to care, and many of the 
Big Government Republicans who will support this bill are fine with 
sending money to Ukraine, but they also want virtually unlimited 
increases in military spending as well.
  Really, it is the reverse of the current compromise that is actually 
needed to defend our country. The reverse of the compromise would be to 
say that everything needs a little bit of a haircut. You know, we are 
not going to balance the budget by cutting Sesame Street, so I don't go 
out there, saying: Let's just cut public television, and we will 
balance the budget. No. What I say is: Let's cut a little bit of 
everything.
  The thing is, people are afraid of that. People say--you know, even 
people running for office now say, like: You will raise the age of 
Social Security or you will cut entitlements.
  Well, you have to look at everything. If you take entitlements off 
the table and you say ``I am not going to do anything about the 
entitlements,'' it is two-thirds of the spending. You can cut the 
entire budget we vote on, which is a third of spending, and you don't 
balance the budget or you barely get there. And we are not going to cut 
the whole thing. So what we have to do is trim a little bit across the 
board.
  It is amazing how unreasonable that is up here. I am an outlier. I am 
one of the few people--there are probably two or three people in the 
Senate who would cut everything across the board a little bit. It may 
be more than that. It might be 10 or 15. But the thing is that I think 
people would be open to it.
  Look, Medicare--Medicare is a $1 trillion budget. Could we cut 
anything out of it and still keep the Medicare benefit? I am not 
looking to tell poor people that they can't have healthcare or people 
who can barely afford it. No. I am saying: What could we do with $1 
trillion to spend it better? Absolutely, we could spend it better and 
save some money. Could you not save 1 percent? Could you not save 5 
percent?
  When we look at this--I will give you an example. I will give you an 
example of something that just tugs at the heart strings: Alzheimer's 
disease. I have had family members with it. It is sad to watch it 
progress among people. We give generously--the government does. They 
give your money. It is not their money. But the government gives 
generously to Alzheimer's research. We are a big, rich nation. We ought 
to be able to study Alzheimer's disease. We ought to be able to do 
something, sure. So I am not against it. But let's say they got $100 
million for research last year. Is nobody up here brave enough to say: 
Look, we are out of money. We will give you $95 million next year.
  This isn't like eliminating Alzheimer's research; it is saying: You 
get 95 percent. I would say that to everybody. Everybody gets 95 
percent of what you got last year.
  When I say that at home, not one person looks askance. Not one person 
criticizes. They say: You are right. Why couldn't we do that? That is 
so reasonable. You are not being draconian. You are not being radical. 
We will just spend 95 percent of what we spent last year.
  To a person--businessmen and -women come up to me and say: Yes, we 
have had bad years before where we have had to cut 30 percent of 
spending. So they are like: Five percent would be no big deal.
  It never happens in government. In fact, as times get worse, as the 
economy goes in the tank, government spending goes through the roof.
  But these are the things we have to talk about. These are the things 
we have to think about.
  Madam President, can you tell me how much time I have remaining?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Cortez Masto). The Senator has 16 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. PAUL. Good. Lots of time. I am just getting started.
  Madam President, as we look at these things and try to make these 
decisions, it really is about having a government that sets priorities, 
and I can't emphasize enough how different it is from your local 
government to Washington.
  Every mayor in the United States--I may not agree with their 
policies, but virtually every mayor--particularly smalltown America is 
this way--spends what comes in. Now, some of the bigger cities actually 
have a borrowing capacity and have gotten in trouble with loans, but 
most cities in America spend what comes in.
  So when you go to the city council meetings, what do cities do? They 
do stuff you kind of want. They pave the roads, fix the roads, fix the 
stoplights, make sure the ditches are dug, and make sure the sewage 
works. We all kind of have agreed to have a certain amount of 
government, particularly at the local level. So, when you go to a city 
council meeting, there will be a budget. I know that is extraordinary. 
We don't do that up here. We spend $6 trillion, and we don't have a 
budget. We don't pass a budget. We haven't had a budget for the last 3 
or 4 years. No budget. Six trillion dollars and no budget. That is 
insane. Everybody up here who is for that should be fired.
  I produce a budget every year on my own, one Senator, not on the 
Appropriations Committees. I don't often win. Actually, I have never 
won my budget, but my budget is fairly dramatic according to 
Washington's standards. Mine is called the Penny Plan budget--cutting 1 
percent across the board. That used to be the Penny Plan budget. That 
used to work in balancing the budget over 5 years, but we spent so much 
money on COVID. We locked you up and gave you all checks. We put masks 
on you, four or five masks, earmuffs, goggles, and sent you checks and 
told you not to work. Crazy. We spent so much money, now to balance 
your budget, it would actually be a 5-percent cut over 5 years to 
balance your budget, but it would make us stronger, and we could do it.

  How would we do it? One of the things I proposed is, why don't we 
give government workers bonuses for finding waste? Wow, that would be 
something--an incentive for a government worker to save money. So you 
are in charge of a $12 million budget at the Department of Energy or 
Education. You are in charge, and you have your mission statement: Here 
is what you are supposed to do. If you think you could save $1 million 
just by not buying the wrong stuff and not buying too much of stuff, we 
should give you a raise.
  I have been trying to pass that for 12 years. I can't get Democrats 
to agree to it. Do you know what their sticking

[[Page S913]]

point is? Well, if that person has a $12 million budget and they save 
$1 million, we should spend it somewhere else. Literally, I am trying 
to give people an incentive to save money. I would think that the 
money, since we are $1.5 trillion in the hole every year, could go back 
to the Treasury, and their argument is, absolutely not. They must spend 
it somewhere else. Insane.
  I remember a story of one Republican chairman telling me--when we 
took over a few years ago, they took over a chairmanship, and they went 
into one of the rooms, which was a big closet. They went in there, and 
there were like, I don't know, 5,000 printer cartridges, and they were 
like: Huh? I wonder what this is. Maybe they are saving money or they 
got a good deal on printer cartridges--which might have been true 
except for the fact that they didn't fit any computers or printers 
anymore. You know how it is with printers--everything changes. Some 
person had ordered something nobody in business would have ever done, 
and they had 5,000 printer cartridges they had to just throw away. This 
is how government works. You don't have the incentives.
  Friedman put it this way. He said that nobody spends somebody else's 
money as wisely as their own. That is a pretty profound statement. I 
think that it is the most profound statement that you can apply to why 
government doesn't work very well.
  It also goes in parallel with another statement, that government is a 
necessary evil. They go hand in hand because government is a necessary 
evil because you have to give up your liberty. We don't live in a 
perfectly free society. In a perfectly free society, nobody would tell 
you what to do at all. You would have no government, and you would keep 
all of your money. So we don't live there. We give up a certain amount 
of freedom to have safety and roads and things.
  But those of us who understand and make this debate over liberty 
understand that we do have that liberty, and we are making a sacrifice 
to live in society. So we think our liberty is precious, so we don't 
want to give up too much. So we see government as a necessary evil, but 
we don't want too much of it because, if we gave up 100 percent of our 
income to have government, we would have no freedom--no freedom to 
enjoy the fruits of our labor. If we were to give up 50 percent, we 
would still think that is too much. So, somewhere, the pendulum is.
  You know, those of us who believe in liberty are wanting more liberty 
and less government. We also want it because government is not very 
good at anything.
  So, you know, I think it was Friedman who also said that only the 
government, if you put them in charge of the Sahara Desert, could have 
a shortage of sand because of just sheer incompetence. It is really not 
that people are stupid who work in government, although sometimes it is 
a debatable question; it is that they don't get the same incentives.
  In business, people are rewarded for success, and some people worry 
about this. Some on the left hate business, and they hate it because 
they see it as a dog-eat-dog world, but it is a dog-eat-dog world where 
the only people who succeed in business succeed by pleasing someone 
else.
  It is the interesting thing about transactions in capitalism. People 
think that transactions in capitalism are equal. They are kind of equal 
and not equal. So, if I want these glasses--and they are very 
expensive; they cost me, I think, $1.99--if I want these glasses, I 
will have to want the glasses more than my $1.99. So the person selling 
them--he wants my money or she wants my money more than the glasses, 
and I want the glasses more. So, even though it is an equal trade, it 
is an unequal trade because we are both motivated to trade, and there 
has to be some kind of disparity that we see. But the people who make 
these glasses only succeed if they sell them at a good cost and sell 
them cheaply.
  These are actually from a foreign country. I won't mention which 
country because everybody hates all the other countries now and wants 
to shut down trade. But I think I feel richer that I can get them for 
$1.99. So I get them at like 20 at a time, and I leave them everywhere, 
and they break half the time, but for a $1.99, it is not bad.
  But capitalism works to distribute goods. Can you imagine what would 
happen--think of your life tomorrow if Amazon and Walmart were bought 
by the government or what if they started telling Amazon and Walmart 
they couldn't buy other companies? Oh, they are already doing that. 
They are trying to prevent the merger of companies.
  These are the philosophies that we are talking about that have led us 
to the situation where we are, because these are the philosophies of 
people who don't believe in spending what comes in. They believe in an 
infinite amount of spending, but they also don't prize liberty enough 
to keep people out of our economic affairs.
  Walmart is an amazing store because you can go in, you buy this pen, 
it is scanned, and someone in Benton, within milliseconds, is finding 
out you bought that pen there, and they are sending another one. The 
pen is going out the door.
  But that is capitalism. If it were the government, let's say the Post 
Office, not quite so efficient. Nothing in government works very well. 
It doesn't mean we won't have any government; it means we should have 
as little and as small a government as we could possibly have because 
nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as their own.
  Another way to think about this is to think about the councilman, and 
the city council has been commissioned, and they have something good. 
They want to build a theater or build something in the town. It is $10 
million, and they say: Well, it is a good cause; let's do it. And they 
vote for it.
  But if you ask that city councilman for $1,000 to invest in a 
business, which decision does the person spend more time with? Which 
decision does the person feel deep in his gut or her gut to give 
$1,000? When it is their money.
  Government can't operate with people's money. So I don't know that we 
can change government. We could try adding some incentives to 
government, but what we could really try to do is make government 
small, since we know government is inefficient, and try to keep 
government out of other enterprises.
  I do worry that, on both sides of the aisle, the fear of foreigners 
and the fear of foreign countries--the anger toward foreign countries--
is going to be to our detriment. When the average shopper goes to 
Walmart because of imported goods, they are $1,000 richer because their 
money goes further. A lot of the stuff is imported.
  On some level we get it; like, in my State, we have Toyota. I drive a 
Toyota Camry up here. Several of my staff drive a Toyota Prius. We are 
proud of Toyota. They are owned by a foreign country--by Japan--but 
20,000 Kentuckians work for them. Those Kentuckians understand we don't 
have any anger with the Japanese, and we shouldn't have anger with the 
Japanese.
  But, recently, the administration is--everybody is clapping. There 
are many others who are clapping. They are banning Nippon Steel from 
buying U.S. Steel. What if it makes U.S. Steel stronger to be joined 
with Nippon Steel? We like Toyota. Why can't we like Nippon Steel?
  Nippon Steel buys a lot of metallurgical coal in my State already, 
and already employs people. They are already good for America. If we 
forbid them from buying in another country, what if that country goes 
bankrupt, and now Chinese steel is more important or bigger or more 
powerful?
  We broke up U.S. Steel in the 1920s. We never should have. They would 
be so big and so strong now had we not broken them up that they would 
be more likely to compete.
  People are now saying: Big Tech--we hate Big Tech. Let's break Big 
Tech.
  What is that going to do? It is going to make their Chinese 
competitors better and stronger.
  We need to just stay the heck out of it. If people voluntarily want 
to watch TikTok, if people want to buy a radio from China or Japan or 
Vietnam, let them. If you like getting the prices, good. Buy it. But 
the more and more we have the anger and the isolationism that comes 
with breaking up trade, the more likely we come to war.
  With regard to this bill, I think this bill really is Ukraine First 
and America last. I think the American people agree with me.

[[Page S914]]

  We have spent 5 days filibustering this, and I know we will lose 
sometime tonight. We can each speak for an hour. I think we will get to 
2 or 3 in the morning. So we can hold them off. We can draw attention 
to this, but this is about winning America. It isn't about winning this 
vote. It is about showing America that we care about your sovereignty, 
we care about your tax dollars, and we think that the priority should 
be here, the priority should be our border; that we should be concerned 
enough to stay up, to protest, to filibuster, to protect Americans from 
a bill like this, to say that America is important, that our voters are 
important.
  One of the supporters of this bill said today--and I won't mention 
them by name. But they said that people at home can't understand a bill 
like this, that the elite foreign policy minds of Washington somehow 
can understand this more than the people. I couldn't disagree more.
  I think every one of my acquaintances and friends and people I run 
into in Kentucky have as much ability, if not more ability, than the 
people in this room to make a decision on this. And I have yet to meet 
one who came up to me and said: I want Ukraine first.
  They say: I want to defend America's border. I want to defend 
America, and I want to defend a country that leaves us alone, that 
leaves us free, that allows volunteerism to create the great and vast 
wealth that our country has become.
  Madam President, how many glorious minutes do I have left?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 4 minutes remaining.
  Mr. PAUL. All right.
  A lot of votes up here--win or lose--don't change things. I do 
predict that this vote is transforming things.
  People have asked whether or not there is dissension on the 
Republican side. I think there is a great deal of dissension because 
what has happened on this bill is that a minority of Republicans have 
decided to side with all the Democrats, or virtually all of the 
Democrats, despite the fact that the majority of the caucus is against 
this bill. I think that has led to the length of this filibuster and 
the support for this filibuster.
  We are 5 days in, and we will probably make it 5\1/2\ days on this 
filibuster. The last 24 hours or so have been a talking filibuster. My 
colleague from Utah, Senator Lee, spoke for 4 hours on Saturday. We do 
this because we care about our country. We care about the looting of 
the treasure. We care about the destruction of the dollar. We care 
about setting priorities and saying we don't have enough money; we 
don't have enough to be everything to everyone.
  What we need to do is obey our oath of office. Our oath of office is 
to America. It doesn't mean we can't have sympathy for other countries. 
Come back to me when you have a surplus. When you are running a 
surplus, when you are running this country on a profit, when you are 
running this country and paying for the things you promised to our 
people, then come to me and ask me about another country.
  But you don't borrow money for charity. You don't walk the street, 
and if you are a poor person and you have four kids, and you provide 
enough for your rent and food and your gasoline, and you are barely 
getting by, and you see a homeless person, you don't say, ``Hey, honey, 
let's go to the bank and borrow $1,000,'' and give it to that homeless 
person. Even if you are sympathetic, you might help them up. You might 
help them to the side of the street. You do not go to the bank and 
borrow money.

  Ukraine can be the greatest cause in the world, but we are borrowing 
the money. There is no money. There is no rainy-day fund. There is no 
surplus, and there is no reason on God's green Earth we should be 
borrowing money to send it to Ukraine.
  We are either going to print it up, which causes inflation and hurts 
the working class, or we are going to borrow it, and we go further in 
debt.
  So I, for one, think that the American people are opposed to this 
bill. I think they are opposed to the concept of Ukraine first and 
America last.
  I predict that this issue doesn't go away. I predict that the House 
of Representatives is not going to take up this bill. I predict that 
the vast majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives 
are more conservative than the Republicans in this body, and I predict 
that this fight is not over.
  During this debate and the fact that we were able to delay and talk 
about this for 5 days--5\1/2\ days--the Speaker of the House spoke out. 
I don't know that he would have been prompted to speak out, although he 
has spoken out previously against this. But the Speaker of the House 
spoke out today and said he is not taking this bill up.
  See, they have put together border reform that actually would 
transform things, border reform that acknowledges that it is an 
emergency.
  So I will be a no and continue to be a no on this bill because I 
think it puts Ukraine first and America last.
  With that, I yield my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.
  Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I want to start by talking about Ukraine 
because we have a lot of different opinions here on it. So I wanted to 
take a moment and discuss this issue of Ukraine because there has been 
a lot of talk about it.
  I have been watching. As the Senator from Kentucky has just pointed 
to a moment ago, there has been a lot of debate over the last 5 days 
about the topic of Ukraine.
  I want to set the stage for why what is happening in Ukraine 
happened. But let me just, first, preface it by saying what is 
happening there is not irrelevant to this country and certainly not 
unimportant.
  To set the stage, we have to go back a little bit. In 2014, Vladimir 
Putin actually invaded Ukraine. He didn't admit it was his people. He 
sent in these special forces. They were dressed in costumes. He 
pretended that wasn't his people, but it was.
  The rationale was this. I want to go back for a moment with the 
history about Ukraine. Ukraine was supposed to join--wanted to join--
Europe. There was this push inside of Ukraine to join the European 
Union and to become European in its orientation. Putin didn't like it 
and began threatening and pressuring the then-President of Ukraine. The 
then-President of Ukraine, under that pressure from Putin, backed down.
  Upon backing down, he faced a fierce public resistance to that 
decision. As a result of that, the then-President of Ukraine ordered 
security forces into the street to attack protesters and crack down. 
Those protesters eventually overwhelmed the government, overthrew that 
government. Basically, the President had to flee under the auspices of 
Vladimir Putin's protection, and then Putin decided to take what they 
call ``little green men,'' because they weren't dressed like the 
regular Russian military, and some of these separatist groups--again, 
supported by Vladimir Putin--to seize portions of the Ukrainian 
national territory.
  In addition, the Russians did send their troops, dressed in these 
little green men costumes, to take a portion called Crimea. There are 
several reasons why that was important to them. The first is obviously 
access to the ocean, access to the sea, and for the Navy and so forth. 
And the other is because Crimea has been historically a pretty vibrant 
and profitable tourism site. So they believed it would add to their 
economy as well.
  They even went so far as to conduct a fake referendum--a fake 
election--in which the people of Crimea allegedly voted to join the 
Russian Federation.
  That was the status quo beginning around this time in 2014, up until 
the invasion that began almost 2 years now.
  There was this line of demarcation between these separatist forces 
backed by Putin and the Ukrainian military. They faced off, and there 
were skirmishes and the like. Then Putin decided to invade.
  Why did Putin decide to invade? Well, Putin--I am confident--was told 
by his people two things: The first thing he was told is that in the 
Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine, he would be greeted as a liberator; 
that people will come out into the streets holding up roses and greet 
the Russians as liberators. They wanted to be a part of Russia.
  The second thing he was told was that Ukraine would collapse, that 
Zelenskyy and the leadership in Kyiv would abandon the country. They 
truly believed--the Russians and Putin honestly and truly believed--
that within a

[[Page S915]]

week, 10 days, they wouldn't conquer all of Ukraine but they would 
certainly conquer much of it, and a friendly puppet government would be 
installed in Kyiv. They would at least cut the country in half, if not 
more so, and bring it under the Russian orbit.
  I point to Belarus as an example. Belarus is, theoretically, its own 
independent country, but their leaders do nothing without Vladimir 
Putin. In fact, when Vladimir Putin decided that he was going to 
station troops and nuclear weapons in Belarus, Belarus didn't have the 
right to say: No, we don't want you to do that; you can't do that here.
  They have to do it. That is sort of how he envisioned this rump state 
that he is trying to carve out. That was the thinking that he had.
  It is, by the way, one of the things that these authoritarian regimes 
suffer from. In these authoritarian regimes, no one wants to tell the 
leader that they are wrong. No one wants to tell them they are wrong. 
So they are always telling you whatever you want to hear.
  The other reason why they tell you what you want to hear is because 
that is the stuff that gets paid attention to. The leaders--if you want 
your memo, if you want your intelligence product, if you want your 
advice and counsel to be listened to in an authoritarian government, 
then you are going to genuinely produce things that that person is 
going to like. You want to confirm their preexisting biases.
  And Putin, honestly, believed that Ukraine desperately belonged to 
Russia, wanted to be with Russia, and that the Russian military was so 
powerful that they would be able to sweep in and take them out.
  Well, it didn't work that way. Zelenskyy did not abandon Kyiv. The 
Ukrainian people did not greet them as liberators, and they resisted.
  It is important to remember that they resisted before the flood of 
American aid and European aid went into Ukraine. Ukrainians were 
resisting, and they were fighting.
  And the Russians suffered enormous casualties early in the war when 
Ukraine wasn't even well-armed. These are tough people with dignity, 
and they did not want to be a part of Russia and the Russian 
Federation.
  That sets the stage for what we face today. We don't have time 
today--even with the hour that I have to speak and everything else--to 
go into all the depths of history, the way, for example--you know, 
Putin went on some tirade for 30 minutes in some interview last week 
with all these weird historical references about why Ukraine belongs to 
Russia and so forth. Suffice it to say that the history is complex. In 
fact, many Soviet leaders came from the Ukraine region, but it does not 
belong to the Russian Federation. It is a country that wants to be 
independent of Russia, with a substantial percentage of its population 
that wants to be Western oriented. And Putin does not want a Western-
oriented country that is not under his control on his border. And so he 
decided he was going to make Ukraine a rump state. But it didn't work 
out that way.
  So people do ask me--and the previous speaker, the junior Senator 
from Kentucky, a moment ago was discussing--because people do wonder, 
like, OK, that is terrible what happened. Why is that our business?
  And I heard a lot of talk here today, and so I think it is important 
that we bring a little bit of nuance and balance to this conversation. 
On the one hand, it is not true that this issue is completely 
unimportant. It is not true. It is important.
  Why is it in our national interest? There are a number of issues why 
we should care about what is happening in Ukraine beyond just feeling 
sympathy for the people there. And there is a reason why, for example, 
what we give--let me begin with one of the reasons why we care.
  The first is because if the Russian Federation would have been 
successful, if Putin had been successful in taking Ukraine or dividing 
Ukraine in half, it would completely unravel what is going on in many 
other parts of the world.
  You see, for better or for worse--and I think for better--for the 
better part of the last 20, 30, 40 years, there has been a general 
acknowledgement, for the most part, that you can't just invade another 
country and take land away from them because you want it.
  That is what started World War II, as an example. You can't do that. 
And what regulated that was a series of things: NATO in Europe, our 
alliances in the Indo-Pacific, the ability of countries to defend 
themselves, the condemnation of the international community. No one 
wanted to be a pariah.
  The bottom line is that for much of human history--up until, you 
know, the last 80 years--but for much of human history, it was 
basically defined by leaders who decided: We really like that land; we 
really want that land; and we are going to take that land, because our 
army is more powerful than yours.
  In fact, if you just sit down and read history at all, all of the 
great historic figures--Alexander the Great, Napoleon--they were all 
conquerors. They were all people that basically--their greatness came 
not necessarily because of something great they did for the world or 
some extraordinary advances in their society--although, some of them 
did have advances in their society--but, largely, their fame, their 
repute--they are judged by empire-building, by a desire to conquer as 
much land and territory as possible.
  And it defined, virtually, all of the famous and great civilizations, 
for the most part, that we know about in human history. But after the 
Second World War, the world sort of got together and said: We don't 
want to live in a world like that anymore. And we created not just 
rules and laws at the international stage to govern it, but we also 
created defense alliances to prevent it.
  But what would happen now if, suddenly, Russia was able to go in, 
take Ukraine, just because, carve it up into a rump state--maybe there 
would be a little sliver of Ukraine left, but the core of the country 
would have been pulled into the--imagine they would have been able to 
do to Ukraine what they did to a part of Ukraine and Crimea. Other 
countries would be watching.
  There are dozens of territorial disputes going on in the world right 
now as we speak. And they range from disputes between China and India 
on their border, disputes with China and its claims on Taiwan. It 
ranges from that to in our own hemisphere, where even as we are here 
gathered now late at night talking about these things, Venezuela and 
its Maduro dictatorship has decided that land that belongs to Guyana 
actually belongs to Venezuela.
  Now, obviously, there are some rare minerals there and some really 
important materials, and they discovered a lot of oil. And Venezuela is 
threatening those oil rigs. They are threatening that exploration. But 
that is a territorial dispute right here, right in our region.
  So if we live in a world where you can just go in and invade a 
country, take it, and nothing happens--except maybe a resolution 
condemning you at the U.N.--and you get away with it, other countries 
are going to do the same. And before you know it, we are going to be 
living in a world in which war is literally breaking out in every 
corner over territorial disputes.
  So that, in and of itself, is of concern. The United States is too 
powerful, too big a country. Our economy, our daily lives are deeply 
intertwined with things that are happening all over the world.
  We may not realize it; we may have taken it for granted. But things 
that are happening halfway around the world have direct impact on our 
everyday life.
  Right now, the Houthis--a band of, basically, rebels, guerillas, 
pirates, religious zealots--but, unfortunately, Iran has provided them 
guided munitions and weapons and long-range rockets that are able to 
hit tankers.
  And so today--and people are going to start to feel it soon--you will 
be paying more for a lot of things, particularly, potentially, oil and 
fuel because the insurance rates on shipping through the Red Sea is 
skyrocketing, particularly for vessels flagged by America or American 
allies.
  So the insurance rate on the shipping goes up, prices go up for you--
what is happening halfway around the world. That is just one example.
  So what happens around the world does matter. And if war starts to 
break out in different parts of the world, you

[[Page S916]]

will feel it in your pocketbook; you will feel it in your security; you 
will feel it in migration threats; you will face it in all of this. We 
should care just because of that.
  Imagine, for example, if you are sitting in Beijing right now, you 
are watching Ukraine very closely. What happens when the United 
States--and much of the rest of the world--says to you: We are warning 
you, do not do it, and you do it? What happens? Do they sanction you 
for a few months? Do they maybe provide weaponry for that country, but 
then after a few years, sort of give up and become fatigued and walk 
away? Because, if Russia, with an economy a fraction of the size of 
China, is able to weather sanctions and military support for Ukraine, 
China is calculating: We can certainly weather whatever the United 
States and other countries are going to throw at us the day we decide 
we are going to invade Taiwan. It is a very dangerous situation. So it 
matters because of that.

  The second reason why it matters to us--and I will talk more about 
this in a moment--is our reputation does matter. And it doesn't matter 
as a matter of pride. It matters as a real consequence.
  So right now, the Chinese, in particular--but others--go around the 
world and are openly saying the following--openly. I mean, obviously, I 
am paraphrasing for purposes of understanding this. But, basically, the 
Chinese message to the world is: America is a once-great power in 
decline. Their society is hollowed out. Don't you watch television? 
Don't you see the videos and the images of everything terrible going on 
in America right now? And their government is dysfunctional. And their 
society has turned upside down. And their kids are killing themselves, 
and people are drug-addicted. America is falling apart, and America is 
unreliable. America is unreliable. Didn't you see what they did in 
Afghanistan?
  And, suddenly, if we decide we are done with Ukraine, they will point 
to Ukraine and say: This is what happens to American allies: They are 
with you until they lose interest, and they will walk away.
  And so it begins to undermine a system of alliances, which really is 
the one big advantage we have over the Chinese. The Chinese don't 
really have any global alliances. The Chinese have no alliances 
anywhere in the world. The United States has an alliance system whose 
value cannot be quantified. You can't put a dollar figure on it. It is 
so valuable you can't even quantify it.
  That alliance system would be deeply threatened if, all of a sudden, 
the United States, after about 2 years, decided: We are done with 
Ukraine; we are walking away; we are done with it. The damage would be 
quite significant. So it does matter. It matters. There is a national 
interest involved in Ukraine.
  Now, I also heard some hyperbole. Because I think, when you make 
public policy, you have to balance things. You have to determine to 
yourself: OK, if this matters, how much does it matter? And your 
investment and commitment must be commensurate to your national 
interest.
  I love to believe in ideals. I love to believe in idealism. But, 
frankly, foreign policy is the work of pragmatism. Rarely in foreign 
policy do we get a choice between the perfect and the terrible. 
Oftentimes in foreign policy, we get two very bad choices, and we are 
trying to figure out which one of the two is the least worse for our 
country.
  And so it is important to have a little balance here. And I am very 
confident in everything I am about to tell you, based on the amount of 
time I spend on these things and so forth.
  The first is, no matter what, if tomorrow we were to walk away--and I 
am not arguing that we should--but if tomorrow we were to walk away and 
give Ukraine not a dollar more, not a penny more, not a weapon more, 
the Russian Federation would not be able to take all of Ukraine. They 
couldn't from the very beginning, and they can't now.
  Would they be able to make gains beyond what they hold now? Maybe, 
probably, a little bit. But they would never be able to take the 
entirety of the country. If they couldn't do it back before we were 
helping Ukraine, if they couldn't do it back when their military still 
had capabilities they no longer possess, before they had to start 
begging the North Koreans for weapons and using Iranian drones and all 
these other things, they most certainly could not do it now.
  I think it is also hyperbole to believe that the Ukrainians are going 
to completely crush the Russian military; not because they don't have 
the will to fight, not because they are not brave enough, but because 
the size advantage is extraordinary.
  The Russians, at the end of the day, have an existing military 
industry that can produce weaponry. They are just a bigger country with 
a lot more people that they can conscript. They have more weight to 
bring, and they have more leverage on the international stage, 
primarily because they have a veto at the Security Council, and they 
have nuclear weapons--the largest nuclear stockpile in the world.
  Another hyperbole is, if we don't stop this now, next, Russia will 
move against NATO. There isn't a single NATO country that Russia could 
defeat right now in a war. If they couldn't take Ukraine--they couldn't 
take Ukraine, who is not a member of NATO, who did not have a military 
that was well-resourced, whose territory they had already penetrated, 
whose intelligence services they had already deeply penetrated before 
this--if they couldn't do that and they can't do it now, how are they 
going to take any of these other countries?
  Leaving aside the NATO alliance for a moment, Russia is in no shape 
to take or invade anybody for a substantial period of time. Threaten? 
Yes. Maybe acts of sabotage, maybe, you know, destruction with agents 
or criminals that they hire, yes. But invade and take a country? The 
Poles would crush them. The Lithuanians would destroy them. The 
Germans--any of these countries. That is hyperbole. That is what is 
next here.
  Hyperbole--in some case I have heard this referred to almost like if 
we are living back in 1939 and the Nazi war machine is pushing forward 
into helpless countries. That is just--I get it. There is always a 
desire to live in a historic time and claim, as some have here on this 
floor, this is a historic moment; the history of the world is going to 
be determined. No, this is important. This matters. This is a regional 
conflict with international repercussions that have a direct impact on 
our national security and our national interest. But it is nothing like 
the eve of World War II either. So it is important to have this 
balance.
  Now, the greatest geopolitical threat, challenge that we face today 
is the emerging rise of an axis--a very loose alliance--it is not even 
an alliance--a partnership between China, Russia, Iran, and then some 
other junior partners. And their No. 1 interest of all these countries 
is to create a world--or a world order--that, at a minimum, is an 
alternative to the Western-led, U.S.-led world order--at a minimum, an 
alternative--but, ideally, a replacement. And while they have 
differences--the Iranians and the Russians have some differences--they 
both want to dominate Syria. They have differences--the Chinese and 
Russians have differences, historic and otherwise. The Russians do not 
like to be seen as the junior partner of the Chinese, but they are.
  The Chinese have long claimed that Siberia belongs to them. In fact, 
there are a lot of ethnic Chinese now living in Siberia. So they do 
have some differences, but they have been able to somehow put that 
aside because they share a common goal that is important to their 
national interest; and that is, they want a world in which the world 
order is favorable to them and unfavorable to us, one in which they 
have more influence and we have less influence.
  They want a world order in which the United States can no longer--and 
our allies--can no longer sanction Russia by denying them access to the 
banking system because they have their own banking system. They want a 
world in which the United States cannot threaten them with sanctions 
because there are alternatives to the dollar as the reserve currency. 
That is the world that they all want to live in. That is the world they 
all want to live in, so they are partnering in this.

  (Ms. SMITH assumed the Chair.)
  What do they want to see? If you are sitting in Beijing right now, 
what do their policy leaders--how do they view Ukraine? For that 
matter, how do they

[[Page S917]]

view what is happening in the Middle East?
  Here is how they view it. They view it as, we want America to be 
drained. We want America to be drained by the money and the attention 
they have to pour into Ukraine. We want America to be drained by the 
conflict that threatens to escalate in the Middle East.
  The Chinese want America to be drained in these two parts of the 
world because they know that the more money we spend and the more 
attention we give to those parts of the world, the less money and the 
less attention we will have for the Indo-Pacific.
  By the way, it is one of the reasons why the Chinese get so annoyed 
at the North Koreans, because every time the North Koreans launch 
rockets and give speeches about how they are going to blow something up 
and all these sorts of things and now partner with the Russians and 
therefore feel more confident in doing these things, they feel like it 
is more of an excuse for the United States to pay attention to the 
Indo-Pacific and deploy military assets to the region. So they want us 
to be drained.
  On the other hand, if we don't commit to these parts of the world, 
particularly Ukraine, then they are going to go around and tell 
everybody: You see, we told you. These Americans can't be counted on. 
They will abandon you. They will turn on you.
  So that is their goal--either drain us and if we pull out, hurt us, 
undermine our alliances so that our allies in Europe will decide: 
Listen, we are not going to partner with you anymore. You can't be 
trusted; so the nations in the Middle East will no longer cooperate 
with us because we can't be trusted, we are unreliable; so the nations 
in Asia and the Indo-Pacific will cut the best deal they can with China 
because America can no longer be trusted. That is their goal--drain us 
or undermine us.
  What is our goal? What should our goal be? Our goal should be to 
remain committed to helping Ukraine so that we are not seen as 
unreliable and undermined in our credibility but do it in a way that 
doesn't drain us; do it in a way that does not distract us from our 
ability to focus on all these other parts of the world that are equally 
or more important in many cases. That should be our strategy, to retain 
our credibility and the strength of our alliances through the 
commitments we made in Ukraine but without being drained. That is the 
kind of balancing act.
  By the way, I do want to say something. Again, of the people who will 
speak this evening, I may be the only one in support of helping 
Ukraine, at least at the level I do. Let me just remind everybody that 
no matter what the House decides to do, this spending can't be zero. 
The reason why it cannot be zero is because $20 billion of the $60 
billion is to buy our weapons for ourselves. That is what a lot of 
people don't realize.
  Part of the aid we have given Ukraine--it is not pallets of cash; it 
is--yes, we have rifles, we have guns, we have explosives, we have 
bombs, we have rockets, and we have anti-aircraft capabilities in our 
stocks that we had for ourselves, and we gave it to them. We gave it to 
them to use. But now we don't have it, so we have to buy it. We have to 
restock what we gave them. That is $20 of the $60 billion. At the 
minimum, it has to be $20 billion because otherwise we remain 
vulnerable.
  Ultimately, people who want that strategy--our strategic objective 
here is to be supportive of Ukraine but not in a way that makes us 
incapable of being able to concentrate on the other parts and other 
matters that matter to us.
  As far as how this turns out, you know, I have long resisted--
although I have long believed this be the case, I have long resisted 
talking about it in this way because I didn't want to undermine the 
position of Ukraine in any negotiated outcome, but ultimately the 
conflict in Ukraine will end in a negotiated outcome.
  As I have already said, the Ukrainians are not going to wipe out the 
Russian military, and the Russians are not going to be able to concur 
half of Ukraine. I think the Russians already fully understand that 
their objectives the day they invaded are out of reach. What the 
Russians want now is to negotiate a deal, the best deal they possibly 
can, holding on to as much Ukrainian land as they can get their hands 
on, and to force and compel the neutrality of Ukraine.
  In essence, what the Russians want at this point is to have enough 
military success so they can gain a little bit more territory but also 
force any future Ukrainian Government to be neutral, not to be a member 
of NATO, not to be allied with the West. That is the Russian goal.
  In any negotiation, it is about leverage. Negotiation is about 
leverage--who has the most leverage, who has the most to give, and who 
is in the most desperate need of a deal. So part of the reason why we 
should not abandon Ukraine and give them nothing is because we want 
them to have the strongest possible negotiating leverage.
  If we cut all of Ukraine's money and said we are done with Ukraine, 
we are finished, Ukraine would have no leverage. Russia would have all 
the leverage. The Russians would then be able to negotiate a deal that 
could very much leave us with a Ukraine that looks like Belarus, with a 
puppet government and with Russia holding significant land. Then 
multiple countries around the world are going to see that as an example 
of what they could get away with in their regional conflict. And that 
would matter, as I have already explained. That would have an impact on 
us as a country.
  That needs to be our goal. You can't stop the help. We want to give 
them enough help so they have the strongest possible hand in a 
negotiated settlement at some point.
  Here is my problem with what we are going to be voting on here in a 
few hours. As important as all of this is, as important as what has 
happened in the invasion of Ukraine is, our country is facing an 
invasion too.
  If I walked out these doors tomorrow, most of the people here will 
get on airplanes and fly home in the morning after whatever time the 
vote is here. You reenter the normal world outside the bubble of this 
place, and the overwhelming--I don't have to take a poll--the 
overwhelming majority of people would say: OK, I don't have anything 
against Ukraine. I actually hope Ukraine wins. I don't like Putin. I 
get everything you just said about our national interests. But how can 
we focus on that and not at least also focus on what is happening to us 
in our country at our southern border? Because it makes no sense to 
people.
  It is not just isolated to this instance. When was the last time the 
Senate met over a weekend--Super Bowl weekend, of all things--for hours 
and hours and hours, basically said: We are going to stay here until we 
get it done because it is that important. Other than funding the 
government, when is the last time you saw Congress and the Senate spend 
that much time working on something that matters directly--a priority 
of the American people? It doesn't happen. It doesn't happen.

  If I were to summarize what most people out there are going to say, 
they are going to say: Hold on a second. How can we be so focused on an 
invasion of another country and do nothing about the invasion of ours?
  That is what we face at the southern border. There is no other way to 
describe it.
  I will address some of the points that will be raised in response to 
what I said, anticipating what they will be because they were already 
made.
  The first is, there was a bill, a bipartisan negotiated bill, and you 
rejected it.
  Well, first of all, I didn't negotiate it. I didn't even know what 
was in it until the Sunday that it was released a week ago yesterday. 
There were some things in it that I think were positive. Generally, I 
rejected it because when I took the sum of it and I read the details--
and I read the details. I won't spend all the time here tonight 
discussing all the problems I have with it. I am convinced beyond any 
doubt in my mind that had we passed that legislation, yes, we would 
have gotten some improvements on asylum language, which is something we 
should do, but it had other provisions that actually made things worse 
in the long term.
  One that I continue to point to is that we were going to have in this 
country thousands of new asylum agents, basically, who would have the 
power at the border to either, A, give

[[Page S918]]

someone an immediate work permit--today, even if you asked for asylum, 
you have to wait 6 months to get a work permit. This would give them a 
work permit on the spot. That would be an enormous magnet for more 
people to come. You mean I can come to the United States, say the magic 
words, and I get a work permit right away? You are going to see the 
numbers spike.
  Here is the other thing these asylum agents would have the power to 
do: These asylum agents would have the power to give them asylum right 
there and then. It would be more efficient. It is not like asylum--yes, 
two differences between that and the process today. The first is, the 
process today would be an asylum judge, and that is taking a very long 
time. Those agents would make things more efficient, but it wouldn't 
make it better. It would actually incentivize more flow. Now people 
realize: We can get in, and we might actually have a pretty substantial 
chance--30 percent, 40 percent--of being given a work permit or asylum 
right there on the spot.
  Once you have asylum--most people don't realize this--once you have 
asylum, it is basically the equivalent of a green card. Once you are 
given asylum, you are 5 years away from being a citizen, which is what 
many people on the other side of this aisle want. It is what many 
Democratic activists openly want. They want more citizens who are 
grateful because they know which party is the one that gave them asylum 
and citizenship because they will become voters for them. That 
provision alone would increase the number of people coming to this 
country.
  Today, they come knowing they will be released, have to wait 6 months 
to get a work permit, and at some point, they are going to have to show 
up for an asylum hearing. Now, they will come knowing: We have a real 
chance not just to get released but to get an immediate work permit and 
maybe even granted asylum on the spot.
  That would not make our system better; it would make it worse. That 
alone was a reason why I could not support that deal.
  But I want to be clear. When people go around saying ``We gave you 
exactly what you wanted and you turned it down; you are not serious 
about border security,'' you did not give me what I wanted. I can't 
speak for anybody else. I don't know what other people told you they 
wanted. I never even said I wanted a bill. I said I wanted the 
President to reverse the Executive orders that he issued that created 
the migratory crisis that we now face, that created this invasion.
  Let me show you something in this graph, something I really wanted to 
point to. This is the year. This is the land encounters by month 
heading into the year at the end of fiscal year 2020. This is January 
of 2021. This point right here is the election of Joe Biden. Just look 
at this graph. From the moment he was elected in January, look at this 
spike and this spike. What happened? What happened between here and 
here and moving forward? I don't have a big enough board to show you 
what happened in the last year.
  Explain to me this spike right there. What happened there? Something 
happened there. Look at--the line here was flat. If I went back 
further, you would see the line was flat, flat, actually down a little 
this way. What happened here at this moment in time that things shot 
up? If this was an EKG or some medical test, doctors would point to 
that and say: Something happened here, man. Something happened.
  Look at this jump. I will tell what you happened here. A lot of 
things happened there.
  On his first day in office--Biden gets elected. He issues a 100-day 
moratorium on deportation. We are not deporting anyone for 100 days.
  First of all, throughout the time he campaigned for President, the 
whole world heard him say: I am going to get rid of all the Trump 
policies. So already people who want to come into our country were just 
waiting for the election to go.
  I said the other day when I gave a speech that when I talk to you 
about the issues, this is not something I picked up from some briefing 
or document I read or experts that came in; I get this from the people 
who actually came. A lot of them live in Miami, and their relatives 
live in Miami. Their decisions about coming to the United States 
illegally are not built on legal interpretations of the law. Most of 
them don't even know what our immigration laws are. Many of them 
misunderstand our immigration laws. They come based on what they 
believe our policies are.
  You have traffickers who are telling them things that aren't true, 
but you also have perception. The perception was that Trump was 
restrictive. Trump did everything to stop people from coming. Biden was 
going to do the opposite. He gets elected, and that leads to a spike, 
just his election did--but not just his election; his policies.
  Something else happened in that period of time. Joe Biden became the 
first President in the modern history of our country who decided we 
would not detain virtually anyone who came into this country 
unlawfully.
  People love to say immigration law is so complicated, so difficult, 
so hard to understand. It is. It is complex certainly to practice. But 
at its core, it is pretty straightforward. Here is what the law says, 
and I am paraphrasing. It says: Here are the people who are allowed to 
come into the United States. If anyone who comes into the United States 
is not supposed to be here, you are to detain them until removal.
  Bottom line: You are either allowed to enter the country or you are 
not. If you are not and you enter illegally, they are supposed to 
detain you until they remove you.
  Now, there have always been exceptions, and there are some very 
narrow exceptions that have always been applied on a case-by-case basis 
by every President. Obama applied it that way, and those exceptions for 
humanitarian concerns and things of this nature were designed for 
individual cases.
  So a well-known figure in China or some other part of the world shows 
up and everybody knows who they are and they are being oppressed, they 
let them in--humanitarian. A person is dying; if you send them back and 
they may die on the flight home, you let them in. There has always been 
that exception. Biden made the exception the rule. He basically decided 
it is inhumane to detain anyone, and so we are going to release 
virtually everyone--85 percent, sometimes 90, in some months.
  And so people realized very quickly--forget about the law, forget 
about the particulars of the law, people realized very quickly, if I 
can get to the border and I turn myself over to a border agent, my 
chances of being released into the country are 85 percent or higher. 
And they know it because they know people that did it. This is how this 
works.
  I have literally had people come up to me and show me, Look at what I 
Zelle'd. Look at the Cash App payment that I made to some guy. It cost 
me 5 grand or 10 grand to get my family over here so they could come 
in. I paid them to bring them in.
  They showed it to me. And I asked them, Well, how did you know about 
this? They say, Because I know other people that did it.
  Somebody comes illegally; they turn themselves in; they are released. 
They are turned over to a nongovernment organization, a charity, and 
that charity tells you all the benefits you qualify for, depending on 
the jurisdiction they send you to. They may even give you a plane 
ticket or a bus ticket. They make it to wherever they are going, and 
they call home, and they tell everybody, Here is how I did it; here is 
how I came.
  And more people come behind them and follow them. So this spike is 
easy to understand. Joe Biden changed the way we enforce immigration 
law through Executive order. He basically announced, We are not going 
to enforce immigration law. We are going to release everyone.
  And people figured it out, and they started coming, and the invasion 
began. That is what created the problem--not a law. The law today is 
the same as it was that day right there. The law today--immigration law 
in America is identical. Our immigration statutes are identical today 
to what they were on this day, on this day, all those other years.
  The numbers don't lie. Put aside the graph for a moment. In his first 
full month in office, almost 102,000 people were encountered at the 
border, just in his first month in office. That is double

[[Page S919]]

the highest number of monthly encounters in the last year of the Trump 
Presidency--doubled in its first month. None of these other excuses 
people come up with: the end of COVID, climate change--did the climate 
change that much from one month to the next?
  What changed was a new President that said, Come. We want you to 
come. We will release you.
  The year 2021 from here forward, that ended with over 1.7 million 
total encounters at the southern border. During that 12-month period in 
2021 of that fiscal year, the highest month was over 213,000 encounters 
at the border.
  And if you look at the last year of the Trump Presidency, there were 
458,000 encounters at the southern border. It went from 458 in the last 
year of the Trump Presidency to 1.7 million in the first year of the 
Biden Presidency under the same immigration law. The immigration law 
did not change. What changed is the President and his policies. And 
that is what created this crisis, and that is how you fix it.
  Now, obviously, the President doesn't want to fix it, doesn't want to 
change it. There are reasons why he doesn't want to change it. The 
first is it would be admitting Trump was right. To change it back to 
what those policies were is basically to admit Trump was right about 
immigration and the things he did made sense, and he obviously doesn't 
want to do that.
  The second reason he doesn't want to change it is because he has an 
activist base in his party that will go completely bonkers. He has an 
activist base in his party that believes we should have borderless 
countries, that believes people should be allowed to live wherever they 
want.
  I am not telling you it is a majority--I am not telling you it is 30 
percent, but it is a big and powerful activist base who will protest 
and heckle and threaten to vote against you because they believe humans 
have a right to live in any country they want. They should be able to 
migrate anywhere they want. They admit it openly; I have heard them say 
it to my face. And so he won't do it because of them either.
  But that is what will fix it. Reverse the policies that happened 
right in this period of time. That is what would have fixed it. That is 
what I asked for. That is what I asked for. They didn't do it.
  So I can't speak for anybody else, but don't tell me that you gave us 
what I wanted on the border. You did not. I didn't ask you for a law. 
The law can be improved, but the law is not the reason why we got that 
spike. As I told you, the law is the same here as it is here. What 
changed was those policies, and what will change that back is to go 
back to some of those policies, for Biden to use Executive orders to 
repeal the Executive orders that he put in place that created this 
crisis.
  Now, this is where people tell me, Well, why can't we do both? 
America can help Ukraine and can also deal with the border.
  I agree with that. Not only can we do it, we should do it. My problem 
with this bill is it doesn't do it. It only does one of the two things. 
The choice we were given was here is this fake immigration enforcement. 
We are going to call it immigration enforcement, but it is not really 
immigration enforcement.
  Here is this fake immigration enforcement bill, and here is Ukraine 
money, which is real money. And if you don't take it, then we are going 
to say that you voted against border security and we get what we want. 
They get what they want. What they want is to be able to not do 
anything on the border and be able to blame Republicans for it. It is a 
political ploy, and that is what we are faced with here today.
  The problem I have with this bill, as I said, is we are not doing 
both. If we were getting from the President real changes in his border 
policies to bring this under control, we might not even be here 
tonight. We might have gotten this done already, and I would have been 
supportive. But we don't.
  The other thing I have heard people say is, Now you are holding 
Ukraine hostage. You are holding up the important Ukraine hostage over 
our border.
  Well, I would say a couple things about that. The first is, you are 
holding Israel hostage over Ukraine. If you put in Israel's aid bill on 
the floor right now--if you put a bill on this floor right now 
that said Taiwan and Israel aid, it would probably pass with 89, 90 
votes. But they didn't. They held it hostage until they got Ukraine.

  So they say we are holding Ukraine hostage over the border; they are 
holding Israel hostage over Ukraine. And they held Israel hostage over 
Ukraine. And so you are now faced with a bill that says, You want to 
help Israel? You have to do what we want on Ukraine, and you get 
nothing on the border. They are the ones holding hostage.
  The other argument I have heard is, Well, these are just people that 
are helping Ukraine, and they are just using this as an excuse to kill 
the bill. I have already explained to you that is not me. You might be 
referring to other people, but not me. What I wanted us to do was what 
I said. I wanted us to do something real about our national security, 
about our invasion, about our border.
  Is it leverage? Yes. In this process, in this place, this is the only 
way you sometimes get things done. The only way you get things done is 
by holding up something that you might support but the other side 
really wants in exchange for something that you want.
  And in this case, there is no shame in telling you that, yes, it was 
used as leverage--unsuccessfully, unfortunately. I have no shame in 
saying that because the leverage of what I was asking for is what our 
people need, what our country needs. It is a priority for our country. 
It is important for our country.
  What good are we to Ukraine? What good is America to NATO? What good 
is America to the Indo-Pacific? What good are we as a nation now and in 
the years to come, to any other nation on earth, if we can't even take 
care of our own problems here at home?
  And this is a problem. This is not a small matter. This is not a 
seasonal ebb and flow. This is not a transitory issue. This migration, 
this invasion of the United States, is going to get worse, not better. 
It is going to get worse in terms of numbers, and it is going to get 
worse in terms of severity inside of our country.
  It already is creating a problem. No. 1, we are being overrun--not by 
a few thousand people, by over 3.5 million people that have been 
released in this country that we know about, 600,000 of whom either 
have criminal records or pending criminal matters.
  And they will tell you, Well, we know who a lot of these people are. 
They don't even interview some of these people, but even if they did, 
they don't know who these people are--because I know enough about that 
part of the world to tell you, you can buy fake documents from over a 
dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere where, if you have enough 
money on you, you can go somewhere and get an official government 
document that says your name is Jose Alvarez or Raul Sanchez or 
whatever you want your name to be. And then you show up at the border, 
and that is who we think you are.
  We have no idea who some of these people are. We have no idea if they 
have criminal records. You think the Venezuelan authorities are 
producing their criminal records in biometrics to us? You think the 
Cuban authorities are doing that? You think people coming from Africa, 
people coming from all over the world, that those places are actually 
providing that for us?
  The only thing we can tell you is are you in our terrorist database. 
There are a lot of terrorists that are not in the database until they 
commit terror acts, and assuming they survive it, you get your hands on 
them. We have no idea who these people are.
  People say, Well, but most of them are probably good people, here for 
hard work. I am sure, but that is not the point. The point is if you 
let in 3.5 million people, some percentage of them are going to be bad, 
some percentage of them are going to be criminals, I don't care where 
they came from. You take a million people from anywhere in the world at 
any time, some percentage of that million are going to turn out to be 
bad people at some point and do harm.
  And you are already seeing it. We have a migrant crime wave going on 
in New York and in other major cities. They are not committing crimes 
because they are migrants; they are committing crimes because they are 
criminals. They were criminals in their own country. You think these 
people just got here the other day and learned how to pickpocket?
  You think that 15-year-old that fired on the police officers--I don't 
know if

[[Page S920]]

you heard this story. A 15-year-old went in to shoplift, confronted by 
a security officer, pulls out a gun, tries to kill a police officer--a 
block away, fires the gun again. They arrest him.
  Another roving gang attacked two police officers at a train station, 
and those are the ones you have heard about. It is a crime wave, and it 
is going to get worse.
  The Venezuelan community in south Florida has been telling me for the 
better part of a year that what was coming now are gang members. And I 
didn't know how to judge their claim or what they were saying. Now, I 
see they were right. They were right.
  Some of them didn't come straight from Venezuela. They left 
Venezuela, and they were committing crimes in Peru. They were 
committing crimes in Brazil. They were committing crimes in Colombia. 
And when they realized they could come to America where you can steal 
even more, they saw their opportunity because Biden said, If you come, 
we will release you.
  They came. Now, we have a crime wave, and it is only going to get 
worse. Now, we have cities--I saw the mayor of Denver the other day 
crying and complaining. He wants more money. Sanctuary cities, these 
are places that passed laws that basically said, If you come here and 
you are here illegally, don't worry. We are going to protect you. We 
are not going to arrest you. We are not going to ask questions. If you 
are arrested, we are not going to deport you. We are going to give you 
stuff and benefits.
  So, of course, people go there. They go there, and it costs them 
money. Now, you have to close your schools. You have to spend money on 
migrant shelters. You have to spend money on all these things, and now, 
they are complaining about it. You were very proud to be a sanctuary 
community, and now, in this bill, they tried to get us--hey, we are 
going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to bail them out for 
being sanctuary cities. Meanwhile, they are not spending that money on 
the homeless Americans that live in their community.
  They are taking that money out of services from the taxpayers of 
those communities. So people go to work; they work hard; they pay their 
taxes, and their money is taken and given to people that came into our 
country illegally.
  And what about terrorism? I want to be careful because I don't want 
to say anything--or divulge--let me just say it this way, and I said 
this earlier before, so just use common sense. Do you think that 
terrorists around the world--do you think ISIS and al-Qaida and 
Hezbollah, do you think they are completely unaware of this?
  You think those guys don't know that the most effective trafficking 
organizations in the history of mankind is operating off our southern 
border? You don't think they know that? And you don't think they are 
tapped into that? And you don't think that they would push terrorists 
into this country that way? Well, I think common sense tells you they 
would.
  In the time remaining, I want to briefly talk about Israel because it 
is part of this bill as well. You know, it was interesting, the last 
couple of days, this freak-out over something Trump said about NATO. 
Everyone is running around, freaking out: Oh, my God, he is going to 
get us out of NATO.

  They forget Trump was already President once, and he didn't pull us 
out of NATO. In fact, he deployed extra troops to Poland. We increased 
our troop presence in Poland because Poland was contributing toward 
NATO.
  Put that aside for a moment, because this whole notion of this 
theoretical--Russia is going to invade countries because Trump is going 
to encourage them. All these people on television with all the 
silliness--well, Israel is in a war right now. Israel is in a war right 
now, an existential war. Israel's enemies right now want to destroy 
Israel. They don't want to harm Israel. They don't want to defeat 
Israel's military. They want to destroy Israel. They are in a war right 
now, and we have a President who is undermining Israel--undermining.
  You say no. OK, here is the stuff we are now reading. I just want to 
go off this article from NBC, which is a--you know, NBC, one of the 
most well-known, conservative outlets in America. Right? This is from 
them.

       President Joe Biden has been venting his frustration in . . 
     . private conversations . . . with campaign donors, over his 
     inability to persuade Israel to change its military tactics 
     in . . . Gaza. . . . .
       [He has been] trying to get Israel to agree to a cease-
     fire, but Netanyahu is ``giving him hell'' . . . [Netanyahu] 
     is impossible to deal with.
       ``He feels like this is enough,'' one of the people said of 
     the views expressed by Biden. ``It has to stop.''
       [In some of his private conversations,] his descriptions of 
     dealing with Netanyahu are peppered with contemptuous 
     references to Netanyahu as ``this guy.'' And in at least 
     three recent instances, Biden called Netanyahu an [A-
     something]--

  I can't say it on the Senate floor--

       according to three people directly familiar with his 
     comments.

  It goes on.

       [He] has grown steadily more frustrated with the rising 
     Palestinian civilian death toll in Gaza.
       [He] took a . . . sharper tone on Thursday and described 
     Israel's military assault in Gaza as ``over the top.''

  So I guess this bill is funding Israel's ``over the top'' effort to 
defeat a terrorist group that didn't just massacre over a thousand 
Israelis, but whose organizing principle is the destruction of the 
Jewish State.

     . . . frustrations with Netanyahu have also not led to a 
     major policy shift, but his administration has begun to 
     consider such options. Two weeks ago, officials told NBC News 
     that the administration was discussing delaying or slowing 
     U.S. weapon sales to Israel as leverage to get Netanyahu to 
     dial down Israeli military operations in Gaza--

  As leverage.
  So you are going to vote for a bill to give money to Israel so Biden 
can use it as leverage against our ally Israel. This is an ally 
involved in a war right now--not theoretical, not a campaign speech, 
right now. You are worried about undermining NATO. Worry about 
undermining our ally Israel in a war right now, a real war.
  And, you know, it goes on. I could go on forever.

       [They] are drafting options for formally recognizing an 
     independent Palestinian state.

  The so-called two-state solution.
  How are you going to reach--that is the ideal outcome in a perfect 
world. In the real world, how are you going to have a two-state 
solution with a group--groups--whose goal is a one-state solution? The 
Palestinian organizations--the PLO and the Authority in the West Bank 
and Hamas in Gaza--they don't have a two-state solution. They want a 
one-state solution. Their one-state is that ``from the river to the 
sea'' there not be a single Jew. That is their solution, and you want 
to give them their own territory where they can launch more attacks to 
achieve this goal.
  I could go on, but all of this--how does this wind up in the press? 
This is a strategic leak. They put this out there to message their 
activist base, because there is an activist base within the Democratic 
coalition that is threatening to vote against Biden.
  We have seen these reports. That is why he sent the White House aides 
to go meet with anti-Semites, pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah activists in 
Michigan last week, people who claim that our government is controlled 
by Jewish money. That is who they met with. These are the people 
disrupting his speeches, calling him ``Genocide Joe.'' That is who he 
met with, and this is designed to try to appease them because they are 
threatening to vote against him.
  That is undermining an ally. That is happening in real time, right 
now.
  And all this talk about cease-fire--we can't have a cease-fire.
  Let me tell you how we can have a cease-fire: Hamas can surrender its 
weapons, and it can release its hostages.
  But they won't. Hamas doesn't care how many Palestinian civilians 
die. In fact, they deliberately--deliberately--position military 
targets next to civilians so that civilians get killed. They want 
civilians to be killed. They steal the aid money.
  Has anyone wondered: How much does it cost to build the tunnels they 
have built under the ground in Gaza? Millions of dollars spent building 
tunnels--not building hospitals, not building schools, not building 
industries, not creating jobs for the people of Gaza--tunnels for their 
terrorists so they could hide hostages, so they could hide weapons, so 
they can infiltrate and kill Jews in Israel. That is what they spend 
their money on.

[[Page S921]]

  We are going to send them more of that money when this bill passes. 
That is what you are voting for. It is in there.
  Look, it is just--this is part of a broader problem here. People have 
to be watching this and saying: These people are completely out of 
touch with our priorities. They have abandoned all common sense. The 
list of things that prove this are extraordinary.
  One of the things I see a lot in South Florida are people that have 
been in this country--they maybe came from Cuba 45 years ago. They have 
worked here their entire lives. They retire. They get $800, $900, 
$1,000 a month from Social Security. And then they run into somebody 
who just got here from Cuba 3 month ago, 29 years old, doesn't work, 
and is given $1,500 a month in benefits by our government because they 
are refugees.
  That refugee, a year later, is traveling back to Cuba 15 times. So 
you are a refugee fleeing oppression from a place you now go back to 
and visit 15 times in the following year; and, in the meantime, we are 
giving you Medicaid, food stamps, healthcare for your children, cash 
payments from the refugee fund.
  So imagine if you have been working here for 40 years, and your 
Social Security check is smaller than the benefits going to a 28-year-
old, able-bodied person who just got here. That is real. That happens. 
That is happening every day. That makes no sense.
  How about this one? Biden has issued a visa ban and sanctions against 
Israeli settlers. Where is the visa ban and sanctions on Hamas 
supporters who are here on student visas? We would never have given 
them the visa if they were Hamas supporters. But now that they are 
here, they can go up and down the street calling for ``intifada,'' 
saying anti-Semitic stuff, tearing down posters. We haven't taken away 
a single student visa or any other visitor visa.
  Go after the Israeli settlers but not after the Hamas terrorists and 
Hamas terrorism supporters in our own country? That is happening.
  When the horrible events of January 6 happened, within hours, we had 
fences--the tallest fences you have ever seen--barbed wire, National 
Guard from multiple States. We had more National Guard members here 
than we had Members of Congress, 5 to 1--great people--sleeping in the 
kitchen, sleeping in the dining room. This place was protected.

  When a State decides that we are going to build a fence and deploy 
the National Guard to protect our State and our sovereignty: Let's go 
to the Supreme Court and force them to tear it down.
  So you will build a fence and flood this place with National Guard to 
protect yourself and this Capitol, but you won't do it to protect our 
country? That makes no sense to people. That makes no sense.
  How about this? You know the leverage that Russia--do you know of 
Russia, one of the reasons why they invaded Ukraine? Because they 
believed Europe was so dependent on them for natural gas that they 
wouldn't do anything about it.
  And so Europe is doing something about it, and the United States 
says: And we will export our natural gas surpluses to you so you don't 
have to depend on the Russians. And what does this administration do? 
They suspended LNG exports a couple week ago because a handful of 
TikTok influencers demanded it because of the climate. That makes no 
sense, but they did it.
  On issue after issue, we either have lost all common sense or we are 
consistently ignoring the needs of everyday hard-working Americans and 
putting something or someone above them, over and over and over again. 
And that is why people lose faith in institutions. That is why they 
lose faith in leaders. That is why they lose faith in our process.
  That is what leads to populism. In the history of the world--you look 
at it over and over again--when people believe that their needs--their 
legitimate needs--are being ignored by the people who run the 
government, in modern history they have gone in one of two directions, 
and they are both toxic. One is socialism, the promise of the victim 
against the oppressor and government is going to fix it all by 
controlling the economy and your lives. And the other direction they go 
is ethnic nationalism, the argument that all of this is happening 
because somebody of another race, another color, another religion--they 
are to blame. One of your fellow countrymen is to blame.
  That is the danger in all of this, and that is why it is always so 
important that in a republic, a republic is capable of understanding 
and responding to the needs of the people. And in our country, it is a 
people that, for the better part of 25 to 30 years, were told: It 
doesn't matter that we are going to send our factories and our jobs 
halfway around the world to another country. Don't worry. You are going 
to learn how to code. You are going to find a new job making a lot more 
money.
  Well, they never got to learn how to code, and they never found the 
better job, and they gutted our cities and communities and took them 
apart.
  They are tired of being put in second place, and it has happened too 
often. And it is happening here again now, and that is why I am not 
going to support this bill, because it violates our most important 
responsibility, and that is to give voice to the people of this country 
and stop putting them in second place behind everything and everyone 
else.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.
  Mr. SCOTT of Florida. Madam President, some of my Democratic 
colleagues want you to believe any opposition to their agenda is evil 
and unjustified. They have claimed for weeks that mere questions about 
the $95 billion--$95 billion--bill the Senate is now considering are 
rooted in some radical, rightwing, anti-democracy conspiracy, and the 
liberal press prints these lies as gospel. It has destroyed the Senate 
and ignores the history of our great Nation.
  One of the first decisions facing our new Republic was whether to 
engage in the conflict raging between French revolutionaries and an 
alliance of European nations led by Great Britain. As we know, 
President George Washington ultimately decided to remain neutral in 
that conflict, knowing the new nation was not prepared to assume the 
grand responsibilities of supporting a cause, no matter how noble, 
while properly attending to the pressing matters facing his new 
government here at home. America was cash strapped and war weary.
  In the centuries that have passed since that moment, our great Nation 
has evolved. The United States has grown into the leader of the free 
world, the true global superpower, representing the ideals of liberty, 
freedom, and democracy, and standing staunchly against oppression and 
tyranny wherever they are found.
  We no longer must wrestle with these decisions the ways our Founders 
did, but we still face tremendous domestic challenges that I am sure 
Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson could never have imaged in April of 
1793.
  Today, we are once again cash strapped, and we are war weary. Like 
never before, Americans are questioning whether their Federal 
Government has lost its way and now fails to represent the people they 
elected.
  I hear story after story of the decisions made by the Biden 
administration. People say: Who made those decisions?
  Less than 25 percent of the country believes we are on the right 
track--25 percent. That is not good for government.
  Decades of politicians in Washington being addicted to earmarks and 
pushing reckless fiscal policy have decimated the financial health of 
our great Nation--in last year's omnibus, 7,500 earmarks.
  The United States is more than $34 trillion in debt, soon to exceed 
$35 trillion, and a budget deficit projected this year of nearly $1.8 
trillion.
  I think, when Ronald Reagan got elected, the national debt was less 
than $1 trillion.
  Since 2019, the U.S. population has increased just 1.8 percent. How 
much do you think our Federal budget is up? If 1.8 percent increase in 
the population, what would you think? So 5 percent, 10 percent, maybe 
20 percent? No, our Federal budget is said to increase by 55 percent.
  Were Federal revenues up last year 5 percent, 10 percent? No, they 
were down 9 percent.

[[Page S922]]

  In the last 3 months, we lost nearly 1.6 million full-time jobs. Now 
part-time jobs are up. They are up more than 850,000 as more Americans 
can't find full-time work. Company after company after company doing 
layoffs. Americans can't find full-time work and have to work multiple 
jobs to make ends meet.
  When they put out the real labor statistics numbers, and they say, 
oh, this number of jobs were created, do you think that is a full-time 
job for that person? That might be a part-time job by the same person--
two jobs, three jobs.
  Biden's bad economy and reckless policies have created massive 
inflation. It is up 17 percent since he took office. This causes 
immense pain for families every day, especially poor families like mine 
growing up. Go to the grocery store. Look at the cost of food. Go look 
at the cost of a house and the cost of a car. Then look at what the 
interest rate is or the mortgage rate when you want to buy a house or 
the interest rate when you want to buy a car or the interest rate on 
credit card debt.

  Unfortunately, the world's evil regimes and tyrants will not wait. 
They are not going to wait for the United States to be in top fighting 
financial shape or fiscal shape to launch their attacks. And the 
weakness--the weakness--in the Biden administration has emboldened them 
to sow chaos in nearly every corner of the world.
  Iran and its proxies, like Hamas, Houthis, and Hezbollah, are waging 
war against Israel and fighting the Jewish State and its people. Russia 
continues its war in Ukraine, creating instability not seen in Europe 
since World War II. Communist China continues to threaten the United 
States and prepare for an invasion of Taiwan that will up-end world 
trade and destabilize the Indo-Pacific even further.
  I can't imagine why any American would ever buy a product made in 
communist China. They steal our jobs. They send precursors here. Madam 
President, 75,000 people die from drug overdoses every year. They 
threaten our allies like Taiwan.
  America is weak under President Joe Biden, and our enemies--they know 
it. That is why American enemies are exploiting us and our great ally 
Israel.
  Look where we are. There is a land war in Europe, Israel is under 
constant attack, and evil tyrants like Chinese President Xi Jinping and 
Russian President Vladimir Putin are watching and waiting to pounce.
  The conflict in the Red Sea makes this fact indisputable. The 
increasing number of attacks by the Houthi militia in the Red Sea 
matter to every American family. The attacks are a huge problem because 
so many vessels going through this area are critical to world trade.
  Right now, companies trying to get goods across the globe have a 
decision to make: Go through an area with a clear and present danger or 
choose a much longer, more expensive route, which will lead to delays 
and huge costs to consumers. This is all because of Joe Biden's 
weakness.
  This is what happens when you let terrorists and their sponsors, like 
Iran, run rampant and dictate how the world works. The result is always 
more violence, less scrutiny, less security, and serious consequences 
for American families for everything from the price of goods to their 
safety overseas. That is what we see today as Biden's weakness 
needlessly pushes America towards World War III.
  This bill does nothing to hold Iran accountable. Let me repeat that. 
This bill does nothing--absolutely nothing--to hold Iran accountable.
  Americans don't want war, but instead of standing up to Iran with a 
credible deterrent to prevent it, Biden has rewarded them. Biden has 
rewarded Iran with billions of dollars, which Iranians have used to 
enrich their nuclear program and fund terrorist enterprises like Hamas 
and the Houthis.
  Before Biden took office, the United States oversaw the deployment of 
more naval assets, which was good for Israel, the United States, and 
global commerce. Now he is weakening this posture.
  Biden started his Presidency by removing the Houthis as a foreign 
terrorist organization. Why? He never could explain it. He did that on 
February 16, 2021, which was a massive mistake. This has empowered them 
to raise funds and grow in power as Iran's proxy against Israel. It 
wasn't until a few weeks ago that the United States finally 
redesignated these terrorist thugs as a foreign terrorist organization. 
It only happened after, week after week after week, the Biden 
administration tolerated their attacks, which just created danger and 
disruption to the global economy.
  The United States and capable partners should have stymied these 
attacks before they started by destroying key assets months ago when 
they began terrorizing our trade operations. Biden would have been wise 
to have taken a page from the Trump playbook sooner and acted quickly 
and early to show U.S. strength and to deter ongoing attacks. For far 
too long, Biden refused to do any of this because he is a weak 
President.
  For a President who ran on multilateral internationalism, Biden has 
proven completely ineffective in bringing along most of our allies in 
times of conflict. This is the reason the world is at war now.
  Again, nothing in this bill is going to hold Iran accountable--
absolutely nothing. It pains me to say this because we all want the 
President to be strong regardless of their party. But we know Biden 
will never be capable of being a strong leader. That is not who he is. 
That is just not who he is. He will never really stand up to terrorism, 
hold our allies responsible to truly stand beside us, not behind us, 
and show the world the grave consequences of threatening the shared 
economic and security interests of the United States and our allies.
  U.S. power and engagement ensure the freedom of the seas without 
interference from bad actors and make the world safer and more 
prosperous. That has been why Iran is not directly attacking Israel.
  Currently, the U.S. Navy is the only military force in the world that 
can see and attempt to control the various battle spaces that exist or 
could exist. Our superiority and intelligence gathering allow our 
allies to cooperate in this effort to deter and, when necessary, defeat 
our enemies.
  Right now, there is a serious disparity in what the U.S. taxpayers 
contribute toward this critical issue compared to other freedom-loving 
nations. I believe this needs to be fixed. This bill does nothing to 
address this issue.
  The United States spends $886 billion a year on defense to protect 
ourselves and our interests around the world. The European Union spends 
$295 billion. On top of that, the United States has accrued a more than 
$130 billion trade deficit with the EU.
  Just as we forced NATO countries to agree to a minimum 2 percent on 
their own military spending, we must insist on support from all those 
benefiting from our protection of the seas. These nations need to boost 
military spending and fix these trade deficits with increased purchases 
of American goods. More importantly, we need the President to hold them 
to that. This bill does nothing to address these concerns.
  Proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen continue to escalate 
because the Biden administration has shown it will do little to stop 
them.
  Communist China, Iran, and Russia want to use intimidation tactics to 
dictate the flow of goods and services around the globe. The United 
States must lead the free world to ensure these bad actors are 
deterred, but we should not do it alone.
  As President Ronald Reagan said, the key to security and the 
preservation of our sovereignty is ``peace through strength.''
  Joe Biden has never said that.
  His words echo George Washington's Farewell Address to the Nation, 
who told us that if you want to live in peace, you must prepare for 
war.
  Neither of these great leaders were warmongers, but both understood 
that diplomacy and international agreements without great strength do 
not secure peace; rather, it is having the means and the will to deter 
and defeat enemies that guarantee peace and our sovereignty.
  While chaos continues abroad, America's national security is actually 
being threatened each and every day by an invasion of single adult 
males at our own borders--one that President Biden's lawless actions 
have created, encouraged, and maintained. These have been self-
inflicted wounds by Joe

[[Page S923]]

Biden. This is the sad reality for a nation under the weak leadership 
of Joe Biden, and it has forced this body to deal with world events in 
a way that I am sure many of us dislike.
  I say all of this to put the moment we find ourselves in today into 
the honest context that it deserves but that is so often ignored or 
purposely manipulated by Democrats and their allies in the mainstream 
media.
  The United States cannot ignore the massive threats we face to our 
national security and prosperity that I have just outlined. On that, I 
hope we can all agree. But as this body so often does, especially under 
the control of our Democratic colleagues, the Senate is about to again 
fail to meet this moment with responsible and appropriate legislation.
  Rather than negotiating a bill for border security in the public, we 
were kept in the dark for months and ultimately failed to negotiate a 
border security deal with Democrats that could actually get Republican 
support and pass because it did not require Biden to secure the border.
  This bill completely failed to deliver what most of our conference 
supported in tying the disbursement of Ukraine aid to real reductions 
of illegal immigration at the southern border. This bill was our only 
chance to get Joe Biden to do his job--our only chance.
  Voters in Florida, my home State, want a secure border today, they 
want inflation to cease, and they want better paying full-time jobs.
  Our Republican conference demanded a secure border before we helped 
Ukraine secure their border--makes sense. Our Republican conference 
supported tying the disbursement of Ukraine aid to real reductions of 
illegal immigration at the southern border.
  In December, I and my good friend and colleague from Wisconsin, 
Senator Ron Johnson, wrote an op-ed on this topic. We made clear this 
is where the Republican conference wanted us to go.
  Let me read it for you:

       President Biden's open border policy is a clear and present 
     danger to America. We believe a U.S. president's primary 
     responsibility is to defend the country's citizens and our 
     Constitution. When it comes to border security, he is doing 
     neither.
       Rather than address and alleviate this clear and present 
     danger, President Biden and his Democrat allies in Congress 
     are the root cause.
       Although the Biden administration and mainstream media are 
     far from transparent when reporting on the current border 
     crisis, what we do know paints a disturbing reality. Since 
     Biden took office, approximately 9.5 million migrants have 
     illegally entered America. Approximately 3 million have been 
     returned, mostly under the pandemic emergency provisions of 
     Title 42. That leaves over 6 million that have taken up 
     residency in America under Joe Biden.

  To put that number in perspective, 31 States have a population less 
than 6 million.
  Even though New York City declared itself a sanctuary city, Mayor 
Eric Adams now asserts that the 100,000 migrants who accepted the 
invitation will destroy his city. But the 100,000 migrants Mayor Adams 
claimed will destroy New York City represent less than 2 percent of the 
migrants Biden has allowed to enter. The other 98 percent are dispersed 
all over America, creating enormous burdens for cities of all sizes.
  When the Biden administration took over, the border was largely 
secure. Once in office, the Biden administration claimed President 
Trump's policies that had secured the border were ``inhumane,'' and 
they abruptly reversed course.
  The very unfortunate result is that Biden's open border policy is now 
facilitating the multibillion-dollar business model of some of the most 
evil people on the planet--sex, drug, and human traffickers. It is hard 
to believe anybody would want to do that. The depredations caused by 
this trafficking occur in the shadows and go largely unreported. 
Overdose deaths, largely from fentanyl coming through the southwest 
border, topped 100,000 annually--100,000 annually.
  There is nothing humane about Biden's policies. In addition to its 
inhumanity, the open border represents a huge national and homeland 
security threat.
  Of the 6 million migrants who got in, 1.7 million were detected 
crossing the border and accounted for as known ``got-aways.'' We 
obviously don't ``know'' who these people are or where they currently 
reside.
  In a recent hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental 
Affairs Committee, of which we are both members, FBI Director 
Christopher Wray stated in response to my questioning:

       What has now increased is the greater possibility of one of 
     these Foreign Terror Organizations directing an attack in the 
     United States. . . . It is time to be concerned.

  These are Director Wray's words. ``We are in a dangerous period,'' 
according to Director Wray. ``The terror threats have elevated'' since 
Joe Biden took office. These were all Director Wray's words.
  With an open border, it is obvious how and where foreign terrorist 
organizations would insert their fighters into our country. President 
Biden's failure to secure the border means it is up to Republicans to 
use any leverage we can--including his administration's desire to 
provide foreign aid to Ukraine--to secure it once and for all.
  Regardless of how anyone feels regarding support for Ukraine, and we 
are skeptical, we believe securing America's border and protecting our 
citizens should take precedence.
  A recent column stated that support for Ukraine combined with 
``modest immigration reform'' would be a ``win/win.'' With a President 
who actually wanted to secure the border and could be counted on to 
faithfully execute the laws Congress passes, that might be 
true. Unfortunately, we have a lawless administration and a President 
who wants an open border.

  (Ms. BUTLER assumed the Chair.)
  Remember when the Supreme Court ruled that an eviction moratorium was 
unconstitutional? President Biden extended it anyway. SCOTUS also ruled 
that forgiving student loans was unconstitutional. President Biden 
continues to forgive them. As a result, the strongest border security 
legislation probably won't work under President Biden.
  Republicans must insist not only on strong legislative language but 
also on making any Ukraine funding contingent on achieving benchmarks 
proving the border is being secured. The metric should be the number of 
migrants dispersed in America each month, which would include but not 
be limited to migrants encountered, processed, and released, regardless 
of the waiver or program used, plus the detected ``got-aways.''
  Each month, the administration would be forced to significantly 
reduce the number of migrants getting into America, and its ability to 
disburse U.S. taxpayer money to aid for Ukraine would be tied to 
achieving those monthly goals.
  Under existing law, President Trump went from peak to trough of 
illegal immigration in 12 months using ``Remain in Mexico'' and safe 
third country agreements in Central America. Using that precedent of 
releasing aid to Ukraine only as we ramp down to a secure border over a 
12-month period is a reasonable expectation.
  House Republicans should not consider and Senate Republicans should 
deny cloture on any Ukraine funding that falls short of this 
requirement. That is what we wrote then, and that is what we believe 
today. We made our position very clear, and nearly all of our fellow 
Republican Senators agreed with this when we spoke about it in our 
meetings. We all agreed.
  I remain interested in negotiating and voting for a bill that secures 
our border today, that stops the flow of drugs across our border so 
fewer Americans die, and that stops more criminals, terrorists, and 
traffickers from coming into communities now in a fiscally responsible 
manner.
  When I was in business, I negotiated and closed a lot of deals, and I 
knew that if I couldn't walk away from the table, I would never get a 
good deal. I also knew that I would never get a good deal if the people 
sitting across from me didn't want the same outcome I did.
  We have to walk away from the table until we are negotiating with 
people who share the same goals as our conference--a secure border 
today.
  The result, unfortunately, is what we have before us today--a wildly 
unaccountable foreign aid package that does absolutely nothing to 
secure the U.S. southern border and could funnel billions in borrowed 
money to Hamas

[[Page S924]]

terrorists and into the salaries of Ukrainian politicians.
  This bill claims to address the invasion of Ukraine while ignoring 
the invasion we face here in the United States. This bill could send 
billions in borrowed money into Gaza, which is still dominated by the 
Iran-backed Hamas terrorists who killed more than 1,200 Israelis and 
more than 30 Americans--30 Americans--and are still holding Americans 
hostage.
  I am unapologetically pro-Israel. I have had the honor of visiting 
Israel five times as both Florida's Governor and as a U.S. Senator.
  What happened on October 7 horrified the world and struck me 
personally. Two of my grandsons were staying with me that morning, and 
we watched with horror what happened. I told them about my visits to 
Israel and visits to one of the kibbutzim that was really close to the 
Gaza Strip.
  In 2019, Ann, my wife, and I visited Kfar Aza--one of the kibbutzim 
that was the site of a complete massacre. As the early reports were 
coming out, I was really worried about the kibbutz because of its 
proximity to Gaza. It is only about half a mile away. I told my 
grandsons this. When I heard the news that it was the site of some of 
the most horrific and barbaric activities, my heart just sank. I wanted 
to vomit because I knew so many people there. My wife and I had spent 
an afternoon there, and it was one of the most peaceful places we had 
ever visited. I keep thinking about the moms and kids who played 
outside while enjoying the warm summer weather. It is gut-wrenching to 
think of the fate of the families we met that day.
  I spoke with Chen, the lady who led our tour of the kibbutz, who 
fortunately was traveling outside Israel that day and survived. If she 
had been home, she wouldn't have survived. Most of the people on her 
street were murdered just because they were Jews. I was able to talk 
with her, and she had not yet been able to go home. She said it was 
unclear if she will ever be allowed back.
  Can you even imagine? So many of us in this Chamber are so deeply 
connected to Israel, I will bet many of you will have a story like 
mine.
  On the day I went to the kibbutz, we walked all around. We walked to 
where, you know, they take all their kids to school. It was moms and 
kids. The dads were all at work. We saw the bomb shelters, and 
basically what they were set up for is for missile attacks. They told 
me stories about how Hamas was sending balloons over, and they would 
have explosives on them, with the hope that kids would grab the 
balloons and get hurt. We were told that when the missiles came, they 
had 15 seconds to get ready to get into a bomb shelter. They said the 
kids learned, as soon as the sounds went off, to raise their hands 
because hopefully somebody would pick them up and take them to a bomb 
shelter.
  We know people in the IDF who have been called to serve, many from my 
great State of Florida. We have friends all over Israel who have spent 
days in bomb shelters as rockets have been launched by terrorists 
intent on wiping Israel and Jews off the face of the Earth.
  I have met with survivors and hostage families. I can give you one of 
the stories.
  A young lady was out at the festival. She had been to the festival 
the year before, and she had had a great time. So she was going to go 
this year with her boyfriend, and she invited, I think, every friend 
she knew to the festival. Every one of her friends was killed except 
for two who were taken hostage. When I met with her, she didn't know 
what had happened to them, and she was just in shock because every one 
of her friends was dead, and it is because she invited them.

  I have placed a poster outside my office that features the faces of 
the hostages being held by Hamas, and I am not going to take it down 
until they are home.
  You know, we have these Hamas protesters coming to the Capitol, and 
they ask for a ceasefire. I think it is great to have a ceasefire the 
day after every Hamas terrorist is dead. Every Hamas terrorist should 
be killed. What they have done is despicable. These monsters--if you 
have seen any of the videos--beheaded children and babies. They raped 
girls and burned innocent civilians alive. Can you imagine? It is 
barbaric. They dragged innocent people through the streets and are now 
holding them as hostages in Gaza, which these terrorists absolutely 
control.
  It is unimaginable that the United States would ever consider sending 
money to a place where we know that it will be used to help terrorists 
who are holding Americans hostage, but that is exactly what this bill 
does.
  Do you know what I don't understand? I have not seen one picture of 
Joe Biden in the White House Situation Room, talking about what he is 
doing to bring home any American hostages--not one. In that first 
speech he gave when he talked about what happened on October 7, he 
talked about hostages like for 15 seconds. It is like he does not care. 
You know, you talk about the things you care about. He never talks 
about American hostages--ever. So how does it feel to be an American 
family, with a family member who is being held hostage in Gaza, and 
knowing that your President doesn't care?
  I want to make sure everyone understands exactly what I am saying 
here, which is a fact: Every dollar--every dollar--that goes to Gaza 
directly benefits Hamas. How do they pay for all of those tunnels? How 
do they pay for all of those rockets? How do they pay for them? They 
take humanitarian aid and use it to do those things. You saw the attack 
in Israel. They had humanitarian aid--first aid kits--that they took 
with them.
  I have spent every day since October 7 telling the stories of those 
being held hostage in Gaza by Iran-backed Hamas terrorists. I think it 
is important that the world never forgets, never forgets, never forgets 
what happened on October 7. I have a poster outside my office that 
features the faces of the hostages, and I will not take it down until 
they are all home.
  Unfortunately, President Joe Biden has not done the same. I don't 
understand why the President of the United States isn't speaking every 
single day. He should be speaking every single day about Americans 
being held hostage by Hamas terrorists and what he is doing to get them 
out.
  The IDF just rescued two American hostages in a mission that the 
Biden administration urged them not to do. Can you imagine? The IDF was 
urged not to do something by the Biden administration that rescued two 
American hostages. Who does this? What President would do this? What 
has Biden done to rescue American hostages?
  Many of my colleagues recall the name of 9-year-old Emily Hand. Emily 
and her father Thomas lived in the small kibbutz of Be'eri, which was 
ruthlessly targeted and destroyed by Hamas during the attacks.
  I guess quite a few of the individuals I have met with--hostages, 
people who survived the attack in Be'eri--said that by the grace of God 
were they alive, and they have not been able to go home.
  In the days immediately following the attacks, Emily's dad was 
initially told that his daughter, who had spent the night at a friend's 
house just a few doors down, was killed.
  I am a father of two daughters and a grandfather of seven 
grandchildren. Watching this father speak about the murder of his 
daughter is heart-wrenching.
  He said to CNN at the time:

       They just said we found Emily, and she's dead.

  And what did he say?
  Here is what he said:

       And I went ``Yes!'' And I smiled because that is the best 
     news of the possibilities that I knew. . . . She was either 
     dead or in Gaza. And if you know anything about what they do 
     to people in Gaza, that is worse than death.

  This is the statement of a father of a daughter who thought it would 
be better for her to be dead than to be a hostage in Gaza.
  Soon, to his relief and horror, Thomas learned that Emily was, in 
fact, alive and being held hostage by Hamas. This beautiful, innocent 
little girl spent 50 days as a hostage in Gaza.
  If you go look at the poster outside my office, these are beautiful 
people, innocent individuals.
  While I am sure that Thomas thanks God every day to have his little 
girl back in his arms today, he knows that the child he had on October 
6 is no longer alive. Emily will never be the same as she was before 
she was taken.

[[Page S925]]

  It has been more than 120 days since the attacks, and some parents 
are still waiting for their children to come home. Can you imagine? 
Your child has been kidnapped, and you have no idea what is happening 
to him. All you can assume is the worst.
  Little baby Kfir Bibas's first birthday was spent as a hostage in 
Gaza. His 4-year-old brother Ariel is also still being held hostage.
  There is a group of individuals who put together milk cartons, with 
the pictures of the hostages--you know, like the kids who were on the 
missing list for Americans. They have done it, and they have 
distributed these around the country. I have one in my office with a 
picture of Ariel, a little 4-year-old boy.
  Kfir and Ariel's parents have been waiting for more than 4 months to 
hold their babies again. Now, unfortunately, we have heard horrible 
reports that these innocent children may no longer be alive.
  Why has Joe Biden given money to Gazans who are holding American 
hostages? What American President would do that? Why would we allow 
Biden to give more money to Gazans who are holding American hostages? I 
just can't believe this is happening. When will this stop? Why the heck 
are we allowing Biden to send more money to Gaza in this bill when we 
know that every dollar that goes to Gaza funds the terrorism of Hamas--
more tunnels, more weapons, more rockets, more destruction? Hamas is 
there to kill Jews and destroy Israel, our ally.
  What are we doing to get American hostages released? Do we have a 
daily report from Joe Biden on what he is doing? Do we have a report by 
General Austin as to what he has done? Do we have any idea what the 
Biden administration is doing to get American hostages home? I won't 
stop stating this fact: Every dollar that goes into Gaza directly 
benefits Hamas. So Hamas kills Israelis and Americans, they take them 
hostage, and Joe Biden gives Gazans money that goes to benefit Hamas. 
You can't make this stuff up.

  That is the undeniable truth. That is why I have been fighting for 
years to pass my Stop Taxpayer Funding to Hamas Act, which prevents 
U.S. tax dollars from going to Gaza unless the Biden administration can 
certify that not a single cent will go to Hamas. It is pretty basic: 
They hold the Americans hostage, they shouldn't get money.
  This isn't a solution in search of a problem. It addresses a very 
real threat of taxpayer money funding Iran-backed terrorism that seeks 
to destroy Israel and kill Jews and kill Americans.
  We cannot allow an American family with a family member being held 
hostage in Gaza to see their tax dollars go there. An American family, 
your daughter is being held hostage, and your tax dollars go to the 
same people who are holding your daughter hostage--Joe Biden is doing 
that.
  We have seen reports that the Palestinian Authority has been paying 
over $300 million a year in monthly salaries to terrorist prisoners and 
in monthly allowances to families of dead terrorists. You wouldn't 
think that Joe Biden would want to give any money to the Palestinian 
Authority.
  The Palestinian Authority who pays terrorists and their families 
should not receive U.S. tax dollars, but this bill will allow more of 
that. You can't believe this is happening with your tax dollars.
  In 2021, President Biden's State Department said.

       We're going to be working in partnership with the United 
     Nations and the Palestinian Authority to ``kind of'' channel 
     aid there in a manner that does its best to go to the people 
     of Gaza.

  Don't do your best. No dollars to terrorists, period.
  The official went on to say:

       As we've seen in life, as we all know in life, there are no 
     guarantees, but we're going to do everything that we can to 
     ensure that this assistance reaches the people who need it 
     the most.

  Zero dollars. Don't do your best. No dollars.
  The Biden administration thinks the risk of resources going to Hamas 
terrorists is OK because ``in life there are no guarantees.'' I 
completely reject that. I will not leave anything to chance when it 
comes to preventing U.S. taxpayer money from being sent to the brutal 
terrorists that have slaughtered so many Israelis and Americans--
American citizens.
  That is why I wasn't surprised, actually, in August 2021, when the 
Senate voted 99 to 0 for my amendment to a budget bill that would have 
made the Stop Taxpayer Funding of Hamas Act the law of the land.
  But as we would learn soon after this vote, the Democrats only voted 
for it because they knew that in the final text of the bill, written by 
Democrats, my language would be mysteriously missing. They only voted 
for it because they knew it didn't matter.
  I have tried twice more since then to pass a legislation in the 
Senate, and the Democrats have blocked it twice. Why would a Democrat 
want money to go to Hamas? I don't get it.
  Look, I know the left has a big problem on its hands as so many 
Democrats rally for Hamas and against Israel in the streets of liberal 
cities and on the campuses of America's universities. You would think 
that Democrats would be eager to show that they don't support Hamas. 
Instead, they blocked my bill proving that there is no interest in the 
Democratic Party to stand up to these people who absolutely hate Israel 
and hate Jews.
  That is why I asked earlier today to make my amendment to add my Stop 
Taxpayer Funding to Hamas Act to this bill. It is common sense. 
Democrats blocked even voting on this again today--just a vote.
  I have listened to my Democratic colleagues talk about how we need a 
cease-fire and how we need to make sure that the children in Gaza get 
support. Well, if you want aid to go to the children in Gaza, you would 
want to make sure it doesn't go to Hamas, and you would want to expect 
this administration to do everything they could to make sure money 
doesn't go to Hamas.
  But as you have heard, they are going to work at it. But they are 
going to work in partnership with the Palestinian Authority. What do 
you think are the chances that that is going to work out very well?
  We have also tried twice to pass the standalone Israel aid bill that 
would not send money to Gaza, but Democrats blocked that too. Each and 
every Democrat voted against aid to Israel. So don't tell me or my 
colleagues who oppose this bill that we don't stand with Israel when 
Democrats have twice blocked our bill, then all voted against it--which 
has already passed in the House--to immediately send money to Israel.
  If they had not voted against it, it could have gone to Biden weeks 
ago, and Israel could have gotten more aid.
  Let me be clear on one more thing: Since the day that Vladimir Putin 
launched Russia's unlawful invasion of Ukraine, I have stood strongly 
on the side of the Ukrainian people. But there are numerous unanswered 
questions. We don't know what has happened to the $100 billion of aid 
that has already gone to Ukraine. We have no idea what our plan is. 
What is our plan to win? Why would we pay the salaries of Ukraine 
politicians with borrowed money?
  Will Biden give Ukraine the weapons they need to actually win? If so, 
why didn't he do it in the beginning, when Ukraine could have 
absolutely destroyed the Russian military? They were all sitting ducks 
along the highway. Why didn't Biden give them the weapons to absolutely 
destroy the Russian military? Why not?
  Why can't Congress pay for this with savings from other areas? And 
the most important one is, why is the Ukraine border more important 
than the U.S. border? Why is this bill being rushed through with no 
support for securing our southern border?
  Ukraine must win, and Russia must lose; there is no question. That is 
what is in the best interest of America's national security. That is 
why I have said that we should continue to provide lethal aid--lethal 
aid--to Ukraine, paid for with seized Russian assets, so Ukraine can 
win its war and have a clear plan for how Ukraine will win.
  We need to answer these questions and be strategic about how we 
protect our interests, especially as we add to America's 34 trillion 
dollars' worth of debt, soon to hit $35 trillion.
  The American people will no longer tolerate borrowing billions of 
dollars to pay the government expenses and salaries of the Ukrainian 
politicians. We are borrowing money to pay for the Ukraine politicians. 
It is not a loan; it is just a gift.

[[Page S926]]

  Nor will U.S. voters tolerate this government having no plan for how 
Ukraine will win, how U.S. resources will help it win, and how we are 
making sure that every dollar is spent with one mission in mind: 
defeating Russia.

  Concern grows when we see that Ukraine has fired another top military 
official and seems to be struggling to show a clear path to victory.
  Without more information, we are left to assume the worst--that this 
entire bill has no clear mission but to accomplish the appearance of 
unity so that American politicians can fly over with a giant check and 
deliver hollow speeches about moral righteousness.
  It doesn't sooth our concerns when we hear the majority whip say on 
this floor that we must pass this now so that he can go to Munich this 
week and pontificate about a bill that the Speaker of the House has 
repeatedly stated will never become law.
  Let me just read what the Speaker said today:

       House Republicans were crystal clear from the very 
     beginning of discussions that any so-called national security 
     supplemental legislation must recognize that national 
     security begins at our own border. The House acted 10 months 
     ago to help enact transformative policy change by passing the 
     Secure Our Border Act, and since then, including today, the 
     Senate has failed to meet the moment.

  The Senate did the right thing last week by rejecting the Ukraine, 
Taiwan, Gaza, Israel immigration legislation due to its insufficient 
border provisions. The Speaker said that the Senate ``should have gone 
back to the drawing board to amend the current bill to include real 
border security provisions that will actually help end the ongoing 
catastrophe.''
  Instead, the Senate's foreign aid bill is silent on the most pressing 
issue facing our country. The mandate of national security supplemental 
legislation was to secure America's own border before sending 
additional foreign aid around the world. It is what the American people 
demand and deserve.
  Now in the absence of having received any single border policy change 
from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work on its own 
will on these important matters. America deserves better than the 
Senate's status quo.
  So what we are going to do, this bill is going to be rushed through 
with no amendments. There will not be an amendment on this bill. So a 
bill that was negotiated in the dark by a few people, changed--only a 
few people knew that--is now going to pass, and the Speaker of the 
House has repeatedly stated it is never going to become law.
  This bill accomplishes nothing. If my colleagues were actually 
serious about aiding Ukraine in its war against Russia's invasion, they 
would work with us in good faith, sit down with the Speaker of the 
House and House leaders, and produce a bill that can pass here and in 
the House.
  As I said, I want Ukraine to win, and I want Russia to lose. But that 
does not mean I am or should be willing to simply accept any offer 
thrown down by the Democrats that they claim but cannot prove would 
advance that cause, all while America is being invaded as a result of 
our open border.
  So if you are a general, and your left flank is being invaded and you 
do nothing to shore that up, you get fired, and you lose the battle. We 
are being invaded.
  I will not accept anything that ignores the most urgent threat to 
U.S. national security: Joe Biden's wide open southern border.
  This should not need to be said here on the floor of the U.S. Senate, 
but securing America's border is more important than securing the 
border of any other country. We represent America.
  We should be able to do both. And, frankly, the fact that we aren't 
using revenue generated from seized Russian assets to pay for Ukraine 
aid is ridiculous. But that is how things work here.
  Your Federal Government cannot continue to stroke massive checks to 
borrow more money while providing zero accountability to the American 
people. The people of Florida are sick of this. I am sick of it. I 
think about all Americans are sick of this.
  The deal has always been Ukraine aid for border security--not 
immigration policy, but real border security today.
  Florida families are feeling the impact of this administration's 
lawless border policies each and every day as deadly fentanyl, 
criminals, terrorists, and human traffickers pour across Biden's open 
borders.
  In 2021, how many children, 14- to 18-year-olds, died of fentanyl? 
Over 1,000--1,145. That is a classroom of students dying each and every 
week.
  In 2022, I heard from a mom in Kissimmee, FL, whose son was in the 
Air Force. He came home to visit her and surprise her on Mother's Day 
weekend. He visited an old friend who he didn't know had begun dealing 
drugs. The friend convinced the young man to take a Xanax, which was 
unknowingly laced with fentanyl, and the mom found her son dead. Can 
you imagine?
  It is heartbreaking, and there are more stories like this all over 
the country. I don't understand why Joe Biden doesn't care.
  Over 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2021--72 percent 
of those from opioids like fentanyl. Families in Florida and every 
State across the Nation are being torn apart by these deadly drugs 
coming over the border. Think about how many families are being just 
torn apart as a result of this open border?
  My Democratic colleagues seem to finally be acknowledging this crisis 
on TV, but they are not willing to stand up to this President and force 
him to do what we all know is right--secure the border today.
  I can't imagine why. It is obvious to everyone that the invasion of 
our southern border is what Biden wants.
  Let's take a look at the numbers. Joe Biden was inaugurated on 
January 20, 2021. He inherited the most secure U.S. southern border in 
modern history.
  In some of his first acts as President, he used his Executive power 
to dismantle the policies that President Trump used to secure the 
border and sent a clear message to the cartels: The border is now wide 
open for smuggling, and President Biden is not going to do anything to 
stop you. The surge of illegal immigration started almost immediately.
  In February 2021, right after Biden was inaugurated, there was more 
than 101,000 encounters of illegal aliens attempting to cross our 
southern border between ports of entry. That was a massive increase of 
what we saw the prior month.
  From there, the numbers continued to skyrocket. March `21 saw 173,000 
encounters with illegal aliens between ports of entry. By July 2021, 
encounters with illegal aliens between ports of entry skyrocketed to 
more than 213,000. That is more than 213,000 people attempting to 
illegally enter the United States in just 1 month.
  I point this out to make something very clear: The border was secure, 
and then Joe Biden took office, and the cartels got their message loud 
and clear. The invasion hasn't stopped since.
  In fiscal year 2022, the first full fiscal year under the Biden 
administration, there were more than 2.3 million encounters with 
illegal aliens between ports of entry. These aren't families searching 
for a better life; they are mostly single adults. Of those 2.3 million 
encounters with illegal aliens at our southern border, more than 1.6 
million were single adults, most of whom are military-aged men. That is 
70 percent of all people who are trying to illegally enter the United 
States.
  Even more terrifying, 98 of the people caught trying to illegally 
sneak into our country in fiscal year 2022 were on the Terror 
Watchlist.
  Here is another terrible stat for you from that period: CBP seized 
more than 14,000 pounds of fentanyl along the southern border. Now, 
just 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be a lethal dose, and they seized 
more than 14,000 pounds. That is enough fentanyl to kill 3 billion 
people. Think about how much fentanyl crossed the border without being 
seized.
  In fiscal year 2023, things got worse, and we saw more than 2.4 
million encounters with illegal aliens between ports of entry. Again, 
these aren't families searching for a better life; they are mostly 
single adults. Of those 2.4 million encounters with illegal aliens at 
our southern border, 60 percent--more than 1.5 million--were single 
adults, again, most of whom are military-aged men. And 169 people in 
the Terror Watchlist tried to illegally sneak into our country during 
fiscal year 2023.
  And the drugs continued to flow into our country. Last fiscal year, 
CBP

[[Page S927]]

seized nearly 27,000 pounds of fentanyl along the southern border. That 
is enough fentanyl to kill 6 billion people.
  Last December--2 months ago--more than 300,000 illegal aliens were 
encountered trying to unlawfully enter the United States. This is an 
invasion and a clear and present danger to the safety of every 
American. Even Al Sharpton called it an invasion on his MSNBC show last 
week. But Senate Democrats and Joe Biden still won't do what is needed 
to fix it. Biden's open-door policy is a clear and present danger to 
every American family.
  I have gone to the border quite a bit. I go down there--so right 
after Biden took over, I went down there, and you saw the wall being 
built. And then they didn't finish the gates. Still just laying there. 
People pour across. I was at one place where people were just able to 
fly into Mexico. They took a flight, took a bus up to the border, and 
they just walked across the border. CBP picked them up, and within 
days, they were anywhere they wanted to be in the United States.
  Then we found that they could get on a flight right after they were 
released without any ID. By the way, they don't have IDs. Go to the 
Mexico side, there are IDs everywhere. On our side, there are no IDs. 
On our side, they don't have an ID. They are just given an ICE arrest 
warrant, and they can go on a commercial flight with you. And the Biden 
regulations say they don't have to have an ID. They don't have to have 
a picture. They can decline. They can say they don't want their picture 
taken.
  But you try that. An American can't do that. You wouldn't get on the 
flight. This is a reality that Joe Biden refuses to go see.
  I want to mention one more thing I talked about earlier again because 
this really needs to be driven home. My Democratic colleagues want to 
act like any criticism of the Biden administration is just Republican 
attacks, but here is what the FBI Director told me just a few months 
ago.
  In a hearing at the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs 
Committee last October, I pushed FBI Director Christopher Wray about 
the threats we are facing because of Joe Biden's open border. In his 
response to me, Director Wray said:

       We went through a period where the traditional-structured 
     Foreign Terrorist Organization threat in the U.S. subsided 
     some in favor of this inspired, ISIS-inspired let's say, 
     attack . . . to be clear that threat has not gone away. What 
     has now increased is the greater possibility of one of these 
     Foreign Terrorist Organizations directing an attack in the 
     United States.

  He went on to say:

       It is a time to be concerned. We are in a dangerous period.

  He also said that, since Joe Biden took office, ``The terror threats 
have elevated.''
  Those are the words of FBI Director Christopher Wray. How can anyone 
ignore what he said? At what point are my colleagues on the left going 
to be serious about this? I think the answer, unfortunately, is never.
  The so-called border bill they negotiated in secret wasn't an honest 
attempt to do anything on the border. And when it was clear that the 
bill they wrote would fail, they totally abandoned the idea of border 
security and immediately moved to the bill before us today, which will 
never pass in the House, will never become law, and does nothing on the 
border.
  Let's remember what Speaker Johnson said. House Republicans were 
crystal clear from the very beginning of the discussions that any so-
called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that 
national security begins at our own border. It will not pass the House.
  The people of Florida refuse to ignore these threats, threats that 
are a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the United 
States. We will not pretend it is OK to take care of the border in 
Ukraine while doing nothing to stop the invasion we have right here in 
the United States.
  I want to get something done, and I will always believe in the 
ability of our great Nation to answer the call and defend freedom and 
democracy wherever it is threatened by tyranny. I care deeply about 
protecting the national security of the United States. It is really 
very personal to me.
  At 18 years old, I enlisted in the Navy to defend my country. My 
adopted father was 1 of the 3,000 American soldiers who did all four 
combat jumps with the 82nd Airborne and then fought in the Battle of 
the Bulge. I know there is evil in the world, and America must be the 
leader of the free world. There is no one else to rely on. But we have 
to take care of the families we represent first. We have to secure our 
border. This bill does not secure our border and has too many failures 
to say it will do what is needed to protect America and our interests.
  The bill allows Biden to send billions to Gaza, which will go 
straight to Hamas terrorists, and billions to pay the salaries of 
Ukrainian politicians.
  We all know no bill is perfect. It is nearly impossible. But this 
bill--this bill--is a horrible attempt to basically spend American 
dollars with no accountability and to do nothing to secure the American 
border.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Butler). The Senator from Missouri.
  Mr. SCHMITT. Madam President, I rise to talk about the very ill-
advised plan that we have before us right now that puts Ukraine first 
and America last. Now, for the--I am going to say 25 people in the 
country that may have tuned in to the last time I was on this floor 
earlier today to now, you might notice one big difference: I have a 
different tie on. So in between the last time and now, I worked out.
  As you know, Madam President, you can't skip leg day. So I did that 
in preparation, of course, for the Congressional Baseball Game, which 
is just a mere few months away now. So I figured while I was going to 
do that, I had a little time, a lot of energy, I have 1 hour to give to 
this that I would switch ties--so breaking news.
  I will say, though, that standing here in a very sort of contrived 
effort that the majority leader has put forth--well, I guess I should 
say, actually, he is not making any effort to make this look like it is 
a real activity of the world's most deliberative body. There are no 
amendments being considered for a $95 billion foreign aid package. It 
is being rushed to get done just before guess who gets to go to Munich. 
Chuck Schumer.
  So we want to get this done, without any amendments, so that the 
majority leader can glad-hand with other global leaders and talk about 
how he is delivering for Ukraine. All the while, the people that we 
represent are clamoring for action for something to secure our southern 
border.
  And I know the figleaf that was offered last week that lasted about 
24 hours before people could pick apart the language and realize it 
took us backwards on immigration law. That wasn't anything other than 
trying to get a few more votes for Ukraine. So if you want to 
understand why there is so much dysfunction about this whole process, 
all you need to understand is that the Ukraine piece of this has always 
been the center of gravity.
  Israel aid is held hostage to it. This 4-month exercise to get some 
language that was rejected was about getting more support for Ukraine. 
So here we are--a mere, I guess, hours away from a vote that some of my 
colleagues have told me this is going to be the most important vote I 
will ever cast. I cannot help but think, as someone who has run 
statewide in Missouri three times in 6 years, what an utter disconnect 
what we are doing right now is to where real America is.
  When I am back in Missouri--and I go back and forth every week, I 
live in the St. Louis area--what people want to talk to me about is 
what is going on in their family; the fact that when they go to the 
grocery store every week, they are hit with that sticker shock that has 
never really gone away. For a younger person who is trying to buy their 
first house, it is literally twice as expensive as it was just a few 
years ago.
  We have got 9 million people who have come across our southern 
border. We don't know who they are. We don't know where they are at. 
Some of the most strenuous objections that we have are from immigrants 
who have come here legally, who wait in line, who did the right things.
  The people who don't understand why our energy policy punishes 
working families who just want affordable, reliable energy, who are 
lectured by elites like John Kerry who fly on private jets

[[Page S928]]

to Davos and then tell working families all the things that they should 
live without, that is what they care about.
  Now, as a U.S. Senator, I don't believe that we shouldn't have a 
debate about Ukraine. But I can honestly say there has not been a 
person that has come up to me and said, You know what, Eric, what I 
really want you to do up there is send another $61 billion to Ukraine. 
That is what I really want you to do. My priority is for you to go up 
there and do that when our border is not secure, when terrorists are 
streaming across the border, when fentanyl is streaming across the 
border, when women and children are being raped and trafficked to the 
tune of $100 million a week.
  That is the economic value of the human trafficking alone.
  The cartels have never had it so good. American families are 
struggling, but the cartels have become wealthy beyond belief because 
of policies from this administration that have devastated our border, 
devastated our immigration laws, and flooded our streets with drugs and 
crime.
  Perhaps there could be no more emblematic image of all of this than 
what we saw just last week when a couple of people who came here 
illegally beat up cops, got out of jail in a couple of hours, and did 
the double bird to the camera, telling the American people exactly what 
they thought of them. I mean, I really can't think of a better symbol 
of what this administration has wrought on the American people than 
that. There will be all kinds of disingenuous stuff to shift blame, but 
people are smart. They know exactly what is happening.
  I do come from Missouri, and before I was attorney general, I served 
in the State senate. Like in most States, there actually--for all the 
issues that every State has in working through things--our 
constitutional Republic and our democracy can be a messy thing. It is 
supposed to be that way. It is supposed to be difficult to get things 
done because our Founders believed that one of the ways you protect 
individual liberty is to spread out that power so it is not efficiently 
taking money from people and efficiently taking away their God-given 
rights.
  So in Missouri, the one thing they have to do is pass a budget. It is 
the only thing they are constitutionally required to do. And there is a 
date. I think it is May 15. They have to do that. So the house--there 
is a consensus revenue estimate that comes out in December where they--
I am sure this is true in California and other States--where the 
different parties and branches decide what they think they are going to 
take in, how much they have to spend, and then they craft the budget. 
That process begins in Decemberish.
  They come in January, and the hearings begin in full force, and 
people come and they advocate and they make their arguments. 
Subcommittees report to committees, committees then report bills out, 
and it goes to the house floor.
  All the while, the senate is having their own hearings anticipating 
house bills because it has to originate in the house, and it comes over 
and they work on that. Then they have something, and they report to the 
senate, and they go to a conference committee. And guess what. They 
craft a budget. You disagree with it. It might be too much spending or 
might be not enough spending for your taste. It may not have done all 
the things you wanted to do. But there is a product that people can 
have an input on. They can amend things.
  We don't do that here at all. We don't do it. I talked about it on 
the floor earlier today. It is a travesty for this constitutional 
Republic because the very frustration that you see in this instance or 
in CR debates and the deadline politics that this town has gotten used 
to is all because there are simply no vehicles. There is no way for 
people to advocate for the people they represent.
  We go to lunches. Nobody told me about that, by the way, that we have 
lunch together every day. I love it. I love getting to know my 
Republican colleagues. I am sure the Democrats feel the same. But what 
if, actually, what we have seen here in the last couple of days, where 
Senators come out here and talk about the things that they believe in 
and there is more than just a couple of people at a time--what if we 
did that all the time? Maybe I am just the new guy, but what if we did 
that, and the Senator from California and the Senator from Missouri--we 
would offer amendments. Do you know what we might find out? That there 
are actually some things we could work on together or there are some 
things we are just going to be on a different team.
  But guess what happens. There are a few people in charge who keep us 
very separated. They keep us in those lunches. And we spin around, and 
a couple of people negotiate a bill. We don't know the details. We are 
told: You can't offer amendments. We are told that the tree is filled.
  What if 95 of us said: We are done with that. We are done with it. 
Instead of this Thunderdome you have created for this limited contact, 
we are going to disperse the power to individual Members like it was 
supposed to be, like when this place was created.
  The U.S. Senate is a unique institution in human history. There has 
never been anything like it. It was conceived of an idea that we had 
three branches, but within the bicameral article I branch, there was 
going to be one branch that had 6-year terms, and they were staggered. 
You had to be a little bit older to serve. I don't know if they ever 
thought that the median age would be 68, but it is or I think it is 
something like that. Whatever. I digress.
  No matter. We are supposed to sort of deliberate on these things, and 
then it would take a little more than just a simple majority. In fact, 
we didn't have cloture being filed for everything, like for some, you 
know, appointment to the Zoo Commission; there was a little bit of a 
social contract that happened in this place.

  I know this is really process-oriented, and I am going to get to 
other stuff, but I do think it is important because I actually believe 
that what a couple of people in this place, including the majority 
leader, are really afraid of is that what if we actually get a taste 
for what it is like to have an impact on our own? What if we figure out 
we don't need them to tell us what to do? I don't need that. I don't 
need somebody telling me how to vote. I would think that the 100 of us 
who campaigned so hard and got around our States and listened to 
people--I don't need that. I am open to advice always. I don't think I 
have everything figured out. But I also think that, in talking to 
people--listen, I don't pretend to know everything. I think you have to 
approach this place with some amount of humility. I mean, talk about an 
honor of a lifetime. But in 100 years--I was the 2,000th Senator. I am 
not sure many people in 100 years will know that--maybe my grandkids. I 
hope my kids would tell my grandkids that, but I don't know.
  The point is, our lives are finite. The roles we play here are very 
serious and important. But I just think this place can be so much more 
than what it is, and it is a hollowed-out shell of what was supposed to 
be the greatest legislative body ever conceived. We don't do those 
things. I lament that.
  What I was trying to say was, I talk to plenty of people, and I try 
to meet and am going to meet with every Senator, Republican or 
Democrat, individually. It takes a little while with our schedules. We 
are not on the floor very much voting, but we are all very busy. I just 
found that there are really some unique conversations that you can have 
with people about not only what is important to them and how you can 
work together but a desire to sort of open this place up a little bit.
  I think that what we are seeing play out here is kind of emblematic 
of it. Regardless of how you feel about this particular issue, 
regardless of how you feel about, you know, this is the most important 
vote you will ever cast or I can't believe that we are sending $61 
billion but we won't secure our own southern border--regardless of 
where you fall on that spectrum, I would hope that we could recognize 
individually and collectively that this is broken.
  I mean, look at what is happening with the appropriations process. I 
don't know what is going to happen in a few weeks. We are going to 
presumably vote on this stuff and come back and then--guess what. We 
have another deadline. If you don't support this bill, you want to shut 
the government down.

[[Page S929]]

  Meanwhile, the majority leader in this place has spent 8 hours in 13 
months on appropriations bills. Something tells me--I don't know; I am 
a lawyer, I am not a detective--that there is a reason for that. There 
might be a reason why he doesn't want those on the floor. He doesn't 
want an open discussion, and he is not alone. There is a very natural 
sense of desire to sort of aggregate power.
  The Appropriations Committee voted out every bill. But, Eric, they 
originate in the House. Well, we have a number of vehicles, not to 
mention we could just send a message about what our priorities are in 
the Senate, whether I agree with them or not, on Senate bills. I guess 
it is too hard, but I don't think that is really the reason.
  I have heard: Well, Senators don't--they come to us and don't want to 
take tough votes. We are protecting them.
  I don't believe that. I don't believe that. I think it is because 
this is the--who could imagine the power that somebody could have to 
unveil an omnibus before us, the flashing lights. Wait until I unveil 
this before you all. You won't have time to read it, and you can't 
amend it, can't really affect it. But the lobbyists in town know who to 
go to.
  I just believe that is the source of some of the disconnect. I think 
there is a real danger in being insulated in this town, in this bubble 
here, you know, caring too much about what the New York Times or the 
Washington Post have to say about you, that somewhere along the way, 
and I don't care where you are from--whether you are in a deep blue 
State or a deep red State--you lose a little bit of what people 
actually at home are connected to, what they care about.
  This bill here couldn't be more disconnected from American 
priorities. This bill sends $95 billion to foreign countries. Debate 
the merits of that as you will without actually--think of the message 
that sends. We care so much--think about the issues that we are 
confronting as a country, all of them. This is what we are doing. This 
is what we have chosen.
  And I don't care--like I said, I feel good from the workout--I don't 
care that I have to come out here for my time. That doesn't bother me. 
I wish I had more time. But this is how we are pressing people. We have 
to get this done.
  (Mr. CARDIN assumed the Chair.)
  I know in the back end of this is a trip to Munich. I am not going. I 
kind of wish I was. I would love to have some conversations with some 
of the folks who don't understand, who maybe want to look at people 
like me as like a zoo animal. Don't you understand? I do understand.
  And, by the way, if it was such an existential threat, where has your 
country been? Why aren't you at 2 percent of your GDP?
  I mean, I had a conversation with some high-level government 
officials in a European country. They are pulling back from that number 
because they have to address the flooding that happened in their 
country this year.
  Imagine that, putting the interest of their own country ahead of 
spending money on a foreign war. I am a little surprised, though, by 
the groupthink that sort of embodies anybody that raises legitimate 
issues or questions as being referred to as some sort of like Putin 
lover. To me, that is a very soft defense that reveals deficiencies in 
an argument.
  I think we can have a reasonable conversation, like: To what end? 
What are we seeking to gain? How much will it cost us? Can we be 
effective? Can there be accountability?
  All of those amendments are blocked. All of those conversations are 
blocked.
  I think that the American people will be shocked to know the amount 
of time and energy we spend just on this issue. I know it is important 
to people, but, in my first 13 months, I have been shocked at the 
amount of time that is spent on this one thing--not on the border, not 
on energy policy, not on the government's willingness to suppress free 
speech, not on the fact that we are simply not turning our attention 
quickly enough to China.
  I mean, pick it. The Presiding Officer might have 10 things. I might 
have 10 things. But they are all crowded out by the supernova, which is 
the Ukraine funding. And, you know, the truth is, it is probably going 
to get out of the Chamber sometime in the next, whatever, how many 
hours.
  It is dead in the House, and I think the stubbornness to accept any 
kind of rational debate or meaningful amendments ultimately dooms all 
of this.
  But here we are. And I will also point out that the insistence on 
some--and I hear Senator Schumer, in his comments in the mornings, 
speak glowingly about this and how important it is. Yet he often also, 
interestingly, casts half of the country, half of Americans, often in 
the light of radical, extremist, MAGA Republicans--othering half of his 
countrymen.
  And do you want to understand why people are skeptical of this kind 
of politics--the ``deplorables''?
  I actually think there ought to be a drinking game in Washington. 
Every time Chuck Schumer says ``extremist'' or ``MAGA'' or 
``Republican,'' everybody in this town ought to take a drink. This town 
would be drunk by 10 a.m. It is insane. It is not helpful.
  And for somebody who, by the way, talks about the importance of 
bipartisanship, let me offer this as a refresher. Chuck Schumer, if he 
had it his way and he had two more votes, would end the filibuster and 
would pack the Supreme Court and would add States to the Union, and he 
would federalize our elections. I am not buying it.
  And so he is ramrodding this thing through without any amendments. 
That is not what our Republic is supposed to be. It is not what the 
Senate is supposed to be.
  So there are a lot of problems with this bill, but I want to point 
out that a lot has been said about, well, you talk about border, but 
you had your shot. You got everything you wanted--not what I wanted.
  And my Republican colleagues who have been at the lunches can testify 
under oath about what I said all along. I don't believe that this 
administration is interested in securing our border at all, and I speak 
with some experience on this because I was attorney general of a State 
that sued the administration on a few different measures and had to go 
back in court to get them to abide by court orders. It is not in their 
DNA.
  So we are getting exactly what this administration wants, and no 
language change is going to change that. So let's just be honest.
  Now, I think that they might see how far gone this has gotten. Like 
many socialist enterprises, arguably well-meaning people realize they 
have created a total disaster. And that is what we have now. That is 
what we have at our southern border, because the open borders crowd is 
in charge.
  So to my Democratic colleagues, you have opened up Pandora's box, and 
the ultimate head fake here about having some, you know, border bill 
that made things worse isn't going to cut it. Nobody is buying it. Just 
like nobody is buying that Bidenomics is great. Tell that to the single 
mom that is paying 40 percent more at the grocery store every week.
  So for me, I just want the Biden administration to enforce our 
existing laws and go back to the policies that were working under 
President Trump. I didn't want some 400-page bill that did a couple of 
things that I sincerely objected to, the first of which was to empower 
these asylum officers to effectively grant citizenship at the border--
to grant asylum at the border, and 5 years later they are citizens, 
outside of the judicial process and at a hurried clip we have never 
seen before. That is what would have happened--and, by the way, work 
permits that were immediate. You talk about a magnet for the cartels; 
that is exactly what that would have created.

  The second big objection was how in the world could you possibly cut 
out courts of jurisdiction that have traditionally handled immigration 
matters forever, like in Texas? Where did they go? To some other border 
jurisdiction? No, legal challenges went to the DC Circuit Court of 
Appeals, perhaps the most liberal circuit in the whole country. I am 
sure that was just a coincidence.
  So there were real problems, and in my view, it took us backward. I 
am not disparaging any individual about it, but as a Senator, you have 
the right to analyze the text, which, by the way, was withheld from 
everyone until Sunday night at 7, with Chuck Schumer saying: Get ready 
to vote on Wednesday.
  I don't know. I guess I haven't been here long enough to think that 
that is

[[Page S930]]

OK, regardless of how you feel about it. No State does that.
  So how did we get to where we are at? Ladies and gentlemen, this was, 
on day one, an effort by this administration to undo everything that 
was effective under President Trump. We had gotten to the lowest level 
of illegal immigration we had seen in a generation, in 40 years, in 
December of 2020.
  And I spoke yesterday and used the analogy of, like, if they had the 
Super Bowl--and the Chiefs won, thank goodness--but it would be like 
having the best defense in the history of the NFL one year, and then 
there is a new coach who didn't like the old coach and said: I have got 
an idea. We are going to play without a defense next year, because of 
Trump--totally insane. Results totally predictable, although I am not 
sure anybody could have fully imagined 9 million people here legally. 
But that is where we are at.
  And so from day one, Joe Biden was determined to undo all of the 
things that President Trump had done.
  Now, there are a couple of reasons for it. One could be total and 
utter incompetence. I don't know. The President can't remember when he 
was Vice President. Maybe that is it.
  Another reason could be just this reflexive desire to undo everything 
that Trump did. That is possible. Trump derangement syndrome is real. 
It is treatable, but it takes a lot of time to get over that, certainly 
not on day one. That could be it.
  The other rationale could be the people who, even just a decade 
earlier, were on the fringes of the Democratic Party, who at the time 
were in think tanks, writing white papers about the benefits of open 
borders and how unfair it was that these arbitrary lines disconnect 
people, or that everyone has a right to live wherever they want, and 
they should receive government benefits, no matter what. Maybe those 
people graduated. Maybe they didn't just graduate from an Ivy League 
institution with a gender studies degree. Maybe they graduated to the 
highest levels of government. Maybe they occupy positions in the Oval 
Office and have broken through.
  And if I don't run out of time, there is a very interesting article 
about this sort of behind-the-scenes debate happening in the Biden 
administration.
  Look, I am standing in front of the desk of Harry Truman. Harry 
Truman was--news flash--a Democrat. There is no way under God's green 
Earth that the party of Harry Truman would be OK with this, but a lot 
can happen between here and the wedding. So here we are.
  So, what happened? I don't know the motive. I can make a guess. Only 
God knows. But what I do know are the actions that took place.
  In the myriad of Executive actions, reversals that have caused this 
historic crisis at our southern border--on January 20, 2021, ``I, Joe 
Biden''--he gives the oath. First thing, first day, he terminates the 
national emergency at the southwestern border, halting the construction 
of the border wall. Of course, we need to do that, right? That was 
Trump's idea.
  On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden reversed the Trump-era Executive order 
and several proclamations that put restrictions on immigration from 
countries associated with terrorism.
  Who thinks that is a good idea? In what world? What color is the sky 
in a world where we think that is a good idea? I guess because Trump--
or you are open borders or you are incompetent.

  On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden announced a 100-day moratorium on 
deportations and immigration enforcement. What? Why? Why would we do 
that?
  Forever, including administrations--Democratic administrations, I may 
have disagreed with on a bunch of policy positions. It has been the 
position of Republican and Democratic administrations that our 
immigration policy is that if you come here illegally, you are detained 
and then you are deported, unless there is some exception to the law 
like, let's say, asylum that is legit--9 out of 10 are not legit.
  So what did he do? We are not doing that anymore. We thought a lot 
about this, America. And we actually think that we shouldn't deport 
anyone anymore.
  On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden revoked a Trump-era Executive order 
that directed the Federal Government to employ all lawful means to 
enforce the immigration laws of the United States, Trump Executive 
Order 13768. Let me repeat that. The position of the Biden 
administration was to not enforce the immigration laws of the United 
States.
  I would love to hear one of my colleagues on the other side of the 
aisle try to defend that to their voters in a town hall or something. 
But because Trump. Or because open borders. Or because incompetence. I 
don't know.
  And that was just the first day, so get ready. On February 2, 2021, 
couple weeks later--so they took a break. The Biden administration, 
after on day 1 undoing all the things that kind of work or some of the 
things, had a little meeting, I guess, and said, Well, we have more to 
do. We can't just not enforce immigration laws, and we can't just 
prevent people from terrorist countries from coming here, and we can't 
build the border wall. What else should we do?
  Issue Executive order that began processing asylum claims at the 
border. OK. Here comes the fast pass; here comes the express lane. Also 
in that same month of February 2021, the Biden administration stopped 
applying title 42 expulsions to children at the border. Title 42 was a 
very effective means of providing our Border Patrol Agents of turning 
people around.
  That is gone. OK? Still more to do. Before President Trump 
implemented title 42, migrants could cross illegally, ask for asylum, 
and allowed to be in the United States, and they will be processed. So 
title 42 changed that. Now we are back to the future.
  All of a sudden now, what do we have? Catch-and-release. February 
17--so the same month; we are not done yet--2021, the CDC exempted 
unaccompanied alien children from title 42 expulsion requirements--more 
of the whittling away of one of the more effective means of actually 
turning people away, because to this administration, everyone deserves 
to be here. You don't have to wait in line. Here are your government 
benefits. Can we give you Medicaid and Medicare? How about food stamps?
  Of course, this is the humane thing to do, right, they would tell us. 
Hold on. It ain't.
  On March 10, 2021, the Biden administration announced the 
reinstatement of the Central American Minors Program and expanded on it 
to June 15, 2021.
  In April and again in October 2021, DHS canceled contracts to build 
the border wall. Well, it was Trump's wall. We have to end the border 
wall. What does that mean for taxpayers? Well, I will tell you what it 
means: $140,000 a day--a day--to contractors to not build the wall.
  Think about that for a minute. Materials have been bought. 
Contractors are paid $140,000 a day to not build a wall.
  Now, in a town that spends trillions, $140,000 a day--well, where I 
come from, people still count their money. That is about three times 
the median family income in Missouri for a year. So don't tell me it 
isn't anything. It is an insult to taxpayers who literally--my dad 
worked 7 days a week and the midnight shift. He got a week off for 
vacation.
  All that money taken out by the government that he, if he had more of 
it, would have spent on us and our family. It is taken out. And to tell 
taxpayers that you are on the hook to pay a contractor $140,000 a day 
is insulting.
  And, by the way, if that wasn't enough, they auctioned off the 
materials that were already bought that could have been built to have a 
wall. And in one instance, over 4 million dollars' worth of materials 
were auctioned off for just over $100,000.
  On October 29, 2021, the Biden administration canceled the migrant 
protection protocols. What is that? That is ``Remain in Mexico.''
  So when I was attorney general of Missouri, we filed suit, along with 
Texas, because my contention was every State was a border state. This 
was a very, very effective way of processing but also sending a very 
important signal to people who wanted to come here illegally by way of 
the cartels.

  Listen, if you have any knowledge of what goes on at the southern 
border, the cartels are meeting these people as they traverse, 
threatening them, extorting them, sexually assaulting

[[Page S931]]

them, abusing them. It is a nasty business. So don't tell me that this 
is humane; that, you know, A.O.C. crying, you know, in front of the 
cameras in 2019, you know, was the--was what your focus was.
  NBC Nightly News, if President Trump were still in office and what 
was happening right now at the border--people are drowning and 
trafficked like they are--they would be camped out. They would be 
camped out at the southern border. But meanwhile, Joe Biden and Kamala 
Harris can't be bothered to go down there.
  You know what I wish? I wish Chuck Schumer would cancel his trip to 
Munich and go to the southern border. He won't do that. He is going to 
be a god over there, which is why we are in at 1:15 a.m. Again, it 
doesn't bother me. Doesn't bother me.
  So, anyway, with ``Remain in Mexico,'' we file a lawsuit. We win. 
They had done it the wrong way, rushed it through. In fact, it goes all 
the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court says: Yeah, your 
preliminary and temporary injunction, it is in effect.
  We send it to the lower court to keep this enforced and for a trial 
on the merits. Biden administration totally ignored it.
  So when you ask me: Should we be negotiating with them about some new 
border provisions? I don't trust them.
  So don't tell me: You got everything you wanted. It is not what I 
wanted. It is a bad bill, as far as I am concerned. But more 
importantly than that, we are dealing with an administration that is 
not interested in enforcing border laws. I lived it.
  Now, eventually, the temporary wins on title 42 and ``Remain in 
Mexico'' went away, and the Biden administration got their way. So we 
fought as long as we could, but, ultimately, under our immigration 
laws, the President has immense discretion. And so that is why we have 
the problems that we have.
  So it was a very effective deterrent. Having Mexico essentially as 
the waiting room did a couple of things: It deterred the cartels, but 
it also prevented the catch-and-release problem.
  And I really hope--I don't know. I mean, it is hard to know because 
we are not on this floor debating things together, as much as we have 
these conversations amongst one another. I am on the Armed Services 
Committee. We try to work well together in a bipartisan fashion. That 
Committee actually functions, and we have amendments, and we had a 
bill; came on the floor; you disagreed; it went to the House; and we 
passed it. I am grateful for my opportunity to serve on that Committee.
  And we got a lot of issues that we need to address as a country, 
including, you know, China that has a bigger navy--not a better navy 
but a bigger navy than we have.
  And one of the reasons why I would like to see these things broken up 
is so we actually have real debate on these things individually, but 
that ship has sailed for now. My hope is that we win the war, 
ultimately, on that, that people see the wisdom in that. I am going to 
keep fighting for that. I think it is the right thing to do.
  I see the chair of the Appropriations Committee. I appreciate her 
work and the work of Senator Collins on the Appropriations Committee. I 
long for the day that individual appropriations bills can come out 
there, whether I agree with them or not. And I know they are working on 
that.
  And I hear tales of a Senate of long ago like it is folklore, of a 
time where you could come out here and offer an amendment and have a 
vote and it was pending. And you would figure it out. You know, there 
would be some social pressure. If Senator Lee or something had 80 
amendments--I mean, maybe that--you know, people would say, Senator 
Lee, how about 8 instead or something? He might agree to that, 
whatever. But the point is we would figure it out. We would figure it 
out.
  We don't have to have one person as the gatekeeper for everything. 
Who comes from on high with tablets carved in stone. That is not what 
this place is supposed to be.
  So ``Remain in Mexico,'' as much as I fought it personally as an 
attorney general and had some temporary victories, went away.
  On September 9, 2022, the Biden administration reversed the Trump-era 
public charge rule.
  On December 13, 2022, the Biden administration sued the State of 
Arizona to force them to remove the shipping containers they placed to 
close the gaps at the border--the border wall that existed there. Sound 
familiar? Texas tried to do the same thing.
  So when you have a situation where the Federal Government, who does a 
ton of things it is not supposed to do--one of the things it is 
supposed to do is secure the southern border. But what happens when 
they don't do that? States like Arizona and Texas are going to say: We 
have a population to protect. We have citizens who are at risk. We have 
fentanyl in our communities. We have high crime. We have human 
trafficking.

  The Biden administration has shown their true colors. They will sue 
you. They will take you to court. If you do that, there will be hell to 
pay. Meanwhile, they don't do anything to stop it. And there is a lot 
more, and I can go on.
  But these are the results of Joe Biden's actions, not because of some 
deficiency in the law. There isn't. We could improve the law. I am more 
than willing to have that kind of debate, but that is not the bill that 
we have in front of us. It wasn't.
  And so it will be used as a way to sort of acolyte Republicans--but 
give me a break. No one in their right mind in this country believes 
that anybody other than Joe Biden is responsible for 9 million people 
being here illegally. Just like nobody believes in this country that 
our economy is in better shape for working people because of Joe Biden.
  It is amazing how fast an hour can go. There is so much to talk 
about. But I do want to talk a little bit about--before my time is up--
the foreign aid here.
  I just want to again point out the real disconnect that the people of 
this country, regardless of who they vote for in a Presidential 
election or Senate races, feel with the amount of conversation we have 
here about foreign aid and borders of other countries and our 
unwillingness, again, to force the Biden administration to secure our 
own. There were a lot of ideas to do that. None of them were given an 
opportunity to really have a full airing.
  And in many instances, we are funding both sides of these things. We 
are about to send--well, this Chamber--it is not going to happen, by 
the way, because it is DOA in the House. So like a bunch of hamsters on 
a wheel, alienating Members along the way who would like to work 
together, we are funding both sides of this because, on the one hand, 
$61 billion could be going to Ukraine, but we are actually helping 
Russia by our ridiculous energy policy.
  Joe Biden's war on domestic energy production is real. The 
restrictions he just put on LNG and the export opportunities we have as 
a country are real. If your mission is to disempower Russia and Putin, 
you have essentially sided with climate alarmists instead. No country 
in the history of the world has done either one of these things. No 
country has ever willingly opened up their border to the level that we 
see right now. And no country has ever willingly ceded their energy.
  Since the beginning of time, tribes and nations have gone to war for 
natural resources. Conquest and war were predicated on the idea of 
gaining more. We have everything we will ever need right under our 
feet. We don't need to go anywhere. We don't need to be an imperial 
nation. We got it.
  But here is the problem. You can't check the box anymore if you are 
on the Democrats' side about being virtuous.
  It is insane. Let's be all of the above. Let's be dominant. Let's be 
independent. It is in our national security interest. Let's send it to 
our friends and allies around the world. We are not doing that. We are 
on both sides of that equation.
  And as it relates to Israel, in my final couple minutes here, I do 
want to say, I had an amendment to pull Israel out of here, to have a 
separate vote on it. But they are being held hostage to Ukraine--
cynical, but it is true.
  I have been to Israel. Anyone who has understands the dangers, the 
proximity of the threats. All of us have had moving personal 
experiences there, including a mass I attended at the Church of

[[Page S932]]

the Holy Sepulcher and a moving experience at the Western Wall with 
Jewish friends.
  And to think about what happened there October 7, and to see--I don't 
think a lot of Senators had reservations about going to the private 
viewing of that video, but I thought it was incumbent on me to go as a 
Senator. And some of the things I saw in that private viewing for 55 
minutes, you can never unsee.
  So my contention and my argument here all along has been that I have 
never been in the category of lumping this together, just like I have 
never been in the category of lumping all the categories together in an 
omnibus or minibuses, quite frankly. I understand the constraints, but 
if we plan a little better or make some reforms, I hope we can do them 
individually, regardless of how it plays out in wins. I think that is 
important.
  But in that same bill, helping the people who support terrorism in 
Gaza isn't solving any problems. We can't have it both ways here. The 
``pay for slay'' program by the Palestinian Authority is real. They use 
government money to pay terrorist families for killing Jews and 
Christians. And the pivot by the Biden administration now for political 
reasons away from Israel is not unnoticed, but that is where we are at.
  So, Mr. President, I would just say that the idea that we would be 
moving a bill that has America last, for all this debate over 4 
months--more than that, quite frankly; for a year because this was 
involved in the CR debates--for all the debate we have had, this 
Chamber is about ready to pass a bill that sends billions and billions 
and billions, and billions and billions and billions of dollars to 
Ukraine to secure their border but does nothing to secure America's 
border. And the working folks back home that feel left behind by this 
town and their ridiculous priorities and being $34 trillion in debt and 
shipping jobs overseas--they see it. It is a total disconnect. And I 
for one am going to stand with them. I am going to stand with those 
people--my people--the folks back home, and against permanent 
Washington that, come hell or high water, wants to send a disconnected 
package with billions to Ukraine, and nothing--nothing--for the 
American people.
  With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
  Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, let me first start off and say how bad I 
feel for the Senate floor staff here. It didn't have to be this way. We 
could have--Senator Schumer could have easily sent us home, let people 
have a good night's rest, come back at a reasonable hour and continue 
this debate. But, unfortunately, Senate leadership is so hell bent to 
provide funding for Ukraine, they couldn't wait. They had to work you 
folks through the night, and I feel bad for that.
  You will notice I have a chart here. It is the one I really started 
using back in about 2013, 2014, on the problems we are having at our 
border.
  I wish that was the primary debate we were having right now: What do 
we need to do to secure our border? What should the U.S. Senate, what 
should Congress, what should this administration be doing to keep 
Americans safe?
  Now, unfortunately--and I will get into that in much greater detail--
this was pretty well taken off the table, not because Republicans were 
reluctant to join in a bipartisan immigration bill--we never asked for 
that. But what we asked for is, as long as the administration had a 
high priority of supplying another $60-plus billion to Ukraine to help 
Ukraine secure its border, we thought maybe--just maybe--we could use 
that as leverage to force this administration to secure our border.
  Now, it is important to recognize that President Biden has probably 
all the authority he needs to secure the border.
  Why do I say that?
  Well, President Trump, when faced with his crisis, which never ever 
hit 5,000 people a day--you see how sharp that peak was and how quickly 
it dropped. President Trump used what Executive authority he had--
authority that the Supreme Court wrote in section 212(f) of the 
Immigration and Nationality Act, which exudes deference to the 
President in every clause. It entrusts the President with the decision 
whether and when to suspend entry ``whenever [he] finds that the entry 
of aliens . . . would be detrimental to [national] interests.''
  It defers to him to make a decision on whose entry to suspend--``all 
aliens or any class of aliens.''
  For how long? ``For such period as he shall deem necessary.''
  And what conditions? ``Any restrictions he may deem to be 
appropriate.''
  The Supreme Court goes on to say: It is therefore surprising that we 
have frequently observed that section 212(f) of the INA vests the 
President with ample power to pose any restrictions in addition to 
those elsewhere enumerated in the INA.
  Now, it is true that President Trump, in securing that border, met 
with a great deal of resistance. The radical, open-border crowd 
challenged virtually every action he wanted to take in court.
  He eventually overcame all those. I will go through this history. I 
will come back in greater detail.
  President Trump used existing authority and sheer will power, a 
little arm twisting with the President of Mexico, from peak to trough--
from a little less than 5,000 people a day for only 1 month, but within 
12 months brought it down to about 1,200 a day.
  This is right at the beginning of COVID.
  And then title 42 kicked in and dropped it from about 1,200 a day to 
a low of 570. That is what President Trump did to use his existing 
authority.
  What happened after that?
  Well, the Presidential debates started heating up, and every Democrat 
candidate for President on the debate stage said we were going to end 
deportations and offer immigrants free healthcare. You had all these 
big city mayors declaring their city sanctuary cities: Come one, come 
all. We will protect you from Federal agents.
  So, guess what. They started coming.
  Unfortunately, President Biden won the Presidency, and he made good 
on that promise.
  This marks President Biden's Inauguration and the explosion of 
illegal immigration into America. It is hard to get the exact figures 
because this President's Department of Homeland Security is not exactly 
what you would call transparent. They don't give up the numbers the 
American people deserve to know very easily. So we have to kind of 
cobble these things together from different sources.

  I think it is pretty obvious in looking at the numbers that about 6 
million people since the start of the Biden administration have entered 
this country illegally and have stayed. We really do not know who these 
people are. Who we definitely don't know ``who these people are'' are 
the close to 2 million ``got-aways,'' known and unknown. By the way, 
the known ``got-away'' is kind of a misnomer. We have no idea who these 
people are. We have just detected them coming across the border.
  So you have about 6 million people total. There are 31 States that 
have a population of less than 6 million people. My State of Wisconsin 
is on the bubble. We have about 5.8 million, 5.9 million people. That 
is the magnitude--the order of magnitude--of the migrant flow that 
President Biden--in using the same executive authority that President 
Trump used to secure the border, President Biden used that exact same 
authority to open it wide open and put our Nation at risk.
  When you listen to FBI Director Wray and other law enforcement 
officials talk about the current threat level, Director Wray, during 
testimony in front of both the House and Senate, says that all the 
warning signs are flashing; that the threat of foreign terrorist 
organizations has not been higher since 9/11.
  Gee, I wonder how a foreign terrorist fighter could enter this 
country? Is President Biden's softness on Iran--the coddling of the 
world's largest state sponsor of terrorism--in any way tied to what 
intelligence he might have of sleeper cells that are ready to be 
triggered if President Biden's response to their sponsor of terrorism 
is too hard? It is just a question, but I think it is a pretty 
legitimate question.
  So President Biden opens up the border. He exposes America to these 
threats--a clear and present danger. He

[[Page S933]]

did it, and members of the administration carry on the drumbeat of 
``President Trump's secure border was so inhumane. It is so inhumane to 
enforce the law. It was so inhumane to stop or certainly slow, 
dramatically slow, the trafficking of humans--the sex trafficking, the 
drug trafficking.''
  The fact of the matter is, as to this explosion of illegal 
immigration that President Biden and his Democratic colleagues here in 
Congress, who also want an open border, who also caused this problem--
their open border policy is facilitating the multibillion-dollar 
business model of some of the most evil people on the planet--the drug 
traffickers, with over 100,000 overdoses of primarily fentanyl; the 
human traffickers; the sex traffickers.
  How do you think these young women pay off their $7,000 to $10,000 to 
$15,000 human trafficking fees? They involuntarily get put into the sex 
trafficking business. There is nothing humane about President Biden and 
the Democrats' in Congress open border policy. It is grotesquely 
inhumane.
  I mentioned drug trafficking. A few years ago--certainly in Wisconsin 
but I think this is all over the Nation--a big problem was 
methamphetamine labs. Dangerous labs were sprinkling up all over--in 
little towns and big towns all over the country. That is not a problem 
for law enforcement anymore because, with President Biden and his 
Democrat colleagues in Congress and their open border policy, now 
methamphetamine is so cheap coming in the southern border that those 
meth labs have been put out of business.
  I recently sat down with the sheriffs in Winnebago and Fond du Lac 
Counties. They were talking about the drug trafficking and the 
explosion of it in the Biden administration years. They described how, 
prior to the Biden administration, there was a hub--a hub--of drug 
trafficking in Chicago, and the branches split out from there into 
Wisconsin. Now what has happened is the drug trade is flourishing to 
such a degree that now Wisconsin has hubs with branches springing out 
from those hubs as well. Again, I mentioned all of the overdose 
deaths--the tragedies--facilitated by the open border policy.
  This chart is historical up to this point. This is the line from 
December of last year when, in one day, we experienced 14,509--14,509--
migrants flooding our border. It averaged over 10,000 people a day.
  Since the start of the Biden administration, the average--the 
average--has been over 7,000 illegal immigrants per day, every day, 
since President Biden entered office. I remember back then, during 
Trump's crisis, there would be reports of these huge caravans of a 
couple thousand people. That used to be big news when President Trump 
was President--a couple thousand in a massive caravan. Now 7,000 a day 
is barely ever reported on. In fact, the only reason the current crisis 
is being reported on, the only reason President Biden and his 
Democratic colleagues in Congress and their open border is getting a 
light shined on it now, is because you have mayors like Mayor Adams in 
New York and Mayor Johnson in Chicago--sanctuary cities, proud to be a 
sanctuary city; come one, come all--who all of a sudden found out it is 
not a very good idea.

  Mayor Adams is dealing with less than 2 percent--about 100,000 to 
110,000 people--of the 6 million people. Less than 2 percent of those 
illegal immigrants let in by Joe Biden and his Democratic colleagues 
here in Congress are going to destroy New York City. Mayor Johnson has 
similar comments in Chicago. So the media is forced to report that. 
They don't want to. They would like to keep covering up for the 
President, but the conditions have gotten so bad that even the 
mainstream media--the liberal, the biased, the cover-uppers for 
President Biden--have to report on this. So now more Americans are 
awakened to this clear and present danger.
  When President Biden proposed his security supplemental--funds for 
Ukraine, for Taiwan, for Israel, for the border--I believe his initial 
proposal for the border was about $14 billion, not to secure it but to 
hire more agents to more efficiently and more effectively encounter, 
process, and disperse. That has been their solution to the problem. 
That is why Secretary Mayorkas says: We don't have a problem. We have 
the border under control. It is because they tell the CBP that their 
goal is to encounter, process, and disperse within an 8-hour period. 
They have gotten very efficient at it. That is not a solution.
  So when President Biden proposed his supplemental, a lot of Americans 
started making the point that, before we send tens of billions of 
dollars overseas--as sympathetic as you are or may be of those 
countries receiving those funds, and I have a great deal of sympathy. 
But before we start sending all of those tens of billions of dollars to 
help other countries secure their borders, maybe--just maybe--the right 
thing to do would be to secure our own border first; to eliminate that 
clear and present danger; to reduce the multibillion-dollar business 
model of the human, sex, and drug traffickers. Maybe we ought to do 
that first.
  Maybe we ought to look at Americans and go: You know, we want to keep 
our own citizens safe and secure. We don't want an underground economy. 
We don't want illegal immigrants being abused and taken advantage of by 
unscrupulous employers and oppressed American wages. Let's secure our 
own border first.
  For the Republicans in Congress, our reaction was, Well, we don't 
know how to force this President to use his Executive authority to 
secure the border. Maybe we ought to use that as leverage. So that is 
what we asked of our leadership. Now, our leader certainly wants to 
secure Ukraine's border. It is one of his top priorities. It took him a 
while to understand that the American people really do want a secure 
border and that maybe he ought to take that into consideration.
  So we recommended that the conference--I was a little surprised at 
this because he definitely changed his position. We recommended, OK, we 
need to defeat cloture on this supplemental to show the President that 
we are serious about securing the border. I had my doubts as to how 
genuine that move really was. I really had my doubts when, all of a 
sudden, we started negotiating, entering into secret negotiations with 
the administration and Democrats here in Congress, who, again, by and 
large, want an open border, who caused this problem. That is a real 
impediment to negotiation.
  I have done a lot of negotiating in my business career, and you only 
want to negotiate with people in good faith and only when you agree on 
the goal. The problem with secret negotiations with people who want an 
open border and who caused the problem is you have to recognize they 
are really not looking to close the border. That is not what they want. 
What they want is political cover. They were negotiating for political 
cover, and whether our leader realized it or not, that is what he 
apparently gave them.
  Again, I don't fault Senator Lankford. I think he is certainly 
knowledgeable about this. He was on my committee when I was the 
chairman of it. We held more than 30 hearings on this. We made multiple 
trips. He is knowledgeable. He gets along well with the other side. He 
negotiated something I completely supported, the Prevent Government 
Shutdowns Act, with Senator Hassan. So he was not a bad guy to ask to 
do some of the negotiation for us; but you had to recognize what you 
were dealing with--a negotiating partner, again, who wasn't looking to 
secure the border but was looking for political cover.
  Then when the elements of the border bill--it wasn't a border bill; 
it was an immigration bill--started leaking out, it became all too 
apparent that that bill was not going to secure the border. That bill 
was going to give Democrats political cover. It is not talked about 
much in that bill. There are all kinds of elements that have been very 
fairly criticized.
  (Ms. CORTEZ MASTO assumed the Chair.)
  The main problem with that bill is the 4,000 discretionary threshold. 
I mean, a lot of ink has been spilled on the 5,000 threshold that was 
mandatory--that the President stop processing asylum claims and send 
people home. In other words, at 5,000, it was mandatory that the 
President secure the border; at 4,000, it was discretionary. And that 
authority only lasted for 3 years.
  So what is the problem with that?
  Well, I mentioned earlier that President Trump ran into all kinds of 
resistance from radical left, open border

[[Page S934]]

groups that challenged just about every action he took. By the way, the 
court systems have undermined that authority. We could pass a law to 
reverse those and restore that authority, but that is not what that 
border bill was about--not even close.
  But if you set 4,000 as the discretionary, what you are implying is 
that the President doesn't have that authority. The Congress is now 
weighing in, and they are codifying the fact that the President can act 
to suspend asylum claims until we reach 4,000 a day on average for 7 
days. Then that authority goes away after 3 years.
  So I certainly can imagine the radical left open border groups 
running to court in 3 years--or in 1 year if we have a new President 
who actually wants to secure the border--and saying: Oh, Congress can't 
do that. Congress has spoken. Congress has said that the President 
cannot stop processing asylum claims even though the Supreme Court has 
ruled that 212(f) exudes deference to the President specifically on 
that.
  If you would have passed that law, we would have neutered that 
authority. We couldn't allow that. The fact that Republican negotiators 
didn't understand that was more than unfortunate.
  So, again, it wasn't people like me criticizing the bill that killed 
that bill; it was the public. Once the language was actually released 
and people realized that all the rumors were not only true, the bill 
was actually worse than what was rumored, that bill killed itself. It 
should offer no political cover. It was not a border security bill.
  What this chart shows--again, this shows--going back here. That is 
President Obama's humanitarian crisis. That is when daily 
apprehensions--we called them back then--were a little more than 2,000 
a day. That is when his Secretary of Homeland Security said that 1,000 
a day was really a bad day for him. Later on, after he left office, he 
said 1,000 a day overwhelms the system. Yet the political-cover 
immigration bill would have normalized thousands. I can't tell you 
exactly how many.
  There were tougher asylum provisions. There was more rapid 
adjudication. It wasn't all bad. There were some good elements there. 
But the bad overwhelmed the good, and it was worse than doing nothing 
at all. It doesn't say much about a border security bill, does it?
  This chart would show Obama's humanitarian crisis, President Trump's, 
which he fixed, and then you have this massive inflow from President 
Biden.
  Let's do a little history lesson here, just kind of going back to how 
we got to this point, because one of the problems in the Senate bill is 
that it does nothing to President Biden's abuse of the parole process.
  Again, understand what parole is. Parole should be used on a case-by-
case basis. Let's say somebody has cancer in a different country. They 
want to come into one of our premier cancer centers and get treatment. 
They are granted parole. They come in, they get their treatment, and 
they go home. Maybe they have to attend somebody's funeral. It is for 
humanitarian situations.
  Under the Trump administration, generally it was about 5- or 6,000 
people a year who were granted parole. The Biden administration has 
granted parole to hundreds of thousands--a complete abuse of the 
process.
  Where did he learn that from? Where did he learn his lawlessness 
from? From the Obama administration because what sparked all of this 
was the abuse of prosecutorial discretion, which is what President 
Obama did with the deferred action on childhood arrivals memorandum 
granting prosecutorial discretion to classes, to hundreds of thousands 
of people--an abuse of process. And that sparked all of this.
  I mentioned earlier that I began working on these charts--a chart 
like this--back in about 2013, 2014, after the DACA decision in June of 
2012. Back then, I was primarily concerned about unaccompanied children 
because that really seemed to be the real crisis. We have always had a 
flow of single adults--they are a lot easier to take care of--but 
unaccompanied children are an issue.
  So the DACA memorandum, that abuse of prosecutorial discretion, what 
that did is it dramatically increased the number of unaccompanied 
children. It went from about 2- to 3,000, and then it started spiking, 
as you can see. That is in red.
  Pretty soon, people got the word out that the immigration law changed 
in America, and so now people are coming in as families as well. That 
is in blue. You see, right now, that is the primary abuse.
  One of the issues with the family units is that we really do not know 
whether that family or that group of people who present themselves as a 
family really is a family now. We don't do adequate DNA testing.
  I have been down at the border. I remember seeing some little 18-
month-old little girl being held by some scruffy-looking 50-year-old. I 
seriously doubt that was her father. I seriously doubt it. I hope it 
was. I seriously doubt it.
  In testimony before my committee, we found out that they would sell 
children--they would sell children--for $81 to form a family unit. They 
would leave little boys. One little boy was left in a 100-degree field, 
just abandoned. The only identification they wrote is a phone number on 
his shoe. Is that humane? There is nothing humane about the open border 
policy.
  But, anyway, that is what sparked all of this. That abuse of 
prosecutorial discretion led to all of this eventually.
  Back then, President Obama declared a humanitarian crisis. Again, 
2,000 a day--a humanitarian crisis, and it was. It is. So President 
Obama started detaining families.
  There was a decision back I think in 1996, if memory serves me 
right--it could be a different year--called the Flores decision. It 
involved unaccompanied children. Basically, there was a settlement over 
this one little girl named Flores. Basically, the settlement was the 
United States cannot hold and detain an unaccompanied child for more 
than 20 days. We have to process them through, turn them over to HHS, 
and find some sponsor family or do something with that child. We can't 
detain them within the Department of Homeland Security. We didn't have 
a Department of Homeland Security back then but within the government 
structure.

  Of course, that was taken to court once people starting abusing our 
process and starting coming as families, and there was what they called 
the Flores decision reinterpretation, and that applied that settlement 
to not only just unaccompanied children but children in family units.
  So even the Obama administration started separating families, whom 
they could detain, from the children, whom they couldn't. That, of 
course, was politically untenable, and they stopped. But the result of 
that stoppage, the result that you could no longer detain people, 
pretty well--you really ramped up catch-and-release.
  That caused President Trump's problem. What President Trump did--
again, against great resistance of the open border crowd--is he enacted 
some pretty smart policies.
  I actually worked with Senator Sinema on something we called 
Operation Safe Return. We had three Democrats join in that letter to 
DHS and a number of Republicans. This was something we worked on with 
DHS itself, trying to design a rapid adjudication process of asylum 
claims and a rapid deportation, safe deportation, back to their home 
countries when they don't qualify for asylum.
  By the way, a very small percentage of people who come to this 
country actually qualify for asylum. It is a very tough standard. You 
have to be persecuted by the government, your government, on six 
different criteria. Economic migration is not a valid asylum claim, and 
that is the vast majority of people coming here.
  Listen, I am sympathetic with them. I want a functioning legal 
immigration system so these people can't be abused.
  Anyway, what President Trump did is he started addressing that. He 
took that Operation Safe Return, and that morphed into the migrant 
protection program, otherwise known as ``Return to Mexico.''
  Now, that didn't work immediately because we weren't getting 
cooperation from Mexico. We also didn't have the third safe country 
agreements in place with Central America. But those got in place.
  Then, because Mexico wasn't cooperating, finally, President Trump 
threatened tariffs against Mexico. That got

[[Page S935]]

their attention, and lo and behold, problem solved--until Democrat 
Presidential candidates started talking about they are going to end 
deportation, give free healthcare, and then, even worse, President 
Biden took office and opened up the border.
  Again, as you can see, I just recreated the Obama humanitarian crisis 
in comparison to a normalized flow. This is about 4,500 a day. Maybe it 
would only be 3,900 a day. Under the 4,000 discretionary limit, it is 
going to be thousands a day, which is why that bill had to be defeated.
  Again, I wish we were debating a true border security bill. I wish we 
were giving the American people what they want, which is a secure 
border, being more concerned about Americans' safety than we are the 
safety of foreigners. I wish we were doing that, but we are not. 
Instead, we are debating this supplemental, and the largest chunk of 
that spending is going to Ukraine.
  Just like I have somewhat of a unique perspective on the border 
crisis because I was chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland 
Security and Governmental Affairs for 6 years--I have made multiple 
trips down to the border--I also have a different perspective, a unique 
perspective, on the whole Ukraine situation.
  I served as the either the chairman or ranking member of the European 
Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for about 10 
years. I have made multiple trips to Ukraine. My first trip actually 
was in I think June of 2011. We went to Georgia, which had already been 
invaded by Russia, then to Ukraine, and then up to the Baltic States.
  Back then, the main issue in Ukraine was the corruption within the 
wheat markets and the corruption in their news media--the news 
oligarchs, they called them. I thought that was kind of interesting 
because I look back at America and go: Well, we have billionaires who 
own the media, too. We just call them billionaires; we don't call them 
oligarchs. We have the same corrupt and highly biased media in America, 
so we shouldn't be throwing stones.
  Anyway, that was the big issue back then--corruption in the media, 
the media oligarchs, and corruption in the wheat markets.
  I was the only Member of Congress who attended Zelenskyy's 
inauguration in May of 2019. I went back a few months later with 
Senator Murphy, who was also either chairman or ranking member of the 
European Subcommittee. We did quite a bit of traveling together into 
Europe.
  I think two things stuck out about Zelenskyy in those meetings. The 
first is, I do believe he was sincere. We attended his speech at the 
high court of--I can't remember the exact name but the high court 
fighting corruption. He made a very heartfelt plea laying out his goal. 
He wanted to ``defeat''--that is the word he used--he wanted to 
``defeat'' corruption, but the problem he had is he was a political 
neophyte. The long knives were out immediately, and he was never able, 
really, to accomplish that goal.
  The other important thing to remember and certainly what I remember 
about this is that back then--you have to remember this was 2019--
Vladimir Putin has already illegally annexed Crimea. He was already in 
firm control of eastern Ukraine. But even at that point, President 
Zelenskyy described to me--told me that he wanted to do a peace deal 
with Putin. He understood there was no way Ukraine could dislodge 
Russia from those areas. There was just no way.
  Now, he realized it wasn't going to be popular. I mean, of course, it 
was not going to be popular. You have an invading force in your 
territory. But he was practical enough to realize that Russia is a much 
larger country. It has four times the population of Ukraine. It has a 
much larger industrial base. It has a powerful navy. So he understood 
that he did not have the wherewithal, he did not have the capability, 
Ukraine didn't have the capability of pushing Putin out, so he was 
intelligent enough to realize: I have to do a peace deal.
  How is that relevant right now? As much as it pains me to say this--
and I don't like this reality--Vladimir Putin is an evil war criminal. 
Make no mistake about it: We all agree on that. Vladimir Putin is an 
evil war criminal. He did not have to invade Ukraine. There is no 
justification for what he did, but he did it.
  We are now about 2 years into this bloodbath. And now, we are in a 
bloody stalemate. And the reality I think a lot of my colleagues who 
are supporting this aid package are ignoring is that Vladimir Putin 
will not lose this war. Losing the war is existential for Vladimir 
Putin.
  Again, Russia has four times the population, a much larger military 
industrial base--or industrial base just in general. They can produce 
4.5 million 155-millimeter shells. They are shooting 10,000 a day right 
now at Ukraine. It is a bloody stalemate, primarily a war with 
artillery. Ukraine can only fire a couple thousand a day. I don't think 
the West manufacturing capability has exceeded a million a year yet.
  By the way, a little factoid: Russia produces those 155-millimeter 
shells for about $600 apiece. Our military industrial complex charges 
us 5 to $6,000 apiece--an order of magnitude higher. We are spending 
880-some-billion dollars a year on defense. Are we getting our money's 
worth out of that? Are we asking that question? Are we doing the 
oversight? We should be.
  China, it is hard to say exactly what they spend, but it is about 
$300 billion a year. Now, purchasing power parity, they are probably 
getting more for the 300 billion. We are spending almost 900 billion. 
They are spending 300 billion. In the briefings I get, they are 
building up their military rapidly.
  The next 13 nations combined spend less than $700 billion combined. 
So I would ask: What are you spending that money on? You know, we are 
saying--by the way, I think it is a depraved justification. It is 
depraved to say one of the rationales for spending $60 billion for 
Ukraine is that, Well, it is really not going to Ukraine; it is being 
used here in America; it is creating jobs in your State.
  Why do I say that is depraved? Because if you are really concerned 
about the Ukrainian people--that is my concern, the Ukrainian people--
if you are really concerned about the Ukrainian people, you ought to be 
concerned about what is happening to their country.
  It is hard to get the exact statistics, but I have got something like 
70,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed in action, 10-to-40,000 civilians, 
100-to-120,000 Ukrainians wounded. I have heard other estimates far 
higher than that. Russia has about 120,000 soldiers killed in action; 
wounded, almost 200,000. This is a bloody stalemate. I have seen some 
estimates of the destruction of Ukraine approaching--if not 
surpassing--a trillion dollars.
  So again, the awful reality that we need to face, if we are really 
going to vote to add $60 billion to add fuel to the fire of a bloody 
stalemate is, what result is that going to be? The only way this war 
ends--because Putin is not going to lose this war--the only way it ends 
is in a negotiated settlement.
  And every day that goes by, the settlement gets worse and worse. It 
doesn't get better; it gets worse. More Ukrainians will have died by 
then. More Russian conscripts. And I take no joy in that. I take no joy 
in the death of a Russian conscript, some young man yanked out of his 
village by Vladimir Putin, sent to the front as cannon fodder. I take 
no joy in that. None of us should. And more of Ukraine gets destroyed.
  Our policy should have been, for quite some time now, to use whatever 
influence we have in Ukraine not to fuel the flames but to try to reach 
a peace agreement. Again, I am not Pollyannaish. I realize how hard 
that is going to be. There have been atrocities created, war crimes. 
You don't just kiss and make up. That just isn't healed overnight. That 
will take generations. But we better start now.
  That is one of the main reasons--as sympathetic as I am for the 
Ukrainian people--I don't see how sending another $60 billion helps 
their plight because I see no strategy whatsoever on the part of the 
Biden administration to actually try and end the war. I see no strategy 
whatsoever on this ``spend more money and send more munitions and stoke 
the fires, fuel the flames of the bloody, relentless stalemate.'' 
Again, unfortunately, that is just the stark reality of the situation.
  It was interesting, we did an X Space--I think that is how you 
pronounce it--with David Sacks, associate

[[Page S936]]

of Elon Musk. Elon Musk was on with a couple of Senators: Senator Vance 
and Senator Lee. And I did mention, I just read the new book about Elon 
Musk by Walter Isaacson. And in that book, Walter Isaacson describes 
what Elon Musk has developed; he calls it an idiot index.
  It is a very interesting concept. I am in manufacturing. It really 
resonated with me. I kind of look at things the same way. Basically, 
you take a look at any product, and you calculate what does the raw 
material cost that product. You know, this desk, maybe you have got $10 
worth of wood in there, maybe you have 20. I don't know what it is. The 
next question you ask is: Well, what is the price? And it is the price 
divided by the raw material cost, and that gives you your idiot index. 
The higher that number, the more opportunity there is for dramatically 
reducing the cost of that product. And that is what Elon Musk is a 
genius at.
  I was being interviewed by a Wall Street Journal reporter--I haven't 
verified this, but this is what the reporter told me. He said that Elon 
Musk--through the use of things like idiot indexes and his just 
relentless pursuit of questioning every requirement and driving costs 
out just maniacally, quite honestly--he has taken the cost of a launch 
of a rocket from a billion dollars to $70 million. And he has come up 
with the technology to land the boosters synchronously in pads right 
next to each other. So that is what the private sector does.

  We talked earlier about spending 880-some-billion dollars on defense, 
5 to $6,000 per 155-millimeter shell versus Russia spending $600. It is 
time for Congress, it is time for the Senate to do oversight, start 
putting pressure on our military industrial complex to deliver a whole 
lot more for a whole lot less as opposed to being driven--as President 
Eisenhower warned us--being driven by the military industrial complex 
into all of these foreign entanglements.
  While I have time, I do want to provide a little retrospection of 
America's foreign entanglements. Let me first say I truly believe 
America is a good country because Americans are good people. The reason 
we supported the Ukrainian people is because we want to help anybody 
fighting for their freedom. That is who Americans are.
  As Colin Powell and others famously said, We don't send our sons and 
daughters halfway around the world to conquer land. The only land we 
ever asked for is enough to bury our dead. We send our sons and 
daughters overseas to help other people fight for what we have--
freedom, for those universal goals and values that we all cherish: 
safety, security, prosperity, opportunity.
  That is what Americans want for not only ourselves and our children 
but for everybody on the planet. We are good people. We are a good 
country. But we have had leaders, we have the military industrial 
complex, we have Agencies that are far from perfect--but I think more 
they led us astray. As a nation, we better start taking a look back and 
going: What was the result of that intervention?
  I was just recently in Hanoi. What wonderful people. We did a trip to 
Singapore, to Thailand, and then to Vietnam. Singapore per capita GDP 
is about 75,000. It is a wealthy country, and you can tell. Go to 
Thailand, it is a tenth of that: 7,500. And you see squalor. You see 
highrises. There is wealth. There is the income gap. But you see 
squalor. You go to Vietnam, half of Thailand's GDP, you don't see 
squalor. You see an incredibly industrious people. We were told a poll 
recently of Vietnamese, and 96 percent of Vietnam has a positive 
opinion of America, because we are good.
  We never should have gone to war and bombed Vietnam. And that is no 
way denigrating the service and sacrifice of the finest among us. 
Fifty-thousand paid the ultimate price. Was it worth it? What has been 
the result of Afghanistan? What has been the result of Iraq?
  I recently saw a meme. The title was, this just shows--to describe it 
better, it showed a picture of Iran, and it had all of these U.S. 
military bases surrounding Iran. It was basically saying, Well, you can 
see why we find Iran so provocative, because they put their country so 
close to our bases. Again, I don't apologize for the moles. They are 
the largest state sponsor of terror. They provide the IEDs that were 
responsible for more than 600 American soldiers dead. Do we ever look 
back and say, Was that worth it? Did we take the right actions?
  Ukraine--listen, I was as big a cheerleader as anybody, as those 
freedom-loving Ukrainians took to the Maidan, demanding freedom, asking 
what we have--prosperity. They wanted to link up with the West which 
we, of course, were happy to accept them. Then I did walk the streets 
with John McCain, and I saw the bullet holes in the lightposts. I 
visited the memorial to the more than 100 Ukrainians who were 
slaughtered by their own government.
  Now, the price of freedom is high. Those people are obviously martyrs 
for the cause. That was 2014. Fast forward. I truly think this war 
never had to happen. I remember being briefed in a SCIF. And 
afterwards, I was talking to two of my colleagues. I said, I think 
there is still a way of avoiding this war, but we won't take those 
actions. We either declare that we will never allow Ukraine, at least 
in the foreseeable future, to become a partner in NATO--we could 
declare that. We could say we are not going to bring Ukraine to NATO 
membership. The other thing we could have done is probably take U.N. 
troops and put them in as a tripwire. We certainly didn't very visibly 
show Putin all the defensive weaponry we were providing for Ukraine to 
deter it from invading. But we didn't do that and Putin invaded.

  I still am very interested to find out exactly what happened in 
Istanbul, when they were sitting down trying to bring the war to a 
quick conclusion and Boris Johnson flies in. What happened there? I 
don't know. All I know is the result has been awful for Ukraine and the 
Ukrainian people.
  I guess my time is up--not quite, unless you are really anxious.
  We need to understand and accept reality. As much as we hate it, you 
cannot create good policy living in a fantasy, world constructing your 
own reality. You have to accept the hard realities of the moment.
  And just to repeat, with my remaining minutes here, our first 
priority should be to secure our own border, to protect Americans, to 
keep Americans safe, to keep our children safe. This surge--this 
catastrophe--is not just impacting cities like New York and Chicago. 
There is a small little city in Wisconsin--Whitewater, WI. I was called 
down there with the chief of police and county sheriffs. It has 15,000 
in population. They have hundreds of migrant children in their school 
system speaking a different dialect of Spanish that their bilingual 
teachers don't understand. So they have to hire another interpreter. It 
costs them a hundred thousand dollars plus.
  Police calls are taking three or four times the normal time. So other 
law enforcement activities are way down as they are responding to the 
migrants. Migrants are crowding into apartments unsafely, 12 to an 
apartment. They are trying to grapple with it. Now they are asking for 
help, for funding.
  I am sympathetic with them, but the solution isn't to spend billions 
on sanctuary cities. The solution is to reduce the flow to a trickle so 
we don't have to spend those hundreds of billions of dollars taking 
care of this catastrophe. That is what this is. Six million people--it 
keeps rising by a couple hundred thousand a month; probably more than 7 
million by the end of Biden's, hopefully, only term.
  This shouldn't be that hard. This didn't require a monstrosity of a 
Rube Goldberg immigration bill. All we asked for was some enforcement 
mechanism tied to Ukraine funding to leverage that funding to force 
President Biden, who wants an open border, who caused this problem, to 
use the Executive authority he already has to secure the border, and 
oh, by the way, recognize how much easier it is for a Democrat 
President to secure the border versus a Republican.
  President Trump, again, faced strong resistance from the open border 
crowd and no help from Democrats here in this Chamber to override court 
decisions, for example. President Biden, I know he may face similar 
resistance, but he would have Republicans here more than willing to 
pass a quick little law by unanimous consent to override a wrongful 
court decision like the Flores reinterpretation.
  It may not be widely known, but President Obama's Secretary of DHS,

[[Page S937]]

Jeh Johnson, completely disagreed with that court decision--completely 
disagreed with it, wrongfully decided. What President Obama should have 
done is come to Congress and asked for us to write a very focused law, 
a very targeted law, to instruct the court that you are wrong. We can 
detain families with their children. That is the humane thing to do, as 
opposed to initiate a massive catch-and-release, facilitating human 
trafficking, sex trafficking, and drug trafficking that goes along with 
it--again, a reality that I know my colleagues on the other side of the 
aisle don't want to face. They don't want to admit what a crisis, what 
a catastrophe, this is.
  Secretary Mayorkas--how many times has he been before the Senate and 
House? When we ask him: Secretary Mayorkas, will you recognize this is 
a crisis? No, Senator. At least a problem? No, Senator, it is a 
challenge. It is a challenge we are rising to. We have control of the 
border, Secretary Mayorkas says. And again, his definition of control 
and their solution is billions of dollars to sanctuary cities, billions 
of dollars for more CBP officers, not to secure the border, not to stop 
the flow, but more efficiently and effectively encounter, process, and 
disperse, and create a problem for cities large and small that is going 
to be with us for years, if not decades. This has to end.
  It is a tragedy that this body, this Senate, couldn't rise to the 
occasion and actually construct a real border security bill, one that 
would bring this down to a trickle.
  Do what President Trump did in March and April of 2020. Bring this 
flow down to way under 1,000 a day. That is what the American people 
expected. That is what we should have delivered. That is what we have 
failed miserably to do. And now we are about ready to send $60 billion 
to Ukraine--no border security whatsoever--and we will fuel the flames 
and prolong the destruction of Ukraine and the killing of its citizens 
and Russian conscripts.
  This is a pretty easy ``no'' vote for me. It boggles my mind that so 
many of my colleagues here are actually going to vote yes on this 
without first securing our border.
  I yield to the good Senator from Nebraska.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nebraska.
  Mr. RICKETTS. Madam President, I rise today to join my colleagues in 
talking about the catastrophe at our southern border, what has happened 
under this Biden administration, how it was created by Joe Biden 
because of his policies. This self-inflicted wound has been created by 
Joe Biden and his policies.

  Let's step back a little bit to see: How did we get here? How did we 
get to this situation where we have a flood of illegal immigrants 
coming across our southern border?
  As my colleague from Wisconsin just described, under the Trump 
administration, President Trump brought the crossings of illegal 
immigrants to a 45-year low, less than 1,000 encounters per day. He did 
that with the same tools that President Biden has available to him 
today. But instead of taking the same policies that President Trump 
used to control that border, President Biden was in a rush to undo 
those policies. He promised a pathway to citizenship for 11 million 
illegal immigrants that are in this country. He promised to stop 
``locking people up.'' He said: For those who come seeking asylum, we 
should immediately have a passage to absorb them and keep them safe 
until they can be heard.
  And he said those who cross the border illegally ``should not be the 
focus of deportation.'' Well, certainly on that last point, President 
Biden has been accurate. If you look at the September numbers, there 
were about 270,000 contacts along our southern border and only about 10 
percent of those folks were deported. He is certainly living up to his 
promise.
  In his first 100 days of office, President Biden issued 94 Executive 
orders on immigration. He stopped the construction of the border wall. 
He halted deportations. He suspended the ``Remain in Mexico'' 
provisions.
  He repealed Trump's interior enforcement Executive order that 
prioritized immigration enforcement. President Trump's order encouraged 
States and local jurisdictions to enforce Federal immigration laws. 
Part of it was to revive the Secure Communities Program, which ordered 
the Department of Homeland Security to consider stripping Federal 
funding from so-called sanctuary cities and encourage additional 
criminal prosecutions for illegal entry into the United States.
  Under the Biden administration, Joe Biden has abused the process of 
parole. I want to be clear what we are talking about when we are 
talking about parole. We are not talking about parole as in, I have 
been in prison and now I have done enough of my time and have shown 
good behavior in prison, so that I get paroled and released into the 
public with supervision from our criminal justice system.
  No, that is not what we are talking about here. Parole is a function 
that the executive branch can use to be able to allow people to come 
into this country. The way the law is written, it is supposed to be on 
a case-by-case basis; that it is only to be used in cases of extreme 
humanitarian need or in the best interest of our country. And if we 
look back over the Obama and Trump administration, on average, about 
5,600 people were paroled into this country.
  So these are people who are not U.S. citizens. These people were 
paroled into our country in a given year. That was a just--again, it 
was being used on a case-by-case basis by the previous two 
administrations. Under this President, he has absolutely abused parole. 
This is a lawless administration. President Biden has paroled, last 
year, into this country, 1.2 million illegal immigrants--1.2 million. 
To put that in perspective, that is about two-thirds the population of 
my home State--two-thirds the population of Nebraska.
  Again, let's take a step back and compare that 1.2 million people in 
the last year versus an average of 5,600. This is absolute abuse of 
executive power, of taking a law that was to be on a case-by-case basis 
and applying it to whole classes of people to allow people to come in 
here. President Biden is handing out this parole like it is Halloween 
candy.
  I mentioned the September statics were that about 10 percent of the 
people had been deported. It turns out about 85 percent of the people 
who will knock on our door are getting into our country. That is 
creating the incentive for people to come here. It is not hard to 
understand. If you were not allowed in the country in the previous 
administration, now this administration is saying: If you come across 
that border illegally, I am very likely to parole you into this 
country.
  As soon as you cross that border, you are picked up by Customs and 
Border Patrol, you get processed and released. The first thing you are 
doing then is calling or texting your family members at home saying: I 
was able to get into the United States. I didn't have to follow the 
regular process, which takes years for people who follow the process 
legally. I didn't have to do that; I could just walk across the border 
and be able to get into this country.

  Why are we surprised--or, rather, we shouldn't be surprised that 
there are millions of people who are making that dangerous trek to get 
here.
  Of course, again, as described by my colleague from Wisconsin, it is 
a dangerous trek. This open border policy has facilitated human 
trafficking, sex trafficking, women being sexually assaulted, children 
being trafficked.
  One of the things the Biden administration has done has stopped the 
DNA testing of children coming across the border, and that just 
facilitates the cartels in trafficking those children.
  The scenario is, if you come across the border with a child, you are 
a family, and so the administration won't detain you. Guess what. The 
cartels know this. They take advantage of that. So they take these 
unaccompanied children, put them with an adult, and send them across 
the border.
  On my last trip to the border--I have been there four times, and we 
will talk about that a little bit more--on our last trip to the border, 
we talked to the Customs and Border Protection people. They told us 
that sometimes 30 or up to 50 percent of the kids who came across that 
border were not the kid of the parent or the adult who was with them. 
The child did not belong to that adult. DNA testing at least would help 
us be able to verify whether that child actually indeed was the kid of 
the adult who claimed to be the parent.
  When I was down on the border, I saw this for myself firsthand. There 
was a

[[Page S938]]

man there who claimed this little girl who was with him was his 
daughter. We questioned this man, and he said: Yeah, this is my 
daughter.
  I am a father myself. I have two girls. This girl was terrified. As a 
dad, you can kind of tell, right? You know when a little girl is with 
her father, and it was clear that there was not that kind of 
relationship, that this girl was afraid. She was terrified.
  After more questioning, the man said: Well, I am actually not her 
father; I am her uncle.
  Because of Biden's policies, the Border Patrol could do nothing. They 
did not have the ability to do the DNA testing to see if that child was 
indeed this man's daughter. So what does that open it up to? They come 
in, they get processed, they get released, and that child gets sent 
back to Mexico and gets used with another adult to come back across the 
border.
  This is the type of humanitarian crisis that President Biden has 
created. He is absolutely responsible for every case of sex trafficking 
and child trafficking that is going on along this border because of his 
open border policies. He is responsible. He made the decisions to undo 
the policies that had reduced the trafficking and the illegal 
immigrants coming across our border. It is absolutely terrible.
  So let's talk a little about that. What has happened under this 
administration? Since Joe Biden has been President, there have been 
nearly 6.6 million encounters at our southern border. When he undid 
those policies, he sent a message to people not just south of our 
southern border, not just in Central America, not just in South 
America, but to the entire world: Our borders are open.
  In fact, my colleague from Wisconsin has just talked about the open 
border crowd. It is a very real thing. There are people in this city 
who want open borders, and with this President, they are getting it.
  When the people of the world heard that, they started flooding to 
come here.
  As was previously mentioned, President Trump brought those encounters 
down to under 1,000 a day. Now we see 5,000, 10,000. In December, we 
saw days of 11,000, 12,000. In December total, there were over 300,000 
encounters at our southern border. Again, let me put that in 
perspective. That is larger than the capital city of Nebraska. Madam 
President, 300,000 encounters is more than the population of Lincoln, 
NE, my State's capital. That is how many people are coming across.
  I mentioned people from all around the world. The night I was on the 
border last, this group of illegal immigrants crossed the border. They 
were apprehended by Customs and Border Protection. We had folks from El 
Salvador primarily, but there was a couple from Moldova. Think about 
that--Moldova, Eastern Europe. They had traveled through half a dozen 
different countries to get to the point where they crossed our border.
  When I was in the Rio Grande Valley on a previous trip, they said 
that the number of people crossing from China had been up 400 percent. 
We are also talking about people from Syria, Iran. These are countries 
that have terrorists who are committed to killing our people.
  In years past, we would have single-digit numbers of people on the 
Terrorist Watchlist who crossed our southern border--six, seven, eight, 
nine. Last year, under this administration, 169 people just at the 
southern border crossed who were on the Terrorist Watchlist.
  So how many people have crossed in the intervening years? Total 
encounters by Customs and Border Protection in fiscal year 2021 was 
1,734,686; in fiscal year 2022, 2,378,944; and in fiscal year 2023, 
2,475,669. That is roughly almost 6.6 million encounters by Customs and 
Border Patrol. But what that does not count is the approximately 1.8 
million ``got-aways.'' What do I mean by ``got-away''? These are the 
people who crossed the border and who, for whatever reason, Customs and 
Border Protection could not get to, to apprehend.
  So what happens is, often people come across the border, and they 
surrender themselves right away, such as I saw on my last trip. A 
family came across or individuals, a couple from Moldova with their 
little baby came across the border, and they surrendered right away. 
But there are people who are evading apprehension.
  By the way, the cartels understand the system, and they try to game 
it. Customs and Border Protection has told me what they will do is they 
will understand we have limited resources, flood a certain number--like 
a large number of illegal immigrants across one part of the border, and 
then in another part of the border, they push through their high-value 
people or cargo.
  We have been talking about people coming across the border, but it 
also includes drugs, and that is why now every State is a border State. 
Because of this humanitarian and national security crisis, we see 
people coming across the border who are impacting our communities. We 
see illegal drugs coming across the border that are impacting our 
communities, and it impacts not just States like Texas or Arizona but 
my home State of Nebraska.
  In the last 2 years I was Governor, we saw a dramatic increase in the 
amount of drugs, specifically fentanyl. And I want to take a step back 
here for a moment because as we talk about the drugs coming across the 
border, there are two big ones that are impacting my State: fentanyl 
and methamphetamine.
  Fentanyl is the leading killer of Americans age 18 to 45. The leading 
killer of Americans age 18 to 45, our young people, is fentanyl. That 
fentanyl is manufactured in precursors or it starts as precursors in 
China, gets shipped to Mexico, where then illegal labs that the cartels 
run turn it into fentanyl, and then it gets pushed across the border.
  When I was Governor, just to share with you how much has changed 
under the Biden administration in his rush to undo the policies that 
had brought these crossings to historical lows. In 2019, law 
enforcement in Nebraska confiscated 46 pills that were laced with 
fentanyl--46. By 2021, that number had jumped to 151,000--in just 2 
years going from 46 to 151,000 pills laced with fentanyl. That is 
another example of Joe Biden's failed policies. He is directly 
responsible for this huge increase in fentanyl coming into our country 
because of his open border policies.
  These policies have real-world impacts on people. I mentioned how 
many people have died because of fentanyl, the leading killer of our 
young people. But every one of those cases is not just a statistic; it 
is a person--a person like Taryn Lee Griffith.
  Taryn Lee Griffith was a young mom in Lincoln, NE. She had two kids. 
She went out one night and took a pill she thought was Percocet. Turns 
out it was laced with fentanyl--a lethal dose--and she died that night, 
leaving her two little children to have to learn about their mom from 
pictures and stories from relatives. That family paid the price for Joe 
Biden's open border policies. It is killing our people. And that is why 
my colleagues and I said: Let's see what we can do to stop this.
  Actually, as Governor, I did the same thing. I said: This is 
impacting us in the State of Nebraska. How can we stem this tide of 
people coming into our country, this tide of drugs coming into our 
country?
  So as Governor, I sent my State patrol--25 of our troopers--down to 
assist the Texas Department of Public Safety in doing law enforcement. 
They weren't doing border patrol but were doing law enforcement to help 
out the overwhelmed and overworked law enforcement at our southern 
border.
  When they came back, they told the stories of how, again, these folks 
crossed the border. They are being victimized by the cartels, and when 
they get across, most of them are surrendering themselves to our law 
enforcement because they know they will be safe with our law 
enforcement. They don't want to be left up to the mercies of the 
cartels. They know they will be safe with our law enforcement.
  Our troopers told the stories of providing that safety to these 
people who came across the border.
  That is also part of the human impact this open border policy is 
having.
  And we continue to see the effects of it in my State today. In 
January, News Channel Nebraska reported on a man from Mexico who was 
sentenced to prison in Bellevue, NE, after being convicted of 
conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine. Talked about fentanyl, but 
methamphetamine is an

[[Page S939]]

even bigger problem in the State of Nebraska.
  This 43-year-old man was in the country illegally. He was arrested in 
a motel room with $15,000 in cash, and 11.5 pounds of methamphetamine, 
and he had previously been deported for drug charges.
  This was a problem that became apparent to me early on when I was 
Governor--and not just me, many of my colleagues as well. And so what 
we did was 26 of us got together, and we sent President Biden a letter 
saying: President Biden, your policies are impacting our States.
  Now, remember, this is early on in the administration of President 
Biden. This was his first year. We are like, your policies are 
impacting our States. Will you please meet with us to talk about the 
impacts in our States and what potential solutions would be?
  And President Biden absolutely refused to meet with us. He absolutely 
refused.
  So we went down to the border, and we talked about the solutions that 
had worked in the previous administration. We had a 10-point plan that 
would address the border issues that we have, and we listed those out, 
and we knew they would work. You know why we knew they would work? 
Because they had worked in the Trump administration.
  Those 10 points included: Continue the title 42 health restrictions. 
About 18 to 20 percent of the people who were crossing the border at 
that time--this is September 2021 that we sent that letter. We heard 
nothing back from the President. We went down to the border in October 
of 2021.
  And about 20 percent, 18 to 20 percent of the folks crossing the 
border tested positive for COVID. One report estimated about 40,000 
illegal immigrants were sent to our cities with COVID-19. And you 
wonder why big cities had problems controlling that.
  We said: Reinstate that. Second, we said: Fully reinstate the migrant 
protection protocols. This was established, again, in the prior 
administration that basically said: If you are seeking asylum in our 
country, you have to stay in Mexico. And now this is a big deal because 
when somebody comes here illegally, they know, hey, I am going to have 
to wait years to get into the country just to have my court date, that 
is a disincentive to come here.
  When they know they can just come here, maybe get a court date that 
is 4 years down the road, maybe 10 years down the road, that is a good 
deal for them. They will come here, get released right away, and say, 
hey, I have got a court date that is years down the road. And then, 
guess what, not many of those folks actually show up at their court 
date when it comes up. So they, basically, get to this country without 
going through the regular process that so many legal immigrants do to 
come to our country.
  We said: Finish securing the border; finish building the wall. 
President Biden stopped the construction of the wall. Now, the wall by 
itself is not going to solve the whole problem. But when we talk to 
Customs and Border Patrol folks they say, Walls do work. They help. 
They help limit where you can come across and that helps them do their 
job.
  End catch-and-release. Again, if you know that you can come into this 
country and get released back into our country, what is your downside? 
You come; you get processed; you get released; your court date may be 
years away.
  So we said, part of how we address that also--this is point No. 5--is 
clear the judicial backlog; devote more resources to processing the 
asylum claim; get more judges in there so we don't have this long 
backlog.
  Again, if the incentive is to come here and you know you are going to 
get released, people are going to come. If people come here and they 
get processed and they are told: You don't qualify for asylum, and they 
get sent back, that word will get out, and people will stop coming 
here.
  That is part of the problem. We create these incentives for people to 
come here. The backlog is part of them. We needed to address it.
  And, by the way, again, I have been down to the border. When I talk 
to people coming across, by and large, what they are saying is that 
they just want a better job. I am certainly sympathetic, but a better 
job is not a reason for asylum in this country. Asylum is for people 
who fear for their life in their own country--and not just in their 
neighborhood. You have to fear that their Federal Government is trying 
to harm them. There is no place safe in their country. That is a reason 
for asylum. That is not the vast, vast majority of people coming across 
the border. They are just looking for a better job.
  And then, No. 6 on our 10-point list the governors put forward was: 
Resume the deportation of all the criminals. The Biden administration 
should enforce all of our deportation laws. As I mentioned, again, in 
September, only about 10 percent of the people were being deported.
  No. 7, devote more to Federal resources. Again, this is where my 
colleague from Wisconsin said he would find allies in Republicans in 
the U.S. Senate to get more resources for Federal officials to go after 
the criminals at our southern border. We need to get after them. Stop 
this trafficking--stop the sex trafficking; stop the drug trafficking; 
stop the child trafficking.
  One of the other policies the previous administration was to work 
with the northern triangle countries--Guatemala, Honduras, El 
Salvador--and then Mexico to address the issues there for people who 
were fleeing those countries and work with them to keep the folks in 
their countries and address their issues and not let them cross through 
to Mexico to get to our southern border.

  Again, the Biden administration got rid of that as soon as they came 
into office, got out of that agreement.
  No. 9, of course, send a message to everybody trying to come here 
that there is not a free ride. If you were coming to this country and 
you were forced to remain in Mexico for, say, 3, 4 years before your 
court date, you weren't likely to come and do that. Send that message.
  But this administration did just the opposite. They sent the message 
that our border is open. Come here, you will get in.
  And, of course, No. 10 is: We need more help for Customs and Border 
Patrol. We need more officers. We need more equipment. We need more 
technology.
  When I was down there, they said the cartels actually have better 
drones than we do. We saw aerostats, which are basically these balloons 
that go up with cameras on them to help monitor the border. They said 
they are very effective; they just don't have enough of them.
  There are things we can do to be able to address. So that is what we 
did as Governors to address this crisis.
  And then I come to the U.S. Senate. And what I want to do is continue 
to work to keep people safe, like we did in Nebraska. And so we have 
had this long negotiation on a border bill.
  Now, again, to be clear, President Biden has access to the same laws 
that President Trump did. But my colleagues and I wanted to do more to 
secure our border. For example, end this abuse of parole. We wanted to 
stop this flow of people coming into our country. But the bill that we 
got did not get the job done. It didn't address parole in a meaningful 
way that was going to stop the people coming across the border.
  It set the level of an emergency at 5,000 encounters a day. Folks, 
that is not an emergency; that is a catastrophe. Remember, Trump 
brought it to less than 100--or less than 1,000. That is the emergency 
level, not 5,000. And we weren't doing enough to detain people.
  And by the way, here is the other kicker: Our leader scheduled the 
vote on the border bill before we even had a cost estimate from CBO. So 
we are supposed to vote on a bill that we don't know how much it is 
going to cost? How crazy is that?
  Lots of people understand that there is a cost-benefit tradeoff, that 
you just don't pay an unreasonable amount of money for something if it 
does not have the value. We don't even know what these policies were 
going to cost, yet we were asked to vote on them. And that is why I 
voted no on that bill.
  Now, one of my colleagues from South Carolina came to me and said: 
Hey, I have been in contact with the Border Patrol Council, Brandon 
Judd, president there. He sent me a letter.
  I want to read this letter from Brandon Judd into the record:

       Dear Senators Graham and Cornyn: I am responding to your 
     questions regarding how

[[Page S940]]

     to improve the border security provisions in the emergency 
     national security supplemental. Simply put, defining an 
     emergency at the border as 1,000 encounters a day would be a 
     substantial improvement. It is apparent that 5,000 encounters 
     in a day is a catastrophe, and 1,000 encounters a day is a 
     true emergency.
       This is [in] line with what former Secretary of Homeland 
     Security for President Obama, Jeh Johnson, said [when he 
     said] that one day of 1,000 encounters was a very bad day and 
     ``overwhelms the system.'' If you could lower the number to 
     1,000 encounters on average over a 7 day period and require 
     that the President shut down the border at that level of 
     encounters, that would be a substantial improvement to the 
     legislation.
       As to the question of how to end catch and release, 
     detaining single adults and families rather than referring 
     them to non-custodial removal proceedings--

  And, again, non-custodial removal proceedings, ``non-custodial,'' 
that is just letting people go--

     and enrolling them in Alternatives to Detention--

  Again, letting them go--

     would be a giant step forward towards that goal.

  Don't do that.

       The system of non-custodial proceedings created by the 
     provisions in the supplemental would not effectively curb the 
     catch and release policies of the Biden administration for 
     single adults or aliens in a family unit. Therefore, changing 
     the bill to provide for detention of families as well as 
     single adults would be a tremendous improvement in stopping 
     catch and release.
       Finally, the idea of putting a cap on parole would be a 
     game-changer on ending parole abuse. As you indicated, under 
     the Trump administration and the Obama administration, grants 
     of parole by Customs and Border Protection at the southern 
     border averaged around less than 6,000 a year. Under 
     President Biden, grants of parole across the Department of 
     Homeland Security has skyrocketed to over 800,000 a year. A 
     cap on parole of 10,000 grants a year would be a check on 
     their ability to abuse this authority.
       In summary, redefining emergency from 5,000 to 1,000, 
     requiring actual detention instead of Alternatives to 
     Detention, and a 10,000 a year cap on parole would make this 
     bill exponentially better. Thank you for your questions and 
     interest. Sincerely, Brandon Judd.

  I see my colleague from Ohio is here, so I want to be respectful of 
his time because I know he is anxious to also speak upon this issue. 
But as I wrap up here, what I am hearing from my constituents is that 
they understand this is a catastrophe at our southern border. It is a 
humanitarian catastrophe, as we describe. It is a national security 
catastrophe. They want a secure border.
  They also understand that under the Trump administration, that we had 
this. This wasn't a problem. This has become the No. 1 issue in my 
State. People know what is going on. As I said, every State is a border 
State. And they want us to take action.
  This bill does not get the job done. This bill does not make 
meaningful reforms. And that is why I voted no on the border bill.
  We must continue to look for solutions in the U.S. Senate. But at the 
end of the day, the responsibility for this catastrophe lies squarely 
on the shoulders of our President, Joe Biden. He is responsible for 
every case of human trafficking, sex trafficking, child trafficking, 
drug trafficking that comes across our border, every single one because 
of his open border policies. He is responsible for these deaths.
  We didn't even talk about the thousands of illegal immigrants 
crossing the border who have died crossing the border. He is 
responsible for those too.
  My colleagues and I have introduced a number of pieces of legislation 
to address this. Because I want to allow my colleague from Ohio to have 
the opportunity to be able to talk about this, I won't go into them, 
but the one that I introduced was called: The Ensure Uniform Border 
Inspection Practices Act to make sure we were doing the right things 
across the entire border, but there were a number of other pieces of 
legislation introduced by my colleagues that would have addressed the 
drug trafficking, the asylum abuse, upholding the laws at our border, 
the sanctuary cities that are also draws, all of these things could be 
addressed.
  This administration could do it. I call this administration to stop 
these open border policies. Use the powers at your disposal to secure 
our border.
  That is what the American people want. President Biden, secure our 
border. The American people demand it.
  You have the tools. I call on you to use them.
  With that, I yield back.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Murphy). The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. VANCE. Thanks to my colleague from Nebraska, who confided in 
private to me that he didn't think he could go for the full hour, but I 
would have welcomed at least another 20 minutes of speaking from my 
friend from Nebraska.
  But it is 3:15 in the morning, and we are here discussing sending 
another $61 billion to Ukraine as part of a $95 billion security 
supplemental. I think it is important to at least give some context to 
the four people who are also currently still awake as to how we got 
here and why we got here and why we managed to fumble, I think, a great 
opportunity in this Chamber to actually do some real border security.
  First, months ago, my Republican colleagues and I discussed the 
possibility of doing a border security package as a point of 
negotiation with our Democratic colleagues over Ukraine. The basic 
setup of the negotiation went something like this: Republicans are 
unified--at least allegedly--in our view that the border is a national 
security crisis. This is allegedly a national security supplemental, 
and the border is the most important national security issue that we 
confront. On the flip side, Democrats are united in their view that 
Ukraine must receive another $61 billion or even more of American aid. 
There were the seeds of a potential deal that could be cut between 
Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans.
  Now, there are a few problems with this, as we learned. The first was 
that while our Democratic colleagues might agree that the border has 
some problems, they apparently did not agree it is quite the same 
crisis that we do. That is one problem.
  Another problem is that apparently our Republican colleagues are not 
nearly as united as we thought we were or as we pretended to be. In 
fact, the closer we got to an actual resolution of the negotiation, the 
more we learned that our Republican colleagues--at least a small subset 
of them--cared a hell of a lot more about the Ukraine package than they 
did about securing the American southern border.
  It is negotiation 101 that if you go into a negotiating posture where 
you desperately want the thing the other side of the table also 
desperately wants, you are not in an especially good position. If 
Republicans are as desperate to send $61 billion to Ukraine as 
Democrats are, then it isn't very shocking that the Democrats were not 
willing to give us a large amount on border security.
  Now, this is what, of course, everyone knew. This is what, of course, 
everyone now knows because after a mere hour of debating a border 
security package as part of a broader supplemental, Senate Republicans 
joined with Democrats to immediately move on to a discussion of 
Ukraine's supplemental--literally an hour.
  If you had dreamed up something from the fever swamp conspiracy 
theory of the American conservative movement, you could not have come 
up with something more egregious than this fake negotiation, what it 
produced, and how it immediately led to a debate--not about our 
southern border but about Ukraine.
  Now, there are a few problems with this particular negotiation, a few 
problems with the way that it unfolded.
  The first. The first is that it was done in secret. A border 
security--and by the way, this is problems from the perspective of 
conservatives, problems that the Republicans in our conference who were 
supporting this should have been mindful of if they wanted to actually 
get to a security package that could have gotten a majority of 
Republican support, because after many months of negotiations, there 
was a border security package that received, I believe, four Republican 
votes. And now we have a Ukraine supplemental that received far less 
than the majority of the Republican conference.
  If you wanted to get a majority of Republicans to support this border 
security package, you should have observed a few basic rules.
  The first is that you should not have done a secret negotiation. Many 
of our voters and many of our colleagues are mistrustful of secret 
negotiations. They are mistrustful of the people who participate in 
secret negotiations because if you are not getting the details of a 
plan out as it unfolds, you are not doing a few things.

[[Page S941]]

  First of all, you are not actually allowing people who know the 
immigration law best within the conservative movement to understand 
what is in it, to offer feedback, to try to improve the bill, to ensure 
that whatever text is coming together actually matches the terms of an 
alleged negotiation deal.
  No. 2, you are denying the American people an opportunity to actually 
understand what is in the border security deal that is unfolding.
  No. 3, you are denying Senate colleagues a real opportunity to debate 
the merits as they came together.
  What actually happened was not, you know, you negotiate for a couple 
of weeks, and this is where the Democrats are and this is where the 
Republicans are, and maybe you can find some seeds of a compromise 
here. What actually happened is that after months of negotiation, 
Senate Republicans started asking: Well, what is in this deal? What 
shape is it taking? What are the Democrats giving? What are the 
Democrats asking for in return?
  This was all mediated through a very, very small number of channels, 
and that process bred mistrust before we even knew any of the details 
of what was in the border security package.
  Now, if you were a cynic, you would say this was by design, that we 
designed a package that was meant to create mistrust, that we designed 
a process that was meant to create mistrust and was never meant to lead 
to any significant majority. And I hate to say it, but I think that is 
actually the package that was produced.
  So after months of secret negotiations, after months of denying some 
of the smartest immigration experts in the world the opportunity to 
critique and offer feedback on this package, after months of breeding 
mistrust within the American body politic, the details of an 
immigration grand bargain started to leak out, and the details were 
pretty troubling.
  There were some good things, of course, some things that we liked and 
some things that we think were necessary, but it is interesting that 
even in the most generic terms, the details of the immigration plan 
started to create some backlash among most Republicans. Again, if you 
can't pass a border security package without the support of most 
Republicans, then it is not actually going to pass.
  So here we are, early 2024, with a promise of a grand bargain on 
border security and a national security supplemental to boot. Yet every 
single detail turns out to have not been manifested in the text, turns 
out to have not produced something in the text that would have actually 
meaningfully secured the border.
  So if you were serious about border security, the first thing you 
would want to do is to limit the President's ability to parole close to 
1 million illegal migrants a year. If you go back to the Obama 
administration, the Obama administration paroled about 5,000 illegal 
aliens every single year. Senate Republicans think that is too much, 
but 5,000 a year is far less than the 750,000 or close to 1 million a 
year the Biden administration has decided to parole.
  Now, it is not just the direct effect--you are taking close to 1 
million people a year who have violated our immigration laws and giving 
them what amounts to effective legal status--you are also sending a 
message all across Central America and all across the world that 
America is open for business.
  This is why, when you put a camera or a microphone in front of 
somebody who is crossing the southern border illegally and ask ``Why 
are you coming now?'' they will say ``Because Joe Biden and Kamala 
Harris invited us in.''
  The parole policy has thrown open the floodgates, and this grand 
border compromise contained almost nothing that would meaningfully 
reduce the number of paroles that the President of the United States 
can issue.
  It required a report, I believe, but nothing that would limit the 
President's discretion to grant parole en masse, as he has done for the 
last 3 years of his administration. That was the first problem.
  The second problem is that the grand border compromise did very 
little on the question of asylum. It pretended to do something on the 
question of asylum. It changed the asylum standard. It increased that 
standard from a credible fear to a reasonable fear. But it also changed 
who was enforcing that standard to CIS agents, who are among the most 
pro-asylum people in the entire U.S. Government. So you changed the 
standard, but you created a person who is enforcing that standard who 
has almost no reason to meaningfully enforce American asylum laws.
  Why is this a problem? Well, because we have fundamentally at the 
U.S. southern border an economic migrant crisis that is pretending to 
be a massive asylum crisis. People who are traditional economic 
migrants come into our country at ports of entry or elsewhere, they 
claim asylum. They say that they are persecuted, they say they are 
fleeing persecution, and then the asylum officer usually will tell 
them: You have to come back in 6 years or 12 years or however many 
years down the road to have your case adjudicated before an immigration 
law judge. And, of course, for those 10 years or maybe more that they 
are in the country, they effectively have legal status. They are in our 
country, and many of them never show up for their court date even 
though the court date is years later. So the asylum process has turned 
millions of economic migrants into alleged asylum claimants.
  I find it interesting that when you look at who is actually coming 
across the southern border, it is very, very often young men between 
the ages of 20 and 35, unaccompanied by women or children, because if 
we know anything about world affairs, it is that when people are 
politically persecuted, it is always the young, unaccompanied men who 
are the most politically persecuted, not the women or children. And my 
colleagues will forgive my sarcasm there.
  Why is it that the people who claim the greatest persecution, the 
people who are flooding across our southern border--why are women and 
children so poorly represented among them? Because this is not about 
asylum, and this is not about political persecution; this is about 
manipulating America's laws to turn an economic migration crisis into 
an asylum crisis. It is a legal arbitrage that immigration attorneys in 
the United States of America have cooked up.
  Oh, and by the way, one of the great things about the grand border 
compromise is that we decided to pay immigration attorneys who are 
undercutting our immigration laws massive amounts of legal fees from 
the American taxpayers because why not have a handout for the 
immigration attorneys who have helped create a system where we undercut 
our immigration laws?
  That was the second major problem with the grand border compromise.
  A third major problem with the grand border compromise is that it did 
not meaningfully increase the President's authority or, frankly, force 
the President's hand into deporting anyone who is currently here 
illegally.
  Just a couple weeks ago, in New York City, a group of illegal 
immigrants violently assaulted a police officer. Those people, as far 
as I know, are still in our country because we don't deport people--
even those who violently assault police officers. We deport an 
incredibly small number of the people who come into this country 
illegally.
  A fourth problem with the grand border compromise cooked up by my 
colleagues is that it had an emergency border shutoff authority, which 
was really an effort--an admirable effort--to force Secretary 
Mayorkas's and the President's hand. The way it went was basically 
something like this: If border crossing reached a certain threshold--
5,000 a day, I believe, in the text that we received--then there is an 
emergency shutdown authority that applies for a certain number of days 
per year--270 days in the first year, less in the second year, and less 
in the third year.
  Now, that sounds not too bad, right? Once you hit a certain threshold 
of illegal border crossings, you should shut down the border. I happen 
to think that number should be close to zero but whatever. Opinions 
will differ on where we should set that authority. Yet that authority, 
set at 5,000 a day, which effectively says that you could have nearly 
1.9 million illegal aliens come into the country before you trigger 
that authority--it has multiple provisions that would allow us to waive 
it. It has a 45-day emergency waiver authority for the President. It 
has a 180-

[[Page S942]]

day discretionary waiver for Secretary Mayorkas. For those who are good 
at math, 180 days plus 45 days is 225 days. So in a 270-day border 
emergency shutdown authority, 225 days can be waived by the President 
or the Secretary who refused to enforce our immigration laws. That is 
not much of an emergency authority if they only have to use it 45 days 
in the first year given what is going on at the American southern 
border.

  The fundamental problem, as so many of my colleagues have recognized 
and as so many of my colleagues have noted, is, how do we get Joe Biden 
and Secretary Mayorkas to enforce the border law when they clearly 
don't want to? This is a forcing function because the real negotiation 
here, as was obvious to anybody from the start, was, how do we force 
Joe Biden to do his job, and what leverage do we have in order to force 
that very thing?
  Instead, we went into a negotiation where--again, it was in secret--
our colleagues who were negotiating fundamentally didn't understand or 
didn't enforce this fundamental insight. They wanted to give Joe Biden 
additional authorities. Well, he might not use those authorities even 
if you give them to him. They wanted to give Joe Biden a number of 
discretionary, ``get of jail free'' cards, where even if you create 
authorities for him to enforce the border, you give him the discretion 
to get out of it. We don't need to be granting Joe Biden more 
discretion. We need to be constraining his discretion because it is Joe 
Biden's discretion that has led to the border crisis that we have.
  Now, a number of my colleagues have mentioned the terrible 
consequences of the border problem and what it looks like for so many 
of our citizens. There is no overstating the catastrophe that is going 
on at the American southern border. There is the fentanyl crisis that 
is killing over 100,000 citizens of our country. Of course, the 
fentanyl is now transitioning to other drugs just as the heroin 
transitioned to the fentanyl and just as the prescription pills 
transitioned to the heroin. One of the many gifts of our wide-open 
southern border is a virtually limitless supply of increasingly more 
powerful synthetic opioids to kill our citizens.
  If you read anything about the history of the opium war, you wonder 
if we are witnessing right now the reverse opium war where precursors 
to synthetic opioids come in from communist China, and the Mexican drug 
cartels manufacture them and then ship them across the southern border.
  If you were actually serious about addressing this crisis, the first 
thing that you would want to do is limit Joe Biden's and Secretary 
Mayorkas's authority to open the floodgates and invite millions of 
illegal aliens into this country. You would limit their discretion. 
That was always the only pathway to meaningful border enforcement under 
this administration.
  As so many of my colleagues have mentioned, Joe Biden clearly doesn't 
want to enforce the border. So, ladies and gentlemen, how do we force 
the President to enforce the border?
  The basic deal that was offered by a number of my colleagues and 
friends went something like this: If the Democrats are so desperate to 
send another $61 billion to Ukraine, then what we could do is meter the 
money based on border enforcement metrics. This is, in fact, what was 
discussed in the Republican conference, and it received support from 
Ukraine supporters, like Jim Risch and Ron Johnson, to people who were 
more skeptical of the conflict, like me, to people who were in the 
middle, like Ted Cruz.
  The basic idea was, we are going to force as much as possible Joe 
Biden to enforce the southern border, and unless he gets illegal border 
crossings under a certain level using his existing authority, maybe 
with some additional tools, then we will not provide support to the 
security supplemental. In other words, if he wants his $61 billion for 
Ukraine, Joe Biden is going to have to do a little border enforcement 
despite the fact that he obviously doesn't want to.
  That was the deal that we thought was on the table, and that, 
unfortunately, was not the deal that was actually on the table once it 
was advanced by our leadership team.
  Of course, on Sunday night, February 4, we received the text of the 
grand border compromise. Typically, with a field of law as complicated 
as immigration, you would expect days, weeks, months of committee 
markups, of debates, of negotiation over text; of trying to understand 
how one provision influences another provision; of how another 
provision affects the other. This process of legislative policymaking 
is what was completely short-circuited by this secret negotiation.
  So, on Sunday, the text dropped, and on Wednesday, we were expected 
to vote on it. So, for 3 days--from February 4 to February 7--my staff 
and, I imagine, the staffs of nearly every Republican Member worked 
long nights to try to understand what was actually in the border 
security package. They identified many of the problems that I just 
repeated that actually exist within the policy. Even where it looked 
good on the surface, it very often contained provisions where Democrats 
had, frankly, outnegotiated Republicans.
  It reminds me a little bit of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, where 
the President's negotiators took to the New York Times to brag 
afterward that while then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy had gotten a lot of 
concessions out of the White House, those concessions had fallen apart 
when the concessions were translated to legislative text. That is a 
problem. If the legislative text isn't very good, no matter how good 
the headline promises of the legislation are, then you shouldn't 
support the legislation. That is, of course, what happened.
  On Wednesday, Republicans decided as a conference that they would not 
support the border security package that came out. A curious thing 
happened then. If you had really been serious about border security, if 
you had really wanted to advance the ball in any negotiation, the other 
party comes with an offer. You consider the offer. You read it. You try 
to understand it. You decide it is not good enough. What do you do if 
you are serious about the problem? You then go back and say: Well, you 
know what, this just isn't good enough. We need to keep going down this 
pathway. We need to keep on fighting for a way to secure the border.
  But that never happened. Why that never happened is because too many 
within the Republican conference were desperate--desperate--for money 
for Ukraine--so desperate that they were willing to short-circuit any 
meaningful border security. That is the fundamental truth.
  As much as I am frustrated at my Democratic colleagues for not doing 
more to secure the border, as much as I am frustrated at Democrats writ 
large and the President of the United States for not doing his job, on 
this particular negotiation, the simple truth is that too many Senate 
Republicans cared far more about Ukraine than they did about their own 
country.
  You heard it earlier today or earlier this evening when one of my 
colleagues said that this was the most important vote that any of us 
had ever taken in the U.S. Senate. I can't imagine what leads a person 
to think that sending $61 billion to Ukraine at this moment of crisis 
for our country is the most important vote we have taken. My God. Maybe 
we should take some far more important votes that actually solve the 
problems that confront this country. Maybe we should confront the 
mental health crisis in our country, the fact that our teenagers seem 
to have rising depression rates, the fact that our young people have 
rising suicide rates, the fact that we have a wide-open southern 
border, the fentanyl and sex trafficking crisis. All of these things 
are substantially more important than what we are about to vote on in 
the U.S. Senate and what we voted on last night--but not, of course, if 
your main priority is securing Ukraine's border rather than fixing the 
problems of your own country.

  This is unfortunately where we are. This is unfortunately the problem 
we are confronting. We have a Democratic Party that wants an open 
border, and we have a Republican Party wherein most of us want to fight 
for border security, but a few of us actually care more about Ukraine. 
Therein is the seed of the real bipartisan compromise that we have in 
this country, which is constantly focusing on the problems of other 
countries instead of on the problems of our own.
  So let's talk a little bit about the Ukraine policy because that is 
now--after the border security deal fell apart, now we are on to 
focusing on Ukraine. Of course, this has become

[[Page S943]]

the main focus of so many of my Senate colleagues. This has become the 
reason for breathing, the reason for waking up in the morning, the 
reason for coming to work in the U.S. Senate--to ensure that we send 
another $61 billion to Ukraine.
  There are so, so many problems with our Ukraine policy, and I am 
going to start from the most obvious all the way, hopefully, to the 
unintended consequences if we have enough time and if I am still 
standing.
  Let's start with the most obvious problem of our Ukraine policy: 
There is no strategy.
  A year ago, I spoke with Secretary Blinken, and I had a number of 
private conversations with people in the administration. What was the 
goal of our Ukraine policy? Then the goal was to ensure that Ukraine 
had enough weapons so that they could launch a much-anticipated 
counteroffensive. That counteroffensive would allow them to gain large 
amounts of territory. It may even allow them to push the Russians out 
of Crimea.
  Then, of course, you could have peace settlements where Ukraine was 
from a position of strength and Russia was from a position of weakness. 
We would, in other words, throw the Russians back to close to the 1991 
borders of Ukraine, and then we would try to negotiate with them.
  This leaves out, of course, an important historical detail, which is 
that back in April of 2022, as everybody from Gerhard Schroder, the 
former Chancellor of Germany, to a number of our NATO allies has 
pointed out, the Russians wanted to negotiate back in April of 2022. 
The negotiation was possible back then, but Boris Johnson, the Prime 
Minister of the UK, and, of course, our own administration refused to 
engage in that negotiation. We wanted the Ukrainians to fight and to 
fight on. Of course, they have at great cost to themselves and at great 
cost to the American taxpayer.
  Now, here is the problem with this idea that the Ukrainians would 
ever throw the Russians back to the 1991 borders: They are massively 
outmanned and massively outgunned.
  Ukraine has a population today of about 28 million people. Russia has 
a population today of 145 million people. Russia manufactures far more 
artillery shells not just than Ukraine but more than the United States 
of America--an economy that is 10 times as large. Russia is not going 
to lose the war. That is a fundamental fact that everybody needs to 
accept. They are not going to lose. It is existential to them. It is 
the main focus of Vladimir Putin's. They are bigger, and they have more 
weapons.
  So the question then becomes, How do we preserve as much of Ukraine 
as possible? How do we prevent as much innocent loss of life as 
possible? How do we ensure that this war comes to a negotiated peace in 
a way that prevents a number of negative consequences? That is the goal 
here--a peace that prevents as much bad from happening. But that is not 
our strategy. Our strategy is to throw money and weapons at the problem 
indefinitely.
  So, if a year ago we were praying for a counteroffensive, we could 
ask ourselves: How did that counteroffensive go? Well, the Ukrainians 
lost tens of thousands of soldiers; they gained miles of territory--not 
hundreds of miles; miles of territory--in a country that is massive; 
and they lost some of their best troops and some of their best 
equipment. That was the result of the counteroffensive. That was the 
lynchpin of the American strategy.
  So, having failed to accomplish what we set out to accomplish, did we 
say: Well, maybe our experts are wrong. Maybe we should revisit some of 
our assumptions. Maybe we should design an actual strategy that is 
achievable. No. No. We just moved on to the next thing. Without even 
blinking an eye, without even addressing the American people, the Biden 
administration just went on to the next thing.
  The next thing is, well, we are just going to try to give the 
Ukrainians as much as possible to hope that they don't lose. That is 
now the strategy, such as it is, of the American President with 
Ukraine--throw resources, throw weapons, and throw munitions at the 
problem and hope against all hope that something good will happen.
  What is that good thing that will happen? Well, we have no idea. The 
war is at a stalemate, and, as I already mentioned, Russia has more 
money, more manpower, and more weapons. So we have no strategy.
  Why are we giving $61 billion to Ukraine when we have no strategy for 
how they are going to use it, we have no sense of how they are actually 
going to bring this war to a close, and we have no realistic 
possibility of getting to any reasonable goal within any reasonable 
timeframe?
  We are America's legislative body. Our only real role in foreign 
policy is to approve nominees the President makes to his own 
government--posts, of course, that have importance in foreign affairs. 
That is No. 1. No. 2 is we control the purse strings. The point of 
controlling the purse strings gives us leverage to ensure that the 
people's business is actually being done. What are we doing with that 
leverage here? We are writing, effectively, a blank check, with no 
guarantee that it will produce a strategy, with no demand that the 
President actually tell us what this $61 billion is meant to produce.
  We know where this will end, ladies and gentlemen. We know exactly 
where this road ends. This road ends at some kind of a negotiated 
settlement. The only question is, How many Ukrainians die before we get 
there? How many American dollars are wasted before we get there? How 
many American weapons are spent not for our own national security but 
for the national security of another nation? That is it. How much death 
and destruction do we promote on the path to peace? My answer is, we 
should be promoting as little as possible. We should be promoting a 
negotiated peace. We should be trying to get there as quickly as we 
possibly can.

  Where, I wonder, is the anti-war left?
  It is interesting that in Washington, DC, in 2023, 2024, you hear a 
whole lot about the bipartisan consensus on Ukraine. Yet you never hear 
people asking: Where has that bipartisan consensus led in the past?
  I am 39 years old. In the 1970s, the bipartisan consensus was lined 
up behind the Vietnam war, a conflict that killed nearly 60,000 
Americans over the span of a decade and a half.
  In early 2000, the bipartisan consensus was not just that we should 
knock out Osama bin Laden's terrorist network in Afghanistan but that 
we should rebuild Afghanistan into a flowering Western-style democracy. 
We should put resources into training the Afghan population to think 
about gender roles as Americans do in the 21st century, to promote the 
creation of democratic institutions to train an Afghan army.
  For 20 years, American blood and treasure was committed to that 
project, and that project fell apart in a matter of weeks. It turns out 
the Afghans don't want Western-style democracy. It turns out the 
Afghans don't want to fight for a country that, apparently, very few of 
them actually believed in because it took about 3 weeks--3 weeks--
before the Taliban rolled over their country.
  The bipartisan foreign policy consensus got us exactly there. That 
same bipartisan consensus got us to Iraq under the pretense of weapons 
of mass destruction. Many of the people in this Chamber who supported 
the war in Iraq are now supporting limitless supplies of arms to 
Ukraine. It is interesting how that bipartisan consensus works out.
  That same consensus supported knocking out Libyan dictator Qadhafi, 
which led, of course, to incredible chaos and destruction in that 
country.
  The bipartisan consensus led us to get involved in Syria and yet 
another quagmire in the Levant.
  And that bipartisan consensus has found a new passion project--
limitless war, limitless weapons, and limitless money to Ukraine.
  Why is it that we think that the same people who have been wrong for 
a half a century are somehow right about this question? Why do we not 
learn the lessons of Iraq? One of the most important lessons of Iraq--
as the great, late GEN Colin Powell pointed out--is that we didn't have 
a defined strategy. What is the mission? What are we trying to 
accomplish? What is America's blood and treasure actually trying to do? 
And how long must we be required to spend it?
  Never has that question been answered in Ukraine. Never have we tried

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to answer that question over the last 40 years of failed foreign policy 
experiments.
  I look at this country over the time I have been alive, and I look at 
what its leadership has accomplished, and it is hard to not think that 
the bipartisan consensus in American foreign policy has led to, 
effectively, graveyard after graveyard after graveyard, $34 trillion in 
debt. We have purchased on the backs of our children and grandchildren 
a number of graveyards all across the world. I don't know what we have 
accomplished beyond that.
  Yet people in this Chamber, including my friends on the left, who 
used to have a real anti-war sentiment--the left used to have a real 
understanding that war has terrible unintended consequences, that it 
enriches all of the wrong people, that it kills many innocent people. 
There was no meaningful pushback on this conflict from the left. I find 
that shocking.
  I find it depressing, frankly, because those of us on the right who 
are sick of war, and sick of our children and grandchildren paying for 
it, would actually like some allies in pushing back against this latest 
conflict.
  In fact, just to meditate on this point about strategy a little bit 
longer, if you look for the arguments for why we should be in Ukraine, 
they all boil down to: Unless we send continual resources, something 
terrible will happen. The Russians will overrun the Ukrainians when 
they don't have enough resources, and they won't stop at Kyiv, we are 
told. They will go on to Poland. They will go on to other NATO allies. 
And then it will be Americans who are on the frontlines of Germany 
defending against the terrible aggression of Vladimir Putin.
  What must be said is, first of all, this is a fantasy. No credible 
military expert, no person with a thinking brain believes that Vladimir 
Putin has the capacity to march all the way to Berlin. He does not have 
the capacity to march all the way to Kyiv. Of course, he can't march 
all the way to Berlin. So the fearmongering doesn't work. That dog just 
doesn't hunt.
  Now, of course, if Vladimir Putin could--let's just entertain this 
thought experiment. Let's just assume that Vladimir Putin could march 
all the way to Berlin. What would that mean about our NATO allies?
  One thing it would mean is that they are a lot weaker than they 
pretend to be. Another thing it would mean is the fact that we know 
that NATO needs to step up and spend a lot more resources on their own 
national defense.
  If Vladimir Putin could march all the way to Berlin, that suggests 
that the Germans have got to do a lot better at defending their 
country, and they have to step up.
  NATO was never meant to turn Europe into permanent welfare clients of 
the American taxpayer. It is time for Europe to step up.
  Some of my colleagues give the Europeans far too much credit for 
doing their part over the last 18 months of conflict in Ukraine. They 
point to charts that say if you include humanitarian assistance and 
economic assistance, the Europeans have actually spent about as much as 
the Americans--maybe even more than the Americans--on Ukraine. Well, 
that chart misses a couple of important facts, the first of which is 
that the most critical thing is not money; it is weapons. And the 
United States has supplied a disproportionate share of the weapons to 
the Ukrainians at great cost to ourselves and at great degradation of 
our defense capability.
  The other thing it leaves out is that NATO has, for decades, sucked 
on the teeth of the American taxpayer. Trillions and trillions of 
dollars have gone into American defense budgets that have been an 
implicit subsidy to NATO--an implicit subsidy to NATO. So forgive me if 
I am not impressed that the Europeans are stepping up a little bit for 
a war that is literally in their backyard.
  The other thing this misses is that the war in Ukraine hasn't been 
going on for 18 months. It has been going on for a decade. Of course, 
the conflict that brought us to Russia's large-scale invasion of 
Ukraine has been going on in Ukraine since at least 2014.
  If the Europeans want to compare who is spending more, the relevant 
point of comparison is 2014 or maybe 1992. It is not 2022. So we are 
bailing out the Europeans--$61 billion to bail out the Europeans on a 
preposterous set of circumstances, on a preposterous subsidy.

  By the way, many of our European allies--thanks, in part, of course, 
to our subsidy--have managed their own financial houses much better 
than we have. The Germans have far lower budget deficits and far lower 
public debt than we do. If any time was the time for them to step up, 
it might be now that we are $34 trillion in debt.
  So every argument for why we should support limitless war in Ukraine 
ultimately falls apart. It ultimately boils down to fearmongering--
fearmongering that doesn't have any basis in reality.
  Again, I would ask: If the goal is to prevent Vladimir Putin from 
overrunning Ukraine, the question has to become: For how long are the 
American taxpayers on the hook? What if this goes on another 10 years? 
Are we on the hook to the tune of $500 billion of security assistance 
and $1 trillion of reconstruction?
  At what point is enough enough? At what point do we say the war is a 
stalemate? It is going to end in a negotiated settlement anyway. Let's 
stop wasting lives. Let's stop wasting money. And let's get on with the 
peace.
  That is what American diplomacy could be used for. Unfortunately, the 
President seems uninterested in that.
  But I am worried more about the unintended consequences in Ukraine. A 
friend of mine made the observation today, actually, in a public 
conversation that I hosted, that we are seeing the acceleration of an 
economic and military alliance that will challenge the United States 
over the coming decade and the coming generation. The cooperation 
between Russia and China has accelerated significantly over the last 2 
years.
  We have attempted to set off a financial bomb using America's 
incredible financial power. The rules-based international order has 
given America's financial system great power, and we used it to try to 
set off a bomb in the Russian economy. But that bomb appears to have 
fizzled.
  The Russian economy has consistently defied growth expectations and 
forecasts. Our own leadership has admitted that its sanctions haven't 
worked nearly as well as we wanted them to. And the Russian economy, 
now put on a war footing by Vladimir Putin, is producing weapons at a 
faster rate than the United States, which, of course, has an economy 
ten times the size of Russia.
  So if the goal was to weaken Russia here, we have catastrophically 
failed. What we have done, actually is created an alternative financial 
system around Russia, China, and other countries. And we have created 
an accelerating military alliance between two of our most dangerous 
adversaries in the world. That is the net effect of our policy. That is 
unintended consequence No. 1.
  Unintended consequence No. 2 is that we are, at this very moment, 
destabilizing governments all over the world with higher fuel prices 
and higher food prices.
  I made this observation earlier. So my colleagues, hopefully, will 
forgive me for repeating myself. But one of the most interesting 
conversations I have ever had was with former President Barack Obama, 
just days before he left the Oval Office, about a week before Donald 
Trump and Mike Pence were inaugurated.
  Obama made the observation that though he was obviously more a fan 
of--I will call it mass migration--than I am, that he knew that if you 
created too many immigration pressures in a country, it could 
destabilize that country. He made this observation in the context of 
the 2015 European refugee crisis, telling me--I am paraphrasing here; I 
don't want to violate any confidences--that he felt that the 2015 
refugee crisis that actually destabilized a number of European 
Governments, in fact, had led to the election of his political 
adversary, Donald Trump, in 2016.
  I thought that was a smart and insightful observation from the former 
President. Of course, I disagree with his politics and his immigration 
policies, but it was an interesting and a very self-reflective 
observation.
  What, I wonder, happens--if the European refugee crisis of 2015 
destabilized Europe, what happens when we

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apply massive energy and food price increases to the entire continent 
of Africa--1.5 billion people, almost all of whom have a much lower 
quality of living than the average American or the European?
  We know exactly what would happen. If you take 1.5 billion people--
most of whom are just good people who want to feed their families--and 
you make it impossible for them to feed their families in their own 
country, they will move. And where are they going to move? They are 
going to move to Europe, and they are going to move to the United 
States of America.
  Can we, at a time of a historic border crisis, possibly absorb 
hundreds of millions--at the very least, millions--of starving people 
moving?
  And why are they starving? They are starving because Eastern Europe 
is the bread basket of the world--especially that part of the world--
and grain prices, barley prices, wheat prices have skyrocketed over the 
last 2 years.
  We are creating the predicate for a refugee crisis that will 
destabilize Europe and destabilize the entirely world.
  We are also, while we are at it, enriching Vladimir Putin. While we 
spend $61 billion in Ukraine. We are enriching Vladimir Putin with 
idiotic energy policies.
  We are actually funding both sides of this conflict. Putin's economy 
depends substantially on natural gas, on petroleum. And our energy 
policies, our refusal to empower America's energy producers--the Biden 
administration, just a couple of weeks ago, blocked additional exports 
of liquid natural gas. That enriches Vladimir Putin's Russia. Every 
time you take an action that drives up the cost of energy, you are 
enriching Vladimir Putin's Russia.
  So with the one hand we pursue energy policies that enrich Vladimir 
Putin, and with the other hand, we send $61 billion to Ukraine. I don't 
think we should fund either side of this conflict, but it is the height 
of idiocy to fund both sides of the conflict simultaneously, and that 
is exactly what we are doing, thanks to President Joe Biden's energy 
policies.
  Another unintended consequence--we have already seen this, by the 
way. Allied governments in Slovenia, in Poland, and other countries are 
under an incredible amount of pressure because food prices and energy 
prices are really high. Food prices and energy prices destabilize 
governments. How many American allies will have their country's 
politics destabilized because we are pursuing policies that ensure 
higher food and higher energy prices? Inflation is bad in the United 
States. Inflation is bad, in part, because we are pursuing policies in 
Europe that inflame the cost of food and energy.
  It is always funny when I hear my Democratic friends say that 
inflation is not Joe Biden's fault; it is the fault of what is going on 
in Eastern Europe. Well, if Joe Biden was a little bit smarter and used 
diplomacy more aggressively, perhaps what is going on in Eastern Europe 
would not be quite as prolonged, and perhaps we could bring it to a 
quick close.
  That is unintended consequence No. 3. We are impoverishing our own 
people on this conflict. So $34 trillion in debt--we are on the hook 
now for close to $200 billion to Ukraine. But that doesn't include the 
reconstruction assistance they will certainly need. That doesn't count 
the numerous ways--energy prices, food prices--that this conflict is 
putting pressure on the wallets of American citizens. It doesn't count 
all of the ways in which we are distracted by a conflict in Eastern 
Europe and are unable to pursue smart policies elsewhere in the world.
  We are impoverishing a generation of Americans. We are making it 
harder for them to achieve their American dream. And we are doing it to 
empower defense contractors and to bring a war to effectively a never-
ending stage. That is what is happening. We know this conflict has no 
end in sight. We know that only America, using its diplomatic power, 
could apply the leverage necessary to bring it to a close. We are 
instead using our financial military and diplomatic power to prolong 
the stay as much as possible.
  There are other unintended consequences. And I worry that we have no 
statesmen left at the senior leadership of this country. For a 
generation, we have been told that the important thing is to thump our 
chest, to talk tough, to act tough, but not actually do the things that 
are necessary to strengthen our country and make our country more 
powerful.
  You hear my friends on both sides of the aisle say that if we don't 
show resolve in Ukraine, that it will invite Xi Jinping to invade 
Taiwan. And, of course, I believe a Taiwanese invasion by Xi Jinping 
would be one of the worst things that could happen on the world stage. 
Our colleagues are right to worry about it.
  But the argument is that they will invade--the Chinese will invade--
unless we show resolve in Ukraine. But the unfortunate truth is that 
the Chinese don't care about our resolve; they care about our strength. 
In classic foreign policy schools, deterrence is the combination of 
resolve and capacity. You have to both want to do something, but most 
importantly, you have to have the ability to do that thing. And we have 
no capacity to deter the Chinese in East Asia and help the Ukrainians 
fight a war in Eastern Europe.
  For many generations, our leadership shipped our industrial base, our 
manufacturing jobs overseas. And that has left us in a place where we 
don't produce enough weapons; we don't produce enough missiles; we 
don't produce enough artillery shells; we don't produce enough of the 
critical munitions that are necessary to fight conflicts all over the 
world.
  So every time we spend critical resources on Ukraine, we ensure that 
they will not be available to a contingency necessary for the United 
States of America. That is not hypothetical, and that is not abstract. 
We, even now, are sending weapons to Ukraine far faster than we can 
make them.
  Why are we sending cluster munitions to Ukraine right now? Again, I 
will ask: Where is the anti-war left? What happened to the left that 
was worried about sending cluster munitions to various conflicts all 
over the world? Why are we sending cluster munitions to Ukraine? It is 
because we don't make enough artillery shells to send to Ukraine, to 
Israel, and to other partners.
  We cannot fight a war on multiple fronts because of the leadership 
made, frankly, by some of the Members of this Chamber, we don't have a 
strong enough manufacturing base to support both of these conflicts.
  Now, my colleagues will say that this particular bill--this 
particular legislation--has billions of dollars designed to rebuild the 
American industrial base. But you can't rebuild the industrial base by 
making weapons and sending them to Ukraine faster than you make them 
for your own country and for your own defense purposes.
  The question is, If we start rebuilding our defense industrial base 
tomorrow, how long does it take? Three to 5 years at the very least. 
Call it 3 years if we started tomorrow before we could support 
contingencies in Eastern Europe and East Asia.
  So what do we do in the interim when our country, by every metric, 
does not produce enough weapons to support a multipronged conflict? 
What do we do in the interim? The solution and the answer, apparently, 
of this Chamber is: We send everything possible to Ukraine. We get as 
much as possible to Ukraine; consequences--let's not worry about those. 
Let's not worry about the fact that we do not have enough weapons to 
deter aggression all over the world right now, and we have no viable 
pathway of getting in there for the next 3 years.
  I think that a lot of my colleagues are living in a boomer paradise 
where America can do everything all the time without limits and without 
constraints. And that is not the world that we live in. Frankly, it is 
not the world we live in, in part because decisions made by people in 
this Chamber and the leadership of this country over the last 
generation.
  But we are in this situation. Let's rebuild our own country before we 
overextend ourselves in a multipronged conflict. This is something out 
of every history book for how empires fail. Countries allow themselves 
to become eroded. They allow internal division to weaken their resolve. 
They allow economic might to degrade. And then, at the point when they 
are weakest, they overextend themselves militarily.
  That is where we are right now. We are at the weakest point in a 
generation. In the 1980s, our relative power

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and manufacturing was significantly stronger than it is today. My 
colleagues on the other side will say, Well, you know, it is weaker; it 
is a bipartisan problem. It is not just Democrats' fault that our 
manufacturing base is weaker.
  And I would grant that point every day and twice on Sunday. It was a 
bipartisan failure that led our manufacturing economy to grow so weak, 
but it needs to be a bipartisan solution to figure out what to do until 
we rebuild it.
  No one has offered a solution for how to rebuild our manufacturing 
base quickly, and no one has told me what we are going to do while we 
are rebuilding that manufacturing base. We cannot supply unlimited arms 
all over the world when we don't even make enough for our own purposes. 
Yet that is exactly what the U.S. Senate proposes to do later this 
morning.
  Now, one final observation here about where we are in Ukraine. I am 
going to read just a brief summary here produced by my staff. The $60 
billion in Ukraine aid included in the $95 billion supplemental would 
be the largest single Ukraine aid package Congress has passed to date.
  Nonetheless, it was put on the floor with less than a day's notice 
and could obstruct future efforts to bring the war in Ukraine to a 
peaceful conclusion. The bill will commit $60 billion for Ukraine over 
multiple years, and it will provide nothing to secure America's 
southern border. If enacted, it would represent 34 percent of the total 
appropriated supplemental Ukraine aid, almost as large as the first 
three supplemental bills combined.
  It represents a 26-percent increase over the largest previous 
supplemental bill at a time when Ukraine's prospects on the battlefield 
have grown significantly worse. And it has done all this with less than 
a week of real debate. I am trying to think of any amount of money 
where we have not adequately debated, reviewed, amended, and corrected 
such a large spending package to Ukraine--or to any other country.
  I mean, normally, these bills spending $100 billion of American 
taxpayer money, normally, you might expect a real debate. We received 
text on this on February 7. Wednesday, February 7, is when we received 
final text on the package that we are voting on today; $100 billion and 
5 days of debate, most of which, of course, was occupied by the Super 
Bowl media cycle.
  The American people have been deprived of an actual debate on these 
matters from their elected legislature. The U.S. Senate has deprived 
them of the debate. And why? I don't know why. I think maybe the reason 
why we are pushing this so quickly is because a few of my colleagues 
are desperate. They are desperate to get to Munich next weekend and 
tell the leaders of the world that, yes, they did not secure their own 
southern border, but they did the most important thing: They got the 
$61 billion to Ukraine.
  It is shameful. It is shameful to conduct foreign policy through 
blank check writing to never-ending war, and it is extra shameful to do 
it while ignoring the problems of your own country.
  Can I ask how much time I have?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Hassan). The Senator has 4\1/2\ minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. VANCE. I hate to keep my distinguished colleague from Utah 
waiting, but I will keep going here for another few minutes.
  I want to make, in the time that I have remaining, a political 
observation. When you craft legislation that is 370 pages long and you 
deprive the American people and your Senate colleagues of a debate, you 
oftentimes find that there are things in the legislation that were 
unintended--or maybe they were intended, but they should have been 
corrected and taken out.
  In 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump 
under a spurious and ridiculous argument. But the argument went 
something like this: that there was money that had been appropriated 
under the USAI--the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative; the USAI 
had appropriated money, and Donald Trump refused to spend it exactly as 
it had been required by law.
  And the argument is, because he had violated this appropriations 
requirement and because it is in the requirements of the Impoundment 
Control Act, Donald Trump had violated the law and had to be impeached.
  It was a ridiculous argument then; it is a ridiculous argument now. 
But I find it interesting that given that Ukraine aid is a hotly 
contested political item for the 2024 elections and given that Donald 
Trump was already impeached for the exact same reason that so many 
congressional Republicans seem desperate to tie the President's hands 
in the next administration--because built into this ``Ukraine First'' 
supplemental is money that will be spent in '25 and '26--money, just as 
in 2019, that was appropriated and will tie the hands of the next 
administration. And whether it is a Democrat or a Republican, I think 
we ought to empower the next administration to do diplomacy as they 
would like to.
  So for my colleagues who are desperate to send $61 billion to 
Ukraine, one request that I would make is--because this is going to 
come back from the House. The House will not pass this package as it 
exists. One request that I would make is, let's cut off the end of 
funding at the end of 2024. For my Republican colleagues, it may save 
Donald Trump a spurious impeachment trial. For my Democratic 
colleagues, it may save the next President the ability to conduct 
diplomacy on his or her own terms.
  Now, we should not be doing this with such little debate and such 
little consideration. There are all kinds of things--all kinds of 
beautiful gems--that I am sure that we will identify in this 
legislation in the coming weeks.
  As Nancy Pelosi once said: You have to read a piece of legislation 
after you pass it. I would prefer that we read a piece of legislation 
before we pass it. But, most importantly, I would prefer that we debate 
and challenge the legislation before we pass it.
  You cannot write $100 billion worth of checks in 4 days of public 
debate. You need more time. You need to correct it. You need to fix it. 
You need to address the problems, like what I just mentioned, that we 
put an impeachment timebomb for the next Trump administration in this 
legislation. You need to fix problems like this. And a real process is 
how you fix it.
  Now, I appreciate that some of our colleagues prefer a fake process 
because that process has empowered Senate leadership. Well, you know 
who it hasn't empowered? It has not empowered the American people. This 
is ridiculous. And this is ultimately, in my view, a farce.
  I have been in the U.S. Senate for a year. It is the professional 
honor of my lifetime. And I serve across the aisle with distinguished 
colleagues, with brilliant people, people who are publicly minded, 
despite our disagreements. But I think this process is an insult to 
them. We can do better. We should do better.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.
  Mr. LEE. Madam President, a little more than 3 months ago, Senate 
Republicans came together and reached something of a conclusion. We 
concluded it made a lot of sense to make a commitment to each other and 
a commitment to those whom we represent and a commitment to those in 
the other Chamber just down the hall from here that we wouldn't be 
sending another penny to Ukraine without achieving border security in 
our own homeland.
  After all, the conflict in Ukraine is about helping Ukraine maintain 
its own defensible borders. It is about helping Ukraine with its own 
national security.
  Meanwhile, we have a border that to describe it as porous is an 
insult to porousness. It is a border through which an estimated 10 
million people have entered our country unlawfully just over the last 3 
years since President Biden took office.
  And then, now, through the efforts of a faithless few, we are poised 
to treat our promise to Americans the same way President Biden has 
treated his solemn oath to protect our country's borders as somehow 
expedient, expendable, and apparently now expired.
  We cannot send billions of dollars to Ukraine--many, many tens of 
billions of dollars to Ukraine--while America's own borders are 
bleeding, while they are wide open, and while we have many thousands 
upon thousands of the 10 million or so who have come in over the last 3 
years--who are coming in under circumstances that make them highly 
suspicious, to say nothing of the

[[Page S947]]

millions of others who came here. But just in the last few months 
alone, we know that thousands have come in from countries that are not 
in Latin America; from countries like Syria, Afghanistan, China, and a 
lot of other countries where we have a lot of people who don't like 
this country, who don't share its values, who don't share its vision, 
don't share its commitment to the rule of law, and who have come in 
here. We know nothing about them. They come in unvetted; in some cases, 
unseen.
  But in some respect, it is even more troubling with the ones who come 
in that our government knows about. They are processed and then 
released--``processed,'' meaning take down a bunch of information about 
them, then release them into the country, either under the pretense 
that they have applied for asylum and might be deemed qualified to 
receive that form of relief or, alternatively, under the theory that 
they can be brought in under what is known as immigration parole, a 
category that is never supposed to be used--in fact, by law, it can't 
be used, categorically--to treat all people from a certain country in a 
certain way.
  No, it is there to be used in unusual circumstances, either for 
humanitarian, compassionate need, like somebody's loved one has passed 
away and they need to attend a funeral or they need to come to attend 
to a critically ill loved one; or, alternatively, a public-use 
exception under immigration parole, such as somebody speaks a foreign 
language that is badly needed, where they need an interpreter and very 
few people speak that in this country, and they have found somebody 
outside the United States. This is a way of getting them into the 
country for a short period of time.
  Sometimes, they are brought in under the asylum theory, others under 
the parole theory, others still are brought in under ``withheld 
removal'' or just told: You don't have to leave now. In many of these 
circumstances, the people who are released into the interior of the 
country are told: At some point, you will have a hearing before an 
immigration judge. We hope you will come to that, and, by the way, your 
immigration hearing before the immigration judge may well be in the 
2030s, may well be in 2035 or later. But in the meantime, have fun. We 
will get you a plane ticket to the U.S. city of your choice.
  By the way, those pesky things that American citizens have to worry 
about when traveling from one part of the United States to another, 
like airplane tickets, we have taken care of that, also identification 
papers. Americans have to produce a photo ID establishing who they are 
at an airport. You don't have to worry about that either. We will fly 
you anywhere you want. Have fun.
  Well, it is not long before international drug cartels pick up on the 
fact that this is a great source of revenue for them. This is a great 
source of revenue and also a great source of facilitating their other 
businesses when they can traffic human beings in large numbers. You 
see, these drug cartels are making many tens of billions of dollars 
every single year smuggling in human traffic into the interior of the 
United States, and why wouldn't they? People want the American dream. 
People like the Opportunity to live here. Maybe for some, it is 
perceived as a great way to earn more money that can be sent back home. 
Maybe some want to live here permanently and make it their home. Maybe 
others want to inflict harm on the United States. We don't really know 
because we have thrown caution to the wind.

  Under the failed leadership of President Joe Biden, we have just 
brought them in by the millions. It has been a really good deal for the 
drug cartels that have made tens of billions of dollars a year as a 
result of this criminally negligent approach toward enforcing the 
border.
  Now, their approach to enforcing the border in these respects is not 
enforcement. It is deliberate, willful nonenforcement, inuring to the 
great detriment, to the great harm, and presenting incredibly 
indefensible risks to the American people.
  This has gone on now for over 3 years. It kicked in, as I remember, 
right as President Biden took office. He started issuing Executive 
orders, undoing things like the ``Remain in Mexico'' program, the 
Migrant Protection Protocols, the Safe Third Country Agreements 
carefully negotiated by the previous administration, which also had 
some migrant surges and surges of illegal immigration.
  But, to its credit, the previous administration did something about 
it by putting in place these programs to guarantee that if someone 
coming into the United States without documentation across the southern 
border by land, if they claimed asylum, they would have to wait in 
Mexico--remain in Mexico--while his or her asylum application remained 
pending.
  Why does that matter? Well, statistics tell us that for every 10 
people who apply for asylum, fewer than 1 will actually receive it. 
Some say it is around 90 percent. Others say it is in the high 
nineties, the percentages of people who apply for asylum who are deemed 
ineligible for asylum. They are not eligible to receive it, and yet we 
receive all of these people in here.
  Anyway, President Biden takes office. About that time, somebody asks 
Secretary Mayorkas either just before or just after he was confirmed by 
the Senate--I don't remember which. They asked him a question: What 
would you say to people who are part of these migrant caravans--that 
were by then traveling through southern Mexico, making their way toward 
the United States. What would you say to them?
  Now, the kind of answer you would hope and expect and that we should 
be able to demand we would receive from the chief immigration law 
enforcement officer in the United States should have been: Don't come. 
Don't come. Why? Because the risks are myriad. We don't want you to 
enter this country with your first step into the country being an act 
in violation of our law. You don't want to subject yourself or your 
family members who may be with you to great risks to life and limb. You 
don't want to subject anyone, but especially women and girls traveling 
in those caravans, to the risk of sexual assault.
  The statistics vary on this wildly. At the low end, some say that the 
number is around 30 percent of the women and girls who are sexually 
assaulted in the journey. Others say it is much more likely to be in 
the mid-60 percent range of women and girls sexually assaulted along 
these horrible, dangerous journeys. And, of course, women and girls are 
not the only victims of sexual assault along the way. Men and boys also 
have that happen to them.
  What is even worse, a number of these individuals--disproportionately 
women and girls, more than men and boys; but I believe there are some 
in each category--end up being subjected to a form of sex slavery. You 
see, it costs many thousands of dollars to be trafficked into this 
country by a drug cartel--many thousands of dollars. The higher the 
risk you are, the more distant the country you come from, especially if 
it is separated by an ocean from the Americas, the more likely you are 
to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars. If you are from Latin 
America, some are able to make the payment with a few thousand 
dollars--$4,000, $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 maybe. Others pay a little bit 
more. Others pay a lot more if they are deemed high risk and they have 
to be smuggled in, and they can't, for whatever reason, appear through 
a point of entry.
  Where do they get this money? These are people who--those of us who 
have been down to the border as I have many times--many times even in 
the last few months--know that the people who are arriving under these 
circumstances, having made this long, dangerous journey, they don't 
have a lot of money. They don't have expendable sums of cash. It is not 
like they can just go into their local bank and dip into their savings 
account and come up with 5, 6, 7 grand in U.S. dollars to come up 
here--no.
  How do they pay for it? Well, some of it they are able to scrounge 
together, perhaps from contributions from friends and family. Maybe 
they sell everything they have. Maybe for some, that comes close. For a 
lot of them, it doesn't. So how do they pay it?
  Well, there is a word for this, and it is a word that has fallen out 
of use in commonly spoken American English for more than a century and 
a half, but the word is ``indentured servitude.'' It is a word that we 
had all--I certainly had--relegated to the history books.

[[Page S948]]

  That is why I was stunned during my last trip to the border down in 
the McAllen, TX, area, where I lived, served, worked among the poorest 
of the poor as a missionary back in early 1990. That is where I learned 
Spanish. I learned to love the culture down there. It is an amazing 
place with wonderful people. During my most recent visit, as I was 
visiting with Border Patrol agents, they told me that, for the first 
time since the Civil War, and certainly since the adoption of 
ratification of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits slavery and 
indentured servitude, we have in this country, in the United States of 
America in the 21st century, a significant population of indentured 
servants in the United States. Of these, many are living in what is, 
essentially, sex slavery. Others are living in another form of 
indentured servitude, required to live their lives subject to the will 
and whim and wishes of these international drug cartels who make money 
smuggling these people across and then benefit from, essentially, slave 
labor from them.

  One of my colleagues who made an even more recent trip to the border, 
who just came back from the border a week or so ago, recently told me 
that for those subjected to the form of sex slavery to which these 
women and girls are subjected, it may take them 6, 7, 8 years to pay 
off what they owe. They are housed in what can only be described as a 
rudimentary prison; it also doubles as a brothel. And while they are 
nominally paid, in the sense that they are given credit for each thing 
that they do, they are also charged sometimes exorbitant fees for room 
and board to house, clothe, and feed them.
  There are detailed records that have to be kept, right down to the 
cost of doing something as simple as removing an ankle bracelet given 
to them by the Department of Homeland Security to monitor their 
whereabouts. I am told that the cost for that is set at $30. But this 
is one of the reasons why they may have to work 6, 7, 8 years in sex 
slavery inside this country after they have arrived illegally and 
unlawfully, in order to pay off their debts to the drug cartel, who are 
profiting to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year.
  Most of the men are put to a different type of work. One way or 
another, moving parcels from one destination to another, with their 
whereabouts closely monitored by the cartels the entire time.
  But let's get back to the fact that we have a significant population 
of indentured servants here in the United States once again. Why? What 
master are we serving by doing this? What good is being advanced by 
such lawlessness? And at what cost? At what price?
  Let's think about what this does to neighborhoods, communities, to 
schools, to churches, all those people out there who do everything they 
can to lift up the hands that hang low, to serve their fellow beings, 
to find those less fortunate than themselves and figure out ways to 
help them, with their soup kitchens and their homeless shelters, even 
their church pews. Even their schools become overrun. They are less 
able to do what they need to do.
  And I fear that we as Senate Republicans, having made this commitment 
to each other and to the American people and then having abandoned that 
commitment, as we have done in connection with this and we will have 
done, should this legislation pass into law without a single shred of 
border security enforcing language in it, we will have done them a 
grave disservice. We will have done them a grave disservice after 
promising to help them. That saddens me.
  I don't understand why we would do that to them. I don't understand 
why we would do that to ourselves, why we would do that to the American 
people after having made that commitment as we did. This isn't trivial. 
It isn't light. These aren't things that are just fun to talk about. In 
fact, I detest talking about things like human trafficking, about sex 
slavery; it is not pleasant at all. But we must talk about them because 
if we don't talk about them, we cannot fix them.
  We alone are in charge of funding this government. We alone in this 
body are equipped to recognize that there are not many ships that pass 
this direction that are of such import, that have so much of a head of 
steam behind them, that they are likely to pass.
  And this was a uniquely good moment for Republicans to recognize, 
look, the Democrats have something that they really, really care about. 
Some Republicans do too, as we have come to find out. But this is an 
issue that, by and large, unites the Democratic Party and those in the 
U.S. Senate who are part of it. They really, really want to send more 
money to Ukraine. We will talk about that more in a moment, but it is 
something that they really, really want to do, even though we have 
already sent the $113 billion there; even though it is more money than 
any other nation on Earth has sent; even though the military aid that 
we have sent far eclipses not only that of any other nation since this 
war started but of every other nation combined. But that is something 
they really want to do.
  We also knew that securing our border is something that Republicans 
care a lot about. I wish it were not only Republicans who cared about 
our border security, and I am sure that on some level a number of our 
Democratic colleagues do, too, but maybe not in the same way that we 
do, not enough to call out the President from their party. I know that 
can be difficult, but maybe that makes some of them uncomfortable. I 
don't know; it is not for me to say.
  But the point is this: Most Republicans in Congress feel, or at least 
profess strongly to feel, a strong need to secure the border, and most 
Democrats feel very passionately about securing Ukraine's border. There 
is some overlap between those two, I get it. It is an 
overgeneralization, perhaps, but it is a point that Republicans in the 
Senate saw, and we realized: Gosh, maybe, just maybe, we can cobble 
together and harness this desire to send more funding to Ukraine on the 
left with a corresponding desire among Republicans to secure our 
border.
  So it was on that basis that we made that commitment about 3 months 
ago. Sadly, after we made that commitment, we were told that a few 
Senate colleagues were trying to iron out a compromise. Now, I know and 
like each of those colleagues; I have great affection for each of them; 
I have worked with each of them on different pieces of legislation; and 
I consider each of them friends.
  I don't know how it went in the Democratic caucus, but I can tell you 
from my vantage point, in the Republican conference, we were kept 
completely in the dark on the contents of that legislation until a week 
ago Sunday at 7 p.m.

  It wasn't until a week ago Sunday at 7 p.m. that we first got to set 
our eyes on that document that they had spent 3 or 4 months 
negotiating.
  Now, it had a lot of provisions in it, a lot of language in it, but 
the border security portions of that bill didn't do what we committed 
to do. I don't mean to suggest bad faith on the part of any individual 
negotiator, but it didn't do what most of us understood the deal to be.
  What we asked for was not a Ukraine supplemental aid package with an 
immigration overhaul attached to it, or even an immigration overhaul 
package containing some provisions of immigration law that might, in 
the future, under a different administration, prove to be potentially 
helpful in securing the border--kind of what this was, certainly how I 
perceived it. But it wasn't something that would actually force this 
administration to secure the border and provide consequences if it 
didn't. To up the ante, to make it more difficult for this 
administration to continue this pattern of enriching the international 
drug cartels to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every single 
year through aggressive nonenforcement of the border, it did not do 
that.
  So, look, this was the predictable, foreseeable, and by some of us 
foreseen and warned of consequence of having a negotiation in which one 
person was asked to negotiate on behalf of 49 people and also asked not 
to keep those 49 people apprised of the precise contents of that draft 
legislation.
  For many of us, this was unthinkable. I don't know how you can 
possibly negotiate on behalf of anyone, much less a group of 49, 
without regularly informing them of exactly what is going on and even 
providing text that you have been drafting. But, alas, that was not my 
decision, and I have reason

[[Page S949]]

to believe it was not even the decision of our lead negotiator for whom 
I have great respect and admiration. It was the decision of the Senate 
Republican leader.
  It was the decision of the Senate Republican leader, apparently, to 
keep us in the dark, and also to insist on provisions like those that 
could have withheld funds from Ukraine or, at least, delayed the 
release of some of the Ukraine aid until such time as certain 
objectively verifiable border security metrics, benchmarks, indicia of 
operational control of the border had been achieved for a specified 
period of time.
  At one point or another, I think I heard half or more of the Senate 
Republican conference specifically asking for that and explaining that 
that is the type of thing that we would need, either that or something 
so direct, so clear, so precise as the border security package passed 
by the House of Representatives, H.R. 2 or, at least, its core 
provisions. Some combination of provisions like those found in H.R. 2 
and something like the border security metrics package that I 
mentioned, perhaps even with something in there putting teeth behind 
provisions in existing law, prohibiting noncitizens from voting in 
Federal elections. Things like that would have gone a long way; I think 
could have brought most--an overwhelming majority, perhaps--of Senate 
Republicans, depending on the precise contours of the bill--could have 
brought them into the fold and onboard with the topic. But that is not 
how it worked.
  So when we discovered that was not the legislation that we got, even 
though it was the legislation that we asked for and that we anticipated 
and that we committed to each other and to the public and to our voters 
and to our colleagues down the hall who felt the same way--upon 
discovering that that is not what it was, within 24 hours, it appeared 
that that bill was going to go nowhere.
  Within 48, maybe it was 72 hours of the release of that text, all but 
four Senate Republicans had voted against that measure. What we should 
have done, what we could have done, what I still don't understand why 
we didn't do, is then turn forthwith to putting together a package that 
would, in fact, accomplish what we set out to do, which is force the 
issue of border security on the Biden administration as a condition, 
making the release of additional Ukraine aid subject to the achievement 
of border security, operational control of the border that would be in 
place as a condition precedent. This didn't happen. But after that 
didn't happen, oddly enough, 17 or 18--I think it is back down to 17 
now--of my Senate Republican colleagues, having made that commitment to 
each other, to their voters, to our colleagues down the hall, to the 
American people, to the Governors, to communities, to school 
principals, all these people who are relying on and affected by our 
decisions, especially in communities that are being overrun by people 
not of our land, people entering not according to our laws and, in 
fact, contrary to our laws--we let all of them down.

  Seventeen Republicans then decided: Well, you know what, 
notwithstanding that commitment--to heck with it--let's just go ahead 
and pass all the foreign aid stuff. Let's pass all the foreign aid 
without any border security. Let's help Ukraine with its border 
security problems. Let's leave ours out there.
  This may well be the last real opportunity we have to do that in this 
administration. How many more illegal aliens will be brought in? How 
many more people will come in who are on the Terrorist Watchlist? How 
many other people will come in from countries that themselves raise 
suspicion given the concentration of people who hate our country in 
those nations from which they came?
  So why would these 17 Republicans just decide to turn their backs on 
the promise that we had made and on the people who were relying on that 
commitment? I really don't understand, nor do I understand why, once we 
got on the bill--once we approached the bill, we were told by a number 
of those 17: Well, don't worry about it. Once we get onto it, we can 
have an amendment process. We can process amendments. We can have votes 
on amendments. It will be fair and open as an amendment process. Don't 
worry about it.
  Then we got onto it, and we were told: No, sorry. It turns out we 
don't really need your votes anymore because 17 Republicans agreed so 
eagerly, so willingly, to go along with us even without any of those 
commitments. We don't really owe anything to you.
  So I came to the Senate floor and was here most of the day on 
Saturday. I stood here for 4 straight hours talking about different 
amendments that I want to propose, calling up amendment after 
amendment--most of my amendments were germane to the bill--asking that 
they be made pending.
  They received objections each day--not from Republicans but from 
Democrats on the floor. Those Democrats who voiced objections voiced 
them again and again and again, saying in essence: You as Republicans 
had your chance. You blew your chance. You had your chance at a border 
security reform package in this bill, and because you didn't take it, 
you don't get any input into this bill.
  There was nobody else here at the time who was offering up 
amendments, asking that they be made pending, so it wasn't a question 
of the Senate being just flooded with people wanting their amendments 
to be pending at the time. This wasn't one where we had bipartisan 
objections to it. No, these were just Democrats, not Republicans, doing 
it.
  What was even more shocking is that after that happened, after 
amendment after amendment, germane amendment after germane amendment 
was rejected from consideration, was not allowed to be made pending--
you see, when we make something pending, we sort of put it in a queue 
of sorts that says: This is something we are going to dispose of, 
something we are going to address. Maybe we will dispose of it by 
rollcall vote, maybe a voice vote. Maybe it will be disposed of by a 
point of order, a motion to commit, or a motion to table. Maybe, if it 
is a nongermane amendment and we haven't disposed of it by the time 
cloture is invoked, by the time we decide to bring debate to a close on 
the bill, then it will fall out and just won't be covered.
  But, no, this was just too much to ask. But what was really shocking 
and really disappointing was the fact that even after that happened, a 
number of Republicans--even some of the same Republicans who had said, 
Yes, we will stand with you. Not another dime for Ukraine until we get 
the border secure and then had said, Yes, we will stand with you now 
that the border security deal that we received for the first time a 
week ago Sunday at 7 p.m. and that all but four Republicans voted 
against--now that that failed, don't worry, we will have an open 
amendment process.
  Then those same Republicans--a number of them--blamed the failure for 
us to process even a single amendment on this not on Democrats who had 
made those objections but on the same Republicans, on people like and 
including me. I hadn't objected to a single other amendment being 
processed--not one--and yet I was told that I was part of the problem. 
I don't get it.
  Sometimes, I wonder why somebody would run as a Republican, only to 
take one of the issues that really should be bipartisan, used to be 
bipartisan, that has now become partisan but apparently now a lot of 
Republicans don't care about that much because, by golly, they are 
going to make sure that Ukraine gets funded, and they don't want any 
conditions attached to it, and then they are going to dismiss, 
denigrate any Republican who expresses concerns with the bill.
  Not all of those concerns, in fact, most of them related--on the 
amendments that I tried to make pending the other day, a lot of them 
dealt specifically with things that don't have to do with the border. I 
had others that did. I talked about those. Those were rejected that 
day, but so, too, did my amendments that deal specifically with the 
Ukraine portion of the bill.
  For example, I raised some concerns about aid that might--inevitably 
will--flow to Gaza and end up helping Hamas, possibly to the tune of $9 
billion or so on the high end. We know what happened when billions of 
dollars of humanitarian aid over the years flowed into Gaza. Under no 
circumstance did we say: Oh, here is a check from the United States of 
America to Hamas. No. They were funneled through different aid 
programs, a lot of

[[Page S950]]

them through multilateral, multinational institutions like the United 
Nations.

  The thing is, you send money to that part of the country--Gaza is 
unlike anything we have ever experienced, those of us who have grown up 
in the United States and lived our entire lives here. To describe Gaza 
as a failed state is an insult to failed states everywhere. It is not 
even a state.
  Nonetheless, Hamas rules Gaza with an iron fist, and if you send 
money to Gaza, it is literally impossible to keep that money, keep 
those benefits, out of the hands of Hamas and to prevent it from 
benefiting Hamas. It is one of the reasons why October 7 was made 
possible, this elaborate network of tunnels. All sorts of things, all 
sorts of benefits under the banner of international humanitarian aid 
that went to Gaza helped Hamas, it strengthened Hamas, and, yes, it led 
to October 7.
  Now, lest you think that that was the end of it, October 7 was just a 
prelude to other things to come because by the time Hamas and other 
Iranian proxies in the region have their say, what happened on October 
7 in Israel will look like a Sunday picnic.
  So I raised concerns about that in one of my amendments. In another 
one of my amendments, I raised concerns about the fact that, of the 
roughly $8 billion or so going to Ukraine under an economic security 
package, there is no restriction in there preventing that money from 
going to pay the salaries of Ukrainian bureaucrats; no restriction in 
there preventing it from funding Ukrainian social welfare programs; no 
restrictions in there preventing it from going--as similar funds from 
the United States have gone over the last couple of years in the past--
into programs that result in purchase with U.S. funds of things like 
concert tickets for Ukrainian concertgoers, things to shore up clothing 
stores in Ukraine.
  These are things that we are funding over and over again specifically 
as a result of this largesse we are pouring into Ukraine. We are doing 
all of this at a time when the American people are suffering under the 
oppressive yoke of Bidenomics, where it costs the average American 
household an additional $1,000 every single month just to live--just to 
put gas in the car, groceries in the fridge and pantry, to afford 
everything from housing to healthcare, gas to groceries, and everything 
in between.
  You see, when you print multiple trillions of dollars a year, every 
year, for several years in a row more than we bring in, inevitably it 
starts to have the same effect of just printing off more money, which 
is essentially what we are doing. What that means is that every dollar 
you have in your pocket, every dollar you receive in every paycheck, 
every dollar you might have in your bank account, it buys less--
significantly less--than it did just a few years ago.
  Now, for the rich, this isn't as much of a burden because they have 
more. When you are rich, if you are enterprising, you can find a way to 
get richer--a lot richer, in fact--during periods of inflation like 
this one. This one just hurts everyone else. So, look, it is great to 
be rich at a time like this, and figures from Wall Street will tell you 
that.
  President Biden cavalierly says--whenever people bring up economic 
troubles, he and those in his administration love to say: Oh, no. How 
can you say anything is wrong with the economy when Wall Street is 
doing great?
  That is some cold comfort. That shows a tone deafness that I am not 
sure what to do with.
  This hurts them a lot when they see their neighborhoods overrun, 
their schools struggling to keep up with the influx in many communities 
of new populations of people who don't belong in this country, who have 
entered this country unlawfully at the invitation and with the blessing 
of the Biden administration.
  The American people know something is wrong, deeply wrong, even if 
they are not privy to exactly the same details that we have been 
discussing here. They know something is wrong, and it is a profound 
insult to them that those of us in this Chamber would look so 
cavalierly at their plight, especially after some of us, nearly half of 
this body, made a commitment that we have now completely flouted, 
ignored, neglected.
  So back to Saturday, it was Senate Democrats who objected every time 
I raised one of these amendments, even considering any kind of 
amendment. My Democratic colleagues said that ``MAGA extremists had 
their chance,'' implying that when Senate Republicans rejected the 
border bill, we somehow forfeited our right to offer amendments.
  When did that become the principle of this body? When did we accept 
that if you disagree with the legislation before the Senate, that if 
you don't plan, intend, or irrevocably commit to supporting that 
legislation in the end, that you forfeited your right to offer 
amendments, to offer improvements, to make changes to the bill, to make 
one provision better or another provision less bad so that we first do 
no harm, as is our obligation.
  When did we become slaves to that principle in this body?
  When did that become our governing principle?
  When did we accept that if you disagree with the legislation before 
the Senate, you can't try to fix it?
  Where was that written in the Senate rules?
  When did that become a custom here or even acceptable here?
  I would hope my Republican colleagues would unite to completely and 
emphatically disavow this view, which, to the extent accepted, will 
continue to trample on the rights of the minority party and 
disenfranchise the voters we represent. But I am afraid that some of my 
Republican colleagues are entertaining this view and, in fact, fanning 
its flames, becoming some of its chief advocates.
  One of my Republican colleagues, the senior Senator from North 
Carolina, reportedly said:

       You don't put forth 80 amendments & say you won't negotiate 
     on time agreements & be taken seriously. . . . That's what's 
     happening here. Those folks are going to vote against it no 
     matter what.

  As if that were the end of the matter.
  Madam President, do you understand what is implied with that 
statement? It suggests that if someone is going to vote against a bill, 
this body should not even consider your amendments.
  Now, I would hope that this particular colleague is one who I would 
assume he didn't mean that or that he was quoted out of context. Maybe 
he didn't think it all the way through. The only problem is I have 
heard him say it several times now in private and in public, and he 
stands by it.
  I don't get it. This isn't acceptable. This is a rejection of the 
Senate's best traditions and its longstanding protection of the rights 
of the minority, whether they be part of the minority party or whether 
they be people who disagree with whatever is popular at the moment.
  This view must be rejected so that the Senate can once again embrace 
an open amendment process where the American public can see our 
deliberations in public.
  Instead, Majority Leader Schumer is obstructing a fair and open 
amendment process by filling the amendment tree and preventing any 
Senator from making amendments pending on the floor. This procedural 
tactic prevents Senators from offering their amendments and allows 
Senate leadership to screen every single amendment before it is offered 
from the floor and to dole out penuriously and sometimes punitively 
those privileged few opportunities for amendment consideration. It 
allows Senators to avoid any tough votes, to avoid surprises, and, in 
short, to avoid any real debate.
  Now, when I became a Senator in 2011, this was not the standard 
practice. Sure, there were sharp disagreements between the parties as 
there are now, but Members could, by and large, come down to the floor, 
call up an amendment, and make it pending. This change that we have 
seen was pioneered by Democratic leadership about a decade ago and then 
gleefully adopted by Republican leadership as well. In some ways, it 
got more pronounced and even worse over the next few years, after 
Republicans gained the majority. It has gotten steadily worse still 
since then. It has been the practice that leadership on both sides of 
the aisle have used for too long to stifle debate, and it must end.
  I offered a motion to table the amendment tree yesterday--or I guess 
it is the day before yesterday now,

[[Page S951]]

given that it is now Tuesday morning--so that my colleagues could make 
their own motions, their own amendments pending. But every Democrat 
and, unfortunately, some of my Republican colleagues voted against 
this.
  This vote shows that Democrats are not serious about the ``fair and 
open'' or the ``fair and reasonable'' amendment process that we were 
promised before getting on this particular bill. So I had hoped and I 
had asked that Republicans unite and demand a better process from our 
Democrat colleagues. I urged that we demand an open and honest 
amendment process on the Senate floor so that the American people can 
see where we stand.
  Now, my good friend the Senator from Ohio has dug very deeply into 
this disastrous bill and sounded the alarm. This legislation contains 
provisions requiring the next President to keep funding a proxy war in 
Ukraine, even if the circumstances have changed and even if the 
American people elect a President specifically because he promises to 
find a peaceful end to this conflict.
  It is clear that the GOP has been suckered into setting up yet 
another ridiculous, baseless impeachment attempt against the next 
Republican President, should he become the next Republican President, 
which many of us hope that he will, including me.
  How could any Republican or any conservative or anyone who values the 
rule of law support this?
  Well, earlier in the day on Monday, we saw how supporters of this 
terrible bill have resorted to calling their own constituents 
uninformed idiots. One Member of this body said: ``Our base cannot 
possibly know what's at stake'' compared to well-informed U.S. 
Senators.
  Really? Rank-and-file American voters couldn't possibly be as smart, 
as well informed, as capable of processing these concepts as a U.S. 
Senator? They couldn't possibly be as well informed as any of us?
  Well, forgive me, but I haven't seen much reason for a Mensa club on 
Capitol Hill in the last few years. And our own minority leader is 
attacking the ``dimmest and most shortsighted views'' of people who 
don't want to throw $60 billion--$60 billion more--to prolong the 
Ukraine conflict.
  These are not words of people who wish to be elected lawmakers much 
longer, let alone one day take the majority of the U.S. Senate.
  Madam President, like many of my colleagues, I made a commitment, and 
I think it is important that we, as Republican Senators, acknowledge 
that we made that commitment and not just pretend it didn't exist, as 
17 of my colleagues seem hell bent on doing. That is why I didn't 
support cloture, and that is why I will not vote to send aid to Ukraine 
without securing our southern border.
  On Sunday, I came down to the floor again to ask again that a fair 
and open amendment process be held. So I made a motion to table the 
motion to recommit. I did so, you see, because I care about the rights 
and the perspectives of my colleagues in this Chamber. I believe that 
filling the amendment tree and being forced to cave to the demands of 
the leadership of the opposite party was something being forced on us, 
quite unfairly, quite wrongly.
  When I ran for office, I understood that I may have to take tough 
votes from time to time. As we are often told, if you don't want to 
fight fires, don't set up to be a firefighter. If you don't want to 
take the tough votes, don't run for legislative office. This is just 
part of the job.
  So I asked that each Member of this body be able to offer amendments 
and debate those amendments as he or she chose. My colleagues decided 
to decline that proposition, voting against it.
  The Senate passed its final cloture vote to end debate a few hours 
ago. Republicans, as we approached that time, continued to ask for more 
amendments but continued to be blocked.
  My colleagues, I remind them, we didn't have to vote for cloture. Not 
a single Republican had to vote for cloture last night. The bill, as 
drafted, doesn't have to pass even today. Even though cloture is 
invoked, it doesn't have to. But as of last night, Republicans couldn't 
resist the temptation--17 of them--to help. Democrats couldn't have 
passed it on their own; 17 Republicans chose to help them.
  If we were to stand together and we would have voted against cloture 
on the underlying bill, it would have prolonged the debate, enabling 
the opportunity for us to pass germane amendments of which there are 
many--of which I had introduced many. It could remove or fix many of 
the flaws I have previously outlined.
  So while as deeply concerning as all of this is, I do maintain some 
hope in the fact that Speaker of the House   Mike Johnson has been 
clear. The bill, as drafted, is dead on arrival in the House.
  So I ask the question, in closing: Why would we vote to send a bill--
why would Senate Republicans, 17 of them, play any role in sending a 
bill to a majority-Republican House, one that is destined to fail in 
the House? Doing so is counterproductive and doesn't advance the 
interests of the Republican majority in the House.
  I hope that, as we move forward, we will do things differently. And I 
hope that on this vote I would ask once again for Republicans to stand 
together and oppose this bill. Even if they voted for previous cloture 
motions, they don't have to vote yes on final passage.
  In any event, this debate shouldn't conclude, and we should remember 
that we should not pass legislation that fails to secure our border and 
ignores the interests of the American people, even while shoring up the 
borders of Ukraine.
  As their elected lawmakers, as those who have been sent by States to 
represent their interests in the United States Senate, I know we can do 
better.
  A ``no'' vote is a vote to stand up for those who can't stand up for 
themselves, those objecting to the servitude of sex slavery, those 
whose communities, whose soup kitchens, whose homeless shelters, whose 
church pews and classrooms are being overrun. We stand with them. By 
voting against this bill, I stand for the rule of law and against 
lawlessness, cartels, and all the horrors that go along with them.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I understand why many Americans would 
like to find a quick way to end the horrific war Russia unleashed on 
Ukraine. It is tempting to think we can ignore it and hope it will not 
affect us down the line. However, whether we like it or not, Vladimir 
Putin's Russia has launched the largest war in Europe since World War 
II, and if not stopped now, it will only expand until U.S. allies and 
U.S. troops are dragged in. I want to prevent that from happening.
  Russia is not our friend, nor is Russia neutral toward the United 
States. Putin, with his roots in the KGB, has identified us as an 
adversary and actively works to undermine the United States. All the 
way back in 2005, Vladimir Putin said, ``The demise of the Soviet Union 
was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'' Obviously, 
for those countries previously held captive by the Soviet empire, and 
now free and independent, the collapse of their Soviet prison was 
anything but a catastrophe. Putin's lackey, former Russian President 
Medvedev, has recently threatened our NATO ally Poland with losing its 
statehood. Putin likes to repeat the phrase that ``Russia's borders do 
not end anywhere.'' A billboard was recently spotted with Putin's face 
and that phrase just before the border crossing with Estonia, another 
deeply pro-American NATO ally. Maybe this is all bluster, but history 
shows that we should take it seriously.
  Some people on my side of the aisle have suggested that we should 
deny Ukraine the arms and ammunition they need to defend themselves and 
push the Ukrainians to negotiate an end to the war. But we already 
tried that. This was the Obama policy, and it failed miserably. 
Remember, Putin invaded Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014. 
President Obama responded by refusing lethal aid to Ukraine and urging 
negotiations, effectively locking in Russia's territorial gains. Far 
from ending the conflict, this led Putin to conclude that he could get 
away with invading all of Ukraine, which he did in February 2022. I am 
very surprised to see some Republicans now urging a return to the 
dangerously weak and failed Obama policy. That would be a huge mistake. 
I also want to be clear that I do not wholeheartedly support

[[Page S952]]

President Biden's handling of Russia's invasion. If the Biden 
administration had made the decision to send key weapons sooner, the 
Ukrainians might have been able to take back even more territory.
  Both Putin and most Western analysts expected the mighty Russian army 
would take Kyiv in days. The Ukrainians shocked the world with their 
will to defend their homeland. Western support trickled in, with some 
of our European allies leading the way. Ukraine was then able to take 
back half of the territory Russia initially captured in its full-scale 
invasion. Today, Ukraine remains in control of roughly 83 percent of 
its territory. That is a remarkable success, thanks to the support of 
Europe and the United States and the fighting spirit of the Ukrainians. 
The United States has been spending about 5 percent of our annual U.S. 
military budget to arm Ukraine and U.S. intelligence believes the war 
has severely degraded Russia's military power and its ability to 
threaten NATO allies. However, Ukraine is now running out of shells. 
Europe has now committed double the amount of aid to Ukraine in dollar 
terms as the United States. The United States ranks 15th in aid to 
Ukraine relative to the size of our economy, with some European allies 
providing many times more than us. But Europe's military production 
capacity is not as great as ours. In the short term, Europe cannot fill 
the gap in military assistance if the United States does not chip in.
  The frontlines have not moved much in months, which has led to the 
false impression that the situation is stable and ripe for a 
settlement. Russia has shown no indication that it will settle for less 
than its stated aim of toppling the freely elected Government of 
Ukraine and either installing a puppet government or occupying Ukraine 
outright. On the Ukrainian side, after uncovering the massacres at 
places like Bucha and Irpin after being liberated from Russian 
occupation, public opinion has swung overwhelmingly against ceding any 
territory to Russia. The Russian occupiers tortured, raped, and killed 
anyone who espouses Ukrainian national identity. As we have been 
reminded lately and as I spoke about in the Senate a year ago, Putin 
ascribes to a twisted Russian nationalist view of history that denies 
the legitimacy of Ukrainian national identity. In this, he comes from a 
long line of Russian imperialists that for centuries have tried, and 
failed, to convince Ukrainians that they are really ``little Russians'' 
and not a separate nation. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have 
been abducted and taken to Russia, where they face indoctrination to 
forget their Ukrainian identity and become Russian. As I have spoken 
out about, Christian denominations other than Russian Orthodox are 
persecuted by Russian occupying forces. Evangelical Christians, which 
are seen as linked to the West, have been disproportionately singled 
out for torture and repression. We should not urge Ukrainians to accept 
this fate, nor would they if we did.
  It is clear that, with continued Western military aid, Russia is 
unlikely to make significant territorial gains. But, if Ukraine 
continues to face a shortage of artillery shells and the lifesaving 
Patriot missiles, Ukraine could gradually lose in a painful attritional 
war. This would mean even more death and suffering and more genocidal 
Russian war crimes like we have seen.
  Keep in mind that the United States and Russia signed the Budapest 
Memorandum, in which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons inherited from 
the Soviet Union in return for a guarantee of its sovereignty and 
territorial integrity. Russia is in violation of that agreement and at 
least two other treaties with Ukraine. As a signatory, the United 
States should not look the other way, nor should we simply trust Russia 
to adhere to any future agreement any longer than it takes to rearm.
  Putin faced no consequences for his invasion and occupation of part 
of Georgia in 2008. The weak response to his partial invasion of 
Ukraine in 2014 led him to embark on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 
If Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he will be emboldened to attack 
NATO countries down the line, and it will cost much, much more--
potentially including American lives. Those who worry about World War 
III should take a lesson from World War II. Appeasement encourages 
further aggression. Agreeing to let aggression pay off in return for a 
temporary halt to fighting is not an anti-war position; it is likely to 
lead to a wider war before too long.
  I should also add that there is a lot of inaccurate talk about ``$60 
billion for Ukraine.'' In fact, about 80 percent of that money will be 
spent right here in the U.S. This is a U.S. national security bill to 
protect Americans. Much of the money in the bill actually goes to beef 
up our military, not Ukraine's. For instance, $20 billion of the so-
called Ukraine money is actually for DOD to buy weapons here at home to 
replenish our stockpiles with new, updated weapons; $8.3 billion is 
allocated to greatly expand American military production capacity. This 
gets put under the Ukraine heading because Russia's full-scale war on 
Ukraine was a wakeup call that our munitions production capacity is not 
where it should be in the event we get into a major war. But we need 
that capacity for our national security whether we help Ukraine or not. 
In fact, $344 million from previous so-called Ukraine bills has already 
gone to Iowa. The Iowa Army Ammunition Plant loads the explosives into 
shells, including the much in demand 155mm artillery ammunition. The 
dedicated workforce at the Iowa plant has already doubled production, 
and these modernization investments will greatly increase the capacity 
to surge production much further if needed to keep our country safe. I 
am proud of Iowa's role in keeping America the ``arsenal of 
democracy.''
  I remember in the Truman administration, Republicans blaming 
Democrats with the slogan ``Who lost China?'' Republicans at that time 
were blaming the Democrats for China becoming communist. So how does 
that relate to Ukraine? There was an editorial in the Washington Post 
recently titled, ``Will the GOP become the party of retreat and 
surrender?''--meaning surrendering Ukraine to Russia and Putin. So my 
admonition to my fellow Republicans is this: Do we want to make the 
same mistake the Democrats made 70 years ago?
  I, for one, have no intention of doing so.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Klobuchar). The Senator from Washington.


                      Vote on H.R. 815, As Amended

  Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I know of no further debate on the 
bill.
  The amendment was ordered to be engrossed and the bill to be read a 
third time.
  The bill was read the third time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The bill having been read the third time, the 
question is, Shall the bill pass?
  Mrs. MURRAY. I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Wyoming (Ms. Lummis).
  Further, if present and voting: the Senator from Wyoming (Ms. Lummis) 
would have voted ``nay.''
  The result was announced--yeas 70, nays 29, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 48 Leg.]

                                YEAS--70

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Boozman
     Brown
     Butler
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Cramer
     Crapo
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Ernst
     Fetterman
     Gillibrand
     Grassley
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hickenlooper
     Hirono
     Hoeven
     Kaine
     Kelly
     Kennedy
     King
     Klobuchar
     Lujan
     Manchin
     Markey
     McConnell
     Menendez
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Ossoff
     Padilla
     Peters
     Reed
     Risch
     Romney
     Rosen
     Rounds
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Sinema
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Tester
     Thune
     Tillis
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warnock
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wicker
     Wyden
     Young

                                NAYS--29

     Barrasso
     Blackburn
     Braun
     Britt
     Budd
     Cotton
     Cruz
     Daines
     Fischer
     Graham
     Hagerty
     Hawley
     Hyde-Smith
     Johnson
     Lankford

[[Page S953]]


     Lee
     Marshall
     Merkley
     Mullin
     Paul
     Ricketts
     Rubio
     Sanders
     Schmitt
     Scott (FL)
     Scott (SC)
     Tuberville
     Vance
     Welch

                             NOT VOTING--1

       
     Lummis
       
  The bill (H.R. 815), as amended, was passed.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kaine). The majority leader.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, it has been a long night, a long weekend, 
and a long few months. But a new day is here, and our efforts have been 
more than worth it.
  Today, we have witnessed one of the most historic and consequential 
bills to have ever passed the Senate. It has certainly been years, 
perhaps decades, since the Senate passed a bill that so greatly impacts 
not just our national security, not just the security of our allies, 
but the security of Western democracy.
  As I have said, if we want the world to remain a safe place for 
freedom, for democratic principles, for our future prosperity, then 
America must lead the way.
  And with this bill, the Senate declares that American leadership will 
not waiver, will not falter, will not fail. With this bill, the Senate 
keeps its word to Ukrainians in desperate need of supplies and 
ammunition, to innocent Palestinian civilians in need of relief, to 
Israelis in need of support, and to U.S. servicemembers on patrol in 
the Indo-Pacific, the Red Sea, and around the world.
  Today, we make Vladimir Putin regret the day he questioned America's 
resolve, and we make clear to others like China's President Xi not to 
test our determination. And we send a clear bipartisan message of 
resolve to our allies in NATO.
  With the strong bipartisan support we have here in the Senate with 
this vote, I believe that if Speaker Johnson brought this bill to the 
House floor, it will pass with the same strong bipartisan support.
  I thank all of my colleagues, Democratic and Republican alike, who 
supported this bill. Thank you to Senators Murray and Collins, Murphy, 
Sinema, Lankford. Thank you to Leader McConnell, and thank you to all 
the Senators and staffs, including my own great staff, who worked 
through Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's and even the Super 
Bowl to get this done.
  Finally, these past few months have been a great test for the U.S. 
Senate to see if we could escape the constant centrifugal pull of 
partisanship and summon the will to defend Western democracy when it 
mattered most. This morning, the Senate has resoundingly passed that 
test.

                          ____________________