Congressional Record, Volume 170 Issue 40 (Wednesday, March 6, 2024)

[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 40 (Wednesday, March 6, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2223-S2224]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

Unanimous Consent Requests--H.R. 4366

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I have come to the floor today to talk
about some of the spending requests--known as earmarks--that are placed
in this legislation. Earmarks have long been used by Members of
Congress as ``sweeteners,'' as things that make the bill package go
down more smoothly, more easily, than perhaps it would otherwise--
special interests give-outs, handouts to business entities, nonprofit
entities, or otherwise that individual Members request, sometimes
successfully.
One of them involves a significant sum of $850,000--just shy of a
million dollars--to a leftwing organization known for publicly calling
for the granting of citizenship to illegal immigrants, persons who have
entered our country, whose common characteristic that they hold in
common--that unites them--is the fact that they entered the country
unlawfully, in violation of our laws.
This arises during a significant period of time; one in which we are
experiencing the worst immigration crisis that we have ever known. And
Congress wants to send $850,000 to an organization that is interested
in enabling and inflaming it.
Why, exactly--even if you agree with the objectives of this
organization called the New Immigrant Community Empowerment
organization--or NICE--even if you agree with that entity, which many
Americans don't, why exactly is it that we are going to take money away
from U.S. taxpayers and use that to fund this organization that
actively assists in helping illegal aliens get American jobs?
NICE's LinkedIn page says as follows:

At NICE we envision a world where all people, regardless of
immigration status, live and work with dignity and justice.

And ``dignity'' and ``justice'' are nice things. They are things that
the American people aspire to; and they are the very things that cause
immigrants worldwide to want to come to the United States of America.
For this to work, for us to continue to be a nation of immigrants, we
need to be a nation that also honors our own laws and enforces them.
So if you support this bill--the Schumer minibus bill--with this
earmark, then you are voting, in one way or another, to fund this
organization to the tune of $850,000, which, in turn, goes to help
perpetuate, inflame, and extend the immigration crisis--the border
security crisis.
So to that end, Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to reprint
the joint explanatory statement to accompany H.R. 4366, the
Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024, that was printed in yesterday's
Record with the following changes and that this amended version be
considered the joint explanatory statement to accompany H.R. 4366:

[T]he removal of a House CDF project that would give
$850,000 to the New Immigrant Community Empowerment
organization in T-HUD.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, reserving the right to object, last
Congress, Senate and House Appropriations Committee leaders reinstated
the practice of congressionally directed spending--or CDS--with
bipartisan support.
CDS is one very important way for lawmakers to advocate for the
communities they represent; and they know best.
At the beginning of this Congress, the senior Senator from Maine and
I laid out a very robust process alongside our counterparts in the
House to accept CDS requests for fiscal year 2024. The process includes
important guardrails and requirements to, among other things, ensure
transparency, ensure Members do not have financial stakes in the
project they seek to fund, ensure projects are eligible to be funded,
and that for-profit entities do not receive funding, and more.
If a project meets those requirements, it is eligible for funding.
This is a Member-driven process, and we respect the eligible projects
Members choose to request or to withdraw support for.
All four corners worked in a bipartisan way to make sure these bills
could reflect the input and priorities of every Member. And that
includes funding for eligible projects they have sponsored.
But what the Senator from Utah is offering would undo all that hard
work and overrule Members about the projects they have secured funding
for in this package. That is not how this process can or should work.

We have a process here that is driven by the rules we have in place
and by Members' requests. And that process cannot be upended now at the
11th hour by a single lawmaker. Doing so would overrule other lawmakers
and deny funding for projects they have secured for their constituents.
That cannot happen now. I will not let it happen.
I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Utah.
Mr. LEE. Madam President, first of all, with regard to the last
unanimous consent request, it is important to remember a couple of
things: First of all, we saw that the whole bill together, with the
congressionally directed spending elements, for the first time in just
the last 48 hours or so. So it is not as though this has been through a
public process with debate back and forth. An essential element of any
legislative body is that there is an opportunity to amend, to discuss,
and debate. In fact, that has been taken advantage of within the last
24 hours as another measure--a measure to remove something that has
been characterized online as providing a million dollars to fund BDSM
sex parties. That was removed. So if that can be removed, I don't know
why this one can't.
In any event, to say that this cake is baked--that this legislation
must be treated as now passed when it is not passed is folly. And it
doesn't bode well for this institution, which has long heralded itself
and held itself out to the world as the world's greatest deliberative
legislative body.
Let's go to another one: Georgetown University. We have got nearly $1
million also going to Georgetown University--$963,000--nearly a
million--to Georgetown University for something called the Prison
Justice Initiative.
Now, I don't know a whole lot about exactly what this will
accomplish. It may well have good elements to it. But the point is
this: Georgetown University is not only one of the wealthiest
universities on planet Earth, it is one of the wealthiest entities of
any kind on planet Earth.
Indeed, it has an endowment. Its endowment alone is valued at over
$3.2 billion. And this begs the question: Why does it need to be
subsidized to the tune of nearly a million dollars by U.S. taxpayers?
To that end, Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to reprint the
joint explanatory statement to accompany H.R. 4366, the Consolidated
Appropriations Act, 2024--it was printed in yesterday's Record with the
following changes--and that this amended version be considered the
joint explanatory statement to accompany H.R. 4366:

[T]he removal of a House project that would provide
$963,000 to Georgetown University for the Georgetown
University Prison Justice Initiative, in CJS.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?

[[Page S2224]]

The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Utah.
Mr. LEE. Madam President, here again, this is unfortunate. We have a
small handful of people who have negotiated this thing behind closed
doors. They have agreed to what they have agreed to. They have taken
out things that they themselves have found controversial.
So, apparently, it is not the hermetically sealed chamber that it is
purported to be and has been purported to be just moments ago by my
friend and distinguished colleague, the Senator from Washington. And
yet we are told that the cake is sufficiently baked, and not for their
purposes but for ours. When we want to make a change to it, when we
even want to have a debate about it, we are shut down. We are told:
Sorry, no dice. That cannot happen.
That is unacceptable.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.
Mr. LEE. Madam President, there is also a measure in this
legislation--a measure calling for $2.5 million to be set aside for
outdoor recreation purposes--funding kayaking and slalom facilities in
Franklin, NH.
These sound like fun activities. They are fun activities. I mean, who
doesn't like those kinds of activities? I think most of us could agree
this is completely inappropriate. And it is an unnecessary use of
Federal taxpayer dollars. This ought to be funded solely at the State
and local level or with private funding and not here.
To that end, Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to reprint the
joint explanatory statement to accompany H.R. 4366, the Consolidated
Appropriations Act, 2024, that was printed in yesterday's Record with
the following changes and that this amended version be considered the
joint explanatory statement to accompany H.R. 4366:

[T]he removal of a Senate Community Development Fund
project that would provide $2,500,000 to the city of
Franklin, NH for outdoor recreation, in THUD.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The objection is heard.
Mr. LEE. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.
Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, here today, since I have been in the
Senate, which has been a little over 5 years, I think I have been the
most steadfast voice in terms of, whatever we want to do here, we
shouldn't be borrowing it from our kids and our grandkids.
Any of you up there listening, it is a sad state of affairs in the
sense that, just a little over 5 years ago, we were $18 trillion in
debt, borrowing at the tune of about a trillion dollars a year to
backfill for all the things we want to do here, and ask you and your
kids to pay for it. To me, that is a bad business plan.
Sadly, it gets even worse. Over these 5 years, instead of a trillion
dollars annually, it is now a trillion dollars every 6 months. For
those of you who are good at math, take current interest rates and
apply that to $34 trillion--soon to be $35 trillion, if it has not
already crossed that threshold. That is a big figure with a lot of
zeroes behind it. To put it in perspective, the interest on that alone
is going to be about what we spend on defense in the next year or the
discretionary side of our budget.
How we have ever gotten there, I don't know.
We are going to be considering another package tomorrow or Friday
that takes the whole process of doing budgets, asking: Do you really
need it? Aren't there some places that we could surely get back to
where we don't spend more than we take in, because when we don't, we
are borrowing every penny of it. And, on every dollar that we spend
here, 5 years ago, it was about 20 cents of that dollar that we had to
borrow. Now it is 30 cents. The arithmetic--the numbers--don't just go
away.
It will be the single biggest thing all of you--this country--has to
deal with over the next 5 to 10 years, and it is just starting to get
to the point where it is going to, literally, break the back of the
American public. Sooner or later, you won't have people lending us that
money. Sooner or later, it is going to crowd out almost everything we
do here, and it is shameful, in my mind.
I want to focus on one, actually, small part of it, but what is
symbolic of what shouldn't be happening here: earmarks. Earmarks are
justified because we ought to be able to maybe do it better here and
should have input in it, and not let the executive branch do that. But
to me, that would be valid if, in fact, we were balancing our budget in
the first place.
Until we get total fiscal reform here and at least start to turn it
around to where the deficits get smaller, the debt is never going to
get smaller because, in general, if you take out a loan, imagine if you
told your banker: I just want to pay interest only for as long as I
have that loan.
They would laugh you out of the office.
So when it comes to earmarks, this bill is filled with them. It
wasn't too many years ago that we got rid of them. Then the House
started doing them again--both sides of the aisle. We are elective
here, if you want to do it or not. But to me, that is fine, but not in
the context that it is new money. For every earmark, you have to lend
us the money or maybe somebody overseas. Who knows who will do it down
the road?
It has a lot of other stuff in it that you are not going to like in
terms of policy that goes along with the spending. It is no wonder to
me that Americans say: What is going on here?
How are we going to change it? We are not going to change it until
you demand it. Two simple things: term limits and a balanced budget
amendment. Then it would run like your households and most other
governments around our own country.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to strike the joint
explanatory statement to accompany H.R. 4366, the Consolidated
Appropriations Act, 2024, that was printed in yesterday's Record.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.