[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 145 (Wednesday, September 18, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6127-S6130]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                   Unanimous Consent Request--S. 685

  Mr. LEE. Madam President, I appreciate my friend and colleague, the 
Senator from Alabama, for leading this discussion today. This is an 
important one to have. And I am honored to be here to be part of it.
  You know, the situation at the border, across our southern border, 
is, by any standard, a humanitarian crisis and nothing short of that. 
Vice President Kamala Harris, appointed by President Biden as his 
border czar, publicly declared that she would focus as border czar on 
addressing the root causes of immigration.
  However, now that Kamala Harris is the Democrats' nominee for the 
Presidency, she and the legacy media want to pretend that was never the 
case. Axios even reported that Vice President Kamala Harris ``never 
actually had''--that is a direct quote--``never actually had'' the 
title of border czar.
  That is funny because that is a claim that contradicts the reporting 
that we have seen from Axios itself on this. In fact, we can see that 
right here in this chart.
  On April 14, 2021, Axios reported that ``Harris, [who had been] 
appointed by [President] Biden as border czar, said she would be 
looking for the `root causes' that drive migration.''
  Moreover, a tweet from her official Twitter handle further emphasized 
her role:

       @POTUS asked me to lead our diplomatic work with Mexico, El 
     Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. To address the situation 
     at the southern border, we have to address the root causes of 
     migration. It won't be easy work--but it's necessary.

  I agree; it is necessary. She took on this role. She acknowledged the 
role, and she failed.
  Since Biden and Harris's inauguration a little more than 3\1/2\ years 
ago, over 10 million undocumented immigrants have entered the United 
States and have done so illegally. This figure exceeds the population 
of 36 States. Meaning the overwhelming majority of our States, 36 out 
of 50 have populations smaller than the total number of persons 
entering the United States illegally on the watch of border czar Vice 
President Kamala Harris, thus creating a crisis that has been met with 
a troubling combination of silence and inaction from this 
administration--the executive branch of government responsible for 
enforcing our border laws and the border itself.
  Now, if the Biden-Harris administration were serious about addressing 
the crisis at the border and addressing the issue and ensuring, in the 
process, that the real victims of government persecution in other 
countries would receive asylum here, then they would support reforming 
our broken asylum process. And, sadly, they are not. We are still 
encountering over 100,000 illegal immigrants at our southern border 
each month.
  Now, since President Biden took office, there have been almost 10 
million illegal immigrant encounters nationwide. Keep in mind, this 
doesn't reflect the sum total of those who have crossed into our 
country. These are just the documented immigrant encounters throughout 
the country. Though, there are more. That is a subset of the total flow 
of illegal immigration. Over 360 individuals on the Terrorist Watchlist 
have been stopped while trying to cross the southern border.
  And, shockingly, 27,583 Communist Chinese nationals have been 
encountered at the southwest border in the last year alone. That is a 
lot of people. And China is not close to the United States.

  By any metric, the Biden-Harris administration has shown no interest 
in securing our border. In fact, the data suggests this administration 
wants as many illegal immigrants to enter this country as possible.
  My Democrat colleagues want to pretend that Republicans are somehow 
responsible for this crisis. Why? Well, it is obvious why. They don't 
want to own it given that their party owns the crisis, as their party 
is running the administration and it is responsible for making 
decisions that has allowed this in.
  What argument did they use in order to blame Republicans who are not 
in control of the administration, do not occupy the White House, or 
control the majority in this Chamber? What is their argument as to why 
we as Republicans are to blame? Well, because we were unwilling to pass 
a bad immigration bill that would have normalized thousands of illegal 
entries across our southern border each month--and particularly in the 
hands of the Biden administration, it could have and inevitably would 
have made the situation much worse.
  But today I am offering a smaller bill, a narrower bill, a more 
focused bill that would help alleviate the crisis by closing loopholes 
in the law. These would be helpful. They are not necessarily things 
that represent a complete loophole such that President Biden would be 
powerless to enforce the border without them, but they would make it 
harder for President Biden to justify the massive loopholes that he has 
manipulated.
  This isn't the entire answer. This bill wouldn't necessarily solve 
the whole problem. But if my Democratic colleagues can't agree that 
these commonsense reforms need to be adopted, then how can we take 
their concern about the border crisis seriously?
  My bill, the Stopping Border Surges Act, would address loopholes in 
our immigration laws, which have helped create some of the perverse 
incentives for illegal immigration. It made it easier for the Biden 
administration to facilitate this flow of 10 million illegal immigrants 
into our country over the last 3\1/2\ years.
  The bill would clarify that an adult cannot bring a child into this 
country expecting that child to be his or her ticket to avoid 
detention. This would help eliminate the disturbing practice of what is 
sometimes referred to by the Border Patrol as the practice of recycling 
children and babies by coyotes and cartels.
  People will bring in a child, and sometimes that same child will be 
brought in under similar circumstances over and over and over again as 
the ticket into the United States--the ticket thus making it less 
likely that they will be detained and ultimately deported.
  It allows all unaccompanied children to be returned to their home 
countries, thus ending the incentive for the parents to send their 
young children here alone, leaving them vulnerable to abuse.
  Sadly, we see what is happening to those children under the 
supervision of the Biden-Harris administration and Secretary Mayorkas. 
They are trafficked either into child slavery, sex slavery, or as drug 
dealers.
  My bill would require that the Department of Health and Human 
Services provides DHS with biographical information about the persons 
to whom children are being released so that they know something about 
them, rather than just ``This is the person to whom you are going to 
release the child.''
  It also requires asylum seekers to apply for and be denied asylum in 
at least one safe country on their route from their country of origin 
to the United States. It would combat the Biden-Harris administration's 
obliteration of the credible fear standard by heightening the burden of 
proof.
  The correct application of this standard is pivotal to the operation 
of our asylum system and making sure that it is there for those who 
need it and not subject to rampant abuse by those not eligible for it.
  It has been corrupted over the years. But this administration has 
destroyed it entirely--manipulating it to the point where it is now 
beyond recognition. We must fix it.
  It is sad that we have to fix it, but we have to fix it in large part 
because it has been so distorted and abused by this administration, 
profiting international drug cartels to the tune of tens of billions of 
dollars a year, leaving a huge--huge--wake of human suffering in its 
path.
  It would close loopholes and restrict asylum to aliens who present 
themselves at an official point of entry. We must eliminate these 
loopholes and not allow the Biden-Harris administration to make more of 
them.
  Congress needs to take back the authority to establish law. We can 
start today by passing the Stopping Border Surges Act.
  Ending the ambiguities in our current asylum law will help to 
mitigate the situation at the border and prevent unelected, 
unaccountable bureaucrats from acting with utter impunity to enforce 
their own policy preferences, culminating inevitably in open borders

[[Page S6128]]

with more than 10 million people coming into this country in a space of 
only 3\1/2\ years. So I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

  To that end, Madam President, as if in legislative session and 
notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee 
on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 685 and 
that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that 
the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion 
to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there an objection?
  The majority whip.
  Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, there is a pamphlet that is circulated 
to tourists and students alike entitled ``How Laws Are Made,'' and it 
tells the basic process under our Federal Constitution for enacting 
legislation. It talks about committee hearings; it talks about votes in 
committee, votes on the floor--in the Senate, then in the House; 
conference committees, agreements, a lot of other votes. Finally, the 
measure is sent to the President, if it is successful, for his 
signature or his veto. That is the ordinary process.
  You will not see what is happening on this floor of the Senate in the 
pamphlet to describe how laws are made. It is such an unusual thing. 
Here we are in the Senate, basically trying to say: I ask unanimous 
consent to ignore the Constitution as written and the laws as described 
and go ahead and pass this bill anyway.
  Well, you might say there are times when that is needed--and it is--
but when it comes to the issue of immigration, there is a much broader 
consideration.
  The fact of the matter is, it has been almost 35 years since we have 
passed an immigration reform bill--35 years. I don't know how many 
times the Senator from Utah has voted for an immigration bill--perhaps 
not--but the point is, we have tried and can't bring the measure to the 
floor. There is resistance and objection, primarily from the Republican 
side of the aisle, for any type of comprehensive reform.
  But there comes a time when there is a glimmer of hope. Once in a 
while, something happens around here, and you think things are going to 
be different. That happened not that long ago, a few months back.
  We had a conservative Republican Senator from Oklahoma named James 
Lankford. James and I disagree on so many issues, but I respect him so 
very much when it comes to his legislative commitment. He sat down with 
Chris Murphy, a Democratic Senator from the State of Connecticut, and 
they said: Can we, Republican and Democrat together, come up with a 
measure that won't solve every problem with immigration, but at least 
it will move us forward?
  What are we going to include in that?
  Well, we are going to include provisions that dictate what happens 
when someone presents himself to the border: who would be considered in 
a fast fashion and who would not be.
  We are going to put more Border Patrol agents on the border. They 
wrote a provision that the Border Patrol agents' union--thousands of 
men and women who risk their lives--endorsed.
  Well, what are we going to do about fentanyl and narcotics that are 
coming into the United States as well? They added more provisions and 
then more law enforcement to stop the flow of narcotics.
  There were provisions in that bill which I didn't like, but by and 
large, I had to say that was a good bill. It really was a bipartisan 
effort to solve some of the major problems we have.
  Some on the Republican side said: Unless you pass this bipartisan 
bill, we are not going to allow other business to occur.
  It was a pretty serious showdown moment. So we were prepared to do 
it. A lot of us were prepared to vote for this measure. It was 
bipartisan, it made real progress, and it really addressed the flow of 
people coming across the border.
  What happened next is important. What happened next is one person 
stepped up and said: Stop. That person was Donald Trump, the former 
President of the United States. He said: I don't want this bipartisan 
measure that Senator Lankford and Senator Murphy have crafted to pass 
in the Senate.
  Critics said: Wait a minute, former President. If we don't do this, 
we won't do anything. We won't be able to address this measure 
significantly or constructively before the next election.
  He said: So be it. Blame it on me, Donald Trump said. Kill this bill.
  The word went out on the Republican side: Stop where you are. No 
measure is to pass, not even this bipartisan measure.
  When it turned out that only a handful of Republicans were willing to 
defy Donald Trump, the measure died. That was the end of it.
  You have to ask yourself, did we miss an opportunity there? The 
answer is, we certainly did--a bipartisan opportunity to do something 
constructive. And the decision was made by Donald Trump that he would 
rather have this issue going into the election in 2024 than to have any 
solution, bipartisan solution, which might inure to the credit of the 
Democrats as well as the Republicans. That was the end of the 
conversation.

  So we find ourselves on the floor today with a measure that is being 
suggested on it by unanimous consent that, of course, did not go 
through committee and has not been reviewed, and it unfortunately has 
some serious flaws. Instead, this bill targets the most vulnerable 
people seeking safety and protection in the United States: children 
traveling without a parent or guardian, families with minor children, 
and asylum seekers fleeing persecution.
  The bill that is before us--the unanimous consent request--would 
strip away protections for unaccompanied children. It would deport many 
of them back into the hands of smugglers, keep others in detention for 
up to a month, and keep them separated from adults who could care for 
them. This bill would require families to be detained--a failed policy 
that has disastrous effects on children and doesn't make the border any 
safer.
  This bill would also create multiple new restrictions on asylum, 
undermining our longstanding commitment to refugees seeking safety, 
such as the people in Ukraine. Many of them were refugees to the United 
States, once attacked by Vladimir Putin, and I believe most Americans 
agree that providing protection for them and their families is the 
right thing to do.
  The Biden administration is doing what it can under our outdated 
immigration laws to secure the border, and encounters between the ports 
of entry have decreased by more than 50 percent. Yes, there are too 
many flowing over the borders at various times, but we have seen 
dramatic reductions in those who are coming across our border now, and 
we could have seen more with this bipartisan bill, which Donald Trump 
and his loyalists ended up killing.
  The administration has dramatically increased deportations, made 
tough changes in our asylum system, and improved access to lawful 
pathways to citizenship, but ultimately it is Congress's responsibility 
to reform our broken immigration system, which has not been updated, as 
I said earlier, in 35 years.
  To resolve our challenges at the border, we need immigration reform 
that will actually fix our broken immigration system and provide the 
necessary resources to DHS to secure the border. Rather than providing 
additional resources, improving infrastructure, or adding more lawful 
pathways, this bill would undermine fundamental American values and put 
families and children at risk.
  Recently, a bipartisan group of Senators had a tough border deal put 
together. I want to commend Senator Lankford for his courage in 
stepping up, particularly when Donald Trump was opposed to it. I wish 
the majority of Republicans would have stood behind their Senator from 
Oklahoma, but the Senator from Utah and others decided they wouldn't. 
They would rather take these opportunities to come to the floor and try 
the unanimous consent route.
  Donald Trump was crystal clear. He said: Blame it on me if the bill 
fails. The bill failed, and I am blaming it on him just as he has. He 
doesn't want a solution; he wants an issue in November.
  The time is long past due for my Senate Republican colleagues to stop 
partisan bickering, get behind James Lankford's effort, and work on a 
bipartisan basis to pass the immigration

[[Page S6129]]

legislation the American people deserve.
  I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Rosen). Objection is heard.
  The Senator from Utah.
  Mr. LEE. Madam President, I appreciate the thoughtful remarks from my 
friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Illinois. He and I 
have worked together on many issues. We don't agree on everything, but 
when we do agree, it is a lot of fun. We are able to do a lot of great 
things together. I appreciate his leadership on the Judiciary Committee 
and the fact that he has always been friendly toward me.
  I also appreciate his reference to our sort of civics aspect of what 
we do. The notion of how a bill becomes a law is always, always 
instructive. It is always helpful to bring that up. You know, we have 
lost some of that in our system, and people get confused as to how laws 
are made.
  Of course, the very first operative provision of the Constitution--
article I, section 1--has only one clause, so it is clause 1. The very 
first language after the preamble says that all legislative powers 
herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States which 
shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.
  Remember, legislative powers are lawmaking powers, meaning all power 
to make law--to make Federal law--is vested in this body and the body 
with which we share the legislative power just down the hall, the House 
of Representatives.
  Article I, section 7 elaborates on this function and makes clear yet 
again that you cannot make a Federal law without following this 
formula. The formula prescribed by article I, section 7 is bicameral 
passage followed by presentment to the President of the United States. 
You have to pass the same legislative text down the hall and also pass 
it here. It doesn't matter in what order unless it is a revenue bill, 
but that is not relevant here, but it does have to be the same text 
passed by both bodies. Then and only then can you present it to the 
President for signature, veto, or acquiescence. That is how you make a 
law. That is what the Constitution requires.
  Now, on top of that, we have a number of other procedures that we 
have added by Senate rule, precedent, procedure, common practice. Those 
are not required by the Constitution, but those rules and practices are 
acknowledged as legitimate by the Constitution. Yes, most of the time, 
we pass those, but it is ultimately up to us to decide when, whether, 
to what extent, and in what ways to follow all of our procedures.
  And I agree with the Senator from Illinois--it does make sense 
whenever we can do it--that we always should follow our own procedures. 
It generally works out best if we can move something through committee, 
if we can have a full committee hearing and we can have what is called 
a markup, where we introduce and entertain amendments to proposed 
legislation, pass it out of committee, and then bring it to the floor 
ultimately.
  I think we generally have much better legislation when we do it that 
way, and I would love to follow that procedure with this particular 
bill. If what the Senator from Illinois and the chairman of the 
Judiciary Committee is offering is for us to have a full committee 
hearing and a markup on this bill, I would love that, and I would 
gladly entertain that.
  Tragically, in the Senate, we have seen a deviation from that same 
practice--that same practice to which he attributes great significance, 
understandably, today. In fact, fully 94 percent of all legislative 
matters passed by this body are passed by this same procedure that I am 
attempting to utilize here today--by unanimous consent.
  The way it works is, essentially somebody makes a request, and they 
ultimately come down to the floor like I have done today and say: Let's 
call up and pass this bill.
  Why would we do that? Well, in many instances, committee chairmen 
have become somewhat stingy with what bills on which they are going to 
hold hearings and markups. We have been unable to get a hearing or a 
markup set on this bill, and so this bill, like so many others--in 
fact, like 94 percent of all legislation passed by this body--comes to 
the Senate floor today without the benefit of having had either a 
hearing or a markup.
  Well, that doesn't stop the 94 percent of the legislation from moving 
forward. In fact, in addition to that 94 percent of the legislative 
proposals that are passed by unanimous consent, an additional number of 
them--I am not sure what the number is; it probably varies a little bit 
from year to year--but an additional number of them are brought to the 
floor and passed not unanimously but by rollcall vote without having 
had the benefit of either a full committee hearing or a markup. This, 
too, is unfortunate. Sometimes it is necessary and unavoidable, and 
other times, it is not.
  The point is this: Neither the Constitution nor the Senate rules 
prohibit passing legislation this way. Sometimes it becomes necessary 
when the other path has been made unavailable to us by the majority 
party and the committee chairman.
  In this circumstance, there is an additional reason why we need to 
bring this forward. We talked a minute ago about the legislative 
process required by the U.S. Constitution to pass a law to make or 
change any statute that is Federal in nature. You have to go through 
that article I, section 7 formula: bicameral passage in Congress, 
followed by presentment to the President for signature, veto, or 
acquiescence.
  What the Constitution does not countenance and certainly prohibits is 
the making of new law or the modification of existing law by the 
executive branch of government or by anyone or anything outside the 
framework of article I, section 7. That is what we have seen with our 
immigration laws, including and especially with this administration 
with regard to laws that are relevant here--laws, for example, 
involving asylum standards.
  The asylum standards have morphed over the years, over many decades, 
and the practice of applying our asylum laws has become so different 
under this administration than what the law actually says, although 
this is comparable in many respects to another great frustration of 
mine that is closely related to this where we outsource de facto 
lawmaking authority to unelected, unaccountable bodies in the executive 
branch, allowing them to just make new law. We call them regulations to 
get around the obvious awkwardness that would otherwise be created by 
this thing called the Constitution to which we have all sworn an oath, 
but we allow, in effect, the executive branch to make laws that way 
under the form of rules and regulations.
  But either way, whether it is by the stroke of the Executive pen or 
whether it is through an administrative Agency, we have seen laws being 
made and changed entirely outside the constitutionally authorized 
process recognized by article I, sections 1 and 7.
  So it is one of the reasons we are here today because we have had the 
executive branch making and changing law not authorized by the 
Constitution, and we have had a lack of access to committee hearings 
and committee markups. So that is why we come here today and do this.
  While it is not ideal, it is how 94 percent of the legislation passed 
by this body is, in fact, passed. So that kind of matters. That 
provides some helpful context.
  We talked a little bit about asylum and how the asylum laws have been 
abused and modified. The idea behind asylum is that if you are subject 
to certain kinds of persecution in your home country, we want to 
provide people with a place to go.
  The problem we had in this administration--the way it is supposed to 
work is if you show up without documents at the U.S. border and you 
make the case that you are entitled to stay here as an asylee, well, 
you are supposed to be detained until such time as they can decide the 
issue. You don't have a statutory or a constitutional right to be 
granted asylum. It is a discretionary grant of authority given to the 
Secretary of Homeland Security. No one has a guaranteed right to it. So 
you are supposed to be detained while they consider your application, 
whether or not they are going to grant it.
  But instead, what this administration has been doing is just saying: 
OK. Come in. You claim asylum. And they let you go. And because there 
are so

[[Page S6130]]

many people coming in--about 10 million of them; many of them are 
claiming asylum--they decide that the best thing to do is not deport 
them because they can't handle all those asylum applications. They 
can't adjudicate them. They say: Well, let's just let them go--let them 
go and tell them that at some point you may hear about a hearing that 
will be scheduled before an immigration judge. We hope you will come to 
your immigration hearing. At the current rate, many of these people are 
being told that their immigration hearing may not happen until the mid-
2030s.
  This doesn't make any sense. This amounts to a de facto change in 
law.
  It definitely amounts to a de facto change in law when we have got 
things like what is called immigration parole. Immigration parole is 
supposed to exist as a discretionary grant of authority, allowing the 
U.S. Government to let somebody come into the United States either for 
a specific humanitarian purpose or a public purpose. But it has to be 
individualized, not generalized by country, not broad categories, and 
an individual person. The law specifies that.
  An example of a humanitarian purpose is somebody is in a foreign 
country. Maybe their mother lives here. She is about to die, and that 
person needs to come in and be there for the funeral with the 
understanding that he or she will probably leave thereafter.
  The public use, the public benefit example, would be someone who 
maybe speaks an obscure language. We don't have adequate interpretation 
services in that language here. We need somebody to come in and 
translate for that language. We allow them to come in, be a translator 
for that trial, with the understanding that they will leave.
  Well, this President has granted contrary to what the law allows. He 
has effectively rewritten the law so as to just grant huge categorical 
blocks of immigration parole. We are talking to the tune of hundreds of 
thousands of people who have been admitted in a single year on these 
things.
  That is lawless. That is outside what the law requires. So, yes, that 
is a change of law, and that is why we need to tighten this law here.
  Now, I do want to get to this point about the so-called border bill, 
the border bill that my friend and colleague from Illinois claims--
mistakenly but very wrongly--was killed only by one man, Donald J. 
Trump. It is just not what happened, not what happened at all. And I 
don't agree with his description of the bill either.
  The Senator from Illinois and I share a common friendship with and 
great affection for the senior Senator from Oklahoma. The senior 
Senator from Oklahoma did a fantastic job. He had done a great job on 
so many things that he decided that he would try to negotiate this. I 
think it was done at the request of the minority leader, the Republican 
leader in the Senate, to try to negotiate something.
  The Senate Republican conference wanted legislation that would, in 
one way or another, tie President Biden's hands so he couldn't continue 
to abuse and negotiate that system of laws, and so he went in there. He 
did his best to negotiate that. At the end, most Members of our 
conference didn't feel comfortable with what he negotiated because it 
wouldn't adequately tie President Biden's hands.
  It is not his fault, and it is not Donald Trump's fault. But the fact 
is that most of the Members of our conference didn't feel that it did 
enough to tie President Biden's hands.
  Perhaps under the jurisdiction of a different President, that 
legislation might have worked but not with this President. It certainly 
didn't tie President Biden's hands.
  So it wasn't Donald Trump who killed the bill. It was the fact that 
we didn't have the votes here.
  So, look, this is a big deal. It matters. I reject, fundamentally, 
the premise that we can't reform any of our immigration laws without 
so-called comprehensive reform, which is usually code for something 
else, including allowing large numbers of persons entering illegally to 
be deemed legal.
  So let's make sure we have the facts right, both on the way laws are 
made and based on what happened with this legislation and why it is 
necessary to pass the Stopping Border Surges Act.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.
  Mrs. BRITT. Madam President, I appreciate the remarks from my 
distinguished colleague from Utah.
  While my colleague from Oklahoma gets set, I just want to recap a 
couple of things. I mean, here we have today a fracking bill that has 
been put on the floor but yet blocked by Democrats.
  We have a bill here just now closing asylum loopholes, helping 
unaccompanied children get back to their family, but that has been 
blocked by Democrats.
  Earlier, you saw us put a bill on the floor that would actually help 
build a barrier on our southern border, but yet that was blocked by 
Democrats.
  When we have looked at how Vice President Harris is running, it is 
obviously very different than the way she served.
  If you look back in 2020, Vice President Harris said, ``Trump's 
border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won't make us any 
safer.''
  I am wondering if she will put a disclaimer that says that underneath 
her commercials that focus on and show the border wall.
  She said, as a Senator, that she vowed to block any funding for the 
border wall and urged her colleagues to reject any funding for the 
border wall, which is actually exactly what they continued to do and 
you saw them do here today.
  Here is the deal: You can't have it both ways. Kamala Harris either 
wants to secure our border--which she has had ample time to do--
building barriers that help us keep Americans safe or she doesn't, 
which is what we have seen throughout her tenure both in the Senate and 
as Vice President. But yet now she is campaigning as something totally 
different.
  We saw here today that her newfound support of a border wall is not 
supported by her Democratic colleagues here in the Senate.
  I look forward to hearing more about what we have seen on the 
campaign trail versus, in actuality, where she stands.
  On that, I see my distinguished colleague from Oklahoma and would 
love the opportunity to hear from him.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.