[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 71 (Wednesday, April 22, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1867-S1888]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
LEGISLATIVE SESSION
______
SETTING FORTH THE CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
FOR FISCAL YEAR 2026 AND SETTING FORTH THE APPROPRIATE BUDGETARY LEVELS
FOR FISCAL YEARS 2027 THROUGH 2035--Resumed
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the
Senate will resume consideration of S. Con. Res. 33, which the clerk
will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
A concurrent resolution (S. Con. Res. 33) setting forth the
congressional budget for the United States Government for
fiscal year 2026 and setting forth the appropriate budgetary
levels for fiscal years 2027 through 2035.
Recognition of the Majority Leader
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority leader is recognized.
S. Con. Res. 33
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, yesterday, Republicans moved to begin
consideration of a budget resolution to fund law enforcement--Border
Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement--at the Department of
Homeland Security.
We have a multistep process ahead of us, but at the end, Republicans
will have helped ensure that America's borders are secure and prevented
Democrats from defunding these important Agencies.
Bear in mind, that is exactly what Democrats are trying to do here.
You remember the cry to ``defund the police''? Well, it is back.
Democrats want to defund law enforcement, defund border security, and
effectively reopen America's borders to the flood of illegal
immigration and criminal activity we saw under the Biden
administration.
We have always seen what happens when Democrats embrace open borders.
Almost exactly 5 years ago, I was at the southern border with a number
of my Republican colleagues. And at the same time, just 2 months into
the Biden administration, the signs of crisis were already present.
That March, Border Patrol apprehended more illegal immigrants than it
had in a single month in 15 years. Nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children
crossed the southern border that month.
And under the Biden administration, thousands of children were placed
with unvetted sponsors or turned up missing or unaccounted for or
worse.
As we saw on that visit, Border Patrol was overwhelmed. One facility
that we visited was at 16 times its allotted capacity, and agents were
being pulled off the border to deal with the influx of immigrants,
leaving border security operations understaffed.
All of this, as I said, was just 2 months into the Biden
administration.
Now, I wish I could say that that is as bad as it got, but
unfortunately the situation continued to get worse. Over the next few
years, we saw the number
[[Page S1868]]
of illegal crossings climb to hundreds of thousands per month, and the
Biden administration's catch-and-release policies allowed millions of
those individuals to take up residence in our country.
Numerous cities, including many blue cities far from the border like
Denver, Chicago, Boston, were overwhelmed with the influx of migrants.
Amid the surge of illegal immigration, the United Nations named the
United States-Mexico border the deadliest border crossing in the world
as hundreds of immigrants died making the journey through the desert
across the Rio Grande.
Meanwhile, the cartels got rich.
A New York Times headline in 2022 read: ``Smuggling Migrants at the
Border Now a Billion-Dollar Business.''
And illegal drugs made their way across the border to every corner of
America.
The sheriff where I live in Minnehaha, County, SD, said in 2022:
Whatever your thoughts are on immigration, I will tell you
that the fact that our southern border is not secure is
allowing this poison to come into our communities at a level
that we've never seen before.
And we all remember the tragic instances of illegal immigrants
murdering American citizens. The lives of young women like Laken Riley
were taken by illegal immigrants who came into our country during the
Biden administration.
We had a crisis on our hands at the border and in our communities
from the earliest days of the Biden administration. And Democrats?
Democrats just ignored it.
It wasn't until 2024--by no coincidence, an election year--that
Democrats decided it might be a good idea to at least show some
interest in border security.
Leader Schumer finally conceded that year:
Most people agree the status quo cannot continue. Our
southern border is in desperate need of more resources.
That was the Democrat leader just 2 years ago.
Our southern border is in desperate need of more resources.
Well, no more. Democrats are back to their cry to defund law
enforcement. That is right.
Two years ago, Leader Schumer said the southern border was in
``desperate need of more resources.'' Now he refuses to give any--any--
resources to the southern border.
I have to say, as bad as things got under President Biden, at least
we had Border Patrol. Now Democrats seem to think we can do without
them. They refuse to fund Border Patrol, the very Agency that is tasked
with securing the southern border. They want to defund it.
They refuse to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They are
apparently willing to leave our law enforcement unfunded and our border
unprotected. You would think Democrats would have learned their lesson
from embracing the ``abolish ICE'' and ``defund the police'' crowds.
These kinds of radical positions are exactly why Americans elected
Republicans in 2024. But if Democrats want to continue to embrace being
the party of ``defund the police'' and open borders, they can do that.
Republicans are going to do the job that the American people elected
us to do, and one of the most basic parts of that job is funding the
government--the entire government--and securing our borders.
And so as I said, Republicans are moving forward with a budget
resolution that will allow us to fund critical functions that Democrats
refuse to support: law enforcement, drug interdiction, border security,
protecting children--both our own and the unaccompanied minors who
suffer human trafficking and worse under Democrats' open border
policies.
And to prevent Democrats from deciding that they want to defund law
enforcement again in September, we are going to fund these critical
functions for the next 3 years. I would love to think that at least
some Democrats would rethink their defund law enforcement posture and
join us to fund these priorities.
But the party of the Biden border crisis seems still determined to
opt for open borders.
I yield the floor.
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.
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Recognition of the Minority Leader
The Democratic leader is recognized.
S. Con. Res. 33
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, yesterday, Senate Republicans put forward
their budget resolution for its first procedural vote. The contents of
their budget resolution are astounding.
Mr. President, $140 billion for ICE and Border Patrol, zero dollars
to lower Americans' costs. This will be a reconciliation of contrasts:
Republicans want to shell out billions of dollars to Donald Trump's
private army without any commonsense reforms or restraints.
Democrats want to put money in Americans' pockets by lowering the
costs of healthcare and gas and groceries, housing, and so much else.
Republicans are bending the knee to Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.
Democrats are standing up for the American people. Republicans want to
keep shutting down TSA, FEMA, CISA, Coast Guard, and other crucial DHS
Agencies. Democrats want to reopen all the law-abiding Agencies in the
Department of Homeland Security.
Republicans are at each other's throats, tying their party up in
knots. Democrats stand united, and we stand firm. So this is a
reconciliation of contrasts.
Senate Democrats will make these contrasts abundantly clear, vote
after vote, amendment after amendment, during the upcoming vote-arama.
We are also making the contrast apparent off the floor. This week, we
Democrats are releasing another ``Broken Promises'' report on how
Republicans have taken a trillion dollars out of the healthcare system
and ripped healthcare away from 15 million Americans all to give tax
breaks to the billionaires.
Republicans are about to learn the hard way that when they refuse to
reduce costs, they lose. Republicans will find they cannot reconcile
their deeply partisan, unpopular, and costly policies with the
frustration Americans feel today.
This will be a reconciliation of reckoning for Senate Republicans--a
reconciliation of reckoning.
Iran
Mr. President, every day this disastrous war continues, Donald Trump
digs himself deeper and deeper and deeper into a hole.
The longer Trump takes to extricate himself from Iran, the deeper the
hole gets and the harder it will be for him to get out.
The Iranian regime that the United States is trying to negotiate with
is even more hardline than when Trump began the war.
Iran's hold over Hormuz has gotten even stronger. Iran maintains its
economic stranglehold on the world, firing on more merchant ships in
the Strait of Hormuz earlier today.
So it is amazing. Before the war, the regime in Iran, bad as it was,
was not as dug in as this one is, making it even harder to negotiate.
Before the war, oil was flowing freely out of the Strait of Hormuz. Now
it is all clogged up.
Everything Trump did with this war has made things worse, and he
keeps digging himself into this hole--deeper and deeper. The American
people are fed up, seeing this war as reckless, as harmful, and as
costly a misadventure as there has ever been.
Trump's continued enthusiasm for the war makes me wonder: Has he
somehow mixed up the graphs showing his crumbling approval ratings with
those showing the soaring price of oil and gas? Let's sort it out for
him.
Trump's approval rating is at an alltime low. Only 33 percent approve
of him in the most recent polls. Trump's approval on the economy is
even lower, at 30 percent, in part because the price of oil and gas has
gone up and up and up. Trump's standing in the eyes of the American
people craters every day that this war continues.
Meanwhile, gas has been over $4 a gallon for weeks, the highest it
has been in years. Americans are going to pay at least $740 more this
year to fill
[[Page S1869]]
up their tanks because of Trump's war. That is money that could have
gone to other things: more groceries, furniture. Who knows? But it is
now going into the hands of the oil merchants.
Every day, we hear new promises from the Trump administration that
victory has been achieved. Victory is just around the corner, he keeps
saying. But when you look around the corner, that hasn't happened.
Trump says peace is at hand; costs are starting to come down--both
lies. And every day, we see the opposite.
Trump can talk all he wants, but nothing will change--nothing--until
he realizes his war has to end.
While I am relieved that the cease-fire deadline has been extended,
Congress needs to seize this opportunity to stop this blunder before
the fighting resumes.
I urge Senate Republicans to vote for our War Powers Resolution later
today. That is their fifth opportunity to do so.
Republicans, if Trump won't dig himself out of the hole he has dug,
you, Republicans, should pull him out by voting for our War Powers
Resolution today. If not, you, Republicans in the Senate, are going to
fall into the same hole. You are already falling into it. But if you
don't dig him out of the hole, you are going to fall into this hole,
deeper and deeper, alongside him.
I thank Senator Baldwin for her work on this resolution. Democrats
will continue to force votes on our resolution every week, until
Republicans see reason and help us end this war.
They would be doing Donald Trump a favor. Republican Senators would
be doing Donald Trump a favor by supporting this resolution. And every
week Republicans wait to do so will cost their party politically and
the American people financially.
Southern Poverty Law Center
Mr. President, on the Southern Poverty Law Center, I just want to say
a quick word about the deeply disturbing charges the Justice Department
has brought against the Southern Poverty Law Center.
These charges should send a chill down the spine of every American
who cares about free expression and the rule of law in the Justice
Department. It should send a chill down the spine of every American who
cares about civil liberties and the fight against violence and
extremism.
Let's be clear what this case is really about. It has nothing to do
with alleged wire fraud or the Southern Poverty Law Center somehow
working in coordination with the KKK. That is ridiculous on its face.
It doesn't pass the laugh test. It is about Donald Trump turning the
Department of Justice into the ``Department of Vengeance,'' his own
attack dog. He has done it time and time and time again. And when you
think it can't get worse, it does: To attack the Southern Poverty Law
Center of collaboration and accuse it of collaboration with their known
enemy, the KKK?
Weaponizing the DOJ to indict civil rights groups is not law and
order. It is a message. If you defend voting rights, if you fight White
supremacy, you are next. Donald Trump will use the Federal Government
to go after any group that dares to speak out against him.
This is amazing. In 1983, the Ku Klux Klan tried to burn down the
Southern Poverty Law Center for daring to expose its hatred. More than
four decades later, the Trump administration is trying to do the same
thing in the courtroom. It is an absolute disgrace how far this
administration goes down, turning what America is all about inside out.
Kash Patel
Mr. President, on Patel, every day Kash Patel remains in this job is
another day that undermines the FBI and its mission.
Take yesterday's press conference. The head of the FBI, the Nation's
top law enforcement officer, spent the entire time getting into fights
with reporters about his alleged drunken behavior, his partying, his
overall fitness for the job. This has become a dangerous, unacceptable
distraction for the FBI, which has so much important work to do.
Donald Trump has led us to war right now against Iran, a nation known
for sophisticated cyber attacks. Why is Kash Patel not focused on that?
Why is Kash Patel not focused on the serious threats facing this
country?
Every day that these stories of misconduct persist, they undermine
the mission of the FBI. Every day that these questions about Patel, his
behavior, his character linger, they weaken confidence in the
leadership of one of the most important law enforcement agencies in the
world.
Kash Patel must resign immediately. He is not a serious person. He
has not shown that he has the skills required for the job. And the last
few days have shown he does not have the judgment to lead an Agency
like the FBI.
This is what happens when Trump just chooses acolytes--people who
suck up to him--for important jobs. That shouldn't be any criteria in
choosing the head of the FBI. But, instead, it seems to be Trump's only
criteria, and it puts him in trouble. It puts him in the hot seat, in
the frying pan, over and over again, by choosing people whose only
criteria is loyalty to him.
Americans deserve steady, sober leadership from their FBI Director,
especially during a time of war. Kash Patel is not it. And if Kash
Patel wants to keep partying, he can do it somewhere else, without
putting the safety of the American people on the line.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, 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.
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
S. Con. Res. 33
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, let me begin with a message to the brave
men and women of ICE and of Border Patrol. Republicans honor your
unwavering service and sacrifice. You know that Democrats, through
their words and actions here, do not.
Many of you are veterans and served in the military. Many of you have
families at home. You are the professionals who secure our Nation's
borders. You are the heroes who risk your lives to keep our communities
safe.
Democrats have said you are the problem. You are not the problem.
``Defund the police'' Democrats are the problem.
Democrat Representative Ocasio-Cortez of New York said you are a
``rogue Agency.'' Senator Schumer of New York has echoed those same
words yesterday.
You are not a rogue Agency. Today's Democrats are a rogue and radical
party.
You deserve better than reckless Democrat hostage-taking. That is
what is going on here. You deserve the tools and the support from
Congress necessary to carry out the vital mission that Congress has
given you.
This Nation depends upon you, and Republicans are going to deliver
for you. That is what this debate is about today.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement must be funded fully and
immediately. The U.S. Border Patrol must be funded fully and
immediately. It is just common sense. These Agencies keep America safe
every single day.
If Congress doesn't act quickly, they are going to run out of money
very soon, perhaps in a matter of weeks. That would make our country
less safe.
Senate Republicans are united and committed to keeping America safe
and secure. Republicans will use the budget reconciliation process to
do that.
This means that we can fund American law enforcement without relying
on a single Democrat vote. Democrats have turned into the party of
``defund the police''.
And let me tell you about the Republican plan to protect our
communities. Our plan provides more than $70 billion of funding for
immigration enforcement and border security. It secures the funding not
for 1 year, not for 2 years, but for the next 3 years.
The Republican plan means stronger law enforcement and safer
communities. It also represents a commitment to the dedicated
professionals of ICE and Border Patrol. And we are going to continue to
support them, just as they continue to protect all of us.
This is funding Democrats once agreed to. Now, they have walked away
from it. Democrats have blocked funding for the Department of Homeland
Security not once, not twice--16 times
[[Page S1870]]
they have voted against it. Why? Because Democrats are playing to the
most radical members of their party.
Through their actions, Democrats are putting the safety and security
of our Nation behind the safety and security of their own political
careers.
Democrats have blocked funding for Border Patrol. This is the Agency
that stops the criminals, the drug traffickers, the human traffickers,
and the terrorist suspects from entering our country illegally.
Democrats would love to defund them permanently.
Democrats have also blocked funding for Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. This is the Agency that removes illegal immigrant
criminals from our communities and takes them off the streets.
The American people support removing illegal immigrant criminals.
Clearly, Democrats do not. Democrats care more about protecting illegal
immigrant criminals than they do about protecting law-abiding American
citizens.
Democrats seem to want to take our country backward--backward to the
bad days when they were in the majority and our southern border was
wide open, backward to the days when illegal immigrant criminals roamed
freely in our communities. This is an insult to the families of Laken
Riley and Sheridan Gorman and to all of the innocent people who have
been murdered by illegal immigrant criminals.
The budget resolution that we are debating today is part of a larger
Republican effort to keep America safe. The last administration threw
the border wide open. More than 10 million illegal immigrants flooded
into our Nation. Under President Trump and Republicans, the border is
now secure. Law enforcement is being restored.
Last year, Republicans passed the most comprehensive border security
investment in American history--nearly $165 billion. It was part of the
Working Families Tax Cut law. The results speak for themselves: Zero--
absolutely zero--illegal immigrants have been released into the country
for nearly a year. The Republican budget resolution builds on that
success.
To my Democrat colleagues who are calling for reforming ICE, let me
just say directly to you on the floor of the U.S. Senate: You rejected
every single opportunity for common sense, cooperation, and compromise.
You said no to all of it.
Republicans offered body cameras for agents; Democrats voted no.
Republicans offered more oversight; Democrats voted no. Republicans
offered more training for agents; Democrats voted no.
Reform no matter how reasonable--no matter how much common sense--was
never the point of the Democrats. The point has always been to abolish
ICE, to abolish our Border Patrol, and to return to open borders.
Today's Democrat Party owns that shameful record. They can run from it,
but they cannot hide from it. It is their record, and the Senate has a
duty to protect the American people.
The choice is simple. The choice is clear: Fund law enforcement or
block it. That is the vote today. Fund border security or try to block
it. That is what we are voting on.
The American people are watching. They will know and remember who
voted to protect law-abiding American citizens and who voted to protect
illegal immigrant criminals. Republicans are ready to stand and vote
for the safety and the security of the American people.
I yield the floor.
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.
Ms. ERNST. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Tribute to General Randy George
Ms. ERNST. Mr. President, I rise today to honor a fellow Iowan, a
friend, and an extraordinary leader GEN Randy A. George, upon his
retirement from the U.S. Army after more than four decades of
distinguished service to our Nation. General George has devoted his
life to the defense of the United States of America and her people.
Born to Robert and Lorraine George and raised in Alden--a beautiful,
rural community in north central Iowa--Randy's folks instilled in him
solid Iowa values that would take him on an incredible journey from the
rolling countryside of our heartland to the highest ranks of the U.S.
Army.
Randy was raised humble, hard-working, courageous, and patriotic.
Randy enlisted in the U.S. Army before his 18th birthday, and he
focused his eyes on the future. Two years after his enlistment, Randy
received a nomination for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from
my distinguished colleague Senator Chuck Grassley. Randy then received
his appointment to West Point and joined the distinguished ``Long Gray
Line.'' He was commissioned from West Point as an infantry officer in
1988 and served as a lieutenant in the vaunted 101st Airborne Division
and rose through the ranks in many illustrious units, including the 4th
Infantry Division, 173rd Airborne Brigade, and I Corps.
Randy has served in multiple deployments through several eras of
American warfare--from Operation Desert Shield-Desert Storm to the
Global War on Terrorism. His boots tread soil and sand in many
countries--Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many more around the globe in
his most senior positions with the United States Army. He literally
commanded at every level of the Army, and our Army is so much stronger,
agile, and lethal because of his leadership.
Randy advanced to the role of Vice Chief of Staff of the Army from
2022 to 2023 and most recently served as our 41st Chief of Staff of the
Army. As Chief of Staff, Randy readied our Army for the future
battlefield, capitalizing on the innovative spirit of our soldiers to
transform the service from the ground up.
His determination yielded generational investments in the Army's
Organic Industrial Base and a long overdue slashing of unnecessary
waste and bureaucracy, equipping our soldiers with the training and the
technology they need to survive and dominate on the battlefield.
Those who served with him describe him as a consistent leader, steady
in even the most trying of times. He is a man who loves and respects
his soldiers and built winning, capable teams. He is a soldier's
soldier, which in the Army is the highest of compliments. He will be
remembered for that. He is a man of character, who placed the Army's
responsibility to our great Nation above all else.
Now, as a Senator, I am very privileged to travel to many communities
across Iowa every single year. As I recently passed through the little,
tiny communities in Hardin County, I asked the farmers and the small
business owners if they knew Randy George, and, of course, they did. I
received answers of ``I played basketball in high school with Randy,''
or ``My sister used to babysit Randy,'' and ``Randy's dad inspired me
to go into agriculture.'' They all had kind words, and they spoke those
words with pride.
Most were proud that Randy was serving in the Army. They all knew
that he had an important job, but their eyes would pop open when I
explained that he was the highest ranking officer in the U.S. Army:
Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. Honestly, Randy's job title didn't
matter to them because, in Alden, IA, he--simply known as Randy
George--was doing great work to keep them all safe. Randy represents
the very best of Iowa and of our Nation.
I would also like to express my thanks to Randy's wife and his West
Point classmate Mrs. Patty George. She has served Army families for
nearly 40 years and whose energy--endless energy--and dedication were
reflected in every single formation that Randy led. The Georges raised
two incredible kids Grant and Andrea, and they recently welcomed two
grandchildren to their family as well.
We wish Randy and his entire family continued success and
fulfillment.
GEN Randy George's legacy will endure through the thousands and
thousands of soldiers that were shaped by his mentorship and example. I
know he will continue to serve our Nation.
Sir, General George, I am honored to be your Senator.
So today, as I hold the floor of the Senate in the heart of the
Nation's Capital, on behalf of an extremely grateful nation, I extend
my deepest
[[Page S1871]]
thanks and appreciation to GEN Randy A. George for his extraordinary
service, sacrifice, and leadership.
Randy and Patty, ``No Task Too Great.'' You have demonstrated this
well to all of America. God bless you, and Godspeed.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sheehy). The Senator from Iowa.
Ms. ERNST. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Texas.
S. Con. Res. 33
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, we are almost at the end of April, and the
Department of Homeland Security has been shuttered since February. It
is incredible to me that at a time when the geopolitics of the world
make the likelihood of domestic terrorist attacks greater than usual,
that our Democratic colleagues would simply reflexively oppose funding
for the Department of Homeland Security because they don't believe
immigration laws should be enforced.
It is absurd that they have taken this approach to voice their
opposition to President Trump, which maybe explains everything because
the first question, it seems like, in their mind is: If President Trump
wants it, maybe we should oppose it, which has been consistent with
their behavior. But it is time for this nonsense to end for a variety
of reasons.
I just came from a Judiciary Committee hearing on intellectual
property theft and espionage from the People's Republic of China, among
other adversaries. And one of the things that I am not sure people
recognize is that the chief civilian cyber security Agency of the
Federal Government is housed within the Department of Homeland
Security--CISA, it is called.
They have currently furloughed 60 percent of their staff because
Democrats refuse to fund the Department of Homeland Security because
they are mad that President Trump is keeping his commitment to enforce
our immigration laws. So, again: collateral damage to many unintended
targets, but this is what happens when mindless partisanship prevails.
The American people, of course, voted to elect President Trump, and
one of the main reasons was because he was very clear about where he
stood on open borders and on the failure of the Biden administration to
enforce our immigration laws. So, now, the Democrats have shut down the
Department to try to prevent him from carrying out his mandate.
At the end of our last session, the Senate finally came together on a
plan to reopen the Department of Homeland Security. I was proud to vote
yes. It seemed like a no-brainer. But, unfortunately, the House did not
agree. Unfortunately, I think they misunderstood what we had actually
done because we had prefunded ICE and Customs and Border Protection in
the Working Families Tax Cut bill because we anticipated that they
might pull this kind of stunt. Well, unfortunately, that funding is now
stalled in the House.
Speaker Johnson, of course, has his own constraints, given a one-seat
majority and the fact that Democrats won't cooperate even on
commonsense things like funding the Department of Homeland Security.
But I hope that he will continue to try to pick up the torch and pass
this bill so this shutdown can end--this mindless partisanship that has
caused this shutdown.
President Trump, Leader Thune, and Chairman Graham have decided that
we will keep the current budget resolution focused like a laser on
funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of
Homeland Security generally so we can do that by the deadline that
President Trump set of June 1.
None of this would be necessary if Democrats would come to their
senses and just simply--we can fight about the role that Immigration
and Customs Enforcement plays. We can fight about the policies that
guide them. But they are, in fact, enforcing laws that Congress has
passed. Yet they want to make them the scapegoat for enforcing
immigration laws.
And, again, this appears to me to be nothing more than a continuation
of their efforts to maintain open borders and to deny enforcement of
immigration laws.
But as we are considering a budget reconciliation bill, hopefully,
once we get this accomplished here in the next few weeks, it will give
us enough time before the end of this fiscal year to consider a third
reconciliation vehicle to accomplish additional Republican priorities.
And there are some important provisions I would like to see included in
that next reconciliation bill--again, anticipating no cooperation at
all from our Democratic colleagues.
One of those priorities for me is to permanently defund Planned
Parenthood. Respect for life has always been and always will be a
pillar of the conservative movement and the Republican Party platform.
We are the pro-life party. Many great minds have said before that
civilization should be measured by the way we treat our most
vulnerable, and I believe that to be true. And it is hard to imagine
anyone more vulnerable than an unborn, helpless child.
In fact, our founding document--the Declaration of Independence--
states that the right to life is an inalienable right that all of us
are granted by our Creator. I am proud to be a member of a party that
acknowledges the right to life as a God-given gift. Republicans can and
should deliver a win for the unborn as part of our next reconciliation
bill by defunding, on a permanent basis, the Nation's largest abortion
provider.
When Republicans assembled the One Big Beautiful Bill, or the Working
Families Tax Cut Act, last summer, we successfully included a 1-year
ban on Medicaid funding for abortion providers like Planned Parenthood.
Now, here we are approaching the end of that year, and this provision
will soon expire. We have our work cut out for us again to ensure that
this monstrous organization does not receive another dime of taxpayer
money.
Of course, like any entity that receives government funding, Planned
Parenthood has a team of lobbyists and public affairs officials whose
job it is to convince lawmakers and the public that they are worthy
recipients of public funding. Planned Parenthood would like all of us
to believe they are primarily a healthcare organization, providing
women's health services. But the truth is that is not the case; it is a
pretext. Their own 2024-2025 annual report states that Planned
Parenthood performed more than 400,000 abortions in the previous fiscal
year--400,000 abortions.
We know that all the money that organizations like Planned Parenthood
receive are fungible. In other words, they can trade one dollar for
another dollar, depending on the source of that money. When Planned
Parenthood receives Medicaid reimbursements for services other than
abortions, that money ultimately finds its way into helping their
bottom line and directly subsidizing a procedure that ends a human
life.
If that were not enough, Planned Parenthood is not only an abortion
provider, but they have recently become entwined with the business of
providing gender transition treatments to minors. Planned Parenthood's
own reporting brags that, in some States, their so-called gender-
affirming care--what a euphemism that is--that their gender-affirming
care visits increased by more than 500 percent between 2021 and 2022.
Other organizations have also reported that Planned Parenthood exploits
legal loopholes in order to provide gender transition medications to
minors without their parents even knowing.
Nearly 60 percent--and I am surprised the number isn't higher--nearly
60 percent of Americans oppose gender transition procedures for minors.
You know, when you are young and have not yet matured, your brain is
not completely developed. These children are incapable of making these
life-changing decisions for themselves, and the business of government
and the business of organizations like Planned Parenthood shouldn't be
to exploit the youth of these children, to change the trajectory of
their life forever.
[[Page S1872]]
In recent years, the scientific community has also expressed its own
concerns. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons released a statement
earlier this year recommending against gender transition surgeries for
minors. Their statement emphasized the lack of long-term research to
support this medical intervention, as well as ethical concerns
surrounding potential harms and the fact that adolescents don't have
the capacity to fully consent to these harms.
Other Western countries, including the United Kingdom and the
Netherlands, are also taking steps to restrict these operations. The
least the U.S. Congress could do would be to halt government funding
for providers of these controversial procedures and related treatments
that rest on a dubious--if maybe even nonexistent--scientific backing.
Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the Nation and
the leading provider of youth gender transition therapies, should not
receive a dime--a dime--of taxpayer funding.
The second reconciliation bill, focused as it is on ICE and CBP and
the Department of Homeland Security, cannot be our last bill this year.
I urge my Republican colleagues to come together on a third
reconciliation bill once we have completed this bill so we can notch
another win for the pro-life and the pro-commonsense movement. Again,
it is only common sense that our Republican majority should use the
power we have to defund Planned Parenthood using the tools available to
us, like reconciliation.
Defending the right to life has been a longstanding priority of our
party, and Republicans ought to deliver another victory for the unborn.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The minority whip.
Trump Administration
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, last week, President Trump was asked to
assess the state of the American economy. He said:
Very happy.
This is one of the rare moments where I can understand the
President's thinking. In his eyes--and in the eyes of his billionaire
friends--the economy has never been better.
In the first year of his second term, President Trump added $1.4
billion to his personal wealth through cryptocurrency ventures and
licensing deals with individuals tied to foreign governments. He has
made more money in office than any other President in the history of
the United States.
And for his billionaire friends, the returns from the past year have
been equally impressive. Elon Musk helped gut the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau right before it began to supervise his new digital
payment platform.
Oil billionaires like the Koch brothers have seen decades of climate
regulation overturned after their multimillion-dollar donations to the
2024 Trump campaign.
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, at least
88 of some of the largest corporations--including Tesla, Coinbase, and
Palantir--made more than $105 billion in 2025.
How much did they pay in Federal income tax? Nothing. Zero dollars
because of the Republicans' ``One Big Beautiful Budget Bill.''
Collectively, billionaires added $1.5 trillion to their wealth in
2025 alone, a 22-percent increase in 1 year. They really would be
happy. It is no wonder the President is so bullish about the economy
when everyone he golfs with is raking in record profits.
But if he asks any of the millions of working Americans what they
think about the economy, I bet he will get a different answer. Most
Americans don't feel like they are in the ``golden age of economic
opportunity,'' in the words of the President. Instead, they feel like
no matter how many hours they put in to provide for their family, the
odds are stacked against them.
Ask a young couple trying to buy their first home if they feel the
President has delivered on a housing affordability agenda. Ask a small
business owner struggling under the combined weight of Trump's tariff
taxes and his cuts to healthcare if they feel like they are benefiting
from this so-called pro-growth agenda. Ask anyone who isn't part of the
wealthy elite that President Trump surrounds himself with, and they
will tell you they feel abandoned by the President, who promised to
lower prices for families ``on day one.''
His war with Iran, reckless tariffs against our trading partners, and
cuts and chaos across the Federal Government have damaged the economy
and pushed many families to the breaking point.
In March, the Consumer Price Index--the leading measure of
inflation--rose to 3.3 percent after the President's Iran war, which
spiked oil prices and increased uncertainty for business owners.
One in 10 people nationwide who were on the Affordable Care Act last
year were forced to drop their health insurance altogether after the
President and Republicans in Congress cut Medicaid and ACA by hundreds
of billions of dollars.
The price of groceries, childcare, rent, utility bills, and many
other basic necessities keep going up, and the President and
Republicans in Congress have not done nearly enough to help Americans
make ends meet.
What has the President proposed when 82 percent of Americans say
housing affordability is a concern? He has proposed cuts--billions of
dollars of cuts--in housing and homelessness assistance.
What have Trump and congressional Republicans done for 6 in 10
Americans who are worried about being able to afford groceries? They
enacted the largest SNAP cuts in history--the food program for those in
low-income categories.
When it comes to working families, the administration has little
desire to help them. Instead, the President is distracted with election
conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant hatred.
When discussing legislation that would tackle rising housing costs,
President Trump reportedly told Speaker Johnson that ``no one gives a
[bleep] about housing'' and pushed Johnson to focus on disenfranchising
voters.
That is not to say Republicans in Congress are doing more than the
President to address the cost of living. Sadly, they are equally
distracted by President Trump's current and changing priorities. This
week in the Senate, instead of voting on legislation to lower costs,
Senate Republicans chose to focus their efforts on a party-line
package, a package of legislation that would give ICE and CBP up to
$140 billion to continue the administration's reckless, cruel, and
deadly mass deportation campaign.
They already provided a $170 billion slush fund for border and
interior enforcement last June. They insist it is not nearly enough.
Imagine the potential if they put their energy into making America
more affordable instead of this agenda.
The American people consistently say the economy is one of the most
important issues our country faces. What does it say about Congress--
about our government--when we fail to pass any bill at all that
meaningfully addresses these concerns?
America has lost faith in a President who is more focused on his own
bottom line than enriching his country and Republican leadership that
would rather deport hard-working families than help them afford the
basics. Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency.
They are responsible for the chaos we face, and Americans are
increasingly wondering, What have Republicans done to help their
families?
My colleagues will need to find a better answer to that question than
the current agenda of the Republican Congress or Americans will make
their dissatisfaction known in November and usher in the beginning of
the end of President Trump's last term in office.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mrs. MOODY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
[[Page S1873]]
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ricketts). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
The Senator from Florida.
S. Con. Res. 33
Mrs. MOODY. Mr. President, I also rise today to address the
importance, in fact, the necessity that we expediently fund ICE and CBP
and we take measures to ensure that in the future these Agencies are
not held hostage by political games from the Democratic Party.
We are here again facing a situation where we have critical public
safety Agencies at risk for not being funded at a time when we are in
the middle of an armed conflict, at a time when we need our communities
to have our officers and those that support them at the top of their
game because the men and women of ICE and CBP are on the frontlines
every single day.
They secure our borders, they enforce our laws, and they protect our
communities. And yet we will debate again whether we are going to give
them the resources they need to do their jobs. And this should not be
controversial. I cannot believe in my first year at the U.S. Senate, I
have had to come to the floor multiple times to merely fund critical
public safety Agencies, Agencies that were created after 9/11.
We have to pass the reconciliation bill, and we have to fund ICE and
CBP, not just for the short term, for the long term because this is not
going to stop. The modern Democratic Party has no interest in being on
Team America. Everything that they are espousing is subversive to the
strength and security of this Nation, whether that is abolish ICE,
whether that is defund the police, whether that is destroy our borders
and roll out a welcome mat. It cannot happen.
And too often in this town, we see the same pattern play out when we
face this obstructionist behavior. I would call it dangerous behavior.
We kick the can down the road, and the American people are sick of it.
Thousands of TSA agents who have worked more days unpaid than paid
during this fiscal year are sick of it.
We aren't sent here to keep parts of our vital government Agencies
shuttered at a time when our security is threatened. All of us here
know we need DHS to keep us safe. So we should be coming here every day
to give them the tools that they need, the resources they need, not
tying their hands behind their back with short-term funding patches and
political gridlock--not to mention the attack on morale that they must
feel when their very jobs are threatened every time the Democrats throw
a political tantrum.
It shouldn't take Executive orders or emergency measures to get these
critical safety folks paid, but that is the hand that the Democrats
keep dealing us.
And if we are serious about solving this, not just now as we move
into passing reconciliation, but if we want to prevent this from
happening in the future, if we want to move the Senate's work forward,
especially when we are dealing with funding critical public safety
Agencies, we have to take a hard look at how this body--the Senate--
operates.
Because what has happened when there have been lapses in funding,
what has happened in my first year here at the Senate, when I have
pushed to get this done, pled with all--everyone in this Chamber--to
get this done, stayed here, what happens? Government workers go unpaid,
our government shuts down, and often Senators are told to go home.
We are not just told to go home. Taxpayers fund Senators to go home.
They reimburse them for travel in the middle of a government shutdown
when we are not paying government workers, and the buck stops here. We
have to commit to solving this problem, not just funding the Agencies,
but solving the problem that how the Senate has done things
historically is not working. It is not working in the face of a
Democratic Party who is not on Team America. It is not working on the
face of the modern-day Democrats in this Chamber that are not just
voicing subversiveness, they are taking actions in this Chamber to
undermine the security of this country.
The ways we have always done things as a Senate does not work
anymore. It does not work for this country. It does not work for the
American people, and we have got to be bold and do something about it.
And that is why I have introduced a resolution to forbid taxpayers
dollars for reimbursement of Member travel home during a lapse in
government funding because if we are asking Federal employees to deal
with uncertainty, if we are asking our ICE officers and Border Patrol
to continue doing their jobs without clarity, if we are asking TSA
agents to continue showing up without clarity, we should be willing to
stay here and do ours.
If Senators stayed in Washington and worked through the problem and
focused on the discussions and delivering results and how do we do
this--I mean, we are having to work around and go to a reconciliation
as opposed to the normal budgeting process in order to fund DHS.
I dare say, I wonder if we would have gotten to this idea if we had
been forced to stay here and deal with this a lot sooner. It shouldn't
be complicated; funding the government is one of our most fundamental
roles.
The stakes of not fully funding ICE and CBP are far too high.
Americans are clearly at risk right now. We know why my Democratic
colleagues are obstructing this process. They told you--they told you--
where their priorities lie.
They want to go back to how things were under the previous
administration, you know, when they broke down all security measures at
the border, when they made it open borders, when they demoralized and
undermined law enforcement. They like that. They don't like it when
they have Republican leadership and a President in the White House that
are saying: That was backward. That put Americans in danger. We have to
do things differently, and we have got to clean up the mess.
And what is this mess? I mean, I don't want to just broadly say it
was dangerous. Let's talk about the mess. Let's talk about the
catastrophic place we find ourselves in. We now have thousands of
people that were on the Terrorist Watchlist that were ushered in by the
Biden administration, and we know that they released them and pushed
them into this country. They are here right now.
So in the middle of an armed conflict, we have people in this country
right now that were on the Terrorist Watchlist that were released by
the last administration, and the Democrats' response is to not fund the
folks that were going to go out and find them.
Let's talk about the 22-year-old Laken Riley, who was killed by an
illegal immigrant in Georgia, or the 18-year-old college freshman
Sheridan Gorman, shot and killed in a random attack by an illegal
immigrant in Chicago. Or in my home State of Florida, in Fort Myers,
just recently, an illegal immigrant bludgeoned a mother to death
outside of a gas station. These are just a few examples, but they are
not--it is reality. It is not hypothetical. It is not what could
happen. It is what is happening.
And so we have to take action today, and that means if we have to
stay here and get this done during times of shutdown, let's do it. And
anything that will incentivize that, we should promote, we should
support, and we should pass.
And that means changing our own rules, changing the way that we are
doing business here in the Senate, because in so many ways, business as
usual in the Senate isn't cutting it.
And so I invite my colleagues, who are really on Team America, to
show that they are on Team America and show they are willing to put in
the hard work and roll up their sleeves and stay here, when we find
ourselves in a funding lapse of critical safety Agencies, to support my
resolution and support the reconciliation that will fund CBP and ICE.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
Ms. SLOTKIN. Mr. President, I just want to start with reviewing the
bidding and why we are here.
We are having an American cultural conversation about the role of ICE
and law enforcement--Federal law enforcement--in our streets and in our
cities and particularly because two Americans were killed in Minnesota
because of ICE, CBP: Alex Pretti, 37 years old, a nurse in a VA
hospital, shot multiple
[[Page S1874]]
times, killed while exercising his right to assemble.
Video shows it. So that no matter where you are in the political
spectrum, your eyes do not lie.
Renee Good--shot and killed by ICE agents in her car on January 7--
and a third American citizen killed by Homeland Security agents, the
first being Keith Porter, who was killed on New Year's Eve in L.A. That
is not counting the 32 people who have been killed in ICE's custody in
2025, including one in Baldwin, MI--the most fatalities in 1 year than
in more than two decades combined.
These three people should be alive, but their deaths are the
culmination of something much bigger. The behavior of our Federal
forces in our streets strikes at the heart of who we are as Americans.
I am not going to list everything ICE is doing, but I want you to think
about what would happen if these things happened to you, to your
community, to your neighbors: being pulled over and asked for your
papers as you shop at Target or drive on a highway off-ramp or stand in
line for a flight; agents shooting tear gas at your kids' playground;
being held at gunpoint inside your own home and taken to a police
precinct, in your underwear, in subfreezing temperatures, and then
being released, without apology, after being held for hours, even
though you are an American citizen.
Imagine someone in a mask breaking your car window and pulling you
and your 2-year-old daughter out of that car.
Imagine being shot with rubber bullets at a protest in America;
masked men detaining your 5-year-old coming home from preschool; being
pepper-sprayed while praying aloud; tear gas filling your car on your
way home from a basketball game and then having to do CPR on your 6-
month-old to help him breathe; then being beaten, shot repeatedly, and
killed because you are exercising your Second Amendment right. Imagine
being taken to a detention facility and not being able to communicate
with your family.
All of these things happened in Minneapolis, and that is not my sense
or, I think, the average American's sense of freedom. When people
turned on the TV and saw these things happening with their own eyes,
they understood it as something that ran completely contrary to who we
are as a people, and it certainly spit in the face of how we became a
nation in the first place--with the rebellion that our American
forefathers launched not too far north of here because of an oppressive
government--because of an oppressive regime--that was using brutal
tactics in the streets and in people's homes.
So that is why we are here today--to have very commonsense reforms on
Federal law enforcement because of what we all saw with our own eyes.
Now, these things that we are calling for are not radical, right?
They are the things that we ask of our local police: Be clear on who
you are and what law enforcement unit you are from, have some way of
identifying that you are part of official law enforcement, don't wear a
mask so that we understand who you are, have a judicial warrant if you
want to go inside someone's house--you have to prove that there is a
reason to go inside an American citizen's home.
These are things our law enforcement does every single day in our
cities and in our towns, but the other side of the aisle refuses to
have that conversation. What they would rather do is ignore that
conversation altogether even though Kristi Noem got fired over it and
local ICE agent Bovino got fired for all of that behavior, even though
they themselves, from the White House, were willing to consider some
sort of reform because they know they are on their heels because they
know they got on the wrong side of history. We are here today because
the other side of the aisle is refusing to have an even basic
conversation on those reforms and wants to fully fund ICE with no
changes.
I will close with this: We are here talking about this issue when, in
fact, what the average person wants to talk about when I am out in
Michigan or anywhere else are the things that this President said he
was going to cover, which were tackling the fundamental costs of
living, tackling the fundamental things that are keeping people up at
night and making them feel like they can't achieve the American dream
in America. The lists of things this President said he was going to do
could fill up a ream of paper.
Certainly, the President won his election by talking about what he
was going to do domestically, but I think we have to accept now, as we
continue to see the war drag on with Iran, that this President has
become fundamentally a foreign policy President. He has taken military
action in 9 locations around the world in his first 15 months--more
than any single President in history, Democrat or Republican.
He is focusing his energy and his administration's resources on
issues abroad while the average thing that hurts Americans isn't being
tackled at all. Think about housing, healthcare, the price of food, and
now, certainly, the prices of gas and utilities. In Michigan, we are
now at $4 a gallon, approximately, for gas and $5 a gallon for diesel.
Healthcare premiums have gone up. Housing has only gotten
more expensive in the past year. By any objective measure, things are
more expensive than the day this President took office.
He can pretend and say what he wants about how costs have actually
come down and that it is ``no big deal'' that gas prices are up, but we
know that, in the United States of America, we have a shrinking middle
class. That is an objective fact. That is not a political statement. It
has gotten harder to stay in and be in the middle class, and it has
gotten harder to save every month.
It is the issue that unites young people who are thinking about how
they are going to afford college, whether they are ever going to be
able to own a home the way their parents are, and the workers down at
the GM plant who are wondering: Will I be able to have that fishing
cabin up north? Will I be able to take a vacation the way my parents
were able to do so with the same job?
On our economy, we know that we need, fundamentally, three big things
in order to compete in the future as the future of work is changing.
So, when we are distracted by things like wars and things like American
cultural conversations on other issues, it means there is an
opportunity cost for the things we are not talking about. What we need
more than anything right now is a focus on three big things. For our
economy, we need to focus on people, we need to focus on chips, and we
need to focus on power.
On people, we know that, between artificial intelligence and a whole
bunch of other things going on, we are going to have a changing
economy. We need great public schools that are well-funded, and we need
to get people comfortable with the fact that they are going to have to
do more than just the K through 12. I call it K through 12 plus two.
You have got to do something after high school to prepare yourself for
this next new world that we are in. That can be an apprenticeship with
a union. That can be an associate's degree. That can be a training
program for one of our companies.
It means K through 12 plus two is upon us, and we need to start
thinking about it that way. We need to centralize every single job
training program. We have 17 job training programs in the Federal
Government alone. They are all in different Departments and Agencies.
We need a one-stop shop for our young people to be like: If I want a
job for the future, how do I get trained or retrained for that?
On chips, every single one of you has chips in your pocket. You have
a cell phone or you have some sort of piece of technology that depends
on chips. They are in everything that we use and in everything we need
to grow our economy.
Over the last decade or so, we have been, really, at the mercy of
China when it comes to chips. I want to make chips here in America with
American factories and American labor, and I want chips to put
Americans to work. We made them and invented them in the first place,
and I want to make them again so that we don't live under a veto from
China.
On power, we can't do any of what we need to do unless we have the
amount of power that we are going to need to power our economy; and
without major changes to our electrical grid, we are in trouble on the
issue of power. Our
[[Page S1875]]
grid is a national security asset. It powers our economy. We know we
are going to have more and more companies trying to take more and more
power out of the grid. It is old and outdated. Again, I think that is
something this body could agree on and focus on, but we are not because
we are busy fighting these kinds of cultural conversations that we are
having.
So I wanted to put down, in front of everyone here, some of the
opportunity costs and some of the things we are not doing here in the
U.S. Senate because we are focusing on these terrible cultural
conversations that are happening when things like Minneapolis erupt. We
are not talking about the economy, and we are not attacking the
problems that are plaguing most Americans. That is because we have a
refusal to talk about just basic reforms, simple things we could do in
an hour.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
National Debt
Mr. PETERS. Mr. President, recently, our Nation has been hitting a
lot of very unfortunate milestones. Data from the National Association
of REALTORS shows that the average age of the first-time home buyer in
America has reached an alltime high of 40 years old, while the number
of first-time home buyers has also reached an alltime low.
We just experienced the highest monthly spike in gas prices in
decades, thanks to the President's reckless war in Iran.
And perhaps most staggering, just last month, we reached a new and
unthinkable milestone when the national debt eclipsed $39 trillion, the
highest it has been at any point in our Nation's history. For context,
when I first came here to Congress in 2009, the national debt stood at
$10.6 trillion. That means more than $28 trillion has been added to the
debt in just 17 years.
This illustrates what economists have warned about for years: The
national debt is growing at an exponential rate, and it is past time to
stop the bleeding. Yet, for decades, this issue has not received the
attention and demands that Congress needs to act.
That is why I am back on the Senate floor today to address my
colleagues and the American people. The alarm bells cannot continue to
fall on deaf ears. The fate of future generations of Americans depends
on it.
But I am not the only one that has been issuing this warning. In
recent months, various actors from across the Federal Government--from
the Congressional Budget Office to the Department of Treasury--they
have all said the same thing: Our current fiscal policy is simply not
sustainable, and without changes, we are headed toward an economic
catastrophe.
In its last financial report, the U.S. Treasury said our public debt-
to-GDP ratio now sits at 99 percent. That means the amount of debt we
owe is nearly the same size as the entire U.S. economy. Our debt-to-GDP
ratio is the highest it has been since World War II, and experts say
that ratio is expected to exceed 200 percent by 2048.
This would mean serious economic harm for Americans in the form of
higher interest rates, less money to support critical Federal services,
and slowed economic growth.
The Government Accountability Office says that in order to close this
fiscal gap, we need to increase our revenues by 25 percent, while
reducing our spending by 20 percent. And we need do that each and every
year for the next 75 years.
Our Nation's leading economists are telling us point-blank: We simply
do not have time to waste. Dealing with our national debt is no longer
a down-the-road problem or something that future Congresses will be
dealing with. We won't put our country on more stable financial footing
by avoiding the facts or pretending this problem simply doesn't exist.
We won't reduce our debt by continuing the President's war in Iran. Not
only are we sending our sons and daughters into harm's way, we are
spending a reported $1 billion per day on a conflict that Congress has
not approved and the American people simply did not ask for.
The time for bipartisan action to address our growing national debt
is right now. And that is why, just last month, I joined my colleagues
in introducing a resolution that says, by 2030, we must lower our
deficit to only 3 percent of GDP. And I am also proud to lead
bipartisan legislation in the Senate that would examine how our
national debt impacts our national security.
These efforts alone won't solve the problem, but we have to start
somewhere. We must put forward bipartisan responsible and achievable
solutions that allow us to make headway in any way that we possibly can
because I know one thing is absolutely for certain, to make it out of
this national debt crisis is going to take a buy-in from everyone:
Congress, the administration, and the American people.
We are all in this boat together, and it is past time to start rowing
in the right direction before the boat sinks.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
S. Con. Res. 33
Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, right now, Trump is waging a war in Iran.
He is threatening war crimes. He is threatening an end to an entire
civilization and mentally deteriorating in front of our eyes.
Meanwhile, costs for our families are going through the roof. Grocery
costs and everyday expenses are going up because of inflation and
fueled by Trump's tariffs. Estimates show Trump's trade war cost
families well over 1,000 bucks last year.
Healthcare costs are skyrocketing for families as Republicans refuse
to extend the tax credits and prevent the mega-healthcare hike. People
have seen their premiums double, triple, and even worse. We now know
that millions of families were completely priced out of their health
coverage, and millions more switched to a worse plan, often still at a
higher price.
And, of course, energy costs, energy costs are going through the roof
because Trump has also chosen, all on his own, to start a reckless war
with Iran that is putting servicemembers at risk and jeopardizing our
national security.
Gas is up to 4, 5, 6, even 7 bucks a gallon in some places. The
challenges that we are facing right now are many, and they are
major. But Republicans can't be bothered with any of them. Republicans
aren't trying to rein in Trump's absurd tariffs, they are not trying to
address soaring healthcare costs, and they are certainly not lifting a
finger to stop Trump's war and bring down gas prices. Instead,
Republicans' top priority right now is shoveling $70 billion--billion--
at ICE and Border Patrol, covering multiple years, and cutting another
blank check for Stephen Miller's deranged mass deportation dreams
without ensuring any sort of accountability--none whatsoever.
After providing over $190 billion to DHS last year without any real
strings attached, Republicans are now again pushing to give ICE and
Border Patrol tens of billions of dollars more, and they plan to do it
without any new accountability steps, like the ones Democrats have been
demanding for months, without any of the accountability steps
Republicans themselves agreed to during negotiations, and even without
the same basic accountability steps we have long included in our annual
funding bill.
I really want to underscore that. Not only have Republicans refused
even the most basic accountability measures for DHS--things like
displaying their IDs or taking off masks or requiring judicial
warrants, basic use-of-force standards--in choosing to send these
Agencies more money through this process, through reconciliation,
Republicans are planning to proceed without the basic accountability
requirements we put in place every year in our spending bills.
Republicans are making clear that their biggest priority is not
lowering prices or helping families with the basics, not stopping
Trump's warmongering--it is giving tens of billions of dollars more of
your hard-earned tax dollars to ICE and Border Patrol.
Republicans want to supercharge Stephen Miller's budget to harass
communities with no restraint, smash in car windows with no warrant,
detain Americans with no reason, and mass-deport members of communities
with no criminal record whatsoever. We are talking about firefighters
and grandpas and grandmas and caregivers for our seniors and parents
and spouses and veterans themselves.
To anyone thinking this sounds familiar, well, you are right, because
[[Page S1876]]
guess what Republicans were doing last summer: the exact same thing--
ignoring the needs of working families while hurling billions at ICE.
Last year, Republicans moved heaven and earth to cut taxes for
billionaires and hand tens of billions of dollars to ICE and Border
Patrol. They passed that ``Big Ugly Bill,'' shoveling money at ICE and
Border Patrol, shoveling money at billionaires, and cutting healthcare
and SNAP to do it.
Now here we are a year later, after Republicans unleashed chaos on
our streets by cutting a $75 billion blank check to ICE, after the
American people were outraged by ICE and Border Patrol tear-gassing and
tackling peaceful protestors, and after Republicans themselves admitted
DHS had gone way too far following the outrageous and horrifying
shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. After all of that, Republicans
refused commonsense reforms that we put forward, and now they are
choosing to deliver even more money for ICE and Border Patrol with
exactly zero steps to rein them in.
So if you are watching this Republican farce and wondering why this
feels pretty darn familiar, don't worry--you don't have deja vu.
Republicans are just faking amnesia. Republicans are choosing--
choosing--to ignore the violence we have seen unleashed on our streets
by a rogue Federal Agency that they threw tens of billions of dollars
at. They are choosing to ignore the shocking killings we saw this year
and the parade of injustices we are seeing every single day.
Instead of lifting a finger to lower prices or to exercise their
constitutional responsibility over the power to declare war,
Republicans are spending this week working hard to send ICE more
money--no strings attached.
Families across the country are struggling to make ends meet. Gas
prices and grocery prices are squeezing out moms and dads. Childcare is
hard to find. Housing is unaffordable. Healthcare costs are
skyrocketing. But ICE and Border Patrol? Well, they are literally
wasting billions of dollars from the ``Big Ugly Bill'' as we speak.
Just consider this: There was plenty of money for former Secretary
Noem to blow hundreds of millions to cut ridiculous ads and plaster her
face on TV. There is plenty to blow hundreds of millions on new private
jets. ICE was able to waste millions on souped-up SUVs with flashy
paint jobs, which they can't even use. Throughout this shutdown, ICE
has continued to acquire new warehouses way above the asking price and
even buy more planes.
So even after all of the waste, fraud, and abuse funded by
Republicans, ICE and Border Patrol still have billions upon billions of
dollars on hand right now. Not even a year ago, Republicans gave them
more funding than most militaries. Meanwhile, Republicans are acting
like they have no idea why Democrats have been demanding accountability
and reform, so let me refresh your memory.
The reason we want actual judicial warrants? ICE dragged off a kid
who was working at Target, only to release him when they realized he
was a citizen. They dragged a woman out of her car on her way to a
doctor's appointment. They dragged a man out of his house in the
freezing cold, in his underwear, and didn't even check to see if they
had the right guy. Another man who was a U.S. citizen got dragged off
his worksite and wrongly detained--not once but twice.
That is not targeted law enforcement. It is unbelievable to me that
any Republican can say that with a straight face. You want targeted law
enforcement? That is what judicial warrants help ensure.
Look at the use-of-force standards. Pastors have been shot in the
head with pepper balls. A family on the way home from a basketball game
was tear-gassed. We have seen peaceful protestors tackled to
the ground. We have seen people pinned down and pepper-sprayed in the
face. And then, of course, we have seen several horrific, unjustifiable
shootings.
I am not just talking about Alex Pretti and Renee Good, whose
killings did send a shock through the Nation--at least until
Republicans decided to move on and buy ICE more bullets. Last year in
Chicago, a Federal agent rammed Marimar Martinez and shot her several
times. They tried to blame her until the video came out and showed the
truth. The agent sharply turned his wheel and rammed her car.
Just recently, new video footage showed ICE agents lied about another
shooting in Minnesota. The agent said he fired when he was attacked
with a shovel. It turns out that was a flatout lie. He actually fired
blindly through a door.
ICE agents shot Ruben Martinez in March of last year. His own mother
didn't know how he died until a year later. That video, by the way,
also did not match the ICE version of events.
I am all for laws. I want to see our laws followed and enforced, and
that is why I want ICE and Border Patrol held accountable. These rogue
Agencies have been breaking our laws. They have been hurting our
citizens. But what is the Republican response to this pattern of abuse?
How are Republicans addressing this rogue Agency? Well, here we are
choosing to give it even more money and less oversight. That is a
perversion of justice and an utter rejection of responsibility. I don't
know how you can pretend you are for law and order while shoveling
money at a lawless Agency.
But the important thing for everyone to remember is that it did not
have to be this way. Despite what some Republicans are saying, this is
not something they are forced to do. This is a policy choice that
Republicans are making, because there has been a straightforward,
bipartisan path available this entire time. Democrats have been ready,
willing, and truly begging Republicans to work with us to enact some
very basic reforms as part of a bipartisan funding bill.
I have spent weeks working hard to land the plane on some commonsense
steps, and we were having some productive conversations across the
aisle and actually with the White House. The White House publicly
agreed to enact a set of steps into law. But ultimately Republicans
decided to walk away and end any talk of reform. Even when we offered a
narrower set of basic reforms in exchange for some funding, Republicans
said: No, won't do. They ultimately refused to enact even the basic
reforms the White House itself agreed to.
So nobody's hand was forced here. Republicans just chose to walk away
from the basic reforms the American people were demanding.
What is more, they have decided that instead of spending their time
working on urgent issues, like oversight of Trump's war and addressing
skyrocketing costs, instead of using taxpayer dollars to actually solve
problems for families who see healthcare costs rising, childcare costs
increasing, energy costs, housing costs, Republicans have chosen to
waste their time and waste your money, writing Stephen Miller a $70
billion check and turning a blind eye to the rights that he and ICE are
trampling.
This is not what America wants. It is not what America stands for.
You can bet Democrats will be pushing every single minute to stop this
massive waste of time and money and focus on how we can help working
families instead.
If Republicans decide that instead of cutting another enormous check
for ICE, they would like to resume conversations about a bipartisan
path forward to enact some basic reforms, I am right here where I have
always been--at the table, ready to get it done.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I was out in the hallways a week ago, and
a reporter asked me a reasonable question. She said: Do you think
Democrats overplayed their hand in the negotiations over the DHS
budget? Did you ask for too much, thus prompting the moment that we are
in today as we do something unprecedented, debate using reconciliation
to appropriate money for the ongoing expenses of the Federal
Government?
My answer was a confident no, for a few reasons. First, our asks were
pretty minimal. All we wanted was to make
[[Page S1877]]
sure that the money we were sending to the Department of Homeland
Security wasn't used for illegal purposes, it wasn't being used to tear
gas elementary schools or conduct ``show me your papers'' raids in our
cities.
A lot of things around here are about politics, but this didn't
really seem to be about politics. I just think that we all have an
obligation to only appropriate money to the Federal Government when the
Federal Government is acting lawfully.
But there is another element to this. We definitely didn't anticipate
that Republicans were going to pull the plug on those negotiations when
they did. I was part of those negotiations up until the last minute. We
thought that we had a potential deal in place in order to bring
Republicans and Democrats together around funding all or most of the
Department of Homeland Security.
We didn't get that done because Republicans decided--the Republican
leader decided--instead to fund the Federal Government through this
process, reconciliation, whereby Republicans only need 50 votes.
Now, both sides have used reconciliation to get things done that they
wanted to get done, but never before has reconciliation been used as
just a straight substitute for the appropriations process.
Traditionally, appropriations bills need 60 votes. That means that the
budget that we write for the country every year needs to be one that
Republicans and Democrats support. But we are here today because
Republicans didn't want to negotiate with Democrats over the Department
of Homeland Security budget because they knew they could pass that
budget with only Republican votes.
Now, listen, I am actually somebody that believes it is probably time
to change the rules of the Senate. So I am not going to sit here and
tell you that I am defending or willing to defend all of the current
rules of the Senate. But let's just be clear, once Republicans have
taken the lid off this jar, there is no putting it back.
Republicans are now using reconciliation to fund the ongoing
appropriations of the government in an area where it was hard to get
agreement with Democrats. Democrats are going to do the same thing.
Regardless of how the rules change, now Democrats are just going to
say: You know what? When we have power, we don't need to negotiate with
Republicans over the hard stuff. We don't need your votes because we
will just go fund the government through reconciliation.
So you have changed the practice of the Senate here, and you are
going to have to live with the changes that you have decided to make
because there are a lot of folks here who have defended the 60-vote
threshold for appropriations. Well, that is probably going away, even
if the rules don't change now because of the actions that you have
taken.
But I guess I come back to this sort of basic obligation that we
have, which is to just make sure that we don't fund illegality. A judge
in Minnesota issued a ruling--this is at the height of the assault on
Minneapolis--that ICE was in violation of almost 100 court orders.
That is stunning. Again, this isn't 100 instances where ICE was
violating the law. This was 100 instances where ICE was violating the
law, a court told them to stop, and ICE didn't stop. My Republican
colleagues claim they are for law and order. How do you defend an
Agency that was told to stop acting illegally and on 100 occasions,
when reading the court order, just said: Forget it. We are not obeying
what the court tells us to do?
When we say this is an Agency that was and is out of control, this is
what we mean, an Agency that does not care about the law, does not care
what courts say, thinks it is accountable to no one--except for the
President of the United States.
We can't fund that kind of Agency. We would be violating our oath of
office, all of us, to fund an Agency that just doesn't care about the
law. To get 100 court orders telling you to obey the law, you have to
be in violation of the law thousands of times.
In fact, Federal courts have ruled, just between October of 2025 and
February of this year--that is October, November, December, January,
February--over 5 months Federal courts ruled that ICE unlawfully
detained not hundreds of people but thousands of people; 4,400 times in
5 months courts have ruled that Americans or legal residents of this
country have been unlawfully detained.
That is illegal behavior at scale. And I don't care what your
politics are, whether they are right or left, they are inclusionary or
nativist, you should not be willing to fund an Agency that just doesn't
care about the law at scale.
Mr. President, 48 people have died in ICE custody, 17 in just the
last 4 months, right? The cameras aren't in Minneapolis like they were,
but 17 people have died in custody in just the last month. Between 2017
and 2021, when Biden was President, there were a total in those 4 years
of 52 people that had died. People are dying in ICE custody at a rate
four times higher than during the Biden administration.
ICE has detained 6,200 children. We have put 6,000 children in jail.
Seventy-three percent of the people that ICE has arrested have no
criminal record; 95 percent of them have no violent criminal record.
They say that they are locking up the worst of the worst; 5 percent, 1
in 20 have a violent criminal record.
Mr. President, 170 U.S. citizens have been detained. Almost all of
them were Latino. You saw the videos of ICE and CBP officers going
through the streets just detaining people based upon their accents.
Just this week, ICE detained the wife of SFC Jose Serrano. He is an
Active-Duty United States Army soldier who has served our military for
27 years, including service in Afghanistan.
His wife wasn't not following the rules. She was obeying the rules.
She was showing up to her court appointments, but they detained her
anyway and now they are threatening to send her to Mexico, a country
with which she has no ties. Sergeant First Class Serrano, because of
his military service, is not allowed to travel to Mexico. Twenty-seven
years he has been serving this country, and they are going to deport
his wife who is following the law to Mexico and basically guaranteeing
they will never see each other again.
Last month, a 5-year-old who was nonverbal with significant
disabilities was put in jail at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, a
detention center that I tried to get into to inspect because of claims
of horrific conditions, and I was not allowed to go into that facility.
Again, this should trouble Republicans and Democrats. I didn't show
up unannounced. I gave them notice. They still didn't let me in. Even
though the law explicitly states that any Member of Congress,
Republican or Democrat, has the right--the statutory right--to inspect
facilities.
This little 5-year-old, nonverbal 5-year-old was in jail for 3 weeks.
This place is called the baby jail. The boy literally melted down while
he was there. He struggled to eat. His stomach became visibly swollen
because he was literally suffering from malnutrition, and he couldn't
go to the bathroom. He was only released after a children's entertainer
named Ms. Rachel highlighted his case in a video. Like, what are we
doing? What are we doing? Like, intentionally abusing children? This
wasn't before Minneapolis; this happened just a month ago.
Yesterday, it was reported that the Trump administration is in
discussions to send more than 1,000 Afghans who were in the United
States because they helped us during the Afghanistan war--they would be
under the threat of death if they stayed in Afghanistan; we emergency
evacuated them to the United States because they helped us, because
they protected our troops. And the Trump administration said yesterday
that they are going to take 1,000 of those Afghans, heroes, that helped
protect our troops in Afghanistan and they are going to send them to
the Congo, just for the point of being cruel, just because it is mean,
just because it would be kind of funny to send a whole bunch of Afghans
who helped us in the war to a country that is in a humanitarian
meltdown right now.
So no, none of us should be signing on to fund an Agency that is this
lawless and this inhumane. That is the bottom line.
But here is the second bottom line: People are suffering in this
country right now. And they are not suffering because we let immigrants
into America, they are suffering because gas prices in some parts of
the country are
[[Page S1878]]
over $6. On average, gasoline is over $4. It was just $3 a few months
ago. And it is $6 and $5 and $4 for one reason only: this insane,
incompetent war that is being waged in Iran. That is the only reason
that these gas prices are so high right now.
The national average, as I said, is over $4. Americans have now paid
more than $16 billion more at the pump than they should have simply
because of Trump's war. Sixteen billion dollars out of the pockets of
American consumers, American families, American small businesses, sent
to the oil companies who are, by the way, making a killing off these
high prices, just because of Trump's incompetent war in Iran.
Americans, since Trump came into office, have spent $2,300 more on
goods and services because of inflation and tariffs. The average family
has spent an extra $2,000 in the last year and a half on the things
that they buy every day because of Trump's inflation and because of his
tariffs.
There are 15 million people in this country who are on the verge of
losing their healthcare because of a law that Donald Trump and
Republicans passed in this Congress ripping health insurance away from
seniors, the poor, and the disabled.
The Consumer Price Index is up 3.3 percent over last year. That is
closing in on double what the Federal Reserve's target is. Unemployment
is up since Trump took office. Long-term unemployment is way up since
Trump took office. Unemployment for Black workers is up since Trump
took office.
The tariffs, which are part of the reason that Americans have spent
more than $2,000 extra because of Trump's policies, were supposed to be
tough, hard medicine in order to bring factory jobs back to the United
States. Biden had increased the number of manufacturing jobs in this
country. We had more manufacturing jobs at the end of Joe Biden's term
than we had at the beginning.
Well, do you know what has happened since Trump took office? He has
reversed all of that progress. The tariffs aren't bringing more
manufacturing jobs to the United States. We are losing manufacturing
jobs. We have lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump became
President.
So we are paying higher tariffs, and we are losing manufacturing
jobs. Like, it doesn't make any sense.
And so we are going to spend--this week on the floor--giving a blank
check to an immigration enforcement Agency that is out of control,
while ignoring the real problems that Americans are facing.
We could have spent this week--Republicans could have spent their
reconciliation process on gas prices or the healthcare catastrophe that
is about to hit Americans or reversing Trump's tariffs or trying to
actually do things that will bring manufacturing jobs back to this
country, but they are doing none of that.
There is no conversation on the Senate floor right now about gas
prices. There is no conversation on the Senate floor being led by
Republicans about inflation. There is nothing being done to bring our
manufacturing jobs back. There is no second look at the last
reconciliation bill they passed, which is going to end insurance for 15
million Americans.
Instead, Republicans are handing billions of dollars in a blank check
to an immigration enforcement Agency that right now is hunting 5-year-
old kids with severe disabilities and locking them up in baby prisons
to the point that they have swollen bellies because of their sickness
due to the inhumane conditions.
They are locking up the family members of 27-year military veterans
fighting for this country, just because it is mean and cruel.
So we are going to have a chance to debate this over the next 24
hours and vote on it, but I think the American people are seeing where
Republican priorities are: not on the stuff that matters to American
families.
I am not saying that the people of this country don't want a secure
border--they do--but that is not what we are debating here. We are
debating funding an immigration enforcement operation that is going
after legal citizens, that is not targeting people who are a threat to
this country, that exists just to try to stoke fears of our neighbors,
that tries to make people think that immigrants are the biggest threat
to this country so that you are distracted from the fact that Donald
Trump is stealing from you--the most corrupt President in the history
of this country.
We could be spending this time--we could even try to come together,
Republicans and Democrats--to do something about inflation or the cost
of gas. We have been begging our Republican colleagues to vote with us
on these resolutions to stop the war in Iran because that is probably
the fastest way to get the gas prices to come down.
We could spend time working across the aisle to try to address the
issues that are a real crisis for American citizens right now: costs,
inflation, gas prices, health insurance.
But, instead, we are about to send another blank check to an Agency
that is unconscionably out of control.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Banks). The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant executive clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, as we gather here, prices and costs
around the country are going up and up and up. The cost of gas is going
up. Electric bills are going up. The price of groceries is going up.
The costs of rent and mortgages are up. Childcare costs are up, and the
list goes on and on. So rising costs and prices are clearly on the
minds of the American people as they try to make ends meet.
Dealing with those costs should be a priority for this Congress, but
in this bill, Senate Republicans are telling the country--telling our
fellow Americans--that rising costs and affordability are not their
problem, are not their priority.
Budgets always tell us a lot about what the President and the
Congress think is important, and the budget reconciliation process that
Republicans are using right now specifically tells us a lot about what
the Senate majority's priorities are. It tells us what, in this moment,
Senate Republicans are focused on.
That is because it is a special procedure that allows the majority
party--in this case, the Republican Party--to pass something without a
single vote from the minority party. The Senate Republicans are
preparing to pass this without any Democratic vote. You can only do
this once per fiscal year. So it is reserved for the biggest goals, the
top priorities, the things that the majority party--the Senate
Republicans--thinks are the most important, the things it wants to
become law.
When the Democrats were last in the majority, we used the budget
reconciliation process as well. We used it to pass the Inflation
Reduction Act. That allowed us to require Medicare to negotiate lower
prescription drug prices. We used it to cap the price of insulin for
seniors. We used it to accelerate the deployment of clean energy to
create good-paying jobs and to expand Affordable Care Act tax credits
to make healthcare more affordable for millions and millions of our
fellow Americans. That is what we used it for. In fact, it was those
Affordable Care Act tax credits that Republicans allowed to expire at
the end of last year.
So, last year, Republicans passed a reconciliation bill as well. They
called it their Big Beautiful Bill. Well, it was beautiful if you were
a billionaire, but it was pretty much a big betrayal for everyone else.
It provided permanent tax cuts for the wealthy, and it was in that bill
that Senate Republicans and the President allowed the Affordable Care
Act tax credits to expire, causing premiums to go up for 22 million of
our fellow Americans. In fact, they went up so high that 4 million
Americans lost their coverage altogether. But in that bill, wherein tax
credits for working Americans to better afford healthcare were not
extended, Republicans and President Trump provided big, permanent tax
cuts for the rich.
I want colleagues to focus on this chart for a moment because it
tells you exactly what the tax priorities were in the Republicans'
reconciliation bill from last year.
As I said, it was a Big Beautiful Bill if you were a billionaire. As
you can
[[Page S1879]]
see, 72 percent of the tax benefits went to the richest 20 percent of
the American people--72 percent of the tax benefits went to the top 20
percent. In fact, it gets even more skewed than that. If you zero in
more closely with a magnifying glass, 22 percent of the total tax
benefits went to the top 1 percent--the richest Americans. That is what
Republicans did in their so-called Big Beautiful Bill. That is why I
say it was beautiful if you were a billionaire. We know that it was
skewed in that direction not only by the numbers but because
Republicans chose to make the tax cuts for billionaires and the very
rich permanent. Those go on forever.
I asked the Director of the President's Office of Management and
Budget, Russ Vought, about this phenomenon in a hearing just last week.
He conceded that the bill last year, the reconciliation bill, provided
permanent tax cuts for the very rich, and he conceded that the tax cuts
and benefits for everybody else, which are much smaller as a proportion
of the whole, were made temporary. For example, the ``no tax on tips''
provision will expire at the end of 2028. Smaller tax cuts for working
people--temporary. Big tax cuts for wealthy Americans--permanent. They
have admitted to it. That was a choice that was made by Republicans as
part of that bill.
That is why I introduced an alternative, the Working Americans' Tax
Cut Act, which provides 100 percent of its tax benefits not to the
richest 20 percent but to the 80 percent of American taxpayers who are
working hard--paycheck to paycheck--to make ends meet for themselves
and their families.
Now, the Trump tax plan that he worked on and passed with Republicans
not only provided very wealthy individuals with these big tax cuts but
also big profitable corporations. In fact, the changes that were made
by President Trump and Republicans have enabled 88 of the largest
corporations in America to pay no--zero--Federal income taxes, despite
having more than $100 billion in total profits among them. At the same
time that these huge tax cuts were given to big corporations and the
very wealthy, Republicans cut by $1 trillion our investments in health
and nutrition programs for our fellow Americans. By the way, all told,
it adds $4 trillion to our national debt.
There was another major part of that bill that Republicans passed
last year with the President, and it was a massive slush fund for their
mass deportation agenda. They put in that bill $140 billion for ICE and
CBP. So, just for comparison's sake, for ICE, that was seven times
their previous annual appropriation. They stuffed that into that one
so-called Big Beautiful Bill. You know, that is as much money as many
countries spend on their militaries in a year.
The results have been predictable--a bloated, unaccountable Agency
that is not focused on deporting the ``worst of the worst,'' as the
President said he would do, but that goes into communities and
indiscriminately abducts people, ships them around the country, and
then tries to deport them. Overwhelmingly--overwhelmingly--they are
people with no criminal records who, according to DHS' own data, pose
no risk to our communities: small business owners, pastors, veterans,
parents taking their kids to school, even children.
When the American people rose up against these brutal policies and
exercised their right to protest, when they took to the streets to
exercise their First Amendment rights and to take pictures of what ICE
agents were doing, we saw in Minneapolis two American citizens shot and
killed--a mom, Renee Good, who was killed as she tried to drive away
from ICE agents who were aggressively approaching her car, and a VA
nurse Alex Pretti, who was killed when he stopped to help a fellow
observer. He was shot in the back by CBP agents.
And the Trump administration--what was their response? They called
the victims--they called Renee Good and Alex Pretti--domestic
terrorists.
That is the mindset of this out-of-control, lawless ICE operation.
Well, my constituents in Maryland and Americans across the country
have been horrified by these actions. They said it has to stop, and it
needs to stop. These Agencies need to be held accountable. They need to
be reined in. We need independent investigations.
So Democrats put forward some pretty straightforward proposed
reforms: require Federal agents to show identification, take off the
masks that allow them to evade accountability. Our local police
officers don't wear masks. Our local police officers provide
identification.
We also said: You have got to cooperate with State and local law
enforcement investigating these incidents. When you have an
administration calling the victims domestic terrorists, it is hard to
trust the outcome of an administration that is doing the investigation.
We want the local and State law enforcement authorities involved.
And our list of reforms went on, but they were rejected by
Republicans and rejected by the White House. They didn't want
meaningful reforms. They wanted to keep the blank check going.
And so then Democrats proposed that: OK, let's set aside ICE and CBP,
and let's negotiate those, but let's immediately fund other parts of
the Department of Homeland Security, like TSA, FEMA, and the Coast
Guard. We were resisted for a very long time, and then finally Senate
Republicans agreed. There was no reason to hold TSA, for example,
hostage to an out-of-control ICE operation. So we passed that out of
the U.S. Senate, allowing those other entities to get funding.
But what happened in the Republican-controlled House? Speaker Johnson
refused to even let it come to a vote.
And so here we are, and Republicans are putting forward their
reconciliation bill for this fiscal year. Their top priority? At this
moment, when Americans are seeing their bills go up, their costs rise,
when American families have had to absorb the huge increases as a
result of Trump's illegal, unconstitutional tariff taxes--which is
estimated, on average, to cost American families $1,700 a year. By the
way, the President should give those families their money back, and do
it now.
But as all of these costs are rising, Republicans here in Congress
have decided to focus, instead, not on affordability but on using this
special, rare process to do something else: to add to the slush fund
for ICE and Customs and Border Patrol. And they are doing it in a way
that doesn't require any Democratic votes. So this is Republicans only,
so that is how we know that this is their top priority.
And, by the way, they are wasting a ton of taxpayer money in the
process--a lot of taxpayer money--on these warehouses that they are
buying up around the country to retrofit for detention centers, often
paying way over market value. In my State of Maryland, they have spent
$102 million to buy a warehouse in Western Maryland to turn into a
detention center. They did so without adequate notice, without
consultation with the community, and it is going to put strains on
local water supplies and sewage capacity.
That warehouse project has been halted by a judge and is now being
reconsidered by DHS, but $100 million of taxpayer money, already
wasted.
I don't think any of us are surprised by the priorities that have
been put forward by the Trump administration and now with Republicans
in Congress because it was right down the hall here that Donald Trump
was sworn in, and he promised a golden age for America, for Americans.
Well, he has been delivering a golden age--a Gilded Age--for his
billionaire buddies.
And despite what he said during his campaign when he said he was
going to stop wars and bring down prices, he has started wars. Prices
are going up. He is focused on building a gold-plated ballroom in the
White House and new monuments to himself. He is focused on hiding
portions of the Epstein files from survivors and the American people.
He has been busy lying to the American people time and time again,
telling them that prices are going down and the world is more peaceful
and everybody is doing just great.
He wants everybody to believe the dear leader; and, unfortunately, if
you look at a Cabinet meeting these days, you can see all the Cabinet
officials--the most billionaire-filled Cabinet in history--nodding
along.
But we can do better than that, and we should do better than that. We
should listen to the concerns being expressed by people all over the
country, and we should focus on bringing costs down and letting people
have and keep
[[Page S1880]]
a little bit more of their hard-earned money--working people, not
mostly the billionaires.
Instead, we see this effort by Republicans simply to fatten an Agency
that is out of control, engaged in lawless activity, instead of what is
important to the American people.
So I urge all of my colleagues to oppose--to strongly oppose--this
reconciliation bill, which is simply an effort to stuff an illegal
Agency like ICE at the expense of the American people.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, there is a lot going on in the country and
the world. Gas is at 4 bucks a gallon nationwide, and it is 5.65 at my
corner Shell station in Honolulu. Groceries are expensive. Electricity
bills are rising at double the rate of inflation, and millions of
Americans have lost their health insurance this year. People really are
struggling just to get by, and we, in the U.S. Congress, have got to be
focused on helping them.
We have this very limited tool called reconciliation, and it is a way
to circumvent the filibuster. It is a way to do things on just a purely
partisan basis, and both parties have used this tool. It is really only
available once every fiscal year. And without getting into the terribly
boring details, it is basically spending or tax cuts. And that is the
tool that we can use without having to compromise with the other side.
Now, when we had the House and the Senate and the Presidency, we used
that tool for the American Rescue Plan. In the middle of COVID, mass
unemployment, we decided to stabilize everybody's salary so they
wouldn't be unable to make their rent or their mortgage or put food on
the table.
And then we did the Inflation Reduction Act, which focused on
reducing the cost of prescription medicine and attacking the climate
crisis and providing tax credits for those who are working but not
wealthy but not poor enough to qualify for an array of government
programs.
And so the most important thing to understand about what is happening
today and tomorrow is not that Republicans are about to spend $70
billion to fund an Agency that already has 7 years of prefunding, not
that they are trying to make ICE--and will make ICE--more well-funded
than the U.S. Marine Corps; it is not that Republicans refuse to make
even the most reasonable reforms to hold ICE to the same standard that
every local police department is held to--that you have to get a
warrant before you conduct a search, that you have to introduce
yourself, that you have to have a name and badge number, that there are
very, very rare circumstances under which an officer should be
permitted to wear a mask and conceal their face, and that there should
be training in excess of 47 days.
I want everybody to understand the reason ICE trainees were given 47
days of training is to match up with the fact that this is the 47th
President of the United States. It used to be many months of training.
There used to be use-of-force training. They used to be treated like a
normal law enforcement agency.
Now, we can have a disagreement about the degree and extent of
immigration policy and who should be in this country and who shouldn't,
but I think what happened was they mistook people's dissatisfaction
with the Biden border policy for license to go and terrorize
communities.
Everybody now agrees: Get the bad guys who don't belong here out of
the country. Deport people who are committing violent crimes or
dangerous crimes. Get them out of here. But everybody also understands
that what ICE has done over the last year has been inhumane and made
all of us less safe.
And so we were at a negotiation about--again, these are not like some
progressive wish list full of reforms; these are literally the things
that the Honolulu Police Department, that the New York City Police
Department, that any police department in a rural State or an urban
State or anywhere across the country has to adhere to. And most law
enforcement officers--Federal, State, county--are perfectly fine being
well-trained, are perfectly fine having to get a warrant, are perfectly
fine when there is an officer-involved shooting to have an independent
investigation. All of that is normal, and most law enforcement officers
say: Yeah, these guys are unusually poorly trained.
And so we were in a negotiation to provide funding with reforms, but
the Republicans ran out of patience. And so what we said was: Why don't
we just go ahead and fund the Agencies that we all agree on--FEMA, the
Cybersecurity function, the Coast Guard. So we passed this over on a
bipartisan--not just a bipartisan basis, a unanimous basis out of this
Chamber, and then the House killed it.
And so they are stuck now trying to figure out how they are going to
fund this Agency. So they are using their one legislative opportunity
that comes only once every fiscal year to fund ICE and CBP for 3 years
going forward.
Why does that matter so much? First, it is a failure of just, like,
basic legislating to solve a problem that everybody saw with their own
eyes. When Alex Pretti and Renee Good were killed by Federal employees,
it transcended politics; it transcended immigration policy. That is for
sure. Nobody wanted to see that. But they didn't have the appetite to
enact the most basic reforms, and so here we are. But that is not the
most important part.
The most important part is this: People are paying more for gas, for
utilities, for food, for lumber, for housing, for healthcare, for every
single aspect of their lives. And you would think even if--I am not
accusing anybody of anything--but even if you didn't care about the
actual material condition of your constituents, you would care that
they were mad at you that everything was up. You would care that
everything has gotten more expensive during Donald Trump's second term,
especially since, by most accounts, he was elected because everything
was too expensive.
And so you would think these guys--they have the trifecta: They have
the House; they have the Senate; they have the Presidency. And so they
are going to go charging up the mountain and try to reduce the cost of
living. That is what you should do with this reconciliation
opportunity. That is what you should do. And, instead, they are
spending $70 billion on this rogue Agency.
So over the next couple of days, we are going to give them
opportunities to enact good policy that would reduce the cost of
living. There are a number of ways we could do that: We could restore
the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act. We could reverse the
tariffs that are attacks on every consumer across the United States of
America. We could end this preposterous war, which is costing about $2
billion a day and raising the price, by the way, not just of gasoline
but of diesel, and not just of diesel but of fertilizer, which is an
input for our agricultural industry. So everything is getting more
expensive at the same time that we are spending $2 billion a day.
Just to give you context, last year when the government was shut down
over a healthcare fight, the amount in question was $23 billion for a
year's worth of the Affordable Care Act tax credits. That is about 11
days' worth of this war. And so don't let anybody tell you that there
is not enough money. There is enough money. They are spending $2
billion a day on this war that nobody asked for, nobody expected. It is
not even working out--$2 billion a day. No end in sight. And then $70
billion prefunding a Federal Agency that has already been prefunded.
And so don't let anybody tell you there is not enough money. What
there is not enough of is moral clarity. People are going broke, and we
are, in fact, lighting money on fire in the government. It is just for
all the wrong things.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
S. Con. Res. 33
Mr. REED. Mr. President, I rise today to oppose a budget resolution
my Republican colleagues have put before the U.S. Senate.
The American people are worried because of the pure chaos let loose
on them by President Trump and the Republican majority--whether it is
tariffs, billionaire tax cuts, or a war of choice with Iran.
Today, in addition, Republicans have put before the Senate not a bill
to help
[[Page S1881]]
average Americans cope with the higher prices for energy, food, and
healthcare caused by their policies but instead a budget resolution
that will dump another $140 billion into Border Patrol and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement.
This unpopular and excessive spending comes mere months after
Republicans already gave these Agencies a first-of-its-kind slush fund
of $140 billion--an amount that is around four to seven times their
annual regular appropriations and dwarfs annual funding for programs
like SNAP food assistance and housing choice vouchers that actually
lower costs for Americans.
The good news is that we will be giving our Republican colleagues a
chance to correct this issue--to vote for funding and policies that
actually help the American people. This includes a measure I intend to
offer to rescind the Medicaid cuts Republicans and Donald Trump enacted
last summer, which are depriving millions of Americans of health
coverage.
Since President Trump returned to the White House, billionaires have
gotten richer and working-class Americans and middle-class Americans
have been overrun with higher prices, overrun with an affordability
crisis.
The President's signature policy is his broad tariffs. As Americans
struggled under the weight of ever-increasing costs, the President
imposed new, illegal tariff taxes that added an extra $1,000 in
additional costs to the average household budget last year, according
to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. And even though the bulk of Trump's
tariffs were declared illegal by the Supreme Court, the Trump
administration has fought to prevent Americans from getting their money
back. Instead, with the help of this Republican Congress, the President
is delivering financial relief to his real constituents--his
billionaire and multimillionaire friends--giving the top one-tenth of 1
percent--that is the top one-tenth of 1 percent--of households a huge
$250,000 tax cut--$250,000 this year and every year going forward,
unless we take action.
To partially hide the cost of this huge giveaway which is adding $3.4
trillion to the national deficit, Republicans cut Medicaid by nearly $1
trillion and made health insurance, as a result, unaffordable for
millions of working-class Americans. Roughly 15 million people in this
country are projected to lose their health insurance over the next
decade because of these trillion-dollar Republican cuts. In an act of
cynicism, Republicans phased in these cuts to hit Americans just after
the election this year. It is all part and parcel of the longstanding
approach of ``say one thing but do another.''
As you might recall, the President pledged to reduce inflation the
first day he was in office. Actually, inflation has gone up. The first
day in office, it was 3 percent; now it is 3.3 percent and likely to
climb higher because of the situation in the Persian Gulf and the
stress on oil production and distribution throughout the world.
Some of these cuts to Medicaid have already taken place, and about
1.5 million people were forced to drop their Affordable Care Act
coverage during open enrollment this winter because of increased costs
and the loss of tax credits for their premiums.
In my home State of Rhode Island, 10,000 people lost their health
insurance. That is a 20-percent drop in coverage from that population.
Before President Trump came into office and began decimating our
healthcare system, Rhode Island was on track to have one of the lowest
rates of uninsured individuals in the country: 2.2 percent.
There was still much work to be done--lowering costs further,
requiring even more drug companies to negotiate lower prices, cutting
out-of-pocket costs, increasing the healthcare workforce to make it
easier to find a doctor, finding more cures and treatment by funding
biomedical research, and more than that--but the Trump administration
is not doing any of that. Instead, people are losing their healthcare,
and it is just costing everyone more money in the long run.
When people get sick and don't have health insurance, they will end
up eventually in the emergency room with a much more serious case and a
much more costly case, which is more expensive than these premiums that
we were helping people afford. And those costs--the cost of the
uninsured going to emergency rooms, the cost of the problems
contemplated by the failure to have health insurance--will be passed on
to everyone. They will drive up health costs for businesses, families,
States, and the Federal Government.
We are seeing that already not just in Rhode Island but across the
country. Because of the anticipated loss of Medicaid funds, Blue Cross
and the other insurance companies are already raising their premiums
for private healthcare insurance. And that will go up and up and up, so
that no one is escaping these cuts. It is not just a few of the poor
people; it is everyone.
We have to do much, much more. These healthcare cuts are not making
people healthier. They are not cost-effective. They are just a way to
pay for tax cuts, in summary.
With households reeling from his tariff cuts--or shocks, I should
say; they are not really cuts, they are raises--and healthcare cuts,
President Trump upped the ante by unilaterally choosing to attack Iran
and close a huge portion of the global oil industry. Any economist
could have predicted what came next when you shut down 20 percent of
the world's oil. Gas prices spiked from an average of $2.98 per gallon
to a recent high of $4.17 per gallon. Diesel shot up above $5.60 a
gallon and hit record highs in at least six States. Heating oil has
gone above $5 per gallon, putting even greater pressure on household
budgets. We are seeing costs overwhelm working families in Rhode
Island. Their healthcare has gone up. Gasoline prices are going up.
Heating oil is going up. Groceries are going up.
Our farmers are being impacted because the Strait of Hormuz is the
passage point for a huge amount of fertilizer or fertilizer components,
and it is hitting farmers all over this country and all over the world.
What we are seeing, though, is that the President is not only not
getting it, but he is also asking Congress to eliminate existing aid
that lowers home energy costs, provides affordable housing, and helps
families pay for groceries. All of this was in his recent budget
proposal. In each of these instances, the President chose to take
policy actions that any rational person knows would make it harder for
families to afford the cost of living.
Under his watch, food staples like ground beef and coffee have hit
record highs. So have new car and home prices, which now sit at almost
$50,000 and over $400,000 respectively. Health insurers in the
Affordable Care Act Marketplace increased prices 26 percent in 2026,
and business plans, as I said, are also going up--the private insurance
that company owners have to pay for.
Right now, the Senate should be considering bread-and-butter issues
like these. We should invest in the American people by ensuring every
family can access programs like SNAP, Housing Choice vouchers, and the
Affordable Care Act Marketplace so that no one has to worry about food,
housing, or health insurance.
Unfortunately, this budget does not do a single thing to lower
prices. Instead, it unlocks reconciliation, a process that will allow
Republicans to ram through another partisan bill that funds two rogue
Federal Agencies--ICE and Customs and Border Protection--without any
accountability for their operations.
These Agencies spent the bulk of last year intimidating Americans
throughout our Nation instead of conducting themselves like true law
enforcement professionals. They were not seeking hardened criminals who
were threats to the community. They were not stationed at the border,
keeping a watchful eye for smugglers and those types. They were sent en
masse to cities like Minneapolis and elsewhere to conduct seemingly
random roundups. That is not real law enforcement. That is not the way
to reform our broken immigration system. And that is certainly not the
kind of activity that merits $140 billion more in taxpayer money.
Indeed, ICE officers tragically killed two Americans in the past
year, and 48 immigrants have died in custody since the start of 2025.
Together with Customs and Border Protection, ICE deployments have
forced States and cities to shoulder tens of millions of dollars in new
costs. Businesses in municipalities that weathered ICE surges lost
customers and revenue as Federal
[[Page S1882]]
agents took over streets and intimidated local residents.
This is all bad enough, but House Republicans have taken it one step
further and are holding funding for the Coast Guard, FEMA, and the rest
of DHS hostage until they can grab another $140 billion for ICE and
Customs and Border Protection.
Again, neither ICE nor Customs and Border Protection needs more
money. Republicans used the reconciliation process last summer to
provide $140 billion to these two Agencies, which usually receive less
than $30 billion a year in total annual funding.
What these Agencies need is not more money but more accountability--
commonsense measures like requiring that all agents wear body-worn
cameras and visible identification, while prohibiting the use of masks.
You will not find a professional police force in this country that goes
about their community in masks with no identification. We are just
asking ICE to be professionals, to do what every other police force in
this country--State, local--does and does each day.
We want to require agents to obtain a judicial warrant, signed by a
neutral judge, before entering private property rather than relying on
administrative warrants. We have seen incidents where ICE crashed into
a house, grabbed an individual out, half-clothed, took him to their
detention facility, and it turns out the individual was an American
citizen, not an illegal alien. Why? Well, one reason was they didn't
have the scrutiny of a real judge pledged to enforce the law; rather,
they just asked their boss--``Sign this, please''--and they were off to
create harm in a community.
We also want to prohibit agents from targeting hospitals, schools,
daycare centers, churches, places of worship, holy places, and
courthouses for immigration enforcement raids. This is something that
we must do. These are places of community. These are places of
religious observation, not a place to trap people and haul them away.
Now, to avoid confronting the malfeasance of ICE and Customs and
Border Protection and to avoid addressing the damage their economic
policies are causing, Senate Republicans are pushing partisan
legislation to double down on their mistakes, giving more money to out-
of-control Federal Agencies and failing to do a thing to help average
Americans in this economy. We all--all Americans--deserve better.
In amendment after amendment during this debate, Senate Democrats
will be giving our Republican colleagues the chance to stand up and do
the right thing, to fix President Trump's mistakes, reverse the blunder
of their Medicaid cuts, and start solving our affordability crisis. And
I hope we will all join together and make those wise choices to help
the American people.
With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Moreno). The Senator from Missouri.
Mr. SCHMITT. Mr. President, I rise again on this pressing matter of
funding law enforcement, and the stakes couldn't be higher. Just weeks
ago, I stood on this floor and warned that we would be back. Democrats
blocked full funding for border security and deportations. They chose a
radical ideology over the safety of the American people, yet again.
Now, we return with reconciliation as our vehicle, and we will not
fail. This time, we will finish what the American people elected us to
do--enforce our immigration laws and deport those who defy them,
because this is not just another spending debate. This is a test of
whether or not we are still a sovereign nation.
For decades, Washington has operated under a dangerous lie that
America is an economic zone, not a nation; merely an economy, not a
people; merely a labor market, and not a home. Under that lie, borders
became suggestions, citizenship became paperwork, and enforcement
became optional.
Then came the 4-year invasion, 15 million illegal immigrants flooding
across our border--criminals, rapists, murderers. And the American
people were told to accept the consequences in their wages, their
schools, their hospitals, their neighborhoods, and sometimes at the
grave sites of their children.
The American people were told to accept the affordability crisis
caused by the massive influx of millions of aliens who suppressed
Americans' wages, and Democrats nodded along as Joe Biden let it
happen. The American people were told to accept higher rent. They were
told to accept higher housing prices as millions of new neighbors
flooded their communities, driving up costs. We saw that surge account
for up to 100 percent of rental price growth in our most populous
States--in two-thirds nationwide. That is the root cause of today's
affordability crisis.
And on national security, the threat is very real. We have seen
individuals from over 100 countries cross our borders--cartels,
traffickers, and foreign adversaries ready to exploit weakness. Without
enforcement, our southern border becomes a superhighway for cartels,
crime, drugs, and terror.
But beyond economics and security, there is something deeper at
stake. Our Nation isn't a marketplace. It is a people, a shared
history, a culture, a way of life. Our Nation is woven together by our
faith, our families, our freedoms. Our Nation has language, a memory, a
border, and a people with the sovereign right to decide who gets to
join them.
American citizenship is not a property interest to be conferred upon
anyone who flies under the radar long enough. American citizenship is a
covenant. It confers extraordinary rights but also demands obligations,
loyalty, gratitude, humility, and the fidelity to the Nation and its
people.
And when millions enter illegally--without assimilation, without
limits, without enforcement--you don't get unity. You get division. You
get a country that no longer knows who it is, and that is what we are
here to stop.
This package funds the machinery of enforcement Democrats spent years
trying to dismantle. It funds ICE. It funds CBP. It funds detention
capacity, transportation, officers, agents, removal operations, and the
hard infrastructure required to carry out deportations at scale.
The point is simple: A deportation order means nothing without a
detention bed. A detention bed means nothing without agents. Agents
mean nothing without transportation. And immigration law means nothing
if Congress refuses to fund the men and women charged with enforcing
it.
We have seen the costs of that failure. We have seen what this chaos
looks like up close. It runs like a river of sin cutting through our
land--murder, rape, arson, torture. Innocent Americans--daughters,
sons, families--lost because the law was not enforced before the crime;
lost because the Democrats have chosen illegal aliens over their fellow
citizens, a choice made time and time again by the Democrats.
When given the choice between funding deportations and protecting
sanctuary jurisdictions, Democrats chose sanctuary jurisdictions. When
given the choice between detention beds and catch-and-release,
Democrats chose release. When given the choice between American
citizens and illegal aliens, Democrats chose illegal aliens, and the
human cost of that decision is staggering.
The destiny of the American Nation is not to manifest death and
destruction upon its own people through lawlessness and subversion of
law enforcement. The destiny of this Nation--our Nation--is to be
great, to be sovereign, and to be free.
We will not accept a system where action only comes after an
American's blood is spilled on American soil. We will not defund law
enforcement as Democrats argue for. We will not force our agents to do
more with less while anarchy spreads like a plague. And we will not
accept the lie that enforcement must always be delayed, diluted, or
denied.
We are going to restore order. That means ending sanctuary policies
that shield criminal illegal aliens. It means cutting off the
incentives that fuel illegal immigration. It means giving our agents
every tool they need to do their jobs.
To my Democrat colleagues, the American people rejected your open
borders agenda. They voted for law and order. They voted for
sovereignty. They voted for the deportations law enforcement will
deliver.
And we are going to deliver.
To my Republican colleagues, this is our moment. For too long, we
talked about these problems without solving them. That era is over. We
have a real
[[Page S1883]]
opportunity right now to change the trajectory of this country; to
restore the rule of law; to restore sovereignty; to restore our
trajectory, our destiny; to restore the American Nation. And we cannot
afford to fail because this is more than just about policy. It is about
whether or not our kids inherit a country that has the guts to enforce
its laws and protect its own citizens.
We will not let America become a place where citizenship means
nothing, where borders mean nothing, where the good and the heroic
people who built this country are treated as enemies, while politicians
refuse to notify law enforcement when a criminal illegal alien is being
released from prison and into our communities.
I reject that future and so do the American people.
Citizenship is not merely paperwork. It is a covenant among our
people. The first duty of the Federal Government is not to the world,
not to an NGO, not to foreign nations or nationalists. It is not to the
cheap labor lobby either. Its first duty is to its citizens.
The American people are watching. They will remember who stood with
them and who stood in the way. The safety of our citizens isn't
optional. The rule of law isn't optional. And our duty to defend both
is not optional.
We will fund ICE. We will fund CBP. We will fund law enforcement. We
will enforce our laws, and we will protect the American people, no
matter how many times and for how long we have to return to this floor.
We will finish the job.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, well here we are. And for more than 2
months, our colleagues and friends across the aisle have decided that
they were going to hold the Department of Homeland Security shut down,
kind of hold them hostage.
And for that same 2 months, Republicans have been trying every single
day to negotiate with them in good faith to find a resolution to this.
Well, they claimed, if they could just reform ICE, they would be
happy. And, where reasonable, the White House offered to implement
updated guidelines for ICE agents, including expanding the use of body-
warn cameras, limiting civil immigration enforcement at certain
sensitive locations, and enforcing the use of visible officer ID during
enforcement actions.
Well, that sounds reasonable. Those were all things they wanted. But
do you know what? All of a sudden, that wasn't enough. They rejected
every offer to reopen the Department of Homeland Security.
Since February, they have taken 16 votes--not 1 or 2, but 16 votes--
against reopening the Department of Homeland Security.
One thing has become very clear, and it is this: For the Democrats,
shutting down DHS is not a means to accomplish other policy goals. It
is not a negotiating tactic. Keeping Homeland Security shut down is the
goal. That is what they want.
Now, you come to that realization because when everything you put on
the table--things they have said they are for, things they have said
they wanted to see done--and they reject it all. They reject it all.
Nothing suits them because they have wanted to keep DHS shut down.
And their goal is to abolish ICE. Their goal is to defund law
enforcement.
So they found out that that was really not that popular with the
American people because the American people want safe communities.
They think we should have public safety as a goal and they have
watched what the Democrats have done and they have decided they don't
like this. They like the fact that Republicans, that President Trump,
has been focused on public safety.
You know, that is one of the reasons that the American people sent
President Trump back to the Oval Office. It was to make certain that we
were focused on our Nation's security, that we were focused on safe
communities, that we were apprehending people that were in the country
illegally, that individuals that were in the country illegally who had
committed crimes were being apprehended and were being deported.
And I will say this: Since Inauguration Day, President Trump has
delivered on his promise that he would restore law and order and he
would bring law and order to the southern border after 4 years of solid
chaos down there and, what we know, at least 10 million illegal aliens
coming into this country.
For 11 consecutive months, CBP has released zero--zero--illegal
aliens into our country, think about that, 11 months in a row. Now,
under Joe Biden, border apprehensions were soaring, and what we saw
last month was the stat that border apprehensions were down 97 percent
from the same time in Joe Biden's term.
For most Americans, they like this, and they like the fact that the
border is secure. They like the fact that drug dealers and sex
traffickers are not coming into the country. They like the fact that
people have to go to a port of entry, and they have to show their
documents if they want to come into our precious country.
But you know what? That isn't what the Democrats want. They want to
end President Trump's success at the southern border. They want to
abolish ICE. They want to bring back the Biden years of rising crime,
crime in your community's streets. They want to bring back drug
trafficking. They want to bring back human trafficking and sex
trafficking and lawlessness.
If you look at where their priorities are and where they spend their
time and the votes they cast, that is what you see. Open the border,
abolish ICE, defund the police, bring back the Biden years of rising
crime, chaos, drug trafficking, human smuggling, sex trafficking, and
lawlessness.
Now, as Republicans, we have said we are not going to stand for this,
which is why we are moving to fully fund ICE and CBP for years to come
through this reconciliation.
Our budget committee is chaired by Senator Graham, and he has
introduced the budget resolution that is going to unlock a pathway for
a public safety reconciliation bill.
Now, I don't see who can be against public safety. This is a
targeted, focused bill, focused on public safety, something everybody
should want not only for our Nation but for their cities and States.
Now, by doing this public safety reconciliation bill, we can fund
these vital Agencies, and we can do it with a simple majority vote.
This is how we were able to pass the Big Beautiful Bill with the
working families tax cuts, and, indeed, I think many people have taken
advantage of those extra tax cuts that were in that bill as they filed
their taxes this year.
Now, every single Democrat who votes against funding for border
enforcement is going to have to explain to their constituents why they
put the concerns of illegal aliens before the concerns of the citizens
who voted for them.
Tennesseans are really sick and tired of the games that are being
played up here, primarily these games by the Democrats where they are
not funding DHS. And they are frustrated when they see that Congress
isn't getting things done.
This week, I did a telephone townhall. I love doing these. We have
thousands of Tennesseans on the line with us, and some of the questions
that I got were: Why can't we fund border enforcement? We should want
to keep the border closed so we know who is coming in here. Who could
be opposed to that?
Why can't we pass the SAVE America Act? You know, 83 percent of the
American people, not just Republicans or Independents or Democrats, but
83 percent of the American people want us to pass the SAVE America Act.
It is very simple. If you are going to register to vote in our
country, you have got to prove that you are a U.S. citizen--common
sense. Most every country does that. You have got to be a citizen if
you are going to vote in their elections.
And next, they want to make certain that when you go to vote, you
show an ID. Thirty-six of our States require already that you show an
ID.
We have got 14 States, primarily blue States, that do not require
that you show an ID. To the American people, it is common sense. So
they ask: Why can't we pass the SAVE America Act? Why can't we
prioritize our national security amid a conflict that is going on with
Iran, who is the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism?
[[Page S1884]]
We should be prioritizing our Nation's security. And time and again,
as I answered these questions, I would tell Tennesseans the Democrat
agenda is completely at odds with the interests of the American people.
They are going to do anything and everything they can to undermine
President Donald Trump because they don't like him. And they have TDS.
And so to them what they are trying to do is stall and not fund the
Agencies that are here to support what the American people want to see
done.
Now, despite all these efforts, Democrats can't stop us from putting
the American people first, addressing the concerns, meeting the needs
of the American people.
So we will move forward with our reconciliation bill. We will move
forward with fully reopening the Department of Homeland Security as
soon as we possibly can, and we will move forward with making certain
the American people know that the Democrats have used them as a pawn.
They didn't want to negotiate. Nothing was ever good enough. Their goal
was to abolish ICE and to defund the police.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Wisconsin.
Iran
Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. President, I rise today to end President Trump's war
in Iran. This vote could not come at a more crucial time.
Today was supposed to be end of the cease-fire that is hanging on by
a thread. While the President said that it will be extended, we have no
idea until when. We have no idea if the President will, as he has many
times, change his position and go through with his threat to commit war
crimes and bomb civilian infrastructure.
So now is the time to act. We simply do not have any time to waste
and see if an entire civilization will die because the President gets
impatient.
This entire war has been unnecessary, illegal, and unwise. We need to
put a check on this President before it gets even worse.
Unfortunately, the President has shown us that he did not have a plan
after day one. The President said that the war would be over in a
matter of days. We are coming up on the 2-month mark with no real end
in sight. And over the course of 50-plus days, we have seen nothing
short of a disaster. This war has caused irreparable damage to
families, to the American people, to our standing in the world, and to
our economy.
We have lost 13 American servicemembers, with hundreds of others
injured, many seriously. Thousands of civilians have been killed
including many dozens of schoolgirls by an errant U.S. bomb.
President Trump's war has delivered higher costs for Americans at the
pump with families paying more than $1 more per gallon since the war
started. And I would be remiss if I didn't say that even the Trump
administration is now admitting that those costs are going to be here
to stay, given the mess they created in the Strait of Hormuz.
It has jacked up the cost of fertilizer and fuel for Wisconsin
farmers. Soon enough, this will also mean higher costs at the checkout
counter at the grocery store for families as my farmers simply can't
eat those costs.
The cost of the war--which the administration won't even tell us
outside of classified settings--is in the tens of billions of dollars,
and the American taxpayers are footing the bill.
Iran's resolve is hardened and, arguably, so is its regime. And they
are still in control of its enriched uranium.
This war has taken us backward and created more problems for the
people that I work for. The American people have been crystal clear
that they do not want this war. They want what they were promised from
this President: lower costs and no foreign wars. They were sold a bad
bill of goods and now are left cleaning it up.
It is time for Congress to do its job and end this war now. I
encourage my colleagues to vote yes on this resolution.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. President, today the Iranians claimed to have seized
two ships in the Strait of Hormuz, while firing on a third. The
President has ordered the blockade of Iranian ports to continue, even
as he announced a cease-fire, even as he backed off yet another
apocalyptic threat.
In short, we are approaching the end of the second month of Trump's
Iran war, and there is no end to the conflict or the confusion in
sight.
Sadly, there is little sense that a deal is in the offing or what
that deal would look like and whether our security will be any better
if and when the President declares some kind of Pyrrhic victory. But
this much we know already: This war has come at a terrible cost.
First and foremost, there has been the tragic loss of human lives.
Mr. President, 13 of our servicemembers have been killed, including CW3
Robert Marzan of California. Over 200 U.S. servicemembers have been
injured, some seriously. Our hearts go out to all of the families and
communities from which they come.
Scores of Iranian civilians have also been killed including over a
hundred at a girl's school that appears to have been mistakenly bombed
by the United States. There have also been casualties in Israel and the
Gulf States, the total number of which is still unknown.
Second, there is the economic cost to the American taxpayer to the
tune of tens of billions of dollars--maybe when this conflict is over,
hundreds of billions of dollars. Every American family will already be
asked to pay over $1,000 as their contribution to a war they did not
want, which their Representatives in Congress did not vote to approve.
Just imagine what that means. For that price, America could have paid
for universal pre-K for all of our kids. Think about that. Every
American child could have had pre-K for the likely cost of this war. In
a very real sense, the early childhood education of our kids will
suffer because this President chose to invest in bombing Iran instead
of educating our kids.
A hospital costs around $100 million. That means there could have
been 200 hospitals in 200 communities around the country for the cost
of this war. One of those communities just might have been yours. Those
hospitals will never be built because this President, who promised no
more foreign wars, no more regime change wars, no more stupid wars,
broke his promise. Diminished healthcare for you and your family is a
cost of the war.
Third, you are paying much higher prices for gas, electricity,
groceries, and more as a result of this war. Why? Because of the
eminently predictable action Iran has taken to close a vital shipping
lane--the Strait of Hormuz.
General Caine reportedly warned President Trump that Iran was very
likely to take this action. Frankly, it didn't require a military
genius to reach that conclusion.
But drunk on his own power, convinced of his own infallibility, this
is a President, after all, who just said that he would have won the
Vietnam war very quickly. Donald Trump could not conceive of anything
other than a quick Iranian capitulation. Sadly, though, this has not
been the case, and there is still no end to the conflict or the higher
prices Americans are paying.
An average family--your family--can expect to pay at least $1,000
more a year in costs like those at the pump as a result of Trump's Iran
war; and that is on top of another $1,000 in taxes to pay for all the
bombs that we are dropping on that country.
And, finally, we are paying an additional cost for this war from the
fact that the case for this war was never made to the country or to the
Congress, from the fact that our Republican colleagues in the majority
have refused thus far to hold a single hearing on the war. I am told
maybe there will be one at the end of next week.
And the American people are not informed about the purpose, the
goals, the duration, the price tag, and more of this conflict because
we have had no open hearings on it.
And that cost is this: more wars by this President or future
Presidents because Congress has refused to exercise its constitutional
authority over war.
[[Page S1885]]
And that cost could be the most substantial of all because the
establishment of a precedent in which the President can initiate a war
of enormous consequence, a war in which we pay a tremendous cost in
life and treasure--without any input, without any approval--that
precedent may lead to additional wars, needless wars, dangerous and
damaging wars, which brings us to this moment and to this War Powers
Resolution and the need to use our constitutional power to bring an end
to this war.
I urge an aye vote.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague Senator
Baldwin and others for continuing to bring this debate before the
Senate again. It is just extraordinary that this is the most
significant military action that the United States has taken in
decades. And there has yet to be one single hearing, one single debate,
one single vote on an authorization of military force.
I want to target my remarks today on just what has happened over the
past 2 weeks because we tend to bounce from one news cycle to the next
without being able to really connect together the growing incompetence
that has defined the management of this war.
We shouldn't sugar-coat or normalize this degree of gross,
unacceptable incompetence being exercised here. We essentially have a
talk show host and a couple of real estate developers who are in charge
of our war strategy, and we are getting essentially what you would
expect if you put a talk show host and a handful of real estate
developers in charge of a major Middle East war.
If millions of lives weren't at stake--and that is really what is at
stake as the global economy threatens to melt down because of rising
gas prices and the fact that one-third of all fertilizer supply is
right now stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, if this wasn't really
about millions of lives being at stake, this would be the stuff of
farce, one mistake just compounded by another.
So many of us believe this war has to end right now because as each
mistake gets bigger than the next, the hole for the United States, for
American families, for our national security gets deeper and deeper.
So I am literally just going to very quickly run you through what has
happened in the last 2 weeks.
So we all remember on April 7, when Trump posts on social media that
he is going to destroy Iran's entire civilization. He says:
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought
back again.
Later that day, he announces that there has been a cease-fire. But
within hours, there is essentially diametrically opposed
interpretations from Trump and the Iranians as to the terms of that
cease-fire. The next day, he puts out a series of posts saying:
A big day for World Peace! Iran wants it to happen, they've
had enough! Likewise, so has [everybody] else. The United
States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in
the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action!
By the end of day on April 8, the cease-fire has fallen apart. Iran
says that a cease-fire in Lebanon is also necessary in order to get the
Strait of Hormuz opened. Trump is unable to secure that. So by the end
of the day, the day after the cease-fire is announced, the cease-fire
no longer exists.
Two days later on April 10, Trump sends his Vice President JD Vance
to Pakistan for negotiations.
On April 11, those negotiations are concluded after what appears to
be an hour or two of face-to-face negotiations. Vance gets right back
on a plane after--having spent an entire day--1 day--negotiating the
end of this war to come back to the United States.
That day, Trump says:
Their Leadership is DEAD!
Not true.
The Strait of Hormuz will soon be open . . .
Not true. The U.S. delegation, led by Vance, comes back to the United
States without an agreement.
On April 12, Trump announces--this is the day after the negotiations
fall apart--that he is setting up a blockade. So the Iranians have a
blockade on the strait. Now Trump announces a layered second blockade.
But he is still saying that negotiations are going great. He says:
[T]he meeting the day before went well, most points were
agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR,
was not.
Of course, that is not true. Virtually nothing was agreed to in that
meeting.
He says the next day that his negotiators, who were talking about a
20-year moratorium on enrichment of uranium, do not have his support.
He says:
I have been saying they can't have nuclear weapons . . . so
I don't like the 20 years.
I mean, we have never seen this before--literally a President in
public contradicting his negotiators who were negotiating the terms of
an agreement just 2 days ago.
Three days later, on April 17, Trump says that Iran again has agreed
to everything, including removing enriched uranium. Trump says our
people are just going to go get the uranium and bring it back to the
United States.
Within hours, Iran says this is not true. They say: We have the
right--a sacred right--to enrich uranium on our soil.
Trump says his negotiators are not considering releasing sanctions.
Two of his negotiators go to the press and say they were talking about
releasing sanctions.
Again, this is just diplomatic malpractice. The President of the
United States and his negotiators are arguing with each other in public
through the media.
Then, on April 19, Trump says he is sending Steve Witkoff and Jared
Kushner to Pakistan for new talks. The top negotiator, JD Vance ,
apparently has been sidelined. The administration then says Vance is
indeed going to Pakistan. Trump goes back to the press and says Vance
is not going to Pakistan. The White House scrambles again and confirms
that Vance will be going. The problem is that the Iranians have not
agreed to the negotiations.
So a day later, the President says Vance and his delegation are on
their way. Come to find out they are not leaving for Pakistan because
the Iranians are not agreeing to negotiate.
I mean, I get it that we have come to kind of normalize this kind of
incompetence, this kind of planned, executed chaos, but we are on the
floor week after week asking our colleagues to end this war because
this is an embarrassment to the United States of America. The President
and his negotiators are arguing in public with each other. The
President is literally deciding by the hour whether his son-in-law is
in charge of the negotiations or whether the Vice President is in
charge of the negotiations. The President is lying consistently about
the nature of the negotiations, saying things have been agreed to that
clearly have not been agreed to--helping the Iranians blockade the
strait.
We have never seen a foreign conflict mismanaged in public like this
before. I understand many of my Republican colleagues want to support
their President, but we are becoming a laughingstock in the world while
at the same time, we are hurting Americans who are now paying billions
more in gas prices. We are risking a global famine as fertilizer is
unavailable to poor farmers all over the world, and economies are
shutting down because of the high price and shortage of fuel.
The costs of keeping this war going 1 more day are just too high both
in reputational costs to the United States but also in the cost to
lives and the pocketbooks of millions of Americans.
I know my Republican colleagues have a hard time breaking with their
President. I will say that many of us--in closing--on the Democratic
side certainly had a hard time breaking with our President as well,
whether it was Barack Obama or Joe Biden, but on multiple occasions, we
did. Many of us stood on this floor and argued against President
Obama's intervention in the Yemen war. Many of us stood on this floor
and argued against Biden's policy in Gaza. That wasn't easy, but we
thought it was important for us to separate ourselves from our party
loyalty when we thought our President had gotten it wrong for America's
national security.
It is time for our Republican colleagues to join us in one of these
resolutions because it is just so clear to the entire world that if
this war continues
[[Page S1886]]
even for another day, the reputational cost to the United States is
potentially unrecoverable.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise to support my colleague Senator
Baldwin's War Powers Resolution. I have spoken on all of these
resolutions now going back to the very beginning of the war. I will not
be long. I thank my colleague for bringing this forward.
In just the news of today, one aspect of the war is the increasing
fuel costs and its effect on the global economy. There have been three
news items just in the last 3 hours.
First, Lufthansa Airlines is canceling thousands of flights because
of increased fuel costs.
Second, the American airline Spirit Airlines is on the verge of
bankruptcy, with the U.S. Government considering the need to bail out
Spirit Airlines.
Finally, there has been an announcement within the last couple of
hours by United Airlines--one of our largest carriers--that they
believe they may have to increase airfares by up to 20 percent for some
significant time into the future to recoup the costs of additional
aviation fuel.
If you just think back to February 27, it seems like a long time ago
now because so much has happened. Less than 2 months ago, oil prices
were normal, the Strait of Hormuz was open, and commerce was happening.
Then President Trump made the decision--without a rationale, without a
plan, without consulting with allies, without consulting or seeking a
vote of Congress--to enter the Nation into yet another war in the
Middle East.
The entire world is suffering, but the suffering that matters the
most to me is the suffering of Americans--the 13 families who have lost
loved ones in an unnecessary war and the hundreds of our military
members who have been injured and their lives forever altered going
forward.
I want to say this to my colleagues: You made a really good point.
This is a critical moment. We are in a cease-fire. It is actually
easier to stop something when you are in a cease-fire.
If we could vote yes on this resolution and get it to the House, it
could have the effect of extending the cease-fire so that we don't
start bombing again.
We know the President has been going back and forth. He came within a
few hours last night of ending the cease-fire, of calling for a
renewing of the bombing that has killed civilians and that has
dramatically damaged civilian infrastructure in Iran. Yet, at the very
last minute, as he is prone to do, he changed his mind and said the
cease-fire should be extended. I salute that.
For whatever the reason or however he is going to describe it,
extending the cease-fire is the right thing to do because all of this
gets harder when bombs start falling again. The regime's backbone gets
stiffer and stiffer. Their desire to retaliate grows stronger and
stronger. The chaos in the region escalates the threat to American
troops. It escalates. This all gets harder if bombs start falling
again.
So while we are in the moment of a cease-fire that is fragile and
that may not be counted upon to last for very long, if we could pass
Senator Baldwin's resolution, we would send the strong message that
Congress wants the pause. We want the pause. We don't want this war to
pick up again unless or until we have the debate and the vote that the
Constitution requires. That would be the right thing to have happen.
That would be respecting our troops.
I will conclude and just say this: After nearly 14 years on the Armed
Services Committee representing one of the most military States in the
country and thinking as a military dad ``What is it that we owe our
troops?'' we owe our troops the resources that they need.
My colleagues and I on both sides of the aisle every year pass the
Defense authorizing bill. It is the only bill that we have passed every
year for 63, 64 years in a row. This is something for which, in a
bipartisan way, we join together to make sure that our troops have the
resources they need. That is the first thing we owe them.
The second thing we owe our troops is respect, and that is why so
many of us on both sides of the aisle go out of our way, as we are
traveling around our States, to spend time with our military families
and to thank those who serve. When we have the opportunity during
recess, we travel around the world to see our troops in harm's way. We
look them in the eye and thank them for the sacrifices they make.
But I would argue that an even more important way to respect our
troops--even more than the resources we provide and the thanks we
offer--is to not use them for missions that are not worth their risking
their lives for. Let's not use them for stupid reasons. Let's use them
for good reasons--when war is the last resort that must occur in order
to protect America. At that point, our troops who have signed up have
volunteered for a mission that they know might be dangerous, and yes,
we should deploy them in those circumstances. But when we use troops
foolishly, as we often have during my lifetime--in Vietnam and in Iraq,
where they served bravely, but in a way, they were betrayed by poor
civilian decisionmaking--that is the cardinal form of disrespect to our
troops.
The way we use them in the right way is by having this kind of a
debate about whether a mission is in the national interest before we
send them in to risk their lives.
Senator Baldwin's motion at this moment when we are at a cease-fire
gives us a chance to step back, have that debate, and have that vote.
In full view of the American people, those who want to make the case
that this war is worth it should be able to make that case, and those
of us who don't believe it is worth it should make that case. Then we
would have a vote, and the answer would be in accord with the process
set out by the Framers of our Constitution.
If the will of Congress is that we should go to war, I might disagree
with it, but I would argue that it was done lawfully, just as our
Framers demanded, but if, as I imagine, the full debate and vote in
these bodies does not provide sufficient votes to authorize the war,
how dare we keep asking our troops to risk their lives for something we
are unwilling to vote for.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Schmitt). The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague Tammy Baldwin
for bringing this War Powers Resolution to the floor and for forcing it
onto the Senate. By its own prerogative, the leadership on the
Republican side did not want to have a debate or a discussion about a
war that is affecting every single American.
Remember, the problem we have right now, which I will talk about, is
not just the actions of a President; it is the inaction of this body.
Today, what my colleague is doing is saying: No, we will not have
business as usual. We will not just go about as if there is not a
cataclysmic war going on. We will not go about as if we are not
spending billions of dollars a week overseas that are desperately
needed resources here at home.
My colleague is saying: No, we are not going to let the Senate
operate as business as usual. We are going to force a debate and a
discussion and a vote because the Senate is abdicating its
responsibility--its constitutional responsibility--in that matters of
war should be decided here and not unilaterally by one person, by the
President of the United States. Explicitly stated in the Constitution
is that those powers lie with us.
What we have seen in the U.S. Senate is one of the worst examples in
the history of our country of a surrendering of our constitutional
responsibility, a surrendering of our power to a President who is
abusing it.
Now, those abuses are obvious. Those abuses are now seen forever for
the historical record in that this President told us we were going to
war because of multiple different reasons.
Regime change. That hasn't been accomplished. We now have a more
extreme regime.
Because of nuclear concerns. Well, the ultra-enriched fissile
material is still there in that country.
He said that we are going to war to protect civilians. He threatened
them: If you continue to kill your civilians who are protesting for
democracy, the
[[Page S1887]]
USA will jump in. Well, we now are seeing more civilian deaths,
including a school full of children, and a more secure regime.
He said his goals and his end in this--he stated them clearly: We
will attain unconditional surrender. Well, that is clearly not the case
when you are rushing off to Pakistan to try to negotiate an end.
This is a President who has failed in everything he has said about
this war that he wanted to achieve. If anything, he has shown the
Iranians that they have more power, that this regime has more leverage
against Americans.
First and foremost, they found out that--as we send multimillion-
dollar weapons into that country to bomb and to achieve an erosion of
their navy and their army, they have actually shown now that their low-
cost, inexpensive drones can still inflict maximum damage; that when
the President bragged about having control of the air, our planes were
still being shot down.
This is a President who now has seen Iran realize: Wait a minute, we
have tremendous leverage here; we can choke the Strait of Hormuz and
cause a global economic shock--the likes of which we have never seen
and an oil shock here at home that we have never had.
There is no way to look at this war as if there is any modicum of
success, when you have the Iranians holding more cards than they did at
the beginning of the war, still have their highly enriched uranium,
have a more extreme, entrenched regime, and have us rushing to try to
negotiate to get something out of this horrible ``excursion,'' as the
President has called it.
And not only has this cost tens of billions of dollars, but it has
cost American lives. We are seeing it already as, recently, a brave
U.S. servicemember, who survived a deadly attack by Iran in Kuwait,
spoke up. This attack killed 6 servicemembers and injured 20.
One of the injured soldiers stated that the story Secretary Hegseth
was telling the public that the building was ``fortified,'' and that
one of the drones just ``squeaked through'' is a falsehood, our
military servicemember said.
The servicemember said:
I want people to know the unit was unprepared to provide
any defense for itself. It was not a fortified position.
Now, you would think, if a U.S. member of our armed services is
shedding factual light on our unpreparedness for a war that our
President rushed us into--unprepared, no plan, no strategy--that the
one body that was responsible for providing check, balance, oversight,
and accountability, the U.S. Senate, wouldn't just sit back and do
nothing. But that is exactly what this body has done.
Republican leadership has done nothing to call for open hearings
where we could ask questions, which we can show those U.S.
servicemembers on the frontline that, while you are upholding your oath
to the Constitution, we will uphold ours. But we are not. They are
showing the ultimate fealty and loyalty to the Constitution, but we are
not. They are brave enough to confront the enemy, but we are not brave
enough to call questions to the President of the United States that
must be called.
Were you prepared? Under what grounds did you go? How much is this
costing the American taxpayer? And more.
We are not doing our job. We have abdicated our responsibility. We
have betrayed the Constitution, and yet we do nothing.
So what my colleague is doing today is forcing this debate, forcing
this vote. But dear God, this is a sad day, because the only thing that
we need to do to check the power of the Presidency when it is being
abused, when it is reckless, when the consequences of that recklessness
are higher prices for every American, when the consequences of that
recklessness is giving a dangerous Iran more power and more leverage,
when the consequences of that recklessness is the death of our
soldiers--what is this body doing? Nothing.
Republican leadership has called no open hearings, no sufficient
accountability, no substantive oversight. They are kowtowing to a
President and allowing him into a reckless war with grave consequences
and a shredding of our constitutional intent by our Founders.
Woe be to us at this 250th anniversary, where people will rush out
with flags, waving to celebrate our Constitution and our country. But
here, they are betraying it.
We have a job to do. It is clear in the Constitution. We have three
equal branches of government that function when they check each other.
They function when there is oversight. They function when there is
accountability. But when one branch fails to rise to the historic
urgency of this moment, that is when our Constitution and the people on
the frontlines--the people like this brave servicemember--are not only
being ill-served, but they are at graver danger.
Our Nation is in crisis right now. Our precious, scant resources are
not spent on healthcare, our children's education, science research,
but on this President's war. We have servicemembers in danger. The
least we should ask from this body is to do its job, uphold the
Constitution, and provide a real check and balance, real
accountability, and oversight to this President.
I thank my colleague for forcing this debate and forcing this vote.
This is yet, unfortunately, another sad day in history for this body.
This is the least we could do, but we should be--we must be--doing so
much more.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, we are here at this moment to defend the
Constitution, and the constitution of any nation is incredibly
important in creating the vision of the checks and balances between the
judiciary and the executive and the Congress.
But what really matters is whether the elected representatives
actually honor the Constitution. Do they follow the words and the
vision laid out?
You know, it is article I, section 8 that delineates powers, and in
the course of it, there are three megapowers assigned to Congress. And
one of those is the power of the purse: design programs, authorize
them, fund them.
It is a President's job to execute.
The second is the power of taxation, including the power of tariffs.
In fact, the first bill ever debated by the Senate was a tariff bill--3
weeks spent figuring out how they could reach agreement on what the
tariff would be on a keg of nails or a barrel of molasses.
And the third, perhaps the most consequential, is the power of war.
You know, it is just three words delineated--``The Congress shall have
[the] power,'' and it lays out these responsibilities, and then it
says: ``To declare War.'' Three words: ``To declare War.''
Now, if anyone thinks those were just some kind of bureaucratic
phrase, you are mistaken. Madison summed it up and pointed out that, in
the history of all governments, it is the executive, as the branch of
government, ``most interested in war, and most prone to it.'' And then
he summarized it this way: The Constitution ``has accordingly with
studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.''
So this is the moment we decide today: Are we going to actually
follow the document we took an oath to?
Now, some of my colleagues have said: Well, the President also has
the power, when there is an imminent threat to our national security,
to act.
And I don't dispute that. Think about planes on the way to bomb the
United States, or forces--a raid across the border on the verge of
coming across.
But that was not the situation 2 months ago. There was no imminent
threat of any kind, of any sort, anywhere near that exception.
Perhaps this war really is a poster child for why the wisdom of the
Founders was so important, because wars go off in directions you never
anticipate, because wars result in carnage--the death of Americans, the
injuries of Americans, the death of the combatants we oppose, the death
of civilians, and treasure vastly expended.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--those misbegotten foreign
adventures so poorly thought through--cost $8 trillion, the lives of
7,000 of our servicemembers, and 50,000 injured. That shows the
consequences of war. But in those two cases, Afghanistan and Iraq, at
least the President followed the Constitution, and this body, the
Senate of the United States of America, insisted that the President
follow the Constitution.
[[Page S1888]]
Where is that insistence right now? Where is the leadership of this
Chamber defending the constitutional role of the Senate? Why are they
not on the floor at this moment saying: We took an oath to the
Constitution, and, damn it, we are going to follow it.
This war is another misbegotten adventure. It did not benefit in any
way from a President's effort to persuade this Chamber or the Nation or
the House of Representatives that this strategy had merit.
Every expert said you can count on the Strait of Hormuz to be shut
down. Every expert said extracting the highly enriched uranium from
deep underground during the middle of war is a near impossibility. ``So
what is your mission?'' they asked.
But we didn't have those debates here in the Senate.
What has this war actually done? It has strengthened the Iranian
hardliners; that is not a win. It weakened the reformers; that is
certainly not in our interest. It failed to secure the stockpile of
highly enriched uranium; so that is a failure. It shredded our moral
leadership as champions of human rights; that is certainly a loss. It
enriched and emboldened Russia. We actually took off the sanctions,
allowing Russia to make even more money on the sale of its oil, at the
very time that they continue to attack Ukraine.
It raised the prices at the pump. Oregon is at over $5 a gallon of
gas. Maybe some of you are complaining about $4 a gallon. Well, it is
$5 in Oregon. And diesel is $6.
And the agricultural community is suffering from vastly higher prices
on fertilizer, and everyone is suffering from increased inflation on
everything that energy goes into.
And this battle has already cost us in blood and treasure. We already
have American servicemembers who have died. We already have more than
100 seriously injured. And it is already costing us directly a billion
to $2 billion a day.
Now, four times we have come to the floor and said the debate should
be now, because the Constitution is clear: There is no 60-day clause
when there is no imminent threat, in the law. And four times, it has
been a partisan vote.
There is nothing partisan about the Constitution. There is nothing
partisan about the oath we took to the Constitution. There is nothing
partisan at all about ensuring that the high risk of war is duly
debated in this Chamber and following the advice of our Founders,
including Jefferson and Madison.
But the President launched this war in violation of the Constitution,
and so now is the time we have to respond. And it is in the War Powers
Act that we can put up a resolution that says: Stop. You have violated
the law. Come and get the authorization the Constitution demands. Come
and do that.
That is what this vote is on today.
Not only did the President violate the Constitution, but he
threatened a bombing campaign that would have resulted in massive
civilian deaths. He threatened to bomb Iran ``back to the Stone Ages,''
and he said: ``A whole civilization will die tonight.'' He threatened
massive war crimes as part of his unregulated campaign, unauthorized by
this body.
So, to my colleagues, let's join together--united, Democrats and
Republicans. We should have done so when Trump launched this illegal,
unconstitutional war. We should have done so when 13 members died. We
should have done so when we bombed a school and at least 175 people
died--other reports have it much higher--and a whole lot of them
schoolgirls. We should have done it when the President threatened to
slaughter civilians and conduct war crimes overseas. We should have
done it because it is costing us billions of dollars a day. We should
have done it when the price at the pump shot through the roof. But most
of all, we should have done it because the Constitution says it is our
responsibility.
I recognize it is an uncomfortable vote because we are perhaps afraid
to take this consequential decision and get it wrong, so it is easier
to duck the responsibility we have under the Constitution, but duck we
must not because it is our responsibility; it is on our desk; it is
what the Constitution requires.
So let's honor that Constitution and vote yes and put up the stop
sign and say: Mr. President, if you wish to pursue a war against Iran,
then do what previous Presidents did in Afghanistan and Iraq and come
and make your case and try to persuade us that it is in the Nation's
interest. I think it is a very, very tough sell, which tells you a lot
about what is wrong with this effort and why the Constitution requires
that we weigh in.
I urge my colleagues: Do your job under the Constitution and vote aye
on the War Powers Resolution.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Mississippi.
Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I will speak against the War Powers
Resolution, but first I have a unanimous consent request to make, and
so I ask that I be recognized for that purpose.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is recognized for that purpose.
____________________