[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Pages 1519-1522]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY FUNDING

  Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise today because I wish to speak about 
the importance of this DHS funding bill that is going to be before the 
body in the coming days. In particular, I wish to emphasize what I 
think is the important imperative that we pass what we are calling a 
clean bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the 
remainder of fiscal year 2015 through the end of September. That clean 
bill would be a bill that would fund homeland security without 
attaching additional items to it concerning immigration.
  The support of this legislation was an initiative we were together 
on. We negotiated in December as part of a budget process by leaders of 
both parties in both Chambers, and the funding for DHS would have been 
an increase to help protect our borders and help protect our security 
by about $1.2 billion above the enacted level for fiscal year 2014. But 
at the end of the year the decision was made by the House to not fund 
that piece and leave it separately and that is why we are now talking 
about whether we will fund the Nation's homeland security efforts and 
under what circumstances.
  All 45 Members on the Democratic side, save only Senator Reid, have 
written a letter saying let's make sure we fund DHS at the level we 
have already agreed to between the Houses. Then, let's not play 
politics over immigration issues; let's take up immigration separately. 
But the House bill that has been sent to us includes measures to begin 
to block or unwind actions taken by the President on immigration, and 
those complicate what all should agree is a national imperative, which 
is the need to fund homeland security. If we don't pass such a bill, 
that funding will expire on February 28.

[[Page 1520]]

  I don't need to explain too much why homeland security funding is 
important, but let me make a few points. This Department was created 
after the attacks of 9/11, and its stated mission--while it employs an 
awful lot of people and does many complicated things, the mission is 
quite simple--let's keep our country safe, secure, and resilient 
against terrorism and other hazards. We see every day the kinds of 
terrorism hazards we are dealing with. The horrible shooting in Paris a 
few weeks ago and the shooting in Quebec a few months ago remind us of 
the dangers of terrorism, and now that we are in a war against ISIL--a 
jihadist terrorist enemy that has promised to carry out attacks on the 
United States--we should be very concerned about the mission the DHS 
performs and the need to provide funding.
  The men and women who work for the DHS are quite a wide swath of our 
Federal employees. They are the TSA personnel who protect our 
transportation system, the Border Patrol agents who serve on our 
Nation's front lines, Customs officials who oversee the entrance of 
nearly 1 million visitors per day who come to the United States, and we 
need Customs agents to help process those visitors. Our DHS folks 
include disaster specialists--people who respond to hurricanes and 
other emergencies. Our Coast Guard, our Secret Service, and many of our 
cyber security professionals all work for the DHS and they work hard 
every day to carry out that mission of keeping our Nation safe.
  Funding DHS is not just critical to the Nation's security, it is also 
critical to the economy because DHS is the third largest agency in the 
Federal Government by the number of employees. The impact of any 
shutdown or cessation of funding would reverberate through the country, 
from our Southwest border to our Nation's ports to every international 
airport that brings in either foreign commerce or foreign visitors who 
want to come and be tourists in our country.
  Many DHS employees, as the Presiding Officer knows, call Virginia 
home, and a shutdown would impact their lives and would make it 
difficult for them to plan not only for their immediate needs but for 
an unknown period of time.
  So as we are facing threats--and I think we all would agree--while we 
sometimes have differences of opinion about how to deal with threats, I 
think everybody in this body would acknowledge that the threats we are 
dealing with as a nation are not shrinking, they are growing. The 
challenges we are facing are not getting fewer in number, they are 
getting greater in number. To respond to threats, the DHS not only 
needs a good funding bill at an appropriate level, which we have 
already agreed to, but they need financial certainty and the 
flexibility to direct its resources as they can.
  Let me give one interesting recent example of how DHS employees have 
been very important in Virginia, and how those serving in Virginia have 
performed a critical role for the Nation.
  We saw a crisis spring up in 2014 that many of us hadn't paid too 
much attention to before, and that is the spread of the Ebola virus in 
Africa. That epidemic that began in 2014 is the largest in history for 
this kind of virus and it had a significant impact on many West African 
countries. There were more than 22,000 cases as of January 30, 2015.
  One of the great things is whenever there is a challenge such as 
this, the nations of the world turn to the United States and they ask 
for our help. Many parts of our government responded. We deployed 
military and health professionals to Africa to try to battle the 
disease there, but we have also deployed our DHS personnel right here 
at home to keep us safe. As part of this strategy to stop the spread of 
Ebola, DHS announced in October that five U.S. airports would begin an 
advanced screening process for Ebola, and one of those airports is in 
Virginia, and that is Dulles airport. Shortly after, DHS announced that 
all travelers from Ebola-affected countries would have to enter the 
United States from one of these five airports.
  So using existing resources--using existing resources because we 
didn't have an Ebola line item in the 2014 budget; this is an emergency 
that came up--but with existing resources, the DHS employees at Dulles 
were charged with supervising the entire Ebola screening process, 
including administering questionnaires, taking travelers' temperatures, 
and referring potentially infected people to the Centers for Disease 
Control, while also doing all of their regular duties. These officers 
in Virginia have gone above and beyond their mission for the sake of 
keeping every American safe.
  Since this advanced screening began in October, CBP officers at 
Dulles have interviewed more than 2,000 visitors to the United States 
from African countries and they have referred more than 140 people to 
the CDC. As a result of their work and the work of their colleagues and 
their ability to react to this emerging threat, the United States has 
only seen two diagnosed cases of Ebola since advanced screening began 
at our airports, and both patients recovered.
  This should be viewed as a huge success. Remember how worried we all 
were--how worried I was--when this was happening in September and 
October. Our DHS employees have gone the extra mile to keep us safe.
  This is the kind of mission that we call upon our DHS employees to 
carry out for our security. It has nothing to do with congressional 
debates about immigration policy, but it has everything to do with 
doing the stated mission of keeping us safe. To limit DHS's access to 
resources by shutting down the agency or passing another continuing 
resolution that would keep them running on auto pilot--sort of driving 
by looking in the rearview mirror rather than looking through the 
windshield of the challenges to come--would damage the ability of DHS 
to deal with growing threats.
  I understand the message from the House. We have agreed on the right 
funding level for DHS. They are saying, however, that we will only fund 
DHS, we will only fund the guys who are protecting us from ISIL, or 
protecting us from Ebola, or protecting our ports from nuclear material 
being shipped--we will only fund it if we can get an agreement to 
change policies enacted by the President with immigration. They are 
threatening to stop funding DHS actions unless we reverse the 
President's actions on immigration--actions that, in my view, are 
already helping the economy by bringing families out of the shadows to 
become productive, taxpaying members of our communities.
  While I strongly support the President's immigration actions--and 
most of them I voted for as part of the Senate's comprehensive 
immigration reform bill that we passed in June of 2013--I can 
understand there might be Members of the House who may not like those 
actions. They may want to do something different. And the great thing 
is they have an ability to do something different. The House, with a 
significant Republican majority, can pass their own immigration reform 
bill. They can retract the President's actions. They can express what 
they want to do about immigration reform. They can pass that bill just 
as they passed the DHS funding bill, and send it over to the Senate, 
and we can have a debate about immigration reform. But we can have that 
debate without holding hostage the funding of the third largest agency 
in government, without holding hostage the work that agency does every 
day to keep us safe.
  I think the good news in all of this is in both the House and Senate 
there are people who think the immigration system is broken, the 
immigration system needs to be fixed, and we ought to have a dialogue 
to do it. Certainly, when the Senate passed an immigration reform bill 
in June of 2013--nearly 2 years ago--and we sent it to the House, we 
knew the House was not going to adopt what the Senate passed without 
changing anything. We were trying to start a dialogue where the House 
could pass their own bill and then we could sit down in conference and 
work out a solution to an immigration system that we all think is 
broken. That is what we should be doing as responsible legislators--
fixing an immigration system,

[[Page 1521]]

and even those of us who have different views, getting those views on 
the table and finding a compromise. It is the wrong thing to do to try 
to hold up funding for the third largest agency in government--this 
agency that is keeping us safe in so many ways all over this country 
every day--to try to reverse actions the President took that are well 
within his legal authority.
  So I am going to continue to support the President's Executive 
actions. I am going to continue to encourage the House and others, if 
they have different ideas about immigration reform, to pass a bill, put 
their ideas on the table and we will talk about them. But it is wrong 
to try to hold up protecting our Nation's security as a punishment to 
the President for using Executive action that was within his legal 
power to make. Since we have the complete ability to have a discussion 
about immigration, let's do it.
  I will conclude and say this, although I wish I didn't have to--and 
particularly looking at these young pages who are sitting in front of 
me--it is a dangerous world out there. For the sake of these youngsters 
and my own kids, I wish it was getting less dangerous. I have a son in 
the military. I wish it was getting less dangerous, but it is not. It 
is getting more dangerous. The kinds of threats we have to face abroad 
and at home are tough, challenging, difficult threats. We have 
professionals on the front line every day, many of whom are risking 
their lives for us, to try to stop these threats. Let's not starve 
their work. Let's not hamper their work. Let's not make them face the 
threat of a shutdown or losing their salary or losing their livelihood 
while we wait for Congress to have a meaningful debate about 
immigration.
  I appreciate the opportunity to offer those thoughts and to urge 
funding for a clean DHS bill.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lankford). The Senator from Utah.
  Mr. LEE. Mr. President, tomorrow afternoon the Senate will vote to 
begin consideration of the bill called H.R. 240. This is a bill that 
authorizes funding for the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS. It 
would fund DHS through September of this year. This, of course, is a 
procedural vote we have scheduled for tomorrow, not a substantive one. 
The only question on the table, the sole question in connection with 
this particular vote, will be whether the Senate is ready to begin 
voting and debating on H.R. 240.
  I am ready--I am eager, in fact--to begin this debate. It does need 
to begin. That is what this vote is about. Not just because we have 
only 25 days before the current budget authority for DHS expires but 
also because this debate will finally allow the American people to see 
where their elected representatives, right here in the U.S. Senate, 
stand on President Obama's recent Executive action on immigration.
  The legislature is the only lawmaking branch within our Federal 
Government because it is the only deliberative branch in our 
government. Before Congress enacts a piece of legislation--before it 
makes a new piece of law--we first debate the merits of that 
legislation--weighing the various pros and cons of each proposal in a 
candid and transparent discussion, and allowing the various sides of 
the issue to make their case.
  Open, robust debate is not merely incidental to the lawmaking process 
that goes on here, it is the essence of that lawmaking process. It is 
at the very heart, the very center, the very core of this process that 
we hold near and dear and was established by our 227-year-old founding 
document. It is the only way for Members of Congress to fully explore 
the cost and consequences of a particular policy under consideration. 
It is the only way for the American people to know exactly where their 
elected officials stand on an issue; and, just as importantly, why they 
stand where they stand.
  When the President of the United States announced in November of last 
year he was singlehandedly going to rewrite our immigration laws, in 
effect, he short-circuited this process of debate and of deliberation 
that is at the very heart of our constitutional lawmaking process.
  His announcement showed us what it looks like when one person ignores 
the limits of his office and claims the power to change the law all on 
his own, just as an expression of his own unilateral will.
  Policies are written behind closed doors, in consultation with 
lawyers and special-interest groups, rather than the American people. 
The law is pronounced from behind a podium as a fait accompli rather 
than discussed and debated in an open, transparent, fair contest of 
ideas and open to inspection by 300 million Americans who will be 
affected by these decisions.
  This is not how our Republic works. It is not what the American 
people expect from their elected officials in Washington, DC. Indeed, 
poll after poll shows most people disapprove of the President's 
Executive action on immigration--that same action taken just this last 
November. Even those who agree with the President on policy grounds, 
even those who think the President's amnesty action would be the kind 
of policy they would prefer, even those people disagree with the 
President on the process because the American people understand that 
the process does matter. Especially among those people who have taken 
an oath to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United 
States--that same document that prescribes the formula by which our 
laws are made.
  According to one poll, when asked if the President should ``sidestep 
Congress and act on his own using Executive orders,'' only 22 percent 
of the public said he should--22 percent. It is hardly a rousing 
mandate from the American people. In other words, the American people 
know what our President seems to have forgotten: that in a 
constitutional republic the ends don't justify the means.
  The American people oppose lawmaking by fiat not out of some abstract 
loyalty to the abstract concept of separation of powers. No, that is 
not why. Rather, they understand quite intuitively that when a 
President sidesteps Congress and avoids open, robust debate on a 
particular policy, it is probably because the public isn't likely to 
accept and isn't likely to like the substance of that policy. 
Otherwise, he wouldn't need to take this kind of action. Otherwise, he 
could do it through the people's duly elected representatives who have 
been put in office specifically for the purpose of making law through 
this open, deliberative, transparent process.
  This is certainly what we have seen in the aftermath of the 
President's Executive order on immigration. The more the people 
discover about the content and about the consequences of his policy, 
the less they like it. For instance, the President claimed that his 
Executive order would honor the golden rule of American exceptionalism: 
If you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead.
  We now know his plan subverts this very basic fundamental bargain by 
paving a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants who have broken 
the rules and violated the law, and by granting them work permits and 
benefits such as Social Security and Medicare.
  Likewise, we were told the President's Executive order would make our 
immigration system more fair and more functional, more accessible for 
everyone. But we now know his plan will only exacerbate the problems in 
our labor market for American workers by giving more power and more 
money to the dysfunctional U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 
or USCIS. This is the agency within the Department of Homeland Security 
that was recently reported to have given over 900,000 work permits to 
illegal immigrants since 2009. We know that unless we do something to 
stop it, unless we do something to reach back and take back our 
constitutional privilege, our institutional privilege as the lawmaking 
branch of the Federal Government, the President's Executive order will 
go into effect at a time when all net job growth in our economy since 
2007 has gone to immigrants.
  These are the kinds of facts and figures that ought to inform the 
legislative process and ought to not be treated as some sort of 
afterthought. These

[[Page 1522]]

are not, coincidentally, exactly the kinds of observations, the kinds 
of facts and figures, the kinds of details that could have been and 
should have been and, undoubtedly, inevitably would have been explored 
had this policy been implemented through the constitutionally 
prescribed formula.
  Last November the President may have chosen to ignore these facts and 
to circumvent debate altogether, but that doesn't mean we have to 
respond in kind. That certainly doesn't mean we have to capitulate and 
say, okay, the way he wants to do it is fine. It is not constitutional. 
It is not legal. It is not what the American people want, but we just 
have to accept it. No. On the contrary, I believe we have not just a 
right but we have a duty, we have an affirmative obligation to make 
every effort to ensure lawmaking by edict does not become the new 
normal in this country. Not now, not ever, not in the United States of 
America.
  Beginning debate on this bill will give us the opportunity to do just 
that, to make sure this never becomes the new normal. Some have said we 
shouldn't be debating the President's Executive action on immigration 
right now. They say it has nothing to do with funding the operations of 
the Department of Homeland Security. To this I have a very simple 
reply: If not now, when? If we are not going to do it right now, when 
are we going to do it? When will there be a better time? When will 
there be any adequate time for us to respond to this constitutional 
overreach, this grave injustice? If we don't debate the legality of the 
President's Executive orders when we are in the very process of 
authorizing money to the Department that is tasked with carrying out 
those very orders, then when exactly will we have that debate?
  The truth is now is the perfect time because it is the only time. It 
is the only time when we can do this. It is the only time for us to 
have a meaningful debate on the President's Executive action on 
immigration.
  At any other point our debate is more or less hypothetical. Now is 
the time, when we are exercising our constitutional power of the purse, 
that our debate has consequences, real consequences. They are 
consequences the American people can see and feel, consequences that 
will inure to the betterment or the detriment of the American people. 
Now is the time when this needs to be debated.
  The power of the purse is the power to allocate money to fund 
government operations as well as the power to withhold money from 
improper or illegitimate government operations. It is what enables 
Congress--and only Congress, uniquely Congress--to reform dysfunctional 
government.
  We like to talk about the power of the purse as a tool that Congress 
can use, use as a check and a balance against the excesses of an 
overbearing President. That is absolutely true. There is no doubt about 
it. But first and foremost, it is a tool for Members of Congress 
themselves to represent the interests of our constituents and to fix 
the very things that are broken within our government.
  Our Constitution grants the legislative branch--this branch, 
Congress--the power of the purse not simply to achieve some abstract 
equilibrium or balance of power, but to compel the national government 
to truly represent the American people and to be faithful stewards of 
taxpayer funds.
  At the end of November of last year, President Obama made his choice. 
It was an unfortunate choice; it was a wrong choice. It was a choice 
not backed up by law, not backed up by the U.S. Constitution, and 
flatly inconsistent with the same. President Obama made his choice in 
November. Now it is time for us to make ours.
  The President chose to sidestep Congress, and in the process to avoid 
debate and to rewrite our immigration laws on his own. Now we must 
decide: Are we going to be a deliberative body or are we going to be a 
rubberstamp for the President's agenda, whoever the President is 
happens to be in power, whether it is now or years from now? Are we 
going to be that kind of legislative body that just rubberstamps what 
the President does, or are we going to exercise our prerogative as an 
independent coordinate branch of this government to make sure our laws 
are faithfully and carefully executed in a manner consistent not only 
with the wishes of the people but also with the formula prescribed by 
the Constitution? Are we going to acquiesce to an Executive who 
disregards the boundaries of his office, or are we going to stand up 
for the rule of law and for the will of the American people?
  I choose the latter. I urge my colleagues to choose the latter. I 
hope my colleagues will join me in voting to at least begin debate on 
H.R. 240. This is a debate the American people have been waiting for 
Congress to have for far too long. If not now, when? The time is now. 
We need to get on this bill. We need to debate it. We need to allow our 
constituents to be heard.
  The American people have a will, and that will is expressed though 
regular elections. Those elections choose those people who occupy seats 
in this Chamber and in the House of Representatives. We must represent 
them. We must do so in a manner fully consistent with the oath that 
every one of us has taken as required by article VI of the 
Constitution. We can begin to do that by voting to proceed to H.R. 240 
tomorrow.
  I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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