[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5841-5842]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        GOVERNMENT SPENDING BILL

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I join the majority leader in welcoming 
everybody back to the Senate after the 2-week recess. We have a lot of 
business to attend to this week. Most importantly, we have to pass a 
spending bill to keep the government open.
  So far, the discussions between our two sides have been constructive 
and are progressing nicely. Without interference, I believe our two 
parties can come together on an agreement by the end of the week. The 
four-corner negotiations--that is Leader McConnell, Speaker Ryan, 
Leader Pelosi, and I--have been going very well, and a monkey wrench 
was thrown into them.
  I will caution: If the administration insists on poison pill riders 
or extraneous funding requests, then our talks could get sidetracked, 
particularly if the administration demands funding for a border wall.
  Democrats have been long clear that the border wall is a nonstarter. 
More than a month ago, here on the floor, from this desk, I warned 
against including funding for the border wall in any must-pass 
government spending bill. If the administration insists on funding for 
a wall in this bill, it will endanger the prospects of a bill's passing 
and raise the prospects of a government shutdown because a border wall, 
we believe, is a pointless waste of taxpayer money for several reasons.
  First, President Trump promised that Mexico would pay for the wall, 
not American taxpayers. The idea that President Trump is fulfilling a 
campaign promise when he says that America will pay for the wall now 
and Mexico will pay it back later is untrue. He will only fulfill his 
campaign promise if he gets Mexico to pay for the wall now. That is No. 
1.
  Second, the Trump administration has not shown us any specific plans 
about how and where the wall will be built. How high will it be? How 
much will it cost? Where along the Rio Grande River will it be built? 
The President's own Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Zinke, said:

       The border is complicated, as far as building a physical 
     wall . . . the Rio Grande, what side of the river are you 
     going to put the wall? We're not going to put it on our side 
     and cede the river to Mexico. And we're probably not going to 
     put it in the middle of the river.

  Zinke said it well: How, where, when, and how many dollars is this 
wall going to cost? Before rushing into it, we ought to see some real 
plans, not just talk.
  Third, the cost of the wall is staggering. Some estimates peg it as 
high as $50 billion. That money could be spent a lot better elsewhere 
on things like infrastructure and education. For example, with $50 
billion, we could connect more than 98 percent of Americans to high-
speed internet, more than double the Federal funding for roads and 
bridges across our country, and update every VA building listed in the 
VA's long-range strategic capital plan. The money would be better spent 
elsewhere.
  Fourth, there are much better ways to protect our borders--with 
drones, fences, and other more cost-effective measures. The President 
said the wall is needed to stop the flow of drugs, but drugs come into 
our country in several ways, including by water, through tunnels, and 
snuck in by cars and trucks. We have all seen the pictures on TV where 
they hide them in the carburetor of the car, and no one finds them.
  A huge, expensive wall will still have to have border crossings for 
vehicles. A huge, expensive wall could still have tunnels dug beneath 
it. In reality, a combination of drones and fencing and other more 
sophisticated means would be a much more effective way to secure the 
border.
  Fifth, in order to build the wall, the President--the Federal 
Government--would need to take private land, using eminent domain from 
thousands of law-abiding Americans. Much of the land on the border is 
privately owned. It is not owned by the Federal Government. Eminent 
domain? A lot of people on that side of the aisle don't like it, and we 
all know it would take a very long time to get it done.
  For those reasons, it is not just Democrats who oppose the wall, many 
Republicans oppose the wall. According to a Wall Street Journal survey: 
``Not a single member of Congress who represents the territory on the 
southwest border said they support President Trump's request for $1.4 
billion to begin construction of his promised wall.'' That includes my 
friends Senators Cornyn, Cruz, McCain, and Flake.
  For the very same reasons, the American people don't support the idea 
of a border wall by almost a 2-to-1 margin. A recent Quinnipiac poll 
found that 64 percent of Americans oppose a wall on the border with 
Mexico, versus only 33 percent who favor it, and that poll didn't even 
include the fact that Mexico would not be paying for it under the 
President's plan.
  Now, I say to my colleagues and to President Trump, we Democrats 
don't mind having a debate on the wall in regular order. We don't think 
it would pass, given the amount of opposition on both sides, but 
certainly a proposal with as many flaws as this one shouldn't be the 
thing the administration uses to hold the government hostage and 
certainly shouldn't be pushed through without debate, without regular 
order, without answers to these questions.

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