Making further continuing appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for fiscal year 2019, and for other purposes.

Madam President, as you know, I seldom rise on this floor to contradict somebody on the other side. Over the years, I have worked very hard to work in a bipartisan way with the Presiding Officer and with my Republican colleagues, but these crocodile tears that the Senator from Texas is crying for the first responders are too hard for me to take.

They are too hard for me to take because when the Senator from Texas shut this government down in 2013, my State was flooded. It was under water. People were killed. People's houses were destroyed. Their small businesses were ruined forever. Because of the Senator from Texas, this government was shut down for politics.

He surfed to a second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses but was of no help to the first responders, to the teachers, and to the students whose schools were closed with a Federal Government that was shut down because of the junior Senator from Texas.

It is his business--not my business--why he supports a President who wants to erect a medieval barrier on the border of Texas, who wants to use eminent domain to build that wall, and who wants to declare an unconstitutional emergency to build that wall. That is the business of the Senator from Texas.

I can assure you that in Colorado if a President said that he was going to use eminent domain to erect a barrier across the State of Colorado, across the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and he was going to steal the property of our farmers and ranchers to build his medieval wall, there wouldn't be an elected leader from our State who would support that idea.

That comes to my final point--how ludicrous it is that this government is shut down over a promise the President of the United States couldn't keep and that America is not interested in having him keep. This idea that he was going to build a medieval wall across the southern border of Texas, taking it from the farmers and ranchers who were there, and have the Mexicans pay for it isn't true. That is why we are here, because he is now saying the taxpayers have to pay for it. That is not what he said during his campaign.

Over and over he said that Mexico would pay for the wall--over and over again.

I was going to talk about what he said about the junior Senator's father, but I am going to let that alone. It was after that.

Now we are here with the government shut down over his broken promise, while the Chinese are landing spacecraft on the dark side of the moon. That is what they are doing, not to mention what they are doing in Latin America and with their One Belt, One Road Initiative in Asia. That is what they are doing while we are shut down over a promise he never thought he could keep and didn't keep.

Finally, this idea that my colleague from Texas--and I am sorry to say this because I respect him. He is obviously a very intelligent person, but this idea that Democrats are for open borders is gibberish, and it is proven by what the Senator from Louisiana said, which is that time after time, we have supported real border security, not a wall that Mexico pays for that gets you attention at campaign rallies from some people in America and that gets talked about on FOX News at night.

In 2013, the Senator from Texas didn't support it. I did. In 2013, we passed a bill here in a bipartisan way. It got 68 votes. It had $46 billion for border security in it--$46 billion, not $5 billion for his rinky-dink wall that he is talking about building. There was $46 billion for border security. To be precise about it, it had 350 miles of what the President now refers to as steel slats.

By the way, America, do you hear him not calling it a wall anymore?

Now it is steel slats. Now it is a border barrier. There were 350 miles of so-called steel slats in that bill.

Do you know what else was in that bill? I think the Presiding Officer voted for that bill. In that bill, we doubled the number of border security agents on the border. They could practically hold hands on that border. There were so many border security agents in that bill. We had billions of dollars of drone technology so that we could learn what we have learned in Afghanistan and in other places, to see every single inch of that border--every inch.

We had internal security in that bill so that small businesses, farmers, and ranchers don't have to be the immigration police, and so that, finally, in America we could actually know who came here legally on a visa but overstayed their visa.

Forty percent of the people in this country who are undocumented are here because they came legally and overstayed. We still can't do that in America because that bill passed the Senate, but it couldn't get a vote in the House because of the stupidest rule ever created, called the Hastert rule, named after somebody who is in prison. That rule has allowed a minority of tyrants in the Congress to bring a Democratic President low--President Obama, whom they didn't let do anything--to ruin the speakership of John Boehner, and to allow Paul Ryan to almost accomplish nothing while he was Speaker, except leaving this place in a government shutdown.

The so-called Freedom Caucus has had a veto around this place for 10 years and completely distorted the Republican Party here, if I do say so myself. That may sound presumptuous, but I know a lot of Republicans in Colorado who don't agree with almost anything or anything that the Freedom Caucus has stood for. Yet they have had a veto on good, bipartisan legislation passed by the U.S. Senate.

So I am not going to stand here and take it from somebody who has shut down the government while my State was flooded or from a President who says that he wants $5 billion to build some antiquated, medieval wall, which he said Mexico would pay for, when I helped write and voted for a bill that actually would have secured the border of the United States of America, that would have secured our internal defenses as well.

This is a joke, and the fact that it consumes the cable networks all night, every night, and all the rest of it--this government should be open. We can debate whatever it is we want to debate.

Do you think the Chinese don't know that we can't land a spaceship on the dark side of the moon? Do you think the Russians don't know that for the first time since John Glenn was sent up to orbit this planet, America cannot put a person into space without asking the Russians to do it? Do you think the rest of the world doesn't know that we are not investing in our infrastructure; that we are not investing in the young generation of Americans; that we are willing to lose the race for artificial intelligence to the Chinese; that we are going to break all of our longstanding alliances since World War II at a moment when China is rising; that China's GDP has quadrupled since 2001, tripled since 2003, doubled since 2009? Do we think that no one in the rest of the world knows all of that about us?

We should reopen this government today. We should reopen it today. Then, what I hope much more than that is that we actually come together to figure out how we are going to govern this country again and stop playing petty, partisan politics, which is going to do nothing to educate the next generation of Americans, which is going to do nothing to fix the fiscal condition of this country.

For 10 years--for 10 years, I have heard the junior Senator from Texas

and I have heard the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives talk about how important it is to get the fiscal condition of our government fixed. In fact, that has been the pretext for shutdowns and for fiscal cliffs and for all of this stuff that does nothing but denigrate our democratic Republic.

Now, for the first time almost in history--it happened once before during the Vietnam war--we are actually having our deficit shooting through the roof while unemployment has fallen. It has never happened before. These are the people who called Barack Obama a Bolshevik and a socialist at the depths of the recession, when we had a 10-percent unemployment rate, and didn't lift a finger to do anything. They have now given us a fiscal condition where our deficit is going up while our unemployment rate is falling. Do you know how hard it is to accomplish that? Do you know how irresponsible you would have to be to accomplish that? Yet that is what has been accomplished.

When I was first here--it was actually a little after I was first here--I used to walk through Denver International Airport, which we are very proud of in Colorado. By the way, it is the most recent airport that has been constructed in America. While we have been closed, other airports around the world--new airports have been opened just while we have been closed.

Denver International Airport is the most recent airport in the country to be opened. It was opened 25 years ago--a quarter of a century ago--and during moments like those when the Senator from Texas shut down the government while Colorado was underneath floods and people had lost all of the things I talked about earlier--their houses, their jobs, and their lives--I used to want to walk through that airport with a paper bag over my head because I was so embarrassed to be part of this.

I often wondered why anyone in their right mind would want to work in a place that has a 9-percent approval rating. In fact, I brought a chart--two charts--one day to the floor, one that showed we hadn't always had a 9-percent approval rating, to remind people how far we had fallen in the public's estimation over the time that the Senator from Texas and I have been here. Then I brought out another chart that looked at who else has a 9-percent approval rating. I can't remember all--it has sort of been lost in the mist of time--but I do remember that the IRS had a 40-percent approval rating; there was an actress who had a 13-percent approval rating; more people wanted America to be a Communist country--11 percent--than approved of this Congress; and Fidel Castro had a 5-percent approval rating, which was lower than our 9-percent approval rating. He was the only one who had a lower rating than that.

So my question, often, was this: Why would anybody want to work in a place that has such a low approval rating, and why would they want to behave in a way that only made matters worse?

I am sorry to say this, but there is an answer. If you think you have been sent here to dismantle the Federal Government--and I have lots of problems with this Federal Government. I think it does a lot of things very well, and, as a westerner, I certainly believe we need to not be in the business of defending bad government. We need to be improving the government. But if you think your job is to dismantle it--as the Freedom Caucus does, in my view--then a 9-percent approval rating suits you just fine because you get to go home and say ``See how terrible all of those guys are? See what idiots all of those guys are?'' while you are taking your pay while the Federal workers are not getting paid, while you are keeping your job while they are losing their job.

There has been an effort not just to dismantle the Federal Government but to separate it from the American people, to claim that it is someone else's or that it is corrupt. In many ways, I think it is; I believe it is. I believe this place is one of the most corrupt parts of the whole thing. But because it is corrupt or because it can't get its act together or because it is too far away from the people or, I think I would say, because it is populated by a bunch of self-interested politicians who don't care about the priorities of the American people--whatever the reason is, it is not separate. It is not separate. The reason that is important is that we live in a democratic Republic, and the Founders of this country did two things that had never happened in human history: They led a successful armed insurrection against a colonial power in one generation, and they formed a democratic Republic whose Constitution was ratified by the people who would live under it.

What they knew because they were enlightened thinkers--or I should say not what they knew but what they believed because they had only bad examples from which to draw when they sat there in Philadelphia writing that Constitution--but what they knew was that in a Republic, we would have disagreements. That was their expectation, and their belief was that out of those disagreements we would--and, by the way, they knew we would have disagreements because they had disagreements, and they had failed on some very important things. It has to be said. They perpetuated human slavery because they couldn't come to an agreement about that, and other people, whom I think of as Founders--just as important, just as significant as those Founders--ended the enslavement of human beings in America and did other important things, such as make sure my daughters had the right to vote. Those people also are Founders. But what they believed at their core was that through our disagreements, we would forge more imaginative and more durable solutions than any King or tyrant could come up with on their own. That was their belief. That was their expectation.

I would say that our country, in many ways, has eclipsed any expectation they ever had of what America would become. For the moment, we are the richest country in the world. We have the greatest capacity for self-defense of any human population in the history of the world. We are far more democratic and far more free, with all of our imperfections, than they would have ever imagined and probably than most of them would have ever wanted. We are the longest lived democracy in human history. But, for some reason, there is a generation of politicians in America today who don't think it is necessary to live up to the standard that they set and the standard lots of other people have set from the founding of our country 230 years ago until today.

I don't even know what day it is anymore of this record-long shutdown, but the pretext for it is an invention. It is a creation of something in the President's mind. It was something we have learned from reading the press that was a mnemonic device used during the campaign to remind him to talk about immigration in an effort to divide Americans from one another instead of an effort to bring us together, in an effort to turn what just 3 years ago was a bipartisan issue in the Senate--securing our southern border with $46 billion--into a cudgel to be wielded at campaign rallies.

In any case, the least we could do while we have these shabby disagreements that are not worthy of our predecessors, that are not worthy of the State I represent--which is one-third Democratic, one- third Republican, and one-third Independent--that are threatening to make our generation the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to the people coming after us, a generation of politicians who are openly suggesting that America's role in the world should be diminished--the least we could do is reopen our government and stop pursuing this self-inflicted harm that it creates in having hundreds of thousands of Federal workers out of work and not being paid, not able to support their families while we continue to stand on this floor, having mindless arguments that are going to do nothing to advance the future of our country.

We shouldn't shut the government down, as it has been in this case, for a campaign promise the President, I am sure, knew he could never keep.

With that, I yield floor.

I thank the Senator from Texas for having this conversation. I don't think I was yelling--but I will go watch the tape--or screaming at you. I also have never called anybody on this floor a liar, as you did, in 2015. I get the theatrics of all of this.

I guess I want to say two things. One, I appreciate the fact that you, at least, seem to be accepting the fact that every Democrat who is here, on that immigration bill in 2013, voted for it--voted for the 350 miles of wall you are talking about. You didn't vote for that bill or the Senator from Texas didn't vote for that bill, and I assume you had your reasons.

By the way, I wouldn't presume to think what the Senator would think about as a person from a border State. My State is not far from the border. We see the effects for ill and for good of immigration in my State.

I do know this. There were two Senators from a border State--the border State of Arizona--who were on that Gang of 8 bill, with whom I sat, day after day, negotiating the provisions for months. They didn't have to just vote for the bill or against it, but they had to go home to Arizona--John McCain and Jeff Flake did--and explain why they supported it and why it was the right thing to do for Arizona, which, as the Senator from Texas knows, is a border State.

The idea that there is a problem to be solved here because Democrats in this Chamber are for open borders is false, as the Senator indicated. The second point is, the Senator from Texas referenced Ben Franklin.

Ben Franklin was standing outside the steps of Constitution Hall, and somebody who was passing by--this is while they were writing the Constitution--said: Mr. Franklin, what kind of government are you creating--a monarchy or a republic?

That was the question. As Senator Cruz has said, his answer was ``a Republic, if you can keep it''--if you can keep it. His answer was not ``a Republic''; it was ``a Republic, if you can keep it,'' because he knew that the words written in the Constitution weren't going to preserve themselves, that this exercise in democratic self-government, a democratic republic, would require generations of women and men--not just in this Chamber but as citizens and I would say as founders--to keep the Republic they created.

That is what is at stake here. That is what is at stake when the government has been shut down for politics, when we have a President who doesn't believe in the rule of law, who attacks judges whose decisions he disagrees with, who attacks the free press, who have that freedom because of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

It is that Republic which is at risk when we are not educating the next generation of Americans, when we are not investing in our infrastructure, when we have the unbelievable and unprecedented fiscal hypocrisy that has resulted in a ballooning deficit while the unemployment rate is going down. It is a farce. It is a farce.

My closing word is to say that I will work with anybody--including the Senator from Texas, if he will work with me--to put this sorry episode behind us. And I don't mean this sorry episode of this government shutdown, although that is a sorry and pathetic episode, but this episode of American political history where we have done so little for the next generation of Americans and done almost nothing to honor the legacy of our parents and grandparents and the people who came before them. That would be worth doing around this place before we all die.

With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I first want to make a single declarative sentence:

There is no one in this body who is for open borders.

One of the most troublesome aspects of this debate that has been framed, particularly by this administration, is that you are either for the wall or for open borders. That is not true. In 2013, two-thirds of us voted for a very strong border security provision as part of the comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed this body--as I say, by two-thirds. It was never taken up in the House. Had it been taken up in the House, it likely would have passed; the President would have signed it; and a lot of these issues would have been behind us.

All of us--everyone here on both sides of the aisle--support border security. What we support is cost-effective, sensible border security, not border security that really doesn't fit the nature of the problem we face and that so far, anyway, is undefined in terms of location, design, cost, and all of the other characteristics of any major construction project that is submitted to this Congress for its approval.

Again, one of the problems with this whole discussion is what does the President mean when he says ``wall''? Is it 30 feet high? Is it 20 feet high? Is it steel? Is it concrete? This has evolved over time. The biggest question is where and how long. Is he talking about a wall that extends from the Gulf of Mexico to Southern California, to the Pacific Ocean? That is about 2,000 miles. Is that what he is talking about? If so, we should know that. Then we can debate it as it relates to other potential options for securing the border along that distance.

It also should be noted that there already is a wall, by anybody's definition, along portions of that border. I have seen it. I have been to McAllen, TX, where the President was yesterday, and I have seen the wall--a wall. Yet the questions are, How big is it? Where is it going to go? How is it going to be designed and paid for?

One of the reasons the wall is really not the right solution for the current problems of immigration starts with the fact that about 50 percent of the illegal immigrants--of the undocumented immigrants--in this country today are here on overstayed legal visas. A wall has nothing to do with these people. These are people who came in through airports and all other ports of entry all over the country into the United States, and 50 percent are here on overstayed visas. The wall has zero effect on that issue.

The other principal issue we are facing at the wall--and this has also been confused in the news coverage of the caravans and in the fear that has been spread--is that the vast majority of the people who come to the border today are not looking to sneak across; they are looking for a port of entry at which to give themselves up as asylum seekers. They are not illegal immigrants; they are availing themselves of American law. Once they get to this country, with their having credible fears of prosecution or of persecution or of danger in their home countries, they have a right to have it be determined whether they are legitimate asylum seekers.

That is who we are dealing with. That is who all of those people are. When you see the pictures of the caravans, they are not headed for a blank place in the Arizona desert. They want to go. They want to be captured. They want to be taken into custody. Then they can have their asylum claims adjudicated. The wall has nothing to do with them. The wall is a response to a problem that is decades old but that has grossly, drastically diminished over the last 10 or 15 years. For the problem of people literally sneaking across the border--entering the country illegally--all of the data is that the number is down. It is down about 85 percent from the number of people who entered the country illegally in 2007, over the past 10 or 11 years.

By the way, all of the data can be found in a fascinating document that was produced in September of 2017, about a year ago, by the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security. I can't remember the exact title, but it is something like the ``Status of Illegal Immigration at the Southern Border.'' It is a long report that is full of graphs. I like graphs, but I don't need to hold them up because all of the graphs have a downward slope in terms of illegal entries, of the people who get away, of the number of people who come in who are recidivists, who have been here before. They are all down. So to argue that we are somehow in a crisis today, when all of the indicators are moving in the right direction, is really hard to reconcile with the reality.

The issue I am trying to illustrate is that the wall is the wrong solution to the current problem. It may have been a rational solution in 1985 or even in 2005 or in 2006, when the Congress passed a major fence law and did increase border security substantially, but we are dealing with a different set of problems today that the wall--a wall-- whatever it is--doesn't address.

I said at the beginning that nobody here is against border security and that there may be places where a wall is part of that. Yet one of the secondary problems we have is, we have never been told what this thing--the wall--is. How long will it be? How big will it be? How much will it cost? Is it going to be on private land or Federal land? We don't have a plan for what it is that is actually being proposed that the government is being held hostage over.

We don't know what the President wants. To say ``I want a wall'' doesn't tell you much. Is it 2,000 miles long or 100 miles long? Is it 20 feet high, is it a fence, is it a 30-foot high concrete wall or something with steel slats, which seems to be the design of the day?

We don't really know what it is. If the mayor of Bangor, ME, went to the city council and said ``I want to build a new school, but I am not going to tell you how many students are going to be in it; I am not going to tell you where we are going to build it, and I am not going to tell you what it is going to cost; just give me a blank check to build that school,'' the city counsel of Bangor would laugh Her Honor out of the hall. It wouldn't even think about doing something like that. No city in America would do something like that. Yet that is what we are being asked to do here today.

We are essentially being asked for a blank check--well, it is a check for $5.7 billion, but that is a downpayment. The real estimate is for what they think the President wants, which is more in the $20- to $25- billion amount.

That gets me to my final point before I talk about the impact of this in Maine. Let's say that we could settle this, this week. We could negotiate with the White House--which is not easy to do because their position changes day to day--and say: OK, it is going to be 100 miles of wall; this will be the size; this will be the design; this is the agreed-upon cost. Let's say we could do that. If we do that in the context of the government being shut down, we are inviting this to happen again.

Next year, we will just have more budgets. We have a debt ceiling debate coming that is very important for the future of the country, for the economics of the country, for the soundness of our economy. We have budgets coming next September. If this works, if this shutdown that has been initiated by the President works as a tactic to get a portion of his wall, he will do it next time. That is why the age-old principle is, you don't negotiate with hostage-takers. Why? Because if you do, the next time, they will do it again. Then this will become a normal and routine tactic between this President and, perhaps, future Presidents and the Congress that puts us in a position of being totally--where we have to choose between a government shutdown and the pet project of whatever and whoever that President is. That is a very dangerous path for us as a deliberative body, particularly as a coequal branch of the U.S. Government.

I have talked in sort of global terms, but this is hurting Main Street America. We have heard today and we have heard on the news and we hear all the time about the effects on the furloughed Federal workers, which are very real. Today is the day that they don't get their check. Here is the problem: You can shut down and stop people's checks from coming, but you can't stop their bills from coming--their mortgage payment, their childcare payment, their automobile insurance, their homeowners insurance, their heating bill, their medication, their food. All of that has to be paid for.

We can say: Well, we know they will make adjustments. That is a pretty

hard path to put people on. That is a heartless path. These people are being used as pawns, as hostages, in a policy debate that has nothing to do with them.

One of the easiest solutions would be for us to pass the six bills that the House has passed and that we passed, which funds 90 percent of the government. Why should the Department of Agriculture be caught in the crossfire of a debate over a wall in Texas? Why should park rangers be caught in that? Why should the Coast Guard be caught in that?

This is having a real effect. Aside from those Federal workers, of whom there are about 1,000 in Maine on furlough right now, there are all the contractors that serve these government Agencies. We passed a bill last night that is going to ensure that the furloughed Federal employees will eventually be paid. That doesn't say anything about what they are going to have to do about penalties on late mortgages and those kinds of things that they can't pay now. But there is no help for the contractors that are going to lose total income during this period, and some of them will be threatened with going out of business.

It is not just the 800,000 workers nationwide; it is thousands and thousands--tens of thousands--of people who depend on those Agencies for the work that they do, that they provide to the Federal Government.

Let's talk about effects in hometown, Main Street America--in places all over Maine. In Portland, for example--I will chuckle because it sounds like ``Oh, this is no big deal''--one of our most growing industries in Maine is beer. We have over 1,000 people employed in the craft brewing industry. It has been a growth industry. Yet many of the brewers are being stymied because they can't ship their beer across State lines without approval of their labels from the Food and Drug Administration. That is held up.

We have a merger or an expansion of a brewery in Southern Maine that is held up because they can't get their permission from the tax and trade bureau, from the ATF. These are the kinds of things--the services that should be provided--that aren't occurring. The Portland Press Herald reported on the breweries.

The Portland Press Herald also reported on a developer who has a project to develop a real estate project in Maine and can't get an SBA loan. The SBA is shut down. That is going to hold up the project and could even cause the deal to fall through.

The Bangor Daily News reports that a family is stuck in the middle; they have moved out of their house, anticipating a closing on a new house with an Agriculture Department loan guarantee that is now stuck, stranded. There is no action, nobody to answer the phone. They are living out of boxes. They are caught in the middle.

These aren't Federal employees. These are good Maine people who relied upon the daily activities of the Federal Government occurring, which ought to be just simple common sense. Yet they are caught without a place to live.

The Ellsworth American newspaper in Ellsworth, ME, an award-winning weekly newspaper, reports about a smokehouse that does smoked salmon. They were getting ready to reopen and hire people. They got people on staff, and, all of a sudden, they are dead-stopped because the Food and Drug Administration can't act to approve their licenses.

You can say: OK, this little smokehouse can survive. The family will find a place to live, but if you multiply these examples by thousands and millions, you are talking about a really substantial effect on real people's lives, and there is no excuse for it.

If this were over some major life-or-death policy issue, it would be somewhat understandable, but this is an eminently negotiable problem. It is not a crisis but a problem. I don't argue that it is not a problem and that the southern border doesn't need to be secure--again, that is where I started--but the question is, How do you do it right? How do you do it in a way that makes sense to the American taxpayer?

There may be places where we need a wall, but the wall is $200 million a mile. There may be ways to do it for a fraction of that and provide equal security. There also are ways--for example, with better screening devices at the ports of entry--to deal with drugs.

By the way, all of the data from the DEA, the current administration's Drug Enforcement Agency, is that the principal source of drugs coming across the southern border is at ports of entry, hidden in cars, hidden in trucks, not over, through, and around some place in the middle of the desert. That is where the drugs are coming through. That is where we ought to be concentrating. That is where we ought to be putting the technology--more dogs, more technology that can detect this type of thing, not building a wall that doesn't address the current problem. It is a solution, but it is going after the wrong problem.

These are real-life impacts. It doesn't need to be this way. If this were a project being proposed by the military--a new BOQ at Fort Benning--it would come to this Congress. It would go to the authorization committee. The plans would go to the Appropriations Committee. We would review it, question the sponsors, determine if it were an appropriate expenditure of public funds, and either approve it or deny it or suggest some alteration. This wall has never gone through that process. We are basically abdicating to the administration a major decision, particularly about public expenditure, without meeting our responsibilities.

One really simple way to get out of this would be for us to vote by two-thirds to pass the budget that we voted on 98 to 2 several weeks ago. It has $1.6 billion in it for border security, by the way. We could pass that and then sit down and talk with the administration about just what it is that they want and what is reasonable and how do we do it in a sensible way, and then we can get this thing done.

What worries me is the posture that the Senate is in today is adding a provision that isn't in the Constitution. The Constitution says that the President can veto a bill. What we are saying here, now, through our inability or unwillingness to bring a bill to the floor is that the President can stop a bill simply by saying he doesn't like it. That is not what the Constitution says. It doesn't say that the President has the right to stop a bill he doesn't like. It says that he has to veto it. If he is going to veto it, fine. Then we can discuss it, debate it, and determine whether that is an appropriate veto. But by avoiding the responsibility of considering this legislation, we are essentially handing the President a massive power that I don't believe Presidents should have.

This is an important issue. It is one that should be considered. It is one that should be debated. I would like to see the administration given the opportunity to make its case for the specifics, not the case generally about criminals or drugs--many of those claims have been refuted--but a specific case: Here is what we want to do; here is the effect of it; here is what it will cost; and here is why this is the best solution, as opposed to other solutions, like a fence or more Border Patrol agents or more technology or drones or sensors or whatever. We are not being given that opportunity.

I am perfectly willing to debate that in good faith. I don't dismiss out of hand that a wall may make sense in certain areas, but I am not prepared to give this administration a blank check for some construction project when I don't know what it is they want to build.

I am also very reluctant to concede anything in the context of a hostage situation where the U.S. Government is being held hostage because of a project that the President wants to build. If we do this, this will become the go-to tactic for this administration and probably for future administrations. We will have established a precedent that will haunt this institution for years to come. That is one of the reasons I think it is just imperative that we not cave in to this kind of attempted intimidation and express our good-faith willingness to look at, work on, and try to establish the right role for all parts of border security, not put all of our chips in one area that I believe will be both ineffective--not cost-effective--and damaging to our other efforts to actually secure the border and protect the American people.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss where we stand as a nation and as a Senate on day 28 of the longest shutdown in the history of the United States. Following my comments, I will offer by UC to pull one of the House bills up, and I understand the Senator from Oklahoma will be here to respond to that.

We were not scheduled to be in session today. We were supposed to adjourn yesterday and then reconvene on Monday, January 28, but I objected to the adjournment, just as I did last weekend, because our government is closed. So we will be in today and tomorrow, off Sunday and Monday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., and then return on Tuesday, January 22.

I offer a partial apology to my colleagues and to our professional Senate staff for any inconvenience they experience because we will be in session during a time when there had been a scheduled recess. I have never objected to the normal weekly adjournment before last week, and I cannot imagine doing so under normal circumstances. But my apology is only partial because the inconvenience experienced by anyone in this Chamber--Senate or professional staff--pales in comparison to the pain that this shutdown inflicts upon workers who are not getting paid, citizens who are not being served, and a nation whose reputation is being damaged. We are made to look like a laughing stock by this needless shutdown, and the enemies of America around the world are enjoying this immensely, just as our allies are deeply worried about us.

Despite what some believe and despite the impression that some may draw from recent history in the article I branch, I do not believe the shuttering of the government of the United States is a normal circumstance, and I, for one, will do anything I can to fight against the normalization of the status we find ourselves in today. That is why I am here today. That is why I will be here tomorrow. That is why I will be here all next week. If our government is closed, I will be here trying to open it.

I am only one Senator, and I lack the power to compel anyone else to be here with me other than the Presiding Officer. I lack the power to force a floor vote to reopen government. I lack the power to call up any legislative matter for a vote, save the two House bills that we have agreed may be called up pursuant to the UC rules.

I do have the power to talk every day with my colleagues and the administration officials to encourage the reopening of our government, and I do have the power to stand on the floor and describe the circumstances of my constituents and all Americans who are being needlessly hurt.

Only a few will hear me as I describe their pain, but describe it I will, and the Congressional Record will record for all history their stories. If you want me to share your story in the days to come as I take the floor, please reach out to my office at kaine.senate.gov, where you will see a way to share your shutdown story, and I will try to share as many of these as I can in the days to come.

Today, before I offer the UC on the homeland security short-term bill, I want to do two things. I want first to elaborate on a point I made briefly yesterday about the cardinal illogic of this shutdown, and, second, I want to share stories just from meetings that I had yesterday with affected Federal employees and veterans.

The cardinal illogic of this shutdown has at least three levels. The cause of the shutdown is clear. President Trump does not believe $1.3 billion for border security funding contained in a bipartisan appropriation bill is sufficient. He says ``I want more,'' and he is willing to shut down massive sections of the American government to get more. President Trump is not only willing to do this; he says that he is proud to do this, even for weeks and months, and he invited cameras into a meeting with congressional leaders and told America that he is the sole responsible party for it.

The first level of illogic to the shutdown is this: Most of the employees and citizens affected by the shutdown have absolutely nothing--nothing--to do with the debate over the right appropriations level for border security. What does the debate about border security have to do with the food stamp program and those who work for it? What does it have to do with the National Park Service? What does it have to do with the Environmental Protection Agency, with the Internal Revenue Service, with the chemical safety board, with national forests, with mental health services, domestic violence programs funded through Department of Justice grants, or with affordable housing programs administered by HUD? Hundreds of thousands of workers and millions of citizens who are served by the affected Agencies are being punished-- locked out of their jobs, deprived of paychecks, turned away from services because the President believes that if he punishes enough people, even those unconnected with the legitimate issue at hand, he will get what he wants. This is tyrant behavior, not Presidential behavior.

The illogic of this form of punishment struck me most vividly yesterday, when I moved to reopen these affected Agencies and Leader McConnell objected to my UC request. One of the Agencies covered by my UC request was the Executive Office of the President of the United States. At the White House, many of the President's own chosen staff are furloughed or they are working without pay during the shutdown, so I stood on the floor as a Democrat to ask that the President's own staff be allowed to return to work to serve him, to serve the country, and to be paid.

The majority leader, having previously described his motivation as trying to support the President, stood and objected to the motion that would have returned the President's own staff to work. You can't make this stuff up.

The second level of illogic of this shutdown concerns the core of the policy dispute: the appropriations level for border security. The UC request that I will offer in a few minutes deals with that part of the dispute that is pending before the body. I will offer in a few minutes the UC on the House bill that would reopen for a short term the Homeland Security Agencies that provide security while Congress tries to find a bipartisan deal that can pass both Houses and earn the President's signature, and Senate Republicans, again, in a few minutes--at the request of President Trump, who does not yet want this to happen--will object to that request as well.

If the issue in dispute is border security or, as President Trump often says, ``the safety and security of the American people''--he says that in speeches; he says in tweets that is the issue--then why punish the very people who are providing that safety and security? How does it help promote safety and security to not pay the very Border Patrol agents charged with protecting the border? How does it promote safety and security to not pay FBI agents, DEA agents, Federal prosecutors, ATF agents, and U.S. marshals? How does it promote safety and security to not pay members of the Coast Guard, who help interdict drugs and also rescue Americans endangered at sea? How does it promote safety and security to not pay TSA agents, who keep dangerous people off planes, or air traffic controllers, who keep air traffic safety safely coordinated in American skies?

The President has proudly taken paychecks away from the very professionals whom we ask to guard the safety and security of the American public every day, and in doing so, he has made our citizens and our country less safe and less secure.

The third level of illogic is a consequence of actions that were taken by Congress and the President in the last week. For this, I want to offer thanks to my colleagues. I was able, through use of my adjournment objection last week, to negotiate a successful vote on a bill guaranteeing backpay to all workers affected by this or any future shutdown. I appreciate the cooperation of all my Senate colleagues--the majority leader, the minority leader and others and the House--in this effort and appreciate that President Trump signed the bill in the last few days.

Having guaranteed backpay, we are now faced with an unusual question about continuing the shutdown. Now that we know the Federal Treasury will stroke checks to all affected workers to make them whole at least for the salary they have lost, wouldn't we rather have them at work serving their fellow Americans rather than locked out of their offices and unable to serve them? What sense does it make to guarantee payment or prohibit them from doing the work for which they are paid? These workers want to go back to work because they want to serve their fellow citizens.

That brings me to the second part of my remarks before I offer the UC. I had three meetings yesterday with large groups of Virginians where I listened to them talk about the shutdown. Two of the meetings were actually specifically designed to hear from Federal employees about the shutdown. One was an annual coffee that Senator Warner and I have for veterans to celebrate their service to the country, and as they were waiting in line and taking pictures, they were talking to us a lot about the shutdown.

In these three instances, I heard an awful lot. Just as I will share stories next week, let me now summarize a few of the things I heard from those I interacted with yesterday and tell you about them.

The mother of a newborn, 6 months old, who works as an air traffic controller and can't afford to pay her babysitter, is working but getting no salary. She started to cry because, she said: I have to go to work and can't pay a babysitter. So the only thing I can do is--I am not calling in sick. The only thing I can do is send my baby to my mother who lives in another State.

She started to cry.

My baby is 6 months old. I have never been away from my baby for more than 8 hours. I don't want to be away from my child. How long is it going to go on? I may be away from my child for weeks.

She teared up as she told us about this.

There was a Federal employee who said: ``I signed up to serve Americans but didn't realize that I was being drafted into a political war I had no interest in being part of,'' a war in which Federal employees are used as hostages.

There was a young married couple, both Federal employees, working without pay, holding their newborn, a tiny baby in their arms, and tearing up as

they talked about their uncertainty over paying their mortgage and other bills.

There was a furloughed Federal employee whose wife is a disabled veteran with PTSD but is postponing her mental health appointments because of her inability to pay copays or pay for medications.

The two Federal-employee couple whose 4- and 6-year-old children, hearing in the background the news on TV and hearing their parents' anxious discussions at night, came up to them the day after Christmas, each holding their piggy banks and giving them to their parents, saying: Maybe you guys need these piggy banks now more than we do.

There was a veteran who has successfully created an entrepreneurial government contracting business and has hundreds of employees who are out of work because of the shutdown.

All of these people express this: their love for public service, their desire to continue public service, and their personal pain at feeling disrespected just because they want to provide public service.

A repeated concern expressed by so many of them about the backlog that is on their desks--they think they will be back at some point, but it was really interesting: Sitting on my desk was this piece of work that I really wanted to get done and how much more is going to be there? It will be hard to serve people, and they will be mad because the backlog is so big.

They are having anxiety about not being able to serve people well because the backlog will grow during the 4 weeks of the shutdown.

Then, a deep concern shared by so many: Why would any young person want to go into public service? Why would any young person, with a heart for public service, want to do that as a Federal employee?

Before I offer the UC--I see my colleague from Oklahoma is here--I want to tell one last story that, for some reason, of all the ones yesterday, this is the one that stuck with me. There were others that might have been more dire, but this one stuck with me because I think it exemplifies a spirit I see in so many of our Federal workers.

There was an employee of the National Park Service who has been with the park service for about 10 years, and his job is to physically maintain the space around the White House: groundskeeping, trash removal, anything, as he says, he can do to make those grounds around the White House look really fantastic. He described why he loves his job, and it wasn't sort of the tasks that he does.

He said: I want schoolchildren visiting Washington, DC, and I want international visitors visiting Washington, DC, when they come to the White House, to be able to look at this and see it and feel impressed with the United States of America. It makes me feel proud when I see the reaction on people's faces as they are there in front of the White House.

That is how he described his work.

He is furloughed and without pay, so he is home. There are news accounts about trash overflowing at national parks and things like that, and that kind of causes him angst, obviously. He is angry about the situation. He didn't mince any words with me as he described it.

Last Sunday morning he got a call. It was: Hey, we need you to come shovel snow.

We had snow last weekend in DC. We had a lot of snow, 10 inches of snow.

You have to come in and shovel snow. You are not being paid. I know you feel the disrespect of being furloughed, and we are not going to be able to pay you for shoveling snow, but can you come in and shovel snow on Sunday so that at least the walkways are clear in front of the White House?

He said: Boy, I really had something I wanted to say on that call. I wanted to say no, but then I thought about this: What if somebody because of the snow, like a kid, falls and breaks their leg or there is an accident or something because the sidewalks aren't clear or there is ice that causes some problem?

He started to think about the people he cares about that he wants to be impressed by the White House because he wants them to be impressed by the country, and he said: Well, I guess I better go shovel the snow.

I kid you not. We were having this conversation about 11:45 yesterday morning, and some of you had seen there is a weather report this weekend that is a little bit iffy in DC. During the middle of his telling me his story, his phone rang, and he looked at it and said: Yeah, that is my boss. I am not going to answer it. I know why he is calling.

I said: Did you just time this for a stage effect because you knew you were meeting with me right now? Did you tell him not to call at 10:30 but to call at 11:30?

He said: No, I know what the call is about. They need me this weekend, even though I am being disrespected, even though I am not being paid, no matter what I want to say, I know what I am going to say. I am going to say: Yes, I will come in and make sure this White House, this Capitol, this country looks as beautiful as it can look for these schoolchildren and these visitors.

I think we have to up our game, all of us. I know we can do this. We owe it to our citizens. We owe it to our workers. We owe it to our Nation's reputation.

Unanimous Consent Request--H.J. Res. 1

With that, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 6, H.J. Res. 1, making further continuing appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security; I further ask that the joint resolution be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, first of all, let me say how much I appreciate my colleagues on the floor--particularly, Senator Bennet's comments--and the passion that everyone has shown for the people in this country and why we are here for the people that we represent, whether they voted for us or not. That is not the issue. We are here to represent all the people, and I really appreciate those incredible words from my colleagues and, particularly, the passion shown by Senator Bennet.

I am rising today to give my voice to the thousands of Alabamians who are also suffering as a result of this government shutdown. It is not just the folks who are employed but those who are affected by this shutdown by whatever means necessary.

There are people who are not employed by the government who are also affected. In the midst of all the political posturing that we have seen, the costly government shutdown has hurt over 5,100 Alabama workers, their families, and the people who rely on them to do their job. Thousands more are contractors who will not get backpay. Unlike the Federal workers, who traditionally get backpay, these contractors who are not working now because there is no work to be had with the Federal Government will not get backpay from their employers.

Our Coast Guard employees, who aren't paid through the Department of Defense budget that passed last year, don't know whether their paycheck will come or not. By the way, it is the Coast Guard who is interdicting so much of the illegal drugs that are attempting to come into this country. It is not the southern border. It is the Coast Guard, which we are putting at risk, that is doing the best job of interdicting the illegal drugs that are attempting to come into this country.

These folks pay the price of this shutdown while this political drama that we have seen in Washington, DC, drags on and on--on cable TV, on Twitter, and on other social media platforms. These folks are hard- working Alabamians who keep our airports safe. They protect our communities. They monitor our prisons.

We have three Federal prisons in Alabama. Three of the workers in the Aliceville prison were on CNN today talking about the effects on them and their community in Aliceville, AL. These are people who support our national defense, like folks in Redstone Arsenal and at all of the military bases in our State. They support the aerospace programs in our State. These are the folks who are getting hurt. Many of these people are veterans who have gone on to serve their country a second time by working in Federal service.

Most of these folks support strong border security. I venture to guess that all of them support strong border security. Some will support the wall, as the President has described it, but they don't agree with--they don't support--shutting down the Government of the United States of America in a way to just get that wall or that border security done. They do not support that at the expense of their communities and their families.

Over the past 18 days or so since this shutdown, I have heard from any number of my constituents. They call the office here in Washington, and they call the offices in Huntsville, in Mobile, in Birmingham, and in Montgomery. They talk about how they are hurting already because of the shutdown.

One constituent who wrote to me is a small business owner in North Alabama, near Huntsville, whose 30-plus employees have provided very important, continuous support for NASA programs for the past 7 years. As their work gets delayed or stopped altogether, these folks don't know whether they are going to have jobs. If their work stops, those employees are going to need jobs, and they are going to start looking for other jobs. In the economy that we have now, in which unemployment is low, people are looking for workers, and they are going to find those jobs. So his business may get shut down.

There is a military spouse who also works for the Federal Government whose husband is deployed to Afghanistan right now. She also wrote to me and urged an end to this shutdown. She said that while she supports the wall, she doesn't believe that Federal employees should be used as bargaining chips just to get it done. She said that a lapse in funding would be devastating for her job and that her family needs the paychecks to cover these bills. This is a family that is already living under stress with its having a husband and father in Afghanistan. This family doesn't need the extra stress.

On behalf of her family of four in Smiths Station, AL, another mother wrote to me about her family's lapse in healthcare coverage since the shutdown because the employees at a Federal health insurance agency, GEHA, have been furloughed. Her family's change in coverage was never fully processed by the end of the year. So it lapsed and was canceled as of December 31. The family members are now facing important medical decisions--appointments, prescriptions, refills in the next few weeks-- but don't know if they are going to have the insurance to cover it.

The administration announced today that the deadline for farmers to receive their subsidies, because of the administration's trade policies, will be extended, which all sounds really great. It sounds all good and well. We are going to extend it. We are going to put a bandaid on this for our farmers. These farmers have been hit hard by the trade war that this administration has started, which I have talked about on the floor of the Senate on any number of occasions and around my State.

To ease that pain, a few months ago the administration decided to allocate $12 billion as almost a bailout. Now, these farmers really don't want these handouts. They want their markets. Yet, to ease their pain, to its credit, the administration came up with $12 billion to ease that pain. Less than half of that amount--roughly, about $5.2 billion in payments--was made before the Department of Agriculture's local offices were closed. While extending that deadline sounds very good and is, simply, putting a bandaid over the wound, the fact is that until we get this government open, farmers who did not get their payments in before this shutdown are going to have a problem.

Another problem with the shutdown is that they can't depend on the Federal Government any more than they can depend on the weather. These farmers are at risk every season, every year, of things that are out of their control. What they don't need is a government that they cannot depend on, and that is what we have right now. They are out of luck at a time at which they need it the most, as they are starting to plan for their spring planting and summer planting--their loans, their crops, buying the seed--as Senator Bennet talked about a few moments ago.

There is one constituent who wrote me a really heartbreaking letter about the impact of losing her SNAP benefits after January 31 if the shutdown continues. She is living on a razor's edge financially and depends on Social Security disability benefits and SNAP dollars to survive. It is not a lot of money on a monthly basis. It is such a small amount of money that folks in this body and folks in the House and, certainly, the folks in the administration wouldn't think twice about it. It is probably less than they spend at Starbucks every morning, but, for her, it is an incredibly important part of her life, and we have to make sure that we do everything not to let her down.

I did see, just before I came over here, that the administration has said that we are going to extend it. We are going to make sure that SNAP benefits are paid in February. Again, that is great and sounds wonderful, but it is a bandaid. Sooner or later, if we don't end up doing something about this shutdown, that bandaid is going to be ripped off, and these folks are going to be left in the cold once again.

We need to remember--and I think this gets lost sometimes in the talk about this shutdown--that this is not just about the paychecks and the direct benefits that people in this country receive from the Federal Government. It also affects all of those people in our communities who serve those who work for the government--those who take in their grocery money and take in their utility money and take in their gas money. It is going to affect those people. It is going to affect car dealers, and it is going to affect local businesses. It is just like the folks at the prison in Aliceville said today, which is that sooner or later, if they don't have money to spend around Aliceville, it is going to affect that community. This touches so many people in this country that we need not lose sight of that.

The letters and calls and voice mails are pouring in every day as this shutdown continues. More and more Americans face the increasing consequences of the impasse that we see here in Washington, DC. There is, simply put, no excuse for it. We can and must do better. We can and must find the common ground that so many of us talk about. Every day, over and over, we talk about finding common ground, but we have to practice what we preach in terms of finding that common ground.

This past year, I talked to a number of my constituents back home who had gone through a number of issues. I talked to a lot of people who asked me to support the wall. They stopped me over the holidays, and I would always stop and talk to them. They were always very respectful, unlike with some things that happen in our political discourse today. These people were always very respectful, and we had nice conversations. When I asked them what they were talking about, they said that I needed to vote for a wall.

They said: We just need border security, Senator. We need border security.

This gave me the opportunity to say: I completely agree.

Unfortunately, the so-called ``wall'' that we keep hearing about, primarily on Twitter, has really become just a metaphor to support a secure border. To oppose it is to oppose a secure border. That makes no sense. What is getting lost in this debate is that every Member of this body wants secure borders. Every Member of this body and every Member of the House wants border security measures that will keep our communities safe. We might have disagreements about the best way to make sure our borders are secure, and we might have disagreements on what border security will look like, but it doesn't mean that we want open borders as I keep hearing from the administration. That is a preposterous statement.

In fact, in the last Congress, we had one of the President's nominees before us for the head of ICE. He used to work on the border. He was there. He controlled it. He was the head of border security.

I asked him in the hearing: Have you ever heard one politician--have you ever heard anybody in Washington, DC--say that he is for open borders?

He said: No, sir, not at all.

We have to get away from that political posturing so that we can find the common ground that is necessary to move this forward. The fact of the matter is that we have found common ground. We have found that common ground right here in this body.

Last February, in the midst of bipartisan talks on more comprehensive immigration reform, a number of senior administration officials came to the Senate and briefed Members on the situation at the border. They outlined how an infusion of money in the context of a larger piece of legislation could improve security and conditions for asylum seekers and on the border. In the wake of that presentation--if I recall correctly, they proposed a $25 billion price tag for border security-- Republicans and Democrats alike, which was a majority of the U.S. Senate, voted to include that $25 billion in border security funding over the next decade. That was a bipartisan effort.

Over the course of the last spring and early summer, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee--led by my colleague from Alabama, Senator Shelby, and by Senator Leahy, the ranking member--passed a bipartisan Homeland Security funding bill by a vote of 25 to 5. It did that in June of this year. It included $1.6 billion in border security funding, which was on top of the $1.3 billion, I think, that was funded last year. What has started this whole process today is the administration's demand of a blank check of $5.6 billion for a wall as the price to reopen the government. That is, simply, not how our government should work.

Now, candidly and in all fairness, in recent days, we have gone from an argument that was just, simply, about dollars and cents on both sides of the aisle--5.6 versus 1.6 or 1.3--to where we have now seen the administration begin to slowly roll out how it would actually spend that money. There was no plan in the beginning. It was just ``send us $5.6 billion.'' We are learning about that plan via Twitter and on the TV talk shows, not the way this body is used to getting information from the administration--through a budget process or through some proposal about which you can ask questions and can vet.

If the administration is serious about border security--and it should be serious about border security, just like the Senate of the United States and the House of Representatives of the United States should be serious about border security--we should reopen the rest of the government. Officials should also come back to the Hill, like they did in February, and brief Members of both parties in Congress about what is needed and of exactly the new border security money and how it will be spent.

This week, the House has been voting on a series--or will be voting on a series--of funding bills that the Senate has already passed, many by a vote of 92 to 6. Think about that. As I travel around the State, I tell people all the time what I saw last year--my first year--which is that there is so much more bipartisanship in this body that you don't see just by watching C-SPAN and listening to dueling press conferences. There is a lot of it that goes on, and we passed those bills by 92 to 6.

These bills will ensure that the Federal employees and contractors can go back to work and can get paid, that food assistance and housing vouchers can go forward, that vital research can be done, that our parks and museums can reopen, that our airports are safe, and that our prisons are monitored. Instead of handing political appointees a 10- percent raise, it will ensure that we will pay the Coast Guard, whose members continue to serve throughout this shutdown without knowing if their next paychecks are going to come.

I am literally sad to say--and I really hope people will take this into account, especially the folks who have been here for a long time-- that in my first year here, my first year in the Senate, this is the third government shutdown that we have seen. We should be embarrassed about that, and the administration should be embarrassed about that. At every opportunity, I have voted to keep the government open. I can't say that I would do it every time, because it will depend on the circumstances, but, thus far, I have done all I can to keep this government open.

The American people are frustrated and disheartened by the dysfunction and empty rhetoric that they hear out of this town, but we have to remember that the Senate of the United States has done its job and done so in a deliberative and bipartisan way. No one on either side of the political aisle should lose sight of that.

We came together and found common ground, and we should insist that the President of the United States not only acknowledge that but honor that, get this government up and running, and let's sit down to continue to discuss the plans for the border security that we all know is necessary and we would like.

Thank you.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, we are in day 20 of a government shutdown. It is exceptionally avoidable, but it is also exceptionally painful and distracting to the American people.

At the USDA, the Farm Service Agency loans have stopped.

TSA employees are working without pay. If we can't get this resolved by tomorrow, they will miss a paycheck, but they will still be at work.

Home lending programs have halted.

For the FAA, new air traffic controllers are not being trained. We still have air traffic controllers in the tower who are working now--by tomorrow, without pay coming in--but new training has stopped. That means a year from now, when we need to have those new air traffic controllers take their spot in that tower, there won't be someone in that tower because we have halted the training at this point.

IRS taxpayer advocate services are closed.

Indian Health Service is being stretched.

At the Bureau of Indian Affairs, most employees have been furloughed.

The Department of Commerce and many others have been affected.

While this doesn't affect most Agencies in the Federal Government, it affects a lot, and it affects real lives and real people. Let me give some examples from just my State of Oklahoma.

There is a technology company in Tulsa that will have to begin furloughing employees because it is a contractor for the Federal workforce.

Those folks who are selling their cattle right now and who have a relationship with Farm Service can't cash that check because they can't get a second cosigner for the check, and that definitely affects them.

A Federal worker contacted us and said that she is a contractor, and as of a couple days from now, she is not going to be able to pay her son's tuition so he can go back to college, because it will be too far a stretch.

The food banks in my State have already started stocking up and reaching out to Federal employees who may not get a check starting tomorrow and may be stretched and need some additional assistance, many of them for the first time ever.

We have a family in the Norman area, south of Oklahoma City, who typically handles the contract for housing for students who are coming to the FAA, to the academy. Well, obviously those academy students have all gone home, and they are losing $5,000 a week due to the shutdown and the lack of housing for those folks. And it is not just empty facilities; employees who are contractors there are now being furloughed.

See, this affects real lives and real people. This was an exceptionally avoidable shutdown. Months and months ago, the President of the United States announced publicly and repetitively that he was not going to sign a funding bill at the end of the year that does not add additional border security. Over and over again, in public speeches and in private conversations on this Hill, the President repeated over and over: I am not going to sign a funding bill unless it adds additional border security.

For some reason, half of this Hill ignored it and said: He is just kidding. He is not just kidding. He sees the issue of border security-- as I do, by the way, as well--as being a serious issue that has been talked about for decades but has not been addressed. Now all of these families are being impacted because half of this Hill said they thought the President was kidding.

We should be able to do basic border security. This used to not be a partisan issue. It was just a decade ago that this body voted to add 650 miles of additional fencing along the border between Mexico and the United States because at that time, a decade ago, this body said: There is a serious issue with border security. We should add fencing to the border.

Outspoken liberals like Senator Clinton and Senator Obama voted to add fencing to the border in 2006 and said that is the right thing to do. But suddenly now, a decade and a couple years later, it is a partisan issue and we can't allow President Trump to have additional fencing. It seems very odd to me. This seems like a personal attack on the President rather than a realization of where we have been as a country for a long time. We should have basic border security.

For the President to be actually very malleable on this--shockingly so, to some people--he stepped out and said: I want $5.7 billion for a wall or for fencing or for steel barriers or whatever you want to call it. We need some additional barriers on it.

To negotiate during the Christmas time period and to be stuck because the White House makes an offer to Senator Schumer, and Senator Schumer's response apparently was, we will wait to negotiate this after Nancy Pelosi becomes speaker--so for 10 days we sat with no negotiations going because we had to wait until there was a Speaker Pelosi.

Now Speaker Pelosi steps up and says: We are going to do nothing on this. And the President says: No, we need to do something. And suddenly something that the American people saw as obvious--why wouldn't we do basic things for border security--has suddenly become political and controversial.

The President, even in his speaking earlier this week from the Oval Office, started by saying we should do additional technology at the border. I fully agree. In fact, just in the last 2 years, the Department of Homeland Security has added 31 new fixed surveillance tower units to the southern border, has added 50 mobile surveillance systems to the southern border, and has added ground sensors and tunnel detection capabilities to the southern border. Those are all technology aspects of helping the southern border. The President stepped up and said we need to do more in that area.

He said we need to add additional agents, which, again, has not been a partisan issue in the past.

He said we need to add additional immigration judges, which, again, has not been controversial. We have 800,000 people waiting in immigration courts to get due process right now. Many of them will wait 3 years or more just to get to a court. That is because we have too few judges handling the many immigration cases that are out there. It should be common sense to say ``Let's add additional judges so people can get to due process faster,'' but suddenly that has become controversial.

The President said we need to add a steel barrier. Now, I am fully aware he has talked about a wall in the past, and he said wall, wall, wall over and over, and some people have this picture that it is going to be the Berlin Wall, complete with graffiti on the side of it. That is not what DHS is putting up, nor what they have put up. They put up these big steel slats because the Customs and Border Patrol folks don't want a solid wall. They need to be able to see through it to see whether there is a threat coming to them.

Has it made a difference? It has absolutely made a difference. Some of my team were down at the border in San Diego just a month ago. They visited with the Customs and Border Patrol folks there. They stated that the old fencing that is there--and there is some very old fencing in that area--that old fencing had more than a dozen penetrations through it a day--a day. It was meaningless. But the new fencing that they are putting up, these big steel slats, that steel barrier has one person a month. So it moved from 10 to 12 a day to 1 a month. That is a pretty big difference. That is helping manage our border. That is why fencing actually does work.

I am fully aware of folks saying, if you put up a 30-foot fence you get a 31-foot ladder, but what happens is, when you have to climb a 31- foot ladder, you have to slow down in the process, and it gives time for the Border Patrol to be able to interdict. That is what a fence is about, to say: You can't cross here easily. You have to slow down through the process--and we can interdict folks.

This is a completely avoidable and, quite frankly, very recognizable problem. We should not have a government shutdown happening right now. Interestingly enough, some of my Democratic colleagues I have spoken with over the last 2 days were quietly whispering in these hallways: I hope the President will just declare a national emergency so the fencing can get built, and we can say we fought it, rather than actually bringing a piece of legislation here to solve it.

There are real families and real lives getting affected by this. Let's resolve this. This is not a big number. This is not a complicated issue. We can come to common agreement on basic border security to protect our communities and our cities. We should have the ability for individuals to come into the United States to work. We have always been that way.

Interestingly enough, I remind people all the time that the 5,000 people coming from the migrant caravan from Honduras are camped out 250 yards from the largest legal border crossing in the world, the San Ysidro crossing. We have 5,000 people who are trying to illegally cross the border literally 250 yards from where 100,000 people a day cross legally every single day, but the cameras are all focused on the 5,000 people trying to cross illegally, not turning the camera 90 degrees to focus in on the 100,000 people a day who filled out the forms and did it right and are

coming into our country. We are still a country with open immigration, and we should be; we just ask people to do it the right way. I don't think it is that unreasonable.

So how do we get out of this? The most basic way to get out of this is just to do what we talked about for months--let's sit down and figure out how to do border security--just the simple process of that. Some of my colleagues have said the President needs to open the government, and then we will talk about border security. That will be the same argument we have had for a couple of years now, where they say: Some other time, some another time. The President said, after months and months, this is the time to talk about this. So let's resolve it as quickly as we possibly can.

Let's not complicate it. I have heard people say: Let's add all these additional things to the conversation and make the deal bigger. Making the deal bigger just slows down the process even more. Federal employees and all these families need answers right now. Let's not continue to try to make this a bigger and bigger argument that stretches out longer and longer in debate. Let's solve the issue we have in front of us right now and keep debating the other issues.

Finally, let's get a permanent resolution to this issue of government shutdowns. It has been interesting to me to see the media comparing this shutdown to the one that happened during the Jimmy Carter Presidency or the Clinton Presidency or the three that happened during the Reagan Presidency or those that happened in the Bush Presidency. This is a bad habit Congress is in. There were 16 of us who met this last year, from April all the way through December--eight Democrats and eight Republicans, half from the House and half from the Senate--to try to resolve the budget process. Many of us spoke up, myself included, over and over again, saying that this is a broken budgeting process, saying we have to end the government shutdowns. By the time we got to the middle of December, that group of 16 could not come to a resolution to address this problem. Well, how about now? Are we willing to admit now that there is a problem with budgeting?

Here was one of the solutions I brought to that committee. I think it is straightforward. The simple solution is, if you get to the end of the budget year and if we don't have things resolved at that point, go into a continuing resolution; that is, continue to fund the government, hold the Agencies and employees harmless, but Members of Congress have to stay in Washington, DC, and the Cabinet and the White House have to stay in Washington, DC--no travel for anyone. We have to be here.

If you want to hit Members of Congress where it hurts, don't let anyone go home for the weekend to see their families. We have families we want to see, too, but we shouldn't be able to walk away when there is still work to be done. The greatest pressure point we can have in this body is that we would have to stay in continuous session until the negotiations are finished. Make everyone stay here.

That may sound overly simplistic, but when I bring that up to other Members of Congress, they are like: Whoa. That is too much. Really? Everyone needs to stay here, keep the negotiations--from the House, the Senate, the Cabinet of the White House, and the White House staff itself.

The second measure we can take is, each week, through any kind of fight that goes on to get the budgeting done, cut everyone's budget in the House, Senate, and White House's operating budget 5 percent that week. Now, again, holding all the Agencies harmless, but for those who are doing the negotiations, they start feeling the pressure. Not only can you not travel, you can't see your families. You have to stay in continuous session, but your budget is getting cut every week by 5 percent, each week until it gets resolved. Again, the pressure is on the people it should be on, holding harmless the American people who aren't in the middle of this fight in the process. There are ways to solve this--simple, commonsense ways--and I will continue to bring those up again and again because when this shutdown is complete, there will be a fight over another one coming. In the meantime, we need to try to end this loop we are in that destabilizes our system.

Let's do border security. Let's not fight over, ``OK. Let's open up the government, and we will talk about it later.'' Everyone knows that really will not happen. Everyone knows that game. Let's resolve what all the American people know needs to be resolved--basic, functional, real commonsense security, not putting up a big wall across the whole border. No one wants to see a 2,000-mile-long wall. It is not even needed, but in areas where there is a city on both sides of the border, and you literally cross the border within seconds unless there is a barrier there, it makes sense to have a barrier in those locations. It makes sense to put technology in other areas to be able to monitor folks who are illegally crossing the border in other areas. We can do this in a commonsense way. We can do this quickly. Let's get it resolved.

With that, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I rise to strongly support the Senator from Alaska and the Senator from Louisiana and the Senator from Mississippi.

We should pay our Coast Guard. It is not right that we aren't paying the Coast Guard. Right now, every other military branch is being paid. The Army is being paid. The Navy is being paid. The Air Force is being paid. The Marines are being paid. Those in the Coast Guard are not being paid even as they are risking their lives.

Many of us in Texas and along the gulf coast saw the incredible heroism of the Coast Guard in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, during which so many brave men and women risked their lives to save thousands upon thousands of innocents. They should be paid. I think it is important for the American people to understand what just happened here because it is highly consequential. It is easy for things to get lost in procedural gobbledygook and to assume: Well, this is some back and forth about the shutdown and about the wall. It has nothing to do with any of that.

What Senator Kennedy did was to bring forward a bill to pay the Coast Guard. The bill did nothing else. It didn't address any aspect of the shutdown. It didn't address any aspect of the wall. It simply said: Let's pay the men and women in the Coast Guard--yes or no. That means you can be a yes on that, whether you think we need to secure the border and have a steel barrier or whether you support open borders. It doesn't say anything either way. It just says that the men and women in the Coast Guard deserve paychecks.

We could have passed that right here today. There is one reason and one reason only that we didn't. It is because the Democratic leader stood up and said: I object.

I note that if there are Democrats on the Democratic side of the aisle who are not comfortable with that, who agree that the Coast Guard should be paid, let me encourage my Democratic colleagues to say so because it is their party's leader who has lodged an objection on behalf of, effectively, every Democratic Senator.

The Democrats are fond of using the phrase ``hostage-taking.'' They are, quite literally, holding the men and women of the Coast Guard hostage because they want to win a political victory against the President. Their objective here is to have the President back down and to have not a single mile of border wall built--never mind that the Democratic leader and every Democrat in this Chamber voted in 2013 to build and fund 350 miles of border wall. That was 350 miles that every Democrat in this Chamber voted for.

We are in a shutdown today because they are now unwilling to fund 234 miles of border wall, which is less than they voted for in 2013.

We understand that politics rears its head in this business, and the Democrats want to defeat the President politically, and so the substance is secondary to trying to get the partisan victory over the President. Let me suggest that this ought to be an issue. We keep fighting back and forth on whether securing the border or having open borders is a good idea, but this ought to be an issue that should be real simple.

Senator Kennedy brought forward a clean bill that does one thing and one thing only. It pays the salaries of the men and women in the Coast Guard. If the Democratic leader hadn't objected, that would have passed right now. The President could have signed it tonight. The paychecks could have gone out right now for every man and woman in the Coast Guard.

If you are serving in the Coast Guard in any of our 50 States, let me say: No. 1, thank you for your service. Thank you for your heroism. Thank you for the amazing difference you make. You deserve to be paid. You will be paid. But if you want to know why you aren't being paid right now, it is because the Democratic leader objected to your getting a paycheck.

It is my hope that the Democratic Senators will go to their leader and say: This is a bad idea for Democratic Senators to hold hostage the paychecks of the men and women of the Coast Guard.

We should pay the Coast Guard, and that ought to be something that commands unanimous, bipartisan support.

I yield the floor.

Would the Senator from Alaska yield for a question?

Did the bill that Senator Kennedy brought forward do anything--anything else--beyond simply paying the men and women of the Coast Guard?

So if the Democrats had not objected and it had passed and the House had passed it and sent it to the President, could we get the men and women of the Coast Guard paid right now, today, and get that passed into law?

So the only thing that is necessary to pass a clean bill, paying the salaries of every man and women in the Coast Guard, is for the Democratic Senators to withdraw their objection; is that correct?

Thank you.

Madam President, there is an old saying in Texas among Texas trial lawyers. If you have the facts, you bang the facts. If you have the law, you bang the law. If you don't have either one, you bang the table. We have seen a whole lot of table banging right here on this floor.

The Senator from Colorado spent a great deal of time yelling, spent a

great deal of time attacking me personally. He did at one point briefly rise to the defense of my father. I appreciate that gesture, but he spent a lot of time yelling.

I will say, in my time in the Senate, I don't believe I have ever bellowed or yelled at one of my colleagues on the Senate floor, and I hope in my time before me, I never do that. I think we should discuss issues and substance and facts and not simply scream and yell at each other.

Let's go over some of the facts. In the angry speech of the Senator from Colorado, he did not dispute, No. 1, that he and every other Senate Democrat in 2013 voted for 350 miles of border wall. That is a fact. He has voted for 350 miles of border wall, as did every other Democrat in this Chamber at that time.

No. 2, he did not dispute that in December of last year, the then- Republican House of Representatives voted to fund the government--to fund the entirety of the government--and to secure the border, and the Senator from Colorado, and I believe every other Democrat, filibustered that bill and caused the shutdown.

I voted to take up that bill. You voted to take up that bill. Had we taken up the bill, had we simply passed the bill the House of Representatives had passed funding the government and securing the border, the government would never have shut down.

It takes some degree of chutzpah to stand up, after filibustering funding for the government, as the Democrats did, and blame the shutdown on the opposing party.

The Senator from Colorado did not dispute the Republican House voted to fund the government, and he and his Democratic colleagues filibustered that, which caused the shutdown.

No. 3, the Senator from Colorado did not dispute that the stated reason the Democrats filibustered that bill is because it authorized the funding of 234 miles of wall.

I have to say, I find it amusing that a new adjective has crept in. It is now not 234 miles of wall; it is medieval wall. I don't know if there is something in there that has a moat and has catapults that are throwing burning tar--medieval wall now.

It is kind of an odd thing. It does raise the question: Well, if walls are medieval, why did the Senator from Colorado and every other Democrat in 2013 vote for 350 miles of medieval wall? To the extent walls are medieval, they presumably were medieval in 2013, just as much as they are now.

The President has a good observation. He said: I will tell you something else that is medieval, the wheel. There is a reason the wheel is medieval--because it rolls things, and it works. Walls are effective.

Unlike the Senator from Colorado, I live in a border State. We have 1,200 miles of border. I have spent a great deal of time down at the border with Border Patrol agents. We have miles and miles of wall right now that are working. I have been to those walls--not once, not twice but over and over again.

One of the rich things about this Chamber is, Senators from States nowhere near the border presume to lecture border States about what it is like on the border and what works securing the border. Walls are effective. I will tell you, every single Border Patrol agent I have asked----and I have asked dozens, probably hundreds of Border Patrol agents--are walls effective, unquestionably, they say yes.

Let's not destruct the straw man. Walls are not the only thing. You need technology. You need boots on the ground. You need all sorts of other tools. The critical point in intercepting someone crossing over illegally is the time between detection and interception, and what a wall does is slows down the traffickers to give the Border Patrol time to intercept them.

By the way, we have seen it over and over again in San Diego. When they built the wall, the illegal traffic plummeted. In El Paso, when they built the wall, the illegal traffic plummeted. Now the Democrats' position is not substantive. They voted for 350 miles of wall. So why are they shutting the government down over 234 miles of wall? It is not substantive; it is political.

We get that they hate Donald Trump. If anyone in America had missed that point--that they really don't like this man--their yelling and screaming and bellowing has made that abundantly clear. Just because you hate somebody doesn't mean you should shut down the government. I voted to keep this government open, right now, today. The Democrats are filibustering funding for the government.

Let me tell you something else the Senator from Colorado didn't dispute. We had a whole colloquy with the Senator from Louisiana and the Senator from Mississippi and the Senator from Alaska about funding the Coast Guard. Did you notice, in that entire bellowing speech, the words ``Coast Guard'' were never uttered? Not once.

What Senator Kennedy asked this body to do was pass a clean bill to pay the paychecks of the Coast Guard. Senator Kennedy's bill doesn't mention a wall--whether you like one or not, it doesn't mention a medieval wall or any other kind. It simply says: Pay the Coast Guard-- yes, no.

Every Republican agrees, pay the Coast Guard right now. It is not fair to treat the Coast Guard differently than we are treating the Army and Navy and Marines and Air Force.

The Senator from Colorado didn't address that because it is indisputable, it is a fact that the reason that didn't pass right now is because the Democratic leader stood up and made an objection.

By implication, every Democratic Senator presumably agrees with it. The fact that the Senator from Colorado didn't say, yes, we should fund the Coast Guard, and, you know what, my leader was wrong when he held the paychecks of the Coast Guard's men and women hostage because he wants to win a political fight with the President.

By the way, I would note to the Senator of Colorado, it is not the end of the world to stand up to your party's leader. Some of us have a history of having done so in the past.

We are now in the longest government shutdown in history. This shutdown needs to end--the American people want it to end--but we also need to secure the border.

I have to say, the contrast between the two parties could not be clearer. The President has repeatedly said he wants to negotiate and compromise. He says he is willing to meet in the middle. He hasn't insisted on every mile of border wall he asked for. He hasn't insisted on every single dollar of border security. He said: Let's meet and compromise. Republicans on this side of the Chamber have said: Let's compromise in the middle.

The position of Senate Democrats is that they will not negotiate; they will not compromise, period. Their position, how many miles of wall can be built? Zero. They are not to 1 yet. When it comes to negotiating, their position is not an inch of wall can be built, even though we the Democrats already voted for 350 miles of it. Why? Because Donald Trump is President.

That is an extreme and radical position. Look, I understand, folks watching at home, it is hard to tell--you are reading the news. It seems like both parties are bickering. It is hard to tell what is happening, particularly because on the Senate floor, there is a lot of procedural mumbo jumbo.

If you want to understand what is going on, the exchange between Senator Kennedy and Senator Schumer illustrates it all. Senator Kennedy's bill did one thing and one thing only. It paid the salaries of the men and women of the Coast Guard. It didn't touch any other issue.

Every Republican agrees with that bill. The Democrats objected and said: We will not pay the Coast Guard.

Had they not objected, we could put that bill on the President's desk today, and they could get their paychecks right now. That is emblematic of the approach of Senate Democrats.

When the Senator from Colorado stopped screaming at me, he then engaged in a bit of historical retrospective about the great Framers of our Constitution, which I enjoyed and very much agree with. I am someone who spent a lifetime devoted to the Constitution. I am inspired by the Framers who gave us this extraordinary democratic Republic. The Senator from Colorado called for Members of this body to aspire to be more like the men and women who gave us this country, gave us this Republic, if you can keep it, as Benjamin Franklin put it. I concur with that.

What I urge the Senator from Colorado do is to reach out to his Democratic colleagues and counsel compromise. I am urging my colleagues on this side to do the same. The difference is, the Republicans are willing to compromise, have offered to compromise, and, in fact, just now sought to pay the Coast Guard, and the Democratic position is: No, no, no. We object.

That is partisan, it is extreme, and it is not behavior that would bring pride to the Framers of our Constitution. I hope this body can do better.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, it is interesting--we have entered the 24th day of the Trump shutdown. That means that for 24 days, hundreds of thousands of Federal workers have lived with the uncertainty of when they will get their next paycheck. Tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of private contractors know they will never be paid. For 24 days, nine Federal Departments and dozens of Agencies have been closed for business. They have withheld vital services from millions of Americans. I want to point out that the millions of Americans who are not receiving these services pay taxes to have these services. It has now become the longest government shutdown in history. Taxpayers have lost billions of dollars. The country has lost billions of dollars.

The United States should be considered the most powerful country in the world, but the rest of the world sees our government being held hostage to the whims of an undisciplined President who is proud of the shutdown and shows no concern for the chaos he is causing to all Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Ask people at home what this means to them, no matter whether they are Republicans or Democrats, that the President seems not to care that the Food and Drug Administration has stopped inspecting seafood, fruits, and vegetables, and Americans are at the risk of eating tainted food and feeding their families tainted food. He seems not to care that the Environmental Protection Agency has stopped inspections of chemical factories, water treatment plants, and other industrial sites, leaving our country vulnerable to dangerous pollutants seeping into the air we breathe and the water we drink. Ask any parent how they might feel about their child going to school and drinking water that is tainted with chemicals solely because we closed down the Agency that is supposed to inspect those chemicals.

He seems not to care that over 800,000 dedicated Federal workers have gone without a paycheck this month. As a result, across this Nation, hundreds of thousands of families are wondering how to pay their bills and put food on the table. It doesn't make any difference whether they are Republicans or Democrats or Independents; they are hard-working Americans.

Just a few days ago, the President's own chief economic adviser went on national television and said furloughed workers were better off from this shutdown because they don't have to use up vacation days during this time they are being forced to take. Does he actually know what he said? Can you even believe such an arrogant, out-of-touch dismissal of hard-working Americans? The President's economic adviser is going to get paid and doesn't have to worry, but this cavalier way of treating hard-working, honest Americans is indefensible.

I hear from Vermonters every day about the impact the shutdown is having on their lives. None of these Vermonters--Republican and Democratic alike--are better off. Let me give you an example.

The other day, I heard from a single mother who works at the Department of Homeland Security in Vermont. She has been working without pay since December 22, when the Trump shutdown began, and it has taken a toll. Remember, this woman works for Homeland Security.

She writes:

I love my job and country. I do have a child to feed and

bills to pay. I have been working a second job to get some

money coming in, but when you are working full time and you

have a family to care for, there are only so many extra hours

you can work, especially if you are not getting a paycheck

for some of the work you are doing.

I heard from another mother. She is worried about her daughter. Her daughter works for the U.S. Institute of Peace. She has been furloughed. She just missed her first paycheck, and she is unable to pay her bills and her student loans. Her daughter dedicates her life to combating terrorism, and now she is not only unable to do her job, but she is getting into financial trouble. She is worried, and her mother is worried, as any mother would be, but she does not have the financial resources to help her daughter.

Then there is the story of Anthony Morselli, who is a TSA agent at the Burlington International Airport. I see him often as I fly back and forth. The local paper recently reported he was forced to start a GoFundMe page in order to raise money to help his family pay the bills during the shutdown. His wife is also a TSA agent. They are both working without pay during the shutdown--it is a double hit--and they have two children to support. He points out that almost everyone seems to understand except the President.

Mr. Morselli says:

To see a zero balance in your bank account really hurts.

Some of us live paycheck to paycheck. Today would be payday,

and no money is coming in.

Another Vermonter called in who also works for the Department of Homeland Security in Vermont. He says he has a month's worth of money available in his savings account, and then he runs out of money entirely. He has a mortgage to pay, and the bills are piling up. He is scared. He works for the Department of Homeland Security. He says he wants to keep his job, but the shutdown is beyond reason. He says he certainly does not feel valued at all by the President and this White House. He points out that while the President says he wants border protection, he has been holding the pay from the people who protect our borders, including this Vermonter. I couldn't agree with him more.

Last week, the Senate and House passed a bill to ensure that all Federal workers will get backpay as soon as the shutdown is over. I was a cosponsor of that bill. I am glad to hear the President will sign it. It is the least he can do, considering the fact that he is the one who caused the mess. While this bill offers assurance to Federal employees that they will eventually get their paychecks, it does absolutely nothing to help them now. It does not help the people who call my office--the TSA agents, the DHS employees, or the State Department employees--because their bills are due now. This is not a case of, ``Oh, don't worry about it. Someday, you will get a check.'' The bills are due now, and the President has threatened that his Trump shutdown could last months or years. This is untenable.

The President says it is about border security. You could have fooled me. The examples I just talked about--and I could give so many more-- all involve dedicated Federal employees who are working to keep this country safe. They are proud of the work they do to keep America safe and are proud of the service they perform for their country, but they are all caught in the crosshairs of the Trump shutdown. The Trump shutdown is not about border security; it is about fulfilling a cynical campaign rally chant the President made to spin up his base. He even gave his word that Mexico would pay for the wall, while knowing, even as he said it, that it would never happen.

Congress is a coequal branch of government. We are not in the business of throwing taxpayer dollars around to build monuments to the Presidential egos of the Presidents of any party. Everyone knows the $5.7 billion wall he wants to build is a waste of taxpayer money. Everybody knows it will not address the immigration challenges in this country.

The President has manufactured a sense of urgency on the southern border solely to generate support for his ridiculous wall. The President likes to spin up his base by talking about the invasion of illegal immigrants, but that is not the reality. Apprehensions at the southwest border have dropped 75 percent since 2000. More people are here in this country illegally because they have overstayed their visas, not because they have snuck across the border. Every Member of the Senate supports border security, but I would argue we need to invest in smart border security, not spend billions of taxpayers' dollars on a 30-foot wall that determined people will be able to go over, or through, or under.

The President is now asserting that Democrats are for open borders. That is nonsense. In fiscal year 2018, the Democrats supported $21.1 billion in direct appropriations for border security and immigration enforcement. That followed a similar amount in fiscal year 2017. This funding supports investments at our northern and southern borders to help stop the flow of dangerous drugs like opioids, fentanyl, and methamphetamines. It targets money where it is needed. It pays for 19,500 Border Patrol agents nationwide, including, roughly, 16,500 on our southern border. It pays for 23,500 Customs Officers at our ports of entry, including 6,815 who are assigned to the southwest border's ports of entry. In fact, with Democratic support, the number of agents and officers we have is at a record high, even though illegal border crossings are at the lowest level we have seen since 1971.

Last year, Democrats and Republicans came together and agreed upon $1.7 billion in targeted border security investments. This included over $1 billion to be used between the ports of entry for improved facilities, tactical communications equipment, additional air assets, integrated fixed towers, video surveillance systems, ground detection systems, tactical aerostats, and money for countering cross-border tunnel threats. This is from Republicans and Democrats working together. It included $580 million for security at our ports of entry by increasing funds for intelligence capabilities at the National Targeting Center, nonintrusive inspection equipment so as to detect illicit contraband, and opioid testing equipment. It also included another $615 million to help address the root causes of migration from Central America.

These are investments that Republicans and Democrats can all agree on. This is how you protect our borders. It is more complex, but it is more effective than building a 30-foot wall. A 30-foot wall would not begin to do what this does. The shutdown is not about border security. Let's just be honest. It is about the President's own ego. It has to end.

In a few minutes, we are going to be voting on another bill that is one the Republican leader keeps bringing up. It is S. 1. At a time when people are desperate and are out of work here in America, we are to bring up this bill which has nothing to do with funding the government or border security. Rather than voting on the appropriations bills that would put Americans back to work, S. 1 authorizes more than $800 million, in this year alone, for Israeli defense contractors as part of $38 billion for Israel over the next 10 years. It is money that will put Israelis to work. It will pay for them to go to work. That is fine, but couldn't we take time, first, to put Americans back to work?

It also includes the boycott, divestment, sanctions legislation. This is an open violation of our First Amendment. It would give up Federal authority over matters of foreign policy to our State and local governments. I might not like a particular boycott, but the right to boycott is fundamental. Just pick up any one of our books about the U.S. civil rights movement and wonder if Martin Luther King and others would have been successful if they had not been allowed to have boycotts. It is not up to the government to pick and choose which boycotts citizens should support or oppose.

We have bills that are supported by Republicans and Democrats alike that could reopen the government. That should be our focus. We could talk about creating jobs in Israel at another time. Let's create jobs in America. Let's reopen our government.

I call on my friends, the Republicans, to stand up to the President and put a stop to this madness. Otherwise, the shutdown will not be just the President's fault but the fault of the Republicans in the Senate.

I implore Senator McConnell to bring up H.R. 21 and H.J. Res. 1 and send them to the President. Let Democrats and Republicans join together in voting for them. We could pass them with a veto-proof majority.

Congress is a coequal branch of government. We should not be intimidated

by any President of any party. We should start acting like a coequal branch of government. Frankly, we have 800,000 people in this country who will be paid for their work immediately if we start acting like we are supposed to--as a coequal branch of government. There are hundreds of thousands of others who need to work--contractors and all.

Let's stand up for Americans. We have the money for border security, but let's stand up for Americans. Let's put them to work. Let's let them get paid for what they are doing. These are our neighbors. These are people I see in the grocery store in Vermont when I am home on weekends. They are the people I see coming out of church on Sunday. These are the people I see when I am walking down the street to pick up my newspaper. These are good, hard-working people. Of the ones I have talked to, I have no idea whether they are Republicans or Democrats. All I know is that they want to do their work for this country. They support this country. They want to help this country be secure, but they can't understand why a temper tantrum at the White House will allow their paychecks to be stopped.

I yield the floor.

I don't see anybody seeking recognition.

So I suggest the absence of a quorum and ask for the time to be equally divided.

Mr. President, I rise to call on the President to stop holding the government hostage and trying to force taxpayers to pay for his border wall--a wall that would be ineffective and wasteful and that is rejected by the American people.

President Trump said he is ``proud''--that is his word that he used-- to shut down the government. He is proud to force hundreds of thousands of people across this country to miss their hard-earned paychecks. He is proud to shutter critical services. He is proud to try and extort the American people into paying for a wall they don't support. This Trump shutdown is nothing to be proud of. It is a national disgrace, and it is time to end this recklessness.

I join with my Democratic colleagues today in calling on the Republican leaders to do their jobs and reopen the government right now. The American people don't support Trump's border wall, and they don't support this Trump shutdown. The funding bills that are being held up and used by the President as a bargaining chip have broad bipartisan support. The Democrats in both Chambers want to pass these appropriations bills now. Yet, as the Democrats stand ready to reopen the government, President Trump plans to address the Nation tonight to tell us again why he is proud to keep the government shut down.

We will likely hear more bizarre talk tonight about what we need at the border from a President who doesn't know the first thing about the border. Once again, we will likely hear blatant lies about immigrants, about our border, and about our border communities. The American people are tired of this President's assault on the truth. They are tired of having their lives and livelihoods caught up in this President's inability to rise to the office he holds. No address from the Oval Office will change that.

We need the Republican leadership in this Chamber to muster the political will to stand up to the President and get Federal employees back to work and critical services restored. We are now on day 18 of this shutdown--the second longest period that the government has been shuttered since 1980. We have already begun to see real-life consequences for families all across the Nation, and my home State of New Mexico is one of the States that is being hit the hardest by the President's temper tantrum, by his act of political extortion.

In New Mexico, roughly 5,800 Federal workers are either furloughed or are working without pay. These aren't just

numbers, these are real people. They are real people who are wondering how they will make their mortgages or rent payments or will feed their families. A Federal employee in Albuquerque wrote to my office to tell me how this shutdown is affecting her and her family.

She wrote to me to ``go on the record that I am not one of the Federal employees the President is touting . . . as wanting to be out of work, without a paycheck, until he gets his wall.''

She had an important message for the Republican leadership of the Senate:

The Senate does not work for the President--it is supposed

to represent the citizens of the United States . . . .

Federal employees do not want to stay out of work; we want to

go back to work and get paid.

She ended:

This is not our fight--just his.

Economic anxiety is pervasive in all corners of the State. In fact, New Mexico was recently ranked as the most vulnerable to the impacts of the shutdown because of our significant Federal workforce and the importance of the Federal Government to our economy. As the ranking member of the Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, I am acutely aware of how the lapse in appropriations is affecting the Agencies that are funded in our bill and the services they provide. These include the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Indian Health Service.

As the ranking member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, I am especially cognizant of how this shutdown is hurting Native communities. For Tribes across Indian Country, the shutdown's consequences are particularly dire after their going more than 2 weeks without Federal funds. Simply put, Tribes report that Federal programs that are critical to health and public safety are grinding to a halt and that lives are in danger.

In New Mexico, the shutdown has left the Mescalero Apache Tribe's reservation--larger in size than the entire city of Houston, TX--with only one on-duty police officer, which would be unacceptable even under normal circumstances. Yet, due to a huge winter storm that left my State under heavy snowfall and subfreezing temperatures, that lone officer is responsible for not only responding to domestic violence and child welfare but also to snow-related accidents and emergencies across 720 square miles--all because furloughed road crews aren't clearing the snow and ice from the reservation's roads. One elder already died because he was unable to make it to dialysis. Sadly, Mescalero's experiences are not uncommon.

The Yurok Tribe of California will soon have to close its courts, curtailing the Tribe's efforts to rein in the opioid epidemic. Urban Indian Health Programs in Baltimore and Boston are days away from closing completely, leaving Native families in these cities without support. The Yankton Sioux Tribe in South Dakota was just informed that its Indian Health Service unit must begin reducing services.

The 276 Tribes that depend on the USDA's Food Distribution Programs on Indian reservations--a program that feeds nearly 100,000 American Indians and Alaska Natives--are also faced with reliving the 2013 shutdown crisis, when food rotted in locked warehouses while hungry families gathered outside--all because the President and some extreme Members of his party refuse to do their jobs and keep the government open.

It is disgraceful, and it is dangerous. Every day that the President continues to treat Tribal health and public safety programs like hostages for political gain, it endangers families across Indian Country. The United States has trust and treaty obligations that Tribes obtained in exchange for ceding millions of acres of land. The consequences of the President's outright disregard for treaty obligations are real. The consequences of the Senate majority leader's inaction are real. The consequences of the Republicans' unwillingness to stand up for Tribes in their States--to stand up for basic humanity and common sense--are also real.

We are talking about people's lives and the fundamental obligation of our Nation to honor its commitment to Native Americans. It is really that simple. We all know how pressing these problems are. The impacts of the Trump shutdown are far and wide. There are thousands of stories across the Nation. Let me tell you another from my home State of New Mexico.

A local Santa Fe small business--a construction company, Sarcon Construction Corporation--is ready to begin an $8.4 million project to build two new hangars at the Santa Fe Municipal Airport. This 32,000- square-foot project will generate $650,000 in local tax revenue and will employ 75 to 100 people. Many of those people are literally unemployed now while waiting for this project to begin. This project is a big deal for my home city of Santa Fe.

Do you know why the project is stalled? Sarcon can't get the necessary approval from the Federal Aviation Administration because of the Trump shutdown, as the FAA personnel who are responsible for its approval are furloughed.

This shutdown has real consequences for real people, especially for people like those unemployed New Mexicans who are ready and eager to work but who are unable to because of our President's tantrum. The President says he can ``relate'' to Federal workers who can't pay bills during the shutdown, but in the next breath, he blithely assumes they will ``make adjustments'' and be fine.

As he has demonstrated time and again, this President cannot and does not relate to the struggles of everyday Americans who are hurt by his policies. He cannot and does not relate to Federal employees who live paycheck to paycheck or to Santa Fe construction workers who wait anxiously to get back to work. He has shown us time and again that his policies and behavior are heartless and that he is unfit for the office he holds. I will say it again. The President told the American people on camera that he is ``proud to shut down the government.'' The responsibility falls squarely on him and now on his Republican collaborators in the Senate.

The impacts reach every corner of our Nation. His shutdown has already had real impacts on our Nation's public lands, including our most iconic national parks.

Many national parks, such as Bandelier National Monument and Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico, remain closed. Restrooms have been closed for 2 weeks, trash has accumulated, and roads have not been plowed. For 2 weeks, we have heard horror stories of poor sanitation and public safety issues at national parks because of the shutdown, including overflowing toilets, vandalism, and other resource damage. In Big Bend National Park, because of the lack of emergency services, Good Samaritans had to rescue a hiker who fell and broke his leg while hiking on Christmas Eve.

In fact, the effects have been so devastating that, in a legally questionable move, this administration just made the unprecedented decision to dip into the park's entrance fees to fund basic services at a handful of parks across the country. These are fees that Congress authorizes the Park Service to collect to pay for deferred maintenance projects and other critical needs, not to take the place of appropriated funds. We still don't know which parks will be affected by the administration's decision, but I fully expect this bandaid approach to fall far short of protecting our treasured national resources or restoring services to the public in a meaningful way. It is merely a cynical attempt to get the problems caused by the President's shutdown off the front page of the newspaper.

If we want to reopen the parks, there is a simple solution: Pass the Interior appropriations bill without delay, and we can reopen the entire National Park System. In the meantime, reopening some park sites but not others will not help many gateway communities that depend on parks and public lands to provide needed revenue and that are facing economic crisis as this shutdown wears on.

The National Parks Conservation Association estimates that in January, visitors spent an average of $20 million per day in nearby communities. That is real and vital revenue. In New Mexico alone, national parks generated more than 1,700 jobs in 2017 and created more than $140 million in economic output

for my State. I can tell you that New Mexico can't afford for these sites to be closed.

It is not just the parks that are at risk. Fire prevention programs funded by the U.S. Forest Service are being deferred during the shutdown, despite a recordbreaking fire season. Environmental protection programs are suffering. EPA has halted most activities related to hazardous waste cleanups under its national Superfund Program. Enforcement activities against polluters have ground to a halt, as have Federal permitting efforts. States aren't receiving funds to operate their regulatory programs.

Even our Nation's cherished national museums are shuttered. On January 2, the Smithsonian ran out of funds and closed its doors, preventing more than 110,000 visitors a day from accessing its prized collections. Its next-door neighbor, the National Gallery of Art, is also closed, leaving school groups, families, and everyday citizens out in the cold.

Again, there is a simple solution to stop this damage. All we have to do is pass an appropriations bill and reopen the government.

I want to end where I began. The President has nothing to be ``proud'' of here. President Trump needs to stop holding Federal programs hostage to his demands for a wasteful, ineffective, and destructive wall and end this shutdown now. We can do it easily. The Senate can immediately take up and pass H.R. 21--the appropriations bill passed by the House last week. This should cause no controversy. These are bills drafted by Republicans with broad bipartisan support. In fact, the Interior bill is the exact same legislation that was passed by this Chamber by a vote of 92 to 6 last August--a margin that would override a veto of the bill, I might add.

I call on Leader McConnell and Members of his party to let us get to work. We need to do what is right and immediately take up and pass the House bill today. There is no reason this shutdown must go on one day longer. The lives and livelihoods of everyday Americans hang in the balance.

As a final comment, I will say that I so much appreciate working with Senator Leahy, who is vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee and who I know feels, sees, and hears from all of his Appropriations members how concerning this situation is.

With that, I yield the floor.