Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act of 2019

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I want to congratulate the Presiding Officer on being in the Senate and presiding over the Senate.

I come to the floor to remind us how we got here. President Trump told us over and over and over again during his campaign that Mexico would pay for the wall. He said it at the beginning of the campaign. He said it in the middle of the campaign. He said it at the end of the campaign.

He made that promise over and over again. The U.S. Congress didn't make that promise. There is no way for Congress to force Mexico to pay for the wall. We cannot force Mexico to pay for the wall. It is not Congress's fault. It is the President's fault, and it is his promise he has broken.

Instead of going to Mexico to get them to pay for the wall, as he said he would do over and over again, he has now asked Congress to pay for it. He has now asked the American taxpayer to fulfill his broken promise.

By the way, that is after 2 years of having a Republican majority in the Senate and a Republican majority in the House who said: We don't want to build your wall. We are not going to help you keep your promise. In fact, you promised Mexico would pay for the wall. Go get Mexico to pay for the wall is what the Republican Senate and the Republican House said.

So he was frustrated. He said how frustrated he was. He went out to the American people during the 2018 election, and the people rewarded him by electing Democrats to be the majority in the House of Representatives.

Then, last December, those Democrats offered the President $1.3 billion for border security. It wasn't for his medieval wall. It is for what he now calls steel slats.

Instead of accepting that fact--the fact that nobody here wants to fund the wall he said Mexico would pay for--he shut down the government for 35 days. Then, after all the misery he inflicted, after the billions of dollars he cost our economy, to say nothing of what he did to the Federal workers, he basically got exactly the same deal as he got before he shut down the government, making the shutdown pointless, making the billions of dollars of lost wages and economic activity in America pointless, all a casualty of his inability to keep his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall and his inability to get Republican majorities in the House and the Senate to build his wall.

So having failed to get Mexico to pay for the wall, having failed to get a Republican Congress to pay for the wall, he now says he is going to declare a national emergency to pay for the wall.

We should ask ourselves--we must ask ourselves--whether this is an appropriate use of emergency power. By the way, if it was an appropriate use of emergency power, why didn't he just declare an emergency before he shut the government down for 35 days? Why cost the economy billions and billions of dollars if you can just do this by declaring an emergency? The easy answer for that is that it is not an emergency.

He is only doing this now because he lost the negotiation. He lost his leverage. He embarrassed himself by having the longest shutdown in American history.

This is not a national emergency. This is just plan B. The President has admitted as much as he was signing the declaration itself--the declaration of emergency. He said:

I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster.

. . . I just want to get it done faster, that's all.

It is not an emergency. He just wants to get it done faster, which is astonishing coming from a guy who has not spent the money that Congress has already appropriated for the wall. He

hasn't even spent that money, and now he is saying he wants to go faster, and he has to declare a national emergency to do it.

By the way, America, you may have noticed that the President is also now saying that ``much of the wall has already been fully renovated or built.'' ``Much of the wall has already been fully renovated or built.'' That is what your President is saying to you at the exact same time he is saying that he needs a national emergency to build the wall. It is preposterous. It is a joke.

On top of everything else, he is not telling the truth about that. He has not built a mile of this wall since he has been President of the United States, even though Congress has appropriated more than $1 billion--I think about $1.7 billion--to do it.

When he signed the emergency declaration, he said that national emergencies have ``been signed many times before. It's been signed by other presidents from 1977 or so; it gave the presidents the power.''

``There's rarely been a problem'' the President said. ``They sign it. Nobody cares.'' That is what he said.

Nobody cared because those were real emergencies, not fake emergencies. They weren't emergencies being declared by Presidents who had promised that Mexico would do something, and then it didn't happen, and now they had to declare an emergency. They certainly were not cases where the President came to the Congress, including a Congress of their own party, and said, I want to do something, and they said no. Then, they said: Well, we are going to declare an emergency.

That has never happened before in American history.

By the way, if we go down this road, this will not be the last time this happens. This will happen time and again, which is why every Member of the Senate should vote for this measure of disapproval.

Since 1976, when Congress passed the National Emergencies Act, Presidents have declared national emergencies 58 times. Fifty-three of those times have been to do things like block the sale of weapons to foreign countries or to sanction governments, like Iran and North Korea. The four remaining cases were after two U.S. planes were shot down by Cuba, after we invaded Iraq and desperately needed to protect critical infrastructure, after the outbreak of swine flu, and after 9/ 11.

Failing to fulfill his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall is not a national emergency, and if he thinks it is, he should sanction himself for failing to keep his promise.

As I said earlier--and this should bother everybody who believes in our system of checks and balances and who believes in the Constitution--never has a President sought to enact a national emergency like this after Congress has said no. In our Constitution, Congress has the power of the purse. Every single Senator should be voting to protect that.

Over the months and now stretching into years, I have been shocked at how the people around here who declare that they are constitutional conservatives have put up with a President who obviously doesn't care about the rule of law, doesn't care about the separation of powers--as you see here--isn't concerned about having an independent judiciary, and wants to threaten the leading journalists of this country, calling them fake news.

I would think this step would be one step too far, even for anybody in this Chamber who supported this craziness up until this point.

Let's add it all up. What has it gotten us? The President couldn't get Mexico to pay for the wall. He couldn't get a Republican House and a Republican Senate to pay for the wall. So now he is violating the Constitution to steal money that has been appropriated by this branch-- by Congress. He is stealing that money from the Department of Defense, from our warfighters, and from the U.S. military to expropriate private land held by American farmers and ranchers--many of whom I assume are Republicans--through eminent domain.

As I have said on this floor before, if any President tried to do that in Colorado, there is not a person in our delegation who would support that--stealing our farms and ranches.

It must be said that, for a politician, he has a very unusual view about eminent domain. Here are some quotes of his: ``I think eminent domain is wonderful.''

For those of you who don't know what eminent domain is, it is when a government decides it wants a project, and your house is in the middle of where that project is going to go. Then, the government can use this thing called eminent domain to take your house and pay you for it. That is what it is. It is rarely used because most people don't want the government deciding whether they can live in their house or on their farm or on their ranch, which--in the case of people on the border of the United States--has been in their family for generations. That is why the local Congressman down there doesn't want this wall built. I think he is a Republican.

But the President said: ``I think eminent domain is wonderful''--not sometimes essential, not a tool that is useful from time to time. He said it is ``wonderful.''

He said: ``Eminent domain is something that has to be used, usually you would say for anything that's long, like a road, like a pipeline, or like a wall, or a fence.''

He didn't say steel slats, but I am sure the same thing applies.

Here is another quote. This is fascinating. I have not met a single person in Colorado who would agree with this--not one--and I bet you there is not a person in Mississippi or Texas or Alabama who would agree with this sentiment either. This is what the President of the United States said:

Most of the time, they just want money. It's very rarely

they say, ``I love my house, I love my house, it's the

greatest thing ever.''

Here is another quote--and just for everybody who is watching this because people are going to come out on this floor and say: Oh, no, the money will not be used for it in this case--not for a wall, not for eminent domain.

Donald Trump says:

We are going to need a little eminent domain to get that

wall built, just so you understand. . . . You need eminent

domain, you have to take certain areas, okay?

That is the kind of language you would expect out of some autocrat someplace, not in a democracy.

I say to my Republican friends here who are going to vote with the President on this bill, that is what you are supporting when you are voting with him on this bill.

I don't know how anybody goes home and defends that. For anyone who wants to go home and defend misappropriating money that has been dedicated to the Department of Defense and to our military and to take that money extra-constitutionally and use it to take the property of law-abiding citizens, I don't understand how you defend it.

I am not making any of this up. These are his words. By the way, it is no wonder he can't get it through the people's Representatives in Congress because there is not a single person here who would ever admit to doing what he is about to do and what he says he wants to do. What a betrayal of conservative principles this is.

As I said, this whole exercise itself is an admission that he has broken his promise to the American people.

We didn't break it, Republicans in the Senate. We didn't break it, and we should not help him keep it if it is going to break the Constitution. In fact, we can't help him keep it unless somebody around here has a way of persuading Mexico to build the wall or pay for the wall, which I don't think there is a single person here who has that kind of influence, as influential as all of us think we are.

I don't understand it, but it is amazing to me why people would cash in their conservative principles so cheaply--$3.6 billion.

The idea that you would be willing to give up your principles in such a tawdry exchange should be infuriating to the real conservatives who I know are in this country. Many of them live in my State of Colorado, which is a third Republican, a third Independent, and a third Democratic. Don't come to our State and tell us you are taking away our houses because we don't care about them--that we will just take the money instead for a broken promise that you didn't keep. That would not sell in Colorado. I don't know why it sells in Texas. I can't imagine that it does. I don't know how anybody could support that.

By the way, that is not even the most important point. The most important

point is that we have ground ourselves up for a 35-day government shutdown, for 3 months of media cycles on this fight by the President on a wall that he now says is almost fully built, while he is declaring an emergency to build a wall that hasn't been built.

While we are screwing around here to keep a broken promise that Mexico is going to pay for the wall, this is what was going on in China. By the way, I know somebody is going to say: Hey, they have a wall. They do have a wall. They built it 500 years ago. That is not what they are working on today. They took care of that medieval wall 500 years ago.

Today, what they are doing is they are spending $125 billion on high- speed rail this year alone. That is $125 billion on high-speed rail. You get on one of those trains and you could hear a pin drop. If you go on Amtrak, which I take all the time--I feel grateful that we have it-- it is less than half the speed, and you can't put your Coca-Cola on the table in front of you without it falling over or falling on your neighbor.

China has spent $300 billion on new roads, bridges, and ports across the globe through their Belt and Road Initiative. They have bought stakes in 16 different ports across Europe and the Mediterranean, some of which have fallen into their hands because--and this is part of the plan--the debt that the countries have put on to build the ports is so onerous that China gets to own the ports. They have built the longest sea bridge in the world. They have laid over 3,700 miles of fiber optic cable to connect Africa to Latin America and, ultimately, to China. On that Belt and Road Initiative, they have laid their technology over that with fiber optic cables so they could extend the surveillance society that they are building inside of China right now, while we screw around with this wall.

By the way, on the $3.6 billion for the wall, here is an interesting chart. Here is how much cement China used over a 3-year period, from 2011 to 2013. This is what they used in 3 years, 2011 to 2013. I was in the Congress then. We were in the depths of the great recession during that period of time. It was 6.6 gigatons of concrete. Here is how much we have built in concrete in 100 years: 4.5 gigatons.

They used 4.5 gigatons in 3 years. They have used dramatically more than we have used in 100 years, and we can't even get an infrastructure bill off this floor. The White House can't even write an infrastructure bill.

All night, every night, on the cable, all we hear is $3.6 billion for the wall, the wall, the wall--the wall that the President says has already been mostly built, that he is now declaring a national emergency to build.

The world is racing ahead of us, as I have said on this floor over and over again, while we are getting run around by one inane distraction after another. It has been said that the President is somebody who is mostly concerned with winning the politics of any given day. That is what he tries to do, and he is often very effective at it. We spend a lot of time talking about him and his priorities, unlike figuring out a plan to counteract what China is doing or others are doing.

I bet they have a great strategy in China and Iran. Russia is not so obviously good at that strategy. Actually, come to think of it, they are pretty good, too. If you can stay off FOX News, the President will not pay any attention to what you are doing, so go do whatever it is you want to do while we fritter away one day after another of the American people's time over a broken promise that he never could keep.

Unless we are prepared to be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to the people coming after us, we need to do a lot better than what we are doing, and part of that is to ensure that we preserve the institutions that built this country, like the one we are standing in right now.

I know that among some people there is an effort to divide the government from the American people and that there are people here who think they have been sent here for one purpose, which is to discredit the Federal Government.

I have a lot of problems with the Federal Government--lots of them. I was a school superintendent before I came here. I have a lot of problems with what is happening to poor children who are going to schools in our public system of education across the country, so I am not here to defend government or the way it works right now. In fact, I don't think Democrats should be the party defending bad government. We should fix it where it needs to be fixed.

We are talking here about our institutions. We are talking here about the rule of law. We are talking here about the Constitution that generation after generation after generation of Americans has preserved--not always perfectly, often very imperfectly.

Every generation of Americans has seen it as their obligation, their responsibility, to at least try to live up to the pages in our founding documents, and where we failed, we got up and we tried again. This whole country is founded on the idea that we will have disagreements because we live in a Republic, and in a Republic, you have disagreements. There is no King or tyrant to tell you what to think. That is the reason we live in a democratic Republic.

This place here and the Chamber down the hall are part of the mechanisms that were drafted into our founding documents for us to resolve our disagreements. The Founders believed something. They had no good example in the past, but here is what they believed. They believed that out of that vigorous disagreement, we would create more imaginative and durable solutions than any tyrant could ever come up with on their own. That is why they designed the institutions the way they did, and that is why they created the checks and balances that they did. There is a reason no President has ever done what this President is trying to do.

They exercise self-restraint because of what is in the Constitution and because nobody on this floor would have supported him. There are many ways this generation of politicians--and I accept my share of the blame. There are many ways in which we have degraded these institutions in our time. We have destroyed the Senate's responsibility to advise and consent on judicial nominations and Supreme Court nominations. That has been turned into a purely partisan exercise by this generation of American politicians. I am ashamed of that. I am ashamed to have been here when we did that, and I take my share of the responsibility.

What I say to my colleagues is that we cannot continue to degrade these institutions and expect that the next generation of Americans is going to look back on us with anything except contempt. Generation after generation after generation of Americans has preserved these institutions so the next generation could have the opportunity to resolve their disagreements in these Chambers. We will regret it. We will regret it if we go down this road.

As the majority leader said in another time: Things have a way of changing around here sooner than you think, and someday the shoe will be on the other foot. If this Republican sets this precedent and some Democratic President follows it, that is one more step away from living in the Republic that we all claim we cherish, from the democracy we all claim we cherish, to put power in the hands of a tyrant who may or may not represent the will of the American people.

We may never get another vote like this around here. This is going to be the time that each of us is going to decide whether we are going to act to preserve these institutions for the next generation or whether we are going to continue to degrade them in our mindless partisanship and, in this case, to somehow fulfill a promise the President never could keep. That would be a shameful day in the U.S. Senate.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am here to talk about the vote that we will take later today on this floor regarding the President's national emergency declaration.

From the outset of this process, I have had two objectives. One is to support the President on the crisis at the border. I believe his plan to address that crisis is a good one, and we should support it. But, second is to do it in the right way, without setting a dangerous new precedent counter to a fundamental constitutional principle, without tying up the needed funds for the border in the courts, and without taking funds away from important military construction projects for our troops.

Unfortunately, despite a sincere effort by the administration as recently as this morning to try to work with me and other colleagues, including the Presiding Officer, we were not able to agree on a path forward that addresses those concerns that I just outlined.

I am going to lay out in a minute how I think we can better achieve the President's goals of strengthening our border security without invoking the national emergency and the funding he

seeks through that national emergency.

First, let me repeat what I have said on this floor many times and said consistently: I do believe we have a crisis at the border--a humanitarian crisis, a trafficking crisis, a drug crisis. According to Customs and Border Protection, in February--last month--76,000 illegal immigrants arrived at our southern border. That is an average of about 2,000 every day. Since October of last year, we have apprehended more than 268,000 people at the border. That is about a 100-percent increase over the same period last year. We have also seen a 300-percent increase in families arriving at the border compared to this time last year. By the way, the vast majority of those are from three countries in Central America.

This is a humanitarian crisis. The journey to the United States from these so-called Northern Triangle countries is incredibly dangerous, especially for women and for children. They face violence from gangs and traffickers and hunger and dehydration in the rough terrain. Many of them arrive at our border traumatized, hurt, sick, and often we don't have the resources to provide for those needs.

There is also a growing human trafficking crisis. Our lack of border security allows these smugglers--human smugglers--to move across the border unchecked. Increasingly, they are taking advantage of these flows of individuals to traffic women and children.

In particular, I will say the Border Patrol resources are spread thin trying to monitor these areas that do not have barriers.

Third, this is a drug crisis. The Drug Enforcement Agency has said that the southwest border ``remains the primary entry point for heroin into the United States.'' That is not a debatable point. I am told that with regard to Ohio, where we have been devastated by the opioid epidemic, over 90 percent of the heroin is coming across the southern border.

Fentanyl, the deadliest drug of all, which comes primarily from China and primarily through the U.S. mail system--50 times more powerful than heroin--is increasingly coming across the southern border too. Yesterday I learned from Customs and Border Protection that fentanyl seizures along the border between the ports of entry have increased by 400 percent between 2016 and 2018.

As we are finally beginning to make progress on the opioid crisis in my home State of Ohio and around the country, finally reducing the number of heroin and other opioid overdose deaths for the first time in 8 years, we are seeing a reduction in those deaths, but crystal meth and the devastation it causes is coming back--coming back with a vengeance. It is more pure than ever, more powerful than ever, and it is coming from Mexico.

Some of you may remember in your own communities the issue of crystal meth labs being in people's houses and the environmental damage it caused and the crystal meth being cooked. That is not happening much anymore. Why? Because the pure crystal meth from Mexico is so much more powerful and less expensive; it is cheap.

Law enforcement tells me that on the streets of Columbus, OH, pure crystal meth is now plentiful and less expensive than marijuana--and far more dangerous. Where is this coming from? It is coming from Mexico.

Even with limited resources, in fiscal year 2018, Customs and Border Protection seized almost a half million pounds of marijuana and 11,000 pounds of methamphetamine between ports of entry. At the ports of entry, they seized over 1,700 pounds of fentanyl--by the way, that is enough to kill about 3 billion people--1,700 pounds of fentanyl, three flecks of which can kill you, 56,000 pounds of meth, and nearly 52,000 pounds of cocaine.

Frankly, that is the tip of the iceberg. Most of it is getting through. They are checking only a small percentage of shipments, meaning the vast majority of drugs are coming across our borders undetected. We need to do more.

There is no question we need stronger border security. Again, I support the plan the President has outlined, including the $5.7 billion the President has requested for walls and other barriers.

That $5.7 billion number, by the way, wasn't just picked out of thin air. It funds the top 10 priorities of the Customs and Border Protection Border Security Improvement Plan. The experts have given us a plan, and the President's $5.7 billion simply funds what the experts have said.

This plan, by the way, the expert's border security plan, has been embraced by this Congress in the last two appropriations bills. They pointed to that plan and said: This is the path forward. These are the experts. It is not controversial.

By the way, the experts have recommended not that we build a wall from sea to shining sea--it has been mischaracterized as that--but 234 miles of barriers, walls, and other fencing at places where people cross the border most frequently, primarily in the State of Texas, primarily in the urban areas--places where it will make the most difference.

Funding for these types of barriers has been included in the budget requests from previous administrations, of course. Previous administrations have built hundreds of miles of fencing--over 500 miles.

It has also been included in appropriations bills passed by Congress during the last two appropriation cycles by both Republicans and Democrats. Why is it that this administration can't build the barriers that other administrations have and that Congress in the past has supported?

Of course it is not just about more physical barriers, and the President's plan also recognizes that. It calls for more Border Patrol agents, more technology, more surveillance, more drones, more cameras, more screening at our ports of entry, more technology to stop this illegal flow of drugs. That is also a significant part of the plan.

But erecting more barriers and fencing in key areas along the border will help stem the tide. It will ease the burden on our Border Security personnel and allow them to focus their resources more effectively.

It is time to listen to the experts and give them what they need to carry out their important mission, but we have to do that in the right way.

As we all learned in high school, our government has a system of checks and balances. It gives some powers to the President; it gives some powers to Congress. Our Constitution explicitly gives the U.S. Congress what is called the power of the purse.

Congress, not the President, has the sole authority to determine how to spend taxpayer money, and that is appropriate. After all, we are here to represent the people. We are most accountable to the taxpayers. Once we appropriate the money for a specific purpose, then it is the President and the executive branch that are responsible for administering those programs.

We had our spending fight here in Congress. I thought we should give the President the full amount of money he requested for barriers, and I voted that way. At the end of the day, Congress decided to give him only some, not all, of the funds he requested.

Under current law and current congressional approval and authorities, without declaring a national emergency, President Trump can actually access additional funds that get him to the $5.7 billion he requested. As the Wall Street Journal said in a recent editorial opposing a national emergency, ``The President doesn't need to invoke a national emergency to build his wall along the southern border.''

Declaring a national emergency to access different funds sets a dangerous new precedent. The use of national emergency powers to circumvent Congress's explicit decision on funding is unprecedented. No President has ever used what is called the National Emergencies Act in this way. As a result, it opens the door for future Presidents to implement just about any policy they want and to take funding from other areas Congress has already decided on without Congress's approval.

Once a President declares an emergency, he or she has access to a lot of power. Some would say nearly unlimited power. A future President could seize industries or could control means of communication. Think of the internet. A future President may well say that climate change is a national emergency and use emergency authorities to implement the Green New Deal. By the way, according to a new study by Douglas Holtz- Eakin at the American Action Forum, the proposed policies in the Green New Deal would cost

between $51 trillion and $93 trillion over the next 10 years when added up together. Obviously, that is not sustainable. It is an astounding price tag. In fact, as Senator Alexander said on the floor earlier today, future Presidents could actually use this emergency authority to tear down the very wall we are now constructing, and some Democrats running for President have said that is what they intend to do. That is what they want to do.

The President is using the National Emergencies Act to take funds away from a particular area of spending. It is called military construction funds. Only twice before have Presidents declared a national emergency in order to transfer military construction funds away from congressionally designated projects into other priorities. In both of those situations, we were at war, and the Secretary of Defense transferred the funds to support the war effort, and Congress did not object. Although there is a crisis at our southern border, we are not in wartime, and there are funds available to address border security.

The President wants to do more to address the crisis at the border, and I do, too, and he can do more. The President has available to him enough funds, right now, to begin building all the barriers he has requested without resorting to national emergency funds. I support his using those funds to get to the full $5.7 billion he requested for barriers on the southern border.

Here is how we could access it without using the national emergency. First would be the $1.375 billion appropriated by this Congress for the barriers. By the way, that is the most that has ever been appropriated in a fiscal year, ever, for the purpose of barriers. Second, he can access, as he intends to do, $601 million from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund. He could do that without a national emergency. Third, he could access funding through the DOD counter-drug account. He has said that he would like to access about $2.5 billion from that account, but he could actually access, under our laws that we have passed here--and we have given him authority to access--up to $4 billion. This adds up, as we can see, to over $5.7 billion--almost $6 billion--which is at the President's disposal without moving to the national emergency that he has invoked. My hope is that the President will take this approach.

I think using those funds is a better way to accomplish our border security goals. Precisely because the President does not need to declare a national emergency, these funds are far more certain. The $3.6 billion the President takes from the military construction projects is uncertain because these funds are likely to be tied up in constitutional litigation for months, probably years. By the way, the President has rightly acknowledged that.

Under the National Emergencies Act, Congress has given the President flexibility to address significant threats to our Nation's well-being, and we want him to have that flexibility. It was critical for President Bush to act quickly and decisively in the days after the 9/11 attacks. But short of that type of situation, it is imperative for the President to honor Congress's constitutional role to make policy and appropriate money. A national emergency declaration is a tool to be used cautiously and sparingly. That is why I cosponsored legislation, authored by Senator Mike Lee, to amend the National Emergencies Act to ensure that Congress does have more control over these decisions in the future.

So in my view, the best resolution here is for the President to use that nearly $6 billion in funding that he has at his disposal to implement his plan, and, then, ask Congress for additional funding during the next appropriations cycle, which, by the way, begins on October 1 of this year.

This approach, again, has three distinct advantages. One, it would not set the dangerous precedent we discussed today. Second, the funds could actually get to the border because they will not be tied up in litigation. Third, it would fully protect important military construction projects in Ohio and around the country--including, by the way, funding for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, or NASIC, at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; an automated, multipurpose machine gun range at Camp James A. Garfield; a fire station replacement at Mansfield Lahm Airport; a small arms range at Rickenbacker International Airport, and a main gate relocation project at Youngstown Air Reserve Station. All of those are things in the current fiscal year Military Construction appropriations bill that benefit Ohio. I am a strong supporter and advocate for Ohio's military facilities and our research institutions, and I will continue to work to ensure that our key military construction projects at these strategic facilities can continue to move forward.

I have worked on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. I have had the honor of being a Senator and a Congressman on this side, and I have worked for two White Houses. In fact, I was Associate Counsel to President Bush 41 in his White House Counsel's office. I know how hard it can be for the executive branch, the President, and Congress to find the balance that our Founders intended between the executive branch and the legislative branch, but our Founders drew a clear line on at least one thing: Congress, closest to the people, would have the power of the purse.

When President Obama bypassed Congress and took executive action to create new immigration policy back in 2012, I spoke out. I criticized him because of the constitutionality issue. I said I agreed with President Obama that our immigration system was--and, by the way, still is--broken. I agreed we needed to work together to fix it, but, I said that it doesn't mean that a President can ignore Congress, substitute his own judgment for the will of the people, and make up new laws on his own. That is what I said President Obama did. I believed it was wrong then.

I believe the President's use of the national emergency declaration to access already approved military construction project funding is wrong now. I support his goals. President Trump is right that we have a crisis, and I support his plans to secure the border, and he can fully fund it in a more reliable way. By the way, anyone who cares about getting that money to the border to build walls ought to want that certainty.

Each one of us in this body has sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. So today I will vote to support the disapproval resolution that is before us.

I know the President has the votes to pursue his approach. Even if the disapproval resolution passes, he can veto it, and his veto will be sustained. I know that, but I continue to hope that the President uses the funds he has available to him without creating a bad precedent, having some of the needed funds tied up in the courts, and taking money from important military projects.

President Trump is right about the crisis at the border, and the approach I outlined today would enable him to accomplish his policy objectives on the border and honor our Constitution.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, last month, I launched a new series of floor speeches to recognize what is going on with prescription drug pricing across America.

When you ask the American people about the economic things that are on their minds, it is No. 1--the cost of prescription drugs. No. 2 is, have I saved enough money for my retirement? It really gets to the heart of the concerns families have every day. Each one of us knows that the cost of prescription drugs is going up, and we also realize how vulnerable we may be as individuals if one of those drugs is a matter of life and death.

I came to the floor 2 weeks ago to talk about the cost of insulin. Seven and a half million diabetics across America have seen dramatic increases in the cost of insulin--increases that can't be justified because the same American companies selling the same drugs in Canada do it for a fraction of the cost. Americans pay outrageous prices.

Humalog, which is one of the most popular forms of insulin, costs $329 a dosage in the United States. Twenty years ago, it was about $29. It has gone up in price 35 times in that 20-year period of time. How much does the exact same drug that costs $329 in the United States cost in Canada? It is made by the same company. Thirty-eight dollars. You look at that and you think there is something wrong here. The pharmaceutical industry is not focusing on giving American consumers a break.

What I want to talk about today goes to an issue that is hard to believe but true. A few years ago, the New York Times reported that nearly $3 billion worth of drugs was wasted each year. These are not ordinary drugs; these are cancer drugs used in chemotherapy. Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurers spend billions of dollars on medications. Many of them are literally thrown in the trash. How could that possibly be?

You see, for many of the most expensive drugs, like new cancer treatments, the pharmaceutical industry produces them in a one-size- fits-all container, a single-use vial that a physician has to draw from to give a treatment to a patient. The dosage for the patient in the cancer therapy is based on the patient's size and weight. The problem is that the pharmaceutical industry insists on selling these drugs in excessively large vials that contain dramatically more medicine than the average patient would need, so doctors administer the proper dosage and throw away the rest.

Here is a graphic to illustrate what I am talking about. Here is why we are wasting billions of dollars each year on cancer drugs. One size does not fit all.

This drug, Velcade--the vial size available is 3.5 milligrams. The patient dose is 2.2. The amount that is left over is 1.3. Oh, you are going to recycle that? You can't do it. That is the end of it, and it is thrown away. In 2016, $300 million was wasted in this way.

This vial, the first one here that is produced, is a vial that would apply to a person who is 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 250 pounds, which means our linebacker Khalil Mack on the Chicago Bears--God forbid he would ever need it--that would be his dosage size. Most people are not as big as Chicago linebackers.

Why is Pharma sending us one vial, take it or leave it? Because they make money. They make money when we buy it and have to throw it away.

Takeda Pharmaceutical sells this drug for those who are suffering from multiple myeloma and lymphoma. As I mentioned, it is for a person who is 6 feet 6 inches and weighs 250 pounds. Takeda made $310 million in the year 2016 off of unused Velcade that got thrown in the trash-- $310 million.

What makes this even more appalling is that the pharmaceutical industry titans actually sell the same drug in smaller containers in other countries but not in the United States. Here, we are forced to buy the largest container and throw away the difference.

This chart shows that the same company--Takeda--that makes Velcade sells this drug not in 3.5-milligram vials, as in the United States, but, in Europe, in 1-milligram vials. It seems like a simple thing, doesn't it, that you would dispense this drug in a manner so that it is not wasted? Sadly, wasting and throwing away the drug is part of their marketing strategy.

Another Japanese company, Eisai, sells its chemotherapy drug Halaven only in 1-milligram vials in the United States but sells smaller vials--0.88 milligram--in Europe.

Merck's immunotherapy drug KEYTRUDA, which is truly a breakthrough, an amazing drug--research was done by taxpayers at the National Institutes of Health, which led to the development of this drug--they sell this drug, KEYTRUDA, only in 100-milligram vials in the United States but in 50-milligram vials in Europe. In 2016, Merck made $200 million on KEYTRUDA--this lifesaving drug--that was thrown away.

In 2016, I asked the inspector general of Health and Human Services about this waste of taxpayers' money. The inspector general uncovered that Medicare spent $195 million in just 1 year on 20 identified drugs for medication that was thrown away. That year, Takeda received $47 million in taxpayer funding for amounts of Velcade thrown in the trash. It wasn't alone. Genentech's Rituxan, one of the most common cancer medications, only comes in vials that are 100 milligrams or 500 milligrams. In 2013, Medicare wasted $10 million on Rituxan that was thrown away.

It is for this reason that I am presenting my second Pharma Fleece Award to Takeda, Eisai, Merck, and Genentech. Patients in America should not face higher drug costs because these Pharma fleecers choose to sell their expensive cancer drugs in excessively large drug vials that are necessarily going to be wasted.

Two weeks ago, I teamed up with Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio to introduce the REFUND Act--a simple bill that Senator Portman and I have introduced, and I hope others will join us. It says that taxpayers will only pay for the drug that is given to a patient, not for the part that is thrown away. Medicare already tracks how much of this medication is being discarded, so the REFUND Act simply requires Medicare to determine how much was wasted and to recoup the money from the drug companies. We then provide a portion of that money back to seniors for the 20-percent coinsurance they have to pay for the drugs.

An important point: When Medicare is paying for these drugs, and a lot are being thrown away, the seniors are still paying their 20 percent, even for the drug portion that is being thrown away. So Rob Portman's bill--the one I have introduced with him--says that the money recouped from the drug companies will go back to the benefit of these seniors. Under our new bill, this pharma fleecing for drug vial waste will soon come to an end so that not just the patients but our government will save money.

Remember the bottom line. When you ask the major health insurers today: What is driving the cost of health insurance premiums, they say: Senator, prescription drug pricing is No. 1.

Blue Cross Blue Shield, based out of Chicago, when I sit down with them, say: We spend more money on prescription drugs than we do on inpatient hospital care.

To give you an idea, it is out of sight. You can't turn on a television set, particularly if you are over the age of 50, without being bombarded with all these drug ads, right? You have heard them over and over again.

The No. 1 drug being sold on television today is HUMIRA. What is it for? psoriatic arthritis. It is serious. If you have that arthritis, that may be a lifesaver for you, but it is now being sold for that little red patch on your elbow called psoriasis. Interesting. Do you know how much HUMIRA costs each month? Five thousand dollars.

I have legislation that would require these drug companies to advertise the cost of their drugs on television. They tell us everything else; don't they? They tell us, if you are allergic to HUMIRA, don't take HUMIRA. I have never understood that warning. They tell us everything under the Sun, but they never mention the price. So what I want to do is get the price out in front of the public, and let them know what being perfect in a swimsuit is going to cost you per month.

From my point of view, there are people who need these drugs desperately, and we ought to try to get the prices within their reach. For those who are overusing and abusing the airwaves of America to advertise drugs--to try to push doctors into writing the scripts even when it is not necessary--we have to come to grips with this. If we don't, we are not going to have a serious effort to reduce the cost of health insurance and the healthcare costs that face our Nation.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, the President often claims that he knows how to make deals, but when it comes to the border, he seems uninterested in a good deal, a deal to provide effective border security, and he is hurting our military in the process. This week's vote to repeal the President's national emergency is a vote to restore sanity to our border security debate and restore Congress's constitutional power of the purse.

We all remember Donald Trump's idea that we need a 2,000-mile concrete wall from sea to shining sea and his claim that Mexico would pay for it. He said it some 200 times on the campaign trail and in the Oval Office. In December, after asking and failing to receive funding from Congress for this wall, the President said, ``I am proud to shut down the government for border security.''

What followed was the 35-day Trump shutdown, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. It cost our country $11 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. After the President finally agreed to reopen the government, Congress provided funding to the Department of Homeland Security for smart and effective border security measures, including technology and additional Customs personnel. We did this because the President's own administration has stated that the vast majority of lethal narcotics that cross our southern border come through legal ports of entry.

But within hours of signing this bill, President Donald Trump announced that it wasn't enough. The President went on television to announce that he was declaring a national emergency over the border, and he announced that he was taking $6.5 billion from our military to build it.

Presidents of both parties have declared national emergencies. Each time, it was done in response to a specific crisis, in order to unlock certain statutory authorities. President George W. Bush declared a national emergency after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the 1970s, President Carter declared a national emergency as it pertained to Iran. Presidents of both parties have declared and updated emergencies relating to instability in Syria.

What Presidents did in those situations varied--sometimes levying sanctions, sometimes seizing assets--but each time, it was accepted on a bipartisan basis as necessary, legitimate, and in defense of our national interests. What President Trump did was different. For the last 2 years, he has struggled to fulfill a campaign promise, so when he didn't get his way, he created a fake crisis and declared a phony emergency.

The good news is that the American people aren't buying it. A poll conducted earlier this month by Quinnipiac University found that 66 percent of voters oppose the President's end-run around Congress and oppose his fake emergency declaration.

Newspapers around the country have concluded the same thing. The Tampa Bay Times editorial board said it clearly a few days after the President's announcement, ``Border wall is no emergency.'' In their words, ``It is not a national emergency just because President Donald Trump didn't get his way.''

West Virginia's Herald Dispatch newspaper concludes much the same, urging the President to ``take a realistic look at whether the wall is needed or if it's simply an unnecessary quest to satisfy his ego.'' That is common sense, but then common sense seems to be in short supply in this White House.

Not only is the President declaring a fake emergency, but he is using that crisis to take money. The President has told us that he will take $6.5 billion that Congress gave to our troops and spend it instead on a wall on the southern border. He is proposing to delay or cancel $3.6 billion in military construction projects--projects that our military told Congress it needed less than a year ago--and divert it to his wall.

Last Friday, Senator Schatz and I sent a letter to Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan demanding to know which projects have been deemed, due to political interference, as less important than the President's wall. There are almost 400 military projects at risk. They cover 43 States, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and more than a dozen foreign countries, including strong U.S. allies like Japan and the United Kingdom.

The President will have to cancel or postpone approximately 20 percent of these projects for his wall. What are we talking about?-- $800 million for essential training facilities like National Guard Readiness Centers, simulators, and firing ranges in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, and Montana, to name a few; $1.4 billion worth of maintenance-related projects, such as aircraft hangars, and vehicle maintenance shops in Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and elsewhere; $1 billion worth of projects for medical and dental care facilities, schools for military families, military barracks and dining facilities in Arizona, Missouri, Texas, and beyond.

For instance, the Marine Corps needs a new rifle range at Parris Island, SC. This base trains 20,000 new Marine recruits every year. Also on the list is new training center at Fort Bragg, NC, to provide top-notch training and prevent injuries among our special operations forces. They are using old warehouse right now. Are we really going to tell our military that their needs are being put on hold so the President can fulfill his campaign promise to build a wall? I hope those aren't our priorities.

In addition, the President also announced that he would take $2.5 billion in other military funds for his wall. The Pentagon tells me that they may take some of this money from excess military pay and pensions. Meanwhile, each of the military services--Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines--have met with me to discuss a long list of urgent, last-minute needs, but with $2.5 billion being diverted for the wall, none of those leaders were able to say whether or not they would get the funding they need.

Last year, Hurricane Florence damaged 800 buildings at Camp Lejeune, New River, and Cherry Point, causing $3.6 billion in damage from wind and flood waters. A similar hurricane leveled Tyndall Air Force Base, in Florida. Both of them could use billions right now for repairs.

I am also told that the Navy needs hundreds of millions of additional dollars for unexpected ship maintenance. We can't afford not to make sure our sailors are safe on deployment. The National Guard has 2,100 personnel on the border, but it is starting to run low on its pay account. Unless DOD finds $150-300 million this year, the Guard will have to cut short its summer trainings in all 50 States to pay for this.

My subcommittee has identified almost $5 billion in military priorities that need attention now, but after the President takes $2.5 billion to pay for his border wall, which priorities will get cut?

This week, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate should join the House in rejecting the President's phony emergency declaration, and the Senate should reject any effort by the President to take money from our troops to build the wall.

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

Madam President, I thank my colleague and friend from Tennessee for deferring.

First, on Donald Stewart, I know Leader McConnell talked about him. Everyone is going to miss him here in the Senate. He was truly somebody whom everyone liked. He always had a great sense of humor and a big smile. He served his boss, Mitch McConnell, extremely well, but he never let that get in the way of being friendly and working with the other side. He is somebody we will all miss. I enjoyed my interactions with him a great deal. I think that is probably true of just about every Member here.

We wish Stew the best and thank him for serving this body so long and so well.

H.J. Res. 46

Today, Madam President, the Senate will vote on the resolution to terminate the President's declaration of a national emergency. This is not a normal vote. What we are doing here today--this is not a normal day. It is not your typical vote on an appropriations or authorization bill. It doesn't concern a nomination or an appointment. This will be a vote about the very nature of our Constitution, the separation of powers, and how this government functions henceforth.

The Framers gave Congress the power of the purse in article I of the Constitution. It is probably our greatest power. Now the President is claiming that power for himself under a guise of an emergency declaration to get around a Congress that repeatedly would not authorize his demand for a border wall.

The President has not justified the emergency declaration. You would think in a moment like this, when there is not a war, when there is not an immediate disease, or when there is not a disaster--that is when we had other declarations. They don't need an elaboration, but this one would. But the President hasn't done that. He simply said he ``didn't need to do this.'' That is amazing, folks, my colleagues. The President said he didn't need to do this, and yet he is declaring an emergency. It is a direct contradiction of his own words.

Everyone here knows the truth. Democrats and Republicans know the sad truth. The President did not declare an emergency because there is one; he declared an emergency because he lost in Congress and wants to get around it. He is obsessed with showing strength. He couldn't just abandon his pursuit of the border wall, so he had to trample on the Constitution to continue his fight. That is not how this democracy is supposed to function. That is not how this democracy has functioned. I have never seen it, where, out of anger and out of a desire to win the fight regardless of the consequences, a President would do this.

The President has not laid out where he plans to divert funds from, though we know it is going to be from our military--from the men and women serving us and from the things they need.

Senators who vote against this resolution this afternoon may be voting to gut funding for a military installation in their State or for a cut to military pay and military pensions. How could they do that?

Most importantly, President Trump has shown zero understanding of what his emergency portends for the separation of powers in our democracy. The President seems to regard the government, not just the Justice Department, as his own personal tool to do whatever he wants, whether it is in the private sector or the public sector. We have never had a President like this.

We have had lots of Presidents with lots of foibles, but none of them seem to equate their own ego with the entire functioning of the government of the United States, except this one.

We can't succumb to that. It is our job here, in Congress, to limit executive overreach, to defend our core powers, to prevent a President--any President--from ignoring the will of Congress every time it fails to align with the will of the President. That is what the balance of powers is. That is what checks and balances is. That is what every one of us learned in second grade civics class.

All that teaching in the second grade civics class seems to be lost on so many of my Republican colleagues in blind obeisance to this President, no matter what the consequences.

This is not an issue of the wall. It goes way beyond that. We have had our fights and disputes on the wall for several years here. However you feel about our policy on the southern border and however you feel about the President, Senators should vote yes on the resolution to terminate the emergency declaration.

This resolution is about more than this President. It is about the Presidency now and on into the future.

It should not be difficult for any of my Republican colleagues to take this vote. Conservative principles would demand it, and some of the true conservatives, like Mr. Lee, yesterday, understood that logic. Conservatives have always feared an agglomeration of power in any branch of government, but particularly in the executive branch. The conservative movement has been designed to reduce the powers of the Federal Government. That is why they are for lowering taxes so much.

All of a sudden, again, because President Trump simply wants it, they say: Let's abandon those principles and vote to change, fundamentally, the way the balance of power works--shame.

If conservatism today is to mean anything, self-branded conservatives should vote to terminate the resolution. Deep-seated principles like that shouldn't take a back seat to the politics of the moment. They should not be abandoned just because the President shares the same party.

Now, let me speak from the heart to my Republican colleagues. I know that President Trump is extremely popular among Republicans for many reasons. I know he commands the vast majority of the Republican Party, and I know that the President never shies away from threatening, bullying, or publicly castigating members of his own party if they refuse to do what he wants.

So, I realize this. It is a much more difficult vote for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to take than for those of us who are Democrats. I would say to them, and I would say to every Republican: There are times when loyalty to America, to our Constitution, to our principles, and to what has made this country great should lead Members to rise above and rise to the occasion.

I hope and I pray that this moment is one of those times when Members choose country over party and when Members rise above politics for the sake of fidelity to our constitutional principles and to this great United States of America.

In conclusion, on this issue, this is not an everyday moment. This is not just about going along with this President or that one. This is a red-letter day in the history of how the U.S. Government functions. The judgment of our Founding Fathers and the judgment of history weighs upon this vote.

Tariffs

Madam President, the trade negotiations with China are moving forward, and I continue to have concerns that President Trump will accept a weak deal for the sake of a headline. Apparently, I am not alone. President Trump's former top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, told a podcast that the President is ``desperate'' to reach a trade deal. He also expressed deep skepticism that the administration would be able to stop the Chinese from stealing intellectual property and hold the Chinese accountable.

I hope Gary Cohn is wrong. The President, to his credit, was not desperate for a deal in North Korea and stood up to Kim Jong Un and looked strong for that. I hope he realizes that, as he negotiates with someone with even more consequences at stake for the long run of America--President Xi--and with a country that can do far more harm to our country, ultimately, in the long run.

Ambassador Lighthizer has said that there are still major issues left to be resolved. If that is the case, President Trump should not be pressing for a quick solution. The Chinese are more desperate for a solution than we are, although, obviously, some harm has been created to bring the Chinese to the table with tariffs.

The Chinese are desperate, and it is like they are ahead in the seventh inning, and then you say: I quit the ball game; I lose.

Don't do that, Mr. President. The tariffs you have imposed, at some political cost, have brought China to the table and given us the first opportunity in decades--in decades--to make the Chinese reform so they don't take total advantage of American workers and know-how. Soybean purchases and promises to import more American goods are not sufficient if we don't win concrete concessions on major issues.

If President Trump caves to China for the sake of soybean purchases, he would be trading America's future, literally, for a hill of beans. We want to help the soybean farmers. We want to help everybody else, but not at the expense of the future viability of jobs and wealth in America.

My message to President Trump is the same one I mentioned to him and I gave to him before he met with Kim Jong Un: Don't back down.

The President should be proud that he stood up to North Korea and walked away. He will be proud if he does the same with China, unless President Xi makes enduring, verifiable reforms of China's economic and trade policies, because the odds are high that if the President walks away from a weak deal, he will be able to get a much better deal down the road.

I yield the floor.

We have 1 minute remaining, I think. I ask unanimous consent to speak in leader time.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Today, the Senate will vote on the resolution to terminate the President's declaration of a national emergency.

Let me begin with a quotation.

Revelations of how power has been abused by high government

officials must give rise to concern about the potential

exercise, unchecked by the Congress or the American people,

of this extraordinary power. The National Emergencies Act

would end this threat and ensure that the powers now in the

hands of the Executive will be utilized only in a time of

genuine emergency and then only under safeguards providing

for congressional review.

Let me repeat that. ``[T]he powers now in the hands of the Executive will be utilized only in a time of genuine emergency.'' That is from the special committee report on the National Emergencies Act, which was passed decades ago.

The bottom line is very simple. We all know the other arguments--that this is not an emergency. The President himself said so. He said he didn't have to do this if he didn't want to. In previous emergencies, it was either apparent, like 9/11, or it was a disease or some other immediate disaster, and there was a long explanation as to why. We have gotten no explanation as to why this is an emergency.

The second reason, of course, is the money that might be taken away from the military--our brave men and women in uniform not getting the dollars they need--for this wall.

The third, of course, is that the President couldn't get his way through Congress even when we had 2 years of Republican leadership in the House, Senate, and White House, couldn't get his way this time, and is now simply going around Congress to declare an emergency.

But those reasons pale for the most important reason. This is a momentous day. The balance of power that the Founding Fathers put in place, so exquisitely designed, has served this Nation extremely well for over two centuries. That balance of power was in large part motivated by the fear of an overreaching Executive. The patriots had just fought King George. They knew what it was like to have an Executive who would go too far, and they put in precautions to make sure that didn't happen.

Today, we are being asked, in a way that we haven't been asked in decades, maybe even longer, to change that balance of power. And make no mistake about it--it will set an awful precedent for the future, no matter who is President. It will change it. If a President can invoke an emergency because he didn't get his way or she didn't get her way, without real cause, without a real emergency, woe is our Republic in many ways--the ways the Founding Fathers feared.

I know this is a very difficult vote for my friends on the other side of the

aisle--much more difficult than ours. We all know that the President is extremely popular in the Republican Party for maybe a few good reasons--I would say mostly bad, but he is. We know that he has been vindictive, contemptuous, calling out people who oppose him. So it is not an easy vote. I take my hat off to those Members on the other side of the aisle who have let principle rise above party, who understand what the Constitution requires this afternoon and have agreed to vote against this emergency.

I would plead with those others who haven't made up their minds to look at this moment in history. This is not an immediate moment. You can be for the wall or against the wall, you can think that what we are doing at the southern border is inadequate, but that issue pales before the issue before us; that is, how far an Executive can reach when Congress does not want to do what that Executive wants.

This is a crucial moment. This is a moment historians will look back on. This could be a moment that changes the fundamental balance of power in our government. So I would ask my colleagues--I would really plead with my colleagues. I understand the politics are difficult--much harder for you than for me--but our Nation, our Constitution, the beauty of this government demands that we rise to the occasion this afternoon. Please join us in rejecting this emergency and keeping our government with the same balance of power that has served us so well for two centuries.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, when President Trump declared a national emergency over the crisis along our southern border, it was immediately met with expressions of concern--some, in my view, illegitimate; others, quite legitimate.

As I have said in the past, I will repeat again that this--what we are doing here today--is no one's first choice, but it is useful to recall how we find ourselves at this point today.

Of course, when it comes to funding, when it comes to appropriations, Congress holds the purse. That is why,

each year, the Congress receives the President's budget request for the upcoming fiscal year, just as we did earlier this week.

Even though, in the President's budget, he outlines his priorities, my experience in the Senate is that most Presidential budgets, while they are an expression of the President's priorities, are dead on arrival. It then falls to us, in the Senate and the House, to look at his request and to work on a compromise budget and appropriations process and fund the operations of the Federal Government.

This process is arduous, it is time-consuming, and it is often frustrating, but it is the way the system is supposed to work. As all Americans can attest, what we have seen over the last few months looks like something very different. The refusal of Democrats in the House and the Senate to engage in negotiations on border security funding led us to a 35-day government shutdown.

Despite the clear message from border security experts, despite seeing the humanitarian crisis at the border, described by President Obama in 2014, get many times worse, our Democratic colleagues decided to play politics instead of dealing with the problem.

We heard the Speaker of the House call border barriers immoral. The minority leader here in the Senate said that there would be no additional money for physical barriers along the border. They know, just as I know, that back in 2006 and 2008, the Secure Fence Act was passed with broad bipartisan support, including support from then- Senator Barack Obama, then-Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator Chuck Schumer, currently the Democratic leader in the Senate, who now feels that this President should not get any additional money to fund border security measures that the President believes are an important response to the crisis we see at the border.

My preference would be for the normal appropriations process to be used, but when your negotiating partners refuse to take a seat at the table, normal goes out the window. Our colleagues across the aisle left the President with few options to fund what he believed was so important for the Nation's security, and that is what led us to this situation.

Enter the 1976 legislation, the National Emergencies Act. What the President did is ask his lawyers to look at what other authority, under congressionally passed laws signed by previous Presidents, might he have to access additional funds, and his lawyers pointed to the 1976 National Emergencies Act, which has granted Presidents, since that time, broad powers to reprogram funding previously appropriated by Congress.

This idea that somehow this is an unconstitutional act by this President is simply wrong. Congress has given the President this authority. They may regret it today or they may disagree that this is an emergency or they may disagree with the way the President wants to spend the money to secure the border, but, clearly, the President is using authorities the Congress has previously granted, not just to him but to all Presidents since 1976.

My father liked to remind me growing up--one of the things he always told me is that hindsight is always 20-20. Our predecessors did not anticipate the fights we would be having today, which are largely contrived and unnecessary. We should be working together to solve these problems, not engaged in a zero-sum game of political brinkmanship. That is what brought us to where we are today.

I think it is appropriate to look at what Congress did in 1976, and in a prospective sort of way, ask ourselves: Have we delegated too much authority to Presidents since that time? There are literally 123 statutory authorizations that could be invoked under the National Emergencies Act--123 times that Congress has said a President, upon the declaration of a national emergency, can reprogram money that Congress has appropriated--123 times. That was a shock not only to me but, I dare say, to virtually all of our colleagues here in the Senate.

Many of these statutory grants of authority are exceedingly broad. They cover everything from the military to public health to Federal pay schedules. With these broad authorities already part of the law, the emergency powers provision could be viewed as a fail-safe for an agenda that the administration--an administration alone--is pushing. Let's say, hypothetically, that a future President decides there is a need to declare a national emergency over climate change. Maybe they decide this is a way to enact the Green New Deal being pushed by some of our colleagues across the aisle.

Considering the potential scope and scale in which these powers could be abused in the future and this overdelegation of authority that Congress has done 123 times, I believe we should take a look at the National Emergencies Act, once we vote today, and have a fulsome debate and discussion about whether this is really the sort of delegation of powers that the Founding Fathers intended when they said that distinct separated power should be given to each branch of the government: the legislative, the judicial, and the executive branch.

It is clear that the President is operating within the authority Congress has given to him. You don't have to like it. You don't have to agree with it, but it is clear the President is operating within the authority Congress delegated to him. Rather than talking in circles and debating that fact, I think our discussion should focus on the structure of emergency powers moving forward.

I believe there is a need to rein back in some of the authority that Congress has delegated to presidents just as a constitutional concern, as a constitutional matter, which is why I am cosponsoring a bill which has been introduced by our colleague Senator Lee which gives Congress a stronger voice in processes under the National Emergencies Act.

That bill will now be referred to the Homeland Security Committee. Chairman Johnson has said he will give that bill a hearing and then a markup. Then I would expect, at some point, that legislation will make its way to the Senate floor where we will have a debate and a vote.

The proposal would allow the President to maintain his statutory powers to declare an emergency, but that declaration would end after 30 days unless Congress affirmatively votes to extend it. This would maintain a President's ability to provide funding during national emergencies while restoring Congress's proper authority under article I of the Constitution. I think this is an honest and important effort to hopefully prevent us from ending up in this predicament in the future.

The real cause of where we are today is just politics--Ms. Pelosi's deciding that building any border barrier was immoral, after Democrats and Republicans had not made that a particularly political decision in the past. In fact, it had been bipartisan that we did support it as one tool in the toolbox for Border Patrol, in addition to technology and personnel, some physical barriers.

Rather than scolding the President of the United States for exercising statutory authority that Congress has already given, we should try to work together to solve these problems rather than engaging in the kind of political brinksmanship that brings us here today. We should fix--should it be the will of Congress--this massive delegation of authority not just to this President but to any President since 1976.

I have to disagree with our colleague from Colorado and others who suggest that what is happening at the border is not serious. By the way, I haven't heard any of them suggest any alternative solutions. Perhaps instead of Border Patrol securing the border we ought to have police officers at the border directing traffic, waving people through to their chosen destination. I think that would be a terrible mistake, but that seems to be the only alternative our friends across the aisle are offering to this humanitarian crisis and emergency at the border.

Last month, 76,000 people illegally crossed the border and were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, making this an 11- year high. So rather than 76,000 people in 1 month, which our Democratic colleagues don't seem to think is a problem, let's say next month it is 150,000 or 300,000 or 600,000. As long as we have this attraction for people from other countries to come to the United States, and if they pay the fee to the criminal organizations that transport them

here, they will successfully make their way into the United States. They are going to keep coming.

It is clear this problem isn't going away, and it is overwhelming the communities along the border as well as the Federal Government's ability to deal with it.

I remember what the Director of Customs and Border Protection said. He said: When the Border Patrol is handing out diapers and juice boxes to children coming across the border, the drug cartels will exploit that and move their poison into the United States. I will just remind my colleagues that more than 70,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year alone. A substantial amount of it was synthetic opioids in the form of fentanyl, but a lot of it had to do with heroin that had made its way from Mexico into the United States because 90 percent of the heroin that comes into the United States comes from Mexico. So while the Border Patrol is handing out diapers and juice boxes, the drug cartels are moving in heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine across the border into our Nation and getting rich in the process.

We know border security is complicated, and that it is not just about security, it is about facilitating legitimate trade, travel, and commerce. Last year alone, there was $300 billion worth of commerce that took place just at Texas ports of entry with Mexico--$300 billion. That supports an awful lot of American jobs.

The terrain in the 1,200-mile border between Texas and Mexico varies significantly. What works well in one sector does not work well in another. What I continue to hear from my constituents, including elected officials at the border, is that if this is the Border Patrol telling us what they need in order to succeed to do the job we have asked them to do, we are all in, but if this is just politics and elected officials in Washington trying to micromanage the solution along the border, we are skeptical. This is what they tell me, and I don't blame them.

I think we need to take action to adequately fund our border security missions, and I hope our discussions in the coming months will be more productive than they will be this year.

I will vote against the resolution of disapproval today and encourage my colleagues to instead ask my colleagues to focus their energy on reforming the legislation that got us into this situation to begin with.