Floor Statements

Mr. President, over the Easter recess, Senator Romney and I had the privilege to visit our troops and our diplomats in Iraq. They are serving us well, and they are putting their lives on the line as we partner with the Iraqis to make sure that ISIS does not reconstitute itself in Iraq or in Syria. We have taken their territory away from them, but there are still over 20,000 or so ISIS fighters and loyalists in and around the region.

Once again, our trip proved to both of us that our soldiers and our diplomats are the best in the world. We are so lucky to have them be so willing to stand on guard for us all over the world. It may be the most important assignment today in Iraq as we continue to battle the scattered remnants of ISIS.

I don't want a President who takes the unquestioning advice of his military leaders. I want a President who is willing to push back. But nobody knows how to defeat ISIS better than the U.S. military. They effectively have done it twice. They beat al-Qaida in Iraq, and then they came back again with many partners to take territory away from ISIS. Nobody takes more seriously the threat of ISIS's reemergence or the threat of an expansionist Iran than the U.S. military. But I am here today to talk about our President's refusal, over and over again, to listen to the advice that he is being given by his generals and by his advisers at the Department of Defense. Instead, he is listening to the Iraq hawks inside the White House who think about this problem through the air-conditioned safety of their West Wing offices with little regard to how things actually work in the real world on the ground of the Middle East.

I want to talk about our two main objectives today in Iraq and in Iran, and I want to frame this in the context of today's disastrous news that the Iranians are restarting elements of their nuclear weapons program.

First, let's talk about a bipartisan commitment that we share, and that is the commitment to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. In and of itself, it would be a world disaster. It would present an immediate existential threat to our partners in Israel, and it would result in an arms race throughout the region that would be exacerbated by the fact that in the last 2 years, the Trump administration has made the decision to engage in a new nuclear partnership with the Saudis, which puts the Saudis on a quicker path to obtaining a nuclear weapon in case that arms race sets off.

What the Trump administration has done is to goad Iran into restarting their nuclear weapons program. They announced last night that they are pulling out of their side of the Iran nuclear agreement and that they are going to start to, once again, take steps that could lead them to a quick breakout to a nuclear weapon.

Those who opposed the agreement that President Obama signed did so, in part, because they said that it could allow Iran to restart its nuclear weapons program in 10 to 13 years and that 10 to 13 years wasn't enough security to sign on to that agreement. Well, President Trump has now managed to press the Iranians into restarting their nuclear weapons program in 4 years. We didn't get 10 years; we didn't get 13 years; we got 4 years, and Iran is back on a potential path to a nuclear weapon.

The President will say that he is imposing crippling new sanctions on Iran, such that they will come back to the negotiating table. But let's be honest.

There is not a plausible path for that to happen in the next year and a half of the President's term. It took President Obama two terms to engage in multilateral sanctions to get the Iranians to the negotiating table. There are no credible analysts of Iranian behavior or of politics in the Middle East that will tell you that the Iranians are going to come back to the negotiating table in the next 12 months, in part, because the balance of powers has totally flipped.

Under the Obama administration, it was the United States, Europe, China, and Russia on one side and the Iranians on the other side. President Trump has managed to flip that alignment, such that it is now the Iranians, the Europeans, the Chinese, and the Russians on one side and the United States isolated on the other. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the statements that many of those parties sent out in response to Iran's decision last night, effectively aligning themselves with the Iranians' decision to restart their nuclear program instead of aligning themselves, as they had for years, with the U.S. position of strict nonproliferation.

It is a disaster for the United States that Iran has restarted its nuclear weapons program. It is a massive failure of President Trump's strategy, but it is only one element of a meandering Iranian strategy that is accruing to the national security detriment of the United States.

Let's talk about our second primary objective in this region. I referenced it at the outset. It is to prevent the reemergence and reconstitution of ISIS inside Iraq and Syria. We have bad news to report there as well.

The Trump administration took another step that had been counseled against by his generals and by his military leaders, and that is the designation of the IRGC--an element of the Iranian military--as a terrorist group. Now, nobody could come to this floor and defend the actions of Iran or the IRGC. They have absolutely supported terrorism in the region for years. They supported Shia militias inside Iraq that were shooting at and killing American troops. Yet, notwithstanding that activity, our military leaders and our diplomats inside Iraq cautioned the administration against making this designation because weighing the costs of it against the benefits to our military leaders was a clear case.

The costs are this: By telling these militias inside Iran that they have to make a choice today between the United States and this newly designated terrorist group, the Iranian militias make the choice easily. They align themselves with Iran, their neighbor, not the United States. The effect of our decision is to push more of these militia groups closer to the Iranians.

Second, we no longer can talk diplomatically to the groups that have associations with the IRGC, and that is a lot of these militia groups. That means that the United States effectively takes itself out of the game diplomatically. We no longer have the ability to engage in political reconciliation in the country like we used to.

All of this presses the case of ISIS, as they are able to make the case that Baghdad is more and more leaning toward Shia interests and Iranian interests. As the United States isn't there in order to press the reconciliation case, ISIS has an opportunity to reemerge. All of this also accrues to the benefit of those interested in Iraq who want the U.S. military out.

Just months ago there was an effort to push a bill through Parliament to expel the United States and our continued hard line on Iran. As much as it may make sense to the air-conditioned offices of the White House to allow those interests in Iraq to, potentially, successfully litigate the case to push the U.S. military out of that country, it would, once again, open the gates to ISIS.

As far as I can tell, the administration's policy is to set in motion a series of escalatory actions with respect to Iran that has no end game with no logical conclusion. There isn't a diplomatic process at the end of this rainbow. The President has a year and a half left in his term. There isn't enough time, and there is no willingness in Iran and no partners on our side, as I have mentioned.

So what is the other alternative--military action? An invasion of Iran would be an unmitigated national security disaster. It would make the mistake of invading Iraq look positively benign, in retrospect. There is no appetite in America for such an endeavor, and there is no way the votes exist in Congress to authorize such an action.

The risk, of course, is that we fall into war by accident or through a series of events that appear as an accident. When you commit yourself to such an unplanned and unscripted series of military and diplomatic escalations, as the Trump administration has, and you have no working channel of communication to settle misunderstandings, then accidents can easily happen. Shots can be fired; lives can be lost, and then our options suddenly narrow. That is the real risk of the path we are on today. What scares the heck out of me is that it is a path that is seemingly being made up day by day, and it is a path that is opposed by our military and that is laid out without any meaningful input from our diplomats who are on the ground in the region. That is a potential recipe for disaster.

It shouldn't matter whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, a liberal or a conservative because messing around in the Middle East, in countries like Iran and Iraq, with no strategy and no clear set of goals should send chills down every Senator's spine.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, let me thank my colleague from Maryland for outlining one of the cases for why the override of the President's veto is so important.

There is no question that Saudi Arabia has in no way moderated their human rights behavior since the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi. In fact, as Senator Van Hollen has rightly pointed out, the stick in America's eye from Riyadh has just gotten sharper. The number of executions has increased. More American citizens are being detained. I didn't catch it as to whether Senator Van Hollen specifically referenced the case of Dr. Fitaihi, a Harvard-trained physician who has allegedly been tortured, including stripped to his underwear and shocked with electricity. He has been in detention without charges or a trial for 1\1/2\ years after his arrest.

The Saudis' behavior has gotten more outrageous, has crossed more human rights lines, has compromised the safety of more American citizens, and yet no response from the U.S. Congress and not a single piece of legislation moving through the U.S. Senate that would hold the Saudis accountable for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and now the detention of multiple U.S. residents. We almost shut down our relationship with Turkey over the detainment of an American pastor, but there is no similar response from this body when it comes to the continued detention of Americans in Saudi Arabia, with no trial, with no charges, and with evidence of torture. How is that? How is that?

Today we specifically litigate the case of the disastrous war that continues to rage inside Yemen today. I want to read a very short excerpt written by a hardened U.S. diplomat. Jeffrey Feltman is not a Democrat or Republican. He was a career Foreign Service officer. He did some of the toughest duty in the Middle East, including a stint as our Ambassador to Lebanon. Many people know him, and I know he commands just as much respect from Republicans as he does from Democrats. Here is what he wrote. He said:

The war in Yemen has been a disaster for U.S. interests,

for Saudi interests, and above all for the Yemeni people. It

has sparked the world's largest humanitarian catastrophe:

tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, and 14

million are at risk of starvation. It has been a strategic

blunder as well, producing the exact results the Saudi-led

military campaign was designed to prevent. The Houthis are

more militarily sophisticated and better able to strike

beyond Yemen's borders than they were at the start of the

war; Iranian influence has expanded; and the relationship

between the Houthis and Lebanon's Hezbollah has only

deepened. Although the United Arab Emirates has waged an

effective battle against al Qaeda in Yemen, terrorism remains

a grave threat.

Now, I could read you similar pronouncements from all sorts of other Middle Eastern experts. There is a hegemony of opinion that this war has been a disaster not just from a humanitarian standpoint.

I had to select a picture that, frankly, wouldn't induce sickness from my colleagues. I chose a picture in which this young, starving boy's back is turned to the camera, but there are plenty others in which you would have a hard time holding down your lunch.

It is not just the humanitarian nightmare; it is the strategic nightmare that is Yemen. Every single day that we stay involved in this war, the battle lines do not change, and yet Iran and Hezbollah get more and more involved inside the military fight.

There is a political deal to be had here. If the United States chose to lead diplomatically instead of follow militarily, there is a political deal that can be had, but for reasons I do not understand, the United States does not lead the diplomatic negotiations. We outsource that to the U.N. I am a big fan of the U.N., but there is not going to be a peace settlement in Yemen without the United States as the lead. Instead, we simply choose to follow the military campaign of the Saudis by helping them engage in a bombing campaign that has murdered thousands of civilians, either on purpose or by accident. It has destroyed the civilian infrastructure of the country, and it does not relent.

Every single time you meet with somebody from the administration, they tell you: Well, it is getting better. It is getting better. There is really no evidence of that. On March 26, airstrikes reportedly hit a hospital supported by Save the Children in northwest Yemen, killing at least seven, including four children. There is no excuse for that because every single hospital is on the list of targets that the Saudis can't hit, and yet they continue to do so.

Senator Romney and I just came back from the region, and here is what we heard. All of the relief agencies that do the big heavy lifting in Yemen flew into Amman, Jordan, to talk to our delegation. I thought it was exceptional that they were making this trip, but then when they delivered the news that they had, I understood why they were making the trip into Jordan to meet with us. The report they gave us was absolutely bone-chilling.

I want you to listen to this. Today, in Yemen, there are 250,000 Yemenis who are so malnourished and so sick that they are beyond saving. They will die. One-quarter million Yemenis are so sick, are so malnourished that they cannot be saved, and another 10 million are on the cusp of entering that category. The only way to stop this humanitarian disaster, of a scope and scale that we see nowhere else in the world, is to end this civil war.

So long as the United States participates in the military campaign with the Saudis, while not offering any meaningful pressure to get to a political settlement, we are complicit in those deaths. One-quarter million people are going to die in the next several months inside Yemen from starvation and disease and malnutrition due to a military campaign that we are a part of. Don't get me wrong. The Houthis bear a great degree of responsibility for those who are starving inside territories they control. There is still 15 to 20 percent of the relief supplies that the Houthis steal and take for themselves, but hundreds of thousands of those who are dying or who are subject to disease and famine are in the parts of the country that are controlled by our coalition. This isn't just a matter of the Houthis refusing to let supplies get to people who need them. There are people dying in parts of the country that the coalition, of which the United States is a part of, controls, and we are standing by, largely idly, as this devastation continues.

I hope my colleagues will consider voting to overturn the President's veto. I hope you will do it because it is the only means by which we force a political settlement. I hope you will do it because even if you don't think that a political settlement is coming, the United States should never willingly be a part of a bombing campaign that results in this kind of starvation. I hope you will also do it because even if you believe Iran is the No. 1 objective of U.S. interest in the region or even if you believe that al-Qaida and ISIS are the No. 1 target of U.S. interest in the region, they are getting stronger every single day that the status quo continues.

The military campaign has been a massive failure. The battle lines don't move, and al-Qaida and ISIS remain uniquely strong inside that country because of the chaos, and Iran, every single day, becomes more and more influential. Get out of the military campaign, take the lead on the diplomatic effort rather than simply follow others, and we will end that misery. It is within our power to send that message.

I agree with Senator Van Hollen. This is also about sending a message to Saudi Arabia about the continued murder and detainment of American citizens and residents. This is about standing up for human rights in the face of 37 people convicted and beheaded inside Saudi Arabia, several of them minors. But this is also about squaring U.S. policy with national security interests and getting the blood off our hands as 250,000 Yemenis face certain death if we don't do something different very soon.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to take a moment to pay tribute to Gary Yohe, a Connecticut resident

and preeminent national expert on climate change, who is retiring from Wesleyan University.

Professor Yohe has had an impressive and distinguished career. After receiving his PhD in economics from Yale University, he devoted his career to climate impact and mitigation research. He worked as a senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, receiving a share of the 2007 Nobel Prize, served as vice chair of the National Climate Assessment Development and Advisory Committee under President Obama, and has testified before the Senate on multiple occasions to explain the risks and impacts of climate change. Professor Yohe continues to serve as a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change and has been a member of the faculty at Wesleyan University for more than 40 years. On a more personal note, he has been a great resource to my office, and I hope he will continue to contribute to public policy after his official retirement.

I would like to congratulate Professor Yohe on his retirement from Wesleyan University and take this moment to thank him for his contributions to the scientific community.

Thank you very much, Mr. President.

Once again, I am very pleased to join my friend the Senator from Vermont on the floor to press this body to take seriously its constitutional responsibility and its responsibility to ensure that the United States doesn't enter into hostilities abroad other than in those situations that are vitally necessary to protect our national security interests.

I am so proud to have worked with Senator Sanders, Senator Lee, and many others here to build a truly bipartisan coalition that is going to do something that, as Senator Sanders said, is historic.

I have been coming down to the Senate floor for 4 years now raising concerns about U.S. participation in this civil war. When the United States first entered into an agreement with the Saudis to help them in their bombing campaign, very few people could probably locate Yemen on the map. Today, it is the subject of national conversation. With passage in the Senate and the House, regardless of what the President chooses to do, the world now knows that the United States is paying attention to the world's worst humanitarian disaster--a nightmare inside Yemen that is taking the lives of tens of thousands of people.

Sometimes humanitarian disasters and famines are caused by natural events, those that we cannot control--droughts, for instance. This is a manmade humanitarian catastrophe that the United States has something to say about, and we are going to say something about it in a matter of hours.

Let me just say a few things about what will happen if we pass this resolution and it becomes law and what will not happen if we pass this resolution and it becomes law. I think Senator Sanders covered this, and we have covered this enough.

The first thing that happens is that we uphold the Constitution.

I get it. Declaring war is a lot tougher today than it was 40 years ago or 100 years ago. It is not as if there are big armies that march against each other across open fields. Very rarely is there a nice peace treaty signed to wrap up hostilities. Now we have shadowy and more diffuse enemies who are harder to define. We have wars that seem to never end. But that doesn't obviate Congress's responsibility to set parameters around war. Just because it is harder to declare war today doesn't mean that we still don't have the responsibility to do it.

Over and over again, we have outsourced the decision on hostilities to the President, whether it be President Obama or President Trump. In large part, it is because we just don't want to be in this business any longer.

There is no doubt that when we are helping Saudi Arabia drop bombs on churches, on weddings, on cholera treatment facilities, and on some legitimate military targets, we are engaged in a war, and we should declare it here. That is the first thing that happens.

The second thing that happens if we pass this resolution and it becomes law is that we wash our hands of the blood associated with being a participant in the creation of one the world's worst humanitarian catastrophes.

Never has the world seen a cholera epidemic as big as this one, at least in recorded history. There is no secret as to why there is a cholera epidemic; it is because the Saudis bombed the water treatment facilities, so the water isn't clean any longer.

Whether or not the United States knew about this or signed off on it, we don't know, but the fact is, we should not be associated with a bombing campaign that the U.N. tells us is likely a gross violation of human rights.

Third, if we pass this resolution and it becomes law, peace becomes more likely.

We have evidence of why that is because when we passed this resolution in the Senate at the end of last year, not coincidentally, within days, a partial ceasefire was announced in Hodeidah. Why is that? The reason is twofold. One, when the Saudis realize they don't have a blank check from the United States any longer, they get more serious about peace. Two, the Houthis, who are the other party to this conflict and who don't believe that the United States is an honest broker or that anyone will actually be serious about enforcing concessions they give, come to the table because they see that the United States and others that we support as part of the negotiations will actually be honest brokers and that we are only willing to go so far with our Saudi partners.

The fourth thing that happens, as Senator Sanders has mentioned, is that we are able to send a message to Saudi Arabia and specifically to the Crown Prince that they need to change their behavior if they want to maintain this relationship.

Some people are going to vote against this because they say it has nothing to do with Jamal Khashoggi. It does. Jamal Khashoggi's name isn't in here. The names of the other American residents who are currently being detained by Saudi Arabia aren't in here. But make no mistake--Muhammad bin Salman, who ordered this campaign of political repression--his No. 1 foreign policy priority is the perpetuation of the war inside Yemen.

Given the violation of trust that has occurred with the United States over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the coverup of it, it stands to reason that we would rethink our association with other priorities of the Crown Prince's if he blatantly lied to us about his participation in the human rights violation that has become the obsession of this country and the world. The two are connected. This will be seen as a message to the Saudis that they need to clean up their act.

What will not happen? Casualties will not get worse. The Trump administration says: Well, if we are not part of the coalition, it just means we can't stop civilians from being killed.

Well, forgive me, but it doesn't seem like we have been doing too good of a job thus far if 85,000 children under the age of 5 have died of starvation and disease and tens of thousands of civilians have been caught in the crossfire. We can't get into classified information here, but let's just say there is a limit to what the United States can do as part of this coalition.

There is no evidence to suggest that casualties will get worse. In fact, the cover being lifted of U.S. endorsements of this bombing campaign will make it harder for the Saudis to take chances because they know they don't have the United States to fall back on.

Second, the Saudis will not go somewhere else. This idea that if we just say we are not going to participate in this one single war with you, that the Saudis will all of a sudden break relationships with the United States and go buy their military equipment from Russia, is belied by how this alliance has worked for years. The complication of the Saudis turning around and choosing to go to another partner, if that is how this works, that the nature of our relationship is one in which the United States can never ever refuse a request from the Saudis to participate in one of their military endeavors overseas, then that is not an alliance. An alliance allows you to tell your partner when you think they are wrong and choose, unless you have a treaty obligation of some sort, whether you engage with them.

Lastly, as I mentioned, some people say we will lose our political leverage; that we will make it harder for negotiations to happen. It is exactly the opposite, as evidenced by the fact that when we were debating this resolution last time, as people were telling us that if we passed it we wouldn't have as much leverage in the negotiations, successful negotiations were being concluded in Stockholm.

This is a historic moment for the Congress to step up and say that enough is enough. We are made weaker in the eyes of the world when we willingly participate in war crimes and when we allow for our partner to engage in activity that leads to the slaughter of innocents.

Never mind the conduct of a war in which our true enemies, al-Qaida and ISIS, are getting stronger and stronger by the day. I hope we have the same bipartisan stamp of approval on this resolution today as we did last year, and I hope it stands as a new day for the Senate when we are more willing, on a bipartisan basis, to do our concurrent responsibility, along with the executive branch, to set the foreign policy of this Nation.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I appreciate the remarks of my good friend, the Senator from Oklahoma. I look forward to working with him on ways that we can try to come together and solve some of these big problems.

In a minute, I am going to talk about the Affordable Care Act, which is probably the signature accomplishment of a Democratic Senate and Congress. It is notable that the Affordable Care Act, for all of its controversy, reduced the deficit. It did not increase the deficit. It is also notable that the signature accomplishment of the Republican Congress and the Republican Senate was a tax reduction bill that has dramatically spiraled the deficit out of control. There is $2 trillion of additional deficits in that provision.

I share the concerns about the deficit, and I find it curious that this Congress, under Republican control, has chosen to dramatically increase deficits, making us on pace for having the biggest deficits in our legislative history--with enormous additional new elements of debt as well.

Mr. President, later today, the House of Representatives will pass a proposal that will be supported by 95, 97 percent of Americans.

This is a proposal to make sure anybody in this country who wants to buy a gun in a legitimate transaction has to go through a background check--a background check that in 90 percent of the cases takes less than 5 minutes of time. That background check will assure that only people who should be buying guns and owning guns will be buying and owning guns--people who don't have violent criminal histories and people who don't have histories of serious mental illness. It is a popular proposal. It is an impactful proposal. It will save thousands of lives all across this country.

I have come down to the floor to just remind my colleagues as to why this is so important, and I want to tell a quick story to try to put a little meat on the bone when it comes to this conversation we are having about the importance of making sure people go through background checks before they buy weapons.

Mr. President, 2008 to 2012 was a period of time in this country's history where violence was declining. Homicides were declining. Gun murders were declining. They were declining across the country. Specifically during that period of time, they were declining in the Midwest. Yet there was one State that stood out as a curious outlier during that period of time, and that was the State of Missouri.

In the State of Missouri, there was a dramatic jump during this period of time in gun homicides. In fact, it happened right away after 2007. In 2008 and 2009, about 50 to 60 to 70 additional people every year were being murdered with guns inside Missouri. A researcher from Johns Hopkins went to try to figure out why this was, and I think it is important to tell that story on the floor today.

Let me give a little historical context first. During the Civil War, Missouri was one of the most violent, most dangerous places in the country because there were these outlaws, these renegades of Confederates who were out in the bush--they call them the bushwhackers--who were doing regular battle with Union troops. It was one of the first instances of true, sustained guerilla warfare in this Nation. When the Civil War was over, they didn't go home. They had been brutally put down by the Union, but they stuck, and they formed their own smaller criminal enterprises.

We know about this because Jesse James and his brother Frank were amongst those who made their name as bushwhackers fighting the Union and then turned into criminals who robbed stage coaches and banks and trains.

To combat this post-Civil War continuation of violence, Missouri decided to change its firearms laws, and it started with a crackdown on the ability of individuals to conceal weapons. It extended to a change in the Constitution to make it perfectly clear that Missouri politicians had the ability to limit who could own guns and who couldn't.

Eventually, a provision got passed that said that in order to own a handgun, you had to get a permit from your local authority. As time went on, that permit came to include a background check, so that if you wanted to own a gun in Missouri, you had to go and get a background check. You had to prove you did not have a serious criminal history or a serious history of mental illness.

What happened in 2007 was that, very quietly, that provision got repealed. It was part of a much louder effort to repeal a whole host of gun laws in Missouri. Missouri kind of became the epicenter of the NRA's focus in the 2000s. It was this Southern--semi-Southern State that still had pretty tough gun laws, and the NRA went all in and had their annual convention in St. Louis and spent millions of dollars trying to elect folks who would sign laws they were pushing through the legislature. In 2007, they finally got their way. They got all these laws that had been passed since the Civil War repealed. One of them was the law that required you to get a background check before you could buy a gun.

The researcher from Johns Hopkins sort of looked at all these laws, controlled for all sorts of other factors, and came to the conclusion-- you should read the paper; it is very well done--that it was this provision which removed the background check that led to this dramatic spike in violence. He has all sorts of interesting data to show why that is. All the other violent crime in Missouri stayed flat from 2008 to 2012, but gun crimes spiked. All of a sudden, guns bought in Missouri were being used in crimes all over the region. Other States started to report an increase--a curious, sudden increase--in crime guns that were bought in Missouri. Well, guess why. It was because all of a sudden, you didn't have to get a background check if you wanted to buy a gun in Missouri. All of a sudden, criminals and people with serious mental illnesses could get guns through gun shows and internet sales--transactions on the private market--without that background check.

I tell this story because I hear opponents of this bill in the House saying: This isn't meaningful. It won't work. These mass shootings weren't perpetuated with weapons that were bought without background checks.

Well, that is true. This one public policy intervention won't stop every single bad thing that happens in this country. But the data is the data, and it shows us that States that have background checks have dramatically lower rates of gun crime than States that don't have them.

A little bit earlier than the changes made in Missouri, my State of Connecticut made the opposite change. My State of Connecticut made a change to go from being a non-background check State to a background check State. We put in a local permit that came with a background check requirement. So even if you bought your gun outside of a bricks-and- mortar gun store, you had to get a permit, and that permit required you to get a background check.

Well, that same researcher went to Connecticut, ran all the numbers, and found out that in Connecticut, after that change was made, gun murders dropped by 40 percent. They increased in Missouri by about 25 percent and decreased in Connecticut by about 40 percent--and again controlling for all sorts of other factors that could explain those changes.

So on both sides of the ledger, there is what I would tell you is incontrovertible evidence that a State that has background checks is going to end up having many fewer gun crimes than a State that doesn't have them. The problem is, as we saw in and around Missouri, guns don't respect borders, so when Missouri dropped its gun background check requirement, those guns started moving into other States.

That is what happened in my State. The guns that are used to commit crimes in our cities--the guns that are trafficked out of the back of vans--aren't bought from Connecticut gun stores; they are bought by criminals in other States because they know they can go to gun shows and they can turn to internet sales in those other States and buy those weapons.

The same thing happens as weapons move across our border. I have heard an awful lot from this President about how dangerous Mexico and Central America are. Well, there is some truth to that, but the guns that are being used in those crimes are trafficked from the United States of America, and the way they get to the southern border is through States that don't have background check requirements.

Just go online and check out what people say who have been arrested for gun trafficking. They tell you exactly how they did it. They go to gun shows in Texas. They buy guns at unregulated gun shows in Texas, and they take them back across the border and sell them in Central America.

So we have all the evidence we need--empirical evidence, anecdotal evidence--to pass this piece of legislation, but maybe the most important reason that we should pass it, that we should take it up here in the Senate when it passes the House later today, is that it is just so darn popular. There really isn't anything else in America today that is as popular as universal background checks. The minimum score is about 90 percent. There is plenty of really good polling that says that 97 percent of Americans support universal background checks. Grandma isn't that popular. Apple pie isn't that popular. There is nothing we debate here that gets 97 percent on agreement other than the issue of background checks.

So I am here on the floor today to try to fill in some of the details on why this is so important and to implore my colleagues, once it passes the House of Representatives, to bring it here. Obviously, I would love to have a vote on

the House bill, but I understand how this place works. We are going to send a letter to Chairman Graham asking him to at the very least convene a hearing on background checks in the Judiciary Committee.

We came to a conclusion here in the Senate as to a bipartisan background checks proposal that could get 50 votes--in 2013--and I would love to start that process again. But there is no reason not to do it because all the evidence tells us that when we make sure that only the right people buy guns, a lot less people die from gun crimes.

This is not controversial anywhere except for Washington, DC. Everybody out there in the American public wants us to pass universal background checks. Maybe some other interventions in this space are a little bit more controversial, split folks a little bit more, but not background checks. This thing is decided outside of the Senate Chamber and the House Chamber. Popular in the public, deeply impactful, will save thousands of lives--that is a triple we don't get very often here, and we should take advantage of the opportunity.

Let me leave you with this: I convened a panel a couple of nights ago to talk about the importance of background checks, and there were a number of parents of those who were lost to gun violence. One of the parents was from Sandy Hook. Another was a parent of a child who was killed in Chicago, and she really wanted to make sure we knew what the real impact of gun violence in America was. She wanted to make sure we knew that the victims aren't just those who show up on the police blotter; the victims are the parents and the brothers and the sisters and the friends and the coworkers.

The average number of people who experience some diagnosable trauma when somebody in their life is shot and killed is 20. So when you hear the number that 100 people in the United States die every day from guns--which is a number 10 to 20 times higher than in any other high- income nation on a per capita basis--you have to understand that number isn't really 100; that number is 20 times higher than that because the people who have to live with that loss have to ask these questions: Why did they shoot themselves? What do I do about that individual who shot my son? How do I get over that combination of pain and anger? That is hard to understand unless you have spent time with the mothers and the fathers who will be dealing with this catastrophic, life-changing trauma for the rest of the time they are on this Earth.

So that is why this is so serious to me. It is because we have an answer for their pain--not an answer that will stop every gun crime in this country but an answer that will result in thousands fewer people dying. We know that because the evidence tells us that. And I can't explain to these families--to that mother in Chicago--why something that has been proven to work and is supported by 90 percent of Americans can't get a vote or a debate in the Senate.

I will leave it at that for today. I hope that when this passes in the House with a big bipartisan majority, we will take advantage of the opportunity to get a big bipartisan majority here in the Senate. If the Republican majority commits to starting that process, I guarantee that will be the result.

I want to thank all of the people who made this possible in the House today.

For the record, I have introduced a version of H.R. 8 here in the U.S. Senate.

To Chairman Nadler, Mike Thompson, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Hoyer, and to their Republican cosponsors who helped bring it to the floor--I thank them on behalf of all of the folks they will never know, those lives they will save by their action today if we do the right thing and take it up here in the Senate.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, there have been some days recently when I kind of wonder why we even show up to the Senate any longer. This job is not what it used to be.

When I get the chance to read about the history of the Senate, I read about these things called debates that we used to have on the floor of the Senate. I read about something called an amendment, which apparently is a way that an individual Senator calls up a proposal or an initiative and puts it on the floor for an up-or-down vote.

Those things don't really happen anymore in the U.S. Senate. We don't have open-ended debates on the big policies of the day.

I get it. When Republicans control the Senate, they control the agenda. When Democrats control the Senate, they control the agenda. At the very least, I would have hoped that the Senate majority, now in Republican hands, would put their policy initiatives before the Senate so we could have an open debate. That doesn't happen any longer. All we seem to be doing these days is voting on judges.

Now, that is a really important function of the U.S. Senate, and I am glad we are doing it, but today we are going to do something truly exceptional, which causes me, once again, to wonder what my job here is and to feel a little bit of sadness as to how it has changed and how much less substantive the input of each individual Senator is in the direction of this country.

Today, for the first time in the history of blue slips, we are going to vote and, I assume, confirm a judge who didn't get one blue slip from either of the home State Senators from which that judge comes from and is going to serve.

This has never happened before. Yet today we will vote on Eric Miller's nomination to be a judge on the Ninth Circuit from Washington. He is 43 years old, so he is going to be there for an awfully long time.

Eric Miller did not get a blue slip from either of Washington's Senators. Let me say that again. That has never happened before in the Senate. In fact, the last time a judge was confirmed without both blue slips was in 1989. That was the last time before this Congress that any judge was confirmed without both blue slips.

In that instance, it was a Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee who was confirming a judge over the objection of another Democrat. This is very different. These are two Democratic Senators from Washington, neither of them returning a blue slip on Eric Miller. Yet the majority has decided to go ahead and proceed with this confirmation.

This is a serious break with precedent. The last time Democrats controlled the U.S. Senate, Chairman Leahy was the head of the Judiciary Committee, and he did not hold a single hearing on an Obama nominee who did not have two blue slips--didn't hold a single hearing even when there were exceptional circumstances. There was one time when Senators initially returned the blue slips but later rescinded them. Those are two Republican Senators who submitted them, rescinded them-- did not go forward with the nominee.

There was another circumstance in which Senators had recommended a nominee for the district court but then refused to submit blue slips when that judge was elevated to the appellate court. Once again, Senator Leahy honored that precedent.

Now Republicans have already taken advantage of Senator Leahy's decision to uphold precedent. I will just give you a couple of examples.

In the Seventh Circuit, Michael Brennan was confirmed for a seat that had been held open by Republicans since 2010. So, had Chairman Leahy decided to move forward without blue slips, that Seventh Circuit seat could have been filled, but because he upheld tradition, it was left open, filled by Republicans.

Similarly, for a district seat in South Carolina, Marvin Quattlebaum was confirmed to a seat that had been held open by Republicans, again, since 2013.

So Republicans have already taken advantage of the fact that Democrats upheld the blue-slip precedent, but now they are taking it a step further.

In the past, when Republicans have changed the rules here, as they did on the number of votes required to elevate a judge to the Supreme Court, they claimed it was because Democrats started it. I don't agree with that rationale. If you found the change for district court nominee so objectionable, I am not sure why you would decide to go further, but there is no excuse of that kind here. This is just a brash power grab because there is no claim that Democrats, when they were in the majority, violated the blue-slip principle. This is a fresh violation of tradition here in the Senate.

There is a reason we give deference to home State Senators. In these States and in these districts, there are particular issues that are important to their constituents that may be unique to their area in which they have more knowledge than the rest of us do. Some of the reasons Senators Murray and Cantwell are so concerned about this nominee are his extremist views on the issue of Tribal sovereignty, which is a very big deal in the State of Washington, and the idea that they are going to have somebody sitting in the Ninth Circuit who has these extreme views on limiting the rights of Tribes is of great concern to their constituents. That is why, traditionally, we have allowed for individual Senators to have that kind of voice and that kind of say. No longer.

I would just hope that my Republican friends understand how this works. Once the rule is gone, once the tradition is gone--listen, I am a relatively junior Senator here, so I don't want to speak for those who are going to be the chairman and ranking members of committees in the future, but I would imagine it is not coming back. I would imagine--once we get through today and Republicans have decided that individual Senators, unless they happen to be a member of the majority party,

no longer have any say in who is appointed to their circuit courts-- that horse has fully run out of the barn and across the field.

I don't know if that is a good thing for this body because it is just another hit. It is just another assault on the traditions of this place in which we used to try to work things out together, in which we used to honor the role that individual Senators have some say over what happens in their own States and their own regions.

I do sometimes wonder why we all keep on showing up here if we don't really debate legislation as we used to, if we don't get to offer amendments anymore, and if we don't have any say any longer in the judges who are appointed in our States and our districts, and this is just another day that makes me question that as well.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. President, from time to time, I come to the floor of the Senate to share with my colleagues stories of the victims of gun violence. I had hoped the statistics that consistently show this country has a gun violence rate that is 10 to 20 times higher than those of other similar high-income nations--data that shows this continuing epidemic of mass slaughter during which we average a mass shooting almost every day-- would have compelled my colleagues to action. It hasn't. So I have tried to come down to the floor as often as I can to explain who these people are and to explain the genius that has been lost from this world when lives are cut so short by gun violence--gun violence that is largely preventable in this country.

I come to the floor with an unusually heavy heart because I want to talk about some of the lives that were lost a year ago today at the shooting in Parkland, FL, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It was a year ago that I was actually walking to the floor to give a speech on immigration when I learned of another mass shooting. It hits hard for those of us who represent Connecticut because we are still working through the ripples of grief that never ever disappear in a community that has been shattered by an episode of catastrophic gun violence--in our case, in Sandy Hook, CT.

In February of last year, 17 students and teachers were gunned down in their classrooms at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. One of them was Peter Wang.

Peter was 15 years old. He was a U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps cadet. He was getting ready to celebrate the Chinese New Year with his family. His two younger siblings and many other friends called him a natural leader.

When the shooter entered the high school, Peter had a choice to make: He could run and protect himself or he could try to help his fellow students in need. He chose the latter. He chose to hold a door open to help his classmates escape. He saved other people's lives while he lost his own.

Classmate Jared Burns said: ``For as long as we remember him, he is a hero.''

``He yanked open a door that allowed dozens of classmates, teachers and staffers to escape,'' officials said.

His middle school basketball coach said that he was just a ``joyful person.'' His sacrifice, according to his coach, ``just made perfect sense'' because he was that selfless.

Peter was posthumously accepted to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point for his heroic actions on that day.

Alex Schachter was a freshman who played the trombone and baritone in the marching band, and he loved to play basketball. He loved music so much that in middle school, he took two band classes so that he could get ready to join the marching band in high school, which was his dream. His Eagle Regiment Marching Band actually won the State championship in Tampa.

His dad said that he was just a sweetheart of a kid. He said that he just wanted to do well to make his parents' happy.

His dream was to attend the University of Connecticut. He told everybody. He was only a freshman, but he knew where he was going to college. He wanted to go to my State, to Connecticut. He wore a UConn sweatshirt almost every single day to school. His favorite song was an old one by Chicago, ``25 or 6 to 4,'' which is kind of an odd choice for a 14-year-old. Yet UConn's band actually chose to play that song at halftime at one of UConn's football games, and UConn admitted Alex posthumously because his dream was to be a UConn Husky.

Helena Ramsay was full of laughter and had this infectious smile. She was 17 when she was shot that day. She loved all kinds of music, although she was mostly into K-pop. She had all sorts of other interests too. She was interested in human rights and the environment. She joined the school's United Nations Club and the Christian faith- based First Priority Group. She was always looking out for her friends.

One of her friends said: ``When I was stressed out from my chemistry lab that I thought I was going to fail, she calmed me down and told me that it was going to be OK.''

One of her best friends said that she was ``one of the kindest people I've ever met.''

When the gunman walked into her classroom, she turned to her friend to make sure that her friend was safe and told her to shield herself with books. People described it as a ``moment of bravery in the face of horror.''

Another hero that day was Aaron Feis. He was an assistant football coach, and he was a security guard. He threw himself in front of his kids. That is how he died that day.

The football program's spokesperson said:

[Aaron] died the same way he lived--he put himself second.

. . . He was a very kind soul, a very nice man. He died a

hero.

One of his football players who had been going through leukemia treatments remembered that Aaron had guided him through those treatments.

He would send me prayers. He would send me Bible scripts

and just stuff to cheer up my day.

Aaron died while protecting the kids at that school.

These 4 stories are amongst those of the 17 people who died at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Yet 93 people die every day from gun violence. Most of those are suicides. A bunch of them are homicides. Others are accidental shootings, but they are all preventable.

As we remember today the mass shooting at Parkland, it is important that even on those days on which nobody puts up on cable news a mass shooting, there are still somewhere around 90 people who die every day, and I will tell you about one of them.

Corey Dodd was 25 years old when he died last month in Baltimore, MD. That morning, he told Marissa, his wife, to stay home and rest with their 3-year-old and their 3-week-old while he took the 5-year-old twins to school. After he dropped the twins off at school and pulled up outside their home, he was shot to death. The 3-year-old was inside. Marissa had to tell her kids that Daddy wasn't coming home.

She said:

I've told the kids that Daddy is done. He's not coming

back.

Their family was planning to move because Corey was looking for work, and they were going to move to wherever he found work. He had recently finished a program to earn his commercial driver's license. Things were looking up for Corey and Marissa and their four kids.

I didn't know Corey, but I know something about his death because I happened to be in Baltimore on that day. I happened to be at Corey's kids' school at the moment he was shot. I was inside that school when an announcement came over the loud speaker that there was a code green. I didn't know what a code green meant. A few minutes later, I found out that it is what happens inside schools in Baltimore when there is a shooting in the neighborhood. They locked down the school and our classroom and pulled down the shades, and we turned off the lights. A few minutes later, the police notified us that the scene was clear, that the school was safe, and that the day could go on. Yet, unbeknownst to me, just down the hall from me inside that school were two twins whose father had been shot blocks away from that school. Their lives will never be the same.

Part of the reason we care so much about this epidemic is that it is not just the victims; it is also about the people who are left behind. Imagine going to an elementary school in which you fear for your life when you walk to and from school and where parents of your friends are shot at 10:30 in the morning. It changes their brains, the trauma these kids go through in a school like that. It makes their little, tiny, developing brains unable to learn. There is a biological process that actually happens to these kids. That trauma is what Parkland has been going through for the last year, and that trauma is what kids in Baltimore, New Haven, Hartford, Chicago, and New Orleans go through every single day. We are ruining millions of children all across this country because of an epidemic that we could choose to solve, that we could choose to do something about.

This week, the House of Representatives had a hearing and a meeting to move forward with a universal background checks bill that is supported by 97 percent of Americans. It will pass the House of Representatives, with Republican and Democratic support, with flying colors. Do you know what that tells us? It tells us that the most important thing we could do to save lives, to cut down on the 93 people who are killed every day, is to pass that universal background checks bill. In States that have universal background checks, there is about 30 percent less gun crime and fewer gun homicides than in States that don't have those universal background checks.

As we remember 1 year since the massacre at Parkland and as we strive to understand that this is an epidemic that takes 90 people every day, know that it is within our power to do something about it. We can't eliminate every single gun death. We can't stop every suicide or every homicide, but with commonsense legislation that is supported by 97 percent of Americans, we can make a big difference, and we can send a signal to would-be shooters who are contemplating violence that they should not interpret our silence as a quiet endorsement. It is up to us.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wish to engage in a colloquy with the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Senator Murkowski, regarding S. 47, the Natural Resources Management Act, often referred to as the lands package, of which Chairman Murkowski is the sponsor and which is currently under consideration by the full Senate. In particular, I am interested in clarifying the intent of title IV, regarding ``Sportsmen's Access and Related Matters.''

This title of the legislation deals with--among other issues--the amount of Federal lands open to hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting. If I understand the bill correctly, nothing in S. 47 opens existing Federal lands to hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting that are not currently open to those activities. Moreover, under this bill, those lands may be closed for reasons, including public safety and environmental protection, among other reasons.

Is that a correct reading of the bill?

Thank you. It is also my understanding that S. 47 makes uniform the process by which Federal lands may be closed to hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting Moreover, it is my understanding that S. 47 does nothing to change the standards that the Federal Government uses to determine whether to close Federal lands to hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting or to otherwise limit those activities.

Is that a correct reading of the bill?

Thank you.

Mr. President, I wish to pay tribute to Ann Taylor, who is retiring from Connecticut Children's Medical Center after 19 years of service to the children of Connecticut.

Dating back to my time as the chairman of the State legislature's Public Health Committee, Ann has been a great friend and counsel to me. I have relied on her policy expertise and acumen, and I have drawn inspiration from her relentless focus on improving the lives of Connecticut's kids.

Throughout her career, Ann has both led and managed various departments across Connecticut Children's Medical Center, including legal, risk management, compliance, strategic planning, government relations, marketing and communications, and the foundation. Ann has been the voice of Connecticut's kids here in Washington. She successfully advocated for funding that supports Connecticut Children's vital role as an academic medical center, healthcare reform efforts that protect children with preexisting medical conditions, and protections for the Medicaid Program that maintain a critical safety net for more than one-third of Connecticut's children. At the State level, her drive to improve health outcomes for children led her to establish Connecticut Children's Medical-Legal Partnership Project, which is devoted to providing traditional legal representation for children within a comprehensive approach to the child's healthcare needs. The project also worked to secure funding that improved access to care for children and adolescents in behavioral health crisis through the establishment of the CARES unit on the Institute of Living campus.

On a more personal level, I have seen firsthand the dedication Ann has for every single child who intersects with Connecticut Children's. She doesn't just advocate for broad-based policies; she works for every single patient. I recall working with her for days on one

single case--a little girl who because of her complicated immigration status was having difficulty getting insurance coverage for her expensive, rare medical condition. Ann worked with me to make sure that little girl got what she needed, so that her life could be extended for a few more years. I am sure Ann went that extra mile for countless other children, and that will likely be the legacy she leaves.

The impact of Ann's work will be felt by children and families for years to come, and we are grateful for her service. I hope Connecticut realizes how lucky it was to have her fighting for children's healthcare for the last two decades.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to express my opposition to the amendment before the Senate right now with respect to the disposition of American forces in Syria.

First, for my colleagues, let me stipulate that President Trump's Syria policy has been an absolute mess. It has been a train wreck. It has been a dumpster fire on a daily basis. That is something Republicans and Democrats can agree on, and I assume that is the reason we are having this debate right now.

There is bipartisan consternation over a policy in Syria that seems to change daily. It often changes based upon who the last person was to walk into the Oval Office or catch the President's ear.

The current policy seems to be that the President is intent on pulling out the 2,000 or so troops that are there at the request of the leader of Turkey. He would love to see the United States pull out so that he could move his troops in and overrun the Kurdish forces, which have been our partners for several years in trying to root out ISIS and extremist groups from Syria.

Let me also stipulate that I was one who did not support sending American troops into Syria in the first place. I have never believed that there is a military solution, led by the United States, to the host of problems that ravage that country. But once you have made that commitment, if you are going to undo it, you have to do it in some orderly fashion. To simply decide on a moment's notice, without any discussion with our allies or partners, that we are moving troops out is the wrong way to undo a commitment that I would argue was wrong in the first place.

You have to have a plan in place for the security of those you are leaving behind--both the Kurdish forces that you have pushed to bring the fight to ISIS, as well as all of the civilians who could be caught in the crossfire between an advancing Turkish force and a defensively oriented Kurdish force.

This is not why I am on the floor today--to try to, once again, rehash all of the ways that Trump's policy in Syria has gone wrong. I want to talk about why this amendment is not the right way for us to proceed as a means of correcting Trump's backward policies and how it could, frankly, get us more deeply mired into a series of conflicts in the Middle East, which are not supported--nor will they be supported-- by the American people.

First, we should be debating an authorization of military force for American forces in Syria, not an amendment that restricts an illegal use of military force.

The President does not have congressional authorization to use U.S. troops to fight ISIS in Syria or anywhere else. He claims he does because he has taken the 2001 AUMF and suggested that because some elements of al-Qaida eventually became elements of ISIS, that authorization continues. There is no one who voted then for that authorization some 17 years ago who thought that it would now be used as a means to fight a very different terrorist organization.

We should be having a debate about renewing America's authorization of military force so that it is updated for the enemies we are actually fighting, instead of conceding that the President has what is now, potentially, unlimited ability to fight anyone, anywhere around the world, who has any kind of affiliation to a terrorist group named 17 years ago. We are not doing that. Instead, through this amendment, in some way, shape, or form, we are ratifying the President's extra- constitutional use of military force overseas, green-lighting the continued end-around on congressional authorization that this President and many other Presidents would like to continue.

Let me also concede that this perversion of the 2001 AUMF was not invented by President Trump. It was invented by President Obama. I opposed it then, as I oppose it now.

Second, the language of this bill suggests that our mission inside Syria is not just to fight ISIS. The language of this bill suggests that our troops are in Syria to fight Iran as well. Over and over again, this amendment is peppered with references to the rationale for our existence in Syria being not just to fight ISIS but also to counter Iranian influence.

In fact, the amendment lists a series of conditions that we believe need to be filled before troops are to be withdrawn. Among those conditions is a strategy to ``stop Iran from dominating the region.'' That is an interesting debate for us to have: What should be the role of the United States to stop Iran from dominating the region?

I agree with my Republican colleagues that it is not in the security interests of the United States, nor our allies, for Iran to continue to gain a bigger foothold in the region, but there is absolutely no congressional authorization for U.S. forces to be in Syria to counter Iran or to fight Iran or to try to be a bulwark against Iranian aggression. No matter what kind of hoops you jump through to try to contort the 2001 AUMF to counter ISIS, you cannot get it to cover Iran.

This resolution--I don't know that it suggests, but it essentially admits--it asserts--that our troops are inside Syria today not just to fight ISIS but to stop Iran from gaining a bigger foothold there and, in fact, makes a condition of our troops' withdrawal be a strategy to continue to press back against the Iranians. There is no AUMF for that.

Let me tell you my real worry. Putting a bipartisan stamp of approval today on an amendment that suggests our troops are inside Syria, in part, to counter Iran will ultimately empower those in the administration who are rooting for actual war with Iran. If Democrats and Republicans say here, today, that our mission inside Syria is ultimately to fight Iran, then doesn't that potentially put some imprimatur of congressional support for a bigger conflagration with Iran that some in the administration may be trying to achieve?

Third, this amendment leaves the impression that there is an American-led military solution to all of the vexing problems inside Syria. There is none. There is none. If we really want to have a debate about the future of American policy in Syria, then we need to come to the conclusion that, ultimately, if we want to be a real player in the long-term disposition of Syria for the betterment of the Syrian people, then American diplomats, American refugee programs, and American economic development aid are going to be much more dispositive than 2,000 American troops.

Let me give you an example. In Northern Syria, where the Kurds exist and where American troops are for the time being, we have a problem. As I outlined before, the problem is a relatively simple one. We have pushed the Kurds to become more and more influential in the military and governance matters of that region. That was important for us because the Kurds were the most likely fighting force to be able to oust ISIS, but we knew ahead of time that this was going to create a problem with the Kurds, who see the YPG--the Kurdish military--as a terrorist group. We don't agree with them, but we knew ahead of time that the Turks would not stand for the long-term empowerment of the YPG in those portions of Syria.

We have now reached the point at which the rubber hits the road--at which Erdogan has said: We are not going to stand for that. We are going to bring our troops in, creating a potential flashpoint there.

There is a solution here, and Erdogan outlined it in an op-ed he wrote for a major American newspaper. He said: Well, listen, we understand the Kurds are going to have to be influential, but it has to be Kurds we support, not Kurds we believe to be affiliated with terrorist groups. That is a really tricky needle to thread, and I am not sure that it ever can be threaded. But the way you do that is, frankly, not with tanks or with American marines but with diplomats and with experienced

foreign policy hands--people who know how to work out a complicated political arrangement in which the Kurds continue to be able to run that region but the Turks decide to hold back and not press forward militarily. That is a diplomatic and political quandary that cannot be solved by the American military.

This amendment seems to suggest that we can solve all of our problems--or many of our problems--if we just keep 2,000 troops there.

Fourth, the back end of this amendment lays out a series of criteria that have to be fulfilled before the troops can be removed. I mentioned one of them--that there has to be a strategy to combat Iranian influence. The final of these criteria is that ISIS has to have been substantially defeated in the region and a certification has to be made to that effect.

Well, let me ask my colleagues this--it is a legitimate question, not a rhetorical one. I don't know the answer, and maybe someone can provide it to me. When was the last time this Congress tied the Executive hands in that way? When was the last time this Congress actually laid out the conditions by which the Executive cannot withdraw troops from a region? That seems to be a very curious exercise of our foreign policy oversight responsibility.

I am someone who has suggested for a long time that we have largely abdicated that responsibility. I would love for us to be debating foreign policy and exercising our oversight more often, but the idea that we would, as a legislative body, tell the President that he cannot withdraw troops from a place unless x, y, and z criteria are met seems to be dangerous and restrictive because there are all sorts of conditions that you can imagine that aren't listed in this amendment by which a President may feel it is in our best interest to bring troops home.

The Constitution doesn't vest in this Congress the power to undeclare war. It vests in us the power to declare war. To me, I worry that by restricting the aperture by which the President can make an argument to bring troops home, we ultimately will end up having them be in harm's way for longer than is necessary.

Maybe this isn't unprecedented. Maybe there are other times where we have done this, but it does seem to be fairly unprecedented for the legislature to tie the Executive's hands and tell him or her that he has to keep troops in a place for a certain period of time.

I wanted to come down to the floor and express my reservations about this amendment. Again, I wish we were having a debate on an AUMF. I wish this weren't the way in which we were exercising our constitutional prerogative on foreign policy. I am deeply worried-- deeply worried--about language in this amendment that empowers those in the administration who are jonesing for a fight with Iran. I do not believe that however capable and brave our troops are in Syria, they ultimately are the answer. If we want to have a debate on Syria policy, let's talk about all the other ways that we need to engage in Syria in order to bring stability to that place. I do worry about how we tie this President's hands or any President's hands when they want to bring our troops home and get them out of harm's way.

Trump has completely botched policy in Syria, but that shouldn't go-- even Trump's most ferocious opponents--from endorsing endless wars. That shouldn't require Democrats to be against everything that he is for. He is pulling our troops out in a way that I oppose, but I worry about the long-term implications of this Congress asking for a fight in Syria that is unauthorized and then tying the President's hands when it comes to getting troops out of harm's way in places in far-off lands.

I oppose the amendment and encourage my colleagues to do the same.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I want to share with the body today my very short New Year's wish list. It is very short because Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are all the same. We need to open the government. We need to reopen the one-quarter of the Federal Government that is shut down today. We need to start acting like adults. We need to start doing the job that we were sent here to do because our Nation's security is at stake, kids' health is at stake, and families' economic security is at stake.

Hundreds of thousands of Federal workers all across the country are furloughed as we speak, including over a thousand in Connecticut. But that is not the extent of the damage. When you start having folks at airport security not be able to show up for their jobs because they have to work somewhere else in order to put food on the table, when you start creating questions about whether food stamps are going to go out or Section 8 vouchers are going to get paid, when you can't have the Department of Agriculture functioning to help our farmers, you are starting to affect a whole lot of people. You are starting to drag down the entire economy.

My hope--my wish--is that we will reopen the Federal Government. The fact of the matter is that this happens every now and again. Occasionally, somebody makes a demand, something that they can't get through the normal political process, and they say if they don't get that demand, they are going to shut down the government. Every time I have been through one of these, it is the party making the demand that eventually relents because we tend to all agree that is not the proper way in order to try to get what you want in the U.S. Government.

Senator Cruz and others shut down the government for 2 weeks because they wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Eventually, they relented. This time, President Trump couldn't get Congress to approve $5 billion for his wall in the budget so he decided to shut down the government. This is not how we should conduct a debate about legitimate public policy issues.

The future of the American healthcare system was a legitimate public policy issue, as is the security of our borders, but we shouldn't be having the discussion amidst a government shutdown--trying to use our Nation's security and all of these Federal workers and the work they do as hostages to try to achieve a political result.

Of course, we were all on the same page just a few weeks ago. This body voted unanimously to open the Federal Government, and now Senator McConnell says that piece of legislation that all of us voted for in December can't pass.

What changed? What changed in each one of your States that causes so many Members of this body to now say that they cannot vote for a continuing resolution that you all voted for back in December?

We know what has changed. The only thing that has changed is that the President has decided that he will not sign it. That is not how the Constitution works.

The Constitution doesn't make the Senate subservient to the President. The Constitution certainly doesn't make the President's party subservient to him. No one here has to follow the orders of President Trump, especially when he is doing something that is bad for the Nation. We could bring up that same bill that reopens the government at least temporarily. We could all vote the same way that we did back in December. We could send that bill to the House of Representatives and admit that the President shouldn't dictate our votes. Just because his position changed doesn't mean Senate Republicans' position should have changed.

Let's reopen the government so that, then, we can have a discussion about the question of immigration law and border security, because I am more than willing to have it.

OK, I didn't exactly tell the truth. I do have two other wishes beyond reopening the government, but they are connected to my primary wish. My second wish is that the President would stop making up things as he proceeds through this debate. The worst of his lies was the idea that there were 4,000 known or suspected terrorists who came across our southern border. That was a number proffered by the Press Secretary at the White House. It has been repeated in various ways, shapes, and forms by the President's allies.

Of course, we now know there have not been 4,000 suspected terrorists that have come across the southern border. There have been six since the beginning of this year. That is six people on a terrorist watch list who were not U.S. citizens. Do you know how many people who fit that description came across the northern border in the first 6 months of this year? Forty-one. If you really care about the security of this country--if your primary reason for getting up every morning is to make sure terrorists don't get into this country, then we should be putting up a wall with Canada, not a wall with Mexico.

The second fiction is that all of these drugs coming into the United States are crossing the U.S.-Mexican border at places where there isn't a wall. That is not true either. The vast majority of illegal products that come into this country come through ports of entry. We should all talk about why that is and what we can do to beef up protections, but putting up a wall along the treacherous portions of the Rio Grande are not going to stop smugglers who right now can find lots of other ways to get their goods into the United States.

I want to make sure that when we have this debate, we are having a fact-based debate.

My second wish in this new year is that the President and his allies would just start telling the truth, and the truth is that there is not a new security crisis at the southern border. Illegal crossings have been coming down since 2000. The people who are on the terrorist watch list who occasionally do try to come into this country are predominantly trying to get in through Canada, not through Mexico.

I want to talk about facts.

Here is my last wish. Again, Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are to reopen the government. If I had No. 6 and 7, it would be that the President start talking about the real facts, and the other would be this: Let's not get into this very dangerous conversation about trying to do an end- around on the political process with a national emergency. I guess I am talking to my Republican colleagues here.

I get it that I often have some of the sharpest words for this President, but I hope that we can come together on the idea that declaring a national emergency because you can't get what you want through the political process is a really bad precedent to set. It is true that there are a whole bunch of national emergencies that have been declared, but none of the circumstances of those national emergencies and none of the powers that were utilized in those national emergencies compare to what the President is reportedly considering.

If the President is really talking about declaring a national emergency on our border, despite the fact that there is no set of facts that suggests that what is happening on our border is fundamentally different today than what was happening a year ago or 10 years ago, and if the President is really contemplating, by Executive order, reprogramming billions of dollars this Congress set aside for military construction projects to a border wall, that is a Pandora's box that, once opened, cannot be shut again. This is a genie escaping out of a bottle that will not be put back.

I said in jest last night that if President Trump can use a national emergency declaration to build a border wall, what would stop a Democratic President from declaring a healthcare emergency and passing and declaring a national emergency to create a single-payer healthcare system in this country? I wouldn't advise a Democratic President to do that, but I am not sure what the precedent would be if President Trump, having not been able to get Congress and the American public to get behind a border wall with Mexico that nobody really wants, declares a national emergency and builds it anyway. What would then stop any future President from doing the same thing on a host of other policy areas? Really, what would stop a President from declaring a healthcare national emergency because he or she can't get their legislation passed through the Senate and reordering our insurance markets and our Medicare and Medicaid programs to cure that national emergency, simply shifting money around from place to place?

I don't think this is an avenue that the Federal Government should go down because there will be a Democratic President someday, and if you can just declare a national emergency and move billions of dollars around because you can't get your way in Congress, that is a horse that, once out of the barn, is not coming back.

That is my wish list: Open the government, open the government, open the government, open the government; pass the bills that we passed back in December. Don't let the President dictate your votes. Let your constituents dictate your votes.

I hope the President and the White House start telling the truth about what is really happening with border security, and I hope this nonsense about declaring a national emergency goes away. I hope it goes away in part because Republicans in this body recognize the really dangerous precedent that sets for this country, and they recommend publicly and privately to the President that he shutter that idea.

We could reopen the government today. If Senator McConnell came down here and decided to put a continuing resolution before this body and said that it is the right thing to do for the country, it would pass with flying colors. If Senator McConnell exercised that kind of leadership that he has shown in previous shutdowns, it would pass with flying colors. We all know it would. I am sure there would be a handful of Republicans who just got elected with President Trump's support who might not support it, but it would pass just like it passed 3 weeks ago, and it would likely pass the House of Representatives by a veto- proof margin, as well, once the signal was given by Senate Republicans that the adults need to step up and reopen the government.

So this whole crisis can be over tonight. It can be over tonight if there is some leadership shown by Senate Republicans. Why spend all of this time trying to control this body? Why spend millions of dollars trying to run for office to become the majority party in the U.S. Senate if you are not willing to step up in a moment of crisis and lead the country through it? It is still possible, and I hope, as my new year's wish, that it gets done sooner rather than later.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak briefly about the President's announcement today that he is going to be withdrawing 2,000 American troops from Syria.

Let me be clear. I thought this was a bad idea from the start, primarily because our troop presence in Syria is not authorized by Congress. We have had that debate in many forums here, but I believe this Congress has never authorized the U.S. military to engage in hostilities against ISIS. I think it is an extrapolation of the 2001 AUMF. It simply belies common sense. So we should never endorse military activity overseas, no matter what we think about the merits, if it is not authorized by this body.

But we have also seen over and over again that our relatively meager military presence in the Middle East has never been enough to change the political realities on the ground. The training mission was a disaster. The weapons we gave to the rebels ended up in the hands of the people we were fighting. Ultimately, we never had enough firepower there to be able to meaningfully change the balance of power.

But I will concede that the way the President went about making this decision makes our country an even bigger laughing stock than it already is in the region, and, frankly, that is pretty hard, because everybody is asking questions right now about why we pretended we were going to protect our Kurdish partners in the region if, on the eve of the Turkish offensive against the Kurds, we decide to pull out.

It makes absolutely no sense to pretend for literally months and months that we are going to be the bulwark to protect the Kurds against the Turks and then right on the precipice of the Turkish offensive, we leave. Why would anybody believe us in the future if we give them our word?

Again, I am speaking as someone who didn't support the intervention in the first place, but once you have made that commitment, why not follow through?

Second, why pull the rug out from under our diplomats in the region? It is very clear that neither Jim Jeffrey nor Brett McGurk knew anything about this. In fact, they were just making plans and suggestions weeks ago to increase our military involvement in the region, and now they are having to explain why 2,000 troops are leaving.

If you are going to make a decision like this, make sure the people who are working for you know about it.

Third, why announce this pullout without answering any questions about it or without announcing an alternative strategy? Total darkness from the President and his national security team. An announcement--a statement made on Twitter and no rollout of a plan for how the United States is going to continue to try to keep the peace.

So I agree with many of the criticisms that my Republican friends who have come down to the floor have complained about. This was done in a ham-handed manner that makes us weaker in the world. But forgive me if I have a few questions about why my Republican friends chose to speak up only now with questions about the President's Syria policy.

Where was this outrage when the President of the United States froze millions of dollars in humanitarian funding that could have saved lives on the ground in Syria? If they care so deeply about the future of Syria, why

weren't the Republicans lighting up social media and down on this floor complaining about the fact that the President refused to forward badly needed humanitarian dollars to the region.

Where was the outrage when the President effectively pulled the United States out of the peace process? Remember, the United States, under the Obama administration--whatever you think about Obama's strategy--was in the peace process, was a partner to try to figure out a way forward for Syria. Donald Trump, as has been his strategy internationally, pulled us out of that diplomatic conversation, left the diplomatic playing field to the Iranians, to the Russians, and to the Turks. Where was the outrage when the United States walked away from the negotiating table?

How about the shutdown of the refugee program? Once again, if your focus is on the cataclysm of humanitarian disaster on the ground in Syria, why weren't there all sorts of Members of the Republican Party coming down to the floor and complaining when the President decided to not allow any more Syrian refugees--those fleeing terror and torture-- to come to the United States?

What about outrage over the fact that the President proposed cutting the State Department by 40 percent--the State Department that is going to be in the driver's seat when we eventually get to the point of putting Syria back together politically?

Why is there outrage only today? Well, here is the answer, I think, and it worries me. I think there is outrage today because many Members of the Republican Party still cling to this outdated, empirically disproved, fantastic notion that the American military can solve complicated, convoluted political problems in the Middle East.

We have amazing men and women in the Armed Forces, but there are limits to what they can do. And history--especially the history of the last 15 years--tells us that big U.S. military presence in the Middle East often creates as many problems as it solves.

The Republicans who are complaining about this make it sound as if we had a couple divisions in Syria. We didn't. We had 2,000 troops. We had 2,000 troops compared to the hundreds of thousands of troops fighting on behalf of the Syrian regime, the Iranian militias, the Kurdish forces, the rebel forces, the remnants of ISIS's forces. Two thousand troops isn't enough to bluff. It isn't enough to gain a negotiating foothold. It is, frankly, just enough to keep faking it in Syria--doing just enough militarily to say that we are doing something to be able to sleep at night while never actually doing anything sufficient to change the balance of power. That has been the story of both President Obama's and President Trump's policy in Syria. We do just enough to convince the rebels that they should keep going but never enough to actually tackle Bashar al-Assad. All we have done is keep the civil war running and running and running.

I have really terrible news for you all. Assad is going to win this war. He was always going to win this war because the folks who were on his side had much bigger equities--Russia and Iran--than the folks who were on the side of the rebels. Now, that really stinks, that Bashar al-Assad is going to win, but you have to make policy based on the real world, not on some world that you imagine.

These neoconservatives are still--even after 4,000 Americans were killed in Iraq and 30,000 were wounded, they are still clinging to this notion that a couple thousand U.S. troops are going to be able to solve the problems in Syria. Listen. I get it. Restraint in the face of evil is really hard stuff. But hubris in the face of evil is worse.

So what should we be doing? I won't spend too much time on this, but we should get out of the civil war. We should admit that we have just prolonged it instead of trying to end it. We should keep working with our partners and keep using airpower to keep ISIS on the run. We should rescue Syrians with a generous refugee program, both helping our partners in the Middle East rescue Syrians and bringing them to the United States when they pass our vetting program.

We should stop angering our allies all over the world, but particularly in that region, and get back into the diplomatic game.

Finally, we should stop believing that our only leverage in negotiations in Syria or anywhere else in the world is military force. Put up a promise of massive investment in Syria after a peace deal is signed--likely, frankly, costing a fraction of what we spent in Iraq-- and you will discover that you quickly get a seat at that table again.

But it is time that we give up on this notion that these brave, capable American soldiers can fix these complicated, tribal, political, economic, and religious problems in the Middle East. They are brave, and they are capable, but there are things they can do, and there are things they can't do. Every time we put our troops in situations where they are doomed to fail, when we are not prepared to give them the resources to succeed, as was always the case in Syria--spare me this notion that 2,000 American troops were going to be able to fix Syria-- every time we put them in situations where they can't win, we undermine American influence, and we undermine the power of our military.

I don't agree with how the President did this. Once you have made that commitment, boy, it doesn't make a lot of sense to pull the rug out from under our partners right as the tough stuff starts to come. I don't agree that he didn't do it in consultation with anybody in this place or anybody on his national security team. I think that his announcement today is ham-handed and embarrassing, but his instincts aren't entirely wrong on the question of what American troops can and can't do in the Middle East.

I can't believe I am saying this. I think the President may have learned more than many of my friends in the Senate have.

I yield back.

Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. I understand it will be on a voice vote. This exemption, just like the amendment that will follow, is so broad as to render the underlying resolution impotent.

Let's be clear. The existing conflict the United States is supporting is the primary cause of the humanitarian catastrophe that exists today. Eighty-five thousand kids under the age of 5 have died of starvation and disease. This is the world's worst cholera epidemic in the history of the globe. If we were to adopt this amendment, it could potentially allow for continued unlimited assistance for the Saudi coalition to continue to exacerbate that nightmare.

I urge my colleagues, on a voice vote, to oppose this amendment.

Mr. President, once again, I urge rejection of this amendment. If passed, it would, again, render the underlying resolution a moot point.

I would make two additional arguments against it: First, the entire rationale that the Saudis used for the military campaign in Yemen is to prevent Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia. So if this was an exemption, then the United States could fully participate. Second, existing law already allows the U.S. Commander in Chief to protect U.S. troops against an attack or an imminent attack, and nothing in the resolution would take away the Commander in Chief's power to protect U.S. troops either here in the United States or abroad.

For those reasons, I would strongly oppose--that we object to this amendment which, if passed, would essentially gut the underlying resolution.