Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I rise today to talk about a program of critical importance to my State and to a number of people all across the country, and that is the Affordable Connectivity Program--something that doesn't generate a lot of headlines; something that doesn't generate a lot of partisan debate; and something for which, gratefully, there is a bipartisan group of Senators who would, I think, extend the Affordable Connectivity Program for this country, but, unfortunately, it looks like the leadership does not want to give us a vote on it.

So I want to talk about why this program is important and talk about why it is important that we hopefully, sometime in the future, authorize this important program, which just expired a matter of a few days ago.

Now, this is a town where, often, the things that generate headlines are sometimes the most partisan fights, the things that are most pressing and most relevant. And, of course--the Presiding Officer knows me--I participate in those debates just as well or just as much as anybody.

But sometimes--hopefully, most of the time--this body should be geared toward actually accomplishing things for the constituents that we represent. In the State of Ohio, the Affordable Connectivity Program benefits over a million households. That is not a million people. A million households in the State of Ohio benefit from this program. And my cosponsors from Vermont, from New Mexico, Democratic colleagues, and from a number of Republican States as well, I think, testify to how important this program actually is.

Let me just sort of try to identify a couple of the reasons why it is important. So the first reason it is important is because we know that connectivity is actually one of the important and necessary parts of living life in the 21st century. We may not like this. We may think that this is a negative trend. But, look, kids can't do their schoolwork without access to high-quality broadband. A lot of parents can't do their work from home if they don't have access to high-quality broadband. Teachers can't prepare lessons for the next day.

And, increasingly, especially in a country that is as constrained by budget and fiscal matters as ours, one of the great ways to lower healthcare costs in our country is telemedicine. Yet you can't do telemedicine, of course, if you don't have an internet connection at home.

The Affordable Connectivity Program solves this problem by ensuring that our low-income residents all across the country can afford their internet bills.

Now, it is not just about the consumers; it is not just about our citizens who need a high-quality connection because the guarantee that consumers will be able to pay their internet bills, regardless of their income level, is one of the things that makes it possible for a lot of companies to invest in rural broadband infrastructure.

Now, I talked to a number of companies, a number of businesses that do rural broadband infrastructure just in the State of Ohio, and it costs a lot of money. Right? You lay a mile of fiber in a place like Cleveland, Columbus, or Cincinnati, and you instantly have thousands upon thousands of people who are ready to tap into that connection; but you lay a mile of fiber in rural southeastern Ohio, and maybe, if you are lucky, you have a few people who are willing to tap into that connection. So it is more expensive in the parts of our country that are more sparsely populated.

I think it is one of the reasons my Democratic colleague from New Mexico is as passionate about this as I am--Senator Lujan because you have, of course, large numbers of reservations

all over New Mexico and a large number of rural areas that are in reservations. And, look, you need to be able to access the stuff. You need to be able to access internet connection in the 21st century. It is important for economic development. It is important for people to be able to live their lives.

But in order to ensure that people are willing to actually invest in that broadband infrastructure, to pay for that mile of fiberoptic cable, we have to make sure that, on the other end, there are customers who are willing to actually access and pay for those services.

So this is an important thing, and it is already expired. And it hasn't expired because of partisan bickering. This is a bipartisan piece of legislation that wants to reauthorize this program. It hasn't expired because we don't have the resources. This is a very, very small amount of money in the grand scheme of the Federal budget. The reason it is expired is because sometimes in Washington, people are too busy arguing about public policy and not actually busy enough doing public policy.

We have the votes. We have the need. We have the necessity. But the reason why this program has fallen, the reason why this program has lapsed, the reason why it has gone offline--if you will forgive a pun-- is because we can't actually vote on it. And that, unfortunately, I think, is a reflection on Senate leadership; it is a reflection on the brokenness of this town; and it is a reflection on the fact that, too often, so many good public policies for the people of our country fall through the cracks because other things take priority.

Well, this should take priority. This is important. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of people in Ohio are about to find out how important it is when they start to see the effects of it expiring.

So one of the things, Mr. President--I am mindful a little bit of the time here. I received a number of letters about this. One of the really fascinating dynamics of becoming a U.S. Senator--I have been here for all of 18 months--is that your constituent letters very often tell you the issues that the people you represent, the people you serve, actually care the most about. I expect a lot of constituent mail-- positive and negative--and sometimes I am surprised by it.

I am always surprised that anytime an issue of animal rights comes up, that is when I get maybe the most mail. People in Ohio really love animals, and rightfully so. And this issue I have gotten a lot of letters on. Again, it doesn't gather a lot of headlines, but it matters to a lot of people.

This is one letter I received from a constituent:

Senator Vance: I am writing to you today to stress the

importance of Congress providing continued funding for the

Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) as soon as possible. My

household, along with a special needs person that relies on

GPS for tracking his whereabouts could be life-threatening if

I cannot find him.

Think about that, right?

I am his legal guardian and look over his well-being so as

when he wanders off, I would not be able to find him through his cell phone device. More than 21 million other vulnerable households in the United States--

Mr. President, 21 million, 8 percent or so of our population, rely on this program to pay for broadband services.

Without the support provided by this program, my home and

many others would struggle to afford a broadband

subscription.

The support provided by the ACP program has kept my family

and families like mine online through these difficult

economic times.

I am going to read a second letter here, but I just want to highlight what an extraordinary testament that is: the legal guardian of a special needs person who needs broadband access to be able to keep tabs on this person when they need to. And the program that they desperately need has already expired, and they are about to start feeling it. It only expired a week ago, so they haven't maybe noticed it yet, but they certainly will. And this person needs access to this program to keep track of a special needs person. And you wonder, Will they have it without this continued program?

I am going to read another letter here. This is from Poland, OH:

Dear Senator Vance, I represent the Ohio Connectivity

Champions, a group of technology experts who were hired by

the Management Council of the Ohio Education Computer Network

during the pandemic to help Ohio families find affordable

internet.

We originally focused on parents of students who needed

internet so that their children could complete schoolwork.

Since then, we have focused on all Ohioans and helping them

with enrollment in the Affordable Connectivity Program as

well as other technology related assistance.

We have heard from thousands of Ohioans on how much the ACP

has helped them with affordable internet.

I know that budgetary issues are very difficult right now

and that government expenditures are at the top of everyone's

list of priorities, but the ACP is one of the most successful

social programs in a long time.

The pandemic opened everyone's eyes to the digital divide

in this country and the ACP has allowed for millions of

Americans to participate in the 21st century economy. I know

that the ACP will most likely be adjusted through

negotiations in Congress, and that is fine, but to not fund

the program completely would affect many Ohioans. We would

appreciate your support of the ACP as we continue to help

Ohioans with finding affordable internet.

Another letter comes from Columbus, OH. And though one of the things I really admire and like about the ACP program is it induces investment in rural broadband infrastructure, we also know that there are a lot of people in our urban areas who could not afford their internet bills without the ACP program.

So this is from Natalie in Columbus, OH:

We receive a $30 credit each month on our internet

connection. This is scheduled to end in early 2024 unless the

Affordable Connectivity Program is fully funded. This makes a

significant difference in our monthly budget as we are on

food stamps. Both my husband and I are disabled. This credit

makes a significant difference in our lives. Without it that

$30 will have to come out of our food budget as we don't have

anywhere else to squeeze the budget. Food costs have gone up.

Every month, we end up spending more on food than we get in

food stamps. When we got that extra $95 at the end of the

month it really helped. However, that program was

discontinued. Now, another program is scheduled to end that

directly impacts those Americans on the bottom end of the

economic scale.

So two people--a husband and wife--disabled, who are actually going to forgo food because this program has expired in my home State of Ohio. What a shame that we have failed Natalie and her husband by failing to reauthorize this program, and what an opportunity to actually get off our rear ends and make sure that we do it when we get the opportunity.

This is another letter I am going to read from Mansfield, OH:

I am 73 years old.

Mansfield, OH. Speaking of pets, this is actually where my wife and I got the very first dog that we ever owned together.

Without the ACP, I would not have internet.

So, I am writing to you today to stress the importance of

Congress providing continued funding for the Affordable

Connectivity Program (ACP) as soon as possible.

The support provided by the ACP program has kept my family

and families like mine online through these difficult

economic times. We use it to stay connected to work, school,

and healthcare providers, in addition to family and friends.

Without ACP, the reality is we may no longer be able to

afford to be connected and that would be an added hardship.

Think about this. I know that, like a lot of Americans with young kids at home, probably the most important thing that I use my broadband connection for is so that my three little kids can call their grandparents and call their aunts and uncles.

So this 73-year-old from Mansfield, OH, I wonder whether she will be able to contact her grandkids, whether she will be able to keep connected with her family who are not easy to get to if this program disappears.

One final letter I want to read. I am sorry. Mr. President, given the time, I will not read the last letter that I have. But the point that I think these letters drive home is that real people are going to suffer when this program goes away. You have people who have to pick between food service and internet connectivity. You have an elderly woman who may not be able to connect to her friends and family. You have people worried about their telemedicine and healthcare visits.

And on the point about Federal spending, it sort of breaks my heart when a constituent who can't afford internet service is writing to us apologizing for a program's budgetary hit

when it is a tiny, tiny slice of the American Federal budget. And I know this is a controversial comment with some of my colleagues, but if we can afford to fund military conflicts the world over, can't we afford to provide basic connectivity and services for our own people? Disabled people choosing between food and internet connection--that is the choice that we have foisted upon them by not authorizing this program. I am disappointed by that, Mr. President, and again I will say that it presents an opportunity for us to do the right thing--to make reforms to the ACP program where it needs to be reformed but to do the right thing: Reauthorize this program, and ensure that Ohioans and people all over our country don't have to choose between internet service and food. We can do that. We just have to do our jobs.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, with respect to my colleagues who voted in the other direction on this particular piece of legislation, let me offer some serious concerns about the direction we are headed as a country and about what this vote represents in terms of American readiness; American capacity to defend itself and its allies in the future; and, most importantly, the American leadership's ability to acknowledge where we really are as a country: our strengths, our weaknesses, what can be built upon, and what must be rebuilt entirely.

I am extraordinarily aware of a couple of historical analogies that should inform this debate, one that seems to always inform debate and another that seems to never come up. Now, opponents of further aid in Ukraine--and I count myself among them--say that this is a Chamberlain vs. Churchill kind of moment. You just heard my distinguished colleague from Delaware make this observation.

With no disrespect to my friend from Delaware, we need to come up with some different analogies in this Chamber. We need to be able to understand history as not just World War II replaying itself over and over and over again. Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler. It doesn't mean he is a good guy, but he has significantly less capability than the German leader did in the late 1930s. America is not the America of the late 1930s or the early 1940s. We possess substantially less manufacturing might, in relative terms, than we did almost 100 years ago. And most importantly, there are many ways in which the analogy falls apart even if you ignore America's capacity, Russia's capacity, and the like.

There are ways in which we should be looking at other historical analogies, and I would like to point to just a couple of those right now. The Second World War, of course, was the most devastating war, arguably, in the history of the world. Close behind it is the First World War. And what is the lesson of the First World War? It is not that there are always people appeasing the bad guys or fighting against the bad guys. The lesson of World War I is that, if you are not careful, you can blunder yourself into a broader regional conflict that kills tens of millions of people, many of them innocent. In 1914, alliances, politics, and the failure of statesmanship dragged two rival blocs of militaries into a catastrophic conflict.

In the past week alone, the Council on Foreign Relations has published an essay calling for European troops to sustain Ukraine's lines as Ukraine struggles to raise troops. Some European leaders have said they might send troops to support Ukraine in a conflict.

Perhaps the history lesson we should be teaching ourselves isn't Chamberlain vs. Churchill. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves how an entire continent, how an entire world's set of leaders allowed itself to blunder into world conflict.

Is there possibly a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Ukraine? Yes, I believe that there is. Indeed, as multiple people--both critics of Vladimir Putin and supporters of Ukraine--have pointed out, there was, in fact, a peace deal on the table approximately 18 months ago. What happened to it? The Biden administration pushed Zelenskyy to set aside the peace agreement and to engage in a disastrous counteroffensive, a counteroffensive that killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, that depleted an entire decade's worth of military stocks, and that has left us in the place that we are now, where every single objective observer of the Ukraine war acknowledges today that the war is going worse for Ukraine than it was 18 months ago.

Could we have avoided it? Yes, we could, and we should have avoided it. We would have saved a lot of lives, we would have saved a lot of American weapons, and we would have had this country in a much, much more stable and much better place if we had.

Now, there is another historical analogy that I think is worth pointing out, and that is the historical analogy of the early 2000s. Now, in 2003, I was a high school senior, and I had a political position back then. I believed the propaganda of the George W. Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy, that those who were appeasing Saddam Hussein were inviting a broader regional conflict.

Does that sound familiar to anything that we are hearing today? It is the same exact talking points, 20 years later, with different names. But have we learned anything over the last 20 years? No, I don't think that we have. We have learned that if we beat our chest instead of engage in diplomacy, that it will somehow produce good outcomes. That is not true. We learned that if we talk incessantly about World War II, we can bully people and cause them to ignore their basic moral impulses and lead the country straight into catastrophic conflict.

Now, as one of the great ironies of my time in the U.S. Senate for the last 18 months, I have been accused by multiple people of being a stooge of Vladimir Putin. Well, I take issue to that because in 2003, yes, I made the mistake of supporting the Iraq war. I also, a couple months later, enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, one of two kids from my small block on McKinley Street in Middletown, OH, to enlist in the marines just that year. I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to, that the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.

Just a few days ago, we saw our friends in the House waving Ukrainian flags on the floor of the U.S. House--which, I would love to see them waving the American flag with such gusto. And I won't complain about the fact that it was a violation of the rules of decorum, though it certainly was. But it reminded me--it reminded me--and I believe, 2005, maybe it was 2006--when that same exact Chamber, the Members were raising their fingers, stained with purple ink, to commemorate the incredible Iraqi elections that had happened in 2005.

I was in Iraq for both the constitutional referendum of October of 2005 and the parliamentary elections of December of 2005. And I remember the people in Iraq, happily voting, raising their fingers in the air.

What I am saying is, not that the people of Iraq were bad or that they were bad for voting in their elections, what I am saying is the obsessive focus on moralism--democracy is good, Saddam Hussein is bad; America, good; tyranny, bad--that is no way to run a foreign policy, because then you end up with people waving their fingers on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, even though they have walked their country into a disaster.

And I say this as a proud Republican. I say this as somebody who supports Republican colleagues who agree with me and disagree with me on this issue. It is, perhaps, the most shameful period in the Republican Party's history of the last 40 years that we supported George W. Bush in the prosecution at military conflict.

Now, my excuse is that I was a high school senior. What is the excuse of many people who were in this Chamber or in the House of Representatives at the time and are now singing the exact same song when it comes to Ukraine?

Have we learned nothing? Have we updated nothing about our mental thinking, about the standard that we apply for when we should get involved in military conflicts? Have we learned nothing about how precarious and precious U.S. life is and other life around the world and that we should be a little bit more careful about protecting it?

Back then, in 2003, we actually had an anti-war left in this country. Now, nobody, really, is anti-war. Nobody is worried about prosecuting military conflicts overseas. Nobody seems to worry about unintended consequences. But Iraq had a lot of unintended consequences--a lot of consequences that were, maybe, foreseen by a few smart people; a lot of them that weren't foreseen by anybody--one of which is that we gave Iran a regional ally instead of a regional competitor.

Did George W. Bush stand before the American people and say: We are going to invade this country and give one of our strongest enemies in the region a massive regional ally? Did we think that 20 years later, Iraq would become a base to attack American troops in the Middle East? Did we think it would empower one of the most dangerous regimes in that area of the world?

We are now funding Israel, as I think that we should, to defend itself against attacks that are originating in Iran when the same people who are calling for more war all over the world were the same people who caused us to start a war that empowered Iran.

There is a certain irony in this, a certain sadness that I have that we never seem to learn the lessons of the past. We never seem to ask ourselves why it is that we keep on screwing up American foreign policy, why it is that we keep on making our country weaker, even though we say we intend to make it stronger.

Here is another thing that we should learn from the Iraq war, something that I as a Christian care a lot about and I think that even many of my colleagues who are not Christians, many of my fellow Americans who are not Christians, should care about. The United States remains, to this day, the world's largest majority Christian nation. We are the largest Christian nation by population in the entire world. And yet what are the fruits--``By your fruits ye shall know them,'' the Bible tells us. What are the fruits of American foreign policy when it comes to Christian populations all over the world over the last few decades?

Well, in Iraq, before we invaded, there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq. Many of them were ancient communities--Chaldeans, people who trace their lineage and their ancestors to people who knew the literal Apostles of Jesus Christ.

Now, nearly every single one of those historical Christian communities is gone. That is the fruits of American labor in Iraq--a regional ally of Iran and the eradication and decimation of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.

Is that what we were told was going to happen? Did the American people--the world's largest majority Christian nation in the world--did they think that is what they were getting themselves into? I certainly didn't. And I am ashamed that I didn't, but we did. We did all of those things because we weren't thinking about how war and conflict lead to unexpected places.

Now, it sounds farfetched, I am sure, when we apply these lessons to the Ukraine conflict. Certainly--certainly--this has no risk of spilling over into a broader regional or even world conflict. Well, certainly not, in fact. I was being sarcastic. It obviously does. As European allies propose sending troops to fight Vladimir Putin, drawing NATO further into this conflict, yes, the Ukraine war threatens to become a broader regional conflict.

What about the assault on traditional Christian communities? Just today, the Ukrainian parliament is considering enacting a law that would dispossess large numbers of Christian churches and Christian communities in the country of Ukraine.

Now, they say it is because these churches are too close to Russia. That is what they say. And maybe some of the churches are too close to Russia. But you don't deprive an entire religious community of their religious freedom because some of its adherents don't agree with you about the relevant conflict of the day.

I believe, standing here, that this war will eventually lead to the displacement of a massive Christian community in Ukraine. And that will be our shame--our shame in this Chamber for not seeing it coming; our shame in this Chamber for doing nothing to stop it; our shame for refusing to use the hundreds of billions of dollars that we send to Ukraine as leverage to ensure and guarantee real religious freedom.

The other thing--one final point on this historical contingency point. It was true then, and it was true today, there is this weird way where the debate in this country has gotten warped, where people can't engage in good-faith disagreement with our Ukraine policy. You will immediately be attacked for being on the wrong team, for being on the wrong side.

I remember, as a young conservative high schooler, how opponents from the conservative side of the Iraq War: Well, you are just all for Saddam Hussein, and you believe that Saddam Hussein should be allowed to continue to brutalize the Iraqi people; you have no love for these innocent Iraqi people; you don't believe in America. And the same exact arguments are being applied today, that you are a fan of Vladimir Putin if you don't like our Ukraine policy, or you are a fan of some terrible tyrannical idea because you think maybe America should be more focused on the border of its own country than on someone else's.

This war fever, this inability for us to actually process what is going on in our world to make rational decisions is the scariest part of this entire debate.

You see people who served their country, who have been advocating for good public policies--agree or disagree with them--for their entire careers smeared as agents of a foreign government simply because they don't like what we are doing in Ukraine. That is not good-faith debate; that is slander. And it is the type of slander that is going to lead us to make worse and worse decisions.

It should make us all feel pretty weird when you see your fellow Americans making an argument, and the response to that argument is not: Well, no, no, here is why you are wrong, or, Here is substantively why I disagree with you. But they fling their finger in your face and say: You are a Putin puppet; you are an asset of a foreign regime.

This way of making decisions democratically is how we bankrupt this country and start a third world war. We should stop doing it.

So let me make some arguments for why our Ukraine policy doesn't make any sense. The first, we do not have the manufacturing base to support a land war in Europe. This must be appreciated. And it is interesting, when I was making this argument that we didn't have the manufacturing base to support a military conflict in Eastern Europe, to support a military conflict in East Asia, and then also to actually support our own national defense, that America was spread too thin, I was commonly met 18 months ago with a very common rejoinder. I was told that the Ukraine war represented a fraction of a fraction of American GDP, that we could do everything all at once and it would not stress America's capabilities.

Now, everyone seems to agree with me. Now, everyone seems to acknowledge that we are severely limited, not in the number of dollars that we can send to Ukraine--because there are limits there--but in the number of weapons, of artillery shells and missiles, that we don't make enough of the critical weapons of war to send them to all four corners of the world and also keep ourselves safe.

But people will say: Well, J.D. is right, we need to rebuild the defense industrial base; we need to rebuild our capacity to manufacture weapons. But now the desire and the need to manufacture more weapons is an argument for the Ukraine conflict instead of an argument against it.

It is interesting how advocates of this conflict always find a new justification when the justification of a few months ago falls apart.

So let's deal with some very cold, hard facts. Ukrainians have argued publicly--their defense minister has said this--that they require thousands of air defense interceptor missiles every single year in order to keep themselves safe from Russian attack. Do we make thousands? No.

If this supplemental passes, as I expect it will in a few hours, we will go from making about 550 PAC-3 interceptor missiles to about 650. And there are a few other weapons systems that could provide protection in terms of air defense. But Ukraine's air defenses are being overwhelmed right now because

we don't make enough air defenses. Europe doesn't make enough air defenses. And, by the way, we are being stretched in multiple different directions.

The Israelis need them to push back against Iranian attacks. The Ukrainians need them to push back against Russian attacks. We may, God forbid, need them. And the Taiwanese would need them if China ever invaded. We don't make enough air defense weapons and neither do the Europeans. And so rather than stretching ourselves too thin, America should be focused on the task of diplomacy and making it possible for our friends and our allies to do as much as they can but to recognize the limitations and to ensure that we--most of all, our own people in our own country--can look after our own defense.

It is not just air defense missiles. Martin 155mm artillery shells-- these are one of the most critical weapons for the land war in Europe, maybe the single most critical weapon for the land war in Europe. The United States makes a fraction of what the Ukrainians need. And if you combine what the United States provides with what the Europeans are able to provide and what other figures are able to provide, we are massively limited in whether we can help Ukraine close the gap it currently has with Russia.

Now, you have heard senior figures in our defense administration say that unless this bill passes--unless this bill passes--the Ukrainians will face a 10-to-1 disadvantage when it comes to critical munitions like artillery--10 to 1.

What gets less headlines is that currently the Ukrainians have a 5- to-1 disadvantage, and there is no credible pathway to give them anything close to parity. And I am not even talking about this year; I am talking about next year too. During a conversation with the senior national security official of the Biden administration, I was told that if the United States radically ramps up production and if the Europeans radically ramp up production, the Ukrainians will have a 4-to-1 disadvantage in artillery by the end of 2025. And that was treated as good news.

You cannot win a land war in Europe with a 4-to-1 disadvantage in artillery, especially when the country that you are going up against has four times the population that you do.

And, of course, the most important resource in war, even in modern war, is not just air defense missiles and is not just artillery shells; the most important resource is human beings. Human beings still fight our wars, as tragic as that is and as much as we wish that it wasn't true, and Ukraine has a terrible manpower problem too.

The New York Times recently wrote a story about how they had conscripted--perhaps accidentally; I certainly hope so--they conscripted a mentally handicapped person into service in their conflict. They have now dropped the conscription age. And, still, they are engaged in draconian measures to conscript people into this conflict. That says nothing about the fact, by the way, that approximately 600,000 military-age men fled the country.

This war is often compared, as I said earlier, to the UK's fight against Nazi Germany. In the height of World War II, did a million Brits--over a million Brits leave Britain to avoid being conscripted by the Germans? I highly doubt it. So there is a deep reserve problem--a reserve of weapons, there aren't enough of them; a reserve of manpower, there aren't enough men.

This is the problem that Ukraine confronts. I say this not to attack the Ukrainians who have fought admirably--many of them have died defending their country. But if we want to respect the sacrifice of the people who have died in this conflict, we have to deal with reality. And the reality is that the longer that this goes on, the more people will needlessly die, the fewer people will actually be left to rebuild the country of Ukraine, and the less capable Ukraine will be of actually functioning as a country in the future.

But I am not just worried about that; I am not just worried about whether Ukraine can win. I also worry about, as I said earlier, unintended consequences. And now we should spend a little bit of time discussing some more of those.

A few things come from our obsessive focus on Ukraine. No. 1, we have, at multiple levels in this Congress, passed pieces of legislation that deal with Ukraine that attempt to explicitly curtail the diplomacy powers of the next Presidential administration. I know we don't often talk so directly about politics, and I am sure I disagree with my friends on the other side of the aisle about who the next President should be, but we want to empower the next President, whoever that is, to actually engage in diplomacy, not make it harder to engage in diplomacy.

Multiple provisions of this legislation--but also other legislation this Chamber has passed and I opposed--try explicitly to tie the next President's hands. Let's just say that the next President, whoever that might be, decides that he wants to stop the killing and engage in diplomacy. This Chamber will be giving a predicate to impeach that next President for engaging in basic diplomacy. Hard to imagine a more ridiculous judgment on the priorities of American leadership that we are already trying to make it impossible for the next President to engage in any measure of diplomacy. That is not leadership, and that is not toughness; that is a blind adherence to a broken foreign policy consensus, which is unfortunately exactly what we have.

The Ukraine supplemental that is, again, likely to be passed in the next few hours, funds Ukraine's border while turning a blind eye to the United States own border crisis. The bill includes hundreds of millions that could be used to strengthen Ukrainian border security and support the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine. Good for them. I am glad that they care about their own border security.

The supplemental extends benefits for Ukrainian parolees in the United States. It includes $481 million for refugees and interim assistance, which could be used, in part, for the Office of Refugee Resettlement to provide resettlement assistance to Ukrainians arriving in the United States and also to other organizations that also, because money is fungible, could resettle other migrants from other countries into our country.

So the very same moment that we are supporting the Ukrainians to secure their own border, we are not just ignoring our own border, we are funding NGOs that will worsen Joe Biden's migration crisis. It is completely senseless. Yet that is what we are doing.

Let's talk about something else. This bill includes a provision that is wildly popular called the REPO Act. In short, the REPO Act does something very simple. The REPO Act allows the Treasury Department to seize Russian assets to help them pay for the war. That sounds great. Of course, Russia shouldn't have invaded Ukraine and, of course, they should have to pay for some of the consequences--all of the consequences--that they have created. But ask yourself, are there unintended consequences that come from seizing tens of billions of dollars from foreign assets? In fact, there are.

A number of economists from across the political spectrum have argued that the REPO Act could potentially make it harder to sell U.S. Treasuries. This is something a lot of Americans don't care about. I am sure their eyes might glaze over a little bit. But this country is running almost $2 trillion deficits every single year. You ask: Where do those $2 trillion come from? They come from selling Treasury bonds on the open market. That is how we pay for the deficit spending in this country. And what happens when people start to worry that U.S. Treasuries are not a good investment? Well, we have already seen the consequences over the last couple of years. Interest rates go up. Inflation goes up. Home mortgages become more expensive. Are we at least a little bit worried that the bond markets could react negatively to us seizing tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars from assets? We should certainly be worried about it because we already can't afford the deficit spending in this country to begin with. Treasury yield rates are already extraordinarily high. Thanks to the Biden spending programs, they have actually shown a remarkable stubbornness over the last few months.

Here is another unintended consequence. Germany is an important American ally, and it has, by some

standards, the fourth or fifth largest economy in the entire world. It is a very, very important country, a very important ally. By the way, it is a beautiful country with beautiful people. But Germany, under the influence of a series of so-called green energy policies, is rapidly deindustrialized.

Germany, by the way, was one of the few countries in the wake of World War II--especially in the seventies, eighties, and nineties--that actually kept its industrial might largely intact. Think about German cars and all the other manufacturing things that come from the country of Germany. Well, Germany is much less powerful in terms of manufacturing today than it was 10 years ago. Why? Because it takes cheap energy to manufacture things. You need cheap energy if you want to manufacture steel. You need cheap energy if you want to manufacture cars. That is one of the reasons, by the way, the manufacturing economy has done so poorly under the Biden administration--because their energy policies don't make any sense.

But Germany should be told that the United States will not subsidize its ridiculous energy policies and its policies that weaken German manufacturing. We should send a message to the Germans that they have to manufacture their own weapons; they have to field their own army; and they have the priority and they have the responsibility to defend Europe from Vladimir Putin or anyone else.

I ask the question: How many mechanized brigades could the German army field today? By some estimates, the answer is zero; by other estimates, the answer is one. So the fourth most powerful economy in the world is unable to field sufficient mechanized brigades to defend itself from Vladimir Putin. Now, this isn't 5 years ago or 10 years ago; this is yesterday. So for 3 years, the Europeans have told us that Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to Europe, and for 3 years they have failed to respond as if that were actually true.

Donald Trump famously told European nations they have to spend more on their own defense. He was chastised by Members of this Chamber for having the audacity to suggest Germany should step up and pay for its own defense. Even today, Germany, by some estimates, fails to hit its 2-percent-of-GDP threshold where it is supposed to spend 2 percent of its economy on military. And even if it hits that 2-percent threshold in 2024, it will have hit it barely after, literally, decades of being chastised. Is it fair that the Americans are forced to front this burden? I don't think that it is.

But I am actually less worried about the fairness and more worried about the signal this sends to Europe. If we keep on carrying a substantial share of the military burden, if we keep on giving the Europeans everything that they want, they are never going to become self-sufficient, and they are never going to produce sufficient weapons so they can defend their own country.

You hear all the time from folks who support endless funding to Ukraine that unless--that unless--we send resources to Ukraine, Vladimir Putin will march all the way to Berlin or Paris. Well, first of all, this don't make any sense. Vladimir Putin can't get to western Ukraine; how is he going to get all the way to Paris? Second of all, if Vladimir Putin is a threat to Germany and France, if he is a threat to Berlin and Paris, then they should spend more money on military equipment.

Some of my fellow Americans have been lucky enough to travel to Europe. It is a beautiful place. But one of the things that Europeans often say about Americans is that we have way too many guns and way too little healthcare. One of the reasons why we have less healthcare access than the Europeans do is because we subsidize their military and their defense. If the Europeans were forced to step up and provide for their own security, we could actually take care of some more domestic problems at home. No, too many in this Chamber have decided that we should police the entire world. The American taxpayer be damned.

Let me make one final point here, cognizant I have colleagues who wish to speak.

May I ask, how much time do I have?

I see my colleague from Florida, so I will be relatively brief here.

For 40 years, this country has made, largely, I would say, a bipartisan mistake. It has allowed our manufacturing might to get offshored and to get outsourced, while simultaneously increasing the commitments that we have all over the world. We basically outsourced our ability to manufacture critical weapons while stepping up our responsibilities to police the world. And, of course, if we are going to police the world, then it is American troops who need those weapons.

With one hand, we have weakened our own country; with the other, we have overextended. There is a certain irony that if you look at the voting records and the commitments of this Chamber, the people who have been most aggressive--my colleagues, some of them my friends--who have been most aggressive sending our good manufacturing jobs to China are now the ones who are most aggressive to assert we can police the world.

What are we supposed to police the world with? Our artillery manufacturing, our weapons, our air defense manufacturing, our basic military industrial complex has become incredibly weakened. And this bill, you will hear people say, fixes it. It doesn't fix it at all. This bill, while it does invest some--and this is a good thing, by the way, it is not all bad--while it does invest some in critical manufacturing of American weapons, it sends those weapons overseas faster than it even replenishes them. This is not a bill to rebuild the defense industrial base; this is a bill to further extend this country.

I will yield the floor, recognizing my friend from Florida wants to speak.

Madam President, I am mindful here that we have 30 hours of debate, if we want it, on a problem and on a question that has completely devastated our country. I think it is worth actually starting out by observing some of the procedural background that actually led us here.

If you go back a few months ago, there was pretty broad consensus that this country has a very serious problem at the southern border. Even some of my Democratic friends admit this and worked I think in good faith in an effort to help us try to solve that problem.

The legislation that came out of that bipartisan negotiation had a couple of problems, the first of which is that the negotiation itself was completely shrouded in secrecy from some of my colleagues on my side of the aisle. That naturally breeds mistrust of the process. So when you see a process unfolding where you don't actually know what is in the legislation, you don't actually know what you are voting on, I think you are understandably worried that what you are voting on is not going to be that good for your constituents or for the country at large.

The second problem with that piece of legislation is that the details weren't revealed to my colleagues and me until right up to the moment we were expected to vote for it. My memory is a little foggy, but I believe we were given some sense of the details in a very high level a couple of weeks before the text of the legislation dropped. The text of the legislation--confirming some of those details and disconfirming other of those details--we were given on a Sunday, and then we were expected to vote on that legislation just a few short days later.

Now, we have to ask ourselves whether the bipartisan compromise that wasn't actually that bipartisan because I believe it had a few Republicans and universal Democratic support--near universal Democratic support--whether it actually would have solved the underlying crisis. I think you can make a very good--indeed, a completely airtight argument that it would not have solved the crisis at the American southern border.

Let me walk through three problems with that legislation.

The first is that the legislation did nothing on the question of parole. If we go back to the Obama administration, the last Democratic President this country had--no fan of Republican border policy--Barack Obama paroled and his administration paroled about 5,000 people per year. What that does is effectively grant some measure of legality to people who cross the border illegally.

Now, that is meant to be used in a narrow and tailored way. You have one person coming across the border illegally, and maybe some special circumstance necessitates that we should give that person parole and temporarily relieve them from immigration enforcement.

What the Biden administration has done is radically different. So if Barack Obama paroled 5,000 illegal aliens every single year, Joe Biden is paroling close to 1 million illegal aliens every single year.

Now, we know that isn't just bad for the direct reason that that is a million people who are coming into the country illegally who should not be here, but we also know that it invites others. In fact, if you go to the southern border or you watch a media report of someone going to the southern border and sticking a microphone in the face of somebody who is crossing the border illegally, they will say: Well, we are coming here because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have thrown open the American southern border. They have invited everyone in, so that is what we are doing.

You don't just legalize a million people every single year; you also invite people en masse to come into your country illegally, with the knowledge that their conduct will not be penalized and that the immigration laws of the country will not be enforced.

So the compromise on border security did nothing on parole--perhaps the single biggest problem of the Biden administration.

The second thing that it did is that it actually imposed a so-called border shutdown that would run for 270 days per year, but there were a couple of big exceptions. First of all, the shutdown only applied when nearly 5,000 people per day crossed our southern border. That is close to 2 million people per year. So why are we shutting down the border only after 2 million people cross illegally in a given year? Why shouldn't we shut it down much, much sooner than that? I would say as close to zero as possible, but I recognize reasonable minds disagree. But certainly we can all agree that 2 million border crossings per year is a significant problem. We should shut down the border far before that.

Now, that shutdown authority had a couple of other big problems. First of all, it allowed the President of the United States an emergency exception to the shutdown authority for 45 of the 275 days that applied. It also gave the Secretary of Homeland Security--a man whose job performance has been so terrible that the House of Representatives has impeached him--it gave him 180 days of discretionary authority to limit that border shutdown in the law.

So you have 365 days in a year. You have shutdown authority that only applies once you hit a threshold of 2 million illegal aliens every single year. On top of that, for the 270 days out of 365 that the shutdown authority can even be applied, you give discretionary authority to Joe Biden and Secretary Mayorkas for 235 of those 275 days, to waive it.

So if we had been lucky, we would have gotten 45 days of emergency shutdown authority--again, with the baseline of 2 million people coming into the country illegally every single year. That doesn't sound like border security to me; it sounds like more recipe for an open border.

The third and final problem, something that I have to say my colleagues on my side of the aisle, who negotiated in good faith--they negotiated a border provision that--it is hard to imagine anyone who takes border security seriously being more critical or more skeptical of that border security provision.

In particular, it took the question of whether to grant asylum away from immigration law judges, commonly called ILJs, and put it with USCIS agents--people who are generally considered some of the least interested in border enforcement in our country. So you are taking it away from immigration law judges and giving the ability to grant asylum to some of the most leftwing people within our immigration bureaucracy. We know exactly what would happen. Whatever standard those folks are meant to apply to the immigration system, whatever standards are meant to limit them in granting asylum, if they are committed to granting asylum, they are going to find way to grant asylum, and that is exactly what they would have done.

That single provision made this the worst border security law perhaps that has ever been attempted in this country. It is the opposite of border security to give the right to grant asylum with the wave of a pen to the people in our bureaucracy who are most committed to open borders.

So those three problems created a border enforcement package that would have made the crisis at our southern border much worse. Now, I don't say that because I think that was the intent of everybody who negotiated it, but sometimes when these things get translated from high-level policy talking points into actual legislative text, the details are terrible. In fact, the details of this particular piece of legislation were terrible.

That led us to this brave new world in the border security debate in our country where, having had a complete and utter failure for a border security package that would have made the border crisis worse, my friends on the other side of the aisle have now pivoted to a new talking point that, in fact, because of this border security proposal that was terrible, they are the ones who are actually interested in border security.

Now, we know anybody who has paid attention to this problem knows the reason why we have a problem at the U.S. southern border. In fact, the Biden administration, when they took over a little over 3 years ago, openly bragged about changing every single policy from the previous administration that actually did something meaningful on border security. They ended ``Remain in Mexico,'' and they bragged about it. They radically increased parole, as we have already discussed, and they bragged about it.

On issue after issue after issue, the Biden administration has taken a series of Executive orders and has put those orders in place knowing they would cause border security problems, predicting they would cause border security problems, and then doing them anyway because they didn't want to enforce the border laws of this country.

They wanted to throw the border open for a whole host of reasons. They accomplished it, they were effective, and now, in the runup to an election, with the President's poll numbers sagging, they have decided that they really care about an issue they haven't cared about for 3 years and that, in fact, if the Republicans had just gone along with their legislation that would have made the border security problem worse, then somehow the border security problem would magically go away. This doesn't make any sense.

Right now on the books, immigration law in our country allows the President of the United States to issue an emergency border shutdown. He does not need additional statutory authority from this Chamber. He doesn't need a single piece of policy change. He could do it with the wave of a pen. Immigration law in this country grants the President of the United States extremely broad discretion to shut down the border when he believes that he must do so. So if the President actually cares about this problem, as he now pretends that he does, why doesn't he actually implement the authorities he currently has under existing law?

Well, the reason, of course, is he doesn't actually care about the border; or if he does, he feels politically constrained from the left wing of his party. He cannot care about border security because certain members of his own party would go after him.

That is not just hypothetical.

For those who watched the State of the Union last night, they will know that the question of the murder of Laken Riley came up. To recap, Laken Riley was a beautiful young woman with a lot of promise. She was a nursing student, and she was brutally murdered by somebody who was illegally in this country. She was brutally murdered by somebody who shouldn't have been in this country in the first place. Indeed, if Joe Biden had done his job, Laken Riley would still be with us today, may God rest her soul.

I can't help but feel not just a sense of heartbreak over the loss of somebody who shouldn't have been taken from us, but also a sense of anger over the way in which this young woman's death has been used politically by the other side to avoid taking responsibility for the border crisis.

Let's just recap. The person who killed Laken Riley was in this country having been granted parole. Remember what I said, that Barack Obama granted parole 5,000 times, and Joe Biden has granted parole a million times. Those additional parole cases all--call it 900,000 because it is just short of a million people that Joe Biden is paroling every single year--approximately 900,000 additional parolees every single year, and it is probably going to be closer to 995,000 parolees this year because he is doing even more paroles this year than he was doing last year. If you take those additional people, some of them are, unfortunately, going to be criminals. Some of them are going to commit crimes of violence, and some of them are going to do terrible things like murder young nursing students who deserve to have a chance at life and certainly deserve to be safe and protected in their own country.

Not only was this person granted parole--the person who murdered Laken Riley--but this illegal immigrant also had lived in multiple sanctuary cities. Policies that have been promoted in this Chamber-- policies adopted by some very leftwing people at the local level--gave sanctuary to this person who should not have been in our country to begin with. Because that person was granted sanctuary, they weren't deported; they weren't sent back to their home country. They were in our neighborhoods and in our communities, and this person committed a terrible crime.

Now, we should ask ourselves, if you were serious about border security, why not do something about the parole problem that Joe Biden has completely blown up? If you go from 5 million parole cases a year, you add 995,000, you get to a million parole cases a year, that seems like a pretty bad set of policies, especially when we know some of the people receiving those paroles are actually going and killing American citizens.

Why don't we do something about that? Why can't this Chamber pass legislation that would make it impossible for Joe Biden to grant so many paroles every single year? Well, we don't do that.

Why wouldn't we do something like limiting funding for sanctuary cities, legislation that has broad support--bipartisan support, I should say, in the House of Representatives and, frankly, I think, even has bipartisan support in this Chamber? But we are not going to vote on it. I want to talk about that later because the procedural part of this really does matter.

If we wanted to fix the border crisis, why not make it harder for people to come and access asylum in this country instead of easier for people to come and access asylum in this country? Remember, asylum exists for the purpose of protecting people who are fleeing tyranny. Most of the people who are coming across our southern border, they may be perfectly good people, but they are classically understood as economic migrants. They are coming to this country in search of better opportunities and higher wages and better living conditions; they are not coming into this country because they are fleeing tyranny and persecution. They should not be able to claim asylum. Yet the Biden administration has facilitated them claiming asylum, and this body has refused to do anything meaningful about it.

Why aren't we working on the obvious roots of the border problem? Why aren't we fixing it? Why aren't we doing something about the incredibly pressing challenges that confront us at the southern border?

Instead, we have a political party in this country that has, for 3 years, ignored border security and wants to use it as a political tool these days instead of actually solving the problem. And, again, the way we know they are using it as a political tool is because if they wanted to solve it, the President has every single emergency authority he has right now to solve it.

Because of this, because we have a President who has the authority to solve this problem but chooses not to, one of the things that we are confronted with in this Chamber is how to force his hand. Indeed, if you try to understand American immigration policy in 2024 under the administration of Joe Biden, Congress needs to fundamentally ask the question: How do we force the President to do the job he refuses to do--not, how do we give him additional discretionary authorities, because he won't use those discretionary authorities; not, how do we give him additional powers, because we know he won't use those powers. The question is, How do we ensure Joe Biden does the job he doesn't want to do? How do we force his hand to engage in commonsense border security? There are a number of things we could do, a number of things we have already discussed, but, unfortunately, this Chamber refuses to do it.

That brings me to my procedural point. Why did you have the gross majority of Republicans opposing cloture on this bill? It is not because we like government shutdowns or want to shut the government down; it is because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle refuse to give us some amendment votes on immigration policy that were germane to this legislation and would have addressed the problem at the southern border.

Some of my colleagues will talk about those amendments, but there are a couple in particular I want to point out. One, legislation--I believe an amendment from my colleague, Senator Ron Johnson--that would have made it much harder to have sanctuary cities in this country. It would have significantly defunded the sanctuary cities in this country that were the source of the protection given to the person who killed Laken Riley.

Why should these municipalities receive unlimited resources from their Federal Government if they are actively fighting the Federal Government in the enforcement of immigration laws? Just defund them.

And what is going to be more likely is you are not going to defund them, but the threat of defunding them will actually make them undo their terrible policies and get serious about border enforcement. But when you have a violent criminal living in your city who happens to be an illegal immigrant, maybe you report them to immigration authorities so that person could be deported as opposed to protect them. That is what this legislation would facilitate--getting criminal migrants out of our country and protecting our citizens. If that bill came to a vote, you might say I am frustrated because that bill would not pass this Chamber. But, in fact, the reason it is not coming for a vote is not because it wouldn't pass this Chamber but because it would. If that bill was voted, a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate would vote for it. So why aren't we voting on it? Well, we are not voting on it because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who are the majority won't actually let us vote on it.

There is a second provision, a second amendment that really matters here from my colleague, Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee. Now, I won't say that none of the other amendments matter, but these two amendments, I think, are really important and meaningful. Senator Hagerty's amendment would do something very, very simple. It would say that for the purposes of apportioning congressional representation, you can only count lawful permanent residents, meaning American citizens plus people who are in this country legally. That is what Senator Hagerty's legislation would do.

Now, you might ask: Who could possibly oppose only counting people who are legally in this country for purposes of apportioning congressional representatives? And the answer, of course, is people who believe that they benefit politically from counting illegal immigrants as part of congressional apportionment.

I wasn't here January 6, 2021. But to hear my colleagues who were here, especially on the other side of the aisle, January 6 was the biggest threat to American democracy in our country's history. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the Civil War, but that doesn't compare to January 6. World War II saw 330,000 Americans die--not nearly as big a tragedy as January 6. September 11, 3,000 innocent civilians were brutally murdered by terrorists, but a walk in the park compared to the terrible incident of January 6, 2021. It was a threat to democracy--an assault on democracy--the worst threat to democracy that this country has ever seen. I have actually seen people repeat that phrase multiple times who are representatives of this Chamber, and they do it with a straight face.

Here is the problem with that. What is a bigger threat to democracy? Is it

what happened on January 6, which, of course, was not a good thing? There are people who committed violent crimes, and they ought to be prosecuted. But what is a bigger threat to democracy, that day or giving congressional representatives to people who shouldn't be in this country in the first place?

California has five additional representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives relative to my home State of Ohio. Why? Because California has a large illegal immigrant population and those are counted for purposes of congressional apportionment. So they are destroying the democratic value of the people of Ohio's participation in their own country by giving congressional representation to people who shouldn't be in the country in the first place.

How does that make an ounce of sense? How is that not a major assault on democracy? What if we have a Democratic administration for the next 4 years and another 50 million people come into this country illegally? You rapidly get to a point where the people who belong here--the people who are in this country legally--have a significantly lower representation from their own Congress than they otherwise should. Why is it that if you come into this country and break its laws, you get rewarded with greater congressional representation; whereas if you are in this country legally, you actually have your congressional representation stolen from you? It is not just the inflation of Congress's value, which is to say the destruction of the actual democratic power of people; it is also the vote.

Multiple municipalities all across our country have proposed giving illegal aliens the right to vote in this country. I am sure--though it hasn't, I believe, happened in this Chamber--it will eventually happen where somebody in this Chamber proposes we should give illegal aliens the right to vote in this country. Isn't that a threat to democracy? I think so. In fact, I think it is a far bigger threat to democracy than anything we have seen in the last few years--maybe the single biggest threat to democracy we have seen in the history of this country.

Never before have you had Senators and representatives of the people refusing to allow a vote on whether we should only count U.S. citizens for purposes of doling out Congressmen. I just can't believe it.

I can't believe that anybody would disagree that Congressmen and women should be given to the American people, not to criminal migrates in this country. Does Laken Riley's killer deserve a congressional representative? Well, that person gets one now, thanks to the failure of this body to even vote on Senator Bill Hagerty's amendment. Again, it is not because they wouldn't support it; it is not because this Chamber would refuse to vote on Senator Hagerty's amendment. It would. And that is why it is not being allowed to vote because certain people in this Chamber--certain Senators of this Chamber--do not want to force their colleagues to take tough votes. And for that reason, Senator Bill Hagerty's amendment will not even be voted on, though it is germane and though it would make this country much safer, much more secure, and much more democratic.

Bear to point in this immigration debate where you have to believe some pretty absurd things to actually continue to operate immigration policy in this country with a straight face. Who would have believed--I am 39 years old--who would have believed you would have a major political party that is committed to the basic principle that illegal aliens should have congressional representation? I can't believe that. In fact, I am shocked that we are here, and yet we are. Not only so committed to it, not only do they believe in it, but they are so dedicated to it they won't even let amendments that would correct that problem come to the floor for a vote.

I want to talk a little bit about one of the core problems here with immigration in our country. I want to get a little more philosophical here. I am going to read something from the Center for Immigration Studies about the political importance of solving the immigration debate in the minds of the American people. This is from the Center for Immigration Studies:

Biden's Executive Actions: President Unilaterally Changes

Immigration Policy.

Let's talk about all the Executive actions the President of the United States has taken to make the border more open and less secure. We are just going to run through a laundry list of them because I couldn't possibly remember all of them, there are so many--in fact, over 90--only some of which I am going to actually report on here today.

I might ask, Madam President, how much time do I have remaining?

Thank you, Madam President.

So these are a reminder, a laundry list--but not a complete laundry list--of all of the executive actions taken by the Biden administration over the last 3 years--especially in the early part of his administration.

This was issued on January 20, 2021, the very day that Joe Biden took office as President of the United States, just 14 days after January 6, which we just talked about.

Now, the Trump policy--one of Trump's major immigration policies during his administration--was to complete the construction of a wall along the southern border to help thwart illegal aliens from entering the country. When Congress refused to appropriate the money necessary to accomplish this task, the Trump administration declared a national emergency at the southern border, which allowed it to reprogram unspent money from the Department of Defense toward the building of the border wall.

As of October 23, 2020, the Trump administration completed construction of 386 miles of physical infrastructure, with 195 miles under construction and 157 miles in the preconstruction phase. DHS states that illegal drug border crossings and human smuggling activities have decreased in areas with the barriers.

You often hear my colleagues on the other side say that walls don't work. Well, of course, they don't work perfectly. Nothing is perfect. But walls do substantially reduce the flow of sex trafficking, of drug trafficking, and of illegal migration across the places where the wall exists.

But here is the Biden policy--here to rescue the open borders agenda. On January 20, the Biden administration fully rescinded the Trump administration's proclamation that declared a national emergency at the southern border. Biden's proclamation explicitly states that ``no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall,'' and ``authorities invoked in [the Trump] proclamation will no longer be used to construct a wall at the southern border.'' It also calls for an ``assessment of the legality of the funding and contracting methods used to construct the wall.''

This immediately and instantly ended further construction of the border wall. In fact, further wasting American taxpayer dollars, there are pieces of the border wall that are just like lying in the desert in certain parts along the border between Mexico and Texas, Mexico and New Mexico, and Mexico and Arizona that could just be easily built up. It actually costs more money to leave them rotting there in the desert, and yet the Biden administration refuses to put them up.

And we know, of course, that over 100,000 Americans a year die from the fentanyl that the Mexican drug cartels bring into this country, that untold thousands of children and young adults are sex trafficked into the country by those drug cartels. It is just an unbelievably tragic situation.

Why you would stop completion of the physical border wall is perhaps the least rational of all the Biden administration policies, besides the fact that they want to give Congressional representation to illegal aliens.

This is No. 2, question of interior enforcement. This is Executive Order 13993, Revision of Civil Immigration Enforcement Policies and Priorities.

Now, the Trump policy was that President Trump issued an Executive order enhancing public safety in the interior of the United States. This EO scrapped the Obama administration's immigration enforcement priority, which exempted nearly all aliens from removal, and replaced it with a policy that made all removable aliens an enforcement priority. This Trump order also targets sanctuary cities and made

them ineligible for Federal grants, except when deemed necessary by law enforcement. Imagine that, defunding sanctuary cities rather than paying municipalities to thwart the immigration laws of our country.

The Biden policy fully rescinds this Executive order. In the policy section, President Biden generically says:

The task of enforcing the immigration laws is complex and

requires setting priorities to best serve the national

interest.

Well, who disagrees with that?

However, this EO fails to detail new enforcement priorities and merely says the Biden administration will reset the policies and practices for enforcing civil immigration laws. In other words, they completely undid a set of immigration policy that was actually facilitating the enforcement of our border laws. They kind of promised that they would eventually return to it. They said enforcing the border is in our national interest--well, thank you for stating the obvious-- and then they did nothing to actually reimplement the policy--maybe adjust it a little bit, make it a little bit better, make it a little bit different, make it a little bit worse, in my view, but to actually do something meaningful. They just rescinded an order and let it lie, and now, of course, we are living with additional terrible consequences.

The Trump administration--this is the third of these. The Trump administration implemented policies that focused on benefits integrity, ensuring that illegal immigration did not harm American taxpayers.

In the ``public charge'' final rule, the Trump administration instituted for the first time the regulatory definition of this ground of admissibility found in the Immigration and Nationalization Act section 212(a)(4). Through Trump's Presidential Memorandum on Enforcement of Legal Responsibilities of Sponsors of Aliens, relevant Federal Agencies were directed to update procedures, guidance, and regulations to comply with current law and ensure that ineligible immigrants did not receive Federal means-tested benefits.

In accordance, USCIS required sponsors to reimburse the benefits- granting Agency for every dollar of benefits received by sponsored immigrants. USCIS--this is the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services--and other Federal Agencies thus placed the responsibility on sponsors and employers, rather than American taxpayers, to finance foreign workers benefitting from social programs, such as SNAP, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Now, here is an interesting thing about this. We live in a world of scarce resources. And though I know some people disagree, I would hope that most of the Members of this Chamber--I think it is true of both Republicans and Democrats--believe that we ought to have social insurance in this country. People fall down on their luck. They get hurt at work. Some things happen. Bad things happen, and people sometimes suffer for no reason and certainly through no cause of their own.

Now, when that happens, they can't afford healthcare because of something terrible that happened, or they can't afford to put food on the table because something bad had happened. We have a social insurance system in this country to ensure that we take care of the neediest people in our country. Certainly, for children who through no fault of their own are suffering from poverty, we want to make sure these kids are able to get a bite to eat or go to the doctor when they have to. That is a good thing, and I think most of my colleagues, to be fair, on both sides of the aisle agree with that.

Here is the problem with that: We have scarce resources. The American social welfare system--that social insurance system that ensures that down-on-their-luck kids and parents are able to access food and medicine--that thing is funded by money that doesn't grow on trees. It is funded by American taxpayers.

And if you poll the American taxpayer, paying for healthcare for children is one of those things that they are actually enthusiastic about being taxed for. Most people don't like taxes for most reasons. I am certainly no different. But when it comes to putting food on the table or giving medicine to a kid who needs it, most Americans think they are OK with supporting that. I am certainly among them.

But what happens when you take the number of needy children in our country and you magnify it and multiply it by two times or three times or five times because you have a number of illegal immigrants coming into this country who need those same benefits--again, through no fault of their own? Many of these children did not ask to be trafficked into this country. They were allowed to be trafficked into this country by the terrible, porous border policies of the Biden administration.

But we have to pick and choose, and we have to prioritize. And my way of prioritizing would be this: that you give resources to people who are citizens of this country.

All of us are members of an American national community, and we take care of our own. We take care of our fellow Americans, but we cannot and should not take care of every person who is down on their luck who wants to come into this country even if they violate our laws to do so.

So on a Trump administration policy that would set the simple standard that Americans take care of Americans, that we prioritize our food stamps and our Medicaid for American citizens, did the Biden administration say, yeah, that is actually a pretty good idea that Americans should take care of Americans? No, the Biden administration rescinded this policy too.

On February 2, 2021, Groundhog Day of 2021, the Biden administration issued Executive Order 14012 which fully revoked the Presidential Memorandum on Enforcing the Legal Responsibilities of Sponsors of Aliens and took steps to rescind the public charge rule.

This Executive order announced the review of many standard procedures in the existing naturalization process, including the N-400 application, fingerprints, background security checks, interviews, civics and English language tests, and the oath of allegiance. It also seeks to prevent the Trump era USCIS fee schedule from going into effect and to find ways to further reduce the cost of naturalization, while simultaneously increasing the use of fee waivers.

Finally, the Executive order created a Task Force on New Americans, ``which shall include members of agencies that implement policies that impact immigrant communities.''

Now, the effect of this Biden administration policy is predictably that a lot of people who are here in this country illegally are receiving benefits and receiving benefits that ought to go to American citizens first. This is predictable. In fact, it was, you might argue, an explicit design and purpose of the Biden administration policy.

Now, my friends on the other side of the aisle will sometimes counter that, well, there are certain benefits that illegal aliens can't get, and we all agree with that. At least, I would hope all of us would agree with that. But it is not so simple. For example, section 8 housing vouchers--I have known a lot of people in my life, a lot of friends and family in my community, who have benefitted at one time in their lives from a section 8 housing voucher. Now, under the letter of the law, just to be clear, the section 8 housing voucher ensures that people who are, again, down on their luck are able to keep a shelter over the heads of themselves and their children--an important program for people who need it.

Now, the section 8 voucher program cannot be used by illegal aliens. OK, that is a good policy. Again, I would hope most of my Democratic colleagues would agree. However, if a person is related to an illegal alien, even a minor child, then an illegal alien can receive the section 8 benefit on behalf of the minor child.

So there are millions of people receiving housing benefits and other government benefits that shouldn't be receiving them because they are enjoying and benefitting from this particular loophole.

So the idea that illegal aliens don't benefit from some of our most generous welfare programs is just false. They do. And, again, I say this not because we are angry at them but because we are angry at our own country's leaders for allowing our citizens to be taken advantage of.

Just to pose a hypothetical to make this point especially clear, could we possibly--could we possibly--support the generous American social welfare

system if our country had a billion people in it? We have 300 million people now.

Given our funding problems, given our budget deficit, could we possibly support a billion people, meaning three times as many people receiving Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security? Of course, we couldn't. The math simply doesn't make sense.

So, at some level, we have to say: These benefits were paid for by American citizens. These benefits ought to go to American citizens, and we should limit them to American citizens.

Another problem with inviting the entire world to come and benefit from generous American social insurance is that it encourages people to come to the country. If you, sort of, send a release out to the entire world saying, ``If you come into the United States--even if you come in illegally, even if you break this country's laws--if you come into our country, you will receive generous food, medical, and dental benefits, even though you broke the laws of the country in coming here,'' that is going to bring in a lot of people that ought not be in the country in the first place.

Again, you have got to set a standard, and you have got to set some limits, and I propose that we set the limit at American citizens and lawful residents.

When you become part of our community, we take care of each other. That is part of the deal. But if you are not part of this national community and you violated the laws to become part of it, then you shouldn't benefit from Americans' generosity.

No. 4, the fourth Executive order the Biden administration has talked about--by the way, the Biden administration took over 90 Executive orders in the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden's being sworn in as President of the United States. I am only on No. 4--only on No. 4.

Executive Order 14010, Creating a Comprehensive Regional Framework to Address the Causes of Migration, to Manage Migration Throughout North and Central America, and to Provide Safe and Orderly Processing of Asylum Seekers at the United States Border.

Again, the Trump policy was to take numerous steps to combat the surge of fraudulent, frivolous, or otherwise non-meritorious asylum claims; discourage illegal aliens from taking the journey from the Northern Triangle to the United States; and refine the standards for asylum eligibility.

First, the Trump administration implemented the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as ``Remain in Mexico,'' which required non- Mexican aliens seeking asylum in the U.S. to wait in Mexico until they were able to be seen by an immigration judge.

Now, why does this matter? Because when people come into our country illegally, they are often released for 6 years, for 8 years, for 10 years, with no consequences and with no enforcement action. So if you know you can come into the United States illegally and, even if it is acknowledged that you came into the country illegally, you can be released into the Nation to await a court date for sometimes over a decade, it is a massive invitation to illegal migration in this country. And what the Trump administration very smartly did is it said: If you come into the country illegally, we are not going to release you in the United States, and you come back for your court date in 10 years, but you are going to have to stay in Mexico. You can await your court date there.

And, of course, a lot of people, knowing they wouldn't be able to benefit from this massive loophole, didn't come to begin with. It is one of the reasons why border crossings were so much lower during the Trump administration. The Biden policy was--portions of Biden's EO are substantive, while other sections merely call for reviewing certain Trump policies. Through this particular Executive order, Biden has ended ``Remain in Mexico'' and a number of other title 42 authorities that allowed the President--you might even say forced the President--to engage in some commonsense border security. So that is No. 4.

No. 5, Executive Order 14011, establishment of interagency task force on the reunification of families. The Trump administration reversed the catch-and-release policies of the Obama administration that fueled a surge of family units and those fraudulently posing as family units coming to the southern border with no lawful basis to enter the United States.

And the ``posing'' word is really, really important because, of course, all of our hearts break when we see children separated from their moms and dads, but we also know that the cartels traffic children into this country and tell them to pretend that some person they are coming with is a mom or a dad. That is, in fact, one of the ways in which they benefit from our charity. It is one of the ways they benefit from our kindheartedness, and it is one of the ways that they manipulate and get around our immigration laws.

Now, an overly broad application of the Flores settlement ordered by Judge Dolly Gee frustrated these efforts by severely limiting the ability and length of time the Department of Homeland Security could detain family units. In response, in 2018, Attorney General Sessions issued a memorandum entitled ``Zero-Tolerance for Offenses'' under this particular provision of the law, which resulted in the decoupling of family units. The children were sent to HHS custody and treated as unaccompanied minors, while the adults were treated as single adults for enforcement purposes.

Due to a disjointed--sorry. One of the problems--Madam President, you will forgive me--as you get older is that your eyesight gets worse and worse, and I should have had my reading glasses.

This Biden Executive order officially rescinds then-Attorney General Session's zero-tolerance policy memo and establishes a task force to identify all children who were separated from their families in the United States and the Mexican and southern border between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021, in connection with the operation of the zero-tolerance policy.

Now, again, we have to remind ourselves here that the people who are claiming that they are bringing their children in are very often not bringing their children at all. They are someone else's children. A number of my colleagues have visited the border and talked with young people--sometimes under the age of 12--who have been brought in by people who claim to be their parents, but, in fact, are sexually abusing them. They haven't seen their parents in months, maybe in years.

Eliminating the Trump administration policies on this issue facilitates the very kind of predation that the Trump policy prevented in the first place. It actively encourages the cartels to traffic children and to coach these children to tell U.S. Customs and Border Patrol that the people who are abusing them, the people who sometimes abducted them are, in fact, their parents, and these poor children don't know any better. What an absolute travesty and a humanitarian disaster.

Madam President, may I ask how much time I have?

Madam President, I am not sure which of us is happier about that reality.

I will make one more observation here from a report before I make some concluding remarks, being mindful of time. So this is something published by the Center for Immigration Studies report: ``Three Years of Biden Immigration Policies Have Benefitted Criminal Aliens.'' This was published by Jon Feere on January 9 of 2024.

For three years the Biden administration has claimed that

its policies are designed to focus on criminal aliens to a

greater degree than the policies under the Trump

administration. As DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas put it in

a September 2021 memo, ``By exercising our discretionary

authority in a targeted way, we can focus our efforts on

those who pose a threat to national security, public safety,

and border security and thus threaten America's well-being.''

It is now clear that the promised outcome has not been met

and that the Biden administration's policies have gutted the

nation's immigration enforcement system, with no concern

about the number of criminal aliens that are being released

into our communities.

Official data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

. . . reveals that the Biden administration has arrested and

removed significantly fewer criminal aliens than the Trump

administration. (This data comes from both ICE public

releases as well as a Freedom of Information Act . . .

request by the Center for Immigration Studies.) Contrary to

Secretary Mayorkas's claim, public safety and national

security have been significantly undermined by the Biden

administration's reckless policies, and the threats

the administration has created will continue to inflict

damage on American society for many years to come.

This analysis compares the first three years of ICE

criminal alien data under the Trump administration--

Which was 2017, 2018, and 2019--

to the first three years of ICE criminal alien data under

the Biden administration--

Which was 2021, 2022, and 2023--

and finds that criminal aliens have been top beneficiaries

of the Biden administration's immigration agenda. A criminal

alien is one who--

To define this term--

has a criminal conviction or pending criminal charges.

These aren't people, again, who just came across the country illegally, which no person should do. These are people who actually have criminal charges on top of the fact that they came across the border illegally.

The data shows the Biden administration is responsible for

the following when comparing . . . years 2017, 2018, and 2019

to . . . 2021, 2022, and 2023:

57 percent decrease in arrests of criminal aliens

They are arresting far fewer of these criminal migrants.

68 percent decrease in at-large arrests of criminal aliens

44 percent decrease in detainer requests issued on criminal

aliens

67 percent decrease in deportations of criminal aliens

[And a] 55 percent decrease in immigration-related criminal

convictions

They are explicitly undoing the previous administration's immigration policies, and they have the gall to say that this is all the Republican Party's fault.

I wish that we had a Republican in charge of the White House right now who could undo these things, but we don't. We have President Biden, who refuses to enforce the border policies.

It should be noted that total annual arrests and removals

are larger than the numbers discussed here as this analysis

looks only at data related to aliens with criminal histories

and does not include data on aliens without known criminal

histories.

The Biden administration has cut arrests of criminal aliens by 57 percent. I just want to dig into this just a little bit more in greater detail.

In the first three fiscal years under the Trump

administration, ICE made 389,237 administrative arrests of

aliens with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.

That is 389,000 during the Trump administration.

In the first three fiscal years under the Biden

administration, ICE made [165,000] administrative arrests.

Now, remember that during this time--2021, 2022, and 2023--crime has been going up relative to 2017, 2018, and 2019. In fact, 2021 and 2022 were the most violent years in about three decades, not just for assaults and other things but also for murders. I believe 2022 was one of the worst years for murders in this country in a very, very long time. And yet the Biden administration is arresting fewer than half of the criminal migrants in this country compared to the Trump administration.

They can't say it is lower crime because the crime is a lot worse in 2022 than it was in 2018. What they can say is that it is lower enforcement, lower enforcement that is endangering the people of this country and endangering the citizens of our Nation.

Now, I have heard some say--and I want to address this comment--that, in fact, crime is going down in this country. And it is one of those things that is, like, half true but is completely and utterly dishonest to the actual reality that we confront.

So if you look at the number of murders that exist in the United States--the statistics aren't final, by the way--but in 2023, there were less murders in this country than 2022, right? Good news. That is the half-true part of the statistic, and that is why many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will say it is hoax to say that we have a problem with criminal aliens. There is a problem with that.

Madam President, 2022 is one of the worst years on record for murders in this country. Thirty-nine years old, it is one of the worst years of my life for murders in this country, and 2021 was not much better.

So the 2 years of the Biden administration, they had skyrocketing murders, some of the worst violent crime statistics in the history of the country, and they are patting themselves on the back because it came down a little in 2023.

That is not how this works. That is not a good thing to be a little bit lower than the record highs of 2022. In fact, the number of murders we saw in this country in 2023 is still much higher than what we would have expected in this country 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

We have too much crime in this country. We have too many young people like Laken Riley who are being killed or assaulted simply for living their lives in their country, and the reason why we have this problem is, at least in part, right here, because Joe Biden refuses to deport criminal aliens. It has been the explicit policy of his administration.

And I have to say that Secretary Mayorkas said something I actually agreed with here in referencing the discretionary authority of the Biden administration because it is the discretionary authority of the Biden administration that is the problem. The Biden administration refuses to use that discretionary authority to actually do its job.

It is so funny to me, coming from outside of politics and spending the last year in this Chamber talking to people, almost every single one of my colleagues from across the political spectrum is fundamentally a good person, but, in private, there is a broad recognition that what we are trying to do is force the Biden administration's hands. We are trying to identify tools that will force Joe Biden to do what he already has the authority to do under existing law.

We talk about the border shutdown in the border security deal that went down just a few weeks ago in this Chamber. The border shutdown authority was triggered at a point when nearly 2 million illegal aliens came into this country every single year. Why do we need to wait for 2 million illegal aliens to come into this country before we shut down the border? Can't we shut it down a lot earlier?

But, again, this makes sense in the very weird and deranged world that we live in where we have a President who is less committed to border enforcement than almost any President--probably any President that we have ever had.

I was no fan, largely, of the policies of the last Democratic President, Barack Obama, but say what you will about Barack Obama, he was substantially more committed to border enforcement than Joe Biden is.

Now, there is one last point that I want to make for some of my friends and colleagues, especially those on the other side of the aisle. We have a real problem of social stability in this country. A lot of people talk about our rancorous political debates. A lot of people talk about politics seems more zero-sum today than it has been in a very long time. Well, I believe that one of the reasons why we have such a broken political debate is because we have a set of policies that has promoted social division.

I hear from constituents all the time who will walk into an emergency room--and they go to an emergency room because their kid, you know, they broke their leg on the playground or they hurt themselves in some way or maybe it is a Sunday and you couldn't get into the doctor and your kid has a bad sore throat. We all go to the emergency room for a whole host of reasons, some serious and some a little bit less so.

Emergency room wait times in this country are near alltime highs, and we know why they are at alltime highs: because there are 30 million people who might be good people, but they shouldn't be in this country, and they are making American citizens wait in line for healthcare.

This is a big problem in the State of Ohio: rural school districts, districts that are already incredibly stressed by the fentanyl problem and by a lack of funding, school districts that have a family or maybe multiple families of migrant children who are dropped at their doorstep. These kids don't speak a lick of English. These kids have never been in the country. Many of them are traumatized because they were brought into this country by drug cartels and sex traffickers. These kids are not bad people, but why are we expecting American citizens who are already working in overstressed public

schools to educate these kids? And do we honestly think that when you take a rural school district and you drop a dozen kids who can't speak a lick of English, that it actually makes life easier for the rural kids in those districts to get a good education? Of course it doesn't. Of course it doesn't.

You don't have to believe anything bad about the children who are in those school districts. You just have to believe that every country has its limits, and the thing that we need to be focused on right now is the education of our own children and the well-being of our own citizens.

That doesn't make us heartless. That just means that we recognize that the first and most important obligation that we owe is to our families, our communities, our neighborhoods, and our country, not to people who have illegally crossed the border to come into this Nation.

We don't have enough services. We don't have enough resources, and we don't have enough wealth to support the entire world at the level of generosity that we support the American citizen. Overcrowded hospitals, overcrowded schools, rising violent crime rates--all of these things are the recipe for social dysfunction and social disaster.

We are dividing our citizens against one another. We are taking away some of the critical resources and supports that make living in this country a good and nice thing. And then we are surprised when our politics is angrier than it used to be, or we are surprised when Americans feel like their elected leaders don't care about them. Well, if you are flooding rural Ohio schools and rural Ohio hospitals with a bunch of people who shouldn't be there in the first place, then they are right to think that their leaders don't care about them. If you are creating an immigration system that is seeing rapid murder rates, even as you radically reduce the amount of criminal migrants that you arrest, then they are right to think that their leaders don't care about them.

I don't know what is wrong with this President, but he seems to care far more about the people who live outside of this country than he does the people who live inside of this country. They don't just feel that something is wrong with the political leadership in this country, they are right that there is something wrong with the political leadership in this country. And we could have taken real steps--very real steps-- to fix some of the problems that exist if only we were allowed to vote on Senator Hagerty's amendment, on Senator Johnson's amendment, on a number of other amendments that were offered by my colleagues that would receive bipartisan majorities in this chamber if only we were allowed to vote on them.

So with that, I say what a travesty that we haven't had the debate the American people deserve and what a tragedy that we haven't voted on legislation that would make their lives better and would make the criminal migration problem improved in this country. They certainly deserve it. I wish we would have done our jobs.

With that, I yield to my friend from Kentucky.

Madam President, I come to debate and to make an argument about whether we should continue funding Ukraine indefinitely, because this country and this U.S. Senate has not actually had much of an argument about whether we should continue to fund Ukraine indefinitely.

It has become extremely commonplace, among advocates for further Ukraine funding, to frame this as the courageous against the partisan; those who, in America's and Ukraine's, apparently, moment of need, are expressing the great spirit of patriotism that animated us in World War II and other moments of great world conflict; and that those who don't want to send another $61 billion to Ukraine, well, we are just knuckle- draggers. We are the people who are listening to the base; we are the people who are listening to the media--ignoring that so many of us have been criticizing America's Ukraine policy from the get-go, when both the media and the base were much more supportive than they are today.

One of the most preposterous arguments that I hear in defense of our policy in Ukraine is that it is bipartisan, that the experts know better. Perhaps, Senator J.D. Vance doesn't know what the Joint Chiefs of Staff do. Perhaps the Republican base doesn't know what the experts in national security do. Maybe, they, with their knowledge and their training and their intelligence briefing access, know something that the American people don't. So while the American people have grown more and more skeptical of this conflict, perhaps it makes sense that we should actually listen to the experts.

Where have we heard that argument? So many times in the last many decades have we been asked to listen to the experts, and yet we never actually ask what the track record of those experts is in matters of foreign policy.

The experts--the bipartisan consensus, of course--got us into Vietnam, a war that lasted nearly 15 years that saw the destruction of nearly 60,000 American lives; and for what?

It was the bipartisan foreign policy consensus--the experts--that got us into a 20-year war in Afghanistan, where American taxpayers, for two decades, funded things like how to turn Afghanistan into a flowering democracy or how to ensure that the Afghans had proper American thoughts about gender in the 21st century. Well, maybe that was a waste of money and maybe the experts were wrong.

Those same experts, of course, counseled us that we must invade Iraq because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Yet Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and the war led not only to the destruction of 5,000 American lives, and many, many hundreds of thousands of innocent people beyond that, but also led to the regional empowerment of Iran, which now we are told, by those same experts, is the biggest problem that we face in the Middle East.

Now those experts have a new crusade. Now those experts have a new thing that American taxpayers must fund and must fund indefinitely, and it is called the conflict in Ukraine.

Now, we--at least most of us, I think, in this body; nearly all of us, I hope--do not think Ukraine deserved to be invaded. We don't think what has befallen the innocent civilians of Ukraine was deserved. We condemn it, as we should.

But we have to ask ourselves: ``What are we doing there?'' not how we feel about it. ``What is our objective there?'' not how sad we feel about what has befallen the innocent civilians. We have to engage in what the bipartisan experts have failed to engage in for 50 years: a conversation about strategy--asking very specific, very discreet questions about what it is that we are doing there. What are we trying to accomplish? How long will it take to accomplish these things? And for how many millions or billions or trillions of dollars are we in for before we can accomplish these things?

Now, I have heard any number of explanations from my colleagues who support our policy in Ukraine about what it is that we are trying to do. At the beginning of the war, especially--you hear this argument far less--but at the beginning of the war, especially, you would hear an argument that we had to throw Vladimir Putin back to the 1991 borders. Well, we don't hear that argument so much anymore. Why? Because it was preposterous then, and it is preposterous now.

Ukraine is a country that now has about 28 million people. That is after many hundreds of thousands have died in the war and many, many millions have left the country, probably permanently, beyond that. Russia, by comparison, has 160 million people and has the industrial capacity to make many, many more times artillery shells and other critical weapons per day. So against that leviathan in Eastern Europe, we are told, somehow, the Ukrainians can win.

Well, again, what is victory?

We know now that throwing Russia back to the 1991 borders is preposterous. No one, not even the inner circle of Zelenskyy's own Cabinet, makes that argument. They did a few months ago, but they don't make that argument any more. So what is victory? And when you talk to people, both in public and in private, the actual thing that you can piece together that we are trying to do is to send enough weapons and send enough money to the Ukrainians until something good happens; until, maybe, the Russians get sick of the conflict, and they come to the negotiating table. That is one opportunity to end this war.

That is one opportunity to end this war that we are told is that if we just keep on going and we show our resolve, then Vladimir Putin will come to the negotiating table.

And yet if you listen to former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder or you listen even to some of the ministers in Zelenskyy's government or,

certainly, if you listen to a number of other Western European allies, they will say that Russia was willing to come to the negotiating table at the beginning of 2022, after the war had stalemated from the Russian perspective and after the Ukrainians had shown some real bravery and some real resolve.

Now, it is not just Vladimir Putin who says this; it is virtually everyone who has ever talked about this moment in the conflict. And they will say that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, backed by any number of leaders within the American security apparatus, basically said: Tell Vladimir Putin to shove it. The Ukrainians are winning, the Russians are losing, so we will just keep this war going for as long as it takes.

So we had the opportunity to negotiate back in 2022, and if we had taken it, here is what would have happened: Many fewer hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would have died. Many fewer innocent civilians would have lost their lives, their homes, their livelihoods. And a war in Eastern Europe that has put stresses on everything from food supply to energy prices would have concluded.

So, we are trying to get Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. We don't have a pathway for how to do it, by the way; we just think that is a good thing, and we are going to try to do it if we continue to throw money. But yet that same negotiating table was on the offer about 18 months ago, and we told them to go shove it.

OK, so negotiating table, that seems to not be a realistic end goal if we just continue to funnel money and resources. So what is the end goal here? It is astonishing that not a single person from Joe Biden on down can actually articulate what another $61 billion can do.

They will tell you what it won't do. They will tell you what the absence of $61 billion will do, but how weird is it that they want to send $61 billion to America's ally, Ukraine, and they can't actually tell you what it is supposed to accomplish--what this will accomplish that the previous $120 billion didn't.

So, first, we have a complete absence of strategy, a complete failure for the President of the United States to articulate what we are going to do.

I try to imagine what it would have been as an American citizen if on December 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt stood before the country and said: The Japanese have attacked us. It is a day that will live in infamy, and so we are going to send money for as long as it possibly takes, with no articulation of what we are going to do, of what the battle plan is, of where we are fighting, of what we were going to have our manufacturing base try to accomplish. We are just going to send money and hope that, eventually, these guys come to the negotiating table. That is the equivalent of what we are doing at this moment in time with this particular conflict.

Now, I mentioned just now our manufacturing base. So let's talk about the costs of this conflict. We know there is no strategy. We know there is no plan to do anything other than just to funnel more and more money and more and more resources.

What are the costs of continuing our posture in Ukraine? Well, let's go through them. Now, let me just make an observation about costs, about actually thinking about costs and considering the consequences of our actions. It used to be common in American statesmanship that we hear this phrase, ``Speak softly and carry a big stick.''

The idea was be smart in your strategic decisions, be willing to hit back and hit back hard if you have to, but don't bluster. Don't brag. Don't pretend that you can do things that you can't. And a fundamental part of American statesmanship, I think, is asking ourselves: What is it that we are costing ourselves by continuing to fund this war?

Well, you have heard some of my colleagues talk about this already. We have $61 billion on top of $34 trillion in debt. Can we actually afford to send another $61 billion to Ukraine? Can we afford to send the $100 billion that will be requested at some point next year? Can we afford the hundreds of billions of dollars of reconstruction costs that we have effectively committed ourselves to by funding the war in Ukraine indefinitely?

You already hear these people like vultures with a carcass talking about how much money they are going to make on the reconstruction of Ukraine. And I ask myself, why are we destroying the country in the first place, given that we know the war is at a stalemate and American diplomacy could plausibly bring it to a close.

Now, here is another thing that this is costing us, something that doesn't get talked about nearly enough in this Chamber. But I am reminded of the only time that I have ever been in the White House with a sitting President of the United States. It was about a week before the inauguration of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and so I was there with President Barack Obama.

I think it is important to never reveal confidences of private conversations. But he said something then, said something that was extremely interesting and I didn't expect to hear from a Democratic President. What he said is that the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015 would take down a number of liberal governments.

Now me as a conservative, I might not care about liberal governments going down, but I thought it was interesting that a theoretically pro- immigration guy--a guy much more committed to the cause of open borders than almost any Republican I know--would say that when you have wide, open borders and when you have uncontrolled migration, it destabilizes governments.

Well, of course, the former President was exactly right: Refugee crises do destabilize governments. Why are we not talking about the fact that in multiple countries in southern Europe right now, they are being overwhelmed with people--not bad people, by the way; most of them are just looking for food to feed their family or a job with a decent wage. But we are witnessing the beginning of what I believe will become the biggest refugee crisis in the history of the world. Why?

Because in Africa, which has 1.5 billion people, most of whom have a standard of living much lower than what we have in the United States of America, you have grain prices through the roof, wheat prices through the roof, barley prices through the roof. And if anybody who is advocating an endless war in Ukraine asks: What happens when 1.5 billion starving people start to move north to look for some food? You don't have to make any moral judgments about the plight that they will go on. You should make a moral judgment about the people in this building who refuse to think about the unintended consequences of their actions.

Are we really willing to have over a billion people, starving, trying to pour into the borders of Europe and the United States of America? Are we really willing to set up a refugee crisis, the likes of which the world has never seen? And if we do that, what effect will it have on our allies in Europe? What effect will it have in our own country? What effect will it have for millions of American citizens who are already dealing with the consequences of an overwhelmed southern border?

And I want to talk about that overwhelmed southern border in a second, but I want to keep talking about the unintended consequences of the war in Ukraine. Another unintended consequence is, What do energy prices look like all over the world?

We have no idea who blew up the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline. We can have some guesses. But isn't it kind of weird and isn't it unusual for our European allies to have had their most important fuel artery destroyed and they seem totally uninterested in asking questions about it?

We already know that governments like those in Poland, like those in Slovenia, like those in a number of other allied countries across Europe are under an extraordinary amount of stress because fuel prices are so high.

The country of Hungary, which has 10 million people, took in nearly a million Ukrainian refugees, an important American ally by any standard, and yet they are facing skyrocketing energy prices because of the war between Russia and Ukraine.

What effect does it have on the many millions of people who are living over there? What effect does it have on America's national security when we take down a number of allied governments because the people there can't

afford food and can't afford energy? That is another unintended consequence.

And while we are talking about the unintended consequences of energy prices in Europe, let's ask the very important question about why we are here.

Now my Democratic friends on the other side of the aisle act like Ukraine is the most significant issue confronting our country. You see the Ukrainian flag lapel pins. You see the way people talk about it on social media. There is a species of American liberal who thinks that the Ukraine war is the most important thing confronting our country, but it is not so important that they will pursue commonsense American energy policies.

The reason--the reason--why Russia is so powerful on the world stage today is one reason: because of stupid American and European energy policies, preposterous energy policies that drive up the cost of natural gas.

So while we, with the one hand, send $61 billion to Ukraine, we pursue a set of energy policies that drive up the cost of natural gas and enrich the Russian oligarchs who are paying for the war. We are literally paying for both sides of the war--the Russian side with our energy policy and $61 billion to Ukraine direct with American taxpayer subsidy. That is another unintended consequence.

And my Republican friends, who I assume all of them agree with me on the idiocy of our modern energy policies in 2023 and 2024, why are they supporting a conflict that, in fact, is a cover for those energy policies?

If they really cared about Ukraine as much as they say they did, perhaps they should force the President of the United States to stop enriching Russian oligarchs with terrible energy policies. But we are not doing that; we are going to continue to fund both sides of this war, and I guess that is just the way that it is going to be.

Let's talk about another unintended consequence of our Ukraine policy. We are, at this very moment, incredibly stressed in how many weapons we can manufacture. I tell this to people, and they are sometimes surprised by it. The first time that I heard it, I was surprised by it.

America, if you measure it by GDP, is, of course, the largest economy in the world, and we are 10 times the size of the Russian economy. And yet the most important weapon in Eastern Europe today are 155- millimeter artillery shells. It is one of the reason why 400,000 Ukrainians--that's the best estimate--have died during this conflict is because the Russians have an incredible advantage in artillery.

So you ask yourself: We are 10 times the size of the Russian economy, how many artillery shells do we make in a month, and how many artillery shells do the Russians make in a month? Well, we make, in a month, about 30,000 artillery shells. That is up from about 20,000 artillery shells a month at the beginning of the conflict. Guess how many the Russians make? They make about 25,000 artillery shells a day.

So in a month, the United States, the biggest economy in the world, makes weapons at a rate per month that the Russians are able to meet in a single day. Well, one thing that suggests to me is the GDP numbers are awfully fake. If you can't produce weapons to defend your own people, then you can't pretend that your economy is as strong as you might like to think.

Unfortunately for Wall Street, we cannot fight wars with dollars and derivatives; we need weapons, we need bullets, we need artillery shells, we need missiles. And America doesn't make nearly enough of those--not for our own security and certainly not enough to support both the Ukraine conflict and, God forbid, a conflict that might occur in east Asia.

So let's specify that a little bit more. We are, right now, depleting critical munitions, missiles, artillery shells, and bullets faster than we can replenish them, and then we send them to Ukraine.

I am sorry, why does that make an ounce of sense for our own national security? Shouldn't we rebuild our own manufacturing capacity before we spend all of it on Ukraine? Shouldn't we make more of our own weapons and gain some self-sufficiency in weapons manufacturing before we send all of those resources to Ukraine? The answer of the U.S. Senate is: Apparently not.

So on issue after issue after issue--

Madam President, I am happy to yield.

To my colleague from North Carolina--before I answer that question, Madam President, can I inquire how much time I have?

So, Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the only time used by the Senator from North Carolina be debited to his postcloture time and that, to answer his question, we not have time deducted from my account.

Madam President, to my colleague and friend from North Carolina, I want to answer that question. So the Senator is right that this legislation contains a lot of resources, and I think $35 billion is the number that he used to rebuild the American industrial base, and I have no reason to object to that number. I know that some people have had more time with this legislation than I have, but I believe, based on my own review, that number is correct. But we have to ask ourselves not just how much money is going to rebuild our industrial base, but combined with Presidential drawdown authority, how much of that will then be just redirected to Ukraine?

My understanding is that given the current authorizations and given the current appropriations, while a lot of this money will go--and I am glad that it will go--to places like Ohio and Alabama to manufacture weapons, those weapons will then be mostly sent to Eastern Europe because we are currently spending resources and munitions in Eastern Europe at a rate that is far faster than our own industrial base's ability to replenish them.

So what will happen, in effect, is that we will make the weapons, and literally faster than we can make them, they will then go out the door to Eastern Europe, unless, of course, in the next few months or the next couple of years, the conflict ends.

So the gentleman's question is well-taken, but it actually doesn't address the core concern that we are depleting munitions much faster than we can replenish them.

I want to just--on one final point here, if I may, and I will be quick because I know I am on borrowed time here. The question of whether we should rebuild our industrial base is something my friend and I agree on and I think most of my colleagues here in the U.S. Senate agree on. The more difficult question is, What do we do in the interim?

It will take years to get our industrial base to the point--maybe 3 years, maybe 5 years to get our industrial base to the point where it can support a war in Eastern Europe and a war in East Asia simultaneously.

We don't debate the need to rebuild our industrial base; the question is, What do we do in the interim? And I think, in the interim, continuing to support the Ukraine war indefinitely is a terrible, terrible mistake.

Madam President, I suppose I could go back on my own clock. I don't know what I am supposed to say here.

Madam President, I appreciate your charity, and I appreciate you having to sit up there and listen to me. Members of our Gallery chose this, but some of us did not, so I appreciate you and my staff.

Let me keep on going here on how we got here. I have articulated to the best of my ability why I think we don't have the strategy here and why I think it is important for us to actually articulate a strategy, what it means for us to not have that strategy, and importantly the unintended consequences of continued conflict in Eastern Europe backstopped by the American taxpayer.

But I want to talk about the politics of this. Not long ago--or I should say, excuse me, not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, I made an observation that frustrated a lot of my friends who advocate for continual conflict in Ukraine. I said: How can we support a war in Ukraine? How can we defend Ukraine's borders when we are not even defending our own American border under the Presidency of Joe Biden?

The response that came back went something like this, and I will paraphrase it as much as I can: America can walk and chew gum at the same time.

A great power should, in theory, be able to support an ally in Eastern Europe while at the same time securing its own southern border.

I think the events of the last week have revealed just how preposterous that argument is. We clearly are not able to walk and chew gum at the same time, and, in fact, if we were able to walk and chew gum at the same time, we would secure our border first, and we would have done it weeks or months ago, but certainly we would have done it this past week.

Now, here is the basic political dynamic that unfolded, and I know my colleague from Kentucky has discussed this. So have others. The basic political dynamic that unfolded is the Republicans in the Senate said: We want border security. That is the issue around which Republicans are unified. We want border security.

Of course, the Democrats are in charge. The Democratic leader is the majority leader of the Senate, and we have a Democratic President. So what do the Democrats want? What unites the Democrats that doesn't unite us? And the answer came back: Ukraine.

The Democrats want to send $61 billion to Ukraine. The Republicans want to secure the border. There was the root of a potential compromise. In divided government, sometimes you have to make compromises. Nobody is happy, but there was a potential compromise that could be made.

Here is how the argument went: If we are going to send $61 billion to Ukraine, we should do it first in tiers. We shouldn't send it all at once; we should stagger it out a little bit. The reason we should do that is to ensure that Joe Biden actually keeps his promise and enforces the American southern border.

In other words, we tell the President: You don't get another dime of American taxpayer money for Ukraine unless you bring illegal border crossings to the level that they were during the Presidency of Donald Trump.

That, to me, was the negotiation as it was set up by the Republican conference. That was the understanding that I and so many of my colleagues in the Republican conference had.

Of course, that negotiation could go many places. It could go a place that might make Democrats uncomfortable. It could go to a place that might make some of my Republican friends uncomfortable. In theory, to get a deal, it would sort of get everybody a little uncomfortable, but you would be able to get 60 Senators to pass it and send it on to the House.

Well, that is not what happened. What was produced instead was a secret negotiation where Republican Senators by and large had very, very little input in the process and where we had no idea what was actually in the final package. We heard it through rumor and through conversations with friends. But immigration law is complicated. What a colleague--even a well-meaning colleague--tells you exists in a piece of immigration law doesn't matter nearly as much as the text of the actual immigration law.

So that text finally dropped on Sunday of last week. I believe on February 4 that legislation dropped, a 370-page piece of legislation that would commit many, many billions of dollars to Ukraine, a few billion dollars to East Asia, a few billion dollars to Israel, and a few billion dollars, combined with some policy changes, to the American southern border.

Now, here is the problem: It actually inflamed some of the worst-- when you read the text, you realize that it inflamed some of the problems that make the southern border crisis the worst. Let's just walk through a few of those.

No. 1, parole. The last Democratic President, Barack Obama, paroled approximately 5,000 illegal aliens per year; that is 5,000 per year. Joe Biden, in 3 years, has paroled between 600,000 and close to 1 million illegal aliens per year. That is not a typo or an overstatement. So Joe Biden radically increased parole authority, and that doesn't just have the direct effect of making nearly 1 million illegal aliens legal, it also has a secondary effect, because if you are in Central America or you are anywhere in the world and you would like to come to America and not go through the proper channels, now, all of a sudden, the clarion call has gone out. Joe Biden has thrown open the southern border, and if you come across illegally, he will parole you close to a million times per year, when the last Democrat did it 5,000 times per year.

That is the first effect of Joe Biden's parole, and our great border compromise did nothing to limit Joe Biden's parole authority.

No. 2. Another problem with our border law is that it has been manipulated so that we turn so-called illegal aliens into so-called asylum seekers. Here is how it works. We, of course, want to be a country that is welcoming to those who are fearing persecution. So if you come into this country as an economic migrant and you come illegally, you come having not followed the laws of this country, you can claim asylum. If your asylum claim is granted, you immediately receive amnesty, and you are on the track to becoming a citizen of this country even though you never followed the law to get into the country in the first place.

The other effect of our jacked-up--excuse me--the other effect of our problematic asylum laws is that even if the asylum claim is not granted, you can be released into the country for a period of years, sometimes even decades, before an immigration judge hears your claims.

So let's say you are an economic migrant. You show up at the American southern border. You say: I am an asylum claimant fearing persecution.

An administrative official from Customs and Border Patrol says: Well, we have to adjudicate your asylum claim. You can't do that right now, so what we will do is ask an immigration judge to hear that claim in 12 years. You are free to hang out in America for the next 12 years.

Well, that is an effect of amnesty, and, again, it sends a message all across the world that America is open for business, and we can have a wide-open southern border. That is what it does.

This particular legislation actually made that problem worse. Now, on the one hand, it tried to increase the standard for granting asylum from a credible fear standard to a reasonable fear standard, but, importantly, it changed the people who were enforcing that standard from immigration judges to CIS officers at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. These are people who are widely believed to have some of the most pro-asylum views within the U.S. Government.

So millions of people could come across the southern border, claim asylum, and have their claim granted unilaterally. That would put them on the pathway to citizenship. That would put them in a competitive posture with American citizens for jobs and for

other important benefits. Yet this legislation trying to fix the border actually made the asylum process worse. So here we are with a border compromise that actually makes the border security problems in this country worse.

Let me just say that what we would need to do if we really wanted to secure the border is very simple: We just have to make Joe Biden do it. He has the tools necessary. He has the legal authority necessary to secure the border. The real debate, whether you are using Ukraine money as leverage or something else, is, how do we force Joe Biden to do his job? This legislation didn't do that. It didn't even come close to doing that, and so most Republicans rejected it.

So now here we are an hour after the first foray of border security negotiations, the first volley where Democrats give us border security and Republicans give $61 billion to Ukraine, and what happens? It doesn't succeed. For the reasons I just articulated, the gross majority of my Republican colleagues didn't like that proposal, and so it got dropped.

What you might expect to happen in a good-faith negotiation that was actually about the border, if we were actually trying to secure the border, you might have said: This is not the Democrats' best offer. Let's go back to the negotiating table. Let's continue to push for border security because that is the most pressing crisis that we face as a country.

What happened instead is, after an hour, Senate Democrats and even some in Republican leadership decided that we should move on from border security. They had checked the box. Now let's move on to their real priority, which is sending another $61 billion to Ukraine.

It stinks to my high heaven, ladies and gentlemen. No one who watched this process unfold believes that Republican leadership negotiated in good faith for border security or that Democrats did the same. It was always kabuki theater. It was always an excuse to say: We tried on the border. Now let's move on to the thing that really matters, which is the money for Ukraine.

That failure, the way that it blew up in the faces of our leadership, and the appearance gave lie to the idea that this was ever really about border security.

By the way, it alienated millions of Republican and Independent voters who want their government to focus on the most pressing problem for this country, and that is the border.

When I go back home to Ohio and I talk to audiences about their views on Ukraine, most people agree with me, but some people disagree with me. But if you go to an audience in the State of Ohio--a State that is affected tragically by the fentanyl problem, where you will drive on highways and see billboards for sex trafficking victims to call the hotline because they are being sex trafficked in the State of Ohio by Mexican drug cartels who have been given free reign at the southern border--if you talk to people and ask them ``What are the most pressing problems the country faces?'' none of them will say Ukraine, even those who would like to send more money to Ukraine. None of them will say Ukraine.

So what are we doing? Why did we give up so easily? Why did Republicans stab their voters in the back? Why did we not fight for border security, ladies and gentlemen? That is exactly what we promised we would do.

Many of us did, by the way. Even some of my colleagues who disagree with me on the Ukraine question at least have the courage to stand and fight for border security. But unfortunately far too many Republicans refused, and so we are where we are.

Now let me just make an argument about where we are on this particular border situation. We have millions of people coming into the country illegally every single year. We have hundreds of thousands dying just in the first 3 years of Joe Biden's term from fentanyl overdoses. We have a President who has invited the opening of the American southern border, and now we are living with the consequences.

The American people know that this was the direct result of Joe Biden's policies, and they know he could stop it. So let's debate real border security--border security that actually forces the President to do exactly that.

There are a number of options on the table. You will sometimes hear some of my Democratic colleagues and even some in the Republican leadership say: We can't have a bill because Donald Trump doesn't want us to have a bill; that if we advance commonsense border security, Donald Trump would destroy it.

That is the furthest thing from the truth. In fact, just last week, Donald Trump proposed a border security bill that would force Joe Biden to secure the southern border. You may agree or disagree with the policy, but the idea that there is no policy that would get Republican buy-in, including at the top of the Republican ticket, is preposterous. It is something that does not exist in reality.

Madam President, how much time do I have left?

Great.

So I have given my spiel here, and I want to get a little bit into the details of what we are trying to accomplish here and how we might try to accomplish it. But, first, let's start with a conversation about the American southern border.

I want to read a piece from the Washington Post, an argument that I want to read and that I want to respond to:

Having failed to convince the American people that a blank

check to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in their

interests, the Ukraine First caucus now claims the aid

primarily benefits American workers. Mark A. Thiessen's [who

drafted an] op-ed [on this point] exemplified the pivot.

This is disingenuous and dangerous.

And this is partially in response to some of the arguments that I have heard earlier. We cannot rebuild our industrial base by building capacity and sending all of it to Ukraine. It doesn't make sense.

Now I support--

We support increasing defense spending and building up our

defense-industrial base. An expansion of our military

manufacturing capacity benefits American workers and bolsters

our national security. Washington is more focused on sending

our limited military stockpiles to a conflict in Ukraine with

no clear path to victory.

The Biden administration's new message fails to account for

grave shortages in our stockpiles. Thanks to nearly two years

of mission in Ukraine, the United States is perilously

unready for any additional contingency. Anything with a solid

rocket motor is in short supply--

1Solid rocket motors are the rocket motors that power so

many of the critical missile systems that we need. And

whether it is Javelins or Stingers or Patriot missiles, we

are critically in short supply of not just the missiles

themselves but of some of the components that are necessary

for building those missiles--

including the SM-6s that would be needed in the Pacific. The

high demand for Stingers, Javelins and Patriot interceptors

in Ukraine means we are desperately short of the weapons that

would be needed in Taiwan. Replenishing them is going to take

years.

I want to just pause here to make an observation. One of the arguments my friends make in defense of $61 billion to Ukraine is that we need to send a message to Vladimir Putin that if we give up and walk away from the Ukrainian battlefield--even though the leader of Ukraine's own military, until recently, said they had no chance of victory on that battlefield--if we give up, then it will send a message to Xi Jinping, the leader of China, that we are not a steadfast ally.

What they are arguing, in effect, is that it will weaken American deterrence, that process by which we prevent our enemies and our adversaries from doing things we don't want them to. Well, in classical foreign policy circles, deterrence is the combination of, on the one hand, resolve and, on the other hand, capacity. And they are making an argument about resolve. They are saying that if we show weakness to Xi, we will be showing a weakening of American resolve. We will show that America can't stand in there and fight the fight. And, look, I am obviously a critic of further aid to Ukraine, but it is true that American resolve is important, and we should do everything we can to show American resolve.

But you know what is more important than American resolve? Do you know what is more important than thumping our chests like eighth graders on a playground and saying we are tough, we are strong, we can do it? What is much stronger than that is to

actually have the capacity to defend ourselves and our allies. And that is what is so weak.

Xi Jinping does not care how tough America acts. He cares how strong America is.

And if we use our ammunition, our missiles, our artillery, on a war in Eastern Europe when we don't even have the bullets to defend ourselves or our allies, it doesn't matter how tough we act, Xi will do whatever he wants all over the world. And that is what this is ultimately about. We are trying to rebuild our country. What do we do in the interim? What do we actually do when our country is in a weak enough place because of decisions made over 30 or 40 years?

I find it interesting that so many of the people, from the news commentators to my Senate colleagues, Republican and Democratic, who actively advocated shipping our industrial base to East Asia and Mexico are now the people who are most fervently advocating for endless war in Ukraine.

Here is the game they played: Send all of our weapons manufacturing; send all of our industrial base; send it everywhere but the United States of America. And now that America is in a tough spot, we should fight every conflict everywhere, even though we don't make the weapons that we need to support those conflicts. And why don't we make those weapons? It is because these guys encouraged us to ship our industrial base overseas.

Those of you who are students of history will have heard the term ``arsenal of democracy.'' America was ``the arsenal of democracy.'' We won World War II, not because of chest thumping, not because we showed the strongest resolve, but because we had the strongest people and the strongest economy in the world.

So at a time when America faces a number of problems--including the southern border here at home, at a time when we are weaker in manufacturing capacity than we have been at any time in the last half century, this is the point when these people want to send unlimited weapons to Ukraine? This is the point where they want to send weapons not just to Ukraine but to many theaters all across the world?

Let's have an honest conversation about the decisions that have been made and how they have made this country weaker. Let's not pretend that weakness doesn't exist and send an unlimited number of weapons to Ukraine in the interim.

``Oh, The Places You'll Go!''

Now, I want to move on to another argument. But before I do, I am mindful of something that is very close to my heart personally. I have three beautiful children. I have a 6-year-old baby boy named Ewan--not so much of a baby anymore. I have a 2-year-old baby named Mirabel who is still very much a baby, and I love her very much. And I have a little guy named Vivek Gabriel Vance who was 3 years old yesterday but turned 4 today.

And I am sorry, Vivek, that I can't be with you for your birthday dinner, but I want you to know that Daddy loves you very much. And I am going to read this into the Record because maybe you can watch it at home.

``Oh, the Places You'll Go!'' by Dr. Seuss.

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Congratulations!

Today is your day.

You're off to Great Places!

You're off and away!

You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself

in any direction you choose.

You're on your own. And you know what you know.

And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.

You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.

About some you will I say, ``I don't choose to go there.''

With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,

you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And you may not find any

you'll want to go down.

In that case, of course,

you'll head straight out of town.

It's opener there,

in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen

and frequently do

to people as brainy

and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen,

don't worry. Don't stew.

Just go right along.

You'll start happening too.

Oh, the places you'll go!

You'll be on your way up!

You'll be seeing great sights!

You'll join the high fliers

who soar to great heights.

You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed.

You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead.

Wherever you fly, you'll be best of the best.

Wherever you go, you'll top all the rest.

Except when you don't.

Because, sometimes, you won't.

I'm sorry to say so

but, sadly, it's true

that Bang-ups

And Hang-ups

can happen to you.

You can get all hung up

in a prickle-ly perch.

And your gang will fly on.

You'll be left in a Lurch.

You'll come down from the Lurch

with an unpleasant bump.

And the chances are, then,

that you'll be in a Slump.

And when you're in a Slump,

you're not in for much fun.

Un-slumping yourself

is not easily done.

You'll come to a place where the streets are not marked.

Some windows are lightened. But mostly they are dark.

A place you could sprain both your elbow and your chin!

Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?

How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right . . .

Or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?

Or go around back and sneak in from behind?

Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find,

for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused

that you'll start in to race

down long wiggled rocks at a break-necking pace

and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,

headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

The Waiting Place . . .

. . . for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go

or a bus to come, or a plane to go

or the mail to come, or the rain to go

or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow

or waiting around for a Yes or No

or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite

or waiting for the wind to fly a kite

or waiting around for Friday night

or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake

or a pot to boil, or a Better Break

or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants

or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.

Everyone is just waiting.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I want to read this piece, which articulates my argument for peace very well, written in Responsible Statecraft, published on July 6, 2023. We are now--think about it--nearly a year since this piece was published, and its arguments are, if anything, more prescient today than they were last summer:

Last year, referring to the possibility of escalation that

the Russo-Ukrainian war entails, President Joe Biden

announced that America and the world are closer to a

destructive nuclear war than ever since the Cuban Missile

Crisis in 1962.

Perhaps no other statement from the highest level of

government could so directly affirm the failure of American

grand strategy and foreign policy in the post-Cold War world.

What seemed to be a Hollywood sci-fi scenario that the

average American in the 21st century did not even think about

is now a possibility that experts, policymakers, and world

leaders like President Biden discuss regularly.

As America and the world grapple with the tectonic shifts

that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has unleashed, war

budgets around the world keep increasing. In 2022, global

spending on defense reached an all-time high of $2.24

trillion. The U.S. defense budget accounted for almost 40

percent of the total, surpassing the next 10 countries

combined, including China, Russia, India, the United Kingdom,

France, and Germany.

Yet, America's ever-increasing military expenditures have

hardly translated into success stories in the 21st century.

The trillions of dollars pumped into questionable military

adventurism abroad, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003,

have yielded equally questionable results not only for U.S.

interests and national security, but also for global

security. America's overreliance on the military to achieve

policy objectives and the unilateral actions pursued without

an international mandate have backfired in the form of a

growing coalition of dissatisfied states that refuse to

accept a world order that they see as unjust and

hierarchical.

In April of 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered

his famous ``Chance for Peace'' speech in which he compared

the enthusiasm for a just and peaceful world after World War

II to the unstable, hostile, and unpredictable environment of

the Cold War. ``The eight years that have passed have seen

that hope waver, grow dim, and almost die. And the shadow of

fear again has darkly lengthened across the world,'' he said,

before laying out his vision of a just and peaceful order and

warning against the unbalanced political influence of

military interests.

Today, 70 years later, the world faces the same ``shadow of

fear'' as the unpredictable war unleashed by a revisionist

Russia shakes the international system. Biden's promised end

of ``America's forever wars'' that was supposed to bring

stability and predictability back to the realm of

international affairs while also allowing the United States

to reorient its resources towards a much-needed domestic

revival did not materialize.

While the war in Ukraine poses a significant threat to U.S.

national security interests and necessitates an appropriate

policy response, including security assistance to Ukraine for

self-defense, U.S. military spending was growing even before

Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This pattern should raise

questions about whether the United States should have

increased spending on the military in response to the crisis

in Ukraine.

The war has also turned into a talking point for those

whose direct interests tied to military spending overshadow

the actual interests of the American people. Many are now

pushing for the concept of a long standoff with foreign

rivals, without accounting for the real costs and

implications that will be borne by ordinary citizens, both in

America and abroad.

In foreign affairs, discourse and reality are sometimes

interwoven in complicated and nuanced ways. Conflict can

arise as much from actual strategic disagreements, security

considerations, and national interests as from discourse and

perceptions. In this context, embracing conflict and

promoting discourse that emphasizes a long-term confrontation

is a dangerous path for America to follow. The very cause of

World War I has been attributed to the perceptions of threats

and the interpretation of actions by states as ``hostile,''

leading some scholars to argue that European leaders

``sleepwalked'' into a conflict they neither desired nor

expected to win easily.

The question for Americans today, especially the new

generation that will be inheriting a more unstable and

dangerous world, is whether they will allow America to

sleepwalk into a conflict that the United States neither

needs, nor can afford to win. Traditionally, American voters

do not attach much importance to foreign and defense policy

issues. Yet, the citizens of a country that will be spending

a record $842 billion on the military cannot afford to close

their eyes on such critical policy issues that, in fact,

profoundly affect their livelihoods.

The question is not whether America should abandon its

legitimate security needs and interests, nor neglect the

foreign threats that necessitate spending on the military. We

must understand how much of the current spending is actually

justified. We also need to assess the efficiency of the

military to protect the American people and interests abroad

without overextending resources wastefully and prompting a

dangerous arms race that will paralyze growth, development,

and more importantly--the long-term prospect for peace and a

new, more just world order.

This is why young Americans should be especially concerned

with the unchecked influence of special interests that seek

to inflate threats, instill the inevitability of long-term

conflict confrontation in the world, and justify ever-

increasing spending on the military. The new generation

will be the primary bearer of the burdens, costs, and

consequences that decisions taken in Washington today will

have. Ultimately, it boils down to a simple question of

the kind of vision young Americans have for their country

and for their world.

This question is especially critical given America's own

undeniable internal strife. Those seeking to downplay the

legitimate critique of the overreliance on military forget or

deliberately neglect that foreign policy is ultimately

dependent on domestic policy. Both experts and the general

public now agree that the once-hailed American democracy is

threatened. The inflection point for America is serious: the

country is facing a crisis of identity, social cohesion, a

growing discontent with the economic model that has

marginalized an ever-growing segment of the population, and

what is more concerning--a waning belief and trust in the

country's most foundational institutions.

Those championing a new age of unnecessarily militaristic

and confrontational foreign policy that relies on growing and

unbalanced defense budgets should rethink the use of those

resources. A stroll in the streets of Portland or in the

infamous Skid Row in Los Angeles could be beneficial to re-

evaluate priorities and distribution of limited resources to

deal with the most pressing issues America faces. Ultimately,

the strength and attractiveness of the United States on the

global stage and America's competitiveness vis-a-vis its

rivals depends on the domestic revival of a country that has

been decaying silently for decades in virtually all key

aspects.

This is why a new generation of Americans must step in to

seize the new chance for peace before it is too late. As the

world order continues to fracture, only a wave of

democratization of the most undemocratic sphere of

policymaking in Washington can trigger the kind of

reassessment and accountability the American people should

expect from their elected leaders.

Unless we take steps now to usher in an overdue reckoning

in Washington, we may miss, as President Eisenhower said, ``a

precious chance to turn the black tide of events.''

That was by Martin Makaryan, and that, again, is from ``Responsible Statecraft''--an important argument and an important piece.

Let me address just a couple of points brought to mind by that piece and by that argument.

You will hear--especially in the last couple of days after former President Donald Trump criticized NATO, you will hear a strong argument about what NATO means to the United States of America. I think it is important for us and for our citizens to be honest not just about the problems inherent with NATO and the lack of burden-sharing but also the problems that exist in NATO's own countries--countries that most of us love, that most of us see as important allies, but that have deep, deep pathologies and problems that must be addressed.

Something that is often said is that in this particular conflict of Ukraine versus Russia, NATO is actually carrying its fair share of the burden. You will see charts that make an argument that NATO, which has the economy approximately the size of the United States of America, is spending, actually, more resources on Ukraine than the United States of America. Now, that argument has a few critical flaws. Let's walk through them.

First of all, NATO is providing a large amount of humanitarian assistance, and of course they are absorbing a large amount of refugees; they are doing it because Ukraine is in their backyard. But the critical weapons and

munitions that are being provided are overwhelmingly the responsibility of the United States of America. NATO is not carrying its fair share of the burden when it comes to weapons, and that is the most important thing that the Ukrainians need to win.

Second, even if we assumed--and it is wrong--but even if we assumed that NATO was carrying its fair share of the burden over the last 18 months, NATO has failed to carry its fair share of the burden for literally decades, ladies and gentlemen. Look at just how much money the United States has spent on defense since 1992 and compare that to our NATO allies. Ladies and gentlemen, we have been subsidizing European security to the tune of trillions of dollars. It might feel nice when we go to Munich and the Europeans thank us, and it might be great to get a pat on the back from a European head of state, but the American people demand that NATO carry its fair share of the burden.

Germany is the largest economy in Europe. They have promised for decades and especially over the last years that they would meet the NATO threshold of 2 percent of GDP spent on defense. They are still not there. Italy--a massive economy--still underspends on defense. In fact, most of the economies of Europe--outside of the UK and France and some economies in Eastern Europe--most of the economies of Europe massively underspend on defense, and that has invited aggression not just from Vladimir Putin but from other places as well.

At the same time that world leaders play armchair general with the Ukraine conflict, their own societies are decaying. Not a single country--even the United States--within the NATO alliance has birth rates at a replacement level. We don't have enough families and children to continue as a nation; yet we are talking about a problem 6,000 miles away. We are being invaded by up to 10 million illegal migrants over the course of Joe Biden's term in office, and we have apparently no President with the willpower to stop that problem. We have a fentanyl crisis that has led to the deaths of over 100,000 people per year in the last few years of our youngest and brightest people. Mental health crises are skyrocketing. Youth suicides are skyrocketing. Every single place--not just the United States but every single one of the countries in the NATO alliance sees similar or in some cases even more troubling dynamics on most of those metrics, from migration to economic malaise.

What are we doing, ladies and gentlemen?

China and Russia. If we want them to fear us, we need to rebuild our own countries. We need to rebuild a strong Europe and a strong America. We need to rebuild a civilization that can support conflicts instead of just run away from them because right now we don't have that. We do not have a country and we do not have a NATO alliance that is strong enough to do the things that need to be done.

So our message to the Europeans needs to be simple: Fix your own country. Share your own burden. Spend more on defense. Fix your own problems.

That will deal with the problem in Russia far more than a $61 billion check to Ukraine will. In fact, we are subsidizing them. We are enabling their refusal to spend enough resources on defense.

I see that my time is up. Thank you.

Madam President, pursuant to section 314(e) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order against all emergency designation provisions contained in Senate amendment No. 1388 to H.R. 815, a list of which I am sending to the desk.

The list is as follows:

S.A. 1388 to H.R. 815, Emergency Designation Provisions

Division A. Title I--Department of Defense

Military Personnel

1. Military Personnel, Army

2. Military Personnel, Marine Corps

3. Military Personnel, Air Force

4. Military Personnel, Space Force

Operation and Maintenance

5. Operation and Maintenance, Army

6. Operation and Maintenance, Navy

7. Operation and Maintenance, Marine Corps

8. Operation and Maintenance, Air Force

9. Operations and Maintenance, Space Force

10. Operations and Maintenance, Defense-Wide (including

transfers of funds)

Procurement

11. Military Procurement, Army

12. Procurement of Ammunition, Army

13. Other Procurement, Army

14. Weapons Procurement, Navy

15. Shipbuilding and Conversion, Navy

16. Other Procurement, Navy

17. Procurement, Marine Corps

18. Missile Procurement, Air Force

19. Other Procurement, Air Force

20. Procurement, Defense-Wide

21. Defense Production Act Purchases

Research, Development, Test and Evaluation

22. Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Army

23. Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Navy

24. Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Air Force

25. Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-

Wide

Other Department of Defense Programs

26. Office of the Inspector General

Related Agencies

27. Intelligence Community Management Account

General Provisions--This Title

28. Section 104

29. Section 105

Division A, Title II--Department of Energy

Energy Programs

30. Science

Atomic Energy Defense Activities National Nuclear Security

Administration

31. Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation

32. Federal Salaries and Expenses

Division A, Title III--Department of Homeland Security

Protection Preparedness, Response and Recovery

33. Federal Emergency Management Agency Operations and

Support

34. Federal Assistance

Division A, Title IV--Department of Health and Human Services

Administration for Children and Families

35. Refugee and Entrant Assistance

General Provisions--This Title

36. Section 401--

Division A, Title V--Department of Defense

37. Military Construction, Navy and Marine Corp

Division A, Title VI--Department of State and Related Agency

Department of State

38. Administration of Foreign Affairs Diplomatic Programs

39. Office of Inspector General

40. Emergencies in the Diplomatic and Consular Service

United States Agency for International Development

41. Funds Appropriated to the President Operating Expenses

42. Office of Inspector General

Bilateral Economic Assistance

43. Funds Appropriated to the President International

Disaster Assistance

44. Transition Initiatives

45. Economic Support Fund

46. Assistance for Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia

47. Department of State Migration and Refugee Assistance

48. Department of State International Narcotics Control and

Law Enforcement

49. Nonproliferation, Anti-Terrorism, Demining and Related

Programs

50. Peacekeeping Operations

51. Funds Appropriated to the President Foreign Military

Financing Program

International Assistance Programs

52. Multilateral Assistance Contribution to the

International Development Association

General Provisions--This Title (including transfers of funds)

53. Section 612(c)

Thanks to my colleague from Nebraska, who confided in private to me that he didn't think he could go for the full hour, but I would have welcomed at least another 20 minutes of speaking from my friend from Nebraska.

But it is 3:15 in the morning, and we are here discussing sending another $61 billion to Ukraine as part of a $95 billion security supplemental. I think it is important to at least give some context to the four people who are also currently still awake as to how we got here and why we got here and why we managed to fumble, I think, a great opportunity in this Chamber to actually do some real border security.

First, months ago, my Republican colleagues and I discussed the possibility of doing a border security package as a point of negotiation with our Democratic colleagues over Ukraine. The basic setup of the negotiation went something like this: Republicans are unified--at least allegedly--in our view that the border is a national security crisis. This is allegedly a national security supplemental, and the border is the most important national security issue that we confront. On the flip side, Democrats are united in their view that Ukraine must receive another $61 billion or even more of American aid. There were the seeds of a potential deal that could be cut between Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans.

Now, there are a few problems with this, as we learned. The first was that while our Democratic colleagues might agree that the border has some problems, they apparently did not agree it is quite the same crisis that we do. That is one problem.

Another problem is that apparently our Republican colleagues are not nearly as united as we thought we were or as we pretended to be. In fact, the closer we got to an actual resolution of the negotiation, the more we learned that our Republican colleagues--at least a small subset of them--cared a hell of a lot more about the Ukraine package than they did about securing the American southern border.

It is negotiation 101 that if you go into a negotiating posture where you desperately want the thing the other side of the table also desperately wants, you are not in an especially good position. If Republicans are as desperate to send $61 billion to Ukraine as Democrats are, then it isn't very shocking that the Democrats were not willing to give us a large amount on border security.

Now, this is what, of course, everyone knew. This is what, of course, everyone now knows because after a mere hour of debating a border security package as part of a broader supplemental, Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to immediately move on to a discussion of Ukraine's supplemental--literally an hour.

If you had dreamed up something from the fever swamp conspiracy theory of the American conservative movement, you could not have come up with something more egregious than this fake negotiation, what it produced, and how it immediately led to a debate--not about our southern border but about Ukraine.

Now, there are a few problems with this particular negotiation, a few problems with the way that it unfolded.

The first. The first is that it was done in secret. A border security--and by the way, this is problems from the perspective of conservatives, problems that the Republicans in our conference who were supporting this should have been mindful of if they wanted to actually get to a security package that could have gotten a majority of Republican support, because after many months of negotiations, there was a border security package that received, I believe, four Republican votes. And now we have a Ukraine supplemental that received far less than the majority of the Republican conference.

If you wanted to get a majority of Republicans to support this border security package, you should have observed a few basic rules.

The first is that you should not have done a secret negotiation. Many of our voters and many of our colleagues are mistrustful of secret negotiations. They are mistrustful of the people who participate in secret negotiations because if you are not getting the details of a plan out as it unfolds, you are not doing a few things.

First of all, you are not actually allowing people who know the immigration law best within the conservative movement to understand what is in it, to offer feedback, to try to improve the bill, to ensure that whatever text is coming together actually matches the terms of an alleged negotiation deal.

No. 2, you are denying the American people an opportunity to actually understand what is in the border security deal that is unfolding.

No. 3, you are denying Senate colleagues a real opportunity to debate the merits as they came together.

What actually happened was not, you know, you negotiate for a couple of weeks, and this is where the Democrats are and this is where the Republicans are, and maybe you can find some seeds of a compromise here. What actually happened is that after months of negotiation, Senate Republicans started asking: Well, what is in this deal? What shape is it taking? What are the Democrats giving? What are the Democrats asking for in return?

This was all mediated through a very, very small number of channels, and that process bred mistrust before we even knew any of the details of what was in the border security package.

Now, if you were a cynic, you would say this was by design, that we designed a package that was meant to create mistrust, that we designed a process that was meant to create mistrust and was never meant to lead to any significant majority. And I hate to say it, but I think that is actually the package that was produced.

So after months of secret negotiations, after months of denying some of the smartest immigration experts in the world the opportunity to critique and offer feedback on this package, after months of breeding mistrust within the American body politic, the details of an immigration grand bargain started to leak out, and the details were pretty troubling.

There were some good things, of course, some things that we liked and some things that we think were necessary, but it is interesting that even in the most generic terms, the details of the immigration plan started to create some backlash among most Republicans. Again, if you can't pass a border security package without the support of most Republicans, then it is not actually going to pass.

So here we are, early 2024, with a promise of a grand bargain on border security and a national security supplemental to boot. Yet every single detail turns out to have not been manifested in the text, turns out to have not produced something in the text that would have actually meaningfully secured the border.

So if you were serious about border security, the first thing you would want to do is to limit the President's ability to parole close to 1 million illegal migrants a year. If you go back to the Obama administration, the Obama administration paroled about 5,000 illegal aliens every single year. Senate Republicans think that is too much, but 5,000 a year is far less than the 750,000 or close to 1 million a year the Biden administration has decided to parole.

Now, it is not just the direct effect--you are taking close to 1 million people a year who have violated our immigration laws and giving them what amounts to effective legal status--you are also sending a message all across Central America and all across the world that America is open for business.

This is why, when you put a camera or a microphone in front of somebody who is crossing the southern border illegally and ask ``Why are you coming now?'' they will say ``Because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris invited us in.''

The parole policy has thrown open the floodgates, and this grand border compromise contained almost nothing that would meaningfully reduce the number of paroles that the President of the United States can issue.

It required a report, I believe, but nothing that would limit the President's discretion to grant parole en masse, as he has done for the last 3 years of his administration. That was the first problem.

The second problem is that the grand border compromise did very little on the question of asylum. It pretended to do something on the question of asylum. It changed the asylum standard. It increased that standard from a credible fear to a reasonable fear. But it also changed who was enforcing that standard to CIS agents, who are among the most pro-asylum people in the entire U.S. Government. So you changed the standard, but you created a person who is enforcing that standard who has almost no reason to meaningfully enforce American asylum laws.

Why is this a problem? Well, because we have fundamentally at the U.S. southern border an economic migrant crisis that is pretending to be a massive asylum crisis. People who are traditional economic migrants come into our country at ports of entry or elsewhere, they claim asylum. They say that they are persecuted, they say they are fleeing persecution, and then the asylum officer usually will tell them: You have to come back in 6 years or 12 years or however many years down the road to have your case adjudicated before an immigration law judge. And, of course, for those 10 years or maybe more that they are in the country, they effectively have legal status. They are in our country, and many of them never show up for their court date even though the court date is years later. So the asylum process has turned millions of economic migrants into alleged asylum claimants.

I find it interesting that when you look at who is actually coming across the southern border, it is very, very often young men between the ages of 20 and 35, unaccompanied by women or children, because if we know anything about world affairs, it is that when people are politically persecuted, it is always the young, unaccompanied men who are the most politically persecuted, not the women or children. And my colleagues will forgive my sarcasm there.

Why is it that the people who claim the greatest persecution, the people who are flooding across our southern border--why are women and children so poorly represented among them? Because this is not about asylum, and this is not about political persecution; this is about manipulating America's laws to turn an economic migration crisis into an asylum crisis. It is a legal arbitrage that immigration attorneys in the United States of America have cooked up.

Oh, and by the way, one of the great things about the grand border compromise is that we decided to pay immigration attorneys who are undercutting our immigration laws massive amounts of legal fees from the American taxpayers because why not have a handout for the immigration attorneys who have helped create a system where we undercut our immigration laws?

That was the second major problem with the grand border compromise.

A third major problem with the grand border compromise is that it did not meaningfully increase the President's authority or, frankly, force the President's hand into deporting anyone who is currently here illegally.

Just a couple weeks ago, in New York City, a group of illegal immigrants violently assaulted a police officer. Those people, as far as I know, are still in our country because we don't deport people-- even those who violently assault police officers. We deport an incredibly small number of the people who come into this country illegally.

A fourth problem with the grand border compromise cooked up by my colleagues is that it had an emergency border shutoff authority, which was really an effort--an admirable effort--to force Secretary Mayorkas's and the President's hand. The way it went was basically something like this: If border crossing reached a certain threshold-- 5,000 a day, I believe, in the text that we received--then there is an emergency shutdown authority that applies for a certain number of days per year--270 days in the first year, less in the second year, and less in the third year.

Now, that sounds not too bad, right? Once you hit a certain threshold of illegal border crossings, you should shut down the border. I happen to think that number should be close to zero but whatever. Opinions will differ on where we should set that authority. Yet that authority, set at 5,000 a day, which effectively says that you could have nearly 1.9 million illegal aliens come into the country before you trigger that authority--it has multiple provisions that would allow us to waive it. It has a 45-day emergency waiver authority for the President. It has a 180-

day discretionary waiver for Secretary Mayorkas. For those who are good at math, 180 days plus 45 days is 225 days. So in a 270-day border emergency shutdown authority, 225 days can be waived by the President or the Secretary who refused to enforce our immigration laws. That is not much of an emergency authority if they only have to use it 45 days in the first year given what is going on at the American southern border.

The fundamental problem, as so many of my colleagues have recognized and as so many of my colleagues have noted, is, how do we get Joe Biden and Secretary Mayorkas to enforce the border law when they clearly don't want to? This is a forcing function because the real negotiation here, as was obvious to anybody from the start, was, how do we force Joe Biden to do his job, and what leverage do we have in order to force that very thing?

Instead, we went into a negotiation where--again, it was in secret-- our colleagues who were negotiating fundamentally didn't understand or didn't enforce this fundamental insight. They wanted to give Joe Biden additional authorities. Well, he might not use those authorities even if you give them to him. They wanted to give Joe Biden a number of discretionary, ``get of jail free'' cards, where even if you create authorities for him to enforce the border, you give him the discretion to get out of it. We don't need to be granting Joe Biden more discretion. We need to be constraining his discretion because it is Joe Biden's discretion that has led to the border crisis that we have.

Now, a number of my colleagues have mentioned the terrible consequences of the border problem and what it looks like for so many of our citizens. There is no overstating the catastrophe that is going on at the American southern border. There is the fentanyl crisis that is killing over 100,000 citizens of our country. Of course, the fentanyl is now transitioning to other drugs just as the heroin transitioned to the fentanyl and just as the prescription pills transitioned to the heroin. One of the many gifts of our wide-open southern border is a virtually limitless supply of increasingly more powerful synthetic opioids to kill our citizens.

If you read anything about the history of the opium war, you wonder if we are witnessing right now the reverse opium war where precursors to synthetic opioids come in from communist China, and the Mexican drug cartels manufacture them and then ship them across the southern border.

If you were actually serious about addressing this crisis, the first thing that you would want to do is limit Joe Biden's and Secretary Mayorkas's authority to open the floodgates and invite millions of illegal aliens into this country. You would limit their discretion. That was always the only pathway to meaningful border enforcement under this administration.

As so many of my colleagues have mentioned, Joe Biden clearly doesn't want to enforce the border. So, ladies and gentlemen, how do we force the President to enforce the border?

The basic deal that was offered by a number of my colleagues and friends went something like this: If the Democrats are so desperate to send another $61 billion to Ukraine, then what we could do is meter the money based on border enforcement metrics. This is, in fact, what was discussed in the Republican conference, and it received support from Ukraine supporters, like Jim Risch and Ron Johnson, to people who were more skeptical of the conflict, like me, to people who were in the middle, like Ted Cruz.

The basic idea was, we are going to force as much as possible Joe Biden to enforce the southern border, and unless he gets illegal border crossings under a certain level using his existing authority, maybe with some additional tools, then we will not provide support to the security supplemental. In other words, if he wants his $61 billion for Ukraine, Joe Biden is going to have to do a little border enforcement despite the fact that he obviously doesn't want to.

That was the deal that we thought was on the table, and that, unfortunately, was not the deal that was actually on the table once it was advanced by our leadership team.

Of course, on Sunday night, February 4, we received the text of the grand border compromise. Typically, with a field of law as complicated as immigration, you would expect days, weeks, months of committee markups, of debates, of negotiation over text; of trying to understand how one provision influences another provision; of how another provision affects the other. This process of legislative policymaking is what was completely short-circuited by this secret negotiation.

So, on Sunday, the text dropped, and on Wednesday, we were expected to vote on it. So, for 3 days--from February 4 to February 7--my staff and, I imagine, the staffs of nearly every Republican Member worked long nights to try to understand what was actually in the border security package. They identified many of the problems that I just repeated that actually exist within the policy. Even where it looked good on the surface, it very often contained provisions where Democrats had, frankly, outnegotiated Republicans.

It reminds me a little bit of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, where the President's negotiators took to the New York Times to brag afterward that while then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy had gotten a lot of concessions out of the White House, those concessions had fallen apart when the concessions were translated to legislative text. That is a problem. If the legislative text isn't very good, no matter how good the headline promises of the legislation are, then you shouldn't support the legislation. That is, of course, what happened.

On Wednesday, Republicans decided as a conference that they would not support the border security package that came out. A curious thing happened then. If you had really been serious about border security, if you had really wanted to advance the ball in any negotiation, the other party comes with an offer. You consider the offer. You read it. You try to understand it. You decide it is not good enough. What do you do if you are serious about the problem? You then go back and say: Well, you know what, this just isn't good enough. We need to keep going down this pathway. We need to keep on fighting for a way to secure the border.

But that never happened. Why that never happened is because too many within the Republican conference were desperate--desperate--for money for Ukraine--so desperate that they were willing to short-circuit any meaningful border security. That is the fundamental truth.

As much as I am frustrated at my Democratic colleagues for not doing more to secure the border, as much as I am frustrated at Democrats writ large and the President of the United States for not doing his job, on this particular negotiation, the simple truth is that too many Senate Republicans cared far more about Ukraine than they did about their own country.

You heard it earlier today or earlier this evening when one of my colleagues said that this was the most important vote that any of us had ever taken in the U.S. Senate. I can't imagine what leads a person to think that sending $61 billion to Ukraine at this moment of crisis for our country is the most important vote we have taken. My God. Maybe we should take some far more important votes that actually solve the problems that confront this country. Maybe we should confront the mental health crisis in our country, the fact that our teenagers seem to have rising depression rates, the fact that our young people have rising suicide rates, the fact that we have a wide-open southern border, the fentanyl and sex trafficking crisis. All of these things are substantially more important than what we are about to vote on in the U.S. Senate and what we voted on last night--but not, of course, if your main priority is securing Ukraine's border rather than fixing the problems of your own country.

This is unfortunately where we are. This is unfortunately the problem we are confronting. We have a Democratic Party that wants an open border, and we have a Republican Party wherein most of us want to fight for border security, but a few of us actually care more about Ukraine. Therein is the seed of the real bipartisan compromise that we have in this country, which is constantly focusing on the problems of other countries instead of on the problems of our own.

So let's talk a little bit about the Ukraine policy because that is now--after the border security deal fell apart, now we are on to focusing on Ukraine. Of course, this has become

the main focus of so many of my Senate colleagues. This has become the reason for breathing, the reason for waking up in the morning, the reason for coming to work in the U.S. Senate--to ensure that we send another $61 billion to Ukraine.

There are so, so many problems with our Ukraine policy, and I am going to start from the most obvious all the way, hopefully, to the unintended consequences if we have enough time and if I am still standing.

Let's start with the most obvious problem of our Ukraine policy: There is no strategy.

A year ago, I spoke with Secretary Blinken, and I had a number of private conversations with people in the administration. What was the goal of our Ukraine policy? Then the goal was to ensure that Ukraine had enough weapons so that they could launch a much-anticipated counteroffensive. That counteroffensive would allow them to gain large amounts of territory. It may even allow them to push the Russians out of Crimea.

Then, of course, you could have peace settlements where Ukraine was from a position of strength and Russia was from a position of weakness. We would, in other words, throw the Russians back to close to the 1991 borders of Ukraine, and then we would try to negotiate with them.

This leaves out, of course, an important historical detail, which is that back in April of 2022, as everybody from Gerhard Schroder, the former Chancellor of Germany, to a number of our NATO allies has pointed out, the Russians wanted to negotiate back in April of 2022. The negotiation was possible back then, but Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the UK, and, of course, our own administration refused to engage in that negotiation. We wanted the Ukrainians to fight and to fight on. Of course, they have at great cost to themselves and at great cost to the American taxpayer.

Now, here is the problem with this idea that the Ukrainians would ever throw the Russians back to the 1991 borders: They are massively outmanned and massively outgunned.

Ukraine has a population today of about 28 million people. Russia has a population today of 145 million people. Russia manufactures far more artillery shells not just than Ukraine but more than the United States of America--an economy that is 10 times as large. Russia is not going to lose the war. That is a fundamental fact that everybody needs to accept. They are not going to lose. It is existential to them. It is the main focus of Vladimir Putin's. They are bigger, and they have more weapons.

So the question then becomes, How do we preserve as much of Ukraine as possible? How do we prevent as much innocent loss of life as possible? How do we ensure that this war comes to a negotiated peace in a way that prevents a number of negative consequences? That is the goal here--a peace that prevents as much bad from happening. But that is not our strategy. Our strategy is to throw money and weapons at the problem indefinitely.

So, if a year ago we were praying for a counteroffensive, we could ask ourselves: How did that counteroffensive go? Well, the Ukrainians lost tens of thousands of soldiers; they gained miles of territory--not hundreds of miles; miles of territory--in a country that is massive; and they lost some of their best troops and some of their best equipment. That was the result of the counteroffensive. That was the lynchpin of the American strategy.

So, having failed to accomplish what we set out to accomplish, did we say: Well, maybe our experts are wrong. Maybe we should revisit some of our assumptions. Maybe we should design an actual strategy that is achievable. No. No. We just moved on to the next thing. Without even blinking an eye, without even addressing the American people, the Biden administration just went on to the next thing.

The next thing is, well, we are just going to try to give the Ukrainians as much as possible to hope that they don't lose. That is now the strategy, such as it is, of the American President with Ukraine--throw resources, throw weapons, and throw munitions at the problem and hope against all hope that something good will happen.

What is that good thing that will happen? Well, we have no idea. The war is at a stalemate, and, as I already mentioned, Russia has more money, more manpower, and more weapons. So we have no strategy.

Why are we giving $61 billion to Ukraine when we have no strategy for how they are going to use it, we have no sense of how they are actually going to bring this war to a close, and we have no realistic possibility of getting to any reasonable goal within any reasonable timeframe?

We are America's legislative body. Our only real role in foreign policy is to approve nominees the President makes to his own government--posts, of course, that have importance in foreign affairs. That is No. 1. No. 2 is we control the purse strings. The point of controlling the purse strings gives us leverage to ensure that the people's business is actually being done. What are we doing with that leverage here? We are writing, effectively, a blank check, with no guarantee that it will produce a strategy, with no demand that the President actually tell us what this $61 billion is meant to produce.

We know where this will end, ladies and gentlemen. We know exactly where this road ends. This road ends at some kind of a negotiated settlement. The only question is, How many Ukrainians die before we get there? How many American dollars are wasted before we get there? How many American weapons are spent not for our own national security but for the national security of another nation? That is it. How much death and destruction do we promote on the path to peace? My answer is, we should be promoting as little as possible. We should be promoting a negotiated peace. We should be trying to get there as quickly as we possibly can.

Where, I wonder, is the anti-war left?

It is interesting that in Washington, DC, in 2023, 2024, you hear a whole lot about the bipartisan consensus on Ukraine. Yet you never hear people asking: Where has that bipartisan consensus led in the past?

I am 39 years old. In the 1970s, the bipartisan consensus was lined up behind the Vietnam war, a conflict that killed nearly 60,000 Americans over the span of a decade and a half.

In early 2000, the bipartisan consensus was not just that we should knock out Osama bin Laden's terrorist network in Afghanistan but that we should rebuild Afghanistan into a flowering Western-style democracy. We should put resources into training the Afghan population to think about gender roles as Americans do in the 21st century, to promote the creation of democratic institutions to train an Afghan army.

For 20 years, American blood and treasure was committed to that project, and that project fell apart in a matter of weeks. It turns out the Afghans don't want Western-style democracy. It turns out the Afghans don't want to fight for a country that, apparently, very few of them actually believed in because it took about 3 weeks--3 weeks-- before the Taliban rolled over their country.

The bipartisan foreign policy consensus got us exactly there. That same bipartisan consensus got us to Iraq under the pretense of weapons of mass destruction. Many of the people in this Chamber who supported the war in Iraq are now supporting limitless supplies of arms to Ukraine. It is interesting how that bipartisan consensus works out.

That same consensus supported knocking out Libyan dictator Qadhafi, which led, of course, to incredible chaos and destruction in that country.

The bipartisan consensus led us to get involved in Syria and yet another quagmire in the Levant.

And that bipartisan consensus has found a new passion project-- limitless war, limitless weapons, and limitless money to Ukraine.

Why is it that we think that the same people who have been wrong for a half a century are somehow right about this question? Why do we not learn the lessons of Iraq? One of the most important lessons of Iraq-- as the great, late GEN Colin Powell pointed out--is that we didn't have a defined strategy. What is the mission? What are we trying to accomplish? What is America's blood and treasure actually trying to do? And how long must we be required to spend it?

Never has that question been answered in Ukraine. Never have we tried

to answer that question over the last 40 years of failed foreign policy experiments.

I look at this country over the time I have been alive, and I look at what its leadership has accomplished, and it is hard to not think that the bipartisan consensus in American foreign policy has led to, effectively, graveyard after graveyard after graveyard, $34 trillion in debt. We have purchased on the backs of our children and grandchildren a number of graveyards all across the world. I don't know what we have accomplished beyond that.

Yet people in this Chamber, including my friends on the left, who used to have a real anti-war sentiment--the left used to have a real understanding that war has terrible unintended consequences, that it enriches all of the wrong people, that it kills many innocent people. There was no meaningful pushback on this conflict from the left. I find that shocking.

I find it depressing, frankly, because those of us on the right who are sick of war, and sick of our children and grandchildren paying for it, would actually like some allies in pushing back against this latest conflict.

In fact, just to meditate on this point about strategy a little bit longer, if you look for the arguments for why we should be in Ukraine, they all boil down to: Unless we send continual resources, something terrible will happen. The Russians will overrun the Ukrainians when they don't have enough resources, and they won't stop at Kyiv, we are told. They will go on to Poland. They will go on to other NATO allies. And then it will be Americans who are on the frontlines of Germany defending against the terrible aggression of Vladimir Putin.

What must be said is, first of all, this is a fantasy. No credible military expert, no person with a thinking brain believes that Vladimir Putin has the capacity to march all the way to Berlin. He does not have the capacity to march all the way to Kyiv. Of course, he can't march all the way to Berlin. So the fearmongering doesn't work. That dog just doesn't hunt.

Now, of course, if Vladimir Putin could--let's just entertain this thought experiment. Let's just assume that Vladimir Putin could march all the way to Berlin. What would that mean about our NATO allies?

One thing it would mean is that they are a lot weaker than they pretend to be. Another thing it would mean is the fact that we know that NATO needs to step up and spend a lot more resources on their own national defense.

If Vladimir Putin could march all the way to Berlin, that suggests that the Germans have got to do a lot better at defending their country, and they have to step up.

NATO was never meant to turn Europe into permanent welfare clients of the American taxpayer. It is time for Europe to step up.

Some of my colleagues give the Europeans far too much credit for doing their part over the last 18 months of conflict in Ukraine. They point to charts that say if you include humanitarian assistance and economic assistance, the Europeans have actually spent about as much as the Americans--maybe even more than the Americans--on Ukraine. Well, that chart misses a couple of important facts, the first of which is that the most critical thing is not money; it is weapons. And the United States has supplied a disproportionate share of the weapons to the Ukrainians at great cost to ourselves and at great degradation of our defense capability.

The other thing it leaves out is that NATO has, for decades, sucked on the teeth of the American taxpayer. Trillions and trillions of dollars have gone into American defense budgets that have been an implicit subsidy to NATO--an implicit subsidy to NATO. So forgive me if I am not impressed that the Europeans are stepping up a little bit for a war that is literally in their backyard.

The other thing this misses is that the war in Ukraine hasn't been going on for 18 months. It has been going on for a decade. Of course, the conflict that brought us to Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine has been going on in Ukraine since at least 2014.

If the Europeans want to compare who is spending more, the relevant point of comparison is 2014 or maybe 1992. It is not 2022. So we are bailing out the Europeans--$61 billion to bail out the Europeans on a preposterous set of circumstances, on a preposterous subsidy.

By the way, many of our European allies--thanks, in part, of course, to our subsidy--have managed their own financial houses much better than we have. The Germans have far lower budget deficits and far lower public debt than we do. If any time was the time for them to step up, it might be now that we are $34 trillion in debt.

So every argument for why we should support limitless war in Ukraine ultimately falls apart. It ultimately boils down to fearmongering-- fearmongering that doesn't have any basis in reality.

Again, I would ask: If the goal is to prevent Vladimir Putin from overrunning Ukraine, the question has to become: For how long are the American taxpayers on the hook? What if this goes on another 10 years? Are we on the hook to the tune of $500 billion of security assistance and $1 trillion of reconstruction?

At what point is enough enough? At what point do we say the war is a stalemate? It is going to end in a negotiated settlement anyway. Let's stop wasting lives. Let's stop wasting money. And let's get on with the peace.

That is what American diplomacy could be used for. Unfortunately, the President seems uninterested in that.

But I am worried more about the unintended consequences in Ukraine. A friend of mine made the observation today, actually, in a public conversation that I hosted, that we are seeing the acceleration of an economic and military alliance that will challenge the United States over the coming decade and the coming generation. The cooperation between Russia and China has accelerated significantly over the last 2 years.

We have attempted to set off a financial bomb using America's incredible financial power. The rules-based international order has given America's financial system great power, and we used it to try to set off a bomb in the Russian economy. But that bomb appears to have fizzled.

The Russian economy has consistently defied growth expectations and forecasts. Our own leadership has admitted that its sanctions haven't worked nearly as well as we wanted them to. And the Russian economy, now put on a war footing by Vladimir Putin, is producing weapons at a faster rate than the United States, which, of course, has an economy ten times the size of Russia.

So if the goal was to weaken Russia here, we have catastrophically failed. What we have done, actually is created an alternative financial system around Russia, China, and other countries. And we have created an accelerating military alliance between two of our most dangerous adversaries in the world. That is the net effect of our policy. That is unintended consequence No. 1.

Unintended consequence No. 2 is that we are, at this very moment, destabilizing governments all over the world with higher fuel prices and higher food prices.

I made this observation earlier. So my colleagues, hopefully, will forgive me for repeating myself. But one of the most interesting conversations I have ever had was with former President Barack Obama, just days before he left the Oval Office, about a week before Donald Trump and Mike Pence were inaugurated.

Obama made the observation that though he was obviously more a fan of--I will call it mass migration--than I am, that he knew that if you created too many immigration pressures in a country, it could destabilize that country. He made this observation in the context of the 2015 European refugee crisis, telling me--I am paraphrasing here; I don't want to violate any confidences--that he felt that the 2015 refugee crisis that actually destabilized a number of European Governments, in fact, had led to the election of his political adversary, Donald Trump, in 2016.

I thought that was a smart and insightful observation from the former President. Of course, I disagree with his politics and his immigration policies, but it was an interesting and a very self-reflective observation.

What, I wonder, happens--if the European refugee crisis of 2015 destabilized Europe, what happens when we

apply massive energy and food price increases to the entire continent of Africa--1.5 billion people, almost all of whom have a much lower quality of living than the average American or the European?

We know exactly what would happen. If you take 1.5 billion people-- most of whom are just good people who want to feed their families--and you make it impossible for them to feed their families in their own country, they will move. And where are they going to move? They are going to move to Europe, and they are going to move to the United States of America.

Can we, at a time of a historic border crisis, possibly absorb hundreds of millions--at the very least, millions--of starving people moving?

And why are they starving? They are starving because Eastern Europe is the bread basket of the world--especially that part of the world-- and grain prices, barley prices, wheat prices have skyrocketed over the last 2 years.

We are creating the predicate for a refugee crisis that will destabilize Europe and destabilize the entirely world.

We are also, while we are at it, enriching Vladimir Putin. While we spend $61 billion in Ukraine. We are enriching Vladimir Putin with idiotic energy policies.

We are actually funding both sides of this conflict. Putin's economy depends substantially on natural gas, on petroleum. And our energy policies, our refusal to empower America's energy producers--the Biden administration, just a couple of weeks ago, blocked additional exports of liquid natural gas. That enriches Vladimir Putin's Russia. Every time you take an action that drives up the cost of energy, you are enriching Vladimir Putin's Russia.

So with the one hand we pursue energy policies that enrich Vladimir Putin, and with the other hand, we send $61 billion to Ukraine. I don't think we should fund either side of this conflict, but it is the height of idiocy to fund both sides of the conflict simultaneously, and that is exactly what we are doing, thanks to President Joe Biden's energy policies.

Another unintended consequence--we have already seen this, by the way. Allied governments in Slovenia, in Poland, and other countries are under an incredible amount of pressure because food prices and energy prices are really high. Food prices and energy prices destabilize governments. How many American allies will have their country's politics destabilized because we are pursuing policies that ensure higher food and higher energy prices? Inflation is bad in the United States. Inflation is bad, in part, because we are pursuing policies in Europe that inflame the cost of food and energy.

It is always funny when I hear my Democratic friends say that inflation is not Joe Biden's fault; it is the fault of what is going on in Eastern Europe. Well, if Joe Biden was a little bit smarter and used diplomacy more aggressively, perhaps what is going on in Eastern Europe would not be quite as prolonged, and perhaps we could bring it to a quick close.

That is unintended consequence No. 3. We are impoverishing our own people on this conflict. So $34 trillion in debt--we are on the hook now for close to $200 billion to Ukraine. But that doesn't include the reconstruction assistance they will certainly need. That doesn't count the numerous ways--energy prices, food prices--that this conflict is putting pressure on the wallets of American citizens. It doesn't count all of the ways in which we are distracted by a conflict in Eastern Europe and are unable to pursue smart policies elsewhere in the world.

We are impoverishing a generation of Americans. We are making it harder for them to achieve their American dream. And we are doing it to empower defense contractors and to bring a war to effectively a never- ending stage. That is what is happening. We know this conflict has no end in sight. We know that only America, using its diplomatic power, could apply the leverage necessary to bring it to a close. We are instead using our financial military and diplomatic power to prolong the stay as much as possible.

There are other unintended consequences. And I worry that we have no statesmen left at the senior leadership of this country. For a generation, we have been told that the important thing is to thump our chest, to talk tough, to act tough, but not actually do the things that are necessary to strengthen our country and make our country more powerful.

You hear my friends on both sides of the aisle say that if we don't show resolve in Ukraine, that it will invite Xi Jinping to invade Taiwan. And, of course, I believe a Taiwanese invasion by Xi Jinping would be one of the worst things that could happen on the world stage. Our colleagues are right to worry about it.

But the argument is that they will invade--the Chinese will invade-- unless we show resolve in Ukraine. But the unfortunate truth is that the Chinese don't care about our resolve; they care about our strength. In classic foreign policy schools, deterrence is the combination of resolve and capacity. You have to both want to do something, but most importantly, you have to have the ability to do that thing. And we have no capacity to deter the Chinese in East Asia and help the Ukrainians fight a war in Eastern Europe.

For many generations, our leadership shipped our industrial base, our manufacturing jobs overseas. And that has left us in a place where we don't produce enough weapons; we don't produce enough missiles; we don't produce enough artillery shells; we don't produce enough of the critical munitions that are necessary to fight conflicts all over the world.

So every time we spend critical resources on Ukraine, we ensure that they will not be available to a contingency necessary for the United States of America. That is not hypothetical, and that is not abstract. We, even now, are sending weapons to Ukraine far faster than we can make them.

Why are we sending cluster munitions to Ukraine right now? Again, I will ask: Where is the anti-war left? What happened to the left that was worried about sending cluster munitions to various conflicts all over the world? Why are we sending cluster munitions to Ukraine? It is because we don't make enough artillery shells to send to Ukraine, to Israel, and to other partners.

We cannot fight a war on multiple fronts because of the leadership made, frankly, by some of the Members of this Chamber, we don't have a strong enough manufacturing base to support both of these conflicts.

Now, my colleagues will say that this particular bill--this particular legislation--has billions of dollars designed to rebuild the American industrial base. But you can't rebuild the industrial base by making weapons and sending them to Ukraine faster than you make them for your own country and for your own defense purposes.

The question is, If we start rebuilding our defense industrial base tomorrow, how long does it take? Three to 5 years at the very least. Call it 3 years if we started tomorrow before we could support contingencies in Eastern Europe and East Asia.

So what do we do in the interim when our country, by every metric, does not produce enough weapons to support a multipronged conflict? What do we do in the interim? The solution and the answer, apparently, of this Chamber is: We send everything possible to Ukraine. We get as much as possible to Ukraine; consequences--let's not worry about those. Let's not worry about the fact that we do not have enough weapons to deter aggression all over the world right now, and we have no viable pathway of getting in there for the next 3 years.

I think that a lot of my colleagues are living in a boomer paradise where America can do everything all the time without limits and without constraints. And that is not the world that we live in. Frankly, it is not the world we live in, in part because decisions made by people in this Chamber and the leadership of this country over the last generation.

But we are in this situation. Let's rebuild our own country before we overextend ourselves in a multipronged conflict. This is something out of every history book for how empires fail. Countries allow themselves to become eroded. They allow internal division to weaken their resolve. They allow economic might to degrade. And then, at the point when they are weakest, they overextend themselves militarily.

That is where we are right now. We are at the weakest point in a generation. In the 1980s, our relative power

and manufacturing was significantly stronger than it is today. My colleagues on the other side will say, Well, you know, it is weaker; it is a bipartisan problem. It is not just Democrats' fault that our manufacturing base is weaker.

And I would grant that point every day and twice on Sunday. It was a bipartisan failure that led our manufacturing economy to grow so weak, but it needs to be a bipartisan solution to figure out what to do until we rebuild it.

No one has offered a solution for how to rebuild our manufacturing base quickly, and no one has told me what we are going to do while we are rebuilding that manufacturing base. We cannot supply unlimited arms all over the world when we don't even make enough for our own purposes. Yet that is exactly what the U.S. Senate proposes to do later this morning.

Now, one final observation here about where we are in Ukraine. I am going to read just a brief summary here produced by my staff. The $60 billion in Ukraine aid included in the $95 billion supplemental would be the largest single Ukraine aid package Congress has passed to date.

Nonetheless, it was put on the floor with less than a day's notice and could obstruct future efforts to bring the war in Ukraine to a peaceful conclusion. The bill will commit $60 billion for Ukraine over multiple years, and it will provide nothing to secure America's southern border. If enacted, it would represent 34 percent of the total appropriated supplemental Ukraine aid, almost as large as the first three supplemental bills combined.

It represents a 26-percent increase over the largest previous supplemental bill at a time when Ukraine's prospects on the battlefield have grown significantly worse. And it has done all this with less than a week of real debate. I am trying to think of any amount of money where we have not adequately debated, reviewed, amended, and corrected such a large spending package to Ukraine--or to any other country.

I mean, normally, these bills spending $100 billion of American taxpayer money, normally, you might expect a real debate. We received text on this on February 7. Wednesday, February 7, is when we received final text on the package that we are voting on today; $100 billion and 5 days of debate, most of which, of course, was occupied by the Super Bowl media cycle.

The American people have been deprived of an actual debate on these matters from their elected legislature. The U.S. Senate has deprived them of the debate. And why? I don't know why. I think maybe the reason why we are pushing this so quickly is because a few of my colleagues are desperate. They are desperate to get to Munich next weekend and tell the leaders of the world that, yes, they did not secure their own southern border, but they did the most important thing: They got the $61 billion to Ukraine.

It is shameful. It is shameful to conduct foreign policy through blank check writing to never-ending war, and it is extra shameful to do it while ignoring the problems of your own country.

Can I ask how much time I have?

I hate to keep my distinguished colleague from Utah waiting, but I will keep going here for another few minutes.

I want to make, in the time that I have remaining, a political observation. When you craft legislation that is 370 pages long and you deprive the American people and your Senate colleagues of a debate, you oftentimes find that there are things in the legislation that were unintended--or maybe they were intended, but they should have been corrected and taken out.

In 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump under a spurious and ridiculous argument. But the argument went something like this: that there was money that had been appropriated under the USAI--the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative; the USAI had appropriated money, and Donald Trump refused to spend it exactly as it had been required by law.

And the argument is, because he had violated this appropriations requirement and because it is in the requirements of the Impoundment Control Act, Donald Trump had violated the law and had to be impeached.

It was a ridiculous argument then; it is a ridiculous argument now. But I find it interesting that given that Ukraine aid is a hotly contested political item for the 2024 elections and given that Donald Trump was already impeached for the exact same reason that so many congressional Republicans seem desperate to tie the President's hands in the next administration--because built into this ``Ukraine First'' supplemental is money that will be spent in '25 and '26--money, just as in 2019, that was appropriated and will tie the hands of the next administration. And whether it is a Democrat or a Republican, I think we ought to empower the next administration to do diplomacy as they would like to.

So for my colleagues who are desperate to send $61 billion to Ukraine, one request that I would make is--because this is going to come back from the House. The House will not pass this package as it exists. One request that I would make is, let's cut off the end of funding at the end of 2024. For my Republican colleagues, it may save Donald Trump a spurious impeachment trial. For my Democratic colleagues, it may save the next President the ability to conduct diplomacy on his or her own terms.

Now, we should not be doing this with such little debate and such little consideration. There are all kinds of things--all kinds of beautiful gems--that I am sure that we will identify in this legislation in the coming weeks.

As Nancy Pelosi once said: You have to read a piece of legislation after you pass it. I would prefer that we read a piece of legislation before we pass it. But, most importantly, I would prefer that we debate and challenge the legislation before we pass it.

You cannot write $100 billion worth of checks in 4 days of public debate. You need more time. You need to correct it. You need to fix it. You need to address the problems, like what I just mentioned, that we put an impeachment timebomb for the next Trump administration in this legislation. You need to fix problems like this. And a real process is how you fix it.

Now, I appreciate that some of our colleagues prefer a fake process because that process has empowered Senate leadership. Well, you know who it hasn't empowered? It has not empowered the American people. This is ridiculous. And this is ultimately, in my view, a farce.

I have been in the U.S. Senate for a year. It is the professional honor of my lifetime. And I serve across the aisle with distinguished colleagues, with brilliant people, people who are publicly minded, despite our disagreements. But I think this process is an insult to them. We can do better. We should do better.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak to a particular problem in America's higher education system, a problem borne of unfairness and of mass subsidy from the American taxpayer. It has now metastasized into one of the most corrupt and one of the most politically active and politically hostile organizations in the United States of America, and that is elite colleges.

A lot of us have watched not just since the October 7 attacks on Israel but for over a decade as America's colleges seem less and less interested in education and more and more interested in teaching things like racial hatred and various forms of far-left ideology.

A lot of us ask ourselves: How is this possible? How is it that universities that should be responsive to the public will, responsive to their donors and alumnae, and responsive to their students--how is it that they can go so far, so fast, without any pushback?

The answer, my fellow Americans, is university endowments, which have grown incredibly large on the backs of subsidies from the taxpayers, and they have made these universities completely independent of any political, financial, or other pressure. That is why the university system in this country has gone so insane.

At just three universities--Harvard, MIT, and Penn--the endowments are approaching $100 billion. That is as large as some of the largest hedge funds in America. In fact, Harvard, Penn, Yale--many of our Ivy League institutions and others beyond that--are little more than hedge funds with universities attached to them as pretend.

This must stop. It must stop because it has enabled political insanity. It must stop because it has burdened an entire generation of Americans with over $1 trillion of student debt--student debt relief that many of my friends on the other side would like plumbers in Ohio to pay for. But I think, if the universities have caused the problem, they ought to pay for it, and if they paid for it, if they didn't have these massive endowments subsidized by taxpayers, then maybe they would be a little bit more responsive to the public will in the process.

I have advanced legislation that would do something very simple: take the hundreds of billions of dollars in large university endowments--not even all university endowments, just the largest university endowments--and apply a tax to them. Right now, they pay a tax that is less than 2 percent on their net income--far lower than many of the working-class members of my own family and far lower than most Americans pay in taxes.

Why is it that we allow these massive hedge funds pretending to be universities to enjoy lower tax rates than most of our citizens--people who are struggling to put food on the table and buy Christmas presents this season? Yet they enjoy a far higher tax rate than these university endowments. It is insane, it is unfair, and I think we ought to fix it in this Chamber.

My friends on the other side will often talk about how the wealthy don't pay their fair share in taxes. If the wealthy don't pay their fair share in taxes, there is no institution in this country that is a bigger offender than these massive endowments that pay almost nothing.

Mr. President, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 3514, which is at the desk. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, reserving the right to object and with respect to my colleague from Illinois, my argument here is very simple, and it is this: The Department of Justice, under Joe Biden and under Merrick Garland's leadership, has become a weapon for political intimidation as opposed to an instrument to prosecute justice in this country.

My colleague from Illinois says that Donald Trump has asked me to do this. He, of course, has no evidence for this fact, and I have never had a conversation with President Trump to this effect.

What I have said publicly and privately and to anyone who will listen is that the Department of Justice should be about justice and not about politics.

This hold policy, which covers two nominees right now and maybe a third coming up to the Department of Justice, is simply to say that this cannot go on. We are a republic, not a banana republic. So long as Merrick Garland prosecutes not just Donald Trump but any number of political opponents--from Catholic fathers of seven to parents protesting peacefully at their school board meetings--so long as the Department of Justice focuses on citizens exercising their rights rather than criminals who are violating the rights of others, I will continue to object, and I do object.

Mr. President, thanks to my colleague from Kansas here. Look, this is pretty simple, and it is pretty obvious. The U.S. Senate would pass aid--much-needed aid--to Israel today, at this very moment, aid the House has already passed. It could go to the President's signature this afternoon if my Democratic colleagues would stand down. But they won't. Many of them here are gathered to push back against our very commonsense proposal to offer support to one of our most important allies as they face an existential threat. And it is important for us to be honest about that fact, to acknowledge that Israel would be getting support from this government tomorrow if our Democratic friends didn't stop it today.

Now, why are they doing this? You will hear over the next hour or so--we will hear--a lot of slogans but very little real discussion about our policy in Ukraine or our policy in Israel. The Democrats have decided that this must be combined into a massive hodgepodge package for it to pass the U.S. Senate. They are doing this because they know that America is united behind Israel, and they want to use our Israeli allies as a political cover in their time of crisis. That is all this is about. You will hear a whole lot, but that is, ultimately, what this is about.

They know they cannot defend President Biden's disastrous, pointless, and, ultimately, directionless Ukraine policy, so they would like to use Israel as a cover.

Now, we have before us a hodgepodge of a supplemental from the President of the United States. It combines a few billion dollars for Ukraine with a few billion dollars to Gazan support--because that makes a ton of sense, right? Let's give money to the Israelis to fight back against Hamas, and then let's give some money to Hamas too. I am sure they won't use it to kill Israelis. It will just be food and medicine, we are assured, even though we know that because Hamas is the functional government in Gaza, we know if we give them support, that support will all the way flow into the war effort. At least, some of it will. Let's be honest about it. Maybe some of it will flow to the Palestinian people. Call me skeptical, but we know that, at least, some of it will flow to the Hamas war effort. Let's be honest about that fact.

It is not just that, though. It is not just a few billion for Hamas, a few billion for Israel; it is a few billion to resettle migrants in the United States of America--because, God knows, we haven't had enough resettlement of migrants in the United States of America over the last couple of years. The fentanyl deaths and the chaos and crime in our country prove it.

And then on top of that, let's add $60 billion to Ukraine, because, of course, we know that Israel and Ukraine are very closely connected. They are so closely connected, in fact, that this Chamber can't have a separate debate on one aid package or the other. And then let's add some money to East Asia on top of that.

We will combine all of this into a $106 billion dollar supplemental aid package that has very, very little--the gross majority of the money has nothing to do with Israel--and we will do it so that we can cover for the fact that the President of the United States has thrown the world into chaos.

What I would like to do is have a separate debate. Divide these questions into separate conversations and debate them separately. And, oh, by the way, use the political will of this Chamber to support our Israeli allies yesterday because they have needed it for much longer than that.

Now, let me close with just a couple of final observations here, and then I will kick it over to my friend, the Senator from Missouri.

I am getting sick, in this Ukraine policy debate, of hearing the same exact slogans repeated. This country has been governed for 30 years on bipartisan foreign policy slogans. Why don't we have a real debate? We are told again and again and again that Vladimir Putin is just like Hitler in the 1930s; if we don't stop him in Ukraine, he is going to march all the way through Europe.

What happened to our education system that the only historical analogy we can use in this Chamber is World War II? What about World War I where competing major powers threw the entire world into conflict because we didn't make smart decisions, we didn't deescalate conflict when we had the opportunity.

Why is it that we think Vladimir Putin, who has struggled to fight against the Ukrainians, is somehow going to be able to march all the way to Berlin when he can't conquer a country immediately to his east?

Why do we think that everything that happens in the United States and in the world in 2023 is Munich almost a century ago?

I am sick of us not having a real debate on this conversation. Vladimir Putin is a bad guy. He should not have invaded Ukraine. But our policy in 2023 has to be different than our policy in the 1940s because the circumstances are different.

As Lincoln said:

As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.

You will also hear that China will be emboldened. China will be terribly emboldened if we don't stop the Russians in Ukraine. Well, call me crazy, but I think the Chinese would be emboldened if we use limited American weapons and give it all to the Ukrainians instead of giving it to the Taiwanese.

Now, maybe you disagree, but let's have the debate, and let's have the real debate on the President's Ukraine policy instead of holding Israel hostage.

There is nothing more shameful than taking an existential crisis-- thousands of dead Israeli civilians--and using them as a fig leaf for a Ukraine policy.

If you want to defend the Ukraine policy, defend it. Let the Israel aid flow through, and let's let it flow through today.

I yield to my good friend from Missouri.

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

I appreciate my colleague from Kansas making a forceful case for why this package is necessary.

We have been told by the President, we have been told by our Israeli allies, and we have been told by a number of national security experts that Israel is in a fight for its life. It is in a fight for its life against not just an enemy in Israel but an enemy--radical Islamist terrorism--that very often has and is planning as we speak to come to our shores and to attack us.

This is a commonsense package. As the Senator from Kansas mentioned, it gives the President the exact amount of money that he asked for to support our Israeli allies. What is different about our bill--what is different about the House's bill that had already passed from what the President requested is twofold.

First of all, this is ready to go. It is ready to go today. If we pass this package today, aid would flow to our Israeli allies immediately. That is reason No. 1 to support it.

The other difference from the President's $106 billion behemoth of a supplemental is that this is about a single problem, because we should be debating single problems in this country. The world is complicated, of course. The world has intertwined complexities. But we should have enough respect for the American people to debate these issues distinctly because they raise separate questions.

Many of my colleagues may forget that a matter of weeks ago--a matter of months ago, there were people in this Chamber, there were people in the United States of America demanding that the State of Israel give money and weapons to the Ukrainians--money and weapons that the Israelis are now using this very moment to defend themselves.

The idea that these policies are not intentioned with one another, the idea that what happens in Russia and Ukraine is separate from what happens in Israel is not just obvious, it is common sense, and it has been borne out by the reality of the last couple of weeks.

My colleagues would like to collapse these packages. Too many of my colleagues would like to collapse these packages because they would like to use Israel as a political fig leaf for the President's Ukraine policy. But the President's Ukraine policy, just like the Israeli policy, should be debated. We should talk about it. We should discuss it. We should separate the cost and benefits and analyze them as distinct policies because that is what the American people deserve of their legislature.

There are many questions we could ask about the Ukraine policy, many issues that have gone completely unanswered.

No. 1: What is our end goal in Ukraine?

You hear commonly that the goal is to throw the Russians out of every inch of Ukrainian territory. Yet, when you talk to the President's own administration in private, they admit that is a strategic impossibility. Let me repeat that. No rational human being in the President's administration believes that it is possible to throw the Russians out of every inch of Ukrainian territory.

So why is that the public justification offered by many advocates of indefinite, unlimited Ukrainian aid? Because this debate is fundamentally dishonest. We are not telling the American people the truth because we know that if we did tell them the truth, they would not support an indefinite flow of money to Ukraine.

What are we doing, ladies and gentlemen? How long is this supposed to go on? How much money are we expected to spend? What is the strategic objective? What are we trying to do? Are we monitoring the fact that we have spent nearly $200 billion, if the supplemental passes--$200 billion to one of the most corrupt countries in the world? Do we have proper assurances that all that money is being spent on the things we tell ourselves it is being spent on? The answer, of course, is no because we have not had a real debate in this Chamber. The American people, I think, should be ashamed of us for that fact.

Let me offer just one final observation here. You have heard in this Chamber--you heard even today--that the Ukraine policy was born of a spirit of bipartisan agreement; that we had this moment where Democrats and Republicans recognized that it was very, very important to help the Ukrainians push back against the Russian attack. Of course, we support and praise our Ukrainian friends. They have done a lot more than many people gave them credit for.

But let's also be honest that for 30 years, Washington, DC, has run on bipartisan foreign policy wisdom, and it has run this country to the ground with $1.7 trillion deficits; war after war after war that has killed thousands of Americans, millions of other people, and has not led to the strategic strength of this country.

It was great bipartisan agreement after September 11 that threw Saddam out of Iraq. Of course, a lot of people celebrated it until right now we realize that Iraq is a client state of Iran. We empowered one of the worst regimes in the world with our bipartisan wisdom.

Maybe what we should have is some bipartisan wisdom that the foreign policy consensus of this country for the last three decades has been a disaster. It has been a disaster for this country. It has been a disaster for our dead marines, Army soldiers, Navy sailors, and Air Force airmen. It has been a disaster for this country's finances, and it has been a disaster for the entire world.

Let's have a real debate. We haven't had one in 30 years.

Mr. President, I yield to my distinguished colleague from Florida.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, the Senator from Illinois has made two comments that I would like to respond to.

First of all, I think it takes a special amount of gall to be from Joe Biden's political party and to complain about the fentanyl crisis that is ravaging not just Ohio but the entire country, because it is Joe Biden's border policies that have invited this fentanyl into our country at record levels. I heard a briefing from the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection today that confirmed that very fact.

Second of all, the Senator said something I actually agree with: that this whole policy that I have implemented on Department of Justice nominees is unprecedented. He mentions that we have in the past in this body, before I got here, approved a number of Department of Justice nominees through unanimous consent.

What the Senator from Illinois doesn't mention is that, in that time, when these nominations sailed through unanimous consent, the Department of Justice was not trying to throw the political rival of the President of the United States in prison.

I object to this because we are living in a banana republic where the President is using his Department of Justice to go after his chief political rival, the person he will appear on the ballot with in about a year.

If the Department of Justice will use these nominations for law instead of politics, I am happy to end this whole policy. But so long as the Department of Justice uses its nominations and uses its personnel to go after its political opponents--from the President of the United States on down--I will object. And, because of that, Madam President, I do object.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1210, and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, we are, unfortunately, in a world where COVID will be with us for the rest of our lives. That is not a good thing. It is not a thing to celebrate, but it is a thing to accept.

What we do not have to accept and what we do not have to make part of our lives is the never-ending cycle of public health panic that greets the rise of a respiratory virus that there is very little we can do to stop or control. What we do not have to accept is airline passengers fighting amongst each other and fighting with flight attendants because the flight attendants are asked to enforce a mask mandate. What we do not have to accept is that we respond to a public health problem with panic and with fear.

We know, of course, that the era of mask mandates caused a lot of problems. It caused problems for our kids. It caused developmental delays for school children. It caused a lot of rancor and a lot of division within our common American family.

If people want to wear masks, of course, they should be able to. But if people don't want to wear masks on airplanes, on transit, they should have that option as well, and that is all that my amendment does. It is narrowly scoped. It applies for the next 11 months, and it applies to transportation cases. And I think it is reasonable to not ask the American people to reenter the era of mask mandates. My amendment does that, and I ask that my colleagues support it.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Reserving the right to object, with respect to my colleague from Illinois, I heard a number of arguments that I somehow changed my tune. What I would say is I haven't changed my tune. The Senator from Illinois keeps making different arguments, and I keep needing to respond to each one of them.

But to restate my fundamental problem here, I will note that one of the consistent criticisms of my hold on Department of Justice nominees is that this is unprecedented; that when Donald Trump was President, we let these nominees sail through, and now I am holding up these nominations to the Department of Justice. I would counter that what is unprecedented is not the hold policy but the Department of Justice attempting to throw its political opponents in jail.

Now, much is made about the political prosecution of Donald Trump. I think that is unjustified, and it is, frankly, scary in the world's greatest democracy to have the political opposition leader prosecuted by the sitting President. That is pretty weird, not something that happens a whole lot in the United States of America--and thank God for that.

But you don't even need to make it about the current President. You can

run down any number of everyday conservatives, people who have been prosecuted, investigated, harassed by this Department of Justice. It should be enforcing the law. It should leave the politics to this Chamber and to the electoral process.

I will continue to object so long as the Department of Justice conducts its business in a highly politicized way. If Merrick Garland or anyone else is listening, please get back to the business of enforcing the law, get out of politics, and then and only then will I release my hold policy.

Because of that, I object.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I want to address a few points that my distinguished colleague, the senior Senator from Illinois, made. I will restate a few of the things I have said.

First of all, he made much about my hold policy being focused on Donald Trump. And, of course, I do think it is preposterous--banana republic stuff--that the President of the United States is trying to throw his opponent in jail in the middle of a Presidential election.

But this isn't just about Donald Trump. This is about a pro-life father of seven who was harassed and arrested in front of his children like a common criminal. This is about parents who are investigated by the FBI for peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights at school board meetings. This is about a Department of Justice that seems far more interested in politics than in justice.

So long as that is true, Senator, I will certainly continue to implement my hold policy.

I want to say a second thing, which is that all I am asking for--all I am asking for--is that my distinguished colleague from Illinois or any other Senator invoke cloture, force a cloture vote, and then force a vote on the Senate floor. I understand that is not easy for a Senate that votes one to four times per day, but the American people--most of them have much harder jobs than we do. I think sticking our thumbs in the air or down to the ground is not too much to ask for people who--as my distinguished colleague said, we asked for this job. We ran for this job. We work pretty hard for this job. I think expecting us to vote on cloture and vote on these nominees on the record is not too much to ask.

Third point that I will make: I have come to really appreciate and look forward to these exchanges with my colleague from Illinois. I will say this, that I think his criticism and I think his concern come from a very legitimate place. He has made this argument a number of times, the argument that there is something unprecedented about what I am doing.

What is it--85 nominees were approved during the Trump administration through unanimous consent or whatever the number is--I don't know; I am going off of memory here--and now we have somehow stopped it, we have changed it.

Well, certainly I have changed it. I have changed it because the Department of Justice has changed. When Donald Trump was President, he was not trying to throw Joe Biden in prison. Joe Biden is President, and he is threatening to throw not just Donald Trump but a whole host of political opponents in prison. That is unprecedented. That is a new thing. Therefore, the way we respond to it must be unprecedented as well.

I acknowledge something the Senator from Illinois is pointing out here. In years past, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have made an argument that most of my fellow conservatives don't agree with but I do agree with. It is that for the Department of Justice or any local law enforcement to work--whether it is State, Federal, or county, city--it needs to have legitimacy; it needs to have the trust of the people.

I have talked to a number of people just in the last few months who have told me that they have witnessed things in their community, but they wouldn't call the Department of Justice because they don't trust the Department of Justice.

I know Senator Durbin and others might say: Well, look, you are a conservative Republican from Ohio. Of course you talk to the sorts of people who are skeptical of the Department of Justice.

But I would ask him to extend the same courtesy to my voters that I would extend to all voters across this country whether they like me or not.

When people don't believe that law enforcement can be trusted, public safety will suffer. Our Democratic colleagues have made this argument in the past, speaking about other prosecutors and other communities, and I actually think they are right. Whether you agree with the reasons why a given community is mistrustful of law enforcement, mistrust of law enforcement destroys one of the foundations of the Republic. You cannot have application of law if the people don't trust the people who are doing the application. That is what is different about the situation we find ourselves in.

I don't like that the Department of Justice has become what it has become. I don't like--again, set aside President Trump. I am pro-Trump. A number of my colleagues are anti-Trump. Set aside the concerns about the Presidential election. What about parents who are protesting at their school board meetings for their kids? Should they be investigated by the FBI? Since they are being investigated by the FBI, doesn't that suggest that something is broken at the leadership of the Department of Justice? I think the answer is yes, and I think that answer threatens the foundation of law enforcement and equal justice under the law in this country.

I will continue the hold policy so long as a broken Department of Justice cares more about politics than it does justice. Because of that, I object.

Madam President, in reserving the right to object, let me address a few of my distinguished colleague from Illinois' comments.

First of all, while it is true that my hold policy regarding the Department of Justice is not focused on any particular nominee, I do think this particular nominee is particularly troublesome, and let me just talk about why.

Ms. Perry is a figure who served as the chief ethics officer in the Cook County State's Attorney's Office during the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax. You may remember that from a few years ago. This is when a person accused people of engaging in a false hate crime, took a ton of State resources to investigate it, and it turned out the entire thing was fraudulent and meant to gin up publicity for Mr. Smollett.

Everyone pretty much agrees that Ms. Foxx, who was the State's attorney at the time, engaged in some pretty unethical behavior, and Ms. Perry effectively rubberstamped it. Is she the sort of person who could be entrusted to impartially administer justice in the Biden- Garland Department of Justice? I don't think she is. So I will be voting against her nomination. I also object to giving a streamlined confirmation process for her.

Now, the Senator from Illinois is apparently hell-bent on coming before the Chamber every single week to litigate what I think and believe is a corrupt and politicized Department of Justice. He makes much--and he makes much every single time we engage in this exercise-- about the fact that the Department of Justice has never had this kind of hold policy placed on it before. I agree. This is a new and unique circumstance.

What is much different about the Trump administration Department of Justice and the Merrick Garland-Joe Biden Department of Justice is that Donald Trump never tried to throw his political opponents in prison. This is crazy, banana republic stuff, and I will not stand for it.

I will continue to hold these nominations, and I will continue to push back against the politicization of justice.

Finally, let me just say that what I have asked for and what I will continue to ask for is that these nominees go through regular order. The Senator knows well what everybody else knows, which is that, as one Senator, I cannot prevent the confirmation of these nominees however much I might like to. What I can do is force us to go through regular order.

I asked for a vote, Senator Durbin. You can invoke cloture. We can vote on cloture. We can then do a recorded vote. That is what we have done with many, many nominees, and because of the corruption of Merrick Garland's Department of Justice, it is what I ask with this nominee and with any in the future.

Because of that, Madam President, I object.

Madam President, reserving the right to object. I will continue my hold on unanimous consent for Department of Justice nominations so long as I feel like the Department of Justice is being used for politics instead of justice.

My arguments on this point have already been made, but I will repeat them for the benefit of anybody who hasn't heard me before. From a Catholic pro-life father of seven who was arrested in front of his children like a common criminal for exercising his First Amendment rights to parents who were investigated by the FBI for exercising their First Amendment right to protest at a school board meeting to the leader of the opposition and the likely challenger to President Joe Biden, former President Trump, we have a Department of Justice that has run amok with a focus on politics instead of on justice.

Now, my colleagues make some good points. I agree with my colleagues that U.S. attorneys play an important role. I agree with my colleagues that we need a Department of Justice that is fully staffed to do its job. But I don't think the solution to the politicization of the Department of Justice is to let these guys through on a glide path. I think it is to provide proper consent, proper advisement, and proper scrutiny of each one of these nominees which we can't let them do if we allow them to sail through unanimous consent.

I will continue this hold, but let me just make one final point before I allow my colleague to respond.

I am the new guy, and I recognize that I am a little naive when it comes to matters of the procedures of the U.S. Senate. But I have had a lot of jobs in my life; and yesterday we passed one vote and today we have passed zero votes. The time that we have spent debating whether we should have unanimous consent over these nominations, we could actually use to vote on these nominations and end this charade and call it out for what it is. If we believe that these nominees must go forward, let's just have a vote on it. Allow me to scrutinize them. Allow my colleagues to vote them up or down. That is a totally reasonable thing to ask of this Chamber and to ask of this leadership; and because of that, I object.

My position is that we should have a full Senate vote on each one of these judicial nominations, of these Justice Department nominations. My position is that we shouldn't let them sail through with unanimous consent.

I would like a record vote for all Justice Department nominations in moving forward, yes.

I don't know that, but I believe my colleague from Illinois in that that is how it worked. What is different now, compared to then, is that we have a Department of Justice that has been weaponized against its political opponents.

I understand much of what you said, Senator Durbin, and I appreciate your passion for this issue. My heart goes out to your friends who lost somebody to fentanyl. I, too, know a lot of people who have lost a loved one or a child to a fentanyl overdose.

But what will facilitate the effective administration of justice in this country is for the American people to see the Department of Justice as being focused on justice instead of politics. That is what this is fundamentally about. Do we have a Department of Justice that has the trust of the American people?

Senator Durbin, I don't think that any of my Democratic colleagues could look at public polling and not admit that the Department of Justice has lost a substantial amount of public confidence just in the last year.

How can we have an effective administration of justice if we fill the Department of Justice with people who are perceived, rightfully or not, as political actors by the people who receive that justice?

OK.

I have two responses to that, Senator.

First of all, you appreciate as well as I do that we have had zero votes today. I don't control how many people we vote on. In fact, I believe you do under the Senate procedures and the Senate rules. If it is so important to confirm these folks, bring them up to the floor for a vote.

Yes. As the Senator from Illinois, I assume, knows well, I am not the only person who is holding some of these nominations. I am happy to grant consent to vote on the ones where I am the only hold, but where I have other colleagues, I can't release the holds for other colleagues.

Senator, I am here representing my colleagues. They object. I am not going to release their holds on their behalf.

Senator Durbin, you know the Senate procedures better than I do, and you could certainly bring these folks up for a vote later today, and all of us would have to vote for them.

Why won't you do that?

Madam President, as the Senator knows well, my colleagues have been given no notice, and they have no sense that this is being done. I am not going to release their objections on their behalf as the Senator from Illinois knows well. I am happy to release my own objection, but I am not going to release theirs.

Therefore, I object on their behalf.

My apologies.

Will the Senator repeat that.

Senator Padilla, I would be happy to do that as I am the only person holding 266. As I have said repeatedly, I want these nominations to have a vote so as to be scrutinized by the full Senate, and I am the only Senator holding 266, Ms. McGrath. I am happy to release the hold there and have the--excuse me--not release the holds on the unanimous consent request but certainly to bring this before the full Senate for a vote.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

The Senator from Illinois knows well, I cannot and will not give consent to the confirmation of new officials at the Department of Justice.

My objection is not specific to the qualifications or the particular individuals that have been nominated. My objection is, instead, to the fact that we live in an era where the Department of Justice is used for politics as much as justice. And that is unacceptable.

The DOJ is, and always has been, defined by its most consequential investigations and prosecutions. This DOJ is thus defined by its selective prosecution of the leader of the opposition--the man running against Joe Biden to become President of the United States. Of course, I am speaking of Donald Trump.

Now, this unprecedented double standard selectively prosecuting Donald Trump, leaving the President and his family completely untouched, is a reason why the Department of Justice's public confidence has completely collapsed.

A recent NBC News survey showed that 35 percent of the American people approve of the Department of Justice, which is a radical decline from where it was just a couple of years ago.

It is the constitutional duty of this body to provide advice and consent to high-level DOJ nominees. My real fear here--I don't want to be here, I don't want to be objecting to these nominees--but what I like much less is the fact these nominees will be used by the Attorney General for politics over justice.

My colleague might say--and he might say this to Senator Tuberville, who has a similar hold on Department of Justice nominees--that this is extraordinary, that what we are doing as Republicans in objecting to the unanimous consent of these nominations is extraordinary. And I agree it is extraordinary. But what is more extraordinary is this moment in time where the leader of the opposition is being prosecuted by the President of the United States, and the Department of Justice again and again and again is using its powers to go after people from pro-life activists to members of the community who are just exercising their rights.

I would love to live in a country where the Department of Justice does not engage in selective prosecution. I would very much like if the Department of Justice focused on the work of law enforcement instead of politics. Until it does, I will object to these nominations.

I will object to giving unanimous consent. For these reasons, I object.