Floor Statements

Mr. President, reserving the right to object. This resolution itself and the wording that it has in this resolution says it is the sense of the Senate that every person has the basic right to emergency healthcare, including abortion care.

Let me be very, very specific on this. We had a hearing today in the Finance Committee where this same subject was addressed. We had ob-gyns from both perspectives on this, those who perform abortions and those who have a moral objection to it. We had a very good argument to be able to lay some facts out to be able to walk through this, with two sets of attorneys there to be able to walk through the law.

Here is what became very clear during that conversation this morning in that open hearing. There is no State in America in which a woman faces persecution or prosecution for having an abortion. No State criminalizes miscarriage. No State criminalizes removing an ectopic pregnancy. No States prohibits lifesaving care for the mother. No State requires a woman to be actively dying in order for her doctor to care for her.

We heard story after story about doctors being concerned that they may face this because they are hearing political rhetoric--political rhetoric like Vice President Harris in a speech that she said recently--where she said women were being arrested and facing prosecution for experiencing miscarriages. That is not true.

So all of this rhetoric that is being put out there is making doctors afraid, but it was very clear from the conversation in law that none of those things are actually true. Every physician prior to the Dobbs decision--when there were limitations on abortion across the country and post-Dobbs decision, when every single State is making those decisions--allowed physicians in an ER to be able to make lifesaving decisions for the mother and the child. Every doctor has already the ability to be able to make that decision to be able to protect the life of the mother. They have the protections to be able to do that.

So this is a false claim that somehow what happened in the Dobbs decision and what is happening in the States is limiting that. It is actually the political rhetoric that is making people afraid.

What also came out during the hearing this morning was the very real risk of chemical abortions. We have recently had tragic situations where women used the chemical abortion pills that they are being told are as safe as Tylenol, and that it has life-threatening and in some cases, recently, life-taking consequences. Chemical abortion pills are not Tylenol, yet they are being sold as that.

And what we are seeing is more and more cases of the diminishing of ``this is no big deal to be able to end this pregnancy'' when they haven't seen a doctor because the Biden administration is now saying you don't have to see a physician. So the woman doesn't know if she has an ectopic pregnancy or not. If she takes the chemical abortion pill while she has an ectopic pregnancy, she is at risk. But the Biden administration is saying: You don't have to see a doctor. They can just mail it to you. It is just as safe as Tylenol when it is not.

We are also not being tested for their blood type to be able to make sure it doesn't affect future pregnancies during this chemical abortion. And they are not also determining by sonogram how far along the mom is in this process because there are limitations to this where it becomes more and more dangerous.

All those things are restrictions that used to be there, that the Biden administration has taken away to say: No, we want more people to have access to chemical abortions. But it is making it more dangerous for women. And we have seen this recently.

So we want to engage in a conversation about how can we actually put some of those basic humane doctor-requested restrictions in there to make sure we are protecting the lives of all those women. That is a better conversation for us to be able to have. To say: What is it the FDA actually said was appropriate in the past, and what can we do to be able to protect the lives of women?

So, yes, I object to this resolution based on the wording and what we are doing. But, yes, we should be able to continue to have this conversation because there is a real concern that more and more doctors are afraid to do basic healthcare in an ER because more and more people are laying rhetoric out there that they are going to be arrested, and that is not true.

There has not been a single physician in the country that has been arrested based on actually performing lifesaving care for mom in any ER room in the country.

With that, I object.

Mr. President, it is the middle of September. The end of the funding year is actually just over 10 days away. The Senate has brought up exactly zero appropriations bills, although the Committee on Appropriations has worked in a bipartisan way to be able to get those through the Committee on Appropriations. But zero of them have come to the floor for a vote, which means we are facing a continuing resolution in the next week and another one of those hanging deadlines out there.

We could have worked on it last week, except last week, there were just judges, and this week, it was some tax judges and other folks on the docket and some political votes that came up. So we didn't work on it last week, and we didn't work on it this week. We

didn't work on it 2 months ago or 3 months ago when they had already been out of committee. They just haven't come up at all.

So once again, the Nation is whispering about, will we have another government shutdown based on the fact that Congress has not finished its work. Quite frankly, even during this September, we have not even brought up appropriations bills for a vote on the floor at all.

I have come to this floor multiple times to say that this is not the way it should run. Quite frankly, a hundred of us would all nod our heads and say it is not the way it should run.

I continue to be able to bring to this body a very simple idea that Maggie Hassan and I--my colleague from New Hampshire--have had together for years now that, if it ever came to the floor, would pass. We have plenty of support on both the Republican and Democrat side of the aisle to be able to deal with ending government shutdowns. It is a simple idea that she and I have; that is, if we get to a moment like this that we have not finished our work, the government doesn't have a shutdown; we have, actually, a shut-in where all of us have to stay here and continue our work. Federal employees and the Nation are held harmless, but we have to actually finish the work.

We have multitrillion dollars in debt and little to no conversation here about it, and we won't have any in September. Now, it looks like we will punt this for several months. My question is, Will we have it then? Probably not because it may punt to November or December or it may punt into next year. We haven't decided yet.

When that is decided, there will be another deadline sitting there, and there will be more things to do during that time period, whether it is the end of this year, because there are so many unaddressed things that have not happened this year that have to be addressed, so they will be crammed into the end of the year, so there will be no serious conversation then; or it will be punted into next year, and there are so many things under a new Presidential term that have to be done, there won't be any serious conversation then.

So my simple question is, When do we ever have this conversation on something we all acknowledge is a problem? But instead of working on what we all know is the big issue, we are instead voting on judges and chitchatting and pretending it is not a problem when it is.

We are not voting on the national defense authorization either. That has come out of committee already on wide bipartisan support months ago, but it has yet to come to the floor of the Senate. My understanding now of the latest rumor is that there is no plan to actually bring it to the floor of the Senate, that there seems to be an intent to say: We will just not ever bring it to the Senate and just kind of pretend we did and then move to a conference report at the end of year.

One of the single most important bills that we do during the course of the year is our funding for Americans' tax dollars in our National Defense Act. So far, we have not done any of the 12 bills dealing with our funding, and apparently, we are not going to do the National Defense Act this month, next month; maybe November, December if they can form an agreement with Members of the House behind the scenes. So the first time we may ever see the bill may be after some deal has already been struck, and we will have no amendments, no conversation; just the single biggest thing that we work on during the course of the year--national defense--landing on the floor of the Senate, saying: Vote up or down. Does anyone think that is the way it should operate? Anyone at all?

In this bill, I fought for things like Tinker Air Force Base. It is the largest sustainment base in all of the Air Force, and it happens to be in Oklahoma. There are serious things that are there.

We are in the transition between two different airplanes, the E-3 to the E-7. The E-7 has not come on fast enough, and the E-3 was already fading away, not being sustained. So in this bill, it actually says: Hold on, Air Force. The other platform is delayed. We can't give up this one until that one is on board.

So it is a literal national defense issue to say: We have to be able to resolve this. It is Congress speaking into what we should speak into in a very practical area to say these are things that need to be solved.

We have personnel issues, like pay raises for our military. We have issues for spouses and their work. We have all kinds of things that are built into this bill dealing with our different installations around the world and the fight that is happening in Europe and the Middle East and our preparation all around the world to be able to secure the United States. But we are not talking about that. We are having votes on judges instead. And apparently, from what I am hearing rumor of, we may not have any talk about it at all on the floor of the Senate.

There is a bill that has been moving through committee dealing with energy permitting--it seems to have bipartisan support--saying we have to fix the process of how we are doing energy transmission for transmission lines and also for pipelines and basic energy needs.

It is interesting. Ten years ago, I would have people catch me and say: We really want to be able to get renewable energy. We want renewable energy. We need that for our manufacturing. That is what we want to do.

Do you know what I hear now from manufacturers? We just need energy, period, because our electric grid is being strained across the entire country because we have more data centers, because we have AI coming on board, which uses a tremendous amount of electricity. We have electric vehicles that are coming on board, which use a tremendous amount of electricity. In the process, we have more and more regulations slowing down the production of more and more energy. We are not keeping up, and we all know it. Yet a bill to deal with energy permitting languishes. I have no idea, after it comes out of committee, if we will ever even discuss it on the floor of the Senate, although it has been worked on.

We have healthcare issues. We all talk about the importance of healthcare and trying to be able to bring down the cost for consumers. Well, guess what, the Finance Committee did protracted, multiyear work on a bipartisan basis to be able to move a bill dealing with pharmacy benefit managers to bring down the cost not of 10 drugs but of all drugs and to be able to make it more available--and not just available by mail, available at pharmacies, especially rural pharmacies that are struggling under the oppression of the pharmacy benefit managers.

Just this year, this calendar year--middle of September to January-- just this year, 2,275 pharmacies in America have closed. Do you know why? That pharmacy benefit manager bill that we have that has been out of committee on a wide bipartisan vote is still sitting there not even debated on this floor while 2,275 pharmacies closed because, apparently, we needed to do other things.

So we have ignored more than 2,000 pharmacies closing, many of them in rural areas, because we wouldn't even debate the policy here. If we brought it to this floor, it would pass tomorrow with overwhelming support on both sides of the aisle, but it has not been brought up.

There is a farm bill that is out there that was due last year, so there was an extension into this year. Well, guess what, that farm bill expires now within the month, and there is no debate still about the farm bill that was extended from last year into this year on where it is going to go.

Farmers that are dealing with reference prices right now and inflation and what they are facing for the cost of fuel, the cost of fertilizer, the cost of equipment--as that continues to accelerate, Congress continues to ignore bringing up the farm bill, as if our food is just going to appear at the grocery store.

These are big issues. The reason we all were elected was to work on these big issues, but so far this year, these issues won't even come to the floor of the Senate for debate. It is not that they have been brought up and voted down; they are not even brought up.

My simple challenge is: It is the middle of September. Why aren't we working on the budget? Why aren't we working on the national defense authorization? Why aren't we working on energy and the cost of permitting for energy? Why aren't we working on

lower-priced prescription drugs? Why aren't we working on the farm bill? All of those had wide bipartisan support coming out of committee--all of them--but none of them have been brought up here on this floor.

Maybe it is so everything can just get crammed into the end of the year and get past ``the election.'' But maybe we need to reset our priorities. Let's get the things done that the American people expect us to work on, the hard things, the things that are important, whether it is healthcare, energy, ag policy, the budget, the national defense. Let's address the things that should be addressed, and let's get started. I would be OK with starting today, but let's at least address them next week. But from my understanding of next week's schedule, they are not coming up then either.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I come to the floor today to be able to talk about an issue that, apparently, there is a large belief among some that doesn't exist. So I wanted to be able to pull the veil back and to say this is actually an issue. And I can't believe I even have to have this conversation. And, in many ways, it is an incredibly difficult conversation to be able to have.

During the Presidential debate that happened just a few weeks ago now, there was a debate, ostensibly, between Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump. It ended up being a debate between Vice President Harris, David Muir, Linsey Davis, all against Donald Trump.

There were multiple moments where the ABC moderators decided they were going to debate or correct Donald Trump when he spoke, and it became this very odd interchange that all America watched and thought: Well, that doesn't seem like a debate in that sense.

One of those moments was a really odd moment. There was a question about abortion to President Trump. That is a fair conversation for the moderators to bring up a question and to be able to talk about it. He has openly talked a lot about abortion. And, obviously, the vote that happened in the Supreme Court with the Dobbs decision has highlighted a lot of that conversation nationally since his Presidency.

President Trump, during that debate, talked about children who are aborted away the eighth or ninth month and then some even after. He mentioned that, to which the ABC News moderator, Linsey Davis, responded: ``There is no State in the country where it's legal to kill a baby after it's born'' and then immediately turned to Vice President Harris, where, literally, she jumped in to be able to debate the President and to try to ``correct'' him.

The problem is, there was no one to be able to moderate her in that debate and to make the simple statement, there are not only States in America where that can happen, there are States in America where that does happen.

In this simple map of the United States, this lists out the States where there are strong protections for a child after birth. Now, this is not an abortion; this is a botched abortion that has occurred. This is a woman who went in with the intent of having an abortion, late term. The child was fully delivered, and in medical practice in many of these States that are listed here, the child is fully delivered during the abortion. And if the child cries, breathes, the practice is to back away and to allow the child to slowly die on the table because the intent was an abortion. So everyone just steps back in the facility and watches the child die on the table, however long that takes.

Now, before people say that doesn't occur, eight States have a requirement--eight States have a requirement--that, in an abortion, if it is botched and the child is actually fully delivered, and they are still alive, they have to report it. And in eight States--only those States that actually do that--there were 277 cases of that.

Let me give you an example. This was several years ago. She is now a beautiful young woman, a young woman named Melissa Ohden. She actually didn't know until she was an adult that she was actually the product of a botched abortion. Her mom, who was a teenager, had been compelled to have an abortion by some family members around her. She didn't want to do it, but she did. It was a late-term abortion.

She went in to have the abortion, had the abortion, and after the abortion was over, one of the nurses looking through the ``medical waste'' that was there on the table, saw the young girl crying. She scooped up the infant, took the infant on her own to an emergency room. The emergency room personnel said: There is no way she will have a full, meaningful life. But they took care of her because she was in the emergency room.

I know Melissa Ohden. She is a remarkable lady--no disabilities, no other challenges other than the knowledge that she was supposed to ``have been aborted.'' But there she is alive.

There are a lot of women who are scattered around the country who are all finding each other online telling the story that they are a product of a botched abortion; that they were born alive, and they were given medical care when ``they weren't supposed to be there at all.'' They are now, through one rare benefit of social media, finding each other and connecting in conversation. Not only is this happening, it is happening all over the country.

I am fully aware that the ABC News moderator thinks this doesn't happen anywhere, but not only is it happening, it has happened before; it is happening probably today.

The question that this body has not resolved is, What are we going to do about it?

This is not about reducing abortion. Quite frankly, the bill that I am bringing and I want to bring for unanimous consent today won't reduce abortions at all in America.

I would tell you, it would be my preference to be able to stand for the value of every single child in America and to say there is not a child in America that is disposable; that children in America are all valuable--not some disposable, some valuable--all valuable.

This is not a question of are we going to legalize or not legalize abortion. This is about a fully delivered child crying on a table, if they will get medical care or if we will back up and watch them die. That is the question before us--and what we are going to do about that.

There has been a lot of conversation about this of late, in the last several years. Let me give you an example of several of these States. New York State recently passed a law that not only allows abortion all the way until the ninth month, but they protect--if a child is fully delivered and is breathing on the table, and it was a botched abortion, that they would be protected, quote-unquote, to be able to die there.

When this bill was passed, just a couple of years ago, in New York, the New York Legislature cheered--cheered--at protecting the rights of a child to lie on the table and die after a delivery. They lit up the Freedom Tower in New York City to celebrate the passage of that bill. That is in New York.

In Minnesota, 9 years ago, in a wide bipartisan vote, they determined that they should actually track how many of these botched abortions happen; that they should actually keep track of how many occur like this, that a child is actually born alive. It is rare, but they wanted just to be able to keep track of it with basic records.

So in a bipartisan vote in the Minnesota Legislature, signed by the Governor, they passed a law, 9 years ago, to track how often this occurs. In the State of Minnesota, they determined, over the next several years, that there were 24 children that were born alive during a botched abortion. Now, again, that is not many, but I bet it matters to those 24. But for those 24 children that Minnesota discovered, this is not really a myth. This is really occurring. They tracked it.

The Governor of Minnesota, the current Vice Presidential candidate on the Democratic side, worked to get a repeal of that law, and the simple repeal was: We don't want reporting anymore.

Literally, it was: We are finding out this is happening; so in Minnesota, we have declared we don't want to know that this is happening anymore.

That is unbelievable. That is old-school, put your hands over your ears and scream ``la, la, la, la'' kind of stuff. That is not what we should do as a nation. We should actually know about it and then determine, through debate in this body, what we are going to do about it.

Madam President, I am getting close to a conclusion here. May I ask unanimous consent to be permitted to speak just 3 more minutes, until we can wrap this up, and then prior to the scheduled rollcall vote, for Senator Britt to have 1 minute just to be able to conclude.

Madam President, so here is the issue. We have brought this bill to the floor several times before. In fact, we have had some bipartisan support for this bill several times before. The bill is very, very simple. The bill says: When the doctor performs an abortion but the child is born alive, instead of actually born dead, that care would be provided to that child the same as any other child that is born.

Now, we are fully aware that many abortion clinics do not have a full hospital that is also attached to them. But we are also very aware that if there is a problem with the mom in an abortion clinic, they take her to a hospital. This is a simple statement to say: If a child is born alive, which we know 100 percent this has happened--even in States like Minnesota, that this is happening--what is America going to do with a fully delivered, crying baby on the table? Will they get healthcare or will they not get healthcare? That is all this bill does.

It doesn't reduce abortions, unfortunately. It doesn't do that. It doesn't change abortion processes across the country. It doesn't do that. It just says: When the abortion is unsuccessful and the child is actually delivered instead, we are going to get medical care to that child. That is what I bring in this, and it is absolutely, to me, the simplest of all possible statements to make.

So, Madam President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 204 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask consent 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, I ended up being a topic of conversation for the past month and a half or so in a lot of political conversations about immigration and the border. So I want to be able to come to this body and to say the immigration issues are still unresolved, but there has been a lot of rewriting of what actually has happened in the past year and all the negotiations.

Vice President Harris made a comment publicly just a few weeks ago, when she said:

Let me be clear. After decades in law enforcement, I know

the importance of safety and security, especially at our

border. Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and

conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill

in decades.

I mean no disrespect to the Vice President, but we had 4 months of negotiations. She neither initiated those negotiations nor participated in a single second of those negotiations--not one second.

The Vice President's staff was never involved in any of the negotiations. The negotiations took 4 months because the people that sat down at the table all determined: We are in a very bad place. We need to resolve the chaos that is happening at our southern border.

For the first 6 weeks of those negotiations, the White House refused to participate at all in the negotiation--either from the President's staff, the President, or the Vice President or Vice President's staff. So for the first 6 weeks of the 4 months of negotiations, the White House didn't want to discuss it. After 6 weeks, the White House then got involved in the negotiations. So it was three Senators and the White House to be able to walk through that.

Then, again for the next 3 months of our negotiations, it was a constant fight to get anything agreed to to secure our southern border. What we came up with and was the final agreement wasn't everything that I wanted, but it was enough to, at least, begin to make a change in what was happening at our southern border.

It was a pretty straightforward process. Asylum is very difficult to achieve. Only about 3 percent of the people that actually go through the hearings actually achieve asylum, but you don't find out that until usually 6 or 8 years after you have already been and have already gone through this long process.

So now we have thousands of people crossing our border asking for asylum, not because they believe they qualify but because they know they will stay here somewhere between 6 and 10 years while they wait for the hearing. And they, at least, get a decade in America, and then many of them then disappear.

So what we could get to agreement was, when you cross the border, you would cross the border--first person each day, they would have a much faster screening than would take hours or days, and they would be screened at the standard that was at the end. So instead of waiting 6 or 8 years or 10 years to get that final decision, you would get it rapidly.

So the first person that would cross each day would cross, would be quickly screened under a brandnew process, and then 97 percent of them would be deported immediately because they don't qualify for asylum, and everyone knows the joke. So first day, first person: You cross, quickly screened under a new process, deported immediately.

But if we got 5,000 people crossing, we don't have enough staff to screen that many people, so we created a border emergency authority that if you cross the border and you have got 5,000 people flooding the border and we don't have the staffing to do it, no one gets screened; you just get arrested and deported. So first person: cross, screened, deported. If we are overwhelmed by the cartels with high numbers, you just are deported immediately, and no one is screened. That is what we could finally come up with as an agreement.

Now, I have to tell you, I felt like that would dramatically slow the flow at our southern border and it would deal with the core issue that is the abuse of asylum. But there were a lot of issues I couldn't get agreement on that, quite frankly, many of my colleagues on the Republican side were very frustrated that we couldn't make progress on, some of those very commonsense things; for instance, if you are going to request asylum, you have to request asylum at a port of entry.

You can't come across the border between the ports of entry in the open desert or swim the river and then say when you get caught: Oh, I want asylum. It was obvious you were trying to sneak into the country.

And we were saying: If you are a true asylum seeker and you believe you are requesting asylum, come to a port of entry. We thought that was a pretty commonsense thing to say: We will expedite your process to asylum if you come to a port, not if we have to chase you in the desert. I couldn't get that agreement. My Democratic colleagues would not agree to that. That was a great frustration on the Republican side.

We wanted to be able to require the ``Remain in Mexico'' program. The Supreme Court had already spoken and said that had to be done. It was not being done. So that if we were flooded with people, they are not waiting for 8 or 10 years here; they are actually waiting in another country to be able to come through the process. They would still get their appointment. My Democratic colleagues would have none of that.

We also wanted an end to the two big parole programs that the Biden administration has created. One of them is called CBP ONE. That is, if you come to a port of entry and tell DHS ahead of time ``I'm coming,'' then DHS, when you arrive at the port of entry, will quickly give you paperwork, will give you a work permit that day, and will release you into the country for a decade as you await your hearing.

It was a fast-track process into the country that was actually inviting more people to illegally cross into the country. We now have 1,500 people a day that are coming through that process. We have no idea if they qualify for asylum because they are not being screened for asylum.

We wanted an end to that process because we felt like it is actually inviting more illegal immigration rather than trying to deter it. And it is not just us saying that. The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security made this statement. They felt that CBP did not gather intelligence or conduct sufficient analysis of data generated by CBP ONE appointments to protect against fraudulent applications and misuse and public safety threats.

That is not us saying that; that is the inspector general saying that. We wanted an end to that program. Through the negotiations that were long and hard, I got agreement that that program would end, that we would put a stop to that program.

But there was a second program called the CHNV program. This is 30,000 people a month that are coming in. These are folks from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela--30,000 a month. This was another program that was wholly created out of the Biden administration that has never existed in any other administration. It was a parole authority to say: If you will contact us before you come from one of these countries and someone here in the United States will ``sponsor'' you or at least say ``I know them,'' then you can get into the country and be paroled into the country. This is not even an asylum request. This is just you are just released into the country.

We wanted to have a stop to that program as well because there are all kinds of issues with that program. But that one, my Democratic colleagues would not agree to and said: No. We will stop the CBP ONE parole program. We won't stop the slowdown of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans coming in, in very high numbers.

By the way, the deal was supposedly that we would take in 30,000 of those folks and Mexico would take in 30,000 of those folks. The problem is, we have asked for the numbers that Mexico has taken in; and, so far, the State Department won't give us an answer, and DHS won't give us an answer. As far as we can tell, the Mexican side has been zero while we have been 30,000.

Now, we felt there was a problem with the way the program was being run. And by the way, again, we are not the only ones that think that. DHS itself shut down that program for part of this summer because they found what they called egregious fraud problems; that is, some sponsors sponsoring dozens of people to be able to come in and an overflow of individuals not being properly screened. There are major problems with the program. Unfortunately, the program has restarted again.

Now, why do I walk through this? I keep hearing this rewrite of history that it was President Trump himself that told all Republicans: It is a great deal, but don't do it. Now, there is no doubt President Trump made a statement that it is not enough. He wanted everything in it, and he said: Don't do it. No question that statement was made, but no question that belief was already shared by several folks on my side of the aisle saying we wanted an end to all these parole programs. We also want to stop applying between ports of entry and, if you are going to apply, only at ports of entry.

And several of my colleagues said the House bill--that was H.R. 2--it was that or nothing. They wanted everything or nothing. And suddenly, this whole system falls apart.

I stood here at this exact same spot saying to my colleagues on my side of the aisle: We should do as much as we can do. This is as much as we can get right now with a Democratic Senate, with a Democratic White House. Let's do all we can to be able to stop it.

Obviously, I didn't win that part of the debate, but I also don't want people rewriting history and what actually occurred in the debate because there were serious issues that were unresolved in the bill that are still out there.

My frustration is, all of it is still out there. We still have the same issue with asylum that this bill would have fixed. We still have the same issue between ports of entry. That is still unfixed. And we still have not one of those parole programs but both of those parole programs happening.

Interestingly enough, in the last couple of months, the numbers at the border have started slowing down. It has been very interesting. I don't know if you noticed even during the Presidential debate that happened earlier this week, ABC News asked Vice President Harris: The number of border crossings for illegal immigration was very high during your first 3 years, but they seem to have slowed down the closer we are getting to the election. Why?

She actually didn't answer that question at all. She totally skipped it. And ABC News didn't follow up with her, shockingly, to be able to do a followup question to say: You didn't answer the initial question. You said everything else but why.

Well, I can give you a couple of things on that. Two things have occurred in the past few months: Mexico has had their elections, and we are having ours. So suddenly, Mexico is starting to enforce their border a little better, and this administration is enforcing the border a little better with the authorities they already have.

Now, when I say ``a little better,'' it has gone from 5,000 people illegally crossing a day to about 3,400 people illegally crossing a day. That number is still five times what were crossing during the Obama administration.

My request has been the same for President Biden all along: If you won't enforce the border the same way President Trump enforced it, at least enforce it the same way President Obama enforced it. Under President Obama, we had half a million people illegally crossing a year. Now, we have 2\1/2\ million people illegally crossing in a year. Same law--same exact law, enforced completely differently.

Why is this an issue? It is not just an issue in our economy. It is not just an issue in our schools. It is not just an issue in crime in our communities. It is also a national security issue.

In June, the FBI picked up eight ISIS-affiliated individuals that were in our country, that had come across our southern border and had asked for asylum. They were from Tajikistan. And they had gotten the quick review at the border and had been released, like hundreds of thousands of others had that same month. But these eight were different. They are ISIS-affiliated. And they scattered around the country to Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles and began their flight. Thankfully, our FBI picked them up. But of the 2\1/2\ million people that have crossed just last year, how many did we miss?

I have been very outspoken on this issue. We moved from the border issue being just an issue about how do we manage our own border and illegal immigration to a national security issue.

Madam President, 3,400 people a day illegally crossing our border is still an epic high number. And while the media has looked away because now it is no longer 5,000 a day, 3,400 a day is still way too high. Our system is still overwhelmed, and we still have tens of thousands of people coming in of what this administration calls special-interest aliens. That is folks that, by their own definition, are considered a national security threat. But there are so many, we don't have the opportunity to be able to follow all of them.

That was those eight that were picked up that were ISIS-affiliated. They had been designated as special-interest aliens. Thankfully, we were later able to find them and pick them up, but there are thousands of them currently in the country. Hopefully, they mean us no harm, but currently we have no idea.

That is something that needs to change. National security should not be a partisan issue. I understand it is an election year. This should not be a partisan issue. This should be a how-do-we-fix-this issue; this should be a how-do-we-resolve-this issue. And if the numbers are going down after I was told that the numbers were sky-high because of climate change--that was really what I was told by DHS. In fact, the White House, in 2021, put out a report on climate change and migration, saying that we have dramatically increased numbers because of climate change, not because of lack of border enforcement.

My response to them now is: Well, if the numbers are going down at the border, apparently the climate is getting better worldwide because the numbers are coming down. It is not an issue of climate migration; it is an issue of enforcement at our southern border. If that occurs, the numbers go down. If it doesn't, the numbers skyrocket because we are the United States of America, and people want to be able to be in the greatest country in the world. And I don't blame them.

We, as Americans, though, also have the right to be able to know we live in security and the people that are coming into our country, we know who they are, we know where they are from, and we verified any kind of criminal background that may or may not be there. That is not an unfair request to be able to make.

One last thing. Currently, the House has passed what they call the SAVE Act, and there is an ongoing debate in the House right now how this will fit. The SAVE Act is a pretty simple thing. The SAVE Act just says if you are not legally present in the United States, you can't vote.

Now, it is already Federal law that no one who is a noncitizen can vote in Federal elections. That is already the law. That is the trust part though. There is no verify portion of this. One of the basic principles of trust is verify. Right now, we are all trust. It is against the law, but there is no verification.

The SAVE Act just says we are not going to just trust that people that are not legally present here don't vote; we are going to verify that. You can't register to vote until you can show that you are actually a citizen of the United States. That shouldn't be a radical concept. It should be straightforward.

I have been one of the folks that have asked the current Attorney General: Can you show us any prosecutions or even any attempts to be able to prosecute individuals that were not legally present in the United States that attempted to vote? Because we know some stories. There are some newspaper stories scattered around the country of a few of those stories. We just asked a simple question: Can you tell us any prosecutions?

In Oklahoma, we have about 40 people every election across our State--about 40 people vote twice. They will do absentee voting and then they will show up and vote again. Do you know what they get? They get a knock on the door from law enforcement a couple of months later saying you violated State law; you voted twice. We actually enforce our law that discourages people in the future from then coming and trying that again because they know they are being enforced.

We thought it is a reasonable question to ask the Attorney General: How are you enforcing Federal law in this area? It is not that we are asking for something new. It is how are we enforcing what is existing. So far, the Attorney General, after months of asking the question, has given us no answer.

I look forward to the day that this body can sit down with each other and say: Let's solve the national security issues because we all know they are there. We all see it. We all go through the same briefings. Let's solve those, and let's have an immigration system where we honor legal immigration and deter illegal immigration. That is what most countries do. But for some reason, our politics have gotten in the way of us solving this.

Let's find a way to be able to solve this in the days ahead. I have no delusions that it is going to get solved in the next 2 weeks, but we do need to sit down and resolve this in the days ahead.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, we all had the opportunity yesterday to be able to hear Binyamin Netanyahu speak to a joint session of Congress. It is the fourth time Binyamin Netanyahu has spoken in Congress.

This particular invitation was different, though. During a time of war, it is much more heightened than it has been for a long time. He came in a very serious tone to be able to tell America and Americans: Thank you for standing with us as Israel.

And the second thing we heard from him over and over again is: Don't forget why we are in this war.

He introduced hostages that have been released. He introduced families whose loved ones are still hostages. He introduced members of the IDF who lost limbs or fought against terrorism. And he reminded Americans that more than 1,200 people died on October 7 of last year, and 253 people were taken hostage at that time.

This war would be over right now if Hamas would release their hostages. This is not a war that Israel started. There is a barrier and a fence between Israel and Gaza. Gaza was there; Israel was there.

But thousands of terrorists from Hamas crossed through that barrier early on Saturday morning on October 7, on a Jewish holiday, and slaughtered children in their beds, killed moms and dads, and carried out the worst act of terrorism that Israel has ever seen. So Israel is responding.

Prime Minister Netanyahu committed again that they will continue to fight until they bring every single one of those hostages home, even as they continue the negotiations to try to stop the war.

Currently, Israel is literally surrounded by enemies coming at them. It is something we lose track of in the United States. Israel now faces Hamas actively attacking them through terrorist actions and continuing to threaten, as Hamas leaders, even in the past month, have said that if given the opportunity, they would come back and do an October 7 all over again. They never relented. And they continue to put civilians between them and harm to try to protect the lives of the militants by using civilians as shields.

But many Americans forget that Hezbollah from the north in Lebanon continues to launch rockets consistently into Israel every day. And 80,000 Israelis currently are internally displaced inside Israel, fleeing from their own homes; and they have been away from their homes now for 10 months because 10 or more rockets a day are coming into northern Israel as they continue to launch at them over and over.

While American media has ignored that, the people of Israel cannot, because they live under that threat every single day. From the West Bank, there continues to be attacks that are happening on a weekly basis. From Syria, there continues to be attacks from Iranian-backed militants there. The same with Iraq.

And just in the past 2 weeks, Yemen has landed one of their attack drones inside a neighborhood in Tel Aviv. Now, they have launched hundreds at Israel, but this was the first time they actually struck one of their targets. And Houthi leaders inside Yemen celebrated by saying: We have finally killed some Israelis.

Israel is literally surrounded every single day. All of those militant groups are all funded by the Iranian regime--all of them. We as Americans sometimes point at Iran and say: They are the problem. And we lose track of the simple fact it is not the Iranian people. The people of Iran live under the oppression of the Iranian regime that they would like to be free from as well.

But the entire region is destabilized by the actions and the terrorist activities of just that Iranian leadership and that regime. They are funding Hezbollah. They are funding Hamas. They are funding the militants in Syria and in Iraq. They are funding and providing all the trajectory for the Houthis and attacking ships in the Red Sea, as well as launching at Israel on a regular basis. It is Iran that is doing that.

And we as the United States should do whatever we can to apply the maximum amount of pressure on Iran and on that regime to be able to shut off the flow of money and shut off their ability to be able to sell oil worldwide so we can continue to be able to put pressure on them so they are not flowing money to terrorist organizations that are attacking Israel on a regular basis.

Now, I understand that what I have just stated is controversial to some people in the United States. As Binyamin Netanyahu was speaking yesterday, at Union Station, just four blocks from where I am standing right now, there were people that were waving Palestinian flags, climbing on the statue of Christopher Columbus with spray paint, painting on Christopher Columbus's statue--four blocks from here on Union Station--``Hamas is coming,'' while they burned American flags and burned Israeli flags. Four blocks from here.

I am keenly aware that not every American is supportive of what is happening in Israel. But we are the United States of America. Israel is our ally. She is a functioning democracy in the chaos of the Middle East, and we should continue to stand with Israel because she is facing terrorism, just as we have faced terrorism.

As Binyamin Netanyahu reminded all Americans yesterday, Iran really wants to destroy America. Just Israel is between Iran and America, so they go after Israel first.

There is something growing in America though. And it is a growing anti-Semitism that is occurring, something Senator Rosen and I have talked about for years. We talked about what is happening on college campuses. After October 7, the anti-Semitism on our university campuses nationwide has now exploded into full view. What has been trained into students by faculty that are anti-Israel is now bearing fruit in public demonstrations. It is funded by we don't know who yet, but definitely organized and funded and well-equipped.

Today, Senator Rosen and I held an anti-Semitism hearing with college students from six different college campuses. They came and told their story of what it is like to be a Jewish student on an American college campus. And I think this body needs to be able to hear their story, because not everyone was able to be in that hearing today.

Let me just share the stories, because for some people, they just set it aside and say: There are a few places and there are minor things that are happening, but it is no big deal. Let me share what Jewish students on six different college campuses are saying to us in the U.S. Senate today.

There is a student that is from Columbia University. I will leave the names out to be able to protect them. She gave us testimony today saying this:

In the fall semester alone, I endured harassment in the

middle of the night and repeated vandalism of my property and

resident-assistant bulletin boards, resulting in eventual

removal due to constant damage.

I also experienced both traditional and cyber bullying.

Within the first week of the October 7th attacks, people

began to glare at me, or ignore me entirely, turning away

from me even if I greeted them by name. By the end of school

year, friends of mine who are now--

As she said--

former friends did not even want to be seen with me. But

while my experience was harsh, others endured much graver

conditions. I have friends who were spat on and physically

attacked; I know people who did not leave their dorm rooms

for days [at a time] because they were too afraid of what

might happen to them. This is, of course, not even to mention

the encampment nor the demonstrations at individual Columbia

school graduations that--while I hate to admit it--really did

spoil the entire ceremony . . . And throughout it all, these

students have waved the Palestinian flag. But this has never

been about Palestine; it has not even truly concerned [about]

the war in the Gaza Strip. It has always been a protest

against the existence of a Jewish State.

At Columbia, people chant that zionists are not welcome,

calling on ``death to the Jewish State.'' One student leader

said that ``zionists don't deserve to live.''

Another student from Rutgers University said:

We tracked [and] endured [and] experienced more than 200

incidents of bias/antisemitism since October 7. This

represents the supermajority of all bias incidents on campus.

This has created an environment where Jewish students feel

unsafe, especially since the attack October 7th, with almost

300 days passing without a sense of security on campus or in

their classrooms at Rutgers.

Throughout the last week of the semester and during finals

in the spring, there was an encampment in solidarity with

Hamas, a U.S.-recognized terror organization, on [Vorhees]

Mall in the heart of the College Avenue campus that disrupted

classes, student learning, and threatened the safety of

Jewish students on campus.

That is at the second campus. The third campus, George Washington University, a student there said to us:

On the night of April 29, encampment participants staged a

riot, ripping down the fences that were put up by the

university around the yard. They stood on the pile of fences

while chanting euphemisms for mass murder and desecrating a

statue of George Washington.

Signs in the encampment bore the words ``final solution''

and swastikas. Another read, ``Israelis go back to Europe,

[your real homes]. Protesters claimed to be fighting for

peace yet [they] preached the opposite, chanting: We don't

want no 2 states,'' ``Globalize the intifada,'' and ``Hamas

are freedom fighters.'' One student said, ``when we say we

don't want Zionists here, we really mean it.''

At Ohio State University:

On my campus, Jewish sorority girls were spat on while

selling bracelets with the words ``I stand with Israel.'' Two

assailants vandalized our Hillel building, our center for

Jewish life while screaming anti-Israel and anti-Semitic

obscenities. Two Jewish students were assaulted and spent the

night in the hospital after being physically stopped on the

street. A group of Jewish girls had pennies thrown at them.

Early one morning, several men approached the Jewish Alpha

Epsilon Pi fraternity, screaming--

I am not going to say it--

and throwing bottles at the house. Students for Justice in

Palestine entered our main library and chanted antisemitic

slogans for over an hour without facing any consequences.

Interestingly enough, in my home State, we had a student that was there that had transferred from another university to the University of Oklahoma. He had said he wanted to be able to find ``a legal education, free of fear of having to bite my tongue; forced to hide my identity and [my] thoughts'' all the time. He thought his best chance would be to attend a law school on a campus like the University of Oklahoma.

He said he came there and he openly discussed his faith to see what the climate would be like. He said:

The spirit of Dr. Ada remains strong.

I will have to tell you that story another time. It is a great story on Dr. Ada.

He said:

I . . . have . . . been warmly received by everyone there,

and am receiving the educational experience I wish [I could

have received at Indiana University].

Then I have to tell you this story. A student from Oregon University--she came and said:

Flyers were handed out glorifying the Palestinian

resistance and celebrating the ``Al Aqsa flood''--

That is the October 7 attack--

as an act of ``decolonization.'' Signs called for the

abolition of the state of Israel, saying: ``from the river to

the sea.''

One graffiti on campus asked, ``How many children did you

eat today?''

When we brought these concerns directly to the University

President, we were blamed for not properly reporting these

incidents--even though it was entirely unclear where hate

bias incidents of this nature were to be reported. It felt

degrading. It felt like [it was] victim blaming.

She asked this question and made this statement. She was very kind. She said:

I want to thank Senators Rosen and Lankford for introducing

the bipartisan Countering Antisemitism Act--which takes

tangible action to address some of the issues I have talked

about today.

She said this:

I hope you will work together to get this legislation to

the finish line and to deliver for Jewish students who are

nervously anticipating entering another challenging academic

year this fall.

What was she asking for? She made it very specific. She wants this body to act, to speak out for Jewish students that in a few weeks are going to be headed back to their campus, wondering if their campus will be the same as it was when they left it, because when they left at graduation, there were pro-Hamas rallies at graduations and people shouting down Jewish students on campus, belittling them and attacking them. They are wondering: If I go back to school at all this fall, what will I face? That is not an unrealistic question.

So the students that spoke to us asked for some very specific things. One is that administrators on university campuses should actually enforce the code of conduct on their university campuses--what a radical idea. If you have a code of conduct, actually enforce it. Don't enforce it on some groups and not on others.

Some of these students said that on their campus, the protesters that were shutting down the library and shutting down graduation got meetings with the administration to negotiate what to do and Jewish students did not.

If you have a code of conduct on a university campus--and all of them do--don't allow hateful speech and actions to occur on your campus, to shut down the education. Don't tell--some of these students faced from the administration ``I would encourage you not to go to the library today'' when their tuition helped pay for that library the same as everyone else's. But to say to one group of protesters ``They have taken it over. They really have the occupation. I wouldn't go there. It is not safe for you''--why don't you do something crazy, administrators? Why don't you make your campus safe for everyone? That is one request they have.

The second request they had was--Congress passed the IHRA definition of ``anti-Semitism.'' The House has already passed it. The State Department right now uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance--the IHRA--definition for ``anti-Semitism'' and has used it for more than three decades. It is not controversial for our State Department, but we have never required the Department of Education to also have that same definition.

What is happening on university campuses right now is that all these statements are being made, as some of the students said today, that sound a lot like what Nazi Brownshirts said in Germany years ago to Jewish students, being said on American college campuses now, but university officials are saying: We don't have a good definition of ``anti-Semitism,'' so we can't really say that it is anti-Semitic hatred.

We all know it is.

This body should take the same definition that our State Department has used for decades and require the Department of Education to also use that same definition of ``anti-Semitism.'' That shouldn't be a radical jump for us. The House passed it. We should pass it. That was the second request they had.

The third request they had was to pass the act that Senator Rosen and I have already passed through committee to bring it to this body. It is noncontroversial, but this body of the Senate has not taken it up. I would ask the majority leader to bring up that legislation dealing with anti-Semitism before students return to campus this fall to give a clear message to those students that the United States stands for everyone having the opportunity to be able to speak out their point of view, live their faith, and live without fear--especially in an educational environment.

If students want to be pro-Hamas on a university campus, I think it is foolish, I think it is a terrible thing to do, but you have the right to do it. But you do not have the right to be able to silence and intimidate Jewish students on campus at the same time. You do not have the right to do that. They have the right to live their faith in safety and to be able to go to the school of their choice. It is the United States of America. Right now, we have pro-Hamas demonstrators trying to frighten Jewish students away from campuses of their choice. That needs to stop.

This body needs to take up the act that Senator Rosen and I have brought--that should not be a controversial issue--and to speak out on behalf of all those students that are just looking for someone to stand with them. So why don't we do that?

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, in honor of Jim Inhofe, I would like to ask unanimous consent to speak as long as I so desire.

Mr. President, I am standing today at not my desk location; I am standing at my senior Senator's desk location. This was the location for Jim Inhofe's desk 2 years ago when he retired from the Senate. And as you have heard from multiple different Members today, he will be deeply missed.

I still have a moment every time someone says ``the senior Senator from Oklahoma''--and they are speaking to me--that I turn around and look for Jim. He will be sorely missed.

Jim was my friend. He was my colleague. He was a mentor. He was a person to be able to work side by side with. Our staffs worked very well together because we chose to work well together and to be able to get things done for our State of Oklahoma.

My task today is to tell a little bit of his story. I can't do that in a few minutes, but I am going to try to give as much as I can.

James Mountain Inhofe--and everyone loved that middle name of his. James Mountain Inhofe was actually born in Iowa in 1934. His parents: Perry Dyson Inhofe and his mom, Blanche Phoebe Mountain. That is where the ``Mountain'' came from. Most folks don't even know.

But the Nation and our State was forever changed when, at 8 years old, their family moved from Iowa to Tulsa, OK. They stayed, and he graduated from Central High School in 1953, later graduating from the University of Tulsa but actually attending classes all over the place to be able to get to that graduation.

He served in the U.S. Army from 1957 to 1958, stationed in Fort Lee, VA. He became a licensed pilot in 1958, and that was one of the loves of his life. But the real love of his life was his relationship with Jesus and his beautiful wife Kay, whom he married in 1959.

He was first elected to public office in Oklahoma at 32 years old, actually. He served in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, sat on multiple committees, and then was elected to be the mayor of Tulsa in 1978. He loved Tulsa, OK.

He later served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 to 1994, and then was elected, in a special election, into this body in 1994. He was sworn in on November 17, actually, 1994, on his 60th birthday. He then served five terms after that, serving the U.S. Senate, serving as chairman of Environment and Public Works; serving as chairman of Armed Services; serving on multiple different committees, including the Intelligence Committee, Indian Affairs Committee, Committee on Foreign Relations, Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Committee on Small Business. He was engaged in this body and worked to be able to find ways to be able to make a difference for our State of Oklahoma and for the Nation.

He loved flying and had over 11,000 flight hours. In fact, he did a crazy thing. He did multiple crazy things, but he did a crazy thing in that he replicated--I should say recreated--Oklahoman Wiley Post's historic flight around the world when he got in a twin-engine Cessna and flew from DC to Iceland to Berlin to Moscow, all the way back around to Alaska so he could circumnavigate the globe, following after Wiley Post, the famous Oklahoman's circumnavigation of the globe as well.

He was passionate about infrastructure, which has been mentioned often. He would often say, as a conservative, he was passionate about national defense and about infrastructure, and those were constitutional responsibilities. And he fulfilled that well.

He was passionate about trying to find ways to be able to help veterans and those who were serving in our military and to be able to maintain energy.

There is a great story of a debate that he held about energy taxes on the floor of the Senate here, and it was a full-on debate, which rarely occurs in this body very often. But it was led by Senator Inhofe on this side of the aisle and by Senator Bernie Sanders on the other side. And they had an hourslong debate between the two of them about energy taxation. And at the end of that, there was a vote, and Senator Inhofe won that vote 2 to 1. At the end of it, Senator Sanders came to him and said: We don't do that often enough. We should do that more.

Senator Inhofe never hesitated to be able to talk about the hard issues with the people he disagreed with and to be able to say: Let's figure it out.

When I attended Dianne Feinstein's funeral not that long ago, Senator Barbara Boxer from California immediately found me at the funeral and said: How is my friend Jim? A very conservative Oklahoman had a longstanding friendship with a very liberal Californian, and they found ways to be able to work together.

As Jack Reed mentioned earlier, a Democrat from Rhode Island and a Republican from Oklahoma worked very hard on national defense and found their common ground together.

Though there are many things that Jim Inhofe will be recognized for, he will be remembered for his work in Africa. Jim Inhofe conducted 172 African country visits in the time he served in the Senate, more than any other Senator in the history of the Senate, he spent in Africa. He visited leaders over and over and over again in Africa, developing deep relationships and friendships.

Every time I meet an African leader here in Washington, DC, and they hear that I am from Oklahoma, either the first or second thing that they will say to me is: Do you know my friend Jim Inhofe? And I will proudly say: Yes. And that African leader will say: He has been my friend for years--because Jim Inhofe intentionally went to Africa, developing relationships.

The reason we have an AFRICOM military focus in that area is because of Jim Inhofe. There are relationships that he built across the years there that brought down violence in Africa--because when violence began to erupt in some countries, Jim would get on a plane and would fly and would get the two leaders who were in conflict--because he knew them both--together and say: We are going to pray together, and we are going to resolve this right now. And he did.

And while most of the world doesn't know what Jim Inhofe did in Africa, he will be long remembered for his faith, his love for his family, and for what he did over and over again for the people of Oklahoma and for Africa.

He was the longest serving Senator for the State of Oklahoma, and he will be long remembered and appreciated in my great State. He will be appreciated by many of the staff members who worked alongside of him, I can assure you of that. He had 34 staff members who worked for him for more than 10 years.

Now, for anyone in this body, we know how rare that is because staff members tend to come and go. But for Jim, he wanted to be able to build camaraderie among his team. He wanted to be able to do serious, hard things, but he often did it among his staff in a nonserious way. He was notorious for the way, quite frankly, he tormented his staff, bugged them, hazed them, and challenged them to be able to step up and to be able to do hard things and figure out how to be able to get things done.

Ryan Jackson--who was his future chief of staff--on his first day on the job as a young campaign staffer, Jim Inhofe picked him up in Oklahoma City. They drove out for a campaign event in Western Oklahoma for that event, and then Jim went back to Tulsa not through Oklahoma City and told Ryan: Figure out how to get home--which he did to multiple staff members over the years because he wanted to be able to push them and to say: Figure it out. That was always his challenge to his staff: Figure it out. By the way, that didn't scare Ryan off. He stayed with him 18 years, and that young campaign staff member later became his chief of staff.

He had many rules, but the top rule that he had was, on his airplane, no one touch the door of his airplane but him. That was a fireable offense for any staff member that wanted to be able to touch the airplane door except for him.

He also had a book that he would pass out to his staff all the time called ``Message to Garcia.'' Many of us know that book. That book is a story about a young soldier who was given a task by a general and was basically told he has to be able to figure things out. So he would hand that book to staff members and would say: Read this. You need to be able to know this.

And a staff member on his team, when he turned a memo in to Jim Inhofe and it wasn't sufficient, would get just the message ``MTG'' written on it; in other words, ``Message to Garcia,'' go figure this out, and come back and tell me what needs to be done.

He was also, as has been mentioned by multiple of my colleagues, an extremely hard worker. His staff often said they only worked half a day for Jim; that is, from 7:30 in the morning until 7:30 in the evening; that they would just work half-days. In Jim Inhofe's office, if you arrived at 8:30, he would greet you with a ``good afternoon'' statement to you to be able to welcome you in.

He had, as I mentioned, many opportunities to be able to do ministry and challenges to people in Africa, and there was a deep love for him in multiple countries, but probably no more so than in Western Sahara, where he fought tenaciously for the independence of those individuals in Western Sahara with Morocco--in fact, so much so that Western Sahara officials gave him a camel, which, obviously, he couldn't accept nor bring home; and so he told them: Just hang onto it; I can't actually accept this camel and take it home.

So when he visited Western Sahara, every time, they would bring the camel back to the airport to show him they are still hanging onto his camel; they still have it.

I have to say, there are a million stories about his leadership and his interaction, but his staff tells great stories about their friendships and relationships.

I have been to many a place where Jim would turn and look into the crowd and would identify what he called the ``has-beens'' that were in the crowd. Those were the staff that were his former staff that showed up at just about every event he would go to because of their deep love for him, even though they had left the staff.

Wendi Price, when she first got her job as scheduler, was put on probation because Jim felt she was too young. She stayed on probation for 20 years and would still be working with him today if he hadn't retired.

I have to tell you, there are a lot of caricatures about Jim Inhofe, and I have read some of the stories in the newspaper of things that some of the press writes about him. I can only read those stories and shake my head and say: Jim would have loved that--because he didn't allow liberal press to be able to define him.

He worked across the aisle. He worked to get things done. And he spent time doing the things that needed to be done for the future of the country, including at a moment when President Trump was elected and many of Jim Inhofe's staff were actually put into the EPA. And it drove the Washington Post crazy that many of Jim Inhofe's staff with the EPW went to the EPA. And the Washington Post wrote a blistering story about it.

Jim Inhofe bought a ton of the copies of that Washington Post and then just started handing it out to people so that they would all read and would know he is fully aware of what people say but he is going to work to get stuff done for the country.

I will miss my friend. And I will continue to pray for Kay and for his family as they grieve.

And I say to them, Psalm 34:18:

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and He saves those

who are crushed in spirit.

They grieve for their husband, their dad, their grandfather. Many of us grieve for our friend. But this Senate will miss Jim Inhofe. So will our Nation.

With that, I yield the floor.

Vote on Willoughby Nomination

Mr. President, there is a difference between a refugee who was fully vetted, that America has welcomed historically and should continue to, and we will. We worked for decades to be able to honor refugees and to be able to do our part in what is happening around the world. That same standard for refugees, where an individual is identified, the family is vetted, they go through the process both at the U.N. and through the United States to be able to identify how to be able to help that family, that same definition for ``refugee'' is also used as a definition for ``asylee.'' It is the same definition, but there is a dramatic difference between the two.

The refugee has been fully vetted. We know who they are; we know the situation; we know the crisis that their family has gone through; and our Nation, like multiple nations around the world, engages to see what we can do to help that family in trauma. That is who we are as Americans. It is whom we will continue to be.

The challenge is when we have thousands of people cross our southern border requesting asylum whom we don't know who they are, who are not vetted, that begin to take advantage of American generosity, and it becomes a challenge for us to be able to filter who really qualifies as a refugee/asylee as they are crossing the border and who is just taking advantage of our system.

That is a challenge. It has been a challenge for us for years, but it has dramatically accelerated in the last 3 years. This year we will have 2\1/2\ million people that will cross our southern border. The vast majority of those will ask for asylum, and they will be released into the United States awaiting a hearing, sometimes 8 to 10 years in advance, to be able to make their case that they qualify. In the meantime, we don't know who they are. They have not been vetted. We don't have background information for those individuals.

Last week, the FBI picked up eight individuals with direct ties to ISIS that were in our country, that in the last 2 years had crossed our southern border--had blended in with the rest of the folks who requested asylum--requested asylum and then disappeared into our country.

Thankfully, our FBI was able to pick up that these eight individuals were in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, preparing to be able to carry out acts of violence in our country. We are grateful for the work of the FBI to be able to do that, but why aren't we filtering these individuals at the border?

We are not evaluating criminal history even in the country they are coming from. How do I know that? I know that because I work with DHS, and I am fully aware of what their process is. We fingerprint individuals, and we see if they are on the Terror Watchlist; that is, we know them, we have been tracking them internationally, or if they are on the Interpol international criminal list.

But if they are on a list in their own country, we don't know that. Last week, Victor Antonio Martinez was picked up in my State, in Tulsa, OK, sitting in a sports bar in Tulsa, where he had left out from Maryland after murdering Rachel Morin, a mother of five.

Now, he had fled to Maryland because he had carried out acts of violence in Los Angeles in a violent home invasion in Los Angeles. So he carried out an act of violence in Los Angeles, went to Maryland, murdered a mom there, then was headed to Tulsa. What do you think was about to happen in Tulsa?

Oh, by the way, did I mention, he fled from El Salvador because he murdered someone in El Salvador. So he fled El Salvador, came to our southern border, requested asylum, came into the United States, attacked a family in Los Angeles, murdered a mom in Maryland, and then was arrested in my State, in Tulsa.

Please don't tell my folks in Tulsa, there is nothing to worry about on illegal immigration, this is all going fine at the border. We don't believe it because a violent, multiperson murderer was on a national crime spree, and my State was next before he was picked up and arrested, now extradited back to Maryland for the crime there.

In New York, earlier this year, Raul Castro-Mata from Venezuela shot at two New York police officers. He is one of those folks from Venezuela that had come across asking for asylum. Earlier this month in Texas, an illegal immigrant was arrested when he had broken into a private business and had committed a pretty large robbery there. In Florida, a SWAT team got into a shootout with an illegal alien who had killed a police officer just a few months ago.

In Washington State, an illegal alien from Mexico was driving, and he killed a Washington State police officer. The car was going 107 miles an hour. He was under the influence of marijuana at the time.

Listen, I am fully aware that not everyone that crosses the border is going to carry out acts of criminal activities. I am fully aware of that. All I am doing is asking a simple question: Are we checking criminal history at the border for the thousands of people that are coming across the border? And the answer is no.

For the eight people that were picked up last week that were ISIS terrorist connected, those eight are individuals that were listed as special interest aliens. They are 8 of the 53,000 special interest aliens that had entered our country this year across the southern border.

Oh, and if you think that number is big, last year the number was 70,000 special interest aliens were released into our country last year.

These are individuals that this DHS has declared, at the border, a potential national security risk. Yet instead of detaining them, the vast majority of them have been released on their own recognizance around the country somewhere.

Listen, this body knows full well I am willing to work with anyone on either side of the aisle to be able to solve this issue. Between now and the election, we are going to have another million and a half people illegally cross into our country--between now and the end of the year.

We have had 10 million people illegally cross in the last 3\1/2\ years--10 million. If we don't stop this, every day we have folks that are coming in to find work, to connect with families, and folks that are also coming in to commit criminal acts. They are not fleeing from poverty. They are fleeing from the law in their own country, and they are carrying out acts of violence in ours.

When we can't tell the difference between the two, why are we defaulting to open rather than defaulting to closed? Why are we literally telling the people in my State: That guy sitting next to you at the sports bar--we didn't know if he was a criminal or not, so we just let him in. We didn't know if he had committed murder in his own country, so we just let him in.

Why are we doing that? Why is that happening today on our southern border, and what are we going to do to stop it? I am going to continue to come to this floor to bring this up because it is not getting better.

The Executive action the President took 2 weeks ago to declare they are going to put new limits in place--everybody here should check the facts on it. We had the same number of crossings yesterday that we had 4 weeks ago before that Executive action went into place. That Executive action hasn't changed the numbers. What has changed is the way they are counting the numbers. They are now not including in the count the people who come to a port of entry who are not legally present. They are now not being included, so the numbers look smaller, but look at the asterisk and the fine print of who now is no longer being counted in the publicly released numbers. The numbers haven't changed; the way they are publishing the numbers has changed.

Then this week, the President announced a new amnesty program for folks who are here in the country. That is now his 95th Executive action announcing to the world that if you get across our border, you can stay. It is inviting people to be able to come into our country illegally. That is the wrong message to the world. It is a message we need to address, and we shouldn't just wait around until it gets better on its own.

Mr. President, my guess is, if I went to every person in this room--every page, every person sitting in the Gallery, every Senator--and I pointed to this image and said, ``What do you see there?'' my guess is every person in this room would go, ``Well, that is a baby.''

That is my guess. I mean, I haven't asked every person here, but my guess is every person would look at it, and they would go: Well, that is a sonogram of a baby.

That is what I would say: It looks like a child to me.

So the issue here in America and the next question is: Should it live or die?

The first answer is pretty obvious: That is a baby.

The second question is: Should it live or die?

That one, in America, is not quite so obvious anymore.

You know, what is interesting is that I have two daughters. They are amazing, remarkable, beautiful women. They are adults now, but I distinctly remember that pregnancy test and seeing those little lines on that test, and my wife and I looking at each other with excitement.

I distinctly remember talking to friends and her parents and other folks, saying that we are pregnant. And as we shared our story, I don't remember a single person saying to me: Well, you are pregnant. What are you going to do with it? Are they going to live or die?

No one asked us that. No one asked us: Is it really a baby or is that just a fetus? No one said: You just have tissue.

They asked us questions like: Have you thought of a name? Have you figured out how to install the car seat yet?

Those are the questions they asked us because, every person we talked to and every person with whom we shared the news that we were pregnant, all acknowledged that reality that that is a baby.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled on what is now called the Dobbs decision. It took away the Roe v. Wade decision that mandated that abortion had to be everywhere in the country and took it back to where it was for the first 180 years or so of our country, when the law was that the rules about abortion are handled in each State. That is all it did.

It didn't end abortion in America. We still have abortion in America, in very high numbers. But the decision of how that is done was not done by a Supreme Court. It was done by legislators, as it always had been. And that is what the Court said. So this is now going back to the people and the people's representatives on all levels.

So the debate is, again, scattered all across the country now, and the debate is very simply over: Is that a child? And if it is a child, what should happen to it?

I have to tell you, that baby is not mine, but she is really cute. I look at a baby like that--my daughters both slept in that same position, which we, as parents, call the touchdown position, where they both have their hands up above their heads. I am amazed at this picture of the sonogram to see that infant in the womb in that exact same position asleep.

I think the only difference between this child in the womb sleeping with her hands over her head and this child is time. That is it. That baby is as much of a baby as that baby is a baby. There is no difference there, other than time.

So we debate, and we talk about this very complicated question: When is a child valuable, and when is a child medical waste? When is a child valuable, and when is a child disposable?

We, as Americans, are grappling with that issue. The issue about when that child is a child really comes down to preference and convenience and to determine if the child is convenient. If they are convenient, then they are a child. If they are not convenient, then they are disposable.

If two ladies are walking down the same street--both of them, let's say, 18 weeks pregnant--and of those two ladies on opposite sides of the street, one of them steps into her workplace and into a baby shower, the folks at work are going to talk about how to install a car seat. They are going to talk about: Where are you going to set up the crib? They are going to talk about baby names, and they are going to talk about all the expenses and things. And the person on the other side of the street, also 18 weeks pregnant, is headed to get a surgical abortion.

And so I ask the question: Of those two children, what is the difference between those two children? They are both at 18 weeks of development. One of them is being celebrated and prepared for, and one of them will be disposed of. What is the difference between the two?

We, as Americans, are trying to figure out the answer to that exact question. And the conversation is happening all across the country.

I get it. It is a fair conversation: When is a child a child? Or when are they not a child?

Well, under this administration--this administration, by far, has been the most pro-abortion administration ever in the history of the country. That is not just an opinion. That is just the actions of the administration. That has just been their response to the Dobbs decision.

This administration was so disturbed that we might have fewer abortions in America that the Biden administration has aggressively worked to increase the number of abortions in America to offset the possibility that there could be fewer abortions, because they didn't want to see fewer abortions in America. They wanted to see as many or more.

So the Biden administration opened up, for the first time, VA hospitals to provide abortions--even late-term abortions, even up to the very final months of a viable child. For those VA hospitals, it would be the first time that they would be able to provide abortions.

They are withholding funds for pregnancy resource centers. Now, these are the centers that they really hate the most. These are pregnancy resource centers around the country that offer crazy things like diapers and formula and support for pregnant moms--that if pregnant moms walk in and say, ``Hey, I am really struggling with my pregnancy, and I am afraid,'' they say, ``We will walk with you. We will counsel you. We will give you free materials. We will help provide diapers and baby clothes and a car seat, and we will walk along with you so you don't have to be afraid and alone.''

The Biden administration really hates those folks. So they are withholding funds from any grants going to those folks where they have received grants in the past.

HHS is now paying to move people who illegally cross our southern border

to places--even teenagers--where they can get abortions, and we have Federal dollars going to be able to move people to make sure that those people who illegally cross our border who want access to abortion be able to get it. It has been frustrating to be able to watch.

Even in my State, my State has chosen to say: We think every child is valuable. We look at these two girls, and we see them just a couple of weeks apart. But we see them both as young girls. They kind of state the obvious.

But in my State, because we don't allow abortion and promote abortion, Health and Human Services has now stripped away grant dollars from my State for one reason. Health and Human Services came to my State and said: If you don't put a 1-800 number on all of your healthcare materials stemming from the State, telling women where they can get an abortion, we will take away your Federal funding. If you don't show and give a 1-800 number where you can get an abortion, we will take away your grant funding.

They didn't take away just any grant funding, because, by the way, my State said: We are not going to do that. So the grant funding they took away from my State was for impoverished women to get cancer screenings and for AIDS patients to get testing. They took that funding away, saying: We will not allow any Federal dollars coming into your State for AIDS testing and for cancer screening for impoverished women, if you don't promote abortion in your State.

They were serious. So they did it because this administration is obsessed with increasing the number of abortions in the country and finding ways to be able to expand this and telling people not to look at this picture.

It has been a frustrating journey, the last couple of years, because we seem to be ignoring the obvious. We are so tied up here on the politics of this, even when Senator Thune brings a bill that says, if a child is born alive after a botched abortion--they are a fully delivered, full-term baby on the table breathing--what should we do?

That is a pretty commonsense bill. Yet my Democratic colleagues have knocked it down today and said: No, that child should not have the opportunity for life.

When Senator Hyde-Smith brings a bill that just says, ``Why don't we give education to more doctors and more moms about infertility''--it doesn't limit IVF at all, at all--they are like, ``No, no, not going to do that.''

When Senator Britt from Alabama brings a bill that says: Why don't we recognize, during pregnancy, that that is really expensive, and if States have the requirement to do child support for a child--well, I will just say it: for a deadbeat dad who is not paying child support. If they walk away at that point, that child support should also cover the time of pregnancy, not just after delivery. That is pretty common sense because, for any mom, they know pregnancy is really expensive. It is a very expensive time. So child support should begin when that child is there.

A commonsense bill that, I dare say, most Americans would say, ``Well, that makes sense,'' has been knocked down today.

Unanimous Consent Request--S. 4524

Mr. President, I bring one more that I think is pretty common sense. It is already the law in the United States that every person has the right to conscience. Healthcare providers that go into the profession to protect life, to save life, to heal--many of them also say: I don't want to be a part of taking human life. I went into this profession to protect life.

So they express to their clinics, their hospitals--wherever they serve--that they don't want to be a part of the taking of human life. They understand that it is happening in their hospital; they just don't want to be a part of that. They express their conscience issues.

By the way, that is protected in Federal law right now, that every one of those healthcare providers has the right to be able to express their conscience and not be required to take human life. The problem is, it requires the Federal Government to actually step in and enforce that law.

So let me show you what that looks like. A nurse in Vermont, a few years ago, went into her hospital as she normally did, and as she went into her hospital, went into work as she normally does--she is a nurse that is passionate about the life of every person, including children in the womb, and she had expressed that to the hospital. She got caught as she was going in, saying: Hey, we need you in the ER right now.

She said: No problem.

So she steps into the ER to help with a procedure, gloves up, gets ready. She is going to go assist. As she walks in, the doctor that is in the room looks at her and says: Don't hate me.

She suddenly says: What is going on?

She realizes she is being called in to be able to assist with an abortion. She has already made it clear she doesn't want to be a part of taking human life.

The hospital says: No. We will fire you if you don't help. We need your help. We are short of staff today, so you are going to do this.

A direct violation of Federal law--clearly, no question. They expressed it in the operating room. They knew they were violating her conscience.

So the Federal Government goes through the process of starting to be able to enforce the law on that hospital--until the last Presidential election occurs. When the last Presidential election occurred, the new leadership of HHS stepped in and said: We are not going to enforce that. In other words, we are dropping that case.

It would be the equivalent of a police officer walking down the street, looking at a burglary that is happening, knowing that a crime is occurring right there, and just saying, ``I am going to choose not to enforce the law today,'' and just walking on by. That is what is happening right now.

So the Conscience Protection Act that I bring does a simple thing. It says that if an employer violates Federal law and the Federal Government chooses not to enforce this, the individual that has had their conscience violated--that individual has the right to be able to bring a case on their own.

This is not controversial. This would not eliminate a single abortion in America. We will not have one fewer abortion in America based on this policy. But what it will do is it will say to an American: You are free to be able to live your conscience without fear of being fired for living your conscience. That is the only thing it does. I think that is pretty straightforward and pretty common sense.

Of all things that we should be able to agree to in this body, let's protect each other's right to believe and to live our faith.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be discharged from further consideration of S. 4524 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that the bill be considered read a third time, passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, we will continue to be able to speak out. We do believe that is a child. We believe in the dignity of every human being.

My wife, when we were pregnant--every single cell in her body--every cell--from her toenails and her toes and her nose and her elbows--every single cell in her body has the exact same

DNA. It has that signature of her. But when we were pregnant, suddenly there was a group of cells that had different DNA. They didn't match hers, and they didn't match mine. They were cells with DNA that had never existed on Earth before until that moment. They were uniquely different. I think we should acknowledge that fact in the days ahead, that there is something special about those different cells.

We will continue to speak up for the conscience rights of all individuals to be able to state the obvious and to be able to live their faith. I think in the days ahead we will have a time as Americans when we will look back on this season and think, why would we turn away from what was so obvious to all of us?

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, if everyone here in this Chamber is watching the news of late, in the last 24 hours, the FBI scooped up eight citizens from Tajikistan that were in the United States and arrested them on immigration violations, but they were also suspected terrorists that were in the United States. They were in Philadelphia; they were in Los Angeles; they were in New York City; and they were individuals that had direct connections to terrorism. And they were here because they illegally crossed our southern border and were waved in.

This is an issue that I have been on this floor at this desk speaking about for 2 years now. The population that is crossing our southern border has dramatically changed in the last 2 years.

No longer it is just about everyone from the Western Hemisphere. Now we have very large numbers of people from places like Tajikistan, from West Africa, from China, from Russia, from Pakistan, from other specific places that are known areas of terrorism, and we have people in the thousands that are crossing our borders that we don't know who they are, from places that we typically don't have people illegally crossing.

This group of individuals are called special interest aliens; that is, they are not on our Terror Watchlist, but we don't know why they are here or how they got here or the process that they came to come to the United States across our southern border illegally is unusual, different, or is directed by a crime organization outside of Mexico-- special interest aliens.

Last year, we had 70,000 people that fell into the category of special interest aliens. This year, so far, we have had 53,000 people that were special interest aliens. These eight individuals that were arrested yesterday were part of that group of special interest aliens: illegally present here, not vetted on our southern border but released on their own recognizance, and now, with an announcement yesterday from the FBI, a connection to terrorism, specifically ISIS terrorism.

In the past several months, the FBI has also picked up al-Shabaab terrorists in the United States that had crossed on our southern border, that were listed as special interest aliens, and that have now been picked up.

We are literally living on borrowed time. This is the issue that I have brought up over and over again to this body to say we need to pay attention to this issue of what is happening on our southern border.

Now, currently the administration has put in place a new Executive order to try to lower somewhat the number of people that are coming across, but the way they are doing it is by turning around people from the Western Hemisphere, but folks from other areas like Tajikistan, those folks are still coming through. Some are being detained, but a large number are actually being released on their own recognizance as special interest aliens. We don't have information on a direct tie to terrorism at the time they are at the border so they are being released.

The bill that I brought to this body would have changed the way we did screening dramatically, would have taken all of these issues about terrorism from the end of the process and moved it to the beginning so that we are not releasing people and then trying to figure out if we can chase them.

Right now, what is really happening day-to-day is that individuals that are crossing our border, we are hoping that the FBI can pick up any information on them after they are already released into the country.

Remember, there were 70,000 individuals like this last year, 53,000 so far this year, and we are hoping the FBI is able to discern they are a terror threat before they carry out an act of terrorism. That is exactly the wrong way to do this.

We need to enforce our southern border with more than just some action to be able to reduce what is happening. We should not be living on borrowed time every day awaiting the next terrorist attack in the United States because our border was open.

What have we done in the past? Well, last year we deported four Tajiks--last year, four. Now we are in the process of deporting another eight. We don't know what the numbers are here. And at the end of the day, that is a very bad spot for us to be in as a country.

I don't want the United States of America living on borrowed time, awaiting the next terrorist attack because we were not paying attention and enforcing our own southern border.

We need to be able to wake up on this.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, the President of the United States is, today, using clips of my speech on the floor of the Senate in his campaign ads talking about border security and immigration. Well, I would encourage him to use clips of this speech today instead, because President Biden created the problem at the border right now.

That is not some theory. That is not some political statement. That is fact. And I can compare that to the two previous Presidents, who operated under the exact same law as President Biden is operating under now. We have 2\1/2\ million people--plus--illegally crossing our southern border this year. Under

President Obama, we had half a million.

There is no difference in the law between President Obama, President Trump, and President Biden. The only difference is the Executive who is actually overseeing that law's prosecution. That is the only difference.

So why would we have half a million people illegally crossing the border under President Obama and 2\1/2\ million people under President Biden? It is the Executive and how they are carrying out the law.

Now, I have been very clear: That last half a million is Congress's responsibility. We have a responsibility to change the definition of ``asylum,'' to change how the enforcement is done, increase the number of agents that are there, take away a lot of the appeals that are frivolous--and we all know it--to be able to allow people who qualify for asylum to get into the country and people who do not get turned around so they can go through a legal pathway, not through an illegal pathway.

That is Congress's responsibility, that last half a million. Those are changes in the law we have to get done, and I have been very outspoken on that and will continue to be outspoken on that because we have not done our job here.

But the other 2 million people who are illegally crossing this year, last year, the year before that, that is not on Congress; that is on the President of the United States because he created this.

Why would I say that? Day one of his Presidency, he walked in with an Executive order day one and announced to the world: We are no longer going to do a border wall construction. We are going to stop border wall construction. Day one, this President announced that he is no longer going to do the Executive order that had been put in place under President Trump to ensure that there was a meaningful application of Border Patrol laws and immigration regulations. Literally, he took those regs and set them aside and said: We are not going to do that.

Day one, he announced a 100-day moratorium on deportations and on enforcement and then continued to be able to extend it out from there.

This wasn't day one, but it was a week and a half later: DHS implemented a new policy saying that we are going to change the way we do removals of people who are illegally present in the country. The next day after that, he changed the way asylum processing is done at the border and removed what was called the ``Remain in Mexico'' program.

That is something the Supreme Court actually came back and said: You can't just remove that; you have to re-implement that. So the Supreme Court actually required that to be implemented. This President put in the mechanics to do it but is not actually doing it.

So, as Americans, we are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to have the facility and the personnel actually there to fulfill what the Court has required them to do, but they are not actually doing what is called the ``MPP,'' the ``Remain in Mexico'' program. That is a decision that they made.

A week after that, in February of 2021, Antony Blinken announced that he was terminating the agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador so that they would then enforce their borders more readily. That agreement that we had made with them with the State Department, the State Department terminated that to be able to open up the pathways for more folks to go.

I could keep going on and on and on. You see, what is happening now is not happenstance; it was a deliberate decision made in 2021 to open our borders to ``not look so mean.'' But what has actually occurred is more than 10 million people have crossed our border illegally, and the administration has announced just in the last couple of weeks that 55,000 people have crossed just this year that they designated as a special-interest migrant--their definition--55,000 people. Those individuals are coming from areas that they define as a terror risk. Those 55,000 individuals have all been labeled by this administration as a potential risk to national security--55,000 in just the last year. You know what has happened to those? The vast majority of them are in the United States right now because they were released by this administration.

This is a border crisis of this administration's creation. They created this crisis. While Congress has the responsibility to do the things that we need to do, this administration created this crisis with the decisions that they made in Homeland Security, that they made in the State Department, and they made at the Department of Justice.

Individuals who cross the border multiple times, that is a felony in American law. Ask the Department of Justice how many of those folks have been prosecuted as a felony in the last 3 years--I dare you; ask them--and you will find out it is zero. They have just stopped prosecutions.

They have announced to the world: We are no longer enforcing American law. The world has taken the message, and they are coming because we are the United States of America. We are the greatest country in the world. But we are also the top terrorism threat in the world because people come here to do us harm because they hate our freedom and who we are.

We are not doing the most basic security that every nation does, and that is protect our border. So the President announced an Executive action this week, an Executive action that he literally pulled from a section of the bipartisan bill that we worked on, but it was literally the bolt-on section on the end of it.

The heart of the bill was not what you do after thousands of people are crossing the border; the heart of the bill is what do you do for the first person that illegally crosses. The bill was set up to say that the very first person that illegally crosses--they are picked up at the border, they are screened quickly, and then they are deported quickly. We changed the screening process, we changed the appeals process, and we changed all the standards. We rapidly affected the first person.

This administration has announced a new initiative that they are going to do not for the first person that illegally crosses but for somewhere around the 4,000th.

Why do I say 4,000 when they have announced 2,500? Well, you have to read the fine print. They said: After 2,500 people come, then we are going to add some new authorities. But the fine print is pretty important.

They exclude the about 1,600 people a day that they are currently letting in at ports of entry using what they call the CBP One app. They are giving those folks parole. They have not gone through any legal process. They are declaring them as legal when they come through. So they are not including those folks that are illegally coming across the border under a parole program they have created. That program could end tomorrow. Illegal immigration would drop by 1,600 people tomorrow if they turned off the program they turned on.

They are also not including what is called the Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua program. There are 1,000 people a day coming in under that program. They have just excluded them as well from their 2,500 number.

They are excluding anyone who is an unaccompanied minor. They are excluding them.

They have also listed a whole bunch of others--if they have a health issue, others.

So this 2,500 number--I have had several folks say: Well, that is half of what you all had proposed in your bill. It is not. You have to read the fine print of what is actually in the Executive order.

What could this administration do? It is pretty straightforward. Here a few things they could do right now.

Right now, they could actually start putting pressure on recalcitrant countries, through the State Department, to take individuals back into their own country. The State Department has stopped putting pressure on recalcitrant countries. They could do that today.

The law today allows the administration to start doing direct hire for Border Patrol and for ICE. They are not using that authority. They are just saying: We can't hire enough agents. They have direct hire authority they are choosing not to use.

Right now, this administration could speed up the way they handle the appeals process through all these frivolous regulations and some of the Executive orders. They had to literally take

away those things and make it more difficult to actually fight through the appeals. They could put those back in today.

Today, they could end the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela program that they created to allow folks to be able to come in in greater numbers from those four countries. They started that program. They could end that today.

They could end the catch-and-release that they have created at the southern border. They could end that today. They started it. They could turn that off.

They could restart the cooperative agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to stop the flow of migrants coming from Central America up as they are coming through those areas. They could do that today.

They could reinstate the ``Remain in Mexico'' program. All the structure is there. The court required them to have it. They could actually use it, and that would make a huge difference today.

They could actually start prosecuting border crossing cases from start to finish. What do I mean by that? This administration is starting the process of prosecuting individuals, but halfway through, they are just dropping the case. Well, it doesn't take long for the word to get out to people who illegally cross that even if you start the prosecution, this administration will drop it and will not finish it. They text family members back home and say ``come,'' and the next group actually comes from there.

This administration is currently finding new ways to allow people to come in. In States like Oklahoma--my State is currently being prosecuted by the Department of Justice because we passed laws in our State to put greater requirements on people that are illegally present in the State and have committed criminal acts. It used to be, under the previous administration, if someone was illegally present and they committed a criminal act, they were more active to remove those. Right now, the Department of Justice is actually putting pressure on my State of Oklahoma for pressuring people that are illegally present and also have committed a criminal act.

The Department of Justice could actually enforce our southern border rather than actually go after States that are trying to actually enforce the law in our own States.

Quite frankly, one of the things this administration could do today is to vet people coming across our border better, because they are currently not coordinating all of the data points we have for foreign individuals. They are not checking against all of those systems when people are crossing our border illegally.

This administration and this President need to stop saying there is nothing he can do until Congress acts. Congress does need to act, but there is a lot he could do that would make a huge difference. And it is not just my opinion; I can prove it with fact. Just compare this Democrat President and his number of illegal crossings against the last Democrat President and his number of illegal crossings: Biden, 2.5 million a year; Obama, half a million a year.

I understand this President doesn't want to enforce what President Trump did, although that was more effective than what President Obama did, but he should do at least what President Obama did.

Stop playing politics with this on all sides. Stop running a speech that I have given on this floor for his campaign purposes unless he wants to run this speech and to say this President needs to step up and do his job.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, three Senators started, about 8 months ago now, working to try to get some solutions on border security. It is for obvious reasons, because we have record high numbers over and over and over again at our southern border. We had a record high number in October, record high number in November, and record high number in December. In fact, December had the highest number of illegal crossings ever in the history of the country in a single day.

As of yesterday, we had about 5,200 people that illegally crossed yesterday. In fact, almost every day this year, we have had more than 5,000 illegally crossing day after day after day.

This is a very big issue that the American people want solved. It is a frustrating issue that we have not been able to get to a resolution on. It is an issue that people have been frustrated with President Biden because President Biden has not enforced the border the same way President Trump did or the same way President Obama did.

To be clear, this year we will have 2\1/2\ million people illegally cross the border. With the same law in place under President Obama, we had half a million people that illegally crossed that year.

And as I have raised over and over again with this administration, if they would just enforce the border the same way President Obama did, things would be very different. But they have chosen not to. They have chosen not to enforce it the same way President Trump did.

Instead, we have absolutely been overrun with people from literally all over the world. To put this in perspective, in the last 3 months, we have had more people illegally cross than any full year under President Obama.

They need to do what they can do. But Congress needs to do what we can do. We have got to change the definition of asylum. We have to change the appeals process. We have got to be able to speed up the process. We have got to provide more clarity so that we don't have people waiting around 8 years for a hearing. We can't just release people at the border, as what has happened day after day after day for years now. We can't have a brandnew parole program that the Biden administration literally invented that no President has ever used to release thousands of people a day. We can't have that.

We need to solve this in the administration. We need to solve this in Congress. I wish that is what we were doing today, but we are not.

When Senator Murphy and Senator Sinema and I started working on this months ago, we were working to solve it. We were not able to get that done.

But today is not a bill. Today is a prop. Today is a political messaging exercise. Today is an opportunity to be able to have a vote that is sitting out there so people can send fundraising emails out later tonight and say, ``Look, I tried to do something,'' when no work was actually done to try to get something done and completed and passed today.

In fact, I anticipate there will be fewer votes today than there were 2 months ago when this came up--on both sides of the aisle--because everyone sees this for what it is. It is not an effort to actually make law. It is an effort to do political messaging.

That doesn't help us as a country. We still have people that are illegally present here that need attention, and we are not getting it.

Now, we can say--Democrats can bring this bill up and say: Look, we tried to do something.

Well, so what. Republicans can do the same thing. We brought H.R. 2 twice. That has passed the House with a broad, sweeping piece of approval in the House to come over here to be able to change the way that actually asylum is done, the entire process. That has been voted down twice on a strictly partisan vote.

So we can have this vote today, and people can say: Well, Republicans voted against this; so it didn't pass.

Republicans can say: Democrats didn't vote for H.R. 2; so it didn't pass.

That still doesn't solve the problem. At the end of the day, the people in my State say: There is another 5,000 people that illegally crossed the border. Why aren't we sitting down and resolving this?

So, today, I am going to vote no on a bill that I think should pass, but there has been no effort to really get this to pass. Let's get us back to the table. Let's actually resolve this issue as we need to get done.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, so far this year, 1,624,790 people have illegally crossed our southwest border--1,624,790 so far. We have at least 1.6

million people who have also been designated ``got-aways'' in the last 3 years; that is, they crossed our southwest border, and the Border Patrol could see them, but they couldn't get to them.

Let me give you some context on that. As this body knows well, because we have talked about it over and over and over again, in the first 3 years of this administration, we have had more illegal crossings on our southwest border than in the previous 12 years combined--more in the last 3 years than we had in the previous 12 years combined.

If you want to just drill down, 1 year under President Biden has as many illegal crossings as we had under 4 years of President Trump. Yesterday, we had more than 5,000 people illegally cross our southwest border--yesterday. That has been true every day, I believe, but 3, in the last 3 months, that we have had more than 5,000 people a day.

Now, the national news media has looked away from the southwest border, but those who live on the southwest border can't look away. They are still facing it every single day. And in cities and communities across the entire country, it is still happening every single day, day after day, as this President has looked away from what is happening on our southern border.

As I have said to this Department of Homeland Security multiple times, if they would enforce the border the same as President Obama enforced the border, we would be in a very different place. But they don't enforce the border like President Trump did, and they don't enforce it like President Obama did. They just fail to enforce it.

The same law--the same law--existed under President Obama, when we had less than half a million people cross illegally in a year, that exists under President Biden, where we have had 1.6 million people so far this year, with still quite a few months to go--the same law, the same capacity to be able to enforce the border. But this President has said over and over again that he has nothing that he can do until something is passed.

I have been very clear with this body, and I have been very honest with my own party and with my friends on the other side of the aisle: Congress has a job to do. We need to clarify what asylum means. We need to add the funds that are needed. We need to speed up the process. We need to take away the forever appeals that are built into it that incentivize people coming and gaming the system. That is Congress's job. We should do that.

And I have worked with everyone who is willing to work on that to get us to a place where we can get to 60 votes in this body to pass something to do our job. One party cannot resolve this issue. This has to be both parties sitting down and working on it together. That is the rule of 60 in this body.

But the President also has things that he could do that he has chosen not to do. In fact, this President has taken 94 Executive orders to weaken border security. He has created new parole authorities no President has ever used before to facilitate faster movement into the country. So instead of actually slowing the process down, he has actually sped it up. And they have done so intentionally.

In the past few weeks, the Department of Homeland Security has released a new memo and a new regulatory action that they are getting feedback for that they have admitted to me that will increase screening for, in their words, a handful of additional people--a handful when, yesterday, we had 5,000 people illegally cross.

But, currently, as right now Homeland Security is saying that they don't have enough money to hire more agents, they are spending millions of dollars rebranding Homeland Security Investigation, or HSI. They are rebranding them and changing some of their focus on it. Now, we have yet to be able to find out how much they are spending on it, but we do understand it is in the millions. At the same time, they are saying they don't have enough money to be able to handle greater enforcement.

This administration is focused on the things that don't make a difference when we need them to focus on the things that do. This body is also focused on the things that are not making a difference on this.

Several of us sat down for months to be able to hash out in a bipartisan way: How do we solve this? We felt we had a solution that could pass. We did not.

Now, that same option that everyone in this whole body knows won't pass is now coming back to this body again, exactly as it was. And many of us--including myself, who actually worked on the original language-- are saying: Why? This is not about trying to pass something. This is about a show vote in this body to show: Look, we tried to vote on something, and those mean Republicans blocked it.

Well, I hate to tell you, this vote, when it comes up on Thursday-- because that is when I understand it is coming--I will be interested in how many Democrats vote for this as well because I have already heard quite a few Democrats say: I am not sure I really want to vote for it if it doesn't have Ukraine, if it doesn't have Israel funding in it-- because, originally, it was border security, Ukraine-Israel funding. And so some of my Democratic colleagues were voting for it. But now that it has none of those things, several have said to me: I am not sure I want to vote for that without the other portions of it in there.

Several Republicans are saying the same thing they said before: Hey, I wanted even more in that bill. I know there were a lot of good things in it, but I wanted even more in it.

So they are not willing to vote for it until it has even more.

So what would be the logical thing that should be done in this body? The logical thing would be to say: That vote failed; so what would pass?

You see, we can play the same game because Democrats have blocked the bill from Senator Scott that would fund border security and enforcement of immigration laws at a different level. Democrats blocked that vote.

When Marco Rubio and Senator Graham brought bills to enforce the ``Remain in Mexico'' program that President Biden walked away from, Democrats blocked that vote.

When Senator Cotton brought up a vote to stop aid for sanctuary cities that incentivize more people coming into the country and disappearing, Democrats blocked that vote.

When Senator Grassley brought up a bill to deport criminal illegal aliens, Democrats blocked that bill.

When Senator Hagerty brought up a bill to deal with increasing funding for ICE and to deport more criminal aliens that have already been designated criminal aliens in the United States, Democrats blocked that bill.

When I brought up a bill to be able to implement and fund the title 42 authority and to extend that, Democrats blocked that bill.

When Senator Marshall brought a bill to bring up H.R. 2 and Senator Cruz brought up the bill for H.R. 2--the House bill that has a broad spectrum for border enforcement--Democrats blocked that bill.

When Senator Hagerty again brought up a bill to ban Federal funds from being used to fly illegal aliens from other countries to be able to give them parole authority into our country, Democrats blocked that bill.

When Republicans--Senator Budd--bring up the Laken Riley Act, Democrats blocked that bill.

When I brought up a bill dealing with special interest aliens, those the Department of Homeland Security designated as a potential national security risk--when I brought up a bill to say all those folks could not be released into the country, they had to be detained if they were declared a national security risk--Democrats blocked that bill.

We can play this game all day long. Somehow, this belief that if we bring up a bill that has failed before that is somehow a strong movement to be able to solve the issue doesn't. It plays a political game, and we all know it.

So what should we do? Actually be grownups, sit down, and actually try to figure out what we can pass rather than bringing things up that we all know won't.

Now, I don't know if there is a belief that somehow, on Memorial Day week, Americans across the country can't wait for the Senate to vote again on a bill that has already failed before that could come up again, as if something is going to be different. I have a message to all of my colleagues: The people of America are not, on Memorial Day week, focused on what the Senate is doing this week. They are just not.

They are thinking about their family member that was lost defending the country, or they are thinking about a sale at an appliance store. They are not thinking about this and this drama.

We should take seriously, though, the national security risk that all of us know about and do something about it.

Just as a side note that all of us know full well, the number of people designated by this administration as special interest aliens, those that are a national security risk by definition, who are coming across our border and being released into the country, is in the thousands.

We all know it. We should take that seriously. If we want to just deal with the people who are on the higher list, who are on the Terror Watchlist, if I go back to, let's say, 2017, there were two people who were apprehended on the Terror Watchlist in 2017. There were six people apprehended in 2018. There were three people in 2019. But if I take that to this past year, 2023, there were 172. We have people crossing our border who we know are a national security risk while we are playing political messaging games here.

Let's sit down and solve this. Let's not just vote on things that we know are going to fail. Let's not just do political messaging. Let's actually sit down and solve this.

Over the past 2 years, something has shifted on our southern border. It is not just people from the Western Hemisphere who are crossing illegally; it is people from all over the world. We went from having a handful of Chinese citizens who crossed the border to last year and this year--tens of thousands of Chinese nationals crossing our border.

I asked DHS: Are any of these Chinese nationals being deported?

They responded to me: Yes, we have started deporting Chinese nationals who are here illegally.

I said: Terrific. How many?

Their response: Fourteen so far.

Fourteen of the tens of thousands who have crossed in the last 2 years. We have deported 14 Chinese nationals.

Can I tell you, in Oklahoma, there are thousands of Chinese nationals who have come into my State who are working in illegal marijuana operations. Our Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics has done a tremendous job of trying to be able to shut down all these illegal grow operations, but they continue to spring up. Over and over again, when they do a bust, it is Chinese nationals working, individuals who were trafficked over our southern border and individuals who are in our country illegally--over and over and over.

We know this is going on. We know we have a terror risk. We all see it. We know there are individuals by the thousands being released who are declared by this administration as special-interest aliens. We understand full well criminal activities that are happening. And we are doing messaging bills that everyone knows will fail.

Why don't we sit down and actually talk about it and work it out? Why don't we figure out how to solve this? That is what the American people expect us to do.

My friends in Oklahoma look at me and say ``You guys go figure this out'' because they feel the problem is there, and what they feel is correct. So let's sit down and figure this out.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, can I just recap for this body. Starting in last October, a group of us sat down to have a serious conversation about the border.

We had a Democrat Senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy; we had an Independent Senator, Kyrsten Sinema, from Arizona; and a conservative Senator from Oklahoma.

We all understood the problem is serious, and there are very real threats to our national security, our economy. It was spiraling out of control on the border.

October was the highest month ever in the history of our country. November was the highest number ever in the history of our country. December was the highest number ever in the history of our country, with the largest day of illegal crossings in the history of our country, in December, of 12,000 people in a single day. Things were spiraling out of control at the border, and they continued.

So we sat down in a serious conversation and said we had differences of how to be able to resolve this, but we all want to be able to fix this. So we spent months trying to be able to hammer out a resolution.

It was a serious dialogue that we hoped to be able to get to a conclusion, but we failed to do that. We created a bill that, I felt like, was a great bill with common ground in it. It didn't have everything that I wanted in it, but it did have the essentials in it to be able to change the way we do asylum, to be able to change the processing. It literally took it from the very first person that crossed the border each day would be detained, quickly screened, and then deported--the very first person.

If we had a caravan of up to 5,000 people across the day, we can't control that; so in that situation, instead of detaining, quickly screening, and deporting, we would just detain and deport, because there was no time to do the screening. We weren't going to release people in; we were going to turn people around.

It changed the structure dramatically from what was happening on the border. I felt like this was a good bill to be able to move forward, and I moved in good faith to be able to get that done.

But it is also well-known here that I had disagreements, some within my own party--the majority within my own party--that said this is not the time to be able to resolve this. It is what it is.

It is the political nature of what is going on right now. I understand that. But the problem is still unresolved.

Yesterday, we had 5,500 people that illegally crossed the border yesterday--yesterday.

Last month, we had 174,000 people that illegally crossed our border last month. That would have been the highest month ever--in fact, it would have been the highest month in the past 20 years if it wasn't for the last 3 years under the Biden administration. It would have been higher than any month under President Obama, under President Bush, under President Trump. It would have been higher than any of those months, but it doesn't beat even the records that were even set in the previous months before under the Biden administration because of their dramatic change in policy.

That 1.5 million people now illegally cross the border this fiscal year--1.5 million people. And they continue to be able to come across our border with almost no restraint.

I have said for a long time, this is a serious issue that we need to address. My own party has said this was not the time to be able to do that.

Now I am hearing rumors that next week, the folks I was sitting down with to be able to have serious dialogue to fix it may bring bills back up again and to say: Let's do a political thing on the other side of the aisle.

Listen, if we are going to solve the border issues, it is not going to be by doing competing messaging bills. If we are going to solve this, let's sit down like adults and let's figure out how we are going to actually resolve this together.

If there is a messaging bill that comes back--even the bill that I helped negotiate--next week just to bring it up again to try to be able to poke Republicans in the eye for some sort of messaging piece, why are we doing this? All the American people see it.

Everybody sees this is political, but everyone in the country also sees: Why don't you guys and ladies fix this instead? Why don't you actually resolve it?

There are a couple of quotes that have come out lately. My Democratic colleagues have put out a memo, and this was the memo, saying:

Tom Suozzi flipped the script on his Republican opponent,

successfully painting her as unserious about border security

because of her opposition to the bipartisan border bill, and

turned what could have been a devastating political liability

into an advantage. Democrats should learn a lesson from NY-

03. Quite simply, we risk losing the 2024 election if we do

not seize this opportunity to go on offense on the issue of

the border and turn the tables on Republicans on a key fall

voting issue.

Senator Schumer put out a statement or he made this statement saying:

It's a win if Republicans abandon us at the last minute,

because if Democrats could put together a tough, bipartisan

border bill on border, it would not take border away as an

issue for the Republicans, but it would at least give us a

50-50 chance to combat it.

Listen, I understand the politics of the moment. I do. We are in a Presidential election year. Everybody in America is watching what is happening on the border and saying something needs to be fixed. And it is easy for Republicans to look at the White House and to say there are 94 executive orders that the White House has proactively done that changed how the border was enforced under President Trump and under President Obama. OK? A high number--a high number--under President Obama was 2,000 people in a day. Yesterday, we had 5,500 people.

If President Biden would just enforce the border the same way President Obama did, much less the same way President Trump did, the border would be very different. Everybody sees that.

Everybody also sees that we need a change in the way we do asylum policy. That is a change that has to be done in Congress. That is a vote that we would have to be able to take.

So instead of us pointing at each other and doing political stunts, let's solve this. Let's actually sit down and figure out how we are going to resolve

it. We can't do everything. The bill that I worked with Senator Murphy and Senator Sinema on, we are not going to be able to pass. So let's find the sections on it that we can pass.

The worst case scenario is doing nothing. That is what we are currently doing.

Now, the House of Representatives passed a bill yesterday saying that if someone who is not legally present here in the country attacks a law enforcement officer, whether that is State, local, county, Federal, Tribal, or whoever it may be, if they attack a law enforcement officer, they are going to be deported.

Well, it bipartisan passed over in the House yesterday. Is that coming here to the Senate? Probably not. It probably won't be taken up. But in a bipartisan way, it passed the House yesterday.

We have had two different votes of the House bill that passed called H.R. 2 that was a very comprehensive bill dealing with all areas of border security. It passed the House. It came to the Senate. It has had two votes, and it has failed both times. So Republicans can now say: Democrats didn't take our bill.

And Democrats, it looks like, are going to bring things up and say: Well, Republicans wouldn't take the bipartisan bill.

And we would point at each other, and we are still in the same spot.

Listen, the American people expect us to actually solve this, not just do politics on it.

So here is my counsel: Stop doing all the political games. Let's stop bringing up the messaging bills. This is a national emergency.

Of the 5,500 people who crossed the border yesterday illegally--I haven't seen the number yet, but I would tell you, in all likelihood, if it is tracking similar to other days--several dozen of those folks were designated by the Department of Homeland Security--this Department of Homeland Security--as special interest aliens; that is, they are coming from areas of known terrorism. They were designated at the border as a potential national security risk, and then they were released into the country awaiting a hearing. And by this afternoon, we will have no idea where they are. That happens every day now, because there is a large percentage of the people who are crossing the border every day now who are not from the Western Hemisphere.

They are from West Africa. They are from all the ``stan'' countries. They are from Pakistan. They are from India. They are from China. They are from Russia. They are from areas where we know there are active terrorist cells, but we just don't know this person. They are not on our list. But we do know that clan that they are from and that there are people from that clan in their particular tribe or their particular location that have been an issue. But because we don't have derogatory information, they are being released every day.

This has been the bell I have been ringing for months now. The immigration issue is not the same as what it was 2 years ago. There has been a huge shift in who is crossing the border, and we are not taking this seriously. This is a national security risk, and we need to be attentive to who is crossing our border every single day and take that seriously.

This body knows full well I am not anti-immigration. We are a nation that has welcomed people in from all over the world, and we should continue to do that. We have a million people a year who legally become citizens of our country. But in the last 6 months, we have had 1\1/2\ million people illegally--illegally--cross into our country.

That million that came in that became citizens of our country, they were vetted. They went through the process. They are being welcomed and integrated.

That million and a half other folks who crossed illegally, we have no idea. Some are coming to join family. Some are coming to be able to find a job. But some are, no doubt, also coming for nefarious purposes, and we can't tell the difference.

So my counsel to us is: Let's take this as serious as it actually is. Press conferences take one person; passing law takes 60. That means we have to sit down together to be able to talk this through. We have to be able to figure out how we are going to actually get something done and at least make some progress.

What is DHS currently doing? Well, DHS has just announced they are doing a rebranding of Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI. They are HSI-ICE. Well, they are going to rebrand them and take away the ``ICE'' designation. So we are going to have a new logo and a new something else, and we are expecting a whole new listing of what they are actually going to do.

At the same time, they are saying: We don't have enough money to be able to get more Border Patrol, to be able to detain more people, to be able to deport more people. We are spending millions of dollars. We haven't seen the amount yet, but we are spending millions of dollars on rebranding HSI.

We should take this moment as serious as it actually is. In the past 3 years, the price of groceries has gone up 20 percent. The price of gasoline has gone up 55 percent. But the price of fentanyl has gone down on the streets. We should take this moment as serious as it is.

We have more drugs coming across our border, based on the porous nature of what is going on. Where migrants will come in, Border Patrol will engage with them for humanitarian purposes, and then the cartels will smuggle drugs 2 miles upriver or through the desert when they know that no one is watching that area. So we have a dramatic increase in fentanyl coming into our country, directly connected to 5,500 people who illegally crossed yesterday, and 174,000 people last month, and 1.5 million in the last 6 months.

What are we going to do about that? I hope not just talk about it. I hope not just do political messaging. I hope not just saying: We will bring up this bill to fail, that we all know is going to fail.

I hope it is actually to sit down together and say: Let's do the work to actually resolve this issue.

That is what people sent us to do.

I fully understand it is hard. I have personally experienced it. But we were sent here to do hard things. So we should probably start doing them. Let's get this solved.

I yield the floor.