Floor Statements

Madam President, the conviction of President Trump is a clear manifestation that our justice system has been weaponized against us, against the American people. This was a political persecution aimed squarely at one thing and one thing only: preventing President Trump from challenging the current administration in this Presidential election.

Now, let's just examine the facts--just the basic, irrefutable facts. The proceedings against President Trump were marred by unclear charges and irregular jury instructions, making it evident, from the very beginning, that this trial was not about the pursuit of justice. It was not about the objective demands of the law.

No, it was a choreographed act of partisan lawfare intended to dismantle the political rights of an individual who stands as the principal opponent--I would dare say the sole remaining obstacle--to President Joe Biden becoming a second-term President. He is the last person, the last man, the last object standing in the way of President Biden's second term.

And so that fact, all by itself, signals something. It signals something we haven't seen before. It signals something that I wish we never had seen in our Republic and that I certainly hope we never see again. But the hypocrisy of this is just palpable.

The Democrats and their allies in the media have long accused President Trump of undermining American norms and traditions and of all these supposedly norm-shattering actions. Yet they now champion a prosecution that reeks of the authoritarian tactics seen by the tinhorn dictators in banana republics--the same banana republics and failed systems of government that we have repeatedly sanctioned and shamed publicly with good reason.

In what country could a judge who, according to the New York Times, violated judicial ethics when he donated

to a group supporting President Biden's campaign and another called Stop Republicans--that is literally the name of the group that he donated to, Stop Republicans. In what world could that judge be allowed to preside over the trial of a former President--a former Republican President and chief political opponent of the incumbent Democratic President?

Or how about Matthew Colangelo, another key figure in this prosecution? How could that person be authorized to transition directly from a senior role in the Justice Department under President Biden to lead the political prosecution of President Trump with Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg?

This intertwining of judicial proceedings with partisan politics should alarm every single American, regardless of your age, regardless of what part of the country you call home, and, frankly, regardless of your party affiliation.

Now, let's not forget that Senator Schumer's brother, whose law firm has lent significant legal firepower to this prosecutorial effort-- let's not forget that his brother is a partner in the law firm--the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison--the same firm that granted three highly paid attorneys a paid leave of absence to join the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, specifically in its targeting of Donald Trump.

We cannot stand idly by and act as if this didn't just happen and pretend that this whole endeavor hasn't changed--changed dramatically. We can't pretend that this didn't occur, nor should we. If we were observing such actions in another country, we would be discussing sanctions and shaming and perhaps a whole lot of other things, but certainly not silence. We wouldn't see that.

Now, as we prepare to honor the sacrifices made by the heroes on the beaches of Normandy, we are reminded that those brave souls fought and died, 80 years ago this week, to defeat dictators who ruthlessly wielded the power of the state, specifically to suppress and persecute their political enemies and anyone else who they thought stood in their way.

What would those American heroes say if they saw an American President cheering on a kangaroo-court attempt to imprison his political rival, his sole impediment to a second term in the Oval Office? Would they recognize the America they fought for?

It is with their sacrifice in mind that I call upon every Member of this Chamber to make it clear that we are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear the country apart.

Now, Pandora's box is open and a sword of Damocles hangs over the neck of our great Republic. If we can muster even a fraction of the courage shown by the ``greatest generation'' on June 6, 1944, 80 years ago tomorrow, we may still change course. There is still time. They can still stand down on this.

There are more instances of reversible error in this case, underlying this conviction, than I have time to recite in these remarks. For that reason alone, it would be very easy for the prosecution to confess error on appeal. There is still time, but there is not much time left. Let's put this genie back where it belongs and never, ever let it come back.

I ask you, join me. Join me and fight. Push back on this while there is still time.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my unanimous consent request, the following Senators be allowed to speak prior to the scheduled rollcall vote: Senator Lankford for up to 5 minutes, Senator Sinema for up to 7 minutes, and Senator Murphy for up to 7 minutes.

Mr. President, for over three decades, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act--or RECA, as it is frequently described--has stood as a testament to our Nation's enduring commitment to righting the wrongs of the past. Where it has hurt someone, it wants to do something about it.

Since 1990, this vital program has distributed over $2.4 billion to more than 38,000 individuals adversely affected by the fallout from atomic weapons testing and the uranium industry labor. These Americans suffered due to Federal activities and decisions beyond their control, enduring illnesses that spanned generations.

Yet, as we speak, RECA is on the brink of expiration. On June 10, just 18 days from now, unless we act, the Sun will set on a program that has provided essential relief to those still living with the horrific consequences of radiation exposure.

Among these are not only just the downwinders affected by nuclear tests but also the hard-working uranium miners, mill workers, and transporters contracted by the Federal Government in connection with Federal activities. Their suffering was part of the price of our national security during the Cold War, and their plight must not be forgotten.

So while we debate the merits and the potential expansions of RECA, it is unthinkable that we would interrupt access to aid for those currently suffering, those current beneficiaries, those currently eligible for RECA compensation. They consist of people whom no one disputes have been harmed. So we don't want to interrupt coverage to them simply because we are talking about who else might also need to be covered under this program.

The bill I propose is a clean extension of the existing program. It maintains the existing RECA framework, ensuring no disruption in access to compensation while we deliberate on how best to enhance and extend its reach. I don't dispute that it is appropriate to expand and extend its reach in certain respects because there are some people not currently covered by it, but, again, we don't want to harm those who are the current beneficiaries, and there is no reason why their coverage should lapse.

The proposal previously passed by the Senate to expand RECA includes regions and additional compensation claims in a variety of jurisdictions. In some of those instances, they are abundantly backed by data; in others, they are not. In some of those areas, there may be victims who are covered by other programs; in others, there may not be. Some of them are clearer than others. I think some of the clearest cases are those involving victims in the State of Missouri and in the State of New Mexico, and we will talk more about those in a little bit.

The current bill does have some challenging aspects to it-- challenging from the standpoint of moving forward toward passage. The bill as it stands risks inflating the deficit by at least $60 billion-- that is at the low end--and it may jeopardize the longevity of access to necessary resources for Americans who depend on RECA compensation for the reimbursement of costs associated with medical care or survivor benefits in the event a family member tragically passed away due to exposure.

That I will not do, and I am not alone. You see, the House of Representatives has thus far declined to take up and pass Senator Hawley's previous bill, with some signaling concern and raising some of the concerns that I just restated.

It is deeply troubling that amidst urgent need, we might find ourselves entangled in one form or another of brinkmanship, sitting on our hands, waiting for an unjustly expansive and unattainable bill--one that no one believes can be passed by the House. Expecting that that bill will be passed at the eleventh hour puts real lives at risk if what that means is that the existing RECA structure can't be reauthorized.

So I refuse to stand by and let the program lapse while we continue to search for a solution for legitimate victims in Missouri and New Mexico. We can't allow access to RECA's benefits to be held hostage during those negotiations.

Now, I, too, am in favor of some of the expansions, including and especially the expansion for New Mexico and for Missouri. I think those categories of would-be beneficiaries do need to be added. But we can't allow access to the benefits for the existing RECA beneficiaries to be held hostage during those.

But until we can iron out some of the details more carefully, it is no less imperative that we pass a straightforward extension that will allow support for the existing beneficiaries to continue without interruption. Those people haven't done anything wrong. There is no reason why they should be punished based on the fact that we haven't yet found a solution that can pass through both Houses of Congress and make it to the President's desk.

With the clock ticking down to just 18 days, less than 3 weeks before RECA expires, every moment that jeopardizes benefits for those suffering the consequences of our Nation's past actions is significant, and we should find that troubling. Now, these individuals do not have the luxury of time that seems at times so abundant in Washington. They need our help now, and they deserve swift and unencumbered continuation of access to the support that RECA provides while we work out the other issues.

I urge my colleagues in Congress to not allow RECA to lapse. Let's pass this clean reauthorization. Let's do it right now, and let's send a clear message that America takes care of its own.

To that end, Mr. President, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 4175 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, 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.

Mr. President, I deeply appreciate the insights offered today by my friends and colleagues, and that they truly are. The senior Senator from Missouri and the junior Senator from New Mexico have made an impassioned plea--an impassioned plea that I am deeply sympathetic to for a variety of reasons, including and especially the fact that they are both right as to their respective States. The folks in Missouri deserve to have this coverage, and so do people in New Mexico. There are also additional people not covered by the existing program in Utah who need to be covered.

In all three instances with respect to Utah, New Mexico, and Missouri, we need to get this done. You know, taking into account all of the arguments that they have made and the evidence that I have reviewed, I am prepared to do what it takes, and I am prepared to get this done today.

As I mentioned, this isn't just an abstract concept to me; this is near and dear to my heart. Many people I know and love have had their lives altered and, in many cases, ended by exposure to downwind radiation.

One of those people was a loving husband and father who raised seven children, who was taken at the prime of his life, at the peak of his career, just days after his 61st birthday, as he was surrounded by his wife and their seven children, one of whom stands at this desk today.

My father died from this in 1996, just 28 years ago, and we didn't know at the time--didn't know until years after that he had, in fact, been a victim of and then died of a cancer linked to his exposure as a child growing up in eastern Arizona, spending his summers in Reserve, NM, a small sawmill camp where his family lived each summer. He was exposed to downwind radiation, and that led to his untimely death.

My dad would be nearly 90 if he were alive today, and I can only imagine the youth and the vitality we would still see in him. I am convinced he would still be practicing law. I am convinced he would still be a runner. His life and that of so many others in Utah, Missouri, and New Mexico have been cut tragically short by this exposure, which is why we need to get this done.

So, look, in light of these concerns and the political realities we face, again, I want to make sure that RECA doesn't lapse, and so I want to offer an updated version of the Downwinders Act.

This bill would extend the benefits of the program to those in Missouri exposed to the hazards of improperly stored nuclear waste, while also addressing the historical oversights in New Mexico and in parts of Utah.

When we look at this, we have to do this to make sure that we are following the science, and in all three of those areas, the science is backed up, and in all three of those jurisdictions, not only does the science back it up, but there aren't other government programs that may overlap with it that provide this compensation.

Remember, if this were not the U.S. Government doing it, this would ultimately be some species of tort law. But because it is the U.S. Government and the U.S. Government, as a sovereign entity--you can't just sue it unless the U.S. Government makes itself amenable to suit, and that is really where RECA came in. Because of the fact that we are uniquely situated, both by virtue of what the science currently backs up and the absence of other programs to do it, I think it makes sense to accord that to these States.

The other States covered by the legislation now pending in the House, that is stalled out in the House--it passed here, and so that is done. It has moved on from this Chamber. One of the reasons that I understand why it stalled out in the House is because of cost.

Now, I am not aware of the full context of the quote provided by my colleague from Utah in that quote. I don't know whether there was more context there or not. But if that was the whole context, I don't share that approach. I don't share that sentiment. In other words, we don't not do this just because it is expensive. The whole thing is expensive. The loss of life is expensive, and we need to address that.

The issue is, again, one, whether and to what extent claims are backed up by the science and whether and to what extent there are other programs that already cover it in one way or another, such that the bill adequately addresses that.

There are other States in that legislation pending in the House that deal with law in the Marshall Islands, Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, Alaska, and perhaps one or two other jurisdictions. The claims of those States are not on equal footing. They are different from these claims. The Utah and New Mexico claims are very similar. They stem from the same sequence of events related primarily to exposure to downwind radiation from the atomic weapons testing. In Missouri, they are a little bit different, but they share enough of the same elements, and they are similarly backed by science. In these other jurisdictions, it is a little bit different.

That is where a lot of the--not all but a lot of the expense is accrued and a lot of concerns expressed in the House impeding its quick passage over there that might lead to it not being able to be passed at all.

But, again, look, to ensure we do our due diligence here, where there is uncertainty as to some of the other jurisdictions covered by that bill now pending in the House, my bill that I am offering now includes a requirement that the Federal Government must study and report on other regions that should be eligible for compensation.

We need to get this done. I will continue to fight for the recognition and compensation of all those exposed to radiation through no fault of their own because it is the right thing to do regardless of cost.

With the clock ticking down to just 18 days before RECA expires, every moment that jeopardizes benefits for those suffering the consequences of our Nation's past actions is significant. We can't ignore it. These individuals do not have the luxury of time that seems so abundant here in Washington; they need our help now. They deserve swift

and unencumbered continuation of access to the support that RECA provides.

So I urge my colleagues in Congress to pass the Downwinders Act, this expanded Downwinders Act, and send a clear message: America takes care of its own.

With this legislation, we will be able to take care of our own and expand the coverage to Missouri, to New Mexico, and to the previously unaddressed regions of Utah that have nonetheless been affected.

To that end, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 4403, which is at the desk. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, we have got to keep our eye on the ball, our eye on the fact that the legislation, while pending in the House, is itself mired.

Now, I want to be clear in response to something, a comment made by the senior Senator from Missouri. This is not a new realization on my part. This is not a new willingness on my part to acknowledge the legitimacy of the claims and the suitability of the claims under RECA from Missouri and those from New Mexico. It is not new at all.

In fact, it is not just in this Congress that I support them. And 2 or 3 years ago, in the previous Congress, I introduced legislation because after reviewing the data, I concluded the beneficiaries--the would-be, need-to-be beneficiaries--in Missouri and those in New Mexico deserve to be added.

And so, to be clear, what I am offering here is not the whole thing that exists in the bill that is now passed by

the Senate and pending in the House but appears to be mired with no hope of passage over there. It is not the whole bill, but it is something, and it takes care of our three States. And it is not just because our three States are important and the others aren't. No, it is because the claims arising in our three respective States are materially different than those pending in other jurisdictions.

In most of those other jurisdictions, the scientific data isn't of the same caliber, drawing the same causal link between radiation exposure and liability on the part of the U.S. Government, and, ultimately, the conditions at issue, the types of cancers and related ailments that go along with it. They are materially different.

And so until such time as the science catches up, I think it is going to continue to have difficulty passing in the House. I could be wrong. That is how I see it. That is what I have heard from everyone I trust as to diagnosing the ability of that bill, or lack thereof, to pass in the House.

With respect to the Post-1971 uranium miners and millers, there is a distinction here. It is not a distinction that is necessarily impossible to overcome in every circumstance. But the Congressional Research Service looked at this for us, and we asked them to examine it. They concluded that the Post-1971 uranium millers and miners covered by the Hawley legislation now pending in the House were from the commercial sector. They were not doing this as contractors or as employees or otherwise as agents of the U.S. Government, but rather for private sector industry. And in those circumstances--in many of those circumstances, if not most or all--those can be addressed through tort law and/or through workmen's compensation law.

Now, for those that can't, there may well be an appropriate use of RECA. But if we are going to start expanding this into purely private sector activities, that changes the nature of this bill, and I suspect will continue to make it more difficult to pass in the House of Representatives.

So as to what we have got in Guam, the Marshall Islands, Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, and Alaska, there may well be worthy beneficiaries there as to whom there exists adequate scientific research to justify the expansion of RECA and as to whom there is no other adequate recourse provided for by some other government program or through State tort law, workers' compensation law, or something else.

As to those, I would be happy to expand RECA, but we have to overcome those two issues. Those haven't been overcome. But they have been overcome as to Utah, as to New Mexico, and as to Missouri.

It is unfortunate that my friend and colleague from Missouri chose, rather than to allow the victims in his State and in New Mexico and the yet-uncovered victims in the State of Utah to be taken within the protective boundaries of RECA today--we could have gotten this done today. I am confident we could have gotten it passed in the House right away. He chose to object to it.

In other words, unless you can have all of his bill passed, including the parts that are not scientifically backed--making it unpassable in the House--he is not going to let even the victims in Missouri or the victims in New Mexico get covered. That is most unfortunate.

We have got to deal with this. I will be back. We have to get this done.

Mr. President, as in legislative session, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Rules and Administration be discharged from further consideration of S. 4292 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, 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.

Mr. President, it is unfortunate that it didn't have the chance to pass this today. I would have loved to have passed it. The reason I would love to have passed it is because, as my friend and distinguished colleague, the Senator from California, just noted, it is illegal for a noncitizen to vote. Because it is illegal for a noncitizen to vote, we need to make sure that it doesn't happen.

The fact that it is prohibited by a law with Federal criminal penalties attached to it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. It doesn't mean that it couldn't happen. It doesn't mean that it is not more likely to happen when we bring a whole lot more noncitizens into the country. There are now an estimated 30 million or so noncitizens inside the United States.

My friend and colleague from California cites a couple of studies. One of those studies is from the Cato Institute from 2020. This was about 12 million noncitizens ago. Under this administration, we let in an additional 12 million or so noncitizens into the United States. That rapid of an influx can cause problems.

He also cites another study from 2016. That 2016 study was probably 15 or 16 million noncitizens ago. Things do change.

Now, the Cato study, the one from 2020 that he mentioned, says that there is no evidence that noncitizens are voting in detectable numbers. It doesn't mean it is not happening. It may mean that they are difficult to detect. But the more noncitizens we have, the more time that elapses when the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, remains intact, the more predictable, foreseeable, and, indeed, likely it becomes that many people, some of them perhaps maliciously, knowingly intend to violate the law. Others who might be in sort of a gray area, not quite realizing what they are doing or the fact that it is illegal, might end up registering to vote.

Let's remember, in 1993, Congress passed the so-called motor voter law, the National Voter Registration Act.

It made it very easy to register to vote in Federal elections. All you have to do is check a box and sign your name. It is all on the honor system. If you do that, you are registered to vote.

Now fast-forward two decades. The Supreme Court of the United States decides a case interpreting the National Voter Registration Act as prohibiting the States--preempting the field in such a way that States may not request any proof, any evidence of citizenship when registering someone to vote such that they would be eligible to cast a vote in a Federal election.

Meanwhile, we have a change in trend. Decades ago when the NVRA was passed, No. 1, we had far fewer illegal aliens in the country, and we also, No. 2, had a lot of States that wouldn't issue a driver's license or were reluctant to do so to someone who was illegally in the United States. It is now the case that at least 19 States issue driver's licenses to individuals who are unlawfully, illegally in the United States. All 50 States plus the District of Columbia issue driver's licenses to noncitizens generally.

What that means is that somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 million people, or at least the adult segment--that portion of the nearly 30 million people who are noncitizens inside the United States today--all they have to do is go get a driver's license, which most of them, if they have any interaction with other members of society, are likely to do, to go get a driver's license--you need a driver's license for all kinds of things. Once they do that, if they check that box and sign their name, all on the honor system, they are registered to vote. Not only does the State not necessarily know that they are noncitizens and ineligible to vote, the State is legally constrained, legally prohibited from asking for any evidence establishing whether or not they are citizens.

So this really is concerning. We shouldn't treat it lightly. And the fact that it is difficult to detect makes it more important, not less, to require evidence supporting citizenship.

Look, we have to do this in other contexts. Anyone that travels abroad or might at some point in the future travel abroad will have to apply for a U.S. passport. To do that, you are going to have to produce some sort of evidence of U.S. citizenship.

When you start a new job in the United States, you have to fill out an I-9 form. Under the I-9 form, if you are a noncitizen, you have to produce evidence of your visa and your eligibility under your visa program to work. If you are not here on a visa and you are an American, then you have to produce evidence that you are, in fact, a citizen of the United States.

So if you have to produce that stuff to get a passport, if you have to produce that stuff whenever you start a new job, why would it not make sense to require proof of citizenship upon registering to vote in a Federal election? How else are we supposed to protect our elections, our sacred elections within our constitutional Republic, from foreign interference?

Look, one person, one vote. One citizen, one vote. This is how it is supposed to work. This is a foundational principle, and it is under unprecedented threat today. It is under threat

specifically because President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas have refused willfully to enforce the law. Now we face a direct threat to our electoral system as a result.

Consider this: Since President Biden's inauguration, over 9.5 million undocumented immigrants have entered the United States illegally and have been observed. An estimated 12 million or so have come in. That includes the people estimated to have entered without being observed. This figure exceeds the populations of 36 U.S. States, creating a crisis that has been met with just troubling silence and inaction from many across the aisle.

With millions of unauthorized entrants on U.S. soil, the potential for election fraud through ineligible voting is not just a hypothetical risk, it is a looming reality.

Instead of urging the President of the United States to address this crisis, Democrats seem to prefer to resurrect the so-called Orwellian- named Border Security Act, a bill that has already failed in this body and will do nothing to mitigate the border issues at hand--the border issues created and then exacerbated by this administration.

With the influx of noncitizens under this administration, even if just a fraction--say 1 in 100--were to vote, this could translate to hundreds of thousands of votes, enough certainly to sway tightly contested elections and potentially alter the outcome even in something as significant and with nationwide implications as far-reaching as a Presidential election.

This is concerning considering that a recent study found noncitizens have ample openings to illegally vote. Somewhere between 10 percent and 27 percent of noncitizens are registered to vote, and somewhere between 5 percent and 13 percent of noncitizens vote in Federal elections, including Presidential elections.

Across the Nation, instances abound where States have inadvertently facilitated the crisis. I say inadvertently, but in some ways, their hands are tied. ``Inadvertently'' here sort of refers to the fact that they don't necessarily mean to; it is that they are prohibited from asking for proof of citizenship.

From unsolicited voter registration forms mailed to noncitizens, to driver's licenses issued without adequate checks, practices relying merely on the honesty of noncitizens, including illegal aliens, have opened the floodgates to voter fraud.

While it is true that it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections, there really are no effective systems in place to verify the citizenship of voters. A mere check on a box is all it takes, with little risk--very little risk--of being caught due to inadequate State election infrastructure.

Federal law even prevents States from requiring proof of citizenship when registering voters via Federal forms.

An increasing number of localities permit noncitizens to vote in local elections, further blurring the distinctions meant to protect the integrity of our elections.

Prominent Democrats have openly discussed these tactics as not just existing elements but as things that are beneficial to their agenda. Only months ago, every Senate Democrat voted to count illegal aliens in the census to help them shore up more seats in Congress and more electoral votes in the electoral college.

This cannot continue. It is our responsibility, it is our moral imperative to close these gates. My bill, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act--also known as the SAVE Act--would be a vital step in securing the electoral process, ensuring that in every State, every vote cast is legitimate and every voter is duly registered.

The SAVE Act proposes amending the National Voter Registration Act to enable States to require proof of citizenship when registering voters for purposes of Federal elections.

Under the SAVE Act, we mandate that States obtain concrete documentary proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration. It specifies acceptable documentation that really is desperately needed. It is far more injurious, if you want to compare the two. If you want to talk about the amount of burdensome paperwork that goes on relative to what it is that needs protecting, I think it is at least as harmful, if not far more so, to fail to require documentation and proof of citizenship in the context of voting in a Federal election than it is when completing an I-9, which everyone has to do when they start a new job, citizen and noncitizen alike.

Furthermore, the SAVE Act compels States to proactively remove noncitizens from voter rolls and introduces Federal penalties for those who intentionally register noncitizens.

This bill echoes the sentiments of the American people from coast to coast. It transcends political affiliations and speaks directly to the core of what makes our country great: fair, free, and secure elections.

This is about preserving the integrity of our elections and ensuring that each State will have the opportunity to participate in a way that involves each vote being cast to reflect the American will.

If this administration insists upon keeping America's borders open, then the administration must also ensure that none of these illegal immigrants are thwarting our free and fair elections.

Look, this border crisis--make no mistake--was deliberately engineered and has been willfully perpetuated by this administration. Now, they shouldn't want open borders. There are a lot of good reasons why this is a bad idea, a lot of reasons why we shouldn't allow this. There are a lot of people like Laken Riley who have lost their lives or have otherwise endured heartache, trauma, and devastating consequences because of people who should not have been here to begin with.

But if this is what they want, then for the love of all that is sacred and holy, please, they should at a minimum have the decency to their fellow Americans to make sure that those same people who they have willfully allowed to enter our country against our law and against the will of the American people at least not be able to vote in our elections because they are not citizens.

Every day we delay, the foundation of our electoral processes erodes a little more. We can't wait for this administration to enforce the law because this administration isn't enforcing the law.

By passing the SAVE Act, we send a clear message that in the United States, voting is not just a right and a privilege of citizenship, but it is also a protected and a cherished one--one that our own government won't deliberately allow to be diluted and made less meaningful.

As debates about election integrity rage, the SAVE Act stands out by guaranteeing that only American citizens will have a say in our elections, thereby keeping those elections free from foreign interference--something we all care about.

American elections must be decided by American voters, full stop.

Our country is in the grips of the worst border security crisis in our history. President Biden's open border policies have caused an unprecedented humanitarian disaster, with grave consequences for public safety, national security, and, indeed, for the rule of law.

For years, Democrats have stood by and watched as President Biden presided over and intentionally exacerbated this historic crisis. They know that President Biden has the authority to secure the border. Yet, instead of taking him to task, they remain silent.

No, instead of calling on the President to fix the problem, we are here attempting to revise the so-called Border Security Act--a bill that has already failed to pass muster in this body and will do nothing to secure the border and, if anything, would likely make it worse if, heaven forbid, it became law. It would certainly make it worse when administered under this administration because of the amount of executive branch discretionary authority this bill creates.

Look, let's be honest here. This is a political exercise, not a serious debate, because that bill is going nowhere, and we all know that.

Since President Biden's inauguration, over 9.5 million undocumented immigrants have entered the United States illegally. Those are just the ones that we know about, just the ones that have been observed, that have been recorded by our border security

personnel. It is larger than the population of 36 States. Most of our States are smaller than the number of people who have been observed and recorded as crossing into our country through our southern border unlawfully just since January 20, 2021.

The magnitude of the border security crisis is hard to comprehend. What is not hard to comprehend is that this is a public safety crisis, and it should be treated as such. Our constituents from our various States know this, and we know it from them. They feel strongly about it, and they don't like it.

So let's not pretend that President Biden lacks authority to secure the border and needs new legislation or else he won't be able to do anything about it. That isn't true. That is science fiction fantasy. That is a fraudulently produced statement. It is a truth-free assertion.

President Biden, you have the power right now to secure this border. You have it and you know that you have it and you deceive the American people when you suggest otherwise.

Let's not waste the American people's time by debating a bill that stands to make the crisis even worse--even worse--by giving you, sir, more power to make this worse, which it would do. And we know already how you would utilize that discretionary authority because we know how you utilized the discretionary authority you have already been given.

We should be considering measures that force this administration to actually secure the border, that stay the President's hand, and that force him to do his job, which is to secure the border. We can do just that or at least move in the right direction on that front simply by passing my legislation, known as the VALID Act.

Thanks to the Biden administration, inadmissible aliens are not just entering the United States on foot, they are being flown on commercial flights--often at government expense--into and throughout the country. The CBP One mobile app, which was never intended to be used by migrants seeking entry into the United States, has been repurposed into a tool by the Biden administration to facilitate the entry of even more illegal aliens into the United States.

Today, migrants can download the app, put in whatever identifiable information they would like--no matter the accuracy of the information, regardless of whether they just made it up, just like they walked into a party and wrote their name down on a name tag saying: Hello, my name is thus and such. And then they can use the app as their sole exclusive form of ID necessary to enter the United States.

So the rest of us, if we travel outside the United States, need a passport to come back into the United States. But if you are an illegal alien: No documents, no citizenship, no visa, no problem; we got you covered. All you have got to do is color inside the lines. Just write down whatever information you want to make up. Put it on the app. That is your ticket. You are getting in.

I can't tell you how many times my constituent service operation in my State office back in Utah gets calls from frantic, concerned American citizens. They are somewhere outside the United States. They lose their passport. It is a real crisis. We do our best to help them. We can almost always figure out a way to solve the problem, but it creates real difficulty.

The American citizens don't have access to the CBP One mobile app, but do you know who does? Illegal aliens, and it helps them get into the country.

Now, not only can illegal immigrants use the app to enter the United States by plane, but they can also use it to travel throughout the United States, within the United States, on domestic flights paid for by the U.S. Government. Migrants don't need a legitimate ID or a passport. They can board a plane using Biden's CBP One mobile app, which the TSA now proudly advertises at airports nationwide.

Of course, if you are an American citizen, you will have an entirely different airport experience. You will be expected to wait in long security lines, show proof of valid identification, and then potentially be subjected to an additional invasive security screening. Americans are expected to follow our country's laws. Yet illegal immigrants who are in the United States only because they broke our country's laws that govern how you get into this country are held to a lower standard. It is almost an insult to standards to call it a standard at all. It is a nonstandard.

The Biden administration is rewarding people illegally entering our country with their own personalized form of TSA PreCheck. But it is better than TSA PreCheck; it is free. You don't have to provide any documentation. You don't have to have any real security review.

This backward policy has real consequences. Hundreds of thousands of otherwise inadmissible aliens have entered the United States using the CBP One mobile app as their sole form of identification for travel authorization.

Among those who have entered by using the app include a Haitian migrant who, after entering the United States through the CBP One mobile app, was arrested for committing a double homicide in New York. Cory Alvarez, another man who entered the country through the app, was arrested for sexually assaulting a disabled 15-year-old girl.

Americans deserve the right to fly without fear, which is impossible when we have a President who allows people without verifiable information to enter our country against our laws.

My bill can end this unacceptable lapse in security and public safety, and it can do it today. All I am asking for is a vote, a vote on legislation that would prohibit individuals from flying from foreign countries into the United States if they are using the CBP One mobile app, a notice to appear order, or a notice to report order as their sole form of identification or travel authorization.

This shouldn't be a hard idea to get behind. This shouldn't be controversial, not remotely. Before you board a plane, you should prove who you are, just like the rest of us have to do. We do it all the time. We have to prove who we are when we go to the doctor's office, the pharmacy, when we check into a hotel, pick out a rental car, if we get pulled over on the highway for speeding. Anytime we do just about anything of significance, it seems we have got to produce identification to show who we are.

Look, this has been a pretty widespread practice that Americans have been required to follow for a long time at airports, certainly since 9/ 11. Everybody just understands it is what you have got to do.

Even for a U.S. citizen to fly from one U.S. city to another, he or she must establish identification, proving identity. President Biden is reversing that standard and importing crime into every community in America. No community in our country should be forced to fear that foreign nationals whose identities we cannot confirm can travel free throughout the United States--freely, often at government expense; freely, without even having to produce so much as identification papers.

Earlier this month, one of our colleagues was quoted as saying: There is only one party that is serious about border security. It is the Democratic Party. We are going to ask Republicans to join us.

Look, I will pose the same question that he asked and impose it now to all my Democratic colleagues. If you are, as you claim, the party that is serious about border security, then, for the love of Pete, prove it. Step up. Go on record and show the American people where you stand on this commonsense border security reform, and let's pass the VALID Act.

(Ms. HASSAN assumed the Chair.)

So to that end, Madam President, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate resume legislative session and that the Senate proceed to S. 4387, which is at the desk.

Madam President, I appreciate the thoughtful analysis-- consistent with his always thoughtful, analytical approach to matters-- that has been offered up by my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Connecticut. Yes, he and I have worked together on a lot of things, including in the national security space. It reminds me, he and I need to talk about one of those things sometime soon.

I do, however, disagree with a number of conclusions that he has reached. I think I see where he is going, and I understand how he gets there, but I think he is mistaken on a couple of points.

No. 1, there have, in fact, been hundreds of thousands of people who have entered the United States using the CBP One mobile app as their basis for entering the country and as their form of identification-- hundreds of thousands.

In fact, my understanding is that between October of 2022 and the end of September of 2023, that calendar year, there were a total of 221,456 such people who did that just from four countries alone--from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua--people being brought in and then paroled. These were people who, as I understand it--the Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged--had no valid basis for entering the country, and that is why they had to be paroled into the country. They were using immigration parole illegally, illegitimately, to bring them in because to actually use immigration parole, the statute requires that it be made on an individualized basis, not a categorical one. These were brought in categorically.

With respect to his assertion regarding entry into the United States followed by an assertion of a right to proceed under our asylum laws, that is a different question altogether. First of all, if you enter the United States unlawfully and then apply for asylum, you still have entered unlawfully.

He describes, then, these individuals as having a right to asylum. Nobody has a right to asylum in the United States. We do have asylum laws. Those laws allow the Department of Homeland Security, through authority that goes through the Secretary of Homeland Security, to extend asylum status on a discretionary basis. There is no statutorily conferred right, certainly no constitutionally conferred right to asylum.

In effect, what we do have is that if you enter the United States without documentation and then you apply for asylum, you have to have your asylum claim adjudicated. That can take years. In fact, a number of people who are entering the United States now, if they apply for asylum after entering, they are often told that their court date may not occur until well into the 2030s.

We know that most asylum applications are denied. Most people who apply for asylum are ultimately deemed not eligible for asylum.

You can't call this a statutorily or a constitutional right--a statutorily conferred or a constitutionally conferred right--nor can you say that they are asylees as of the moment that they apply.

Under our asylum laws, while there is some complexity to them, I think that the most natural reading of them is that they are supposed to be detained while their asylum applications are pending and until they are finally resolved, which, as I just noted, most asylum applicants are ultimately denied that.

So to tell them: OK, fill out this form using the app. That could be your form of identification. You may enter the country using that as your ID. You may fly about the country at will using that ID.

To say that that is based on some sort of lawful immigration status isn't accurate, and it certainly ignores the fact that we are flouting in countless circumstances either immigration parole or asylum in order to get them to that point.

As to the suggestion that those entering the country with the CBP One mobile app--if I understand my colleague's assertion correctly, I think he is saying you have to have other forms of ID, perhaps a foreign passport or something akin to that, in order to use the CBP One mobile app to enter the United States. That is not my understanding at all. I have had countless conversations--I as well as my staff--with officials within the Department of Homeland Security when we have raised these concerns. I have never heard any suggestion anywhere that the ability to use the app in that fashion is conditioned upon the ability to show, to produce a foreign passport or other official form of foreign identification.

I would add here, I am quite certain that that is not the case for the additional reason--not only because that would have come up by now in the countless conversations we had about this but also for an additional reason. You see along our southern border people ditching their identification papers--their identification cards, passports, driver's licenses, whatever they are--from their home jurisdictions at the moment they cross the border. They ditch them. They ditch them because they don't need them. They ditch them because that way, they can fill out the CBP One mobile app and make their name or their date of birth or whatever it is whatever they want. This is a very known phenomenon. These are varied widely observed facts along the southern border.

He said that these are not hundreds of thousands who have been here. Look, this is not my understanding. Madam President, 221,000-some-odd people flew in just from the four countries I mentioned alone and just for the 12-month interval I mentioned. We have many hundreds of thousands who have come in using the CBP One mobile app.

Look, at the end of the day, we do have a problem. We have a problem because we have so many people coming in here who don't have a visa to be here, who don't have citizenship, don't have status as lawful permanent residents or otherwise, and they are entering without documentation, without any other legal right.

The fact that this administration has chosen to paper over the fact that in any other administration, in any other era of American history or at least modern American history since these things started happening, those would be regarded as illegal aliens, which, of course, they are.

In this administration, they do their best to try to paper over that by either declaring them eligible for immigration parole even though they are not because you are not allowed to use immigration parole that way--you use immigration parole in two instances, both of which are specific, neither of which may be categorical.

There is the humanitarian use. For example, your mother is in the United States. You are outside the United States. You don't have a visa. You are not a citizen. You are a citizen of another country. You want to come in because your mother is sick. She is about to pass away. For humanitarian purposes, they will let you in for a brief period of time, understanding that it is momentary. The other is a public use purpose--public use. Let's say you speak a language that is needed in the United States--I don't know, interpret at somebody's trial, translation services or something like that. Either way, it has to be a specific individualized determination.

This administration is using these things by the hundreds of thousands to say: Come on in. If you are from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, one of the other favorite countries on this, just come on in.

So papering over them doesn't make them legal. They are still illegal aliens, and we are still facilitating the process by which they enter the United States and making it easier for them to enter the United States without proper identification. This would fix that. This bill would fix that.

Now, I ask today not that we pass it by unanimous consent; I asked only that we turn to it, that we get on to it. Even that drew an objection. That is most unfortunate.

Finally, I want to make the point with reference to the 45th President of the United States. I, like many--I believe like most of my Republican colleagues, have grave concerns with the so-called border security measure--it is really more of an immigration bill than a border security measure--that Democrats want us to turn to next, that they want us to get onto. I have grave concerns with that, and most of my Republican colleagues do.

I will say this: Most of us had real concerns with this long before the 45th President of the United States weighed in on it.

My objections, though, had nothing do and still have nothing to do with the preferences of the 45th President of the United States with regard to that bill. They have everything to do with what that bill actually said.

Now, I understand a number of people put a lot of time into that bill. I get it.

But that bill didn't do what most of us as Republicans asked that it do, which is that it remove the President's vast discretion to make it easier to paper over and document illegal aliens to make them appear legal when, in fact, they are not.

Madam President, I will be brief, and I appreciate my friend and colleague for indulging me on this as I have just a couple of points.

Look, they are entering unlawfully. Again, this administration is using other laws to paper over their illegality. The fact that President Biden is unlawfully using immigration parole to make them appear legal still doesn't make it legal.

I believe it was Mark Twain who asked rhetorically: If you count the tail of a dog as a leg, how many legs does the dog have? I would respond that it is still just four legs. It is still a tail and not a leg.

Somebody who enters unlawfully isn't made lawful in the United States just because the President of the United States is unlawfully using an authority that doesn't allow him to make them legal to do that.

As to the suggestion that those who enter using the CBP One app have uniformly provided a passport, it just isn't true. In fact, I had it confirmed right now with the person who helps me with these things, who helps constituents--the people in my State--who confirmed just now that it is not a requirement. They are not required to provide a passport in order to do this, and we know that this has been used over and over and over again by people who do not have documentation.

Mr. President, if my Democratic colleagues were really serious about addressing the crisis unfolding on our border, they would demand Senator Schumer immediately take up H.R. 2 instead of this counterproductive and excessively, at best, weak bill that would, if anything, only make matters worse along the border.

Sadly, they are not. We know that by their actions--their actions today--actions we have seen just moments ago. We are still encountering close to 180,000 illegal immigrants at our southern border each and every month. Since President Biden took office, there have been over 9.5 million illegal immigrant encounters nationwide. Those are just the ones we know about. The actual estimates put it 12 to 13 million that may have crossed illegally. Over 350 individuals on the terrorist watchlist have been stopped while trying to cross the southern border. Over 27,583 citizens of communist China have been encountered at the southwest border in the last year alone.

By any metric, this administration has no interest in securing our border. In fact, quite to the contrary. The data suggests this administration wants as many illegal immigrants to enter the country as possible. My Democratic colleagues want us to pretend Republicans are somehow responsible for creating or prolonging the crisis. Why? Because we were unwilling to pass a bad immigration bill masquerading as a border security bill; a bill that would have normalized thousands of illegal entries at our border each month.

I continue to believe that H.R. 2 would solve most of our most vexing problems at our southern border. It is not that you have to have new legislation to fix it, but this would fix it. It would fix it because it would cabin President Biden's authority to allow this to continue to happen. He doesn't need legislation. He could do this all on his own.

But back to the point. If the Democrats were serious here, that is what Democrats would allow us to do is to take up and pass H.R. 2. Sadly, that offer was rejected moments ago. And so trying to find something that will work, I am offering a smaller, narrower bill; a bill that doesn't contain all the same provisions, but that would help alleviate the crisis by closing some of the most gaping loopholes in the law that are allowing this thing to continue. Again, cabining the President's discretion, forcing his hand so as to make it more difficult for him to perpetuate this cycle of illegal border crossings.

To be clear, this isn't the entire answer. But if my Democratic colleagues can't agree to those commonsense reforms found in H.R. 2, then if they can't agree to consider these reforms that are narrower than I am offering, how, honestly, can we take their concern about the border crisis seriously?

The Stopping Border Surges Act would address loopholes in our immigration laws which create some of the perverse incentives for illegal immigration. It would clarify that an adult cannot bring a child into this country expecting that child to be his or her ticket to avoid detention. This bill would help eliminate the disturbing recycling of children and babies by coyotes and by international drug cartels. It would allow all unaccompanied children to be returned to their home countries, thus ending the incentive for parents to send their young children here alone.

Sadly, we see what is happening to those children under the supervision of the Biden administration and Secretary Mayorkas. They are trafficked either into child slavery, sex slavery, as drug mules, or some combination of the above.

My bill would require the Department of Health and Human Services to provide the Department of Homeland Security with biographical information about the persons to whom children are released. It would require asylum seekers to apply for and be denied asylum in at least one safe country on their route to the United States. It would combat the Biden administration's obliteration of the credible fear standard by tightening that standard back to where it should be. The correct application of this standard is pivotal to operation of our asylum system; for it to be there for those who need it and are entitled to it while protecting it from being abused as it has been. It has been corrupted over the last 3\1/2\ years. More recently, it has gotten much, much worse. In fact, the Biden administration has, you might say, destroyed it entirely. We must fix it. We have an obligation to do so.

This Stopping Border Surges Act would also close loopholes and restrict asylum to aliens who present themselves at an official port of entry. We must eliminate the loopholes, not allow this administration to continue to expand them and, indeed, to make more of them.

Congress must take back the authority to establish law. We can start that today with the Stopping Borders Surges Act. Ending the ambiguities in our current law will help mitigate the situation at the border and prevent unaccountable bureaucrats from acting with impunity as the despots in miniature that they have become to enforce their own policy preferences at their own will and whim.

So I urge my colleagues to support what I am about to do here, which is to ask that we consider this bill. Keep in mind, just a moment ago, I had colleagues offer up to pass by unanimous consent H.R. 2. I am offering a narrower, more targeted fix and I am asking unanimous consent, not that it be passed right now, but just we be allowed to consider it. We bring it up, we debate it and discuss it, and dispose of it with votes.

To that end, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 685 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. President, this is unfortunate. Keep in mind what just happened here. I asked not that we pass this bill but that we move to its consideration, that we be allowed to debate it, discuss it, and ultimately dispose of it through votes after having an opportunity to review its merits and to consider amendments. That, too, drew an objection even though this would allow the body to work its will through amendments, and we could get to a point where perhaps we could agree on something.

Instead, we see absolute fealty pledged to this bill, what is being referred to as the bipartisan bill. Now, with all due respect to those who negotiated it, keep in mind, Senators in the room were two Members of the Democratic caucus and one Republican, and then you add to that the White House--a significant player even if you don't weight the White House as more than just one Senator equivalent. Putting it generously, this is a 3-to-1 negotiation. Yet this negotiation went on for many months. During most of that time, most of us were unaware of what was being discussed. As soon as the details started to leak out, as soon as we started to become aware of them, many of us started publicly and privately expressing our concerns, first in private and then in public.

Look, separate and apart from what the 45th President of the United States had to say about it, many--I would say most of us in the Senate Republican conference had already formed our opinions and decided to oppose the bill based on its own terms long before the 45th President of the United States weighed in on it. Long before Donald Trump said a word about this, we were concerned. We always would have been concerned even had he not weighed in, based on the merits of the bill.

Look, the bill itself didn't do what it was supposed to do, and it kept referring to one of my colleagues as the designated authorized representative. Well, when you are authorized and designated as a representative of one or more individuals--in this case, 49 individuals--that still presupposes that you are negotiating something consistent with their express desires and subject to their approval.

When at last we became aware of the details of it, we decided this is not nearly what we talked about, not what we ordered, and so we rejected it. Again, this was underway long before President Trump ever said a word about it. So it isn't accurate to describe this bipartisan bill--which, by the way, at the end of the day, received only 4 out of 49 Senate Republicans supporting it on the Senate floor. I believe it would probably receive less than that even today. It is minimally bipartisan at best.

Now, as to the suggestion that my bill, the Stopping Border Surges Act, and bare consideration of it--not just that it be passed into law but that we be allowed to even consider it--he says that it somehow targets vulnerable people, including children, for inhumane treatment. Do you know what is inhumane? What is inhumane is perpetuating a system that incentivizes the kidnapping, the renting, the borrowing, the leasing, the recycling of children for the purpose of creating a ruse by which adults can avoid detention, sometimes sending the same kids back through the system over and over and over again as if they were poker chips or something like that. Look, children are not props. Children certainly are not there as currency to facilitate illegal immigration.

Are there human rights violations? Yes. Constantly, incessantly, directly as a result of this. Somewhere between, I don't know, 35 percent at the low end and 65 percent at the high end of the women and girls who are trafficked into this country by the drug cartels--which are making tens of billions of dollars a year under the Biden administration's deliberately lax policy--are subjected to rape, to sexual assault, in many cases, to sex slavery.

In many instances, people can't afford the many thousands of dollars they have to pay to the cartels in order to be trafficked, so what do they do? Well, they work it off. How do they work it off? They do what they can, what they are told to. In many circumstances, we know exactly what that means.

So don't talk to me about this being an inhumane bill. This is a bill that would stop the inhumanity. This is a bill that would tighten the restrictions so that this doesn't happen anymore, so that kids aren't recycled, so that they are not kidnapped, sold, borrowed, rented, and recycled as props to facilitate illegal immigration.

Anyone who suggests this is humane isn't looking at the reality of the circumstances and at the lives lost even before you get to the Americans whose lives have been ended or have ended in tragedy or met with tragedy unnecessarily by people who should never have been in this country to begin with and then carry out crimes--some too heinous to describe on the Senate floor. Even before you get to those Americans who have met tragically with fate in those ways, just look at the inhumane treatment received by those who are being trafficked.

The humane thing to do here is not to perpetuate this cycle. There is nothing humane about allowing human beings to be trafficked on this scale, enriching international drug cartels whose object is lucre and whose means inevitably involve violence. Shame on all of us if we don't do this. Shame on the Senate for not being willing. Shame on the Senate Democrats not being willing today even to consider a bill that would bring that to an end.

Mr. President, this is a little like deja vu all over again. Here we are dealing with another piece of legislation. It is an important piece of legislation. It is important legislation that deals with a lot of things important to a lot of Americans, affecting something that is uniquely, distinctively within our legislative jurisdiction as Federal lawmakers; that is, the work of the Federal Aviation Administration.

It has been part of the interstate network from the dawn of the Republic. Article I, section 8, clause 3, the commerce clause, has been interpreted, among other things, to give Congress regulatory-- legislative jurisdiction over channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and air travel happens to be one of those things.

This important FAA reauthorization bill that has a lot of provisions in it--some of which I like, some of which I am not wild about--was processed by the Senate Commerce Committee. The Commerce Committee--the chair and especially the ranking member--did yeoman's work in incorporating into the base text amendments from a wide array of Members, and I have appreciated the hard work they have put into it.

It is important to remember that no matter how hard a committee chair and ranking member work--certainly the ranking member, my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Texas--have done in this case on this bill, it still doesn't obviate or supplant the need for robust consideration of amendments to be offered on the Senate floor because, remember, any one Senate committee, including the Commerce Committee, contains at most, you know, a few dozen Members of this body--a couple of dozen is about all--and there are, of course, 100 of us. Every one of us holds an election certificate.

One of the most fundamental rules in the Constitution--a rule that, by directive of the Constitution itself, can't be changed--is the principle of equal representation among the States in the Senate. So to give life and vitality to that, it is absolutely imperative that individual Senators be given the opportunity to have meaningful input into legislation whether they sit on the committee of jurisdiction or not.

To that end, throughout the nearly 2\1/2\ centuries of the existence of this body, the U.S. Senate, our rules have given pretty broad deference to individual Members and given certain prerogatives to each and every Senator, no matter how junior or how senior, whether a Member is with the minority party or with the majority party.

The whole basis of traditions in the Senate built into our rules-- things like the filibuster, like the cloture standard--they are all designed to allow Members to engage in robust debate. You can't really have meaningful debate and meaningful input from every Member of this body who wants to participate unless you have something of an open amendment process on the floor.

Now, this was always the norm in the history of the Senate. It was even when I arrived here. I was sworn into office at the beginning of 2011. The Presiding Officer, of course, joined us not too long after that, and thus commenced the golden era of the U.S. Senate with the arrival of the current Presiding Officer.

When we arrived here in the Senate, there were still real, live, significant vestiges of the way the place always operated; namely, when we had a significant bill--especially a significant, must-pass legislative vehicle like the FAA reauthorization bill we are considering now--it was still normal, still to be expected that an individual Senator could come down to the Senate floor, call up his or her amendment, and make that amendment pending.

Once an amendment is made pending, then the Senate has an obligation eventually to dispose of that amendment either by passing it or voting on it and declining to pass it or tabling it or something like that. There are not many options, but it had to be disposed of once it was made pending.

We have gotten into a bad pattern since then. Unfortunately, both political parties have played a role in this. We have had increased prevalence of a situation in which the majority leader will come to the Senate floor, file cloture on the bill to bring debate to a close, set that process for bringing debate to a close in motion, and fill the tree.

Fill the tree. Filling the amendment tree is what that refers to. That is fancy Senate terminology that just means the majority leader has some tricks at his disposal to make it nearly impossible to get amendments made pending by individual rank-and-file Members.

It was fairly common that we could make our amendments pending as recently as 2011 and 2012, when I arrived and then when the Presiding Officer arrived in the Senate. It is almost unheard of now because filing cloture and filling the tree have become almost automatic, almost reflexive. They are almost self-perpetuating. And it is relentless to the point that many Members who have joined us since then haven't ever even really experienced the Senate the way it is more properly expected to function. Individual Members have to beg and plead, go on bended knee to political leaders of both parties in the Senate, asking: Please, please, may I have a chance to do this? Without the acquiescence of the majority leader, the only way you can get your amendment pending in many circumstances involves coming to the floor and asking unanimous consent to make it pending. That consent is too routinely denied now, very often by the majority party--typically by the majority party; sometimes not.

What that results in is really a truncation, an abbreviation, a short-circuiting of the legislative process as it has always functioned here, as it was designed to function in the Senate rules, as I imagine it to have been envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

There are 100 Members of this body, and they should all have the opportunity to fight publicly for their constituents, to make improvements to the bill, to take away things they consider harmful, and to add things that have not been included that they think should be included.

This bill has not been amended on the Senate floor. That is why I opposed cloture moments ago. Like I say, there are some things in this bill that I really like, and there are other things that I don't like, but the biggest single reason to oppose cloture on the bill is that I don't know how you can in good conscience vote to bring debate to a close when debate has effectively not happened--at least not on the Senate floor.

I don't believe debate can happen meaningfully, effectively on an amendable vehicle like this one where there has been no opportunity to amend. The bill hasn't been amended on the Senate floor.

The Senate shouldn't simply agree to rubberstamp this so-called four corners agreement.

``Four corners agreement'' is a term that can refer to several different things. Very often it means that it has been blessed-- depending on the nature of the bill, very often it has been blessed by the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson, and Jeffries or perhaps the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson, and Jeffries accompanied by the chair and ranking member of the appropriate legislative committee or committees.

But we are not a rubberstamp for one or more committees or for the firm; we are each elected by the voters in our respective States and should stand accountable to them. In order to do our jobs, we have to stand here and be willing to debate. If you don't want to

fight fires, for heaven's sake, don't become a firefighter. If you don't want to cast votes, including lots of votes on amendments to legislation, even where you don't feel like taking the vote, even where you would rather be kicking back, drinking a root beer or something-- you would be really doing your constituents a disservice if you subjugated your own desires--your own desire for bliss and for inaction and you preferred those over your duty to your constituents who elected you.

We are not here to celebrate somebody's birthday. We are not here to rubberstamp what the committees do or what the law firm suggests. We are here to legislate.

We are not really legislators; we are a gigantic rubberstamp to the extent that we ourselves don't have the opportunity to vote for amendments. That is why I call upon all Senators within the sound of my voice, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or something else, a liberal or a conservative, whether you have been here for a few years or a really long time--it doesn't matter; you should want your job that you worked really hard to get elected to--you should want to be able to do your job.

I want to be clear. There are a lot of amendments that have been prominently featured and touted in connection with this bill, amendments--the sponsors of which have really aggressively argued for. A lot of those amendments are not amendments I support. In fact, a number of them are things that I strongly oppose and would really hope would not pass. Some of them, I would support; others, I wouldn't.

But notwithstanding the fact that some of them really are awful, call me old fashioned, Mr. President, but I think that is our job, is to take votes, to try to make legislation better, and to offer improvements to it, and that means amendments.

Look, I understand that in the House of Representatives, things operate a little bit differently. You have 435 people over there. It is a lot harder to have--this is why we have always bragged about our status as the world's greatest deliberative legislative body.

On paper, we are. Historically, we certainly have been. Today, we are not. We are kidding ourselves. We are delusional if we want and expect the American people to believe otherwise, because we are not that.

But here is the good news: We still are that entity on paper. We still are that entity as it is envisioned, as it is created, as it is established and outlined by the Constitution. We still are that entity with our own rules, our own precedents, and our own customs.

But, alas, the best rules, the best constitutional provisions will amount to dead letter if we ourselves refuse to exercise our own rights and our prerogatives. The muscle of legislative procedure begins to atrophy with nonuse--especially, deliberate, willful, chronic nonuse-- always ultimately to the benefit of the firm, to the benefit of a small handful of Senators and to the exclusion, to the effective disenfranchisement of everyone else--most importantly, those who elected us to do a job that we are neglecting, that we are outsourcing to third parties. Sometimes, it is third parties in the executive branch of government. Sometimes, it is individual Senators within our own ranks, within our own body, our own party leaders within our respective legislative Chambers.

Here is my closing plea. I hope and I humbly ask Senators--and I have great affection for the Presiding Officer and consider him a dear friend, even though he and I don't agree on every political issue. We have different positions on everything from the consumption of meat to whether I waited too long to shave my head. But the Presiding Officer and I are good friends, and even though we have different ideas for a lot of things, I think we both agree on the fact that the Senate could do a better job and would be doing a better job if we were voting more on his amendments, more on my amendments, more on the amendments that anyone else wants to file.

Sure, it takes a little bit more time, perhaps. Sure, it requires a little bit of effort. But that way we are doing our job. And not everything we want will always pass. And, yes, that way the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson, and Jeffries wouldn't be able to control as much as it does. But it was never intended to be that way.

We are intended to make laws, not other lawmakers--certainly not legislative oligarchs who stand in for everybody else while the muscle of legislative and constitutional procedure continues to atrophy.

So, in short, the next Senate Republican and Democratic leader, regardless of who holds the majority, I hope, including and especially the next majority leader of either political party--I certainly hope he or she, whoever holds that position, will plot out a course that is different than the one that we have been on for the last few years and plot out a course that allows and encourages and enables each and every Senator to do his or her job.

We are all going to work better if everyone is allowed to do his or her job, and that means the leader needs to stop filling the tree reflexively, consistently, instinctively every time and boxing out rank-and-file Members.

Now, look, I get it. There are times when the majority party may see fit to do that, and those decisions have to be made in realtime. But I don't think it should be done often. I don't think it should be done for lighter, transient reasons. It should be the rare exception, rather than the norm.

But regardless of who the next majority leader is and to which party that leader may belong, it is not as though we are hopeless, passive observers, subjects to be acted upon here. No, we can be a part of this process.

Wherever, whenever there is an effort to lock out amendments, to fill the tree and exclude individual rank-and-file Members from the amendment process, any 41 Senators--Republicans, Democrats, or a combination of the two--can respond to that by proposing cloture and prohibiting the process from resulting and bringing debate to a close, unless or until each Senator is allowed the opportunity to offer, call up, and make pending their amendments.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I echo and endorse the wise comments just uttered by my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Missouri. What we are witnessing here is the destruction of the legislative process in the Senate.

The Senate is here today preparing to vote on one of the most significant pieces of legislation this entire Congress--that is, a bill to send nearly $100 billion overseas--and Senators are unable even to offer an amendment to that bill.

By filling the amendment tree this afternoon, the majority leader has prevented every single Member of this body from offering amendments to the legislation, any efforts to improve it. If we want to have any amendment considered, we have to beg the majority leader to let it come before the full Senate for a vote.

You may remember that just a couple of months ago, we were in a very similar position on a very, very similar bill.

Senator Schumer promised a ``fair and open'' amendment process on the national security supplemental in February of this year, but not one amendment--not a single amendment--was considered on the Senate floor.

Republicans filed over 150 proposed amendments to improve the bill, but not one vote on a single one of those amendments or any other was allowed. Why? Why?

Well, Senator Schumer blocked every amendment from even being considered by filling the amendment tree. That blocked all of the other 99 Senators from participating meaningfully in that process.

Now, why wouldn't he want amendments? That is, after all, the hallmark characteristic of what defines us as a body. It is why we call ourselves the world's greatest deliberative legislative body. So why wouldn't he want those?

Well, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that an amendment might point to some of the weaknesses in the bill, some of the defects of the bill. It might prompt Members to--I don't know--slow down and ask whether this is a prudent idea--to send a lot of humanitarian aid to Gaza, up to $9 billion, $9.5 billion that could go there with minimal guardrails, where Hamas will, with certainty, seize it to wage war against Israel; or if the U.S. taxpayer should be footing the bill for ``gender advisors'' in Ukraine's military. Should they really vote for a bill that does this? That is what an amendment forces all of us to ask ourselves and decide on one particular question or another.

But leadership in the Senate wants to avoid these thorny questions that might rock the boat. Leadership wants to ram this bill through the Senate with minimal debate and perhaps no amendments because they know that aspects of it, especially the $60 billion for Ukraine, are massively controversial with the American people, those who elected us, those who pay taxes to fund these efforts.

Now, my colleagues and I are working in good faith to reach a unanimous consent agreement to bring forward a handful of amendments and set up a stand-alone vote in exchange for expediting the passage of the bill.

We nearly had that agreement locked in late Friday night--an agreement to vote on just two amendments and one stand-alone bill--but a couple of Senators on the other side of the aisle panicked and started objecting to any and all agreements.

They panicked because they knew that one of those items set up as part of a UC--the stand-alone legislation to redesignate the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, as has been offered by my friend and colleague the Senator from Texas--might actually pass. Remember, this is the same entity that has been firing on U.S. forces in the region and those of our allies, and yet they couldn't let that happen. Democrats will agree only to amendments that they find politically palatable or know will not pass.

Now, it has not always been this way in the Senate. When I first joined this body in 2011 as a new Member, individual Members could call up our amendments freely and then make them pending, and the Senate would then have to dispose of them as it does with pending amendments, either by voting them in; voting them out, up or down; or by a motion to table or reject them.

But Members had to vote. They had to take ownership for their opinions in public. They had to let their constituents know where they stood.

Today, the majority leader hides the ball from the public by filling the amendment tree, ensuring that the amendments that he and his party dislike will never see the light of day.

This is a circus. It is a madhouse. Filling the amendment tree isn't about creating an orderly process. It is about limiting real debate.

When we had an open process, when Members could call up their amendments and make them pending on most bills, it actually sped up consideration of a bill. Members knew that they would have a fair shot in the debate and debate eventually. So they would be more cooperative, would be more willing to collapse time, and wait until the next bill to offer their amendment or take a motion to table as a proxy for their amendment vote.

But in today's Senate, we do nothing on the floor for hours while Members and the staff hide in the cloakroom and argue about what we can and cannot vote for. They twist arms, pressure Members in private, and make assurances they can't and don't intend to keep, saying: Oh, you will get the amendment in the base text of the next bill or you will get it as a free-standing measure another time.

And then they shrug their shoulders when it just doesn't work out.

Why not have these debates in public? Why not allow our Senators and their constituents to know what is

going on? Well, it is because the majority leader doesn't want to give up control.

Sadly, while the Democrats pioneered this change in the amendment process, Republican leadership chose to tolerate the practice and even continue it while we were in the majority by filling the amendment tree so that no one could offer an amendment without the leadership's blessing. For both sides, it is about control. It is about protecting Members from voting, the very thing we all came to this body to do.

On the Republican side of the aisle, our aspiring leaders need to ask if they want to perpetuate this awful trend. Will they tolerate blocking out Members, including Members of their own party from offering amendments? Will they continue to lock down the floor? Will they continue to disenfranchise Members and, more importantly, those they represent, by preemptively blocking them from exercising their procedural rights? Or will they finally stop this barbaric practice of filling the amendment tree? Will they let Members make their amendments pending so that Senators must actually debate and vote?

Republicans need to ask these questions of anyone desiring to lead our conference.

Mr. President, we just heard the astounding claim that it would be a waste of time to allow individual Senators to come here and do what they were elected to do, which is to offer improvements to pending legislation.

We are not a rubberstamp for the House. We are not a rubberstamp for either party's leadership in either Chamber. We are U.S. Senators, and we should be able to vote as such.

And so I am asking for the support of my colleagues in tabling the amendment tree so we can have the ``fair and open'' process that Senator Schumer promised the last time we addressed the national security supplemental.

If we table the tree, Members can actually, finally, be able to call up their amendments on the floor, instead of begging Senator Schumer to give his blessing for their consideration.

If you support a fair and open amendment process, if you want to improve the bill, you should support my motion to table.

This will not create the post-apocalyptic hellscape that those in leadership would have us believe will ensue.

There will not be dogs and cats living together in the streets, nothing out of the Book of Revelations. We will just find ourselves in the position of being able to do our job.

Motion to Table

To that end, I move to table the motion to refer.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, it wasn't too long ago when Republicans made a promise to ourselves and to the American people that before we sent another dollar, another dime, another nickel, another penny to Ukraine, we would ensure that our own house was in order, that our own country was secure, that our own border was secure, that we would pass a real border security measure. And yet here we are, months later, preparing to dispatch nearly $100 billion. If you say it slowly, you sound a little bit like Dr. Evil in the original Austin Powers movie--$100 billion to foreign countries while the security of our own homeland languishes.

House Republicans have broken their promise and at least a critical mass of them, under the direction of House Republican leadership, have betrayed the American people because they have gone back completely on what they--what we--promised.

Tonight, we are seeing the same movie played out on the Senate floor. This occurs at a time when about 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and yet Congress continues to add to a national debt that is about

to blow past the $35 trillion mark. How can we justify this to the American people as a Congress?

Are we really more concerned with the borders of a foreign country-- Ukraine--and with foreign wars around the world than we are with the safety and the security of the United States and its citizens?

This bill tells the American people that the answer to that question is an unambiguous resounding ``yes.'' Congress cares more about sending billions to wage endless war in foreign countries, cares more about this than saving our own country, especially at a time when we are being invaded. We have seen an invasion of between 8 and 13 million people over the last few years alone. That is a big deal.

We are forgetting the wise caution left to us by our first President, the Father of our Country, George Washington, who warned against entangling our peace and our prosperity with the affairs of other nations. He said:

Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of

Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of

European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?

It seems no price is too high, no weapon system is off limits. Our only strategy appears to be ``spend, spend, spend, and then spend some more,'' with little to no thought given to the consequences. It is the continuation of a lackluster approach to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, devoid of coherent strategy, while allocating the vast majority of its funding to Europe and the Middle East, neglecting, of course, the looming threats from China and the warnings from great national policy experts, like Elbridge Colby, who warn us, time and time again, that the same weapons that we are depleting, sending to other parts of the world, sending to Ukraine, are those that are in such dire need in Taiwan and elsewhere.

The $13 billion in military aid to Israel is juxtaposed with the up to $9.1 billion in civilian aid going to Hamas. Now, some would say: You mean Gaza. And I say: No, I mean Hamas.

You cannot send this aid. Even if it is labeled as humanitarian or for some other noble-sounding purpose, if you send it to Gaza, it is aid to Hamas--Hamas terrorists. These are the same terrorists who massacred, who butchered, who savagely mutilated innocent men, women, and children in Israel just a few months ago in October. The architects of this bill undermine their own goal to secure stability and peace in the region.

So I have come to the floor in an attempt to soften the blow to the American people. To that end, I would like to call up Lee amendment No. 1902 for consideration. My amendment would require Ukraine to repay the money loaned to it and that the funds repaid be used to secure our border. If Congress is so determined to send taxpayer money abroad, then the repayment of this loan should not be waivable and must be used to secure our border.

It is sad that shoring up our border and protecting our own citizens has to come at the mercy of our debtors. But that is what this administration thinks of everyday Americans--that they don't deserve protection.

We should be voting on H.R. 2, and we should be doing that today. We should be addressing the crisis at the border. Instead, we are focused on sending money to secure Ukraine's border, not our own.

I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendments and motions in order to call up my motion to concur with amendment No. 1902.

If the objection is that my proposal is somehow not germane, then I will offer up another amendment. I want to bring up Lee amendment No. 1857 for consideration. It would ensure that the repayment of the loan Congress seems so determined to give Ukraine is exclusively used to pay down the U.S. national debt.

This bill demands the American people dig deeper into their pockets, funding the salaries and pensions of Ukrainian officials as humanitarian efforts under the guise of a loan. The unsettling truth is that this loan can and almost certainly will be waived, possibly leaving Americans without any reimbursement. I think that is part of the plan, in fact. It makes it easier to swallow. It makes it look like something less than what it is.

My amendment addresses this concern by prohibiting any cancellation of a debt owed by Ukraine and making sure repayments go directly to the U.S. national debt.

By presenting this amendment, I aim to offer the American people the financial security and oversight this bill currently lacks, deliberately so, effectively serving as an insurance policy against irresponsible fiscal gambles half a world away.

I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendments and motions in order to call up my motion to concur with amendment No. 1857.

Next, I am going to call up, in a moment, Lee amendment No. 1882 for consideration. If we are genuinely concerned about security, let's just start by securing our own citizens' personal information, securing it from foreign adversaries. My amendment would prohibit the sale, transfer, or sharing of American personal data to governments like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran without explicit consent from the individual.

For weeks, proponents of the House-passed bill to force the sale of TikTok--legislation included in the package we are debating--have told us this legislation is vital to protecting the security of Americans' data.

The reality, however, is far more complicated. Indeed, forcing the sale of TikTok through that legislation won't, itself, secure the data of users. Instead, it will simply allow another company to purchase TikTok and do with their users' data what they may.

Only by changing the underlying law and preventing companies from handing over Americans' information to our adversaries can Congress secure the personal information of every American. My amendment aims to do just that rather than engage in a regulatory game of Whac-A-Mole, whereby we allow ourselves to be distracted by whatever company happens to be making headlines at the moment. My amendment would implement a comprehensive prohibition on any individual or company operating in the United States from selling, transferring, or sharing the data of an American citizen to the government of a foreign adversary without that individual's express consent.

This is a serious solution to a serious problem. No company should profit by exposing the personal information of an American citizen to a hostile foreign power, whether that company is owned by a foreign national or by an American citizen.

To that end, I ask unanimous consent to set aside any pending amendments and motions in order to call up my motion to concur with amendment No. 1882.

This really is too bad. These are some really good amendments. Apparently, we are not allowed to have those. We are just allowed to sing off of whatever hymnal they happen to hand us that has been preblessed by the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson, and Jeffries. That is unfortunate.

Next, I want to call up Lee amendment No. 1860 for consideration, which proposes to strike all emergency spending designations from the bill. We cannot continue to spend under the guise of an emergency, especially when an actual emergency--a real-life, present-tense, presently located emergency--involving the security of our own Nation's national border is not even being addressed in this bill. It is not just that it is not being resolved. It is not even being addressed at all.

This irresponsible practice has led to a ballooning national debt now nearing $35 trillion. It will soon blow past that. If this spending is necessary, it should be subject to the same budgetary constraints as all other government expenditures. This bill spends almost $100 billion--$100 billion we don't have--on

top of the more than $100 billion Congress has already appropriated for the war in Ukraine over the last 2 years--in excess of $113 billion, if I am not mistaken. It will spend more money on interest payments on our national debt this year than on all base defense spending. And, within a year, I believe, we are likely to be spending well over $1 trillion a year just in interest on the debt.

If Congress believes it is worth spending $100 billion we don't have, Congress should be making sure that sum of money will be fully offset or subject to appropriate budgetary enforcement.

My amendment would strike the emergency designations of this bill to subject this additional spending to the annual caps Congress agreed to last year, while simultaneously predicting the bill's budgetary effects from escaping proper enforcement.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside any pending amendments and motions in order to call up my motion to concur with amendment No. 1860.

Mr. President, it is profoundly distressing--disappointing, to say the least--that these commonsense amendments have been so cavalierly objected to and have been met only with one-word objections.

Although my amendment to strike the emergency designations--all of them drew an objection--pursuant to section 314(e) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I intend to raise a point of order against these same emergency designations for international disaster assistance and migration and refugee assistance for Gaza.

We are, in the end, going to have to acknowledge that we are at a critical juncture, compelled to reevaluate our priorities as a nation and our responsibilities to the American people. Every decision we make must be weighed against the best interests of those we are sworn to serve, not those people abroad but those who are right here at home.

Waving the flag of another nation in Congress as you vote to send them tens of billions of dollars doesn't inspire confidence; it creates distrust.

As legislators, we fail in our duty if we don't heed the call to prioritize the American people first.

So to all out there who find this distressing--the distressed Americans, the distressed carpenters, the distressed plumbers, the distressed poets--I am sorry that we weren't able and willing to secure the border. We should have been able to do that. We made a promise, and we as Republicans shouldn't have deviated from that promise--certainly not with the critical mass necessary to facilitate passage of this in the House and then, before the night is finished, likely the Senate; certainly not under the leadership of our own elected Republican leaders, who themselves have repeated this promise not too many weeks ago--a promise that is now apparently a thing of the past that we are supposed to forget.

This $95 billion aid package to foreign countries is a stark testament of the misguided priorities of our current congressional leadership and a clear indication that we have let ourselves and, perhaps more critically, the American people down. The situation demands a wake-up call.

To every Member of this body, by failing to address the fundamental needs of our own people, the American people, in favor of international interests, we risk not only the prosperity but also the security of our Nation.

And make no mistake, this isn't free, although it can feel free to those of us who work in this hallowed Chamber. It can feel free to us. It can feel as if we draw from an endless, unlimited well, but we don't.

As we have seen to an acute degree over the last few years, every time we spend more money than we have, that comes at a cost. Sure, we borrow the money, and sure, the credit of the United States is still just good enough that it can feel like we have the capacity to just print our own money, which is essentially what we are doing. But every time we do that, every dollar earned by every hard-working American-- every mom and dad, married or single, in this country, just trying to put food on their table for their kid, suffers, as they are having to shell out an additional $1,000 a month every single month just to live, just to put a roof over their head and keep food on the table.

I agree with the assessment of Nobel laureate and famed economist Milton Friedman, who said that in any given moment, the true level of taxation in America can best be measured not by the top marginal tax rate or even the average effective tax rate but, instead, by the overall level of government spending.

This, he explained--perhaps referring to an odd combination of credit rating, the way our deficit spending works--in effect, every year when we look at overall government spending, especially Federal spending, that is the true cost of the Federal Government because what we don't collect in taxes, we effectively print and thereby devalue every dollar that is earned by every American by degrees. Unlike other expenses that people have--the monthly bills they receive or the annual tax return they file--there is no billing moment attached to this, there is no pricetag. You don't ever see the overall amount that you are spending on this, as you do at least once a year when you file your Federal income tax return. No. It is very different with inflation. Each dollar is diminished bit by bit.

The Federal Government is costly, and when it sends money abroad that we don't have to fund somebody else in fighting a war against somebody else, that costs money.

Another thing we learn about these proxy wars is that in the United States of America, which has assembled the greatest military force the world has ever known--certainly the strongest military force that exists today--proxy wars carry on for going on 2-plus years now. We are in our third year of this effort. They don't remain proxy wars forever.

It becomes especially startling when the proxy war is being fought against a nuclear-armed adversary. That is not to say we can never push back against any nuclear-armed adversary, but it does mean we should be darn careful when we do that. We should know exactly what our objective is, what it is going to take to secure the peace so that we don't have to fight that war.

We don't avoid the profound risk to our own national security simply by funneling money through a proxy, whether that proxy is a great steward of the funds, weapons, and resources that we send or not. Whether that country happens to be one that has proven impervious to fraud, corruption, money laundering, and grift or not, we should be concerned about what happens to that money because it is ours and because how it is spent is going to have a very direct, very real potential outcome on the American people.

We cannot pretend anymore that we have the money to do this, that the economic cost is free, or that the military risk is free. None of them are.

Shame on us if we don't turn this around. Shame on us if we pass this tonight. Shame on us if we do this without taking any steps to secure the integrity of our own border.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the pending measure, the House message to accompany H.R. 815, contains an emergency designation: on page 12, lines 3 through 6, and another emergency designation on page 12, lines 12 through 15. I, therefore, raise a point of order pursuant to section 314(e) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 against both of these designations.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 30 minutes.

Mr. President, as I explained on the Senate floor yesterday, the House FISA reauthorization bill, known as RISAA, has a lot of problems--more problems than a math book. Not only are the bill's purported reforms mostly fake--and where they are not fake, they are woefully inadequate--but the bill itself actually expands FISA. It expands FISA surveillance beyond where it has existed in the past.

In fact, RISAA authorizes the largest expansion of surveillance on U.S. domestic soil since the passage of the Patriot Act. Egregious Fourth Amendment violations against U.S. citizens will increase dramatically if this bill is passed into law as it stands now.

Fortunately, there is one thing standing between where that bill stands now and where that bill could be soon if we enact it without amendment, and that is the U.S. Senate.

Under article I, section 7, the same bill has to pass both Houses before it can be presented to the President for signature, veto, or acquiescence. RISAA, as amended by the Turner amendment, would allow the government to compel a huge range of ordinary U.S. businesses and individuals and other organizations, exempting only an odd assortment of entities, including hotels, libraries, and restaurants, to assist the U.S. Government in spying on American citizens.

Currently, the government conducts FISA 702 surveillance with the compelled assistance of what are known as electronic communication service providers, or ECSPs.

Historically, the definition of such an entity, of an ECSP, is including those entities with direct access to Americans' communications. Think, for example, Google or Microsoft, Verizon, et cetera.

This new provision would allow the government to compel warrantless surveillance assistance from any provider of any service that has access to equipment on which communications are routed and then stored.

This would include a huge number of U.S. businesses that provide Wi- Fi to their customers and, therefore, have access to routers and to communications equipment.

Now, apparently, this provision is a result of the intelligence community's ire at being told by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, or the FISC as it is sometimes described, that data centers or cloud computing do not, under existing law, have to comply with FISA-compelled disclosures.

House Intelligence Committee Members claimed that it was a narrow fix, a narrow fix that would allow the government to compel information from a single service provider--just one. Now, yesterday, right here on the Senate floor, my friend and colleague, the distinguished senior Senator from the State of Virginia and the chairman of the Intelligence Oversight Committee in the Senate spoke about this now infamous Turner amendment.

First and foremost, Senator Warner admitted in that context that even he thinks the amendment could have been better drafted. This is, of course, putting it very mildly and indeed euphemistically. And instead of voting on correcting that language, language that could have drastic implications for the privacy and the Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens and grave implications for all kinds of businesses and other organizations in America, he would rather just pass the faulty, flawed, broad-as-can-be language passed by the House and then rely on promises from the intelligence community Agencies that they will not abuse this new expansion of their authority.

How does that sound to you as an American citizen? To anyone within the sound of my voice, do you really feel good about agreeing to that when you hear from one of our intelligence-gathering bodies, hey, you can trust us? Sure, this language is broad enough; it has got loopholes in it. You could drive a Mack truck, a 747, and an Airbus A380 through the loophole side by side; but, trust us, we won't treat it that way. Is that a good idea? I think not.

In fact, the entire premise of the Constitution--not just the Fourth Amendment but of the Constitution itself--is ``trust but verify.'' It is, we are not angels, we don't have access to angels to run our government, so we rely on rules. We don't rely on placing faith in governments. Faith is reserved for very different beings than those occupying the halls of the U.S. Government, whether they are in the intelligence Agencies or otherwise.

As a Federal lawmaker who has been lied to repeatedly throughout the years by various elements within our government, including some people within the Department of Justice and the FBI on the abuse of the authorities, these very same authorities that we are talking about here, forgive me if I am not just willing to take the word of the intelligence community.

We have a responsibility to our constituents, to voters everywhere, to Americans of every political stripe in every part of this country to protect them by getting this language right, by getting it right before it becomes law, not after when all we could say is, oh, we are sorry. Or, more likely, all that Members who support that could do is try to help them cover it up. That is not right.

Second, my esteemed colleague has either been entirely confused by the protestations of the intelligence community, or he, like the Department of Justice, would like to confuse you as to what this expansion of authority actually means, what it does.

They are suggesting that we are offended by this expansion, merely because it would allow them to target more individuals. That is not the problem, not at all. The problem is, rather, that this amendment is so broadly worded that it could subject any kind of service provider, even one providing services such as cleaning services or plumbing services, to participate in the secret, compelled disclosure process on which section 702 of FISA relies. Now, we are not concerned with new targets resulting from this legislation, as they seem to be suggesting quite mistakenly, but, rather, with the government conscripting any and every kind of service provider into its compelled disclosure scheme.

If DOJ wants to override the decisions of the FISC through an amendment, it must be done through an amendment tailored to precisely that task. Unfortunately, the Turner amendment is about as well- tailored as a muumuu or, better said, a tent--meaning there is no tailoring at all. They just threw it all in there. Like Prego spaghetti sauce, this thing is said to contain whatever they want it to contain.

Again, Senator Warner yesterday acknowledged that this language was poorly crafted, but instead of taking this as an opportunity to amend it, to fix it so that it did what it was actually purported to be intended to do and to go no further than that and to incur no additional grave risk of further meddling, of creating problematic situations for law-abiding Americans everywhere, they suggest that this will be a problem for 2 years and then we can fix it or that it won't be a problem for the next 2 years because we can have faith and trust that they won't abuse it and then we can fix it for real. In fact, he is willing to work with anyone who thinks it is a problem to fix it anytime--just not now. He doesn't want to fix it now.

If the job is worth doing, it is worth doing it right now, the first time, not just so that we don't have to go back and correct it later but so that it doesn't create problems between now and 2 years from now when he proposes we address it for real. It is worth doing right today because the stakes are high. There is no reason not to fix this now and a lot of reasons why it will be problematic if we don't.

Now, let's talk about the statutory deadline for FISA collection for a minute. The administration acknowledges that under the law, it can and will continue to conduct FISA 702 surveillance collection even if 702 temporarily lapses while we debate this. That is because the FISA Court has approved a certification within the last week or so that allows the government to continue 702 collection until April 2025.

There is a provision of FISA that you might say sort of grandfathers in FISA

Court certifications even if the law itself expires, meaning the FISA 702 collection program can continue in its entirety, without exception, until April 10 or 11, 2025, even if FISA 702 temporarily lapses between now and then, because all that matters was that FISA 702 was active, intact, not having lapsed as of the moment on April 11, just over a week ago, when the latest certification was issued by the FISC.

Notably, the administration does not deny this. What it is saying instead is that companies will bring legal challenges and that they might refuse to comply with the government's directives to turn over communications.

What I would like to know is, what is their evidence for this? The fact that a few companies briefly refused--briefly--to cooperate with the government back in 2008 when the predecessor to section 702, the Protect America Act, expired?

Now, here is the problem with that argument: Those companies back in 2008 challenged this, and they lost in court. The FISA Court ruled in 2008 that surveillance could continue despite expiration of the law and that the companies had to comply.

So this legal issue was itself settled on those terms 16 years ago-- not only that, but much more to the point here, Congress has actually made the law stronger, even clearer, even more direct since then, stronger on the government's side since then. The FISA Amendments Act includes language that wasn't in the Protect America Act saying that the FISA Court's approval remains valid notwithstanding any other provision of the law, including the sunset.

You see, that language was added for the first time in December of 2018 in the same legislation that FISA 702 was reauthorized until December of 2023. When we extended the effective date of FISA 702 back in December of 2023, extending it until tonight at midnight, that language was reupped. It was enacted again. So that same language is intact. There is absolutely no ambiguity here.

So it is absurd what they are saying, really. I mean, why would companies risk fines of $250,000 a day to make a legal argument that the FISA Court rejected 16 years ago? This is simply not a valid reason for us in the U.S. Senate to rush to enact laws as deeply flawed and as detrimental to American civil liberties as this one.

All I am asking for is votes on amendments. We have a reasonable list of nine amendments offered by a bipartisan group of Senators reflecting almost every point along the ideological continuum of the Senate. If Chairman Warner and Senator Schumer would just stop blocking these votes, we could finish consideration of FISA today; we could wrap this up today. The problem is, they know the American people agree with us on these amendments. A lot of these are really, really popular. They agree with reforming this program to stop the warrantless surveillance of themselves, of the American of people.

So certain Members of the U.S. Senate are somehow afraid that these votes must not be considered, lest they pass, because they are really afraid of what would happen if--when they did pass. Think about that for a minute. They don't want us to cast votes on something not in spite of its lack of popularity but because of its popularity. That should concern us all.

To that end, I am going to try to move these things forward. Let's see if we can resolve this. I would love to be able to resolve this tonight, get it done tonight, get it over to the House of Representatives, which is still here, still in town. It is really convenient because, as they set this up a couple of centuries ago, we both work in the same building. They are just down the hall. I will personally walk it down there to them if that would help.

So I ask unanimous consent, Mr. President, that the motion to proceed--I will hold on to that for a moment, and I will continue.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to extend my remarks for an additional up to 15 minutes.

So if that really is the concern--that is the concern I am hearing from some colleagues. A number of colleagues on both sides of the political aisle have been telling me--I have been talking about the need to vote on amendments. What a number of them are saying is: We can't do this because if we do it, it is going to expire, and if it expires even momentarily, it is going to be Armageddon; dogs and cats living together in the streets; stuff right out of the Book of Revelations; absolute chaos and pandemonium.

So if that is the case, let's get it done now, but it is not the case. FISA 702 collection is not going to end. And these same companies that objected in 2008 and lost when the law was much less in the government's favor than it is now will remember what happened, and all they have to do is read. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to read the language passed in 2018 and again in December of 2023 to make clear that that collection may and indeed will continue.

So in the spirit of moving this forward and getting it done tonight, I ask unanimous consent that the motion to proceed to H.R. 7888 be agreed to.

I ask further that the following amendments be the only amendments in order: Lee No. 1840, Paul No. 1829, Marshall No. 1834, Wyden No. 1820, Hirono No. 1831, Merkley No. 1822, Paul No. 1828, Durbin amendment No. 1832, and Paul amendment No. 1833; further, that the Senate vote on the above amendments in the order listed, with the Paul amendments Nos. 1828 and 1829 and Merkley amendment No. 1822 subject to 60 affirmative votes required for adoption; that upon disposition of the Paul amendment No. 1833, the bill be read a third time and the Senate vote on passage of H.R. 7888, as amended, if amended, with 60 affirmative votes required for passage and with 2 minutes for debate equally divided prior to each vote.

Mr. President, I appreciate the thoughtful words that have been presented by my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Virginia, who also chairs the Senate's intelligence oversight committee. It is unfortunate that he is unwilling to have these amendments even considered--especially unfortunate because it appears to be predicated on the risk of FISA 702 lapsing. Unless we do something on this in the meantime, it is going to lapse at least for a period of time.

As I made clear a moment ago, the language we adopted in 2018 and that we reupped in December of last year,

2023, makes abundantly clear that FISA 702 collection can continue unabated through April of 2025 based on the recertification by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court I believe on April 11. That is allowed to continue for 1 year following the certification as long as FISA 702 was still intact and not expired as of the moment of the certification, which it was.

But even if that were not the case, if what we are worried about here is the clock, look, I have drafted--and I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but I have drafted and would gladly accept, if that really is the concern, a short-term extension of FISA 702 if by doing so that would make the difference between us being able to consider these amendments, vote on them, and send it back to the House of Representatives without doing so under the threat of this amorphous and unsubstantiated fear that FISA 702 collection is going to go dark, which, of course, it is not.

But, look, once again we do find ourselves at the mercy of Senate Democratic leadership, with the majority leader in particular acting as the doorkeeper of the Senate, only allowing access to the floor to Senators who wish to offer their amendments and only if those amendments are amendments that the majority leader knows he can defeat. He is so determined to block amendments that he is willing to obstruct the quick passage of this bill.

Now, I just offered to speed up the consideration of the FISA reauthorization bill passed by the House--RISAA, as it is known--that many of its advocates desperately want to see passed before midnight today in exchange for votes on nine amendments--just votes, not guaranteed outcomes but just votes commensurate with, consistent with, what the rules of the Senate already allow, with nongermane amendments set at 60 and germane amendments set at a simple majority threshold. That is really not too much to ask, but Senator Schumer and the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wouldn't take the deal.

Why? Well, part of it is the time issue that I mentioned that an entity no less rightwing than the New York Times just earlier this week pointed out that argument really doesn't hold water, and if it does, I am happy to agree to a time agreement to extend it. The only other reason I can think of is there is a fear on the part of those who want RISAA to pass in exactly the form that the House of Representatives enacted it. They are afraid that some of these amendments might actually pass.

Now, six of these amendments are germane to the bill. So, yes, they could pass with a simple majority vote. And that is exactly why some in this Chamber won't allow these amendments to be voted on. They don't want reforms to the bill. They would rather let the bill expire instead of letting the Senate do its work and amend the bill in a manner consistent with the expressed desires and, indeed, the demand from many quarters among the electorate--left and right, east and west, north and south. That is a sad commentary on where we stand in the democratic process today.

Now, some might say that we can't pass these amendments because that would send it back to the House and then the House would have to repass it. But isn't that how the lawmaking process is supposed to work?

I mean, that is exactly how article 1, section 7, contemplates it. It is never meant to be super easy to pass legislation for a bicameral legislature, and that is, in fact, what we have.

Aren't we supposed to vote on amendments, not just for a show or a head pat but to improve the bill to see whether or not the House will take the modifications, rather than just assuming, as if we were adopting some sort of House legislative Chamber doctrine of infallibility, that what they wrote must be treated as if it were carved into stone and that we can't touch it. That is nonsense. That is not how this works. It is never how it was intended to work. It certainly should not be how it works in this circumstance--and not with a bill like this, where Americans at every point along the ideological continuum have concerns about this.

Now, there are a number of us in this Chamber who feel this way. I have some very good friends on the other side of the aisle with whom I frequently disagree on a wide variety of issues but with whom I agree closely on this issue. We are reflective of our constituencies and of the American people, generally.

And the House is actually in session this weekend. They are in the same building, still in session. So it is standing by ready to actually take up our amended bill whenever we can get it passed, but Senator Schumer and Senator Warner are preventing us from performing one of our most basic duties. We have got one or two Members who are acting as doorkeepers to the Senate.

Meanwhile, the other 98 Members or so are being prevented from even having our improvements to the bill considered. And many of these, if not most of them, are pretty widely bipartisan.

So this sort of thing, when it happens, renders us something of a legislative rubberstamp. It is not something that we aspire to.

So, look, like I say, it is unfortunate that we couldn't come to an agreement on this. So I just ask the question: If the clock is really the enemy here, why not just extend it?

I stand ready and willing, speaking for myself, to extend the clock, whether it is for a few days or a week or--so that we can have time to consider it. I am willing to do that. If we won't do that, then maybe we are not really hearing the real reason for the opposition.

(Mr. BENNET assumed the Chair.)

(Ms. BUTLER assumed the Chair.)

(Mr. WELCH assumed the Chair.)

(Ms. BUTLER assumed the Chair.)

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1840, and I ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, in 2020, 77 Members of this body voted for this amendment, and I would love to see the same result today.

According to the IG report following the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, there were a lot of FBI employees who appeared before the FISA Court who had made substantial misrepresentations to the FISA Court. It is one of the things that can happen in a nonadversarial courtroom setting. That is why this amendment that most of us voted for just 4 years ago does two things.

First, it beefs up the ability to have amicus curiae representation so that there is an extra set of eyes, not individual lawyers representing any one single person, but an extra set of eyes there to defend the rights of individual Americans--individual Americans--about 50,000 of whom are queried without any warrant, in a typical quarter, as recently as 2 years ago.

The second thing it does is it requires the disclosure to the court of all material, exculpatory evidence, or impeachment evidence--what we would call, in a courtroom, Brady and Giglio evidence--to the court.

This is not too much. We should all be able to support this just as 77 of us did in 2020.

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

Mr. President, over the last few hours, I have listened to debates occurring on the Senate floor over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and specifically discussions surrounding section 702 of FISA, discussions surrounding, among other things, the FISA 702 reauthorization passed last week by the House of Representatives.

That bill they passed last week is commonly known as RISA, and under RISA, there are a lot of conversations going on about what does and what doesn't concern Americans, what should or shouldn't concern Americans.

Under this bill I am going to be talking about today, RISA--it is an acronym that stands for Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act. Like so many other bills that get passed by Congress, RISA has a really Orwellian name. It purports to do something that, upon further inspection, it doesn't do, and in some cases, it does quite the opposite of that. So there has been a lot of misinformation being peddled by the purveyors of the cult of infallibility surrounding FISA and those who implement it, so I have come to the floor to dispel some of those myths.

The first myth I would like to try to dispel today involves what exactly it is that we are talking about with the FISA 702 collection and what exactly it is that some of us find objectionable. Remember that under FISA 702, a collection that is supposed to occur under that section really doesn't trigger Fourth Amendment concerns. In fact, most of what they collect I am willing to assume and have reason to believe doesn't trigger Fourth Amendment concerns because it is there to collect information about foreign adversaries operating on foreign soil, doing things against American national security.

We are not concerned about someone plotting a terrorist attack overseas as a non-U.S. citizen--we are not concerned about that person's Fourth Amendment rights. We are concerned about that person and what that person intends to do, but that person doesn't have Fourth Amendment rights--at least not rights that are cognizable under the U.S. system of government. That is why Congress was willing to enact FISA--to allow for the acquisition of intelligence on foreign targets operating outside the United States.

But under FISA 702, there are some communications from some U.S. citizens that are, as we say, incidentally collected, that get swept up into the collection under FISA 702--meaning, if you are a U.S. citizen and you are in the United States and you have a phone call with someone, there is a possibility that that person is outside the United States and is not a U.S. citizen and might be under some sort of collection--some kind of FISA 702 collection effort. There is a possibility that when you talk to that person that that phone call is being recorded or that text message exchange or that email thread is being collected by U.S. intelligence Agencies, and we call that incidental collection.

There are a lot of people who have come down here and have the audacity to claim that the Fourth Amendment has no role to play whatsoever under FISA 702. Now, in a broad sense, they have a point in that what FISA 702 was created to do--and I assume--I certainly hope that the bulk of what it does, the bulk of what it collects has no Fourth Amendment protection attached to it, but some of it does, and how you access that information after it has been incidentally collected by our government and then stored in a U.S. Government database under FISA 702--that matters.

One of the lies that I have heard perpetuated on this very floor on this very day by some Members of this body is that somehow United States article III courts, Federal courts, have concluded that FISA 702 collection just simply isn't a problem, and therefore we have nothing to worry about here. That is misleading. It is misleading to a profound degree, especially because in some instances these arguments have been presented in a way so as to suggest that we have no Fourth Amendment interest, no reason under the Fourth Amendment to care about the querying of a specific U.S. person, a specific American citizen, to see whether or where or to what extent that person's private communications that are stored on the FISA 702 database exist--whether they exist and then what the contents of them are.

In other words, if you want to search the FISA 702 database for a specific American citizen, you can figure out, first, whether there is information there; and, secondly, when you open it, you can read the contents of it, figure out what that person said, to whom, when they said it, how long they talked, and what else transpired.

This is a question on which no Federal court in the United States has ever given its blessing, much less said that there are no Fourth Amendment ramifications from this. In fact, some of the case law that has been cited or referenced--indirectly, in some instances; directly, in others--seems to suggest the exact opposite.

Each and every circuit that has addressed this has identified a distinction. We have got, in one step, the incidental collection of communications by a U.S. person who knowingly or unknowingly was connecting with a foreign national located overseas, who happens to be under surveillance under FISA 702. That is one question, a distinct question.

We have come to accept the fact that some of that is going to happen. It is not the collection itself that presents the Fourth Amendment injury that we can remedy and must remedy here. It is, rather, the second question: whether the querying of 702 data in its 702 database for information on a specific American citizen implicates the Fourth Amendment, thus requiring a warrant in order to search for that American's stored private but incidentally collected information.

Each circuit that has identified this second step to which I refer after the incidental collection--the query--each circuit that has identified that as a separate step has acknowledged that it presents different Fourth Amendment questions from the first step, and both circuits have declined to answer that question.

It, thus, remains an open question. And it is my frustration with those who have come down to this floor and suggested directly and indirectly that this matter is closed; that it has been considered and decided by multiple circuits, no less; that we have got nothing to worry about under the Fourth Amendment here. That simply is not true.

Let me read to you an excerpt from one of the cases most frequently cited. This is the ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, a case called the United States v. Hasbajrami. You can find it at 945 F.3d--again, decided by the Second Circuit in 2019. Here is what they said:

But querying the stored data does have important Fourth

Amendment implications, and those implications counsel in

favor of considering querying a separate Fourth Amendment

event that, in itself, must be reasonable.

What kinds of querying, subject to what limitations, under

what procedures, are reasonable within the meaning of the

Fourth Amendment, and when (if ever) such querying of one or

more databases, maintained by an agency of the United States

for information about a United States person, might require a

warrant, are difficult and sensitive questions. We do not

purport to answer them here, or even to canvass all of the

considerations that may prove relevant or the various types

of querying that may raise distinct problems.

Then another circuit, the Tenth Circuit--the Tenth Circuit, where I have argued dozens of cases, and that includes my home State, Utah, along with a number of other States in the West--decided another case that also recognized this distinction. This case was decided in 2021. It is called United States v. Muhtorov. It is found at 20 F.4th 558.

In this case, the Tenth Circuit says that Mr. Muhtorov's Fourth Amendment argument, specifically on this point, ``asserts the government unconstitutionally queried Section 702 databases using identifiers associated with his name without a warrant. He contends that querying led to retrieval of communications or other information that were used to support the traditional FISA applications. But this is sheer speculation. There is nothing in the record to support that evidence derived from queries was used to support the traditional FISA applications.''

The Tenth Circuit then goes on to say:

The record confirms that the relevant evidence did not

arise from querying. We therefore do not address Mr.

Muhtorov's second Fourth Amendment argument.

Querying might raise difficult Fourth Amendment questions

that we need not address here.

So like the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals also acknowledged that that is a different question, a second question--one that almost certainly raises Fourth Amendment questions, Fourth Amendment questions that weren't addressed by that court.

Notice, by the way, some of the language used. This highlights some of the problem, some of the reason why we need to be concerned about this. They said that there is nothing in the record to support where exactly that evidence came from. That is part of the problem, you see, with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or the FISC, as it is sometimes known. It operates in secret.

Having the FISC operate in secret for purposes limited to communications involving foreign nationals operating on foreign soil undertaking acts hostile to the United States of America, that is one thing. But we have reason to be concerned when they operate in secret and don't have additional legal requirements to follow with respect to a query specifically identifying a particular American citizen. We should all be concerned about that.

We should be even more concerned about it, given this feature that the Tenth Circuit acknowledged, which is that there is almost no way of knowing or approving what they might gain. It is one of the reasons why more exacting standards are required under the law.

The second broad misconception that I want to try to dispel--that has been thrown around a lot today, and I suspect will continue to be thrown around a lot today--is that somehow we are operating under a really, really tight timeframe--a timeframe that acknowledges that section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is going to expire at midnight tomorrow, and that if it does expire--which they are saying it will expire if we do anything other than just rubberstamp this ham-fistedly drawn up and passed legislation from the House of Representatives without doing our own homework, without dotting the i's and crossing the t's and making sure that they did their job right, which they did not--that the cost of that will be certain doom and gloom because FISA 702 collection will abruptly cease at exactly midnight tomorrow night.

I would otherwise make mention here of the fact that we have known for months, since December, that April 19 at midnight this deadline was happening. You have seen a deliberate decision in both Houses of Congress. They have religiously, scrupulously avoided bringing it up until just days before that deadline occurs. So they have contrived the very deadline that they are now trying to use as leverage to manipulate our votes to prevent us from doing our jobs to make sure that the i's are dotted and that the t's are crossed and that the American people's Fourth Amendment rights aren't being steamrolled. Shame on them.

I said if I had more time, I would go into that. But I won't because there is another much better argument to make here.

They are lying. They are lying when they say that FISA 702 collection will end abruptly at midnight tomorrow. It will not. The reason we know it will not is because when they shamelessly reauthorized this thing in another eleventh-hour vote back in 2018, our foreign intelligence Agencies and the clever lawyers who work with them threw in language anticipating then that the next time around--that next time when the bill came due late last year in 2023--that there might be a moment then of hesitation because the truth would catch up to them by then that FISA 702 is rife with opportunities for abuse of Americans' Fourth Amendment rights.

Recognizing that, they built into the legislative text, which they dropped at the very last minute and passed by the thinnest of margins, language to guarantee that, even if FISA 702 were to lapse, that as long as there was a certification by the FISC, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a recertification of the FISA 702 collection program broadly--not specific orders regarding specific targets, just the program broadly--that that certification would allow for all FISA 702 collection to continue for 365 days following the issuance of that certification by the FISC, even if during that 365 days, whether at the beginning or near the end of it, FISA 702 had lapsed.

Now, just last week--in fact, I believe it may have been a week ago today--the FISC granted another FISA 702 program certification. What that means is that, because the language that was adopted in 2018 continued until December of last year, and, in December of last year, we punted this issue forward to April 19 of this year, they reenacted a version of that same language from 2018 into the 2023 short-term extension. So it says the same thing.

And because we got, just last week, the FISC certification, that FISC certification and all 702 collection remain lawful 365 days into that, even if FISA 702 lapses statutorily in the meantime.

I will do so.

Thank you.

I am glad to hear that we will be having votes tomorrow. We need votes tomorrow, for some of the reasons that I am discussing. We shouldn't fear those votes.

There is a great song by Blue Oyster Cult: ``(Don't Fear) the Reaper.''

We are lawmakers. It is what we do. We cast votes. We vote on amendments. We shouldn't fear votes. We shouldn't fear doing our jobs.

I have heard it said many times: If you don't like fires and you can't stand being in their presence, then you shouldn't become a firefighter. And if you can't handle taking tough votes, for heaven's sake, you shouldn't be a lawmaker. So that is what we need to be talking about.

One of the reasons why people are fearing the reaper here, fearing amendment votes here--even though there is nothing to fear--they are wanting people to fear those amendment votes because they say: If we cast any amendment votes, if we depart in even the slightest degree from what the House, in its supposedly infinite wisdom, passed last week--with its ham-fisted draftsmanship and its manipulated, truncated approach to voting on amendments over there--that if we depart from that to even the slightest degree, it will be Armageddon, dogs and cats living together in the streets. It will be Armageddon stuff playing out in America. We are all going to blow up. We are all going to die because all FISA 702 collection is going to come to an abrupt halt.

That is a damned lie, and they know it is a damned lie because they guaranteed that that would not be the case.

When I bring this language up to them, they have the audacity to tell me: Oh, no, but that is all great and everything, but the reason it would halt is because some of the service providers, some of the third- party companies through whom they have to work to collect a lot of this information, they are not smart enough to realize what it says. So they are going to fight it, and some of them say they are going to sue us.

Yeah. Good luck with that. Good luck with that theory. In the first place, if they are relying on the fact that they would sue the Federal Government in order to not have to participate with them, I really would like to see that because it is never going to happen. And if it did happen, they would lose. And if they did try, it would take so long to do it that it wouldn't do them any good, especially because they are wrong.

The clock is, in one sense, ticking, but we have got an entire year left before FISA 702 collection would even stop at all. Now, don't get me wrong. I am not thrilled about that. That doesn't make me happy.

It was a manipulative thing to do when they added it. It was a manipulative thing to do when they extended it using the same language. But it is the law. And if they want the benefit of it, which they clearly did just a few weeks ago--just like 3 months ago--then, you know, if you pick up that stick, you are picking up both sides of the stick. And the fact remains that the law makes abundantly clear that FISA 702 collection is not going to halt at midnight tomorrow. It is not going to halt until approximately April 10 or 11 of 2025.

Now, that does not mean we should wait until then to enact legislation addressing these issues and we need not act until then, but it sure as heck means that we can at least take the time to do our own work. There is a reason why we have a bicameral legislative branch.

Washington described the Senate as the cooling saucer; tea would come over sometimes very hot from the House, and it would have time to cool over here. This tea hasn't had any time to cool, certainly not enough time to cool, much less be aired and understood by those whose rights may be affected by it.

So let's do away with those lies at the outset. It is completely fake news; it is a complete, darned lie to say that courts have weighed in and said that there is no problem with the U.S. person queries, to go after a U.S. person's private communications incidentally collected under FISA 702 and stored on a FISA 702 database.

Now, look, I get it. That doesn't fit well onto a bumper sticker. Nobody is going to have that embroidered onto a pillow, although someone should, but it is true.

Second, FISA 702 collection is not going to end tomorrow at midnight. It is not going to end for almost a year. So let's get over ourselves, and let's get over the lies and deal with the actual truth.

All right. Let's talk about RISAA again. I want to talk specifically about RISAA and some of what RISAA does.

Now, a lot of people voted for RISAA over in the House, saying: Oh, it does so much good. I voted for it even though I have concerns with warrantless backdoor searches on Americans. I have got concerns with that, too, but it did so much good, so many reforms. Just so many reforms. Can't even count them. Reforms are so good. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Nonsense. Most of those reforms are fake. Some of them are worse than fake. In fact, I could make an argument that RISAA amounts to a net loss for Fourth Amendment privacy interests. Those folks over there who tell themselves that to justify their votes, they are kidding themselves, absolutely kidding themselves.

Let's go through some of the reasons why. When it comes to backdoor searches of American citizens, the bulk of RISAA is just a codification of preexisting internal FBI procedures, the same procedures that continue to produce illegal queries of Americans' communications.

In fact, you know, I have been here since 2011. I have been on the Judiciary Committee the whole time, had opportunities to have conversations with FBI Directors serving under three different Presidents, different political parties. They have all told me variations of the same thing over the years: Don't worry about it. We have got procedures to stop it. These aren't the droids you are looking for. You really have nothing to worry about. In fact, you are kind of stupid for even assuming that this is a problem because, in any event, we at the FBI, we are serious about this stuff, and we have got procedures that will stop it.

Well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me hundreds of thousands of times, that is not acceptable, not to anyone.

Look, RISAA fails to address the worst of warrantless 702 surveillance. It just does. It codifies the existing FBI requirement of having prior approval from the Deputy Director of the FBI, not from an article III court, a normal court, not from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court--or the FISC. And it has this requirement only for sensitive queries involving a U.S.-elected official, a Presidential appointee, or an appointee of a Governor, political organization, U.S. media organizations, and so forth.

And then, for queries of religious organizations or batch queries, RISAA requires preapproval, again, internal FBI approval only, from-- get this--an FBI attorney. What could go wrong? Great. So the Deputy Director of the FBI, the current occupant of the legacy position once held by Andrew McCabe. I am sure that will make a lot of Americans feel a lot better. I am sure a lot of Americans will feel a lot better also knowing that the likes of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page won't be involved in this.

Look, there are a lot of great FBI agents out there, rank-and-file FBI agents, a lot of great work that they do. The top brass at the FBI is not held in as high esteem as they once were. In fact, that is putting it really, really mildly and indeed euphemistically--not just depending on your political leanings but based on what they have done, based on the number of times we have been lied to, based on the number of times we, as Members of the U.S. Senate and members of the public, the voting public, we have been given assurances that time and time again that have just turned out to be dead wrong.

So it is as though, under RISAA, they say: Hey, Mr. Fox, come on in. Here are the keys to the henhouse. Have fun. Get stuff done, and use your power and your keys responsibly. I am sure you won't be tempted to do otherwise.

What? Do they think we are stupid? Do they think the American people are stupid? They are not. They should know better. Shame on them, and shame on our counterparts in the House of Representatives for thinking that this is anything but insulting to the American people.

They say: Oh, don't worry about it. We have FBI internal controls, FBI internal controls. We are putting the same darn people in charge of this, the same people who have manipulated and abused this over and over again. And we have said: You are in charge now. You will be employing the same sort of reviews that you have employed on the honor system in the past, knowing full well that the American public can't see anything that you do. And we are supposed to trust you with that? This is crazy.

This is the same FBI that approved the surveillance of President Trump's campaign and has failed to prevent illegal queries year after year after year, even after denying that they don't happen.

In all cases involving Americans but especially in these sensitive cases, outside checks and balances--actual checks and actual balances-- on the use of surveillance authority should be firmly in place, but alas they are not, nothing like them.

In addition to narrow queried preapproval requirements, RISAA codifies additional changes to some of these internal FBI procedures regarding the abuse of 702 queries of U.S. citizens by its agents. But these internal procedures have not stopped violations, thousands of which are occurring every year. In fact, we have had hundreds of thousands. Until last year, I think we had over--it was in the hundreds of thousands, like over 200,000, occurring several years in a row until last year when they ramped down a bit. And in the meantime, all while telling us that the same darn procedures that they are now codifying, putting the same people in charge of enforcing them, of providing this oversight--that those same people are now going to be put in charge of making sure that they comply with the same requirements they have already falsely been claiming to follow.

So what exactly is this going to stop? Well, it didn't stop the FBI with the same personnel, employing the same standard from, I don't know, let's think about the guy, the unsuspecting guy who wanted to rent an apartment and, unbeknownst to him, the guy who owned the apartment was an agent who decided that he would run the would-be tenant through the FISA 702 database. Or what about the agent who had some kind of an unparticularized suspicion or hunch, something that wouldn't even most likely justify a Terry stop, that his father might be cheating on his mother, and he therefore ran his dad through the FISA 702 database. Or what about the unsuspecting 19,000 donors to a particular congressional campaign, all of whom were run through the FISA 702 database? Or what about

the Member of Congress who was run through the FISA 702 database?

These are just a few of the people we know about. Through some miracle, we have been able to learn about the existence of those very, very inappropriate, very, very unlawful, very indefensible searches-- searches approved against the backdrop of the same procedures, under the supervision of the same people holding the same positions at the FBI. So forgive me if I don't think that is necessarily going to change a lot.

Now, RISAA purports to rein in warrantless searches of Americans' information by ending the practice of querying data to find evidence of a crime unrelated to national security. However, such queries represent just a tiny fraction of warrantless violations of Americans' privacy.

Keep in mind, what we are talking about here are those that are deemed solely for that purpose. They are there solely for the purpose of looking for evidence of a crime. That was never a significant percentage of the problem. It was always a tiny, tiny portion of the problem. And in any event, this is entirely within the FBI's own ability to circumvent just by recharacterizing the nature and purpose of the query in question.

(Mr. King assumed the Chair.)

You know, of the more than 200,000 backdoor searches performed in 2022, the prohibition would have denied authority in exactly 2 instances--2 searches. And in both of those instances, the FBI could easily have gotten around them by characterizing them differently than they did. Again, this is not serious. This is not the kind of reform that the American people are demanding. It is certainly not the kind of reform that they deserve.

Now, when it comes to transparency and surveillance oversight, there are a number of purported reforms that many Members of the House of Representatives who voted for this are clinging to with all their might, insisting that ``oh, these do a lot of good; these fix the problem.''

But let's look into that. Let's look at what RISAA does to amicus participation. Remember what ``amicus'' means. ``Amicus'' is short for ``amicus curiae.'' The plural of ``amicus curiae'' is ``amici curiae.'' It means ``friends of the court.'' And ``amicus curiae'' is a ``friend of the court.''

Back in 2015, a bipartisan effort that I led on the Republican side in the Senate, called the USA FREEDOM Act, was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. It imposed a number of reforms. It ended the bulk of metadata collection, among other things. It also imposed some requirements related to the FISC, allowing for the participation of an amicus curiae before the FISC in a number of circumstances--because, remember, in the FISC, unlike in ordinary court, its members consist of presidentially appointed, life-tenured article III Federal judges. But in their capacity, while they are serving in their capacity as FISC judges, they sit in a courtroom without opposing counsel. Only the government has historically been present in those circumstances. And because of the sensitive nature of some of the issues that we have described today, we created in the USA FREEDOM Act provisions requiring the participation, in a number of circumstances, for amicus curiae.

There have been no complaints about this not working well--none. I am not aware of a single instance where amicus participation before the FISC has caused a problem. And yet, consistent with its pattern and practice of scanning the horizon, looking high and low to find a solution in search of a problem, those loyal to the intelligence Agencies over on the House of Representatives side have put in place some very significant restrictions on amici before the FISC by limiting the arguments amici can raise and by limiting those who can even serve as amici in 702 proceedings.

Again, not one complaint that I am aware of has been raised on this. Not one reason has been provided as to why they shouldn't do this--not one. But they still said we have got to limit them.

RISAA's amicus provisions will actually weaken oversight, instead of adopting the reforms that passed the Senate, 77 to 19, in 2020, as part of the Lee-Leahy amendment, which would have strengthened oversight by bolstering the role of amici.

By the way, that measure passed in 2020 by the Senate, 77 to 19, was part of a legislative package expected, at the time, to move over in the House, where it would have passed by correspondingly overwhelming bipartisan supermajority margins over there, but for the fact that that vehicle, for reasons unrelated to the Lee-Leahy amendment, caused that bill to stall out. Now, 77 to 19, those are the margins by which this passed the Senate just a few years ago.

That Lee-Leahy amendment would have created a presumption that amici should participate in cases that raise critical issues--such as those involving the First Amendment-protected activity of a U.S. citizen or any other U.S. person, a request for approval of a new program, a new technology, or a new use of an existing one, a novel or significant civil liberties issue with respect to a known U.S. person or a sensitive investigative matter--while giving the FISC the ability to deny participation where there was some particularized reason why that would be inappropriate.

Amicus participation is critical, especially so where you have this kind of ex parte proceeding. An ex parte proceeding is one in which only one side is represented by counsel. It is just the government's lawyer and the judge or judges. Without an amicus, there is no one there to look out for, to protect, to advocate for the rights of the American public.

RISAA requires the government also to provide only limited and inadequate presentation of what we call exculpatory evidence, the type of evidence required by United States v. Brady in an ordinary Federal court. By contrast, the Lee-Leahy amendment would have required a full presentation to the court of all material, exculpatory evidence that might come into play there. And this is absolutely necessary.

Now, why these guys chose to weaken that, I think, is consistent with--I mean, we can only surmise what the reasons might be, but I think they have a lot to do with the fact that, of course, no government Agency wants additional responsibilities or additional burdens. It makes additional work for them.

And that is the whole point. The whole point of the Fourth Amendment is not to make the government's job more efficient. I am sure law enforcement, domestically, would be a whole heck of a lot easier if there were not a Fourth Amendment. That is not a reason to jettison the protections of the Fourth Amendment.

And even though I am sure some of the legitimate foreign intelligence gathering operations of our intelligence Agencies would be made easier, less burdensome if we just threw all of these protections to the wind and pretended that there aren't legitimate reasons related to Fourth Amendment interests to be concerned here, should that make it easier, that doesn't make it the right thing do. It doesn't mean that it is consistent with the letter and spirit of the Fourth Amendment.

Look, this requirement about exculpatory evidence, as it is contained in RISAA, just provides a mere veneer. It is a Potemkin village version of the real thing, just the illusion of protection. This provision draws near to the Fourth Amendment with its lips, but its heart is far from the Fourth Amendment.

The FISC should be given all exculpatory material evidence before a proven surveillance. We have to remember, in December of 2019, the Department of Justice IG reported 17 errors and omissions in the FBI's FISA applications, requesting authority to surveil President Trump's Presidential campaign adviser, Carter Page.

Unsurprisingly, this included the failure to disclose the unreliability of the Steele dossier, an opposition research document with largely fabricated, unsubstantiated claims.

Now, unfortunately, the April 2020 memorandum from the inspector general to FBI Director Wray proved that this was not an isolated incident.

After a sampling of 29 FBI applications for FISA's surveillance of U.S. persons, he found an average of 20 errors per application.

The Lee-Leahy amendment that passed, in 2020, with 77 votes in this Chamber would have required that the

government provide all of that material--all material, exculpatory evidence to the FISC--since the U.S. person being surveilled is excluded from the FISA proceedings.

Next, we will turn to another provision that I think persuaded, unfortunately, some Members of the House of Representatives to support this bill, even though it lacked adequate substantial Fourth Amendment reforms. I am referring, of course, to the protections directed specifically at Members of Congress.

The RISAA bill provides protections not available to others, specifically for Members of Congress. Think about this for a second. One of the reasons why a number of people felt comfortable voting for it was because of the belief--the mistaken belief, as I will explain in a minute--that this protects rank-and-file Members of the House and the Senate. I don't believe it even does that. But, even if it did, think about what that says.

Anyone persuaded by this is tacitly admitting--if not to the public, at least should admit to themselves--that, No. 1, this is enough of a concern that they ought to be worried about it, such that they ought to provide some sort of language requiring accountability for when they do 702 queries on individual Members of Congress. So they are acknowledging that there is a problem, that it can be abused. But then they are providing a type of accountability available only to Members of Congress. That is kind of creepy.

If this thing is bad such that it needs protection, why not make that protection or other similar protections available to Americans broadly--to all Americans? Why limit this to Members of Congress?

So what it does is it requires notification not to all of Congress but notification to congressional leaders--meaning to the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson, and Jeffries and to the top Republican and top Democrat of the House Intel Committee and the top Republican and top Democrat of the Senate Intel Committee. Sometimes, collectively, we refer to this as the Gang of 8.

It requires notification to them if FBI queries the name of a Member of Congress, and RISAA requires prior consent from the Member of Congress in question, but only if it wishes to perform a query on that Member for purposes of a defensive briefing. Otherwise, if it is not for the purpose of a defensive briefing, that Member doesn't get notified.

But the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson, and Jeffries gets notified, and the Intel bruhs--you know, the top heads of the Intel Committee on both sides of the Capitol--they get notified too. Nobody else does.

Now, it is not like they are going to feel inclined to notify the Member. In fact, they are probably prohibited from doing so. Who exactly does that protect? Why is that a good thing? If the querying is being done, then you are allowing a tiny handful, 8 Members out of 535 sworn and currently serving Members of the legislative branch, who have been elected by their respective States--8 of them, just 8 of them--to get to know what they are doing about any and every other Member of Congress. How is that going to help anyone?

In fact, how is that not something that could actually work to the disadvantage of those being surveilled, except in the specific context of a defensive briefing?

This is crazy. This is throwing gasoline on the fire. In addition to giving the keys of the henhouse to the fox, you are then dousing the whole thing with gasoline and then adding more gasoline to it after it is on fire.

As much as anything, these are fake reforms. And to the extent they are not fake, because they are available exclusively to Members of Congress, they are a slap in the face to our constituents, who receive no such protections--none. Including those protections shows that the drafters of RISAA knew that there is a problem. It shows that those who voted for it, who relied on this, to their detriment, understand how invasive these queries really are. And that is why they want to protect Members of Congress, even though they are failing to do that here, unless they happen to be in the Gang of 8. That is why they are claiming to protect themselves from being subjected to 702 queries focused on them.

In reality, these protections for Members of Congress aren't just self-serving, they are elusory. The consent requirement is flimsy, at best, and there is an exception that quite arguably swallows the whole rule, even where it might otherwise apply. And the FBI can, based on the way it categorizes the search in question, it can get around it, the consent requirement, even in the narrow circumstances where it might otherwise apply. So this thing is a fake. But it is worse than fake. I actually think it would be a detriment to privacy and even to the interests of most Members of Congress.

Then we get to one of the big enchiladas of this: the electronic communication service providers expansion, the so-called Turner amendment. And it was basically drawn up and thrown together and thrown into the bill at the last minute, rubberstamped by the House. This particular provision of RISAA authorizes the largest surveillance expansion of this type of surveillance on U.S. domestic soil since the PATRIOT Act.

Egregious Fourth Amendment violations against the United States and its citizens will, I am confident, increase dramatically if this thing is passed into law. RISAA, as amended by the Turner amendment, would allow the government to compel a huge range of ordinary U.S. businesses and individuals--exempting only an odd assortment of entities, including hotels, libraries, restaurants, and cafes--to assist the government in spying on U.S. persons.

Currently, the government conducts 702 surveillance with the compelled assistance of electronic communications service providers or ECSPs. Historically, the definition of ECSP included those entities with direct access to Americans' electronics communications; for example, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, et cetera. This new proposition would allow the government to compel warrantless surveillance assistance of any provider of any service that has access to equipment on which communications are routed and supported. This would include a huge number of U.S. businesses that provide Wi-Fi to their customers and, therefore, have access to routers and communications equipment.

Apparently, this provision is the result of the intelligence community's ire at being told by the Feds that data centers for cloud computing do not have to comply with FISA-compelled disclosures. House Intel Committee members claim it was a narrow fix to allow the government to compel information from a single service provider.

I don't buy it. The reason I don't buy it is because if that is what it was supposed to do, they would have written it differently. They didn't write it that way. They have smart lawyers. They are smart people. They know exactly what they are doing. But even if they didn't know what they were doing, we know what they did, and it is not good. The fix was deliberately written, you see, in really broad terms to conceal the particular provider at issue.

As written, the provision could be used to compel any service provider that could potentially access communications equipment including, potentially, janitors, people involved in repairs, plumbers, to assist NSA in spying. Nothing in the language provides any backstop, any limitation of the unfettered use of this newly, dramatically expanded authority.

Moreover, because these businesses and individuals lack the ability to turn over specific communications, they would be forced to give NSA access to the equipment itself. The NSA would then have access to all of the communications transmitted over or stored on the equipment, including a trove of wholly domestic communications. It would be up to the NSA to capture only the communications of foreign targets.

No disrespect to the fine men and women who work at the NSA, but it is one of the most impenetrable--necessarily impenetrable--Agencies that has ever existed in any government anywhere. Yet no visibility, no transparency, no oversight there that is going to make any difference. Giving the NSA access to Americans' communications on such a broad scale is a recipe for disaster, and it is contrary to the purportedly narrow focus of 702 on foreign targets.

Look, I have outlined some of the myths surrounding this whole FISA 702

debate. I explained that the collection under 702 is not going to go dark if something doesn't pass immediately, meaning we are not forced with this obstinate choice between having to accept lock, stock, and barrel with no amendments, with no opportunity to review it, to air it, to improve it, to make it better, to address the disaster that is the Turner amendment, to address the hypocrisy and the sham that is the Member of Congress exclusive protection; to address any of the glaring omissions, including the failure to add any type of a warrant requirement for communications--private communications--of U.S. citizens incidentally collected and stored on a 702 database.

These are all lies that we can't address any of those to try to include in this thing because FISA 702 collection is going to end abruptly, tragically, at midnight tomorrow.

We already established this language that was first adopted in 2018 then reupped, renewed, and reenacted in December of last year to extend this deadline to April 19. It makes clear that once the FISC has issued a recertification of the program, 702 collection may continue unabated, undisturbed even if FISA 702, itself, expires in the meantime, as long as it is still valid at the time of the certification. That certification was renewed a week ago, and so we have a year. We have a year before that ends. Let's get rid of this nonsensical, unbelievable lie that is being told that we are all going to die if we don't do it.

What do we need to do? First, we have to have an amendment process. We have to have an amendment process that, among other things, allows for a probable cause warrant to be the backstop of any U.S. person query. We have language that I support that is being offered in a Durbin amendment that would require that. And it would attach at the moment they want to review the content, they want to do a U.S. person query, to figure out whether it is there in an emergency or in some other circumstance for some reason. Even if they do that, before they open it, before they review the substantive content after doing a U.S. person-specific query, they would have to get a warrant.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to finish my remarks within the next 15 minutes.

So we need a probable cause warrant requirement. Now, all of the sky-is-falling predictions about why that would be so bad to have a probable cause warrant requirement is really not addressing the facts here.

Look, I think we would have been just fine had we adopted what is known as the Biggs amendment--you know, the amendment that failed by a tied vote 212 to 212. And it failed, I believe, because they gaveled out the second they saw that it was tied, even though there were still more Members coming to the floor to vote--more Members coming to the floor to vote--I was over there at the time--who were believed to be intending to support it. They gaveled out the second they thought they could get away with it and make it fail.

One of the reasons why it didn't get more votes is because of the scare tactics associated with that and overblown, exaggerated concerns that it would just make it impossible. You know, I heard members of the intelligence community argue that it would just necessarily bring an abrupt halt to everything we do in this area. It is not credible. It is not true.

But even if that were true, let's indulge that for purposes of this discussion. The same concerns are minimized by the warrant requirement in the Durbin amendment. In the Durbin amendment, the warrant requirement would be triggered not at the moment of the query itself, but at the moment they want to open the results of the query so they could see whether the particular U.S. person, the U.S. citizen addressed in the search, triggered some kind of response. But then before they could open the search result, read the contents of the email, listen to the contents of the phone calls, read the text messages, whatever it is, then they would have to go get a warrant, unless they make the same argument here and scare people yet again because this is what they do and they get away with it because they are the spies, the spy Agencies: Trust me, trust me, people are going to die unless Congress does exactly what I say.

That is what they say over and over again. You know, it gets really irritating when they say the same thing year after year.

But lest they gain any advantage here by coming up with that, it would affect such a tiny, tiny portion of all--you know, U.S. person queries are a tiny fraction of all queries run on the FISA 702 database. I am told it is, likewise, a tiny percentage of all U.S. person queries, something like 1 or 2 percent, that would be implicated by the Durbin amendment's warrant requirement.

According to Senator Durbin, I believe the estimate he provided was about eight queries a month would trigger that. That is not hard to comply with at all. Those of us who have been prosecutors know it is not hard to get a warrant, especially in a program as huge as FISA 702. To suggest that it is just unduly oppressive for them to get up to eight warrants per month when querying specifically for the private communications of U.S. citizens on the 702 database, no, don't tell me that is unduly burdensome. That is not credible.

So we need that amendment. It is not the only amendment we need, but we definitely need that one. Without that one, I think this bill is an absolute mistake without adopting that amendment.

There are other amendments as well. One that I will focus on is the amendment I am running providing necessary reforms to the amicus curiae process requiring the government to disclose exculpatory evidence. Yes, it is essentially the same amendment. It does exactly the same thing as the Lee-Leahy amendment but introduced now as the Lee-Welch amendment. With a certain degree of poetic symmetry, I have united now with the Senator from Vermont who took the place of our dear former colleague Senator Pat Leahy. Peter Welch is now cosponsoring this measure with me, and we introduced what is the Lee-Welch amendment, which would do as I described a moment ago.

It would beef up the amicus curiae process participation, which has been badly weakened and undermined by RISAA, and it would restore it, making it just a little bit more like the adversarial process that is the hallmark of our country's legal system, designed to protect our individual rights.

It would require, among other things, that at least one of the court- appointed amici have expertise in privacy and civil liberties unless the court found that such qualifications were inappropriate in a particular case.

It would also require the FISC to appoint an amicus in cases presenting a novel or a significant interpretation of law or significant concerns with First Amendment-protected activities of a U.S. person, a sensitive investigative matter, a request for approval of a new program, new technology, or a new use of an existing technology with novel or significant civil liberties issues with respect to a known U.S. person.

All of these things are important, and it is also important that they be required to provide the full panoply of material exculpatory evidence to the FISC as they are going before the FISC in cases involving U.S. person queries under 702.

It is really important that we have these reforms because, again, remember, we suspend what would otherwise be significant restrictions in this arena. We suspend those. Because we suspend them and because this is a secret court, it is that much more important to be careful.

We still understand that because of the risks associated with it, it is still not a court that would operate in a public way, but at least there would be another set of eyes in there looking at it. A set of eyes under some circumstances is allowed to be in there now but maybe not as often as they should be, and that will be weakened if we just pass RISAA reflexively. RISAA would actually weaken transparency in surveillance oversight, very significantly and very dangerously.

So, look, I am about out of time, and so I need to wrap this up. Let me just close by saying this: We can't fall for the lie every time, and we certainly can't fall for the lie every time and then claim surprise when it gets abused again.

The American people have seen over and over again that there is some risk in this. Sure, these things have made us safer, and we like those things that have made us safe.

I don't personally know any American who is concerned--who stays up late at night worrying about FISA 702 surveillance of a foreign adversary operating on U.S. soil. That is not a zone where Fourth Amendment interests are cognizable in our legal system, and it is not something that Americans I know spend time worrying about. But they are worried when they learn that a number of innocent, unsuspecting Americans have their own private communications incidentally collected or swept up in what might well be legitimate operations associated with FISA 702. It is the querying of their name, of their personal identifiers, their phone numbers, the email addresses of a known U.S. citizen, looking for them--it is a great cause of concern to many.

That is my principal focus, and it is why I am focused so heavily on the Lee-Welch amendment and on the Durbin amendment, of which I am also a cosponsor, requiring a warrant for them to access the contents of those private communications of U.S. persons when they are queried on the FISA 702 database.

That doesn't mean these are the only reforms that are necessary. There are a handful of our other colleagues who have introduced other reforms. One of them addresses the Turner amendment.

This breathtakingly broad expansion of FISA was written in a ham- fisted way. I understand that there is a legitimate reason for it, but the way it is written, one has to wonder about what the subjective motives of those writing it may have been. But even if you assume for purposes of argument that they were pure, their draftsmanship sure wasn't pure, and we have to fix that. We have to fix that.

There are some other amendments that also need to be considered. You know, I am not sure how I feel about every one of these amendments, but, you know, when you get elected to the United States Senate, one of the things that differentiates this body from other legislative bodies--we pride ourselves on supposedly being the world's most deliberative legislative body. We need to act like it.

Our rules and nearly 2\1/2\ centuries of tradition, precedent, custom, and practice are such that we are expected to vote on each other's amendments even when we don't necessarily agree with them. Even those amendments that I don't feel great about, that I might well oppose, perhaps even vigorously, I want them to have votes too.

We can't fall for fake scare tactics telling us that Armageddon will be upon us if we get past tomorrow night at midnight because it is just not true. Nor can we fall for the lie that has been repeated on this floor today that Federal courts have addressed this issue and concluded that this issue raises no Fourth Amendment concerns. That is a lie.

To the extent that it is being spun innocently or just negligently, then I guess in that circumstance, we wouldn't call it a lie; we would call it a badly, badly mistaken argument. But it is not something that should persuade us. Just let us vote.

We have to end this practice of filing cloture and filling the tree. That is fancy Senate parlance for preventing people from offering up amendments and having those amendments voted on. Every time you do that, you bolster the disproportionate, hegemonic power of the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson, and Jeffries so that you make them superlegislators while subordinating all of us and, more importantly, those who elected us from a pretty important legislative process.

I implore my colleagues to think about them--those who voted for us and those who didn't vote for us but those to whom we stand accountable--before reflexively enacting this again. And I implore our Senate majority leader to just let the people's elected lawmakers vote.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, as wrong as the majority leader was moments ago in making this particular point of order as to article I, the impeachment article--article I, remember, refers to the willful defiance by Secretary Mayorkas of the law. As wrong as he was in making that as to article I--and he was very wrong for the reasons articulated moments ago by the Senator from Texas--he is even more wrong, far more so, with respect to article II, because article II accuses him of knowingly making false statements. This is a violation of 18 U.S.C., section 1001--a felony offense.

If this is not a high crime and misdemeanor, what is? If this is not impeachable, what is? What precedent will be set? We need to address this, and to discuss it, we need to discuss it in closed session.

Motion For Closed Session

For that reason, Madam President, I move that the Senate proceed to closed session to allow for the deliberation on this very consequential point of order that he has just made that violates hundreds of years of Anglo-American legal precedent and understanding on the question required by impeachment, rule XXIV, and I call for the yeas and nays.

Vote on Motion

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with my Republican colleagues.

Madam President, what we witnessed today is truly historic. This has never occurred. Nothing like this has ever occurred.

Under article I, section 3, clause 6, we have been given a duty. We have been given the sole exclusive power to try all impeachments--try all impeachments--not some of them, not just those with which we happen to agree, not just those we are happy that the House of Representatives undertook to prosecute, but all.

The word ``try'' is also significant. It refers to the word ``trial.'' It is the same word. It is a proceeding in which the law and the facts are presented to finders of fact--in front of judges--in order to reach an ultimate disposition. In a criminal proceeding, it would be an ultimate disposition culminating in a verdict of guilty or not guilty.

We were precluded from doing that job today. We were precluded from doing so in a way that is not only ahistoric and unprecedented but counterconstitutional. Nothing could be further from the plain structure, text, and history of the Constitution than that.

Let's look at the arguments that we would have heard, that we could have heard, that we should have heard today had things unfolded as they were supposed to, had things unfolded in a manner consistent with the oath that we took first when we were sworn in as U.S. Senators. We were all required to take the same oath to the Constitution when we did that.

(Ms. BUTLER assumed the Chair.)

But also the oath that we took just a few hours ago in this very Chamber in this very case to decide this case impartially.

What would we have heard? Well, first and foremost, regardless of what you think about what a trial consists of or how different people might cleverly define the term, a trial will always, at a minimum, involve lawyers, involve lawyers. Unless the person is proceeding pro se, you will always have lawyers there. At least one side will always be represented by lawyers in 99.9 percent of all cases. Both sides will. You will hear from lawyers.

We didn't hear that today. We didn't hear from the committee of individuals appointed by the House of Representatives to be the House impeachment managers or prosecutors. What else would you expect to hear? Well, you would hear evidence. Evidence would be brought in. Sometimes trials in the Senate involve bringing in evidence in a documentary form.

Other times, you might have witnesses. We didn't have any witnesses, we didn't have any documentary evidence, other than that which was charged.

So let's talk about what was charged and what evidence we could have, would have, and should have heard had we done our job today.

Well, the accusations in this impeachment trial, they fit into two categories. Category one, Senate article I of the Articles of Impeachment, article I alleges that Secretary Mayorkas repeatedly, defiantly did the exact opposite of what Federal law requires; namely, that under myriad circumstances, eight or nine different statutory provisions that he violated, he was required to detain people whom he did not detain.

But it is not just that he didn't do what the law required; he did the exact opposite of that. Instead of holding them until such time as they could be removed or alternatively adjudicated to have the status, whether in the context of immigration parole or asylum or otherwise, he just released them and, in many cases, gave them work permits.

We would have heard evidence about the fact that memoranda issued by Secretary Mayorkas within the Department of Homeland Security didn't just tolerate this result; they instructed this result. We would have heard evidence about the fact that at the outset of the Biden administration, Secretary Mayorkas, when asked what he would tell those traveling through the caravans, those paying many thousands of dollars per head--in some cases tens of thousands of dollars per head--to international drug cartels. Instead of telling them, Don't do it, he said, Maybe don't do it yet; give us a few weeks before we are ready to receive you--showing intention, aforethought to facilitate the violation of Federal law.

We would have heard evidence about how he instructed his own department to violate those rules. We would have heard evidence about how directly contrary to Federal law those things are and contrary to his own oath and his own duty.

Now, as to article I, the Senate chose to dispose of this today by doing something it has never done, in any context anywhere close to this, with a point of order that said as follows.

The majority leader stood up, defiantly refusing to have the Senate perform its obligations and called a point of order. He said: I raise a point of order that impeachment article I does not allege conduct that rises to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor as required under article II, section 4 of the United States Constitution and is, therefore, unconstitutional.

Now, let's talk about that for a minute. Now, had we been permitted to have a trial--alternatively, had we been permitted to go into executive session; alternatively, had we been permitted to go into closed session, as several of us moved today--we would have been able to hear arguments about this, about how wrong this is, because that is what you do when you have a trial: You hear evidence; you hear arguments from lawyers; and when someone makes a legal argument, as Majority Leader Schumer just did, you can consider their implications and, most importantly, consider whether or not the argument is right.

Because when we are sworn in, in a trial of impeachment, our job is to serve as both finders of fact and adjudicators of law relevant to this case. We were denied that opportunity.

So while we are exploring what we would have heard had we gone to trial, had we done our job, let's also explore what would have happened in a real trial had somebody made an actual motion and we had been permitted to do our job.

But, look, first and foremost, this is patently absurd to argue that a willful refusal to obey the law that one has a sworn solemn obligation to perform is somehow not impeachable.

We don't have to look too far in order to find support for the conclusion that this is an illegitimate, unwarranted, unsubstantiated claim--one that is directly contrary to law.

In fact, we don't have to look further than President Biden's own lawyer. The Solicitor General of the United States, who holds a special position within our Federal Government, performs functions that many people mistakenly associate with the Attorney General. But it is, in fact, the Solicitor General who is the United States Government's chief appellate advocate and chief advocate before all proceedings at the U.S. Supreme Court.

There was an exchange in a case argued last term in the Supreme Court of the United States called United States v. Texas. In that case, the Supreme Court heard arguments from the State of Texas about whether or not this administration's approach toward these same provisions of law is acceptable, whether or not they could challenge them.

Now, unfortunately, the Supreme Court reached a conclusion--a conclusion with which I strongly disagree. And the Supreme Court concluded, ultimately, that the State of Texas lacks standing to challenge Federal policy--Federal policy along the lines of what we are discussing today, notwithstanding the fact that it is conduct that inflicts substantial harm on the State of Texas and its residents.

But the important part that we should have been able to argue here today is the exchange that occurred at oral argument between Justice Kavanaugh and Elizabeth Prelogar, Solicitor General of the United States, in her capacity as Solicitor General as the Biden administration's chief appellate advocate and chief advocate before the United States Supreme Court.

Justice Kavanaugh asked her a number of questions at oral argument, and on page 50 of that argument transcript some of that discussion ensues. He asks the following:

[I]f a new administration comes in and says we're not going

to enforce the environmental laws, we're not going to enforce

the labor laws, your position, I believe, is no state and no

individual and no business would have standing to challenge a

decision to, as a blanket matter, just not enforce those

laws, is that correct?

Here is what Solicitor General Prelogar says:

That's correct under this Court's precedent, but the

framers intended political checks in that circumstance. You

know, if--if an administration did something that extreme and

said we're just not going to enforce the law at all, then the

President would be held to account by the voters, and

Congress has tools at its disposal as well.

So this argument continues, it continues on to the next page, in which Justice Kavanaugh says:

What are the exact tools that Congress has to make sure

that the laws are enforced . . .

And Solicitor General Prelogar answers:

Well, I think that Congress obviously has the power of the

purse.

And she goes on to explain how this is relevant. And then this goes on until we get to page 53.

And then at page 53, Justice Kavanaugh jumps back in and says:

I think your position is, instead of judicial review,

Congress has to resort to shutting down the government or

impeachment or dramatic steps--

of some sort or another.

Solicitor General Prelogar responds by saying:

Well, I think that if those dramatic steps would be

warranted, it would be in the face of a dramatic abdication

of statutory responsibility by the executive.

She just acknowledged exactly what has happened here, and she acknowledged that is exactly the moment at which the impeachment power becomes very relevant.

Lest there be any doubt on that, this stuff was settled, not just in 1789 when we adopted the Constitution and when the Framers used the language that they did, but remember, the Framers were not operating in a vacuum. They were not writing on a blank slate. They were incorporating legal terminology that had been in use for centuries.

In fact, Justice Story in his treatise on the Constitution discusses this very kind of thing and explains in section 798 of his famed treatise, written not so very long after the Constitution itself was written, that we got this stuff from England, that the British knew what impeachment meant, and they understood what would constitute a high crime or misdemeanor.

In section 798, Justice Story acknowledges that there was precedent, there was an understanding at the time of the founding that recognized that you would have an impeachable offense if, among other things, a Lord Admiral would have neglected the safeguard of the sea.

They didn't have a Homeland Security Secretary then, not in America, not in Britain. But this is really analogous. This is the exact same thing. Somebody who had a duty to do a certain thing under the law and defiantly refused to do so.

Those are arguments we could have and would have and should have heard today had we had an actual trial, had we been permitted even to go into executive session, or even go into closed session.

Why closed session? We didn't want to have to do it in closed session. But, you see, the standing rules of impeachment in this body preclude us from having this very kind of debate.

So when Majority Leader Schumer made this argument, to the great shock and surprise of all of us, we wanted to warn the body and have this debate. He wouldn't let us do that. The Democrats voted us down. So that is article I in a nutshell.

Article II of the Articles of Impeachment, what do those get to? Well, those are interesting, because those deal with false statements-- knowingly false statements repeatedly made by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to Congress--to Congress as it is performing its oversight responsibilities.

He lied to Congress according to the allegations of the Articles of Impeachment in article II.

To my great shock--look, he was dead wrong as to article I, but if he was dead wrong as to article I, he was deader than a doornail--whatever that means--ten times more dead as a doornail as to article II than he was to article I.

Why is that? Well, because they allege in article II that Secretary Mayorkas knowingly made false statements. Knowingly making false statements is a felony offense. It is punishable as a crime, as a felony Federal offense under, among other things, 18 USC section 1001. It is routinely charged, prosecuted, and is the basis for lots of convictions for a felony offense. You can go to prison for a very long period of time for that.

Now, for Chuck Schumer to argue--

Yes.

That is exactly what he said. That is exactly what he said when he made this motion, because he stood up and he said: I raise a point of order that impeachment article II does not allege conduct that rises to a level of high crime or misdemeanor.

That is precisely what the precedent established today stands for. That is--we have effectively--by this vote that the Democrats forced through, not even allowing us to debate this--and this is why I raised a point of order--or this is why I made a motion that we go into closed session to discuss this, because we have now set a precedent that effectively--very arguably effectively immunizes from impeachment making a false statement to Congress.

Yes, please.

Well, let's see, obviously, spreading what they deem misinformation on the internet might be a felony. I suppose at some point--

A high crime or misdemeanor.

It takes more than a high crime or misdemeanor.

I would love to respond to that point briefly, if I could, please. What we have done is to effectively immunize this against impeachability--immunize making false statements.

And going back to the original question, I don't know. Maybe aggravated, first-degree murder with heinous, atrocious, and cruel conduct as aggravators--maybe that is still a high crime or misdemeanor. That remains to be seen.

But keep in mind, particularly with the fact that they already set aside article I--and they have already said that that is out of bounds, as well, for impeachability. The Supreme Court has said pretty much nobody has standing to address that. What are we left with?

And getting back to the question from Senator Lummis, this is a phenomenally dangerous precedent to have set here, specifically with regard to false statements, because what does that do to our oversight hearings, where we rely, routinely, on testimony provided under oath by Cabinet Secretaries and other administration officials? What does that do? What incentive structure does that create? What perverse incentives does that create for them to lie?

Yes.

Yes.

Who wouldn't be offended by the use of the term ``kangaroo court.'' In fact, the entire marsupial world will be offended by this.

Yes.

Senator Ricketts is the former Governor of Nebraska. I would love to get your perspective on this.

Before he had his name changed legally--for purposes of this Chamber--to the junior Senator from Missouri, Attorney General Eric Schmitt was one of the Nation's leading legal minds engaged in this problem, engaged in trying to address the lawlessness at our southern border, brought on by the policies of this administration. I would like to hear his perspective on what happened today.

No. Thank you. Excellent remarks. There are some days that one wishes one could live over. This is a day that will live in infamy and is a day that future generations will wish had gone differently.

We have got a friend and colleague--our friend and colleague, the senior Senator from Wisconsin, has many titles in the Senate, titles of distinction. He is the prince of plastics, the maven of manufacturing, the connoisseur of cheese curds. He is also, among other things, someone who has identified himself as a chancellor of charts showing the profound depth of our border security crisis. He has been working on this ever since he first became the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee back in 2015. He has built on these charts, and he has built on them in a way that has resulted in their catching fire. You will now see politicians all over the country at every level of government--and I mean every level of government--utilizing his charts because they are the best in the business. Let's hear from him now.

I am grateful for those insights that we had from our friend and colleague, the distinguished senior Senator from Wisconsin.

You know, when the senior Senator from Alabama joined the United States Senate, it was a pleasure to get to know him. It has been a pleasure to work with him ever since. In fact, I visited our southern border within a few months after he arrived here.

I noticed in him a distinct concern not only for the welfare of the residents of the State of Alabama and all other Americans but also a genuine concern for those who have been human-trafficked into our country by the drug cartels, with the tacit acquiescence and even the affirmative blessing of this administration.

I, for one, am glad that Senator Tuberville was not the head coach at the University of Miami when their football team played BYU in the late summer of 1990. Had he been, that game might have turned out differently. But I would love to get his thoughts on this matter.

A very good game.

Thank you, Coach.

Another one of our colleagues who has been a longtime advocate of secure borders and is tireless in her advocacy is our friend and colleague the senior Senator from the State of Tennessee. I would love to get her thoughts on what happened today.

Thank you, Senator Blackburn.

Another great mind that we benefit from in the Senate is our friend and colleague, the junior Senator from Florida.

Before he became the Senator from Florida, Senator Scott was previously Governor Scott, a Governor of one of the most heavily populated States in America. And prior to that, he was famous in the business world, personally employing hundreds of thousands of people.

So the Department of Homeland Security is an enormous organization. Nobody understands how best to run an enormous organization and to do so with exceptional skill better than Senator Scott, and nobody understands better than him how the buck stops with the person running that organization. We would love to hear from him now.

I am grateful for the comments that have been made by so many colleagues today in this colloquy and for the insights they have shared. Each comes from a different State, bringing a different set of perspectives to the table, a different set of political and professional perspectives that help them shed light on this important issue and provide insights and warnings about the rather grave implications that we so cavalierly overlooked today--``we,'' meaning the Senate as a whole, with 49 of us trying to stand in the way and raise a word of warning about what we are doing and what implications that might have for the future.

The warning signs are everywhere. Tragically, we have seen, just in the last few days, with news breaking in recent hours, that the consequences of our open-borders policy can touch all of us, with one of our dear respected colleagues having lost a beloved staff member within the last few days, having lost that staff member as a consequence of the actions taken by an immigrant in this country who was here unlawfully, who shouldn't have been here.

That is a troubling thing, but the human level has so many ramifications. There are so many thousands of families, so many hundreds of thousands, and, in fact, so many millions and, in fact, tens--depending on how you slice it, hundreds--of millions of Americans who have been impacted in real, meaningful ways by the open-borders policy that has been so prominently featured by these Articles of Impeachment.

Over three decades ago, I spent 2 years along the U.S.-Mexico border, down in the McAllen, TX, region. I was there as a missionary. And, as a missionary, one lives and works among people of all backgrounds. I spent a lot of time with people of modest means. And, in my case, I spent most of my time with people of such humble means that I never quite witnessed in the United States--conditions that I didn't know existed on any widespread basis in the United States, including some people with dirt floors and no indoor plumbing.

But in countless cases--those were a little bit more rare, but they exist or, at least, they existed in the early 1990s. Even though those were more rare--those extreme cases--almost all the people I interacted with on a day-to-day basis were people of very humble means. They were living paycheck to paycheck, just trying to get by. And many of these people were themselves recent immigrants. Some, I suspect, were here legally. Others, I suspect, were here illegally. It wasn't standard practice at the time for missionaries talking to people to find out their immigration status. We were there for different reasons. You get to know people. You get to know their backgrounds. You get to know their concerns.

One of the things that stands out from my memories of those 2 years is that, as I interacted with these people and learned their customs and learned their language--most of them didn't speak English. Some who didn't speak English had themselves lived in the United States most or all of their lives. In fact, there were some people, especially in the older generations, where these families had been in Texas for a very long time--for generations. And some of those older generations of people were raised speaking largely, if not exclusively, Spanish.

But regardless of their immigration background or whether their family had been in Texas for generations or for only days or weeks, and whether they came legally or illegally, something I learned about them was that there is no one who fears uncontrolled waves of illegal immigration in quite the same way, to quite the same degree, as recent immigrants, especially recent immigrants of humble means living on or near the U.S.-Mexico border. You see, because it is their schools, it is their jobs, it is their neighborhoods, their homes, their children, their families who are most directly affected by these uncontrolled waves of illegal immigration, because it is those things that are at their doorstep.

They know that every one of those things are placed in grave jeopardy every time the floodgates open and people pour across our border into the United States without legal authority to be here. Every single time that happens, that has adverse consequences.

We have talked a lot about the more obvious and more newsworthy, more news-covered, implications of open borders, with situations like Laken Riley hitting the news. But we don't always talk about how it affects other people in more mundane, more pedestrian ways.

I think we have to be mindful of and, really, watch out for the tendency of those of us who are privileged enough to serve in this body to otherize immigrants, to otherize anyone with a Hispanic surname, to otherize anyone by, among other things, assuming that those groups of people speak monolithically or that we speak for them, insofar as we are seen as advocating a position that is tolerant of or even eager to embrace open borders. It is not the full picture, and it is one of the more blatantly awful otherizations that we bring about in our society. It is assuming that someone with a Hispanic surname, someone who may be a recent immigrant themselves would necessarily want open borders. It is simply not true, and it speaks profound ignorance to the plight of these individuals when we claim that they speak monolithically, especially insofar as we are suggesting, even indirectly, that they are for open borders just because of their last name or their first language or how recently they arrived in the United States or where they live in the United States relative to the border.

Getting back to the bigger picture here into what specifically happened today, when I think about the 13--

going on 13\1/2\--years that I have spent in the U.S. Senate, I don't think I can remember another day when something of such profoundly disastrous consequences was done in this body to shatter norms, rules, precedents, legal traditions and, in this case, constitutional principles quite like this decision here today did.

I remember, just before Thanksgiving in 2013, I had been in the Senate not yet 3 years, just days before Thanksgiving, just before we broke for the Thanksgiving recess, when a group of my colleagues, all of one particular party, decided to nuke the executive filibuster-- decided to break the rules of the Senate in order to change the rules of the Senate, not by changing the rules themselves, because changing the rules themselves takes 67 votes, but, instead, by a simple majority vote. They created new precedent to undercut and flip the meaning of one of the Senate rules: getting rid of the cloture rule with regard to the Executive Calendar.

I spoke to a lot of people after that happened, people of both political parties, including some of both political parties even within this body, who serve in this body, who expressed regret over that day and concerns for where it could lead. But particularly I heard from people not serving in this body, people from all walks of life, including people of all political persuasions, who acknowledged the profound consequences that could have and would eventually have on the United States Senate because, again, it involves a rather shameless, cynical maneuver whereby the Senate broke the rules of the Senate in order to change the rules of the Senate without actually changing the rules, pretending that the rules said A, not B, when, in fact, they said B, not A.

I think it may have been Abraham Lincoln who once said that--he asked rhetorically, if you count a dog's tail as a leg, how many legs does the dog have? Whenever he asked this to any individual, they would tend to say, understandably, accepting the framework of his hypothetical, that that would be five legs. He would respond by saying: No, it is not five legs. Even if you call the tail of a dog a leg, it is still not a leg.

That is what we did when we nuked the executive filibuster on that fateful day in November 2013.

In countless ways, what happened today was far worse than that because what was at stake today were not just the rules, traditions, precedents, and norms of this body--rules, precedents, traditions, and norms that, I would add here, have at no moment in our nearly 2\1/2\ century existence countenanced a result like what we achieved today. That is to say, we never had something like this, where we had Articles of Impeachment passed by the House of Representatives and transmitted to the United States Senate at a moment when the person impeached was neither dead, nor a person who had left the office that person held, nor a person ineligible for impeachment, meaning a Member of the House or Senate. Members of the House or Senate can be expelled by their respective body by a two-thirds supermajority vote, but they are not subject to impeachment per se.

If we carve out those narrow, rare exceptions where Articles of Impeachment have been cast in a way that was patently wrong, where subject matter jurisdiction in this body was lacking either at the time the articles were passed or between the time they were passed at the House and the time they arrived in the Senate, we have what I think can fairly be characterized as essentially a perfect record--at least a consistent record--that we at least held a trial.

We at least held the bare bones of a trial in which we had arguments presented by lawyers--at a minimum, by lawyers representing the House of Representatives. They are known as impeachment managers and sometimes described colloquially as House prosecutors. We at least heard arguments by them. Normally, that involves a presentation of evidence by them, by the House impeachment managers. Normally, it involves both sides having lawyers--not just the House impeachment managers but also defense counsel representing the impeached individual. Normally, there has been evidence presented and arguments made about why the Articles of Impeachment either were or were not meritorious.

In every one of those circumstances, with the narrow exceptions that I described as the sole exceptions, there has been at least some finding on at least some of those articles in every single case culminating in a verdict--a verdict of guilty or not guilty. That by itself is a precedent and a norm and a custom and a tradition and a set of rules that we overlooked today and that we have run roughshod right over.

But there is something much more at stake, something much more concerning about this that I find so troubling, and that is that under article I, section 3, clause 6, the Senate is given the sole power and with it the sacred responsibility and duty to try all impeachments.

As I just described, in every circumstance where there wasn't some jurisdictional defect--and by that, I mean a bona fide subject matter jurisdictional defect such that we lacked jurisdiction to move forward--we have proceeded and reached some kind of a verdict in every one of those cases. But not today.

Mr. President, I had been concerned for weeks and I heard rumors for weeks that what was going to happen today was that the majority leader was going to approach these articles with a certain degree of cavalier indifference and offer up a motion to table.

I immediately became convinced after looking at the rules and studying the precedent on this that a motion to table would be inappropriate here. It would be inappropriate because, for the same reasons I just explained, we have never done that, never done anything close to that.

The closest precedent for something like that was so far off course that it couldn't even be relied on. I recall the only precedent that even sounded like the same thing was, in fact, very different. During the trial over the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, one Senator had made a particular motion to do a particular thing during that trial, and another Senator later moved to table that motion. There was no motion to table any Articles of Impeachment.

In any event, I became convinced after studying this that a motion to table would be without precedent and contrary to everything I thought I knew about our role constitutionally and otherwise to conduct impeachment trials.

I also became convinced that this would be bad precedent in that it would set a certain precedent suggesting that it is OK, that if the party occupying the majority position at the United States Senate didn't want to conduct a trial, that it didn't have to; it could just sweep them aside.

As I say, channeling the immortal words of Rush and the song ``Freewill,'' if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You made a bad one if you choose to just set aside the impeachment articles without rendering a verdict of guilty or not guilty, whether pursuant to a motion to table or otherwise. A motion to table would be an especially bad basis--an especially bad strategy and bad mode for disposing of or otherwise addressing Articles of Impeachment.

It is important in this context to remember that the United States Senate has exactly three states of being. We exist at any given moment in our capacity as legislators in legislative session; secondly, in executive session, where we consider Presidential nominations and also on occasion treaties for ratification--both executive functions carried out under our Executive Calendar. Our third state of being exists in this context where we are to operate as a Court of Impeachment.

It is solely in our capacity as Senators sitting in a Court of Impeachment that we are administered a second separate oath, different from the oath that we all take each time we are elected or reelected to the Senate--different capacity. It is a capacity that requires us to decide the case and to do so on the merits of the case.

It is also unique in that it is the only mode in which there is a solid expectation, unblemished until today, that if we do, in fact, have Articles of Impeachment over which we have subject matter jurisdiction, that the case hasn't been rendered moot--there is an expectation, backed up by history, tradition, precedent, and the text of the

Constitution, that we will do the job; that, in fact, according to these precedents, up until today, we will reach a verdict of guilty or not guilty by the time we are done.

You see, those things don't exist in the other two states of being. In our legislative calendar, there is no expectation or tradition or precedent or implication from the text of the Constitution that we will affirmatively act upon and ultimately dispose of every piece of legislation presented to the United States Senate. We don't do that. We have never taken that approach. If we did, it would grind the place to a halt. I don't think it would physically be possible.

Nor has that ever been the expectation on the Executive Calendar. Sure, we tend eventually to get to most of them, but there is an understanding that unless or until such time as we confirm a particular nominee, that nominee is not confirmed, such that if we get to the end of the road, the end of that Congress, the end, even, of a session, if that person is to be confirmed, that person is to be renominated first and then considered by the Senate. But even then, there is no guarantee as to any final vote disposing of that nomination.

This is different in the context of an impeachment where we sit as a Court of Impeachment. In so doing, we become two things. In any trial-- in an ordinary court, there are two functions that a trial involves. You have to have finders of fact--that is a role typically played by a jury in our system, both in civil cases and in criminal cases--and you have to have judges of legal issues. Typically, those are performed by a judge. In some cases--most commonly, if the parties agree to have the issues of fact decided by a judge rather than a jury, then you can have the whole thing, the issues of fact and the issues of law, decided by a judge.

We serve both functions. We are finders of fact and judges of the law relevant to the impeachment case before us. I think that is the whole reason why we are given a separate oath for that. We don't take a separate oath every time we bring up a bill or get a Presidential nomination or every time we are asked to consider a treaty for ratification, but we do take a separate oath every time we receive Articles of Impeachment. It is not just because these things are more rare than bills as they are introduced or nominations as they are received or treaties presented to us for potential ratification; it is because it is a sacred responsibility in which there is an expectation, backed up by centuries of tradition, custom, precedent, and understanding of our constitutional text, that we will dispose of the case.

We will dispose of it in a way that culminates in a finding of guilty or not guilty except in these rare instances where we lack subject matter jurisdiction most commonly because the case has been rendered moot, which it is not in this instance.

The particular way in which we went about this today really was crazy and impossible to defend--absolutely impossible to defend on its merits.

Remember, there were two articles in these impeachment charges. Article I alleged that in eight or nine different instances in which Secretary Mayorkas had an affirmative legal duty to detain illegal immigrants pending adjudication of either their asylum claims or of their argument that they might be entitled to some other form of relief, including immigration parole, the Secretary of Homeland Security had an affirmative duty to detain them while those decisions were pending.

Eight or nine different statutes required that, eight or nine different statutes he deliberately violated. He did the opposite of what the statute required, and by doing that, he invited and facilitated an invasion at our southern border that is unprecedented in American history. That has been dangerous. That has resulted in all kinds of heinous crimes being committed--loss of life, loss of innocence, loss of property--many, many harms occurring as a result of this, occurring as a result of his deliberate decision not only not to do the job he was hired to do and that he swore an oath to perform well but to do the exact opposite of what the law required.

I mentioned a little while ago the writings of Justice Story, Justice Joseph Story, one of our early Supreme Court Justices a couple of centuries ago. He was familiar with the Constitution at a time closer to the Founding and also very familiar with the English legal antecedents on which the Constitution was predicated, with the legal terminology incorporated from English law into the American constitutional system.

And in his great treatise on the Constitution, in section 798, he explained a few things about impeachable offenses. And he said in section 798:

In examining the parliamentary history of impeachments, it

will be found, that many offences, not easily definable by

law, and many of a purely political character, have been

deemed high crimes and misdemeanors worthy of this

extraordinary remedy.

This extraordinary remedy, of course, referring to impeachment. It then recites a litany of things that would qualify for this. And, again, he just noted, they don't necessarily have to be easily definable by law when they are of a political nature, but he identified some of those things that had been established through English legal precedent--English parliamentary precedent--as worthy of impeachment qualifying as high crimes and misdemeanors.

Among other things, he identified what he referred to as ``attempts to subvert the fundamental laws''--attempts to subvert the fundamental laws. Those could have broad application in all sorts of areas, but I can think of few laws more fundamental to our Republic, to our Federal legal system than our fundamental laws governing who may enter this country and under what circumstances.

He went on to identify a number of other things that fit this definition, adding to it, among other things, by saying the one thing in particular that would meet the definition of ``high crimes and misdemeanors'' and would thus be impeachable would be an instance in which a lord admiral may have neglected the safeguard of the sea.

So some on the other side of the aisle have argued that, well, really what Secretary Mayorkas did was to just not do as good of a job as he should have and could have in enforcing the law, and that can't be a basis for impeachment, they argue.

Some of them will invoke the line of reasoning that says maladministration--in other words, not doing your job well--isn't a valid basis for an impeachable offense. I am not at all sure that that argument, even stated in the abstract, is accurate. In fact, I tend to think that it is not because the Constitution itself assigns that job to this branch of government--to the House as it assesses whether to charge something as impeachable and to the Senate as it assesses whether an impeachment passed and presented by the House warrants conviction, removal from office.

That really is our job, and as Justice Story noted, it includes offenses of a political character, regardless of whether they would amount to independently prosecutable criminal offenses in a criminal court of law sense of that word.

But in any event, even if you buy into that reason, there are those scholars who believe that. I seem to recall Professor Alan Dershowitz, a respected Harvard law professor from whom we have heard in past impeachment proceedings. I believe that he believes in this approach. Even under Professor Dershowitz's approach, he is someone for whom I have great respect, even where I disagree with him.

Even if you were to accept that premise, this isn't just that. This goes far beyond just maladministration. It is not just that Secretary Mayorkas didn't do as good of a job as he could have and should have and we wish he would have, it is that he willfully subverted what the law required and did the exact opposite of what the law required. That is impeachable.

It has got to be impeachable, and yet the majority leader stood up today, and he said: I raise a point of order that impeachment article I--again, impeachment article I is the part that deals with Secretary Mayorkas's decision to do the exact opposite of what the law requires.

The majority leader continued: Impeachment article I does not allege conduct that rises to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor as required in article II, section 4, of the United States Constitution and is therefore unconstitutional.

Really, I don't know how he gets there. He can't get there except by sheer force, and the way you do something by sheer force here is you produce a simple majority of votes from Senators declaring the impeachment equivalent of defining the tail of a dog to be a leg.

What I found even more stunning, was when--as stunning as that first move was and as disappointing as it was that a simple majority of United States Senators, all from the same political party, I would add, not my own--he somehow managed to outdo that one by later making the same point of order with respect to article II.

Arguing that, you know, he said: I raise a point of order that impeachment article II does not allege conduct that rises to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor as required under article II, section 4, of the United States Constitution and is therefore unconstitutional.

Let's remember what article II was about. Article II charged Secretary Mayorkas with knowingly making false statements to Congress as Congress was carrying out its oversight responsibilities with him testifying, often under oath, to Congress.

Now, unfortunately, we never got to hear any evidence on this. Therefore, we weren't presented with the opportunity to make a final determination on this, but we instead had the majority simply roll right over all of us by just declaring, ipse dixit, it is because it is. It is because we say it is; that it is not an impeachable offense, even if, as has been alleged and as the House impeachment managers--the House prosecutors we sometimes call them--were denied the opportunity to try to prove that he knowingly made false statements to Congress. To say that that is not impeachable is breathtakingly frightening.

We have now established a precedent in the United States Senate that if you occupy a high position of trust within the United States Government, a Cabinet member in this instance, and you knowingly, willfully make false statements to Congress as Congress has tried to get to the truth about what you are doing in your job and whether or not you are faithfully executing, implementing, and enforcing the law, that lying to Congress in that sense, even under oath, isn't an impeachable offense.

That precedent could suggest that we now are effectively immunized from impeachment, doing that very thing. How are we to conduct adequate oversight, if even the theoretical threat, the theoretical, hypothetical, potential threat of impeachment isn't on the table?

That severely weakens the fabric of our Republic. It certainly weakens the ability of the United States Senate to push back on abuses by and within a coordinate branch of government. You know, when James Madison expressed in the Federalist Papers, among other places in Federalist 51, the government was sort of an experiment; it is an exhibit; it is a display of human nature--there and in other Federalist Papers, he explains things like the fact that as he continued in Federalist 51, that if we as human beings were angels, we wouldn't need government; if we had access to angels to run our government, we wouldn't need all these rules to govern those responsible for government, but, alas, we are not angels. We don't have access to angels to run our government, so we need rules.

Madison was also a big believer in the fact that because we are not angels, we don't have access to angels to run our government, we do need these rules. You have got to set up a system in which power can be made to check power, and you set up each branch with its own set of incentives to guard against abuses in power.

I have wondered over time, as I have seen the United States Senate gradually but very steadily over many decades voluntarily relinquishing its power--much of it started with our work on the legislative calendar starting in earnest really in the 1930s, continuing to the present day.

We have gradually, steadily been outsourcing a lot of our lawmaking power to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats--pass all sorts of laws saying, essentially, we shall have good law with respect to issue x and we hereby delegate to Department or Commission or Agency or functionary y the power to promulgate rules carrying the force of generally applicable Federal law as to issue x.

Little by little, the American people lose control over their own government as this happens. Little by little, you start to see that this diminishes the overall accountability of the U.S. Government. And when Agency or Department y promulgates a particular rule carrying the force of generally applicable Federal law, people understandably, predictably, very consistently come to us to complain, saying: This is killing us. This rule made by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats is now going to shut down my business. I am going to be deprived of life, liberty, or property, or some combination of the three. Whether I choose to comply or not, it is going to harm me in material ways.

And, yet, you know, Article I, Section 1, Clause 1, says that all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in the Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.

Article I, Section 7, makes abundantly clear what Article I, section 1 sets up, which is to say: You cannot make a Federal law without the assent of both the House of Representatives and the Senate on the same bill. They have got to the pass the same bill text and then present it to the Chief Executive--the President of the United States--for signature, veto, or acquiescence.

Unless you follow that formula of Article I, Section 7, you are not supposed to be able to make a Federal law.

One of the more influential political philosophers on the founding generation was Charles de Montesquieu, who observed that the lawmaking power is itself nondelegable; that the task of lawmaking involves the power to make law, not other lawmakers, because as we see to this very day, when these things happen, when people come back to complain to us that the administrative regulation carrying the force of generally applicable Federal law, when it causes problems, people come and complain to us. And then Members of Congress, predictably and foreseeably, beat their chest. And they say: Oh, yes, those barbarians over at Agency, Commission, Department y. We didn't mean to authorize this. We just said make good law as to issue x; we didn't say to make bad law.

And then, predictably, Senators, the Representatives, say something like the following: You know what I am going to do for you, Constituent? I am going to write them a harshly worded letter. That is what I am going to do--as if that were our job we were sworn in to do were to write harshly worded letters.

It is not that, of course. It is to make laws, not other lawmakers.

You know, I keep these two stacks of documents behind my desk. One stack is small. It is usually a few inches, no more than a foot or so, consists of the laws passed by Congress in the preceding year. It is just, you know, a few thousand pages long.

The other stack is 13 feet tall. During a typical year, it will reach about 100,000 pages stacked up--even on very thin paper, double-sided, small print--about 13 feet tall, consists of last year's Federal registry, the annual cumulative index of these Federal regulations as they are promulgated, as they are initially released for notice and comment and, later, as they are finalized.

Those rules carry the force of generally applicable Federal law. Failure to abide by those can shut down your business, can result in enormous fines. In many cases can result in your imprisonment if you don't follow them. And yet they are not enacted themselves through the formula prescribed by Article I, Section 7. No.

Because in that instance, we have authorized the making, not of laws but of other lawmakers, not ourselves. And those other lawmakers to whom we have given this assignment, while, perhaps, however well- educated and well-intentioned, wise, specialized, well-trained they might be, they don't stand accountable to the American people, ever. Their name will never appear on a ballot. In fact, their name will stand, essentially, as a secret to nearly every American, including those who will stand accountable to those laws, who may lose life, liberty, and property as a result of those things.

(Ms. HASSAN assumes the Chair.)

That is not right. We all know deep down that is not right. We know that every time we are presented with one of these complaints by our constituents--and we all have them. In my office, it is in nearly constant refrain. And yet they often precipitate the predictable harshly worded letter and not a lot else.

In other instances, they might culminate in the filing of a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act. As fun as those can be--as they do give us, at least, an opportunity to debate them--those are privileged resolutions. If you follow the rules of a Congressional Review Act, you can pretty much always get one of those voted on. You can, at least, have an opportunity to present those here in the U.S. Senate and to vote up or down as to whether or not you want to disapprove of the regulation in question.

Ultimately, however, those prove dissatisfying from a constitutional standpoint in the sense that, with very narrow exceptions, they don't really do any good because nearly any administration whose bureaucratic structures will promulgate the administrative rule in question will like, for policy reasons and political reasons, the policy choice embodied in those regulations. And, consequently, the President whose administration promulgated that regulation being challenged under the CRA resolution of disapproval will almost always veto any resolution of disapproval passed by both Houses of Congress. It is very rare that that doesn't happen.

With only one exception I can think of from a few decades ago, the only time that works--other than that one exception that I am thinking of--occurs when you have a holdover, when you have a new administration and you have regulations that have been promulgated toward the tail end of the previous administration. We had a number of those when President Trump took office following President Obama's time in office where regulations from the Obama era were becoming ripe for CRA resolutions of disapproval, and we were able to get them passed by both Houses of Congress and then signed by President Trump.

Those circumstances are pretty rare. In every other circumstance, the voters of this great country, those subject to these administrative regulations that are, in fact, laws, those things leave us without redress. It is one of the reasons why I have long advocated for us to pass a measure called the REINS Act.

If a genie appeared to me and said: You can pass any one bill now pending in front of the U.S. Congress, it would be the REINS Act. Why? Well, because the REINS Act would require us, by statute, to do what I believe the Constitution already requires, what it, in fact, does contemplate, which is: It is fine for administrative regulations to be promulgated, to be proposed. But unless or until they are affirmatively enacted into law by both Houses of Congress and then signed into law or acquiesced to by the sitting President, or in the event of a veto, that veto is overridden by two-thirds of both Houses of Congress, then it can take effect. Short of that, no dice. You don't get a law.

These do have far-reaching effects, including the fact that, as a Member of the Judiciary Committee, I and a few of my colleagues tried to figure out a few years ago how many criminal offenses are on the books. How many different provisions of Federal law prescribe criminal penalties that can result in a criminal conviction?

We asked this question of the Congressional Research Service, the entity to which we turn regularly in order to get answers to questions like those. The answer came back to us in a way that I found absolutely stunning. The answer that came back to us from the Congressional Research Service--very talented people at the Congressional Service who were very good at answering these questions. They did a good job doing it, and in the end, they gave us the answer that it was possible to achieve. They said: The answer is unknown and unknowable, but we know that it stands at at least 300,000 separately defined criminal offenses on the books.

Now, this does not mean that on 300,000-plus occasions both Houses of Congress passed into law separate statute defining a criminal offense with criminal penalties. No. In many, many of these instances--one of the reasons why the number is so difficult to tie down is because a lot of these are defined administratively.

So that is one area in which the U.S. Senate has been deliberately shirking its responsibilities and handing them off to somebody else, refusing to do the job that we have been given to do. So that is on the legislative calendar.

We have done that time and time again. Also on the executive calendar where we have changed the law so as to limit--changed the law or, in some cases, adopted standing orders that have been embraced in subsequent iterations of the Senate limiting the number of Presidential nominees requiring confirmation.

So we have narrowed our playing field there, too, shirking our responsibility. Even as the size of the Federal Government has increased inexorably, we have narrowed our job. And now we have seen it done again today in our third state of being, in our third category where we operate as a Court of Impeachment.

Even here, where our job is really limited, we have one job in this area: to conduct impeachment trials. There are a thousand ways you can conduct an impeachment trial. You can conduct an impeachment trial with the whole Senate. You can specialize the impeachment trial so that it is heard in the first instance by a select committee with Members of both political parties who hear the evidence and then, after doing that, submit the whole matter for a final vote to the whole Senate.

You can hear evidence through individual witnesses. You can receive evidence in documentary form. There are a thousand different ways to conduct a trial, some of which allow the trial to be conducted pretty quickly, others might take more time. But there are a thousand ways we can do it.

And, here, as with the other two states of being--first on the legislative calendar and then on the Executive Calendar--now as we sit as a Court of Impeachment, we have narrowed our work again, shirking our responsibilities again, again declining to perform our constitutional duties.

This is shameful. I am embarrassed that we as a Senate seem so enamored with the idea that we can't do the things given to us.

What is especially troubling about this is that, you know, we are, in fact, a government of limited enumerated powers.

Our job is not to, as some people put it, run the country. Our job is not to make law on any matter that we think appropriate or significant. Our job is not just to enact legislation in any area where we think it might redound in one way or another to the net benefit of the American people. No. We are supposed to be a government of limited, enumerated powers, charged with a few basic things.

We are in charge of a uniform system of weights and measures, a system of immigration and nationality laws, regulating trade or commerce between the several States with foreign nations and with Indian Tribes. We are in charge of declaring war; establishing and regulating an Army and a Navy; coming up with rules governing State militias, which we now describe and refer to as the National Guard; coining money and regulating the value thereof; coming up with bankruptcy laws; postal roads; post offices; regulating in some instances Federal land to be used for some military purpose; regulating what we now call the District of Columbia; adopting rules governing the regulation and disposal of territory and of other property owned by the United States.

One of my favorite powers of Congress involves granting letters of marque and reprisal. ``Marque'' in this instance is spelled M-A-R-Q-U- E. We haven't done one of those in over a century. I hope we will sometime. I think we should. A letter of marque and reprisal is basically a hall pass issued by Congress that allows those acting pursuant to it to engage in acts of piracy on the high seas, with impunity offered by the United States if they are able to make it back with whatever loot they take into the United States and then divide the spoils and share in the spoils with the United States Government.

That is about it. There are a few other powers of Congress here and

there, but that is the lion's share of what the Federal Government can do.

Of course, we occupy the most significant, prominent, dominant, and dangerous power within that because we are the lawmaking branch. We make the laws.

The executive branch enforces the laws we make, deferring to our policies and enforcing the policies that we enact.

The judicial branch, headed by the Supreme Court, interprets them-- not just in the abstract but interprets them in a way so as to be able to resolve disputes properly brought before the jurisdiction of the courts--disputes over the meaning of Federal law.

So we have the most dangerous, prominent, dominant position. It makes sense that the Founding Fathers entrusted that role only to us because we happen to be the branch of government most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals. You can fire all 435 Members of the House every 2 years. You can fire one-third of the Members of this Body every 2 years. It is one of the reasons why you know the Founding Fathers considered the power that we wield the most dangerous, because they made us subject to the most frequent and regular and direct kinds of guarantees of accountability--that is, through elections.

So now we have somebody who has been impeached because a law that we passed that he was charged with enforcing and administering and implementing and executing--didn't do his job, although it falls on us to decide that.

We have myriad instances in which that violation of the law can't be adjudicated in court, such as this case we referred to earlier, the United States v. Texas, where a majority of the Supreme Court of the United States--I guess, by the way, a brilliant dissent by Justice Alito--concluded that the State of Texas didn't have standing to address violations of law, deviations from law by Secretary Mayorkas and the Biden administration.

So if not us, who? There are countless instances that the courts can't do it. The executive branch isn't going to check the executive branch. The buck stops with us. It is our job to do this, and today, we failed. We didn't just fail in the sense that we tried to do it and we didn't; the majority of us, unfortunately, tried not to, went out of our way to define our role as something that it is not, to define the law as saying something other than what it, in fact, says so that we can shirk our responsibilities once again. Shame on us. Shame on those Members of this body who voted to do that today.

I wonder what future generations will say about this. I wonder how many ways in which future generations will suffer from what we did today.

I hope they will take this as a lesson in what not to do and soon depart from this awful precedent because otherwise this will lead to the shedding of tears and worse.

We are told that the Senate is apparently just too busy to conduct an impeachment trial, just as we are about to be told that the Senate is too busy to require the Federal Government to get a warrant before searching the private communications of the American people incidentally collected and stored in the FISA 702 databases. Too busy to do those things, but I think we are about to be told that it is not too busy to send even more money to Ukraine, where we have already sent $113 billion--not too busy to do that; not too busy to expand FISA without adding a warrant requirement; but just way too busy, apparently, to do what the Senate and only the Senate can do and what under the Constitution we must do.

Like the ghost of Christmas future in Charles Dickens' ``A Christmas Carol,'' I hope that as we examine our future and what today's action portends about the future of the United States and of the United States Senate, I hope we can choose to depart from this course. While I fear that our past will prove to be our prologue, I sure hope we won't solidify and more deeply entrench this unwise, indefensible move that we took today.

But I am glad we have had a chance today to set the record straight, to make an adequate record of what really happened, and that while a majority--a bare, slim majority--chose to excuse the inexcusable today, some of us--nearly half of us tried to stand in front of that train and stop it. I hope this will prove to be an aberration. Let's all pray that it does.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, we have a job to do. That job is not optional. It is assigned to us by the United States Constitution--a document to which we have all sworn an oath under article I, section 3, clause 6. The Senate has the power and, I would add here, the duty to try all impeachments--not just some impeachments, not just those impeachments with which the majority party feels really happy about looking into, but all impeachments. It is the way it has always been in U.S. history.

When the House sends over Articles of Impeachment, if we have jurisdiction, which we clearly, plainly do here, it is our job to conduct a trial. What do I mean by that? Well, it is really a simple concept. In Articles of Impeachment, an accusation is made. Our job is to just decide whether that accusation is meritorious or not, whether the thing that has been accused is legitimate, whether the person who has been accused did the thing that was wrong--committed the high crime or misdemeanors spoken of in the Constitution.

We have a job to do, and it is a job that the Senate has always done when we have jurisdiction following the adoption of Articles of Impeachment.

Now, let's remember, this is a historic day. This hasn't happened very often. It is only the 22nd time in American history in which Articles of Impeachment have been adopted by the House. In this circumstance where we clearly, plainly have jurisdiction, there is no valid basis for us to do anything other than to decide whether the accusations are legitimate. We have to do that. We don't have the luxury of simply standing back and saying: Ah, we don't want to handle it.

Now, I know, I know, the Senate has found ways of shirking its responsibility over and over and over again in all of the operations of the Senate's work. Sometimes--most of the time, we sit as a legislative body, where we consider legislation. We pass law or decline to do so. Other times, we sit in an executive capacity, where we review Presidential nominations to consider them, whether we should confirm them, and also consider treaties. That is in an executive capacity. We also sometimes sit as a Court of Impeachment.

Now, in other areas, the Senate has found ways of shirking its responsibilities. We have handed off a whole lot of the lawmaking power to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in the executive branch. In our executive capacity, we have whittled down the number of executive branch nominees who are subject to Senate confirmation, even as the total volume of those individuals has increased. Now it seems we are determined yet again to whittle down our responsibilities in the one area where we have an affirmative duty, an affirmative obligation, an affirmative command within the Constitution requiring us to make a decision.

In the immortal words of Rush, in one of my favorite Rush songs of all time, called ``Freewill,'' if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Yet that is what Senate Democrats are planning to ask us to do within 24 hours--ask us to not decide, ask us to take these accusations in these Articles of Impeachment duly passed by a majority of the House of Representatives, the body in the Congress that has the sole power to impeach--it is not just 218-plus random people who decided to make the accusations against Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who heads the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. No. It is those particular 218-plus people in the House of Representatives who have that power.

You see, there is a reason why the impeachment power belongs exclusively to the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives is within the legislative branch--the branch of the Federal Government most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals. Within the Congress, within the legislative branch, they are the body most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals. That is why they call it the People's House. They are the only ones entrusted with this power.

A majority of them, of that 435-Member body, has concluded that Alejandro Mayorkas must be impeached. Now, they didn't do it for light and transient reasons. They didn't do it because of a policy disagreement. No. A majority of the House of Representatives has chosen to impeach Secretary Mayorkas for the reason that he has affirmatively defied the commands of Federal law--the laws in particular that he is charged with administering.

They have identified at least seven or eight different provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, including section 235(b)(2)(A) and 235(b)(1)(B)(ii) and 236(c) and 236(a) and 212(d)(5)(A), just to mention a few of them.

These Articles of Impeachment outline a myriad of instances in which Secretary Mayorkas has been commanded decisively, unambiguously to detain illegal immigrants pending one action or another, pending one determination or another as to their eligibility either for immigration parole or for asylum or for something else. He is required to detain them, and he didn't detain them.

These are just a few examples of the many things that he has done in direct contravention to a direct command by the law. And it is not just that he didn't do the things that he was commanded to do; it is that he did the exact opposite of those things. He was commanded, for example, not to exercise his immigration parole authority

under 212(d)(5)(A). He is not allowed to do that categorically. He is allowed to do that only for discrete, individualized, particularized circumstances in which there is a profound, pronounced humanitarian or public need. Yet he issued all these categorical parole orders, creating categorical immigration parole programs allowing for literally hundreds of thousands of people a year to be brought into this country lawlessly, without documentation, without just cause to be brought into the United States. He made illegal immigrants legal by violating the affirmative command of the law.

It is not yet clear exactly what form the arguments presented by the Democrats tomorrow will take, but we do know this: Whether they call it a motion to dismiss or a motion to table, they want to not decide something that has to be decided, by order of the Constitution, by the Senate.

These accusations are real. They make a difference. They make a difference to the American people. These crimes--or I should say high crimes and misdemeanors--of which Secretary Mayorkas has been accused are not victimless crimes--far from it. These are offenses that have resulted in millions--on the low end, it is maybe 7 or 8 million; on the high end, it is more like 12, 13, or 14 million--of people who have come into this country unlawfully since January 20, 2021. The administration of Joe Biden has willfully, intentionally brought people into this country who aren't supposed to be here, who aren't allowed to be here. And it is not just the addition of those sheer numbers of people; it is the fact that among those people are many thousands of military-age Chinese males, many millions of military-age males from other countries, including hundreds of suspected terrorists, including thousands who come from countries that we pay close attention to because we know those countries are full of a lot of people who are bent on acts of lawlessness, violence, and terrorism against the United States of America.

This, of course, is just the beginning. This says nothing about the countless neighborhoods and schools and communities and jobs and lives that have been lost or violated or rendered unsafe or all of the above as a result of those who have been brought in not just with the acquiescence of but at the invitation of and with the assistance of the Secretary of Homeland Security, the very man whose job it is to protect us from those very things and who has very specific orders that he follows--orders that have been put into law by the Congress of the United States.

He is breaking the law over and over and over again specifically to allow for illegal immigration. So the Democrats are expected to come along tomorrow and say: Yeah, but we don't want to have to decide this. We don't want to have to decide it because, well, it is an election year, President Biden is on the ballot, and this is already an area where he is not doing well. And we have other Members of this body, including, you know, a certain Senator from Montana, for example, or maybe a certain Senator from Ohio, for example, or a Senator from Pennsylvania, among others, who are going to be up for reelection.

Sure, they would rather not have to address this. I understand why they would rather be doing something else, anything else, other than this. They would rather reorganize their sock drawer. Some of them would probably much rather have a root canal or another painful procedure without anesthesia than focus on this. But, alas, the Constitution is agnostic as to your sock-reorganization days. The Constitution doesn't care how often you go to the dentist and whether you get a root canal with or without anesthesia. But, you know, the Constitution does care about one thing in particular and very relevant here today, and that is that the Senate is to try all impeachments.

This is an impeachment. We have to try it, particularly in the absence of the case being rendered moot by a vacancy in office or death or otherwise--circumstances that are noticeably absent here. We have the duty to do this.

What happens when we don't? What happens if they get their way and they choose either to table or to dismiss or use some other fancy word to try to avoid doing their job? What happens? Well, more deaths occur--deaths like the tragic passing of Laken Riley, who was taken from us just a few weeks ago as a result of Secretary Mayorkas's lawless conduct along the border. But for his lawless conduct and his cavalier treatment of the law--in fact, his defiant refusal to abide by the law and, in fact, his dogged determination to break the law--Laken Riley would have still been alive. Countless others who have undergone horrific events within their families--murders, rapes, sexual assaults, robberies, drunk driving--all kinds of horrific trauma that the American people have endured. Some of that is going to happen from people who live here already. We shouldn't add to that by bringing in others who shouldn't be here to begin with. This is exactly the kind of thing that our immigration laws are designed to protect against.

As one who spent 2 years living and working along our southern border--living and working among and with the poorest of the poor, including many immigrants themselves, recent immigrants, in many cases--I can tell you, there is no group of people who has more cause to fear uncontrolled waves of illegal immigration than recent immigrants themselves, including, and especially, the poor who live on or near a border. It is their jobs, it is their families, it is their schools, it is their neighborhoods, it is their homes that are most directly put in jeopardy every single time we fail or, in the case of Secretary Mayorkas, we adamantly refuse to obey and enforce the law and we do everything that we can to undermine it as he has done.

There is no set of arguments I can imagine--I look forward to hearing what arguments might be had tomorrow, might be presented tomorrow--that could be presented with any kind of a straight face that could say we need not address the merits of this accusation--because there are none.

Perhaps, they will argue that this is an accusation amounting to mere maladministration--he didn't do a good job. That is not at all what we have here. Even if that is what we have here, that still wouldn't mean that they didn't have to try the case and come up with an answer as to whether or not he did what they said he did.

But the impeachment power goes back some, you know, two and a half centuries to the dawn of the Republic. Nearly two and a half centuries ago, when we became a country, we relied heavily on the legal systems-- a tradition, in some cases--of the terminology used in England. And during the early years of the Republic, we had individuals who were familiar with our Constitution who were also familiar, having practiced in the law at the time of the Revolution and some cases before then-- they knew the meaning of these words.

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story is one of those individuals who lived, practiced, and wrote at and after the time of the American Revolution, during the early decades of our young Republic. And he explained that, among other things, an impeachment could be found, high crime and misdemeanor could be committed where, for instance, a lord admiral who was found to have neglected the safeguard of the sea. It is, perhaps, the most directly analogous comparison he makes to the Secretary of Homeland Security, that would be, you know, best described perhaps as a dereliction of duty, a failure to do one's job. If that--a lord admiral neglecting the safeguard of the sea--if that was a high crime and misdemeanor, it follows for sure--it is even more certain-- that the Secretary of Homeland Security, having defied more than a half dozen direct commands of Federal law and done the exact opposite of those things, has also committed a high crime and misdemeanor.

Now, maybe some in this body disagree. Maybe some in this body believe that the facts are different than they have been alleged here. Well, that is what a trial is for. That is why we don't just take the word of the House of Representatives for it. We do our job over here. We have to review the accusation, and we have to review it against the backdrop of what arguments and evidence they present to us.

We will be sworn in tomorrow at 1 p.m. to be finders of fact and to be judges of law relevant to the impeachment accusation. If we decide not to decide, we still have made a choice. We

shouldn't do that here. Doing that here would be a dereliction of duty. Doing that here would be profoundly disrespectful to the hundreds of millions of Americans who elected us and, especially, to the families of those--like the family of Laken Riley and countless others--whose lives have been permanently and tragically disrupted by the lawlessness exhibited by Secretary Mayorkas.

We must do our job. We must hold a trial. That trial must culminate in a finding of guilt or innocence. The Constitution and our commitment to it requires nothing less.

I yield the floor.