Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I think by now you have seen all kinds of different versions of this depressing chart of total U.S. debt.

Back in 1998--and we will be talking about that year--when Bill Clinton was President and we had our first budget surplus since 1969, the debt level was about $5\1/2\ trillion.

When I arrived here in my first year in the Senate in 2011, the debt was about $14 trillion. I ran, quite honestly, because we were mortgaging our children's future.

I will talk a little bit about 2014 when President Obama had a certain spending level that was up to $17\1/2\ trillion.

As recent as 2019, before the pandemic, our debt was somewhere around $22\1/2\ trillion.

Today, our debt exceeds $36 trillion on a path toward much higher heights.

If you look at President Biden's final budget here, he is predicting our total debt will be $52 trillion in 10 years. This is clearly not sustainable. As I said, this is a depressing reality.

The result of all that debt--one of the many results--was the devaluation of the dollar. A dollar you held in 1998 is only worth 51 cents today. We have basically cut the value of a dollar in half since 1998. In 2014 when President Obama was President--now the value of that dollar is only worth 74 cents. The value of the dollar prior to the pandemic, 2019, is now only worth 80 cents. That is why people can't afford things.

This inflation caused by massive deficit spending--this is the stealth tax on every American. It is a very regressive tax. It primarily hurts people at the bottom part of the income spectrum. Wealthy individuals have stocks, and they have other assets that inflate as the dollar devalues. So, again, this harm primarily affects lower income Americans. The men and women who work are harmed by this.

This can't go on. This is an outrage. This is a tragedy.

I just want to ask a bit of a hypothetical here before we talk about this chart. Let's say you are an American family of four, and you are doing pretty good. You make and you spend about $100,000 a year.

Let's say the next year, you have a serious illness in your family, and all of a sudden, you have major medical bills totaling $50,000. So the next year, you spend $150,000.

Well, let's say you get some good news. That medical condition is now solved. Your family member is healed. What would most American families do? If their income level stayed the same--around $100,000--I don't think they would keep spending at a $150,000 level. They certainly wouldn't borrow $50,000 to maintain that spending level. They would reduce their spending level back to what it was before the illness, right? It would go back to somewhere around 100,000 bucks, maybe a little bit more based on inflation. That is not what the Federal Government did. This, I know, is shocking most Americans as I am laying out the reality of the situation. In 2019, prior to the pandemic, total Federal Government spending was $4.4 trillion. Then we had COVID, and I think we very unwisely shut down a lot of our economy. It destroyed people's businesses. It destroyed people's lives, our miserable failed response to COVID. It cost a lot of money. So Washington went on a massive spending spree, and in the year of the pandemic, we spent actually closer to $6.6 trillion.

Now, again, if it would have been like a normal family, once the pandemic passed, we would have returned to some reasonable spending level, but we didn't do that. The last 5 years now, we spent, on average, $6.5 trillion. That is $2.1 trillion more than we spent in 2019. There is no justification for that.

This last year, we spent a total of $6.9 trillion, $2.6 trillion-- $2.5 trillion higher than the $4.4 trillion. Again, there is no justification for that.

So the question I have been asking is, How do we return to a reasonable, prepandemic spending level?

I will guarantee you that the people who voted for President Trump do not expect the Federal Government is going to continue spending at President Biden's and the Democrats who have been in charge, at their spending levels. This is unacceptable. It is unsustainable.

So what I have done is, I have laid out a couple different options here. Again, I will use another analogy. Let's say that same family of four I was talking about with an income of $100,00, let's say they have a baby. Now their population, their family size, has increased 25 percent. I think most people recognize that if that family of four could increase their income 25 percent, from 100,000 to 125,000, and then tack on an amount for inflation--let's say it is 3 percent inflation--up to 128,750, I think most people would recognize now that family has been kept whole. They have been made whole. They have been able to maintain their standard of living.

Well, I think the same thing would be true for the Federal Government, for Americans living within America, you know, looking at different benefits the Federal Government bestows on Americans as it extracts our hard-earned tax dollars.

So I went back to a number of different years prior to the pandemic. I went back to 1998. Again, that was the first year we actually had a budget surplus since 1969. That is how irresponsible the government has always been. But back in 1998, what a magic moment. We actually had a budget surplus. That was under Bill Clinton. We spent $1.7 trillion.

That is obviously too low because we have had inflation, because we have had population growth. So what I have done in each one of these scenarios here is I have taken the basic spending levels. I have increased them based on population growth and inflation, plus I exempt Social Security, Medicare, and interest. And I have plugged in President Biden's 2025 budget amounts for Social Security, Medicare, and interest.

So the result of that analysis for 1998, for Bill Clinton's spending level--I don't think anybody would really argue that Bill Clinton spent too little in 1998--if you did that, the increase would be based on population and inflation, plus you use today's 2025 Social Security, Medicare, and interest expense, you would end up with $5.5 trillion.

Now, it is not a secret. The reason I chose 1998--I looked at all of these

years. Doing that with 1998 spending levels, if you compare that to President Biden's budgeted revenue for this year, which has not decreased because of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act--the revenue has consistently increased to $5.5 trillion--we would have a balanced budget. What everybody says is impossible to achieve, going back to Bill Clinton's spending levels, increasing them by population and inflation and using today's Social Security, Medicare, and interest expense would balance the budget. We wouldn't have to increase the debt ceiling. We wouldn't be experiencing or threatened by more inflation.

OK. If that is too reasonable for Washington, DC, let's look at another scenario. Let's take a look at Barack Obama's--President Obama's--spending levels in 2014. Again, I don't think President Obama was spending too little in 2014. I was here. He was spending too much.

But if you take his 2014 levels, inflate them by population growth since then and inflation, using today's Social Security, Medicare, and interest, we would be spending $6.2 trillion this year. Pretty reasonable. Not a balanced budget, but a whole lot better than the 6.9 or the $7.3 trillion that President Biden budgeted for this year--a far more reasonable spending level.

But if you don't like that, if that is just too reasonable, too aggressive for you, just go back to 2019 when we spent $4.4 trillion, increase it by population growth, inflation, using President Biden's Social Security, Medicare, and interest, it would be 6.5. I mean, I think that is completely unacceptable. That has been the average.

If we increase that $2.1 above the $4.4 trillion, it would still be a whole lot better than President Biden's 7.3 trillion or last year's spending of $6.9 trillion.

How can anybody justify spending at this level when we were only spending $4.4 trillion 5 years ago?

Here is what I am suggesting. Set those other scenarios aside. President Trump was just elected. Again, I don't think anybody-- certainly not me. I voted for President Trump. I was not expecting President Trump, and I do not expect him, to come into office and accept and spend at President Biden's levels. So I would encourage President Trump to go back and take a look at the final budget he proposed for fiscal year 2021 and look at his estimate for spending in 2025.

So I have done the exact same thing. I am using the fiscal year 2025 estimates from his last budget, but I am using this year's Social Security, Medicare, and interest expense. If we do that, we are looking at a spending level of $6 trillion.

So, again, we can look at individual expense items. You can take a look at defense, if you don't think we are spending enough on that, if it is too risky a world. I mean, somewhere within the range of 5.5, which would literally balance our budget, up to 6, $6.2 trillion, that is a reasonable base that we ought to include in a budget we will be passing this year, and that should drive future spending. That would reset spending levels to a far more reasonable level.

Again, let me just reemphasize, whether we use Bill Clinton's 1998 spending level, which would result in a $5.5 trillion baseline; Barack Obama's 2014 spending levels, which would result in a baseline budget of $6.2 trillion; or President Trump's final budget, which would result in a $6 trillion spending level, that is a reasonable approach.

That is what families do. That is what businesses in America are forced do. They don't just say: Spend whatever you want. Put 70 percent of our spending budget on automatic pilot. We will never look at it. We will just spend whatever we want.

That is how you bankrupt a family. That is how you bankrupt a business. That is how we are mortgaging our children's future. It has to stop.

So I am putting everybody on notice. I am on the Budget Committee. I am on the Finance Committee. I am going to insist that the budget we pass now that Republicans are in control of the Senate returns to some reasonable baseline.

Listen, I am reasonable. I will negotiate. I am not saying this is gospel; this is etched in stone. But President Trump, our majority leader, our majority leadership, House leadership, they are going to have to justify to me how you would justify spending more than these reasonable baselines.

I ran in 2010 because we were mortgaging our children's future. I remember doing parades, shouting that. ``We are mortgaging our children's future.'' It is immoral. It has to stop. We are spending 24, 25 percent of GDP at the Federal Government level. That is not the vision of our Founding Fathers, of sovereign states where government is primarily at the State level, at the local level, where it is close to the people, where it is more efficient, it is more effective, and it is more accountable.

Now Washington is gobbling up all of our resources, borrowing these vast amounts of money, devaluing our currency. They are not solving problems. They are not reducing poverty. They are not making lives better. They are putting American lives at risk.

And as Government grows, our freedoms recede. And Americans have to understand that of all the things that have made this country great, the men and women who have worked and built this marvel of a nation, the one essential ingredient they have always used is just that, freedom. It is freedom that allowed them to dream and aspire and build and create this marvel of a country. It is freedom that will allow these young people sitting in front of me here to do the same thing.

But as long as government continues to grow, those freedoms will necessarily recede. It is a direct relationship. So we have allowed government to grow way too large. It influences far too much of our lives, negatively influences it.

We need to jealously guard our freedom. We need to jealously reclaim our freedom. And the best way to do that is to shrink the size, the scope, and the cost of the government and its influence over our lives. And the only way you do that is you have to reduce total spending by the Federal Government. This is the metric. We talk about all kinds of things. That is the metric.

And one final point: We are not going to be able to tax our way out of this. We don't have a taxation problem; we have a spending problem. I want to make my final comment, the refuting of the false narrative that we hear ad nauseam from the other side. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did not cause our deficits. When the CBO scored that, the score at the time it passed was that it was going to reduce revenue and increase our deficits by $1.5 trillion. And CBO then after passage, I think April of 2018, projected out revenue for 10 years. If you take a look at that revenue from 2018 to 2024, we actually have the actual results. They projected about $27 trillion worth of revenue over that 7-year period. The actual amount of revenue we raised from 2018 to 2024 was $28.7 trillion. We beat CBO's estimate by $1.7 trillion. So if the original score is 1.5 trillion--it was--in 7 years, we actually beat their estimate by 1.7. We paid for that tax cut in 7 years, plus $200 billion.

And we had the severe COVID recession in the middle of that. So don't believe anybody that tells you that Tax Cuts and Jobs Act caused our deficits. They didn't. They paid for themselves in less than 7 years and then some.

We have a spending problem in this country. There is no justification for going from $4.4 trillion to $6.5 trillion, and now we are at 6.9 with no end in sight.

This is immoral, what we are doing to our children. We have got to get this under control, and this is about as good a rationale, as good a justification for setting some dollar limit and using the budget process unlike we have ever used it before, not just for being able to pass some kind of reconciliation package with a mere majority vote but actually use the budget the way American families and American businesses do to set the spending limits.

And then ask our committees and the chair of our committees to take those budget caps seriously and figure out how they can structure spending, how they can structure these programs to actually live within those budget caps, and, again, if they actually used Bill Clinton's 1998 spending level and inflate it the way I have done here, actually balance the budget.

That is what the people who came out in November voting for President

Trump, that is their goal. That is their expectation. I suggest we live up to their expectations.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have six requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

Pursuant to Rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak to the same topic that my distinguished colleague from South Dakota was talking about. He called what was going to happen over the next couple of days here political theater. That is pretty accurate. A political stunt. Political cover. A charade. Instead of actually securing the border, that is what Democrats in Congress, that is what President Biden--that is all they are interested in, because, as my colleague mentioned, President Biden has all the authority he needs to secure the border.

But I want to spend a little bit of time here talking about the bipartisan bill that has been reintroduced that we will be voting on again on Thursday, although it failed very quickly because it literally was worse than doing nothing.

But I think the first point to be made is--so the American public understands--when President Biden and Democrats in Congress talk about securing the border, they are not talking about securing the border the way most Americans think about it, like actually securing the border. What they are talking about is: How do we make it more efficient to encounter, process, and disperse illegal immigrants who are coming to this country with invalid asylum claims? How can we encounter them, process them, and disperse them as efficiently as possible? That is what they are talking about. So don't be fooled when they talk about securing the border.

Proof positive of that is, one of the lead Democrat negotiators in this bipartisan bill--let me give the exact quote. He said the bill requires the President to funnel asylum claims to the land ports of entry when more than 5,000 people cross a day. That is not called securing the border; that is just sending the flow someplace else. Then the Senator went on and said: The border never closes.

So, again, when Democrats talk about securing the border, they are talking about more efficiently encountering, processing, and dispersing people; they are not talking about securing the border.

I want to start--to prove my point that they were never serious in these negotiations other than looking for political cover--with this quote that the majority leader gave to POLITICO a day or two after that border bill failed. The majority leader said:

We were playing chess, they were playing checkers, and we

ended up with a Ukraine bill.

He also went on to say:

We also end up in much better shape on the border than we

were three months ago.

I will come back to this, but let me hit the points now. If you were really negotiating in good faith, if those negotiations failed, would you literally rub your negotiating partner's nose in the failure by claiming: We were playing chess, those knuckleheads were playing checkers, and we got exactly what we wanted? I would argue that is not the sign of a good-faith negotiation.

Then, if you were really interested in securing the border, you would never make that statement: ``We . . . end[ed] up in . . . better shape on the border than we were three months ago.'' Better shape on the border would have been actually passed enhanced authority for the President to actually secure the border.

The majority leader thinks he is in better shape on the border because he got the political cover he sought, which was his only goal in those negotiations.

Let me spend just a little bit of time describing why that bill was far worse--and I mean far worse--than doing nothing.

This is the border chart I have been producing since I became chairman of Homeland Security in 2015. This shows monthly totals of encounters on the southwest border.

You can see, back here in 2014--I have recreated that right here-- that President Obama, when he hit 2,000 people a day, declared that a humanitarian crisis. And President Obama was correct; it was a humanitarian crisis.

Now, the solution back then was we started detaining people. We started clamping down. We built a new detention facility. President Obama actually had success in reducing the flow until a court reinterpreted the Flores settlement agreement and said that that applied to not only unaccompanied children, forcing their release in 20 days; it also applied to children accompanied by their parents.

That was the one court decision that did weaken a Presidential authority. But the fact of the matter is, even with that weakened Presidential authority, because of DACA, which sparked all this, when President Trump faced his border crisis--almost 5,000 people a day in 1 month--he used the Presidential authority that the Supreme Court, in its 2018 decision talking about the Immigration and Nationality Act, said that current law exudes deference to the President in every clause. It entrusts to the President decisions whether and when to suspend entry, whose entry to suspend, for how long, and on what conditions. It thus vests the President with ample power to impose entry restrictions in addition to those elsewhere enumerated in the Immigration and Nationality Act.

So obviously President Trump was able to use existing authority. He closed the border in 12 months--12 months--not through any help by Congress passing a law; by using that authority where the Supreme Court said the law exudes deference to the Executive.

Well, when President Biden came into office, he blew the border wide open. How? He did it by using that exact same Executive authority that exuded deference to the President. He used that deference, he used that authority, and he blew open the border, and we see the catastrophe that has resulted.

Now, the problem with this bill is it codifies most of President Biden's open border policy. It sets thresholds at 5,000, at 4,000, and I will talk about those in greater detail. But thresholds to do what? Supposedly to secure the border. No, it doesn't really secure the border. Again, it sends those individuals to the ports of entry to have their asylum claims adjudicated in a Rube Goldberg-type situation. It spends almost $20 billion, this bill--$20 billion--primarily, again, to accomplish the Democrats' definition of securing the border, which is to more efficiently encounter, process, and disperse illegal migrants who do not have valid asylum claims. That is what this bill does. It builds more detention facilities. It hires a small number of Border Patrol agents--425--but it hires over 4,000 asylum officers to, again, adjudicate these claims.

And they use a new standard now. It goes from a significant possibility that these claims are valid to a reasonable. I am sorry; I don't see much distinction there. So, again, these asylum officers are going to be given all kinds of discretion. These adjudications are now going to be done by asylum officers, not by immigration judges.

So I see nothing in this bill that in any way, shape, or form forces a higher standard. It is all subjective. And under this administration, the subjectiveness of that I can pretty well guarantee you will continue the catastrophe.

It pays for more detention beds. It pays for alternates to detention, which has never worked effectively. But, again, $20 billion of money we don't have.

Now, when President Trump secured the border, he didn't have additional funding for that. He didn't have additional Customs and Border Protection agents. He used his policies. He used his Executive authority--``Remain in Mexico.'' You can't come to this country and claim asylum; you have to do it from your home country or stay in Mexico to do it. That was a huge deterrent, and the flow stopped with safe third country agreements. There were other things. Again, using that Executive authority, he secured the border. We didn't need an immigration bill--certainly not this Rube Goldberg bill that spends $20 billion that we don't have.

Rather than spending all that money to encourage more illegal immigrants

to come to this country, we ought to stop the flow, and then we wouldn't have to spend the money. Doesn't that make a whole lot more sense? Do what President Trump did: Actually stop the flow. But, again, that is not what this bill does.

I think the worst aspect of this bill--and this is why I always talk about it is worse than doing nothing--is not the 5,000 average migrants a day, which was--I mean, that is what this would look like if we just normalized 5,000 or 4,000. You are just codifying the open border. The 5,000 threshold makes it mandatory that the President supposedly secure the border. Again, it doesn't really define that. I would argue that doesn't even secure the border. But it is the 4,000 discretionary threshold--that, when average migration, I think, over 7 days reaches 4,000 a day--a massive number--now the President, it says, has discretion to stop processing asylum claims and supposedly secure the border.

Well, why is that problematic? Well, again, the Supreme Court said the current law exudes deference. President Trump had the authority. By Congress passing a law basically implying the President doesn't have the authority to stop processing asylum claims, you are weakening that authority. And even worse, that discretionary authority ends after 3 years. So that bipartisan bill would actually dramatically weaken the authority of a President who is actually serious about securing the border.

That is why that bill had to be defeated and must be defeated now. It is not a serious attempt. It is a bill that was negotiated in bad faith, with the Democrats supposedly playing chess and, unfortunately, our side playing checkers.

Again, it doesn't have to be this complex. Use current authority. Take a look at what Trump did. Do that. Don't spend additional money. Stop the flow. That ought to be our goal.

So, again, most Republicans in the Senate conference, we weren't looking for an immigration bill. We certainly weren't looking for one that weakened the President's authority. We would have been happy to strengthen the President's authority. We would have been happy to clarify--by the way, Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, completely disagreed with the court decision on the Flores settlement. We would be happy to clarify that, no, Flores only applies to unaccompanied children. We have that deterrence. We could follow the law to detain people who came to this country illegally. We would be happy to strengthen authority.

What we were looking for in a border bill was to have an enforcement mechanism that would force President Biden to use the authority he has to actually secure the border based on our definition of securing the border, the way most Americans view securing the border. Stop the flow of illegal migrants that has caused a clear and present danger to this Nation. I could go through the list of horribles--the drug traffickers, the human traffickers, the sex traffickers, the members of some of the most brutal gangs in Mexico, South and Central America, the military- age men coming into this country. We are going to be dealing with this catastrophe for decades--for decades; the rapes, the murders that are being committed by people in this country who shouldn't be here that have been facilitated by this open border policy.

Again, Republicans would be happy to strengthen the President's authority to actually secure the border. What we are not happy to do is engage in this charade.

Let me end on this note again: Is this the quote of someone who has entered into good faith negotiations to develop a bill to actually secure the border? This is the majority leader of the Senate, the one who is going to engage in political theater again this week, bringing up the exact same bill that has already failed. It failed in the eyes of the public within 24 hours after the introduction, it was so bad. It was worse than doing nothing. But the majority leader seemed to be pretty happy with that failed bill:

We were playing chess, they were playing checkers, and we

ended up with a Ukraine bill.

That is what they wanted. Their primary focus, their priority, was providing $60 billion to a bloody stalemate, which, by the way, a couple of days after that thing passed, the administration was already indicating, well, that is probably not going to be enough. Even though the majority leader came out of the White House and said: This is simple. Ukraine gets $60 billion, they win. If they don't get $60 billion, they lose.

This is a disingenuous quote of a bad-faith negotiating partner. But it is also the quote--if you look at the last sentence there--of somebody who is not looking to secure the border but was looking for political cover. That is all he wanted. That is all the Democrats wanted. That is all President Biden wants: political cover.

We also end up in much better shape on the border than we

were 3 months ago.

Again, the bill didn't pass. I am glad it didn't. It would have been worse than doing nothing. But they didn't get a bill to supposedly secure the border. And he is happy about it? He has a big old Cheshire Cat grin on his face: We were playing chess, they were playing checkers, we got exactly what we wanted. And $60 billion to secure another country's border, and we can keep our border wide open. We can allow this flood of illegal migrants coming to this country. We don't care. We want an open border. We know it causes problems. All we want is political cover, and we got it.

We are in a lot better shape passing nothing; not strengthening the President's authority to close the border; not having enforcement mechanisms to force President Biden, who wants an open border, to use the authority to secure the border. No. They got a bill that they are going to bring up again. It will fail. They are going to play political theater. They are going to use political cover. And they are just happy as a lark. They think they have political cover.

I am hoping that the American public is paying attention to this charade, to this political theater, and recognizes that President Biden and his colleagues in the Democratic Congress want an open border. They caused this problem, and they will do nothing to secure it.

I yield the floor.

I thank my colleague from Utah, and I was not aware of all of those titles, but I will accept them.

Madam President, if we would have had a trial--and it is a travesty we haven't. There has been great damage done to our Constitution and to this institution by our colleagues on the other side of the aisle because they didn't want the American people to see this.

Now, I have described this chart--had we had a trial, this would have been the irrefutable DNA evidence that proved the crime. There is no way you can take a look at the history of illegal entry into this country and not recognize that what has happened under the Biden administration and under Secretary Mayorkas is nothing less than an utter catastrophe.

Yesterday, I spent about 10, 15 minutes on the floor going through the history of the cause and effect that this chart shows. But what I really want to point out today is what the Democrats did not want us to reveal, because what this chart shows is that this was purposeful; this was willful. President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas and our Democratic colleagues here in the Congress and in the Senate, they want an open border. They caused this crisis. This didn't just happen. This was a game plan that they implemented. They aided and abetted it. All the damage, all the destruction, all the crimes that are a result of this-- they have aided and abetted it.

What this chart does show is that the lawlessness started back in 2012 by the Obama administration under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. This took prosecutorial discretion, which is-- again, I am not a lawyer; I am not a prosecutor, but I believe that is supposed to be applied on a case-by-case basis. President Obama took prosecutorial discretion and granted it to hundreds of thousands of people. That is what has sparked every surge in illegal immigration since that point in time.

I used to have a chart that just showed unaccompanied children. Prior to DACA, there were maybe 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 unaccompanied children per year that our Federal Government had to account for and had to deal with. In 2014, because of DACA, we encountered 69,000 unaccompanied children--69,000. Even back then, President Obama, when his Department of Homeland Security and his Customs and Border Patrol were dealing with 2,200 illegal immigrants being encountered per day, he declared that to be a humanitarian crisis--2,200 people a day.

By the way, I went down to McAllen, TX, with a bunch of Democratic colleagues in February of 2015, during this surge, and people were singing the praises of CBP, of their kind of skirting bureaucratic rules and setting up a detention facility that would protect children. They used chain-link fences. Again, we were singing their praises. Democrats were singing the praises of the CBP. A few years later, when President Trump had to deal with the crisis--again, sparked by the unlawful DACA memorandum--all of a sudden, the Democrats were saying they were kids in cages. Do you notice a double standard?

I won't go through all the history, but I will point out, with President Trump, the reality of the situation was we were letting children in. We

couldn't detain them. You had the Flores reinterpretation that said that children, even accompanied by their parents, couldn't be detained. People around the world noticed that, so they started coming. They started creating fake families. Children were being sold--in testimony from my committee, children were being sold for $81 to create a family. A little boy was found abandoned in a field in 100-degree temperatures. He had already been used. He created that family. The other people got in, and they just left him there. The only identification was a phone number written on his shoe.

President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas said they had to undo all of President Trump's successful border security provisions because he said those were inhumane. There is nothing humane about facilitating the multibillion-dollar business model of some of the most evil people on the planet--the human traffickers, the sex traffickers, the drug traffickers. How many overdose deaths have we experienced throughout America because of this open border policy? There is nothing humane about that.

When President Trump faced his peak, there was a sharp, sharp rise but a sharp fall. In May of 2019, almost 4,800 people entered this country illegally. President Trump did something about it. He used what the Supreme Court said in the 2018 decision is existing law that exuded deference to the President. So even though that Presidential authority has been weakened somewhat by the Flores reinterpretation, that settlement, even with that weakened authority, President Trump took the bull by the horns, instituted ``Remain in Mexico,'' safe third-world countries, and had to threaten the President of Mexico with tariffs so he would cooperate. But in 12 months, President Trump went from his peak to his trough: A little more than 500 people a day entered this country.

The interesting thing about this chart--that was, again, April of 2020. Why did the numbers go up? There is a pretty simple explanation. That was amidst a Presidential campaign, and every Democrat Presidential candidate pledged that they would end deportations, that they would give free healthcare, and the world took notice. People started coming in in anticipation of President Biden taking office, and then once President Biden took office, the catastrophe began.

President Biden now he claims he doesn't have the authority. No, he has all the authority that President Trump had to close the border. President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas used that exact same authority purposefully, willfully to open up the border. So President Biden didn't need more laws, Secretary Mayorkas didn't need more laws to fix this problem; they caused the problem. They have the authority.

We would have been happy to strengthen the authority, to overrule the Flores reinterpretation. They weren't asking for that. All our Democratic colleagues wanted was political cover. That is the truth.

So we went from a humanitarian crisis under Obama of 2,200 people a day. Trump had almost 4,800 people a day, but he fixed it. President Biden's record is more than 10,000 people a day in December of last year--10,000 people a day. During his entire administration, he has averaged 7,800 people entering this country illegally because he has welcomed them. He has incentivized them. He wanted an open border. He caused this problem.

Our Democrat colleagues would not even listen to evidence, would not let the House managers make their case of the lawlessness, of the willfulness, of the lying to Congress, because they didn't want the American people to see this.

I have shown this chart to Secretary Mayorkas. I will show it to him again tomorrow when he comes before our committee. The first time I showed this a couple of years ago, it looked almost as bad.

I asked him: Secretary Mayorkas, I mean, don't you recognize this is a crisis?

He sort of said we have a secure border. He wouldn't say it is a crisis.

Well, would you at least admit it is a problem?

No, Senator; it is a challenge.

Now, I would view that as a lie.

I would have liked to have heard the evidence presented by the House managers of other instances where Secretary Mayorkas lied to Congress, which, again, as I thought was definitely pointed out by the Senator from Louisiana--isn't that a felony? Doesn't impeachment only have to be a misdemeanor?

So there is so much wrong in what our Democrat colleagues did today by just summarily, cavalierly dismissing these charges. It is going to come back to haunt our country.

My final point will be that this disaster--it is not a chart; it is numbers. There are colors. But the real disaster is with the individuals who have lost their lives, who have lost loved ones, the children who have been raped, who have been caught in the crossfire of the gang wars. That is the real challenge or that is the real catastrophe. That is the real problem the Democrats today just swept under the rug. It is a travesty that shouldn't happen. But we will continue to prosecute this case right up until November.

Mr. President, earlier today, we heard a very convincing case laid out by the House managers of why the Senate should fill its constitutional duty and proceed to a trial on the impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas.

If we were to hold that trial--and we should do so--this chart that I have been developing since I became chairman of Homeland Security in 2015 would basically be the irrefutable DNA evidence of the crime.

What I have tried to lay out in this chart is the cause and effect of an ongoing set of illegal immigration crises faced by the last three administrations. What I would like to do briefly here on the Senate floor is to go through that history dating back to 2012 and show the impact of certain actions, certain court decisions, certainly the lack of faithfully executing the law in this administration that has now resulted in an invasion of our country.

Let's go back to 2012. That is where this chart begins. Even before that, I had developed a chart just showing on an annual basis the number of unaccompanied children coming into this country. It averaged for many years somewhere between 2-, 3-, 4,000 a year.

Then, in June of 2012, President Obama issued his what I would consider lawless, unlawful deferred action on childhood arrivals. That is what has sparked all the succeeding illegal immigration crises, is that unlawful order, which, by the way, was a complete misuse of prosecutorial discretion, which is supposed to be meted out or administered on a case-by-case basis. For the first time, President Obama and his administration granted prosecutorial discretion to hundreds of thousands of people, and the world took note.

What happened over the intervening years is that people realized America's law has changed. We have reports. When people come to this country illegally, they would get their notice to appear before an immigration court. Well, that was used by human traffickers down in Central America. They called that their ``permiso''--their permission slip--to come to this country.

A couple of years after that unlawful order--deferred action on childhood arrivals--President Obama faced his border crisis. He actually called it a humanitarian crisis when, in May and June of 2014, they averaged about 2,200 encounters per day--2,200. That seems like the good old days. That is that little bump in comparison to President Biden's crisis at the border.

President Obama actually took action. He started detaining family units with children who came across the border, and it worked. He brought down the number of people crossing into our country illegally because there was a consequence to it.

Unfortunately, in February of 2015, pro-immigration groups--pro- illegal immigration groups--took the Obama administration to court under the Flores settlement, which was basically--back in the 1990s, there was a court case with a young immigrant girl named Flores, and the result of that settlement said that DHS could not hold an unaccompanied child for more than 20 days--again, an unaccompanied child.

The Obama administration interpreted that as, well, we can certainly hold a child when they are detained with their family. Again, these pro-illegal immigration groups took the Obama administration to court, took Secretary Jeh Johnson to court, and they reinterpreted the Flores settlement and said: No, you can't detain a child even if they are accompanied by their parents.

So the Obama administration faced a real decision: Should we detain the parents and release the child into HHS custody? They chose not to do that except in some situations where they felt that wasn't a real family unit and those parents may be a danger to that child. You can see the result of that. Basically, catch-and-release is what that resulted in. You can see the numbers started increasing prior to President Trump taking office.

If you remember, President Trump, during his election, made the open border--that catch-and-release--a huge issue in the campaign. When he got elected, again the world noticed. They felt there was going to be a real crackdown on illegal immigration, and they stopped coming. There was a huge reduction from the end of the Obama administration to when President Trump first took office.

Unfortunately, the law didn't change. That Flores reinterpretation stood. So President Trump was faced with trying to figure out how he could utilize what laws existed, what authority he had, with no help from Congress, to address this situation. He wasn't able to address it immediately. As a result, you can see the increase of not only single adults but family units exploiting that provision, and unaccompanied children, to the point where, in May of 2019, he hit his high point: almost 5,000 people per day.

You will notice that President Trump did something about it. He enacted the migrant protection program. He instituted safe third country agreements with countries in Central America. He had to threaten the President of Mexico with tariffs so the President of Mexico would cooperate with us in securing our border.

Over the next 12 months, President Trump by and large secured the border, to hit a low point in April of 2020, when a little more than 500 people per day were trying to come into this country illegally.

President Trump also had, starting in March of 2020, during the pandemic--remember, all of this reduction in illegal immigration occurred before the pandemic, but once the pandemic was in full swing in March and April of 2020, President Trump used his authority under title 42 and used that health emergency to start deporting people coming into this country illegally.

So you see the purple bar is the people expelled using title 42 authority.

Even though the number of single adults was rising--by the way, the reason it was rising is that during the Presidential debate of 2020, every Democrat Presidential candidate said they were going to end deportations and

offer free healthcare. That is a signal. The world listens to what elected officials or potential elected officials say, and they believe them. They also believe their eyes when, once people start coming in here, they are either detained and expelled or they are not detained.

Anyway, so people started coming into this country again, assuming that President Biden was going to win the election and the border would be opened up. Of course, that is exactly what happened, because once President Biden took office, he used the exact same Executive authority that President Trump used.

Let me just quickly cover that. Even after the Flores reinterpretation, the Supreme Court, in a ruling in 2018, said that existing law--even though it was weakened by that reinterpreted Flores decision or settlement--that the current law exudes deference to the executive branch. President Trump used that deference. President Trump used that Executive authority and pretty well closed the border.

President Biden came into office and, with literally hundreds of Executive actions, completely reversed President Trump's successful border security measures using that exact same Presidential authority, all that deference.

The point that is important to understand is that President Biden wanted an open border. He caused this crisis. He could end it if he wanted to. He still has the authority. Republicans in the Senate would be happy to strengthen that authority, to overturn this Flores reinterpretation.

By the way, Secretary Jeh Johnson opposed that reinterpretation. He didn't like that Court decision.

We would have been happy to strengthen President Biden's authority, but he doesn't really need us to to secure the border. That is the point.

Again, here is the DNA, the irrefutable DNA evidence of the crime. This didn't have to happen. President Biden didn't have to reverse President Trump's successful border security Executive orders, but he reversed them, and he opened up the border. The result now is that probably more than 6 million people have come into this country illegally and stayed. That is a number greater than the population of 31 States. That is the order of magnitude of the problem.

The impact of this open border policy is devastating. It is a catastrophe. Not only does this open border policy facilitate the multibillion-dollar business model of some of the most evil people on the planet--the human traffickers, the sex traffickers, the drug traffickers--how many hundreds of thousands of Americans have died of fentanyl overdoses?

President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas said that they are reversing all of Trump's border security provisions because they said it was inhumane. There is nothing humane about facilitating human and sex and drug trafficking.

Of course, the migrants come into this country--it is true, Venezuela is emptying their jails, their mental institutions. There are some bad people, there are some criminals coming into this country. Of course, we see evidence with these migrant crimes, horrific crimes--people who no longer are alive because of President Biden's open border policy, because of Secretary Mayorkas executing President Biden's open border policy.

I am not a lawyer, and I am not a prosecutor, but I believe it is a crime to aid and abet other crimes, so from my standpoint, I think the House managers ought to be allowed to make their case. Again, they laid out very compelling--very compelling--Articles of Impeachment today. It is a pretty simple case. It probably won't take that long for them to make their case, to present it for the Senate. Why won't Majority Leader Schumer allow the House managers to make their case? Why won't he allow the Senate to fulfill its constitutional duty to try impeachments?

Listen, impeachments are not that regular. The least we can do is fulfill that constitutional duty and listen to the evidence and allow the House managers to make their case. I think their case is overwhelmingly convincing.

The repercussions of President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas's open border policy will be felt by Americans for years, if not decades, to come.

About the only thing Congress can do when a President or a member of the executive branch is not faithfully executing the laws, when they are completely derelict in their duty, when their dereliction of duty or the lack of faithfully executing the law is resulting in the deaths of Americans--again, the open border policy is resulting in the deaths of American citizens. It is resulting in young women being forced into the sex trafficking trade. It is resulting in higher levels of fentanyl overdoses. That evidence needs to be heard. That case needs to be made. The Senate should hold a trial.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I move to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 2882 with further amendment No. 1706.

Mr. President, in the last 4 months, we have seen a string of horrific crimes in which the suspects are illegal immigrants.

In December, a 16-year-old cheerleader was stabbed to death in Edna, TX. In my State, a 20-year-old nurse was run down by a drunk driver. In January, again in my State, a Special Olympian was struck by a drunk driver. In Campbell County, VA, a 14-year-old girl was sexually assaulted. In January, a 2-year-old was caught in the crossfire of gangs and murdered. In Kenner, LA, a 14-year-old girl was raped by another individual and stabbed by an illegal suspect. On February 22, Laken Riley was beaten to death while jogging in Athens, GA. Just last week, a 15-year-old mentally impaired girl was raped in Massachusetts.

This must stop.

My amendment is simple. It prohibits Labor, HHS, and Education funding from going to sanctuary cities that do not comply with requests from DHS to provide advance notice of date and time illegal aliens are scheduled to be released from local custody.

We can stop these crimes. We must secure our border. Please vote yes.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object because this modification also removes my amendment.

Mr. President, in just the last 5 months, we have seen a string of heinous crimes in which all of the suspects are illegal immigrants. In September, a disabled person was brutally raped. In December of 2023, a mother and her 16-year-old son were senselessly killed by a drunk driver. The suspect was an illegal immigrant. A 16-year-old cheerleader was stabbed to death in Edna, TX. In my State, a 20-year-old nurse was run down by a drunk driver. The suspect was an illegal immigrant. In January, again in my State, a Special Olympian was killed by yet another drunk driver. In Campbell County, VA, a 14-year-old girl was sexually assaulted. In February, a 10-year-old boy was slain in a hit- and-run in Midland, TX. A 2-year-old was gunned down in a gang-related shooting in Maryland. In Kenner, LA, a 14-year-old girl was raped and another individual stabbed by the same illegal immigrant suspect. In Montgomery County, MD, an 11-year-old girl was raped. And on February 22, Laken Riley was beaten to death while jogging in Athens, GA.

Now, yesterday, on the House floor, 170 Democrats--I believe the number was--voted against a bill that simply would have made it law to deport people in this country illegally that have committed crimes. Now, that is just common sense to do that, and yet 170 Democrats voted against that commonsense measure.

This must stop. My amendment is pretty simple. It is designed to pass on a vote of a mere majority because it is completely germane to what we are talking about. It prohibits Federal housing funding from going to sanctuary cities that do not comply with a request from DHS to provide advance notice of the date and time an illegal alien is scheduled to be released from local custody. It is just very commonsense. Let's force these cities, these declared sanctuary cities, to follow the law and provide notice to DHS.

Now, the U.S. Senate is supposed to be the world's greatest deliberative body. Why are we prevented from voting on an amendment that is germane to the piece of legislation on the floor? This simply is so commonsense. If the Senate doesn't think it is commonsense and the Senate doesn't believe this is good to force cities to follow the law, to provide notice to DHS of an illegal immigrant being released from custody so that possibly that individual could be deported so they wouldn't be around to rape and pillage and murder, why aren't we allowed to vote?

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I have the honor of recognizing Mr. Ron Wanek, a great business leader, innovator, and philanthropist from the great State of Wisconsin, as he, his family, and his company celebrate his induction into the Wisconsin Manufacturing Hall of Fame.

Wisconsin has a long history of being the home of many successful manufacturing businesses. With his induction into the Manufacturing Hall of Fame, Mr. Wanek joins the ranks of past inductees, such as Jerome Case, Patrick Cudahy, Sam Johnson, Walter Kohler, Oscar Mayer, Frederick Miller, and Gustave Pabst, just to name a few of the 78 iconic titans of business who helped to make Wisconsin a proud manufacturing State.

For his part in continuing the long legacy of Wisconsin manufacturing, Ron Wanek founded Arcadia Furniture in the small town of Arcadia, WI, back in 1970. Back then, Mr. Wanek employed just a total of 35 people. Through hard work and innovation, in 1982, Arcadia Furniture merged with Ashley Furniture Cooperation and became Ashley Furniture Industries.

During these last 42 years, Ashley Furniture has grown into the world's largest manufacturer of home furnishings, with over 30 million square feet of worldwide manufacturing and distribution capability, with retail locations throughout the United States and in 67 countries worldwide. Ashley proudly employs 16,000 people in the United States, including 3,000 hard-working Wisconsinites.

Throughout his successful professional career, Mr. Wanek has become the personification of the phrase ``business is a force for good.'' With his focus on philanthropy, the Ronald & Joyce Wanek Foundation has contributed tens of millions of dollars in support for important charitable causes in Wisconsin and across the country.

Through his charitable work, Mr. Wanek has become an unmatched supporter of technical and STEM education at both the K-12 and postsecondary levels. Through his various programs, partnerships, and scholarships, the Ronald & Joyce Wanek Foundation aims to encourage students to pursue careers in STEM fields and improve the quality of life in their own communities.

In addition, Mr. Wanek is an ardent supporter of America's veterans. His establishment of the beautiful Soldiers Walk at Memorial Park in Arcadia, WI--a premier war memorial in the United States, with 29 monuments and statues honoring all of those who have served our country--is just one example of his dedication to those who have sacrificed and, in some cases, paid the ultimate sacrifice for freedoms Wisconsinites and Americans enjoy every day. Some would say the Arcadia Soldiers Walk rivals the magnificence of the war memorials around our Nation's Capital.

Finally, Mr. Wanek is not only a great personification of the American dream, but he actively and enthusiastically supports a steadfast American free enterprise system--a system which has made this country the economic engine of the world.

I congratulate Ron Wanek on his recent induction into the Wisconsin Manufacturing Hall of Fame. It is well-deserved.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me first start off and say how bad I feel for the Senate floor staff here. It didn't have to be this way. We could have--Senator Schumer could have easily sent us home, let people have a good night's rest, come back at a reasonable hour and continue this debate. But, unfortunately, Senate leadership is so hell bent to provide funding for Ukraine, they couldn't wait. They had to work you folks through the night, and I feel bad for that.

You will notice I have a chart here. It is the one I really started using back in about 2013, 2014, on the problems we are having at our border.

I wish that was the primary debate we were having right now: What do we need to do to secure our border? What should the U.S. Senate, what should Congress, what should this administration be doing to keep Americans safe?

Now, unfortunately--and I will get into that in much greater detail-- this was pretty well taken off the table, not because Republicans were reluctant to join in a bipartisan immigration bill--we never asked for that. But what we asked for is, as long as the administration had a high priority of supplying another $60-plus billion to Ukraine to help Ukraine secure its border, we thought maybe--just maybe--we could use that as leverage to force this administration to secure our border.

Now, it is important to recognize that President Biden has probably all the authority he needs to secure the border.

Why do I say that?

Well, President Trump, when faced with his crisis, which never ever hit 5,000 people a day--you see how sharp that peak was and how quickly it dropped. President Trump used what Executive authority he had-- authority that the Supreme Court wrote in section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which exudes deference to the President in every clause. It entrusts the President with the decision whether and when to suspend entry ``whenever [he] finds that the entry of aliens . . . would be detrimental to [national] interests.''

It defers to him to make a decision on whose entry to suspend--``all aliens or any class of aliens.''

For how long? ``For such period as he shall deem necessary.''

And what conditions? ``Any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.''

The Supreme Court goes on to say: It is therefore surprising that we have frequently observed that section 212(f) of the INA vests the President with ample power to pose any restrictions in addition to those elsewhere enumerated in the INA.

Now, it is true that President Trump, in securing that border, met with a great deal of resistance. The radical, open-border crowd challenged virtually every action he wanted to take in court.

He eventually overcame all those. I will go through this history. I will come back in greater detail.

President Trump used existing authority and sheer will power, a little arm twisting with the President of Mexico, from peak to trough-- from a little less than 5,000 people a day for only 1 month, but within 12 months brought it down to about 1,200 a day.

This is right at the beginning of COVID.

And then title 42 kicked in and dropped it from about 1,200 a day to a low of 570. That is what President Trump did to use his existing authority.

What happened after that?

Well, the Presidential debates started heating up, and every Democrat candidate for President on the debate stage said we were going to end deportations and offer immigrants free healthcare. You had all these big city mayors declaring their city sanctuary cities: Come one, come all. We will protect you from Federal agents.

So, guess what. They started coming.

Unfortunately, President Biden won the Presidency, and he made good on that promise.

This marks President Biden's Inauguration and the explosion of illegal immigration into America. It is hard to get the exact figures because this President's Department of Homeland Security is not exactly what you would call transparent. They don't give up the numbers the American people deserve to know very easily. So we have to kind of cobble these things together from different sources.

I think it is pretty obvious in looking at the numbers that about 6 million people since the start of the Biden administration have entered this country illegally and have stayed. We really do not know who these people are. Who we definitely don't know ``who these people are'' are the close to 2 million ``got-aways,'' known and unknown. By the way, the known ``got-away'' is kind of a misnomer. We have no idea who these people are. We have just detected them coming across the border.

So you have about 6 million people total. There are 31 States that have a population of less than 6 million people. My State of Wisconsin is on the bubble. We have about 5.8 million, 5.9 million people. That is the magnitude--the order of magnitude--of the migrant flow that President Biden--in using the same executive authority that President Trump used to secure the border, President Biden used that exact same authority to open it wide open and put our Nation at risk.

When you listen to FBI Director Wray and other law enforcement officials talk about the current threat level, Director Wray, during testimony in front of both the House and Senate, says that all the warning signs are flashing; that the threat of foreign terrorist organizations has not been higher since 9/11.

Gee, I wonder how a foreign terrorist fighter could enter this country? Is President Biden's softness on Iran--the coddling of the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism--in any way tied to what intelligence he might have of sleeper cells that are ready to be triggered if President Biden's response to their sponsor of terrorism is too hard? It is just a question, but I think it is a pretty legitimate question.

So President Biden opens up the border. He exposes America to these threats--a clear and present danger. He

did it, and members of the administration carry on the drumbeat of ``President Trump's secure border was so inhumane. It is so inhumane to enforce the law. It was so inhumane to stop or certainly slow, dramatically slow, the trafficking of humans--the sex trafficking, the drug trafficking.''

The fact of the matter is, as to this explosion of illegal immigration that President Biden and his Democratic colleagues here in Congress, who also want an open border, who also caused this problem-- their open border policy is facilitating the multibillion-dollar business model of some of the most evil people on the planet--the drug traffickers, with over 100,000 overdoses of primarily fentanyl; the human traffickers; the sex traffickers.

How do you think these young women pay off their $7,000 to $10,000 to $15,000 human trafficking fees? They involuntarily get put into the sex trafficking business. There is nothing humane about President Biden and the Democrats' in Congress open border policy. It is grotesquely inhumane.

I mentioned drug trafficking. A few years ago--certainly in Wisconsin but I think this is all over the Nation--a big problem was methamphetamine labs. Dangerous labs were sprinkling up all over--in little towns and big towns all over the country. That is not a problem for law enforcement anymore because, with President Biden and his Democrat colleagues in Congress and their open border policy, now methamphetamine is so cheap coming in the southern border that those meth labs have been put out of business.

I recently sat down with the sheriffs in Winnebago and Fond du Lac Counties. They were talking about the drug trafficking and the explosion of it in the Biden administration years. They described how, prior to the Biden administration, there was a hub--a hub--of drug trafficking in Chicago, and the branches split out from there into Wisconsin. Now what has happened is the drug trade is flourishing to such a degree that now Wisconsin has hubs with branches springing out from those hubs as well. Again, I mentioned all of the overdose deaths--the tragedies--facilitated by the open border policy.

This chart is historical up to this point. This is the line from December of last year when, in one day, we experienced 14,509--14,509-- migrants flooding our border. It averaged over 10,000 people a day.

Since the start of the Biden administration, the average--the average--has been over 7,000 illegal immigrants per day, every day, since President Biden entered office. I remember back then, during Trump's crisis, there would be reports of these huge caravans of a couple thousand people. That used to be big news when President Trump was President--a couple thousand in a massive caravan. Now 7,000 a day is barely ever reported on. In fact, the only reason the current crisis is being reported on, the only reason President Biden and his Democratic colleagues in Congress and their open border is getting a light shined on it now, is because you have mayors like Mayor Adams in New York and Mayor Johnson in Chicago--sanctuary cities, proud to be a sanctuary city; come one, come all--who all of a sudden found out it is not a very good idea.

Mayor Adams is dealing with less than 2 percent--about 100,000 to 110,000 people--of the 6 million people. Less than 2 percent of those illegal immigrants let in by Joe Biden and his Democratic colleagues here in Congress are going to destroy New York City. Mayor Johnson has similar comments in Chicago. So the media is forced to report that. They don't want to. They would like to keep covering up for the President, but the conditions have gotten so bad that even the mainstream media--the liberal, the biased, the cover-uppers for President Biden--have to report on this. So now more Americans are awakened to this clear and present danger.

When President Biden proposed his security supplemental--funds for Ukraine, for Taiwan, for Israel, for the border--I believe his initial proposal for the border was about $14 billion, not to secure it but to hire more agents to more efficiently and more effectively encounter, process, and disperse. That has been their solution to the problem. That is why Secretary Mayorkas says: We don't have a problem. We have the border under control. It is because they tell the CBP that their goal is to encounter, process, and disperse within an 8-hour period. They have gotten very efficient at it. That is not a solution.

So when President Biden proposed his supplemental, a lot of Americans started making the point that, before we send tens of billions of dollars overseas--as sympathetic as you are or may be of those countries receiving those funds, and I have a great deal of sympathy. But before we start sending all of those tens of billions of dollars to help other countries secure their borders, maybe--just maybe--the right thing to do would be to secure our own border first; to eliminate that clear and present danger; to reduce the multibillion-dollar business model of the human, sex, and drug traffickers. Maybe we ought to do that first.

Maybe we ought to look at Americans and go: You know, we want to keep our own citizens safe and secure. We don't want an underground economy. We don't want illegal immigrants being abused and taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers and oppressed American wages. Let's secure our own border first.

For the Republicans in Congress, our reaction was, Well, we don't know how to force this President to use his Executive authority to secure the border. Maybe we ought to use that as leverage. So that is what we asked of our leadership. Now, our leader certainly wants to secure Ukraine's border. It is one of his top priorities. It took him a while to understand that the American people really do want a secure border and that maybe he ought to take that into consideration.

So we recommended that the conference--I was a little surprised at this because he definitely changed his position. We recommended, OK, we need to defeat cloture on this supplemental to show the President that we are serious about securing the border. I had my doubts as to how genuine that move really was. I really had my doubts when, all of a sudden, we started negotiating, entering into secret negotiations with the administration and Democrats here in Congress, who, again, by and large, want an open border, who caused this problem. That is a real impediment to negotiation.

I have done a lot of negotiating in my business career, and you only want to negotiate with people in good faith and only when you agree on the goal. The problem with secret negotiations with people who want an open border and who caused the problem is you have to recognize they are really not looking to close the border. That is not what they want. What they want is political cover. They were negotiating for political cover, and whether our leader realized it or not, that is what he apparently gave them.

Again, I don't fault Senator Lankford. I think he is certainly knowledgeable about this. He was on my committee when I was the chairman of it. We held more than 30 hearings on this. We made multiple trips. He is knowledgeable. He gets along well with the other side. He negotiated something I completely supported, the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act, with Senator Hassan. So he was not a bad guy to ask to do some of the negotiation for us; but you had to recognize what you were dealing with--a negotiating partner, again, who wasn't looking to secure the border but was looking for political cover.

Then when the elements of the border bill--it wasn't a border bill; it was an immigration bill--started leaking out, it became all too apparent that that bill was not going to secure the border. That bill was going to give Democrats political cover. It is not talked about much in that bill. There are all kinds of elements that have been very fairly criticized.

(Ms. CORTEZ MASTO assumed the Chair.)

The main problem with that bill is the 4,000 discretionary threshold. I mean, a lot of ink has been spilled on the 5,000 threshold that was mandatory--that the President stop processing asylum claims and send people home. In other words, at 5,000, it was mandatory that the President secure the border; at 4,000, it was discretionary. And that authority only lasted for 3 years.

So what is the problem with that?

Well, I mentioned earlier that President Trump ran into all kinds of resistance from radical left, open border

groups that challenged just about every action he took. By the way, the court systems have undermined that authority. We could pass a law to reverse those and restore that authority, but that is not what that border bill was about--not even close.

But if you set 4,000 as the discretionary, what you are implying is that the President doesn't have that authority. The Congress is now weighing in, and they are codifying the fact that the President can act to suspend asylum claims until we reach 4,000 a day on average for 7 days. Then that authority goes away after 3 years.

So I certainly can imagine the radical left open border groups running to court in 3 years--or in 1 year if we have a new President who actually wants to secure the border--and saying: Oh, Congress can't do that. Congress has spoken. Congress has said that the President cannot stop processing asylum claims even though the Supreme Court has ruled that 212(f) exudes deference to the President specifically on that.

If you would have passed that law, we would have neutered that authority. We couldn't allow that. The fact that Republican negotiators didn't understand that was more than unfortunate.

So, again, it wasn't people like me criticizing the bill that killed that bill; it was the public. Once the language was actually released and people realized that all the rumors were not only true, the bill was actually worse than what was rumored, that bill killed itself. It should offer no political cover. It was not a border security bill.

What this chart shows--again, this shows--going back here. That is President Obama's humanitarian crisis. That is when daily apprehensions--we called them back then--were a little more than 2,000 a day. That is when his Secretary of Homeland Security said that 1,000 a day was really a bad day for him. Later on, after he left office, he said 1,000 a day overwhelms the system. Yet the political-cover immigration bill would have normalized thousands. I can't tell you exactly how many.

There were tougher asylum provisions. There was more rapid adjudication. It wasn't all bad. There were some good elements there. But the bad overwhelmed the good, and it was worse than doing nothing at all. It doesn't say much about a border security bill, does it?

This chart would show Obama's humanitarian crisis, President Trump's, which he fixed, and then you have this massive inflow from President Biden.

Let's do a little history lesson here, just kind of going back to how we got to this point, because one of the problems in the Senate bill is that it does nothing to President Biden's abuse of the parole process.

Again, understand what parole is. Parole should be used on a case-by- case basis. Let's say somebody has cancer in a different country. They want to come into one of our premier cancer centers and get treatment. They are granted parole. They come in, they get their treatment, and they go home. Maybe they have to attend somebody's funeral. It is for humanitarian situations.

Under the Trump administration, generally it was about 5- or 6,000 people a year who were granted parole. The Biden administration has granted parole to hundreds of thousands--a complete abuse of the process.

Where did he learn that from? Where did he learn his lawlessness from? From the Obama administration because what sparked all of this was the abuse of prosecutorial discretion, which is what President Obama did with the deferred action on childhood arrivals memorandum granting prosecutorial discretion to classes, to hundreds of thousands of people--an abuse of process. And that sparked all of this.

I mentioned earlier that I began working on these charts--a chart like this--back in about 2013, 2014, after the DACA decision in June of 2012. Back then, I was primarily concerned about unaccompanied children because that really seemed to be the real crisis. We have always had a flow of single adults--they are a lot easier to take care of--but unaccompanied children are an issue.

So the DACA memorandum, that abuse of prosecutorial discretion, what that did is it dramatically increased the number of unaccompanied children. It went from about 2- to 3,000, and then it started spiking, as you can see. That is in red.

Pretty soon, people got the word out that the immigration law changed in America, and so now people are coming in as families as well. That is in blue. You see, right now, that is the primary abuse.

One of the issues with the family units is that we really do not know whether that family or that group of people who present themselves as a family really is a family now. We don't do adequate DNA testing.

I have been down at the border. I remember seeing some little 18- month-old little girl being held by some scruffy-looking 50-year-old. I seriously doubt that was her father. I seriously doubt it. I hope it was. I seriously doubt it.

In testimony before my committee, we found out that they would sell children--they would sell children--for $81 to form a family unit. They would leave little boys. One little boy was left in a 100-degree field, just abandoned. The only identification they wrote is a phone number on his shoe. Is that humane? There is nothing humane about the open border policy.

But, anyway, that is what sparked all of this. That abuse of prosecutorial discretion led to all of this eventually.

Back then, President Obama declared a humanitarian crisis. Again, 2,000 a day--a humanitarian crisis, and it was. It is. So President Obama started detaining families.

There was a decision back I think in 1996, if memory serves me right--it could be a different year--called the Flores decision. It involved unaccompanied children. Basically, there was a settlement over this one little girl named Flores. Basically, the settlement was the United States cannot hold and detain an unaccompanied child for more than 20 days. We have to process them through, turn them over to HHS, and find some sponsor family or do something with that child. We can't detain them within the Department of Homeland Security. We didn't have a Department of Homeland Security back then but within the government structure.

Of course, that was taken to court once people starting abusing our process and starting coming as families, and there was what they called the Flores decision reinterpretation, and that applied that settlement to not only just unaccompanied children but children in family units.

So even the Obama administration started separating families, whom they could detain, from the children, whom they couldn't. That, of course, was politically untenable, and they stopped. But the result of that stoppage, the result that you could no longer detain people, pretty well--you really ramped up catch-and-release.

That caused President Trump's problem. What President Trump did-- again, against great resistance of the open border crowd--is he enacted some pretty smart policies.

I actually worked with Senator Sinema on something we called Operation Safe Return. We had three Democrats join in that letter to DHS and a number of Republicans. This was something we worked on with DHS itself, trying to design a rapid adjudication process of asylum claims and a rapid deportation, safe deportation, back to their home countries when they don't qualify for asylum.

By the way, a very small percentage of people who come to this country actually qualify for asylum. It is a very tough standard. You have to be persecuted by the government, your government, on six different criteria. Economic migration is not a valid asylum claim, and that is the vast majority of people coming here.

Listen, I am sympathetic with them. I want a functioning legal immigration system so these people can't be abused.

Anyway, what President Trump did is he started addressing that. He took that Operation Safe Return, and that morphed into the migrant protection program, otherwise known as ``Return to Mexico.''

Now, that didn't work immediately because we weren't getting cooperation from Mexico. We also didn't have the third safe country agreements in place with Central America. But those got in place.

Then, because Mexico wasn't cooperating, finally, President Trump threatened tariffs against Mexico. That got

their attention, and lo and behold, problem solved--until Democrat Presidential candidates started talking about they are going to end deportation, give free healthcare, and then, even worse, President Biden took office and opened up the border.

Again, as you can see, I just recreated the Obama humanitarian crisis in comparison to a normalized flow. This is about 4,500 a day. Maybe it would only be 3,900 a day. Under the 4,000 discretionary limit, it is going to be thousands a day, which is why that bill had to be defeated.

Again, I wish we were debating a true border security bill. I wish we were giving the American people what they want, which is a secure border, being more concerned about Americans' safety than we are the safety of foreigners. I wish we were doing that, but we are not. Instead, we are debating this supplemental, and the largest chunk of that spending is going to Ukraine.

Just like I have somewhat of a unique perspective on the border crisis because I was chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for 6 years--I have made multiple trips down to the border--I also have a different perspective, a unique perspective, on the whole Ukraine situation.

I served as the either the chairman or ranking member of the European Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for about 10 years. I have made multiple trips to Ukraine. My first trip actually was in I think June of 2011. We went to Georgia, which had already been invaded by Russia, then to Ukraine, and then up to the Baltic States.

Back then, the main issue in Ukraine was the corruption within the wheat markets and the corruption in their news media--the news oligarchs, they called them. I thought that was kind of interesting because I look back at America and go: Well, we have billionaires who own the media, too. We just call them billionaires; we don't call them oligarchs. We have the same corrupt and highly biased media in America, so we shouldn't be throwing stones.

Anyway, that was the big issue back then--corruption in the media, the media oligarchs, and corruption in the wheat markets.

I was the only Member of Congress who attended Zelenskyy's inauguration in May of 2019. I went back a few months later with Senator Murphy, who was also either chairman or ranking member of the European Subcommittee. We did quite a bit of traveling together into Europe.

I think two things stuck out about Zelenskyy in those meetings. The first is, I do believe he was sincere. We attended his speech at the high court of--I can't remember the exact name but the high court fighting corruption. He made a very heartfelt plea laying out his goal. He wanted to ``defeat''--that is the word he used--he wanted to ``defeat'' corruption, but the problem he had is he was a political neophyte. The long knives were out immediately, and he was never able, really, to accomplish that goal.

The other important thing to remember and certainly what I remember about this is that back then--you have to remember this was 2019-- Vladimir Putin has already illegally annexed Crimea. He was already in firm control of eastern Ukraine. But even at that point, President Zelenskyy described to me--told me that he wanted to do a peace deal with Putin. He understood there was no way Ukraine could dislodge Russia from those areas. There was just no way.

Now, he realized it wasn't going to be popular. I mean, of course, it was not going to be popular. You have an invading force in your territory. But he was practical enough to realize that Russia is a much larger country. It has four times the population of Ukraine. It has a much larger industrial base. It has a powerful navy. So he understood that he did not have the wherewithal, he did not have the capability, Ukraine didn't have the capability of pushing Putin out, so he was intelligent enough to realize: I have to do a peace deal.

How is that relevant right now? As much as it pains me to say this-- and I don't like this reality--Vladimir Putin is an evil war criminal. Make no mistake about it: We all agree on that. Vladimir Putin is an evil war criminal. He did not have to invade Ukraine. There is no justification for what he did, but he did it.

We are now about 2 years into this bloodbath. And now, we are in a bloody stalemate. And the reality I think a lot of my colleagues who are supporting this aid package are ignoring is that Vladimir Putin will not lose this war. Losing the war is existential for Vladimir Putin.

Again, Russia has four times the population, a much larger military industrial base--or industrial base just in general. They can produce 4.5 million 155-millimeter shells. They are shooting 10,000 a day right now at Ukraine. It is a bloody stalemate, primarily a war with artillery. Ukraine can only fire a couple thousand a day. I don't think the West manufacturing capability has exceeded a million a year yet.

By the way, a little factoid: Russia produces those 155-millimeter shells for about $600 apiece. Our military industrial complex charges us 5 to $6,000 apiece--an order of magnitude higher. We are spending 880-some-billion dollars a year on defense. Are we getting our money's worth out of that? Are we asking that question? Are we doing the oversight? We should be.

China, it is hard to say exactly what they spend, but it is about $300 billion a year. Now, purchasing power parity, they are probably getting more for the 300 billion. We are spending almost 900 billion. They are spending 300 billion. In the briefings I get, they are building up their military rapidly.

The next 13 nations combined spend less than $700 billion combined. So I would ask: What are you spending that money on? You know, we are saying--by the way, I think it is a depraved justification. It is depraved to say one of the rationales for spending $60 billion for Ukraine is that, Well, it is really not going to Ukraine; it is being used here in America; it is creating jobs in your State.

Why do I say that is depraved? Because if you are really concerned about the Ukrainian people--that is my concern, the Ukrainian people-- if you are really concerned about the Ukrainian people, you ought to be concerned about what is happening to their country.

It is hard to get the exact statistics, but I have got something like 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed in action, 10-to-40,000 civilians, 100-to-120,000 Ukrainians wounded. I have heard other estimates far higher than that. Russia has about 120,000 soldiers killed in action; wounded, almost 200,000. This is a bloody stalemate. I have seen some estimates of the destruction of Ukraine approaching--if not surpassing--a trillion dollars.

So again, the awful reality that we need to face, if we are really going to vote to add $60 billion to add fuel to the fire of a bloody stalemate is, what result is that going to be? The only way this war ends--because Putin is not going to lose this war--the only way it ends is in a negotiated settlement.

And every day that goes by, the settlement gets worse and worse. It doesn't get better; it gets worse. More Ukrainians will have died by then. More Russian conscripts. And I take no joy in that. I take no joy in the death of a Russian conscript, some young man yanked out of his village by Vladimir Putin, sent to the front as cannon fodder. I take no joy in that. None of us should. And more of Ukraine gets destroyed.

Our policy should have been, for quite some time now, to use whatever influence we have in Ukraine not to fuel the flames but to try to reach a peace agreement. Again, I am not Pollyannaish. I realize how hard that is going to be. There have been atrocities created, war crimes. You don't just kiss and make up. That just isn't healed overnight. That will take generations. But we better start now.

That is one of the main reasons--as sympathetic as I am for the Ukrainian people--I don't see how sending another $60 billion helps their plight because I see no strategy whatsoever on the part of the Biden administration to actually try and end the war. I see no strategy whatsoever on this ``spend more money and send more munitions and stoke the fires, fuel the flames of the bloody, relentless stalemate.'' Again, unfortunately, that is just the stark reality of the situation.

It was interesting, we did an X Space--I think that is how you pronounce it--with David Sacks, associate

of Elon Musk. Elon Musk was on with a couple of Senators: Senator Vance and Senator Lee. And I did mention, I just read the new book about Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. And in that book, Walter Isaacson describes what Elon Musk has developed; he calls it an idiot index.

It is a very interesting concept. I am in manufacturing. It really resonated with me. I kind of look at things the same way. Basically, you take a look at any product, and you calculate what does the raw material cost that product. You know, this desk, maybe you have got $10 worth of wood in there, maybe you have 20. I don't know what it is. The next question you ask is: Well, what is the price? And it is the price divided by the raw material cost, and that gives you your idiot index. The higher that number, the more opportunity there is for dramatically reducing the cost of that product. And that is what Elon Musk is a genius at.

I was being interviewed by a Wall Street Journal reporter--I haven't verified this, but this is what the reporter told me. He said that Elon Musk--through the use of things like idiot indexes and his just relentless pursuit of questioning every requirement and driving costs out just maniacally, quite honestly--he has taken the cost of a launch of a rocket from a billion dollars to $70 million. And he has come up with the technology to land the boosters synchronously in pads right next to each other. So that is what the private sector does.

We talked earlier about spending 880-some-billion dollars on defense, 5 to $6,000 per 155-millimeter shell versus Russia spending $600. It is time for Congress, it is time for the Senate to do oversight, start putting pressure on our military industrial complex to deliver a whole lot more for a whole lot less as opposed to being driven--as President Eisenhower warned us--being driven by the military industrial complex into all of these foreign entanglements.

While I have time, I do want to provide a little retrospection of America's foreign entanglements. Let me first say I truly believe America is a good country because Americans are good people. The reason we supported the Ukrainian people is because we want to help anybody fighting for their freedom. That is who Americans are.

As Colin Powell and others famously said, We don't send our sons and daughters halfway around the world to conquer land. The only land we ever asked for is enough to bury our dead. We send our sons and daughters overseas to help other people fight for what we have-- freedom, for those universal goals and values that we all cherish: safety, security, prosperity, opportunity.

That is what Americans want for not only ourselves and our children but for everybody on the planet. We are good people. We are a good country. But we have had leaders, we have the military industrial complex, we have Agencies that are far from perfect--but I think more they led us astray. As a nation, we better start taking a look back and going: What was the result of that intervention?

I was just recently in Hanoi. What wonderful people. We did a trip to Singapore, to Thailand, and then to Vietnam. Singapore per capita GDP is about 75,000. It is a wealthy country, and you can tell. Go to Thailand, it is a tenth of that: 7,500. And you see squalor. You see highrises. There is wealth. There is the income gap. But you see squalor. You go to Vietnam, half of Thailand's GDP, you don't see squalor. You see an incredibly industrious people. We were told a poll recently of Vietnamese, and 96 percent of Vietnam has a positive opinion of America, because we are good.

We never should have gone to war and bombed Vietnam. And that is no way denigrating the service and sacrifice of the finest among us. Fifty-thousand paid the ultimate price. Was it worth it? What has been the result of Afghanistan? What has been the result of Iraq?

I recently saw a meme. The title was, this just shows--to describe it better, it showed a picture of Iran, and it had all of these U.S. military bases surrounding Iran. It was basically saying, Well, you can see why we find Iran so provocative, because they put their country so close to our bases. Again, I don't apologize for the moles. They are the largest state sponsor of terror. They provide the IEDs that were responsible for more than 600 American soldiers dead. Do we ever look back and say, Was that worth it? Did we take the right actions?

Ukraine--listen, I was as big a cheerleader as anybody, as those freedom-loving Ukrainians took to the Maidan, demanding freedom, asking what we have--prosperity. They wanted to link up with the West which we, of course, were happy to accept them. Then I did walk the streets with John McCain, and I saw the bullet holes in the lightposts. I visited the memorial to the more than 100 Ukrainians who were slaughtered by their own government.

Now, the price of freedom is high. Those people are obviously martyrs for the cause. That was 2014. Fast forward. I truly think this war never had to happen. I remember being briefed in a SCIF. And afterwards, I was talking to two of my colleagues. I said, I think there is still a way of avoiding this war, but we won't take those actions. We either declare that we will never allow Ukraine, at least in the foreseeable future, to become a partner in NATO--we could declare that. We could say we are not going to bring Ukraine to NATO membership. The other thing we could have done is probably take U.N. troops and put them in as a tripwire. We certainly didn't very visibly show Putin all the defensive weaponry we were providing for Ukraine to deter it from invading. But we didn't do that and Putin invaded.

I still am very interested to find out exactly what happened in Istanbul, when they were sitting down trying to bring the war to a quick conclusion and Boris Johnson flies in. What happened there? I don't know. All I know is the result has been awful for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.

I guess my time is up--not quite, unless you are really anxious.

We need to understand and accept reality. As much as we hate it, you cannot create good policy living in a fantasy, world constructing your own reality. You have to accept the hard realities of the moment.

And just to repeat, with my remaining minutes here, our first priority should be to secure our own border, to protect Americans, to keep Americans safe, to keep our children safe. This surge--this catastrophe--is not just impacting cities like New York and Chicago. There is a small little city in Wisconsin--Whitewater, WI. I was called down there with the chief of police and county sheriffs. It has 15,000 in population. They have hundreds of migrant children in their school system speaking a different dialect of Spanish that their bilingual teachers don't understand. So they have to hire another interpreter. It costs them a hundred thousand dollars plus.

Police calls are taking three or four times the normal time. So other law enforcement activities are way down as they are responding to the migrants. Migrants are crowding into apartments unsafely, 12 to an apartment. They are trying to grapple with it. Now they are asking for help, for funding.

I am sympathetic with them, but the solution isn't to spend billions on sanctuary cities. The solution is to reduce the flow to a trickle so we don't have to spend those hundreds of billions of dollars taking care of this catastrophe. That is what this is. Six million people--it keeps rising by a couple hundred thousand a month; probably more than 7 million by the end of Biden's, hopefully, only term.

This shouldn't be that hard. This didn't require a monstrosity of a Rube Goldberg immigration bill. All we asked for was some enforcement mechanism tied to Ukraine funding to leverage that funding to force President Biden, who wants an open border, who caused this problem, to use the Executive authority he already has to secure the border, and oh, by the way, recognize how much easier it is for a Democrat President to secure the border versus a Republican.

President Trump, again, faced strong resistance from the open border crowd and no help from Democrats here in this Chamber to override court decisions, for example. President Biden, I know he may face similar resistance, but he would have Republicans here more than willing to pass a quick little law by unanimous consent to override a wrongful court decision like the Flores reinterpretation.

It may not be widely known, but President Obama's Secretary of DHS,

Jeh Johnson, completely disagreed with that court decision--completely disagreed with it, wrongfully decided. What President Obama should have done is come to Congress and asked for us to write a very focused law, a very targeted law, to instruct the court that you are wrong. We can detain families with their children. That is the humane thing to do, as opposed to initiate a massive catch-and-release, facilitating human trafficking, sex trafficking, and drug trafficking that goes along with it--again, a reality that I know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want to face. They don't want to admit what a crisis, what a catastrophe, this is.

Secretary Mayorkas--how many times has he been before the Senate and House? When we ask him: Secretary Mayorkas, will you recognize this is a crisis? No, Senator. At least a problem? No, Senator, it is a challenge. It is a challenge we are rising to. We have control of the border, Secretary Mayorkas says. And again, his definition of control and their solution is billions of dollars to sanctuary cities, billions of dollars for more CBP officers, not to secure the border, not to stop the flow, but more efficiently and effectively encounter, process, and disperse, and create a problem for cities large and small that is going to be with us for years, if not decades. This has to end.

It is a tragedy that this body, this Senate, couldn't rise to the occasion and actually construct a real border security bill, one that would bring this down to a trickle.

Do what President Trump did in March and April of 2020. Bring this flow down to way under 1,000 a day. That is what the American people expected. That is what we should have delivered. That is what we have failed miserably to do. And now we are about ready to send $60 billion to Ukraine--no border security whatsoever--and we will fuel the flames and prolong the destruction of Ukraine and the killing of its citizens and Russian conscripts.

This is a pretty easy ``no'' vote for me. It boggles my mind that so many of my colleagues here are actually going to vote yes on this without first securing our border.

I yield to the good Senator from Nebraska.

Mr. President, I ask the quorum call be vitiated and ask consent to do so.

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

Madam President, I am very glad that you have taken the chair to preside because I want to talk about something I think is kind of near and dear to your heart. This is something that I passed in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in the Senate back in 2019, and this was passed with bipartisan support. I am talking about a bill called the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act.

Following passage, I wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal. I just want to read the first two paragraphs of that column, published on September 22, 2019:

If the Legislature in my home state of Wisconsin fails to

pass the next year's appropriation bills, we don't shut

government agencies down. We fund them at the previous year's

appropriation levels. Doesn't that make sense?

That common-sense approach should apply in Washington, but

it doesn't. By the time I arrived in 2011, Congress's

appropriations process was completely broken.

It still is.

The United States has since had--

Again, this is as of September 2019.

--the United States has since had three government shutdowns,

passed 34 continuing resolutions to avoid shutdowns, raised

or suspended the debt ceiling nine times and--

Again, this was just 4 years ago.

--increased the federal debt $8.5 trillion.

So here we are, a couple days before the end of the fiscal year, 4 years later--our debt, by the way, has more than doubled; it stands at $33 trillion now--and we are facing a shutdown.

Isn't this ridiculous? There is no reason for this.

Again, back in June of 2019, I tasked up my committee members. I said: OK. I want to pass a bill that will end all government shutdowns forever. Take it off the table.

Now, there have been a number of bills designed to do that offered in both Chambers, both the House and the Senate.

I have three members of the committee--four members of the committee have their own bills.

The bill I selected to debate, mark up, and pass was one offered by Senators James Lankford and Maggie Hassan.

I chose that bill because--one bill actually increased spending; one bill decreased spending. But the Hassan-Lankford bill did what we do in Wisconsin: You don't shut an agency down; you don't shut the government down; you just keep spending at last year's level until the legislature can get its act together and appropriate the funds.

So that bill that I chose that we passed--by the way, on a bipartisan basis. I believe every Democratic Senator on the committee voted for it because Senator Hassan, Senator Lankford did a good job of coming together in a bipartisan fashion. They put some disciplines in there.

But what it does, it just creates rolling 14-day CRs. With those disciplines, Members can't travel back on the government dime. You only have a 24-hour shutdown, I believe. There are other disciplines there that put pressure on the process to get our act together and start appropriating bills.

If you don't get it done in the first 14 days, you have another 14- day CR, you do another 14-day CR, until we complete the appropriations process.

Again, not an efficient way of doing things. I think the reason most Members say that they don't want to shut down the government is we realize it is a very inefficient process, and it hurts people. It hurts people.

So why haven't we passed this in the last 4 years? Why haven't some of these other preventing government shutdowns acts passed in the past? Why not? It is ridiculous we haven't done it yet.

The result, by the way, has been what this chart demonstrates. Again, I already mentioned we are at $33 trillion in debt. It is very important to recognize how out of control spending is here in Washington, DC.

When we were debating the omnibus last year, I asked my Republican colleagues at the Senate lunch: Does anybody know how much the Federal Government is going to spend this year?

I didn't get any answers. Maybe somebody knew, but they didn't volunteer to answer.

I went out and asked the Washington press corps, the folks who are supposed to be reporting on this to our constituents and to the American public: Does anybody know how much the government spent last year?

Well, it is over $1 trillion. Well, that is true in terms of discretionary spending--less than 30 percent of the budget.

By the way, I granted them immediate absolution. I said: I wouldn't expect you to know how much the Federal Government spends in total because we never talk about it.

Think of it. The Federal Government is the largest financial entity in the world, and, in December of 2022, the people I was asking--the people who should have known this--had no idea what in total the Federal Government spent. Well, the answer was about $6.2 trillion.

Let me put that in context. That is what this chart shows. The numbers are pretty small. So I will describe them. This column is fiscal year 2019 spending. This is the fiscal year before the pandemic and the pandemic recession.

This column is this fiscal year, fiscal year 2023 estimated spending. We don't have hard figures yet, but we have a pretty good idea of what we are going to be spending.

Just 4 years ago, in just the year 2019, total Federal Government spending was $4.446 trillion--$4.4 trillion. Let me put that in perspective. In 2002, it was the first time we passed the Rubicon of spending over $2 trillion in total. Seventeen years later--it took us 17 years to more than double that to $4.4 trillion.

This fiscal year that we are closing out in a couple of days, we will spend over $6.3 trillion. We are spending $1.9 trillion more this year than we spent just 4 years ago. This is completely out of control.

By the way, if you put us on a baseline, based on just population growth and inflation--in other words, take out the massive out-of- control spending during the pandemic and just put us on a reasonable baseline--last year, we spent a little more than $5 trillion.

But in the debt ceiling deal--which, by the way, didn't raise the debt ceiling by a given amount--but House conservatives basically gave the Speaker to negotiate $1.5 trillion. We have done one of these Washington games, which is suspending debt. It will probably result in a debt ceiling of $4 trillion, which will accommodate this massive-- massive--deficit spending.

So again, just to repeat: 4 years ago, $4.4 trillion; 4 years later, $6.3, almost $6.4 trillion. That is an increase of more than $1.9 trillion. And the deficit this year will be somewhere between $1.7 and $2 trillion. We need to get this under control.

But I want to make an important point here. As dysfunctional as Washington, DC, is--it is grotesquely dysfunctional. I come from the private sector. This would not happen in the private sector. You wouldn't take 72 or 73 percent of what you spend in your private sector budget and say: That is on automatic pilot. We are never going to look at that. We are only going to look at 27 percent of the budget and try to control that. That is basically what we are doing here with discretionary spending this year. Twenty-seven percent, we will focus on that, and we will ignore 73 percent and let it grow out of control.

But again, this is a well-honed process. This isn't--it is dysfunctional, but the process is in place, and it is a well-honed process to mortgage our children's future, and we are witnessing that process.

Again, this is my 13th year. I think every year, at least, a shutdown has been threatened, as we are threatening this one--again, disquieting people, worrying people, because if a shutdown does occur, people will be hurt. We can avoid it.

But this well-honed process is playing out as it has ever since I have arrived here. Basically, you don't do appropriation bills without the House, without the Senate. You might start. You might start the charade, like we did this year, and start passing them in this Chamber, in September, a few weeks before the fiscal year. Obviously, you don't have enough time to pass all of them. So then you threaten a government shutdown.

You predict calamity, and then you load onto a continuing resolution spending that may or may not be controversial. It is not where you increase spending. It is not where you put supplemental spending. But that is what

we do. So it becomes controversial, and, all of a sudden, here you are threatening shutdown.

Now the proposal on the table right now in the Senate is: Let's do a CR with some controversial spending, and we will have that CR end the day before the Thanksgiving recess--a little pressure on our Members, just in case we can get our act together to come up with a couple of massive minibuses or just one massive omnibus to drop on everybody's desk. And if they want to go home for recess, you had better pass that now.

Now, my guess is we probably won't be able to get that done in time, and so we will end up with another CR. This one will probably be scheduled to expire--oh, I don't know, pick a date. My guess would be December 23 and December 24--the same process. That is what happened last year.

Then we get it, again, dropped on our desk--about a 2,000-plus page bill. Nobody has time to read it, other than the people who wrote it. And you get the Hobson's choice--vote yes or no. The problem with that, in addition to just the grotesque dysfunction of it, is the individual appropriation bills do not get the scrutiny that they deserve.

If you bring up every appropriations bill--12--you have got to start somewhere around May. You bring up each individual appropriation bill. Now you can actually scrutinize it. The public can see it. We can offer amendments.

Again, it is not a panacea. I am not going to say it is going to completely stop this runaway spending train, but it will be some constraint. It restores some function to this very dysfunctional place.

So what I have been pushing for, for 4 years--and it is one of the reasons I withheld my consent on the minibus. And I appreciate the fact that the chairman and the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee were willing to work with me and offer me an amendment on the minibus to try and get a vote to maybe pass the Preventing Government Shutdown Act, but other people are objecting, and we haven't got that vote yet.

So here we are, a couple days before a shutdown, and we need to do something. The House is having, obviously, a difficult time coming up with a solution. The Senate may pass something that really has no chance of passing in the House. I think we have to be honest about that.

So, again, in order to prevent a government shutdown, what we ought to do is do something that people agree on. You know, rather than trying to use this moment to jam something through that people don't all agree with, let's try and pass something people agree with, which is a bill that will prevent a government shutdown.

Now, I chose a 14-day clean CR--because that is pretty much the structure of the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act, rolling 14-day CRs, giving both Chambers the time to act to start passing these bills with a little bit more scrutiny than what minibuses or an omnibus would afford. It is a very commonsense approach. It is something we all ought to agree on. It would prevent a shutdown. It would prevent pain to real people. And all we have to do is agree to do what we all say we want to do, to avoid what we all say we want to avoid--a government shutdown.

So, Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of my bill, which is at the desk. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I object.

Mr. President, last December, the World Health Assembly established an intergovernmental negotiating body to draft a new convention on pandemic prevention and preparedness.

At its fourth meeting last month, the negotiating body accepted a draft of this new convention that would give the World Health Organization broad new powers in managing future pandemics. If accepted, it would cement the World Health Organization at the center of a global system for managing future pandemics, and it would erode U.S. sovereignty.

Let me just list a few of the examples of some of the provisions of this draft--and I will call it a treaty. Currently, it would require a substantial new U.S. financial commitment to an international body without proportional voting power.

It would require the U.S. to give the World Health Organization 20 percent of vaccines and other pandemic-related products produced during future pandemics. It includes a heavy emphasis on the transfer of intellectual property rights to the World Health Organization.

It gives the World Health Organization a leading role in fighting misinformation and disinformation, and as the Twitter files reveal, that leads to censorship and the suppression and abridging of freedom of speech.

It also promotes a global one-health approach to healthcare, including harmonizing regulation under WHO guidance. The WHO has not earned this power--far from it. At a critical moment in late 2019 and early 2020, the WHO utterly failed to detect the emerging COVID-19 pandemic and delayed in forming its member states. Instead, it was kowtowing to Beijing.

Unfortunately, there are indications that the Biden administration is considering joining this new convention by executive agreement and avoiding the Senate. We should not let this happen. An agreement of such magnitude needs to be submitted to the Senate for advice and consent. This is not a partisan issue; this is about reclaiming the Senate's prerogatives on international agreement.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 11 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, this amendment is very simple, it declares any pandemic convention produced by the intergovernmental negotiating body to be a treaty requiring Senate advice and consent.

I had a similar amendment on the Iranian agreement a few years ago. It is far past time that the Members of this body reclaim our Constitutional authority at ratifying these incredibly serious treaties and no longer allow the administration to go ahead and negotiate agreements that can have a dramatic impact on our sovereignty and bypass the Senate entirely.

So, again, a very simple amendment, it would deem any amendment a treaty and require that it be ratified by the Senate, and I urge all my colleagues to support my amendment.

Mr. President, there is nothing in my amendment that would harm what the Senator from Virginia tried to accomplish in repealing the authorization for use of military force. So my amendment can be accepted and have no impact whatsoever on the legislation before the floor or the body.

Vote on Amendment No. 11

I move to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 7776 with an amendment numbered 6526.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for up to 6 minutes of debate equally divided.

I rise to offer an amendment on behalf of myself and Senator Cruz. I want to say I appreciate Senate leadership for allowing this amendment. I appreciate, as does Senator Cruz, the conferees' willingness to consider or repeal the vaccine mandate, which they didn't include. We truly appreciate that.

This amendment reflects the fact that we don't think the vaccine mandate went far enough. So our amendment is pretty simple, it immediately ends the vaccine mandate, whereas what is in the bill allows it to continue for 30 days.

It prohibits DOD from imposing a future COVID-19 vaccine mandate without the express authorization of Congress. It prohibits DOD from taking any adverse action against a servicemember solely for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

It allows the servicemember to be reinstated with backpay if kicked out of the military solely for refusing the vaccine. And it redresses any other types of adverse actions the DOD took against a servicemember for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

People serving in our military are the finest among us. Over 8,000 were terminated because they refused to get this experimental vaccine, and so I am urging all of my colleagues to support the Senators and my amendment.

Mr. President, how much time do I have left?

I would argue that it is not a lawful order because the executive order required that the vaccine be fully FDA-approved. In August of 2021, the FDA did something very strange: They extended the emergency use authorization for the vaccine available in the U.S. and granted approval on Comirnaty. But that, to my knowledge--and I have asked repeatedly--none of that has been made available to our members of the service. So it is not a fully FDA-approved product. And the FDA is completely ignoring its own safety surveillance systems on VAERS. There have been over 32,500 deaths reported worldwide. Twenty-six percent of those deaths are occurring on a zero, 1 or 2 following vaccination. There are all kinds of different, scary safety signals that are being ignored. It was not unreasonable for people to refuse this experimental gene therapy.

Yes.

Vote on Motion

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, you will notice that the senior Senator from Vermont didn't talk about overall spending numbers.

I would ask the President--I would ask anybody listening to these floor speeches today: Do you know how much the Federal Government spent last year?

I have been asking that question of my colleagues. I have been asking that question of journalists here in Washington, DC, people who report on the dealings on the floor, and the vast majority cannot answer that question.

So the question you all ought to be asking yourself is, Why can't you answer that question?

It is not your fault. The reason nobody knows how much the Federal Government spent in total last year--virtually no one knows it--is that we never talk about it. We are the largest financial entity in the world, and we never talk about how much we spend in total. We talk about little bits and pieces. We talk about $6 billion here, $76 billion there--no doubt, necessary funding for top priorities. But we don't spend the time talking about how we are mortgaging our children's future.

I have got a couple of charts that I would like to display.

This first chart shows over 20 years of spending history, going back to the year 2002, when the Federal Government spent, in total, a little more than $2 trillion.

If we would have just increased spending from that point by population growth and the rate of inflation, last year we would have spent a little under $3.8 trillion.

If you go to the year 2008, when we spent just under $3 trillion, and once again just grew spending by population and inflation, last year we would have spent $4.4 trillion.

If you go back to 2016, when we were spending $3.8 trillion--under $4 trillion--and grew that by just the rate of growth and the population rate of inflation, last year we would have spent about $4.8 trillion.

Instead, last year, we spent $6.3 trillion.

Now, I realize--and you can see on this chart--that, the last 3 years, spending was heavily impacted by COVID relief, close to $6 trillion worth.

But in 2019, before the COVID pandemic, we spent about $4.4 trillion.

I have another chart I would like to put up here that puts this all in perspective.

This breaks down spending between discretionary and mandatory plus interest, and then you have total outlays.

Again, if you look at 2019, total outlay is $4.4 trillion. So because of COVID, the next year we spent an additional $2.1 trillion--$6.5 trillion. In 2021, $6.8 trillion; last year, $6.3 trillion.

Now, I heard President Biden say the pandemic is over. I think most of us have gotten back to our normal lives. That is a good thing. Why haven't we gone back to a normal spending level?

I don't know exactly what the total spending will be for fiscal year 2023. I do know that we are 2\1/2\ months into the fiscal year. We have not brought up one appropriations bill on the floor of the Senate for debate, for amendments--not one. We are operating on a continuing resolution.

I hear all the time that these continuing resolutions are such a terrible way to do business. I agree. It shows the dysfunction--the complete dysfunction--which is leading to these out-of-control spending numbers.

You would think, now that the pandemic is over, that we would return to a more normal level of spending.

Had we just grown the 2019 level by, again, the rate of population growth, the rate of inflation, we would be spending about $4.8 trillion this year, but it appears--again, we don't know; there are a couple of people negotiating this; the rest of us are completely outside of the process--that we are going to have some massive omnibus spending bill dropped on our desks, and we expect to vote on it in a day or two, or maybe just hours. But it is going to be somewhere around $6 trillion.

Have we literally just increased the baseline since the beginning of the pandemic by $1.6 trillion? That is a 36-percent increase.

I will just put this in perspective. Again, had we grown this just by inflation and population growth--that would be a reasonable way to put some kind of constraints on what we are spending--that would be $4.8 trillion.

Last year, the Federal Government raised in revenue $4.9 trillion.

Again, I can't predict what revenue is going to be in 2023, but based on 2022 revenue, if we are only talking about $4.8 trillion, we would actually have a surplus as opposed to a massive deficit almost guaranteed to be more than $1 trillion.

My final point is this. And I know Senator Scott also is in the business world, and a number of Senators have been. If we were looking at this as, let's say, a division that had a problem, that had to spend a lot more money--a fire, some kind of real issue with the business where they had to drag increased spending over the last 2 or 3 years-- but that spending issue had been resolved, and that division came to us having spent $4.4 million in 2019 and now that the problem has been resolved, now they want to spend $6 million, I can guarantee you we would be looking for a lot more detail. We would be spending a lot more time in terms of why in the world would we be increasing our base budget by 36 percent now that the danger or the problem has passed.

So in the business world, in the private sector, where I and Senator Scott came from, we would be spending a lot of time analyzing this. But here, in Washington, DC, the world's capital of dysfunction--of monetary and budgetary dysfunction--we don't even know what we are spending, and we are not even supposed to know because the powers that be are negotiating some massive omnibus bill, and they are going to jam us up against the Christmas holidays and ask for an up-or-down vote. That is outrageous.

This process--this horribly broken, dysfunctional process--must end, which is why I completely agree with Senator Lee's amendment.

Let's pass a continuing resolution. As much as I hate them, as much as that signals dysfunction, it will allow us the time to actually take a look at, debate, and question: Why in the world are we talking about $6 trillion of spending when, at most, looking back to 2019, growing that by inflation and population growth, we ought to be talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.8, certainly under $5 trillion, and maybe looking at the prospect for the first time in many, many years of balancing a budget?

That is the attitude we ought to be taking. That is the debate we need to have. We need to have time for that debate, which is why I support Senator Lee's amendment.

I yield the floor.