Energy and Water, Legislative Branch, and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, first, as the Senate continues to process appropriations bills on the floor, I thank Chairman Shelby and Ranking Member Leahy for their hard work on the appropriations process.

The Republican leader and I have both committed to work through appropriations in a bipartisan way, through regular order, which is something the Senate hasn't achieved in some time. Chairman Shelby and Ranking Member Leahy are leading the way. We want to continue along this road in a bipartisan, cooperative way, wherein what we bring to the floor basically has approval from both sides of the aisle. Family Separation Policy

Madam President, on immigration, let me address the humanitarian crisis at our southern border.

For a little over a month, President Trump's family separation policy has resulted in more than 2,300 children being separated from their families. Young children, toddlers, babies are being held alone. I have seen the pictures of these tiny, little girls with forlorn looks on their faces--it breaks your heart--and they are being placed into what are being called tender age facilities. That is an Orwellian term if there ever were one. Other minors have been flown, scattershot, to different parts of the country to live in foster homes that are hundreds of miles away from their parents. A 5-year-old is sent hundreds of miles away from his or her parents? What kind of country are we?

Yesterday the President signed an Executive order that made it 100- percent clear that what the Democrats have been saying--that the President can fix this problem on his own--has been correct. The President vindicated everything we had been saying and undid everything he had been saying when he said only Congress could fix this problem. Of course, he made it partisan.

It is a relief that the President has reversed himself and recognized the cruelty of his policy of separating children from their parents. I would like to believe he found it in the goodness of his heart. We certainly know there was a ton of pressure on him to do this and that he didn't do it when he first looked at the problem.

After weeks of acting like his administration bore no responsibility for this policy--contravening all fact and all reality--I hope this represents a turning point with the President. I hope it means this President will stop blaming others for problems he creates and will start fixing them himself. I hope it means the President realizes, just because he says something, it doesn't make it so. So often, more than any other President many times over, what he says is just outright false, made up. It pops into his head, and he says it. Yet this Executive order raises several questions. That means the President must continue to deal with these problems, which, again, he can do on his own.

First, the way the Executive order was drafted means it will not go into effect until a court rules on its legality. What is the President's policy on family separation in the meantime? Will he continue to insist that these heartbreaking separations continue?

Second, the Executive order allows for the indefinite detention of families who are apprehended at the border. The U.S. Government cannot be in the business of indefinitely detaining minors.

Third, the Executive order is silent on the more than 2,300 families who have already been split apart. Will the President and his administration work to reunite those families? We believe he must do that immediately. What exactly is the President's plan to accomplish this? Leader Pelosi and I are sending a letter to the President this morning that will demand he use all the necessary resources to reunite the separated families.

At his rally in Minnesota last night, which is the kind of red meat thing the President likes--gathering 10,000 people together in a State of 5, 6, 7, or 8 million so he is a hero with everyone, which is the way he thinks--the President acted as if he had taken care of the border crisis, as if all of the problems were in the rearview mirror.

He said: ``I signed an executive order keeping families together because I think that's probably a very important thing to be doing.''

The only thing is, we in Congress and the American people have a whole bunch of questions the President hasn't answered, questions which are listed above that I will repeat. How many kids are in these facilities now? What are their conditions? Why hasn't the media been allowed to go in, see, and verify that the conditions are humane? The Department of Defense has been asked whether it can house 20,000 unaccompanied children from now until the end of the year. How will that work? Is it even feasible? How is the administration keeping track of the families who have already been separated? What are the plans and timetable for their being reunited?

President Trump hasn't taken care of the problem, not by any stretch of the imagination, but he has certainly admitted that his administration does have the power to take action. He, in a sense, by what he did yesterday, increases the burden on himself to solve these other problems. I urge him to continue to use his power to address these serious, unresolved issues. Legislation in Congress remains unlikely and far more difficult to achieve than the simple corrective actions the President can take immediately and administratively.

Let us not forget that immigration has been the graveyard of legislation for years in this Congress. Saying Congress can act and getting Congress to act are two different things, particularly when, on the House side, we have a group of Congress Members in the Freedom Caucus--way out of the mainstream by any polling standard, by any real standard on immigration--that insists that poison pills be added to anything we do on immigration. Speaker Ryan, thus far, has shown no ability or desire to resist them. So having Congress get it done is not going to solve the problem, unfortunately, because immigration is such a contentious and divisive issue. The President has to do it himself, and let us hope he does. Trade with China

Madam President, on our trade relationship with China, for too long, China has taken advantage of America's unwillingness to strongly confront its rapacious trade policies. For too long, China has dumped artificially cheap products into our market, stolen the intellectual property of startup and blue-chip American companies, and denied our companies access to its markets. When companies have good products that China wants to copy, it has denied our companies access to its markets so China can steal the know-how of how to do it and then compete with us. China alone, by its rapacious, unfair trade policies, has accounted for the loss of millions of American jobs and the decline in pay of millions of other American jobs.

So I am heartened that President Trump, after making a debacle of the deal on ZTE, has taken a tougher approach to China in recent days. His instincts to be tough on China are right on the money. As I said before, on China, my views are closer to President Trump's than they were to President Obama's or President Bush's, both of whose administrations, anyway, let China get away with economic murder.

Now President Trump needs to stay strong. If he backs off at the first sign of trouble, after the first company calls to complain or after President Xi calls to complain, then China will know we are weak and unserious. I am worried China already thinks that because of what the President has done on ZTE. China is waiting to see if we are tough enough to ride this out. We need to show China that America means business because the stakes are too high. Business relocations to China have cost too many American jobs. The theft of our intellectual property has been called the greatest transfer of wealth in history by former four-star general and Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command GEN Keith Alexander.

The lifeblood of the American economy is on the line, so I urge President Trump to stay strong on China. At the first sign of complaint, if we turn, China will know it can push us over, and the number of jobs we will lose--the amount of wealth we will lose--will far exceed the kind of damage these tariffs might do.

Please don't mistake my support on this issue as a license for the President to be reckless or as an endorsement of what the President is doing to our allies. The tariffs leveled against Canada and our European allies are misguided and poorly timed. We should be rallying our allies to work with us against China, which is what they want to do. Instead, we are poking them. China is our No. 1 economic trade enemy, and I use the word ``enemy'' advisedly. We have to have the whole world on our side, and these other actions are poorly timed at best. Republican Tax Bill

Madam President, 6 months ago, in the dead of night, the Republican majority jammed through a partisan tax bill that lavished tax cuts on big corporations and the wealthiest few--the old theory of trickle-down that the Republican Party embraced. My friend from Pennsylvania is one of the few who will actually say that is what he believes, which I appreciate, even though I strongly disagree.

It is an appropriate time now to look back on how the tax bill is faring. While the Republican leader, on a daily basis, celebrates vague statistics about business confidence, here are some hard, cold facts.

Since the beginning of 2018, corporations have announced plans to repurchase more than $475 billion in stock buybacks--a record pace. In the past week, the Washington Post has reported ``wages aren't just flat, they are falling'' for a strong majority of American workers. According to a recent analysis by JUST Capital, only 7 percent of the capital allocated by companies from the tax bill's savings has gone to employees while 57 percent has gone to shareholders--just what we Democrats predicted.

When the vast majority of the tax cuts goes to the very wealthy and to the largest and most powerful corporations, the average worker sees very little gain--trickle-down--certainly, a smaller proportion of the gain than the cut. The kind of plan we would have advocated, which would have helped the middle class predominantly, not the wealthy, would have been far better for average workers.

Remember what President Trump promised the American people? He said the Republican tax bill would give a $4,000 raise to the average American family. In reality, American families are not seeing close to that figure. A recent Washington Post headline sums it up best: ``The Republican tax bill's promises of higher wages and more jobs haven't materialized.''

The truth is that the tax law has failed to deliver for American workers and American families, and the American people are realizing it. The polling data shows it is becoming more unpopular. It started out being very unpopular with all of those little publicity bonuses that many of them arranged. In January, it was at about 50-50, but now it is declining again. American families know they are getting the short end of the stick in this tax bill. Corporations are reaping record profits as a result of the tax bill, and they refuse to pass much of those savings on to their workers.

Whatever benefits American families are getting from the tax bill, if they are getting benefits at all, are starting to get wiped out by the skyrocketing healthcare costs--the result of Republican sabotage, some of which was in the tax bill itself. There are millions of American families now whose tax breaks are far exceeded by the increases in premiums they are paying for healthcare.

All in all, that is why today, just 6 months since its passage, the Republicans' signature legislative accomplishment is so deeply unpopular with the American people and why Republican pundits are saying we had better go over to the area of immigration because this tax bill thing isn't working for us.

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I will be very brief.

I thank the Republican leader and the senior Senator from Tennessee-- the chair of one of the relevant subcommittees--for their comments.

We want to make this process work. It is going to take a little work to bring it back to the way it used to be on both sides. This is an outstanding start, and I appreciate that very much.

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