Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. I am not--keep going.

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I thank my friends from Illinois and Texas for yielding the floor to me amidst that interesting debate.

Family Separation and Asylum Processing

Mr. President, yesterday a Federal judge ordered the Trump administration to immediately reunify the families who were separated by the administration's policy. It certifies what we in the Congress already expect--that the administration will expend all resources at its disposal to immediately reunite the over 2,000 families who have been separated. This should be the President's first order of business to undo the harm he has caused through his chaotic and cruel family separation policy.

In addition to this effort, Democrats believe we should start addressing the root cause of the migrant crisis, attacking the disease as well as the symptoms. We believe that Central American countries should conduct asylum processing within their own countries. We believe the United States should help governments in Central America crack down on the ability of gangs and cartels to operate freely and ruthlessly in their countries. And we believe we should go after the drug cartels, smugglers, and drug traffickers with increased penalties and sanctions. There were robust efforts during the last administration to do exactly that, and they were showing progress. But President Trump, in shortsighted fashion, proposed significant cuts to the aid and resources used to fight the cartels and stop the violence in Central America. This is not only dangerous, but it also shows a basic lack of understanding.

There is a pretty simple reason people are fleeing Central America. It is the impunity of these gangs and cartels and the brutal violence they spread. Many of the young people who want to escape being killed are then forced to use smugglers and other coyotes and carry drugs into this country through no fault of their own. We should stop this there in ways that we have been successful in Colombia, and that would greatly reduce the number of people coming to the border. That would make things easier for our country, but it would also make their lives a lot better and safer if they could file an asylum claim in their own country and get it adjudicated quickly. This is what many Democrats are going to propose in about an hour. There are other things we can also do, but we are addressing this issue today.

President Trump needs to end the inhumanity and chaos at the border. We have to develop a real strategy to go after the gangs and cartels in Central America, curbing the violence that sends migrants to our borders in the first place. Later today, I will be joining with several of my colleagues to discuss how we believe the United States should go about this.

China and Trade

Mr. President, on China, I have long argued that the best way to make progress in our trade relationship with China is to be consistently tough until real concessions are won.

China has flagrantly abused international trade rules and norms for more than a decade, stealing our intellectual property and know-how, illegally dumping artificially cheap goods into our markets, and denying blue-chip American companies access to their markets unless those companies sign away their know-how and intellectual property.

Previous attempts to force China to change its behavior have been faulty and milquetoast, at best. Unsurprisingly, these efforts have largely failed.

While we disagree on a lot of things, I was happy to hear President Trump talk as if he had learned from the lessons of the past. President Trump has, at times, pursued a tough, aggressive course of action against China, and I have applauded him when he has. But President Trump seems unable to consistently keep pressure on China. Every time I think he is going down the right path, he turns around and gives China a pass on something.

Take the Chinese telecom giant ZTE, for example. Out of the blue, President Trump relaxed penalties on ZTE and loosened the restrictions on its sales in the United States, despite the fact that it has been labeled a national security threat by our military. Why? It seemed to no end other than to placate President Xi, hardly our friend on economic issues.

This morning, after threatening a tough new approach to limit China's ability to invest in the United States where national security was concerned, the Trump administration has once again backed off, it seems. Instead, the President seems to be endorsing a bill here in Congress to expand the authority of CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. That is a good provision in the NDAA. It passed with a filibuster-proof majority. An endorsement of the provision hardly means much because it is going to pass. Many of us wanted it to go further. Expanding CFIUS is not just for military and national security, but for economic security as well. But it is not sufficient--not sufficient.

Mr. President, you are backing out again. President Xi is outfoxing you and outplaying you again. Once again, we get the tough talk and no action.

This happens over and over and over again with this President and this administration. Why are we waiting to impose real pressure on China for its efforts to undermine our Nation's economic wellspring? It is another example of President Trump starting down a tough path with China and then just veering off course for reasons unexplained, sometimes on a whim.

It appears there is a total war in the administration over just how strong the President should be with China. One week he is pulled in one direction, and the next, the opposite. If we are going to convince the Chinese Government we are serious, the United States must be strong, tough, and consistent. Otherwise, the President's approach will not succeed in changing China's behavior--or convincing President Xi that he means business--to the detriment of American workers, American businesses, and the economy for generations to come.

Supreme Court Rulings

Mr. President, there is one final topic, on the Supreme Court and what they did yesterday and today.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that California was violating the First Amendment by requiring crisis pregnancy centers to provide information to their patients about abortions.

It comes alongside a rule to affirm the President's travel ban in which the majority also bent over backward to accept President Trump's position. You would have to be living with your head in the sand over the past 2 years not to see a racial and religious animus behind the President's decision to ban travel into the United States from Muslim- majority countries.

Unfortunately, both cases were decided 5 to 4. Five conservative judges ruled against California law and the travel ban. Anyone watching the Bench at the moment ought to be shaking their heads at the political polarization of the Court.

The abortion case makes it even worse. As Justice Breyer pointed out in his dissent, in 1992, there was a California case where the Supreme Court upheld a Pennsylvania law requiring a doctor to provide information about adoption services. In other words, clinics performing abortions, helping women, had to provide alternative information.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. California passed a law that said that clinics that try to dissuade women from having abortions, which is their right, also had to provide information about abortion.

The majority ruled one way in the one case and the opposite in the other case. If free speech works in the one case, why doesn't it work in the other? If the government can compel a doctor in Pennsylvania to provide women information about adoption, why can't the government compel someone in California to provide information to a woman about abortion? There is a total contradiction.

The majority somehow argued there was a glaring difference between the two cases, but it is plainly sophistry. In fact, there was little to no difference between these two cases.

Let me state it again exactly. If an abortion clinic should be required to give information about alternatives, why shouldn't an anti- abortion clinic be required to do the same exact thing? Why does free speech apply to one and not the other? Why does lack of free speech fit one and not the other?

Many Americans see this Court in a much more negative light than they used to. Chief Justice Roberts famously claimed in his confirmation hearings that he would ``call the balls and strikes'' as he sees them. Here we have the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court leading a majority departing from a clear precedent to affirm a conservative ideology, an anti-choice ideology. No one can see Chief Justice Roberts' decision in the California case as calling balls and strikes; instead, it is a wild, political pitch. And I would say to the Chief Justice: You are demeaning the Court you seek to uphold, in this type of contradiction, and the dissenting opinion showed its outrage at it.

Just a moment ago, the Court ruled on the Janus decision. In the Janus decision, the Court said people had a First Amendment right not to join a union. That is a crazy idea cooked up by the conservative anti-labor movement and pursued relentlessly until a favorable collection of Judges would accept such a harebrained theory. The First Amendment and the right to organize are two totally separate things, but somehow the hard right first pays for these think tanks, which come up with these ideas, and then they assemble enough people in the Court who see things politically--not constitutionally, not legally, not ideologically--to affirm this decision.

Unions are only 6 percent of private sector America. They are declining in membership, and it is a reason the middle class doesn't make more money even in this prosperous economy. This is an awful decision. It is going to increase economic polarization in this country. It is going to make it harder for middle-class people to earn a decent living. And sooner or later, people are going to get so angry that Lord knows what will happen.

The American people are now seeing the results of a coordinated political campaign by deep-pocketed conservative interests to influence the bench all the way up to the Supreme Court. Justice Gorsuch, of course, and the current conservative majority on the Court are the capstone of these efforts, the result of an appalling decision by Senate Republicans to refuse President Obama a Supreme Court pick.

Alongside the California ruling, the Roberts' Court affirmed a plainly discriminatory travel ban, unleashed a flood of unlimited, dark money in our politics, and scrapped a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act--all goals of the hard right, all having little to do with the Constitution or reading the law, all making America a more polarized, economically divided country.

Opponents of these decisions and the President's policy should focus on the Supreme Court, whose thin majority will once again hang in the balance this November.
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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, we recently received news that Justice Anthony Kennedy will be retiring, leaving a vacancy on the Nation's highest Court. This is the most important Supreme Court vacancy for this country in at least a generation. Nothing less than the fate of our healthcare system, reproductive rights for women, and countless other protections for middle-class Americans are at stake.

Will Republicans and President Trump nominate and vote for someone who will preserve protections for people with preexisting conditions, or will they support a Justice who will put health insurance companies over patients or put the Federal Government between a woman and her doctor?

The Senate should reject, on a bipartisan basis, any Justice who would overturn Roe v. Wade or undermine key healthcare protections. The Senate should reject anyone who will instinctively side with powerful special interests over the interests of average Americans.

Our Republican colleagues in the Senate should follow the rule they set in 2016 not to consider a Supreme Court Justice in an election year. Senator McConnell would tell anyone who listened that the Senate had the right to advise and consent, and that was every bit as important as the President's right to nominate.

Millions of people are just months away from determining the Senators who should vote to confirm or reject the President's nominee, and their voices deserve to be heard now as Leader McConnell thought they deserved to be heard then. Anything but that would be the absolute height of hypocrisy.

People from all across America should realize that their rights and opportunities are threatened. Americans should make their voices heard loudly, clearly, and consistently. Americans should make it clear that they will not tolerate a nominee, chosen from President Trump's preordained list and selected by powerful special interests, who will reverse the progress we have made over the decades.

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