STRENGTHENING AMERICA'S SECURITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST ACT OF 2019--Motion to Proceed--Continued
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I would say to my friend from Virginia, we both serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and of course we have both been intimately involved in the investigation on Russia's activities up to and including the 2016 election.
I would like to point out the hypocrisy of our colleagues across the aisle who refused to take up any legislation whatsoever, such as S. 1, which is on the floor and which would take extraordinarily positive measures to protect our most important allies in the Middle East, including Israel and Jordan. They filibustered that bill and said: We are not going to take up any legislation until the government is back open--100 percent of it.
For the past 2 weeks, the minority leader has paralyzed the work of the Senate, saying they would block the Senate from considering any legislation unrelated to government funding. A number of our colleagues have said--for example, the junior Senator from Virginia said: ``The Senate should vote on nothing else until we vote to reopen the government. Period.'' Senator Merkley said: ``The Senate's schedule cannot be business as usual if we shut down a quarter of the government and just leave it shut down.'' Senator Booker said that Senate Democrats should block consideration of all unrelated bills.
All this comes as a result of the fact that the impetus is on the Democrats to come forward and negotiate a resolution of the shutdown in good faith. But to this point, the Speaker, Ms. Pelosi, and the minority leader, Senator Schumer, have simply refused to negotiate with the President.
I was with the President down in Texas, down along the border, on Thursday. He is willing to negotiate. We know we had broad bipartisan support for the Secure Fence Act, for example, in 2006, authorizing up to 800 miles of fencing on the southern border. The Democratic leader voted for that, and so did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Later, in 2014, all Democrats voted for $40 billion in border security, including barriers, fencing, and tactical infrastructure along the border. Now they are saying, as the Speaker has said, that somehow this is ``immoral.'' Well, this is hypocrisy at its worst.
Nomination of William Barr
Madam President, on another matter, today the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on the nomination of William Barr to be Attorney General of the United States. Mr. Barr is uniquely qualified for this position in large part because he held the job before. As a matter of fact, 27 years ago, he was nominated by George Herbert Walker Bush to be Attorney General of the United States. He was confirmed by a unanimous voice vote in the Senate. It received little fanfare at the time because it wasn't particularly controversial--nothing like the contentious, partisan confirmation battles we have seen the last 2 years. There wasn't an attempt--at least so far, and I am keeping my fingers crossed--to assassinate Mr. Barr's character or try to decipher the notes in his high school yearbook like we saw in the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing. Instead, so far, and to the committee's credit, we have focused on his qualifications.
He is clearly smart, articulate, and able. He has a clear understanding of what the role of the Attorney General is and, more importantly, what it is not. An Attorney General should not be a politician. As a matter of fact, the Attorney General has the very difficult job of trying to balance his responsibilities as the chief law enforcement officer in the country enforcing the rule of law along with the fact that he is a political appointee of the President's. To me, that is one of the most difficult positions in the Cabinet to hold. But Mr. Barr has done it before, and I think he can do it again. He, of course, has great institutional knowledge about the Department of Justice.
In addition to Attorney General, he held the job of Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel and Deputy Attorney General before he was promoted to the top job
Back in 1992, when Mr. Barr was confirmed, then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary, Joe Biden--President Obama's Vice President--said he would be a fine Attorney General.
This morning, I heard Mr. Barr discuss the qualities that undoubtedly led Senators on both sides of the aisle to support his confirmation. He spoke of the importance of acting with professionalism and integrity. As a matter of fact, he said that at 68 years old, he basically had decided to semi-retire, only to answer the call by the President to return to public service. He said: I am completely independent. I will make the hard decisions. I will make the right decisions. I will help restore the reputation of the Department of Justice and the FBI to an apolitical, a nonpolitical department, which is exactly what we need.
He wants to make sure that the character and reputation of the Department of Justice is enhanced and restored and then maintained, and then it could withstand even the most trying political times, including those in which we presently live.
He spoke of serving with independence, providing no promises or assurances to anyone or anything, other than to faithfully execute and administer the laws of the United States of America.
It is clear to me that he maintains the same views he held 27 years ago. I share his view that the Department of Justice should function outside of the highly politicalized times we live in. The fair and impartial administration of justice is the highest obligation and duty of this position.
I believe Mr. Barr is an outstanding nominee and, once confirmed, will be an outstanding Attorney General. I look forward to voting yes on his nomination.
Government Funding
Madam President, on the matter of the government shutdown--the 25 percent of the government that is presently not funded--last week, I traveled with the President, along with my colleague Senator Cruz, to the Rio Grande Valley, to McAllen, TX.
After the President held his roundtable, where he saw heroin, methamphetamine, and weapons, and heard about the human trafficking, including sex slavery involving children and girls and women, after that presentation--after the President left, Senator Cruz and I sat down with a number of our constituents--county judges, mayors, law enforcement officers, as well as the folks from Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection. They understand the border better than anybody because they live there. They are deeply concerned about the posturing in Washington and how the political arguments seem to overcome logic and listening to the experts when it comes to border security. I was glad for them to confirm once again what they previously told me: that we need to strengthen those border communities and keep our country safe, while keeping legitimate trade and commerce flowing across the border.
During our discussion, Scott Luck, Deputy Chief of the Border Patrol, talked about the positive impact of physical barriers and what positive impact they have at targeted locations along the southern border. He said:
The physical barrier has worked every place I have been. I have been in places where they did not have it; they put it in and it worked.
He mentioned Douglas, AZ, as one of those. He said:
There were more people coming into the country there than any other place in the country. I was there. It stopped. It stopped in California. It stopped in Yuma. It stopped in El Paso. It will stop wherever we put it.
Despite what our colleagues across the aisle are saying, physical barriers at the border can be effective when coupled with technology and personnel. It doesn't do you much good to have a physical barrier that somebody can go over or around or through and you don't have a Border Patrol agent there to detain them.
Actually, the physical border is the last place you are going to stop people trying to illegally enter into the United States, together with the narcotics and the human trafficking, but it is important to have those tools available to the Border Patrol, and that is what Deputy Chief Luck was stressing. He made the comments and observation that physical barriers alone are not the solution for the entire border--a holistic border security approach also requires technology and personnel.
When we were discussing the need for building physical barriers in strategic locations, my friend, Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevino, said something to Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd that I think encapsulates the whole debate. He was talking to the Border Patrol and CBP and said:
If you tell us where you need it, I think we are all on board. If the politicians tell us where we need it, I think that is where we have our concern.
In other words, what Judge Trevino was saying was, let's listen to the experts, the people who know how to use the right combination of technology, tactical infrastructure, and personnel at each given place along the border because it makes no sense to try to treat this like a one-size-fits-all. Anybody who has ever been to the border between the United States and Mexico knows that the geography and topography vary tremendously from place to place.
Let's not try to dictate from Washington, DC, where every dollar goes and in so doing try to micromanage the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security. Let's leave that to the experts--the men and women who work to protect and secure our border every day.
What we continue to hear and what I continue to advocate is for a layered approach--barriers where they are appropriate, technology, and personnel. That is exactly what we have been talking about. That is what we voted for in 2006 with the Secure Fence Act. The Democrats supported that, along with Republicans. That is what law enforcement officers tell us they need to operate optimally. Unfortunately, it is what Democrats are now refusing to negotiate and provide.
When looking at the border, it is not just physical security we need to be concerned about; we need to be concerned about our economic security as well.
During our discussions last week with local stakeholders, we also focused on the importance of facilitating legitimate trade and travel at our ports of entry. I was shocked by this figure, but the Customs and Border Protection Officer there, Mr. Higgerson, mentioned that the trade from Texas ports alone is valued at $300 billion per year. For the State of Texas and border communities in particular, these ports fuel our economy, and we need to provide additional funding to ensure efficient movement across the border.
One thing we all agree on is that most of the high-end drugs--the heroin, the methamphetamine, and the fentanyl--come through the ports of entry. So let's modernize those. Let's provide the technology that is needed in order to stop the flow of that poison into the United States. Legitimate trade and commerce is the lifeblood not only of our border region in my State, it is also the lifeblood of our Nation's economy. There are 5 million Americans whose jobs depend on binational trade with Mexico alone.
Along with a number of my colleagues from Texas, we are sending a bipartisan letter to President Trump that thanks him for his continued work to secure our southern border. His advocacy for that layered approach, as well as for port of entry improvements, is vital to my State. In that letter, we also address recent rumors to the effect that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' funds might be used for border security purposes, and I have urged the President not to take that route. While I will continue to advocate for additional border security, I believe those funds were intended to support disaster relief and should be used for that purpose. We need both border security and to lend a helping hand to those who are still recovering from natural disasters. We don't have to rob from Peter to pay Paul. We need to do both.
I am grateful for the support that has been shown from the President to the people of Texas both in the days following Hurricane Harvey's landfall and in the nearly year and a half since, and I hope he will continue to work with all of my Texas colleagues and me as we rebuild our communities impacted by Hurricane Harvey and as we work together to secure our border.
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Mr. CORNYN. I yield.
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, if I could respond to my friend, the Senator from Delaware, he speaks correctly--accurately--about some of the symptoms and, I think, some of the cures that we need to put in place to deal with this extraordinarily complex problem. We would love to continue to work with him on coming up with something. We may not want to call it ``Plan Mexico'' but ``Plan Americas'' because what we really have to deal with is a regional challenge.
He is exactly right in that most of the illegal immigration now is coming from Central America. Gaps in our immigration and human trafficking laws encourage unaccompanied children and family units to come up to the border because they can, essentially, get placed in the United States while they wait for their asylum claims to be determined by a court, and there is a backlog of 700,000 or 800,000 asylum claims. In other words, the criminal organizations that move people for money into the United States have cracked the code and have figured out how to be successful in placing people in the United States.
Unfortunately, it also helps to enrich those organizations that move the poison from south of the border into the United States. They contributed to the deaths of some 70,000 Americans last year alone. I am thinking particularly about the fentanyl, along with the heroin, going from China to Mexico and up across the border. Of that consumed in the United States, 90 percent of it comes from Mexico. I agree that it is the demand here in the United States that enriches the cartels, but they are, more or less, commodity agnostic. In other words, they will do anything that makes them money, these criminal organizations.
We need to have people sit down and work together, and I pledge to work with my colleague to try to do that. Yet we can't get a solution as long as the Speaker of the House calls physical infrastructure or barriers immoral. This is kind of a nonstarter to a conversation that we need to have to try to negotiate our way out of this shutdown.
I welcome working with my friend.
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