Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2019
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. I promise my friend from Maryland that I will be less than an hour. I am kidding. I am kidding. I will try to wrap it up in 10 or 15 minutes, max.
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, responding to our friend from Maryland, I understand the situation. We will try to figure out how to accommodate all Senators so that they get a chance to speak.
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, since the shutdown began, we have heard voices on both sides of the aisle, mine included, calling for a bipartisan solution to fund the government and end this stalemate. With Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader Schumer refusing to come to the negotiating table, they made finding common ground much harder than it needs to be.
This weekend, President Trump made a serious proposal that would deliver on priorities that are important to both parties--Republicans and Democrats--in bringing this partial government shutdown to an end.
The bill we voted on today contains key provisions to border security and to make improvements to our immigration system as a whole. As we have heard from the Border Patrol experts time and again, we need sensible solutions, which, along the border, consist of three components: its physical barriers in some locations, its technology in others, and personnel in others--or some combination of those three.
President Trump himself has said he understands there doesn't need to be a wall from sea to shining sea, and he has acknowledged the role of technology and personnel and border security. We need to prevent the illegal movement of goods and people without inhibiting legitimate trade and travel.
I wish to show colleagues one example of a physical barrier in Texas that was voted on in a bond election in Hidalgo County, TX. These are folks who live on the border. They voted to pay for this levee wall. The reason? Because they knew the levee system had to be improved in order to get insurance companies to write insurance so that they could build and develop the property in Hidalgo County, TX.
They also talked to the Border Patrol about what the Border Patrol needed to control the movement of illegal immigration across the border, and they came up with a win-win proposition--a levee wall, which is appropriate at this particular location. This was voted on as a bond election by the voters in Hidalgo County, TX, and did not involve spending any Federal money.
My simple point is, there are solutions that can be worked out if we consult the experts--the Border Patrol--to find out what exactly they need for border security that will meet with public approval along the border and represent a win-win.
Recently, when the President was in McAllen, TX, Senator Cruz--my colleague from Texas--and I had a meeting with mayors and county judges after the President's entourage left to come back to Washington, DC. I remember specifically my friend, Judge Eddie Trevino, the county judge of Cameron County, TX--that is where Brownsville, TX, is--who said: If it is the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection telling us what we need in order to secure the border, we are all in. But if it is people in Washington, DC, making political judgments, politicians trying to micromanage how the border can be secured, we remain deeply skeptical.
I think those wise words ought to guide us in our discussions going forward. Not only did the legislation that embodied the President's proposal invest in critical components along the border, it included more than $1 billion for improvements and personnel at our ports of entry.
If you talk to anybody who knows anything about the movement of illegal drugs--heroin, methamphetamine, fentanyl--across the border, most of it comes through the port of entry, embedded in trucks and trailers and personal vehicles. We need more technology in order to scan those vehicles in secondary review. In order to detect them, deter them, interdict them, we need the personnel to be able to do that without impeding legitimate trade and travel.
These are priorities I have long advocated for, based on feedback from the experts--the law enforcement officers, community leaders, and folks who live and work along the Texas-Mexico border every day.
As we all know, the challenges that exist within our immigration system don't end at our borders. With a court backlog of roughly 800,000 cases deep, nearly 1 million people living in the United States with temporary legal status, and the loopholes that make enforcing some of our immigration laws nearly impossible, there is much more that needs to be done. That is why this legislation includes provisions to build the foundation of real immigration reform--something heralded by both parties.
This bill generously granted provisional status to current DACA and temporary protected status recipients, who live each day not knowing if or when they would be forced to leave the United States. It does not offer a path to citizenship or a long-term solution. I wish we could do that, but we don't have a long-term solution. It does provide stability for 3 years while Congress works on a legislative fix.
This is far from a solution to the pervasive problems in our immigration system, but it is a start. A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. This represents a first step. Most importantly, though, this legislation funds the Departments and Agencies that have been shuttered since December 22. This shutdown may have begun as a battle for border security, but it affects men and women in all 50 States whose jobs have nothing to do with border security at all, people at the Department of Agriculture, the Justice Department, the Interior Department, Housing and Urban Development, Treasury, the National Space and Aeronautics Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Peace Corps. All of the people working for each of these government Agencies are working without pay or have been furloughed. Not only is the partial shutdown impacting the critical work being done by these Departments and Agencies, it is harming the dedicated men and women who work at them, those tasked with executing and enforcing laws written by this very body.
Since this shutdown began 34 days ago, nearly 800,000 Federal workers have lost the security of knowing when their next paycheck will come. Tomorrow is the second paycheck they will miss, meaning they have now gone more than a month without income.
Yesterday, when I was in Austin and then in Dallas, I was told that people who routinely volunteer their time at the food banks in those locations now find themselves going to the food banks and seeking food so they can feed their families because they are missing a government paycheck and can't provide for them without the generosity of those food banks.
I also went to events in Austin and Dallas and met with U.S. attorneys in both locations to talk about our efforts to counter human trafficking and child exploitation. What I learned is that the frontline prosecutors who prosecute these kinds of cases aren't being paid, but maybe more troublesome is the fact that neither are the FBI agents who conduct the investigations or the administrative personnel who support the U.S. attorneys offices. So this is harming our ability to investigate and prosecute human trafficking and child exploitation cases too. People are being forced to work without pay, and it is harming not only them but also the victims of these horrific crimes.
More than 110,000 of these unpaid Federal workers earn less than $50,000 a year, and they rely on their paycheck to make ends meet. They are not millionaires. While we did pass legislation to guarantee that these public servants will eventually get their pay, that does nothing to help them in the interim.
Federal workers are being forced to make decisions that no family should have to consider. For a single mom who is a Federal correctional officer in Arizona, that means turning off her heat, never letting the temperature get higher than 60 or 65 degrees in order to cut costs. For a mom in Wisconsin who works at the Department of the Interior, that means rationing her insulin because she can't afford the $300 copay.
This shutdown is deeply impacting thousands of Federal workers and their families all across the country, including Texas. One Texan who works at the Internal Revenue Service says he has been sleeping in so he only has to worry about eating two meals a day, not three. One woman whose husband is in the Coast Guard drove from Galveston to Ellington Field in Houston--about 40 miles each way--to pick up free diapers for their kids.
On a recent trip home, I heard specific examples of the impact this shutdown has had on the Department of Justice, which I mentioned just a moment ago, and the heartbreaking challenges they are facing every day. These dedicated men and women have chosen their careers in public service. They want to go to work. They want to be able to pay their bills. It is time for us to do our job so they can do theirs with the dignity and the pay they earn.
I want to remind all our colleagues that our constituents did not send us to Washington so we could simply vote no on a less than perfect piece of legislation. If that were the case, we would never get anything done here. We were elected to work with our colleagues to create legislation so we can get to yes, to build consensus, and to solve problems, not to score political points.
Are there certain pieces of legislation that I don't agree with? Of course--parts of this legislation we just voted on. But it does fund priorities critical to our southern border and to the people of Texas. Right now, this is the only bill I have seen that includes priorities of both parties and that carries the President's support.
I voted for this legislation to support the men and women who have been treated as collateral damage throughout this unnecessary government shutdown, those who are forced to apply for food stamps or unemployment who would rather be working, who can't pay their medical bills or for childcare, who not only want this shutdown to end but need for this shutdown to end.
We aren't here to hold show votes on legislation the President won't sign. Just ask the elementary school civics students, and they can tell you that is not how a bill becomes a law.
This was a serious offer by the President to end this shutdown and build the trust and good will necessary to have real reform, and I am disappointed that our colleagues voted against this bill. That was a vote not on the merits of the President's proposal; that was a vote to get on the bill so it could be amended. In other words, our colleagues who voted against the bill aren't even interested in having a conversation about how we solve this problem and how we find our way out of this boxed canyon. Unfortunately, there are those who, for political reasons, continue to lack any interest in negotiating a compromise bill that could earn bipartisan support.
We solve difficult problems every day in the U.S. Congress on a bipartisan basis--every single day--but somehow we have decided we can't solve this problem. And I fear that is not because of the difficulty of the problem presented; it is because of the politics that have paralyzed us and made it impossible for us to bridge our differences.
I thank the President for this comprehensive offer and the majority leader for bringing it to the floor so we could vote on it. I would urge all of our colleagues, now that we have had these two failed votes--we know we are right where we started when we got here today--to work together to try to bridge our differences, to build consensus, and end this shutdown.
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