Strengthening America's Security in the Middle East Act of 2019--Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague and Democratic leader Senator Schumer for making clear what is going to happen on the floor of the Senate this afternoon. We have a chance, an opportunity when 100 Senators come to the floor, to put an end to the government shutdown this afternoon. I want to tell you, there is nothing more important than that, as far as I am concerned. I hope we will rise to that occasion and rise to that challenge.

During the last 2 days, what I have done is travel across my home State of Illinois and sit down and meet on an informal basis with Federal employees who are going through this government shutdown. In the last couple of weeks I have been to Peoria, Pekin, Aurora, Marion, and I went to St. Louis, though it is clearly not in Illinois, to meet with air traffic controllers who live in my State. I sat down and asked them tell me the stories, to tell me what has happened in the 34 days when they haven't been paid--34 days, as of today. They were a little embarrassed and a little reluctant to talk about what it meant.

Eventually, I said ``Well, tell me about some of your coworkers,'' which is usually a way that people can tell their own stories without embarrassment. I heard some stories that are breaking my heart as I stand here at this moment.

Have you ever been in an air traffic control tower? It is amazing. I have seen some of the biggest. We had one up in Elgin, IL, which takes care of O'Hare and Midway and all of our great airports. It is a little bit frightening to go into one of these towers and see 10, 20, 30 air traffic controllers looking at these screens. On those screens are little dots, and each one of the dots is an airplane, and in each one of the airplanes there are going to be 20, 30, 40, 150, 200 people. That air traffic controller has an awesome responsibility to make sure that they are on the right path for takeoff and landing, to make sure that their paths don't cross. A mistake in that job can be fatal. That is the reality of what they face.

Air traffic controllers have one of the most stressful jobs in the Federal Government. We don't think about it. We get on the plane; we get off the plane. Thank goodness for those men and women who are there to make sure it is a safe experience for all of us.

Do you know that the shifts that are worked by air traffic controllers are 10-hour shifts? How would you like to face a 10-hour shift with that kind of stress every single day you go to work? Do you know how many days a week they work? Six. Six out of seven days they are working 10-hour shifts in one of the most stressful jobs we have in America. Do you wonder why they work 6 days? Most people work 5 days, and they certainly don't work 10-hour shifts. It is because there is a shortage of air traffic controllers. At age 56, you have to leave. Literally, you have to leave as of the next day. You cannot continue to work because they decided that at age 57, you are too old to do this job. It is too stressful.

As these air traffic controllers are leaving, we are hoping, in a system that works, they are being replaced by new air traffic controllers who are skilled and trained so they can take over these important, life-and-death jobs.

Do you know what happened because the government shut down? We stopped the input of new air traffic controllers, so the number is continuing to diminish because of mandatory retirement, and the pressure on those air traffic controllers increases. It increases not just because of fewer numbers; it increases because of what we have done to their lives.

These men and women are totally innocent when it comes to our debate about border security. They had absolutely nothing to do with the President's promise of a grand and glorious wall from sea to shining sea, paid for by the Mexicans. They didn't make that up; the President did. Now he has called for a government shutdown until his campaign promise is fulfilled.

I talked to some of those air traffic controllers. What is it like? What are you facing? They went through a long litany of things they are facing. Many of them are struggling because of no paycheck coming in. It is difficult for them. A couple of them were embarrassed to say that they are going to food pantries set up by churches and charities in their hometown to pick up some groceries to feed their families during this government shutdown. Others talked to me about children in their families with serious medical problems. Yes, they continue to get their health insurance as Federal employees, but there are copays they have to pay out-of-pocket. They worry about making those payments now that they are not getting a regular paycheck, and they can't see any end in sight as to when they will.

A couple of them have some very practical issues. One of them went to one of his coworkers, who is the head of the local union for those air traffic controllers, and he said: I want to tell you something in confidence. I have 5 days left here. I cannot continue to come to work beyond 5 days. I drive a long distance. I have to buy gasoline for my car. I have to find another job. I may have to drive an Uber car. That is what some Federal employees are doing. I may have to find some job tending bar--which some Federal employees are doing--just so there is income coming in for my family.

The worst one was in St. Louis, where this woman air traffic controller said: One of my colleagues here at air traffic control confided in me that he has to drive a long distance to get to work in St. Louis. He buys a lot of gasoline each day to make that roundtrip. To buy gasoline last week, he went and sold plasma from his own body to get the cash to buy the gas. That is the reality of this government shutdown.

All of us asked these air traffic controllers: Do you see any evidence on the job that people aren't doing the job as they are supposed to?

No, we have an awesome, life-or-death responsibility here, and we take it seriously. But they quickly added: Senator, if this continues and people are not replaced, we are going to reach a point where we have to keep the system safe. To keep it safe, the distance between aircraft flying into and out of airports will have to be increased and the intervals between aircraft will have to be increased so there is always a safe atmosphere when it comes to our airports.

What happens when that interval and distance are increased? Your flight is late again. Mine was about an hour and a half late leaving O'Hare last night. We asked why. A member of the crew was coming in on an international flight. She had to go through Customs. Customs has been reduced in number to two people at St. Louis because of the government shutdown, so it took her an extra hour to join up with the flight I was on. It was a minor inconvenience for me but maybe a major inconvenience for some other passenger.

It is an indication of what happens when all these men and women who are behind the scenes keeping our air control system working are under pressure and when there are fewer of them than there should be doing their job. It reflects what happens when we don't have enough people in the Customs section at international airports to process people in a timely way. The system slows down.

Why are we at this point? Did the air traffic controllers need to be punished for something? If they did, I don't know what it might be. They are good men and women. They are trained in such a fashion that very few people could actually do their job. It is interesting. I have been down to Oklahoma City and places where they have been trained. Everybody doesn't cut it. You have to be pretty darn sharp to be able to keep track of all those aircraft and to not buckle under pressure because it is a pressure-filled job. President Trump's shutdown has added pressure to that job. Does it make you feel safer when you get on an airplane to know that? I don't. I worry about it. I worry about those men and women who simply want to do what they were hired to do.

Incidentally, about one-third of them are veterans. They served our country--many of them in the Air Force--and they took the skills they learned in the military and brought them into air traffic control.

We give a lot of speeches on the floor here, Republicans and Democrats, about how we want to honor our veterans. How can we be honoring our veterans when 800,000 Federal employees have gone without pay for 34 days, and between 25 and 35 percent of them, depending on the Agency, are veterans? Are we honoring our veterans by not paying them in a timely fashion?

The first bill we have today is President Trump's bill in dealing with this crisis. It will deal with the shutdown he created, but it also addresses several other problems which the President made a decision on and we are trying to fix. I want to address one of them in particular because it is an issue I have worked on for a long time; that is, the fate of people known as Dreamers, those who are protected by DACA.

These are people who were brought to the United States as children, some of them as infants and babies. They grew up in this country believing this was home. They went to school here. They prepared for a future life. At some point, usually in their teenage years, their parents brought them in and said: We never filed the papers for you. You are undocumented in America. Through no fault of their own, they were brought to this country, grew up here, and they learned some time in high school that there is no future for them in America.

I have met so many of them over the years, these Dreamers. I appealed to President Obama: Do something to help them. And he did. He created the DACA Program. The DACA Program allows these young people I just described to apply for protection for 2 years at a time--protection from being deported from America--and to be allowed to work legally in America. Almost 800,000 came forward across the Nation and signed up for this protection under President Obama. These are amazing young people. They are tomorrow's doctors and engineers and lawyers and teachers and leaders. They are incredible young people. I have met so many of them. All they are asking for is a chance to be part of America's future.

President Trump came in September of 2017 and announced he was abolishing this program, abolishing the DACA Program, which meant that these young people had no protection for the future and really didn't know which way to turn. President Trump challenged us to come up with legislation to solve the problem he created. We were unable to do so. We couldn't reach an agreement. The President's bill, his own solution to the problem, came before the Senate and received 39 votes. It didn't even receive the support of his own political party when he brought it up. It just wasn't a reasonable approach.

The President said last weekend: I am going to address the fate of DACA and Dreamers as part of this effort to end the stalemate in Washington.

My hopes were raised. He talked about a bill that I had introduced with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, 2 years ago called the BRIDGE Act and said that is what we are going to do. It sounded hopeful. Maybe this would be part of the solution. For these young people, it meant everything that they might have a chance to be able to stay in this country and not be deported.

It turns out that when the President produced this bill a couple of days ago and we read the text, it was a bitter disappointment. It really bears no resemblance to the BRIDGE Act, which he referred to.

I would say to my colleagues in the Senate who are considering voting for the President's bill: Please don't vote for it if you think you will be doing something to help DACA and the Dreamers. This bill, as written by the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Mr. Miller, who is the President's adviser at the White House, shows their barely masked contempt for these young people. They have dramatically increased the costs of going through this process-- doubled it. They have set in new conditions so they can eliminate more and more people from being eligible for this protection. They added provisions that are totally unnecessary. During the 7 years DACA has been in place, we have seen positive things happen, not negative things. Unfortunately, what the President proposes now is a dramatic step backward. This does not help.

After meeting with air traffic controllers and Federal prison guards at Federal penitentiaries in Marion and Pekin, I can tell you what they want. They want the shutdown to end today. They want to get a paycheck for their families so they can get back to the business of being good husbands, good fathers, and good members of their community. They are embarrassed about going to these food pantries. They can't imagine what they are going to do because of some problems that have been created with their credit ratings because this President has shut down their paychecks for 34 days.

These prison guards and air traffic controllers don't have any choice but to come to work. They are called essential personnel. I would hope at the end of this day that we would think of them first and make sure the shutdown ends immediately, today.

One other thing. This needs to be the last time we have this conversation on the floor of the Senate--the last time. We have to make government shutdowns an unacceptable tactic of either political party or any branch of our government. It is absolutely terrible that these innocent people who work for our government are paying the price of our inability to reach a political agreement on issues. We can find an agreement on border security, but it shouldn't be because 800,000 innocent Federal employees haven't received a paycheck for 34 days.

Let's step forward and do this in a bipartisan fashion. Over this last weekend, I received scores of phone calls from my colleagues in the Senate. Some people may find it hard to believe, but Republicans have called, and I have called them, and Democrats have called. There is a bipartisan feeling that this crisis--this manufactured crisis--has to come to an end.

The second vote that will be offered today--the one the Democrats will offer--is simply to extend the continuing resolution to fund our government, end the shutdown immediately, and give us a matter of days to get this job done in coming to a compromise on border security. I know we can do it. I am convinced we can do it. I know there is a feeling of good will, but we need enough Republicans to join with the Democrats to make this a bipartisan effort today.

I don't believe the President's bill is going to pass. There are aspects to it that I described that are unacceptable to so many of us. But this bare-bones approach--a 3-week extension; a number of days to actually bargain and compromise while the government is up and running and people are being paid--is a reasonable end to this.

I don't know how any of us can go home if, at the end of the day, we have done nothing and the shutdown continues. Let's stick here and do our job--the job we were elected to do to solve problems, not to create them.

As Senator Schumer said earlier, there are so many individuals who are providing security and safety across our Nation. Whether it is our FBI, our prison guards, the Coast Guard, the air traffic controllers-- why in the world would we endanger any Americans because of our inability to reach a political agreement? The votes today will give us a chance to emerge from this with a positive approach to solving this problem. I believe we can do it. The sooner the better.

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