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

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, the announcement this morning that air operations in major cities in this country on the east coast and other places could be delayed or are interrupted comes as no surprise.

This last week, I met with air traffic controllers in St. Louis and in Aurora, IL. We have over 600 air traffic controllers in Northern Illinois because of O'Hare, Midway, and so many other important airports in that region, and, of course, in St. Louis, with Lambert airfield and others. They have quite extensive air operations.

They explained to me what is going on with air traffic controllers. It shouldn't have worried us before the shutdown. It should frighten us at this moment.

Currently, air traffic controllers work 10-hour shifts. It is a stressful job--an important, stressful job. There is hardly any person more on the frontline of public safety than an air traffic controller. They are expected to concentrate--to concentrate exclusively--for 10 straight hours on each shift. Because of a shortage of air traffic controllers, they now are working 6 days a week.

If you can only imagine for a moment what it is like, and, if you have been to an air traffic control tower, you know what it is like--at least from an outside observer's point of view. There they are, with a screen full of dots. In each one of them is an airplane, and in each airplane tens, maybe even hundreds of lives, and they are trying to make certain that nothing terrible occurs.

Imagine the added burden they face now on the 35th day of this government shutdown. As of today, they will have missed two pay periods. The last paycheck came last year. I listened to these air traffic controllers explain what it meant to them. For some of them, it has gotten down to the basics. In the St. Louis area, one of the air traffic controllers has to drive a long distance each day. They didn't have the cash for gasoline. He sold his plasma in order to fill the tank to go to work.

At another air traffic control meeting in Aurora, one of the controllers came to me and said that one of his colleagues, who had been working for some time, came to him and said that he only had 5 days left that he could continue doing this--working for nothing--and then he would have to go look for other jobs and possibly jeopardize his future in air traffic control.

The stories came to me one after another. There was a young family where a little child of the family is suffering from medical illnesses of a serious nature. Luckily, they still have health insurance when they are not being paid. When it comes to the out-of-pocket expenses and copayments, they don't have money for it.

Those are the realities these men and women face. They are the realities that have to be on their minds every waking moment. We pray, as passengers in these aircraft, that the only thing on their mind is their job. Instead, for many of these people, it is just basically getting by, keeping their family together.

A lady came up to me at the airport at O'Hare and told me that she and a lot of friends run a food pantry in Oak Park, which is west of the city of Chicago, and she said to me: We have problems. The Federal employees who are coming around now are in desperate need of help, and we are running out of supplies at our food pantries.

Has it come to that in America, where we have to rely on food pantries and charity for men and women who are performing such a vital function as air traffic control? That is the reality of the situation.

Yesterday we had two votes on the floor of the Senate. I know that every Federal employee and their families were tuned in, in the hopes that this shutdown would end yesterday, that we would muster the courage and political will to come together on a bipartisan basis. We didn't. We fell short of the 60 votes needed on both of the measures that were called.

There is a ray of hope but only a small one. The conversations at the highest level continued last night and even into today. My only hope is that the President will decide that this shutdown has to come to an end.

He alone stood in the beginning and said he was proud to claim that he was the author of this shutdown. I don't see how anyone can be proud of what has happened in this country. It is time to put it behind us. It is time to move forward with serious negotiations about border security and other issues but not at the expense of 800,000 Federal employees. Venezuela

Mr. President, last year, my staff prevailed on me to make a trip which I really wasn't sure I should do. It was to Caracas, Venezuela. I had never been to that country, and I was visiting there at the invitation of their government. Nicolas Maduro was the President of Venezuela, and he did not enjoy the very best of reputations, but yet he was willing to see me.

So for several days I went down to Venezuela, met with President Maduro, met with the opposition, met with the American who was being held prisoner by the Maduro regime, and in matter of a few days, got an impression of what was happening in Venezuela.

It is hard to imagine that 30 years ago, Venezuela was one of the most up-and-coming countries in South America. It was considered one of most prosperous. Their oil industry was generating money in amounts they had never imagined before. The lifestyles of people were improving. There were a lot of things to be said on the positive side of the ledger, but over the span of the next 20 or 30 years, things became tremendously worse.

Last year, as I had this opportunity to travel in Venezuela and meet with then-President Maduro, I met also with members of the elected National Assembly, civic and humanitarian groups, medical professionals, and the exceptional men and women who were working at the U.S. Embassy.

What I found was that this once-proud and relatively wealthy democracy, last year was on the verge of political, economic, and humanitarian collapse.

The stories I learned in that short period of time were heartbreaking--of children fainting at school because they were hungry, the return of diseases that had once been eradicated, a massive outflow of millions of refugees from Venezuela to neighboring countries, some rates of infectious disease being rivaled only by war zones in this world. So many children were going so hungry while the government cronies were siphoning off millions of dollars from the state food aid program. It was infuriating and disgusting.

I walked down the streets of Caracas and saw firsthand Venezuelans emaciated, waiting in long lines at ATM machines, and I asked: Why is it every hour of the night and day there is a long line at the ATM machine? Inflation was so bad in that country that people had to wait patiently in line to max out each day's withdrawal from their accounts so they would have enough money for a roundtrip bus ride the next day.

I walked through one of the private hospitals, and I heard of unimaginable shortages of key medicines, shortages even worse in the state hospitals, where simple blood tests were no longer possible.

In fact, just this week, a collaborative and brave Venezuelan media effort entitled ``Petrofraude'' released a devastating investigation. It details how the Venezuelan Government decimated the nation's oil supply to enrich the cronies of President Maduro and attempt to buy diplomatic support, all while its people were dying of malnutrition, and inflation was soaring beyond 1 million percent.

When I met President Maduro last year, I told him--this was in April--that if he proceeded with the planned, rigged election, he would find himself even more isolated in the world, and he would bring even greater suffering on his people. He ignored me, and of course, sadly, that is what happened.

In May, he went forward with a bogus election whose illegitimate results were not recognized by many countries in the region.

Maduro also then kicked out America's top diplomats at the time--two of our finest whom I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with on the trip.

Yet, during my visit, I was also inspired and found some hope. There were brave civic leaders who were looking for public service for the right reason--healthcare workers, doing the best they could with almost nothing, and the next generation of young elected members of the National Assembly, the only legitimate democratic body left in the nation of Venezuela.

These young leaders had notably won election in areas that once supported Hugo Chavez, supposedly the patriarch of the country and the godfather of Maduro, but they had prevailed in districts that had gone for Chavez in previous elections because the people in those areas had grown disillusioned with the years of corruption, repression, and movement toward dictatorship by Mr. Maduro.

Among this group of patriotic elected officials were some extraordinary leaders with whom I managed to have dinner one evening.

We went to a somewhat secret location on the second floor of a neighborhood restaurant. There were five of them. They were on the opposition side from President Maduro. They were careful not to meet or be seen too much in public, and I sat and talked to them about why they were in politics. They weren't even being paid. Maduro had decided to stop paying them after they were elected, and yet they continued to try to serve.

At one point, one of them said to me: Senator, if you come back next year, I can tell you that of the five of us, two will likely be in prison, two will be exiled, and one may have disappeared. That is what happens when you oppose the Maduro regime.

I thought to myself, there is a heavy price to pay for politics in our country, but it doesn't get close to what these young people were facing.

Seated at that table that night was a young 35-year-old man. His name was Juan Guaido--the same Juan Guaido who was recently chosen as President of the Venezuela National Assembly.

This last Wednesday, he did a courageous and dangerous thing. He announced that under the Constitution, he believed he had the power to take control and to call for a free and credible election, and he announced that he would be the interim President of Venezuela under that Constitution.

It was a dramatic move. Guaido now finds himself as the interim Venezuelan leader--35 years old.

What has happened since he made that announcement? The United States has recognized him, as has Canada, and virtually every other country in South and Central America, save three, and I will spell them out: Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua which refuse to recognize him.

The Secretary General of the Organization of American States has also recognized him.

Under article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution, if the Presidency of the country is deemed unfilled by a vote of the National Assembly, then the National Assembly President ``shall take charge of the Presidency'' and lead a timely transition back to a legitimate government.

This is what has happened on the streets of Caracas because of his courage: The National Assembly passed a measure finding that the Office of the Presidency was vacant due to a clearly stolen election.

So Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the United Kingdom have all recognized Guaido as Venezuela's legitimate leader, in addition to the United States and Canada, I might add.

Earlier this week, I also joined in support of his effort, calling on him to fulfill his constitutional role to help Venezuela return to the community of democracies and to do so with a thoughtful and timely transition to a credible election in which the Venezuelan people can once again choose their leaders through a fair, transparent process.

Yesterday I had the privilege to speak at length with President Guaido and offer my support for his transition. Just as when I met with him last year in Caracas, he was deeply thoughtful and expressed his love of his country that he serves. That couldn't have been more clear in our conversation.

He knows how much the Venezuelan people have suffered, how the Maduro regime bankrupted the nation and destroyed its democracy and economy, and how desperate the people of this country are to rejoin the community of democracies.

I told him we in the United States stand ready to help, and the Venezuelan people need our help to rebuild their country's democracy and economy and to help return the millions of Venezuelan refugees safely.

Yesterday the administration pledged $20 million of humanitarian support to the opposition, to those who are in the streets trying to reclaim democracy in that country.

I support that $20 million and hope other countries will join us. It is just the beginning of the help they will need.

This once-proud country can return to the community of democracies. It can start to restore the faith of the people in their government. It can start to answer the basics.

To think of what they are going through, to think that children are fainting in school because of malnutrition and that basic antibiotics are not even available in the hospitals, these are unthinkable developments in any modern country in our hemisphere. I hope this effort, as dangerous as it may be for the new interim President, leads to a credible free election and the restoration of democracy in Venezuela.

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