Providing for Consideration of H.J. Res. Termination of National Emergency Declared By the President on February 2019
Floor Speech
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Woodall), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Mr. Speaker, on Monday, the Rules Committee met and reported a rule, House Resolution 144, providing for consideration of H.J. Res. 46, relating to a national emergency declared by the President on February 15, 2019.
The rule provides for consideration of the legislation under a closed rule. The rule provides 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking member of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.
Additionally, the rule provides that the provisions of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act shall not apply during the remainder of the 116th Congress to a joint resolution terminating the national emergency declared by the President on February 15, 2019. This provision was included to avoid privileged legislative action on redundant resolutions.
Mr. Speaker, today we must stand up for democracy; we must stand up for the rule of law; and, most importantly, we must stand up for the United States Constitution, the Constitution that we took an oath to defend when we were sworn into office.
Mr. Speaker, the Constitution we swore to defend granted Congress the power of the purse. That means Congress decides how we spend the American people's hard-earned money.
Congress spoke when we passed, and President Trump signed, a spending bill that granted him $1.4 billion for fencing along the border. Now President Trump is acting like a dictator by ignoring Congress and declaring a national emergency. As a result, billions of taxpayer dollars would be taken from high-priority military construction projects that ensure our troops have the essential training, readiness, and quality of life necessary to keep the American people safe.
Mr. Speaker, as a former member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I have visited countries where the rule of law takes a backseat to the whims of their Presidents. Just look at Venezuela, where Nicolas Maduro has removed every single obstacle to his power.
When he objected to the rulings of the judges, he ended their terms early and replaced them with his political allies. When the democratically elected congress didn't agree with him, he created a new congress filled with his supporters.
Last year, he even banned prominent opposition leaders from running into the Presidential election. He has demonized the press and even took CNN en Espanol off the air. Last night, he detained one of America's journalists, Jorge Ramos, of Univision.
Fighting with judges, manipulating elections, attacking the press. Mr. Speaker, does any of this sound familiar?
Now you have a situation where food is so scarce that the average Venezuelan has lost 24 pounds in the last year and more than 3 million have fled the country. The Maduro presidency, now that is a true national emergency for the people of Venezuela.
The collapse of democratic institutions is also happening in Nicaragua and Guatemala. The President of Guatemala and his allies in congress are taking the country down the same path, removing every check on their power. They have expelled the international prosecutors who dared to investigate them.
And just as Guatemala's Government has tried to undermine and delegitimize the police and prosecutors who are investigating, President Trump has called Robert Mueller's investigation a ``witch hunt'' and denigrated the brave men and women of the FBI.
Mr. Speaker, we cannot allow this President--or any President, Republican or Democrat--to take us down the same path as Venezuela, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, all to build a wasteful and ineffective wall along our southern border.
These women and children coming from Central America do not represent a national emergency. That is why 58 former national security officials, both Republicans and Democrats, issued a statement saying there is ``no factual basis'' for the President's emergency.
Our call to duty today is to protect, to defend our Constitution. We will vote, and we will see how many in this body have that same respect for the rule of law.
Mr. Speaker, I urge our Republican colleagues to join us in this effort. It is not too late for my colleagues across the aisle to tell the President that this is wrong, that the Constitution that we swore an oath to uphold really matters.
We stand here today to stop this power grab of our own democracy. A ``yes'' vote will affirm our democracy. A ``no'' vote further erodes the trust in our democracy and, again, expands executive power.
Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues on which side they stand.
Mr. Speaker, I can think of many other things that we could be talking about that truly, truly, truly call out and scream out for a national emergency.
Homelessness in our communities: Thousands of people in our communities sleep on a street, under a bridge, children sleeping in vehicles every single night.
I think about the opioid epidemic, and how many of our families are simply immune to the issues around drug abuse and how addiction overcomes them?
I think about last year around Christmastime when 800,000 of our Federal workers were going without a paycheck and went without a paycheck for 35 days. Yet my colleagues on the other side of the aisle could not find 1 minute and 6 seconds to give them a paycheck, to open up the Federal Government, to do their duty.
Instead, in the Rules Committee, we took up an emergency order on labeling of cheese curds. They found that to be more important than the lives and the families of 800,000 Federal workers.
Mr. Speaker, we can talk about the scary people from our southern border. I am not that scary looking, am I? I think not. The fact is that the number one trading partner for California and Texas is Mexico, a friendly country. For Central America, we are standing up for our responsibility to uphold democracy in the Northern Triangle, to address the root cause of migration. That is where our focus should be.
Do we need an immigration reform package that brings 11 million people out of the shadows? Absolutely. These are the 11 million people who our agricultural partners depend on to deliver fresh food to our table. But we are not doing that here. What we are doing here, what the President has chosen to do, is political theater, political theater for 2020.
In essence, a vote against this resolution means a vote against the families of the military people who are depending on us to provide infrastructure, schools for their children to learn, and quality housing.
Do Democrats think and believe that fortifying our borders is important? Absolutely. We have committed billions of dollars to ensure that we stop the narcotrafficking that happens at our ports of entry. That is where it is happening.
We need to work together on these issues, not relinquish our responsibilities, our legislative responsibility, and the power of the purse that we hold.
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Mr. Speaker, political theater, political posturing for 2020, that is what we are hearing.
This is the law. This is the Rules Committee moving forward a piece of legislation that will prevent the President from calling a bogus national emergency, from stealing money from our troops, from taking from those who don't have and those who are giving everything that they have to protect our Nation. Political posturing for 2020.
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Velazquez).
Mr. Speaker, fact-checking the President is not an attack against the President. The facts matter. As a matter of fact, the President himself at his press conference said: ``I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster.''
What does he mean by that? Last year, Republicans gave him $25 billion if they read the bill, but I actually brought it to their attention on the floor that the bill actually read $75 billion that they were allocating for a border wall. The facts didn't matter then for one side of the aisle.
The President himself said it. ``I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster.'' That is not an emergency. I was a 911 emergency dispatcher for 17.5 years. I can cite many examples of what an emergency is. Building a wall much faster is not an emergency. That is political theater. That is political posturing for 2020.
Where is the President stealing this money from? Certainly, he is not getting it from Mexico as he promised. Mexico said ``no.'' The President is stealing $2.5 billion that Congress approved to combat illegal drug activities around the world.
I know that my colleagues believe that fighting international drug organizations is important. I know this because I traveled with Republicans and Democrats to the jungles in South America. We talked about eradication of narcotrafficking.
What about the $3.6 billion that the President is stealing from military construction? A study earlier this year found that 16 percent of military families had a positive view of their base housing. That means 55 percent had a negative one.
Many families reported unsafe conditions, including lead-based paint, rampant mold, exposed asbestos, faulty electrical wiring, vermin infestations, and gas leaks. Is that not an emergency? Is that not worthy of the bipartisan vote that we took to allocate that money so that they can make those fixes?
I know my Republican colleagues support military families. I know that because I have traveled with them to Afghanistan. I have traveled with them to other countries. I know that this is wrong. This so-called national emergency is wrong, and I know my colleagues know that this is wrong too. This is undemocratic. This puts us at the cusp of a constitutional crisis.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support the previous question and the rule.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of our Constitution and in defense of our republic and urge all members to join me in voting for H.J. Res. 46, which terminates the phony declaration of emergency issued by the President on February 15, 2019.
The reason this resolution is before us today is because of the petulant intransigence of a single person, the current President of the United States.
As a senior member of the Committee on the Judiciary and the Committee on Homeland Security, I have visited the southern border on numerous occasions in recent weeks and months and can state confidently that there is no national emergency or national security crisis that justifies the President's reckless and unconstitutional decision or compels the Congress to abdicate its responsibilities under Article I to check and balance the Executive Branch.
The President is only pursuing this tactic of declaring a national emergency after realizing that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was absolutely correct when she informed him that he did not have the support in Congress to require the taxpayers to pay for his broken promise that ``Mexico would pay for the wall, 100 percent!''
In fact, according to the latest Marist Poll, the most recent polling data available, Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of the President's national emergency declaration by a 61 percent-36 percent margin.
The President's decision is opposed by both men and women in every region of the country, by every income group and education category.
National security experts across the political spectrum are unanimous in their assessment that the situation on the southern border does not constitute a national emergency, an assessment echoed by leading former Republican senators and Members of Congress.
They understand that after failing to convince the American people or Congress to pay for his ineffective, wasteful, and immoral multibillion dollar concrete wall, the President has now embarked on a course of conduct that is deeply corrosive of the constitutional system of checks and balances wisely established by the Framers and which has served this nation and the world so well for nearly 250 years.
Having failed miserably to achieve his objective in the constitutional legislative process, the President is trying a desperate 11th hour end-run around Congress with an unlawful emergency declaration that contravenes the will of the American people and negates the awesome power of the purse vested exclusively in the Congress of the United States.
The Congress will not tolerate this.
Despite being repeatedly admonished and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the President continues to propagate false information regarding the state of our southern border.
Mr. Speaker, these are the facts.
Net migration from Mexico is now zero or slightly below (more people leaving than coming) because of a growing Mexican economy, an aging population and dropping fertility rates that have led to a dramatic decrease in unauthorized migration from Mexico.
Migrant apprehensions continue to be near an all-time low with only a slight increase from 2017.
The combined 521,090 apprehensions for Border Patrol and Customs agents in fiscal year 2018 were 32,288 apprehensions fewer than the 553,378 apprehensions in 2016.
To put this in perspective, on average, each of the 19,437 Border Patrol agents nationwide apprehended a total of only 19 migrants in 2018, which amounts to fewer than 2 apprehensions per month.
In the last few years, an increased proportion of apprehensions are parents seeking to protect their children from the violence and extreme poverty in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
But even with more Central Americans arriving to our southern border seeking protection, total apprehension rates are still at their lowest since the 1970s.
The absence of a massive wall on the southern border will not solve the drug smuggling problem because, as all law enforcement experts agree, the major source of drugs coming into the United States are smuggled through legal ports of entry.
The southern border region is home to about 15 million people living in border counties in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
These communities, which include cities such as San Diego, Douglas, Las Cruces, and El Paso, are among the safest in the country.
Congress has devoted more U.S. taxpayer dollars to immigration enforcement agencies (more than $21 billion now) than all other enforcement agencies combined, including the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Secret Service.
The bulk of this money goes to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), with a budget of $14.4 billion in fiscal year 2018 and more than 59,000 personnel.
CBP is the largest law enforcement agency in the country, and more than 85 percent of the agency's Border Patrol agents (i.e., 16,605 of 19,437) are concentrated on the southern border.
Expanded deployment of the military to the border to include active- duty troops could cost between $200 and $300 million in addition to the estimated $182 million for the earlier deployment by the President of National Guard to the border.
Mr. Speaker, having been soundly defeated legislatively by Congress, a co-equal branch of government, the President wants to finance border wall vanity project by diverting funds that the Congress has appropriated for disaster recovery and military construction.
The funds the President wants to steal were appropriated by Congress to help Americans devastated by natural disasters, like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, or for other purposes like military construction.
Congress did not, has not, and will not, approve of any diversion of these funds to construct a border wall that the President repeatedly and derisively boasted that Mexico would pay for.
In fact, the President has admitted he ``didn't have to do this,'' but has opted to do so because ``I want to see it built faster.''
Mr. Speaker, just yesterday a bipartisan group of nearly 60 national security officials including former secretaries of state, defense secretaries, CIA directors, and ambassadors to the UN issued a statement declaring that ``there is no factual basis'' justifying the President's emergency declaration.
Instead of protecting our national security, the President's declaration makes America less safe.
The President is stealing billions from high-priority military construction projects that ensure our troops have the essential training, readiness and quality of life necessary to keep the American people safe, directly undermining America's national security.
The President's declaration clearly violates the Congress's exclusive power of the purse, and, if unchecked, would fundamentally alter the balance of powers, violating our Founders' vision for America.
Opposing the President's reckless and anti-American decision transcends partisan politics and partisanship; it is about patriotism, constitutional fidelity, and putting country first.
That is why nearly two dozen distinguished former Republican Members of Congress are urging Republicans in Congress to vote for H.J.R. 46 and uphold ``the authority of the first branch of government to resist efforts to surrender'' our constitutional powers to an overreaching president.
To quote Thomas Paine's Common Sense: ``In absolute governments, the King is law; so in free countries, the law ought to be King.''
Mr. Speaker, I urge all members to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution, and reject the President's power grab; I urge a resounding YES vote on H.J. Res. 46.
The material previously referred to by Mr. Woodall is as follows:
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