Relating to A National Emergency Declared By the President on February 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I rise, as colleagues of mine have earlier today, to talk about the President's emergency declaration. Before I do, I will just say that this declaration deals with budgetary matters at the end of the day, whether the President should be able to take $6.1 billion this year and possibly more in future years from the Pentagon's budget to deal with a nonbudgetary emergency.

I want to acknowledge that today is the last day of my budget staffer, my right hand on all Federal budget matters for the last 6\1/ 2\ years, Ron Storhaug. I am going to miss him. I will start there. I will miss Ron. He has done such a good job. My only good feeling is that he is staying right here in the Senate and moving to work with the senior Senator from Maryland.

I want to talk about the declaration and urge my colleagues to vote to reject what I believe is the President's unwise use of his power to raid the Pentagon's budget.

Is there an emergency at the border? There is a serious issue at the border--a whole series of serious issues, negative but also positive. Trade happens across all the borders of the country. But all the testimony before the Armed Services Committee, where I sit, says there is no military emergency at the border. We heard testimony from General O'Shaughnessy, who is the commander of what we call NORTHCOM-- everything in the Americas north of Mexico's southern border. General O'Shaughnessy said there is no military emergency at the border between the United States and Mexico. We heard the same testimony this morning from Defense Secretary Shanahan and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dunford. So there is no military emergency at the border.

Compared to other significant challenges we deal with--70,000 drug overdose deaths a year, climate change, 40,000 deaths a year from gun violence, including both homicides and suicides, homelessness, lack of medical care, military housing--it is hard to see why the border issue would be an emergency that would rise to the top of any list. I can certainly assert this: There are much higher priorities for Virginians.

While we could argue about whether it is an emergency, one thing I think is pretty clear--it is inarguably a Presidential power grab. The President is unhappy with congressional appropriations for the border, so he is declaring an emergency to take $6.1 billion this year and possibly more in future years from the Pentagon's budget. This will establish a very dangerous precedent.

First, let's focus on the President's being unhappy. For all of this President's tenure up until January 3, he had two Republican Houses. There were two Republican Houses and a Republican President. Why should he be unhappy with the budget? He would have had the ability to convince Republican majorities to do what he wanted, but he could not. So he is unhappy with what Congress, the appropriating branch, has put on the table. We put billions of dollars on the table for the border, but he is unhappy with it, and so now he is going to declare an emergency.

It raises two important questions. Can a President just declare an emergency every time he is unhappy that Congress doesn't accept his budgetary proposals? Second, can the President use the declaration of a nonmilitary emergency to just tap a spigot into the Pentagon's budget? That is exactly what President Trump is trying to do in this case.

The President has declared an emergency that all agree is a nonmilitary emergency. The President said: I want to take $6.1 billion from the Pentagon's budget to deal with this emergency.

He wants to take $3.6 billion from military construction. Military construction are the funds we use to build facilities on our military bases across the United States and across the world or to rebuild facilities, like the airbase at Tyndall or the big sections of Camp Lejeune that were hit in hurricanes last year. That is what the MILCON budget is supposed to do.

This morning, I toured Fort Belvoir to visit with Army families living at Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County, VA. They shared with me atrocious stories about the condition of the housing they are living in. These are atrocious stories of rodent infestation, black mold, lead, and asbestos. I drove by one military house at Fort Belvoir that had a big warning sign on the door: ``Poison.'' You could not enter it because of efforts at asbestos and lead remediation.

The families told me about the poor physical conditions of their properties. They told me about the fact that they couldn't get a response when they were trying to get help. Then they told me, tragically, about the illnesses of their children, hospitalizations, and having to move out of their homes and apartments. One mother of a 10-year-old talked about the fact that her 10-year-old daughter, because of mold in her military housing unit, missed 45 days of school in the last school year. Her daughter had to be absent for a quarter of the school year because of the poor physical conditions of military housing.

The MILCON budget is there to deal with issues like these. Yet the President wants to take $3.6 billion out of the MILCON budget. The President wants to take $2.5 billion out of the drug-interdiction budget within the Department of Defense. Press reports suggest that account only has about $85 million available, so what they would need to do is cannibalize other accounts to fill up that account to $2.5 billion to then take out. Those are the important funds--military construction and drug interdiction--the President is proposing to raid.

I think it is important to notice this: The President's emergency declaration is not just about tapping the budget this year for $6.1 billion. Earlier today, in an Armed Services hearing, I asked Secretary Shanahan: Doesn't this emergency declaration last until the President declares it is over? If we don't rebut the emergency, it will not just be fiscal year 2019; it will be fiscal year 2020 or 2021 and beyond. It will enable the President to tap a spigot into the MILCON budget and draw out moneys this year, next year, and in future years. So it is $6.1 billion that he is asking for this year, but unless Congress asserts its article I power to say, no, we are the appropriators, we will basically be allowing the President to tap into this fund in perpetuity, thereby affecting important military construction priorities that would be good for the military families and our Nation's defense.

Which military construction projects might be compromised by the President's use of this $6.1 billion?

When the President declared the emergency, I wrote a letter to Secretary Shanahan on February 15 and asked: Can you give us a list of the projects that will be compromised by this $6.1 billion raid on the Pentagon's budget? I have not received a response. That was 27 days ago.

This morning, before the committee, Secretary Shanahan was asked: Why haven't we received a list? If the President wants to take $6.1 billion out of the Pentagon's budget, give us a list of the potential projects that could be affected.

I wrote a letter on the 15th, and staffers have been reaching out to the Pentagon. If you do not know precisely the projects, give us the universe--all unobligated MILCON projects on your priority list that could possibly be affected. Today, after not responding to the requests, Secretary Shanahan said that he will send us a list at the end of the day: I will send you a list, basically, after you vote this afternoon.

The vote that we will be casting this afternoon is about whether the President should be able to raid the Pentagon's budget for $6.1 billion. For a month, we have been asking what projects might be affected, and they are now proposing to give us an answer to the question after the vote. They have had the list since the very day we asked them. They keep a list every day about unobligated MILCON projects, but the service secretaries are not allowed to share those lists with Congress until the Secretary of Defense allows them to, and he is going to allow us to see it today.

Everybody is voting to cannibalize the Pentagon's budget to the tune of $6.1 billion. All of the Senators should be interested in what projects might be affected in their own States that are necessary to the Nation's defense before they vote to give the President this power.

In conclusion, I hope, today, we will stand up against the President's power grab. We shouldn't let the President tap a spigot into the Pentagon's budget to deal with an emergency that all have agreed is a nonmilitary emergency. We shouldn't let him tap a spigot that is not just for this budgetary year but for future fiscal years, as well, which is the effect of the vote today.

We are the article I branch, and under that section of the Constitution, we set the spending priorities. Because he is unhappy with our work product, the President should not be able to overturn the spending priorities that we have established in our appropriations bills and raid the Pentagon's budget without telling us where the moneys will come from.

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