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

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to congratulate the Presiding Officer on being in the Senate and presiding over the Senate.

I come to the floor to remind us how we got here. President Trump told us over and over and over again during his campaign that Mexico would pay for the wall. He said it at the beginning of the campaign. He said it in the middle of the campaign. He said it at the end of the campaign.

He made that promise over and over again. The U.S. Congress didn't make that promise. There is no way for Congress to force Mexico to pay for the wall. We cannot force Mexico to pay for the wall. It is not Congress's fault. It is the President's fault, and it is his promise he has broken.

Instead of going to Mexico to get them to pay for the wall, as he said he would do over and over again, he has now asked Congress to pay for it. He has now asked the American taxpayer to fulfill his broken promise.

By the way, that is after 2 years of having a Republican majority in the Senate and a Republican majority in the House who said: We don't want to build your wall. We are not going to help you keep your promise. In fact, you promised Mexico would pay for the wall. Go get Mexico to pay for the wall is what the Republican Senate and the Republican House said.

So he was frustrated. He said how frustrated he was. He went out to the American people during the 2018 election, and the people rewarded him by electing Democrats to be the majority in the House of Representatives.

Then, last December, those Democrats offered the President $1.3 billion for border security. It wasn't for his medieval wall. It is for what he now calls steel slats.

Instead of accepting that fact--the fact that nobody here wants to fund the wall he said Mexico would pay for--he shut down the government for 35 days. Then, after all the misery he inflicted, after the billions of dollars he cost our economy, to say nothing of what he did to the Federal workers, he basically got exactly the same deal as he got before he shut down the government, making the shutdown pointless, making the billions of dollars of lost wages and economic activity in America pointless, all a casualty of his inability to keep his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall and his inability to get Republican majorities in the House and the Senate to build his wall.

So having failed to get Mexico to pay for the wall, having failed to get a Republican Congress to pay for the wall, he now says he is going to declare a national emergency to pay for the wall.

We should ask ourselves--we must ask ourselves--whether this is an appropriate use of emergency power. By the way, if it was an appropriate use of emergency power, why didn't he just declare an emergency before he shut the government down for 35 days? Why cost the economy billions and billions of dollars if you can just do this by declaring an emergency? The easy answer for that is that it is not an emergency.

He is only doing this now because he lost the negotiation. He lost his leverage. He embarrassed himself by having the longest shutdown in American history.

This is not a national emergency. This is just plan B. The President has admitted as much as he was signing the declaration itself--the declaration of emergency. He said:

I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster. . . . I just want to get it done faster, that's all.

It is not an emergency. He just wants to get it done faster, which is astonishing coming from a guy who has not spent the money that Congress has already appropriated for the wall. He hasn't even spent that money, and now he is saying he wants to go faster, and he has to declare a national emergency to do it.

By the way, America, you may have noticed that the President is also now saying that ``much of the wall has already been fully renovated or built.'' ``Much of the wall has already been fully renovated or built.'' That is what your President is saying to you at the exact same time he is saying that he needs a national emergency to build the wall. It is preposterous. It is a joke.

On top of everything else, he is not telling the truth about that. He has not built a mile of this wall since he has been President of the United States, even though Congress has appropriated more than $1 billion--I think about $1.7 billion--to do it.

When he signed the emergency declaration, he said that national emergencies have ``been signed many times before. It's been signed by other presidents from 1977 or so; it gave the presidents the power.''

``There's rarely been a problem'' the President said. ``They sign it. Nobody cares.'' That is what he said.

Nobody cared because those were real emergencies, not fake emergencies. They weren't emergencies being declared by Presidents who had promised that Mexico would do something, and then it didn't happen, and now they had to declare an emergency. They certainly were not cases where the President came to the Congress, including a Congress of their own party, and said, I want to do something, and they said no. Then, they said: Well, we are going to declare an emergency.

That has never happened before in American history.

By the way, if we go down this road, this will not be the last time this happens. This will happen time and again, which is why every Member of the Senate should vote for this measure of disapproval.

Since 1976, when Congress passed the National Emergencies Act, Presidents have declared national emergencies 58 times. Fifty-three of those times have been to do things like block the sale of weapons to foreign countries or to sanction governments, like Iran and North Korea. The four remaining cases were after two U.S. planes were shot down by Cuba, after we invaded Iraq and desperately needed to protect critical infrastructure, after the outbreak of swine flu, and after 9/ 11.

Failing to fulfill his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall is not a national emergency, and if he thinks it is, he should sanction himself for failing to keep his promise.

As I said earlier--and this should bother everybody who believes in our system of checks and balances and who believes in the Constitution--never has a President sought to enact a national emergency like this after Congress has said no. In our Constitution, Congress has the power of the purse. Every single Senator should be voting to protect that.

Over the months and now stretching into years, I have been shocked at how the people around here who declare that they are constitutional conservatives have put up with a President who obviously doesn't care about the rule of law, doesn't care about the separation of powers--as you see here--isn't concerned about having an independent judiciary, and wants to threaten the leading journalists of this country, calling them fake news.

I would think this step would be one step too far, even for anybody in this Chamber who supported this craziness up until this point.

Let's add it all up. What has it gotten us? The President couldn't get Mexico to pay for the wall. He couldn't get a Republican House and a Republican Senate to pay for the wall. So now he is violating the Constitution to steal money that has been appropriated by this branch-- by Congress. He is stealing that money from the Department of Defense, from our warfighters, and from the U.S. military to expropriate private land held by American farmers and ranchers--many of whom I assume are Republicans--through eminent domain.

As I have said on this floor before, if any President tried to do that in Colorado, there is not a person in our delegation who would support that--stealing our farms and ranches.

It must be said that, for a politician, he has a very unusual view about eminent domain. Here are some quotes of his: ``I think eminent domain is wonderful.''

For those of you who don't know what eminent domain is, it is when a government decides it wants a project, and your house is in the middle of where that project is going to go. Then, the government can use this thing called eminent domain to take your house and pay you for it. That is what it is. It is rarely used because most people don't want the government deciding whether they can live in their house or on their farm or on their ranch, which--in the case of people on the border of the United States--has been in their family for generations. That is why the local Congressman down there doesn't want this wall built. I think he is a Republican.

But the President said: ``I think eminent domain is wonderful''--not sometimes essential, not a tool that is useful from time to time. He said it is ``wonderful.''

He said: ``Eminent domain is something that has to be used, usually you would say for anything that's long, like a road, like a pipeline, or like a wall, or a fence.''

He didn't say steel slats, but I am sure the same thing applies.

Here is another quote. This is fascinating. I have not met a single person in Colorado who would agree with this--not one--and I bet you there is not a person in Mississippi or Texas or Alabama who would agree with this sentiment either. This is what the President of the United States said:

Most of the time, they just want money. It's very rarely they say, ``I love my house, I love my house, it's the greatest thing ever.''

Here is another quote--and just for everybody who is watching this because people are going to come out on this floor and say: Oh, no, the money will not be used for it in this case--not for a wall, not for eminent domain.

Donald Trump says:

We are going to need a little eminent domain to get that wall built, just so you understand. . . . You need eminent domain, you have to take certain areas, okay?

That is the kind of language you would expect out of some autocrat someplace, not in a democracy.

I say to my Republican friends here who are going to vote with the President on this bill, that is what you are supporting when you are voting with him on this bill.

I don't know how anybody goes home and defends that. For anyone who wants to go home and defend misappropriating money that has been dedicated to the Department of Defense and to our military and to take that money extra-constitutionally and use it to take the property of law-abiding citizens, I don't understand how you defend it.

I am not making any of this up. These are his words. By the way, it is no wonder he can't get it through the people's Representatives in Congress because there is not a single person here who would ever admit to doing what he is about to do and what he says he wants to do. What a betrayal of conservative principles this is.

As I said, this whole exercise itself is an admission that he has broken his promise to the American people.

We didn't break it, Republicans in the Senate. We didn't break it, and we should not help him keep it if it is going to break the Constitution. In fact, we can't help him keep it unless somebody around here has a way of persuading Mexico to build the wall or pay for the wall, which I don't think there is a single person here who has that kind of influence, as influential as all of us think we are.

I don't understand it, but it is amazing to me why people would cash in their conservative principles so cheaply--$3.6 billion.

The idea that you would be willing to give up your principles in such a tawdry exchange should be infuriating to the real conservatives who I know are in this country. Many of them live in my State of Colorado, which is a third Republican, a third Independent, and a third Democratic. Don't come to our State and tell us you are taking away our houses because we don't care about them--that we will just take the money instead for a broken promise that you didn't keep. That would not sell in Colorado. I don't know why it sells in Texas. I can't imagine that it does. I don't know how anybody could support that.

By the way, that is not even the most important point. The most important point is that we have ground ourselves up for a 35-day government shutdown, for 3 months of media cycles on this fight by the President on a wall that he now says is almost fully built, while he is declaring an emergency to build a wall that hasn't been built.

While we are screwing around here to keep a broken promise that Mexico is going to pay for the wall, this is what was going on in China. By the way, I know somebody is going to say: Hey, they have a wall. They do have a wall. They built it 500 years ago. That is not what they are working on today. They took care of that medieval wall 500 years ago.

Today, what they are doing is they are spending $125 billion on high- speed rail this year alone. That is $125 billion on high-speed rail. You get on one of those trains and you could hear a pin drop. If you go on Amtrak, which I take all the time--I feel grateful that we have it-- it is less than half the speed, and you can't put your Coca-Cola on the table in front of you without it falling over or falling on your neighbor.

China has spent $300 billion on new roads, bridges, and ports across the globe through their Belt and Road Initiative. They have bought stakes in 16 different ports across Europe and the Mediterranean, some of which have fallen into their hands because--and this is part of the plan--the debt that the countries have put on to build the ports is so onerous that China gets to own the ports. They have built the longest sea bridge in the world. They have laid over 3,700 miles of fiber optic cable to connect Africa to Latin America and, ultimately, to China. On that Belt and Road Initiative, they have laid their technology over that with fiber optic cables so they could extend the surveillance society that they are building inside of China right now, while we screw around with this wall.

By the way, on the $3.6 billion for the wall, here is an interesting chart. Here is how much cement China used over a 3-year period, from 2011 to 2013. This is what they used in 3 years, 2011 to 2013. I was in the Congress then. We were in the depths of the great recession during that period of time. It was 6.6 gigatons of concrete. Here is how much we have built in concrete in 100 years: 4.5 gigatons.

They used 4.5 gigatons in 3 years. They have used dramatically more than we have used in 100 years, and we can't even get an infrastructure bill off this floor. The White House can't even write an infrastructure bill.

All night, every night, on the cable, all we hear is $3.6 billion for the wall, the wall, the wall--the wall that the President says has already been mostly built, that he is now declaring a national emergency to build.

The world is racing ahead of us, as I have said on this floor over and over again, while we are getting run around by one inane distraction after another. It has been said that the President is somebody who is mostly concerned with winning the politics of any given day. That is what he tries to do, and he is often very effective at it. We spend a lot of time talking about him and his priorities, unlike figuring out a plan to counteract what China is doing or others are doing.

I bet they have a great strategy in China and Iran. Russia is not so obviously good at that strategy. Actually, come to think of it, they are pretty good, too. If you can stay off FOX News, the President will not pay any attention to what you are doing, so go do whatever it is you want to do while we fritter away one day after another of the American people's time over a broken promise that he never could keep.

Unless we are prepared to be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to the people coming after us, we need to do a lot better than what we are doing, and part of that is to ensure that we preserve the institutions that built this country, like the one we are standing in right now.

I know that among some people there is an effort to divide the government from the American people and that there are people here who think they have been sent here for one purpose, which is to discredit the Federal Government.

I have a lot of problems with the Federal Government--lots of them. I was a school superintendent before I came here. I have a lot of problems with what is happening to poor children who are going to schools in our public system of education across the country, so I am not here to defend government or the way it works right now. In fact, I don't think Democrats should be the party defending bad government. We should fix it where it needs to be fixed.

We are talking here about our institutions. We are talking here about the rule of law. We are talking here about the Constitution that generation after generation after generation of Americans has preserved--not always perfectly, often very imperfectly.

Every generation of Americans has seen it as their obligation, their responsibility, to at least try to live up to the pages in our founding documents, and where we failed, we got up and we tried again. This whole country is founded on the idea that we will have disagreements because we live in a Republic, and in a Republic, you have disagreements. There is no King or tyrant to tell you what to think. That is the reason we live in a democratic Republic.

This place here and the Chamber down the hall are part of the mechanisms that were drafted into our founding documents for us to resolve our disagreements. The Founders believed something. They had no good example in the past, but here is what they believed. They believed that out of that vigorous disagreement, we would create more imaginative and durable solutions than any tyrant could ever come up with on their own. That is why they designed the institutions the way they did, and that is why they created the checks and balances that they did. There is a reason no President has ever done what this President is trying to do.

They exercise self-restraint because of what is in the Constitution and because nobody on this floor would have supported him. There are many ways this generation of politicians--and I accept my share of the blame. There are many ways in which we have degraded these institutions in our time. We have destroyed the Senate's responsibility to advise and consent on judicial nominations and Supreme Court nominations. That has been turned into a purely partisan exercise by this generation of American politicians. I am ashamed of that. I am ashamed to have been here when we did that, and I take my share of the responsibility.

What I say to my colleagues is that we cannot continue to degrade these institutions and expect that the next generation of Americans is going to look back on us with anything except contempt. Generation after generation after generation of Americans has preserved these institutions so the next generation could have the opportunity to resolve their disagreements in these Chambers. We will regret it. We will regret it if we go down this road.

As the majority leader said in another time: Things have a way of changing around here sooner than you think, and someday the shoe will be on the other foot. If this Republican sets this precedent and some Democratic President follows it, that is one more step away from living in the Republic that we all claim we cherish, from the democracy we all claim we cherish, to put power in the hands of a tyrant who may or may not represent the will of the American people.

We may never get another vote like this around here. This is going to be the time that each of us is going to decide whether we are going to act to preserve these institutions for the next generation or whether we are going to continue to degrade them in our mindless partisanship and, in this case, to somehow fulfill a promise the President never could keep. That would be a shameful day in the U.S. Senate.

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