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

Floor Speech

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Mr. COTTON. Mr. President, the Senate will soon vote on the President's declaration of a national emergency. We have reached a moment of crisis, but it is not a constitutional crisis; it is a crisis on the border, a crisis of American sovereignty. When hundreds of thousands of foreigners arrive at the southern border and demand entry, that is not migration; that is an emergency and a threat to our sovereignty. The stories speak for themselves.

Last Thursday, an American citizen named Rocio Alderete was shot to death on a bridge over the Mexican border near McAllen, TX. Early reports suggest Rocio was caught in a shoot-out between cartel gunmen and the Mexican police, but whatever the case turns out to be, Rocio has perished--the latest American victim of lawlessness at our southern border.

Since last October, Border Patrol agents have apprehended more than 260,000 illegal aliens at the border, which is a surge of 90 percent-- almost double from the previous year. For the most part, these aren't young men who are coming for work, as has been so often the case in the past; rather, they are Central Americans who are gaming our generous asylum laws. Instead of running away from the Border Patrol, these illegal aliens run to it so they can be captured and released into the country, with notice to appear in court, which they hardly ever do. Thanks to stupid laws and activist judges, illegal aliens are even using little kids as legal force fields because being detained with minors increases their odds of being held in America rather than to be turned around and sent home.

As a result, we see all of the horrors of the human smuggling trade at the border today. Women and girls are sexually assaulted at horrific rates. Hundreds die in the desert each year of thirst and exhaustion. Infectious diseases we had all but eradicated with vaccines are appearing again in border communities. ICE health officials have found 236 confirmed or probable cases of mumps among detainees in the past year after having reported zero cases for the previous 2 years.

This surge of illegal aliens is swamping law enforcement's ability to do its job. ``Overwhelmed'' is the word we hear so often from agents. Border Patrol Commissioner Kevin McAleenan says: ``This is clearly both a border security and humanitarian crisis.''

The consequences of this crisis stretch far beyond the border. Sometimes it stretches thousands of miles away. An American--1 of 192 every day--dies of a drug overdose. The poison in his veins flows across the Mexican border. A brave police officer and father, Corporal Ronil Singh, of California, was shot dead the day after Christmas after his killer snuck into the country illegally. We have failed to protect our border, as any sovereign nation must, and our people are dying because of it.

The President has declared a national emergency because of this crisis. Yet the administration's sensible, long overdue efforts to secure the border have been met only by howls of outrage from the Democratic Party and its media wing. Judging from their reaction, you would think the real emergency was not our lawless border but any genuine effort to secure it. The minority leader called the President's emergency declaration a ``lawless act'' that showed ``naked contempt for the rule of law.'' Other members of the self-styled resistance have compared the President to Hitler.

These are curious, overheated claims, I have to say. To be lawless, after all, one must act outside the law. Yet the President's critics don't even bother making that case, probably because they don't have much of one to make.

The President isn't purporting to invoke his inherent Executive powers under article II of our Constitution. He does not even claim to defend his constitutional prerogatives from legislative encroachment. On the contrary, he is only exercising the statutory authority that has been delegated to him by us, by this very body--the U.S. Congress. More than half of the $8.1 billion the President is using to build the wall and secure the border comes from nonemergency statutes that have been passed by Congress. The remainder comes from an explicit delegation of various powers to the President in the event of a national emergency, just like the one the President has declared, which we also delegated him the authority to do. I should add, the National Emergencies Act passed nearly unanimously, with only five ``no'' votes in the House.

I am sympathetic to arguments that the National Emergencies Act is too broad and gives the executive branch too much power. That is a reasonable debate to have. Believe me, Congress has ceded too much power to the Executive for more than a century and has expanded an administrative state that increasingly deprives our people of having a meaningful say in their government, so I invite my Democratic colleagues to reconsider the wisdom of this path.

Maybe we can also reform the EPA. Perhaps we can require up-or-down votes in Congress in order to approve big regulations so politicians around here can show some accountability for once. I am ready to have those debates. Believe me, I am ready. In the meantime, don't pretend we didn't delegate all of these powers or that it is lawless for the Executive to use the laws we have passed just because you deplore him.

If you want to see lawless Executive action, by the way, you can look, instead, to the last administration. President Obama purportedly gave millions of illegal aliens legal status and work permits, which was in clear violation of statutes that had been passed by this Congress. He also expressly defied our ban on bailout payments from the ObamaCare slush fund to big health insurance companies. It is strange how I don't recall the self-styled resistance manning the ramparts and rushing to the Ninth Circuit back then. In fact, I only recall a lot of congressional fanboys of the President's using the pen and phone to encroach on our constitutional prerogatives.

I have also heard from some Senators who admit the President is acting lawfully but who worry about the slippery slope of Executive power. I respect this view. Our system of separated powers calls on each branch to jealously protect its own powers, but one can ski to the bottom of a slippery slope pretty fast. A Republican declares a national emergency today on the border. A Democrat--or who knows these days, maybe a socialist-- will tomorrow declare a gun violence emergency to confiscate guns or will declare a climate change emergency to shut down coal-fired powerplants.

I acknowledge it doesn't take much to imagine such abuses by a future liberal President, especially with the gang they have running today, but that is precisely what such actions would be--abuses. What the law says matters here. We have delegated to the Executive the power to enforce the Nation's immigration laws, including by an emergency declaration. We have not delegated to the Executive the power to confiscate guns, to close powerplants or any of the other common entrants in the parade of horribles on the slippery slope. That is the difference between lawful and lawless government, and that is the case here.

Still, others claim the crisis on the border isn't bad enough to call a national emergency. Some have gone so far as to deride it as a fake emergency. If killings, caravans, and cartels at the border are fake emergencies, I would really hate to see a genuine emergency.

Let's suppose we take their claim seriously. We at least ought to compare the crisis at the border to past national emergencies to see how they all stack up. Right now, there are 32 national emergencies in effect--32 national emergencies. Among them is a national emergency related to election fraud in Belarus. Another is in response to the breakdown of the rule of law in Lebanon. A third is in response to a failed coup in Burundi.

I don't deny that those are all genuine problems or that an American response may well be warranted--far from it. Yet I doubt many Americans would put them ahead of a serial violation of our sovereign border by millions of foreigners. If the Belarusians warrant an emergency declaration, then surely Americans do, too, when we face a crisis at our southern border.

The Democrats used to take border security seriously, but in elite society these days, ``border security'' are bad words, and ``wall'' is practically a four-letter word unless they are the walls that protect the rich and the powerful and the politically connected from a dangerous world. Look in the news. The Democrats' newest Presidential aspirant, Robert Francis O'Rourke--a former Congressman and failed Senate candidate--has gone so far as to suggest the tearing down of existing barriers at the southern border, which I am sure has thrilled all of the good people in El Paso who don't live in a world of private planes and security details.

Regrettably, the Democrats' hostility to border security couldn't come at a worse time for our country because there is, indeed, a crisis at the border, and we ought to be addressing it.

We could be spending this valuable legislative time tightening up our asylum laws or cracking down on employers who exploit illegal aliens instead of hiring American workers or ramping up drug enforcement. Instead, we are debating whether a crisis at our southern border can be called an emergency. Instead of solving a problem, we are trying to spin it.

So I have a simple suggestion for my colleagues: If you are genuinely alarmed by the President's invocation of the very emergency powers we delegated to him, instead of furrowing your brows and tugging your chins and gravely citing Youngstown Sheet, let's tackle this emergency declaration by making it unnecessary. Let's get to the root of the problem and secure our border once and for all. No more border crisis, no more emergency--it is as simple as that.

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