Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I return to the floor again this week to discuss Congress's progress on important legislation--or, rather, the lack of it--since the obsession with impeaching the President began.

When the House decided to proceed full steam ahead on impeachment, they promised that it wouldn't interfere with our ability to get other important work done for our constituents. While it has been less than a week since the House formally authorized their impeachment inquiry, the crusade to impeach the President and remove him started nearly 3 years ago.

For example, on January 20, which was actually Inauguration Day, 2017, at 12:19 p.m. the Washington Post ran the story with the headline ``The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.'' That was on Inauguration Day in 2017. Nineteen minutes into his Presidency, the writing wasn't only on the wall. It was on the front page of the Washington Post.

Our Democratic friends are on a kamikaze mission to get President Trump out of office less than a year before the next election, and, in the process, they are preventing Congress from solving the big problems facing the American people.

The latest casualty of this impeach-at-all-costs strategy is a bill I introduced with my Democratic colleague from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, called the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act. This legislation would lower the cost of Americans' prescription medication and save more than a half billion dollars in taxpayer money.

Here, in the Senate, it counts the Democratic whip, Senator Durbin from Illinois, as well as the Assistant Democratic Leader, Senator Murray from Washington State, as cosponsors. With that kind of lineup, you would think this would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, drug pricing legislation isn't the only consensus effort that has gotten caught up in impeachment mania.

For a quarter of a century, the Violence Against Women Act has provided resources to assist women who are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Unsurprisingly, this program has consistently maintained broad bipartisan support. There is agreement that we must do more to provide services and protection for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, but it is safe to say that there are disagreements on how best to accomplish that goal.

Those differences in opinion came to a head in February of this year. We were fresh off the heels of the longest government shutdown in history and working to fund the government through the remainder of the year, but our Democratic colleagues threw a curve ball when they insisted that we should not include a temporary extension of the Violence Against Women Act, which had expired in September of 2018.

Even amid the political jockeying we have been seeing in this Congress, this was a shocking omission. Republicans were in favor of a short-term reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act to provide time and space for bipartisan negotiations for a long-term reauthorization. Surprisingly, our Democratic colleagues in the House blocked this reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. So it expired.

Fortunately, though, our friends on the Appropriations Committee have continued to fully fund these programs, but the authorizing statute has expired because of this gamesmanship. Despite continued bipartisan negotiations led by the Senator from Iowa, Ms. Ernst, over the last 8 months, we haven't been able to come up with a consensus agreement to reauthorize the program on a long-term basis.

This has been an 8-month negotiation. This isn't all that complicated. We should be able to do it in the space of an afternoon, but, clearly, there is no desire to get this resolved.

Reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act is a top priority for Members on both sides of the aisle, and I hope we will work harder to make it happen rather than to use this important law to play partisan political games. Sadly, the Violence Against Women Act is not the only program to get caught up in the political crosshairs.

The Debbie Smith Act, another traditionally bipartisan bill here in the Senate, expired at the end of September because of the refusal of the House to take up the Senate-passed version and to send it to the President.

The Debbie Smith Act, you will recall, provides funding to State and local crime labs to test DNA evidence and reduce the rape kit backlog. The Senate unanimously passed the bill in May to reauthorize this program, but the House simply refused to act. At a roundtable I held in Houston, a few months ago, I heard from rape victims and their advocates about how troubling and, frankly, how insulting all of this was.

After months, the House has now finally relented and voted to reauthorize the Debbie Smith Act, after the pressure on them became unbearable. I am glad they changed their minds, and I am hopeful we can get this bill to the President's desk soon. Although I would have welcomed less drama this time around, the Debbie Smith Act reauthorization will hopefully be an example of what Congress can accomplish when you put partisan political fights aside and work for our constituents; in other words, do the job we were elected to do when our constituents sent us here.

It is really disappointing that some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle would rather relitigate the 2016 election--again, less than a year before the next election--rather than do the work of the American people. This obsession with impeachment mania has consumed our Democratic colleagues and is preventing us from getting work done on a nonpartisan basis. That is what our constituents want us to do.

Texans are worried about high prescription costs, worried about the state of our roads and bridges, and worried about our national security. In the case of the Democratic leader, I would be willing to wager that New Yorkers are worried about many of these issues too. So it is time to stop the partisan games. They don't result in pay raises for our troops, which have now been voted against two times by our Democratic colleagues. They don't advance victims' rights and give justice to survivors like the reauthorization of the Debbie Smith Act and the Violence Against Women Act would do. They don't increase the public's trust in our institutions of government and assure them that we really have their best interests at heart. Definitely, these games don't help make Americans' lives better.

We have heard our Democratic colleagues say ad nauseam that impeachment will not interfere with their ability to legislate, but the evidence suggests otherwise. What Americans want is action. What Americans want is for us to do our job. We can give them what they want by allowing legislation we know has a chance of becoming law, such as my drug pricing bill, the Debbie Smith Act, and the Violence Against Women Act, to come to the floor, get passed, and sent to the President. That would be doing our jobs, and I believe that is what our constituents want from each of us--not this single-minded obsession with impeachment that started the day the President was sworn into office, less than 1 year before the next election.

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