Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, Senate Democrats had hoped to work with our Republican colleagues this year on a fully bipartisan process. It got off to a great start when the four congressional leaders reached a budget deal over the summer, but it quickly went awry.

Senate Republicans departed from the bipartisan process by unilaterally proposing their own allocations to the various agencies. This was not part of the agreement. This was not in the spirit or concept of the agreement. It was always, when we agreed, that we would work out the 302(b) allocations. Instead, the Republicans went ahead, unilaterally, and they proposed moving $12 billion--$12 billion--from critical health programs and military families to pay for the President's border wall, and that was way out of bounds.

The Republican leader has accused Democrats, myself included, of breaking our budget deal by not going along with these very partisan bills. He knows--and every Member of this Chamber, Democrat and Republican, knows well--that Democrats are not going to support a unilateral move by the Republicans to take $12 billion away from military families, education, opioids, and NIH and put it into the President's vanity, partisan wall. So, until Republicans get serious about negotiating a bipartisan way forward, the partisan appropriation bills are all we have and they cannot move forward.

Now, in the last few days, after conversations that I had with Leader McConnell, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader McCarthy, we are seeing some positive signs that we can get the process back on track. This month, Democrats and Republicans worked through a package of bipartisan appropriation bills on the floor with few issues. Now, as we speak, both parties, both sides--Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate appropriators--have started talking again about restarting the good- faith negotiations on the remaining bills.

We hope this moves forward in a bipartisan way. Each side has to agree. I will repeat my view. If President Trump stays out of it, we will come to an agreement. If President Trump messes in, if the Republican leader feels so in obeisance to Donald Trump, who doesn't have any concept of how to get things done around here, then we will not get it done, and we may have a second Trump shutdown with the leader going along, which will not succeed. It will not succeed in getting them what they want.

So I hope that with a little effort and compromise, we in Congress can find a way forward on appropriations by working together. Whistleblowers

Mr. President, on the whistleblower, yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee announced the schedule for its first week of public hearings in the House impeachment inquiry, including testimony from the current and former top U.S. diplomats in Ukraine. These public hearings are a reminder that the whistleblower's account has already been corroborated many times over by officials with firsthand knowledge of the situation.

Yet there remains a searing focus by the President and one Member of this Chamber on the whistleblower. Even though his or her account has been verified by other sources, the White House and, most particularly, the junior Senator from Kentucky, seem committed to discrediting the whistleblower, disclosing the whistleblower's identity, and turning the rightwing media machine on this person--and they can be vicious.

The junior Senator from Kentucky went so far as to block a simple resolution from my friend the Senator from Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, that would have reconfirmed the Senate's support for whistleblower protection laws--laws that have been on the books for a very long time.

The whole concept started with the Continental Congress, even before the Constitution. We are going down a dangerous road when Members of this body are refusing to stand up for our Nation's laws, particularly those laws that enforce the rule of law and make sure our government is doing what the people want.

These attempts to expose the whistleblower are unfortunately not the only example of how a few of my colleagues are taking the defense of this President too far. It seems that with each coming week, sometimes each coming day, the President's allies in Congress come up with a new tortured defense of his actions. House Republicans have gone from attacking the process because it was closed to attacking it because it was opened. They have gone from insisting on ``no quid pro quo'' to saying ``maybe quid pro quo but who cares?''

Here in the Senate, we heard a new one from the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who said the Trump policy on Ukraine was so ``incoherent'' that the administration was ``incapable of performing a quid pro quo.'' That is a good one. Seriously, he said that. They are reaching. They are reaching as far as they can because they know that the facts--at least as we have heard from the House; we will wait until they come over here, if they do--that the facts about what the President did are so damning.

There was even a Member of this Chamber who went so far as to insult the Speaker's intelligence at a political rally--a childish and nasty smear that is far out of bounds.

Nobody is happy about the fact that the House is examining the potential impeachment of a President. It has always been a sad and somber process. But there is no excuse for jumping to conclusions, advocating for lawbreaking, or resorting to nasty insults. This is a time when we must check partisanship at the door, study the facts in the case, and make our own independent judgments. That is our duty. I will remind all of our colleagues that history will one day judge whether or not we lived up to it. President Erdogan

Mr. President, on ISIS, next week President Trump will welcome Turkish President Erdogan to the White House. Frankly, it is confounding that President Trump is rolling out the welcome mat to an autocrat whose recent actions have threatened our allies and partners.

For over 5 years, American and coalition troops, including our Syrian Kurdish partners, worked shoulder to shoulder in northern Syria to bring ISIS to the brink of defeat. But after the President's calamitous decision to green-light Erdogan's military operation and precipitously withdraw American troops, Turkish forces and their proxies have advanced far into northern Syria, committing atrocities without accountability. It is a shameful betrayal of our Syrian Kurdish partners, and it has thrown our efforts to defeat ISIS into chaos. At least 100 ISIS detainees have reportedly broken out of prison and disappeared, and they could be very dangerous to us in our homeland.

While we are glad that terrorists like al-Baghdadi have been taken off the field, a fundamental question remains: What is the administration's plan to secure and defeat ISIS?

It is unacceptable that a month into this crisis, the President has chosen to welcome Erdogan to American soil before explaining to Congress his plan to defeat ISIS. So ahead of Erdogan's arrival next week, I and several of my Democratic colleagues are sending a letter to President Trump demanding that he submit to Congress a comprehensive plan to secure the enduring defeat of ISIS.

There are questions that need to be answered immediately. How many ISIS members have been accounted for in the wake of our withdrawal? How are we going to stabilize former ISIS territory? What training will we give to the forces on the ground to continue fighting ISIS? These questions need to be answered at once. They are far more urgent than welcoming an autocrat who just bullied the President into giving him everything that this autocrat wanted. Nomination of Steven J. Menashi

Mr. President, finally, on Mr. Menashi, in a few minutes--maybe as of now--the Judiciary Committee will be holding a vote on a nominee who is dangerously unfit to serve on the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals--Mr. Steven Menashi of New York. His nomination should not be allowed to continue.

Mr. Menashi has a very troubling record on race, women's equality, LGBTG rights, and the rights of immigrants. His conduct before the Judiciary Committee was insulting, his contempt for the Senate reprehensible, and his refusal to be forthcoming about his record is outright disqualifying.

But if members of the committee needed any more evidence to vote against Menashi's nomination, they should read this morning's New York Times. The headline reads ``Appeals Court Nominee Shaped DeVos's Illegal Loan Forgiveness Effort.'' The Times reports that during Mr. Menashi's tenure working with Secretary DeVos at the Department of Education, he played a leading role in designing an illegal effort to deny debt relief to thousands of students swindled by for-profit colleges.

Let me repeat. Mr. Menashi concocted a plan to illegally use the private Social Security data of defrauded student borrowers to deny them debt forgiveness after they were preyed upon by for-profit schools. A Federal judge ruled that these efforts violated privacy laws.

This is someone the President wants us to make an appellate court judge? A judge is supposed to uphold the law, interpret the law, and have a reverence for the law, not someone who schemes to break the law, as Mr. Menashi did.

Mr. Menashi's nomination is an embarrassment to this country. It is an insult to millions of hard-working young Americans saddled with student debt. It is an insult to women and LGBTQ Americans, to African Americans and immigrants, and to everyone who believes in the rule of law.

If anyone has not earned the privilege of a lifetime appointment to the bench, it is Mr. Menashi. I urge every Member of the Judiciary Committee to vote against his nomination.

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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, it is now several weeks since the President asked our troops to leave a critical sector in northern Syria, and, subsequently, lots of things happened, including at least 100 and probably more ISIS prisoners escaping, an uncertainty as to who is guarding the prisons where ISIS prisoners are kept, and a whole strategy as to how to continue the fight against ISIS.

ISIS is not vanquished. ISIS is weakened but not vanquished, and we all know ISIS can come back. We all know a small group thousands of miles away can do untold damage in our homeland. Yet we still have no plan, that we have heard, from the administration on how are we dealing with ISIS; how are we dealing with the prisoners who escaped; how are we dealing with the prisoners who are still incarcerated; and how are we dealing with ISIS overall.

This is one of the greatest security threats America faces, and I would hope we could pass this proposal, which simply demands that the administration report to Congress on what their plan is to deal with ISIS. It is that simple. That is the immediate danger.

I know my friend, the Senator from Florida, wants to talk about what happened in the past. We can argue that all day long, but the immediate danger is ISIS, the ISIS prisoners who have escaped, the ISIS prisoners who are incarcerated, and the ISIS members who still are around. We don't have a strategy, and it is one of the greatest failings of foreign policy not only of this administration but of any administration.

A resolution passed the House a while ago. It has laid fallow here. All we are asking in this legislation is very simple: to require a report on the strategy to secure the enduring defeat of the Islamic State.

I hope we will not hear objection. I don't see how anyone could object when the security of America is at risk and when ISIS is still a danger. Every one of us could come up with an amendment to make it better. We know we will not get it done if that happens.

I hope we can move this forward, and then we can debate other issues that are not directly dispositive here because we have an immediate crisis, and we need a report.

281, S. 2755, a bill to require a report on the plan to secure the enduring defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, this is a diversion. We can all debate history. Maybe Bush was to blame. Maybe Obama was to blame. Who knows. Maybe Harry Truman was to blame when they set up CENTO. That is something we can debate at a later time.

We have an immediate crisis. We need a report, and our Republican colleagues keep finding ways so they can object so the President doesn't have to answer. That is wrong. It risks the security of America, and it is not what we should be doing.

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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, if they are worried about an attack, it is not on this President or a previous President. That is the political stunt here, I would say to my friend in Florida. He knows what he is doing. He is trying to stop this from happening. The attack we are worried about is an attack by ISIS on the United States.

Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, liberal, or conservative, the country needs a plan. All of the diversion, all of the games will not prevent the American people from seeing that we need that, and it is our job as Senators to push the administration to do it.

So I would have hoped we could have passed this amendment without the diversionary, partisan proposal made by the Senator from Florida. I am sorry we haven't been able to move the amendment. It is so wrong for the safety of this country.

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