Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I had a wonderful Thanksgiving break, and I trust the Presiding Officer did, too. I hope all enjoyed time with their families and friends last week.

It was my pleasure to be back home in Texas and spend time with some incredible people who and some organizations that are doing a lot of good in their communities.

For example, I volunteered at the Central Texas Food Bank, which has a service area that is twice the size of Massachusetts. It has been fighting hunger for nearly four decades. I joined those there to help distribute to low-income families some of the food they had collected as they prepared for Thanksgiving, and I had the chance to speak with dozens of constituents there in the Austin area.

Then I got in my car and went south about 70 miles to San Antonio, which is my hometown, where I volunteered with the preparations for the 40th annual Raul Jimenez Thanksgiving Dinner. As I said, this dinner has been going on for 40 years, and it serves 25,000 people each year in the San Antonio area who might otherwise go hungry. The numbers are immense. I spent a little bit of time as a volunteer with a number of folks and picked the turkeys apart and broke them up into small, bite- sized pieces. They told me that they served 9,400 pounds of turkey during this 40th anniversary dinner. It is really one of my favorite events each year, and it was made even more special since they dedicated this year's dinner to Mary, Raul's wife, who, sadly, passed away earlier this year.

Then I traveled up to Wichita Falls, where I was able to spend a little bit of time at Sheppard Air Force Base with the families of deployed airmen. I think it is very important that we remember, particularly during the holidays, that having a loved one in the military service who is deployed and separated from the rest of the family involves a lot of sacrifice, not only on the part of the servicemember but on the ones who are left behind, as that hole in your heart feels a little bit bigger during the holidays.

My dad served 31 years in the U.S. Air Force. Fortunately, by the time I came along, his long-term deployments had long been over. Still, every time I meet a young family whose loved one is deployed overseas while the family waits behind, it tugs at my heartstrings. So we thank not only those who wear the uniform of the U.S. military but those family members as well, who, I believe, also serve.

We have an all-volunteer military. No one makes you join the military anymore in America. We should thank all of them for their service in different ways.

It was encouraging to me to meet with these patriots and thank them for their sacrifices and help to distribute a little bit of Thanksgiving love and food ahead of the holiday.

I came back here to Washington refreshed, having spent that time with constituents and family and friends, and I am eager to get back to work.

We know that the countdown to Christmas is on, and we have a long to- do list before we are through. One of our top priorities, strange as it may sound, is to actually pass appropriations bills to fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year. I believe that the single most important function of the Federal Government--something that none of us can do individually nor the States collectively--is to provide for the common defense. The way we do that is by funding our military and making sure that they have the training, the leadership, and the materials they need in order to fight and win our Nation's wars or, ideally, to not have to fight our Nation's wars because nobody will dare mess with the U.S. military.

That is why it is particularly sad to see that we find ourselves balled up in this appropriations process this late in the year. Over the summer we came to a bipartisan, bicameral agreement to guide the appropriations process and, hopefully, to eliminate this uncertainty going into the Christmas season. Last August we had an agreement that provided a roadmap for negotiations this fall, and we all promised to work together in good faith and to stay away from poison pill policy riders and other things that might derail this appropriations process.

Well, obviously things did not work the way we had planned. Unfortunately, our Democratic colleagues went back on their promise because of a disagreement over 0.3 percent of the federal budget. You heard that correctly--0.3 percent. A disagreement over domestic spending involving 0.3 percent of the Federal budget derailed all of the appropriations process and leaves us in our current state of dysfunction.

So rather than passing appropriations bills on time, as we were on track to do, we passed two short-term funding bills, and we are working day and night to avoid needing another one when the current continuing resolution expires on December 20. I know Chairman Shelby and our colleagues and the staff on the appropriations committees have been trying to build consensus on these funding bills, and I can only hope and pray that we can reach an agreement soon.

There are a lot of other things that we can and should be doing. We started this year off with a government shutdown, and we can't afford to make that an annual affair, but this roller coaster ride involving short-term spending bills puts us in a bad position, particularly for our military and other areas of government that need certainty and need to be able to make plans.

As our troops are serving around the globe to keep us safe, as well as our friends and allies abroad, we need to do everything in our power here at home to give them the stability they need to succeed. Our commanders and military leaders have repeatedly told us how difficult it is to plan for the future without a predictable budget, and the constantly evolving threat landscape only underscores that need. We need to get that done.

In addition to funding the military, we need to finish up the National Defense Authorization Act and get it to the President's desk. Every year since 1961, Congress has passed the National Defense Authorization Act without delay, and now is not the time to get bogged down in partisan fights in Congress and fail to do what we have done each year since 1961.

Unfortunately, our Democratic colleagues in the House are trying to use this must-pass piece of legislation to leverage some of their liberal wish list. The version of this legislation passed by the House earlier this year is so partisan that it didn't get a single Republican vote--not one. Putting our national security on the line in order to pander to radical factions in the opposing party is absolutely shameful. There are some things that should rise above politics, rise above partisanship, and providing for our military is first on that list.

I appreciate our colleagues on the Armed Services Committee, led by Chairman Inhofe, who have been fighting to get these poison pills out of this legislation so we can pass the National Defense Authorization Act without any additional delay. It is critical that we get these bills moving before everyone heads home for the holidays.

There is one other piece of legislation I hope we can deliver before we leave. Over the last few weeks, I have been hearing rumors--which I hope are true--that a deal on the USMCA is very close. The USMCA, of course, is the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, which is the successor to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

NAFTA is reported to support, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, about 13 million jobs in America--8 million with our binational trade with Canada and 5 million with Mexico. This comes after nearly a year of negotiations between the administration and Speaker Pelosi and her House colleagues to resolve some differences, and I am cautiously optimistic that we may yet see an agreement soon. We have been anxious to get the final agreement so the House can begin processing it and then send it over here so we can begin reviewing it in the Senate Finance Committee.

The experts have told us that this agreement would lead to increased wealth for the United States and more than 176,000 new jobs. So it is time to get it ratified, but with the House continuing its single- minded obsession to impeach the President, I hope this trade agreement doesn't fall victim to impeachment mania.

Whether I am meeting with farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, small businesses or just average Texans, one of the top questions I get at home is this: When is the USMCA going to pass?

I heard last week that it is one of the top Federal priorities for the Central Texas Food Bank. I would like to be able to head home for Christmas in a few weeks with some great news for my constituents back home.

With impeachment using up most of the oxygen in Washington, I am afraid our ability to get bipartisan work done is getting smaller and smaller. If the impeachment circus makes its way to this side of the Capitol, that ability may completely go away. If we stick to the timeline of the Clinton impeachment, that would mean the articles of impeachment would be voted on in late December, and then, literally, for the first 5 or 6 weeks of 2020, the Senate would be required to sit as the jury in impeachment proceedings, during which time nothing else can be done.

We need to check these critical items off of Congress's to-do list over the next few weeks--the things that we can and should get done before the Christmas holidays, and I am eager to get to work and to do my part.

Our hope is that our friends on the other side of the aisle will join us in the same commitment.

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