Business Before the Senate

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, for weeks now, the Republicans have been asking the Democrats to take off their impeachment blinders and let Congress legislate for the American people. We have argued that American families deserve better than this partisan paralysis, where the Democrats literally obsess over impeachment and obstruct everything else.

This very morning, for example, the Speaker gave a speech on national television to push forward her rushed and partisan impeachment, with not one word on the outstanding legislation the American people actually need--nothing on the USMCA or the NDAA or funding for our Armed Forces. It is all impeachment, all the time. Only in this town, only in Washington, does anybody think it is OK for our Armed Forces to go unfunded and for a major trade deal to go unpassed, because the Democrats are too busy hosting a panel of law professors to criticize President Trump on television instead of being busy on the things the American people actually need us to address.

The Kentuckians I represent cannot believe our military commanders are being denied certainty, our men and women in uniform are being denied stable funding, and 176,000 new American jobs are being held up all because the Democratic leadership thinks there is more political advantage in obstruction than in doing their jobs. Well, the servicemembers and personnel in the Kentucky National Guard and at Fort Campbell, Fort Knox, and the Blue Grass Army Depot aren't going to simply stop doing their jobs. No, they are counting on us to pass critical defense legislation that reforms housing and spousal employment programs, that invests in construction, readiness, and modernization, and that locks in--listen to this--the largest pay raise in a decade.

These bills touch every single State. Of course, there are major national and international issues at stake, as well, but the Democrats are still holding the NDAA hostage for a partisan wish list that is meant to appease trial lawyers, public sector unions, and their own far-left base. They are holding up the NDAA over unrelated, nongermane, leftwing wish-list items.

Meanwhile, the Speaker and the Democratic leader are withholding their assent from important bipartisan provisions like the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which has previously passed both Houses and has been modified to resolve all concerns by the committees of jurisdiction. Unlike the Democratic leader's rhetoric on Syria in recent weeks, this bill would actually do something to stand up for the Syrian people and hold Assad accountable. So I hope the Democratic leader will allow this important demonstration of our support for the Syrian people to go forward.

In the meantime, as if to underscore that the Democrats' top priority is performance art for coastal elites and not the people's business, I understand the Speaker of the House spent part of this week in Madrid, talking about climate change. She took an international flight to discuss carbon emissions. So the Speaker was in Spain, lamenting President Trump's decision to pull us out of the Paris Agreement. Maybe she pitched her conference's Green New Deal--its socialist plan to hurt our economy for American families--while bigger emitters like China go roaring right by.

As an aside, over the past 15 years, the United States' carbon emissions have actually fallen significantly. We appear to be on track for another decline in 2019. Meanwhile, Paris Agreement signatories, like China and India, continue to emit more and more every year. China already emits, roughly, twice as much as the United States, and it is increasing every year.

Kentucky and many other States know exactly what happens when Washington Democrats ignore these facts and decide America needs to take on unilateral economic pain for no meaningful change in global emissions. We are still trying to recover from the Democrats' last ``War on Coal.'' We certainly don't need the Speaker of the House to promise the Europeans that she is going to start a new one. So working Americans and their families are not well served by the Democrats' political performance art. What they really need are results.

The only path to results is bipartisan legislation, and, fortunately, it is a well-trodden one. There are 58 consecutive annual defense authorizations to prove it. Always in the past we have been able to overcome these partisan differences and go forward. There is a bipartisan-bicameral agreement that the Speaker and the Democratic leader signed just a few months ago to help them find their way back to the table, but the agreement needs to be honored. I hope they do so sometime soon.

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