Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services Relating to ``Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Omnibus Covid-19 Health Care Staff Vaccination''

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, last night, of course, we all listened to President Biden's prime-time opportunity to explain what his administration is doing to address the many challenges that our Nation is facing.

Here at home, we know family budgets are being plundered by the worst inflation in four decades. We are paying higher prices for everything from food to gasoline. We also know that there have been spikes in violent crime that have created public safety concerns in communities across the country. After a year of hearing folks on the Democratic side of the aisle, the progressive base of the Democratic Party, calling for defunding the police, it was welcome to hear the President say last night that we should fund the police. It is long overdue.

Of course, there is the humanitarian crisis at the southern border. As I have said before, Texas has 1,200 miles of common border with Mexico, and, of course, we have seen records shattered month after month of people coming across the border, claiming asylum, and then being placed by U.S. authorities into the interior of the United States, given a notice to appear for a future court hearing, which, in all likelihood, will never occur.

The human smugglers and drug cartels have figured out the weaknesses in our own laws and policies, and they are exploiting them, to the detriment of the American people.

On drugs alone, 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year, the overwhelming amount of which those drugs came across the southern border into the United States. And the cartels are smart. They figured out that if you flood the border with people, that is going to take the Border Patrol off the frontlines, and here come the drug cartels moving their poison across the border.

Of course, the trials we are facing now abroad are not any easier. The precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan without any kind of warning or consultation with our NATO allies has caused the world to doubt the future of American leadership, and then the Chinese Communist Party over in the People's Republic of China continues to commit genocide against the Uighurs and threaten attacks against a democratic Taiwan.

Of course, very much on our minds today is the fact that Vladimir Putin is attempting to seize a sovereign nation and redraw the maps of Europe and testing the resolve of the United States and other democracies around the world.

I, of course, like many, attended the President's address last night and listened closely as he spoke about each of these challenges, beginning with the conflict--or I should say war--in Ukraine.

When it comes to Russia, our allies are not strong enough on their own to deter Vladimir Putin or the Russian Federation. They are looking to the United States as part of NATO--the North Atlantic Treaty Organization--for leadership.

I was pleased to hear President Biden deliver a clear message to the world that we stand with the democracy in Ukraine and we will do everything we can to help the Ukrainians deter Putin and to defend their country. The President said we will continue to send military, economic, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, and it is clear that there is bipartisan support for that. But the fact of the matter is, most of our allies in Europe have been the ones who stepped up to the threat--of course, it is in their neighborhood--and we could have but did not impose sanctions before Putin invaded rather than after the fact.

I was disappointed that the President did not speak about what is at stake in Ukraine. It is something I talked about here on the floor a few weeks back.

With so many challenges in our own backyard, it is easy for folks in Texas or Colorado or New Jersey or anywhere else around the country to wonder, why should I care about what is happening in Ukraine?

Americans want to know, what difference does a war or a military conflict on the other side of the globe--what relevance does it have to me, and if it is important, how can we best help?

Well, we know the answer to that question here in the House and the Senate. We know that this conflict is key to preserving our rules-based international order, that if Putin can get away with this, he can get away with anything. If Putin gets away with this, President Xi is waiting for his opportunity to unify Taiwan with mainland China. So this is a global geopolitical crisis. We know China and Iran, as I mentioned, and other adversaries are paying close attention.

If Texans want America to stay out of another world war, then we better slam the door on Vladimir Putin now.

President Biden had a window to remind the American people and our allies around the world what is at stake in this conflict. Vladimir Putin has even put his nuclear forces on active reserve. He is rattling the nuclear sabre in order to threaten and intimidate NATO and the United States and the rest of the world, but he is also finding an incredible amount of courage and resilience and leadership by people like President Zelenskyy in leading the courageous Ukrainian people in their effort to resist this invasion.

So this is a very serious and very dangerous moment. Many of the things that Vladimir Putin has done are eerily similar to what happened in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s.

On another topic, the President alluded to inflation last night, but he didn't instill much confidence that he had a concept of what was at stake or how to solve the problem. When he talked about his plan to address inflation, he said we need to cut our expenses and overhead. Well, I talked to some of the cotton producers in Texas last week when I was home, and they told me that one of the biggest problems they have are the increasing costs of their inputs, things like diesel and energy, fertilizer, and the like. They don't have any room to cut their overhead unless they go out of business entirely.

So the President did not inspire much confidence when it came to dealing with the scourge of inflation. But one thing we can do is quit making it worse by trying to continue to shovel more and more money out the door, chasing fewer and fewer goods and services.

The President did try to recycle some of the elements of the Build Back Better--or, as I like to call it, the ``Build Back Broke''--bill, but that bill, that policy is dead and buried. The President couldn't even get support among his own political party. But he did try to rebrand it and respond to it in a way--rebrand it in a way that appeared to deal with the concerns that everybody has about increasing costs and inflation, but it just did not make any sense.

The President repeated the same line that has already been shot down a number of times. He talked about raising taxes on the American people, and he says no one earning $400,000 a year or less would pay a penny more under his plan. But, of course, this is the same President who said that the price of the $5 trillion Build Back Better bill was zero. I think the President has lost a lot of credibility when it comes to talking about taxes and spending.

Well, what the President talked about last night was really a laundry list of his liberal agenda. This isn't a new plan. This is the same old plan with a new name broken down into smaller pieces. None of this is going to address what is confronting the American people today when it comes to inflation or crime or the border or regaining America's leadership and credibility in world affairs.

While I mention crime, when it comes to crime, the President did affirm that defunding the police is not the answer.

I see our friend, the Senator from New Jersey, on the floor of the Senate. I think he led an effort for us to have a vote on funding the police rather than defunding the police.

Of course, this is a complete reversal from what we have heard from many of the President's nominees, including those at the Department of Justice--people like Vanita Gupta who for months, if not years, chanted this mantra of defunding the police and criticizing the men and women in law enforcement who are the thin blue line between us and chaos. But there are some shining examples that I think the President could have pointed to. One is Dallas, TX. It is a shining example of how supporting our police both financially and with moral support and with smart plans can make a difference.

In most major cities across the country today, crime is up in all categories. In Dallas, TX, violent crime is down by 8.5 percent, and that is no accident. It is thanks to the great leadership of Dallas's mayor Eric Johnson and Chief Garcia, chief of the Dallas Police Department.

I asked Chief Garcia yesterday in a hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I said: Is there any reason, Chief Garcia, that the plan you implemented in Dallas couldn't work elsewhere around the country? And he said: No, there is no reason.

Of course, every plan needs to be adapted to local conditions; but what the Dallas Police Department and the city council and mayor have done is something that can be replicated in other parts of the country.

Chief Garcia and other witnesses also testified to the importance of Project Safe Neighborhoods, which is a Federal program designed to go after gun criminals, particularly people who are felons in possession or people who use firearms for carjacking, drug transactions, and the like.

The fact of the matter is that Federal law with its mandatory minimum sentences for using a firearm illegally in violation of Federal law is a huge deterrent. And if you can't deter people from using firearms, you certainly can lock them up for an extended period of time which, I think, sends a strong message that this sort of activity will not be tolerated and will deter future criminal activity.

So there is a lot we can do when it comes to crime. We can also make sure that people who are suffering from mental health challenges aren't diverted to jails and denied the treatment that they need that can help them on the road to recovery. Those are the kinds of things that I wish we could have heard more about from the President last night.

I was shocked when the President said we need immigration reform last night. I have been in the Senate for quite a while now, a member of the Judiciary Committee. I am the ranking member on the Immigration Subcommittee. When my party has been in the majority, I have been the chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee. For the President to say immigration reform is something we ought to do struck me as a throwaway line. And the reason I say that is because he has done nothing, zero, zip, nada, to stop the flood of migrants across our southern border, together with the illegal drugs that come right behind them.

I have tried to do my best on a bipartisan basis working with people like Ms. Sinema, a border State Senator from Arizona, to come up with some modest suggestions for the administration to deal with the crisis at our border. Unfortunately, we have not heard a peep out of the administration, at the same time that the President's poll numbers, when it comes to border security and immigration, are in the cellar. You would think that they would be looking for some sort of bipartisan opportunity to register a win and make some progress, but that would be wrong.

Well, I was hopeful that we would hear more about the President's plan to work with Republicans in a 50-50 Senate to build consensus for bipartisan solutions. Other than the bipartisan support for Ukraine, we didn't hear much about that last night. What we heard was a long laundry list of partisan legislation that has been tried and failed during this last year.

The Biden administration needs to do more to address inflation in a smart way--in an effective way. They need to do more to support our men and women in uniform who are the thin blue line between us and criminals; and they need to do something--anything--to address the humanitarian crisis at the southern border.

I was hoping this could be a reset moment. You know, we all make mistakes in life, but the real test is whether we learn from those mistakes. But from the comments that the President made last night when it comes to these failed policies, it appears that he has learned nothing.

The American people elected a 50-50 Senate expecting to force us to work together, and we should do that. We should put the tried-and-true formula of building consensus and passing positive legislation to help the American people. We should use that formula again. It just simply blows my mind that the President and his party, with the prospect of an evenly divided Congress, has tried to do so many things on a purely partisan basis, and, as you might expect, has failed to do so when he has been unable to unite even his own political party.

Well, we need a stronger and a safer and a more prosperous country. As Governor Kim Reynolds said yesterday evening, we can't project strength abroad if we are weak at home. And we can't support our allies, NATO, and our own military to deter authoritarian thugs like Putin if our economy isn't strong here at home as well.

So I continue to be an optimist and hope for the best, but last night's message was not encouraging.

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