Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the United States Fish and Wildlife Service Relating to Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Endangered Species Status for Northern Long-Eared Bat

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, the Biden administration's reckless policies have created chaos on our southern border, and further mistakes from the Democrats are taking things from very bad to even worse.

For more than 2 years now, President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas have proven they are either incapable, unwilling, or uninterested in defending and maintaining our borders. Illegal crossings at our southern border have exploded under this administration--2.38 million in fiscal year 2022 alone. And that is just the subset of people whom the authorities actually found and stopped. It doesn't count the ones who got away.

The vast majority of these crossers are single adults--not families, not children but unaccompanied grownups.

Customs and Border Protection stopped 67 known terrorist suspects at the southern border ports of entry last year alone, but they found 98 attempting to cross the border elsewhere--more than six times as many as the previous year. As of March, authorities had already seized nearly three times as much fentanyl this fiscal year as they had by this time last year.

All of these terrible numbers have come with a stopgap pandemic policy called title 42 actually in place. Every month of the Biden Presidency, anywhere from 20 to 75 percent of the illegal crossers have been turned right around and expelled, rather than apprehended and processed in the typical way. But the Biden administration has failed so badly that even with this stopgap in place, our border facilities have still been overwhelmed and overrun.

Now, as the Democrats finally give up the COVID state of emergency, title 42 is going away. That wouldn't pose a crisis for an administration that was willing to get tough on its own and enforce existing immigration law, but Democrats don't seem to be willing to do that--just the opposite.

President Biden's team has designed a bizarre Rube Goldberg system that amounts to a special concierge service to help even more illegal immigrants come here more easily. It is a whole parallel system with processing centers in foreign countries--not to make people come in our front door but to help even more people surge in through the back door. Now I understand there is even an official U.S. Government smartphone app to help illegal immigrants along the journey--your taxpayer dollars hard at work. Our colleague, the senior Senator from Missouri, has correctly summarized the Democrats' plan as ``Ticketmaster for illegal immigrants''--``Ticketmaster for illegal immigrants.'' Remember, things are already at an unacceptable level before this new craziness.

According to one public report, the authorities are already considering--listen to this--``street releases of migrants [into] communities across [the] border if NGO shelters and CBP facilities do not have the capacity to hold them . . . releases of migrants at bus stops, gas stations, supermarkets, etc., in communities across the border.''

Now, this week, some of our Democratic colleagues are feigning great angst and indignation over title 42's demise. They claim to be outraged that President Biden doesn't have a better plan. But every Senator had a chance just last year to vote to keep funding title 42 measures. Senate Republicans gave our Democratic colleagues that opportunity, and every single Democrat voted in lockstep against it. Every Senate Democrat voted in unison to let title 42 lapse with no better solution in place. So the country reaps what Democrats sowed. National Defense Authorization Act

Mr. President, on another matter, the National Defense Authorization Act is a must-pass piece of legislation, but Senate Democrats have developed a bad habit of letting our national security actually languish.

Last year, the 2023 NDAA spent 5 months in limbo. Even at the eleventh hour, the Democratic leader refused to bring the Senate's own bill to the floor. It took an informal conference between our colleagues on the Armed Services Committee and their House counterparts just to get this must-pass bill over the finish line.

Our Democratic friends like to invoke America's competition with China whenever they are seeking to justify huge outlays of domestic spending, but they push the nuts and bolts of actually defending America to the back burner. Case in point: Chairman Reed just announced the Armed Services Committee will wait an entire extra month before beginning consideration of this year's NDAA. You can bet China isn't waiting around and twiddling its thumbs, but apparently Leader Schumer's Senate will do just that.

What would the Democratic majority have us do instead? Our colleagues are making a push for a grab bag of left-of-center domestic priorities they call another China bill.

Let's remember the last so-called China bill that we just passed last year. The Commerce Secretary and other Biden administration officials told us with great alarm that reshoring microchip production was a hugely urgent national security priority. This was last year. Now, that is a genuine bipartisan concern, and many of us Republicans actually agreed. But since then, the administration's stated urgency has all but disappeared.

President Biden's approach to implementing the law has been atrocious--atrocious. They are violating congressional intent and trying to attach extra strings to the microchip money to end run liberal social policy through the private sector.

The Biden Commerce Department has tried to say that the semiconductor companies can't get grants unless they tilt their hiring to benefit Big Labor, unless they provide all kinds of free employment benefits to the satisfaction of Washington bureaucrats--you get the picture. It reminds me of a couple of months ago when Transportation Secretary Buttigieg asserted that one important problem with building American infrastructure is the racial and demographic composition of the construction crews. For goodness' sake.

So Washington Democrats have spent trillions of dollars--trillions-- on a never-ending wish list of leftwing domestic priorities, heaping historic inflation on the American economy, but not a penny of their partisan bills built up our hard power.

If my colleagues were truly serious about competing with China, first of all, they would prioritize the NDAA, not let it languish, and second, Democrats would join Republicans in pushing for the strong, commonsense policies that will actually help us build and make things.

So let's prioritize real, robust permitting reform--the Capito- Barrasso bills. Let's green-light domestic mining for our own critical minerals and reduce our dependence on Chinese supply chains. Let's unleash America's abundant domestic energy reserves. Let's combat China's rampant espionage and theft of high-tech research and intellectual property.

If our Democratic colleagues really want us to outcompete China, then let's put first things first and stop using this issue as a Trojan horse for unrelated liberal demands.

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