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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I find it ironic that we are talking about government shutdowns when it is as a result of Senator Schumer's handling of this matter that we find ourselves here 2 weeks before the end of the fiscal year without having a chance to vote on appropriations bills. This is by design. This is not a bug. This is a feature of his strategy.

These bipartisan appropriations bills were passed out of the Senate Appropriations Committee weeks ago, and then Senator Schumer put the Senate in a 40-day recess during the month of August. Now, with the clock ticking, September 30 just right around the corner, we will start with a minibus appropriations bill next week, but we won't able to finish. We won't be able to reconcile the House and the Senate versions before the end of the fiscal year, so we will be forced to do some form of continuing resolution.

You might ask, why would the majority leader of the Senate sabotage the normal, expected procedure by which the appropriations process should work? Well, one, it maximizes his power because he knows that only a handful of people will ultimately negotiate the final product, and it will disempower 98 other Members of the U.S. Senate, rank-and- file Members who will not have a chance to debate, vote, and amend various appropriations bills as they come across the floor.

So this is a part of Senator Schumer's strategy. His political strategy is to create this crisis and then to blame somebody else-- namely, the House of Representatives. And you heard it from our friend from Michigan, the Senator from Michigan. This is all about talking about shutdowns. Well, we tried that before, and we figured out it doesn't really work because when you reopen, the same problems that you found difficult to deal with beforehand are still in front of you.

So we need to do our work here, but we need to do it on a basis where we can actually have an opportunity to shape these appropriations bills and not go through this unnecessary but entirely predictable drama because the majority leader refused to give us an opportunity to put these bills on the floor and to go through them in an orderly and transparent way.

Our national debt is about $38 trillion. Excuse me, I forgot what the exact number is, but it is at a historic high. One reason that spending is out of control is because of this gamesmanship. So we need to do better.

With the government funding deadline just a few weeks away, the Biden administration has adopted a puzzling messaging strategy.

This week, the White House launched an attack against House Republicans, accusing them of turning a blind eye to the fentanyl crisis. Well, it is tough to peel back the many layers of irony and hypocrisy in that accusation. After all, this administration has been asleep at the wheel for more than 2\1/2\ years as fentanyl has continued to pour across our border.

Last year alone, 71,000 Americans died of fentanyl poisoning. We know where it comes from. We know what we need to do to stop it. But the administration has done none of those things to try to save the lives of Americans and now has the temerity--audacity, really--to blame House Republicans for its own failure. How hypocritical is that?

In the last 12 months, Customs and Border Protection has seized nearly 28,000 pounds of fentanyl. I know occasionally you will see it in social media where people will say: Well, good for them; they got it. And I agree--good for them--but that is only a fraction of the fentanyl that has come across the border.

We know--because 1\1/2\ million migrants got away from law enforcement, ran away from law enforcement, we will never know what they were carrying on their persons. This fentanyl powder is so powerful that even small amounts that can be contained in a backpack or in some similar carrying case can kill hundreds of thousands of people.

We know from the sad fact that 71,000 Americans died of fentanyl poisoning last year that, notwithstanding their heroic efforts, Customs and Border Protection is unable to stop all of it. A lethal dose of fentanyl, after all, fits on the tip of the sharpened end of a pencil. So when you consider the fact that Customs and Border Protection has seized nearly 28,000 pounds, it is enough to wipe out the entire U.S. population 20 times over.

I have been in too many sad meetings with too many grieving parents who lost their teenage son or daughter to fentanyl poisoning. One of those fathers gave me this wristband that I still wear that he has handed out to others in memory of his daughter. It says: ``One pill can kill.''

These kids don't know they are taking this deadly drug. They think they are taking something like a Xanax or Percocet, something relatively innocuous, but, in fact, it is a counterfeit pill contaminated with this poison that kills them.

I am grateful to the brave men and women who work hard to stop these drugs every day. We know they aren't able to interdict all of the contraband that comes across the border, but thanks to President Biden's border strategy--otherwise known as the Biden border crisis-- their already-tough job has become even more challenging.

Over the last couple of years, the unprecedented border crisis has affected all of our missions at the southern border, even those that have nothing to do with immigration. Law enforcement has been shifted from the frontlines in order to process the migrants who continue to come in the millions. Instead of stopping dangerous drugs and criminals, many agents are now pushing paper, changing diapers, and arranging for transportation, so they are not able to be on the frontlines to stop this scourge of illegal drugs, including fentanyl.

Of course, no one profits more from the status quo than the drug cartels. With fewer agents on the frontlines, these cartels have a clear and easy path to move fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, and other deadly drugs into the United States.

Our communities are being ravaged by this overdose epidemic, and the Biden administration apparently does not care, because if they did care, they would do something different.

By ignoring the border crisis for more than 2\1/2\ years, President Biden has given the cartels a clear and easy pathway to move drugs into the United States. The fact that the White House has decided that the best defense is an offense and to turn around and try to attack House Republicans isn't just dishonest, it is completely incoherent. It is cynical, and it is wrong.

In its memo, the White House cited a Morning Consult poll that found that nearly 60 percent of voters want Congress to make fentanyl trafficking a top priority. This may have surprised the White House, but it isn't news to anybody else in America who has been keeping track of the fentanyl epidemic.

As I said, the fentanyl epidemic is terrorizing our communities. No one, no community is safe. This doesn't respect how rich you are, how poor you are, the color of your skin, your ethnicity. All of our country is being affected.

Since President Biden took office, he has made every effort to ignore, underplay, or misrepresent what is happening at the border.

Over the last few months, we have seen another effort to try to downplay his failure to meet the challenge at the border. When title 42, for example--the public health title that allowed the Border Patrol to expel people for public health reasons--when it expired, the Biden administration tried to assure the American people that it had a plan to manage the crisis, and there is no reason to worry. And for the first few weeks, we saw a drop in border crossings, and the administration was quick to declare victory. The Department of Homeland Security bragged that the Biden administration border plan was ``working as intended.''

Well, as I and others pointed out at the time, the dip was likely to be only temporary. There was a lot of uncertainty how cases will be handled in a post-title 42 world, and it made sense that migrants--but even more so the criminal organizations that smuggle these migrants-- would take a wait-and-see approach, sort of get the lay of the land before they decide the next method they would use.

And as an added deterrent, the growing summer heat made the journey to and across our border even more dangerous. Either way, it was tough to tell how much things had really changed as a result of the administration's gimmicky accounting.

Earlier this year, the administration stood up a new program that allows migrants from four countries to enter and remain in the United States for up to 2 years and to receive work permits. All they have to do is submit their information online and wait for the administration to give them a green light. Now, this is not a small program. You would think after the 7 million migrants who have crossed our border since President Biden became President, that he would try to tamp down the flow of even more migrants across the border. But this program is open to up to 30,000 individuals a month. That is 360,000 migrants a year.

Until recently, the American people had a pretty good idea about the number of migrants who crossed the border each month. The administration is required to report the number of apprehensions each month, and this data provides a great snapshot of what the facts actually are.

By standing up a new program, the administration effectively opened an additional loophole that allows it to hide the true scale of this crisis. They just basically quit counting some people. They said: Well, we are creating a program where 30,000 people a month can come across under this program so we are going to cut them from the total so that makes us look like we are doing better.

We do not know the full extent of the administration's programmatic use of parole to hide the effects of their immigration nonenforcement policies. What that means is even if people do not claim asylum when they come to the border, the Biden administration is simply waving them through, granting what is known in immigration law as parole--not based on individual circumstance but by the hundreds and thousands. They simply are refusing to enforce the immigration laws that Congress passed on the books.

Despite the smoke-and-mirrors accounting and a range of other factors that contribute to the post-title 42 decrease, the administration had the temerity to declare victory.

But it is becoming clear there was no reason to celebrate. Preliminary data published in the Washington Post shows that last month, a record number of families illegally crossed the southern border--a record number. In August alone, Border Patrol detained more than 91,000 migrants who ended up in the United States as part of a family unit. This is the highest number we have ever seen in a single month.

But it is not just what is called family units. Apprehension numbers increased dramatically over the past couple of months. We have gone from just under 100,000 in June to 132,000 in July, to more than 177,000 in August. To be clear, these are not overall encounters. These are just the arrests by Border Patrol.

I already mentioned that since President Biden became President, there have been 1\1/2\ million ``got-aways,'' people who were evading law enforcement--up to no good, I am sure. We won't see the full picture until the administration releases its data later this month. But the Washington Post is estimating roughly 230,000 migrant encounters in August when you include migrants processed through the land ports of entry. This would make it the busiest month for border crossings this year.

Time and time again, the Biden administration has refused to accept responsibility. The administration has cooked the books, manipulated the numbers, in order to hide the pace of border crossings. It has ignored frontline officers' plea for support. It has attacked States like mine for providing transportation to migrants to help them reach other States rather than to have them settle in our States. And now, it is trying to blame House Republicans for turning a blind eye to the fentanyl crisis. This is a new low, a new low even for the Biden administration.

The reason so many Americans see, understand, and care about fentanyl is because the crisis has ballooned under President Biden's watch. It is going to continue to get worse, not better. Under this administration, fentanyl has poured across the southern border and into our communities across America. If anyone should be named and shamed for ignoring this crisis, it is not the House of Representatives, it is the gentleman sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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