Securing Growth and Robust Leadership in American Aviation Act--Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, right now we are working through a bipartisan proposal to keep the government open and operating, at least for the next several months. But those who study the Constitution might ask: Why is the Senate beginning debate on a continuing resolution? Isn't it the responsibility, constitutionally, of the House to begin debates on spending measures?

That is true. But the reason the Senate is using certain procedural maneuvers to begin the debate on the continuing resolution is because the House refuses to do its job. The House of Representatives is currently pretending like the government isn't shutting down in 3 days.

Instead of doing their job, House Republicans are spending the week impeaching Joe Biden, even though they admit they have no grounds to do it. They are setting this country on a course toward ruin. Shutdowns cost the economy billions of dollars. Starting on Saturday night, our military won't get paid; Head Start teachers won't get paid; our wildfire firefighters won't get paid; Federal prison guards won't get paid; NIH and CDC scientists won't get paid; border agents won't get paid. And yet the House is pretending that this isn't happening.

So we are attempting--the Senate--to come together, Republicans and Democrats, to solve this problem. But it is absolutely extraordinary-- extraordinary--that the House is refusing to do their job. And the reason for that is that there is this cabal of Republicans in the House who want the government to shut down, who hate the government so much that they want to burn it to the ground. And they are willing to compromise the safety of this country. They are willing to put hard- working Federal employees out of work. They are willing to force our military and our Border Patrol to forgo their paychecks. They are willing to lose $10 billion in revenue to the economy.

So this is a pretty sad moment. The Senate is going to try to come together, Republicans and Democrats, to do our job; but House Republicans are causing this shutdown. They admit it. They go on TV every day--House Republicans go on TV every day and admit that it is their caucus that is causing this shutdown. And, hopefully, sometime between now and this weekend, those arsonists in the House of Representatives will come to their senses and put this country above their politics, above their hatred of government, above their hatred of Joe Biden. The consequences are pretty enormous otherwise. Gun Control

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, this past February, a woman by the name of Maria Zapata Escamilla was startled out of her sleep in her home in a relatively small city in Mexico. She was startled out of her sleep because a band of men armed with powerful weapons and wearing military fatigues broke into her family's home. They looked like soldiers, but they weren't soldiers. They were, in fact, drug cartel members. That night they dragged her husband away, and they dragged her 14-year-old son, still in his pajamas, out of the house.

Two weeks later, 10 bodies were found in this town, all dead at the hands of the cartel. One of them was Maria's husband. She still, to this day, has no idea where her 14-year-old son is, but she presumes that he is dead. Maria's story is the norm in this city, Fresnillo, which, for much of this year, has been a war zone between Mexico's two biggest cartels as they battle for space to make and transport drugs to the United States.

Maria says:

Every day there are kidnappings, every day there are shootouts, every day there are deaths. It's terror.

These cartels act with impunity in Mexico because they buy off local officials and police because of endemic corruption inside Mexico but, also, because these cartels are very often more heavily armed than the police. And this ability of the cartels to control so much space inside of Mexico because of corruption but also because they are often carrying more firepower than law enforcement, this is not just a nightmare for Mexico; this is a nightmare for the United States of America. There is a straight through line between the power of the cartels and the fentanyl trade that is killing American citizens.

Fentanyl is a plague in my community in Connecticut, in my colleagues' communities. And it is not enough for us just to tell Mexico to do better. No doubt, Mexico does not have clean hands. Mexico needs to get in the game to take on these cartels.

But on this question of heavily armed cartels, Mexico has actually acted. It surprises many people to know that there is one single gun store in all of Mexico. Mexico has essentially eliminated the commercial trade of firearms. You can't buy a firearm in the commercial market, for all intents and purposes, in Mexico today.

So why on Earth is Mexico flooded with weapons? Why on Earth do the cartels trade weapons like water? It is because somewhere between 70 to 90 percent of the guns that are found in crime scenes--mostly crime scenes connected to the cartel business--in Mexico can be traced back to the United States.

This is absolutely stunning. It is U.S. guns bought here in the United States, transited to Mexico that is fueling the violence that ends up in fentanyl being made, produced, and transported freely into the United States.

So it is time for the United States to recognize that if we want to do something about fentanyl coming into the United States, if we want to save our citizens from ruin, then we have to do something about the guns that move from the United States into Mexico.

Now why is this happening? Why have the cartels been able to get their hands on these weapons?

Well, there is a handful of reasons. First, without a universal background check law in the United States, these cartel members, most of whom have criminal records, can easily buy guns at gun shows and online, even though they are criminals, because in those settings there are not background checks applied in many of our States. So the cartel members go into these gun shows in places like Texas; they buy the guns; and they bring them to Mexico.

Second, there is no comprehensive effort to stop the trafficking. It is largely Americans that are doing the trafficking--dual citizens, often. We do lots of checks of cars and trucks going from Mexico to the United States, but we don't do significant serious checks on vehicles going from the United States to Mexico. And so the guns, along with the cash, move freely north to south.

And so as long as this gun trade continues, the Mexican authorities, even if they clean up their act, have very little chance to stop these cartels. And what is so maddening is that this is just a choice. We know what to do to stop these guns from being trafficked to the cartels in Mexico, but we choose not to do it.

So for those of us that have relationships with leaders in the Mexican government, we have very few good answers when the Mexican government looks us in the eye and says: Do your part. Stop these guns from moving into Mexico.

The things we can do are all politically popular. Universal background checks are supported by 95 percent of Americans, first and foremost because it will cut down on crime in the United States. But 41 percent of the guns that go into Mexico come from Texas; 15 percent come from Arizona; the lion's share of these weapons comes from States that don't have universal background check laws on the books and so they have all of these loopholes and these ways for criminals to buy guns and transfer them to Mexico.

Second, we can fund DHS to actually do the checks on the cars and the vehicles that are moving into Mexico. Last year, for the first time, because of an initiative that I pushed, we funded 200 more CBP officers to do these outbound inspections. Yet we are still only doing the inspections at a handful of ports of entry, and we should be doing them all across the border. That is something that Republicans and Democrats can come together on.

Last year, we did make progress. With the help of Senator Cornyn and others, we made gun trafficking a crime in this country. It is amazing that it wasn't. We made straw purchasing a crime, which makes it a little bit harder for the traffickers to move weapons from north to south, but it is just a start.

It is really important for us to own the mistakes we have made that have allowed for these cartels to get so big and so powerful. There is no doubt that the lion's share of work lands squarely with the Mexican Government. The corruption there that is endemic is the biggest gift to the cartels.

Second to the corruption is the flow of weapons that the United States has permitted and, at times, facilitated. We need a massive, laser-focused effort to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States. It is killing thousands of Americans. In my State, there have been 10,000 overdose deaths just in the last 10 years.

We can't just lecture the Mexican Government to do better; we need to do our part. So I am here on the floor today to ask my colleagues to join me in taking some big, bold steps to stop the flow of these weapons from the United States to the Mexican drug cartels.

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