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Floor Speech
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Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I am thrilled to join my colleagues on the floor to talk about the importance of this border security bill, but I am also going to talk about my own naivete and admit to being a very naive Senator.
When I came to the Senate in 2013 with Senator Murphy, one of the first things we did in June of my first year in the Senate was to pass a significant and bipartisan immigration reform bill. That immigration reform bill was comprehensive, including a $40 billion-plus investment in border security. We passed it in a bipartisan way in this body with nearly 70 votes.
My naivety was this: Yes, there was a Republican House. When the bill went over there, having been a Governor and having watched how State legislatures worked, I assumed that the Republican House wouldn't just embrace our bill but that they would do their own version of an immigration bill, and then we would sit down in a conference and hash out some middle ground. No. I was wrong. The Republican majority House decided to bottle the bill up in committee. They never took it up and never did their own bill. That was in 2013--the education of a naive Senator.
Years later, in 2018, during the Trump administration, when we had a Republican majority in this body, we dealt directly with President Trump. He wanted $25 billion in border security over 10 years. We basically came up with an offer that was, Can you take yes for an answer?
I was part of an eight-member crew negotiating a bipartisan deal: protection for Dreamers and $25 billion in border security--every penny Donald Trump asked for and not one penny less. He told us that he supported Dreamers. He told us that if the bill got to him, he would sign it. Because we had a Democratic House, if we could get it through this body, we would get it to President Trump's desk. But as soon as we rolled out the bill with eight Democrats and eight Republicans as cosponsors, President Trump did a 180, turn tail. He trashed the Dreamers. He said the bill was awful and encouraged Republicans to vote against it, and we couldn't get to the 60-vote margin.
So, for the second time, we did a bipartisan deal that was going to do good things and invest a whole lot in border security that was killed by President Trump and now this most recent effort.
I so applaud Senator Murphy, Senator Sinema, Senator Lankford, and others from the administration who worked on this deal, a bipartisan border security provision with other important provisions: the normalization of Afghan refugees. We have more in Virginia than almost any other State. There is really important work in this bill-- bipartisan.
It is not lost on me how hard it is to do a deal where both the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the Border Patrol union, which tend to be quite opposite politically, take a look at a compromise and say: You know, this isn't perfect, but we need to do this.
I don't know of another issue where these two organizations have said: We need to do this. That was the needle that these Senators were able to thread after months and months and months of negotiation.
But just as in the first two instances, a significant effort to protect our border and make our country safer in a bipartisan way got shot down when President Trump came out and encouraged Republicans to oppose it. Even though they had been briefed on the negotiation every step of the way and supported it, as soon as President Trump said they should oppose it, folks turned tail and ran. President Trump was honest. I mean, I will give him this. He was honest about the reason. He didn't say to oppose it because he didn't like clause A or clause C. He pretty much said: We don't want to fix this problem. We would rather raise heck about this problem and blame Joe Biden about this problem than fix this problem.
We are sent here to solve problems, and when we have a bipartisan solution that fits this narrow window where both left and right say it is the right step to take, we should do it. I am so glad that this is going to be up on the floor for a vote tomorrow. I look forward to joining my colleagues in supporting it. I urge others to do the same.
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