Welcoming the Guest Chaplain

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, yesterday morning, the Senate was greeted by some sad news. A longtime former colleague and dear friend of many of us, Jim Inhofe, passed away.

As many of our colleagues are familiar, Jim's path to the Senate was an adventure on its own: honorable service in the Army, small business success, undergraduate degree by way of nine different schools, and, by one account, even some prospecting on rare earth minerals.

But what came to define his time in this body was more than his sheer confidence and experience on such a dizzying array of topics, more than his dogged determination on issues from infrastructure to the Armed Forces to African development. What I suspect so many of our colleagues will remember most about Jim was his honesty, his decency, and his deep faith; his love of God, love of country, and love of neighbor.

It would be difficult for anyone to hope for a richer legacy than that.

So this week, I know the Senate is keeping Jim's wife Kay and the whole Inhofe family in our prayers as they mourn a great man. NATO

Mr. President, as I said yesterday, NATO members have taken some promising steps toward making the alliance fit for purpose. But now is not the time to get complacent. The threats we face are grave and growing. How we meet them will determine the future of the order that has underpinned the free world's peace and prosperity for decades.

Our greatest adversaries are not beating around the bush. PRC officials are stepping up their pressure against Taiwan. Standing on NATO soil, China's Ambassador to France suggested recently that China's civil war ``has not yet ended'' and threatened that the mainland could expel the ``rebel regime'' in Taiwan ``at any time.''

This comes from the same revisionist power that has succeeded for too long in infiltrating our economies, supply chains, and critical infrastructure with the promise of quick investments and easy profits. Not long ago, it was America falling prey to this alluring promise, but it is past time for European allies to learn from our experience. And it is time for America to correct our lingering mistakes as well.

We cannot continue to stand by as Chinese military modernization outpaces our own. We cannot abide defense budget requests that fail to even keep pace with inflation.

The cold truth for all of us is this: Those who fail to take hard power seriously will learn that fighting wars is vastly--vastly--more expensive than deterring them.

Just consider the neo-Soviet imperialist with whom the PRC has struck up an ``unlimited partnership.'' The West's weakness and hesitation didn't just fail to deter Putin's escalation in Ukraine, it actually invited a longer, costlier, and bloodier conflict. And Putin's brutal aggression, his reckless nuclear saber-rattling, his militarization of space, his weaponization of energy, his repression of Christians at home and in an occupied Ukraine, his coldblooded targeting of civilians, including a missile strike on Ukraine's largest children's hospital earlier this week--all of this is facilitated by China's support.

Of course, firmly knit into this same web of aggression is Iran, perhaps the most notorious enabler of terrorist child murder in the world, the architect of slaughter across the Middle East, the mastermind of Houthi threats to international trade, and the world's most active state sponsor of terrorism.

Iran continues to make determined progress toward a nuclear weapons capability. As the Biden administration's Director of National Intelligence acknowledged just yesterday, the regime is also stoking aggressive and anti-Semitic demonstrations on our soil--U.S. soil-- against Israel's response to the horrific attacks that Tehran enabled.

Our European allies, of course, are reckoning with a persistent strain of anti-Semitism in their own politics. Serious allies ought to dispense with any wishful thinking about the prospects of rapprochement under Iran's newest President.

So make no mistake, the transatlantic alliance is growing stronger, larger, and more committed through the shared responsibilities of collective defense. And on the whole, we are staring down those connected threats with clearer eyes.

But the alliance is only as strong as its weakest link. And today, it almost appears that one weak link in NATO's chain wants to break it.

Last week, without coordinating with Ukraine, NATO, or the EU, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban showed up in Moscow on a self- aggrandizing ``peace mission,'' giving Putin a chance to counterbalance the diplomatic pressure he is otherwise feeling.

Then he took to the pages of Newsweek to accuse the alliance of ``seeking conflict'' rather than resolving it. How insidious. Hungary knows what Soviet repression feels like. How in the world its leader could mistake NATO's efforts to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression for ``the pursuit of war'' is beyond me.

Neither Ukraine nor NATO provoked Russia into invading Ukraine in 2014. Neither Ukraine nor NATO provoked Russia into escalating its conflict in 2022. As I have said, it was the West's failure to meet Russian aggression with strength that emboldened Putin.

Unfortunately, Mr. Orban's curious soft spot for authoritarians isn't limited to the aggressor that, ironically, drove Hungary to join NATO in the first place.

This week, he also found time to visit Beijing to reinforce what both Hungary and the PRC call ``an all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership.''

Well, Republicans in Washington who fashion themselves both ``national conservatives'' and China hawks should pay more attention to Mr. Orban's actions and ask themselves if they are consistent with American interests.

It is certainly difficult to explain away the data. Three years ago, Hungary accounted for less than 1 percent--1 percent--of Chinese investment in Europe. Last year, it received more than 44 percent.

With an economy smaller than Kentucky, Hungary attracted more Chinese foreign direct investment than Europe's top three economies combined. I thought America and our allies were supposed to be reducing our reliance on the PRC. Money talks.

So perhaps it is not surprising that Orban finds time to confer with President Xi, but his government has gone out of its way to slow-walk European assistance to Ukraine. And it has chased deeper trade ties with Iran.

Budapest publicized a call between Hungary's Foreign Minister and his new Iranian counterpart with not a word of criticism for Iran's support for terrorism, malign activities across the Middle East, or support for Russia's war of aggression.

So much for Orban's pursuit of peace. The most successful military alliance in human history didn't get this way by letting dictators and theocrats eat our lunch.

China hawks should be the first to discourage the expansion of PRC tools like Huawei on European soil. Friends of Israel should have no time for myths of constructive engagement with an Iranian regime that underwrites the slaughter of Jews.

NATO members ought to know better--and many do--but, clearly, we have a lot of work still ahead of us. Student Loan Forgiveness

Mr. President, last month, two judges approved by President Obama ruled against one of President Biden's cornerstone efforts to buy votes: the so-called SAVE plan. By one estimate, this iteration of the Biden administration's student loan socialism scheme would transfer about half a trillion dollars from borrowers to taxpayers by arbitrarily lowering payments for those who borrowed less than $12,000.

Now, as I mentioned before, the policy is not just costly, it is profoundly--profoundly--unfair. Working taxpayers who opted not to attend college, folks who worked their way through college to avoid taking out loans, and families who sacrificed and saved for their children's education are all now on the hook to pay somebody else's bills. Even left-leaning scholars have noted that this policy is regressive.

By one analysis, nearly one-third of all the student debt is held by the highest earning fifth of American households. Meanwhile, the lowest earning fifth of households hold only 8 percent of the debt. Just last month, one Congressional staffer earning more than $80,000 thanked President Biden publicly on social media for forgiving his $8,000 student loan.

Working families are struggling with high prices and high interest rates--the direct and predictable result of the Biden administration's runaway spending spree. But now Washington Democrats expect them to pay the bills of some of the highest earning elites? Talk about adding insult to injury.

Even Obama-appointed judges are now agreeing with Republicans that the policy is illegal. Last month's ruling confirmed that the President does not have the authority to wave a magic wand and lower student loan payments.

Washington Democrats love to crow about how the Federal judiciary has been co-opted by shadowy rightwing extremists. They have gone to shameful lengths to degrade the legitimacy of the institution of the Supreme Court.

But when even judges appointed by a Democratic President are siding with the Republicans, it might be time for our colleagues to look in the mirror and ask who the extremists really are.

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