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Floor Speech
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The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. McCORMICK). Objection to the modification is heard.
Is there an objection to the original request?
The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. VAN HOLLEN.
I just want to take a few moments to respond to the Senator from Kansas.
First of all, I do think it is the business of the subcommittee that oversees the Department of Justice and the FBI to ensure that the men and women of the FBI have a headquarters--wherever it is--that meets the security standards that they have set out for themselves for their own protection.
I also agree with the Senator from Kansas in that we should and do work together on a bipartisan basis on the Appropriations Committee and that we should do that as a separate branch of government than the executive branch.
The only reason we are here is that the President of the United States decided to seize funds that had been set aside by this committee on a bipartisan basis and others and use them for another purpose.
This is a moment, actually, where, if the Senate were adhering to its traditions of bipartisanship, it would stand up together against the President of the United States. But that is not what we are witnessing on so many of these appropriations bills.
What happened in this case was the President of the United States interfered with the process. I did offer an amendment in the Senate Appropriations Committee. It was actually adopted on a majority basis. It was an amendment not only to ensure that the FBI would go to a level 5 security facility, but it was an amendment that said it should go to the one that was selected after a long process.
After that was adopted on a bipartisan basis, our Republican colleagues on the committee said that all of the work that we had done on the bill--all of the work the Senator from Kansas is talking about when it comes to the NSF, when it comes to NASA, when it comes to NOAA--that we were not going to let all of that good work go forward if that amendment to ensure the security of the FBI facility at the selected site were attached.
I have never seen anything like it in Congress. Even before I got here, I, too, was a student of Congress and loved the process. What happened was, after that amendment got on in the Appropriations Committee on a bipartisan basis, our Republican colleagues said: We don't want that so badly that we are now going to undo that entire process.
That is not bipartisanship--and we know why that happened too. It didn't happen because members of the Senate Appropriations Committee-- Republicans and Democrats--didn't think that it was the right thing to do to preserve what we had set out before and make sure that the men and women had a level 5 security headquarters. We did it because the President of the United States was going to throw a fit if that provision stayed on. That is why people reversed the position.
So I say to my friend from Kansas: We should do our work on a bipartisan basis, and we shouldn't make our decisions out of fear about what somebody in the White House is going to do, because that--that-- distorts the entire process here in the U.S. Senate.
I believe that, if we set this aside for now, we will, I hope, be able to get it back on track in September. I hope we will return to what has been that bipartisan tradition and not allow the executive to come in and undo work that has been done on a bipartisan basis. This is not about picking the location in this amendment. This is simply about making sure that the men and women of the FBI have a building that is secure.
I will just end with this: The last time the Trump administration was in the White House, they also played with this whole issue. They said they wanted to construct a new headquarters on the site of the current FBI building, the Hoover building. Then they submitted to Congress a 25-page prospectus that they said would meet the security requirements of the men and women of the FBI. Guess what. The inspector general of the Department of Justice and the inspector general of GSA said that the work they showed did not meet those security requirements. It did not meet those security requirements.
We should make sure wherever they go--Maryland, Virginia, Washington--that the congressional directive, that FBI directive, for the purposes that I set out at the beginning because of the kind of work the FBI does--we need to honor that. That is what this amendment does. That is what it did when it was first adopted by the Appropriations Committee on a bipartisan basis before everyone ran the other way because they were going to make the White House mad.
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