Providing for Disposition of Senate Amendment to H.R. Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2026

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Minnesota for yielding and all the applause coming from the other side.

Look, Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this important bill to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security. You know, we have done this time and time again at least in the House. This will mark tonight the fourth time that the House has voted to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security.

I know there has been a lot of back and forth in the Senate, and then at 3 in the morning Senators just decided, well, throw in the towel and maybe see what they can cobble together to get out of town.

But, Mr. Speaker, we have got a job to do. Our job is to protect the American people to do our job to keep them safe, and that is why we created this Department, not some of the Department, not just pieces of the Department, but the entire Department of Homeland Security.

I know the other side over and over again has wanted to go back to open borders. We are not going to go back to open borders. The American people don't want us to go back to open borders. They have seen the peril of that.

We also, Mr. Speaker, cannot go back to a September 10 mentality, a pre-September 11 mentality where you just ignore the signs of the bad things that are happening in this country. We changed that after September 11, and we vowed: ``Never forget,'' never let it happen again, yet here we are.

Some Members want to get in the time machine, and they want to go back to another day where maybe America didn't have any attacks. Well, how about we go back in a time machine and listen to the Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries. I will read a quote from Hakeem Jeffries. ``We are here today to do a single job, and that should be to fund fully the Department of Homeland Security. Anything else is an abdication of our responsibility. Anything else is an act of legislative malpractice. We are playing political games at a time when the safety and the security of the American people is being threatened.'' That was said in 2015 by Hakeem Jeffries.

Now, what has happened between now and then? Well, let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, this is not your father's Democratic Party anymore. You have seen how far the radical crazy elements of the party have taken over and tried to bring it to this socialist mentality, this open borders mentality, this defund the police mentality. And, yes, this bill absolutely defunds the police.

You have got under this bill that came over from the Senate, even when you count in the working families tax cut that every Democrat voted against, even when you count that in, 6,700 people at the Department of Homeland Security will be defunded. That is right. They will be defunded.

The American people rejected the defund the police movement. Just because it happened in the Senate at 3 in the morning doesn't mean nobody heard it. We did. We didn't just hear it, we read the bill, and we said, no, Mr. Speaker, that is not the responsible thing to do for this country.

This country is counting on us. And by the way, it is at a time when we are at a heightened level of threats. If you are wondering what that heightened level is--I know there are some people that just want to go after police all the time. Why don't we just read a couple of the names that the other side doesn't want to read.

Richard Williams, Mr. Speaker, was an 83-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran who was randomly shoved into the subway tracks by an illegal alien from Honduras. He just died this week.

We have all heard of Sheridan Gorman. Maybe not enough people, Mr. Speaker, have heard of Sheridan Gorman, but we are going to say her name again. She was a beautiful 18-year-old young girl from Loyola University in Chicago, a student who had the world before her. She was shot to death by, yes, an illegal alien from Venezuela who came over here under President Biden's open borders that the other side wants to take us back to. We are not going to do that. That surely is not the responsible thing to do.

Stephanie Minter, a 41-year-old mother from Virginia, was randomly stabbed to death by an illegal, yes, with a lengthy rap sheet with more than 30 prior charges.

How many more of these do we have to have before some people will say, okay, maybe we need to fund this Department? I don't think there is an endless list before--they just don't want to offend their radical base, Mr. Speaker. That is really who they are afraid of.

Obviously, if they were concerned about all these Americans--over and over and over again. This is just in the last month who has been killed by people here illegally, and they are going to go and defund almost 7,000 people at the Department? That is insane.

And, oh, by the way, have we talked about the multiple terrorist attacks that have happened, yes, here on our homeland, not on foreign soil, here on our homeland just in the last month, and they want to partially defund this agency with this bill and the working families tax cut. Still over 10 percent of the whole agency will be defunded at a time when we are at a heightened terrorist threat.

Could you imagine if you had a terrorist outside of your house, and somebody said, well, we will let you lock the front door, but we don't have time to lock the back door? You would think that was crazy. You would lock the front door, the back door, the windows, and everything else, and you would go get your shotgun.

But yet, they want to defund this agency and make our country vulnerable, make Americans less safe? I am not going to have anything to do with that, Mr. Speaker. I want to fund the whole Department. That is what this bill does. It pays everybody. It pays the TSA agents as they should be, as Democrats have voted time and time again to not pay. We pay them. And it is not long-term. I wish it was. We have sent them a long-term bill. This is for a few months. We at least have time to keep negotiating our differences.

These are big differences, but these are dangerous times in America. This is not the time to defund the police, to defund the Department of Homeland Security at any level. Mr. Speaker, I would urge everybody to vote for this bill. Let's do our job. We are here doing the right thing to keep America safe. I urge adoption.

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