Emergency Border Security Supplemental Appropriations, Fiscal Year 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROGERS of Kentucky. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I might consume.

Madam Speaker, it's been now 47 days, almost 6 weeks, since our subcommittee marked up the fiscal 2011 appropriations bill that would fund the Department of Homeland Security. Forty-seven days. Normally, after you mark up a bill in subcommittee, it immediately goes to the full committee, and then immediately to the floor of the House for us to act on the entire appropriations for the entire Department of Homeland Security.

For some reason, the Democrat leadership in the House chose to delay the markup of the funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security now 6 weeks. And instead, they're bringing up this piecemeal supplemental bill that would make a nice amendment to the appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security if we could get that bill to us. And this supplemental, if passed, has to go back to the Senate, who is gone for the summer, before it can become law, even if we pass it here. And number two, it won't take effect until next year.

So, Madam Speaker, I'm asking, why are we here? Why did we come back for this? Because it can't take effect until next year and it can't take effect until the Senate comes back to pass on it. And they're gone until September. So why are we here? I don't know. I don't know. Forty-seven days that we have been waiting to bring up funding for the whole Department of Homeland Security. Homeland security, flippantly dealt with by the Democrat majority.

Now, here's what this bill before us today won't do. This bill won't address the massive and inexplicable cuts the President proposed to cut the Coast Guard and to the Customs and Border Protection's aerial resources. The President submitted a budget to the subcommittee cutting Coast Guard, slashing the Border assets. The subcommittee in our markup corrected that, but we can't get that bill to come onto the floor.

This bill won't do enough to improve our interdiction capabilities and stop the flow of drugs into northern Mexico and through the source and transit zones. This bill won't address any of the post-Christmas Day attack needs for aviation security or watchlisting. All of these were dealt with in the regular bill, if we could get it before the House. But this piecemeal approach doesn't work. And this bill surely won't address the numerous other homeland security challenges facing the country that range from emergency preparedness, to immigration enforcement, to cybersecurity. Simply put, this bill does nothing to make up for the fact that the fiscal 2011 Homeland Security bill is nowhere in sight.

Why are we taking up this piecemeal approach? So it's all about, I guess, politics. It's all about politics. I ask the majority, where's the bill? Bring us the bill. We can amend it with this supplemental, make a modest change in the bill. Just bring us the bill.

Madam Speaker, our country's facing many grave threats to our security. In the wake of the Christmas Day, Times Square, and Fort Hood attacks, and with a drug war waging along our border, it's a complete dereliction of duty by the Democrat majority to avoid moving the fiscal 2011 Homeland Security appropriations bill.

So let's be absolutely clear about what we are doing here today. Yes, we are improving, we would improve the House Democrats' incomplete and deficit-increasing border security supplemental, but this bill won't take effect until next year. Why are we here? According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, not a single dime of this bill will be spent until fiscal 2011.

If they had brought forth the Homeland Security appropriations bill for the whole Department, we could have avoided a supplemental altogether. We could have made the changes in that bill that this bill suggests, perhaps, and all would have been fine. Homeland security would have again reached the importance that it has in the past. Instead, now homeland security is sort of a secondary thought, apparently, by the majority, because they won't bring us the bill.

So what that tells me is that we should be addressing all of our homeland security issues here today, not just putting a Band-Aid on some of our urgent border security needs with this supplemental. In fact, this supplemental, as I have said, might have made a very worthwhile amendment to the full security appropriations bill if the majority would bring it out and let it be discussed. But they control the rules, and they've said, no, we don't want to discuss the whole matter of homeland security. We want to address just these small pieces of it.

So again we ask, where's the bill and why are we here? The fact of the matter is that the Democrat majority should be governing and Congress should be addressing our urgent security needs in the most responsible and disciplined way possible. Sadly, as demonstrated by the Democrat majority's repeated attempts to bend the rules and their lethargic pace and inaction on critical security issues like funding for our brave troops, that is certainly not the case this year. The bottom line is we desperately need to get our homeland security right. We need to address our security needs with real solutions, not partial fixes that circumvent regular order and that employ questionable offsets, as this bill does.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ROGERS of Kentucky. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I understand the gentlelady from Arizona's frustrations. In fact, I sympathize with her. I made the same arguments she has just made in trying to bring up to the floor of this House the funding bill for the entire Department of Homeland Security, for the Coast Guard and for the Secret Service and for the Border Patrol and for all of the other agencies, the 22 that make up the Department. I made those arguments: Why are we wasting time? Let's get on with it. And yet the majority will not bring up the bill that funds the whole Department.

We could have cured this months ago. It's been 6 weeks, Madam Speaker, since we passed the bill in the subcommittee that would have taken care of all these problems.

And, yes, I want to see politics out of it, too, but you're in control, and you won't let us bring that bill to the floor. Instead, we are faced with this little piecemeal bill here, trying to correct the President's slash of the Border Patrol when he submitted his budget to the Congress.

So, yes, I sympathize with the gentlelady. I wish we could get that bill up here, too, and stop playing politics with national security.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ROGERS of Kentucky. Madam Speaker, I will yield myself such time as I may consume in closing.

Again, I wish we had, Madam Speaker, the bill that funds the entire Department of Homeland Security before us instead of this piecemeal approach. I don't fathom why the majority will not bring forth that bill that's been marked up since 47 days ago--6 weeks--and yet they refuse to bring it out. Instead, they bring this piecemeal bill out there that only deals with a particular aspect of the entire Homeland Security bill.

And, number two, as I've said before, even if we pass this bill here, it still has to go back to the Senate before it can become law, and they're gone until the middle of September. And this bill won't spend any money until next year anyway.

So that's why I say why are we doing it this way? Why can't we just bring out the bill and deal with it? It includes all of this as well.

And yet the majority refuses to do that. It's all about politics, Madam Speaker. We are all concerned about that border, about the crime that is taking place, about the illicit drugs coming across, illegal people coming across. And we have devoted so much of the Nation's energy and monies to try to seal that border to little effect, it seems.

And yet if we had the whole Department of Homeland Security budget here on the floor so that we could at once deal with Coast Guard, with Secret Service, with Border Patrol, with enforcement of the laws against illegal immigration, if we had all of those matters before us, we could deal with it holistically. But they won't do it. Instead, we have this bill which won't become law until next year anyway. So I ask the Speaker, why did you call us back in session on this bill knowing that it could not become law until next year anyway? Puzzlement.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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