Department of Homeland Security Funding

Floor Speech

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, as we continue this debate on funding
for the Department of Homeland Security, we face some fundamental
questions. Are we going to prioritize the safety and security of the
American people or are we going to put the country at risk because of
an ideological disagreement? That is the choice we face with this bill.

We can debate immigration. I think Members of the Democratic caucus
would be happy to do that. The Senate did that 2 years ago when we
passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill with 68 bipartisan
votes. But this is not the time for us to have this debate.

We need to fund the Department of Homeland Security now so they can
continue to do their work. We can either pass a clean bill that makes
critical investments in our Nation's security or we can put our Nation
at risk by playing politics with funding for the Department of Homeland
Security.

I appreciate what the Appropriations Committee chairman, Senator
Cochran from Mississippi, did earlier today by coming down and laying
out what is in the funding for the Department of Homeland Security and
laying out the important work of the Department of Homeland Security. I
believe most of us appreciate the work they do and why it is so
important to the safety and security of the country. That is why we
need to pass a clean bill to ensure that they are funded for the rest
of this year.

For those who are in the Senate Chamber and for those watching at
home who have not been following what has gone on here in Washington
with this bill, I will provide a little history on how we got to where
we are today.

In the closing weeks of the 113th Congress, Senator Mikulski, then
chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Congressman Rogers,
chair of the House Appropriations Committee, negotiated spending for
the entire government, including the Department of Homeland Security.
This was a compromise measure. Not everyone got what they wanted, but
the bill funded Homeland Security priorities at levels that would
ensure that the Department could fulfill its mission.

Then, sadly, politics came into play. Some Members of the House
Republican caucus demanded that the Homeland Security bill be removed
from the larger budget because of immigration issues. They didn't like
the President's Executive action on immigration. Now the entire
Department is funded on a short-term basis through February 27, which
is just 23 days from now.

Last month the House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill to
fund Homeland Security, but they added politically divisive language
that rolls back protections for immigrant children, among other anti-
immigrant measures. It also would roll back some of the efforts for
surveillance and efforts to address illegal immigrants who are
committing crimes when they come into this country.

Because of these controversial immigration riders, President Obama
immediately announced that he would veto the House-passed bill. Last
week, the entire Democratic caucus of the Senate signed a letter to
Majority Leader McConnell urging him to put the security of our Nation
first, to put politics aside, and to work with us to pass a clean
Homeland Security funding bill without controversial immigration riders attached--to pass a bill the President can sign.

I ask unanimous consent to have the letter from the Senate Democratic
caucus printed in the Record.

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Cloture was not invoked on the House bill. We saw that
yesterday in our vote. It is a bill that cannot become law. There are
only 24 days left before funding for the Homeland Security Department
expires.

The House bill cannot move forward. So I urge my colleagues on the
other side of the aisle to work with us to pass a clean full-year
budget, without controversial riders, to fund Homeland Security.

As the ranking member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee, I am
ready to work with my colleague Senator Hoeven, who chairs the
Subcommittee on Homeland Security, and the chair and ranking member of
the Appropriations Committee, Senator Cochran and Senator Mikulski, and
the entire committee to pass a bill to keep our Nation safe and to
avoid disrupting the work of the Department of Homeland Security and to
keep this critical agency operating at full strength. In fact, Senator
Mikulski and I introduced a bill last week, S. 272, which would do
exactly that.

We live in dangerous times. Every day new threats emerge that
threaten our citizens at home and our allies abroad. The Department of
Homeland Security's role in protecting our country from these threats
cannot be overstated, and its funding should not be controversial.

Right now the U.S. law enforcement community is on high alert for
terror threats after attacks in Sydney, Australia, and Ottawa, Canada,
and, of course, the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.

Just 2 weeks ago, an Ohio man was arrested when authorities
discovered he was plotting to blow up the U.S. Capitol in an ISIS-
inspired plan. ISIS has thousands of foreign fighters, including
Americans among their ranks, who can return to their home countries to
do harm and who say they intend to do that.

We were all horrified yesterday by the news of the courageous
Jordanian pilot who was killed in such a barbaric and disgusting way by
the Islamic State.

We have recently learned that ISIS plans to take advantage of the
Syrian refugee crisis and to move their fighters into Turkey and
Europe. These are real threats. They are a clear and present danger to
this country, and because they are so real, we need our
counterterrorism intelligence community operating at full strength. An
essential part of our Nation's counterterrorism and intelligence
infrastructure is within the Department of Homeland Security.

As Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush's Secretary of Homeland Security
said, ``intelligence is not only about spies and satellites.''

Intelligence is also about the disciplined daily tasks of collecting
and analyzing thousands of reports and investigations that are ongoing
all across our country--from our local and State police, our Border
Patrol agents, our port security personnel, and our Coast Guard
patrolling our shores.

The Department of Homeland Security takes these thousands of bits of
information, sifts out the critical details, coordinates with our
foreign intelligence agencies, and gets critical information to our
first responders on the ground as quickly as possible. This work is
critical to keeping our Nation safe from terrorism.

One of the chief criticisms of the 9/11 report was that we need to
improve intelligence information sharing between the intelligence
community and our first responders on the ground.

I was Governor on September 11. I know some of the challenges that we
had in New Hampshire with that information sharing. Well, that is one
of the missions the Department of Homeland Security was created to
carry out.

If you talk to Governors and mayors, police chiefs and sheriffs, and
the folks on the ground who are responsible for keeping our citizens
safe every day, ask them about their fusion centers. Ask them whether
they want their law enforcement to go back to the days when all of our
intelligence was bottled up in Washington, DC, and our towns and cities
were on their own. Of course they don't want to go back to being kept
in the dark. There is too much at stake, but that is what could happen
if the Department of Homeland Security is not fully functioning.

I wish to point out that we received a letter from the U.S.
Conference of Mayors. It is signed by Tom Cochran, CEO and executive
director. He sent it to Senators Cochran, Mikulski, Hoeven, and
Shaheen. I will not read the whole letter, but they point out a number
of issues which I believe are important in laying out the challenge and
why we need to pass a clean funding bill.

Mr. Cochran says:

I write on behalf of the nation's mayors to urge you to
expeditiously report out a ``clean'' bill to fund the
Department of Homeland Security for the remainder of the
current fiscal year. A fully functioning Department of
Homeland Security is critical to the security of our nation,
our cities, and our citizens. A Department operating on a
short-term continuing resolution, despite its best efforts,
faces uncertainty and delays and simply cannot be fully
functioning.

He goes on to elaborate a number of the important programs and
important work that the Department of Homeland Security does, and I
will not read all of that.

I ask unanimous consent that this letter be printed in the Record.

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I will also point out a letter we
received, which again, was addressed to Senator Cochran and Senator
Mikulski.

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. This is from emergency managers, and it says:

The nation's local emergency managers urge you to include
full-year funding for programs at the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) that support state and local emergency
management programs. These programs are critical to preparing
our nation for all hazards including terrorist attacks.

Again, they go on at length, and I ask unanimous consent to have this
letter printed in the Record.

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. There are any number of reasons why we need to pass a
clean funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security. We should
be working to do that now. We should stop the ideological debate and
focus on the risk to this country if we fail to act, the potential risk
we would face by passing a continuing resolution, and the risk to this
country if we shut down the Department of Homeland Security. None of
those options are acceptable.

We need to work together and get this done. I urge my colleagues to
do that.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

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