Legislative Session
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the Senate will resume consideration of S. Con. Res. 33, which the clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority leader is recognized.
Mr. President, yesterday, Republicans moved to begin consideration of a budget resolution to fund law enforcement--Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement--at the Department of Homeland Security.
We have a multistep process ahead of us, but at the end, Republicans will have helped ensure that America's borders are secure and prevented Democrats from defunding these important Agencies.
Bear in mind, that is exactly what Democrats are trying to do here. You remember the cry to ``defund the police''? Well, it is back. Democrats want to defund law enforcement, defund border security, and effectively reopen America's borders to the flood of illegal immigration and criminal activity we saw under the Biden administration.
We have always seen what happens when Democrats embrace open borders. Almost exactly 5 years ago, I was at the southern border with a number of my Republican colleagues. And at the same time, just 2 months into the Biden administration, the signs of crisis were already present.
That March, Border Patrol apprehended more illegal immigrants than it had in a single month in 15 years. Nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children crossed the southern border that month.
And under the Biden administration, thousands of children were placed with unvetted sponsors or turned up missing or unaccounted for or worse.
As we saw on that visit, Border Patrol was overwhelmed. One facility that we visited was at 16 times its allotted capacity, and agents were being pulled off the border to deal with the influx of immigrants, leaving border security operations understaffed.
All of this, as I said, was just 2 months into the Biden administration.
Now, I wish I could say that that is as bad as it got, but unfortunately the situation continued to get worse. Over the next few years, we saw the number
Numerous cities, including many blue cities far from the border like Denver, Chicago, Boston, were overwhelmed with the influx of migrants.
Amid the surge of illegal immigration, the United Nations named the United States-Mexico border the deadliest border crossing in the world as hundreds of immigrants died making the journey through the desert across the Rio Grande.
Meanwhile, the cartels got rich.
A New York Times headline in 2022 read: ``Smuggling Migrants at the Border Now a Billion-Dollar Business.''
And illegal drugs made their way across the border to every corner of America.
The sheriff where I live in Minnehaha, County, SD, said in 2022:
And we all remember the tragic instances of illegal immigrants murdering American citizens. The lives of young women like Laken Riley were taken by illegal immigrants who came into our country during the Biden administration.
We had a crisis on our hands at the border and in our communities from the earliest days of the Biden administration. And Democrats? Democrats just ignored it.
It wasn't until 2024--by no coincidence, an election year--that Democrats decided it might be a good idea to at least show some interest in border security.
Leader Schumer finally conceded that year:
That was the Democrat leader just 2 years ago.
Well, no more. Democrats are back to their cry to defund law enforcement. That is right.
Two years ago, Leader Schumer said the southern border was in ``desperate need of more resources.'' Now he refuses to give any--any-- resources to the southern border.
I have to say, as bad as things got under President Biden, at least we had Border Patrol. Now Democrats seem to think we can do without them. They refuse to fund Border Patrol, the very Agency that is tasked with securing the southern border. They want to defund it.
They refuse to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They are apparently willing to leave our law enforcement unfunded and our border unprotected. You would think Democrats would have learned their lesson from embracing the ``abolish ICE'' and ``defund the police'' crowds.
These kinds of radical positions are exactly why Americans elected Republicans in 2024. But if Democrats want to continue to embrace being the party of ``defund the police'' and open borders, they can do that.
Republicans are going to do the job that the American people elected us to do, and one of the most basic parts of that job is funding the government--the entire government--and securing our borders.
And so as I said, Republicans are moving forward with a budget resolution that will allow us to fund critical functions that Democrats refuse to support: law enforcement, drug interdiction, border security, protecting children--both our own and the unaccompanied minors who suffer human trafficking and worse under Democrats' open border policies.
And to prevent Democrats from deciding that they want to defund law enforcement again in September, we are going to fund these critical functions for the next 3 years. I would love to think that at least some Democrats would rethink their defund law enforcement posture and join us to fund these priorities.
But the party of the Biden border crisis seems still determined to opt for open borders.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Democratic leader is recognized.
Mr. President, yesterday, Senate Republicans put forward their budget resolution for its first procedural vote. The contents of their budget resolution are astounding.
Mr. President, $140 billion for ICE and Border Patrol, zero dollars to lower Americans' costs. This will be a reconciliation of contrasts: Republicans want to shell out billions of dollars to Donald Trump's private army without any commonsense reforms or restraints.
Democrats want to put money in Americans' pockets by lowering the costs of healthcare and gas and groceries, housing, and so much else.
Republicans are bending the knee to Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. Democrats are standing up for the American people. Republicans want to keep shutting down TSA, FEMA, CISA, Coast Guard, and other crucial DHS Agencies. Democrats want to reopen all the law-abiding Agencies in the Department of Homeland Security.
Republicans are at each other's throats, tying their party up in knots. Democrats stand united, and we stand firm. So this is a reconciliation of contrasts.
Senate Democrats will make these contrasts abundantly clear, vote after vote, amendment after amendment, during the upcoming vote-arama. We are also making the contrast apparent off the floor. This week, we Democrats are releasing another ``Broken Promises'' report on how Republicans have taken a trillion dollars out of the healthcare system and ripped healthcare away from 15 million Americans all to give tax breaks to the billionaires.
Republicans are about to learn the hard way that when they refuse to reduce costs, they lose. Republicans will find they cannot reconcile their deeply partisan, unpopular, and costly policies with the frustration Americans feel today.
This will be a reconciliation of reckoning for Senate Republicans--a reconciliation of reckoning.
Mr. President, every day this disastrous war continues, Donald Trump digs himself deeper and deeper and deeper into a hole.
The longer Trump takes to extricate himself from Iran, the deeper the hole gets and the harder it will be for him to get out.
The Iranian regime that the United States is trying to negotiate with is even more hardline than when Trump began the war.
Iran's hold over Hormuz has gotten even stronger. Iran maintains its economic stranglehold on the world, firing on more merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz earlier today.
So it is amazing. Before the war, the regime in Iran, bad as it was, was not as dug in as this one is, making it even harder to negotiate. Before the war, oil was flowing freely out of the Strait of Hormuz. Now it is all clogged up.
Everything Trump did with this war has made things worse, and he keeps digging himself into this hole--deeper and deeper. The American people are fed up, seeing this war as reckless, as harmful, and as costly a misadventure as there has ever been.
Trump's continued enthusiasm for the war makes me wonder: Has he somehow mixed up the graphs showing his crumbling approval ratings with those showing the soaring price of oil and gas? Let's sort it out for him.
Trump's approval rating is at an alltime low. Only 33 percent approve of him in the most recent polls. Trump's approval on the economy is even lower, at 30 percent, in part because the price of oil and gas has gone up and up and up. Trump's standing in the eyes of the American people craters every day that this war continues.
Meanwhile, gas has been over $4 a gallon for weeks, the highest it has been in years. Americans are going to pay at least $740 more this year to fill
Every day, we hear new promises from the Trump administration that victory has been achieved. Victory is just around the corner, he keeps saying. But when you look around the corner, that hasn't happened. Trump says peace is at hand; costs are starting to come down--both lies. And every day, we see the opposite.
Trump can talk all he wants, but nothing will change--nothing--until he realizes his war has to end.
While I am relieved that the cease-fire deadline has been extended, Congress needs to seize this opportunity to stop this blunder before the fighting resumes.
I urge Senate Republicans to vote for our War Powers Resolution later today. That is their fifth opportunity to do so.
Republicans, if Trump won't dig himself out of the hole he has dug, you, Republicans, should pull him out by voting for our War Powers Resolution today. If not, you, Republicans in the Senate, are going to fall into the same hole. You are already falling into it. But if you don't dig him out of the hole, you are going to fall into this hole, deeper and deeper, alongside him.
I thank Senator Baldwin for her work on this resolution. Democrats will continue to force votes on our resolution every week, until Republicans see reason and help us end this war.
They would be doing Donald Trump a favor. Republican Senators would be doing Donald Trump a favor by supporting this resolution. And every week Republicans wait to do so will cost their party politically and the American people financially.
Mr. President, on the Southern Poverty Law Center, I just want to say a quick word about the deeply disturbing charges the Justice Department has brought against the Southern Poverty Law Center.
These charges should send a chill down the spine of every American who cares about free expression and the rule of law in the Justice Department. It should send a chill down the spine of every American who cares about civil liberties and the fight against violence and extremism.
Let's be clear what this case is really about. It has nothing to do with alleged wire fraud or the Southern Poverty Law Center somehow working in coordination with the KKK. That is ridiculous on its face. It doesn't pass the laugh test. It is about Donald Trump turning the Department of Justice into the ``Department of Vengeance,'' his own attack dog. He has done it time and time and time again. And when you think it can't get worse, it does: To attack the Southern Poverty Law Center of collaboration and accuse it of collaboration with their known enemy, the KKK?
Weaponizing the DOJ to indict civil rights groups is not law and order. It is a message. If you defend voting rights, if you fight White supremacy, you are next. Donald Trump will use the Federal Government to go after any group that dares to speak out against him.
This is amazing. In 1983, the Ku Klux Klan tried to burn down the Southern Poverty Law Center for daring to expose its hatred. More than four decades later, the Trump administration is trying to do the same thing in the courtroom. It is an absolute disgrace how far this administration goes down, turning what America is all about inside out.
Mr. President, on Patel, every day Kash Patel remains in this job is another day that undermines the FBI and its mission.
Take yesterday's press conference. The head of the FBI, the Nation's top law enforcement officer, spent the entire time getting into fights with reporters about his alleged drunken behavior, his partying, his overall fitness for the job. This has become a dangerous, unacceptable distraction for the FBI, which has so much important work to do.
Donald Trump has led us to war right now against Iran, a nation known for sophisticated cyber attacks. Why is Kash Patel not focused on that? Why is Kash Patel not focused on the serious threats facing this country?
Every day that these stories of misconduct persist, they undermine the mission of the FBI. Every day that these questions about Patel, his behavior, his character linger, they weaken confidence in the leadership of one of the most important law enforcement agencies in the world.
Kash Patel must resign immediately. He is not a serious person. He has not shown that he has the skills required for the job. And the last few days have shown he does not have the judgment to lead an Agency like the FBI.
This is what happens when Trump just chooses acolytes--people who suck up to him--for important jobs. That shouldn't be any criteria in choosing the head of the FBI. But, instead, it seems to be Trump's only criteria, and it puts him in trouble. It puts him in the hot seat, in the frying pan, over and over again, by choosing people whose only criteria is loyalty to him.
Americans deserve steady, sober leadership from their FBI Director, especially during a time of war. Kash Patel is not it. And if Kash Patel wants to keep partying, he can do it somewhere else, without putting the safety of the American people on the line.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, let me begin with a message to the brave men and women of ICE and of Border Patrol. Republicans honor your unwavering service and sacrifice. You know that Democrats, through their words and actions here, do not.
Many of you are veterans and served in the military. Many of you have families at home. You are the professionals who secure our Nation's borders. You are the heroes who risk your lives to keep our communities safe.
Democrats have said you are the problem. You are not the problem. ``Defund the police'' Democrats are the problem.
Democrat Representative Ocasio-Cortez of New York said you are a ``rogue Agency.'' Senator Schumer of New York has echoed those same words yesterday.
You are not a rogue Agency. Today's Democrats are a rogue and radical party.
You deserve better than reckless Democrat hostage-taking. That is what is going on here. You deserve the tools and the support from Congress necessary to carry out the vital mission that Congress has given you.
This Nation depends upon you, and Republicans are going to deliver for you. That is what this debate is about today.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement must be funded fully and immediately. The U.S. Border Patrol must be funded fully and immediately. It is just common sense. These Agencies keep America safe every single day.
If Congress doesn't act quickly, they are going to run out of money very soon, perhaps in a matter of weeks. That would make our country less safe.
Senate Republicans are united and committed to keeping America safe and secure. Republicans will use the budget reconciliation process to do that.
This means that we can fund American law enforcement without relying on a single Democrat vote. Democrats have turned into the party of ``defund the police''.
And let me tell you about the Republican plan to protect our communities. Our plan provides more than $70 billion of funding for immigration enforcement and border security. It secures the funding not for 1 year, not for 2 years, but for the next 3 years.
The Republican plan means stronger law enforcement and safer communities. It also represents a commitment to the dedicated professionals of ICE and Border Patrol. And we are going to continue to support them, just as they continue to protect all of us.
This is funding Democrats once agreed to. Now, they have walked away from it. Democrats have blocked funding for the Department of Homeland Security not once, not twice--16 times
Through their actions, Democrats are putting the safety and security of our Nation behind the safety and security of their own political careers.
Democrats have blocked funding for Border Patrol. This is the Agency that stops the criminals, the drug traffickers, the human traffickers, and the terrorist suspects from entering our country illegally. Democrats would love to defund them permanently.
Democrats have also blocked funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This is the Agency that removes illegal immigrant criminals from our communities and takes them off the streets.
The American people support removing illegal immigrant criminals. Clearly, Democrats do not. Democrats care more about protecting illegal immigrant criminals than they do about protecting law-abiding American citizens.
Democrats seem to want to take our country backward--backward to the bad days when they were in the majority and our southern border was wide open, backward to the days when illegal immigrant criminals roamed freely in our communities. This is an insult to the families of Laken Riley and Sheridan Gorman and to all of the innocent people who have been murdered by illegal immigrant criminals.
The budget resolution that we are debating today is part of a larger Republican effort to keep America safe. The last administration threw the border wide open. More than 10 million illegal immigrants flooded into our Nation. Under President Trump and Republicans, the border is now secure. Law enforcement is being restored.
Last year, Republicans passed the most comprehensive border security investment in American history--nearly $165 billion. It was part of the Working Families Tax Cut law. The results speak for themselves: Zero-- absolutely zero--illegal immigrants have been released into the country for nearly a year. The Republican budget resolution builds on that success.
To my Democrat colleagues who are calling for reforming ICE, let me just say directly to you on the floor of the U.S. Senate: You rejected every single opportunity for common sense, cooperation, and compromise. You said no to all of it.
Republicans offered body cameras for agents; Democrats voted no. Republicans offered more oversight; Democrats voted no. Republicans offered more training for agents; Democrats voted no.
Reform no matter how reasonable--no matter how much common sense--was never the point of the Democrats. The point has always been to abolish ICE, to abolish our Border Patrol, and to return to open borders. Today's Democrat Party owns that shameful record. They can run from it, but they cannot hide from it. It is their record, and the Senate has a duty to protect the American people.
The choice is simple. The choice is clear: Fund law enforcement or block it. That is the vote today. Fund border security or try to block it. That is what we are voting on.
The American people are watching. They will know and remember who voted to protect law-abiding American citizens and who voted to protect illegal immigrant criminals. Republicans are ready to stand and vote for the safety and the security of the American people.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I rise today to honor a fellow Iowan, a friend, and an extraordinary leader GEN Randy A. George, upon his retirement from the U.S. Army after more than four decades of distinguished service to our Nation. General George has devoted his life to the defense of the United States of America and her people.
Born to Robert and Lorraine George and raised in Alden--a beautiful, rural community in north central Iowa--Randy's folks instilled in him solid Iowa values that would take him on an incredible journey from the rolling countryside of our heartland to the highest ranks of the U.S. Army.
Randy was raised humble, hard-working, courageous, and patriotic. Randy enlisted in the U.S. Army before his 18th birthday, and he focused his eyes on the future. Two years after his enlistment, Randy received a nomination for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from my distinguished colleague Senator Chuck Grassley. Randy then received his appointment to West Point and joined the distinguished ``Long Gray Line.'' He was commissioned from West Point as an infantry officer in 1988 and served as a lieutenant in the vaunted 101st Airborne Division and rose through the ranks in many illustrious units, including the 4th Infantry Division, 173rd Airborne Brigade, and I Corps.
Randy has served in multiple deployments through several eras of American warfare--from Operation Desert Shield-Desert Storm to the Global War on Terrorism. His boots tread soil and sand in many countries--Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many more around the globe in his most senior positions with the United States Army. He literally commanded at every level of the Army, and our Army is so much stronger, agile, and lethal because of his leadership.
Randy advanced to the role of Vice Chief of Staff of the Army from 2022 to 2023 and most recently served as our 41st Chief of Staff of the Army. As Chief of Staff, Randy readied our Army for the future battlefield, capitalizing on the innovative spirit of our soldiers to transform the service from the ground up.
His determination yielded generational investments in the Army's Organic Industrial Base and a long overdue slashing of unnecessary waste and bureaucracy, equipping our soldiers with the training and the technology they need to survive and dominate on the battlefield.
Those who served with him describe him as a consistent leader, steady in even the most trying of times. He is a man who loves and respects his soldiers and built winning, capable teams. He is a soldier's soldier, which in the Army is the highest of compliments. He will be remembered for that. He is a man of character, who placed the Army's responsibility to our great Nation above all else.
Now, as a Senator, I am very privileged to travel to many communities across Iowa every single year. As I recently passed through the little, tiny communities in Hardin County, I asked the farmers and the small business owners if they knew Randy George, and, of course, they did. I received answers of ``I played basketball in high school with Randy,'' or ``My sister used to babysit Randy,'' and ``Randy's dad inspired me to go into agriculture.'' They all had kind words, and they spoke those words with pride.
Most were proud that Randy was serving in the Army. They all knew that he had an important job, but their eyes would pop open when I explained that he was the highest ranking officer in the U.S. Army: Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. Honestly, Randy's job title didn't matter to them because, in Alden, IA, he--simply known as Randy George--was doing great work to keep them all safe. Randy represents the very best of Iowa and of our Nation.
I would also like to express my thanks to Randy's wife and his West Point classmate Mrs. Patty George. She has served Army families for nearly 40 years and whose energy--endless energy--and dedication were reflected in every single formation that Randy led. The Georges raised two incredible kids Grant and Andrea, and they recently welcomed two grandchildren to their family as well.
We wish Randy and his entire family continued success and fulfillment.
GEN Randy George's legacy will endure through the thousands and thousands of soldiers that were shaped by his mentorship and example. I know he will continue to serve our Nation.
Sir, General George, I am honored to be your Senator.
So today, as I hold the floor of the Senate in the heart of the Nation's Capital, on behalf of an extremely grateful nation, I extend my deepest
Randy and Patty, ``No Task Too Great.'' You have demonstrated this well to all of America. God bless you, and Godspeed.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Texas.
Mr. President, we are almost at the end of April, and the Department of Homeland Security has been shuttered since February. It is incredible to me that at a time when the geopolitics of the world make the likelihood of domestic terrorist attacks greater than usual, that our Democratic colleagues would simply reflexively oppose funding for the Department of Homeland Security because they don't believe immigration laws should be enforced.
It is absurd that they have taken this approach to voice their opposition to President Trump, which maybe explains everything because the first question, it seems like, in their mind is: If President Trump wants it, maybe we should oppose it, which has been consistent with their behavior. But it is time for this nonsense to end for a variety of reasons.
I just came from a Judiciary Committee hearing on intellectual property theft and espionage from the People's Republic of China, among other adversaries. And one of the things that I am not sure people recognize is that the chief civilian cyber security Agency of the Federal Government is housed within the Department of Homeland Security--CISA, it is called.
They have currently furloughed 60 percent of their staff because Democrats refuse to fund the Department of Homeland Security because they are mad that President Trump is keeping his commitment to enforce our immigration laws. So, again: collateral damage to many unintended targets, but this is what happens when mindless partisanship prevails.
The American people, of course, voted to elect President Trump, and one of the main reasons was because he was very clear about where he stood on open borders and on the failure of the Biden administration to enforce our immigration laws. So, now, the Democrats have shut down the Department to try to prevent him from carrying out his mandate.
At the end of our last session, the Senate finally came together on a plan to reopen the Department of Homeland Security. I was proud to vote yes. It seemed like a no-brainer. But, unfortunately, the House did not agree. Unfortunately, I think they misunderstood what we had actually done because we had prefunded ICE and Customs and Border Protection in the Working Families Tax Cut bill because we anticipated that they might pull this kind of stunt. Well, unfortunately, that funding is now stalled in the House.
Speaker Johnson, of course, has his own constraints, given a one-seat majority and the fact that Democrats won't cooperate even on commonsense things like funding the Department of Homeland Security. But I hope that he will continue to try to pick up the torch and pass this bill so this shutdown can end--this mindless partisanship that has caused this shutdown.
President Trump, Leader Thune, and Chairman Graham have decided that we will keep the current budget resolution focused like a laser on funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security generally so we can do that by the deadline that President Trump set of June 1.
None of this would be necessary if Democrats would come to their senses and just simply--we can fight about the role that Immigration and Customs Enforcement plays. We can fight about the policies that guide them. But they are, in fact, enforcing laws that Congress has passed. Yet they want to make them the scapegoat for enforcing immigration laws.
And, again, this appears to me to be nothing more than a continuation of their efforts to maintain open borders and to deny enforcement of immigration laws.
But as we are considering a budget reconciliation bill, hopefully, once we get this accomplished here in the next few weeks, it will give us enough time before the end of this fiscal year to consider a third reconciliation vehicle to accomplish additional Republican priorities. And there are some important provisions I would like to see included in that next reconciliation bill--again, anticipating no cooperation at all from our Democratic colleagues.
One of those priorities for me is to permanently defund Planned Parenthood. Respect for life has always been and always will be a pillar of the conservative movement and the Republican Party platform. We are the pro-life party. Many great minds have said before that civilization should be measured by the way we treat our most vulnerable, and I believe that to be true. And it is hard to imagine anyone more vulnerable than an unborn, helpless child.
In fact, our founding document--the Declaration of Independence-- states that the right to life is an inalienable right that all of us are granted by our Creator. I am proud to be a member of a party that acknowledges the right to life as a God-given gift. Republicans can and should deliver a win for the unborn as part of our next reconciliation bill by defunding, on a permanent basis, the Nation's largest abortion provider.
When Republicans assembled the One Big Beautiful Bill, or the Working Families Tax Cut Act, last summer, we successfully included a 1-year ban on Medicaid funding for abortion providers like Planned Parenthood. Now, here we are approaching the end of that year, and this provision will soon expire. We have our work cut out for us again to ensure that this monstrous organization does not receive another dime of taxpayer money.
Of course, like any entity that receives government funding, Planned Parenthood has a team of lobbyists and public affairs officials whose job it is to convince lawmakers and the public that they are worthy recipients of public funding. Planned Parenthood would like all of us to believe they are primarily a healthcare organization, providing women's health services. But the truth is that is not the case; it is a pretext. Their own 2024-2025 annual report states that Planned Parenthood performed more than 400,000 abortions in the previous fiscal year--400,000 abortions.
We know that all the money that organizations like Planned Parenthood receive are fungible. In other words, they can trade one dollar for another dollar, depending on the source of that money. When Planned Parenthood receives Medicaid reimbursements for services other than abortions, that money ultimately finds its way into helping their bottom line and directly subsidizing a procedure that ends a human life.
If that were not enough, Planned Parenthood is not only an abortion provider, but they have recently become entwined with the business of providing gender transition treatments to minors. Planned Parenthood's own reporting brags that, in some States, their so-called gender- affirming care--what a euphemism that is--that their gender-affirming care visits increased by more than 500 percent between 2021 and 2022. Other organizations have also reported that Planned Parenthood exploits legal loopholes in order to provide gender transition medications to minors without their parents even knowing.
Nearly 60 percent--and I am surprised the number isn't higher--nearly 60 percent of Americans oppose gender transition procedures for minors. You know, when you are young and have not yet matured, your brain is not completely developed. These children are incapable of making these life-changing decisions for themselves, and the business of government and the business of organizations like Planned Parenthood shouldn't be to exploit the youth of these children, to change the trajectory of their life forever.
In recent years, the scientific community has also expressed its own concerns. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons released a statement earlier this year recommending against gender transition surgeries for minors. Their statement emphasized the lack of long-term research to support this medical intervention, as well as ethical concerns surrounding potential harms and the fact that adolescents don't have the capacity to fully consent to these harms.
Other Western countries, including the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, are also taking steps to restrict these operations. The least the U.S. Congress could do would be to halt government funding for providers of these controversial procedures and related treatments that rest on a dubious--if maybe even nonexistent--scientific backing.
Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the Nation and the leading provider of youth gender transition therapies, should not receive a dime--a dime--of taxpayer funding.
The second reconciliation bill, focused as it is on ICE and CBP and the Department of Homeland Security, cannot be our last bill this year. I urge my Republican colleagues to come together on a third reconciliation bill once we have completed this bill so we can notch another win for the pro-life and the pro-commonsense movement. Again, it is only common sense that our Republican majority should use the power we have to defund Planned Parenthood using the tools available to us, like reconciliation.
Defending the right to life has been a longstanding priority of our party, and Republicans ought to deliver another victory for the unborn.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The minority whip.
Mr. President, last week, President Trump was asked to assess the state of the American economy. He said:
This is one of the rare moments where I can understand the President's thinking. In his eyes--and in the eyes of his billionaire friends--the economy has never been better.
In the first year of his second term, President Trump added $1.4 billion to his personal wealth through cryptocurrency ventures and licensing deals with individuals tied to foreign governments. He has made more money in office than any other President in the history of the United States.
And for his billionaire friends, the returns from the past year have been equally impressive. Elon Musk helped gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau right before it began to supervise his new digital payment platform.
Oil billionaires like the Koch brothers have seen decades of climate regulation overturned after their multimillion-dollar donations to the 2024 Trump campaign.
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, at least 88 of some of the largest corporations--including Tesla, Coinbase, and Palantir--made more than $105 billion in 2025.
How much did they pay in Federal income tax? Nothing. Zero dollars because of the Republicans' ``One Big Beautiful Budget Bill.''
Collectively, billionaires added $1.5 trillion to their wealth in 2025 alone, a 22-percent increase in 1 year. They really would be happy. It is no wonder the President is so bullish about the economy when everyone he golfs with is raking in record profits.
But if he asks any of the millions of working Americans what they think about the economy, I bet he will get a different answer. Most Americans don't feel like they are in the ``golden age of economic opportunity,'' in the words of the President. Instead, they feel like no matter how many hours they put in to provide for their family, the odds are stacked against them.
Ask a young couple trying to buy their first home if they feel the President has delivered on a housing affordability agenda. Ask a small business owner struggling under the combined weight of Trump's tariff taxes and his cuts to healthcare if they feel like they are benefiting from this so-called pro-growth agenda. Ask anyone who isn't part of the wealthy elite that President Trump surrounds himself with, and they will tell you they feel abandoned by the President, who promised to lower prices for families ``on day one.''
His war with Iran, reckless tariffs against our trading partners, and cuts and chaos across the Federal Government have damaged the economy and pushed many families to the breaking point.
In March, the Consumer Price Index--the leading measure of inflation--rose to 3.3 percent after the President's Iran war, which spiked oil prices and increased uncertainty for business owners.
One in 10 people nationwide who were on the Affordable Care Act last year were forced to drop their health insurance altogether after the President and Republicans in Congress cut Medicaid and ACA by hundreds of billions of dollars.
The price of groceries, childcare, rent, utility bills, and many other basic necessities keep going up, and the President and Republicans in Congress have not done nearly enough to help Americans make ends meet.
What has the President proposed when 82 percent of Americans say housing affordability is a concern? He has proposed cuts--billions of dollars of cuts--in housing and homelessness assistance.
What have Trump and congressional Republicans done for 6 in 10 Americans who are worried about being able to afford groceries? They enacted the largest SNAP cuts in history--the food program for those in low-income categories.
When it comes to working families, the administration has little desire to help them. Instead, the President is distracted with election conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant hatred.
When discussing legislation that would tackle rising housing costs, President Trump reportedly told Speaker Johnson that ``no one gives a [bleep] about housing'' and pushed Johnson to focus on disenfranchising voters.
That is not to say Republicans in Congress are doing more than the President to address the cost of living. Sadly, they are equally distracted by President Trump's current and changing priorities. This week in the Senate, instead of voting on legislation to lower costs, Senate Republicans chose to focus their efforts on a party-line package, a package of legislation that would give ICE and CBP up to $140 billion to continue the administration's reckless, cruel, and deadly mass deportation campaign.
They already provided a $170 billion slush fund for border and interior enforcement last June. They insist it is not nearly enough.
Imagine the potential if they put their energy into making America more affordable instead of this agenda.
The American people consistently say the economy is one of the most important issues our country faces. What does it say about Congress-- about our government--when we fail to pass any bill at all that meaningfully addresses these concerns?
America has lost faith in a President who is more focused on his own bottom line than enriching his country and Republican leadership that would rather deport hard-working families than help them afford the basics. Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. They are responsible for the chaos we face, and Americans are increasingly wondering, What have Republicans done to help their families?
My colleagues will need to find a better answer to that question than the current agenda of the Republican Congress or Americans will make their dissatisfaction known in November and usher in the beginning of the end of President Trump's last term in office.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Florida.
Mr. President, I also rise today to address the importance, in fact, the necessity that we expediently fund ICE and CBP and we take measures to ensure that in the future these Agencies are not held hostage by political games from the Democratic Party.
We are here again facing a situation where we have critical public safety Agencies at risk for not being funded at a time when we are in the middle of an armed conflict, at a time when we need our communities to have our officers and those that support them at the top of their game because the men and women of ICE and CBP are on the frontlines every single day.
They secure our borders, they enforce our laws, and they protect our communities. And yet we will debate again whether we are going to give them the resources they need to do their jobs. And this should not be controversial. I cannot believe in my first year at the U.S. Senate, I have had to come to the floor multiple times to merely fund critical public safety Agencies, Agencies that were created after 9/11.
We have to pass the reconciliation bill, and we have to fund ICE and CBP, not just for the short term, for the long term because this is not going to stop. The modern Democratic Party has no interest in being on Team America. Everything that they are espousing is subversive to the strength and security of this Nation, whether that is abolish ICE, whether that is defund the police, whether that is destroy our borders and roll out a welcome mat. It cannot happen.
And too often in this town, we see the same pattern play out when we face this obstructionist behavior. I would call it dangerous behavior. We kick the can down the road, and the American people are sick of it. Thousands of TSA agents who have worked more days unpaid than paid during this fiscal year are sick of it.
We aren't sent here to keep parts of our vital government Agencies shuttered at a time when our security is threatened. All of us here know we need DHS to keep us safe. So we should be coming here every day to give them the tools that they need, the resources they need, not tying their hands behind their back with short-term funding patches and political gridlock--not to mention the attack on morale that they must feel when their very jobs are threatened every time the Democrats throw a political tantrum.
It shouldn't take Executive orders or emergency measures to get these critical safety folks paid, but that is the hand that the Democrats keep dealing us.
And if we are serious about solving this, not just now as we move into passing reconciliation, but if we want to prevent this from happening in the future, if we want to move the Senate's work forward, especially when we are dealing with funding critical public safety Agencies, we have to take a hard look at how this body--the Senate-- operates.
Because what has happened when there have been lapses in funding, what has happened in my first year here at the Senate, when I have pushed to get this done, pled with all--everyone in this Chamber--to get this done, stayed here, what happens? Government workers go unpaid, our government shuts down, and often Senators are told to go home.
We are not just told to go home. Taxpayers fund Senators to go home. They reimburse them for travel in the middle of a government shutdown when we are not paying government workers, and the buck stops here. We have to commit to solving this problem, not just funding the Agencies, but solving the problem that how the Senate has done things historically is not working. It is not working in the face of a Democratic Party who is not on Team America. It is not working on the face of the modern-day Democrats in this Chamber that are not just voicing subversiveness, they are taking actions in this Chamber to undermine the security of this country.
The ways we have always done things as a Senate does not work anymore. It does not work for this country. It does not work for the American people, and we have got to be bold and do something about it.
And that is why I have introduced a resolution to forbid taxpayers dollars for reimbursement of Member travel home during a lapse in government funding because if we are asking Federal employees to deal with uncertainty, if we are asking our ICE officers and Border Patrol to continue doing their jobs without clarity, if we are asking TSA agents to continue showing up without clarity, we should be willing to stay here and do ours.
If Senators stayed in Washington and worked through the problem and focused on the discussions and delivering results and how do we do this--I mean, we are having to work around and go to a reconciliation as opposed to the normal budgeting process in order to fund DHS.
I dare say, I wonder if we would have gotten to this idea if we had been forced to stay here and deal with this a lot sooner. It shouldn't be complicated; funding the government is one of our most fundamental roles.
The stakes of not fully funding ICE and CBP are far too high. Americans are clearly at risk right now. We know why my Democratic colleagues are obstructing this process. They told you--they told you-- where their priorities lie.
They want to go back to how things were under the previous administration, you know, when they broke down all security measures at the border, when they made it open borders, when they demoralized and undermined law enforcement. They like that. They don't like it when they have Republican leadership and a President in the White House that are saying: That was backward. That put Americans in danger. We have to do things differently, and we have got to clean up the mess.
And what is this mess? I mean, I don't want to just broadly say it was dangerous. Let's talk about the mess. Let's talk about the catastrophic place we find ourselves in. We now have thousands of people that were on the Terrorist Watchlist that were ushered in by the Biden administration, and we know that they released them and pushed them into this country. They are here right now.
So in the middle of an armed conflict, we have people in this country right now that were on the Terrorist Watchlist that were released by the last administration, and the Democrats' response is to not fund the folks that were going to go out and find them.
Let's talk about the 22-year-old Laken Riley, who was killed by an illegal immigrant in Georgia, or the 18-year-old college freshman Sheridan Gorman, shot and killed in a random attack by an illegal immigrant in Chicago. Or in my home State of Florida, in Fort Myers, just recently, an illegal immigrant bludgeoned a mother to death outside of a gas station. These are just a few examples, but they are not--it is reality. It is not hypothetical. It is not what could happen. It is what is happening.
And so we have to take action today, and that means if we have to stay here and get this done during times of shutdown, let's do it. And anything that will incentivize that, we should promote, we should support, and we should pass.
And that means changing our own rules, changing the way that we are doing business here in the Senate, because in so many ways, business as usual in the Senate isn't cutting it.
And so I invite my colleagues, who are really on Team America, to show that they are on Team America and show they are willing to put in the hard work and roll up their sleeves and stay here, when we find ourselves in a funding lapse of critical safety Agencies, to support my resolution and support the reconciliation that will fund CBP and ICE.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
Mr. President, I just want to start with reviewing the bidding and why we are here.
We are having an American cultural conversation about the role of ICE and law enforcement--Federal law enforcement--in our streets and in our cities and particularly because two Americans were killed in Minnesota because of ICE, CBP: Alex Pretti, 37 years old, a nurse in a VA hospital, shot multiple
Video shows it. So that no matter where you are in the political spectrum, your eyes do not lie.
Renee Good--shot and killed by ICE agents in her car on January 7-- and a third American citizen killed by Homeland Security agents, the first being Keith Porter, who was killed on New Year's Eve in L.A. That is not counting the 32 people who have been killed in ICE's custody in 2025, including one in Baldwin, MI--the most fatalities in 1 year than in more than two decades combined.
These three people should be alive, but their deaths are the culmination of something much bigger. The behavior of our Federal forces in our streets strikes at the heart of who we are as Americans. I am not going to list everything ICE is doing, but I want you to think about what would happen if these things happened to you, to your community, to your neighbors: being pulled over and asked for your papers as you shop at Target or drive on a highway off-ramp or stand in line for a flight; agents shooting tear gas at your kids' playground; being held at gunpoint inside your own home and taken to a police precinct, in your underwear, in subfreezing temperatures, and then being released, without apology, after being held for hours, even though you are an American citizen.
Imagine someone in a mask breaking your car window and pulling you and your 2-year-old daughter out of that car.
Imagine being shot with rubber bullets at a protest in America; masked men detaining your 5-year-old coming home from preschool; being pepper-sprayed while praying aloud; tear gas filling your car on your way home from a basketball game and then having to do CPR on your 6- month-old to help him breathe; then being beaten, shot repeatedly, and killed because you are exercising your Second Amendment right. Imagine being taken to a detention facility and not being able to communicate with your family.
All of these things happened in Minneapolis, and that is not my sense or, I think, the average American's sense of freedom. When people turned on the TV and saw these things happening with their own eyes, they understood it as something that ran completely contrary to who we are as a people, and it certainly spit in the face of how we became a nation in the first place--with the rebellion that our American forefathers launched not too far north of here because of an oppressive government--because of an oppressive regime--that was using brutal tactics in the streets and in people's homes.
So that is why we are here today--to have very commonsense reforms on Federal law enforcement because of what we all saw with our own eyes.
Now, these things that we are calling for are not radical, right? They are the things that we ask of our local police: Be clear on who you are and what law enforcement unit you are from, have some way of identifying that you are part of official law enforcement, don't wear a mask so that we understand who you are, have a judicial warrant if you want to go inside someone's house--you have to prove that there is a reason to go inside an American citizen's home.
These are things our law enforcement does every single day in our cities and in our towns, but the other side of the aisle refuses to have that conversation. What they would rather do is ignore that conversation altogether even though Kristi Noem got fired over it and local ICE agent Bovino got fired for all of that behavior, even though they themselves, from the White House, were willing to consider some sort of reform because they know they are on their heels because they know they got on the wrong side of history. We are here today because the other side of the aisle is refusing to have an even basic conversation on those reforms and wants to fully fund ICE with no changes.
I will close with this: We are here talking about this issue when, in fact, what the average person wants to talk about when I am out in Michigan or anywhere else are the things that this President said he was going to cover, which were tackling the fundamental costs of living, tackling the fundamental things that are keeping people up at night and making them feel like they can't achieve the American dream in America. The lists of things this President said he was going to do could fill up a ream of paper.
Certainly, the President won his election by talking about what he was going to do domestically, but I think we have to accept now, as we continue to see the war drag on with Iran, that this President has become fundamentally a foreign policy President. He has taken military action in 9 locations around the world in his first 15 months--more than any single President in history, Democrat or Republican.
He is focusing his energy and his administration's resources on issues abroad while the average thing that hurts Americans isn't being tackled at all. Think about housing, healthcare, the price of food, and now, certainly, the prices of gas and utilities. In Michigan, we are now at $4 a gallon, approximately, for gas and $5 a gallon for diesel. Healthcare premiums have gone up. Housing has only gotten more expensive in the past year. By any objective measure, things are more expensive than the day this President took office.
He can pretend and say what he wants about how costs have actually come down and that it is ``no big deal'' that gas prices are up, but we know that, in the United States of America, we have a shrinking middle class. That is an objective fact. That is not a political statement. It has gotten harder to stay in and be in the middle class, and it has gotten harder to save every month.
It is the issue that unites young people who are thinking about how they are going to afford college, whether they are ever going to be able to own a home the way their parents are, and the workers down at the GM plant who are wondering: Will I be able to have that fishing cabin up north? Will I be able to take a vacation the way my parents were able to do so with the same job?
On our economy, we know that we need, fundamentally, three big things in order to compete in the future as the future of work is changing. So, when we are distracted by things like wars and things like American cultural conversations on other issues, it means there is an opportunity cost for the things we are not talking about. What we need more than anything right now is a focus on three big things. For our economy, we need to focus on people, we need to focus on chips, and we need to focus on power.
On people, we know that, between artificial intelligence and a whole bunch of other things going on, we are going to have a changing economy. We need great public schools that are well-funded, and we need to get people comfortable with the fact that they are going to have to do more than just the K through 12. I call it K through 12 plus two. You have got to do something after high school to prepare yourself for this next new world that we are in. That can be an apprenticeship with a union. That can be an associate's degree. That can be a training program for one of our companies.
It means K through 12 plus two is upon us, and we need to start thinking about it that way. We need to centralize every single job training program. We have 17 job training programs in the Federal Government alone. They are all in different Departments and Agencies. We need a one-stop shop for our young people to be like: If I want a job for the future, how do I get trained or retrained for that?
On chips, every single one of you has chips in your pocket. You have a cell phone or you have some sort of piece of technology that depends on chips. They are in everything that we use and in everything we need to grow our economy.
Over the last decade or so, we have been, really, at the mercy of China when it comes to chips. I want to make chips here in America with American factories and American labor, and I want chips to put Americans to work. We made them and invented them in the first place, and I want to make them again so that we don't live under a veto from China.
On power, we can't do any of what we need to do unless we have the amount of power that we are going to need to power our economy; and without major changes to our electrical grid, we are in trouble on the issue of power. Our
So I wanted to put down, in front of everyone here, some of the opportunity costs and some of the things we are not doing here in the U.S. Senate because we are focusing on these terrible cultural conversations that are happening when things like Minneapolis erupt. We are not talking about the economy, and we are not attacking the problems that are plaguing most Americans. That is because we have a refusal to talk about just basic reforms, simple things we could do in an hour.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
Mr. President, recently, our Nation has been hitting a lot of very unfortunate milestones. Data from the National Association of REALTORS shows that the average age of the first-time home buyer in America has reached an alltime high of 40 years old, while the number of first-time home buyers has also reached an alltime low.
We just experienced the highest monthly spike in gas prices in decades, thanks to the President's reckless war in Iran.
And perhaps most staggering, just last month, we reached a new and unthinkable milestone when the national debt eclipsed $39 trillion, the highest it has been at any point in our Nation's history. For context, when I first came here to Congress in 2009, the national debt stood at $10.6 trillion. That means more than $28 trillion has been added to the debt in just 17 years.
This illustrates what economists have warned about for years: The national debt is growing at an exponential rate, and it is past time to stop the bleeding. Yet, for decades, this issue has not received the attention and demands that Congress needs to act.
That is why I am back on the Senate floor today to address my colleagues and the American people. The alarm bells cannot continue to fall on deaf ears. The fate of future generations of Americans depends on it.
But I am not the only one that has been issuing this warning. In recent months, various actors from across the Federal Government--from the Congressional Budget Office to the Department of Treasury--they have all said the same thing: Our current fiscal policy is simply not sustainable, and without changes, we are headed toward an economic catastrophe.
In its last financial report, the U.S. Treasury said our public debt- to-GDP ratio now sits at 99 percent. That means the amount of debt we owe is nearly the same size as the entire U.S. economy. Our debt-to-GDP ratio is the highest it has been since World War II, and experts say that ratio is expected to exceed 200 percent by 2048.
This would mean serious economic harm for Americans in the form of higher interest rates, less money to support critical Federal services, and slowed economic growth.
The Government Accountability Office says that in order to close this fiscal gap, we need to increase our revenues by 25 percent, while reducing our spending by 20 percent. And we need do that each and every year for the next 75 years.
Our Nation's leading economists are telling us point-blank: We simply do not have time to waste. Dealing with our national debt is no longer a down-the-road problem or something that future Congresses will be dealing with. We won't put our country on more stable financial footing by avoiding the facts or pretending this problem simply doesn't exist. We won't reduce our debt by continuing the President's war in Iran. Not only are we sending our sons and daughters into harm's way, we are spending a reported $1 billion per day on a conflict that Congress has not approved and the American people simply did not ask for.
The time for bipartisan action to address our growing national debt is right now. And that is why, just last month, I joined my colleagues in introducing a resolution that says, by 2030, we must lower our deficit to only 3 percent of GDP. And I am also proud to lead bipartisan legislation in the Senate that would examine how our national debt impacts our national security.
These efforts alone won't solve the problem, but we have to start somewhere. We must put forward bipartisan responsible and achievable solutions that allow us to make headway in any way that we possibly can because I know one thing is absolutely for certain, to make it out of this national debt crisis is going to take a buy-in from everyone: Congress, the administration, and the American people.
We are all in this boat together, and it is past time to start rowing in the right direction before the boat sinks.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, right now, Trump is waging a war in Iran. He is threatening war crimes. He is threatening an end to an entire civilization and mentally deteriorating in front of our eyes.
Meanwhile, costs for our families are going through the roof. Grocery costs and everyday expenses are going up because of inflation and fueled by Trump's tariffs. Estimates show Trump's trade war cost families well over 1,000 bucks last year.
Healthcare costs are skyrocketing for families as Republicans refuse to extend the tax credits and prevent the mega-healthcare hike. People have seen their premiums double, triple, and even worse. We now know that millions of families were completely priced out of their health coverage, and millions more switched to a worse plan, often still at a higher price.
And, of course, energy costs, energy costs are going through the roof because Trump has also chosen, all on his own, to start a reckless war with Iran that is putting servicemembers at risk and jeopardizing our national security.
Gas is up to 4, 5, 6, even 7 bucks a gallon in some places. The challenges that we are facing right now are many, and they are major. But Republicans can't be bothered with any of them. Republicans aren't trying to rein in Trump's absurd tariffs, they are not trying to address soaring healthcare costs, and they are certainly not lifting a finger to stop Trump's war and bring down gas prices. Instead, Republicans' top priority right now is shoveling $70 billion--billion-- at ICE and Border Patrol, covering multiple years, and cutting another blank check for Stephen Miller's deranged mass deportation dreams without ensuring any sort of accountability--none whatsoever.
After providing over $190 billion to DHS last year without any real strings attached, Republicans are now again pushing to give ICE and Border Patrol tens of billions of dollars more, and they plan to do it without any new accountability steps, like the ones Democrats have been demanding for months, without any of the accountability steps Republicans themselves agreed to during negotiations, and even without the same basic accountability steps we have long included in our annual funding bill.
I really want to underscore that. Not only have Republicans refused even the most basic accountability measures for DHS--things like displaying their IDs or taking off masks or requiring judicial warrants, basic use-of-force standards--in choosing to send these Agencies more money through this process, through reconciliation, Republicans are planning to proceed without the basic accountability requirements we put in place every year in our spending bills.
Republicans are making clear that their biggest priority is not lowering prices or helping families with the basics, not stopping Trump's warmongering--it is giving tens of billions of dollars more of your hard-earned tax dollars to ICE and Border Patrol.
Republicans want to supercharge Stephen Miller's budget to harass communities with no restraint, smash in car windows with no warrant, detain Americans with no reason, and mass-deport members of communities with no criminal record whatsoever. We are talking about firefighters and grandpas and grandmas and caregivers for our seniors and parents and spouses and veterans themselves.
To anyone thinking this sounds familiar, well, you are right, because
Last year, Republicans moved heaven and earth to cut taxes for billionaires and hand tens of billions of dollars to ICE and Border Patrol. They passed that ``Big Ugly Bill,'' shoveling money at ICE and Border Patrol, shoveling money at billionaires, and cutting healthcare and SNAP to do it.
Now here we are a year later, after Republicans unleashed chaos on our streets by cutting a $75 billion blank check to ICE, after the American people were outraged by ICE and Border Patrol tear-gassing and tackling peaceful protestors, and after Republicans themselves admitted DHS had gone way too far following the outrageous and horrifying shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. After all of that, Republicans refused commonsense reforms that we put forward, and now they are choosing to deliver even more money for ICE and Border Patrol with exactly zero steps to rein them in.
So if you are watching this Republican farce and wondering why this feels pretty darn familiar, don't worry--you don't have deja vu. Republicans are just faking amnesia. Republicans are choosing-- choosing--to ignore the violence we have seen unleashed on our streets by a rogue Federal Agency that they threw tens of billions of dollars at. They are choosing to ignore the shocking killings we saw this year and the parade of injustices we are seeing every single day.
Instead of lifting a finger to lower prices or to exercise their constitutional responsibility over the power to declare war, Republicans are spending this week working hard to send ICE more money--no strings attached.
Families across the country are struggling to make ends meet. Gas prices and grocery prices are squeezing out moms and dads. Childcare is hard to find. Housing is unaffordable. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. But ICE and Border Patrol? Well, they are literally wasting billions of dollars from the ``Big Ugly Bill'' as we speak.
Just consider this: There was plenty of money for former Secretary Noem to blow hundreds of millions to cut ridiculous ads and plaster her face on TV. There is plenty to blow hundreds of millions on new private jets. ICE was able to waste millions on souped-up SUVs with flashy paint jobs, which they can't even use. Throughout this shutdown, ICE has continued to acquire new warehouses way above the asking price and even buy more planes.
So even after all of the waste, fraud, and abuse funded by Republicans, ICE and Border Patrol still have billions upon billions of dollars on hand right now. Not even a year ago, Republicans gave them more funding than most militaries. Meanwhile, Republicans are acting like they have no idea why Democrats have been demanding accountability and reform, so let me refresh your memory.
The reason we want actual judicial warrants? ICE dragged off a kid who was working at Target, only to release him when they realized he was a citizen. They dragged a woman out of her car on her way to a doctor's appointment. They dragged a man out of his house in the freezing cold, in his underwear, and didn't even check to see if they had the right guy. Another man who was a U.S. citizen got dragged off his worksite and wrongly detained--not once but twice.
That is not targeted law enforcement. It is unbelievable to me that any Republican can say that with a straight face. You want targeted law enforcement? That is what judicial warrants help ensure.
Look at the use-of-force standards. Pastors have been shot in the head with pepper balls. A family on the way home from a basketball game was tear-gassed. We have seen peaceful protestors tackled to the ground. We have seen people pinned down and pepper-sprayed in the face. And then, of course, we have seen several horrific, unjustifiable shootings.
I am not just talking about Alex Pretti and Renee Good, whose killings did send a shock through the Nation--at least until Republicans decided to move on and buy ICE more bullets. Last year in Chicago, a Federal agent rammed Marimar Martinez and shot her several times. They tried to blame her until the video came out and showed the truth. The agent sharply turned his wheel and rammed her car.
Just recently, new video footage showed ICE agents lied about another shooting in Minnesota. The agent said he fired when he was attacked with a shovel. It turns out that was a flatout lie. He actually fired blindly through a door.
ICE agents shot Ruben Martinez in March of last year. His own mother didn't know how he died until a year later. That video, by the way, also did not match the ICE version of events.
I am all for laws. I want to see our laws followed and enforced, and that is why I want ICE and Border Patrol held accountable. These rogue Agencies have been breaking our laws. They have been hurting our citizens. But what is the Republican response to this pattern of abuse? How are Republicans addressing this rogue Agency? Well, here we are choosing to give it even more money and less oversight. That is a perversion of justice and an utter rejection of responsibility. I don't know how you can pretend you are for law and order while shoveling money at a lawless Agency.
But the important thing for everyone to remember is that it did not have to be this way. Despite what some Republicans are saying, this is not something they are forced to do. This is a policy choice that Republicans are making, because there has been a straightforward, bipartisan path available this entire time. Democrats have been ready, willing, and truly begging Republicans to work with us to enact some very basic reforms as part of a bipartisan funding bill.
I have spent weeks working hard to land the plane on some commonsense steps, and we were having some productive conversations across the aisle and actually with the White House. The White House publicly agreed to enact a set of steps into law. But ultimately Republicans decided to walk away and end any talk of reform. Even when we offered a narrower set of basic reforms in exchange for some funding, Republicans said: No, won't do. They ultimately refused to enact even the basic reforms the White House itself agreed to.
So nobody's hand was forced here. Republicans just chose to walk away from the basic reforms the American people were demanding.
What is more, they have decided that instead of spending their time working on urgent issues, like oversight of Trump's war and addressing skyrocketing costs, instead of using taxpayer dollars to actually solve problems for families who see healthcare costs rising, childcare costs increasing, energy costs, housing costs, Republicans have chosen to waste their time and waste your money, writing Stephen Miller a $70 billion check and turning a blind eye to the rights that he and ICE are trampling.
This is not what America wants. It is not what America stands for. You can bet Democrats will be pushing every single minute to stop this massive waste of time and money and focus on how we can help working families instead.
If Republicans decide that instead of cutting another enormous check for ICE, they would like to resume conversations about a bipartisan path forward to enact some basic reforms, I am right here where I have always been--at the table, ready to get it done.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, I was out in the hallways a week ago, and a reporter asked me a reasonable question. She said: Do you think Democrats overplayed their hand in the negotiations over the DHS budget? Did you ask for too much, thus prompting the moment that we are in today as we do something unprecedented, debate using reconciliation to appropriate money for the ongoing expenses of the Federal Government?
My answer was a confident no, for a few reasons. First, our asks were pretty minimal. All we wanted was to make
A lot of things around here are about politics, but this didn't really seem to be about politics. I just think that we all have an obligation to only appropriate money to the Federal Government when the Federal Government is acting lawfully.
But there is another element to this. We definitely didn't anticipate that Republicans were going to pull the plug on those negotiations when they did. I was part of those negotiations up until the last minute. We thought that we had a potential deal in place in order to bring Republicans and Democrats together around funding all or most of the Department of Homeland Security.
We didn't get that done because Republicans decided--the Republican leader decided--instead to fund the Federal Government through this process, reconciliation, whereby Republicans only need 50 votes.
Now, both sides have used reconciliation to get things done that they wanted to get done, but never before has reconciliation been used as just a straight substitute for the appropriations process. Traditionally, appropriations bills need 60 votes. That means that the budget that we write for the country every year needs to be one that Republicans and Democrats support. But we are here today because Republicans didn't want to negotiate with Democrats over the Department of Homeland Security budget because they knew they could pass that budget with only Republican votes.
Now, listen, I am actually somebody that believes it is probably time to change the rules of the Senate. So I am not going to sit here and tell you that I am defending or willing to defend all of the current rules of the Senate. But let's just be clear, once Republicans have taken the lid off this jar, there is no putting it back.
Republicans are now using reconciliation to fund the ongoing appropriations of the government in an area where it was hard to get agreement with Democrats. Democrats are going to do the same thing. Regardless of how the rules change, now Democrats are just going to say: You know what? When we have power, we don't need to negotiate with Republicans over the hard stuff. We don't need your votes because we will just go fund the government through reconciliation.
So you have changed the practice of the Senate here, and you are going to have to live with the changes that you have decided to make because there are a lot of folks here who have defended the 60-vote threshold for appropriations. Well, that is probably going away, even if the rules don't change now because of the actions that you have taken.
But I guess I come back to this sort of basic obligation that we have, which is to just make sure that we don't fund illegality. A judge in Minnesota issued a ruling--this is at the height of the assault on Minneapolis--that ICE was in violation of almost 100 court orders.
That is stunning. Again, this isn't 100 instances where ICE was violating the law. This was 100 instances where ICE was violating the law, a court told them to stop, and ICE didn't stop. My Republican colleagues claim they are for law and order. How do you defend an Agency that was told to stop acting illegally and on 100 occasions, when reading the court order, just said: Forget it. We are not obeying what the court tells us to do?
When we say this is an Agency that was and is out of control, this is what we mean, an Agency that does not care about the law, does not care what courts say, thinks it is accountable to no one--except for the President of the United States.
We can't fund that kind of Agency. We would be violating our oath of office, all of us, to fund an Agency that just doesn't care about the law. To get 100 court orders telling you to obey the law, you have to be in violation of the law thousands of times.
In fact, Federal courts have ruled, just between October of 2025 and February of this year--that is October, November, December, January, February--over 5 months Federal courts ruled that ICE unlawfully detained not hundreds of people but thousands of people; 4,400 times in 5 months courts have ruled that Americans or legal residents of this country have been unlawfully detained.
That is illegal behavior at scale. And I don't care what your politics are, whether they are right or left, they are inclusionary or nativist, you should not be willing to fund an Agency that just doesn't care about the law at scale.
Mr. President, 48 people have died in ICE custody, 17 in just the last 4 months, right? The cameras aren't in Minneapolis like they were, but 17 people have died in custody in just the last month. Between 2017 and 2021, when Biden was President, there were a total in those 4 years of 52 people that had died. People are dying in ICE custody at a rate four times higher than during the Biden administration.
ICE has detained 6,200 children. We have put 6,000 children in jail. Seventy-three percent of the people that ICE has arrested have no criminal record; 95 percent of them have no violent criminal record. They say that they are locking up the worst of the worst; 5 percent, 1 in 20 have a violent criminal record.
Mr. President, 170 U.S. citizens have been detained. Almost all of them were Latino. You saw the videos of ICE and CBP officers going through the streets just detaining people based upon their accents.
Just this week, ICE detained the wife of SFC Jose Serrano. He is an Active-Duty United States Army soldier who has served our military for 27 years, including service in Afghanistan.
His wife wasn't not following the rules. She was obeying the rules. She was showing up to her court appointments, but they detained her anyway and now they are threatening to send her to Mexico, a country with which she has no ties. Sergeant First Class Serrano, because of his military service, is not allowed to travel to Mexico. Twenty-seven years he has been serving this country, and they are going to deport his wife who is following the law to Mexico and basically guaranteeing they will never see each other again.
Last month, a 5-year-old who was nonverbal with significant disabilities was put in jail at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, a detention center that I tried to get into to inspect because of claims of horrific conditions, and I was not allowed to go into that facility.
Again, this should trouble Republicans and Democrats. I didn't show up unannounced. I gave them notice. They still didn't let me in. Even though the law explicitly states that any Member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, has the right--the statutory right--to inspect facilities.
This little 5-year-old, nonverbal 5-year-old was in jail for 3 weeks. This place is called the baby jail. The boy literally melted down while he was there. He struggled to eat. His stomach became visibly swollen because he was literally suffering from malnutrition, and he couldn't go to the bathroom. He was only released after a children's entertainer named Ms. Rachel highlighted his case in a video. Like, what are we doing? What are we doing? Like, intentionally abusing children? This wasn't before Minneapolis; this happened just a month ago.
Yesterday, it was reported that the Trump administration is in discussions to send more than 1,000 Afghans who were in the United States because they helped us during the Afghanistan war--they would be under the threat of death if they stayed in Afghanistan; we emergency evacuated them to the United States because they helped us, because they protected our troops. And the Trump administration said yesterday that they are going to take 1,000 of those Afghans, heroes, that helped protect our troops in Afghanistan and they are going to send them to the Congo, just for the point of being cruel, just because it is mean, just because it would be kind of funny to send a whole bunch of Afghans who helped us in the war to a country that is in a humanitarian meltdown right now.
So no, none of us should be signing on to fund an Agency that is this lawless and this inhumane. That is the bottom line.
But here is the second bottom line: People are suffering in this country right now. And they are not suffering because we let immigrants into America, they are suffering because gas prices in some parts of the country are
The national average, as I said, is over $4. Americans have now paid more than $16 billion more at the pump than they should have simply because of Trump's war. Sixteen billion dollars out of the pockets of American consumers, American families, American small businesses, sent to the oil companies who are, by the way, making a killing off these high prices, just because of Trump's incompetent war in Iran.
Americans, since Trump came into office, have spent $2,300 more on goods and services because of inflation and tariffs. The average family has spent an extra $2,000 in the last year and a half on the things that they buy every day because of Trump's inflation and because of his tariffs.
There are 15 million people in this country who are on the verge of losing their healthcare because of a law that Donald Trump and Republicans passed in this Congress ripping health insurance away from seniors, the poor, and the disabled.
The Consumer Price Index is up 3.3 percent over last year. That is closing in on double what the Federal Reserve's target is. Unemployment is up since Trump took office. Long-term unemployment is way up since Trump took office. Unemployment for Black workers is up since Trump took office.
The tariffs, which are part of the reason that Americans have spent more than $2,000 extra because of Trump's policies, were supposed to be tough, hard medicine in order to bring factory jobs back to the United States. Biden had increased the number of manufacturing jobs in this country. We had more manufacturing jobs at the end of Joe Biden's term than we had at the beginning.
Well, do you know what has happened since Trump took office? He has reversed all of that progress. The tariffs aren't bringing more manufacturing jobs to the United States. We are losing manufacturing jobs. We have lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump became President.
So we are paying higher tariffs, and we are losing manufacturing jobs. Like, it doesn't make any sense.
And so we are going to spend--this week on the floor--giving a blank check to an immigration enforcement Agency that is out of control, while ignoring the real problems that Americans are facing.
We could have spent this week--Republicans could have spent their reconciliation process on gas prices or the healthcare catastrophe that is about to hit Americans or reversing Trump's tariffs or trying to actually do things that will bring manufacturing jobs back to this country, but they are doing none of that.
There is no conversation on the Senate floor right now about gas prices. There is no conversation on the Senate floor being led by Republicans about inflation. There is nothing being done to bring our manufacturing jobs back. There is no second look at the last reconciliation bill they passed, which is going to end insurance for 15 million Americans.
Instead, Republicans are handing billions of dollars in a blank check to an immigration enforcement Agency that right now is hunting 5-year- old kids with severe disabilities and locking them up in baby prisons to the point that they have swollen bellies because of their sickness due to the inhumane conditions.
They are locking up the family members of 27-year military veterans fighting for this country, just because it is mean and cruel.
So we are going to have a chance to debate this over the next 24 hours and vote on it, but I think the American people are seeing where Republican priorities are: not on the stuff that matters to American families.
I am not saying that the people of this country don't want a secure border--they do--but that is not what we are debating here. We are debating funding an immigration enforcement operation that is going after legal citizens, that is not targeting people who are a threat to this country, that exists just to try to stoke fears of our neighbors, that tries to make people think that immigrants are the biggest threat to this country so that you are distracted from the fact that Donald Trump is stealing from you--the most corrupt President in the history of this country.
We could be spending this time--we could even try to come together, Republicans and Democrats--to do something about inflation or the cost of gas. We have been begging our Republican colleagues to vote with us on these resolutions to stop the war in Iran because that is probably the fastest way to get the gas prices to come down.
We could spend time working across the aisle to try to address the issues that are a real crisis for American citizens right now: costs, inflation, gas prices, health insurance.
But, instead, we are about to send another blank check to an Agency that is unconscionably out of control.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant executive clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, as we gather here, prices and costs around the country are going up and up and up. The cost of gas is going up. Electric bills are going up. The price of groceries is going up. The costs of rent and mortgages are up. Childcare costs are up, and the list goes on and on. So rising costs and prices are clearly on the minds of the American people as they try to make ends meet.
Dealing with those costs should be a priority for this Congress, but in this bill, Senate Republicans are telling the country--telling our fellow Americans--that rising costs and affordability are not their problem, are not their priority.
Budgets always tell us a lot about what the President and the Congress think is important, and the budget reconciliation process that Republicans are using right now specifically tells us a lot about what the Senate majority's priorities are. It tells us what, in this moment, Senate Republicans are focused on.
That is because it is a special procedure that allows the majority party--in this case, the Republican Party--to pass something without a single vote from the minority party. The Senate Republicans are preparing to pass this without any Democratic vote. You can only do this once per fiscal year. So it is reserved for the biggest goals, the top priorities, the things that the majority party--the Senate Republicans--thinks are the most important, the things it wants to become law.
When the Democrats were last in the majority, we used the budget reconciliation process as well. We used it to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. That allowed us to require Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices. We used it to cap the price of insulin for seniors. We used it to accelerate the deployment of clean energy to create good-paying jobs and to expand Affordable Care Act tax credits to make healthcare more affordable for millions and millions of our fellow Americans. That is what we used it for. In fact, it was those Affordable Care Act tax credits that Republicans allowed to expire at the end of last year.
So, last year, Republicans passed a reconciliation bill as well. They called it their Big Beautiful Bill. Well, it was beautiful if you were a billionaire, but it was pretty much a big betrayal for everyone else. It provided permanent tax cuts for the wealthy, and it was in that bill that Senate Republicans and the President allowed the Affordable Care Act tax credits to expire, causing premiums to go up for 22 million of our fellow Americans. In fact, they went up so high that 4 million Americans lost their coverage altogether. But in that bill, wherein tax credits for working Americans to better afford healthcare were not extended, Republicans and President Trump provided big, permanent tax cuts for the rich.
I want colleagues to focus on this chart for a moment because it tells you exactly what the tax priorities were in the Republicans' reconciliation bill from last year.
As I said, it was a Big Beautiful Bill if you were a billionaire. As you can
I asked the Director of the President's Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, about this phenomenon in a hearing just last week. He conceded that the bill last year, the reconciliation bill, provided permanent tax cuts for the very rich, and he conceded that the tax cuts and benefits for everybody else, which are much smaller as a proportion of the whole, were made temporary. For example, the ``no tax on tips'' provision will expire at the end of 2028. Smaller tax cuts for working people--temporary. Big tax cuts for wealthy Americans--permanent. They have admitted to it. That was a choice that was made by Republicans as part of that bill.
That is why I introduced an alternative, the Working Americans' Tax Cut Act, which provides 100 percent of its tax benefits not to the richest 20 percent but to the 80 percent of American taxpayers who are working hard--paycheck to paycheck--to make ends meet for themselves and their families.
Now, the Trump tax plan that he worked on and passed with Republicans not only provided very wealthy individuals with these big tax cuts but also big profitable corporations. In fact, the changes that were made by President Trump and Republicans have enabled 88 of the largest corporations in America to pay no--zero--Federal income taxes, despite having more than $100 billion in total profits among them. At the same time that these huge tax cuts were given to big corporations and the very wealthy, Republicans cut by $1 trillion our investments in health and nutrition programs for our fellow Americans. By the way, all told, it adds $4 trillion to our national debt.
There was another major part of that bill that Republicans passed last year with the President, and it was a massive slush fund for their mass deportation agenda. They put in that bill $140 billion for ICE and CBP. So, just for comparison's sake, for ICE, that was seven times their previous annual appropriation. They stuffed that into that one so-called Big Beautiful Bill. You know, that is as much money as many countries spend on their militaries in a year.
The results have been predictable--a bloated, unaccountable Agency that is not focused on deporting the ``worst of the worst,'' as the President said he would do, but that goes into communities and indiscriminately abducts people, ships them around the country, and then tries to deport them. Overwhelmingly--overwhelmingly--they are people with no criminal records who, according to DHS' own data, pose no risk to our communities: small business owners, pastors, veterans, parents taking their kids to school, even children.
When the American people rose up against these brutal policies and exercised their right to protest, when they took to the streets to exercise their First Amendment rights and to take pictures of what ICE agents were doing, we saw in Minneapolis two American citizens shot and killed--a mom, Renee Good, who was killed as she tried to drive away from ICE agents who were aggressively approaching her car, and a VA nurse Alex Pretti, who was killed when he stopped to help a fellow observer. He was shot in the back by CBP agents.
And the Trump administration--what was their response? They called the victims--they called Renee Good and Alex Pretti--domestic terrorists.
That is the mindset of this out-of-control, lawless ICE operation.
Well, my constituents in Maryland and Americans across the country have been horrified by these actions. They said it has to stop, and it needs to stop. These Agencies need to be held accountable. They need to be reined in. We need independent investigations.
So Democrats put forward some pretty straightforward proposed reforms: require Federal agents to show identification, take off the masks that allow them to evade accountability. Our local police officers don't wear masks. Our local police officers provide identification.
We also said: You have got to cooperate with State and local law enforcement investigating these incidents. When you have an administration calling the victims domestic terrorists, it is hard to trust the outcome of an administration that is doing the investigation. We want the local and State law enforcement authorities involved.
And our list of reforms went on, but they were rejected by Republicans and rejected by the White House. They didn't want meaningful reforms. They wanted to keep the blank check going.
And so then Democrats proposed that: OK, let's set aside ICE and CBP, and let's negotiate those, but let's immediately fund other parts of the Department of Homeland Security, like TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard. We were resisted for a very long time, and then finally Senate Republicans agreed. There was no reason to hold TSA, for example, hostage to an out-of-control ICE operation. So we passed that out of the U.S. Senate, allowing those other entities to get funding.
But what happened in the Republican-controlled House? Speaker Johnson refused to even let it come to a vote.
And so here we are, and Republicans are putting forward their reconciliation bill for this fiscal year. Their top priority? At this moment, when Americans are seeing their bills go up, their costs rise, when American families have had to absorb the huge increases as a result of Trump's illegal, unconstitutional tariff taxes--which is estimated, on average, to cost American families $1,700 a year. By the way, the President should give those families their money back, and do it now.
But as all of these costs are rising, Republicans here in Congress have decided to focus, instead, not on affordability but on using this special, rare process to do something else: to add to the slush fund for ICE and Customs and Border Patrol. And they are doing it in a way that doesn't require any Democratic votes. So this is Republicans only, so that is how we know that this is their top priority.
And, by the way, they are wasting a ton of taxpayer money in the process--a lot of taxpayer money--on these warehouses that they are buying up around the country to retrofit for detention centers, often paying way over market value. In my State of Maryland, they have spent $102 million to buy a warehouse in Western Maryland to turn into a detention center. They did so without adequate notice, without consultation with the community, and it is going to put strains on local water supplies and sewage capacity.
That warehouse project has been halted by a judge and is now being reconsidered by DHS, but $100 million of taxpayer money, already wasted.
I don't think any of us are surprised by the priorities that have been put forward by the Trump administration and now with Republicans in Congress because it was right down the hall here that Donald Trump was sworn in, and he promised a golden age for America, for Americans. Well, he has been delivering a golden age--a Gilded Age--for his billionaire buddies.
And despite what he said during his campaign when he said he was going to stop wars and bring down prices, he has started wars. Prices are going up. He is focused on building a gold-plated ballroom in the White House and new monuments to himself. He is focused on hiding portions of the Epstein files from survivors and the American people. He has been busy lying to the American people time and time again, telling them that prices are going down and the world is more peaceful and everybody is doing just great.
He wants everybody to believe the dear leader; and, unfortunately, if you look at a Cabinet meeting these days, you can see all the Cabinet officials--the most billionaire-filled Cabinet in history--nodding along.
But we can do better than that, and we should do better than that. We should listen to the concerns being expressed by people all over the country, and we should focus on bringing costs down and letting people have and keep
Instead, we see this effort by Republicans simply to fatten an Agency that is out of control, engaged in lawless activity, instead of what is important to the American people.
So I urge all of my colleagues to oppose--to strongly oppose--this reconciliation bill, which is simply an effort to stuff an illegal Agency like ICE at the expense of the American people.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Mr. President, there is a lot going on in the country and the world. Gas is at 4 bucks a gallon nationwide, and it is 5.65 at my corner Shell station in Honolulu. Groceries are expensive. Electricity bills are rising at double the rate of inflation, and millions of Americans have lost their health insurance this year. People really are struggling just to get by, and we, in the U.S. Congress, have got to be focused on helping them.
We have this very limited tool called reconciliation, and it is a way to circumvent the filibuster. It is a way to do things on just a purely partisan basis, and both parties have used this tool. It is really only available once every fiscal year. And without getting into the terribly boring details, it is basically spending or tax cuts. And that is the tool that we can use without having to compromise with the other side.
Now, when we had the House and the Senate and the Presidency, we used that tool for the American Rescue Plan. In the middle of COVID, mass unemployment, we decided to stabilize everybody's salary so they wouldn't be unable to make their rent or their mortgage or put food on the table.
And then we did the Inflation Reduction Act, which focused on reducing the cost of prescription medicine and attacking the climate crisis and providing tax credits for those who are working but not wealthy but not poor enough to qualify for an array of government programs.
And so the most important thing to understand about what is happening today and tomorrow is not that Republicans are about to spend $70 billion to fund an Agency that already has 7 years of prefunding, not that they are trying to make ICE--and will make ICE--more well-funded than the U.S. Marine Corps; it is not that Republicans refuse to make even the most reasonable reforms to hold ICE to the same standard that every local police department is held to--that you have to get a warrant before you conduct a search, that you have to introduce yourself, that you have to have a name and badge number, that there are very, very rare circumstances under which an officer should be permitted to wear a mask and conceal their face, and that there should be training in excess of 47 days.
I want everybody to understand the reason ICE trainees were given 47 days of training is to match up with the fact that this is the 47th President of the United States. It used to be many months of training. There used to be use-of-force training. They used to be treated like a normal law enforcement agency.
Now, we can have a disagreement about the degree and extent of immigration policy and who should be in this country and who shouldn't, but I think what happened was they mistook people's dissatisfaction with the Biden border policy for license to go and terrorize communities.
Everybody now agrees: Get the bad guys who don't belong here out of the country. Deport people who are committing violent crimes or dangerous crimes. Get them out of here. But everybody also understands that what ICE has done over the last year has been inhumane and made all of us less safe.
And so we were at a negotiation about--again, these are not like some progressive wish list full of reforms; these are literally the things that the Honolulu Police Department, that the New York City Police Department, that any police department in a rural State or an urban State or anywhere across the country has to adhere to. And most law enforcement officers--Federal, State, county--are perfectly fine being well-trained, are perfectly fine having to get a warrant, are perfectly fine when there is an officer-involved shooting to have an independent investigation. All of that is normal, and most law enforcement officers say: Yeah, these guys are unusually poorly trained.
And so we were in a negotiation to provide funding with reforms, but the Republicans ran out of patience. And so what we said was: Why don't we just go ahead and fund the Agencies that we all agree on--FEMA, the Cybersecurity function, the Coast Guard. So we passed this over on a bipartisan--not just a bipartisan basis, a unanimous basis out of this Chamber, and then the House killed it.
And so they are stuck now trying to figure out how they are going to fund this Agency. So they are using their one legislative opportunity that comes only once every fiscal year to fund ICE and CBP for 3 years going forward.
Why does that matter so much? First, it is a failure of just, like, basic legislating to solve a problem that everybody saw with their own eyes. When Alex Pretti and Renee Good were killed by Federal employees, it transcended politics; it transcended immigration policy. That is for sure. Nobody wanted to see that. But they didn't have the appetite to enact the most basic reforms, and so here we are. But that is not the most important part.
The most important part is this: People are paying more for gas, for utilities, for food, for lumber, for housing, for healthcare, for every single aspect of their lives. And you would think even if--I am not accusing anybody of anything--but even if you didn't care about the actual material condition of your constituents, you would care that they were mad at you that everything was up. You would care that everything has gotten more expensive during Donald Trump's second term, especially since, by most accounts, he was elected because everything was too expensive.
And so you would think these guys--they have the trifecta: They have the House; they have the Senate; they have the Presidency. And so they are going to go charging up the mountain and try to reduce the cost of living. That is what you should do with this reconciliation opportunity. That is what you should do. And, instead, they are spending $70 billion on this rogue Agency.
So over the next couple of days, we are going to give them opportunities to enact good policy that would reduce the cost of living. There are a number of ways we could do that: We could restore the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act. We could reverse the tariffs that are attacks on every consumer across the United States of America. We could end this preposterous war, which is costing about $2 billion a day and raising the price, by the way, not just of gasoline but of diesel, and not just of diesel but of fertilizer, which is an input for our agricultural industry. So everything is getting more expensive at the same time that we are spending $2 billion a day.
Just to give you context, last year when the government was shut down over a healthcare fight, the amount in question was $23 billion for a year's worth of the Affordable Care Act tax credits. That is about 11 days' worth of this war. And so don't let anybody tell you that there is not enough money. There is enough money. They are spending $2 billion a day on this war that nobody asked for, nobody expected. It is not even working out--$2 billion a day. No end in sight. And then $70 billion prefunding a Federal Agency that has already been prefunded.
And so don't let anybody tell you there is not enough money. What there is not enough of is moral clarity. People are going broke, and we are, in fact, lighting money on fire in the government. It is just for all the wrong things.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, I rise today to oppose a budget resolution my Republican colleagues have put before the U.S. Senate.
The American people are worried because of the pure chaos let loose on them by President Trump and the Republican majority--whether it is tariffs, billionaire tax cuts, or a war of choice with Iran.
Today, in addition, Republicans have put before the Senate not a bill to help
This unpopular and excessive spending comes mere months after Republicans already gave these Agencies a first-of-its-kind slush fund of $140 billion--an amount that is around four to seven times their annual regular appropriations and dwarfs annual funding for programs like SNAP food assistance and housing choice vouchers that actually lower costs for Americans.
The good news is that we will be giving our Republican colleagues a chance to correct this issue--to vote for funding and policies that actually help the American people. This includes a measure I intend to offer to rescind the Medicaid cuts Republicans and Donald Trump enacted last summer, which are depriving millions of Americans of health coverage.
Since President Trump returned to the White House, billionaires have gotten richer and working-class Americans and middle-class Americans have been overrun with higher prices, overrun with an affordability crisis.
The President's signature policy is his broad tariffs. As Americans struggled under the weight of ever-increasing costs, the President imposed new, illegal tariff taxes that added an extra $1,000 in additional costs to the average household budget last year, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. And even though the bulk of Trump's tariffs were declared illegal by the Supreme Court, the Trump administration has fought to prevent Americans from getting their money back. Instead, with the help of this Republican Congress, the President is delivering financial relief to his real constituents--his billionaire and multimillionaire friends--giving the top one-tenth of 1 percent--that is the top one-tenth of 1 percent--of households a huge $250,000 tax cut--$250,000 this year and every year going forward, unless we take action.
To partially hide the cost of this huge giveaway which is adding $3.4 trillion to the national deficit, Republicans cut Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion and made health insurance, as a result, unaffordable for millions of working-class Americans. Roughly 15 million people in this country are projected to lose their health insurance over the next decade because of these trillion-dollar Republican cuts. In an act of cynicism, Republicans phased in these cuts to hit Americans just after the election this year. It is all part and parcel of the longstanding approach of ``say one thing but do another.''
As you might recall, the President pledged to reduce inflation the first day he was in office. Actually, inflation has gone up. The first day in office, it was 3 percent; now it is 3.3 percent and likely to climb higher because of the situation in the Persian Gulf and the stress on oil production and distribution throughout the world.
Some of these cuts to Medicaid have already taken place, and about 1.5 million people were forced to drop their Affordable Care Act coverage during open enrollment this winter because of increased costs and the loss of tax credits for their premiums.
In my home State of Rhode Island, 10,000 people lost their health insurance. That is a 20-percent drop in coverage from that population. Before President Trump came into office and began decimating our healthcare system, Rhode Island was on track to have one of the lowest rates of uninsured individuals in the country: 2.2 percent.
There was still much work to be done--lowering costs further, requiring even more drug companies to negotiate lower prices, cutting out-of-pocket costs, increasing the healthcare workforce to make it easier to find a doctor, finding more cures and treatment by funding biomedical research, and more than that--but the Trump administration is not doing any of that. Instead, people are losing their healthcare, and it is just costing everyone more money in the long run.
When people get sick and don't have health insurance, they will end up eventually in the emergency room with a much more serious case and a much more costly case, which is more expensive than these premiums that we were helping people afford. And those costs--the cost of the uninsured going to emergency rooms, the cost of the problems contemplated by the failure to have health insurance--will be passed on to everyone. They will drive up health costs for businesses, families, States, and the Federal Government.
We are seeing that already not just in Rhode Island but across the country. Because of the anticipated loss of Medicaid funds, Blue Cross and the other insurance companies are already raising their premiums for private healthcare insurance. And that will go up and up and up, so that no one is escaping these cuts. It is not just a few of the poor people; it is everyone.
We have to do much, much more. These healthcare cuts are not making people healthier. They are not cost-effective. They are just a way to pay for tax cuts, in summary.
With households reeling from his tariff cuts--or shocks, I should say; they are not really cuts, they are raises--and healthcare cuts, President Trump upped the ante by unilaterally choosing to attack Iran and close a huge portion of the global oil industry. Any economist could have predicted what came next when you shut down 20 percent of the world's oil. Gas prices spiked from an average of $2.98 per gallon to a recent high of $4.17 per gallon. Diesel shot up above $5.60 a gallon and hit record highs in at least six States. Heating oil has gone above $5 per gallon, putting even greater pressure on household budgets. We are seeing costs overwhelm working families in Rhode Island. Their healthcare has gone up. Gasoline prices are going up. Heating oil is going up. Groceries are going up.
Our farmers are being impacted because the Strait of Hormuz is the passage point for a huge amount of fertilizer or fertilizer components, and it is hitting farmers all over this country and all over the world.
What we are seeing, though, is that the President is not only not getting it, but he is also asking Congress to eliminate existing aid that lowers home energy costs, provides affordable housing, and helps families pay for groceries. All of this was in his recent budget proposal. In each of these instances, the President chose to take policy actions that any rational person knows would make it harder for families to afford the cost of living.
Under his watch, food staples like ground beef and coffee have hit record highs. So have new car and home prices, which now sit at almost $50,000 and over $400,000 respectively. Health insurers in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace increased prices 26 percent in 2026, and business plans, as I said, are also going up--the private insurance that company owners have to pay for.
Right now, the Senate should be considering bread-and-butter issues like these. We should invest in the American people by ensuring every family can access programs like SNAP, Housing Choice vouchers, and the Affordable Care Act Marketplace so that no one has to worry about food, housing, or health insurance.
Unfortunately, this budget does not do a single thing to lower prices. Instead, it unlocks reconciliation, a process that will allow Republicans to ram through another partisan bill that funds two rogue Federal Agencies--ICE and Customs and Border Protection--without any accountability for their operations.
These Agencies spent the bulk of last year intimidating Americans throughout our Nation instead of conducting themselves like true law enforcement professionals. They were not seeking hardened criminals who were threats to the community. They were not stationed at the border, keeping a watchful eye for smugglers and those types. They were sent en masse to cities like Minneapolis and elsewhere to conduct seemingly random roundups. That is not real law enforcement. That is not the way to reform our broken immigration system. And that is certainly not the kind of activity that merits $140 billion more in taxpayer money.
Indeed, ICE officers tragically killed two Americans in the past year, and 48 immigrants have died in custody since the start of 2025. Together with Customs and Border Protection, ICE deployments have forced States and cities to shoulder tens of millions of dollars in new costs. Businesses in municipalities that weathered ICE surges lost customers and revenue as Federal
This is all bad enough, but House Republicans have taken it one step further and are holding funding for the Coast Guard, FEMA, and the rest of DHS hostage until they can grab another $140 billion for ICE and Customs and Border Protection.
Again, neither ICE nor Customs and Border Protection needs more money. Republicans used the reconciliation process last summer to provide $140 billion to these two Agencies, which usually receive less than $30 billion a year in total annual funding.
What these Agencies need is not more money but more accountability-- commonsense measures like requiring that all agents wear body-worn cameras and visible identification, while prohibiting the use of masks. You will not find a professional police force in this country that goes about their community in masks with no identification. We are just asking ICE to be professionals, to do what every other police force in this country--State, local--does and does each day.
We want to require agents to obtain a judicial warrant, signed by a neutral judge, before entering private property rather than relying on administrative warrants. We have seen incidents where ICE crashed into a house, grabbed an individual out, half-clothed, took him to their detention facility, and it turns out the individual was an American citizen, not an illegal alien. Why? Well, one reason was they didn't have the scrutiny of a real judge pledged to enforce the law; rather, they just asked their boss--``Sign this, please''--and they were off to create harm in a community.
We also want to prohibit agents from targeting hospitals, schools, daycare centers, churches, places of worship, holy places, and courthouses for immigration enforcement raids. This is something that we must do. These are places of community. These are places of religious observation, not a place to trap people and haul them away.
Now, to avoid confronting the malfeasance of ICE and Customs and Border Protection and to avoid addressing the damage their economic policies are causing, Senate Republicans are pushing partisan legislation to double down on their mistakes, giving more money to out- of-control Federal Agencies and failing to do a thing to help average Americans in this economy. We all--all Americans--deserve better.
In amendment after amendment during this debate, Senate Democrats will be giving our Republican colleagues the chance to stand up and do the right thing, to fix President Trump's mistakes, reverse the blunder of their Medicaid cuts, and start solving our affordability crisis. And I hope we will all join together and make those wise choices to help the American people.
With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
Mr. President, I rise again on this pressing matter of funding law enforcement, and the stakes couldn't be higher. Just weeks ago, I stood on this floor and warned that we would be back. Democrats blocked full funding for border security and deportations. They chose a radical ideology over the safety of the American people, yet again.
Now, we return with reconciliation as our vehicle, and we will not fail. This time, we will finish what the American people elected us to do--enforce our immigration laws and deport those who defy them, because this is not just another spending debate. This is a test of whether or not we are still a sovereign nation.
For decades, Washington has operated under a dangerous lie that America is an economic zone, not a nation; merely an economy, not a people; merely a labor market, and not a home. Under that lie, borders became suggestions, citizenship became paperwork, and enforcement became optional.
Then came the 4-year invasion, 15 million illegal immigrants flooding across our border--criminals, rapists, murderers. And the American people were told to accept the consequences in their wages, their schools, their hospitals, their neighborhoods, and sometimes at the grave sites of their children.
The American people were told to accept the affordability crisis caused by the massive influx of millions of aliens who suppressed Americans' wages, and Democrats nodded along as Joe Biden let it happen. The American people were told to accept higher rent. They were told to accept higher housing prices as millions of new neighbors flooded their communities, driving up costs. We saw that surge account for up to 100 percent of rental price growth in our most populous States--in two-thirds nationwide. That is the root cause of today's affordability crisis.
And on national security, the threat is very real. We have seen individuals from over 100 countries cross our borders--cartels, traffickers, and foreign adversaries ready to exploit weakness. Without enforcement, our southern border becomes a superhighway for cartels, crime, drugs, and terror.
But beyond economics and security, there is something deeper at stake. Our Nation isn't a marketplace. It is a people, a shared history, a culture, a way of life. Our Nation is woven together by our faith, our families, our freedoms. Our Nation has language, a memory, a border, and a people with the sovereign right to decide who gets to join them.
American citizenship is not a property interest to be conferred upon anyone who flies under the radar long enough. American citizenship is a covenant. It confers extraordinary rights but also demands obligations, loyalty, gratitude, humility, and the fidelity to the Nation and its people.
And when millions enter illegally--without assimilation, without limits, without enforcement--you don't get unity. You get division. You get a country that no longer knows who it is, and that is what we are here to stop.
This package funds the machinery of enforcement Democrats spent years trying to dismantle. It funds ICE. It funds CBP. It funds detention capacity, transportation, officers, agents, removal operations, and the hard infrastructure required to carry out deportations at scale.
The point is simple: A deportation order means nothing without a detention bed. A detention bed means nothing without agents. Agents mean nothing without transportation. And immigration law means nothing if Congress refuses to fund the men and women charged with enforcing it.
We have seen the costs of that failure. We have seen what this chaos looks like up close. It runs like a river of sin cutting through our land--murder, rape, arson, torture. Innocent Americans--daughters, sons, families--lost because the law was not enforced before the crime; lost because the Democrats have chosen illegal aliens over their fellow citizens, a choice made time and time again by the Democrats.
When given the choice between funding deportations and protecting sanctuary jurisdictions, Democrats chose sanctuary jurisdictions. When given the choice between detention beds and catch-and-release, Democrats chose release. When given the choice between American citizens and illegal aliens, Democrats chose illegal aliens, and the human cost of that decision is staggering.
The destiny of the American Nation is not to manifest death and destruction upon its own people through lawlessness and subversion of law enforcement. The destiny of this Nation--our Nation--is to be great, to be sovereign, and to be free.
We will not accept a system where action only comes after an American's blood is spilled on American soil. We will not defund law enforcement as Democrats argue for. We will not force our agents to do more with less while anarchy spreads like a plague. And we will not accept the lie that enforcement must always be delayed, diluted, or denied.
We are going to restore order. That means ending sanctuary policies that shield criminal illegal aliens. It means cutting off the incentives that fuel illegal immigration. It means giving our agents every tool they need to do their jobs.
To my Democrat colleagues, the American people rejected your open borders agenda. They voted for law and order. They voted for sovereignty. They voted for the deportations law enforcement will deliver.
And we are going to deliver.
To my Republican colleagues, this is our moment. For too long, we talked about these problems without solving them. That era is over. We have a real
We will not let America become a place where citizenship means nothing, where borders mean nothing, where the good and the heroic people who built this country are treated as enemies, while politicians refuse to notify law enforcement when a criminal illegal alien is being released from prison and into our communities.
I reject that future and so do the American people.
Citizenship is not merely paperwork. It is a covenant among our people. The first duty of the Federal Government is not to the world, not to an NGO, not to foreign nations or nationalists. It is not to the cheap labor lobby either. Its first duty is to its citizens.
The American people are watching. They will remember who stood with them and who stood in the way. The safety of our citizens isn't optional. The rule of law isn't optional. And our duty to defend both is not optional.
We will fund ICE. We will fund CBP. We will fund law enforcement. We will enforce our laws, and we will protect the American people, no matter how many times and for how long we have to return to this floor.
We will finish the job.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. President, well here we are. And for more than 2 months, our colleagues and friends across the aisle have decided that they were going to hold the Department of Homeland Security shut down, kind of hold them hostage.
And for that same 2 months, Republicans have been trying every single day to negotiate with them in good faith to find a resolution to this.
Well, they claimed, if they could just reform ICE, they would be happy. And, where reasonable, the White House offered to implement updated guidelines for ICE agents, including expanding the use of body- warn cameras, limiting civil immigration enforcement at certain sensitive locations, and enforcing the use of visible officer ID during enforcement actions.
Well, that sounds reasonable. Those were all things they wanted. But do you know what? All of a sudden, that wasn't enough. They rejected every offer to reopen the Department of Homeland Security.
Since February, they have taken 16 votes--not 1 or 2, but 16 votes-- against reopening the Department of Homeland Security.
One thing has become very clear, and it is this: For the Democrats, shutting down DHS is not a means to accomplish other policy goals. It is not a negotiating tactic. Keeping Homeland Security shut down is the goal. That is what they want.
Now, you come to that realization because when everything you put on the table--things they have said they are for, things they have said they wanted to see done--and they reject it all. They reject it all. Nothing suits them because they have wanted to keep DHS shut down.
And their goal is to abolish ICE. Their goal is to defund law enforcement.
So they found out that that was really not that popular with the American people because the American people want safe communities.
They think we should have public safety as a goal and they have watched what the Democrats have done and they have decided they don't like this. They like the fact that Republicans, that President Trump, has been focused on public safety.
You know, that is one of the reasons that the American people sent President Trump back to the Oval Office. It was to make certain that we were focused on our Nation's security, that we were focused on safe communities, that we were apprehending people that were in the country illegally, that individuals that were in the country illegally who had committed crimes were being apprehended and were being deported.
And I will say this: Since Inauguration Day, President Trump has delivered on his promise that he would restore law and order and he would bring law and order to the southern border after 4 years of solid chaos down there and, what we know, at least 10 million illegal aliens coming into this country.
For 11 consecutive months, CBP has released zero--zero--illegal aliens into our country, think about that, 11 months in a row. Now, under Joe Biden, border apprehensions were soaring, and what we saw last month was the stat that border apprehensions were down 97 percent from the same time in Joe Biden's term.
For most Americans, they like this, and they like the fact that the border is secure. They like the fact that drug dealers and sex traffickers are not coming into the country. They like the fact that people have to go to a port of entry, and they have to show their documents if they want to come into our precious country.
But you know what? That isn't what the Democrats want. They want to end President Trump's success at the southern border. They want to abolish ICE. They want to bring back the Biden years of rising crime, crime in your community's streets. They want to bring back drug trafficking. They want to bring back human trafficking and sex trafficking and lawlessness.
If you look at where their priorities are and where they spend their time and the votes they cast, that is what you see. Open the border, abolish ICE, defund the police, bring back the Biden years of rising crime, chaos, drug trafficking, human smuggling, sex trafficking, and lawlessness.
Now, as Republicans, we have said we are not going to stand for this, which is why we are moving to fully fund ICE and CBP for years to come through this reconciliation.
Our budget committee is chaired by Senator Graham, and he has introduced the budget resolution that is going to unlock a pathway for a public safety reconciliation bill.
Now, I don't see who can be against public safety. This is a targeted, focused bill, focused on public safety, something everybody should want not only for our Nation but for their cities and States.
Now, by doing this public safety reconciliation bill, we can fund these vital Agencies, and we can do it with a simple majority vote. This is how we were able to pass the Big Beautiful Bill with the working families tax cuts, and, indeed, I think many people have taken advantage of those extra tax cuts that were in that bill as they filed their taxes this year.
Now, every single Democrat who votes against funding for border enforcement is going to have to explain to their constituents why they put the concerns of illegal aliens before the concerns of the citizens who voted for them.
Tennesseans are really sick and tired of the games that are being played up here, primarily these games by the Democrats where they are not funding DHS. And they are frustrated when they see that Congress isn't getting things done.
This week, I did a telephone townhall. I love doing these. We have thousands of Tennesseans on the line with us, and some of the questions that I got were: Why can't we fund border enforcement? We should want to keep the border closed so we know who is coming in here. Who could be opposed to that?
Why can't we pass the SAVE America Act? You know, 83 percent of the American people, not just Republicans or Independents or Democrats, but 83 percent of the American people want us to pass the SAVE America Act.
It is very simple. If you are going to register to vote in our country, you have got to prove that you are a U.S. citizen--common sense. Most every country does that. You have got to be a citizen if you are going to vote in their elections.
And next, they want to make certain that when you go to vote, you show an ID. Thirty-six of our States require already that you show an ID.
We have got 14 States, primarily blue States, that do not require that you show an ID. To the American people, it is common sense. So they ask: Why can't we pass the SAVE America Act? Why can't we prioritize our national security amid a conflict that is going on with Iran, who is the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism?
We should be prioritizing our Nation's security. And time and again, as I answered these questions, I would tell Tennesseans the Democrat agenda is completely at odds with the interests of the American people. They are going to do anything and everything they can to undermine President Donald Trump because they don't like him. And they have TDS.
And so to them what they are trying to do is stall and not fund the Agencies that are here to support what the American people want to see done.
Now, despite all these efforts, Democrats can't stop us from putting the American people first, addressing the concerns, meeting the needs of the American people.
So we will move forward with our reconciliation bill. We will move forward with fully reopening the Department of Homeland Security as soon as we possibly can, and we will move forward with making certain the American people know that the Democrats have used them as a pawn. They didn't want to negotiate. Nothing was ever good enough. Their goal was to abolish ICE and to defund the police.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Wisconsin.
Mr. President, I rise today to end President Trump's war in Iran. This vote could not come at a more crucial time.
Today was supposed to be end of the cease-fire that is hanging on by a thread. While the President said that it will be extended, we have no idea until when. We have no idea if the President will, as he has many times, change his position and go through with his threat to commit war crimes and bomb civilian infrastructure.
So now is the time to act. We simply do not have any time to waste and see if an entire civilization will die because the President gets impatient.
This entire war has been unnecessary, illegal, and unwise. We need to put a check on this President before it gets even worse.
Unfortunately, the President has shown us that he did not have a plan after day one. The President said that the war would be over in a matter of days. We are coming up on the 2-month mark with no real end in sight. And over the course of 50-plus days, we have seen nothing short of a disaster. This war has caused irreparable damage to families, to the American people, to our standing in the world, and to our economy.
We have lost 13 American servicemembers, with hundreds of others injured, many seriously. Thousands of civilians have been killed including many dozens of schoolgirls by an errant U.S. bomb.
President Trump's war has delivered higher costs for Americans at the pump with families paying more than $1 more per gallon since the war started. And I would be remiss if I didn't say that even the Trump administration is now admitting that those costs are going to be here to stay, given the mess they created in the Strait of Hormuz.
It has jacked up the cost of fertilizer and fuel for Wisconsin farmers. Soon enough, this will also mean higher costs at the checkout counter at the grocery store for families as my farmers simply can't eat those costs.
The cost of the war--which the administration won't even tell us outside of classified settings--is in the tens of billions of dollars, and the American taxpayers are footing the bill.
Iran's resolve is hardened and, arguably, so is its regime. And they are still in control of its enriched uranium.
This war has taken us backward and created more problems for the people that I work for. The American people have been crystal clear that they do not want this war. They want what they were promised from this President: lower costs and no foreign wars. They were sold a bad bill of goods and now are left cleaning it up.
It is time for Congress to do its job and end this war now. I encourage my colleagues to vote yes on this resolution.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, today the Iranians claimed to have seized two ships in the Strait of Hormuz, while firing on a third. The President has ordered the blockade of Iranian ports to continue, even as he announced a cease-fire, even as he backed off yet another apocalyptic threat.
In short, we are approaching the end of the second month of Trump's Iran war, and there is no end to the conflict or the confusion in sight.
Sadly, there is little sense that a deal is in the offing or what that deal would look like and whether our security will be any better if and when the President declares some kind of Pyrrhic victory. But this much we know already: This war has come at a terrible cost.
First and foremost, there has been the tragic loss of human lives. Mr. President, 13 of our servicemembers have been killed, including CW3 Robert Marzan of California. Over 200 U.S. servicemembers have been injured, some seriously. Our hearts go out to all of the families and communities from which they come.
Scores of Iranian civilians have also been killed including over a hundred at a girl's school that appears to have been mistakenly bombed by the United States. There have also been casualties in Israel and the Gulf States, the total number of which is still unknown.
Second, there is the economic cost to the American taxpayer to the tune of tens of billions of dollars--maybe when this conflict is over, hundreds of billions of dollars. Every American family will already be asked to pay over $1,000 as their contribution to a war they did not want, which their Representatives in Congress did not vote to approve.
Just imagine what that means. For that price, America could have paid for universal pre-K for all of our kids. Think about that. Every American child could have had pre-K for the likely cost of this war. In a very real sense, the early childhood education of our kids will suffer because this President chose to invest in bombing Iran instead of educating our kids.
A hospital costs around $100 million. That means there could have been 200 hospitals in 200 communities around the country for the cost of this war. One of those communities just might have been yours. Those hospitals will never be built because this President, who promised no more foreign wars, no more regime change wars, no more stupid wars, broke his promise. Diminished healthcare for you and your family is a cost of the war.
Third, you are paying much higher prices for gas, electricity, groceries, and more as a result of this war. Why? Because of the eminently predictable action Iran has taken to close a vital shipping lane--the Strait of Hormuz.
General Caine reportedly warned President Trump that Iran was very likely to take this action. Frankly, it didn't require a military genius to reach that conclusion.
But drunk on his own power, convinced of his own infallibility, this is a President, after all, who just said that he would have won the Vietnam war very quickly. Donald Trump could not conceive of anything other than a quick Iranian capitulation. Sadly, though, this has not been the case, and there is still no end to the conflict or the higher prices Americans are paying.
An average family--your family--can expect to pay at least $1,000 more a year in costs like those at the pump as a result of Trump's Iran war; and that is on top of another $1,000 in taxes to pay for all the bombs that we are dropping on that country.
And, finally, we are paying an additional cost for this war from the fact that the case for this war was never made to the country or to the Congress, from the fact that our Republican colleagues in the majority have refused thus far to hold a single hearing on the war. I am told maybe there will be one at the end of next week.
And the American people are not informed about the purpose, the goals, the duration, the price tag, and more of this conflict because we have had no open hearings on it.
And that cost is this: more wars by this President or future Presidents because Congress has refused to exercise its constitutional authority over war.
I urge an aye vote.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague Senator Baldwin and others for continuing to bring this debate before the Senate again. It is just extraordinary that this is the most significant military action that the United States has taken in decades. And there has yet to be one single hearing, one single debate, one single vote on an authorization of military force.
I want to target my remarks today on just what has happened over the past 2 weeks because we tend to bounce from one news cycle to the next without being able to really connect together the growing incompetence that has defined the management of this war.
We shouldn't sugar-coat or normalize this degree of gross, unacceptable incompetence being exercised here. We essentially have a talk show host and a couple of real estate developers who are in charge of our war strategy, and we are getting essentially what you would expect if you put a talk show host and a handful of real estate developers in charge of a major Middle East war.
If millions of lives weren't at stake--and that is really what is at stake as the global economy threatens to melt down because of rising gas prices and the fact that one-third of all fertilizer supply is right now stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, if this wasn't really about millions of lives being at stake, this would be the stuff of farce, one mistake just compounded by another.
So many of us believe this war has to end right now because as each mistake gets bigger than the next, the hole for the United States, for American families, for our national security gets deeper and deeper.
So I am literally just going to very quickly run you through what has happened in the last 2 weeks.
So we all remember on April 7, when Trump posts on social media that he is going to destroy Iran's entire civilization. He says:
Later that day, he announces that there has been a cease-fire. But within hours, there is essentially diametrically opposed interpretations from Trump and the Iranians as to the terms of that cease-fire. The next day, he puts out a series of posts saying:
By the end of day on April 8, the cease-fire has fallen apart. Iran says that a cease-fire in Lebanon is also necessary in order to get the Strait of Hormuz opened. Trump is unable to secure that. So by the end of the day, the day after the cease-fire is announced, the cease-fire no longer exists.
Two days later on April 10, Trump sends his Vice President JD Vance to Pakistan for negotiations.
On April 11, those negotiations are concluded after what appears to be an hour or two of face-to-face negotiations. Vance gets right back on a plane after--having spent an entire day--1 day--negotiating the end of this war to come back to the United States.
That day, Trump says:
Not true.
Not true. The U.S. delegation, led by Vance, comes back to the United States without an agreement.
On April 12, Trump announces--this is the day after the negotiations fall apart--that he is setting up a blockade. So the Iranians have a blockade on the strait. Now Trump announces a layered second blockade. But he is still saying that negotiations are going great. He says:
Of course, that is not true. Virtually nothing was agreed to in that meeting.
He says the next day that his negotiators, who were talking about a 20-year moratorium on enrichment of uranium, do not have his support. He says:
I mean, we have never seen this before--literally a President in public contradicting his negotiators who were negotiating the terms of an agreement just 2 days ago.
Three days later, on April 17, Trump says that Iran again has agreed to everything, including removing enriched uranium. Trump says our people are just going to go get the uranium and bring it back to the United States.
Within hours, Iran says this is not true. They say: We have the right--a sacred right--to enrich uranium on our soil.
Trump says his negotiators are not considering releasing sanctions. Two of his negotiators go to the press and say they were talking about releasing sanctions.
Again, this is just diplomatic malpractice. The President of the United States and his negotiators are arguing with each other in public through the media.
Then, on April 19, Trump says he is sending Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan for new talks. The top negotiator, JD Vance , apparently has been sidelined. The administration then says Vance is indeed going to Pakistan. Trump goes back to the press and says Vance is not going to Pakistan. The White House scrambles again and confirms that Vance will be going. The problem is that the Iranians have not agreed to the negotiations.
So a day later, the President says Vance and his delegation are on their way. Come to find out they are not leaving for Pakistan because the Iranians are not agreeing to negotiate.
I mean, I get it that we have come to kind of normalize this kind of incompetence, this kind of planned, executed chaos, but we are on the floor week after week asking our colleagues to end this war because this is an embarrassment to the United States of America. The President and his negotiators are arguing in public with each other. The President is literally deciding by the hour whether his son-in-law is in charge of the negotiations or whether the Vice President is in charge of the negotiations. The President is lying consistently about the nature of the negotiations, saying things have been agreed to that clearly have not been agreed to--helping the Iranians blockade the strait.
We have never seen a foreign conflict mismanaged in public like this before. I understand many of my Republican colleagues want to support their President, but we are becoming a laughingstock in the world while at the same time, we are hurting Americans who are now paying billions more in gas prices. We are risking a global famine as fertilizer is unavailable to poor farmers all over the world, and economies are shutting down because of the high price and shortage of fuel.
The costs of keeping this war going 1 more day are just too high both in reputational costs to the United States but also in the cost to lives and the pocketbooks of millions of Americans.
I know my Republican colleagues have a hard time breaking with their President. I will say that many of us--in closing--on the Democratic side certainly had a hard time breaking with our President as well, whether it was Barack Obama or Joe Biden, but on multiple occasions, we did. Many of us stood on this floor and argued against President Obama's intervention in the Yemen war. Many of us stood on this floor and argued against Biden's policy in Gaza. That wasn't easy, but we thought it was important for us to separate ourselves from our party loyalty when we thought our President had gotten it wrong for America's national security.
It is time for our Republican colleagues to join us in one of these resolutions because it is just so clear to the entire world that if this war continues
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
Mr. President, I rise to support my colleague Senator Baldwin's War Powers Resolution. I have spoken on all of these resolutions now going back to the very beginning of the war. I will not be long. I thank my colleague for bringing this forward.
In just the news of today, one aspect of the war is the increasing fuel costs and its effect on the global economy. There have been three news items just in the last 3 hours.
First, Lufthansa Airlines is canceling thousands of flights because of increased fuel costs.
Second, the American airline Spirit Airlines is on the verge of bankruptcy, with the U.S. Government considering the need to bail out Spirit Airlines.
Finally, there has been an announcement within the last couple of hours by United Airlines--one of our largest carriers--that they believe they may have to increase airfares by up to 20 percent for some significant time into the future to recoup the costs of additional aviation fuel.
If you just think back to February 27, it seems like a long time ago now because so much has happened. Less than 2 months ago, oil prices were normal, the Strait of Hormuz was open, and commerce was happening. Then President Trump made the decision--without a rationale, without a plan, without consulting with allies, without consulting or seeking a vote of Congress--to enter the Nation into yet another war in the Middle East.
The entire world is suffering, but the suffering that matters the most to me is the suffering of Americans--the 13 families who have lost loved ones in an unnecessary war and the hundreds of our military members who have been injured and their lives forever altered going forward.
I want to say this to my colleagues: You made a really good point. This is a critical moment. We are in a cease-fire. It is actually easier to stop something when you are in a cease-fire.
If we could vote yes on this resolution and get it to the House, it could have the effect of extending the cease-fire so that we don't start bombing again.
We know the President has been going back and forth. He came within a few hours last night of ending the cease-fire, of calling for a renewing of the bombing that has killed civilians and that has dramatically damaged civilian infrastructure in Iran. Yet, at the very last minute, as he is prone to do, he changed his mind and said the cease-fire should be extended. I salute that.
For whatever the reason or however he is going to describe it, extending the cease-fire is the right thing to do because all of this gets harder when bombs start falling again. The regime's backbone gets stiffer and stiffer. Their desire to retaliate grows stronger and stronger. The chaos in the region escalates the threat to American troops. It escalates. This all gets harder if bombs start falling again.
So while we are in the moment of a cease-fire that is fragile and that may not be counted upon to last for very long, if we could pass Senator Baldwin's resolution, we would send the strong message that Congress wants the pause. We want the pause. We don't want this war to pick up again unless or until we have the debate and the vote that the Constitution requires. That would be the right thing to have happen. That would be respecting our troops.
I will conclude and just say this: After nearly 14 years on the Armed Services Committee representing one of the most military States in the country and thinking as a military dad ``What is it that we owe our troops?'' we owe our troops the resources that they need.
My colleagues and I on both sides of the aisle every year pass the Defense authorizing bill. It is the only bill that we have passed every year for 63, 64 years in a row. This is something for which, in a bipartisan way, we join together to make sure that our troops have the resources they need. That is the first thing we owe them.
The second thing we owe our troops is respect, and that is why so many of us on both sides of the aisle go out of our way, as we are traveling around our States, to spend time with our military families and to thank those who serve. When we have the opportunity during recess, we travel around the world to see our troops in harm's way. We look them in the eye and thank them for the sacrifices they make.
But I would argue that an even more important way to respect our troops--even more than the resources we provide and the thanks we offer--is to not use them for missions that are not worth their risking their lives for. Let's not use them for stupid reasons. Let's use them for good reasons--when war is the last resort that must occur in order to protect America. At that point, our troops who have signed up have volunteered for a mission that they know might be dangerous, and yes, we should deploy them in those circumstances. But when we use troops foolishly, as we often have during my lifetime--in Vietnam and in Iraq, where they served bravely, but in a way, they were betrayed by poor civilian decisionmaking--that is the cardinal form of disrespect to our troops.
The way we use them in the right way is by having this kind of a debate about whether a mission is in the national interest before we send them in to risk their lives.
Senator Baldwin's motion at this moment when we are at a cease-fire gives us a chance to step back, have that debate, and have that vote. In full view of the American people, those who want to make the case that this war is worth it should be able to make that case, and those of us who don't believe it is worth it should make that case. Then we would have a vote, and the answer would be in accord with the process set out by the Framers of our Constitution.
If the will of Congress is that we should go to war, I might disagree with it, but I would argue that it was done lawfully, just as our Framers demanded, but if, as I imagine, the full debate and vote in these bodies does not provide sufficient votes to authorize the war, how dare we keep asking our troops to risk their lives for something we are unwilling to vote for.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague Tammy Baldwin for bringing this War Powers Resolution to the floor and for forcing it onto the Senate. By its own prerogative, the leadership on the Republican side did not want to have a debate or a discussion about a war that is affecting every single American.
Remember, the problem we have right now, which I will talk about, is not just the actions of a President; it is the inaction of this body.
Today, what my colleague is doing is saying: No, we will not have business as usual. We will not just go about as if there is not a cataclysmic war going on. We will not go about as if we are not spending billions of dollars a week overseas that are desperately needed resources here at home.
My colleague is saying: No, we are not going to let the Senate operate as business as usual. We are going to force a debate and a discussion and a vote because the Senate is abdicating its responsibility--its constitutional responsibility--in that matters of war should be decided here and not unilaterally by one person, by the President of the United States. Explicitly stated in the Constitution is that those powers lie with us.
What we have seen in the U.S. Senate is one of the worst examples in the history of our country of a surrendering of our constitutional responsibility, a surrendering of our power to a President who is abusing it.
Now, those abuses are obvious. Those abuses are now seen forever for the historical record in that this President told us we were going to war because of multiple different reasons.
Regime change. That hasn't been accomplished. We now have a more extreme regime.
Because of nuclear concerns. Well, the ultra-enriched fissile material is still there in that country.
He said that we are going to war to protect civilians. He threatened them: If you continue to kill your civilians who are protesting for democracy, the
He said his goals and his end in this--he stated them clearly: We will attain unconditional surrender. Well, that is clearly not the case when you are rushing off to Pakistan to try to negotiate an end.
This is a President who has failed in everything he has said about this war that he wanted to achieve. If anything, he has shown the Iranians that they have more power, that this regime has more leverage against Americans.
First and foremost, they found out that--as we send multimillion- dollar weapons into that country to bomb and to achieve an erosion of their navy and their army, they have actually shown now that their low- cost, inexpensive drones can still inflict maximum damage; that when the President bragged about having control of the air, our planes were still being shot down.
This is a President who now has seen Iran realize: Wait a minute, we have tremendous leverage here; we can choke the Strait of Hormuz and cause a global economic shock--the likes of which we have never seen and an oil shock here at home that we have never had.
There is no way to look at this war as if there is any modicum of success, when you have the Iranians holding more cards than they did at the beginning of the war, still have their highly enriched uranium, have a more extreme, entrenched regime, and have us rushing to try to negotiate to get something out of this horrible ``excursion,'' as the President has called it.
And not only has this cost tens of billions of dollars, but it has cost American lives. We are seeing it already as, recently, a brave U.S. servicemember, who survived a deadly attack by Iran in Kuwait, spoke up. This attack killed 6 servicemembers and injured 20.
One of the injured soldiers stated that the story Secretary Hegseth was telling the public that the building was ``fortified,'' and that one of the drones just ``squeaked through'' is a falsehood, our military servicemember said.
The servicemember said:
Now, you would think, if a U.S. member of our armed services is shedding factual light on our unpreparedness for a war that our President rushed us into--unprepared, no plan, no strategy--that the one body that was responsible for providing check, balance, oversight, and accountability, the U.S. Senate, wouldn't just sit back and do nothing. But that is exactly what this body has done.
Republican leadership has done nothing to call for open hearings where we could ask questions, which we can show those U.S. servicemembers on the frontline that, while you are upholding your oath to the Constitution, we will uphold ours. But we are not. They are showing the ultimate fealty and loyalty to the Constitution, but we are not. They are brave enough to confront the enemy, but we are not brave enough to call questions to the President of the United States that must be called.
Were you prepared? Under what grounds did you go? How much is this costing the American taxpayer? And more.
We are not doing our job. We have abdicated our responsibility. We have betrayed the Constitution, and yet we do nothing.
So what my colleague is doing today is forcing this debate, forcing this vote. But dear God, this is a sad day, because the only thing that we need to do to check the power of the Presidency when it is being abused, when it is reckless, when the consequences of that recklessness are higher prices for every American, when the consequences of that recklessness is giving a dangerous Iran more power and more leverage, when the consequences of that recklessness is the death of our soldiers--what is this body doing? Nothing.
Republican leadership has called no open hearings, no sufficient accountability, no substantive oversight. They are kowtowing to a President and allowing him into a reckless war with grave consequences and a shredding of our constitutional intent by our Founders.
Woe be to us at this 250th anniversary, where people will rush out with flags, waving to celebrate our Constitution and our country. But here, they are betraying it.
We have a job to do. It is clear in the Constitution. We have three equal branches of government that function when they check each other. They function when there is oversight. They function when there is accountability. But when one branch fails to rise to the historic urgency of this moment, that is when our Constitution and the people on the frontlines--the people like this brave servicemember--are not only being ill-served, but they are at graver danger.
Our Nation is in crisis right now. Our precious, scant resources are not spent on healthcare, our children's education, science research, but on this President's war. We have servicemembers in danger. The least we should ask from this body is to do its job, uphold the Constitution, and provide a real check and balance, real accountability, and oversight to this President.
I thank my colleague for forcing this debate and forcing this vote. This is yet, unfortunately, another sad day in history for this body. This is the least we could do, but we should be--we must be--doing so much more.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, we are here at this moment to defend the Constitution, and the constitution of any nation is incredibly important in creating the vision of the checks and balances between the judiciary and the executive and the Congress.
But what really matters is whether the elected representatives actually honor the Constitution. Do they follow the words and the vision laid out?
You know, it is article I, section 8 that delineates powers, and in the course of it, there are three megapowers assigned to Congress. And one of those is the power of the purse: design programs, authorize them, fund them.
It is a President's job to execute.
The second is the power of taxation, including the power of tariffs. In fact, the first bill ever debated by the Senate was a tariff bill--3 weeks spent figuring out how they could reach agreement on what the tariff would be on a keg of nails or a barrel of molasses.
And the third, perhaps the most consequential, is the power of war. You know, it is just three words delineated--``The Congress shall have [the] power,'' and it lays out these responsibilities, and then it says: ``To declare War.'' Three words: ``To declare War.''
Now, if anyone thinks those were just some kind of bureaucratic phrase, you are mistaken. Madison summed it up and pointed out that, in the history of all governments, it is the executive, as the branch of government, ``most interested in war, and most prone to it.'' And then he summarized it this way: The Constitution ``has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.''
So this is the moment we decide today: Are we going to actually follow the document we took an oath to?
Now, some of my colleagues have said: Well, the President also has the power, when there is an imminent threat to our national security, to act.
And I don't dispute that. Think about planes on the way to bomb the United States, or forces--a raid across the border on the verge of coming across.
But that was not the situation 2 months ago. There was no imminent threat of any kind, of any sort, anywhere near that exception.
Perhaps this war really is a poster child for why the wisdom of the Founders was so important, because wars go off in directions you never anticipate, because wars result in carnage--the death of Americans, the injuries of Americans, the death of the combatants we oppose, the death of civilians, and treasure vastly expended.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--those misbegotten foreign adventures so poorly thought through--cost $8 trillion, the lives of 7,000 of our servicemembers, and 50,000 injured. That shows the consequences of war. But in those two cases, Afghanistan and Iraq, at least the President followed the Constitution, and this body, the Senate of the United States of America, insisted that the President follow the Constitution.
Where is that insistence right now? Where is the leadership of this Chamber defending the constitutional role of the Senate? Why are they not on the floor at this moment saying: We took an oath to the Constitution, and, damn it, we are going to follow it.
This war is another misbegotten adventure. It did not benefit in any way from a President's effort to persuade this Chamber or the Nation or the House of Representatives that this strategy had merit.
Every expert said you can count on the Strait of Hormuz to be shut down. Every expert said extracting the highly enriched uranium from deep underground during the middle of war is a near impossibility. ``So what is your mission?'' they asked.
But we didn't have those debates here in the Senate.
What has this war actually done? It has strengthened the Iranian hardliners; that is not a win. It weakened the reformers; that is certainly not in our interest. It failed to secure the stockpile of highly enriched uranium; so that is a failure. It shredded our moral leadership as champions of human rights; that is certainly a loss. It enriched and emboldened Russia. We actually took off the sanctions, allowing Russia to make even more money on the sale of its oil, at the very time that they continue to attack Ukraine.
It raised the prices at the pump. Oregon is at over $5 a gallon of gas. Maybe some of you are complaining about $4 a gallon. Well, it is $5 in Oregon. And diesel is $6.
And the agricultural community is suffering from vastly higher prices on fertilizer, and everyone is suffering from increased inflation on everything that energy goes into.
And this battle has already cost us in blood and treasure. We already have American servicemembers who have died. We already have more than 100 seriously injured. And it is already costing us directly a billion to $2 billion a day.
Now, four times we have come to the floor and said the debate should be now, because the Constitution is clear: There is no 60-day clause when there is no imminent threat, in the law. And four times, it has been a partisan vote.
There is nothing partisan about the Constitution. There is nothing partisan about the oath we took to the Constitution. There is nothing partisan at all about ensuring that the high risk of war is duly debated in this Chamber and following the advice of our Founders, including Jefferson and Madison.
But the President launched this war in violation of the Constitution, and so now is the time we have to respond. And it is in the War Powers Act that we can put up a resolution that says: Stop. You have violated the law. Come and get the authorization the Constitution demands. Come and do that.
That is what this vote is on today.
Not only did the President violate the Constitution, but he threatened a bombing campaign that would have resulted in massive civilian deaths. He threatened to bomb Iran ``back to the Stone Ages,'' and he said: ``A whole civilization will die tonight.'' He threatened massive war crimes as part of his unregulated campaign, unauthorized by this body.
So, to my colleagues, let's join together--united, Democrats and Republicans. We should have done so when Trump launched this illegal, unconstitutional war. We should have done so when 13 members died. We should have done so when we bombed a school and at least 175 people died--other reports have it much higher--and a whole lot of them schoolgirls. We should have done it when the President threatened to slaughter civilians and conduct war crimes overseas. We should have done it because it is costing us billions of dollars a day. We should have done it when the price at the pump shot through the roof. But most of all, we should have done it because the Constitution says it is our responsibility.
I recognize it is an uncomfortable vote because we are perhaps afraid to take this consequential decision and get it wrong, so it is easier to duck the responsibility we have under the Constitution, but duck we must not because it is our responsibility; it is on our desk; it is what the Constitution requires.
So let's honor that Constitution and vote yes and put up the stop sign and say: Mr. President, if you wish to pursue a war against Iran, then do what previous Presidents did in Afghanistan and Iraq and come and make your case and try to persuade us that it is in the Nation's interest. I think it is a very, very tough sell, which tells you a lot about what is wrong with this effort and why the Constitution requires that we weigh in.
I urge my colleagues: Do your job under the Constitution and vote aye on the War Powers Resolution.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Mississippi.
Mr. President, I will speak against the War Powers Resolution, but first I have a unanimous consent request to make, and so I ask that I be recognized for that purpose.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is recognized for that purpose.
Directing the Removal of United States Armed Forces from Hostilities Within or Against the Islamic Republic of Iran That Have Not Been Authorized by Congress: Motion to Discharge
Pursuant to section 601(b) of the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act, I move to discharge the Committee on Foreign Relations from further consideration of S.J. Res. 114 to direct removal of U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities within or against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
I know of no further debate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there further debate?
The question is on agreeing to the motion to discharge.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley), and the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. McCormick).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 46, nays 51, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
Mr. President, I am going to give you a name: Tony Hanagan.
As we all know--not necessarily everybody outside this Chamber--Tony is a senior floor assistant. I will come back to what that means in a second.
Tony is leaving us for the private sector. Under the ethics rules, he can't tell us where he is going. I think it is a startup, but I am not sure. I think part of his job responsibilities--not exclusive because I don't know because he can't talk about it--will be ``congressional relations.'' I have strongly encouraged him to ask the startup to define very carefully what they mean by ``congressional relations'' in light of what has been going on around here.
Though we kid him a lot--I will come back to that too--Tony is very smart. He is a graduate of William & Mary. I am sure there are some dummies at William & Mary, but I have never met one coming out of there. It is a great school. He has also spent time at the Wharton School, studying their model budget project.
He has worked his way up as a member--as basically a Senate advisor. And let me explain a little bit of what Tony and his colleagues do.
You see these two doors back here, this one and this one. This one leads to what we call the Democratic cloakroom. This door leads to what we call the Republican cloakroom. Now, that is where Senators go to cuss and to tell each other lies, but it is not the only purpose of those. Supposedly, we can go back there and relax and when someone isn't around--and sometimes when they are around--and make fun of people.
But there are members of our staff who have desks back there, and not every member of our staff has a desk back there. Some are close by.
What do they do? They make this place run. For one thing, they understand the rules or claim to. No living human being, at least not in the U.S. Senate with a beating heart, understands the Senate rules. I am not saying no one understands them. I am just saying nobody in the Senate does. They say they do. They lie like fish swim because to understand--you don't only have to understand the rules; you have got to understand all the precedents.
The first 6 months I got here, I said: You know, I am going to learn the rules. I read about Lyndon Johnson who supposedly sat here and learned all
But after 6 months, here is my conclusion: I don't know if I can learn the rules and all the precedents, and by the time I do, they will have changed. And someday, I am going to die, and I don't want on my tombstone ``Kennedy understood the Senate rules.'' So I gave up. I quit. No mas. And so now, when I want to understand the rules, I talk to a member of our staff, like Tony, or some of my colleagues, and so do most of my Senate colleagues on the Democratic side and on the Republican side. Now, our staff could be lying to us because we don't know any better. They could make this stuff up, but I don't think they do. I have never seen Tony make it up. A couple of times, I thought I had caught him, but he turned out to be right, and that is important.
But it is more than just an understanding of the rules. It is more than Tony's job and my colleagues' job who are our advisers--it is more than just learning the rules because the rules look like they were designed by a heroin addict with a socket wrench.
We don't know how to get things done, so we go to our advisers and say: Tell me how to do this.
And they are really good at that. Tony is really good at that. I know sometimes the questions are so esoteric and so bizarre, I can tell from their eyes that they want to look at you and say: You are not the stupidest person I have ever met, but you had better hope the stupidest person I have ever met doesn't die.
But they never do that. They always say: OK. You know, you can try it that way, but here is the downside of it, and with all due respect, there is a better way of doing it, and you might consider this.
Frankly, I mean, our Parliamentarian--I see her here. She does understand the rules, and she is pretty good at helping you too. She has got lines she can't cross because she doesn't work for Senate Republicans or Democrats.
But this is what Tony does and the other staff members, and they make this place run. They are not responsible for the fact that the Senate only works when everybody isn't crazy at the same time, and they are not responsible for the fact that sometimes it takes us weeks, months, even years, to get nothing done. Doing nothing--it can be frustrating. Doing nothing is very hard because you never know when you are finished. But they make this place run, and we are going to miss Tony.
Now, we make fun of Tony. It is all in good fun. There is a big mirror back in the cloakroom. I think it is an antique mirror. That is what they tell us. Sometimes we will--I have done it, but others, I think, have too. Sometimes we will write little notes to the majority leader--we used to do it with Mitch, and now we do it sometimes with Thune--and sign it ``Tony,'' and, of course, they all have a heart attack.
Tony keeps a couple of pairs of shoes under his desk, and probably about once a week, some of us take at least one of the shoes and hide it, and he is ready to go home at whatever--11 o'clock, 12 midnight-- and he can't find his shoe. Max, who works with him back there--his job is to eventually, after he spends an inordinate amount of time and he gets really close to the point that he has no more firetrucks to give and is going to start telling everybody what he thinks--Max will tell him where the shoe is.
I have got some other stories about Tony, but I just can't tell them because there are probably some children listening.
But anyway, you will read about Tony someday in the Wall Street Journal, and it won't be because he went ``Eric Swalwell''; it will be because of his financial success. And we are going to miss him, but I can't blame him. He is already picking out the color of his new Mercedes.
The Presiding Officer knows the Mercedes-Benz. If you have any advice for him, like the best one that deflects heat, you might want to talk to him. He may want to just buy two, OK?
But anyway, we are going to miss Tony, and I wanted to say that, and I am sorry I can't tell you all of the ``Tony'' stories. They are legendary.
But, Tony, you have just been awesome, you and all of your colleagues, and we never talk about them enough. I just want to say thank you.
And my final words: Peace out.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, we are at a critical moment. It is a crossroads for the American people.
The President is waging a war of choice. It is really a war of impulse, a war of whim and illusion without the support of the American people and without approval from the U.S. Congress, representing the American people. Meanwhile, the costs of food and fuel--gasoline at the pump and produce at the grocery store--all have soared. Healthcare is unaffordable. Gas prices are going to continue to skyrocket.
The Secretary of Energy told us just last weekend that prices will not come down appreciably before the end of the year. Of course, since then, he has contradicted himself. His chain was yanked by the President. But the reality is--and we need to stay in touch with reality--that the costs of living for the everyday American are skyrocketing out of sight.
Instead of doing something to lower those costs, Senate Republicans just introduced a budget resolution to give $140 billion to ICE and the CBP without any reform and without any changes in practices or policies that will make them legal and humane. In fact, Senate Republicans are willing to work overtime to deliver huge tax breaks to billionaires and siphon hundreds of millions--in fact, billions--to ICE with no strings attached.
When it comes to lowering costs for Americans, helping working families, or making good on our promises to veterans, Republicans say: We can't afford it. In fact, Senate Republican leadership has continuously refused to advance bipartisan legislation to deliver for combat-injured veterans that I have advocated for repeatedly and twice asked for unanimous consent on the floor of this body to pass. Why? They claim we can't afford those benefits.
Let's be very clear. The Major Richard Star Act will cost $1 billion a year for the next 10 years. We are spending $2 billion a day on the Iran war, and that figure probably is lowballed. The benefits equate to 1/14th of the money Republicans want to send to ICE. The same Republicans who say we can't afford the time or the $13 billion to ensure our combat-injured veterans receive their full earned benefits will keep us here all night to spend $140 billion on ICE and CBP.
My legislation, the Major Richard Star Act, would finally deliver to some 50,000 combat-injured veterans their full military benefits. Currently, they are receiving a dollar-for-dollar reduction of their VA retirement pay for every dollar of compensation for disability. That is just plain wrong. They have earned both retirement pay and disability benefits. One should not be docked dollar for dollar for the other. In fact, it shouldn't be reduced at all. Most of this body--79 of my Democratic and Republican colleagues--agree. They joined the legislation. But the bill is still blocked from a simple floor vote by Senate Republican leadership--the same leadership that is willing to bend over backward to pass another partisan law to fund ICE.
Meanwhile, the President continues to send more servicemembers into harm's way. Thousands more are heading to the Middle East right now. But it falls on deaf ears for Republicans that claim veterans initiatives like the Major Richard Star Act are too expensive while they push hundreds of billions into Trump's rogue Agency or a war of choice.
It seems to me Republicans can always find more money for tax cuts. They can always find more money for benefits that go to the billionaires, but not so much when we are talking about working families or veterans.
The simple fact is--and remember this point if you remember nothing else of what I say here--the cost of our taking care of veterans is the cost of war. It is one that always must be paid. When we send a servicemember into war, we are incurring an obligation. We have made a promise. Those injuries result in disability benefits that should not be reduced, nor should retirement pay, just because they are injured. In
As Memorial Day approaches, prove to veterans and Americans that you really do appreciate their service. And remember that words, without actions, are meaningless--totally meaningless.
And that is why I have introduced an amendment to strike the reconciliation instruction and focus on providing for our combat- injured veterans who were forced to retire because of their injuries. Give them the benefits they earned, the benefits they deserve, the benefits they were promised.
Today, we have an opportunity to act and to do something meaningful for the thousands of combat-injured veterans who have sacrificed on our behalf. I urge my colleagues to make the right decision and support this amendment to advance the Major Richard Star Act.
It isn't lost on me that while I am speaking here, urging for the passage of an amendment that would help our veterans, the Trump administration is actively harming them. Over the past year, the Trump administration has begun deporting procedures for 34 former members of the military and 248 relatives of former military members. This number doesn't include the countless former military members that have been swept up into detention by roving patrols and lawless arrests.
These individuals are real people. They are veterans who chose to wear the uniform. They are not abstract entities. They are not numbers or statistics. They are people who raised their right hand, willing to give their lives for our country, veterans who served and sacrificed so that we could celebrate Memorial Day, so that we could stand here and speak as we wish and worship as we would like in the days ahead.
Take William Vermie, for example. He is an Army veteran, a Purple Heart recipient, who served as a combat solder in Iraq. On January 13, 2026, he was on a public sidewalk, observing ICE arrest two young men in his neighborhood. He was tackled. He was arrested. He was driven to detention. He was held in a cell for 8 hours.
Or George Retes, a disabled Iraq War veteran who was detained for 3 days and 3 nights after being arrested on his way to work--on his way to work. He has a job. He is a citizen. He is a veteran. He was arrested and detained.
Family members of U.S. servicemembers and veterans have fared no better. U.S. SSG Matthew Blank recently married his wife Annie and brought her to his base, Fort Polk, LA, to begin their lives together. Within hours, ICE entered his base and detained Annie, who was brought to the United States as a toddler and has applied for DACA status. Annie was released only after public outcry shamed the administration.
Last June, Narcisco Barranco, the father of three marines, was clearing his weeds when immigration agents attacked him from behind and placed him in deportation proceedings. Mr. Barranco has no criminal record. He has been in the United States for 3 decades.
And just this week, Sergeant First Class Serrano's wife, Deisy Rivera Ortega, was arrested by ICE during her appointment at an immigration office in Texas.
None of these people sought to hide or conceal themselves or run. They were there. And she was at an appointment at an immigration office in Texas. She had been in the United States for over a decade and has legal protection that prohibits her deportation to El Salvador and allows her to legally work. She was at the immigration office, interviewing, as part of an application for parole in place, a program specifically designated to offer protections to military spouses and their parents.
This stuff is just unbelievably cruel. It is illegal. It is inhumane. But it is also savagely mean and wrong. To encourage the men and women of our armed services to apply for protection for their spouses or their parents, only to have those applications entrap their loved ones, spirit them away to detention, and wreak havoc in their lives--is that the America that we want?
It is not the America I recognize as my country, nor would most Americans.
These servicemembers, veterans, and their family members were not convicted of any crime. They were not committing any crime. They were doing the right thing--in the offices of the U.S. Government, some of them--when they were tackled, arrested, and detained by the same government that gave them so much to serve.
Marine Corps cadets could not even enjoy their graduation this year without fear after the Marine Corps issued a warning that ICE agents would be conducting ``enhanced screening and lawful immigration status inquiries'' outside the Parris Island base, prior to graduation events.
What did that mean? Marine Corps privates, graduating from Parris Island--and I have been there--had to fear that their relatives coming to watch their graduation on that drill field could be arrested and detained.
Some cadets were forced to forgo celebrating because they feared for their loved ones. That is not how we honor courage and sacrifice. That is not how we plan to commend the individuals who choose to serve. Such efforts will not help us to recruit the next generation of brave and bright men and women for our military. It only demonstrates how little the Trump administration values people who put their lives on the line.
As Republicans propose sending another $140 billion to ICE and CBP, let's ask them whether they share the same disregard for our troops and veterans. I hope they will join me in saying: Enough is enough.
The absence of reform, in connection with this huge amount of funding--$140 billion--is absolutely reprehensible and unacceptable. It is unconscionable to shovel more money--$140 billion--without fundamental changes that will stop the abuses and many others of the kind I have just described.
I ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to join me in saying: America is still the land of the free and the home of the brave because of the brave who protect the free. And let us cherish those freedoms and make them real, not just in rhetoric but in the reforms we demand of the U.S. Government when it is engaged in lawless and reckless conduct.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, people following the Senate floor will know that hundreds of times I have come to the floor with my trusty, increasingly beat up ``Time to Wake Up'' poster to describe the various manners in which the fossil fuel industry has corruptly obstructed our ability to solve the problem of climate change that is caused by fossil fuel emissions.
They might also remember that I have come to the floor dozens of times to give my ``Scheme'' series of speeches about the corrupt manner in which the Supreme Court has been captured and put into the service of a gang of rightwing billionaires who tend to be fossil fuel billionaires.
In this speech, the ``Time to Wake Up'' series and the ``Scheme'' series converge. I don't know quite how to describe it, but maybe it is ``Time to Scheme Up'' because, for sure, that is what has been done in this country by the fossil fuel industry to blockade our efforts to solve the pollution hazard that they have created for our people--a pollution hazard that is now real and immediate in our economy.
Look no further than the State of Florida, where climate risk has thrashed the home insurance markets to the point where the home insurance market collapse has cascaded into mortgage markets, which has, in turn, cascaded into real estate values--property values.
Last year, Florida led the country in lost property values. This year, there was an article in Newsweek just a few days ago about how 6 to 8 percent losses are predicted in Florida real estate values because of that cascade. Property is very hard to sell if you can't get a mortgage on it, and it is impossible to get a mortgage on it if you can't get insurance on it. And even if
So this is on its way. It is coming right now. I am just going to continue to dig into how it is that we got here because how we got here involves a lot of mischief, a lot of real problems. One of those problems came to light just recently in the form of a number of memos from within the Supreme Court from the Justices to each other that were released or leaked--somehow came to the New York Times--that describe how it was that the captured Court put an end to the Clean Power Plan of the Obama administration before it even came to life.
Before even a court decision had been made about the merits of the rule, five Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices stepped in and killed that rule in the crib before it could have any real effect.
Charles Pierce has written a pretty good summary of that New York Times article. He said:
What appears to have happened here is that the shadow docket was born in the crib-killing of the Clean Power Plan.
This is quoting the New York Times story:
Not a Court of final impression, a Court of first impression--the first one to look at it. That is not the way it ordinarily works.
That is similar to the way the shadow docket has been working--before briefing, before argument--a decision without legal reasoning provided.
It continues about the Chief Justice:
I will get into this a little bit further as I continue through my remarks, but the basic summary is that the Court concluded that without stopping the EPA's rule before it went into effect, before any court had actually considered it, that would cause irreparable harm to the fossil fuel industry--specifically, mentioning that private industry will suffer irreparable harm--this, at a stage in the proceedings, where the question of whether that harm even existed had still not been properly litigated.
So I go back a ways on this. In 2015, in one of my ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches, I said:
Another one, 2017:
A year later, I described how:
I warned that we mustn't try to replicate that apparatus. We must expose it. And when we expose one part of the apparatus, we expose all because it is the same crew behind packing the courts and denying climate change and running the dark money machine.
In January of 2010, I said:
I said:
This integration between the fossil fuel industry and the Supreme Court and the dark money power that the fossil fuel industry has used to crush climate action in Congress is something that has been apparent for some time.
In 2020, I added:
In 2022, I called this ``the Court that dark money built.''
In 2022, I said:
So it comes as little surprise that these memos from within the Court should reveal that linkage between the Republican-appointed Justices and the fossil fuel industry. And, of course, it should come as no surprise that the roots of this shadow docket that has been used so politically by the Republican majority on the Court--the roots are found in an act of service to the fossil fuel industry billionaires who captured the Court.
If you look at the scheme to maintain the fossil fuel industry's free-to-pollute business model where they get away with polluting as much as they like with no cost or consequence, you have to look at the Supreme Court facilitating this.
Citizens United, of course, signaled the end of climate legislation because the unlimited dark money that the fossil fuel industry could use to shut down climate action in this body was successful. Unlimited fossil fuel dark money was brought to bear on Congress, and our ability to solve this problem collapsed.
Look before the Citizens United decision. Look back to 2007, 2008, 2009. My first years here, there was robust negotiation on major climate legislation--four different strategies here in the Senate; three major bills, bipartisan bills; and a Presidential candidate in John McCain who ran on a perfectly legitimate climate platform. All of that dead--dead--the day the Citizens United decision came down and the fossil fuel industry pounced with its new dark money power.
But it is not enough to stop legislation. If you want to protect your free-to-pollute business model, you also have to stop regulation, and that is where this Clean Power Plan decision came in. That is where the subsequent major questions doctrine came in. That work by the Supreme Court signaled the end of climate regulation as the Supreme Court intruded into a decades-long regulatory process and rebooted it to protect against regulation that would limit the free-to-pollute business model of the fossil fuel industry.
As I have said in other speeches, that major questions doctrine did not pop from the heads of the Supreme Court Justices in that decision. It was cooked up in fossil fuel-funded doctrine factories, massaged, maneuvered into conferences, propagated by the Federalist Society, called up at conferences. It was groomed and grown so that the Supreme Court could pick it up in a decision, which, of course, they did.
So if you shut down climate legislation and you shut down climate regulation, what is left is climate litigation--that people harmed by all this damage, by all this pollution, usually have a right to bring a lawsuit. And sure enough, lawsuits are emerging. So the next project of the Court is to attack climate litigation, and sure enough, the fossil fuel industry is all over that Court, asking for it to shut down the prospect of climate litigation.
And guess what. That little rascal Leonard Leo, who was the fixer, the implementer of the Court capture scheme, who worked with Trump's counsel, McGahn, to get the three Supreme Court Justices Trump supposedly appointed--separate argument: I think they were actually selected by the Koch brothers' political operation, and Trump was the chump at the end of the deal who signed off on it.
But Leonard Leo and his billionaires were the ones who put that whole
Guess what Leonard Leo is doing now. He has an array of maybe 25 front groups that he orchestrates. Some of them are actual corporate entities. Some of them are what are called fictitious names for his corporate entities. So you have a front group, which has a fictitious name, that you operate through. Why you need to do that is a little hard to say, but if you are up to no good, I suppose you want as much camouflage as possible.
What Leonard Leo and his front groups are all over right now is trying to shut down climate litigation, to make it a clean trifecta so that one industry is free to pollute as much as it wants with no legislation, no regulation, and no litigation that can stop it.
Again, it goes without saying that pollution is not something that should be allowed. It is certainly not something that should be allowed for free. But money will buy you a lot, and the fossil fuel-funded phony flotillas of front group amici who come into the Court to tell it what to do--and have, I would say, a 100-percent winning record before the Court--are starting to gather around shutting down climate litigation as well as regulation and legislation. In other words, a captured Court is delivering the goods for the billionaires who captured it.
So let's go through these different memoranda as they came out. The first is from Chief Justice John Roberts dated February 5, 2016. He is responding to emergency applications seeking to have the EPA's Clean Power Plan stayed.
On the very first page, he communicates to the other Justices:
That is a factfinding. It is a factfinding made without any court having found that fact. It is a factfinding by a Court that is not supposed to engage in factfinding in the first place. It is a disputed fact in the case before the case is even litigated. Yet here is the Chief Justice of the United States going with the factual argument of one of the parties even before arguments related to an emergency stay.
He has to admit to his colleagues that ``the rule does not require emissions reductions until 2022.'' It is dated 2016. Six years later, it might require emissions reductions. But then, February 5, 2016, he says that ``its impact is being felt now.''
He is taking the side of one party on a contested fact and saying that the impact of that contested fact, as he sees it, is actually being felt now, 6 years ahead of when anything has to happen.
He says that ``the applicants indicate''--again, an assertion by a party--the applicants untested, unchallenged--``applicants indicate that they are currently in the process of committing time and resources to compliance.''
That is the reason to shut down the Clean Power Plan?
He says that ``the impact of the rule will reduce coal production for power sector use by 2.0 percent.''
Over a 2-percent reduction, he jumps completely out of his lane, makes factfinding, and shuts down the regulation before it has even been considered by the lower courts.
Then he says that the ``harm . . . is irreversible.''
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have the Chief Justice memorandum printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.
That memorandum was responded to rather quickly by Justice Breyer, who noted:
It is a live legal dispute in the court of appeals, and the Supreme Court is jumping in to stay it? That was not just unusual; it was unprecedented. As Justice Breyer points out, ``it is difficult at this point to say that the absence of a stay will cause irreparable harm.''
Even among the Justices, that is a contested fact, and yet the Chief Justice is willing to rely on his view of that contested fact even though it is supposedly not a factfinding body in the first instance.
As I mentioned a moment ago and as Justice Breyer points out, ``the order does not require any company to take action for six years.'' So it was hardly an emergency.
Finally, he pointed out that ``all of the applicants'' were ``free to renew their applications for a stay'' once the DC court of appeals had done its work and come right back to the Court and get the stay then rather than to jump ahead of the circuit court of appeals. And it notes that the circuit court of appeals has agreed to proceed on an expedited basis.
Well, it didn't take long for the Chief to respond to that. He wrote right back saying that ``private industry will suffer irreparable harm from a rule that is--in my view--highly unlikely to survive.''
So now he is not only making factfindings that are contested even within his Court and that he shouldn't be making in the first place, but he is also predicting the legal conclusion of how this is going to end up in his Court.
He says that the ``Court will not issue a decision until 2018 at the earliest''--still 4 years before that date--``long after the real-world impacts of the rule would have been felt in the absence of a stay.''
Again, more and more factfinding.
He says there will be ``on-going, cumulative, and irreversible harms that private parties are incurring each day.''
Again, that is a contested fact, but he is willing to say that as if it were an actuality and not a point in contention.
Justice Kagan comes back to him to say:
She calls this a ``drastic and unusual remedy'' and points out that this fact that Chief Justice Roberts has so readily lurched to--the applicants' assertion--``is both entirely speculative and highly doubtful.''
So now you have another Justice challenging the fact that the Chief Justice offers as Gospel.
She says:
Two-percent reduction in coal--
Then in comes Justice Sotomayor.
She says:
An actual, real facility--
She challenges the costs that have been discussed by the Chief Justice, and she points out that ``an emergency stay on limited briefing before the D.C. Circuit will hear argument on this regulation in just four months.''
Just wait 4 months and get the proper order--circuit court of appeals, then Supreme Court.
Faced with that, in chimes Justice Alito, brought onto the Court with Leonard Leo at the White House helping make the selections. He concludes saying:
Remember, this is a rule that won't have effect for 6 years, where there will be a proper appellate court decision below in 4 months, and all of that is intolerable to Justice Alito, a product of the ``billionaires/Leonard Leo'' court-packing operation.
And the closer is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who writes an unusually brief
That gave the Chief the votes. They granted the stay, and the Clean Power Plan died.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the remaining memoranda that I referred to be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks in the sequence in which I described them.
Mr. President, what is the backdrop to all of this? The backdrop to all of this is the massive amount of harm that is caused by fossil fuel emissions. The pollution is really astounding.
The International Monetary Fund most recently assessed the cost of fossil fuel pollution and of its free-to-pollute business model in the United States of America at $770 billion in 1 year--$770 billion in benefit to the fossil fuel industry, a form of subsidy, from being allowed to pollute for free and not being obliged to clean up its mess. They are allowed to cause $770 billion worth of harm to Americans for zero dollars.
When you are allowed to cause $770 billion worth of harm to ordinary Americans for zero dollars, you have a massive motive to corrupt. You have a massive motive to apply political influence. You have a massive motive to take advantage of the dark money that you pressed the Supreme Court to allow and authorize, and bring that to bear on Congress to make sure that your $770 billion annual pollute-for-free subsidy is protected.
What did you note about my discussion about the Court's conversation on harm? What you should have noted is that 100 percent of the Court's conversation on harm was on harm to the polluters. It was the only harm that the Chief Justice mentioned or considered.
The entire argument about staying the Clean Power Plan hinged on analysis of harm that only looked at the harm to the polluter. There was no mention of climate change. There was no mention of the harm of emissions. There was no discussion of the health damage from climate change and what it is doing now and could be projected back then to do to insurance markets; what it was causing in sea level rise; what the ancillary pollution of fossil fuel that isn't climate change pollution but is lead, mercury, SOX, NOX, particulate matters, is doing.
They literally turned a blind eye to fossil fuel pollution measured at $770 billion worth of harm, most recently--total blind eye to it-- and focused only on the harm that would be done to the fossil fuel industry from having to comply with clean power rules.
Other studies have shown that the amount of money spent on the operation to capture the Court--a short word on Court capture, it goes back to the well-acknowledged notions of Agency capture or regulatory capture in the bad old days. Mining interests would make sure that all their friends were appointed to the mining safety commission so they could know the mining safety commission would always give them the answer that they wanted.
That is Agency capture.
In the bad old days, railroad barons would make sure that all their friends and lackeys were appointed to the railroad rates commission so they could be sure that all the railroad rates that were set were advantageous to them and that they could make sure that they got the rates that they wanted. That was called Agency capture.
It is a renowned phenomenon. It is written about constantly in administrative law. There is a whole field of economics that studies it.
What happened here is that Agency capture or regulatory capture was brought to bear on the Supreme Court, and it has now turned into, in essence, a captive body that does this bidding.
The number that I am referring to is the amount that was spent on that Court-capture operation. People who do really good research have dug into this, and at this point--more research will make the number bigger certainly. But at this point, it looks like about $600 million-- million with an ``m''--was spent on the Court-capture operation.
Now, that is a lot of money. But it is not a lot of money if you are defending a $770 billion annual subsidy that lets you pollute for free when you shouldn't be allowed to do that and nobody else is allowed to do that.
Protecting that $700 billion for $600 million is probably the most lucrative investment the fossil fuel industry has ever made.
And if you pile up the years since the Clean Power Plan was stopped-- that was in 2016. Now, it is 2026--so 10 years. That subsidy number has grown over the years as the International Monetary Fund has done a more and more detailed and better job of figuring out all the added harms, as harms are piling up.
So if you look at 10 years, it is not $7.7 trillion. It is probably a number closer to $6 trillion. But think about that. What the Supreme Court did in this one decision, by breaking all of its own rules and looking only at the fossil fuel industry's harm, is to set loose $6 trillion worth of harm over the next 10 years that all of us have had to pay for in health, in harm, in lost property values, in increased insurance, in a myriad of different ways--$6 trillion, call it, over those 10 years.
That makes $600 million to capture the Court that made that decision an amazing payback, but a really, really dangerous payback for the American public.
I will conclude by saying that whether you look at this as an aspect of the scheme to capture the Court or whether you look at it as an aspect of the endless fossil fuel pollution that is causing us to need to wake up before it is too late--either way you look at it--the rot runs deep around fossil fuel, and it seems to have infected the Court right over there.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, it has been 13 months to the day since the House first passed Donald Trump's ``One Big Ugly Bill,'' 290 days since it was signed into law--the largest cut to healthcare in American history; $1 trillion slashed for families, children, seniors, our most vulnerable; billions taken away from hungry families; millions of Americans pushed closer to poverty, closer to financial ruin; rising costs.
And for what? To pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans, to give big corporations another leg up, and to give ICE and CBP a budget so astronomical it rivals the military budget of many industrialized nations.
For the average American, it has been 290 days of lost opportunities and less affordable healthcare; of harder conversations at the kitchen table; of more sleepless nights worrying about how to get by; more skipped meals; more doctor visits postponed; week upon week of American families hoping against hope that this President and this Congress might recognize the difficulty that they are facing, the struggle they are enduring, the central promise that this President is breaking.
Day one of Donald Trump's final term is long past, but the prices-- much to the contrary of what he has promised--have not dropped. His first 100 days are now 15 months ago, and still, inflation persists. Indeed, it is worse.
Two hundred and ninety days into the lifespan of the President's supposed signature legislative achievement, this ``Big Ugly Bill,'' and life for so many Americans is not bigger, and it is not more beautiful. At gas stations across America, the reality of Donald Trump's America is clear. At grocery stores in California to the Capitol, that reality is hitting people in their pocketbooks.
And we are not on the right track either--an illegal war in Iran that has neither a clear goal nor an endgame, that has pushed prices higher, that has rocked markets on a daily basis and made the summer road trip that so many families were looking forward to the latest victim of Trump's economy; a misguided tariff agenda that has been struck down by the highest Court. But now this administration will only take steps to return the billions in illegal duties it levied to the corporations that charged them, not the Americans who paid them.
This body recognizes the immense strain that our constituents are under. I know it does because people are making their discontent loudly known at the ballot box and at public fora all over the country in the red States and the blue States alike.
I can assure each and every one of you watching that Members of Congress understand the American dream is slipping out of reach. We know that you are worried about making ends meet. We understand that you are agonizing over whether you can keep your business afloat or what opportunities will be there for your kids.
We have heard your stories. We understand the dread you feel as you near the first of the month, the fear that is all too real when you open the mailbox, unsure of what surprise bill will arrive and tip your family into bankruptcy, the terrible math that you must use to decide which dose of medicine or which meal you can afford to skip just to keep the lights on. This is the reality for so many Americans, and we understand that.
It might be--I don't know--worse, if you could just accuse the Congress of
But as I stand here recounting to you the myriad ways in which the past year of Trump's America has gotten harder--a reality that you live every day--Republicans are getting ready to act on their next big budget resolution, not to help drive down costs, not to address the healthcare crisis, not to do something to help. No, their grand plan to address our Nation's challenges is asking the American taxpayer to give even more money out of their pocket, out of their bank account, to ICE and Border Patrol agents.
An out-of-control police force that has killed Americans and terrorized our streets, and they want more money for CBP and ICE without even a modicum of reform. Now, how is that supposed to help your life? And the short answer is: It isn't. There is nothing in this bill to make your healthcare, your energy, or your housing more affordable. Nothing.
So if there is no money, no billions in this bill to improve the quality of your life, just what are my colleagues proposing to spend these billions on? And it is this: on Agencies that have shot and killed American citizens in our streets, in broad daylight, on video, for exercising their constitutionally protected right to free speech; the agents that have broken into homes, refused to show their faces or their badges, and taken children from their parents; this run-amok force that has defied court orders, detained citizens and people with lawful status, denied them basic medical treatment, which has resulted in an unprecedented number of deaths in immigration custody and denied their constitutional rights.
ICE and CBP get $140 billion in this bill after getting close to $170 billion less than a year ago, for a whopping total of $340 billion. I am sorry, but that is an insane amount of money. That is more than we give to the Marine Corps and the FBI and the DEA and all the other Federal law enforcement Agencies combined.
So if you take the money from the Marine Corps, one of our incredible military services, and you add it to the money for law enforcement Agencies like the FBI and the DEA and the ATF, and you add it all together, it isn't a fraction of what we are giving to just these two pieces of immigration enforcement. That is what they get.
That is what these Agencies get: $340 billion. And you? You get nothing. You get not a dime. After putting more than $3 trillion on the Nation's credit card to give tax breaks to the rich and to give these Agencies the funding to arm themselves to the teeth, after taking your healthcare dollars and plowing them into heavily armed and ill-trained ICE agents, they want to put even more money into what is becoming Trump's private army.
A Gallup poll released last month found that about 1 in 3 adults, U.S. adults, the equivalent of about 82 million people, reported having made at least 1 daily life trade-off in the past year to pay for healthcare expenses. That is 39 million Americans stretching a prescription longer than the doctor recommended; it is 38 million Americans going into debt to pay a medical bill; it is 28 million Americans skipping a meal. One in nearly every 10 Americans reporting the cutback on utilities or on the amount they are driving. And that was even before gas prices spiked thanks to Trump's Iran war with no solution in sight.
And we see these impacts playing out across the country in realtime, month after month, week after week, hospitals are shutting down, clinics are closing, workers are laid off, services are canceled, and families are paying more out of pocket and going without the care they need.
Earlier this year, a hospital in Oakland, CA, announced plans to lay off 300 medical staff because it is projected to lose more than a hundred million a year thanks to the ``Big Ugly Bill.'' Another hospital in Santa Rosa, CA, had to shutter its pediatric unit; Corona, CA, lost its labor and delivery unit; clinics in Madera and Fresno had to lay off staff. There are so many of these stories, and thanks to the trillion-dollar Medicaid cut forced by Republicans in their last budget.
And where layoffs or service cuts were not enough to balance the budget, a worse fate awaited these healthcare providers. Clinics in Compton, Gilroy, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, and South San Francisco all closed their doors thanks to Donald Trump.
Thousands of Californians, all now without a place to go for medical care; that is if they can afford care at all.
Our insurance Marketplace in California saw a 30 percent decline in enrollment as premiums spiked to sometimes double what they were paying for their healthcare before the ``Big Ugly Bill.''
But healthcare--let's face it--it is not the Republican priority. This is something they are not willing to fund. This is not something in this bill.
Instead, we are asked to fund immigration Agencies that have already seen their budgets explode and their accountability erased by this administration.
For months, Democrats have sought on behalf of the families and communities terrorized by ICE to enact basic guardrails, reforms, and oversight of their conduct; to mandate they wear body cameras and clear identification, just like any other law enforcement agency; to stop the use of excessive and deadly force, and to guarantee that when they do there is accountability in the form of truly independent investigations; to mandate the use of judicial warrants so that when they are going to someone's home, as the Constitution requires, they have a judicial warrant; to stop racial profiling and the targeting of schools and churches.
All of this for a reason: So we don't have more tragic victims like Alex Pretti or Renee Good or the people that have died in detention centers like Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz or Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, a list that is already far too long.
Now, bear in mind, these reforms that I have mentioned are all wildly popular with the American people, and we have worked in good faith to try to secure these very basic guardrails, saying clearly until these commonsense measures can be implemented, we would vote not for one more dime for these Agencies that have taken lawless instructions from the likes of Stephen Miller and Greg Bovino.
But the administration and my Republican colleagues don't want to solve the problem of excessive use of force from ICE and CBP; they don't want the accountability; they don't want the reform. And so they will use this budget and reconciliation process to bypass the need for changes to how ICE and CBP operate, to jam more money through without Democratic support, and to advance a budget that contains literally not a single dime for healthcare, hospitals, food and groceries, energy bills, nothing but more money for ICE and CBP.
And the terrible tragedy is that we in this Chamber, we here could meet this challenging moment in our Nation when people cannot afford the cost of living.
We could meet that need with a budget that would help people in need. John F. Kennedy on his first day of office stood on the west steps of the Capitol and said:
For every day of Donald Trump's second term, he has sought only to save the rich, to help those that already have so much, to line pockets that are already so deep; and in doing so, he has revealed his campaign rhetoric to be just that, just words.
My Republican colleagues may see this as a convenient way to avoid our demands for accountability, but the American people will see this as a failed opportunity for the GOP as it squanders perhaps the last chance in the 119th Congress to act meaningfully on making America affordable again.
The attempt to sell the ``Big Ugly Bill'' has failed. The American people were not fooled, neither will they be fooled now, because the billions wasted and the millions hurt will not go unnoticed. There will be an accounting, if not now, then in November.
And the American people's rejection of this President's agenda will be big, and in its own way, it will be beautiful. It will certainly be necessary.
If we are ever to make this economy work for people again, we must reject more money for lawless agents in favor of more money for healthcare for the American people.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, if you look anywhere across the country right now, what you will see more than anything else is working families, countless Americans struggling just to get by; struggling with skyrocketing prices at the pump; struggling with rising costs of healthcare premiums; struggling to afford groceries, their prescriptions, to pay their rent or their mortgage. Many struggling just to keep the lights on at home.
You would think that the Republican majority would recognize that and dedicate time on this floor of the Senate to prioritize a discussion and proposals to bring down costs for working families; but, no, instead we are focusing once again on immigration and, specifically, whether or not to give even more money to ICE and CBP.
So I think it is important for us to lay out to the American people why we are in this position. Republicans created this mess last year when they passed their ``One Big Anything But Beautiful'' bill.
But rather than fix that mess through commonsense reforms, as we have suggested, their solution is to throw even more money at these Agencies that have been acting for a year now with little regard to the rule of law, to dump $140 billion in the same out-of-control immigration Agencies that have created chaos in American communities for the past year, the very same ICE and CBP that Republicans already gave $140 billion to last year.
That is over seven times ICE's typical annual funding and more than four times the typical annual appropriations for CBP. That was last year.
And what did they do with that money? Before we entertain should we give them even more, let's see what they did. They went on a so-called Defend the Homeland hiring spree. They brought on unqualified recruits who were deployed into communities across the country with clearly insufficient training. Let me lay it out. Let me break it down for us.
In just 6 months, ICE doubled its number of agents from 10,000 to over 22,000--more than doubled. And the only way to reach those numbers is to cut a bunch of corners and to lower standards. And so that is what they did.
They dropped the minimum age for ICE officers to just 18 years old, and they reduced the required training to 47 days--47 days. Let me put that figure into context.
To be a DC Metropolitan Police officer here in the streets of our Nation's Capital, it takes 28 weeks of training. Basic training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is 12 weeks. The Los Angeles Police Department, where I am from, that takes 6 months of training before you are on the job. But to be an ICE officer, just 47 days, and then you are given a gun and a badge and deployed into the field.
We have seen the records that DHS has rushed applicants through a very sloppy vetting process. It has led to the hiring of numerous officers with questionable backgrounds, clearly unfit to do these jobs.
We have also seen reports that about a third of the recruits at the ICE training academy failed what is considered a relatively easy physical test. And a number of others were sent home because they failed a written exam which, by the way, a written exam on which they could use textbooks and notes, but they still failed.
Here is a quote from an article by the Associated Press that really shines a light on what is happening with this hiring spree:
This is a description of one officer.
Here is another:
How is that for a description of an ICE officer?
Don't take my word for it, colleagues--actual reporting.
So let's, again, assess where we are. Republicans gave ICE and CBP $140 billion. And the Trump administration used it to hire people with questionable qualifications, questionable histories, questionable temperaments, and questionable ability to do the job.
And you are going to tell me you are surprised by the chaos and the violence that we have witnessed unfolding in the streets across America this last year? If you are hiring all these unqualified people, encouraging them to act with impunity, you throw out the rule books and the training manual and ensure that there is little or no oversight and accountability, it is entirely predictable that chaos will ensue and especially when they are led from the top by people who regularly dehumanize others, whose goal is to inflict pain and cruelty on immigrants and refugees as deterrents. It is exactly what we are seeing.
We are seeing agents knocking down doors to homes without a judicial warrant in violation of the law. We are seeing cars being driven off the road, their windows smashed in, their occupants literally dragged out through broken windows, and some, like Marimar Martinez, shot multiple times.
We are seeing indiscriminate raids sweeping up hard-working people who are just trying to provide a better life for their family, including legal immigrants with work authorizations.
We are seeing American citizens hurt simply for exercising their First Amendment rights, like 21-year-old Kaden Rummler, who permanently lost his vision in one eye after being shot by agents at close range.
And, of course, we saw--we all saw, the whole country saw, the whole world saw--two U.S. citizens, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti--killed by Federal agents on camera in broad daylight.
So, yes, Democrats are demanding commonsense reforms to address this outrageous behavior. You should be too. And the commonsense reforms we are talking about are nothing other than policies that State and local law enforcement officers across the country already have to abide by.
Instead, Republicans continue to refuse, and that is why we are here today, because as Democrats, we refuse to give a single dollar more to an out-of-control, unaccountable Agency.
We are demanding oversight. We are demanding these commonsense reforms, not just to protect people's rights but to protect people's lives.
Instead, what do our Republican colleagues want to do? They want to hand over another--another--$140 billion of taxpayer money, even though, by the way, for the fiscally responsible ones of you, the Congressional Budget Office says that ICE and CBP still have $103 billion in unspent funds from last year's bill. That is right. ICE is sitting on $63.2 billion of its funding from last year's bill. That is 84 percent of the funding from last year. And CBP is still sitting on $40 billion--62 percent of its funding--from last year's bill.
So what are we even doing here? They have a ton of money left over from last year's bill they haven't even spent--they can't spend it fast enough--and you want to give them more. You would rather give them more when they don't need it than negotiate necessary changes to these Agencies.
That is outrageous, and it comes at a time when President Trump says: Oh, we don't have enough money to help people with daycare. We don't have enough money for Medicare and Medicaid. We have to cut those programs.
But, clearly, he and you all believe we have enough money to give another $140 billion to these ICE Agencies. By the way, that is on top of the $1 billion a day that we are spending in this unauthorized war in Iran.
If we are going to use this budget reconciliation process for anything right now, we would rather be using it to help working families afford the basics. Let's use it to help bring down healthcare costs. Let's help bring down gas prices. Let's bring down the cost of food and housing and utilities. That would be worthy of our time, not this sham--not this sham.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
Mr. President, we are going to start reconciliation. I think we all know what that means; that is Latin for ``a long night.''
But why are we here? We are here to make sure that the Department of Homeland Security, the ICE division and Border Patrol, are funded.
Now, why are we here? Our Democratic colleagues have refused to provide funding for the Border Patrol and ICE at a time of great threat to our country.
So what are we doing? We are trying to use the reconciliation process to get money to secure the border and not shut down enforcement of our immigration laws.
Our friends on the other side sat on the sideline and watched the Joe Biden administration allow 11 to 15 million illegal immigrants to come into this country in a 4-year period. We have been dealing with that mess ever since we have been in charge.
ICE--count me in for reforming ICE. We tried to have some reforms, but you refused. You refused to give a dollar, guys, because, in your view, ICE is the problem. I think the illegal immigration invasion that was allowed by Joe Biden and condoned by you is the problem. It is not the ICE agents that are the problem; it is the millions of people who came here illegally, and only God knows who they are and exactly where they are.
So we are not going to stop trying to enforce immigration laws. We have to. We are trying to clean up a mess, a national security threat.
Let me be really clear. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, we had a tremendous spike of people that came into the country under Biden on the Terrorist Watchlist. We don't know where all these people are. It went from, like, nothing to a bunch. Everybody in the world was told: If you can get to the American border, you are home free. Good guy, bad guy; good gal, bad gal--they came. They came by the millions.
One reason they came is because there was a policy called sanctuary cities. It is really sanctuary States. There are about 15 States that refuse to enforce Federal immigration law. There are cities that will not turn over an illegal immigrant to the Federal Government for deportation when they are eligible to be deported. It is creating chaos.
There are 10,000 criminals who were released by sanctuary policies who went on to be arrested for additional crimes and $9 billion in fraud stolen by Somali immigrants in Minnesota alone. Fifty-nine percent of illegal immigrant households are on government welfare programs, costing taxpayers $42 billion a year.
These sanctuary cities create a magnet. People all over the world believe that if you can get to one of these cities or States, you will never get deported. Why? Because the people running those cities and those States refuse to turn illegal immigrants over to the Federal Government--laws that were established long before Donald Trump became President of the United States. Some of these people they refuse to turn over are dangerous--very dangerous.
Abdul Jalloh comes in illegally in 2012; 30 arrests, including rape, malicious wounding, and assault. ICE submits a formal detainer to deport Jalloh. The request is blocked by the Virginia attorney for Fairfax County, a Soros-backed prosecutor and defender of sanctuary cities who ignored the detainer. In May of 2025, he is arrested one more time for stabbing an individual in the leg, but he is released again. In February 2026, Jalloh brutally murders Stephanie Nicole Minter.
Look at this. If that doesn't disgust you, something is wrong. This is disgusting. This is what happens when you have sanctuary policies. This is what happens when people fail to enforce Federal law.
The Virginia attorney for Fairfax County refused to work with the Federal Government. This guy stayed out. In May, he commits a crime, stabs a guy in the leg. In February 2026, he brutally murders Stephanie Minter.
That happens all the time, way too much.
Last week in Spartanburg, SC, two boys were killed by an illegal immigrant in a drunk-driving car crash. He was a ``got-away.'' He came across the border, and he literally got away. He was able to take advantage of lawless open borders to enter the United States undetected.
The victims were 12-year-old Dereon James Robinson and 9-year-old Mikhail'Lee Smith--killed by somebody who shouldn't have been here to begin with, an illegal drunk driver.
In April 2025, a University of South Carolina student was killed in a hit-and-run crash by an illegal alien. Fernandez-Cruz, a native of El Salvador, illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexican border on an unknown date but was arrested by the Border Patrol in Hidalgo, TX, on December 24, 2016. He was released the next day, which I guess was Christmas, and issued a notice to appear as DHS initiated removal proceedings. The victim was 21-year-old Nathaniel Baker. They had him and let him go.
In March 2025, a mother of two was murdered in Rock Hill by a group of six illegal immigrants. This heinous crime was committed by a gang of six illegal aliens in a random robbery attempt that ended deadly. The victim was Larisha Sharell Thompson, 40 years old, a mother of two.
On and on and on--I can read you too many of these things.
Laken Riley was a young lady killed in Georgia. The man was detained at the border--her killer, Jose Ibarra--and was released because they had no bedspace in 2022. He went to New York, found his way back to Georgia, and killed this young lady. He was loose because of the lack of detention space.
All I can tell you is that--what are we trying to do to make sure this never happens again? It happens over and over and over. So we are here tonight to do something Democrats won't let us do that must be done.
Seventy billion dollars will be allocated to fully fund the Border Patrol and fully fund ICE through the entire term of President Trump's second term, for 3\1/2\ years--one and done. I wish we could do more, but we are going to do for 3\1/2\ years. We are going to give DHS--the Border Patrol and ICE--the money to pay their people and to conduct operations to make sure what I described never happens again.
Why are we here? We passed everything in the appropriations bill in a bipartisan manner except this. Our Democratic friends wanted to pick a fight about this. No money for the Border Patrol. No money for ICE. No reforms of ICE; just no money.
We are not going to let that stand. We are going to fix that. So Republicans, starting today and hopefully by the 1st of June, will create a process so that we can get the money that ICE and the Border Patrol need to keep your families safe, to enforce illegal immigration violations--ICE--to have money and people on the border at a time when terrorism is through the roof.
We are having to do this through reconciliation because the appropriations process failed only here. These are the two accounts we couldn't get money for. It says a lot about the state of play where our Democratic colleagues are. In their world, not paying the Border Patrol seems to be an acceptable outcome. Really? With terrorism rampant all over the world, a war with the largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, heated up and fully running? Really?
ICE. We tried to have--we had reforms, but you said no to the reforms. You said no money at all. Putting these people out of business really is dangerous when you have millions of people still in this country illegally.
So, tonight, we are going to start the process to pass a budget resolution that will instruct two committees--Homeland Security and Judiciary--to report back to us a reconciliation bill that will be $70 billion in spending. That will allow the Border Patrol and ICE to be fully funded through the rest of President Trump's term so we can be safe.
I am sad we are having to do this, but you gave us no choice. The day that you said no to funding the Border Patrol and the day you wanted to put ICE out of business is the day that, as the Budget chairman, I and my colleagues acted. We are not going to let this happen. We can fix this with Republican votes, and we will.
Every Democrat has opposed money for the Border Patrol and ICE in a time of great peril and we are going to fix that and it starts tonight. And in the coming weeks, we are going to get it done.
We are going to make sure that the Federal Government honors its obligation to protect the American people.
This needs to be done. And I am not saying other things don't need to be done. But this has to be done. It will be done. We are going to get this right. We are going to fully fund for 3\1/2\ years the Border Patrol so they have money they need to pay their people to protect us, and we are going to continue to enforce immigration law by fully funding ICE. We are going to do that, and we are not going to fail. We cannot fail. The world is too dangerous to fail.
So to my Democratic colleagues, you have taken a path that blows my mind in this regard. Don't you see the same world we do? Reform makes sense. We had reforms. You threw them out because, I guess, the hardest of the hard on your side insists not one dime for the Border Patrol, not one dime for ICE.
The American people are not where you are at, and I hope the American people will understand tonight that we, the Republicans, fixed this problem, and we couldn't find a partner on the other side. Sad but true.
We are going to succeed. We are going to fix this problem. Working with the Trump administration, we are going to secure that border. It is the most secure I have ever seen it in my life. What President Trump has done is amazing.
We are not going backward. What the Democrats want us to do is not fund ICE, not fund the Border Patrol, to go back to the policies that reigned during the Biden years. We are not going back to the Biden years. We are going forward.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
Recognizing the Significance of Community College Month in April
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 686, which is at the desk.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The bill clerk read as follows:
There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the resolution.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to; that the preamble be agreed to; and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The resolution (S. Res. 686) was agreed to.
The preamble was agreed to.
(The resolution, with its preamble, is printed in today's Record under ``Submitted Resolutions.'')
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, we are here tonight because our Republican colleagues have introduced a budget resolution. It is a budget resolution that unlocks the reconciliation process.
But before we examine this next reconciliation bill, let's recognize that it has been just 10 months since we passed the last one. That was the one that was known as H.R. 1, or in Trump lingo: One Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, most of the Nation called it ``One Big Ugly Betrayal'' because that was a more accurate describer of what it did to families across our Nation.
It slashed a trillion dollars from healthcare programs--a trillion dollars from healthcare programs--for families. It kicked 15 million Americans off health insurance. That certainly doesn't help American families.
It took food off the plates of more than 3 million families with kids. You know, kids can't really do well in school if they are hungry; making them deliberately hungry--what were you thinking?
What were you thinking in destroying healthcare by a trillion dollars for 15 million Americans, taking food off the plates of 3 million families with kids, and to do it to fund tax breaks for billionaires? Wow. That is all about government by and for the powerful.
But you know why I love this country? Because it is all about government by and for the people. That is the vision our Nation was founded on. That is the beauty of a democratic republic.
But what did we get last year? We got the opposite. We got the opposite--the type of policy that comes out of a strongman state, the type of policy that comes out when the powerful exercise tyranny over the people--the type of tyranny our Founders revolted against when they created our Nation. That is what we saw 10 months ago: families lose and billionaires won.
And that is not all that bill did. It also gave 65 billion to Customs and Border Protection and 75 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. And that amount of money was about seven times a normal annual appropriation.
We can see here in this chart 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, all less than 10 billion; 2025, and there we are. So much more. The annual appropriation, plus this extra for ICE of an additional $75 billion.
And anyone looking at the chart goes: Wow. They already prefunded, for multiple years, ICE. They did exactly the same thing for Customs and Border Protection--CBP.
So we heard a few moments ago from my colleague at the head of the Budget Committee that ICE is out of money. Oh, really? Not true. That CBP is out of money. Not true.
In fact, the President's Office of Management and Budget puts out a monthly report, so go look it up yourself. They are sitting on $103 billion of unobligated funds.
So they already have funds for this year and next year and the year after. So the entire premise of this bill is completely false-- completely false. They don't need more money. What they do need are reforms about their conduct across America because they have been terrorizing our communities across our country because this administration said: No longer will you use
But those standards exist because there is accountability to the citizens of the country. Again, government by and for the people, not by and for the powerful.
There are things called civil rights that this administration has forgotten about. They proceeded to say: We don't need warrants to break into people's homes. Are you kidding me? Every sixth grader in America has heard about the Bill of Rights and that we have the sanctity of our homes, and the government can't break in without a warrant. But this majority party, led by Trump, said: Yes, you can. Forget the Bill of Rights. Forget the Fourth Amendment.
And then when we detain people, you have another right, and that is to contact a lawyer. But we are going to detain you and not let you contact a lawyer. We are going to detain you and not let you contact family.
And when family says: Where did my family member go that you-all swept off the street? We are going say: We don't know. We moved them. We don't know where. That is not conduct acceptable in a democratic republic with a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.
Well, since ICE and CBP have already been prefunded, since they are sitting on $103 billion of unobligated funds, what is this all about? It is about the majority saying: We want to drive home the point that we are just fine with the way ICE is conducting themselves. We are so fine that we won't reform any of those violations of civil rights or constitutional rights in order to have a normal budget process regarding CBP or regarding ICE.
Well, if we are going to have a special reconciliation process when ICE and CBP have already been prefunded, how about we actually address issues that America cares about because that extra money isn't going to help with the border because they are already funded.
It isn't going to help improve security because they are already funded.
But you know what is not adequately funded? Healthcare is not adequately funded. There isn't a dime in this bill for healthcare. That is important to the American people.
There is not a dime in this bill to help with the rising grocery prices that have gone up, up, up under Trump's stewardship--a whole lot of it impacted by his tariffs, which were themselves unconstitutional.
There is not a dime in this bill to address the gas prices, which are over $5 a gallon in my State, and diesel is over $6 a gallon. Go talk to a farmer across America and see if they are happy and ask yourselves: If we are doing a special budget process, why not address some help to our farmers who are impacted not just by the high cost of diesel for their tractors, they are being extraordinarily impacted by the tariffs as well. Why not help them?
Why not reduce the debt? This bill increases the debt. It is unpaid for just like the Republican war in Afghanistan was unpaid for, the Republican war in Iraq, going after nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, was unpaid for. They launched wars that undermine our security and cost the American Treasury $8 trillion of debt because they wouldn't pay for it, and now that debt is coming home to roost. And it means more interest payments, and it means paying higher interest. It means less money for those fundamentals for families, like healthcare and housing and education--the foundations for families to thrive.
So there is not a dime for working families, not a dime to improve affordability, not a dime to reduce a deficit or the debt; but there is, in this bill, the instructions to two committees to spend up to $70 billion apiece.
Now, my colleague clarified that they are not really going to ask for $140 billion but, more likely, $70 billion. OK. Well, $70 billion, that is a lot of money. What could $70 billion buy for America's families? Well, it could, every year for 3 years, pay the entire salary of 330,000 teachers across America. Wow. What an impact that would have on classroom size in our Nation--a real investment in our children for the next generation. Or that same $70 billion could hire 200,000 police officers every year for 3 years. What an investment in public safety for communities across this Nation. Or--we have been watching the dream of home ownership die. Back in 2020, the median age for buying a first home was about 33 years of age. Six years later, the median age for buying a home: 40 years. In 5 years, the median age has gone up 7 years because nobody is able to buy a home in America--in part because private equity is buying up all the houses and driving up the prices, and because our economy for the rich billionaires is not providing the type of wages for middle-class America it provided before.
So how about downpayment assistance to help people become homeowners? That same $70 billion, that would provide 7 million American families with a $10,000 downpayment grant to help them become a homeowner.
So 330,000 teachers a year for 3 years, 200,000 police officers a year for 3 years, 7 million families getting $10,000 downpayment grants. I make these examples to point out how large this sum is and how much need there is in America for us actually to invest in families--not tax breaks for billionaires but in families, in housing, in healthcare, in public safety, in education.
That bill 10 months ago--that bill was families lose, billionaires win. Families lost healthcare. They lost nutrition. Billionaires got massive tax breaks. And to help fund those tax breaks for the billionaires, their bill added--get this--$30 trillion to the national debt over the next 30 years. And if interest rates are 1 percent higher than the interest rate used in the Congressional Budget Office's model, it is $50 trillion in additional debt over the next 30 years.
So bankrupting America, failing to invest in families, going through this charade for two organizations that are already sitting on $103 billion and obviously pre-funded, that is not about building a better America. That is about families lose and billionaires win. That is about undermining the future for the next generation rather than building a better future for the next generation.
There is a better vision for America than families lose and billionaires win. It is families thrive; and billionaires, they pay their fair share. Families thrive; billionaires pay their fair share. Investing in education helps families thrive. Investing in healthcare helps families thrive. Investing in housing and home ownership helps families thrive. Investing in infrastructure helps build the physical infrastructure for the next generation.
But this bill says to hell with all of that; we are going to, instead, create this false story about unfunded Agencies that are already sitting on $103 billion.
Let's reject this vision that is designed for families lose and billionaires win and instead adopt the vision of families thrive and billionaires pay their fair share.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
(Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.)
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Louisiana.
Mr. President, I want to spend a few minutes telling you about why I held the vote-arama tonight on reconciliation. Our leader is going to make it to happen a lot quicker than I am. He has got the patience of Job.
My Democratic friends--and they are my friends; I don't hate anybody--agreed to a budget for the Department of Homeland Security as part of our normal budgetary process.
They changed their mind, as is their right. But it caused the Department of
And our leader decided that he was going to negotiate with my friend, Minority Leader Schumer, and Senator Schumer was going to meet us halfway and figure out a way to get the Agency open.
He and my Democrat colleagues did agree to open everything but ICE and, I believe, border security. They will never agree to fund ICE-- never, not in your natural lifetime, not in mine. They won't do it.
My friend Senator Schumer did the right thing last March, when we were shut down. He agreed to release some of his Members to let us open the government back up. The loon wing of his party--that is what I call them; if you disagree with me, you can tell me why--beat him bloody. They hit him so hard--now when they hit him, they are just working on scar tissue--for doing the right thing.
Now, I don't consider all of my Democratic friends to believe in defunding ICE. The people in control do. They know it. I know it. We know it. They will never vote to fund ICE. This is the same group of people that wanted to defund the police, and we know how that vampire movie turned out.
Now, they will deny it, and that is their right. But it is the truth, and everybody in this body knows that.
But, nonetheless, our leader said we can work it out.
We didn't work it out. They never agreed to fund ICE, and they never will.
Now, about--I don't know; time runs together up here when you are having fun--a month ago, 6 weeks ago, 2 months ago, we started talking about reconciliation and doing it without Democratic votes, even though the Democrats would be welcome to join us.
I want to give full credit. Ted Cruz, I believe, was the first one to do it. I was second. And Ted went first only because he beat me to it but also because Ted pointed out, in President Trump's first term, that we shouldn't leave efforts to do reconciliation on the table. He was right then. He is right now.
The leader said OK, finally, after doing everything he could, except standing on one leg and barking like a dog. Senator Thune did everything but stand on one leg and bark like a dog to get Chuck to agree. It was his right. Chuck wouldn't agree. And for all I know, John did stand on one leg and bark like a dog. It didn't work. So we finally said: OK, let's do the reconciliation.
Now, once we started talking about reconciliation, which Senator Cruz and I and others pushed, I said I wanted to try to use--well, I said, first, I refuse to believe that Democrats in the Senate and the House cannot adult hard enough to come up with a couple of issues that we can agree to do, in addition to funding ICE and border security, in reconciliation. I didn't believe that then, and I don't believe that now.
Some people said I am naive. Maybe so, but I still believe it. And I still think we ought to try. Why? Because there is not going to be a third reconciliation bill. I am not seeing--I am not saying anybody is lying. They are not. People probably intend to do a third reconciliation bill, but you are not looking at Bambi's baby brother here. There won't be a third reconciliation bill.
You know it, and I know it. This is it. This is the last train leaving the station. Maybe we will do some other bills. I don't know. I am labor, not management. That is above my pay grade. But this will be the last one where we can add stuff to it.
And I would like to see us come up with one or two issues that will help the American people with the cost of living and other things that I know Republicans can agree to. And my Democratic friends, like Senator Durbin, whom we are going to miss--and I mean that--are welcome to come aboard if they want to.
One of the things I also said I wanted to try to do in reconciliation was the SAVE Act. Here is what I want to do, and I am willing for all of us to put our heads together to figure out how to do it.
The American people no longer have confidence in our elections. You can debate whether that is justified or not, but it is just a natural fact. I think that we can restore confidence in our Federal elections if we do three things: if we come up with a way to make sure that everybody who is registered to vote is an American citizen. I think we can restore confidence in our elections if, No. 2, we pass a rule for Federal elections that says you have to prove you are who you say you are in order to vote. And, No. 3, I would like to see us--I consider this part of the SAVE America Act, but it is not traditionally a part. I think we ought to go back to having an election day and not an election month. I know some votes come in late. I get that. We are smart enough to figure out a way to accommodate that. But this election month stuff is just undermining the people's confidence, both Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. That is what I mean when I say the SAVE Act.
And I have said that I am going to try to put the SAVE Act on the reconciliation bill, and I want to keep my word. Where I come from, your word is your bond.
Now, Senator Thune, our leader, came to me earlier--and so did Whip Barrasso--and said: Some Senators want to do the vote-arama tonight, and they have got to get home for various reasons.
And I have been there.
And if you insist on going tomorrow--because, frankly, I am. I am worried about the health of some of our Members--not that they are in bad health, but it is hard to stay up all night. It was hard to stay up all night when I did it in college. I was studying, of course.
But, anyway, I said: No, I would rather go tomorrow. I am going to object.
And John explained to me, and others did as well: The majority wants to go.
So I said: OK. I will pull my hold.
I didn't realize it then. This is my fault. I thought everybody knew I wanted to offer amendments. I didn't realize then that there was a way, procedurally, for me to be blocked from offering my amendments. That is my fault. I just didn't know the rules.
Do you want me to talk again about our rules, Tony? I won't get off on that tangent.
Did I mention they were put together by a heroin addict with a socket wrench? If I didn't, that is how I feel about rules. But, anyway, that was my fault.
So I called Senator Thune back and I called Senator Barrasso back and said: Guys, my bad. I was ignorant. I am redoing my hold because you all have the right to block me from offering amendments, but I have the right to exercise my procedural rights and start this thing tomorrow and leave more time to debate. And I apologize to every one of my colleagues. I have been there. I am sorry. But I will tell them I am sorry.
So I put together my amendments. I have got five of them, and I showed them to Senator Graham and Senator Barrasso and Senator Thune. I just left their office.
So if what we talked about leaked, I am not going to leak it. You will know it was one of those three. They promised me they wouldn't leak it.
Here is what I want to offer. And they can stop me, but I can stop us from voting tonight, which is going to hurt some of my colleagues, and I don't like to do that.
I think that we should instruct the appropriate committee--I will get into it, if you want to; it is the Banking Committee--to come up with a bill to prevent medical debt from being reported to the credit rating agencies and ruin the credit of all these people who are too poor to be sick, including middle-class Americans, because their credit gets screwed up, and it makes it harder to get the money to pay off the debt.
Now, the hospitals and others, they are foaming at the mouth right now and having a grand mal seizure. But I am sorry. That is the way to effect the cost of living in America that every mom and dad is worried about at night. I wanted to do that. I still want to do that.
I wanted to instruct the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to provide that, before the United States of America agrees with the United Kingdom to give away our military base in Diego
What Prime Minister Starmer is doing right now is deep-dish stupid. He says he is going to stop, but he may be back.
I wanted to offer an amendment to instruct the Finance Committee to put together a bill that would eliminate Federal income taxes and State income taxes, if our colleagues would go on with it, for our poll workers. They don't make but $50 or something. Why do we make them pay taxes?
To allow the American people to buy insurance across State lines--now the insurance commissioners are having grand mal seizures too, but we ought to talk about it.
The bill would also increase the minimum distribution age of retirement--the required minimum distributions from retirement accounts--to 76. Right now, it is 75, and you have got to take it. And they tax the living bejesus out of you. Some people need it; others don't.
I was going to ask the Finance Committee to come up with a bill to allow every American who has suffered a casualty loss to be able to deduct it below the line on their income taxes. That will help with affordability.
I wanted to ask them to put together a bill so that when you sell your home--I think you get--$500,000 of the sale is subject to capital gains. I am sorry. I am kind of tired. I may be wrong on that, but, anyway, you get a specialty tax break. Hell, we set that limit in 1997.
I would like them to talk about increasing it. If the Finance Committee thinks it is a bad idea to increase it, I would like to ask them to at least index that figure, that special treatment, to inflation.
I have some other things, but we have got a good Finance Committee, and they can come up with a bill that will help our people deal with the cost of living because if you think that the American people--moms and dads--when they lie down to sleep at night and can't, they are worried about the cost of living, you will never own your own home. Everybody here knows that.
I have another amendment to instruct the Senate Rules Committee to put together a bill that tracks my rule that I can't get brought to the floor. So I am going to turn it into a bill to withhold pay from Senators during a shutdown. They can get their money back after the shutdown is over. I know that hurts some Senators more than others because some of them have houses that are bigger than a Costco. I get that. I am not one of them. But we have a lot of people in the TSA and other people in the DHS who have various levels of income and wealth. So it just seems to me there ought to be some shared sacrifice.
I have another amendment to--oh, I have another amendment that would--I am sorry to take so long.
I think my Democratic friends--gosh, I hope I am wrong, but I think my Democratic friends are going to shut down the government right before the midterms. I hope I am wrong. If I am, please make me wrong. I will come to this floor and apologize to every one of them by name if I need to, but I am scared they are going to shut down the government and create chaos. So my other amendment would be to instruct the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, which already has been instructed--it is germane--to take Senator Lankford's Prevent Government Shutdowns Act, which is S. 2721, and Senator Ron Johnson's Shutdown Fairness Act, which is S. 3012--you won't find two smarter people in the Congress than James Lankford and Ron Johnson--and marry those bills so we will be ready in case anybody tries to do a shutdown on us.
And I am sorry to pick on my Democratic friends. Hell, we have got some Republicans who could try to shut it down too. That has been known to happen. But, anyway, it will stop it. Whatever knobhead wants to shut down the government before the elections, this will stop it, and that is one of these things I wanted to do with my amendments.
Finally, I have an amendment to implement my version of the SAVE Act. You have got to prove you are an American citizen. This would instruct the Rules Committee. Prove you are an American citizen. Prove you are who you say you are to vote, and let's go back to having an election day and not an election month. I have got a lot of confidence in the Rules Committee. They are really smart Republicans, and they are really smart Democrats. They can do it, and I want to instruct them to do that.
Now, they can stop me, but I can stop us from voting tonight. I don't want to do that; it is going to hurt some of my colleagues. I was going to stop us from voting tonight to try to prove my point because what you allow is what will continue around here. I am pulling my objection except for my right to offer the SAVE Act--my version of the SAVE America Act. If you don't want to vote for it, don't. All I ask of you is to think about it, to trust our Rules Committee, and to follow your heart but take your brain with you because the American people-- Democrats and Republicans and Independents--are questioning our elections.
This isn't about any one person--everybody is entitled to their opinion--but I am telling you whoever loses in the next round of elections--in the next round of elections, if we go back to an election month, they are going to go: We got it stolen. It has got to stop. That only happens in a country whose Powerball jackpot is 287 chickens and a goat. That is not America, and we can stop it with this.
Anyway, that is where I am. So I appreciate your patience. I am going to release my hold. I have been told I will be able to offer the SAVE Act. Do whatever the hell you want on it. Vote for it. Vote against it. Just follow your heart. Take your brain with you. Give the Rules Committee a chance. And that is where I am. My work here is done.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, well, let me be very clear: The Democrats are ready. Republicans wanted this vote-arama. Republicans picked this fight. If Republicans want to slog this out on the floor, so be it.
But imagine, America, this is what the Republicans are fighting for-- to maintain two unchecked, rogue Agencies that are dreaded in all corners of this country instead of reducing your healthcare costs, your housing costs, your grocery costs, your gas costs. Can you believe it? Can you believe it?
When America is crying out for real relief on the skyrocketing cost of living, Republicans are spending another $140 billion on Trump's private militia--on these two rogue Agencies--that have no restraint and ignore people's real needs.
If you ever wanted to know what a bubble these Republican Senators are in, look right here. Look right here. They are tying the Senate in a knot, holding back, moving forward--all so they can fund with no restraint Agencies that have been discredited widely in America.
Are you Republicans kidding us? Are you kidding the American people? That is your priority--not lowering costs but billions for ICE; not helping families but billions for masked agents--while America is forking up $4 a gallon at the pump while families are set back thousands more a year because of inflation. Where the heck are you? Where the heck are you? Republicans think the best thing to do right now is to cut another $140 billion check for unaccountable rogue agents.
Democrats are ready to go. We will go to bat for the American people anytime, anyplace, against anyone. America will see even more clearly tonight where the Republicans are--not on the side of lowering costs but on the side of masked agents occupying our streets.
Where the heck are you?
America is crying out for relief from high costs, and you are here, adding $140 billion to an Agency--two groups, Border Patrol and ICE-- that nobody respects in this country.
On a whole series of amendments now, we are going to contrast where we are--we Democrats--and where the Republicans are. The Republicans will either side with the American people on high costs or bow to Donald Trump and
So Democrats are united and strong, focused like a laser on reducing costs. This will be a reconciliation of reckoning for Senate Republicans who will continue to pay the price for their actions tonight.
This reconciliation, this budget act, will show who is on whose side, and clearly, if Republicans vote against our amendments, they are not on the side of the American people.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
Mr. President, in my prior remarks, in one respect, they were not exactly a model of clarity, so I want to be clear. I don't want to do anything to hurt the reconciliation bill. I like my amendments that I talked about. I don't know whether they will pass. If they don't pass, I will tell you how I will sleep tonight--with a fan on, because I think they are good amendments. But I am going to pull them down, except for the SAVE Act, because I don't want to do anything to keep ICE and Border Patrol from being funded. And I am pulling them down.
I think Lindsey could stop me anyway. He says he doesn't know how. But remember when I said Thune is going straight to Heaven? Lindsey is going to have to be persuasive. But I know he can stop me. But rather than make him do that and, if it gets on, jeopardizing this resolution, I am going to pull them all down but the SAVE Act.
I am coming with the SAVE Act. Do what you want. Follow your heart. Take your brain with you. If you don't vote for it, that is cool. I am still going to sleep with the fan on and sleep well. I would appreciate if you would consider voting for it.
Have a little confidence in our Rules Committee. I haven't met a dummy yet who is on the Rules Committee.
And I am done. What am I supposed to do now?
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
Mr. President, I am not on the Rules Committee. That deals with the dummy thing.
I ask unanimous consent that there be up to 10 minutes for debate, equally divided, prior to any amendment offered by Senator Kennedy.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I yield back all debate time on the Republican side.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Time is yielded back.
The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, time to get this show on the road, so I yield back all remaining time on the Democratic side.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. All time is yielded back.
The minority leader.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4799 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
that does not lower out-of-pocket health care costs while Americans
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There are 2 minutes equally divided on this amendment.
The minority leader.
Mr. President, Republicans say they want to lower healthcare costs. Well, here is a chance. Here is a chance for you, a chance for Republicans to join Senate Democrats to start doing something about it once and for all.
Tonight, with the very first amendment of the evening, I am offering Republicans an exceedingly simple option: We should not consider any reconciliation bill that does not lower out-of-pocket healthcare costs for the American people.
Republicans slashed $1 trillion from our healthcare system as part of their ``Big Ugly Bill.'' Since then, premiums have soared by thousands of dollars a month for millions of people, prescription drugs are up by 600 percent, and out-of-pocket costs have gone up for people with Medicare, Medicaid, ACA.
Instead of pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into ICE and Border Patrol, Republicans should be working with Democrats to lower out-of-pocket costs.
Republicans, listen to the American people. They are crying out for you to lower their healthcare costs, not play these ridiculous, ridiculous, games--
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. SCHUMER.--by adding so much more to ICE and CBP.
So, Republicans, listen to the American people, say no to billions more for unrestrained, rogue agents, and say yes to lower premiums, lower healthcare costs.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
Mr. President, the Democratic leader, the Republicans are working to reduce healthcare costs and lower premiums, but this amendment is not in order. Creation of such a point of order is outside the jurisdiction of the Budget Committee and is therefore not appropriate for inclusion in a budget resolution.
Adopting this amendment would jeopardize the privilege of the budget resolution and lose our ability to use reconciliation to reopen the Department of Homeland Security. Therefore, under the provisions of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order that the amendment offered is not germane.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The minority leader.
Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the waiver provisions of applicable budget resolutions, I move to waive all applicable sections of that act and applicable budget points of order for the purpose of the pending measure and ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 48, nays 50, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 48, the nays are 50.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
The point of order is sustained and the amendment falls.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the remaining amendment votes related to S. Con. Res. 33 be 10 minutes in length.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4798 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There will be 2 minutes of debate, equally divided.
Mr. President, allowing our friends, family, and neighbors to go hungry in the United States of America is a policy decision, a choice--a choice--made by Donald Trump.
At a time when food prices are at an alltime high, fuel prices are up because of President Trump's reckless war in Iran, and tariffs have increased the cost of living across the board, American families are being squeezed all across America, and this resolution before us today does nothing to fix this.
Instead of working to address the affordability crisis and help Americans across the country struggling to afford their bills, what have Republicans done? Cut $187 billion from the best tool America has to address hunger.
Mr. President, 41.2 million Americans rely on SNAP to put food on their family's table, and 40 percent of recipients are kids. It is critical that Congress reverse these cuts. I urge my colleagues to join me in that mission and simply vote yes on this amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.
Mr. President, I rise in opposition to amendment No. 4798. I appreciate the concerns of my colleague from New Mexico regarding grocery costs and recent changes to the SNAP program. Working Families Tax Cut took a practical approach to reduce SNAP by reducing waste, enhancing accountability, and encouraging recipients to move toward self-reliance through work and training.
This amendment is not germane to the budget resolution in violation of the Congressional Budget Act.
I, therefore, raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and waiver provisions of applicable budget resolutions, I move to waive all applicable sections of that act and applicable budget points of order for the purpose of the pending measure.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Kaine), and the
On page S1907, April 22, 2026, second column, the following appears: Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Kane), and the
The online Record has been corrected to read: Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Kaine), and the
Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) are necessarily absent.The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 47, nays 50, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote the yeas are 47, the nays are 50.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
The point of order is sustained, and the amendment falls.
The Senator from Georgia.
I call up my amendment No. 4897 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
Mr. President, think of the retired Georgia teacher who had paid over $100,000 into a cancer policy, only to be diagnosed with cancer and have her insurance claims denied.
Think of the Monroe County mother of three diagnosed with cancer who needed a liver transplant, was told she had 6 to 12 months to live, and had to fight her insurance company because her claim was denied; or the thousands of Georgia children who have had their claims for needed healthcare denied.
This amendment will ensure that this legislation prevents insurance companies from denying or delaying medically necessary healthcare for the American people.
Let's pass this amendment and protect Americans' healthcare.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
MR. CRAPO. Mr. President, this amendment is not in order. Creation of such a point of order is outside the jurisdiction of the Budget Committee and, therefore, is not appropriate for inclusion in the budget resolution.
Adopting this amendment would jeopardize the privilege of the budget resolution and our ability to use reconciliation to reopen the Department of Homeland Security.
I raise, therefore, under the provisions of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act, a point of order that the amendment offered is not germane.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
Mr. President, I hear procedural excuses in defense of insurance companies. Americans deserve the healthcare they need, and pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the waiver provisions of applicable budget resolutions, I move to waive all applicable sections of that act and applicable budget points of order for the purposes of the pending measure.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 49, nays 49, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote the yeas are 49, and the nays are 49.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is not agreed to.
The point of order is sustained and the amendment falls.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be the next amendments in order: Graham, No. 5281; Hirono, No. 4884; and Hickenlooper, No. 4956.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there an objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from South Carolina.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 5281, and I ask it be reported by number.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
Mr. President, this amendment would create a deficit- neutral reserve fund relating to ICE conducting apprehension, mandatory detention, expedited deportation of adult illegal aliens who have been convicted of rape, murder, sexual abuse of a minor after illegally entering the United States.
Over 4 million people, illegals, who came in during the Biden years were released into the United States. Jose Ibarra was one of them who killed Laken Riley. We have arrested 380,000 illegal aliens with criminal records over the past 12 months.
President Trump has prioritized detaining and getting out of our country or putting in jail illegal immigrants who rape, murder, and abuse minors, and this would give us more resources. Everybody in this body should be for this. These people need to be caught, put in jail, or kicked out of our country.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
The Senator from Illinois.
Mr. President, that is exactly the point. I support the Graham amendment. The reason I do is that under current law, undocumented immigrants who are convicted of rape, murder, or the sexual abuse of a minor are subject to mandatory detention and deportation. What we object to is what is happening on the streets of Minneapolis and Chicago. Fewer than 14 percent of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE and the CBP had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.
I support the existing law. I support the Graham amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There is a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 98, nays 0, as follows:
The amendment (No. 5281) was agreed to.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4884 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
Mr. President, Republicans' budget resolution would provide another $140 billion for immigration enforcement. With that amount Republicans have proposed, Democrats could fully fund Federal programs for low-income students, fully fund Federal programs for students with disabilities, quadruple Federal funding for afterschool programs, double the Pell grant maximum award, and provide universal free school meals for all students.
That is why my amendment with Senator Van Hollen would ensure that, before we give another blank check to ICE and CBP without any guardrails, we ensure funding for free school meals so every child has the nutritious food they need to learn and grow.
Republicans could easily do this, but they would rather spend our tax dollars on lawless immigration enforcement and illegal wars.
Budgets are about priorities. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this amendment and showing that our Nation's children are worth prioritizing.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.
Mr. President, I rise in opposition to amendment No. 4884. I appreciate my colleague, and I share her support for school meals programs. This issue is within the jurisdiction of the Senate Agriculture Committee, of which I am chair. I am eager for the Agriculture Committee to turn to the child nutrition reauthorization. It is prudent that we work together to examine and strengthen our school meals programs so they are targeted to those most in genuine need.
This amendment is not germane to the budget resolution in violation of the Congressional Budget Act. Under the provisions of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order that the amendment offered is not germane.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and a waiver of provisions of applicable budget resolutions, I move to waive all applicable sections of that act and applicable budget points of order for the purposes of the pending measure.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 48, nays 50, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 48, the nays are 50.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
The point of order is sustained and the amendment falls.
The Senator from Colorado.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4956 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to ensuring that consumers are protected from price increases associated
Mr. President, the President of the United States calls affordability a hoax, but 92 percent of Americans call it a crisis.
The President's tariffs, his healthcare cuts, and the unwanted war
Farmers have all this and more. Fertilizer prices are up more than 40 percent. Diesel is up 50 percent. Together with what many scientists refer to as a climate-caused drought, farmers are wondering if they should even plant at all.
Our amendment is simple. It gives Congress a path to lower costs for Americans by investing in and supporting clean, affordable energy and other technologies without adding to the deficit.
Across this country, working families are struggling to make ends meet. Let's do our job and help them.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
Mr. President, the focused budget blueprint before us today is necessary to quickly fund ICE, Border Patrol Agents, and support staff.
Since the Finance Committee is not instructed in this budget resolution, this is not a tax, trade, or healthcare reform bill. The budget makes that clear.
Adding a deficit-neutral reserve fund and finance jurisdiction is nongermane, as it expands the scope of the budget resolution.
Therefore, under the provisions of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order that the amendment offered is not germane.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.
Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the waiver provisions of the applicable budget resolutions, I move to waive all applicable sections of that act and applicable budget points of order for the purposes of the pending measure. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is agreeing on the motion.
Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 47, nays 51, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 47, the nays are 51.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
The point of order is sustained, and the amendment falls.
The Senator from Maryland.
Madam President, I call up my amendment 5294 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The senior assistant executive clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
Madam President, so many of my constituents in Maryland are worried--worried about making ends meet when the cost of utilities, goods, and services are at a record high because of this administration's reckless policies. The cost of housing is up. The cost of groceries is up. The cost of healthcare is up. The cost of gas, because of the President's war with Iran, is now $4.19 a gallon on a good day. And the average cost of childcare in the State of Maryland is around $25,000 a year.
Across the country, working families are demanding high-quality, affordable childcare opportunities for their children. Childcare has been hard to find and expensive for families for years, while many childcare providers struggle to stay afloat. The system is broken, and American families and their children are stuck paying the price.
Instead of solving the problem, the Trump administration has frozen billions in childcare funding for States this year. Freezing and delaying Federal childcare funds hurts childcare providers, forcing them to close their doors.
As if that were not enough, the President's budget proposal slashes funding for preschool programs by $315 million. Now, the President has thrown salt in the wound for working families by telling them it is about to get much worse. This month, the President said it is not possible for the Federal Government to fund Medicare, Medicaid--
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
The Senator from Louisiana.
Madam President, the Democrats have held the Department of Homeland Security hostage for 68 days with the shutdown. This discussion is about funding ICE, Border Patrol, and paying the men and women who keep our country safe. The Senator is using childcare as a distraction.
Republicans have supported reducing childcare costs for families through multiple provisions of the Working Families Tax Cut, including the expansion of tax credits for childcare expenses for working families.
I am--we are--open to conversations about other ways to increase access to affordable childcare options, but that must include an acknowledgement from colleagues across the aisle that flaws in the childcare system steal money from taxpayers, steering money away from families who need it the most.
Ultimately, this amendment is not germane to the underlying bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, and I urge a ``no'' vote.
Under the provisions of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order that the amendment offered is not germane.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
Madam President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive the point of order, and I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The question is on agreeing to the motion.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant executive clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 47, nays 51, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 47, the nays are 51.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
The point of order is sustained and the amendment falls.
The Senator from Louisiana.
Madam President, I ask with respect that there be order in the Senate and conversations be taken off the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate will come to order.
Madam President, I call up my amendment No. 5414 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The bill clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
and election day and the counting of ballots in Federal elections)
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There are 10 minutes, equally divided, on this amendment.
Madam President, this amendment would instruct our Rules Committee to come up with an elections bill. It is my version of the SAVE America Act, but you can call it what you want.
It would ask the Rules Committee to do two things: require that in Federal elections you have to be an American citizen to vote and provide for the provisions to enforce that.
No. 2, it would require that in Federal elections you have to prove you are who you say you are in order to vote, and it would provide provisions to enforce that.
No. 3, under this, it further instructs the Rules Committee that we are going to go back to having an election day and not an election month, and it instructs the Rules Committee to provide the provisions to enforce that.
Now, I did not just pull this bill yesterday out of my rectum, though I will concede sometimes I do my best thinking there.
I have been talking about this bill for a month, so it should come as no surprise. Now, some say it can't be done under the Budget Act and under the Byrd rule and reconciliation, and you know what? They may be right.
But you know what else? They can't predict the future. They are not clairvoyant. They have to wait on the future like the rest of us.
I hope you won't vote against this bill just because President Trump has talked about it, this amendment, rather. If you think this is just a Republican issue, then you are not revolving in the same direction as planet Earth.
There are plenty of Democrats and plenty of Independents that are worried about the integrity of our elections, and this would allow the Rules Committee to try to resolve some of their concerns.
I trust the Rules Committee; there is not a dummy on there. There are plenty of Republicans and plenty of Democrats. There are a lot of smart lawyers in the U.S. Senate, but they are not the only smart lawyers in America. And, in fact, believe it or not, there are some lawyers not in the Senate who are smarter than we are, and I trust the Rules Committee to go find them and try to craft a bill to fit within reconciliation, working with our esteemed Parliamentarian.
Last two points: If this amendment passes, and I hope it will, the Rules Committee is going to have to saddle up and ride. I am asking them to do it within weeks, days, if possible. That is probably too ambitious. If they have to work weekends, I will stay here with them. Fine, do what you think is right. Don't vote against this just because President Trump has talked about it. Follow your heart. Take your brain with you.
I respect everybody in this body. Everybody. If you vote against this bill, I
I yield back.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Madam President, of all the serious issues facing this country, including but not limited to the affordability challenges that so many working families are struggling with, I can't believe we are back here debating a partisan attempt to rush through what I referred to as a solution in search of a problem.
As we all know, and particularly the voters of Virginia will remind us, voting is already underway this election year. And instead of working to keep our elections safe and secure by making it more accessible for eligible Americans to cast their ballot in our elections, we have back before us a measure that would make it harder for eligible citizens to register to vote, to stay registered to vote, to cast their ballot, and make it tougher for election administrators and volunteers to administer our democracy, as is so fundamental to our country.
We have already gone down this road for several weeks and weeks and weeks now. We have debated the so-called SAVE America Act, but I think, despite how you talked about the SAVE America Act, which has certainly not passed the Senate, even my Republican colleagues who have seen the measure suggested by our colleague from Louisiana, it is an even more extreme version.
Let me begin by saying, we already know that you have to be a citizen to vote in our elections. That is nothing new. That is already existing law. And despite the President's claims, there is zero evidence of massive voter fraud across the country, which is the premise of these proposals. So not only is it a solution in search of a problem, to paraphrase a wise man, this measure is all foam and no beer.
This amendment seeks to eliminate or, at a minimum, restrict early voting opportunities which 47 States in the country offer for eligible citizens, 47 States. Why we would want to take away opportunities for citizens to participate in our democracy, I don't know.
This proposal also suggests that all ballots be counted within 36 hours of the election. That may sound good, and it may be very doable in States with smaller populations and smaller numbers of registered voters, but in the larger States, yes, it takes more time to count more ballots. And I know we can all agree that we want to do it securely to maintain election integrity, things to ensure that if a ballot comes in on election day, that that voter hasn't already voted by mail. It takes a minute to cross-reference those records.
Or a ballot that is received on time by mail that you conduct a signature verification to help confirm that the person submitting that ballot is indeed the voter. You need more than 36 hours when you have more than 20 million voters like we have in my home State of California.
So what is this proposed amendment really about? It is about holding on to power because the President knows that his agenda has failed, and it is not just extremely unpopular but has done damage to families across the country.
Just look at his most recent executive order seeking to ban vote-by- mail--changes to the rules when the primary season is already underway. But the language has these changes go into immediate effect, just adding to the rising costs, just adding to the rising chaos, just adding to the rising corruption.
And it is unfortunate that the election administration has been turned into a partisan issue.
I actually ask our colleagues to protect the early voters, not just in my State but in yours. Protect vote-by-mail opportunities, not just in my State but in yours. Let's protect women who are married and change their name and their right to vote, not just in my State but in yours.
Colleagues, I urge a ``no'' vote on amendment No. 5414.
And, furthermore, Madam President, I raise a point of order that the pending amendment is not germane and, therefore, violates section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1984.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
Madam President, we will never know until we try.
Pursuant to section 904, with respect to my colleague, I move to waive, and I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The question is on agreeing to the motion.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant executive clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 48, nays 50, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 48, the nays are 50.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
The point of order is sustained, and the amendment falls.
The majority whip.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be the next amendments in order: Hawley No. 4794; Markey No. 5001; Paul No. 5378; Merkley No. 5235; and Kaine No. 5282.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there an objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Missouri.
Madam President, I call up my amendment No. 4794, and I ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The senior assistant executive clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to extending the prohibition on Medicaid payments to abortion providers)
Madam President, this amendment poses a simple and direct
More specifically, should we divert money from Medicaid--a program that is dedicated to the most needy among us--and use it instead to pay for risky, dangerous, irreversible transgender drugs and surgeries for minor children?--because that is what has been happening.
For years, outfits like Planned Parenthood have gotten billions of dollars from Medicaid and Medicare--billions of dollars taken from the elderly, from the poor, from the needy--paid out to them which they can then use for transgender surgeries, treatments, and drugs for minor children. They proudly advertise it on their websites. One recent study found that, in 3 years alone, Planned Parenthood got $1.5 billion from Medicaid and Medicare--money to be used on these risky surgeries and procedures for our children.
This is wrong. This is a terrible misuse of Federal funds. We should put a stop to it today. I ask for a ``yes'' vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Madam President, it has been a year since Republicans gutted Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics. For many women, Planned Parenthood is their only source of primary care and prevention, like cancer screenings and STI testing. There are 23 Planned Parenthood clinics that have closed, and 75 percent of the clinics that have shuttered their doors have been in rural or underserved areas. The number of breast exam visits fell by 25 percent. Fewer women are getting essential preventive care, heightening their risk of cancer.
All of this lifesaving care is on the chopping block if this amendment passes. This amendment is just the Republicans' latest attempt to strip women of the healthcare they need and depend on so that they can go score some political points.
I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment--to strongly oppose it.
Madam President, I raise a point of order that the pending amendment is not germane; therefore, it violates section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
Madam President, under no circumstance should Medicaid money that is dedicated to the poor and the needy be used for transgender surgeries and treatments for minor children. It is a moral outrage. This body has a duty to stand against it.
Madam President, pursuant to section 904, I move to waive, and I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant executive clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 50, nays 48, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 50, the nays are 48.
Three-fifths of the Senators, duly chosen and sworn, not having voted in the affirmative, the point of order is sustained, and the amendment falls.
The Republican leader.
Mr. President, we have four more amendments in this tranche that we are doing right now, but if we could start to compress this time for votes even more. We are still running close to 20 minutes, and it is a 10-minute vote, so let's try to do it in 10 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. Markey. Mr. President, I call up my amendment 5001 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The bill clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
Mr. President, since Donald Trump took office, electricity prices have risen by as much as 13 percent--three times faster than inflation. Families are already falling into debt, and it is only getting worse.
Utilities requested a record $31 billion in rate increases in 2025. That is twice as high as the year before. Republican cuts to American energy programs stoked this fire of a crisis. The Republican ``Big Ugly Bill'' is expected--this is unbelievable--to kill 790,000 megawatts of new, clean electricity over the next decade. It has already canceled or stalled 28,000 megawatts from 365 energy projects. As we produce less and less new electricity, the remaining electricity becomes more and more expensive for families all across this country.
Instead of providing a blank check for ICE, we should be providing--
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. MARKEY.--relief on electricity bills for American families, and that is what my amendment does. It says that if Congress is going to pass--
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. MARKEY.--this budget, then the budget must result in lower electricity bills for all American families.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. OK. Who is next?
I urge my colleagues to support my amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.
Mr. President, we need dispatchable power. Something happens when the government subsidizes and otherwise encourages nondispatchable power and punishes and discourages dispatchable power: The price of dispatchable power and power generally goes up.
That is exactly what happened following the passage of the Democrat bill with the Orwellian name of the ``Inflation Reduction Act.'' The same year that was passed, in 2022--that bill, which encouraged and fostered nondispatchable power and discouraged dispatchable power--the cost of electric power went up. It went way up. It went up more than any year since the Energy Information Administration began tracking this data in 1984. That is what happens, and that is what they
So under the provisions of section 305(b) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order that the amendment offered is not germane.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive the point of order, and I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 48, nays 50, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 48, the nays are 50.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
The point of order is sustained, and the amendment falls.
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 5378 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The bill clerk read as follows:
(The amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text of Amendments.'')
Mr. President, Congress ought to fund border security, but we should be good stewards of the taxpayer dollars and fully pay for the $70 billion to secure our borders.
My amendment would eliminate over $5 billion in refugee welfare, cut over $45 billion in foreign aid, and slash the National Science Foundation by nearly $4 billion, as well as reducing the Department of Education by 16 percent. This is consistent with the Trump administration's goal of returning educational authority to the States. These reductions would be made in just one fiscal year and would fully pay for border security.
With $2 trillion deficits and a $39 trillion debt, we must stop handouts to refugees, countries that hate the United States, and Federal Agencies that study such things as frog mating calls in Panama.
Let's pay for the border security. I ask for a ``yes'' vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, my colleague from Kentucky is right that this bill is unfunded, that it adds to the deficit and adds to the debt. And maybe the best way to address that is not to send $70 billion to two Agencies that are sitting on top of $103 billion right now of unobligated funds. They couldn't even get started spending that massive amount from H.R. 1 last year.
But blindly slashing away at scientific research when China is producing four times the patents that we are producing each year, blindly slashing away at Pell grants, which, under this proposal, would be equal to 2 million individual students losing their Pell grants-- that is the type of detailed work that needs to be done in the authorizing committees and in the Appropriations Committee. This slash- and-hack strategy is way off base.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. President, there is nothing in the bill that cuts Pell grants.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, the bill cuts $16 billion from education. It doesn't say specifically where, but that is a good example of the type of thing that could happen.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on adoption of amendment No. 5378.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 25, nays 73, as follows:
On page S1914, April 22, 2026, third column, the following appears: [Rollcall Vote No. 99 Leg.] YEAS--25 Hagerty Hawley Hoeven NAYS--73 Graham Hassan Heinrich Hickenlooper Hirono Husted
The online Record has been corrected to read: [Rollcall Vote No. 99 Leg.] YEAS--25 Hagerty Hawley Hoeven Husted NAYS--73 Graham Hassan Heinrich Hickenlooper Hirono
The amendment (No. 5378) was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. President, on rollcall 99, I voted nay. My intention was to vote yea. Therefore, I ask unanimous consent to change my vote since it will not affect the outcome.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. President, we have a finite list of five amendments. So if everybody could stay in their seats, and we will try and knock them off quickly and do legit 10-minute votes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 5235 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
Mr. President, in the State of the Union, President Trump has told the story of Rachel Wiggins who had lost out to private equity 20 times in trying to buy a house.
After all, it is very hard to compete against an all-cash offer, fast closing, no inspection. The President said: I am asking Congress to act because we want homes for people, not corporations.
And the Senate did act, and they included in a bill--the ROAD to Housing Act--an element--and my compliments to my colleague from Ohio and my colleague from Massachusetts who worked together to get the element into that bill.
But right now down the hall, private equity is lobbying like hell to make sure that element never passes. We have an opportunity tonight to send a message that we agree with the President, that we have a challenge in home ownership because home ownership is dying, and one of the factors is private equity buying up the homes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. President, let's pass this amendment and restore home ownership.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. President, first of all, I am very thankful that the Senator from Oregon is now completely on the side of President Trump in making certain that we restore home ownership for Americans. I didn't think I would see this moment, but I am excited that it happened either way.
I obviously urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment because we have already passed it. We have already solved this problem. In fact, congratulations to all of us--89 to 10, we banned institutional ownership of single-family homes. I think that is fantastic.
By the way, in January, we saw a 7-percent decline in the prices of homes in just San Diego because another factor that we are dealing with tonight is that, unfortunately, the Democrats allowed tens of millions of people to come into this country illegally. That drove up housing prices.
So what this bill is about is actually enforcing our immigration laws, making certain that we have border protection, and making certain that we remove the people from this country that were not supposed to be here in the first place. That will also continue to drive down housing prices.
But again, I agree with the Senator from Oregon. This is about lowering the price of housing. We have already done it. I urge all my colleagues to vote against this amendment.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on adoption of the amendment.
Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 46, nays 52, as follows:
The amendment (No. 5235) was rejected.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment 5159 and ask that it be reported by number.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will report.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To reduce the price of prescription drugs in the United
States by more than 50 percent by adopting Most Favored Nation drug pricing so that the American people pay no more for prescription drugs
Mr. President, I ask for order. Could we have order?
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Order in the Chamber, please.
Mr. President, the American people pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. As a result, one out of four Americans cannot afford the prescriptions that their doctors write, and thousands die every year as a result, and many become sicker than they should.
During his State of the Union Address, President Trump asked us to codify a most-favored-nation drug policy to ensure that the American people pay no more for prescription drugs than people in other countries.
Well, the amendment that I am offering now calls on Congress to do exactly that. This amendment is very simple. It would prevent pharmaceutical companies from charging more for prescription drugs in the United States than they do in Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and Japan.
Researchers at Yale University estimate that this bill would cut the cost of prescription drugs in America by half--a 50-percent reduction-- so we are not paying the highest prices in the world.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator's time has expired.
Let's stand with the American people, not with the pharmaceutical industry.
Please vote yes.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Idaho.
MR. CRAPO. Mr. President, the focused budget blueprint before us today is necessary to quickly fund ICE, Border Patrol agents, and support staff.
Since the Finance Committee is not instructed in this budget resolution, this is not a tax, trade, or healthcare reform bill. The budget makes that clear.
Adding a deficit-neutral reserve fund in the Finance jurisdiction is nongermane, as it expands the scope of the budget resolution.
Therefore, under the provisions of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order that the amendment offered is not germane.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Vermont.
Pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive the point of order, and I ask for the yeas and nays.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The question is on agreeing to the motion.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 49, nays 49, as follows:
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. On this vote the yeas are 49, the nays are 49.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
The point of order is sustained and the amendment falls.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4855 and ask that it be reported by number.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
Mr. President, my amendment would create a point of order against reconciliation bills that would provide funding for Federal Agencies that still have unobligated funds left over from previous reconciliation bills.
Now, as I have described this amendment, many people are thinking: Well, that is pretty common sense. Why is this even necessary?
Well, let me remind us that ICE and CBP still have a combined total of $103 billion in unspent funds from last year's ``Big Anything But Beautiful Bill.'' You heard me right: $103 billion. Let that sink in.
Let that sink in.
ICE is still sitting on $63.2 billion of its funding. That is 84 percent of the funding from that bill. The CBP is sitting on $40 billion. That is 62 percent of the funding from last year's bill. So what are we even doing here? There is $103 billion that is unspent, and you are trying to give them another $140 billion.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator's time has expired.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Wyoming.
So, colleagues, I urge you to vote yes on amendment No. 4855.
Mr. President, the Republicans are committed to a safe and secure America. That is what this debate is about tonight.
All night long, Democrats have ignored this very important issue. Democrats would rather protect illegal immigrant criminals than protect law-abiding American citizens. They want to defund ICE. They want to defund the Border Patrol. They want to go back to the days of 10 million illegal immigrants flooding into our country--the criminals, drug dealers, gang members--all of it. The Republicans are getting law enforcement the resources they need to keep our communities safe.
Mr. President, under the provisions of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order that the amendment offered is not germane.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive the point of order, and I ask for the yeas and nays.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there a sufficient second?
The question is on agreeing to the motion.
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 46, nays 52, as follows:
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. On this vote, the yeas are 46, the nays are 52.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is not agreed to.
The point of order is sustained, and the amendment falls.
The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 5336 and ask that it be reported by number.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to
requiring the Comptroller General of the United States to conduct a study related to economic consequences of private or confidential drug pricing agreements struck by any Federal department, agency, or office
Mr. President, the amendment would require that the Government Accountability Office analyze Donald Trump's agreement with the pharmaceutical companies. He claims that he signed deals with 16 pharmaceutical companies to get Americans the lowest prescription drug prices in the world, but the details of these so-called deals are completely shrouded in secrecy.
Donald Trump wants Congress to put these deals into black letter law, sight unseen. So my amendment would require the Government Accountability Office to analyze the deals and provide a clear analysis of the savings, if any, to taxpayers and to patients.
And for any of my Senate colleagues who are concerned about disclosing trade secrets, this amendment protects all confidential information.
If these Trump deals are so great, there should be nothing to hide. This amendment would give Congress and the public the specifics for the first time on these Trump pharmaceutical deals. I strongly urge my colleagues to vote yes.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Idaho.
Mr. President, we just voted briefly, a few moments ago, against the Sanders MFN amendment. This is a similar amendment. It is outside the purpose of the budget resolution.
I encourage Senators to vote no and support the focused budget blueprint before us and quickly fund ICE and Border Patrol agents and support staff.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 48, nays 50, as follows:
The amendment (No. 5336) was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 5333 and request that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to
requiring the obligation of amounts appropriated to the Federal
Emergency Management Agency to carry out the public assistance and
Right now, my colleagues, FEMA is holding up more than $3 billion in disaster relief funding for California--funds that could be used to help families impacted by fires, floods, and other disasters that have hit the Golden State in recent years.
More than a half a billion of that funding, in particular, is to help communities in Los Angeles County affected by the devastating wildfires that began at the very start of this Congress. People are suffering, wanting to move back into their homes and neighborhoods, still waiting on Congress to act.
But as we debate this budget resolution, I know our State of California is not alone. North Carolina is waiting on millions in relief designated for Hurricane Helene in 2024. Kentucky saw
My amendment would require outstanding FEMA funds that American communities are counting on to be obligated--
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Time has expired.
Mr. SCHIFF.--so that we are, at the very least, helping these families get the support they need.
I urge an ``aye'' vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
Mr. President, my colleagues that are here, we voted as a body to be able to get those funds to California. We agree this is an issue that needs to be funded, that needs to be taken care of--whether it is North Carolina or whether it is California or whether it is flooding or tornadoes that have happened across the Midwest. We completely agree.
Our challenge has been that we have been in a government shutdown in DHS, now for 2 months--2 months. We have got to be able to get those funds released. That means we have got to get DHS funding completely done for all of DHS.
We have FEMA employees that are being paid, but they don't have program dollars that they can actually release. So we need the full funding to actually be complete on this.
This particular bill, what we are debating tonight, is just ICE and CBP. It is just that narrow area. This body has already passed the rest of DHS funding. We have got to be able to finish the ICE and CBP portion.
So I would encourage my colleagues to be able to vote no because this bill is not about FEMA, though we, as a body, have already voted to say, ``Yes, this needs to be funded,'' and have already agreed with that.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
So let's keep it narrow to ICE and CBP. So I would vote no.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on adoption of amendment No. 5333.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 49, nays 49, as follows:
The amendment (No. 5333) was rejected.
Mr. President. I would like to thank the Democratic staff of the Senate Budget Committee for all their hard work on this resolution, both through extensive preparation and diligent staff work during floor consideration. Staff includes: Ben Ward, Mike Jones, Jill Harrelson, Josh Smith, Tyler Evilsizer, Melissa Kaplan-Pistiner, Misha Rafiq, Brian Lyons, Anna Barnes, Connor Jennings, Ethan Rosenkranz, Andrew Cobian, Anirudh Srirangam, Fiona Forrester, Lauran Pauley, Hilary Gelfond-Gross, Madilyn Shirley, John Bratton, and Mina Shahinfar.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. President, I know of no further amendments on the concurrent resolution.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the concurrent resolution, S. Con. Res. 33, as amended.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Iowa (Mr. Grassley).
I announce that the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) is necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 50, nays 48, as follows:
The concurrent resolution (S. Con. Res. 33), as amended, was agreed to, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The minority leader.
Mr. President, tonight, Senate Republicans showed the American people where they stand, not for families struggling with the high cost of childcare, groceries, gasoline, electricity but for pumping $140 billion toward rogue Agencies.
All night long, we gave the Republicans a chance to do the right thing by voting for our amendments. We gave Republicans a chance to vote for an amendment to lower out-of-pocket healthcare costs.
They said: No.
We gave Republicans a chance to lower childcare costs.
They said: No.
We gave Republicans a chance to stop insurance company delays, to protect school meals, to give people a hand at the grocery store.
And Republicans said: No, no, and no, again.
What kind of bubble are they living in? How apart are they from people's real needs? And, instead, take that money, which should have gone to lowering people's costs, and give it to an Agency that everyone knows needs reform.
Republicans can rest assured that when reconciliation comes back up in a few weeks, they are going to have to face these votes again. Democrats will make sure that they do. We will continue to force vote after vote on the most pressing issue facing Americans today: their high, high, all-too-high costs.
Democrats are going to hold Republicans' feet to the fire because the American people demand it. The American people are hurting right now because of the soaring cost of living, and that is why it is so important that Democrats continue to force Republicans to take these votes and go on record about their disastrous agenda.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. President, before we leave and finish this evening, I would like to take a moment to recognize a departing member of the Republican cloakroom staff Tony Hanagan. He is leaving this Friday after 12 years in the cloakroom and his 12th vote-arama.
Tony, I know a lot of those occurred here in the last 15 months, and I am hoping we didn't push you out the door by forcing you to go through another one. But, seriously, it is hard for me to think of the Republican cloakroom without Tony.
When you become leader, you realize all over again just how indispensable our cloakroom staff are. The command of Senate procedure and the institutional knowledge they bring is as essential to passing legislation as is the votes of our Members.
Since I became leader, I have relied on Tony's expertise on a daily basis, whether we are adopting a UC or I am delivering the wrapup. Tony isn't just smart and knowledgeable; he is also invariably positive, hard-working, and deeply committed to the team--our team here in the Senate--and the sports teams at his beloved Gonzaga College High School here in Washington, DC.
Tony, you have played an indispensable role in the victories we have won for the American people, and I am very grateful for the 12 years you have dedicated to the cloakroom and to this institution. I want to wish you the very best of everything in your future ventures. Wherever you go, I am confident you will excel.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
