Ted Cruz

Mr. CRUZ

Mr. CRUZ. I appreciate my friend from Illinois impugning the integrity of our friends in the House and also describing the plight of innocents. As you rightly noted, 67 years ago my father came here. He came from Cuba and spoke no English. He had $100 sewn into his underwear. He came here legally on a student visa to study. He followed the rule of law. And I would note--my friend from Illinois knows full well--there is no stronger advocate of legal immigration in the Senate than I am. Indeed, on the Senate Judiciary Committee I introduced two amendments, one for high-skilled workers, H-1B workers, to increase that fivefold from 65,000 to 325,000 because temporary, high-skilled workers are progrowth. Every one of those who comes along produces 1.7 American jobs. I am sorry to say my friend from Illinois and every Senate Democrat on the Judiciary Committee voted against that proposal--voted against increasing legal immigration for temporary, high-skilled workers. My friend from Illinois is also aware--since we are both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee--that I introduced another amendment that would take our current failed legal immigration system and dramatically simplify it by reducing the barriers and costs and eliminate the per-country caps which have the effect of discriminating against nations such as Mexico, China, and India and take the legal cap from 675,000 and double it to 1.35 million so we can have a legal system we can continue that welcomes legal immigrants who come here to celebrate the American dream. Again, I was sorry to see every single Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee vote against increasing legal immigration, streamlining it, making the system work better, and eliminating the discriminatory per-country caps on nations such as Mexico, India, and China. I understand the Senator from Illinois just gave a passionate speech in defense of granting amnesty to people who are here illegally. He is certainly entitled to those views. We should indeed have a full and robust debate, but I will note that the Democratic Senator from Arkansas, the Democratic Senator from Louisiana, the Democratic Senator from North Carolina, and the Democratic Senator from Alaska are all busily telling their constituents they disagree with what my friend from Illinois just said. They are at home telling their constituents: No, no, no, no. We don't want amnesty. No, no, no, no. We don't want the President to unilaterally grant amnesty. If that is indeed their position, I welcome them to come to the floor right now. If that is indeed their position, there is an easy action. For centuries this body has been called the world's greatest deliberative body. Unfortunately, that label is no longer accurately applied because this body, sadly, under Majority Leader Reid and the Democratic majority, neither deliberates nor votes on much of anything. There are over 350 bills the House of Representatives has passed to address the great challenges in this country--mostly with substantial bipartisan support--and over 350 pieces of legislation are sitting on Harry Reid's desk and he will not allow a vote on them. When it comes to solving the crisis at the border, the only way to do so is to end the promise of amnesty. The 90,000 children who are coming believe when they get here they will get amnesty. The position, sadly, of President Obama and the majority leader and the Senate Democrats is that they will do nothing--zero--to fix that problem. Let me say it is not compassionate, it is not humane to continue a system where tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of little boys and little girls are being victimized and assaulted physically and sexually by violent coyotes. Under the Democratic plan that will continue. It will continue this year. It will continue next year. In response, they do nothing--zero, nada--to fix the problem. That is a hard-hearted approach to this challenge. We have a demonstration, a study in contrast. Looking at a humanitarian crisis, the House of Representatives stood and voted on legislation to lawfully make it clear that the President of the United States has no authority to grant amnesty to people who are here illegally. The Senate had a chance to do the same. President Obama has promised the American people that right after the election he intends to unilaterally and illegally grant amnesty to another 5 or 6 million people. Every Senate Democrat has an opportunity to make clear where he or she stands. In a moment I am going to ask for this body to take up the bill the House has passed to make clear in law that the President has no authority to grant amnesty prospectively. I understand my Democratic friends are going to object to this. That should surprise no one because my Democratic friends for the last 2 years have objected to considering almost every major piece of legislation to address the challenges in this country. What this means is that the 55 Democrats in this body who are standing united in blocking this legislation that the House of Representatives has passed--all 55 Democrats bear responsibility for President Obama's amnesty, for the amnesty of 5 or 6 million people. I understand the President thinks it is politically clever to delay the amnesty until after the election, but I have real faith in the American people, that it is too clever by half, that all 55 Senate Democrats who are standing together, standing united with President Obama and saying we want the President to have the ability to illegally grant amnesty, every Senate Democrat in this body bears responsibility for that choice. If they did not, any Senate Democrat is welcome to come to the floor. I will note that other than the Democratic Senator from New Jersey, who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee--and I expect will object to my unanimous consent momentarily--there is not a single Democrat in this Chamber speaking out on eliminating the President's authority to grant amnesty. Clarity in elections, enabling the American people to hold all of us accountable is a very good thing. One body, the House of Representatives, is leading. The other body, the Senate, under Democratic control, refuses to even allow a vote on solving the crisis at the border or stopping the President's illegal amnesty. Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 5272 Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 551, H.R. 5272. I further ask consent that the bill be read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. CRUZ. I will yield for a question in a moment. The President intends to expand this to 5 or 6 million people who are here illegally to give them presumably the same authorization to work unilaterally and with no authorization in law to transfer their status from being illegally here to legally here on executive dispensation. I understand my friend from Illinois and other Members of the Democratic Party support that decision. I believe--and I would allow him in his question to clarify that. If I mischaracterized it, I would welcome his clarification. But there certainly are some members of the Democratic Caucus who do support that. But the American people powerfully don't, profoundly don't. They recognize it is inconsistent with the rule of law, is bad policy, and is creating this crisis at the border. I have to say the President's decision to delay the amnesty until right after the election reflects a cynicism that even in Washington, DC, is unusual. Because what it is saying is: I understand the policies that I, President Obama, am trying to force that are completely unpopular with the American people, so I am going to jam them through right after the election. Because what it reflects is that President Obama and unfortunately many of the Senate Democrats hold their constituents in very low regard. It reflects the view that if we do this after the election, even if the people don't like it, they will forget about it in 2 years. If my friends in the Democratic Party believe the right policy solution is amnesty for 5 or 6 million more people and the President acting unilaterally, then we have a very simple solution. Let's bring this up for a vote before the October recess. The House of Representatives took the legislation I introduced in this body and they stayed over an extra day, they voted on it, and they stood up and led, acting to solve the crisis at the border. And what happened in the Senate? The majority leader of the Senate refused to allow a vote on the proposal and sent every Senator home for August while having done nothing to address this crisis. If my friend, the Senator from Illinois, believes amnesty is the right policy decision, then let's have a debate, let's bring it up for a vote, and let's have every Senator in this body go on record.

Mr. CRUZ. The deferral of deportation under DACA is a written determination from the President that the individuals who receive this, No. 1, will be immune from the black-letter text of the immigration law that subjects them to removal; and No. 2, the administration has created an authorization-to-work document as a component of DACA that has no basis or authority in existing Federal law. Let us be clear. The President has been absolutely explicit. He intends to expand that to another 5 or 6 million people who are here illegally.

Mr. CRUZ. I will be happy to yield for a question.

Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, Americans across the country have been riveted by the crisis occurring on our southern border. President Obama is correct with one regard: What we are seeing is a humanitarian crisis. But it is a crisis, sadly, of the President's own creation, and it is the direct consequence of President Obama's laws. To understand why, one merely has to look at the numbers. Three years ago, in 2011, there were roughly 6,000 unaccompanied children entering the country illegally. Then in June of 2012, just before the election, the President unilaterally granted amnesty to some 800,000 people here illegally who entered as children. As a direct foreseeable consequence of that--the predicted consequence of that is: If you grant amnesty to people who enter as children, you create an enormous incentive for more and more children to enter the country illegally. That is exactly what we have seen happening. As a result of the President's amnesty, we have seen the numbers go from 6,000 kids 3 years ago to this year, it is expected, when there will be 90,000 unaccompanied children entering the country illegally, and next year the Department of Homeland Security predicts it will be 145,000. I have traveled down to the border of Texas many times. As recently as the last couple of months I have been down to McAllen. I visited with the Border Patrol chief in McAllen. I visited with the Border Patrol agents and line agents down there. I have been to Lackland Air Force Base where there are roughly 1200 children being housed. I am sorry to say that President Obama, when he visited Texas, had time to do neither. He had time to go to Democratic Party fundraisers, to pal around with the fat cats in the Democratic Party and to raise money but no time to travel to the border and see the human suffering his failed immigration policies have produced. It is worth underscoring, these are little boys and little girls who are not being brought into this country by well-meaning social workers with beards and Birkenstocks trying to help the kids. They are being brought in by hardened, drug-tough coyotes, cartels. And these little boys and little girls are being physically victimized, physically abused, sexually abused. When I was at Lackland Air Force Base, a senior official there described to me how the cartels, when they have control of these kids and are smuggling them illegally into this country, sometimes will hold the kids hostage and try to extract more money from the families. In order to do so, horrifyingly, they will sever body parts from these kids. This senior official at Lackland described to me how these coyotes will put a gun to the back of the head of the little boy or little girl and order that child to cut off the fingers or ears of another little boy or little girl, and if they don't do it they will shoot that child and move on to the next one. They describe how on this end we are getting, No. 1, some children who have been horribly maimed by these vicious coyotes and, No. 2, we are getting children who have enormous psychological trauma from being forced to participate in such horrors. The crisis at the border cannot be solved without ending the promise of amnesty. The data demonstrates that, compellingly, it was when the President granted amnesty that the numbers spiked, but more recent data demonstrates that as well. A few months ago the Border Patrol conducted a survey of over 200 people who entered illegally, many of them children, and asked the obvious question: Why are you coming? What has changed? Just 3 years ago it was only 6,000 kids and now it is 90,000. What has changed? Ninety-five percent of them told the Border Patrol they were coming because they believe they will get amnesty. They believed they will get a permiso, a slip of paper that lets them stay once they get there. When I was in McAllen, I took the time not just to meet with the chief but to meet with a number of Border Patrol agents who spend every day out on the river, up in the air, on horseback, working to secure the borders. I asked the line agents the obvious question: Why are they coming? What has changed? What has caused this humanitarian crisis? Every single Border Patrol agent gave me the exact same answer: They said they are coming because they believe they will get amnesty. In fact, they explained to me, they said: Right now the Border Patrol is not apprehending these kids. When they cross the river, they often have nothing, sometimes just rags on their back after a long, arduous journey where they have been subjected to horrible physical and sexual abuse, but the one thing they almost inevitably have is their documents. And these children immediately look for the first person in uniform they can find. The Border Patrol isn't apprehending them; they are looking for the Border Patrol, because they come to the Border Patrol and hand them their documents because they believe they will get amnesty; they will get a permiso; they will be allowed to stay. If we want to solve this crisis, if we want to stop these children from coming and from being abused, the only way to do so is to end the promise of amnesty. Before the August recess, I introduced legislation in this body to do exactly that. It was very simple legislation. It was directed to the source of the problem. It provided in black-and-white law that the President of the United States prospectively has no authority to grant amnesty to anyone. The legislation doesn't address the 800,000 who were the subject of the 2012 order. It simply says going forward the President cannot grant amnesty to anyone else, and the reason for that is the cause of this crisis is these children coming believing they will get amnesty. The White House, in their talking points, routinely said that children coming today are not eligible for amnesty. I see my colleague from Illinois nodding in agreement with that statement. If that is the case, then my colleague from Illinois should join me in sponsoring this measure because the legislation I have introduced would simply put into law what the White House talking point is, which is that----

Mr. CRUZ. I will be happy to yield to the Senator for a question.

Mr. CRUZ. I thank my friend from Illinois, but I would note that the comments he made are not connected to the facts of the proposal. The proposal is explicitly post-DACA. Some 800,000 people have already received amnesty. Let's be clear. The President had no legal authority to grant amnesty at the time. He did so unilaterally, contrary to the rule of law. Now we are in a broader context where the President has quite publicly promised to grant amnesty--again unilaterally and illegally-- to some 5 or 6 million people. Yet at the behest of our friends on the Democratic side of the aisle, he announced this weekend he is delaying the decision until after the election, because apparently Senate Democrats up for election have noticed their constituents don't support the President in illegally and unilaterally granting amnesty. I would suggest that Members of this body cannot have it both ways. My friend from Illinois stated he doesn't think we should be granting amnesty to these children, and yet the legislation I introduced, the legislation the House of Representatives passed, does not act retroactively, does not address anyone who has fallen within the previous DACA. It simply says going forward the President doesn't have the authority to grant amnesty. Instead it is Congress that has the authority to pass or not pass immigration.

Mr. CRUZ. Absolutely.

Mr. CRUZ

Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, at a time of extraordinary challenges across the globe and here at home, we are not gathered in the Senate to discuss how to confront the threat of ISIS. We are not gathered in the Senate to discuss how to prevent Putin's Russia from invading its neighbors. We are not gathered in the Senate today to discuss how to solve the humanitarian crisis at the border with some 90,000 unaccompanied children coming into the country this year. We are not gathered in the Senate today to discuss how to bring back jobs and economic growth, or how to correct the fact that the Obama economy has produced the lowest labor force participation since 1978--92 million Americans not working today. And we are not gathered in the Senate to discuss how to stop the disaster that has been ObamaCare, which has caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs, to be forced into part-time work, to lose their health insurance, to lose their doctors, and to see their premiums skyrocket. No. Instead, we are gathered today in the Senate for a very different topic. The majority leader and the Democratic majority in this Senate have determined that the most important priority this Senate has, which we are spending the entire week addressing, is the proposal of 49 Democrats to repeal the free speech provisions of the First Amendment. That is not hyperbole. Typically, when Americans hear that Members of the Senate are proposing repealing the free speech protections of the First Amendment, the usual reaction is a gasp of disbelief. Could we really have entered a world so extreme that our common ground no longer even includes the First Amendment of the Constitution? The First Amendment protects our most foundational rights. Yet, under the amendment we are debating today that 49 Democrats have signed their name to, the First Amendment would, in effect, have crossed out freedom of speech. Why? Because 49 Democrats have cosponsored a constitutional amendment that is currently on the floor of the Senate, being voted on this week, that would give Congress blanket authority to regulate political speech. From the dawn of our Republic we have respected the rights of citizens to express their views. It is the right upon which every other civil liberty is predicated. But in the Democratic Senate of 2014, citizens' free speech rights are tools for partisan warfare. This proposal before the Senate is, bar none, the most radical proposal that has been considered by the Senate in the time I have served. If this proposal were to pass, its effects would be breathtaking. It would be the most massive intrusion on civil liberties and expansion of Federal Government power in modern times. Let's talk about how and why that is the case. The text of the amendment that is currently in the Bill of Rights says, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech. So right now we operate under a First Amendment that says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech--not some laws; not laws that some politicians think would help them politically; but no law abridging the freedom of speech is what our First Amendment says. What would the new First Amendment say? Well, according to our Democratic friends, the new First Amendment would have two sections. The first section says, Congress and States may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections. Now, ``reasonable.'' Who could oppose reasonable limits? Isn't that the essence of reasonableness? Perhaps I have forgotten my spectacles, but I don't see in the current First Amendment, Congress can make reasonable restrictions on the freedom of speech. It doesn't say that. It says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. What is the difference? The First Amendment is not about reasonable speech. The First Amendment was enacted to protect unreasonable speech. I, for one, certainly don't want our speech limited to speech that elected politicians in Washington think is reasonable. There was a time this body thought the Alien and Sedition Acts prohibiting criticizing the government were reasonable. There is a reason the Constitution doesn't say let's trust politicians to determine what speech is reasonable and what isn't. I would note the Supreme Court has long made clear the First Amendment is all about unreasonable speech. For example, when the Nazis wanted to march on Skokie, IL--Nazi speeches, the paradigm example of unreasonable speech; it is hateful, bigoted, ignorant speech--the Supreme Court said the Nazis have a constitutional right to march down the street in Skokie, IL, with their hateful, bigoted, ignorant speech. Now every one of us then has a moral obligation to condemn it as hateful and bigoted and ignorant. But the First Amendment is all about saying government doesn't get to decide what you say is reasonable and what you say is not. The First Amendment is all about saying we will not censor American citizens. What is this amendment about? Saying the Federal Government now has the power to censor each and every American who dares speak about politics. So if a person has a political view at home, they better hope politicians in Washington think that view is reasonable. I will tell my colleagues that very little of what we do in this town is reasonable and the idea that elected politicians would seek to arrogate power to themselves to censor the citizens is anathema to who we are as a country. This bill, if adopted, raises three simple questions--questions I raised at three hearings in the Judiciary Committee and in the Constitution subcommittee, and I am the ranking member on the Constitution subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. We have had extensive debates on this amendment. I wish to pose three simple questions that I would ask every Democrat who has put his name to this--and I notice, sadly, my friend, the Presiding Officer, is one of them, but he didn't serve on the committee. So I would ask him to consider these questions, and I would hope every Democrat who has put his name to this, upon thinking about it, will have second thoughts and pull his name off. So here are three questions every one of us should ask. No. 1, should Congress have the constitutional authority to ban movies? No. 2, should Congress have the constitutional authority to ban books? And No. 3, should Congress have the constitutional authority to ban the NAACP from speaking about politics? My answer to these three questions is unequivocally, unquestionably no. Yet every single Democrat who has put his name on this amendment has no choice but to answer yes to all three of these questions. I posed these questions in the Constitution subcommittee. When I posed them to the committee, the chairman of the committee, Senator Durbin, gaveled the hearing shut because he could not answer those questions. But at the full Judiciary Committee hearing, I was told by my Democratic friends: This is hyperbole. This is exaggeration. We don't intend to ban movies or books or the NAACP. My response in those hearings was that this is the Senate. Forty-nine Senators are proposing an amendment to the Bill of Rights. The inchoate intentions that may be buried in the hearts of each and every Senator are utterly irrelevant to the question. The question is, What is the language that would be inserted into the Bill of Rights of our Constitution? Let's look to the language. Section 2 of this amendment says Congress and the States shall have the power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation and may distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections. That is very specific language that would now become part of our Bill of Rights. It is breathtaking. It is staggering in its scope. I wish to take these one at a time because the Democrats, I am sure-- all 49 Democrats--say, We don't intend to ban movies, books, or ban the NAACP. Well, let's look to the language they put their names to. No. 1, let's start with movies. We have all heard a lot about the Citizens United case. In fact, we remember President Obama during the State of the Union hectoring the Supreme Court of the United States for the Citizens United case. Relatively few people know the facts that underlie the Citizens United case. The facts in those circumstances are that a nonprofit corporation made a movie critical of Hillary Clinton, and for making a movie critical of Hillary Clinton the Obama administration tried to impose massive fines on them. Citizens United, which President Obama and the Senate Democrats decry as the most pernicious thing in modern times, it seems, was all about the government trying to fine a movie maker for daring to make a movie about Hillary Clinton. Listen, let me be very clear. There are movie makers--Michael Moore's movies I think are complete nonsense. To quote the bard, they are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Michael Moore has a right to keep making those movies over and over again and spewing his nonsense as long as he likes. The First Amendment protects his right to be wrong. And as a simple legal matter, would this amendment give Congress the constitutional authority to ban movies? Paramount Pictures is a corporation. Under the text of the amendment, what could Congress do to a corporation? It can prohibit--and that is the language in the amendment--it can prohibit the corporation from spending money to influence elections. So if a movie talks about politics, Congress can make it a criminal offense. Go down to Hollywood, take the producers, the directors, the actors and everyone involved in the movie and put them in handcuffs. That is breathtaking. Now, again, the Democratic Senators say, We don't intend to do that. Then why did they submit a constitutional amendment to the Bill of Rights that says Congress can prohibit Paramount Pictures from speaking about politics? That means Congress can ban movies. How about the second question: Should Congress be able to ban books? That is an extreme question by anyone's measure. Surely, nobody in Washington is talking about banning books. Well, if we assumed that, our assumption would be wrong. Indeed, during the oral argument in Citizens United, the Supreme Court asked the Obama administration: Your position is that under the Constitution, the sale for the book itself could be prohibited. The answer from the Obama administration: Yes, if the book contained the functional equivalent of express advocacy. The Obama administration went in front of the Supreme Court and argued: We have the power to ban books. This is in the record. This is in the official transcript. People can go and listen to this argument, listen to the Obama administration say they believe the Federal Government has the ability to ban books from your house. That is breathtaking. I recognize in today's partisan society there are some people who may be watching these remarks who aren't inclined to believe me. They might say: Listen, you are a Republican. You are a conservative. And coming from the spot in the political aisle that I do, I don't tend to trust Republicans or conservatives. I understand that. I would tell you that if you don't believe me, perhaps you would believe that famed rightwing organization, the ACLU. The ACLU said this amendment, to which 49 Democrats have signed their names--what would it do? It would ``fundamentally `break' the Constitution and endanger civil rights and civil liberties for generations.'' I said a few minutes ago that this was the most radical legislation that has been put before this body. Why is that? Because it is legislation the ACLU says would ``fundamentally `break' the Constitution.'' Breaking the Constitution is no minor matter, and endangering civil rights and civil liberties for generations ought to concern every Member of this body. One still might say: Surely banning books is hyperbole. Well, if you don't believe me, the ACLU in writing told the Senate this amendment--to which 49 Democrats have put their names--would give Congress the power to ban Hillary Clinton's new book, ``Hard Choices.'' I want that to sink in for a moment. Forty-nine Democrats have just put their names to a constitutional amendment, and the ACLU rightly tells us that the express language of the amendment gives the government the power to ban Hillary Clinton's new book, ``Hard Choices.'' I have that letter from the ACLU. I also have a subsequent letter from the ACLU doing something which they haven't done before and which I don't know they will do again--thanking me and thanking all of us who have been fighting against this amendment for standing up for civil liberties. It is truly a shame the Democratic Party is not among them. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record both of the letters from the ACLU I referred to earlier.

Mr. CRUZ. The third question every Senator who has put his name to this amendment must answer is this: Should Congress have the constitutional authority to ban the NAACP from speaking about politics? Well, why is that? Because the NAACP is a corporation. We hear the word ``corporation,'' and we tend to think of ExxonMobil, Walmart, or what have you, but the NAACP is a corporation. What could Congress do under this amendment, under the explicit language of this amendment? Congress could prohibit the NAACP from speaking about politics. Let me state some other corporations Congress would have the constitutional authority to silence. The ACLU is a corporation. The AARP--the American Association of Retired Persons--is a corporation. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is a corporation. Amnesty International is a corporation. Americans United for Separation of Church and State is a corporation. The Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders is a corporation. The National Organization for Women is a corporation. The Center for Reproductive Rights is a corporation. The Sierra Club is a corporation. La Raza is a corporation. NARAL is a corporation. Planned Parenthood is a corporation. Moveon.org is a corporation. The Human Rights Campaign is a corporation. Greenpeace is a corporation. People will note that every one I listed is a group that in our political discourse is often associated with being on the left. Many of those groups are not particular fans of mine as an elected official, and that is their right. Indeed, it is their right to scream from the mountaintops their criticism of my political positions. I will defend their right to criticize me or any other Member of this body all day long because the Bill of Rights says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Forty-nine Democrats just said that every organization I read--that it should be constitutional for Congress to prohibit them from speaking about politics. It seems to me that when we return to our home States, every Senate Democrat who put his or her name to this amendment should expect to answer questions from citizens: Senator, why did you vote for a constitutional amendment to silence my free speech rights? That is a question we should all expect. I would like to address a couple of red herrings in this debate because there are arguments put forth by the Democrats who say: No, no, no. Pay no attention to the text of the amendment we have introduced. Pay no attention to the fact that it would give Congress the power to ban movies, books, and to silence the NAACP. Pay no attention to any of that. It is something else. There are three red herrings that are tossed forward. First, money is not speech. How many times have we heard that over and over in floor speeches? Yesterday and today Democrats have stood and said: Money is not speech. Money is not speech. It has been repeated over and over. It is a good talking point. It is simply, on its face, demonstrably false. It is certainly true that all money is not speech. If you go out and buy a Ferrari, that is not speech, but if you go out and erect a billboard and pay money to put up a billboard that says ``Senator Joe Manchin is a terrific guy,'' that is speech. It takes money to do that. They don't put up billboards with pixie dust. It actually takes some dollars to erect that billboard and to express that speech. If you decide you want to run a radio ad saying that Senator so-and- so is terrible or wonderful, they don't run radio ads just because you asked ``pretty please.'' It takes money. Let's say you want to run a television ad. It takes money. Let's say you want to launch a Web site. Have you ever launched a Web site for free? Let's say you are a little old lady who wants to put a yard sign on your front yard, and it is going to take $5 to buy some poster board and a stick and some crayons and markers and write: I love the First Amendment; I love free speech. That takes money. The Federalist Papers were the essence of speech, and it took money to print them. Thomas Paine's ``Common Sense''--it took money to print it. It took money to print pamphlets. Everyone in the tech community--and I would note that all of our Democratic friends and sponsors of this amendment almost to a person go routinely to the tech community and say: Give us money. Give us campaign contributions. Every Senate Democrat should expect the tech community to say: Wait a second. Why did you vote for a constitutional amendment to give Congress the power to regulate every Web site in America? If a Web site talks about politics, this amendment gives Congress the power to regulate that Web site. Listen, I understand there are Members in this body on both sides of the aisle who find it really pesky when citizens dare criticize us. If you don't want to be criticized, don't run for office. Democracy is messy. I guarantee there is no one in this country who truly believes money is not speech. It is a talking point, but those examples are unquestionably speech, and they have been from the very first days of our Republic. A second canard is that corporations are not people. That is often said. Citizens United said that corporations are people. Of course corporations are not people, but that is not the right question. It never was the question. Nobody thinks corporations are people. They don't breathe, they don't walk, and they are not human beings. The question is, Do corporations have rights under our Constitution? Again, I guarantee that every person in this Chamber and every person in the gallery believes the answer to that question is yes. If they don't, the New York Times is a corporation. Do we really think the New York Times has no First Amendment rights? If the canard were true--corporations are not people, so they don't have rights--Congress could pass a law tomorrow that says the New York Times can never again criticize any Republican Member of Congress. I think the paper would probably go out of publication if it had to remove that from its content. But it, of course, cannot. Why can't it? Because corporations have rights. Every one of us knows that. We would be horrified. That legislation would be blatantly unconstitutional. Why? Because the New York Times has a First Amendment right to speak about politics however it likes, whether wrongheaded or right-headed. The groups I mentioned before--the NAACP is a corporation. I challenge any Senator to stand and say the NAACP has no First Amendment rights. But every Senator who has said on this Senate floor that corporations aren't people, that they have no rights, has said the NAACP has no constitutional rights--if you were a first-year law student and put that answer in any constitutional law class in the country, you would get an F. It wouldn't be a D-plus or a D-minus; it would be an F. It is an obviously blatantly false statement. Yet 49 Democrats rely on it to justify trying to gut the First Amendment. The third red herring the Democrats in this body point to is they paint a specter of evil billionaires coming to steal our democracy. We have all heard of our friends the Koch brothers--in part because the majority leader has launched an unprecedented slander campaign on two private citizens. Almost on a daily basis the majority leader stands and demagogues two private citizens who have committed the sin of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, being successful in the private sector, and then exercising their First Amendment rights to speak out about the grave challenges facing this country. If one Member of this body impugns the integrity of another Member of this body, we can rise on a point of personal privilege. I ask the Presiding Officer, where is the point of personal privilege for a private citizen when the majority leader drags his name through the mud day after day? What Senator Reid is doing to two private citizens who are fighting to exercise their free speech rights is reprehensible. It is an embarrassment to this institution. Yet perhaps one might say there is some truth to the matter. We are told these nefarious brothers are responsible for almost everything bad in the world, so it must be that they are playing a huge role in our body politic. Well, if you go look at OpenSecrets, which compiles campaign giving from 1989 to 2014, so for the past 25 years--and it compiles them from the biggest givers down to the smallest givers--if you look at first 16 names on that list--I have heard what our Democratic Members of this body have said: There are evil, nefarious Republicans trying to steal our democracy. And the implication is that they are backing Republicans. So my assumption is, as I look at the list of the top donors, the top 16--how many of them give predominantly to Republicans? Well, one would assume, given how great the magnitude is, that it has to be a lot of them, probably all of them, or if not all of them, most of them--at least half of them. Mr. President, do you know how many of the top 16 groups give predominantly to Republicans? Zero. The top 16 political donors in this country all give either overwhelmingly to Democrats or at best evenly between the two parties. You have to fall to No. 17 to find a group that gives more heavily to Republicans than to Democrats. Now, that is curious given the story that is being told by our Democratic friends about these evil Republican billionaires stealing democracy. Gosh, the top 16 donors are not Republicans. And how about the Koch brothers who we are told are somewhat like the Grinch who stole Christmas? Where do they fall? We have to go down to No. 59 on the list to find Koch Industries. But perhaps you believe there is something to this claim of secret money. That too is a red herring. The Federal Election Commission estimates that over $7 billion was spent in the 2012 election cycle. We have heard from Democrat after Democrat after Democrat that secret money--money where the donors are not disclosed--is this enormous problem in our democracy that justifies gutting the First Amendment. So of that $7 billion, I assume a lot of that is secret money. Well, if you were to assume that, you would be wrong. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that in 2012 about $315 million was spent by groups that do not disclose all of their donors. That is less than 4.5 percent of all the political speech in 2012. So this entire effort to gut the First Amendment, to give Congress the power to ban movies, books, and the NAACP from speaking about politics is justified because of 4.5 percent of political spending, a whole bunch of which is being spent to help Democrats. Those are the facts. As John Adams famously said: Facts are stubborn things. (Ms. WARREN assumed the Chair.) So it raises the question: If the problems they are telling us about are not real, why are the Democrats doing this? Why are we spending a week debating this constitutional amendment, the most radical constitutional amendment this body has ever considered, particularly because every single Member of this body knows the outcome? There are not sufficient votes to adopt this amendment. The Democrats all know this. The Republicans all know this. Then why would they be doing it? Well, if you are a Democrat running for reelection in 2014, you cannot run on the economy. The Obama economy is a disaster. Millions of people are out of work. The people who have been hurt the most by the Obama economy are the most vulnerable among us--young people, Hispanics, African Americans, single moms. We have not seen such a low labor force participation since 1978, since the stagnation and misery and malaise under Jimmy Carter. The Obama economy has recreated that. So if you are a Democrat, you cannot run on the disastrous economic record of the Obama administration. If you are a Democrat, you certainly cannot run on ObamaCare--the most harmful social services legislation in modern times that has cost millions of Americans their jobs, their health care, their doctors. If you do not believe me, take a look at how the Democrats are running in their States. You do not see Democrats running saying: We passed ObamaCare. When you take away millions of people's health care and doctors, and when you look in the TV camera and repeatedly state falsehoods: If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it, if you like your doctor, you can keep them, you do not really want to remind the American people that you deliberately lied to them. And the Democrats certainly cannot run on the Obama-Clinton foreign policy--a policy about which we heard last week the President has no strategy for dealing with the great threats facing this country. Leading from behind is not a strategy, and we can see the consequences of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy, which is that the entire world is on fire. If you are a Democratic Senator running for reelection in 2014, you have a problem. You cannot run on your record because the record is abysmal. So what is done instead? It is smoke and mirrors. It is distraction. The only explanation I can come up with for why we are spending a week--with all the challenges in the world--a week debating an amendment that will never ever pass is this is designed to fuel a bunch of TV commercials for Democratic Senators, to paint the picture of nefarious billionaires coming to steal our democracy. Facts do not get in the way of their story. But yet the breadth of this is rather enormous. I serve on the constitution subcommittee with the Senator from Minnesota, who before being a Senator was a very talented comedic actor and comedic writer on ``Saturday Night Live.'' I grew up watching ``Saturday Night Live.'' I love ``Saturday Night Live.'' ``Saturday Night Live'' over the years has had some of the most tremendous political satire--for decades. Who can forget Chevy Chase tripping and falling over just about everything? Who can forget portrayals--Dana Carvey's George Herbert Walker Bush: ``Not going to do it.'' Who can forget Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Al Gore? Who can forget in 2008 the ``Saturday Night Live'' wickedly funny characterization of the Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin? It was wickedly funny and also had a profoundly powerful effect on people's assessment of Governor Palin, who is a friend of mine. When I asked the Senator from Minnesota in the Senate Judiciary Committee: Do you believe that Congress should have the constitutional authority to prohibit ``Saturday Night Live'' from making fun of politicians, the good Senator promptly reassured me he had no intention of doing any such thing. But what we are debating is not the intentions of 100 Senators. What we are debating is a constitutional amendment that 49 Democrats are proposing to be inserted into the Bill of Rights. The only question--it is not the intention of those Senators--but, rather, what would that amendment say? What the amendment says is for any corporation Congress would have the constitutional authority to prohibit it from engaging in political speech. Well, NBC, which airs ``Saturday Night Live,'' is a corporation. Under this amendment 49 Democrats have signed their name to, Congress would have the power to make it a criminal offense. Lorne Michaels could be put in jail under this amendment for making fun of any politician. That is extraordinary, it is breathtaking, and it is dangerous. The idea of banning books is not new. Advocates of government power, statists, have long favored silencing the citizenry. It is why our First Amendment was such a revolutionary concept, the idea that the individual citizen has the authority to challenge any elected official, from local magistrate all the way up to the President of the United States. But if you are an advocate of governmental power, the citizens having the liberty to speak out is inconvenient; it can lead to inconvenient truths. So on some level it should not be surprising that the modern Democratic Party, which has become the party of government power over every aspect of our lives, would take it to the final conclusion of giving government the power to silence our political speech and to ban books. I am reminded, in Ray Bradbury's immortal book ``Fahrenheit 451,'' of the words of Captain Beatty: ``If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.'' That was, of course, the chief fireman in charge of burning books in ``Fahrenheit 451.'' In the book that is the temperature at which book paper ignites. It breaks my heart that today we are seeing the Fahrenheit 451 Democrats. Today we have seen 49 Democrats put their name to a constitutional amendment that would give Congress the power to ban books. Some might dismiss it and say: What does it matter? It is an exercise in politics. They do not really believe it. They know it is not going to pass. Politicians will be politicians. No wonder the American people are cynical. I would be embarrassed if one Senator put his or her name to an amendment repealing the free speech protections of the First Amendment. Instead of one, it is 49. And much like with Sherlock Holmes and ``the dog that didn't bark,'' every bit as troubling as the 49 names of the Senators who are willing to repeal the free speech protections of the First Amendment are the Senators who are not speaking out. In particular, we have not seen a single Democrat have the courage to speak out against this abominable provision. It was not always so. There was a time not long ago when there was bipartisan agreement on questions of civil liberties. There was a time when you could find Democrats for whom the First Amendment meant something. In 1997, Democrats attempted a similar amendment to give Congress the power to regulate free speech, and that lion of the left Ted Kennedy stood up and said: ``In the entire history of the Constitution, we have never amended the Bill of Rights, and now is no time to start.'' Where are the Ted Kennedys? Where are the Democrats? Where are the liberals? Also in 1997, Senator Russ Feingold, another passionate liberal, stood up and said: . . . the Constitution of this country was not a rough draft. We must stop treating it as such. The First Amendment is the bedrock of the Bill of Rights. It has as its underpinnings that each individual has a natural and fundamental right to disagree with their elected leaders. I agree with Ted Kennedy, I agree with Russ Feingold, and I will tell you, privately I have urged Democratic colleagues to come and join me in defense of the First Amendment--the handful who have not put their names to this amendment--and all I can surmise is that the partisan pressures of Washington are too much. This amendment is not going to pass, but it is profoundly dangerous that in the U.S. Senate not a single Democratic Senator will come to the floor in defense of the First Amendment. It is profoundly dangerous that the modern Democratic Party now thinks it is good politics to campaign on repealing the First Amendment. The hashtag #don'trepeal1A has echoed through twitter as individual citizens are amazed. Earlier this year we saw all 55 Democrats stand together against religious liberty, supporting an amendment that would gut the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by Bill Clinton. It used to be on religious liberty there was a bipartisan consensus. The same used to be true on free speech. When did Democrats abandon the Bill of Rights? When did Democrats abandon civil liberties? I assure you, if it were my party proposing this egregious amendment, I would be standing on the floor of this Senate giving the very same speech trying to hold my party to account. Because at the end of the day, when we take our oath of office, it is not to a Democratic Party or the Republican Party, it is to represent the citizens of our State--in my case, 26 million Texans--to fight for their rights and to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States. There is nothing the United States has done in the just under 2 years that I have been in this body that I find more disturbing and more dangerous than the fact that 49 Democrats would put their name to a proposal to repeal the First Amendment. When my daughters Caroline, 6, and Catherine, 3, came up from Texas to Washington for a weekend to visit, I took them to the Newseum. It is a terrific museum. The front facade of the Newseum has in gigantic letters the text of the First Amendment carved in granite. If the Democratic Party has its way, the Bill of Rights will be forever altered. We will have to send up workmen to that facade to carve with jackhammers the words of the First Amendment out of the granite in the front of the Newseum. In the Senate Judiciary Committee I introduced a substitute amendment. It was an amendment to replace every word of this extraordinarily dangerous amendment with the following words: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. It was word-for-word verbatim the text of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, and I am sorry to tell you every single Senate Democrat on the Judiciary Committee voted against the text of the First Amendment. It was a straight party-line vote. Going back to Senator Kennedy, Senator Kennedy and I would have agreed on very little. On matters of policy, he was a big government man and I most assuredly am not. On matters of foreign policy, he supported a far weaker military than do I and a far weaker defense of our Nation. But on the question of the First Amendment, I am proud to stand side by side with Ted Kennedy. What does it say about the modern Democratic Party that not a single Democrat is willing to honor Senator Kennedy's legacy? His words are every bit as true now as they were in 1997. In the entire history of the Constitution, we have never amended the Bill of Rights, and now is no time to start. It is my plea to the Democratic Members of this body that they reconsider the decision of putting their name on this amendment. It may seem like harmless election-year politicking that will help in political campaigns, but it is dangerous when 49 Senators come together and say: We no longer support the First Amendment. We have a two-party system--a two-party system on which there should be robust debate. It is even more dangerous when one of the two parties becomes so extreme and so radical that it becomes seen as good politics to campaign against the First Amendment. This will not pass this week, but I hope my Democratic colleagues will have second thoughts. I hope we can return to the day where there is a bipartisan consensus in favor of civil liberties, in favor of protecting the free speech rights of every American. I hope we will listen to the wise counsel of Senator Kennedy, and I hope we will recognize, as Senator Kennedy and Senator Finegold observed, that there are no James Madisons or Thomas Jeffersons serving in this body today. The Bill of Rights is not a rough draft, and the U.S. Senate should not be proposing to repeal the First Amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. CRUZ

Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, I rise to address an issue of grave importance to the national security of the United States; that is, the threat from the radical Sunni terrorist organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or simply as the Islamic State. Now it claims to control territory in a grotesque parody of a nation state. ISIS is a study in oppression and brutality that is conducting ethnic cleansing against religious minorities in the region; that is, targeting and persecuting Christians and that is attempting to subject the local population to the strictest forms of Sharia law. ISIS has grotesquely murdered U.S. civilians and indeed journalists on the public stage. It should come as no surprise that the people of the United States are deeply concerned about this development. We are concerned about the inability of our government to anticipate this gathering threat. We are concerned about the brutal acts of oppression against the weak and the helpless. We are concerned about ISIS's seizure of financial and military assets that have fueled their murderous rampage. Above all, we are concerned about the threat ISIS poses, not only to our close allies in the region but also to our citizens and even here in our homeland. There has been a lot of talk in recent days about developing a strategy to combat ISIS. I would like to propose a couple of commonsense steps that we should take immediately to combat this scourge. First, the time has come--it is beyond time--for us to secure our borders. Representing the State of Texas, which has a border nearly 2,000 miles long, I know firsthand how unsecure the border is right now. This week of all weeks, with the anniversary of the September 11 attacks upon us, we can have no illusions that terrorists will not try to make good on their specific threats to attack America. As long as our border is not secure, we are making it far too easy for the terrorists to carry through on those promises. Rumored ISIS activities on the southern border should unite us all in the resolve to make border security a top priority rather than an afterthought or rather than something to be held hostage for political negotiations in the Congress. Second, we should take commonsense steps to make fighting for or supporting ISIS an affirmative renunciation of American citizenship. We know there are over 100 Americans who have joined ISIS who have taken up arms alongside the jihadists, along with thousands of others from the European Union. We also know they are trying to return to their countries of origin to carry out terrorist attacks there. We know this because on May 24 an ISIS member returned to Belgium where he attacked innocent visitors at a Jewish museum, slaughtering four people. It was reported today he had been plotting an even larger attack on Paris on Bastille Day. In addition, on August 11 of this year, an accused ISIS sympathizer, Donald Ray Morgan, was arrested at JFK Airport trying to reenter the United States. So we know this threat is real. That is why I have today filed legislation, the Expatriate Terrorist Act of 2014, which would amend the existing statutes governing renunciation of U.S. citizenship to designate fighting for a hostile foreign government or foreign terrorist organization as an affirmative renunciation of citizenship. By fighting for ISIS, U.S. citizens have expressed their desire to become citizens of the Islamic state. That cannot and will not peacefully coexist with remaining American citizens, the desire to become a citizen of a terrorist organization that has expressed a desire to wage war on the American people, has demonstrated a brutal capacity to do so, murdering American civilians on the global stage and promising to bring that jihad home to America. We should not be facilitating their efforts by allowing fighters fighting alongside ISIS to come back to America with American passports and walk freely in our cities to carry out unspeakable acts of terror. It is my hope the legislation I am introducing today will earn support on both sides of the aisle, that we will see this body come together and say: While there are many partisan issues that divide us, when it comes to protecting U.S. citizens from acts of terror, we are all as one. That is my fervent hope. The third thing we should do is we should do everything possible to make ISIS understand there are serious ramifications for threatening to attack the United States, for murdering American citizens. While damaging ISIS's financial assets is certainly a part of this action, because of the very nature of ISIS, the response must be principally military. All Americans are weary of the long and costly wars in the last decade. We are tired of sending our sons and daughters potentially to die in distant lands. No one wants to see an extended engagement in Iraq, but at the same time I do not believe the American people are one bit reluctant to defend our national security, to defend the lives of fellow Americans. The American people can see the grim threat represented by ISIS and the need for decisive action. We should concentrate on a coordinated and overwhelming air campaign that has the clear military objective of destroying the capability of ISIS to carry out terror attacks on the United States. We must remain focused on this clear military objective if we hope to be successful. We cannot engage in photo op foreign policy or press release foreign policy of dropping a bomb here, shooting a missile there, and not have a strategy that is dictated by clear and direct military objectives in furtherance of U.S. national security interests. We should be perfectly clear as well that any action we take against ISIS is in no way contingent on resolving the civil war in Syria. That conflict is a humanitarian tragedy, pitting a brutal dictator against radical Islamic terrorists. The sad reality is there are no good options for the United States in this fight. We may have had less radical options 3 years ago, but those are not currently available. The Obama administration had proposed arming rebel forces that contained terrorist factions associated with ISIS. Previously, we were told the rebels fighting alongside ISIS were our friends and Assad and Iran were our enemies. Now, in the face of ISIS, we are hearing Assad may be our friend, Iran may be our friend, and ISIS is now our enemy. This makes no sense. Indeed, it is a dangerous cycle reminiscent of George Orwell's ``1984.'' Orwell wrote: At this moment, for example, in 1984. . . . Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. . . . Actually . . . it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But . . . [o]fficially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. . . . This administration seems to have no sense of past or future. All of those familiar with the terribly human carnage inflicted by the civil war in Syria pray for its end. But the goal of our action against ISIS should not be to end it by supporting Assad. The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Sometimes the goal is the destruction of the enemy who poses an imminent threat to our national security, not the enabler of yet another enemy of America. It should also be clear that any action we take against ISIS should in no way be contingent on political reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad. This administration has often become distracted by the hope to achieve this reconciliation, but the sad truth is the Sunnis and Shiites have been engaged in a sectarian civil war since 632 A.D. It is the height of hubris, it is the height of ignorance to suggest the American President can come and resolve a 1,500-year-old religious civil war and have both sides throw down their arms and embrace each other as brothers. That should not be our objective, although we of course always hope for reconciliation and peace. We should not be so naive as to make defending our national security contingent on resolving millennia-old sectarian religious civil wars. Doing so, seeking to promote a utopia, seeking to transform Iraq into Switzerland is nothing less than a fool's errand. Likewise, it should be perfectly clear that any action we take to stop ISIS from attacking and murdering Americans is in no way contingent on consensus from the so-called international community. America is blessed to have many good friends and allies in the region and beyond who understand the threat of ISIS and are eager to do what they can to combat it. We welcome their support. But in order that this action be done right, it must be led by the United States, unfettered by other nations' rules of engagement that might impede our effective action. Achieving some preordained number of countries in a coalition is not a strategy. For as has often been remarked: In the most effective efforts, the mission determines the coalition, not the other way around. It is heartening to hear the voices from my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, raising the alarm of the threat posed by ISIS. President Obama has signaled his intention of addressing the issue later this week. It is well past time for him to do so. His recent statements from his admission on August 28 that ``we don't have a strategy yet'' to his suggestion on September 3 that ``our best bet is to try to `shrink' ISIS's sphere of influence until they are a manageable problem,'' those comments are not encouraging. The objective is not to make ISIS manageable. The objective is to protect the national security interests of the United States and to destroy terrorists who have declared jihad on our Nation. Neither are the two things we already know that the President will propose in his new ``game plan''--namely, that he will not be requesting authorization from Congress for military action against ISIS and that his model is the counterterrorism policies pursued by his administration the past 5 years. Neither of these is encouraging. I ask the President to reconsider both of these points. While ISIS is obviously part of the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism that has bedeviled the West for decades, it equally obviously represents a new and particularly virulent strain. The President is reportedly considering an action that could last as long as 3 years and may require a range of actions. If this is indeed the case, then it is incumbent on him to come to Congress and lay out his strategy so that we and the American people are clear on it. I would note that the Presiding Officer has been particularly vocal and clear defending the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war. I would note as well that it is beneficial for the effort for the President to come to Congress, because in doing so it will force the President to do what has been lacking for so long, which is lay out a specific and clear military objective: What is it we are trying to accomplish that is tethered directly to the U.S. national security interests of America? The Constitution is clear. It is Congress and Congress only that has the constitutional authority to declare war. Any President, as Commander in Chief, has constitutional authority to respond to an imminent crisis, to respond to a clear and present danger. But in this instance, the President is not suggesting it. He is suggesting engaged military action, and it is, therefore, inconsistent with the Constitution for him to attempt to pursue that action without recognizing the constitutional authority of this body. It is my hope that he will do so, and it is my hope we will have a substantive and meaningful debate about the military objective we should be united in achieving, which is, namely, destroying ISIS and preventing them from committing acts of terror and murdering innocent Americans. Given the need to consider such action against a new actor such as ISIS, it also must be admitted that the Obama administration's counterterrorism policy has not been a success. They have labeled the 2009 attack on Fort Hood in my home State of Texas as an act of ``workplace violence'' even though the terrorist attacker Nidal Hasan recently asked to become a citizen of the Islamic State. They also missed connecting the dots that would have uncovered the radicalization of the Tsarnaev brothers that resulted in the attack on the Boston Marathon. It should be noted that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother, worshipped at the same Cambridge, MA, mosque where the ISIS head of propaganda worshipped. This jihad can reach back and directly take the lives of Americans citizens at home. The administration has failed to respond effectively to the attack on our facilities in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, in which four Americans were murdered, including the first ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979, an event that inaugurated Libya's spiral into terrorist anarchy that continues unchecked to this day. They completely missed the gathering threat of ISIS to the point that the President himself was under the misapprehension that the group was the terrorist equivalent of the junior varsity only a few months ago. We cannot afford to return to these destructive policies, given the acute threat posed by ISIS. It is my hope that this body will stand together as one in bipartisan unity to secure the borders and to change our laws to pass the legislation I am introducing today to make clear that any American who takes up arms with ISIS has, in doing so, constructively renounced his or her American citizenship so that the Congress, with one voice, can protect Americans at home. This requires clear, decisive, unified action, and it is my hope that all of us will come together supporting such action and that the President will submit to the authority of Congress seeking authorization to protect America against ISIS and to engage in a concentrated, directed military campaign to take them out.

Mr. CRUZ

Mr. CRUZ. I yield the floor.

Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. CRUZ

Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, I rise to address an issue of grave importance to the national security of the United States; that is, the threat from the radical Sunni terrorist organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or simply as the Islamic State. Now it claims to control territory in a grotesque parody of a nation state. ISIS is a study in oppression and brutality that is conducting ethnic cleansing against religious minorities in the region; that is, targeting and persecuting Christians and that is attempting to subject the local population to the strictest forms of Sharia law. ISIS has grotesquely murdered U.S. civilians and indeed journalists on the public stage. It should come as no surprise that the people of the United States are deeply concerned about this development. We are concerned about the inability of our government to anticipate this gathering threat. We are concerned about the brutal acts of oppression against the weak and the helpless. We are concerned about ISIS's seizure of financial and military assets that have fueled their murderous rampage. Above all, we are concerned about the threat ISIS poses, not only to our close allies in the region but also to our citizens and even here in our homeland. There has been a lot of talk in recent days about developing a strategy to combat ISIS. I would like to propose a couple of commonsense steps that we should take immediately to combat this scourge. First, the time has come--it is beyond time--for us to secure our borders. Representing the State of Texas, which has a border nearly 2,000 miles long, I know firsthand how unsecure the border is right now. This week of all weeks, with the anniversary of the September 11 attacks upon us, we can have no illusions that terrorists will not try to make good on their specific threats to attack America. As long as our border is not secure, we are making it far too easy for the terrorists to carry through on those promises. Rumored ISIS activities on the southern border should unite us all in the resolve to make border security a top priority rather than an afterthought or rather than something to be held hostage for political negotiations in the Congress. Second, we should take commonsense steps to make fighting for or supporting ISIS an affirmative renunciation of American citizenship. We know there are over 100 Americans who have joined ISIS who have taken up arms alongside the jihadists, along with thousands of others from the European Union. We also know they are trying to return to their countries of origin to carry out terrorist attacks there. We know this because on May 24 an ISIS member returned to Belgium where he attacked innocent visitors at a Jewish museum, slaughtering four people. It was reported today he had been plotting an even larger attack on Paris on Bastille Day. In addition, on August 11 of this year, an accused ISIS sympathizer, Donald Ray Morgan, was arrested at JFK Airport trying to reenter the United States. So we know this threat is real. That is why I have today filed legislation, the Expatriate Terrorist Act of 2014, which would amend the existing statutes governing renunciation of U.S. citizenship to designate fighting for a hostile foreign government or foreign terrorist organization as an affirmative renunciation of citizenship. By fighting for ISIS, U.S. citizens have expressed their desire to become citizens of the Islamic state. That cannot and will not peacefully coexist with remaining American citizens, the desire to become a citizen of a terrorist organization that has expressed a desire to wage war on the American people, has demonstrated a brutal capacity to do so, murdering American civilians on the global stage and promising to bring that jihad home to America. We should not be facilitating their efforts by allowing fighters fighting alongside ISIS to come back to America with American passports and walk freely in our cities to carry out unspeakable acts of terror. It is my hope the legislation I am introducing today will earn support on both sides of the aisle, that we will see this body come together and say: While there are many partisan issues that divide us, when it comes to protecting U.S. citizens from acts of terror, we are all as one. That is my fervent hope. The third thing we should do is we should do everything possible to make ISIS understand there are serious ramifications for threatening to attack the United States, for murdering American citizens. While damaging ISIS's financial assets is certainly a part of this action, because of the very nature of ISIS, the response must be principally military. All Americans are weary of the long and costly wars in the last decade. We are tired of sending our sons and daughters potentially to die in distant lands. No one wants to see an extended engagement in Iraq, but at the same time I do not believe the American people are one bit reluctant to defend our national security, to defend the lives of fellow Americans. The American people can see the grim threat represented by ISIS and the need for decisive action. We should concentrate on a coordinated and overwhelming air campaign that has the clear military objective of destroying the capability of ISIS to carry out terror attacks on the United States. We must remain focused on this clear military objective if we hope to be successful. We cannot engage in photo op foreign policy or press release foreign policy of dropping a bomb here, shooting a missile there, and not have a strategy that is dictated by clear and direct military objectives in furtherance of U.S. national security interests. We should be perfectly clear as well that any action we take against ISIS is in no way contingent on resolving the civil war in Syria. That conflict is a humanitarian tragedy, pitting a brutal dictator against radical Islamic terrorists. The sad reality is there are no good options for the United States in this fight. We may have had less radical options 3 years ago, but those are not currently available. The Obama administration had proposed arming rebel forces that contained terrorist factions associated with ISIS. Previously, we were told the rebels fighting alongside ISIS were our friends and Assad and Iran were our enemies. Now, in the face of ISIS, we are hearing Assad may be our friend, Iran may be our friend, and ISIS is now our enemy. This makes no sense. Indeed, it is a dangerous cycle reminiscent of George Orwell's ``1984.'' Orwell wrote: At this moment, for example, in 1984. . . . Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. . . . Actually . . . it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But . . . [o]fficially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. . . . This administration seems to have no sense of past or future. All of those familiar with the terribly human carnage inflicted by the civil war in Syria pray for its end. But the goal of our action against ISIS should not be to end it by supporting Assad. The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Sometimes the goal is the destruction of the enemy who poses an imminent threat to our national security, not the enabler of yet another enemy of America. It should also be clear that any action we take against ISIS should in no way be contingent on political reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad. This administration has often become distracted by the hope to achieve this reconciliation, but the sad truth is the Sunnis and Shiites have been engaged in a sectarian civil war since 632 A.D. It is the height of hubris, it is the height of ignorance to suggest the American President can come and resolve a 1,500-year-old religious civil war and have both sides throw down their arms and embrace each other as brothers. That should not be our objective, although we of course always hope for reconciliation and peace. We should not be so naive as to make defending our national security contingent on resolving millennia-old sectarian religious civil wars. Doing so, seeking to promote a utopia, seeking to transform Iraq into Switzerland is nothing less than a fool's errand. Likewise, it should be perfectly clear that any action we take to stop ISIS from attacking and murdering Americans is in no way contingent on consensus from the so-called international community. America is blessed to have many good friends and allies in the region and beyond who understand the threat of ISIS and are eager to do what they can to combat it. We welcome their support. But in order that this action be done right, it must be led by the United States, unfettered by other nations' rules of engagement that might impede our effective action. Achieving some preordained number of countries in a coalition is not a strategy. For as has often been remarked: In the most effective efforts, the mission determines the coalition, not the other way around. It is heartening to hear the voices from my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, raising the alarm of the threat posed by ISIS. President Obama has signaled his intention of addressing the issue later this week. It is well past time for him to do so. His recent statements from his admission on August 28 that ``we don't have a strategy yet'' to his suggestion on September 3 that ``our best bet is to try to `shrink' ISIS's sphere of influence until they are a manageable problem,'' those comments are not encouraging. The objective is not to make ISIS manageable. The objective is to protect the national security interests of the United States and to destroy terrorists who have declared jihad on our Nation. Neither are the two things we already know that the President will propose in his new ``game plan''--namely, that he will not be requesting authorization from Congress for military action against ISIS and that his model is the counterterrorism policies pursued by his administration the past 5 years. Neither of these is encouraging. I ask the President to reconsider both of these points. While ISIS is obviously part of the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism that has bedeviled the West for decades, it equally obviously represents a new and particularly virulent strain. The President is reportedly considering an action that could last as long as 3 years and may require a range of actions. If this is indeed the case, then it is incumbent on him to come to Congress and lay out his strategy so that we and the American people are clear on it. I would note that the Presiding Officer has been particularly vocal and clear defending the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war. I would note as well that it is beneficial for the effort for the President to come to Congress, because in doing so it will force the President to do what has been lacking for so long, which is lay out a specific and clear military objective: What is it we are trying to accomplish that is tethered directly to the U.S. national security interests of America? The Constitution is clear. It is Congress and Congress only that has the constitutional authority to declare war. Any President, as Commander in Chief, has constitutional authority to respond to an imminent crisis, to respond to a clear and present danger. But in this instance, the President is not suggesting it. He is suggesting engaged military action, and it is, therefore, inconsistent with the Constitution for him to attempt to pursue that action without recognizing the constitutional authority of this body. It is my hope that he will do so, and it is my hope we will have a substantive and meaningful debate about the military objective we should be united in achieving, which is, namely, destroying ISIS and preventing them from committing acts of terror and murdering innocent Americans. Given the need to consider such action against a new actor such as ISIS, it also must be admitted that the Obama administration's counterterrorism policy has not been a success. They have labeled the 2009 attack on Fort Hood in my home State of Texas as an act of ``workplace violence'' even though the terrorist attacker Nidal Hasan recently asked to become a citizen of the Islamic State. They also missed connecting the dots that would have uncovered the radicalization of the Tsarnaev brothers that resulted in the attack on the Boston Marathon. It should be noted that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother, worshipped at the same Cambridge, MA, mosque where the ISIS head of propaganda worshipped. This jihad can reach back and directly take the lives of Americans citizens at home. The administration has failed to respond effectively to the attack on our facilities in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, in which four Americans were murdered, including the first ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979, an event that inaugurated Libya's spiral into terrorist anarchy that continues unchecked to this day. They completely missed the gathering threat of ISIS to the point that the President himself was under the misapprehension that the group was the terrorist equivalent of the junior varsity only a few months ago. We cannot afford to return to these destructive policies, given the acute threat posed by ISIS. It is my hope that this body will stand together as one in bipartisan unity to secure the borders and to change our laws to pass the legislation I am introducing today to make clear that any American who takes up arms with ISIS has, in doing so, constructively renounced his or her American citizenship so that the Congress, with one voice, can protect Americans at home. This requires clear, decisive, unified action, and it is my hope that all of us will come together supporting such action and that the President will submit to the authority of Congress seeking authorization to protect America against ISIS and to engage in a concentrated, directed military campaign to take them out.

Mr. CRUZ

Mr. CRUZ. I thank my friend from New Hampshire. I would note that she is exactly right. We have the ability to do something productive, something that does not happen in Washington an awful lot. We have the ability right now to come together in a bipartisan way for the Senate to demonstrate that it can function productively to address the economic challenges in this country the way the House has. The House is doing its job. The House has passed this bill. It is the Senate that has refused to take it up for a vote. It is the Senate that is refusing to do its job. We have an ability not just to protect the Internet from taxes but also to honor our word. How many Members of this body, on both sides of the aisle, go to the tech community and say: We want to stand with tech. We want to stand for the entrepreneurial vibrancy of tech? Yet I would note anyone objecting to this right now is setting the stage for a massive Internet tax. How many of us make the case to young people that we are standing for the future for young people, we are standing for greater opportunity, we are standing for the chance to help young people achieve the American dream? You know, young Americans, 18 to 29 years old, oppose an Internet sales tax by 73 percent to 27 percent. Yet if this body refuses to stand together in a bipartisan manner, we are telling young people: What we say on the campaign trial is not backed by action on the floor. We ought to come together on what should be an uncontroversial bill, a bill that has passed three times before, a bill that was signed by President Bill Clinton, a bill that in this body is introduced by a senior Democrat. We ought to come together in a bipartisan way to say: We stand in unison protecting Internet tax freedom. Accordingly, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 3086, which was received from the House. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. CRUZ. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. CRUZ. Madam President, I wish to briefly explain to people watching the back-and-forth that just occurred what is going on here, because it is easy to not understand everything that is happening. There are three things going on here: No. 1, what we are unfortunately seeing is the Senate holding one bill hostage in order to try to force through another unpopular bill. There are two bills concerning the Internet. The first is the Internet Tax Freedom Act. That has been in place for over a decade. It has had bipartisan support. It has been championed by the Senator from Oregon who has been an outspoken and passionate advocate of making sure that when you and I go and sign up for the Internet, we don't face taxes for getting Internet service, and it has worked very well. That law has always been an area of bipartisan agreement. But there is a second law that has been proposed in this body but not passed. The second law is the Internet sales tax, what its proponents call the Marketplace Fairness Act. The Internet sales tax is not focused on taxing someone just for signing up to the Internet. Rather, the people being punished by the Internet sales tax are all the small businesses trying to sell their wares online, and there are a number of Senators who very much want to impose taxes on those small businesses in 9,600 jurisdictions nationwide. What is happening here, right now, is even though no one has serious objection to the Internet Tax Freedom Act, we are, unfortunately, seeing our colleagues from the Democratic side of the aisle hold that bill hostage in an effort to try to force through the Internet sales tax. I would note the reason my friend from New Hampshire had no choice but to object to the 2-month proposal is the 2-month time period was not picked out of a hat. Two months means the Internet Tax Freedom Act would expire during a lameduck session. And why is that? Because in a lameduck session there are a bunch of Members who have been defeated, who aren't going to face voters ever again. A lameduck session is the session most likely to raise taxes. So why is it there is an effort to extend this just 2 months? So when the Internet Tax Freedom Act expires in the lameduck, the Members of this body who lost their election and are immune from democratic accountability will all come together and say: OK, now let's pass the Internet sales tax. We shouldn't be holding the Internet hostage to the rapacious desire of tax collectors. A second point I want to make about what is going on here--this is about discriminatory taxes, not about federalism. My friend, the Senator from North Dakota, was a learned attorney general who talked about the 10th Amendment and federalism. I welcome seeing friends of mine on the Democratic side of the aisle embrace the 10th Amendment. I look forward and hope aspirationally that friends on the Democratic side of the aisle will embrace the 10th Amendment on other issues. I would note, however, that the constitutional history we were told was a little bit off, because if we look at the history of our country, originally we had the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation allowed States to enact discriminatory taxes against each other, and it led to chaos. It didn't work. One of the reasons our Constitution was adopted was to prevent discriminatory taxes, one State picking on another State. So when Congress was given the authority to regulate interstate commerce, it is precisely to prevent a little mom and pop selling online from being forced by 9,600 jurisdictions nationwide to collect all of those taxes. If someone is living and working in the State of Texas, they shouldn't have to collect taxes for New York or California--for politicians they don't get to vote for. For politicians they don't get any input on, they shouldn't be forced to collect their taxes. Indeed, for the approach of Members of this body who want to pass the Internet sales tax, recall President Reagan's famous admonition: Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. Why don't we stop it at the outset? The Internet is moving. It is generating entrepreneurial steam throughout this country. We haven't been taxing it. Let's not start now. The third and final point I will make about what this exchange is about is, more than anything, this exchange is about crony capitalism. I would note the Presiding Officer today has been quite passionate discussing the corruption in Washington that favors big business. What we just saw on this Senate floor illustrates that as powerfully as anything that has happened this year. Because what is the Internet sales tax all about? It is about a coalition of big businesses coming together, both big bricks-and-mortar retailers and big online retailers coming to their elected officials, saying: You know what. We don't like competition. These little guys, these little upstarts, these single moms who start businesses and compete with us, we don't like that. So let's go to our friends in Washington--our friends, mind you, whom we hold campaign fundraisers for, whose campaigns we contribute to--and let's get the Congress to come together and hammer every small online business we can. That is what we are seeing. This is crony capitalism. This is a law designed to benefit big companies and hurt small startups. The beauty of our country is that anybody can come to this country with nothing but a hope and a dream and a vision and achieve anything. It is because the entrepreneurial vibrancy of this country gives the little guy a chance. Yet I am sorry to say Washington more and more behaves as though it is for sale to the highest bidder. Right now, today, the top 1 percent in our country earns a higher share of our income than any year since 1928. We ought to come together in a bipartisan way and say: Stop being the handmaidens of big business. Stop using government to make it harder for the little guy, for young people, for single moms, for Hispanic and African-American entrepreneurs. Stop making it harder for them to achieve the American dream. Stop pulling up the ladder so the big companies can say: We have got ours; nobody else gets theirs. When big business comes to Washington and says: We want government's help stifling small business, both parties should stand together and say: Sorry. That is not what the Congress is for. We work for the American people. But, I am sorry to say, what we just saw was a powerful demonstration that this Senate right now is more interested in preserving crony capitalism than it is in protecting mom-and-pops, in protecting opportunity, in protecting Internet tax freedom. But the great thing about our system is at the end of the day, the American people don't work for the 100 Members of this body. It is the other way around: All 100 of us work for the American people. And I will tell you, the American people are getting fed up. They are getting fed up with Members of both parties who spend more time giving in to the corruption of Washington and entrenching power than they do removing barriers to people achieving the American dream. I am hopeful and confident that the voters are waking up, are standing up, and will hold every one of us accountable. Democrats and Republicans, every one of us, will be held accountable: Have you fought to make it easier to achieve the American dream or have you simply preserved the corrupt crony capitalism of Washington? I hope we can together aspire to our better angels. I hope we can come together and keep and preserve in a bipartisan manner Internet tax freedom.

Mr. CRUZ. Madam President, I rise today to speak in favor of a principle that should unite us all--the principle of Internet tax freedom. One of the great blessings of our modern economy is the productivity, the entrepreneurial spirit the Internet has created, the ability of anyone with an idea to jump online, to communicate, to create a business, to reach the world. One of the reasons the Internet has been such an entrepreneurial haven is that Congress has wisely decided to keep it free from taxation, not to subject the Internet to taxation. Well, unfortunately, we are at the precipice of that long tradition changing. If the Senate refuses to take action, the Internet will be taxed this November. For a decade and a half, Americans have been able to use the Internet all across the country free of taxes, and Republicans and Democrats have agreed on this basic principle. There is not a lot of agreement in this town on much of anything, including what time of day it is. Yet on Internet taxes--in 1998 President Bill Clinton signed the law banning Internet taxes. Congress has extended it three times--in 2001, 2004, and 2007. Today there is a bipartisan coalition on the record to keep the Internet tax free. The senior Democratic Senator from New York and the senior Democratic Senator from Wisconsin both publicly support keeping the Internet free from taxation. Conservatives in the Senate, such as the junior Republican Senator from Utah, the junior Republican Senator from Florida, and the senior Republican Senator from Louisiana, agree as well. There are 52 cosponsors in the Senate on the bill by the senior Democratic Senator from Oregon, who is here with us, to keep the ban on Internet taxes. This should be easy. This should be a matter of easy agreement because rarely is there an issue that has united parties so broadly as keeping the Internet tax free. Yet, unfortunately, this session of the Senate is also seeing politicians who want to extend sales taxes to the Internet, who want to subject small businesses, mom-and-pops, businesses started by people just wanting to build a business, to crushing sales taxes from 9,600 jurisdictions nationwide. I am passionate in saying we should fight against taxing the Internet, and we should not open the door to Internet taxes. The average tax rate right now on telephone services and other voice services is 17 percent. The average tax rate on cable and video services is 12 percent. If this Senate does not act, you are going to see consumers in States such as Montana and South Dakota and Massachusetts, on November 1, begin paying taxes for having basic Internet service. Those State laws are already in effect and will go into effect on Internet services. I would note for the Senators who represent Montana and South Dakota and Massachusetts that come November 2--which, I might note, is right before an election day--anyone in those States should be prepared to answer questions from their citizens on why the Senate stood by and let taxes be raised on their citizens just for having an Internet connection. Americans are struggling to pay their bills in the Obama economy. Life has gotten harder and harder for working men and women in this country. Life has gotten harder and harder for the most vulnerable among us--for young people, for Hispanics, for African Americans, for single moms. The last thing we should be doing is playing politics and jacking up taxes on people accessing the Internet. I would note that the U.S. House of Representatives has already acted. On July 15 the House voice voted H.R. 3086, the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act. It had 228 cosponsors. My friend Senator Wyden has introduced the Senate version of it, S. 1431. It has 52 cosponsors, including 18 Democrats. This ought to be something where we stop playing games and say let's all come together and agree: Do not tax the Internet. Yet, unfortunately, we are not in that situation. Unfortunately, we are seeing an objection to the House-passed bill, to a bill that has the support of a majority of Senators. Why? The only reason is because there is hope that by holding the Internet Tax Freedom Act hostage, it can become a vehicle to impose sales taxes on transactions over the Internet, to impose sales taxes on every small business. I would note one of many wonderful things. It used to be that if you were a single mom and you wanted to start a small business, you wanted to make something, you wanted to sit down and make something, whether it was a computer program or sweaters for dogs or anything else, it used to be that to create a small business took time, it took money, it took infrastructure. You had to have in place warehouses and distributors. You had to have a mechanism to sell your products. Do you know the great thing about the Internet? If you are a single mom and you have an idea to start a business, you can put up a Web site, and with FedEx you can deliver anywhere in the country. Anyone all over the country can do it, if you have an idea. Let me tell you, my cousin had an idea to sell scarves. She thought she had some good design ideas. My cousin Beatriz worked with her best friend to design scarves. If you put up a Web site, suddenly you can sell all over the country. Well, what would the Internet sales tax do? It would say that when you start your business, if you start getting customers, you have to collect taxes in 9,600 jurisdictions all over the country. If the school district across the country changes its tax rate from 4.5 percent to 4.75 percent, you have to know that and collect that differential tax. This does not make any sense. We should stand together united in protecting the entrepreneurial haven that is the Internet. We should stand united against taxing the Internet. I would note that my friend the Senator from New Hampshire has a long and passionate record on this issue as well, and I am happy to yield to her for a question on this important topic.

Mr. CRUZ

Mr. CRUZ. I thank my friend from South Dakota.

Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, I am pleased and saddened to stand here in support of my colleagues as we stand united in support of the Nation of Israel. In the last several weeks over 2500 rockets rained down over the Nation of Israel. Eighty percent of the population had to flee what they were doing and run to bomb shelters to hide--moms, dads, children. When the alarm goes off they have sometimes 10, 15 seconds to get to a bomb shelter. I want you to imagine if the same situation were happening in America. Imagine if 80 percent of this country in the last several weeks had run to a bomb shelter. Imagine if 240 million Americans in the last several weeks had been sitting at work or in the doctor's office or having breakfast and had to grab their children and run in panic toward a bomb shelter. Imagine what our country would be doing in response. In recent weeks we have discovered that Hamas has opened a new chapter in the annals of terrorism. It is not just raining rockets down from on high, but it is now attacking from below. Some 32 full-scale terror tunnels have been discovered dug under the ground under the border and coming up in kibbutzes inside Israel along Gaza. Some of the tunnels come up inside kindergartens. We have discovered in recent weeks a terrifying plot that was underway for Hamas terrorists on Rosh Hashanah to come through those tunnels--hundreds of them--to emerge in kindergartens to kidnap and murder vast numbers of young Jewish children. Imagine right now if enemies of this country had dug tunnels into this country and were coming up into our schools. Imagine if Iran or China or some other hostile foreign nation had tunnels from which your children and my children were at risk of being kidnapped or murdered. Today in Gaza we see massive civilian casualties that are the direct consequence of the violence of Hamas. You see, the human casualties are not an unintended side effect of the conflicts. They are the objective that Hamas seeks--dead Palestinian children and women and men. We know this because Hamas is engaging in a war crime right now, not that the United Nations Human Rights Council would ever say anything about it. But Hamas is engaging in a war crime of using human shields--deliberately using human shields. Where do they place their rockets with which they are raining down death and destruction upon Israel? They place them in schools. They place them in private homes. They place them in mosques. Deliberately they surround their rockets and their terror tunnels with innocent civilians. Israel right now is engaged in something unprecedented in the annals of modern warfare. It is undertaking more humanitarian effort to spare civilian deaths than any military has in recorded history. Before attacking, Israel sends out texts. When they discover a rocket battery they need to take out because it is firing rockets targeting innocent civilians, they send texts saying: Clear out of the area. They try to save the Palestinian civilians. They drop from the sky pamphlets on an area that is about to be bombed to take out the rockets that are coming from that area. The pamphlets say to the civilians: Get out. Get out because we are going to take out the rockets and you are in harm's way. Not only that, they have a practice of sending an initial knock bomb. What does that mean? It means the first bomb lands on the roof and makes a knock. It doesn't explode; it just makes a loud knock. They do that for a reason: So the people inside the building can look up, can hear the knock, and can flee the building so the second missile can take down the building and the rockets that are housed inside and being used to try to murder innocent civilians. A few weeks ago Prime Minister Netanyahu summed it up very powerfully when he said: Israel uses missile defense to defend our citizens. Hamas uses its citizens to defend its missiles. Israel has tried to warn Palestinian civilians: Don't be located where the missiles are because we are going to respond as any sovereign nation will to protect our citizens. What does Hamas say? Hamas tells the Palestinians: Stay there. Picture that for a second. Israel is warning civilians to clear the area because they are going to take out the rockets and they are going to take out the tunnels. The response from Hamas is: No. Stay there. Why? Because what they want to see is Palestinian children, Palestinian women killed so they can put the pictures on the Sunday night news because they know the world--many at the United Nations, many in the media--will behave like useful idiots. They will point to the civilian casualties that are Hamas's fault. When you put rockets on top of children, when you tell the children ``do not leave,'' when you know the rockets are going to be taken out--it is Hamas, the terrorists who are responsible for those children's deaths. Yet the international community puts the pictures on the evening news and blames the nation of Israel. I am proud this week to have joined my colleague, Senator Gillibrand from New York, in filing a bipartisan resolution in this body condemning Hamas's use of human shields, condemning it as a war crime, condemning it as an outrage, condemning it as the direct reason we are seeing so many civilian deaths. I have to note that one of the reasons civilian deaths have been mitigated in Israel is because of the incredible success of the Iron Dome missile defense system. Ronald Reagan's ``Star Wars'' is today's Iron Dome. We see unfolding in recent weeks in Israel the product of President Reagan's vision when he proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, on March 23, 1983. Critics at the time dismissed it as ``Star Wars.'' The Presiding Officer will recall--we were both teenagers at the time, and we recall learned experts, so to speak, going on television saying SDI was a fool's errand; it was a dream. The analogy that was given was you cannot hit a bullet with a bullet; it can't work. Well, run the clock forward three decades, and we see an Iron Dome, the strategic vision of President Reagan, playing out in real- time. There is a wonderful video on YouTube that I encourage anyone who is interested to Google and watch. It is a video called ``Iron Dome Wedding.'' If people Google it, they will discover a video from a wedding in southern Israel. It is an ordinary wedding video, just like I suspect the Presiding Officer and I both had from our weddings. But in the midst of it, rockets begin coming through the night sky. We see rockets come across the sky, and then we see Iron Dome interceptors come up and explode the rockets. One after the other is hit and explodes, and the whole thing looks like fireworks. In the background we hear the wedding music and the sound of celebrating, and we think, were it not for these Iron Dome interceptors, those missiles might be landing on that wedding and causing carnage and death and destruction. But because of the potential, the power, the actuality of missile defense, instead they are intercepted. There are indisputable differences between the intercontinental ballistic missiles that SDI was designed to target and the low-tech missiles Hamas is firing over Israel that Iron Dome is intercepting. That is why Iron Dome is one part of a three-tiered system that includes David's Sling and the Arrow 2 and 3 systems, which are designed to guard against more sophisticated weapons, such as the longer range missiles being provided to Hamas by Syria and Iran, and they would also defend against nuclear ballistic missiles of the sort being developed in Iran. It is worth underscoring, even as the fighting in Gaza grabs the headlines, that we have to keep our eye on the far more serious danger of a nuclear Iran. The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran would make Hamas and their rockets seem like child's play. And our support for Iron Dome should be understood in the context of support for the continued development of these systems, which not only protect our friend and ally Israel, but they protect us. There is a reason why Hamas and Iran refer to Israel as the ``Little Satan'' and the United States as the ``Great Satan,'' because their intention with both is the same terror, the same murder, the same death and destruction. Israel is currently working to carry out the grinding work to eradicate these terror tunnels that have been built under schools and kindergartens designed to kidnap and murder young children. I would note that it is an enormously difficult task, one that might prove impossible were it not for the success of Iron Dome limiting the effectiveness of those rockets. I encourage this body to stand together, united as one, Republicans and Democrats. There may be issues on which we disagree--there may be a great many issues--but we ought to be able to stand together as one and speak in unison that we support the nation of Israel and that we will work with the nation of Israel immediately to replenish their Iron Dome supply so they can protect the citizens there and so they can do what is necessary to eradicate the Hamas rockets and terror tunnels being used to commit war crimes. There should be a unified, bipartisan voice in this body, and it is my hope that by the end of this week that is exactly what it will be. I yield the floor.

Mr. CRUZ

Mr. CRUZ. Senator Sessions, it causes me great concern. One of the most troubling aspects of the Obama Presidency has been the persistent pattern of lawlessness from this President. We have never seen a President who, if he disagrees with a particular law, so frequently and so brazenly refuses to enforce it, refuses to comply with it, and asserts the power to unilaterally change it. The President famously said: I have a pen and I have a phone, and he seems to confuse his pen and his phone for the constitutional process of lawmaking our country was built on. Rule of law does not mean you have a country with a whole lot of laws. Most countries have laws, and many totalitarian countries have a whole lot of laws. Rule of law means no man is above the law. It means that everyone, everyone, everyone, and especially the President, is bound by the law. President Obama openly defies his constitutional obligation under article 2 of the Constitution to take care that the laws will be faithfully executed. I would note that Professor Turley, as the junior Senator from Alabama quoted, is a liberal Democrat who in 2008 voted for President Obama. Professor Turley also testified before the House that President Obama has become the embodiment of the imperial President. Barack Obama has become the President Richard Nixon always wished he could be. Those are the words of a liberal Democratic constitutional law professor who voted for Barack Obama. But my friend the junior Senator from Alabama is learned and experienced in the ways of the Senate. He has seen lions of the Senate walk this floor. It is unprecedented to have a President so brazenly defy the rule of law, but I state what is equally unprecedented, to have the Senate lie down and meow like kitty cats. Abuse of power by the President is not a new phenomenon. Presidents of both parties have abused their power. That is a job, sadly, where that tendency has been significant. But in the past, when Presidents have abused their power, Members of their own party stood and called them to account for it. When Richard Nixon abused his power, Members of both parties rightfully decried his abuse of power, so much so that he was forced to resign. I can state when George W. Bush was President, he signed a two- paragraph order that purported to order the State courts to obey the World Court. I know this because I was at the time serving as the solicitor general of Texas, and it was our State courts that the President's order purported to bind. George W. Bush is a good man. He is a former Governor of Texas, he is a Republican, and he was a friend and is a friend. Yet I was proud that the State of Texas did not hesitate to stand up to that abuse of power. I went before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the State of Texas and argued that President George W. Bush's order was unconstitutional, that no President has the authority to give up U.S. sovereignty. I am pleased to say the U.S. Supreme Court agreed and struck down the President's order by a vote of 6 to 3. What is unprecedented today is that on the left side of the Chamber it is both literally and figuratively empty. We had, not too long ago, the President abuse his power with recess appointments. One of the important checks and balances the Constitution creates on Presidential authority is it gives this body, the Senate, the power of confirmation. President Obama apparently didn't like any checks and balances on his power, so he made a series of recess appointments when the Senate wasn't in recess. It was brazen, it was naked. The President simply asserted: I say the Senate is in recess. Mind you, the Senate didn't say we were in recess, but the President claimed the power to declare us in recess when we weren't. Do you want to know how extreme that was? Do you want to know how brazen that was? Do you want to know how extraordinary that was? Just a few weeks ago the Supreme Court unanimously struck it down as unconstitutional. It is important to underscore that. There is a lot of coverage in the newspaper that suggests we have liberal Justices, conservative Justices, and on any close issue it is going to be 5 to 4. This wasn't 5 to 4, it wasn't 6 to 3, it wasn't 7 to 2, and it wasn't even 8 to 1-- 9 to 0. Every Democratic appointee on the Court--both of President Obama's appointees on the Court. They looked at the substantive issue and they said: This ain't hard. The President doesn't get to say when the Senate is in recess, the Senate gets to say when the Senate is in recess. And if the Senate isn't in recess, the President has to respect the checks and balances of confirmation. So we have an easy, no-brainier layup of a constitutional law question about the President usurping the constitutional prerogatives of the Senate, and how many Senate Democrats stood up to their party's President? Not a single one. Not the majority leader of the Senate, who we would think might have some interest in the credibility of this institution and, I am sorry to say, not a lone Democratic Senator. It wasn't that long ago there were lions of the Senate on the Democratic side who prided themselves on defending this institution: Robert Byrd, who stood for years defending this institution; Ted Kennedy. I would say to my friend the junior Senator from Alabama, what is truly unprecedented is that there are no Senate Democrats who say: Enough is enough. I am hopeful at some point we will see a Senate Democrat listen to their constituents, listen to the Constitution, and listen to the rule of law. I can assume the reason why Senate Democrats don't do it and why our friends in the press often don't report on this. I can assume their reasoning goes something such as: Well, I basically agree with the policies of President Obama. I like the policies. I agree with what he is doing, and he is our guy. We kind of have to back our guy. I am guessing that is a reason, but I will note, as the Scriptures say: There came a pharaoh who knew not Joseph and his children. President Barack Obama will not always be President of the United States. There will be another President. And even to my friends on the Democratic side of the aisle--I must say something shocking and terrifying to you--there will come another Republican President. If the President has the authority to do what President Obama is claiming, with ObamaCare--28 times--he simply unilaterally changed the text of the law, said: It doesn't matter what the law says, I say it is something different. If the President has that power, a Republican President has that power too. So I would encourage all of my friends on the left who like these policy issues--well, imagine some of the policy issues you don't like, whether on labor law or environmental law or tort reform or let's take tax law. I will give an example. Imagine a subsequent Republican President who stood up and stated quite sensibly the economy might do much better if we move to a flat tax, so I am therefore instructing the IRS: Do not collect any tax above 20 percent. Now one might say, well, that sounds extreme. That sounds radical. As a policy matter, that would be a terrific policy. But could the President instruct the IRS not to enforce tax laws? Fifty-five Members of this body are already on record saying yes. Do you know why? Because when the President suspended the employer mandate for big business, the text for ObamaCare says the employer mandate kicks in on January 1, 2014. The President said: I am suspending that provision of law. I am granting my buddies in big business a waiver. That was a tax law.

Mr. CRUZ. Would the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. CRUZ. The junior Senator from Alabama has just described President Obama's stated intention to grant amnesty to an additional 5 to 6 million people here illegally in the months preceding this next election. As the junior Senator from Alabama is certainly aware, there are a number of Senators up for reelection, including a number of Democrats in bright red States where the constituents of those States, whether in Louisiana or Arkansas or North Carolina or many other States, do not support amnesty for another 5 to 6 million people here illegally. The question I would ask my friend from Alabama: Is he aware of any Democrat in this Chamber, including those Democrats running for reelection in conservative States where the citizens strongly oppose amnesty--is he aware of any Democrat in this Chamber who has had the courage to stand with him in standing up to President Obama and saying: Do not grant amnesty illegally? Is he aware of any Democrat who has joined the two of us in our legislation to prohibit President Obama from illegally granting amnesty to 5 to 6 million people?

Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, I thank my friend, the junior Senator from Alabama, for his very kind comments and for his relentless leadership in defense of the rule of law and standing against amnesty. What I wish to speak about this afternoon is the humanitarian crisis that is playing out on our southern border right now and the abdication of responsibility that is playing out in Washington, DC. A couple of weeks ago President Obama was in my home State of Texas. He found time to go to two Democratic Party fundraisers, to pal around with some Democratic Party fat cats, to collect a whole bunch of checks. Yet somehow he didn't have time to make it down to our southern border. The day before he was in Colorado and he found time to play a game of pool with the Governor there. I am glad he enjoyed himself playing pool. Yet somehow he didn't have time to go visit Lackland Air Force Base and see the 1,200 children who are being held there who are paying the price for the failure of the Obama immigration policy. In the coming weeks he is headed to Martha's Vineyard. He is, I am sure, going to enjoy himself paling around with swells. Yet the people held in detention facilities up and down the border are not going to see the Commander in Chief because he cannot be bothered to address the human suffering. He was just in California, in Hollywood, where the producer of ``Scandal'' hosted him. That is kind of fitting because it is scandalous that the President has more time to be ``Fundraiser in Chief'' than he does to do his basic job as Commander in Chief in securing our borders. Let me tell my colleagues, while the President was running around collecting checks from Democratic Party fat cats, I was back home in Texas. I was on the border this weekend down in McAllen. I sat down with the chief of the Border Patrol in McAllen. I sat down with the line officers of the Border Patrol in McAllen. I visited the detention facilities that are being constructed to hold these children. I saw a remarkable facility. It used to be a gigantic warehouse, and in 18 days the Border Patrol had to stand up a facility to house 1,000 children because that is the volume coming through there every couple of days. The President is right in one regard. He has publicly stated we are seeing a humanitarian crisis, and that is correct, but it is a crisis of his own creation. This humanitarian crisis is the direct consequence of President Obama's lawlessness. I will note he cannot even be bothered to cast his eyes on the people who are suffering because of it. If we want to know what is causing this crisis, a simple examination of the numbers will suffice. Just 3 years ago, in 2011, the number of unaccompanied children entering this country was roughly 6,000. Then, in June of 2012, just a few months before the election, President Obama unilaterally granted amnesty to some 800,000 people who were here illegally in this country who entered as children. He did so, presumably, because he thought there would be a political benefit. It was a few months before an election and he thought there was good politics in ignoring the law and granting amnesty. But the foreseeable consequence of that amnesty--the predictable and the predicted consequence of that amnesty--if we tell people across the globe that if they enter as children, they get amnesty, suddenly we create an incredible incentive for more and more children to come and more and more children to come alone. This year, the Department of Homeland Security estimates that 90,000 unaccompanied children will enter this country illegally. Next year they estimate 145,000. I want my colleagues to compare those numbers for a second. Three years ago, it was 6,000. Now it is 90,000, and next year we expect 145,000. The direct and proximate cause was President Obama's amnesty. There are some in this body who might not believe what a Member of the opposite party says on this. There is a whole lot of partisanship in Washington. It truly has shut down the ability of this body to deal with real challenges facing this country. If people don't believe what a Member of the opposite party says, perhaps they will believe the Border Patrol. Just a few weeks ago the Border Patrol conducted a confidential study that was given to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee by a whistleblower in the Border Patrol, where they interviewed over 200 people who had entered the country recently illegally, and they asked them the question: Why are you coming? Ninety-five percent said we are coming because we believe we will get amnesty; that if we just get here, we will be allowed to stay. The administration has been giving lots of supposed causes for this humanitarian crisis. One of their favorites is the violence in Central America. It is true. Tragically, there is a great deal of violence in Central America and it has been increasing, but I would note violence is not new to the human condition. There have always been countries across the globe that are racked by violence, racked by civil war, and we have always seen when violence rises, the immigration from a particular country goes up. We see legal immigration from that country go up and we see illegal immigration from that country go up. What we haven't seen in the past is the explosion of children. The violence in Central America is a reasonable cause to explain the increase in immigrants from Central America, the increase in families coming up to get away from the violence. What it doesn't explain is this new phenomenon: 90,000 unaccompanied children. That is a new phenomenon. There is no reason violence would dictate saying, I am going to take my little boy, I am going to take my little girl, and send them alone. That instead is a direct response to what President Obama did by granting amnesty that was targeted to those who entered as kids. Why are kids entering? Because the President has said, if you enter as a kid, I will grant you amnesty. Several weeks ago I visited Lackland Air Force Base where roughly 1,200 of these children are being held. I visited with the senior officials there. It is worth understanding that there are many victims of the President's refusal to enforce the law, but some of the most direct victims are these little boys and little girls because the coyotes who are bringing these children in are not well-meaning social workers. They do not have beards and Birkenstocks, and they are not there out of love. These coyotes are hardened, vicious transnational drug cartels, and these children are being subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse. When I was at Lackland Air Force Base, a senior official there described to me how these coyotes get custody of these kids to smuggle them illegally into this country, and then sometimes they will decide to hold the children for ransom, to get even more money from the families. If the families cannot or will not pay, horribly, what these coyotes are doing is severing body parts of these children and sending them back to the families. The senior official at Lackland described coyotes putting machine guns to the back of the head of a little boy or a little girl and ordering them to cut off the fingers or the ears of another little boy or little girl. If the child refuses, they shoot that child and move on to the next one. They described how on our end we are seeing children come into this country--some of whom have been horribly maimed by these violent coyotes and drug cartels, others of whom have enormous psychological damage--from a little boy or a little girl forced to commit such atrocities upon pain of death. I asked the officials at Lackland: How many of these children have been victimized? The answer: All of them. That was from the senior official at Lackland. By the way, one of the things we hear reports of is these families with the girls, before they send them up, they give them birth control because the expectations are that the risks of sexual assault and rape are so high. That risk is being undertaken because of the promise of amnesty. When I was down in McAllen this weekend, I asked the line agents--I said: Listen. Every day you guys are on the river, you are in the helicopter, you are securing the border. Why are they coming? What has changed? Just 3 years ago it was 6,000 kids. Now it is 90,000. What has changed? Every single one of the Border Patrol agents gave the exact same answer. They said they are coming because they believe they will get amnesty. It is important to understand, by the way, the coyotes smuggle them across the border, and as soon as they get across the border, they actively look for the Border Patrol. They are not being captured. They are not being caught. They go look for someone in uniform. They may have ragged clothes falling off their back, they may not have food or water, but they have their papers. They have their papers with them. They cross the border illegally with a coyote and they endure the physical and sexual abuse and then they look for the Border Patrol to hand their papers to. Why? Because they believe once they get here and hand their papers over, they get amnesty. If we want to solve this crisis, there is one, and only one, way to solve this crisis; that is, to eliminate the promise of amnesty. I mentioned a few moments ago that I wanted to talk about this humanitarian crisis and talk about the abdication of responsibility because Washington has always been lousy at taking responsibility for the suffering our policies create. But the response of this President, and I am sorry to say the Democratic majority in this body, has been particularly callous. President Obama proposed a $3.7 billion supplemental plan. Mind you, he did not have time to visit the border, to visit the children, to see the suffering, but he proposed yet more spending. The $3.7 billion supplemental is an HHS social services bill. It spends a whole bunch of money. By the way, to give you a sense of just how much $3.7 billion is, for $3.7 billion we could purchase a first-class airplane ticket for each one of these 90,000 children to return them home--first class--sitting in the front row of a commercial airline. After doing so, we could deposit $3.6 billion back in the Federal Treasury. It is a massive amount of money he has asked for, and what is striking, less than 5 percent of it goes to border security. Here is the cynical part. Here is the sad part. Nothing in the President's proposal does anything to solve the underlying problem. Nothing does anything to eliminate the promise of amnesty. Nothing does anything to solve the problem. What the President is saying is he is perfectly content for this crisis to continue in perpetuity. Under the President's bill, next year we can expect 145,000--DHS expects--to come. We can expect tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of little boys and little girls to be physically assaulted and sexually assaulted by coyotes. That is not humane. That is not compassionate. Any system that continues to have children in the custody of these vicious drug cartels is the very opposite of humane and compassionate. As my friend the junior Senator from Alabama pointed out, the magnet of amnesty has been significantly exacerbated in recent months. Why? Because President Obama, in a very high-profile way, met with far-left activists and made a promise. He said: I am going to study how to expand amnesty and to grant amnesty to another 5 or 6 million people here illegally. Let's be clear. There is nothing--zero--in U.S. immigration law that gives the President the power to grant amnesty. It is open lawlessness and contempt for rule of law, but yet that promise is heard. That promise is heard throughout Central America. That promise is heard by those mothers and dads who make the heart-wrenching decision to hand their sons and daughters over to these coyotes. They do so because they love their kids and they believe, as terrible as the journey will be, that if they get here, they get a permiso, they get to stay in the ``promised land.'' That promise of amnesty is why this crisis has happened. So I have introduced legislation to solve the problem. Last week I introduced a very simple bill that puts into law that President Obama has no authority to grant any additional amnesty. It is a very simple bill. It prevents the President from taking the DACA Program that he unilaterally and illegally implemented in 2012 and expanding it to cover any new immigrants. It is interesting. Representatives from the administration go on television and they say: These children are not eligible for amnesty. If that is their position, the administration should support my bill. If that is their position, all this bill does is put into law what they say their position is; that these children are not eligible for amnesty. Have they supported the bill? They have not. Instead the majority leader of this body took it upon himself to go out and hold a press conference. What is the top priority for the majority leader of this body? To come after and attack the legislation I introduced, to personally come after the freshman Senator from Texas. The majority leader is welcome to impugn any Member of this body. Sadly, that happens all too often. But yet nowhere in the majority leader's comments was a word said about solving this problem. Nowhere in the majority leader's comments was a word said about changing it so little boys and little girls are not physically and sexually assaulted so we do not have tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of kids coming illegally into this country. Look, we all understand politics in this town. It is an election year. The election is a few months away. Scaring people and demagoguing, unfortunately, is not new to Washington. But the cynicism that is reflected in President Obama's and the majority leader's approach to this issue is a new level for this town. This week I am introducing broader legislation that not only includes what was included last week--a prohibition on the President granting amnesty--but includes two other elements: a reform of the 2008 law to expedite the humane return of these children to their families and a provision to reimburse the cost for the States calling up the National Guard to secure their borders. I would like to say a word about the 2008 law. That has actually been discussed a lot in this body. Indeed, the Obama administration has two talking points. If we ask the administration what has caused this crisis, the first one is violence in Central America. There is something convenient about that talking point because if it is violence in Central America, it is not President Obama's fault. It is not anything they have done. It is something else extrinsic. But the second talking point that sometimes the administration will say is that the cause of this crisis is the 2008 law. There is a reason they point to that. Because it seems there is nothing President Obama enjoys more than blaming everything bad on this planet on George W. Bush. The 2008 law was signed by George W. Bush. So if this crisis was caused by the 2008 law, then mirabile dictu, it is not this administration's fault. But John Adams famously said: Facts are stubborn things. If someone is going to make a claim that a crisis is caused by the 2008 law, they have to be willing to take at least a moment to look to the facts. The 2008 law was passed, unsurprisingly, in 2008. The number of children entering unaccompanied did not spike in 2008. It did not spike in 2009. It did not spike in 2010. It did not spike in 2011. In 2011 it was roughly 6,000. If the 2008 law were the cause of this crisis, we would have seen the numbers spike in 2008 or 2009 or 2010 or 2011. No, they did not spike until 2012--June of 2012--when the President pulled out his pen and granted amnesty. That is the cause--the direct cause-- the cause that the Border Patrol tells us these immigrants are telling us is why they are coming. Once the crisis was created, the 2008 law has had unintended consequences. The 2008 law allowed expedited removal for unaccompanied children from Mexico and Canada--our immediate contiguous countries-- but created slow, delayed, bureaucratized removal for children from more distant countries. That did not create significant problems in 2008 or 2009 or 2010 or 2011 because we did not have a massive influx of kids from those countries. But once the President illegally granted amnesty and we started getting--as we are expected to this year--90,000 unaccompanied children--most of whom are from Central American countries--now we are seeing the 2008 law cause real problems because returning these children home is delayed, often delayed indefinitely. When I was in the McAllen meeting with the line Border Patrol agents, I asked them another question. I said: Listen. Washington is dysfunctional. Partisan politics rips the town apart. If you could ignore the politics, what do you say on the frontlines? How do we actually secure the borders? How do we solve this problem? Every single one of the Border Patrol agents answered the same way. They said: We have to send them home. We treat them humanely. We treat them compassionately--because that is who we are as Americans; those are our values--but humanely and compassionately we need to expeditiously return them to their families back home. Why? Because if the children are allowed to stay--and, mark my words, President Obama wants these children to stay and he wants to grant amnesty to the next children and the next children, which means that promise of amnesty will cause tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of children to continue to be physically assaulted and sexually assaulted in perpetuity. If we grant amnesty, all it will do is incite yet more kids to be victimized. The only way to solve this problem--this is coming from the Border Patrol agents--is to humanely and expeditiously send them home, reunite them with their families. The legislation I am introducing this week changes the 2008 law so the policies for sending them home are the same as the policies for Mexico and Canada. We treat Mexico and Canada with great friendship and compassion. There is no reason the very same procedures cannot apply to children from Central America. The final element of this bill is dealing with the real security crisis that is occurring. Just today the junior Senator from Alabama and I both heard a briefing from one of our senior military leaders on the national security threats caused by our porous borders, by the same avenues that are taking those kids in and that are also being used to smuggle vast quantities of drugs. The same corridors that are taking those kids in are also being used to smuggle in thousands of aliens from special interest countries, from the Middle East, aliens from countries that face serious issues of radical Islamic terrorists. A number of our border Governors have stepped forward to respond to this crisis. I commend the Governor of my home State of Texas, Rick Perry, for showing leadership and calling up the National Guard in Texas. It was the right thing to do. He should not have to do it. The Constitution gives that responsibility to the Federal Government. The Governor should not have to step in and fill the breach. They are doing so because the President and the Federal Government are refusing to do their job. But I commend the Governors for doing so. The legislation I am introducing simply provides that when a State steps up and does the job that is our responsibility, the Federal Government will reimburse the costs. In all likelihood, next week we are going to have a vote on a bill that is denominated a ``border security'' bill. It is a bill the majority leader wants us to vote on that is a version of the President's HHS social services bill and spends a whole bunch of money and does nothing, zero, nada, to solve the problem. The majority leader knows that. The President knows that. The intention is to have it voted down. One of the incredible things about where we are right now is this Democratic Senate is a do-nothing Senate. We do not pass any legislation of consequence. There is a reason for that. The majority leader has decided we are not going to pass any legislation of consequence. So instead what do we have? We have a series of show votes, every one of which is designed to fail, every one of which the majority leader knows will fail, and every one of which is poll tested or focus-group tested to allow Democrats running for reelection to campaign based on those votes. It is not legislating. It is not doing the job the Senate was meant to do. This border security bill that we will likely vote on next week will do nothing for border security. It is not designed to. Even if it were to pass, it is not designed to. It is not designed to do anything to stop President Obama's amnesty. It is not designed to do anything to expedite reuniting these kids with their families back home. It is simply designed to be a fig leaf, to say: The Democrats have responded to this crisis. The evil, mean, nasty Republicans did not go along. That is a political narrative that is not new. It is common in partisan politics. It just happens not to be true. Unfortunately, the Democratic majority in this body has demonstrated no interest in actually solving this problem. You want to know just how cynical the majority leader's strategy is? They have added to this border bill a provision that would replenish the Iron Dome missiles for the nation of Israel. I would note that has nothing to do with the crisis at our southern border. It is a policy that is unambiguously good. Every Member on the Republican side of this Chamber supports replenishing the Iron Dome missiles that are right now keeping Israel safe from the Hamas terrorist rocket fire. So why has the majority leader stuck that onto a bill that he knows will fail and is designed to fail? Well, it is called partisan politics. Because when it fails, the talking points will come out. The majority leader will come out and say: The Republicans do not want to solve the problem on the border. The Republicans are unwilling to stand with our friend and ally Israel. Let me tell you right now, every Republican on this side of the Chamber would vote right now, this afternoon, to replenish the Iron Dome missiles. To be honest, we should be voting. You know, in most parts of the country, Thursday afternoon, 4:30, people who actually have an honest job are still at work. Not in the Senate. The Senate people head on home. People are out campaigning. How about we actually have Senators show up on this floor more than one or two at a time and debate these issues? How about we actually see Senators stand, debate the issues, and resolve the problems? The majority leader went on television and said: The border is secure. I find that an astonishing assertion. I recognized how from the perch of Washington, DC, it might seem that way. Perhaps the DC/ Virginia border is secure. But I would invite the majority leader and I would invite any Member of the Chamber: Come down to Texas. Come to McAllen. Come visit the border. When I was in McAllen on Saturday, the Border Patrol agents told me the day before they had apprehended 622 people. I went to the processing center. They had 10 holding centers with 600 or 700 people there. One holding room had little girls below age 14, unaccompanied. Another holding room had little boys under age 14, unaccompanied. The third holding room had girls ages 14 to 19, unaccompanied. The fourth room had boys ages 14 to 19, unaccompanied. The fifth and sixth rooms had family units, mothers and fathers and little bitty babies, including tiny infants needing diapers and formula. Then the final four holding areas held adults. That was one day. That was not a week. That was not a month. That was one day. Ninety thousand unaccompanied children are expected to enter the country this year. The majority leader of the Senate says the border is secure. I would invite the majority leader to say that to those little boys and little girls who have just been victimized that the border is secure. That sure would surprise them. I would invite the majority leader to say that to the farmers and ranchers and the citizens in South Texas because that sure would surprise them. By the way, when you get outside of Washington this issue is not partisan. When you go down to South Texas and you visit with the elected leaders there, many of whom--most of whom--are elected Democrats and often Hispanic Democrats, and you ask: What is your top priority? Among Hispanic Democrats on the border, they say: Border security--because the border is so far from secure that their communities are paying the price. I would invite the majority leader to come to Brooks County, TX. In Brooks County, TX, hundreds of men, women, and children are found dead from crossing illegally. I would invite the majority leader to look, as I have, at the photographs of these bodies. Pregnant women are abandoned and left to die. Those are vicious cartels and coyotes. This is the face of amnesty. Ninety thousand children being victimized, being physically assaulted and sexually assaulted. This is the face of amnesty: Children held in detention centers with chain-link fences going up 18 feet, separating them in separate pens. This is the face of amnesty. Our heart breaks for these kids. But if it really breaks for those kids, we should do something about it. The only way to stop this humanitarian crisis is to stop President Obama's amnesty. As long as the President continues to promise amnesty, these children will keep coming, and they will keep being victimized. Sadly, as long as Senate Democrats are unwilling to stand up to their President and say, let's actually show some leadership and fix this problem, then the Senate will continue to be the Democratic do-nothing Senate. We will not solve those problems. We will fail in the fundamental obligation all of us owe to the men and women who elected us.