Richard Durbin

Mr. DURBIN

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I have come to the Senate floor before to talk about my connections with the country of Lithuania, where my mother was born. She came to the United States as an immigrant at the age of 2. It has been my good fortune to visit and revisit her homeland and to get to know the wonderful people who live in that nation. During my time in Congress, I have tried to make sure Lithuania's heroic path to freedom, the EU, and NATO are strongly supported by their American allies in the U.S. Congress. Now more than ever, we need to support our Baltic allies. They are critical frontline NATO partners with clear memories of Russian tyranny and a key reason the United States has troops serving in former Soviet- occupied countries like Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. Sadly, last month, four American soldiers stationed in Lithuania died tragically while on a mission to recover a vehicle immobilized during a training exercise. I want to take a moment to tell you about these four brave men, one of whom was from my home State of Illinois, and the amazing efforts that were made to recover them. SSG Jose Duenez, Jr., was from Joliet, IL. He, along with SSG Edvin F. Franco, PFC Dante Taitano, and SSG Troy Knutson-Collins, was part of the 1st Armored Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. Stationed in Lithuania at a military base that I personally visited, they were called on March 25 to retrieve a tactical vehicle mired in dangerously deep mud. Sadly, these soldiers never returned. Then search efforts were initiated to locate them, and they couldn't find them. They were in a tracked vehicle, a 70-ton tracked vehicle, and they disappeared. It took days before they finally found some tracks that led to an area, which was not very large, that looked like a puddle, but it was much more serious. The effort to find the soldiers eventually required hundreds of people from other nations. The effort was nothing short of miraculous. The soldiers' vehicle was thought to have sunk into a muddy bog, but it was nearly impossible for the dive team to locate. They struggled to see through their masks and get enough air through their regulators. It was extremely dangerous. It was soon clear that the mission would be one of recovery and not rescue. Engineers were brought in to thin the concrete-like mud in an effort to drain the bog that swallowed this vehicle, but the water kept seeping in. The recovery team grew by the hour, eventually reaching hundreds, comprised of 250 U.S. servicemembers, 160 Lithuanian soldiers and civilians, 50 Polish troops, and working canine teams from Estonia and Lithuania. Soon, a team of U.S. Navy divers received urgent orders to fly from Spain to Lithuania to help connect cables to the sunken vehicle and pull it from the bog. It took hours of struggling through the thick sludge, but they secured the vehicle. It was a mission fraught with extreme danger and challenges. It was met with ingenuity and a commitment to the underlying principle that every American servicemember must be brought home. I spoke to the Lithuanian Ambassador to the United States and others in Lithuania who described these days as painful days when they first tried to discover what happened to the vehicle and then an even longer period of time when they tried to retrieve the vehicle and the bodies of our soldiers. They told me that in Lithuania, virtually every newscast focused on this tragedy. People in Lithuania felt a personal attachment to our troops, as certainly we do today. The death of these four American soldiers is a tragedy, but the joint efforts to secure them show the gravity of our commitment to our allies. We have American troops stationed in nations like Lithuania because we have a commitment to join our NATO allies in stopping Russian aggression. These four American soldiers lost their lives safeguarding democracy, but we owe gratitude to our Lithuanian and other allies who dropped everything and faced great odds to help us, a reminder of the common defense underlying our alliance. On April 3, the schools were closed, the schoolchildren and their families came out and stood in the streets in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania--included in their ranks was the Lithuanian President--to pay their respects to our fallen American soldiers in their procession back to the United States. It was a devastating episode, but it illustrated the power of international cooperation, friendship between allies, and solutions in the face of great challenges. The loss of American servicemembers is always a tragedy. I particularly want to highlight my late constituent Sergeant Duenez. He jumped at the chance to volunteer for assignments, including the fateful mission to this bog, which he went to support even though he was not on that crew. He was a model Illinoisan and American, and he leaves behind a wife and a little boy. We should all strive to be more like Sergeant Duenez, and we owe him and his family a great debt of gratitude. In honor of these four servicemembers, who were living examples of American values, I will be introducing a resolution recognizing their service and sacrifice to our Nation and our NATO allies. And I urge my colleagues to join me in honoring the memories of these four great soldiers and the remarkable effort that went into their recovery by passing this resolution without delay. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Connecticut (Mr. Blumenthal) and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Hickenlooper), the Senator from Maine (Mr. King), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, the jury is in. At the end of 100 days, the major polling firms across the United States went out and asked the American people: So what do you think? What is your impression of this new President? What is your impression of the MAGA agenda? The results that came back don't surprise me, but they might surprise some. Overwhelmingly, on every major issue that this administration has taken a position, the American people have said: We don't like it. We are not happy with what is happening in this country today. After all the promises in the last political campaign about dealing with the cost of living for ordinary Americans, there is little or no progress to be shown for the 100 days of President Trump. For 100 days, President Trump and his administration--mainly billionaire buddies like Elon Musk--have brought us chaos, wreaked havoc, and sowed division. President Trump has undermined the Constitution and our system of checks and balances and the rule of law. Through it all, I am sad to report that my Republican colleagues have remained silent. I got a call several weeks ago, before the Easter break, from CEOs of major corporations, some in my State and some not. I had not heard from them before. Why they called me puzzled me a little bit. What it boiled down to was they were desperate for information about the policy decisions here in Washington. What did it mean that this President, Donald Trump, started a trade war and then announced he was going to put it on pause for 90 days? What were they supposed to do in terms of the future of their businesses? Were they to assume that the tariff tax war had begun, that in order to import key elements and parts to their production, they would have to pay tariffs of 10, 20, 30 percent? 100 percent? What did I know about it? I couldn't answer because I didn't know the answer. I am not sure anyone knew the answer. Somewhere in President Trump's mind is a theory of tariffs that he believes is going to make America stronger. These business leaders said just the opposite. Because of the uncertainty of these tariffs and the uncertainty of our trade relationships, they were going to hold back. They couldn't risk it. And that is the reality of what we face today. When it comes to specific cases in this administration, it is hard to explain how we have reached this point. When Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father who was living legally in the State of Maryland with his family, was sent to a terrorist prison in El Salvador because of what was said in court to be an ``administrative error,'' where was the outrage that this man was treated so unfairly, with no evidence except, perhaps, a tattoo that might be connected with a gang? There was no evidence that took this man out of the United States and put him in a prison in El Salvador. Our colleague Senator Chris Van Hollen went down to see him and the conditions he is being held in and never came back with a satisfactory answer of why this man was being charged with a crime. Now, you remember how many times Donald Trump gave speeches at rallies, and he said that we are being overrun by murderers and rapists and terrorists and mentally ill people who came to this country and shouldn't be here, and as a consequence, they were going to change things when he was elected President. What they changed was to take this Mr. Garcia, living legally in Maryland with his family, and, through an administrative error, threw him into a hopeless prison in El Salvador. Is that what America is all about now? Because he had a surname like ``Garcia,'' we can ignore any reference to due process? The President went so far as to suggest he would do the same thing to an American citizen. Now, of course, he says things which he later disavows, but it is outrageous to think a President of the United States would suggest that an American citizen, without due process, would be relegated to a terrorist prison in a foreign country. The American people don't care for that much, and neither do I, because it happens to offend this document: the Constitution of the United States. Can you imagine an immigrant living here under a protected status torn from his home and family for no legally justifiable reason, and then the administration says it was an ``administrative error''? While the Trump administration continues to avoid facilitating the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia as the Supreme Court has ordered him to do, Republicans have remained silent. It was about 6 weeks ago. There were several key appointees by the Trump administration to positions in the Department of Justice. They included a Solicitor General and two other Deputy Attorneys General. During the course of questioning, I asked these individuals a basic question: Do you believe that an executive official can defy a legally held court order? I thought the answer was clear: It is no, and it should be, whatever the President's party may be. Yet they struggled to come up with an answer that suggested maybe, in some cases, it was all right to defy a court order. We have been through this in America. The case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was an effort to integrate schools across America for the first time--an extremely controversial decision, and several other decisions followed from it. But there was a legal court order for that to happen. In order to move forward, you have to start by obedience to the court order. You can criticize it within the realm of ethics, and you can even appeal it, but you can't ignore it. Yet these officials headed for the Trump Department of Justice wanted to equivocate on the answer. Who came to my rescue on my argument? A Republican Senator from Louisiana, John Kennedy, who came in and addressed the three nominees and said: Let me make it clear to you--I paraphrase him I think accurately--your options with a legal court order are to be critical within the bounds of ethics and to appeal the decision if you disagree with it, but you have to obey that order or resign your official position. That was as clear an explanation as I have ever heard. But under the Trump administration, they believe they are above the law. Some do. Or take Donald Trump's ill-conceived, mindless tariff tax war, which I mentioned earlier. Global markets plunged when he came out with his proposals in the beginning of April. It wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth from the stock market and will cause Americans to suffer from higher prices and smaller export markets. The advice which many people are giving to those who are worried about their IRAs and 401(k)s is: Don't look at it. Don't look at the balance. You are going to be too depressed when you see it. And it is because of the chaos in the Trump White House when it comes to our trade policy and economics. While their constituents saw their retirement funds drain and grocery bills skyrocket, sadly, my Republican colleagues remained silent. Rinse and repeat the cycle. Donald Trump threatens to withhold Federal funds from higher education institutions to coerce them to give up their constitutional rights. It is hard to imagine--we are talking about modern America--that a President of the United States who is unhappy with what is being taught at a college or a university threatens to remove all of their Federal funding. For God's sake, this is a democracy. Freedom of speech is part of what we admire in this country so much and what is part of our future and our past. Yet, when it comes to President Trump, he has decided that if they want to teach something that he doesn't care for, whatever it may be, they are going to lose Federal funding. That is being tested in court. The Secretary of Defense violates national security protocol and shares classified war plans in a Signal chat that mistakenly includes a journalist listening to the conversation. You would think that at least one hard-line Republican conservative, some hawk in their ranks, would stand up and say: That is wrong, regardless of who the President may be. But they didn't. The Republicans remain silent. Unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE brothers gut the Federal Government, leading to cuts to lifesaving medical research, Americans unable to get their Social Security benefits, and threats to Medicaid. What was the response from the Republican side to these outrageous developments under the Trump administration? Silence. When our Nation's Founders began the lofty task of building our democracy, they created a system of checks and balances to ensure a stable government and prevent the abuse of power. In 1788, James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper 51: Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. But it seems the ambition of the Republican-controlled legislative branch is all but absent as Donald Trump's government goes out of control. Never in our Nation's history has a coequal branch of government so willfully rolled over and ceded their power. It is, in fact, the silence of the lambs. The President is testing--and violating--the bounds of our Constitution, amassing power for himself as the economy tanks, violating the rights of Americans, and destroying our image abroad. My congressional Republican colleagues have the power to join us in a bipartisan effort to stop it. Has it ever happened in history? It did, very graphically, in history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was upset with the Supreme Court and its rulings on New Deal programs. He went through a reelection cycle and was reelected by a large margin. He then came here to Washington and said: My first order of business is to increase the number of men-- all men then--serving on the Supreme Court so that I can finally get the rulings that I am looking for on my key elements of the New Deal. What was the reaction of the Democratic Congress to the Democratic President, Franklin Roosevelt, who wanted to pack the Court? The reaction was fierce and it was bipartisan in opposition to FDR and he had to drop the plan. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress realized that if a President can control the composition of the Supreme Court and its rulings, that we have lost a valuable part of the protection of our Constitution. My congressional Republicans have the power to join us in a historic stand on so many areas that this President has violated. They have majorities in both Chambers of Congress, and in private moments many of them express outrage and horror at Trump's dangerous abandonment of law, norms, and the will of the American people. But as their constituents suffer, out of fear of retaliation, Republicans remain silent. When we are elected Members of Congress, we swear an oath to the Constitution, not to any politician or any President. It is time both parties remembered that and lived accordingly. So I am coming to the floor regularly to highlight the President's latest outrage and the GOP's inevitable silence in the face of it. Until they start using the voices they were elected to raise, we are going to continue to have a pending constitutional crisis in this country. I yield the floor.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) is necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) is necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, my grandparents and my mother and her two siblings immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in the year 1911. They came over on a ship from Germany to Baltimore and found their way to the city of my birth, East St. Louis, IL. There are very few things left from that voyage experience so long ago. My grandmother had brought with her a Lithuanian Catholic prayer book that was considered, at the time, to be contraband in Czarist Russia. It is a family treasure. I still have it. I keep it in my office as a reminder of her faith and mine. Today, I join people across the world and mourn the passing of Pope Francis. He was forgiving, hopeful, and committed to the notion of peace. Francis taught us that there is no one ``right'' way to be a Catholic; that the church can shape you, and you can shape the church, and in the process, he made the church stronger. Ten years ago, Pope Francis became the first Pope to deliver a joint address to Congress. I was honored to be present for that historic speech and to shake his hand. The Holy Father spoke in that speech about one of my political heroes, Abraham Lincoln. And Pope Francis reminded Members of Congress that: You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics. Pope Francis used his platform to highlight the plight of immigrants and refugees, to ask compassion for those in the LGBTQ community whom the church had historically shunned, to advocate for peace in distant waters, and to protect our environments. Like myself, Pope Francis was the child of immigrants, and he often reminded us of our responsibility to welcome the stranger. In a recent letter to American Catholic bishops, Pope Francis affirmed our Nation's right to ``defend itself and keep communities safe.'' But he raised serious concerns about mass deportation, which ``damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.'' His message is so timely as our government ignores due process and, through an administrative error, sends a person to a hell-hole prison in El Salvador and deports a 2-year-old to Honduras. In one of his final public acts, Pope Francis offered remarks for Easter Sunday. He was so ill he was unable to deliver the speech himself, so it was read by one of his assistants. It was a speech of peace. It was a speech of hope. It was a speech of a truly good man. In it, he pled: On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas. Over the weekend, it was my honor to join Senator Susan Collins and three of our colleagues as part of a delegation of five Senators who represented the U.S. Senate at Pope Francis' funeral at Vatican City. The crowd was overwhelming. Estimated in the hundreds of thousands, they came from every corner of the Earth. Just in our small section was a delegation in business suits from Lesotho in Africa. There were Buddhists in bright orange robes, members of the Italian Parliament, a turbaned Sikh delegation from India, and our bipartisan House delegation, led by Nancy Pelosi and Republican Leader Steve Scalise. Thousands of Catholic clergy on the altar and in the audience wore vestments representing every shade of the colors of scarlet and red. But the vast crowds of mourners and celebrants were simply admirers of Francis, who, in his humble way, touched so many lives. At the front of the alter was his simple wooden casket. The funeral ceremony was in Latin--the language of the Catholic Church when I was a young altar boy at St. Elizabeth's Church in East St. Louis, IL, in the 1950s. As I witnessed this solemn mass and read from the text, I could hear in my mind the rusty hinges of an opening door taking me back to the Latin mass and Gregorian chant of my childhood. It is all still there, ``deo gratias.'' How did this mass differ from the funeral of John Paul decades ago? I remember the crowds of Polish mourners who were there with their red and white flags for John Paul II. But with Francis, what struck me were the many waves of spontaneous cheering from the vast crowd when reference was made to his simple message for immigrants, for peace, and for understanding. Who could forget his five words: Who am I to judge? They defined his humility and his humanity for so many of us. After the ceremony, I went back to my hotel room and turned on my television. There was a recurring segment every few minutes. It showed a simple photograph of Francis and the Italian words, which I will probably mispronounce. They were: ``Grazie Francesco. Il papa della gente.'' Translated to English: ``Thank you, Francis, the Pope of the people.'' We must continue to hold fast to the message of Pope Francis to love and respect one another. In a world of hate and fear, his message of peace and understanding is needed now more than ever. I yield the floor.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fetterman), the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Kaine), the Senator from Washington (Mrs. Murray), the Senator from California (Mr. Padilla), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch), and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the vote scheduled for 11 o'clock begin immediately.

Mr. DURBIN. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) is necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) is necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) is necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Coons), the Senator from New Mexico (Mr. Heinrich), the Senator from Michigan (Mr. Peters), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), the Senator from New Hampshire (Mrs. Shaheen), and the Senator from Oregon (Mr. Wyden) are necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Coons), the Senator from Michigan (Mr. Peters), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), the Senator from New Hampshire (Mrs. Shaheen), and the Senator from Oregon (Mr. Wyden) are necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Michigan (Mr. Peters), the Senator from New Hampshire (Mrs. Shaheen), the Senator from Oregon (Mr. Wyden), the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Coons), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), and the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet) are necessarily absent.