Bernie Moreno

Mr. MORENO

Mr. MORENO. Of course.

Mr. MORENO. Madam President, let's just spend 60 more seconds here to recap what we have. So my colleague from Oregon representing the Democrats--who has been given a lot of time to kind to figure out how to come here--has said that what the position of the Democratic Party today is--today's position--different Saturday, by the way; different Sunday. By the way, different than Monday morning in which the minority leader went on Joe Scarborough and said that it was President Trump who objected to the idea to fund all of DHS except for Enforcement and Removal Operations. And then, of course, I think President Trump was maybe a genius there--because maybe by him saying no on Sunday, it made the Democrats say yes. And then he said yes on Monday evening. Then the Democrats had to go back to no. Kind of crazy. What we are doing is not going to fund for the rest of the fiscal year people who keep our country safe because they want to defund the people whose job it is to keep our borders secure and to deport people who broke into our country illegally, including murderers, rapists, transnational organizations. They do not want to fund those Agencies. I just want that to settle in here and point out to the Presiding Officer that what I proposed today--and the Presiding Officer voted yes--54 Republicans--sorry--53 Republicans and 1 courageous Democrat--54 voted for that. All it would take is 6 Democrats, and 254,000 people would get their paychecks. It is a sad day. I will mark the time, 5:45 p.m. It is a sad day for the U.S. Senate. I yield the floor.

Mr. MORENO

Mr. MORENO. My colleague will yield for a question?

Mr. MORENO. To all the Senators here, I ask you to think about a couple concepts that come from the private sector.

Mr. MORENO. I remember the 2008 financial crisis as follows: It was a situation where any day, you would think, we are going to face total and complete bankruptcy. I had mortgaged everything I owned in my life. I had maxed out my credit cards. I took out loans so big, I couldn't even do the math in my head. I would wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning wondering how I was going to make payroll. My wife would say: Are you OK? I would say: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I am fine. I think, Mr. President, you have been there. I had to ask my team to make a lot of sacrifices. We had to cut pay. We had to make a lot of adjustments because it was a matter of life or death. Either the business was going to survive or we were going to collectively perish into the great abyss of bankruptcy. There is a concept that is important in creating a culture that says that as a leader, you must be willing to live in the shared experience of your team. Now, I will contradict a little bit of what you said. Each of us in this Chamber makes $175,000 a year. That is not what the average American makes. That is dramatically more than the average American makes, and it is certainly a lot more than what the average TSA worker makes or the average FEMA worker who has to go out and help in places all over the country. I saw the very sad storms that Hawaii is seeing, and I hope we get help to those people. But it is not going to be me that goes there; it is going to be the hard-working men and women of FEMA that go there, and they make a fraction of what we do. I can't imagine having a job in which, for the third time in 6 months, you have to explain to your wife or husband or kids: Hey, I didn't get a paycheck today. The kids look at you and say: Well, what did you do? What did you do to not get a paycheck? Were you insubordinate? Did you not show up for work? Did you yell at your boss? Nope. I did everything right--other than work for the Department of Homeland Security. Why would you stay in that job? I think that is the thing we don't understand, is that people have breaking points where they just say: I am just not going to work here anymore. This particular Agency, more than anything else, has a very simple charter: Protect us from dangers from abroad. These are the people that chase transnational criminals. I don't think any of us in this Chamber would be willing to go do that. It is tough work, brutal work. They put their lives at risk. Not only do I think we should give them their paychecks, I think we should say: Thank you. Thank you for being willing to do this job. I will end with this to my colleagues: We have to eat our own dog food. If we don't eat our own dog food, we will get disconnected permanently from the people we serve. If we are willing to accept a paycheck that is three, four times what the average American makes and we deposit that every month and we say: Well, look, I have to pay the bills--I don't care how wealthy you are, if somebody is a multimillionaire or not a multimillionaire, 175 grand a year is a lot of money, certainly enough to pay the bills. Just ask the people who make three times less than that--they figure out how to make the bills. This isn't about giving up the paycheck or giving up money--which, by the way, I think we should. I don't think we should get paid retroactively. I think we should just say: Look, you didn't do your fundamental duty, which is to fund the government, and if you have a policy dispute, then do the hard work. Go into the rooms and make the calls and go out there and persuade your colleagues. In the meantime, don't punish the workers. Don't punish the workers. I grew up coming to America in the seventies and eighties. I looked at Democrats like Tip O'Neill and J.F.K. These were Democrats who said: Above all else, we are the party of the working men and women of this country. We are for the people who built this country. The very wealthy--they are just fine. They are just fine. But we focus on the working men and women of this country. What drove me to run for office--not what I expected ever to do in my life, believe me. I never did. But I do consider it a great honor. Every day, including today--a beautiful, sunny day--I see the Capitol, and I think, my God, what would my mom and dad think if they were alive, that their youngest son gets to work in the U.S. Capitol? It is crazy. Do you know what my mom would say? Only in America. Only in America. But there are 260,000 families that aren't feeling the love right now. The least we could do today is say: We join you in that shared sacrifice. We join you so that we can understand what it is like to have to leave here and say ``Hey, yeah, not good. We are not going to get a paycheck because we didn't do our job.'' If we don't do that, what do you think the message is? You are much more elegant than I am. I think the accent does you 80 percent of the bidding there. But what do you think that says? Here is my question: What does a signal of saying ``No, no, no, no. We insist on getting paid three times what the average American makes. We are not willing to sacrifice anything because maybe we are special''--is that the message that is sent? I yield the floor.

Mr. MORENO. Will my colleague yield for a quick question?

Mr. MORENO. Mr. President, I just wanted to clarify where we are right now because I think it was--we maybe rushed through it. My question to my colleague from Louisiana is: This doesn't remove money from Senators; this just holds the money until the government reopens, much like the employees at DHS, where their paycheck is being held but, once we do our job--because they are doing their job--once we do our job, everybody would then get paid, correct? There is no loss of money. And so that seems to me--would the Senator agree that that is like a bare minimum standard because any of us can go to the clerk of the Senate and say: Hey, hold my check until this government opens. What the Senator's resolution is saying is that all of us should do that, correct?

Mr. MORENO. Will my colleague yield for a question?

Mr. MORENO. I would ask my colleague if he would consider resubmitting your question again as a motion to reconsider.

Mr. MORENO. Mr. President, just a parliamentary inquiry. Again, this is just somebody who has not been here a long time. I just want a clarification--a parliamentary inquiry: In order to speak before the U.S. Senate, my understanding is that the Senator has to yield the floor or complete his speech. Another Senator, if ordered to speak, has to seek recognition from the Chair in order to speak; is that correct or not?

Mr. MORENO. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MORENO

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

Mr. MORENO

Mr. MORENO. Mr. President, today marks the fifth time that Republicans have asked to end debate and allow us to discuss funding the Department of Homeland Security. So for the people at home that don't keep up with Senate procedures, what the Democrats have actually done again, for the fifth time, is not even let us get on the bill and actually debate it. They have refused to allow us to consider the bill, which is a pretty remarkable scenario when you think of the effects. For those who aren't as familiar, the Department of Homeland Security was created right after 9/11, the attacks of 9/11. I don't know about you, Mr. President, but I know exactly where I was when that second plane hit the tower, because that is when we knew we were under attack. We took a bunch of the Agencies that are charged with protecting this country and put them into this very, very large Agency that today employs 260,000 Americans. If this was a private company, it would be absolutely a Fortune 50, maybe even a Fortune 25 enterprise--huge, huge organization. The one part of the Constitution that is crystal clear is that our responsibility is to fund the government. Yet, for the third time, we now are in either a full or partial government shutdown that the Democrats have initiated because they refuse to do the basic work-- funding the government. Now, you will see a lot of noise from the Democrats when they say: Well, we have--they acknowledge that they have not funded the entire Department, so they will say: But we want to fund this Agency or this Agency within the Department of Homeland Security. What they won't tell you--because obviously then they would have to admit what it is they really want--is they don't want to fund Customs and Border Patrol and they don't want to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So you think, well, what do those two Agencies do that would make the Democrats not want to fund them? So let's talk about the first one-- Customs and Border Patrol. All of us who have ever flown in from a foreign country, you see the person that greets you--that is somebody from Border Patrol, Customs. Why would you not want to fund that Agency? I think what is interesting is the way the Senate is set up, the appropriations process is meant to allocate money, and then we have committees whose job it is to set the policies for those. But they don't want to do that. They are tying both together. We just don't want to fund--typically, when you don't want to fund an Agency, it is a way of saying we don't want that function any longer. So they don't want to have Customs? They don't want to have people inspecting packages? We are in the middle of deep hostilities with a very savvy adversary, and you don't want to have somebody guarding our border, checking our ports, making sure these containers don't have hazardous materials? We have all seen the movies. Those are people from Customs and Border Patrol. I haven't heard one rational explanation from my Democratic colleagues why on earth they would not want to fund Customs and Border Patrol. Now, of course, it is no secret to anybody that the Democrats have been held hostage by the extremists in their base who want to both either abolish ICE or defund ICE. So what is ICE? Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is basically broken down into two organizations. You have something called Enforcement and Removal Operations. Now, what do they do? A pretty straightforward mission. If somebody enters the country illegally, a judge gives them a hearing and says: You have a final order of deportation. It is the job of that Agency to remove that person from the country. Is that what they are looking not to have happen any longer? Then the other one is Homeland Security Investigations. What do they do? I am going to read you the mission statement. It says: Criminal investigations targeting transnational criminal organizations and terrorist networks that exploit U.S. customs and immigration laws. It seems like a decently important function. You can see it here on this chart. It is 7,000 special agents. So I wish we would just have a more honest debate here and that my Democrat colleagues would stand up and say: Look, we just want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We want to abolish the Enforcement and Removal Operations. We do not want--they do not want to take people out of the country that are here illegally; it is that simple. Instead, what they are doing is they are keeping 260,000 people without a paycheck. I said, and I will say it again today: I find it deeply ironic and, quite frankly, I will use the word ``disgusting'' that we here in the U.S. Senate are getting paid while 260,000 people aren't getting paid because of political shenanigans from the other side. It is just morally reprehensible. We need to do our job. We need to get the Department of Homeland Security funded. I am going to end with one difference between what we are seeing now and what we saw during the Biden era. I think by any metric, by any standard during Mayorkas' term as the Secretary of Homeland Security, it was a total abject disaster. We allowed tens of millions of unvetted migrants to enter this country. We had no idea who they were, where they came from, what their intent was, or, quite frankly, where they were going. Border Patrol was a total disaster during the Biden years, total and complete failure. But you know what we understood as Republicans? It wasn't the fault of the Border Patrol agents; it was a fault of policy. And yet Republicans still funded the Agency. Because when we are not happy with the executive, we have a few other tools that we should be using. We could have impeached Mayorkas; Democrats unanimously fought against that. By the way, we passed no new laws, and yet our border went from the most open in American history to a border that is now completely zero. Zero illegals entered this country in the last 10 months--zero, not 1. During the Biden years, there was 10,000 a day. Yet Republicans funded Customs and Border Patrol because we knew it was not the fault of the agents; it was the fault of a Commander in Chief and a Cabinet Secretary with Democrat enablers here in Congress that allowed that to happen. Just keep that in mind as these arguments get made. It is Friday. People should be thinking about March Madness and which their favorite team is, what they are going to do for the weekend, and millions and millions of Americans are doing that. But 260,000 American families are wondering how they are going to pay for that barbecue, how they are going to make the rent, how they are going to pay for the car payment, how are they going to pay for that vacation that they had planned because they have now missed three paychecks. I hope to get to a point in time where our Democrat colleagues find their humanity because this is what it is about, their humanity, to do the right thing, fund the Department of Homeland Security, and then let's have a robust argument around oversight and how we do it. I yield the floor.

Mr. MORENO. Thank you. Thank you. Are all of your Democrat colleagues here, because, by our count, there are nine missing.

Mr. MORENO. So we are willing to call our Members back. Are you willing to call your Members back from the California fundraiser that they are doing this weekend?

Mr. MORENO. Will you yield for another question?

Mr. MORENO

Mr. MORENO. Mr. President, for those who are not familiar with what actually happens here in Washington, DC, as I stated earlier, for the fifth time, Democrats have blocked to end debate on whether 260,000 families should get paid for the work that they have done. It is almost ludicrous to even make that statement because the idea that we would withhold the pay of 260,000 hard-working DHS employees is insane. But we haven't actually even had debate. What you see here in this Chamber that is virtually empty is that one person will make a speech, another person will make a speech, and quite frankly there is no interaction. So I actually want to change that a little bit. So to any of my Democratic colleagues that want to speak, I will yield my time if they can answer for me and acknowledge that there are currently 260,000 DHS families going without pay. Is that true or false? OK. No answer on that one. I will break the suspense. That is true. The second thing I will yield for a comment on is: Will any of my Democratic colleagues that are present in this Chamber acknowledge that the Democrats have not agreed--have not agreed--to individually fund Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, and the nuclear threat Agency within the Department of Homeland Security--have absolutely not presented any resolutions or votes to fund those Agencies? Is that true or false? Seeing no response, I will break the silence and say that is true. Would any Democrat in the Chamber acknowledge that fewer than 10 percent of the entire workforce of DHS works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE? Well, they can fact-check me, but the answer is that is true. Of the 22,000 ICE employees, will any Democrat in this Chamber acknowledge that the vast majority of those employees work for Homeland Investigations? What do they do? That is the group that identifies, chases, and catches really bad guys. These are the people who actually go out and find the worst of the worst, transnational groups. The vast majority of ICE employees work for that division. Is that true or false? Would you acknowledge that that is accurate? OK. Hearing no comments from my Democratic colleagues, the answer to that is it is true. So the remaining 5,000 employees out of 260,000 that my colleagues do not want to give a paycheck despite the fact that they came to work for the last 35 days--unlike anybody in this Chamber who has not come to work the last 35 days because that has definitely not happened--will they acknowledge that collective punishment is a bad idea? In other words, would they acknowledge that punishing 5,000 people who work for Enforcement and Removal Operations because a couple dozen--maybe, generously, a couple dozen; probably less; probably a handful maybe didn't do everything perfectly--you are recommending that we collectively punish all 5,000 people? Is that what you are saying? No response. The answer is only a politician would think that that is a good idea. Only a politician would think that collective punishment is the way to go. You are punishing 260,000 employees in the Department of Homeland Security because you think that if you had been in that situation, you would have acted differently. Four or five, six, seven people that you think did the wrong thing gives you the moral authority to take away the paychecks of 260,000 people. And I am going to look forward to hearing from my colleague from Utah, who has done so much work to put together the SAVE America Act. And he actually hasn't had anybody say this to him: Thank you. Thank you for the hard work. You have put in I can't even imagine how many hours--you and your staff. You have been willing to listen to anybody who wants to improve your bill, and yet you have gotten very little feedback, except for on the floor when they accused you of God knows what. But I will ask my Republican colleague--because I watched it on TV, and so I am going to ask my Republican colleague to answer whether this is true or false; and any of my Democratic colleagues I will yield to if they want to jump in. I suspect they won't. Is it true that, yesterday, my fellow Republican Senator, Senator Husted, who is doing an amazing job--a good man that I have known for 20 years. Is it true that he proposed a bill that would have simply required photo ID to vote? Not a photo ID that proves you are a citizen, which I think we should have that, but just a simple photo ID the way any of us have to walk in and out of this building? Is that true?

Mr. MORENO. I yield to my colleague from Utah.

Mr. MORENO. It does. Unless any of my Democratic colleagues want to debate any of the items I mentioned--hearing no debate, I yield the floor.

Mr. MORENO. Will my colleague from Utah yield for a question?

Mr. MORENO. There are just a few of us here in this Chamber, but I see my colleague from Connecticut. So I am going to ask the Senator a question, my colleague from Utah. Would it surprise you to know that, just a couple of years ago, a Democrat State representative in Connecticut proposed a bill to allow all undocumented noncitizens the right to vote? It is estimated that there are 240,000 illegal aliens in the State of Connecticut; yet a Democrat-elected official proposed that bill. Would that surprise you?

Mr. MORENO

Mr. MORENO. Mr. President, I would like to continue exactly the themes my colleague from Vermont brought up, except I think, before we talk about artificial intelligence, we should talk about natural intelligence. It absolutely goes against natural intelligence for us to sit here in this Chamber knowing that we have 260,000 working American families, who work for our government, who are doing their job and not getting paid. That, to me, is the crisis we should be talking about. And, yes, I agree with my colleague from Vermont. We should not be worried about Mr. Musk or any of the other billionaires going hungry. I worry about our TSA agents going hungry. I worry about our Coast Guard people going hungry. I worry about the people at FEMA going hungry. And yet, with total disregard for over a quarter of a million families, we sit in this Chamber, and we are getting paid. Everybody here is getting paid, and yet they are not. And I applaud my colleague from Vermont, who is walking out of the floor, for caring about working Americans. Why don't we care about them? Why don't we fund DHS now? Why don't we worry about those families who, by the way, according to the last Secretary of Homeland Security--the last one said--and I am going to quote here: The average [TSA agent] lives paycheck-to-paycheck. We have taken away three paychecks. Three paychecks we have taken away from them. If there was ever a time we needed to fund [DHS], it's . . . now. This is not a Republican Secretary saying that. It is a Democrat Secretary of Homeland Security saying that. I don't understand how, in a leadership role--which is what we are here in the U.S. Senate--we would allow the suffering of 260,000 families to go with this much contempt and, instead, fund DHS in its entirety. Allow those families to get paid. Mr. President, you were a business guy like I was. Could you ever look at yourself in the mirror when you owned your businesses and know, because of your actions, the people who worked for you weren't getting paid and were suffering? It is impossible. I remember when I started my first business. I felt the weight of success because I had to take care of my family. But for those early families, for that first business that I bought, every day I walked in, I felt this incredible responsibility. Man, if I made bad decisions, if I make a bad decision today, people will go hungry who work for me. And that drove me to succeed. We are totally disconnected. We sit here in this Chamber. It doesn't even touch any of us, and I think that is a disgrace. I think we should, very simply, do what has always been done before we became this hyperpartisan Chamber: We fund the government responsibly. And then, if we have policy disagreements, we can sit down. By the way, right now, just down this hallway--just down this hallway--there are Democrat colleagues and Republican colleagues of good faith sitting down to negotiate differences to get the Department of Homeland Security funded. We have American citizens that are paying taxes to fund the government to work that is not working. I know that sometimes pleading with my colleagues to have some level of humanity is ineffective because, quite frankly, maybe this place takes a little humanity away from you. Maybe you don't see how these decisions affect many, many people. So with that, Mr. President, I am going to ask a very, very, very simple request--very simple. I am going to ask unanimous consent that this body, the U.S. Senate, proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 156, H.R. 4553; I further ask that the substitute amendment at the desk be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table. What this means in English, to the person who may be watching, is this funds the entire Department of Homeland Security for 2 weeks. Everybody gets paid up to date. We get the Department open, and then let the work that is being done now proceed. I ask that that happen.

Mr. MORENO. Mr. President, I am not sure what I just heard because I just offered to fund TSA. I just offered to fund the Coast Guard, FEMA, Customs and Border Patrol, Secret Service, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, USCIS, Homeland Security Investigations. Let's do it for 2 weeks. Let's do that for 2 weeks. Down the hall--down the hall--there are Senators of good faith that are getting together to end this political charade. So, to my colleague, I will yield the floor for a simple question: Why would you want to fund just TSA and not the Coast Guard? Not, for example, in your State, the American Immigration Council, which deals with 102,700 undocumented immigrants in Michigan--why wouldn't you want enforcement around that? Why wouldn't you want to fund the Department that allows people like me, who, when I was 18 years old, applied for citizenship? Why wouldn't we want to fund 3,300 employees--some of them in your State--that actually process legal immigrants? Why wouldn't we fund that? Why wouldn't we fund 7,000 special agents that are there to stop transnational criminals? Why wouldn't we fund 200 employees that fund--and you were a CIA agent--that fund biological and nuclear threat prevention? Why wouldn't we do that? Why wouldn't we fund 60,000 employees at Customs? You care a lot about the bridge that was hopefully due to be opened from Canada. You need Border Patrol agents there. You need Customs there. Why wouldn't we fund that? Why wouldn't we do that for 2 weeks--2 weeks--and then we can get together. Why wouldn't we do that? Why just fund one narrow slice of the Department of Homeland Security? I am just curious why you would do that.

Mr. MORENO. Will you yield for a question?

Mr. MORENO. Look, I appreciate--and I know you are a person of good character, by the way. I genuinely believe that. But that is not what you are asking for. You are asking to fund just TSA, meaning the question is this: Why would we use 260,000 people and their families as pawns in a negotiation? Why wouldn't we pay all those people? So will you consider adding a bill that I have put together that says that as long as we haven't fully funded the government, we get money taken out of our paychecks--not held in suspension, but we actually would lose compensation, about $500 a day, every day that goes by where we haven't fully funded the government. Would you consider adding that to your resolution?