Rand Paul

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, here we go again. Senators of both parties will once again kick the can down the road. Our national debt is over $34 trillion and growing at an alarming rate. The majority of the Senate meets today to vote once again for more deficit spending. We now know that the Federal Reserve is not only buying the Federal debt; they are buying the debt of profligate, large- spending States like California, New York, and Illinois. My amendment would make it explicitly illegal for the Federal Reserve to buy the debt of these big-spending, profligate individual States. It was never intended that Congress give the Fed the power, and we should make sure that it is explicit that the Federal Reserve cannot buy the debt of individual States. I urge a ``yes'' vote.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, what we have here is a ``Ukraine First'' bill. This bill was never really about securing our border but about securing another country's border. What we have here is a failure of the elites of Washington on both sides of the aisle--the leadership of the Democratic Party, the leadership of the Republican Party--what we have here is a failure of these elites to understand that the American people want to put America first. Sixty-one percent of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, and they want to put Ukraine first. I want you to talk to your constituents at home, the ones who live paycheck to paycheck, and tell them why you are shipping $60 billion to Ukraine. This will be $170 billion. We have never before in the history of the United States flooded so much money into another country. Sixty-one percent of our country lives paycheck to paycheck. Eight out of 10 families who make $50,000 or less won't have enough money to pay their bills in 2 weeks if their check doesn't come. If they have one interruption in their family, one thing that sets them back, one unexpected expense, they won't have enough money to pay their bills, and you want to put Ukraine first. This is why the Democratic Party is losing the working man. This is why the Republicans have become the party of the working class. This is why many, if not most, members of the unions are now looking at Republicans--because we support the working man and we support the working women of America, and we recognize that they do not want to send their hard-earned money and taxes halfway across the world. What does their money go for? Do we know what they are doing with their money in Ukraine? Well, we do know that the money went to fund six fashion brands to go to the Paris fashion show. We do know that it is funding small businesses to sell ladies' handbags. We do know that it is paying for the salaries of 57,000 first responders. What about the first responders in our country? What about the people who get in an ambulance and have a $35,000 bill in our country? What about tackling the problems of America first? Instead, this bill is a ``Ukraine First'' bill. It is a ``Ukraine First'' policy. According to the ``Ukraine First'' party, which includes elites of both parties, war is good; war is useful; war profits make us stronger. It sounds a bit Orwellian. They say that war profits will build the defense industrial base. This is the part they used to say quietly. They used to whisper this. They used to never say it out loud, that war profits fund the defense industrial base. And by golly, we are going to be stronger the more war profits there are. According to the ``Ukraine First'' party, war is not so bad. More profits make us stronger. Lost in this reprehensible argument is any sense of grief over the 500,000 dead, for the mothers and fathers weeping graveside. Little sense of grief, little sense of understanding that supporting and lauding grief is supporting and lauding the death of war. Missing from the ``war profits are good'' argument is any sense of compassion for the thousands of lives that will yet be lost by the prolongation of this war. If military contracts for 100,000 rifles are good, what about 1 million rifles? If military contracts for 1,000 tanks are good, what about 1 million tanks? If military contracts for 500 bombs are good, what about military contracts for 5,000 bombs? Missing from the argument that war profit is good, that the more armaments we sell, the better, is compassion for the deaths that we are talking about, the prolongation of war. You know, war doesn't end typically in victory. Almost all wars end in negotiated settlement. The longer there are unlimited war profits, the longer there are unlimited weapons being sent to Ukraine, the longer the war goes on, the more people who die. This is a grinder. It is a meat grinder over there. There are whole towns without young men. Do I think Russia is in the wrong? Of course they are. Are they the aggressor? Of course they are. Do I have sympathy for Ukraine? Absolutely. But we also are now funneling money to a country that has no elections. They have canceled their Presidential elections. They have suppressed speech. They have banned certain opposition parties. They have banned certain opposition press. They have banned officials of opposition religion. Now, this should bother people because it is said that American might and foreign aid is to express our power and our values. Are our values no elections? Are our values suppressing speech? What has become confusing even in our country is the Democratic Party has become the party of censorship. They are the party that agrees that the Biden administration is OK to meet with the FBI, to meet with Homeland Security, and to meet in the offices of Twitter, meet in the offices of Facebook. They suppressed for over a year anybody who is willing to say that it looks like the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. That was suppressed for over a year not just by private business but by the government, by the Biden administration meeting the FBI, Homeland Security, meeting with the tech companies. So it doesn't surprise me that they don't care too much; just get the honey out the door even though, in Ukraine, they are living under a regime where speech has been suppressed. What the ``American Firsters,'' what the ``Ukraine Firsters'' are really arguing for is an ``America Last'' policy. They are really arguing for a longer, bigger, more deadly war because it expands the profits of the defense industrial base. How despicable. How absolutely disgusting. They are saying the quiet part out loud. They are OK with war. The longer the war, the more profits, the stronger the American defense base. It is a circular argument: We are not sending the money to Ukraine; it is coming right back. It is coming back in the form of profits to the American arms merchants. It is OK. We are really not going to lose $170 billion because it is coming back in profits. We will make more bombs. What ever happened to the progressive left? Wasn't it great when there were people on the left who actually were progressive on things such as war? How absolutely disgusting to argue that war profits are a benefit, a benefit that somehow overshadows the awful specter of war's death and carnage. The amount of money going to Ukraine in this bill is more than we spend on the entire Marine Corps. Think about it. We are going to send to Ukraine more money than we spend on our own Marine Corps. This is a bill about ``Ukraine First.'' This is a bill that makes us weaker. There is no money to give to Ukraine. It is not like we have a pot of money. There is no surplus. There is no rainy day fund. This money will be printed up or borrowed from China to send to Ukraine. It makes us weaker. Once the border bill failed and they decided that this wasn't really about the border, that this was about Ukraine's border, the ``America Firsters'' plowed on but with a more intellectually honest proposal: Nothing for America, everything for Ukraine. That is what this bill is: nothing for America; nothing to stop the invasion of nearly a million people across our southern border. They offered a border bill that would have said: Well, if we have an emergency. The emergency has already happened. Nearly a million people came in the last 2 months. That is the emergency. This is a bill that is ``Ukraine First'' and America last and ought to be defeated. I notice my colleague from Alabama is here. I reserve the remainder of time. Can you tell me how much time I have left?

Mr. PAUL. Thank you.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, often the titles of bills before the legislature don't really represent what the bill stands for. The title of this bill should say ``Ukraine First, America Last'' because that is what this is really about. Now, bills in the legislature, bills that come before the Senate, don't have pictures or covers on them like a book would have or a magazine. But if this bill had an image or a cover on the front of the bill, the image would be the migrant in New York who assaulted a police officer, was freed from jail on no bail, and gave the middle finger of both hands to America. That is what this bill is. It is the middle finger to America. This bill is the middle finger to every working man and woman in America, every struggling American family. This bill gives them the middle finger and says: We don't care about you. We care more about Ukraine than we care about our southern border. We don't seem to care or these ``Ukraine Firsters'' don't seem to care about the crime that is happening. They don't seem to care about the assault on a police officer in New York. They are intent on more coming in. Just that one image of that man, that migrant, that illegal immigrant who came across the border and decided to assault, with a whole group of other thugs, to assault a police officer in New York-- just that image alone ought to be enough for us to say: Enough is enough. Enough is enough. We really have to control our border. Guess what. From now on, the only people who can come into America are legal immigrants. But this bill--this bill--ignores the southern border. Almost a million people came over the border in the last 3 months, almost a million people. And the ``Ukraine Firsters'' are saying: We don't care about the southern border; we care about Ukraine first. And so the picture, the image that every American should have when they see all of these billions of dollars--$60 billion being shoveled out the door, being loaded on the plane--as you see the smiling politicians gleefully dropping off the pallets of cash over there, every American should remember the image of the young man giving America the bird after he assaulted a police officer. That is the image of this bill. That is the image of the ``Ukraine Firsters,'' and nobody should forget about it. When we look at the problems that we face, we need to be fully aware that there is no pot of money. There are no surplus funds. There is no money to give to Ukraine. We don't have enough money to pay our bills. We do not have enough money to pay for what we budget every year. In fact, the entire budget that Congress votes on is borrowed. Let me make that very clear: The entire budget--not a little bit of it, not half of it, the entire budget--is borrowed. This would be like someone saying: Well, yeah, I don't have any money for rent, and I don't have a job. I am going to borrow the money for my rent. That is essentially where we are. Two-thirds of spending up here is entitlements. All of the tax revenue from every source that comes into the Federal Government is only enough to pay for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and food stamps. Everything else is borrowed. And we don't vote on the entitlements. The entitlements are on autopilot. What do we vote on? We vote on what is military discretionary and nonmilitary discretionary--$1.5 trillion. So people talk about: What is a trillion dollars? Well, we are running a $1.5 trillion deficit in 1 year. So in 2 years, $3 trillion is accumulated. How much is a trillion? How much is $3 trillion? If you take a trillion in $1 bills and you stack them up, $3 trillion would reach to the Moon. So 240,000 miles high would be the stack of $1 bills. That is what we borrow in a 2-year period. But it is accelerating. Just in the last week, the Federal Reserve Chairman said the debt problem is ``urgent.'' Jamie Dimon, head of one of the big banks, JPMorgan Chase, says: The problem is urgent. Some of the economists and authors that wrote about the collapse in 2008 that predicted it coming have said that the debt is an urgent problem. So how does the Senate respond to some of the keenest minds in the country saying that we have a debt crisis? They respond by sending $100 billion of your money overseas. And it is not money we have got on hand. It is not cash on hand. We don't have any money. We are flat broke. People say: It is for our national defense. We have these ``Cold Warriors'' who still believe in the domino theory, and they say we are going to be somehow overrun by communists if we don't do this. But we have no money. There is no money to be sent over there. It all has to be borrowed. The title of this bill should be ``Ukraine First, America Last,'' if they were being honest. Sixty-one percent of Americans work paycheck to paycheck. Eight out of 10 Americans who make $50,000 don't have enough money on hand to pay their bills. If something goes wrong for them, do you think they are excited about having their tax dollars shipped off to Ukraine? Ukraine first, America last--that is what this bill is about. It is about giving the middle finger to America. It is about giving the middle finger to every working-class man and woman in America. It is an insult. It should be rejected. It should be soundly rejected, and we should get back to the business of this country, which is protecting our borders. We have got a real problem. Democrats didn't even seem to think there was a border problem until a few hundred of them were shipped to New York, and, all of a sudden, they think there is a problem now. So they put them up in a fancy hotel, and they spend millions of dollars coddling them. But, mark my words, the American people are smarter than the elitists up here. The title of this bill is and ought to be if they were honest: ``Ukraine First and America Last.'' That is what the authors should have called this bill. I reserve the balance of my time. How much time do I have remaining?

Mr. PAUL. I yield the floor.

Mr. PAUL. All right. So one of the proposals I have had--I think it is a modest proposal and you would think it would be a no-brainer and should have been adopted unanimously, and that is to have an inspector general oversee the money. We have been doing this in Afghanistan for 20 years, but we still spent nearly $2 trillion in Afghanistan over 20 years. But at least there was someone trying to watch because in times of war, a lot of things happen. You talk about the fog of war? Sometimes there are atrocities, sometimes there is killing of civilians--almost always--but there is also a lot of stealing. They have a name for it. It used to have a bad connotation--``war profiteer.'' But it happens. In Afghanistan, there was a hotel being built, and it was being built across the street from our Embassy. It was framed out. It was halfway-- it was at least started. You could tell it was going to be a hotel. As it was being built, somebody said: Wow, looks like they will look right down into the courtyard of our Embassy. Somebody said: Wow, wouldn't that be a safety risk? The other one said: Yes, I think you are right. So the construction slowed down when they evaluated the possible safety risk of building a tall hotel looking down on our Embassy. Meanwhile, the guy who had the money fled to Jordan with $60 million. It was going to cost $80 million, and they put about $20 million into it. It was left there as an eyesore. My understanding is that it was eventually torn down. How did we know about this? Because we had an inspector general. The inspector general is called SIGAR, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. So I had a proposal over a year ago. I said: Why don't we take the inspector general who has been doing this in Afghanistan, already has a budget--because I just happen to be conservative with everything--and I said: We don't even need a new budget. The guy already has a budget. He has $10 or $15 million in his budget. Why don't we switch him over from Afghanistan to Ukraine? I told absolutely everyone I know about it, and when I go home, I mention it. People mention it to me. I have not heard of one person who is opposed to it. I have not heard of one person who would be opposed to having an inspector general. So we voted on it. The other side almost universally voted it down, and some on my side voted against it. Why? Because the inspector general has a history of finding waste. They don't like it. I picked him because he apparently is good at his job. He has a whole series of maybe 50 to 100 economists, accountants, people who are used to looking at war spending, and he finds the people wasting it. He writes a book on it every year. One of the waste projects he found was a natural gas gas station. This is the kind of ludicrous stuff that people at home don't know about, and this is the stuff the other side sticks in everything. Everything has to be green. We are going to make the military green. So they decided they wanted to have s natural gas gas station in Afghanistan. You have to realize this is a country where a lot of the food is still cooked on open fires, and people ride burros, not natural gas cars. But they built it. They spent $45 million building a natural gas gas station 30, 40 miles out from any military site--couldn't be protected. But then they discovered another problem, and I guess maybe they hadn't thought this through. They wanted to go green. They wanted to get rid of the internal combustion. They wanted to go to natural gas and away from gasoline. They were going to solve climate change in Afghanistan, a country of open fires. So they built this natural gas gas station for 45 million bucks, but lo and behold, do you know what they discovered? Nobody had a car that ran on natural gas. So, never to be deterred, the wastefuls of American spending said: Let's buy them cars that go on natural gas. We have a gas station. We have to get them cars that run on natural gas so we can cure global warming in Afghanistan. So they bought them I think 24 cars that ran on natural gas, but they didn't think this one through, either. The people now had a gas station that delivered natural gas to their cars. We gave them a couple of cars that ran on natural gas. But they didn't have any money. So they said: Let's give them a credit card. So they got them credit cards to buy natural gas. We have a gas station with natural gas, natural gas cars, but now here is your credit card. But they didn't think that all the way through, either. It turns out that people were still killing each other in that part of the world, and it was too dangerous for our soldiers to protect. So when one of my staff members asked to see the natural gas gas station, he was told by our soldiers: Too dangerous to see it. So, as you can imagine, this natural gas gas station now looks like-- if you can imagine an inner-city gas station with the copper pipes torn out, you know, anything that is of value torn out of the ground, that is your natural gas station in Afghanistan. That is your 45 million bucks. And that is war even with an inspector general who found out about it. Can you imagine what war is like with no inspector general? Now, the other side would say: Oh, well, the Department of Defense has an inspector general. Well, yes, they do. This is the Department of Defense that is missing a couple of trillion dollars' worth of equipment. This is the Department of Defense that says they are too big to be audited. So I would say that you have to be a little bit wary of just saying: Well, the Department of Defense will watch this money. I mentioned earlier about a billion dollars. You know, what is a billion? So a million dollars in the palm of your hand is thousand- dollar bills--if you had thousand-dollar bills, 4 inches high would be a million dollars. A billion dollars is more difficult to visualize, but to put a billion into perspective, a billion seconds ago, Reagan was starting his second term. A billion minutes ago, the Pantheon was being completed in Rome. A billion hours ago was the stone age, over 100,000 years ago. But a billion dollars ago, at the rate we are spending money, was just a little more than 2 minutes ago. Now, that is a billion. See, you wonder how bad things are around here? We used to think a billion was a lot of money, but now we have trillion--$34 trillion. I remember when George W. Bush was President, it was $5 trillion, and it went to $10 trillion. I was, like, gosh, this is terrible. This is a Republican administration. Then when Obama was President, it went from 10 to 20. Then when Trump was, it went up 7\1/2\, 8, in 4 years--even at a more alarming rate. Each President has been worse. They have all been bad. Congress deserves some of the blame, too. It doesn't happen without Congress. But the money is going crazy. We are up to about $1.5 trillion. I looked this up this morning. I wanted to know, if you stacked one- dollar bills and you wanted to know how big $1.5 trillion is. Well, if you take 2 years' worth of debt--that is $3 trillion--and you want it in one-dollar bills? The one-dollar bills would stack all the way to the Moon, over 230,000 miles away. We are starting to talk about a bit of money here. But it is not just the overall debt. When they pay for the debt, the Federal Reserve dilutes the currency, and the currency becomes worth less and less. But also what happens is that our interest rates increase over time. So under George W. Bush, we went from $5 to $10 trillion, we doubled the debt from $5 to $10 trillion. In that period of time, the interest rate was cut in half, so the interest rate really wasn't a lot worse. But we finally, I believe, have lost the ability for the Federal Reserve to suppress interest rates. Interest rates have risen, and interest payments have doubled. We are on course within the next year or so to have interest rates become the largest item, pushing out and crowding out other spending in the budget. Mark my words--this $100 billion will add to that problem, and I think it is absolutely an utter mistake and an insult to every American that we ignore the invasion on our southern border in order to send money overseas. I reserve the balance of my time. I ask the Parliamentarian how much time remains.

Mr. PAUL. Thank you.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, open the champagne, pop the cork, the Senate Democrat leader and the Republican leader are on their way to Kyiv. They have got $60 billion they are bringing. I don't know if it will be cash in pallets, but they are taking your money to Kyiv. Now, they didn't have much time, really no time and no money to do anything about our border. We are being invaded. A literal invasion is coming across our border--800,000 people came illegally last month--and all they had time to do in the Senate was get the money, get the cash pallets, load the planes, get the champagne ready, and fly to Kyiv. On Friday, they will take the $60 billion to Kyiv, crack the champagne; and meanwhile, each day, between 5 to 10,000 people come across the border illegally. Now they put up a sham bill, and they said: You should have taken the sham bill. You should have taken the ruse. We gave you a border bill. But the border bill would allow 5,000 people a day to come across, and then they would declare an emergency. Guess what? The emergency is already here. Madam President, 700,000 people in 2 months is an emergency. Nearly 800,000 people in 2 months is an emergency. But they gave lie to the ruse when they tweeted out their great bullet points on how great this deal was going to be. They tweeted out: The border never closes. So they were putting forward this great border bill that the President would use to stop illegal immigration, but they tweeted out that of all the main points that this would do, the border never closes. And this is actually true, because what would happen is they would close the illegal crossings, but leave the legal crossings open. It is like, why wouldn't we have the illegal crossing always closed? Why wouldn't we, after having 750,000 people come in illegally, close down the illegal crossings immediately? And what also gives lie to their assertions is that we have the same laws we had under President Trump and President Trump controlled the border. So how could President Trump do it with the same set of laws, and now they are saying if you only gave us power, we would do something? But what gives lie to this assertion is that they are in court every day trying to dismantle the barriers that Texas puts up. Texas and 30-some-odd Republican Governors have said: Enough is enough. They have put cargo containers and razor wire on the border to say: No more illegal crossings. So the Biden administration, who says just give us more power and we will do something about the border, went all the way to the Supreme Court to get the power, and they have it temporarily--they may not keep it--but they have fought tooth and nail to remove the cargo containers, remove the razor wire, and remove the border barriers. So which is it? They want more power to shut down illegal immigration, or they want to remove the border obstacles to illegal immigration? They can't have it both ways. Well, some would argue that this appears to be that you don't want immigrants in your country. Nothing could be further from the truth. We admit a million immigrants to our country every year, and I am for that. In fact, I am cosponsor of a half dozen bills to increase lawful immigration. I think it would be difficult for America to do a lot of things, including building houses, apartments, and commercial construction, without new people coming to the country. I think some of the best Americans just got here. Many of them are my friends. Bowling Green, KY, is known for people from all over the world. We have a hundred languages being spoken in our schools. This has nothing to do with not wanting immigrants. It has to do with not wanting 750,000 people to come across who we don't know who they are. Most of them are males of a military age. And we are doing nothing. So we come to an inflection point. That is where we are, an inflection point, and we had a chance. Madam President, 41 of us--41 Republicans--could have stood and said, no, we want something better. There is an emergency on the border; we will not settle for anything until we get a border security bill. Instead, it folded. Why? Because Republican leadership is flying with the Democratic leadership to Kyiv because they have prioritized Ukraine over the southern border. There is no other way to put it. We have a disaster at our southern border, and the ranking Republicans and the ranking Democrats, there is no difference, they are on the same team. They will be on the same plane to Kyiv--Republicans and Democrats, same plane, pallets of cash, your money, to Ukraine. Even if you could make the argument--and I think there is an argument that there is a noble cause, that these people are fighting for their independence, and they are fighting against aggression. All of that is true--but there is no money to give them. We are out. We are flat out of cash. Not only are we flat out of cash, we are $34 trillion in the hole. We are borrowing money like it is going out of style. We have never ever borrowed money at this alarming rate. It is hard to even fathom the billions of dollars that goes out the door. It has been said before, but people have asked: How do you imagine--how do you put into perspective a billion dollars? What is a billion dollars? If you put a million dollars in the palm of your hand in thousand- dollar bills, it would be 4 inches high. But a billion dollars is difficult--more difficult to visualize. To put a billion into perspective, a billion seconds ago, Reagan was starting his second term. A billion minutes ago, the Pantheon was being completed in Rome. A billion hours ago, we were in the Stone Age, over a hundred thousand years ago. But a billion dollars ago, just a couple of minutes. In the time that I will speak, the government will spend billions upon billions of dollars, virtually a billion every 2 minutes, $30-some billion in the space of an hour. It is out of control. If you look at the debt that is being incurred, people say: What does it matter? You could be like Dick Cheney and some of these Republicans: Eh, deficits don't matter. We don't care about the deficits. Well, you should, and you see the results of the deficit every time you fill up your car, every time you go to the grocery store, every time you buy something, you are seeing the results of the debt. The way we pay for the debt is we print out money. The Federal Reserve buys the debt, but the Federal Reserve has no money, so they print up the money, and they dilute the value of the existing currency. What does that mean? Inflation. Prices go up. But so does the cost of the government. People have cost-of-living increases, and I don't begrudge that, but it is 9 percent in the last year or so, so the costs of Social Security are going through the roof. The costs of Medicare are going through the roof. But do you hear a peep? Not one peep about the problem paying our own bills. We are basically like renters paying for our apartment. In what kind of world do you borrow money to send charity? If you see a homeless person and you want to help them but you have no money, would you go to the first corner and go into the bank and say: I want to help homeless people. Will you give me a thousand dollars so I can help homeless people? No one does that. If you are paying the rent for your apartment, do you go to the bank and borrow the rent for your apartment? No, there are times at which you borrow against things of value. You can borrow against a home that you have a downpayment on. You can borrow for capital improvements like schools or roads, but you don't borrow for your daily expenses. That is what is going on here. Realize that two-thirds of the spending is entitlements: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and food stamps is two-thirds of all spending. That is all we have enough money for. Tax revenue pays for that; everything else is borrowed. You will hear people talk about a budget. They say, Congress votes on a budget. Well, the budget we vote on is equal to about $1.5 trillion, that is the debt. Every bit of the budget we vote on is borrowed. Last month we borrowed $210 billion, so we are on course to borrow over $2 trillion at that rate. People are alarmed by this. The head of the Federal Reserve, Powell, said the other day that the problem was ``urgent,'' and these are the kind of people that pick their words carefully. The debt is urgent. The need to restrain spending is urgent. And so how does leadership respond? The Republican leaders and the Democratic leaders have gotten together to send $100 billion to another country while they can't pay the bills for our country. We are borrowing money to pay our rent as citizens in our own country, and we are sending $100 billion to another country. Under what world is that a good idea? It is a terrible idea. The Federal Reserve Chairman has said the problem is urgent. Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan Chase, has said the problem is urgent. Nassim Taleb, the author of ``The Black Swan,'' has said it is urgent. You have all of these people, some who predicted the crisis in 2008, saying it is an imminent crisis. The debt crisis hangs over us. There is a danger of destroying the dollar and destroying our country, and leadership is concerned about making their plane to Kyiv. The Republican leader and the Democratic leader will be on a plane to Kyiv--I am assuming with champagne and pallets of cash. Have you ever seen the pictures when they unload the pallets of American cash? When they did it in Iraq? How much oversight do you think there is on pallets of cash? How much is stolen? We will never know because they have refused to have an inspector general. I have forced at least two votes on this. I have been advocating for over a year. I am not for sending your money to Ukraine, but if you are going to send it, can we at least count how much is being stolen? Ukraine has been on the top 10 list for one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and nobody is watching the money. Now journalists in Ukraine have actually caught a few people. We haven't caught anybody. If you ask our people from our Defense Department, they will say: Oh, nothing to see here. You realize our Defense Department has never been audited. We have been trying to audit the Pentagon in our country for two decades. Do you know what the Pentagon tells Congress? We are too big to be audited. You know what my response is? You are too big then. You should be smaller if you can't even audit the money we are spending. They routinely lose billions of dollars. They routinely have billions of dollars paid where they have no idea where the dollars went. And so in the midst of this, in the midst of a $1.5 trillion deficit this year, at least, the leadership has come together. People say they want compromise, well, you are getting it today, but it is the wrong kind of compromise. It is compromise to loot the Treasury. It is compromise to spend money we don't have. We have not one penny saved. There is no savings; there is no rainy day fund, they are shoveling out borrowed cash. Essentially, they have to borrow this from China. They either borrow it from China or they print it up, but there is no money. There is no money sitting around; it has all been spent. There isn't enough money to take care of the stuff they have already promised. So everyone on the other aisle and half the people on this side that are wanting to send more cash over there have also promised they are going to take care of you, so all the entitlement programs are out there. Well, the entitlement programs consume all of our tax revenue. There is no money beyond that. So the military and the nonmilitary discretion that is about a third of the overall spending, there is no money for it. It is all borrowed. So we are going to add to that. Now, I have often asked the question: Couldn't we maybe set priorities, and if you really believe that Ukraine is part of our national security--which is ludicrous--but if you believe that, maybe the money should come out of the defense budget. If this is truly defending Ukraine is defending our country--which is ludicrous--but if it were, we are at $880 billion in our military budget. This is more than the next 10 countries in NATO combined. If you really want to send your money to Ukraine, take it out of the military budget. Take it out of something. This is a perpetual problem, but I think the American public needs to know as Republican leadership and Democratic leadership jet off to Kyiv, cracking the champagne, and delivering pallets of cash, they need to know that there was opposition to this. People say, why do you come to the floor? Why do you make the poor Senators be here over the Super Bowl weekend? Why do you make them cancel their vacations? Do you think I do it just to be mean or out of spite? I do it because I care about our country. I care about the bankrupting of America. I care about the looting of our treasury. (Ms. BUTLER assumed the Chair.) There can be an honest debate over national security or what is in our vital security, but there never is a debate. If you look closely at what people say, they will simply declare it is in our national security to send money to Ukraine. There isn't really a debate. I actually think it is the opposite. I think sending money to Ukraine actually makes our national security more endangered. I think it threatens our vital national security to send more money to Ukraine. Why? Because I think it threatens the fiscal solvency of our country. I think it, along with so much of the rest of the spending, is dragging America down and threatening a day of destruction. There have been civilizations that have destroyed their currency, and, typically, this happened on the heels of war. After World War I, Germany destroyed their currency. After World War II, England was in arrears to such an extent that they no longer were the dominant currency after World War I and II, and the United States became the dominant currency. I think that we should think twice before sending our money overseas. I think we should think twice about the problems we have here at home. But I think the American people ought to look at those here in this body who are willing to prioritize another country over our country. I think they need to look at that and decide: Is this what you want? Is this what the American people really want? Did you elect these people to ignore the southern border and to send money to look at Ukraine's border--to prioritize Ukraine's border over the U.S. border? Is that what you elected these people to do? And, if you did, do you not care about the bankrupting of America? Do you not care about the destruction of the dollar? It is happening every day, and it is happening sort of gradually--5, 10 percent a year of lost purchasing power. But there are people who are left behind, the people whose salaries aren't adjusting with inflation, people who are being squeezed by this inflation. And people say: Whose fault was the inflation, Republicans or Democrats? And I say: Both. Really, there is only one party when you get down to it. They all want to spend money. The leadership in the Republican party is really not a great deal-- this is a secret you are not supposed to expose in Washington, but there is not a lot of difference between the Democrat leadership and the Republican leadership. They kind of want to spend money sometimes for different things. Sometimes Republicans want to spend more on the military enterprise, and Democrats maybe more on welfare. But they get together. You say there is not enough compromise in Washington? There is way too much compromise. Why? They compromise to spend money we don't have. So in order to raise military spending, they have got to promise that they will raise the welfare spending as well. There is one particular argument that has been made by Republican leadership as well as Democratic leadership, as well as the White House. I find this argument particularly reprehensible, particularly disgusting and disturbing. They make the argument that it is really not so bad to send money to Ukraine because it increases the profits of the arms merchants, and most of the arms merchants selling the arms into this war are Americans. They say: Oh, it is a win-win. We send the money overseas to Ukraine, but Ukraine then buys our arms, and the arms merchants are enriched. I don't know. I know there are no American soldiers yet in this war. But have some sympathy for the young men and women involved in this war--that the argument that we should perpetuate the war, that the war isn't a bad thing, and that war is not a hell on earth, is because we make some profit off of it. I find that disgusting. I find it really disturbing that there are people out there making the argument on both sides of the aisle: No big deal. It is helping our defense industrial base. That is another word for the military-industrial complex, because even Eisenhower warned 70-some years ago--he warned that there was a danger that the military-industrial complex would get so big that it wouldn't be policy led by Congress, that the corporations would become so big--trillion-dollar corporations grabbing up money--that they would direct policy; that it would no longer be you voting or no longer be us voting, but it would be the corporate interests that make the profits that would be driving this. And I think we have become eerily close to that. This is sort of the quiet part they used to not say out loud. They used to keep it kind of on the q.t.: We are just going to not talk about the profits going to the arms merchants. But now they are bragging about it: The defense industrial base--we are going to enhance the defense industrial base. Really? The meat grinder of war is now justified by expanding the profits of arms merchants? Some estimates are that 500,000 people have died in that war. So if we keep it going for another year or 2, maybe a million will be dead in the war. That will be good for arms profits. So is that what our advocacy is? Not to shorten the war, but it is not so big a deal to let the war go on and on. The head general in Ukraine has said that the war has come to a stalemate. And I am the first to acknowledge: Look, the whole war was started by Russia. Russia is the aggressor. There is nothing good to be said about Putin doing this. He is the aggressor. He is in the wrong. But that doesn't really change the situation on the ground. It is at a standstill, and 500,000 people have died. It is at a standstill. In some towns in Ukraine, you can't find young people anymore. They are either dead or have gone off to Europe to avoid the war. So Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, fired his major general because the major general admitted to the truth, which is that this is at a stalemate. Many people in this body, to justify foreign aid, will say: We are spreading and projecting American power and American values. We are trying to teach and show to the world the nobility of democracy. Yeah, if you watch one of the networks, that is all you hear: democracy, democracy, democracy. Well, guess what. Ukraine is not a democracy. They don't have elections. So they stopped having elections several years ago, and there is no plan to have elections. Zelenskyy had one, and I am not saying he didn't win. In all likelihood, it was a legitimate election. But it is sort of one and done. He is not going to have more elections. And so we are bending over backward--not we--the Republican leadership and all of the Democrats are bending over backward to send money to a country that doesn't have elections. This is a country that has banned media criticism. There is no media criticism. And you would think that the defenders of the First Amendment would be irate at the fact that there is no objective media criticism in Ukraine. But the reason why the other side is not standing up and why they are not crazy at arms about this is they actually want that now in our country. They actually are for censorship. They believe in the Homeland Security of the United States censoring and telling people they can't tell you. So if I were to say--which I have said a million times--that it is a mistake to vaccinate your kids for COVID because they already have immunity and that there are some risks to that vaccine, the other side will say I don't have the right to say that. They say it would be OK for government, in league with corporations, to censor my speech. If I were to tell you masks don't work--and they don't. All of the studies--78 randomized control studies--say masks don't work. You can wear one. I am not going to forbid you from wearing one. I will just tell you the truth. They will say I shouldn't be allowed to say that. I can still say it on the Senate floor, but if I say it on some of the Big Tech platforms, we have the FBI and Homeland Security under the Biden administration sitting down and meeting with Big Tech on a weekly basis to encourage them to take down my speech. So when Ukraine limits speech, you don't hear much of a criticism. It is just: Send them money--because they are no longer opposed to censorship. They are no longer for the First Amendment. They are for the First Amendment, unless you are spreading misinformation. But what is misinformation? It is their definition and their idea that they don't like what you are saying. I would be perfectly willing to acknowledge that there are arguments on the other side of what I am saying: whether masks work, whether you should vaccinate your children. I think the arguments are stronger on our side, and I will debate anybody on these subjects. I think they should be debated, and then you should make your own choice. In a free country, you make the choice: Wear a mask; don't wear a mask. Vaccinate your kids; don't vaccinate your kids. But to ban the speech is a very dangerous precedent. This is the kind of speech that they are in favor of banning in our country. So they are not too troubled when speech is banned in Ukraine. There has also been banning of religious authorities in Ukraine as well. So we don't have elections in Ukraine. We have banned speech. And there has also been a banning of religion as well. And yet the fervor--the fervor of people to send the money, to load the plane--the plane is likely loaded. Now, I may be exaggerating that there are going to be pallets of cash. There is probably going to be a computer entry. But it is much more visual to imagine the pallets of cash. But there will be a plane that will leave this weekend, and it will have the Republican leader on it and the Democrat leader, and they will be celebrating $60 billion of your money going to Ukraine--$60 billion--$60 billion we don't have. And, also, at the same time, they had no time to discuss the invasion coming in from the southern border. We didn't have 1 minute. We haven't had an amendment. We have several amendments that would actually put border security back into the bill, and some on the other side--I love this--they have said: Well, because you opposed the bill, you don't deserve to have amendments. I love the definition and the idea of what their concept of democracy is. If you agree with me, you get to have speech. But if you don't agree with me, you--my goodness--you are a deplorable, and you don't deserve to have your speech or to have amendments. That is what they have said, basically. So, right now, there have been no amendments on border security. There is an emergency at the southern border. I am all for more legal and lawful immigration. I have several bills that would do exactly that. I have bills that would expand employment-based immigration. It used to be that, when you came to our country, particularly when we had the big waves of people coming in toward the end of the 19th century, you had to have a sponsor and you had to work. I don't have a problem with that. Even for some of the people who have already come here and didn't follow the rules, I would probably be in favor of allowing work permits. But the thing is, I am not in favor of 780,000 people coming, en masse, across the border. People are coming from China. People are coming from Venezuela and Colombia and Paraguay. They are coming from all over the place. There was a Pew study a few years ago that did samplings of people: Who would come to America if you could? It was estimated that 750 million people would. Do you think we can take 750 million people all at once? Do you think we can double our population? No, there has to be some planning. There has to be some periodic sort of obstacles. There has to be a lawful way to come into this country. So I have been for expanding the lawful paths. I have been for expanding employment-based immigration. Most people I know who are first generation are great workers. Like I say, some of the best Americans just got here. But we can't have a wide-open border. We can't allow the invasion to continue. What has transpired here over the last few days and will continue to transpire is basically ignoring the people. There is an elite class in this country that think that Americans aren't smart enough to figure these things out. They think that Americans aren't smart enough to really figure out whether they want to vaccinate their kids, whether they want to wear a mask, or whether or not 6 feet of distance works. Did you hear the one recently, when they interviewed Fauci? They asked him where the 6 feet of distance came from? He is like: I don't know. I think we just made that one up. Really? I went to my son's university for graduation. They had white circles drawn on the ground outside. You had to stand in another white circle, 6 feet from people outside. There is zero science behind that--zero. They don't even know where their supposed science came from. I said: I thought you came up with the science. No, I thought you did. I thought it worked. It doesn't work, and you don't catch a disease outside. All of those things--we went through graduations with people with masks on and the chairs 6 feet apart. My favorite is this, though. These people are so obsessed and think masks work that you will see them on the floor now--and not all of them. I am just guessing. But I know at least some of them on the floor, when they are wearing a mask, it is because they have COVID. And it is like, they used to teach the common sense. When I went to medical school and when I was growing up, you stayed home when you were sick. If you had an infectious disease, you stayed home. Now they tell you to just keep going and confronting people while wearing a mask that doesn't work. Why don't the masks work? Because the pores in the mask are 600 times bigger than the virus, and the virus is aerosolized--not just on droplets of water, aerosolized, moving freely throughout the air. Probably, the most imbecilic thing we did--which rivals maybe the Middle Ages--is plexiglass. These morons told you that plexiglass would stop the virus. Only a moron would say that. There is no truth to that. There is no science to that. It is ridiculous. It should be a ``Saturday Night Live'' skit. Plexiglass that is this high? The virus can't go over it? The virus can't go around it? A group of engineers at MIT looked at this and looked at patterns of flow, and I can't say that I know that this is right or not, but they conjectured, actually, that the plexiglass actually made it worse because the laminar flow of air was actually disrupted by these things, and your filtration systems, which actually probably do serve some value, were interrupted by the plexiglass. But that is what we lived through. But these are the people--the people who inflicted these things on you believe you are not smart enough to make your own decisions. When you tell people at home what is going on up here--and I go home every weekend, go to the grocery store, go to church--when I tell people at home that they just sent $60 billion overseas, they are aghast. They say: How can that happen? They say they know of no one--if I am in Eastern Kentucky, I could be talking to a fireman, a policeman, a city councilman. They come up to me spontaneously and say: We have problems here in our country. We can't pay for the basic functioning of our country. Only two- thirds of the spending in Washington is paid for, and an entire third of it is borrowed. Yet they want to send money to a foreign country to deal with their problems? Shouldn't we try to take care of our own country first? Shouldn't we try to do something to actually quit the destruction of our own currency? How do they get away with it? It is incredibly unpopular. If you were to take this position in my State and ask everybody in Kentucky ``How many of you think we should send $100 billion overseas and do zero for the southern border--not a penny, not one policy change, nothing for the southern border,'' how many people believe that? In my State, it is close to zero. Very few people believe that. So how does it happen up here? It happens because there is not enough sunlight. There is not enough transparency. So that is part of what a filibuster is. This is a talking filibuster today, and the reason we talk is to try to broadcast this message, to get the message home so they can send us better people. Madam President, can you tell me how much time I have remaining in the hour of speaking?

Mr. PAUL. This filibuster now enters its fifth day. For many people across America, they may not understand the Byzantine rules of the Senate, but they allow for sufficient debate on important questions. Often the rules of the Senate are abbreviated, and bills are passed in a quick fashion--sometimes too quickly, sometimes without sufficient discussion, sometimes without sufficient review. But this bill will take a while to pass. We have been here through the weekend; we were here on Super Bowl Sunday--none of it because of a desire to punish or a desire to inflict pain on those from the other party or another persuasion, but with the desire that there be a full and sufficient airing of the pros and cons of this legislation. This is not the naming of a post office. This is a profound question about where our priorities are as a nation. Are our priorities as a nation the borders of Ukraine or the borders of the United States? We had a chance, in the beginning, to perhaps discuss both, but immediately that chance was lost when the proposal to control the border was inadequate. It would have actually been less than the current law. It would have actually allowed 1.8 million illegal immigrants to continue to flow into the country. The battle to attach border security to this bill was lost, frankly, when the Democrat cosponsor tweeted out to the public how proud he was that the bill would never close the border; that even under an emergency, as the bill defined it, even with 5,000 people coming across illegally, that the ports of entry would always be open. And the American people reacted, and they called us, as they have called us by the thousands today, to say: Continue the debate. Don't give up. The debate is worth it. Our phone lines have been jammed all day. People have been texting and messaging saying: Don't give up the fight. The fight is worth it. The fight is worth it on many levels. Most profoundly, the fight is worth it because we have no money. More than the debate over the border, more than the debate over whether we should fund Ukraine, the fight is over whether or not we are going to stave off calamity by controlling our expenditures; and when we have priorities, when we set those priorities, where we spend the money, where it is most needed. I will never forget being in a committee hearing and a member of the opposite party looked at me and said, ``We shouldn't have to make choices,'' because I said: Shouldn't we set priorities? Shouldn't we spend money on what is most important and leave those things not as important for another day when we have more money? Because, you see, this is the way government operates at every level other than in Washington. If you go to your city council, at any city anywhere in the country, or you go to your county magistrates, or you go to your State government, they are all constrained by spending that which comes in. We are the only government in America--unfortunately the biggest and most expensive--but we are the only government in America that is not constrained by their budget. In fact, we don't even have a budget most years. We don't operate under a budget currently. They can't even take the time to pass a budget. But even if there were a budget, it is not constrained by the amount of money that comes in. We just spend. There are never any priorities set saying: Well, this is more important than this. So we will have to wait until next year to spend the money on this. So it is always just spend it on everything. But as we come to this crisis in our country with $34 trillion of debt, we are adding between $2 and $300 billion in debt every month. Our interest payment has doubled. We are basically borrowing to pay the rent. This is a disaster unfolding before us. There are some who describe a ``black swan'' event. Nassim Taleb wrote a book called ``The Black Swan.'' It is an unexpected big event that just sort of consumes, like the 2008 crisis we had. Some predicted it, but it was still a ``black swan'' that arose out of nowhere and was enormous. But many people are calling this more of a ``white swan.'' It is a big event. It is an important event, but it is unfolding in slow motion. It is unfolding with all kinds of warning signs. Federal Reserve Chairman Powell recently said, in the last week or 2, that the debt is urgent, that somebody must do something about it. But when you tell that to many Members of this body--that it is urgent that we deal with the debt--the response to the debt wouldn't be sending $100 billion to another country. The responsibility of dealing with the debt, the urgency of the debt, would be to do something about controlling the expenditures. And yet the response of this body, upon hearing from the Federal Reserve Chairman; upon hearing from the chairman of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, that he was concerned about the accumulation of debt; upon hearing from economist after economist that this is unfolding, that the interests rates are rising, that interest rates are going to squeeze out other spending, and that there may come a day in which we destroy the dollar, the response is to send $100 billion to Ukraine? So while superficially and initially the debate here has been about whether Ukraine comes first or America comes first--so many bills here are inappropriately titled. Many of them say they are going to do all of these great things, but in the end, there is a more accurate title for so many bills, and the more accurate title for this bill would be ``Ukraine First, America Last'' because they are prioritizing the border of Ukraine over the border of the United States. This isn't someone alleging a problem. This isn't us making it up and saying there is a border crisis. This is us seeing it in person-- 785,000 people coming across illegally. People say: What is it? Do you have a problem with immigrants? I say: No. I am for lawful immigration. We bring in about 1 million people a year--that is pretty many. I am actually a sponsor, with some on the other side of the aisle, to bring in more people lawfully. I am pro-immigration. I am proud of saying that some of the best Americans just got here. I live in Bowling Green, KY. We have over 100 languages spoken in our schools. We have a large population of people from Bosnia. I remember treating my first patients from Bosnia and trying to learn a little bit of the language. Their language is Serbo-Croatian, so I speak exactly about 10 words of Serbo-Croatian. But I found the language sort of very logical and easy to pronounce, and I enjoy knowing a few words to try to communicate. Many of the people from Bosnia in my town own restaurants. One owns a trucking company. They have been very successful in our community, and we welcome them. Our church has invited many of them to begin with. So there is something great about America and accepting immigrants, but accepting immigrants lawfully who take the time and pledge to work and have a sponsor and come in in an orderly fashion is not the same as the people marching up through Central America. Some of them are coming from China. Some of them are coming from the Middle East. Some are on the Terror Watchlist. Many of them probably want a better way of life but apply to get in. We can't let everybody in all at once. There was a Pew or Gallup poll a few years ago, and it asked people: Would you want to come to America if you could? If they let you come in, would you come? And they estimated the percentages by country, and they added it up, and it was about 750 million people would come. That might be too many, particularly if they all came in a 2- or 3-year period. We are talking about millions of people coming across the border at a time, undocumented, unprocessed. I think it is a mistake. And I think we have made a huge mistake in this body today. And I know I won't convince any minds in Washington--nobody in the Senate is going to be of this mind--but I do truly believe the Senate is out of step. I talk to people at home. I go to the grocery store. I go to my church. I see people at home. I don't meet anybody who is saying: Please prioritize Ukraine. Please make sure Ukraine gets their money before you do anything about our southern border. I meet nobody saying that. I meet everybody who says the opposite, and these are people from all different parties--Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, you name it. The people I meet say: We can't just leave the door wide open. We have this enormous welfare state. There has to be a wall either around the country or around the welfare state. We have to do something. But they certainly don't beg me and plead with me to send the money to Ukraine. They would never support a ``Ukraine First, America Last'' bill, and that is what this is. Now, many in the blue States have sort of refused to see this for so long. They just have completely ignored the problem because it has mostly been Texas's problem--California, too, but Texas in particular. The tens of thousands of people coming across the border overwhelm the hospital system, overwhelm the city system, overwhelm--you name it, it is being overwhelmed by so many people. So it is intriguing that the only way we have gotten anybody on the other side--particularly in these cities in the Northeast--to at least be aware of the problem is to let them have some of the immigrants. You know the people who have ``love'' on a yard sign in their yard? They love everybody? They love everybody until they have all these immigrants in their city and say: Oh my goodness; we can't pay for it. They are putting them up in hotels and giving them free credit cards. They are just giving--you know, they go: We have 100; we will give them $10 million. What happens when you have 1,000 or 5,000? But even worse, what happens when they begin to commit crimes? Because, see, lawful immigration selects out for the people who want to work and are willing to obey the law. If you are a scofflaw, if you are a potential criminal, or if you got let out of a prison in Venezuela, guess what--that is part of what is coming across unlawfully. So when some of these people made their way to New York, New Yorkers are starting to wake up and say: My goodness, maybe we can't afford this. Maybe there ought to be some, you know, criminal justice applied to people breaking the law. But everybody saw the pictures. Everybody saw the pictures of a gang of migrants attacking two police officers, kicking them and beating them, kicking them to the ground--awful images. But then everybody in America saw the images of a migrant let out without parole a day later, after kicking a policeman in the face, kicking and bludgeoning a policeman, let out of jail with no bail. What does he do? He flips the finger to America, both hands, holds them high and proud, walks on by, and New York let him go. Nobody put him back in jail. Nobody rearrested him. He gave the finger to America. Well, guess what. This bill gives the finger to American taxpayers. This bill gives the finger to all of America. This bill is ``Ukraine First, America Last.'' Even more than the border issue, which I think is about setting priorities, whether or not the priority should be America's border versus the Ukrainian border--I think that is a big issue, and for me, it is an easy one. This ought to be an ``America First'' legislature. We ought to be taking care of American problems before we think about trying to solve the world's problems. Now, this doesn't mean I have no sympathy for Ukraine. I hope Ukraine kicks Russia's butt. I hope Ukraine wins. I hope Ukraine can stave them off. And the battle has been somewhat fought to a standstill. But I know that my first oath of office and my first responsibility is to my country, to America. If we are to send $100 billion overseas, this will be a total of $170 billion. Never ever in the history of the United States have we ever sent so much money to one country--$170 billion. This is about 1\1/2\, almost 1.75 times the entire economy of Ukraine. Never before have we done that. But the thing is, it is not like we have the money sitting around. It is not like we have a rainy-day fund or a surplus fund or, hey, here is a bunch of money we are not doing anything with. Our money is all gone. See, we have responsibilities. And the really I think disturbing thing this legislature has done--not just this one but over decades--is they vote for everything for everyone. Everybody's got a need, we will give it to you. We are not going to set priorities and spend what comes in; we are going to give everybody everything they want. Everybody who ever comes to Washington with their hands out, we are going to give you what you need regardless of whether we have the money to pay for it. So this legislature, this Senate, this Congress, has made all of these promises to people. They started these things. They started Social Security in the thirties. They started Medicare in the sixties. They added on to all of these problems--Medicaid, food stamps. They have all of these problems. But in being everything to everyone, in saying that you can have free stuff and it won't cost you anything, it has been a big lie. This big lie to America is that you can have your cake and eat it too. You can have stuff for free. We are going to give you free government stuff, and you won't have to pay for it. You don't have to pay taxes. We still have taxes in this country, but the taxes in this country pay for only about two-thirds of the spending. So we spend about $6 trillion a year, and we bring in $4 trillion. In no world will that work. There are repercussions to that. Eventually, if you spend $2 trillion more than your revenue, you will go into this massive debt and potentially a debt spiral. People say: The debt is meaningless. We owe it to ourselves. It doesn't mean anything. Tell that to the person who goes to the grocery store. Anybody bought a steak lately at the grocery store? I saw a steak in Kroger less than a month ago--$20 a steak. I didn't buy it. So the thing is that there are all kinds of problems people are facing. There are people with ordinary incomes that are not going up with inflation who are being hit by the price of food, being hit by the price of gas. Think about what has really happened when the money gets printed by government and it goes into these programs. The last people to get it are the working class. The people who get an advantage to inflation in the early stages are the rich people. These are the people who have stocks and mutual funds and retirement funds. Those people have been kicking butt for the last several years. The stock market is doing this, and they are all getting wealthy. It is the ordinary citizen in our country, it is those on fixed income or working class who just get creamed by inflation. But inflation isn't a mystery. They come to us, and they say: Oh, well, inflation--it could be transitory. It is probably over, and maybe it has something to do with greed. I say: Really? Inflation is caused by greed? Did people just become greedy? They haven't been greedy since the beginning of time? It is greed that causes inflation? No. It is debt that causes inflation. Inflation comes when the Federal Reserve buys the debt. So when we run a deficit each year, we spend $6 trillion and we bring in $4 trillion, the $2 trillion in debt has to--somebody has to finance that. So we print up Treasury bills, pieces of paper--that is basically what they are--and we sell them. Some are bought by foreigners. Some are bought by private funds in the United States. But then at least about one-third and sometimes more are bought by the Federal Reserve. You say: Well, that is fine. They are a big bank. They are the country's bank, the central bank. Well, but they don't have money; they own debt. And it has always been boggling to me. They call this the asset sheet, but it is really just a sheet full of debt. But they buy Treasury bills by printing up money, by creating money, and so when they do that, it dilutes the value of the currency. So people who say the debt is just a number and doesn't affect people--no. The debt causes inflation. The Federal Reserve causes inflation when they buy the debt, and it causes the prices to rise. But inflation disproportionately hurts the poor and the working class. Rich people can get by. You know, if the steaks cost more, the food costs more, their gas costs more, rich people get by. They have extra income. But if most of your income is going toward your rent and your food, you get creamed by inflation. Inflation is part of a bait-and-switch problem. So many of the people got elected here because they promised something for nothing. Government will be Santa Claus and will give you a free education. We will give you free electric cars. We will give you free electric car stations. We will give free money even to other countries. We will let people come in for free and take stuff for free. Everything is going to be free, but it is a bait-and-switch. It isn't really free. Nothing is really free. You can either pay for it through taxes--and we tax the heck out of everybody. Some would tax them even more. But, really, a third of it is left over, and it is not taxed. It ends up being this deficit that rolls forward, and then it is financed by the Federal Reserve and causes prices to rise. So think about this when you think about the bait-and-switch that is American politics: Politicians offer people something for free. They say to the working class and to the poor: We will give you free stuff. Many people accept that, and they say: I want free stuff. I am struggling. I need some extra help. But then they don't realize that the free stuff comes with a price. The free stuff comes with a price, and it is an inflation tax. And the inflation tax hurts the very people you tried to help. So it is a catch-22. They are behind the eight ball. They are poor, and they want some help from government. But that causes the prices to rise, which traps them in the same place that they started with--maybe worse. So when we get a bill like this, it brings things into stark perspective for everyone, because what we are finding is, this isn't just a priority about whether we borrow the money or spend the money, this is about whether we spend it across the ocean or whether we spend it in our country. It is also a very visible problem that we have 785,000 people who came in, in the last 2 months. So we are looking at a couple of million people that have come in. We are close to a million already in 2 months. So we are looking at a problem that is not something that can easily be pushed away. So this problem arose, and there was a decision to try to match up-- the Democrats really, really want to send your money to Ukraine. I can't tell you how much they really want to send your money to Ukraine. They want to send your money to Ukraine. They are hot and heavy--so hot and heavy to send your money to Ukraine that almost nothing would stop them. It was sort of the perfect situation for sort of putting up some leverage and saying: OK. We know you want to loot the Treasury. We know you have these economic theories that debt doesn't matter. We know you think you can just send all this money, but what about this? We won't let you do it unless you secure the border. So that is how the debate sort of began. And a lot of people say: Why don't Republicans stand up more? See, in the Senate--the unusual and really creative thing that our Founding Fathers did was, in the Senate they didn't make it a majority rule; it is a supermajority rule. So if you ever have 41 votes in the Senate, you can block anything the majority wants to do. So we have 49 Republicans. That means we have the power of 41. If we had interested leadership that wanted to use the strength of our 41, who wanted to use the strength of the minority to say: We will only let them shovel the money and flush it down the toilet and throw it away and give it to other countries--we will only let that happen if you secure the border. We have the leverage. What ended up happening is we ended up getting what I would call fake reform. It was reform negotiated--and the mistake was doing it, I think, behind closed doors and with only one individual. Not that it is really all that individual's fault, but the individual really needed to come back to the caucus and say: Do you guys think--you men and women, you think you might support this border bill we are putting together? Instead, it was just sort of an all-done deal: Here it is. And almost of all of us said it is not accurate. Almost all of us said it is actually worse than the existing law. So we were stuck in a conundrum, and then our leadership advocated it. They basically just punted. Our leadership said: We are not going to use the power of the minority, because we want and salivate to send the money to Ukraine also. This is the problem now. In our country, some people say there needs to be more compromise. Here is the compromise. You got it. You got 10 or 15 Republicans who side with the Democrats. They believe in Ukraine first and America last. They believe that we should borrow $100 billion, whether it comes from China or whether the Federal Reserve prints it up. We are going to take $100 billion we sent over there on top of the $113 billion we have already sent. And some might say: Well, you know, it is for a good cause. Well, shouldn't we examine what they spend it on? Shouldn't we have like a special inspector general, someone who is trained to look for waste? Shouldn't we have that person appointed to look at the waste? I have advocated for it for over a year. I forced them to vote on it. The Democrats all voted no, and all the Big Government Republicans who love this money, they voted against it, too. They don't want scrutiny in how the money is being spent. I even helped them to pick who would be the inspector general--somebody who has been doing it for 10 years. The inspector general that is in charge of Afghanistan is called the SIGAR, Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. He has done a great job. He has a team of over 100 people that work for him-- accountants and economists and people who look at this war spending and they know how to look at war spending and they know how to do war contracts and they know how to look for malfeasance. And he has found billions of dollars' worth of it. Now, we spent a couple trillion in Afghanistan. That is not the inspector general's fault; that is Congress's fault. But he has done his best to try to police this. He has written entire books on the waste. As a consequence, the people who love sending your money overseas, they hate him. They hate the idea. They hate the idea so much they voted it down with a vast majority. They don't want an inspector general. But if you ask them: You don't want to oversee the money? They would say: Oh, no. The Pentagon or the State Department or somebody who already has an inspector general, they will do it. And I said, Oh? You mean the Pentagon that can't be audited? The Pentagon that refuses to be audited? The Pentagon that says they are too big to be audited? You trust them to now oversee the money going to Ukraine, when Ukraine has a history of being in the bottom 10 percent as far as corruption-- meaning they have had more corruption than the other 90 percent of countries? I think that is kind of crazy. Even if you were for the money, you would think the power of 41--41 supposedly conservative Republicans--could simply look them in the eye and say: We are giving you the money, but we want this, this, and this. We have the power to do it. They have completely abdicated the power. They threw in the towel, and they said: We aren't going to do anything on the border, but we are not even going to ask for an inspector general on this. We are just fine. Just shovel it out the door. So where is some of the money going? Inevitably, some of it is buying weapons. And to listen to the supporters of this bill, they are proud of the weapons and the profit that will go to the people who sell weapons. This, to me, just boggles the mind. They actually have a new name. They now call it the defense industrial base. Since the time of Eisenhower, it was known as the military-industrial complex, but they have renamed it the defense industrial base, and we are going to rebuild ours with war profits from Ukraine. So we are really not giving it to Ukraine. We are giving it to Ukraine, but they are giving it right back to American arms manufacturers. See, it is this sort of mercantile, sort of--oh, yeah, looks like it is good for business. It is good for money. And it is like: Are these people not realizing we are talking about a war? A war that some estimate some 500,000 people have died. And they are thinking: Well, gosh, if instead of 100,000 rifles, we send them a million, that will be more profit and our companies will be bigger and more profitable and they will be able to make more weapons for us then--not acknowledging that a million rifles might kill more people than 100,000. Or let's say we have 1,000 tanks. What if we give them 10,000 tanks? That will be more profit for the arms merchants. Wouldn't that be good? That would be great. We are reinvigorating the defense industrial base. Really? You are going to make the argument that war is good? Or maybe war ain't so bad? Or maybe just a little war here and there? If we can get more profit for these guys, the big companies, the large multinational arms manufacturers--if they just get a little more profit--a little more profit will be good because that will reinforce the defense industrial base. This is saying the quiet part out loud. This is saying something they should be embarrassed by. This is saying something so reprehensible and so disgusting. But it has happened to the leadership on our side, the leadership on the other side. It has happened also with the Biden administration. In committee, they come to us and they brag about how: This isn't really money to Ukraine; this is money to America. We are giving it to Ukraine, but it is sort of a conduit. It is sort of a laundering scheme to get the money back to America, to our arms manufacturers. So, under this logic, the longer the war goes on, the more weapons we sell, the better it is for our defense industrial base. So a 1-year war--let's say--we are closer to, I think, 2 years--a two-year war that has lost 500,000 people--which would be better for the defense industrial base, a 2-year war that loses 500,000 people or a 3-year war that loses 750,000 people? Well, it is a lot better for the defense industrial base to have a 3-year war. And we ask ourselves: What would be the ultimate result of the war? And I am going to say my sympathies are with Ukraine. Russia is the aggressor and Russia should be repelled and if I were Ukrainian, I would fight for Ukraine against the Russian aggressors. But the thing is, as they fight and as this war goes on, how many wars end in unconditional surrender? Virtually zero. World War II ended that way, but it was one of the few wars that ended that way. It ended in utter defeat through the drop of the atomic bombs on Japan, and there was complete and unconditional surrender, and I believe the same with Germany as well. That is a rare war that ends that way. Most wars are fought to somewhat of a standstill and there is a negotiated settlement. So, recently, the Commander in Chief in Ukraine reported to the public that he felt like the war was at a standstill. Typically, when that is said, it doesn't mean he is willing to--I am sure he is a very brave soldier and is well-liked by the troops. But when that is said, that is an indication that, perhaps, negotiations can start. That doesn't make him a coward or weak; it actually makes him strong, because he knows that another year of war will grind--will be this meat grinder that will grind and torture and maim another group--another group of thousands of young men of Ukraine. And if he felt it would be an imminent victory and that Ukraine could win and Russia would be defeated, then I am sure he would want to fight on. And he probably still wants to fight on, but I think what the indication is, is that there has to be some openness to negotiation. I don't think Russia is strong enough to take Ukraine. Likewise, I don't think Ukraine is strong enough to push Russia out. They fought to a standstill. And the thing is, is that if our promise is unlimited weapons and unlimited money to Ukraine, I think it makes it less likely that people will look for an exit ramp, will look for a possibility of a peaceful outcome for this. There will be no complete victory in Ukraine. There is an infinite amount of money that can be sent--$170 billion is getting close to infinite. We never sent that much money to any country ever. If we go another year and they burn through about $10 billion a month--and they already think they are a couple months behind on that--within 4 to 6 months, they will be asking for more money again. But shouldn't we, at least, ask where it is being spent? Sure, some of it is being spent on arms, tanks, guns, this, that; but some of it is going to pay their government's salaries. Some of it is going to pay for welfare, disability, healthcare, first responders. I think we pay the salaries of 57,000 first responders. Do we have enough money to pay for the entire government of another government, plus all of their weapons? In addition to their government, we had been paying their pensions. That embarrassed some of the people until they said, finally: Well, we will pay for everything else. We will pay for all your government, but, by golly, we draw the line at pensions. So they excluded pensions on this after paying for the pensions for over a year. But billions upon billions are going to pay for their government. Look, most of us over here want a smaller U.S. Government. Now they want to ask us to pay for a bloated Ukraine government? But it is worse than just paying for their government and all their programs. We are giving small business subsidies to Ukraine. If you watched ``60 Minutes'' not too long ago, what you saw was a lady's bag--you know, a lady's handbag business getting subsidies from us. Look, I am not even for subsidizing U.S. businesses. I am for profit and loss. You sell something good that somebody wants to buy, you become successful in business. I don't think we should subsidize American businesses. But now they are not asking me just to subsidize American businesses; they want me to subsidize Ukrainian businesses. I think that is obscene. I think that is absurd. I think when I go home and I ask people: Can you believe they are sending money to a handbag factory, to a handbag shop in Ukraine? People are aghast. They are livid. They are like: Who are these people? We will vote them out. And that really is what should go on. It is part of what this debate is about. People at home need to know who these people are. Every Democrat, save one, and about 15 Republicans. People need to pay attention. They need to look how their Senator votes on this or how their Congressman votes if he gets to the House of Representatives, because this is about people who are prioritizing Ukraine first and America last. Some of the money that is going over there, in addition to going to small businesses, actually went to send six contestants to Paris Fashion Week for the famous fashion show of Paris. So in the midst of this war, we are sending money to send some fashion brands--or whatever that is--from Ukraine to the Paris fashion show. In the middle of this war, their President had time to take some fancy pictures with Vogue. I don't know, but I think that kind of looks bad. I think that sort of just--you know, that one doesn't pass the smell test when we are in the middle of a war. Sure, he is wearing his great T-shirt and everything, but he is in Vogue, all right? He is at war. About a month ago, he was in Argentina for the victory party for the new Prime Minister--no doubt, asking for money. But the thing is, I am a big fan of the new Prime Minister of Argentina, too, but I didn't go down there on the taxpayers' dime, and I won't take the taxpayers' dime to go down there. But the thing is, he is in the middle of a war. What the heck is he doing in Argentina? He is everywhere, all around the world, asking for our money. My oath of office is to my country. It doesn't mean I don't have sympathy for Ukraine. It doesn't mean I don't want them to win. It is just that my oath of office is to my country. This would be a different debate if we had a big pile of money and we ran a surplus, but I can't in good conscience send money to Ukraine that we don't have. That $100 billion that is going out in this bill, in addition to the previous $110 billion, is all borrowed. It makes America weaker; it makes us less strong. You will often hear the debate, and you will hear people say: It is in our vital national interest to give money to Ukraine. Well, that is merely an opinion. There is a debate on both sides of it, and I will give you the debate on the other side of this. They say: We must support Ukraine or the dominoes will fall. Well, that was a theory from the Cold War, which didn't turn out to be true even during the Cold War. The interesting thing is, it is useful to understand how the Soviet Union lost, and to my mind, it is very clear how the Soviet Union was defeated: The engine of capitalism defeated the engine of socialism, the engine of communism. There is no comparison. Capitalism, which is freedom--the freedom to exchange goods, the freedom to trade goods across boundaries--is so incredibly powerful that it has driven our success, but the Soviet Union couldn't keep up in the arms race because socialism just frankly doesn't work. It doesn't work for developing a strong military--they were always much weaker than we actually thought they were--but it also doesn't work for charity or anything else. One of the great things about our country is its incredible wealth, all the way down to our middle class, which exceeds the middle class of any country on the planet, but also because that great wealth has allowed such an amazing amount of charity. Even our national parks--as you look around and see most of our national parks, a huge percentage of the land in our national parks was actually donated by capitalists. A lot of the land is being set aside in the Western States, and very wealthy people are buying the land so it won't be developed, and it will remain pristine. But that is capitalism. That is a result of capitalism. Socialism doesn't work. The stories of socialism abound. There was a story in Poland of how price controls worked and how they always inevitably led to shortages. A guy goes in to buy eggs, and he says: Are you the store that doesn't have eggs? The guy says: No. We are the store that doesn't have toilet paper. The store across the way is the store that doesn't have eggs. That is the story of socialism. It is scarcity; that is the story of price controls. There has been a debate for a long time in our country about whether or not you can have a free market, a capitalist society, and have a large military industrial state. This was some of the division after the war between the Libertarians and the Conservatives, a little bit between Buckley and Murray Rothbard among the Libertarians. Rothbard and the other Libertarians were worried that if you had a big military state, the amount of money that went into it would cause us to lose our freedoms; that you couldn't have both; that really you need not have this massive military state. That argument still goes on. I am one of the ones here who say that balancing our budget, spending what comes in, is so important that we should look at spending across the board. That spending would include military spending, and it would include entitlement spending. But it is part of the problem, and I will be very ecumenical in my criticism in that the debt is the fault of both parties. The Democrats are just completely oblivious. They don't care at all. The Republicans kind of pretend to care, and many of the Big Government Republicans who will support this bill are fine with sending money to Ukraine, but they also want virtually unlimited increases in military spending as well. Really, it is the reverse of the current compromise that is actually needed to defend our country. The reverse of the compromise would be to say that everything needs a little bit of a haircut. You know, we are not going to balance the budget by cutting Sesame Street, so I don't go out there, saying: Let's just cut public television, and we will balance the budget. No. What I say is: Let's cut a little bit of everything. The thing is, people are afraid of that. People say--you know, even people running for office now say, like: You will raise the age of Social Security or you will cut entitlements. Well, you have to look at everything. If you take entitlements off the table and you say ``I am not going to do anything about the entitlements,'' it is two-thirds of the spending. You can cut the entire budget we vote on, which is a third of spending, and you don't balance the budget or you barely get there. And we are not going to cut the whole thing. So what we have to do is trim a little bit across the board. It is amazing how unreasonable that is up here. I am an outlier. I am one of the few people--there are probably two or three people in the Senate who would cut everything across the board a little bit. It may be more than that. It might be 10 or 15. But the thing is that I think people would be open to it. Look, Medicare--Medicare is a $1 trillion budget. Could we cut anything out of it and still keep the Medicare benefit? I am not looking to tell poor people that they can't have healthcare or people who can barely afford it. No. I am saying: What could we do with $1 trillion to spend it better? Absolutely, we could spend it better and save some money. Could you not save 1 percent? Could you not save 5 percent? When we look at this--I will give you an example. I will give you an example of something that just tugs at the heart strings: Alzheimer's disease. I have had family members with it. It is sad to watch it progress among people. We give generously--the government does. They give your money. It is not their money. But the government gives generously to Alzheimer's research. We are a big, rich nation. We ought to be able to study Alzheimer's disease. We ought to be able to do something, sure. So I am not against it. But let's say they got $100 million for research last year. Is nobody up here brave enough to say: Look, we are out of money. We will give you $95 million next year. This isn't like eliminating Alzheimer's research; it is saying: You get 95 percent. I would say that to everybody. Everybody gets 95 percent of what you got last year. When I say that at home, not one person looks askance. Not one person criticizes. They say: You are right. Why couldn't we do that? That is so reasonable. You are not being draconian. You are not being radical. We will just spend 95 percent of what we spent last year. To a person--businessmen and -women come up to me and say: Yes, we have had bad years before where we have had to cut 30 percent of spending. So they are like: Five percent would be no big deal. It never happens in government. In fact, as times get worse, as the economy goes in the tank, government spending goes through the roof. But these are the things we have to talk about. These are the things we have to think about. Madam President, can you tell me how much time I have remaining?

Mr. PAUL. Good. Lots of time. I am just getting started. Madam President, as we look at these things and try to make these decisions, it really is about having a government that sets priorities, and I can't emphasize enough how different it is from your local government to Washington. Every mayor in the United States--I may not agree with their policies, but virtually every mayor--particularly smalltown America is this way--spends what comes in. Now, some of the bigger cities actually have a borrowing capacity and have gotten in trouble with loans, but most cities in America spend what comes in. So when you go to the city council meetings, what do cities do? They do stuff you kind of want. They pave the roads, fix the roads, fix the stoplights, make sure the ditches are dug, and make sure the sewage works. We all kind of have agreed to have a certain amount of government, particularly at the local level. So, when you go to a city council meeting, there will be a budget. I know that is extraordinary. We don't do that up here. We spend $6 trillion, and we don't have a budget. We don't pass a budget. We haven't had a budget for the last 3 or 4 years. No budget. Six trillion dollars and no budget. That is insane. Everybody up here who is for that should be fired. I produce a budget every year on my own, one Senator, not on the Appropriations Committees. I don't often win. Actually, I have never won my budget, but my budget is fairly dramatic according to Washington's standards. Mine is called the Penny Plan budget--cutting 1 percent across the board. That used to be the Penny Plan budget. That used to work in balancing the budget over 5 years, but we spent so much money on COVID. We locked you up and gave you all checks. We put masks on you, four or five masks, earmuffs, goggles, and sent you checks and told you not to work. Crazy. We spent so much money, now to balance your budget, it would actually be a 5-percent cut over 5 years to balance your budget, but it would make us stronger, and we could do it. How would we do it? One of the things I proposed is, why don't we give government workers bonuses for finding waste? Wow, that would be something--an incentive for a government worker to save money. So you are in charge of a $12 million budget at the Department of Energy or Education. You are in charge, and you have your mission statement: Here is what you are supposed to do. If you think you could save $1 million just by not buying the wrong stuff and not buying too much of stuff, we should give you a raise. I have been trying to pass that for 12 years. I can't get Democrats to agree to it. Do you know what their sticking point is? Well, if that person has a $12 million budget and they save $1 million, we should spend it somewhere else. Literally, I am trying to give people an incentive to save money. I would think that the money, since we are $1.5 trillion in the hole every year, could go back to the Treasury, and their argument is, absolutely not. They must spend it somewhere else. Insane. I remember a story of one Republican chairman telling me--when we took over a few years ago, they took over a chairmanship, and they went into one of the rooms, which was a big closet. They went in there, and there were like, I don't know, 5,000 printer cartridges, and they were like: Huh? I wonder what this is. Maybe they are saving money or they got a good deal on printer cartridges--which might have been true except for the fact that they didn't fit any computers or printers anymore. You know how it is with printers--everything changes. Some person had ordered something nobody in business would have ever done, and they had 5,000 printer cartridges they had to just throw away. This is how government works. You don't have the incentives. Friedman put it this way. He said that nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as their own. That is a pretty profound statement. I think that it is the most profound statement that you can apply to why government doesn't work very well. It also goes in parallel with another statement, that government is a necessary evil. They go hand in hand because government is a necessary evil because you have to give up your liberty. We don't live in a perfectly free society. In a perfectly free society, nobody would tell you what to do at all. You would have no government, and you would keep all of your money. So we don't live there. We give up a certain amount of freedom to have safety and roads and things. But those of us who understand and make this debate over liberty understand that we do have that liberty, and we are making a sacrifice to live in society. So we think our liberty is precious, so we don't want to give up too much. So we see government as a necessary evil, but we don't want too much of it because, if we gave up 100 percent of our income to have government, we would have no freedom--no freedom to enjoy the fruits of our labor. If we were to give up 50 percent, we would still think that is too much. So, somewhere, the pendulum is. You know, those of us who believe in liberty are wanting more liberty and less government. We also want it because government is not very good at anything. So, you know, I think it was Friedman who also said that only the government, if you put them in charge of the Sahara Desert, could have a shortage of sand because of just sheer incompetence. It is really not that people are stupid who work in government, although sometimes it is a debatable question; it is that they don't get the same incentives. In business, people are rewarded for success, and some people worry about this. Some on the left hate business, and they hate it because they see it as a dog-eat-dog world, but it is a dog-eat-dog world where the only people who succeed in business succeed by pleasing someone else. It is the interesting thing about transactions in capitalism. People think that transactions in capitalism are equal. They are kind of equal and not equal. So, if I want these glasses--and they are very expensive; they cost me, I think, $1.99--if I want these glasses, I will have to want the glasses more than my $1.99. So the person selling them--he wants my money or she wants my money more than the glasses, and I want the glasses more. So, even though it is an equal trade, it is an unequal trade because we are both motivated to trade, and there has to be some kind of disparity that we see. But the people who make these glasses only succeed if they sell them at a good cost and sell them cheaply. These are actually from a foreign country. I won't mention which country because everybody hates all the other countries now and wants to shut down trade. But I think I feel richer that I can get them for $1.99. So I get them at like 20 at a time, and I leave them everywhere, and they break half the time, but for a $1.99, it is not bad. But capitalism works to distribute goods. Can you imagine what would happen--think of your life tomorrow if Amazon and Walmart were bought by the government or what if they started telling Amazon and Walmart they couldn't buy other companies? Oh, they are already doing that. They are trying to prevent the merger of companies. These are the philosophies that we are talking about that have led us to the situation where we are, because these are the philosophies of people who don't believe in spending what comes in. They believe in an infinite amount of spending, but they also don't prize liberty enough to keep people out of our economic affairs. Walmart is an amazing store because you can go in, you buy this pen, it is scanned, and someone in Benton, within milliseconds, is finding out you bought that pen there, and they are sending another one. The pen is going out the door. But that is capitalism. If it were the government, let's say the Post Office, not quite so efficient. Nothing in government works very well. It doesn't mean we won't have any government; it means we should have as little and as small a government as we could possibly have because nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as their own. Another way to think about this is to think about the councilman, and the city council has been commissioned, and they have something good. They want to build a theater or build something in the town. It is $10 million, and they say: Well, it is a good cause; let's do it. And they vote for it. But if you ask that city councilman for $1,000 to invest in a business, which decision does the person spend more time with? Which decision does the person feel deep in his gut or her gut to give $1,000? When it is their money. Government can't operate with people's money. So I don't know that we can change government. We could try adding some incentives to government, but what we could really try to do is make government small, since we know government is inefficient, and try to keep government out of other enterprises. I do worry that, on both sides of the aisle, the fear of foreigners and the fear of foreign countries--the anger toward foreign countries-- is going to be to our detriment. When the average shopper goes to Walmart because of imported goods, they are $1,000 richer because their money goes further. A lot of the stuff is imported. On some level we get it; like, in my State, we have Toyota. I drive a Toyota Camry up here. Several of my staff drive a Toyota Prius. We are proud of Toyota. They are owned by a foreign country--by Japan--but 20,000 Kentuckians work for them. Those Kentuckians understand we don't have any anger with the Japanese, and we shouldn't have anger with the Japanese. But, recently, the administration is--everybody is clapping. There are many others who are clapping. They are banning Nippon Steel from buying U.S. Steel. What if it makes U.S. Steel stronger to be joined with Nippon Steel? We like Toyota. Why can't we like Nippon Steel? Nippon Steel buys a lot of metallurgical coal in my State already, and already employs people. They are already good for America. If we forbid them from buying in another country, what if that country goes bankrupt, and now Chinese steel is more important or bigger or more powerful? We broke up U.S. Steel in the 1920s. We never should have. They would be so big and so strong now had we not broken them up that they would be more likely to compete. People are now saying: Big Tech--we hate Big Tech. Let's break Big Tech. What is that going to do? It is going to make their Chinese competitors better and stronger. We need to just stay the heck out of it. If people voluntarily want to watch TikTok, if people want to buy a radio from China or Japan or Vietnam, let them. If you like getting the prices, good. Buy it. But the more and more we have the anger and the isolationism that comes with breaking up trade, the more likely we come to war. With regard to this bill, I think this bill really is Ukraine First and America last. I think the American people agree with me. We have spent 5 days filibustering this, and I know we will lose sometime tonight. We can each speak for an hour. I think we will get to 2 or 3 in the morning. So we can hold them off. We can draw attention to this, but this is about winning America. It isn't about winning this vote. It is about showing America that we care about your sovereignty, we care about your tax dollars, and we think that the priority should be here, the priority should be our border; that we should be concerned enough to stay up, to protest, to filibuster, to protect Americans from a bill like this, to say that America is important, that our voters are important. One of the supporters of this bill said today--and I won't mention them by name. But they said that people at home can't understand a bill like this, that the elite foreign policy minds of Washington somehow can understand this more than the people. I couldn't disagree more. I think every one of my acquaintances and friends and people I run into in Kentucky have as much ability, if not more ability, than the people in this room to make a decision on this. And I have yet to meet one who came up to me and said: I want Ukraine first. They say: I want to defend America's border. I want to defend America, and I want to defend a country that leaves us alone, that leaves us free, that allows volunteerism to create the great and vast wealth that our country has become. Madam President, how many glorious minutes do I have left?

Mr. PAUL. All right. A lot of votes up here--win or lose--don't change things. I do predict that this vote is transforming things. People have asked whether or not there is dissension on the Republican side. I think there is a great deal of dissension because what has happened on this bill is that a minority of Republicans have decided to side with all the Democrats, or virtually all of the Democrats, despite the fact that the majority of the caucus is against this bill. I think that has led to the length of this filibuster and the support for this filibuster. We are 5 days in, and we will probably make it 5\1/2\ days on this filibuster. The last 24 hours or so have been a talking filibuster. My colleague from Utah, Senator Lee, spoke for 4 hours on Saturday. We do this because we care about our country. We care about the looting of the treasure. We care about the destruction of the dollar. We care about setting priorities and saying we don't have enough money; we don't have enough to be everything to everyone. What we need to do is obey our oath of office. Our oath of office is to America. It doesn't mean we can't have sympathy for other countries. Come back to me when you have a surplus. When you are running a surplus, when you are running this country on a profit, when you are running this country and paying for the things you promised to our people, then come to me and ask me about another country. But you don't borrow money for charity. You don't walk the street, and if you are a poor person and you have four kids, and you provide enough for your rent and food and your gasoline, and you are barely getting by, and you see a homeless person, you don't say, ``Hey, honey, let's go to the bank and borrow $1,000,'' and give it to that homeless person. Even if you are sympathetic, you might help them up. You might help them to the side of the street. You do not go to the bank and borrow money. Ukraine can be the greatest cause in the world, but we are borrowing the money. There is no money. There is no rainy-day fund. There is no surplus, and there is no reason on God's green Earth we should be borrowing money to send it to Ukraine. We are either going to print it up, which causes inflation and hurts the working class, or we are going to borrow it, and we go further in debt. So I, for one, think that the American people are opposed to this bill. I think they are opposed to the concept of Ukraine first and America last. I predict that this issue doesn't go away. I predict that the House of Representatives is not going to take up this bill. I predict that the vast majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives are more conservative than the Republicans in this body, and I predict that this fight is not over. During this debate and the fact that we were able to delay and talk about this for 5 days--5\1/2\ days--the Speaker of the House spoke out. I don't know that he would have been prompted to speak out, although he has spoken out previously against this. But the Speaker of the House spoke out today and said he is not taking this bill up. See, they have put together border reform that actually would transform things, border reform that acknowledges that it is an emergency. So I will be a no and continue to be a no on this bill because I think it puts Ukraine first and America last. With that, I yield my time.

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1384, and I ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, today, we are gathered once again to kick the can down the road. We are gathered to continue spending money, not individually in appropriations bills and not with any real accountability for the money that is being spent but just to keep spending. But at the rate we are spending the money, we have accumulated a $34 trillion debt. We are accumulating debt at about $1 trillion every 3 months. If you look at how we spend the money, about two-thirds of the money is spent on mandatory programs, and there are no votes on mandatory programs. They are on autopilot, growing at about 5 to 6 percent a year, but they consume two-thirds of the spending. So when we come before you and they say, ``We are going to vote on a budget; we are going to vote on spending,'' we are actually voting on only about 28 percent of the budget. That is called discretionary spending. About half of that is military, and half of it is nonmilitary. Amongst that, they have this great agreement they came to. In the military, they decided we are going to increase the military by 3 percent. So this big chunk over here that is mandatory--we are not going to vote on it--is going up about 5 or 6 percent. Then we are going to vote on discretionary, but half of that is going up at 3 percent. So, really, we are looking at about 14 percent of the budget and saying: Oh, we are going to try to do something. You can eliminate the 14 percent of the budget, and it doesn't do anything to the debt. In fact, the debt equals the entire discretionary spending. So when we vote on whether it is $1.5 trillion or $1.6 trillion or $1.7 trillion, it is all borrowed. The taxes that you pay essentially pay only for the entitlement programs. Everything else is borrowed. Why is that a big deal? Why does it make a big difference to the average American? Because that is why your grocery prices go up. That is why your gas goes up. It is why people can't afford houses and why interest rates are high. Why? Because the Federal Reserve buys your debt, prints money, and your dollars become worth less and less. That is what inflation is. We are just days into the new year, and the Treasury Department has announced that the debt has surpassed $34 trillion. The situation is only getting worse. We are spending money and borrowing at about $1 trillion every 90 days. You know, I can remember before, you know, back in the eighties, when we were in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Now we are adding $1 trillion in 90 days. If that pace continues, that will amount to a mind-boggling $4 trillion added to the debt every single year. We are spending ourselves into oblivion. Since last fall, the United States has been borrowing over $5 billion every day, over $220 million an hour, nearly $4 million every minute, and over $62,000 a second. This is literally out of control. We are destroying the dollar. We are creating inflation in borrowing $62,000 a second. Your family's share of the cost of that borrowing amounts to about $15,000 a year. Our Nation's greatest threat comes not from abroad but from the Halls of Congress, which at every opportunity look for ways to ignore our spending problem and expedite our economic decline. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that we will add an average of $2 trillion a year in debt every year for the next decade. That is another $20 trillion in debt. Do you see the debt climbing? Thirty-three? Thirty-four? We are going to be up in the fifties in 10 years. Within a decade, we are going to go from $34 trillion to $50-some-odd trillion. It is literally out of control. The real-world consequences are that home prices are doubling, interest rates are rising, grocery prices are rising, and gas prices are rising. It is not a mystery. Prices don't rise; the value of the dollar declines. The value of the dollar declines because the Federal Reserve prints up the money to buy the debt. This isn't rocket science, but you will often watch the evening news, and they will go ``Oh my goodness, the mystery of inflation'' or ``It is going to be transitory.'' Nobody is addressing the root cause. The root cause is Congress. Congress creates the inflation by running massive deficits. This reckless level of borrowing and spending is unsustainable. The ever-increasing heights of our debt mean a weak economy, high inflation, and confiscatory tax rates. In other words, today's spending threatens tomorrow's prosperity. It should come as no surprise that our financial institutions are beginning to sound the alarm. JPMorgan described our $34 trillion debt as a ``boiling frog'' phenomenon for the economy and expects a debt- related recession in the next year or two. Moody's recently slashed its rating outlook on the United States' sovereign debt. There will come a time when other countries will refuse to buy our debt. There will come a time when the Federal Reserve buys all of the debt, and the destruction of the currency will become pervasive. It seems that the whole world can see this coming, the warning signs. Everyone can see it except for those Members of Congress who are so deluded by always giving everybody everything they want--free money for all. It is only a matter of time before the world wakes up and refuses to buy our debt. We are approaching the most predictable economic crisis the United States has ever faced. That is why I am back on the floor today and drawing attention to our out-of-control spending. Americans are starved for a voice of fiscal sanity. Americans understand better than our Nation's elite that time is running out. Americans will pay dearly for Congress's inability to say no to every cause, every line item, and every pinstriped lobbyist. We will pay more to Uncle Sam in the form of taxes. We will pay more for our groceries. We will pay more for our homes. We will suffer higher interest rates. And we will find a generation of kids who won't be able to leave their parents' homes because businesses can't afford to hire them. But it doesn't have to be this way. America can once again be a rising nation. We can take that first step to a bright future today. I filed an amendment to this bill that would make across-the-board spending reductions, not just rightwing spending reductions or leftwing spending reductions--everything. You know, if we were to spend money at about 95 percent of what we spent last year, we could balance the budget within 5 years. It would still take 5 years. You would tell people at home that that is what we ought to do--just spend 95 percent of what we spent before. Even if it is for good causes, we just can't do it forever. Most people would say: Well, yes, that sounds reasonable. We are not going to eliminate government; we are just going to spend 95 percent of what we spent last year. My amendment would cut spending. My amendment would put us on the right course toward balancing our budget. Some critics will say: But where could we cut? Where could we possibly cut spending? Well, every year, we celebrate Festivus in our office. We have an airing of grievances, and we talk about waste. Last year, right before Christmas, we presented $900 billion worth of waste, and I will give you a couple of the highlights. This is from USAID. This is State Department spending, foreign aid spending. We spent $6 million to boost tourism in Egypt. Does anybody think we don't have enough problems here at home that we should spend $6 million in Egypt in promoting their tourism? I am sure a lot of people will think this one is really worthwhile. The Defense Department spent $8,000 in acquiring a lobster tank. I guess some general needed a lobster tank for his office. I have no idea why they would be spending $8,000 on a lobster tank. During COVID, we passed out money like there was no tomorrow. They couldn't print it fast enough for the government to send it out during COVID. There was $200 billion that was found to have been sent to the wrong people or to have been illegally gained through the COVID money. One of our favorites was a guy showing up, printing out his ID, and the ID was actually a Barbie doll face. He took a picture of a toy, put it on an ID, digitalized it, sent it in for his money, and he got some. One of the other ones that really, I think, gets my gall, gets me up, is we gave money to a thousand dead people. We gave $1 billion to a thousand dead people. When I came to the floor to complain about it, there was opposition. We wanted to unanimously pass a bill allowing the COVID money-givers to look at the Social Security death notices, to cross-match with Social Security death notices to make sure we didn't send checks to dead people. There was an objection. A Senator hurried to the floor, and his objection was that it would violate the privacy of the dead people. I kind of think the dead people's privacy is pretty much over at that point. I also think it is a terrible government policy and makes government look ludicrous at all levels to send a thousand dead people $1 billion. I tried to get it fixed in legislation. There was opposition. Nancy Pelosi pulled it out of a bill that passed that I had it in. They finally did pass something. They said: Well, we can't go backward. We can't get the money back from the dead people. But we will try to do better in the future, not giving money to dead people. And what did we discover in the last year? There was still $38 million--not quite a billion, but there was still $38 million handed out to dead people. Throughout all of this COVID waste, both parties got going. They were giving money to everybody. Every restaurant, every arena, every movie theater was getting money. The money would run out so fast that sometimes they would put up like $45 billion, and in 2 days the money would be gone: Oh, no, it is gone. We want to extend it. We need to give them another $45 billion. Guess what. If you give people free money, they will take it. Even people who say they are conservative and say the government is having problems, free money will be accepted. But it is not free. The free money that was given out--the supposedly free money--caused the inflation. It is still causing the inflation. Nothing in life is really free. The Fed bought it; the Fed created money to do it; and that is where your inflation comes from. And it is not over because we bought so much stuff. We gave away trillions of dollars. Throughout my time in the Senate, I have tried, time and again, to offer budget plans that would stem the tide, that would balance our budget. This amendment won't get a vote today, but we will have a vote on whether to continue things, whether or not to kick the can down the road and just keep spending money. But realize for those who vote to keep spending money at this level, they are voting for about a $1.5 to $1.6 trillion debt, which may well be approaching $2 trillion as this goes on. It is unsustainable, and those who vote to continue government spending at this level are responsible for the consequences, responsible for the inflation, responsible for the high home prices, and responsible for the high interest rates. I will, today, offer an amendment to have more scrutiny on foreign aid. Earlier this week, there was a vote to have scrutiny on the aid given to one of our allies, and I voted for that because I believe friend or foe, whoever is getting American money, there always should be conditions; there always should be catches. We should always ask: What are you doing with our money? We should ask that it is being used honestly. I have harangued for over 2 years now that the money sent to Ukraine ought to have an inspector general looking just at that money. In Afghanistan, we had a special inspector general. I have tried several times on the floor, and we haven't been able to get a special inspector general for Ukraine, one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It is often said, though, that American foreign aid is to project American power and values. Unfortunately, year after year, decade after decade, the only thing consistent about American foreign aid is that the money continues to flow regardless of the behavior of the recipients. In 2023 alone, the U.S. Government took over $43 billion of American tax money and gave it away, sent it as welfare to other nations. Did the government send that money to our friends? Sometimes. But sometimes your tax dollars go to countries better described as frenemies. And often, U.S. foreign aid actually goes to countries best described as authoritarian dictatorships. The idea that we are actually looking to see if our values are being embedded or allowed or exemplified or made to show up in the countries that receive this just doesn't exist. In 2022, the United States sent $1\1/2\ billion to Egypt, but Egypt is a tyrannical nightmare. The State Department acknowledges that President Elsisi--and I use the word ``President'' loosely because he took over in a military coup--that he effectively has turned the country into a prison where security forces routinely engage in extrajudicial killings, torture, as well as harsh crackdowns on anyone who wishes to practice the right to freedom of speech. This is a regime that detains journalists for the crime of reporting, has tortured 14-year-olds for the crime of participating in public demonstration. Is this what America stands for? Are these the American values that we are pushing out on the world by sending over $1 billion to Egypt? Over the last 30 years, I think we have sent close to $60 billion to Egypt. It is just a coincidence maybe, but the Mubarak family who ran Egypt for more than 15 years ended up being worth personally somewhere between $15 and $20 billion. That is called the big skim. Your tax dollars are sent to foreign countries. They are sent to dictatorships. And guess what, the tin-pot dictator takes their skim off the top. It always happens--I could give you a thousand examples--and we never change. People freak out and say: Are you going to put conditions on foreign aid? They would have to behave or have elections or not persecute their people or not hoist up a 14-year-old by his arms and electrocute him. That is the kind of stuff that is happening in Egypt. Yet our money goes on and on. If I propose that there are conditions--oh, we can't have conditions. America just must be generous. We don't care what they do with the money. And if we don't do it, somebody else will. The Russians will or the Chinese will. We have to give away our money or somebody else will give them money. Our values be damned. We don't care. We look the other way, and the majority here--not me but the majority here--votes to continue foreign aid everywhere all the time without conditions. Today, I offer an amendment where there will be conditions. Today's amendment will have conditions on aid to the Palestinians. You would think with the massacre and everything else, why would we be giving any money to the Palestinians? But it will be interesting because I think probably the vast majority here will invoke today to continue to give money to the Palestinians. But really shouldn't they have to do something to earn the money? Shouldn't they have to at least say we believe Israel has a right to exist or that the massacre on October 7 was a bad thing? If they can't say that, should they get any of our money? We need to know what America stands for. Why should we reward governments that have terrible human rights records? If foreign aid is to project American values, then we should write those values into the law. Let's say you only get the foreign aid if you actually are exemplifying American values. We have made such attempts in the past. For example, we have laws on the books named after Senator Patrick Leahy that prohibit U.S. assistance to countries where there is credible information that gross violations of human rights have been committed. But if our government strictly adhered to the Leahy law, it would insist that recipients abandon their despotic ways before they can receive American money. If our government actually enforced the Leahy law, which is well-intended and I support, foreign aid to Egypt would have ended years ago. There is always a loophole. There is always a Presidential waiver, and they always use it. The only thing for certain that never changes is your money will be sent to these foreign countries; there will be no accountability; the deficit will rise; but, by golly, the money gets shoveled out the door every year. There doesn't seem to be a concern for what it is doing to Americans, what it is doing to our dollar and to our economy. Unfortunately, the government always has a way around the rules. They are incredibly effective at circumventing the Leahy laws, and so your money still flows around the globe regardless of the behavior of the recipients. It may surprise many Americans to learn that we have provided hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority over the years. In 2023 alone, we spent over $280 million in the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1993, the United States has provided more than $7.6 billion in assistance to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. I say not one penny more--not one penny more--of foreign aid to countries unwilling to renounce violence. All American aid should be conditioned on recipients' practice of protecting basic human rights. I voted this way recently for one of our best allies, Israel. Their aid should be conditioned as well, not because I dislike Israel but because all foreign aid should be conditioned on how it is spent. It is our money. It should be conditioned on human rights. It should not be too much to ask that the recipients of American aid renounce terrorism and cease trying to destroy Israel. Is that too much to ask? Are you willing to keep giving money to the Palestinian Authority that will not and has not renounced and condemned the massacre of October 7? After these attacks, this principle is even more relevant. The atrocities committed just over 100 days ago resulted in the killing of over 1,200 innocent men, women, and children, 250 people taken hostage. At least 33 Americans were killed, and at least 6 remain unaccounted for and are presumed taken captive by Hamas. That kind of barbarism cannot and should not be rewarded with American dollars. How can we continue to allow the flow of money to groups that call for the destruction of Israel? How can we continue to allow taxpayer dollars to go to the very entities that lob rockets toward civilians in Israel? How can we reward the slaughter of innocent people? The old ways of doing business have not brought peace to the region. We have not bought peace. We don't buy off and somehow create peace, and there is, all of a sudden, peace because of the $7.6 billion we have given to the Palestinians. They won't recognize Israel. They won't condemn the violence. They won't even condemn the massacre where 1,200 were killed October 7. The time has come for the United States to mean what it says in the defense of human rights. This is why I offer an amendment to the spending bill today. That should be something every Senator can support. The amendment would end American aid to governing entities in Gaza and the West Bank unless they, among other things, recognize Israel's right to exist, pledge to renounce terrorism and the October 7 massacre, terminate funding to anti-American and anti-Israeli enticement, as well as release all of the hostages abducted on October 7. Additionally, my amendment requires that the Secretary of State report on Hamas and the Palestinian Authority's compliance with U.S. foreign assistance laws and any use of funds received from the United States that could have been involved with committing these atrocities. American resources should always promote American security interests and values, and any recipient of our tax dollars should be more than willing to adopt the principles that recognize the liberty and dignity of the individual. But we cannot expect the recipient of aid to change their behavior if America does not demand it. We speak of human rights but reward those who violate them. We can no longer afford empty rhetoric. It makes no sense to borrow money from China and turn around and give that money away to foreign countries. It is fiscally irresponsible, and it is weakening our national security. America must demand a change, a change in behavior from those who do not accept Israel's right to exist, from those who actively seek the destruction of the State of Israel and murder innocent Israelis. To that end, I ask for a ``yes'' vote on my amendment that will end aid to Palestinian Authority. I yield the floor.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, most of Europe--indeed, most of the civilized world--does not require three COVID vaccines for adolescents. We are admonished by those on the left to follow the science. The science is pretty clear on this as well. The FDA committee on vaccines, as well as the CDC committee on vaccines, voted, and they said that it would be advisable--not a mandate, but that it would be advisable--to give a booster vaccine to those 65 and older. Adolescents were never addressed in this. In fact, one of the members of the committee, Paul Offit, is a renowned scientist--infectious disease, Philadelphia Children's Hospital. He is pro all vaccines. He is pro the COVID vaccine. I think he probably doesn't even have trouble with the mandate, and yet he said the risks to the vaccine for adolescents are greater than the risk of the disease. We address diseases based on the individual and who they are and what their risks are. You base the risks and benefits of treatment versus the disease. The risks of COVID, particularly in 2021, for a 70-year-old, were maybe a thousand times more than for a teenager. In fact, when we have looked at some countries' statistics, the entire country of Germany had no deaths among healthy children between the ages of 5 and 17. If you take out children who are very, very ill in our country and look at only healthy children, there is no measurable risk of dying from COVID in our country for the youth. Yet we still have a policy here, and this policy originated not with scientists nor with the scientific committee. The policy that they are adhering to here to force our Senate pages to have three vaccines actually comes from political appointees in the Biden administration. It is not just a fact or a matter of whether or not the vaccine is of benefit to them. It is also a question of whether or not the vaccine is actually potentially harmful to them. We do know that there is a side effect to the vaccine, particularly in young people--particularly boys, but it can happen in girls--primarily between the ages of 14 and 24. We know that that risk increases with each successive vaccine because kids have a stronger immune response. We know this because even the CDC recommended that if you just had COVID recently, you shouldn't get a COVID vaccine because you have already gotten a heightened immune response from the disease itself. But we know with certainty that none of the vaccine committees recommended that Senate pages have three vaccines. Yet that is still the policy. We finally have come to the realization that almost everybody has either been vaccinated or had COVID and that, actually, natural immunity is about five times more potent than the vaccine. We finally have come to a sensible policy with regard to our military. We are no longer mandating the COVID vaccine in the military. Yet one of the few places left on the planet where we are mandating it is in the Senate. Now, admittedly, there are not that many Senate pages. But should we be lacking in science and ignoring the science to force them to do something that is actually potentially deleterious to their health. Even the council for the District of Columbia recently voted unanimously to repeal the requirement that students receive a COVID-19 shot to attend public school. Some on the other side will say: Well, we need to force the Senate pages to take these three vaccines because that is what the DC schools are doing. The DC schools are no longer doing this. The entire world admits that the vaccine does not stop transmission. So you can't make this indirect argument: We need to vaccinate them to save the old Senators. That is not true. It doesn't stop transmission. We do believe that still, for vulnerable crowds, vulnerable age groups--over 65--there may be some reduction in hospitalization and death. There is no measurable benefit for adolescents, and there actually is a greater risk of myocarditis from the vaccine--admittedly still not a high risk but about between 4 and 6 out of 15,000--of an inflammation of the heart. But we do know the risk for a child or for an adolescent--a Senate page--dying is zero. If they have particular health problems and they want to take a vaccine, nobody is stopping them, but we shouldn't be mandating something that the science doesn't support. So just before Thanksgiving, the Mayor of DC actually signed the legislation that gets rid of DC's mandate. There is no more excuse that the DC schools are requiring this. The council and Mayor of one of the most liberal cities in the United States are all of one mind: We have had enough of COVID vaccine mandates. We have had enough of students missing school for noncompliance. We have had enough of kids falling behind in their studies for the sake of a misguided mandate. Yet, to become a Senate page, you still to this day must get a COVID-19 booster shot. This requirement in the Senate persists despite the fact that study after study demonstrates that the risks posed by the vaccine for young and healthy people are greater than the risks posed by COVID. In addition, all sides acknowledge that the vaccines do not prevent transmission. Study after study shows that it makes no sense to mandate COVID vaccinations for teenagers who are healthy and that such a mandate could be dangerous. A myocarditis study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology examined 23 million people ages 12 and up across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. This study of 23 million people found that after 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine, the risk of myocarditis was higher compared with being unvaccinated and higher after the second dose of the vaccine. Almost all of the myocarditis came after the second vaccine. With each vaccine, it increases the risk because the kids, or younger people, make an amazingly strong immune reaction to the vaccine. The risk was highest among males ages 16 to 24. That is why many of us argued until we were blue in the face that mandating it for our young soldiers was wrong and actually malpractice. We finally did succeed in removing that mandate, and that was actually passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the President. Yet the same risk exists for the Senate pages, and the mandate continues. This is exactly why several European countries--including Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway--all restrict the use of mRNA vaccines for COVID for young people. Yet the policy for Senate pages blindly commands vaccines for young, healthy people. A study published in December 2022 in the Journal of Medical Ethics found that per 100,000 third doses of mRNA vaccine, up to 14.7 cases of myocarditis may be caused in males ages 18 to 29. Up to 80 percent of those diagnosed with vaccine-induced myocarditis or pericarditis continued to struggle with cardiac inflammation more than 3 months after receiving a second dose. Also in December 2022, Dr. Vinay Prasad and Dr. Benjamin Knudsen published a review in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation that examined 29 studies across 3 continents. Madam President, 6 of the 29 studies showed that after 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine, more than 1 in 10,000 males between the ages of 12 and 24 would experience myocarditis. A study published the same month in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that, regardless of sex, among those ages 5 to 39, myocarditis or pericarditis occurred in 1 in every 50,000 after a first booster. With statistics like that, why would anyone think that it is a good idea to insist upon boosters for our young pages, who are in their early teenage years? It is the height of malpractice to subject young people to the greater risk of vaccination simply to satisfy the hunger for mandates. But even the bureaucrats are finding that they can no longer credibly impose COVID mandates. There is a growing movement among scientists and doctors across the country to think more rationally about this. We have always had this. For example, the flu vaccine was never mandated on children. Children survived the flu and developed immunity. How long does your immunity last? Curiously, they found a woman who had survived the Spanish flu who was still alive just a couple of years ago. She actually still had antibodies to the Spanish flu although it had been nearly 100 years since she was infected. We know that people who had the first SARS in 2002 and 2003 still have antibodies nearly 20 years later. People have learned to live with COVID. Even the DC Council, which governs one of the most liberal, mandate-happy cities in the country, knows that their constituents will no longer tolerate mandates, particularly those imposed on children, but the Senate COVID vaccine mandate remains. Will this mandate continue indefinitely, and if so, based on what data? What if someone can come let's say 5 years from now and say: I have had COVID 15 times, and the last 8 times, it was minor cold symptoms. Yet you are still mandating I take a vaccine that doesn't stop transmission and has no benefit to hospitalization or death for young people? You know, when they approved the booster for kids--it was never recommended, but they approved it for kids--they could not come up with data showing reduced hospitalization or death. Why? Because young people aren't going to the hospital or dying from COVID. They simply have it from the beginning, and they don't now. The only way they could actually try to prove efficacy--and not really efficacy but to prove some kind of effect from giving a booster--is they said: If you give these kids a vaccine, they will make antibodies. Well, my response to that is, you can give them 100 vaccines, you can give them 1,000 vaccines, and they will make antibodies every time. That is proof of the concept of the way vaccines work, but it doesn't mean you have to or need a vaccine. Public health measures should be backed up with proof that the benefits outweigh the burdens. There is no evidence of that when it comes to vaccination and booster mandates, especially for teenagers, who, as a group, are less vulnerable to this virus than any Senator. In fact, it is a little-known fact but absolutely true that the seasonal flu, or influenza, is more deadly than COVID for people in the ``young'' category. In the category for the age of the Senate pages, the seasonal flu is more deadly than COVID. Now, this isn't to downplay COVID; it is just to say that COVID had a very targeted mortality and lethality. Its target was generally over 65. It was also those who are obese at almost any age. But it specifically was not fatal for young, healthy people. I merely ask that the Senate open its eyes to what several other countries are doing, what the rest of the country sees: that COVID vaccine mandates on children are harmful, counterproductive, and must be put to an end. That is why I ask unanimous consent that the Senate pass my resolution to end all COVID-related vaccination mandates for pages who serve in the Chamber. So therefore I ask, Madam President, unanimous consent that the Committee on Rules and Administration be discharged from consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 336; further, that the resolution be agreed to and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. PAUL. Nothing in our proposal bans future vaccines. So it is a spurious argument to say that somehow, this would prevent a future vaccine. Ten years from now Ebola erupts, and everybody is getting Ebola, and we have a great vaccine--nothing prevents that. Now, he mentioned whether or not the children, the kids, the teenagers, might have a preexisting condition. We don't know that; you are right. So the people who take care of minors are their parents, and they would make a decision. Nothing in this resolution prevents anybody from getting a vaccine. In fact, I would recommend you ask your doctor. That is the way you are supposed to do it: Ask your doctor and your parents and decide whether you need a vaccine. So, really, there are no real arguments here being made. It is important to know that no one would be prevented from getting a vaccine, and no one would be prevented from having a new vaccine policy later on. The question of who is dying from this is an important one because the question is whether for healthy kids, whether the risks of the vaccine are greater than the risks of the disease. This is something people are going to have different conclusions on. But the science shows at this point that the risks of the vaccine are greater than the risks of the disease for healthy kids. Now, if your kid is not healthy or had a kidney transplant and you want to talk it over with their doctor, by all means they can get a vaccine if they want. But realize that the other kids getting vaccines is not protecting your child because the vaccines don't stop transmission. And this is admitted by everyone. Even the Biden administration admits this. Everyone admits they don't stop transmission. So what we are doing here is going against all science. We are going against all freedom. We are taking the freedom away from our Senate pages and their parents to make this decision. And we are actually using faulty science. The two main vaccine committees that have looked at this voted to recommend this for only people over 65, where the evidence was that in that age group the risks of the disease were greater than the risks of the vaccine. I acknowledge that. For children, teenagers, for adolescents, it is the opposite. The risks of the vaccine, while small, actually exceed the risk of the disease, which are virtually zero, if not zero, for healthy kids. And so I find it elitist. I find it the height of arrogance that some people will want to make those decisions for others. In a free country, each individual should be allowed to make these decisions. You shouldn't have some nonscientist Senator coming forward and saying: You must do as I tell you, particularly when all of the science actually goes against that at this point. But even if you disagreed with my point of view, I am not here to tell you that you have to take my point of view. Go get a vaccine for your kids if you want. But the interesting thing is, people are smarter than you think they are. If you look at the statistics on vaccines, there will be people lamenting: Oh, if we only had more people vaccinated, we would have done so much better. It is, actually, really not true. Over age 65, it is somewhere between 97 and 98 percent of people over 65 who chose to get vaccinated. People read the news. People are smarter than you think. People see someone their age dying, and they are like, I think I might get vaccinated. But do you know how many people are vaccinating their teenagers? It is about 3 percent because people are reading the news that teenagers don't die from this disease. They also know that kids probably had COVID-19 already. They may have already had the test. And what we do know from looking at millions of people in large studies, that if you have had COVID, your protection from getting it again or getting seriously ill is about 5 times better than the vaccine. Now, that is not an argument for not getting the vaccine if you are in an elderly category or if you are in a high-risk category. But it is certainly an argument against getting it if you are a young person and you have already had COVID and now you are being forced to get this. The other thing is, is the current Senate policy and page policy isn't taking into account the fact that if one of the pages had COVID 2 weeks ago and now they want to be a page and we won't let them come up, are they advising getting a vaccine if they only had COVID 2 weeks ago? I don't think there is any allowance for that. That is actually against medical advice to take a vaccine very quickly after you have already had COVID, because their immune response is so extraordinary, they get a heightened response. And that is when you get this overlap or overlay, which causes an inflammation of the heart. So what I would find today is that the Flat Earth Society still just wants you to do as you are told. The Flat Earth Society doesn't believe in your medical freedom. And, yes, we will come back--and I will continue to come back--until some sense is finally jogged into the minds of those who want you to blindly just do as they are told--do as you are told, don't think about it, don't make your own decisions, do as you are told. I think that form of elitism and arrogance will eventually backfire because there are a lot of people out there who made the decision that, you know what, I am not vaccinating my child because it is still under emergency use; it has some unknowns; and I know my kids have already had COVID. And I don't see any kids dying from COVID unless they are extraordinarily ill. When the Senator says: Oh, they are the leading cause of death among children, they all have significant other terminal illnesses. None of them are healthy children dying from COVID. Entire countries have released their statistics. There is even more that the government is hiding from us, frankly. The vast majority of people over 65 who took at least two vaccines: 97, 98 percent. So if you have taken two vaccines and you have gotten COVID twice--which is the average person over 65 because it doesn't stop transmission--you have had two vaccines and COVID twice, what are your risks of going to the hospital or dying? That is what you want to know. Do you need to take a vaccine every 3 months? Do I want to keep being vaccinated? Tell me what the statistics show, and I will make a rational decision based on that. The CDC won't release this because the CDC, essentially, have become salesmen for Big Pharma. They want you to get vaccinated. Big Pharma is complaining they are not making enough money on the vaccine because you are not rushing out to get another vaccine. Wouldn't you want to know: Am I going to get sick and die if I already had COVID twice and I have already had two vaccines? They have the statistics. So all I ask for is there ought to be a little more consideration for freedom. And I bring this up for the Senate pages because I do care about their medical freedom. And I care about their right to be left alone. And this is not the end of this debate.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I raise a point of order that section 7902 of the conference report to accompany H.R. 2670, the National Defense Authorization Act, violates rule XXVIII.

Mr. PAUL. During the 1960s, the FBI spied on Martin Luther King and other civil rights protestors. The FBI spied on Vietnam war protesters. The Church Committee was formed in the 1970s and detailed these abuses, and the response by Congress was to pass something called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. FISA was ostensibly passed to limit spying on Americans. It was supposed to be a reform, but as far as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows government to spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant, it is unconstitutional. As Dr. John Tyler from Houston Christian University points out, ``the FISA text, the Constitution's text, and the relevant opinions by the U.S. Supreme Court conclusively demonstrated that FISA, and its secret, ex parte''--meaning you only hear from one side of the court--these ``courts are unconstitutional for three reasons.'' ``First, the secret, ex parte courts violate the case or controversy requirement of Article III.'' Courts are about deciding disputes between two parties. They aren't originated just to say: This is a pronouncement. There has to be a dispute, and in the FISA Court, it is more about having a generalized comment. ``Second, FISA violates Fourth Amendment liberties from unreasonable searches and seizures.'' ``Third, FISA and its secret ex parte courts violate the due process guarantees of the 5th and 14th Amendments.'' Dr. Tyler goes on to say that ``lastly, the Supreme Court has ruled that national security does not require secret courts or justify ignoring the Fourth Amendment liberties.'' This unconstitutional government spying has been further authorized by adding section 702 to FISA. That law entrusts America's intelligence Agencies with broad authorities, supposedly to surveil foreigners abroad. But time has proven, again and again, that America's intelligence Agencies cannot be trusted with this immense power and responsibility. Section 702 expires at the end of this year. We have known this for 5 years, and yet somehow the Senate has no time to debate this and wishes to simply extend it. Members of Congress anticipated using this deadline as an opportunity not just to make meaningful changes but to reform FISA generally to better protect Americans' civil liberties, but it doesn't appear to be allowed to happen at this point. Everything is rush, rush, rush; let's pass it without debate. But they have known for 5 years that it was going to expire at the end of this year, and yet they just want to punt it with the hope that they will never have to debate it. Extending this section 702 robs Congress of the ability to make reforms now and likely robs Congress of the opportunity to make reforms any time in the next year. That means that, once again, the intelligence Agencies that ignore the constraints on their power will go unaddressed and unpunished, and the warrantless surveillance of Americans in violation of the Bill of Rights will continue. Using 702, Americans' communications, content, and metadata is inevitably swept up and kept in government databases without a warrant. Law enforcement Agencies then access Americans' communications, once again without a warrant. In other words, your texts, your emails, and your phone calls are collected into this massive government database, without a warrant, and then searched willy-nilly by thousands of different employees without a warrant. As Judge Andrew Napolitano points out, ``the Constitution requires probable cause of a crime to be demonstrated to a judge before a judge [grants] a warrant. That was the law of the land until FISA.'' But now FISA has set up a special court that meets in secret, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and it authorizes ``judges on that court to issue search warrants based on a lower standard of probable cause.'' The Fourth Amendment says you have to prove to a judge probable cause of a crime. This says you only have to prove probable cause of an association with a foreign entity. This is contrary to the Constitution. This is not the Fourth Amendment. The Constitution requires that warrants be issued on probable cause that a crime has been committed, but as Judge Napolitano makes clear, ``FISA established probable cause of foreign agency.'' So it lowered the standard. It is not probable cause of a crime. It is probable cause of association with a foreign agency. But even that standard ``morphed [down] into probable cause of speaking to a foreign person,'' which then again morphed even further down to ``probable cause of speaking to any person who has ever spoken to a foreign person.'' All of that happened in secret and without Congressional approval. With this weakened standard to order surveillance, these FISA judges, who meet in secret, grant 99.97 percent of all warrants. They are a rubberstamp for whatever they want to do. The left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice further explains why a law designed to protect the Fourth Amendment has led to their dissolution. The Brennan Center states that ``dramatic shifts in technology and law has changed the role of the [FISA] Court since its creation in 1978.'' ``The fundamental changes not only erode Americans' civil liberties, but [they] likely violate Article III of the U.S. Constitution, which limits courts to deciding concrete disputes between parties rather than issuing opinion on abstract questions.'' According to the Brennan Center, ``today's FISA Court does not operate like a court at all, but more like an arm of the intelligence establishment.'' ``The FISA Court's wholesale approval process also fails to satisfy standards set forth by the Fourth Amendment, which protects against warrantless searches and seizures.'' Some people issued prescient warnings about the destruction of civil liberties and constitutional rights at the time. At the time, then- Senator Joe Biden stated that he was voting no on this section 702, this expansion of FISA powers. Senator Joe Biden said it ``would be a breathtaking and unconstitutional expansion of the President's powers and it is wholly unnecessary to address the problems the administration has identified.'' Then-Senator Biden added that he would ``not give the President unchecked authority to eavesdrop on whomever he wants in exchange for the vague and hollow assurance that he will protect the civil liberties of the American people.'' Boy, I wish that Joe Biden were still around and remembering his comments about FISA. Patrick Eddington of the Cato Institute has dedicated his career to exposing the abuses of surveillance authorities. He argues that section 702 of FISA and its predecessors comprise the ``biggest unconstitutional mass surveillance dragnet in American history'' and that ``we have documentary evidence from the federal government's own records of repeated, systemic abuses'' of this authority. Even the FISA Court itself, in 2018, held that the FBI's procedures for accessing Americans' communications that are incidentally collected under 702 violate both the statute and the Fourth Amendment. Even the FISA Court, which rubberstamps these warrants like there is no going away, says that they believe they are violating the Fourth Amendment. But this warrantless surveillance on Americans goes on. In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans' communications. Like the spying on Martin Luther King and Vietnam war protesters, the FBI still targets individuals for their beliefs. The FBI accessed the 702 database without search warrants to access the information of 19,000 political donors. They accessed the records of those involved with a protest on January 6. They accessed the records of a Member of Congress and ``Black Lives Matter'' activists. You might think, oh, I have got nothing to hide, no big deal. You might think that if you avoid political activity, you can avoid the long arm of the government. But think again. If you call a merchant in England or text a family member in Germany or email a friend in Israel, the feds can seize and search your communications without permission, without a warrant, and without due process. But that is not all. The Federal spies can then capture all the communications of the persons you subsequently reached out to and all the persons they reached out to. It goes on and reaches its tentacles out, such that it gathers millions of communications. Imagine a Senator or a Congressman who talks to a Prime Minister overseas. Their communication is in the database. To allow this to happen--imagine all of the people who are in international business and who make international phone calls. Their phone calls are in the database. And it would be one thing if we were just collecting this to look at terrorist activities, but, no, we let the FBI search any American's name in there. They can go in under any pretext. We told the FBI: You have to list why you are searching the name. And they didn't do it. They actually go around some of the rules by saying: Oh, let's search 10,000 things and call it 1 query. We cannot trust them. You cannot trust the fox to be in charge of the henhouse. We need controls, and Congress needs to do their job. We had 5 years to think about this. It comes up, and we are just going to airdrop it in and say: Sorry. We haven't had time to think about this. We don't have time to reform it. We don't care about Americans' privacy. That is what the majority, who will vote to just drop this in and turn the other way, will do. It would be bad enough if the FBI limited itself to eviscerating the Fourth Amendment and indiscriminately collecting and searching the private communications of millions of Americans, but it is far worse than that. As we all know, the FBI abused the immense power conferred to it by FISA to subvert a Republican Presidential campaign. In its zeal to investigate Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Candidate Trump, the FBI sought to obtain permission to conduct electronic surveillance on Page, not by going to a real judge, in public, in an article III court, but by going to a secret judge. Imagine the chilling effect, if you can try to get beyond the politics of whether he is a Republican or a Democrat. Imagine the chilling effect of the government investigating political campaigns. How could anybody think that that is a good idea? To eavesdrop on Page, the FBI needed to get approval from the FISA Court, not a real warrant but just a warrant that he was associated with a foreign government. The secretive court that grants 99.97 percent of warrants gave it to them. But the FBI also relied on information they were given by the Trump opponent's campaign--Hillary Clinton's campaign. You have something called the Steele dossier that was all over the news. That dossier was given to the FBI by a political campaign. It was essentially opposition research. Clinton's Presidential campaign and the Democrat Party obtained the secret surveillance order by subterfuge. But the FBI didn't verify or check the claims made in the dossier, as it is required to do by law. To put it in plain English, the FBI was able to spy on an American citizen because it presented the Democratic Party's opposition research as evidence to obtain a secret order on a campaign operative. This was fraud. This was an abuse of power. This was an attempt to undermine a Republican Presidential campaign. People talk about election interference. My goodness, what could be more of an interference in a campaign than getting a secret order from your intelligence Agencies to spy on a political campaign. The order was ultimately found to be misleading, and you would think this would have led to scandal. You would think this would have led to punishment, but no one, really, was ever punished for this. Even the New York Times described the effort to wiretap Carter Page as ``a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process.'' But these are not errors. These are not honest mistakes. These are abuses of power. The audacity to dupe and manipulate the secret FISA Court demonstrates that the misconduct was not mere accident, but rather demonstrates the arrogance that inevitably results when a secretive, one-sided process all but assures these Agencies will never be challenged. And what are we doing? The Senate will sweep this under the rug. We will have no reform. They have known for 5 years this is coming up, and they are not going to do a thing to reform it. Since the FBI demonstrated a willingness to evade the rules to spy on an aide to a Presidential candidate, we should not be surprised that Carter Page was far from the only victim of the abuse of FISA authorities. A subsequent Department of Justice review reviewed 29 other FISA applications and found that each one contained factual discrepancies and errors, at an average of 20 mistakes per application. More recently, Special Counsel John Durham's report on the FBI's probe into the alleged collusion between Donald Trump and Russia revealed that at least some FBI agents abused America's surveillance apparatus to open a groundless counterintelligence campaign against a Republican Presidential candidate. And yet despite the abuses, despite the years of calls for reform, the Senate is presented with a defense bill that continues the status quo. In 5 years, they have had no time to debate this because they don't want to. They want to rubberstamp this, and they want to look the other way. Not one reform is included in this conference report that would address the neglect of the Bill of Rights. Rather, the only thing this conference report ignores is the long record of abuse of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment is no mere limitation of government power. The Fourth Amendment is fundamental to the concept of American liberty. Today, the elected representatives of our country, whose Founders overthrew a King who claimed a mandate from Heaven to rule an empire, cannot muster the courage to tell its own law enforcement Agencies that we will not tolerate the evisceration of the Bill of Rights, nor the destruction of our electoral process. Why would any Senator vote to waive this point of order? How can you look your constituents in the eyes and justify your vote to empower government at the expense of American's individual rights? Do not fall for the hollow and cynical retorts from the other side who inevitably argue that the world is on fire. Those who make the lazy and predictable argument that government is your only shield from threats, always fail to mention that government itself is often a threat. I think it is high time we quit letting fear overrun our constitutional duty. The Members of this body should do themselves the honor of standing by their oath to the Constitution. To protect our civil liberties and the integrity of the congressional conference committee process, we must strip this extension of domestic spying authority out of the Defense bill.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I rise to honor a great Kentuckian, Lloyd Kenneth Rogers, who passed away on December 8, 2023, at the age of 90, following a recurrence of mantle cell lymphoma. Lloyd was born on June 10, 1933, in Bracken County, KY. Early in his life, he lost his father at a young age and spent time in an orphanage with his brother. However, despite these humble beginnings and challenges, he developed a resilience that would serve him well later in life. Lloyd was guided by his unwavering commitment to freedom and liberty. He demonstrated this in his service with the U.S. Navy and later through numerous leadership roles in his community. From his service as judge executive of Campbell County, KY, to his role as director of veteran Affairs for Congressman Thomas Massie, to his advocacy of legislative reform for veterans, Lloyd embodied service before self and demonstrated his deep affection for this country and the men and women of our armed services. He put the needs of those around him first, and he never backed down when he believed he was fighting for what was right. Lloyd worked tirelessly to advocate for and encourage candidates for public office that he believed in. In my first campaign, he spent hours, braving all elements, putting up hundreds of signs supporting my candidacy for Senate, and in 2016, he organized a nationwide veteran's group for my Presidential campaign. I am grateful for the enthusiasm and support he showed me throughout the years. While we share in the great sadness of his passing, it is with great joy we look back at his life, his many accomplishments, and the positive impact he had on his community and Kentuckians across the Commonwealth. We honor Lloyd and his family, and may he rest in peace.

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on S.J. Res. 51.

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I rise today to invoke the War Powers Act. The War Powers Act requires that upon request from a Member of the Senate or a Member of Congress, that there will be a vote on whether or not troops should be put into harm's way or into a conflict without the approval of this body. Our Founding Fathers felt very clearly on this that we should not go to war without a vote of the legislature. They wanted to make sure that the Executive or the President was prohibited from going to war without the authority of the legislature. We have drifted away from that. There really hasn't been a valid declaration of war since World War II. We have, at times, taken votes to authorize a use of military force. They call them an AUMF. We did when we went into the Iraq war. So we did the voting properly. It was still a disastrous mistake to go there. But we never have voted on being in Syria. We never have voted on having troops in the middle of the Syrian civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people have died, millions of people have been displaced. We owe it to the soldiers who are in Syria--the U.S. soldiers, the young men and women in Syria--to have a debate and have a vote. Now, the Senate doesn't want to do this. They are only doing this under duress because I am forcing them to vote on this issue. I have the power because it is called a privilege vote. They can't deny me this vote or this debate. This will put the Senate on record: Are you for having troops in Syria? If so, why? What are they doing in Syria? I fear that they are merely a tripwire to a greater war or to a tragedy should a terrorist attack occur. They have become the target for the Iranian proxies. Will we ever learn? As the fire of war spreads across the Middle East, the Biden administration sends aircraft carrier strike groups into the region without the debate of Congress about whether the United States should be further enmeshed in these region's conflicts. And will there be a debate at all? For the past two decades, the wisdom of Washington foreign policy, the establishment, has embroiled our country in one war after another, impervious to the catastrophic consequences resulting from this adventurism. Some 7,000 U.S. servicemembers lost their lives in post-9/ 11 conflicts, tens of thousands more live with missing limbs, burn scars, or are confined to wheelchairs, to say nothing of the mental wounds of war. More than 30,000 veterans committed suicide since Washington's misguided project to remake the Middle East. While our soldiers carried out their missions with honor, the Washington establishment has consistently failed them. Both Democrat and Republican Commanders in Chief repeatedly have ordered our troops into ill-advised conflicts with no vital national interest and no possibility of victory. Syria is but one example. In 2014, the Obama administration entangled the United States in yet another endless war in the Middle East without congressional authorization, without a definition of victory, and without an exit strategy. Operation Inherent Resolve was ostensibly intended to destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, an abhorrent terrorist organization that was only able to thrive because of the chaos created by the Iraq war, by Bush's foolish invasion of Iraq. The U.S.-led coalition carried out a significant air campaign again ISIS targets, conducting more than 11,000 airstrikes in Syria alone. But of course our intervention didn't stop there. President Obama unilaterally deployed boots on the ground, sending 300 Special Forces into Syria. My comments at the time were: Who goes to war with 300 people? Who sends 300 soldiers to a battle of thousands and thousands of troops? It was a terrible military strategy and still is. By the end of 2017, the Pentagon revealed that we had, in fact, 2,000 American troops stationed on the ground in Syria. There were tens of thousands of Turkish troops; there are Syrian Kurds; there are Assad's troops; there are Russian troops; and we have got a couple thousand troops, sitting ducks, in the middle of this chaos. Congress enacted the War Powers Act in 1973 to prevent this exact type of situation. At the time, the Nation was emerging from the national tragedy of the Vietnam war. That war was never declared as such. Yet it cost the lives of 58,000 Americans. Vietnam started with a few hundred U.S. military advisers but subsequently escalated to a point where there were over 540,000 troops, U.S. troops, in Vietnam. The calamity of Vietnam prompted Congress to resolve that the President should never again be permitted to enter the United States into a prolonged war without congressional authority. The President doesn't have this constitutional authority. The President does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally declare war anywhere at any time for any reason. It is the prerogative of Congress; the Constitution is clear. Congress must heed the lessons of the past and seize abdicating their constitutional warmaking power to the executive branch. If we are going to deploy our young men and women in uniform to some farflung corner of the planet and ask them to fight and potentially give their life for some supposed cause, shouldn't we, as their elected representatives, at least have the courage to debate the merits of sending them there? Shouldn't we debate if the mission is achievable? Shouldn't we debate what the mission actually is, what the purpose for having the troops actually is, and if it is possible for them to accomplish that mission? The Syrian civil war is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. For the past 12 years, the Syrian people have endured unimaginable suffering. That country has been torn apart, beset by conflict from within and without. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates the war has cost the lives of 600,000 people. The United Nations claims that more than 6.8 million people are internally displaced and another 5.2 million people live as refugees abroad. It is a disaster. Today, some 90 percent of the Syrian population lives in poverty. The war, which began as a civil uprising of the Syrian people against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, quickly transformed into a global catastrophe as other countries, militias, and terrorist groups turned Syria into their own proxy battlefield. Like Vietnam, Syria should serve as a powerful warning of the dangers of Presidential overreach and the dangers of mission creep. The American people are told that the United States is in Syria to fight ISIS, but we are not fighting ISIS. ISIS is gone. We also have been directly attacked by the Syrian government and pro-Assad forces. It is a much more complicated situation. We have targeted Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard and Iranian-backed proxies. We have targeted every stripe of jihadist and militia group we could find in the region, which is lots. In 2018, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the United States has even killed a couple hundred Russians who were in Syria as part of the Wagner Group. We also had our troops take fire from our own NATO ally Turkey. Just this past September, we returned the favor by shooting down an armed Turkish drone that came within 500 yards of U.S. forces. It is, obviously, a conflict; it is, obviously, a war; and it is, obviously, a dangerous place to have a few hundred troops with no clear-cut mission. None of these conflicts were debated or authorized by Congress. Nine American servicemembers have been killed in Syria, and not once has this body debated the merits of our troops being deployed in harm's way there. The only reason the debate occurs today is because I am forcing them to have the debate. They would rather wash their hands of this and say: President--Republican, Democrat, whoever you are--you take care of it. We are washing our hands of this. We have no responsibility. But, today, the Senate will take responsibility. Those who vote against my motion will be voting to have troops in Syria, and it will be their responsibility if calamity occurs. There is a bipartisan agreement that the executive branch does not have authorization for military action, or at least there has been in the past. In 2017, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said in an interview--he's a Democrat--said: The President does not have authorization from Congress to use force against the Syrian regime. He should come to Congress and get the authorization for use of military force. He has to come to Congress and the American people and tell them what the game plan is. How do we get a resolution? This was Democrats in 2017. Fast forward to Democrats today, and they say: No big deal. We have got a Democrat President. We don't want to appear to be critical of him. So even though we used to say there needs to be congressional authority when there was a Republican President, we no longer say that. Now we are just peachy keen with whatever happens. If it was true in 2017, it is still true in 2023. Congress should either authorize a war or we should come home. The Biden administration continues to say that we are there to defeat ISIS. Well, the ISIS caliphate was completely eradicated in 2019. Four years later, we still have 900 troops in Syria. The administration claims it seeks an ``enduring'' defeat of ISIS. Not surprisingly, they don't define what ``enduring'' means. Obviously, it doesn't mean complete destruction of the ISIS caliphate, because the ISIS caliphate no longer exists. They hold no land. Our intelligence folks have said they don't even have the capacity to attack, much less have the desire to attack us now. The administration's quarterly combined State and Defense Department inspector general reports that ``the majority of ISIS's branches likely lack the intent or capability to have direct attacks on the U.S. homeland.'' The only way they can get at us is if we are there. So, ISIS hasn't controlled territory for 4 years. They lack the capability and intent to attack the U.S., and those remaining members of ISIS--there are, indeed, still radical extremists--they are surrounded by numerous state and non-state actors who also seek to eradicate them. Between the Turks, the Syrian Kurds, the Syrian government, none of them are happy to have ISIS there if it should try to arise again. It seems to me, though, that our 900 troops have no viable mission in Syria; that they are sitting ducks; they are a trip wire to a larger war; and without a clear-cut mission, I don't think they could adequately defend themselves. Yet they remain in Syria, and they remain vulnerable to attack by other groups. Our troops in Syria regularly come under attack--not from ISIS, but from Iranian-backed militias. Since Joe Biden took office, Iranian- backed proxies have attacked U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq more than 160 times. They attack us because we are in close proximity to them; and they couldn't attack us, frankly, if we weren't there. These attacks have accelerated following Hamas' monstrous October 7 attack on Israel. Since October 17, U.S. troops have been attacked at least 76 times--40 times in Syria and 36 times in Iraq. According to the Pentagon, a total of 60 U.S. military were injured in these attacks. Of those, at least 32 were at the al-Tanf garrison in southeastern Syria, where our soldiers suffered various injuries including traumatic brain injuries. The U.S. responded with a series of strikes on facilities used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and its proxies in Syria and Iraq. During his time in office, President Biden has carried out strikes on Iranian proxies on at least eight separate occasions. Each time, the White House claimed that the strikes were necessary to deter further attacks. How many times do our troops need to be attacked for the administration to realize that we are not deterring anyone? Does anybody believe the ninth air strike will make a difference or do the trick? We are actually a target. We are a trip wire. We are a place they can actually reach by being there with no clear-cut mission. In 2019, Joe Biden, as Presidential candidate, promised to end the forever wars in the Middle East, saying: Staying entrenched in unwinnable conflicts only drains our capacity to lead on other issues that require our attention. I wish he still had the same belief. But 900 troops sitting in the middle of the Syrian desert does not advance U.S. interests or provide deterrence. In fact, their presence does the exact opposite. Their presence invites the Iranian proxies to be able to reach them with attacks. This is the only way these groups can strike at the United States. It is the only way they can get attention. If they kill each other, no one seems to pay attention; if they kill Americans, they pay attention. So why would we plop Americans down in the desert within a few dozen miles of these folks and allow them to be attacked? We actively are providing Iran leverage to direct proxies to attack U.S. forces. This is the sort of strategic genius-- so-called genius that the Washington establishment parades around as prudent foreign policy. Our troops' presence also risks getting us dragged into a wider regional war. Imagine if these recent attacks resulted in the deaths of 60 of our servicemembers--not injuries but deaths. How would the Biden administration react to that? History is replete with major wars breaking out for less. President Biden would do well to channel the wisdom of President Ronald Reagan. In 1984, Ronald Reagan withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon following the Beirut Marine Corps barracks bombing that killed 241 U.S. military personnel. Remarking on the decision in his autobiography, Reagan wrote: In the weeks [immediately] after the bombing, I believed the last thing that we should do was to turn tail and leave. Yet the irrationality of the Middle East politics forced us to rethink our policy there. If there would be some rethinking of policy before our men die, we would be a lot better off. If that policy had changed towards more of neutral position and neutrality, those 241 marines would still be alive today. President Reagan made the right decision in 1984, and we now have the chance to make the right decision in 2023, without any more American servicemembers being injured or killed. The American people have had enough of endless wars in the Middle East. The American people have had enough of the uniparty--the ``demopublican'' party directing their sons and daughters to fight and risk their lives in these internecine conflicts when the United States is not directly threatened and no vital U.S. interest is at stake. My War Powers Resolution that I put forward today offers the American people an opportunity to see how clearly their elected Senators view our unconstitutional, unnecessary, and dangerous presence in Syria. This vote makes it impossible for Senators to avoid voting or stating their opinion on having troops in Syria. Today's vote essentially puts every Senator on record as being either for or against having U.S. troops in Syria. I urge all my colleagues to muster the courage to reclaim their constitutional responsibilities by voting to remove U.S. troops in Syria. Let's finally bring our troops home. With that, I move to discharge S.J. Res. 51 from the Committee on Foreign Relations.