Mr. President, I have come to the floor this evening to speak about the impending shutdown this week of the federal Department of Homeland Security. At a time when the folks I hear from in Delaware, and I suspect what all of the members in this chamber are hearing, as we return from a week spent in our home states, are concerns about our national security.
Whether it is the heinous acts of ISIS abroad, or the real threats of the weather and recent weather-related events here at home, a central concern all of us should share in the Senate here tonight is about keeping our country and our constituents safe. Yet shutting down the whole Department of Homeland Security later this week would show a reckless disregard for our national security by the Republican leader and some of the hardline conservatives who are, sadly, setting this agenda.
In my view, we do not need to be here. The Democrats and Republicans working together on the Appropriations Committee negotiated a strong bipartisan Homeland Security funding bill months ago. It is a bill that if it got a vote before the full Senate would absolutely pass. It makes wide, needed, broad investments in strengthening all sorts of different organs of our government at the federal, state, and local level that strengthen our homeland security.
Instead, the other party has insisted on attaching political provisions to the bill that would overturn the President’s executive action on immigration. I know I do not need to remind the Presiding Officer or any of our colleagues that we have already debated and passed comprehensive immigration reform in this chamber which, if taken up by the House, would have made the President’s action completely unnecessary.
I think we all agree that congressional action is the preferred path toward fixing our broken immigration system. If that is what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are really concerned about, then I am eager to discuss how we can fix our badly broken immigration system in a bipartisan manner by the preferred path of congressional action rather than executive action.
But I think we should separate that debate over immigration and what is the right path toward a resolution of our broken system from a discussion about responsibly and sustainably funding our Department of Homeland Security. If we fail to fund Homeland Security, it would have damaging consequences to our economy, to the security of our communities, and to our reputation around the world. At this time of heightened concern about our cohesion, about our unity, and about our security as a country, failing to fund the federal Department of Homeland Security I think sends the worst possible message to our allies around the world about our capacity as a mature democracy of reaching responsible resolutions on difficult and divisive issues.
If the Department of Homeland Security shuts down this week, tens of thousands of its staff would be furloughed without pay. They include the FEMA disaster and preparedness staff, the very personnel who check the immigration status of new employees through E-Verify, critical security intelligence analysts, and the folks who run the domestic nuclear detection offices, just to name a few.
The list of these tens of thousands of Homeland Security employees and the vital functions they perform would take longer than the evening could take.
My own state of Delaware has the lowest mean elevation in the country. That means we are a really low-lying state.
We are incredibly vulnerable to storms and to flooding, and we simply can’t afford to have FEMA’s staff suspended, furloughed, laid off.
Whether we shut down or just have a short-term funding bill, funding for Homeland Security grants can’t go out. Some of the folks who watch this debate in the week ahead will have difficulty discerning between folks on my side who will advocate for a so-called clean bill and others who will advocate for a CR. This is where the difference really is: in the areas of grants for state and local emergency preparedness – the difference between actually moving forward the bipartisan bill that was worked through the Appropriations Committee in the last Congress and simply continuing by continuing resolution the previous year’s authorization. That difference is $1.5 billion for state and local emergency management all over this country.
In my community, which is part of the Greater Philadelphia area, we are about to welcome the Pope. Something like two million people are expected in the Greater Philadelphia area as we welcome His Holiness to Philadelphia for the first time in a long time.
I have heard from state and local law enforcement, first responders, emergency managers, and planners that they are counting on some of the grants from FEMA that are currently on hold, while they wait to discover the outcome of this week’s debates, to prepare for that important, very large event. In my own home community, there are volunteer fire companies which even now are working on submitting grants. The SAFER Act and the fire grants act have become an important part of making sure that our local volunteer fire companies have the equipment they need, the training they need to keep our communities safe.
In Delaware the overwhelming majority of the crash response, the fire education, and the fire suppression are done by volunteer fire companies, which often have badly outdated equipment and insufficient funding. To sustain their training and their personnel, they need the grants that have been made available through FEMA and through the Department of Homeland Security over the last decade to upgrade and update their equipment, their materials, and their training. They have been vitally important. They have made a big difference in the fire service in my home state. There are grants to police departments that help ensure they have the tools, the training, and the equipment to be part of emergency preparedness and to keep our communities safe.
If we shut down the Department of Homeland Security, 130,000 other DHS workers will be compelled to remain at work but without pay. I think the idea that there are Americans who work to keep us safe at the border, at our airports, on our coasts and that we don’t value them enough to ensure they will receive their pay for a hard day’s work just goes against the grain of what we stand for as a country.
So are my colleagues really willing to send a message to everyone at Homeland Security that their work isn’t important enough to our nation to ensure that they can provide for their family? That is the message if the Department of Homeland Security shuts down. It hurts families, it hurts morale, it hurts our preparedness, and it hurts our safety.
I wish to say, as someone who is privileged to serve on the Foreign Relations Committee and regularly gets the chance to meet with and talk with leaders from around the world, it sends the message that our democracy isn’t up to the task.
I know this isn’t what my Republican friends want to do, and I urge us to come together and work in a way that will end this era of politics by crisis once and for all – no more shutdowns, no more manufactured crises, and no more demonstrating that we are better at stopping progress than at enacting progress.
Democrats are ready to work together with Republicans to pass a bipartisan, bicameral bill that we all know we can pass and that will fund the Department of Homeland Security and keep our country safe. I hope that after we – this afternoon – voted down for the fourth time a bill that seeks to repeal the President’s actions on immigration, we can put aside that partisan issue and come together to find a bipartisan solution to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
We already know what that solution looks like. We just need to come together and give it a vote. In my view, this is too important to trivialize as part of the ongoing posturing and partisan games that for so long have dominated this chamber.
I urge my colleagues to work with us. Fund Homeland Security and then let’s talk meaningfully in this Congress about how we can fix our broken immigration system together.
I know we are all eager to continue that conversation. First, we need to solve this challenge and make sure that our communities, our states, and our country are safe.