Department of Homeland Security Funding

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, this morning the Senate will complete work on a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, and then we will turn to Senator Collins' bill--commonsense legislation that will protect our democracy from the egregious example of Executive overreach we saw in November. In my view, this deserves broad support. Remember, President Obama said more than 20 times that he couldn't take those kinds of actions. He even referred to overreach such as that as ``ignoring the law.'' So Senator Collins' measure simply takes the President at his word and helps him follow the law instead of ignoring it.

The Collins' bill also provides Democrats who led their constituents to believe they would address Executive overreach with a chance to show they were at least a little bit serious when they said that. Democrats won't achieve that by filibustering Homeland Security, and Democrats won't achieve it by holding hypocritical press conferences just hours after voting to block funding for DHS. But they can help us pass a sensible bill from Senator Collins that will hold the executive branch to account. After so many weeks of senseless filibustering, that is the least these Democrats owe their constituents.

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