Providing for Consideration of H.R. Utilizing Space Efficiently and Improving Technologies Act of and Providing for Consideration of H. Res. Denouncing the Biden Administration's Immigration Policies

Floor Speech

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Kentucky for yielding me the customary half hour, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, another week, another round of trivial messaging bills. That is all this Republican majority can do. It has been one pointless messaging bill after another that will never, ever become law. In fact, we haven't passed a single bill out of the Rules Committee that has become law in 9 months--9 months.

First, let's talk about H.R. 6276, a bill that is supposed to help measure and evaluate Federal building utilization. This bill seems to do with the Republican belief that working from home is always bad no matter what.

Don't get me wrong. I hate Teams meetings, and I hate Zoom calls as much as everyone else, but can Republicans please acknowledge that it is 2024, and people can work from home?

Basically, this bill says that if a Federal employee works from home 1 day a week, they are no longer counted as being in the office. Ignore the 4 days a week that they are in the office. If they work from home once, then they are not in the office. Oh, and by the way, we are going to get rid of their desks because they worked from home once. Come on. It is just a silly solution.

This bill fails to capture even the fundamental nature of some of our most vital jobs in the Federal workforce. For example, Mr. Speaker, if you are a food inspector who spends 4 days a week ensuring that our food supply is safe and secure, this bill would not count them for occupancy, which could eventually lead to eliminating their office space. Or if you are a Federal firefighter protecting the lives and property of countless Americans week after week after week but not sitting at a desk for 40 hours, then this bill would say: No, you won't be counted, and you won't need to have a desk.

Now, if we want our Federal workforce to be the best in the world, then we need to compete. We need to give people the flexibility to work from home, just like other employers do in the private sector, which is something that this bill discourages. For those reasons, I believe it is a bad bill, and I will be voting ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, next we have H. Res. 1065. The actual resolution calls on the President to detain and remove specific individuals from the United States.

I have news for you, Mr. Speaker. Republicans are in charge of this body. They are barely in charge, but they are in charge, nonetheless. They don't have to call on the President to do anything. This isn't a debate club for God's sake. Pass a bill and change the damn policy if you don't like it, Mr. Speaker.

Oh, wait. Republicans don't want to do anything about immigration or the border. They just want to complain and talk about their feelings.

Let me talk to my friends as if I am talking to one of the sixth- grade classes from my district that comes down and tours Washington every year:

If you want a bill to become a law, then you have to pass a bill. There is a difference between a bill, which starts with the abbreviation H.R., and a resolution, which starts with the abbreviation H. Res. I will spell it out for you. That is H, period; R-E-S, period.

Now, some people think H.R. stands for House resolution. It actually stands for House of Representatives, and H. Res. stands for House resolution. Be that as it may, let's move on because I only have 30 minutes.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to legislate, and we do that by passing bills. Bills can change policy. Bills can change taxes, fund programs, and regulate interstate commerce. Hell, bills can even force the President of the United States to do something. They go to the Senate, and then the Senate can pass it and send it to the President. The President can either veto it and send it back to us or sign it into law.

That is how a bill becomes a law.

My Republican friends might have forgotten this, so it is helpful to remind them.

This resolution on the border cannot become law because it is not a bill. It is a resolution, H. Res. 1065. See, it is right here, Mr. Speaker.

If this resolution passes the House, then it will go nowhere. It will just be put on a website and sent out as a press release. This resolution just tells people how you feel about the border.

Mr. Speaker, it is a way for Republicans to talk about their feelings, and I know Republicans have a lot of big feelings on the border.

Now, Democrats care about the border too, but the difference is we actually want to do something about it.

Now, don't get me wrong. There is a time and place for nonbinding resolutions, but this isn't it. We are not going to reform our broken immigration system with a nonbinding resolution. We are just not.

We had a bipartisan deal on border security that Republicans initially supported until Donald Trump called, and then they changed their minds. They killed it. Republicans killed a bipartisan border security deal, a bill that was negotiated by the second most conservative Republican in the United States Senate. They killed it.

So what do they bring up instead?

Not a bill, but a resolution, a meaningless resolution, this resolution, H. Res. 1065 which changes no law, which will not go to the Senate, and which is literally a press release talking about their feelings.

Now, here is the kicker: This resolution, H. Res. 1065, is almost identical to a similar resolution that we dealt with only 3 months ago. So not only does it do nothing, but it is a repeat. They are so bad at legislating that they are even bad at not legislating.

This is all they have to offer Mr. Speaker, half-baked, empty resolutions that don't address any of the fundamental concerns at our southern border.

Oh, sure, they like to pretend that they care about border security on rightwing TV so that Trump and Republican candidates can use it as a campaign slogan in November. They are really good at that. They go on FOX News and say, secure the border, secure the border, but then they kill bills that try to do anything about the border.

They killed the bipartisan border security bill that came out of the United States Senate. It was a bill that would have provided more funding so we could have more people at the border patrolling our border. It was a bill that would provide more money for judges to accelerate consideration of asylum claims. It was a bill, by the way, that was supported by the Border Patrol union that is at the border.

Now, the only thing that they say they will agree to is their grossly partisan H.R. 2, seemingly ignoring the fact that H.R. 2 has lost in the Senate already. It failed bigly. It only got 32 votes.

In fact, the gentleman across the aisle from Kentucky even voted against H.R. 2, but even if it were to pass the Senate, President Biden would never sign it into law because it is a crappy bill.

Furthermore, I got a little whiplash, Mr. Speaker, because on one hand, I hear from my Republican friends, H.R. 2 or nothing, H.R. 2 or nothing. Then we had a gentleman on the Republican side come and do a 1-minute speech and say, we don't need any legislation at all to do anything. We don't have to pass anything. They need to pick one or the other.

Any way you square it, Republicans now own the border crisis. Democrats have given them every opportunity to work together, and we have been turned down by a Republican Party that does not want to solve problems or govern.

So guess what? They own the border. They own the fentanyl crisis. They own all of it. This is their issue. They continue to pass meaningless resolutions like this which do nothing. They continue to scream and yell in committees and on the House floor. They continue to use victims of crimes as props, but when push comes to shove, they don't do a damn thing.

They vote against more funding for border security. They reject serious proposals for border security. They don't want to solve this problem; they want a crisis because they think it helps them in November. What a rotten, cynical, awful way to treat the people of this country. What a terrible way to govern.

This isn't serious legislation. It is a press release. It is embarrassing. House Republicans have no new ideas, so they are just going to keep passing the same meaningless resolution every week until they lose in November.

Maybe then they will realize that this is a bad strategy; that it is a bad idea to treat the American people like they are idiots because the American people are smart, Mr. Speaker. They see what Republicans are doing--obstructing, obstructing, obstructing, and then blaming Democrats for the obstruction they created, passing silly, nonbinding resolutions that do nothing instead of actually working with us to get stuff done.

Democrats actually want to get something done on the border. We want to stop the fentanyl from coming into our country. We want to fix the broken immigration system. And Republicans own this issue now because they rejected a bipartisan deal, and they refuse to work together. They refuse to put people over politics and work with us to address our problems at the border.

Let me just conclude, Mr. Speaker, by, again, reminding my friends on the other side of the aisle--and I would say this to a sixth-grade class if they came to visit Washington--that we now have divided government.

We have, again, a House of Representatives barely controlled by Republicans, a United States Senate barely controlled by Democrats, and a Democrat in the White House.

This notion of ``my way or the highway'' for either side is a nonstarter. If you want to get something done, you have got to work together. For heaven's sake, I would think that you don't have to agree on everything to agree on something. We ought to be able to agree on something, like more support for border security along both our southern and our northern border.

We ought to be able to agree that we need to have more judges to evaluate asylum claims so people aren't here for months and months and months or years; that we can resolve these claims efficiently and effectively in a matter of weeks.

We ought to also, rather than doing nonbinding resolutions, be addressing the situation in Ukraine. Ukraine is out of equipment. I don't know why my friends on the other side of the aisle seem so dedicated to giving Putin a victory; Ukraine is running out of time.

Why haven't you scheduled a vote on a bill to provide Ukraine the military assistance that they need so that they can repel the Russians and stop Putin? They are out of time. And if Ukraine falls, my friends own that, too.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, let me just say to the gentleman from Kentucky, we have acknowledged the problem. Maybe the gentleman wasn't listening to my eloquent oratory here, but I acknowledged and identified the problem at least 13 times in my speech.

I think what I and people on my side of the aisle have a problem with is that you have been acknowledging the problem like we did 3 months ago with a nonbinding resolution a lot of times, and we don't think nonbinding resolutions and acknowledging the problem or expressing our feelings is enough. We have to actually do something.

Mr. Speaker, to the other gentleman who just spoke, we are horrified by the crimes that have been committed by undocumented immigrants who have come to this country who have criminal records. We pray for their families. We want to do everything we can to make sure that these things never happen again. I have a hard time when we gather and we hear this from my colleagues when we have shootings that are happening in this country almost on a daily basis.
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I could go on and on and on. We can do something about that, but the NRA provides lots of money so my friends don't want to deal with it. I mean, come on.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to urge that we defeat the previous question. If we do, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up H.R. 16, the American Dream and Promise Act of 2023.

Mr. Speaker, the bipartisan American Dream and Promise Act provides a pathway to citizenship for people who only know America as their home. They contribute to society as taxpayers, small business owners, educators, and more. Dreamers were brought to the United States as children through no-fault of their own. It is past time to open the doors and empower these talented individuals by granting them access to citizenship that they rightfully deserve.

Mr. Speaker, let me be clear: There is a lot of work that needs to be done to fix our broken immigration system and to secure our border. H.R. 16 won't solve every issue, but it will address a long, outstanding one in our failing immigration system. It is the right thing to do, and we should start doing the right thing around here.

It has the added benefit of being a bill that actually does something. It is not an expression of our feelings. It does something.

Instead of considering the do-nothing Republican nonbinding resolution before us today which just restates the Republican position from a nonbinding resolution we already passed 2 months ago, let's consider actual legislation to start fixing these issues. Let's bring up H.R. 16.

Mr. Speaker, I kind of feel like I am in an episode of ``The Twilight Zone.'' I can't figure my colleagues on the other side of the aisle out.

The bottom line is, I hear they want to be tough on the border, and every time we try to pass a tough border security bill, they say no.

What we have here is a nonbinding resolution that does nothing. It does nothing. It doesn't even go to the Senate. It can never become law. It is nothing. It is just a press release.

What they turned down was $440 million for more judges to accelerate the asylum claims so we are not waiting years and can do this in weeks and months. $23 million to destruct Mexican cartels, they said no to that. $6.7 billion for Customs and Border Protection, they said no to that. Fifty thousand ICE detention beds, they said no to that. $4 billion for USCIS, they said no to that.

Why? Because the former President of the United States called up and said: I want the issue.

This is the former President of the United States, by the way, who says that immigrants poison the blood of our country.

This is from Salon. The title is: `` `He said, Hitler did some good things': Ex-chief of staff says Trump praised Hitler in White House.''

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, let that sink in.

Mr. Speaker, I would say to the gentleman who was just yelling that the proposal that we are talking about, the bipartisan border security deal, is not something that we wrote over here: It was written in a bipartisan way in the Senate, led by the second most conservative Republican in the United States Senate.

He said it doesn't have a chance of passing. I will bet him anything that if he brought the bill to the floor, actually let it be brought before the full House, it would pass.

That is why Trump intervened to make sure that it never got a chance to go to the floor, because he knows it would pass.

Also, to the gentleman from Kentucky, I certainly didn't call the victims of--

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I did not refer to the victims of violence and who were killed by undocumented immigrants as props. I said that my Republican friends are using them as props, and I included in the Record the names of people who were killed by gun violence because I am tired of the selective outrage.

The bottom line is that countless people in this country are killed every week from gun violence, and my Republican friends do not want to do anything about it because the NRA owns the Republican Party in this country, and they are afraid to lose the money. That is what this is about.

Our complaint here is that we are talking about border security issues, and our frustration is that what we are dealing with, this tough bill--my Republican colleagues are so tough on the border. The tough bill that they are bringing before the House of Representatives is a nonbinding resolution that can never become law, that won't even be sent to the Senate, that is just a press release.

That is just a colossal waste of time. Surely, there has to be common ground where Democrats and Republicans can come together and actually pass things to better secure our border and to protect people like Laken Riley and others in the future.

However, I guess that is too much to ask.

Mr. Speaker, if I could just respond to the gentleman who just spoke, not all jobs are the same. I mean, food inspectors, Federal food inspectors, for example, don't sit at a desk 5 days a week. Sometimes they have to go out and do inspections to make sure that the food that we provide people is safe.

Federal firefighters are not behind a desk 5 days a week. It doesn't mean they aren't working.

Our Border Patrol agents are patrolling the border. That doesn't mean they don't need a desk at some point.

Heck, Members of Congress, I mean, we are not in Washington behind our desks 5 days a week. Sometimes we are in our districts, sometimes we are in other places, but because we don't show up physically to work a day or 2 or 5 days in a particular month, somehow we should have our desks taken away?

This is the problem: With some better bipartisan cooperation, with more thoughtful consideration of these matters, we could have had a bill that would have sailed out of here unanimously; but, again, my friends can't help themselves, it is either their way or the highway. In any event, the way the bill is currently written ignores the realities of the workers that I just mentioned.

Mr. Speaker, I have heard the gentleman from New York repeatedly brag about this Homeland Security appropriations bill that the Republicans passed last year as a demonstration of their commitment to securing our border, but here is what he left out: My Republican friends still-- still, still--have not sent it over to the Senate. They have not sent it over to the Senate. I don't know why.

By the way, H.R. 2 is dead. It only got 32 votes in the Senate. That is a pretty strong message that it is going nowhere.

To the gentleman who just spoke, let me just say, you talk about facts. What is an undeniable fact is that the bill before us does absolutely nothing. Nothing. It doesn't add one more Border Patrol agent along our southern or northern border. It doesn't add any more judges. It doesn't do anything to stop the Mexican cartels. It does nothing. It is just a press release.

The other fact is, H.R. 2 is going nowhere and fast, with 32 votes in the Senate. He also said they would like to work together. Every time we try to work together--that is what we tried to do in the Senate--my Republican friends here in the House, at the request of Donald Trump, say: No, we don't want to work with you. That is a problem because we have to work together in order to get real, meaningful solutions over the finish line.

The gentleman also keeps on screaming, the border is open, the border is open. That is the Republican rallying cry. It isn't, but if you say it enough times, then people might believe you and try to come here because you keep on saying that.

However, Mr. Speaker, the American people are smart. They know the difference between empty promises and real action. They know that the only way to get things done in divided government, for problems to be solved, like the border, Members of both parties have to work together. They know that come November the future of this country is in their hands.

They have seen the complete and utter disaster that this Republican majority has created in this Congress. They have witnessed the absolute chaos House Republicans have thrown the country into.

We are on the Rules Committee. All bills of consequence go to the Rules Committee before they come to the House floor. The last bill that we reported on the Rules Committee to the House floor that became law was 9 months ago. How can that happen? How can that happen without incredible dysfunction on the Republican side?

These guys have brought the Nation to the brink of default, shying away from fully funding the government, destabilizing this body by throwing fits and unseating Speakers, and taking the House floor hostage.

The American people also know that House Democrats have rescued this failing House Republican majority at nearly every turn. House Democrats carried the vote to ensure that the United States didn't default on its debt. House Democrats have kept the government running despite GOP leadership wasting time pursuing unrealistic, draconian spending cuts, and House Democrats have used every opportunity to stand against conservative legislation that would hurt average Americans.

This majority has been nothing but dysfunctional, Mr. Speaker. They have no new ideas, no tangible solutions, no drive to address pressing domestic and global challenges. The American people know that, which is why Republicans are going to lose in November.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this rule, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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