Legislative Program

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I know, just yesterday, one of the Members of the House Democrat leadership team, Chairman Nadler, introduced a bill to pack the Supreme Court.

This is a proposal that we have seen in other countries. Unfortunately, it is in mostly socialist countries. If you look at some of the examples, in 2004, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez packed his court, and the result was totalitarian dominance for his socialist regime. Congressman Gimenez, who himself fled Cuba, fled a communist regime, said just recently on court-packing:

Packing the courts is a tactic used by brutal dictatorships to consolidate the socialist power, which resulted in tens of thousands of court rulings in its favor, basically destroying the country.

I wanted to ask the gentleman, is that court-packing bill a bill that the majority is going to be bringing to the floor or even marking up in committee? I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I haven't read the Constitution of Venezuela, but I know in the Constitution of the United States, it actually gives the Senate the advise-and-consent role, the responsibility, as it relates to Supreme Court picks. Obviously, that has been kept.

The borking incident was probably the most embarrassing, egregious abuse that started this back-and-forth, where individual Supreme Court picks became more personally scrutinized. That process has been abused in cases like Bork.

Even the Kavanaugh hearing got out of control, where disgraceful false allegations were made.

But in the end, the Senate's advise-and-consent role is part of the United States Constitution. I don't know if the gentleman is suggesting that that should be changed. I don't see it. Even with a Democratic majority right now, I wouldn't suggest changing that process that is in our Constitution.

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding back. This is the bill. It is not even a page and a half, but the real change in law by the Member of House Democratic leadership Chairman Nadler, says, ``A Chief Justice of the United States and 12 Associate Justices, any eight of whom shall constitute a quorum.'' So in essence, a hostile takeover of the United States Supreme Court, not going through the traditional process that has been in place for over 100 years.

And I think the gentleman knows, if you go back historically, the President in power when the Senate was led by a different party--I can't recall a case in generations where if in the election year there was a vacancy in the Supreme Court it was filled.

And everybody in the country knew that that was an issue in the election of 2016. In fact, it was probably one of the deciding issues that helped elect President Trump, was that there was that vacancy and the public wanted to be engaged in the direction of the country, as well as the direction of the court. It was absolutely a heavily debated item in the 2016 Presidential election and President Trump won that election.

But, again, I have never heard anybody suggesting changing the Constitution to take away the Senate's advise and consent role. But we do see here a bill that was filed just this week by a leader in the Democratic Party to have a hostile takeover of the Supreme Court, similar to what has been done in socialist countries. And I think it is important to point to who has proposed those kinds of changes in the past, and what it has led to. And I know President Biden himself is on the record many times criticizing heavily the idea of packing the Supreme Court.

Now, that was before he was President. Now that it would be him that would be able to appoint these extra judges, I don't know if his position has changed. But it is a dangerous precedent. It is the kind of precedent that exists in Soviet-style nations. I sure hope it is not here.

But Mr. Nadler did just say yesterday when asked about Speaker Pelosi's position, he said, ``Speaker Pelosi and others will come along.'' So I was just wondering if that was something that the gentleman was planning on bringing to the floor that would be a divisive issue as opposed to things that we could work together on, like infrastructure, that would be unifying.

And obviously, there is a lot of talk about infrastructure. This is something that there is tremendous interest in on both sides of the aisle. I know Chairman DeFazio, as well as Ranking Member Sam Graves, have had a lot of conversations about things that we could agree on. And I would hope that would be the approach that we take, unlike the bill that over 90 percent of which had nothing to do with the COVID-- the $1.9 trillion spending bill, which was hyper-partisan.

Madam Speaker, I hope we approach this in a bipartisan way. Because as I said, there are clearly Members on both sides that want to agree on an infrastructure bill and have lots of areas of agreement if we are talking about infrastructure. And by infrastructure, I think most Americans--if you asked them what they thought was infrastructure, they would say roads, bridges, ports, waterways, and broadband.

Once you get into social policy and Green New Deal-type policies or tax hikes that would make America the highest rate above Communist China in terms of tax policy--the National Association of Manufacturers said that the kind of proposal that is being floated in the partisan approach would kill over 1 million American jobs.

So I appreciate the gentleman from Maryland talking about jobs. Why would we want to approach this in such a partisan way that we would threaten millions of jobs, that we would make America uncompetitive again, and Communist China would have a lower tax rate than America? Hopefully, we do the bipartisan approach and not a partisan approach.

And I yield to the gentleman to enlighten us on what direction is being approached right now.

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

Finally, I want to bring up the crisis that our Nation is facing at our southern border. And this has been a crisis that has been brewing for months. It is not an overnight problem, but it is an executive order-created problem when President Biden on day one got rid of some policies that were working incredibly well.

And every border patrol agent that I have talked--and I was on the border last week, Thursday and Friday, in McCollum, Texas, and in Donna, Texas, at the Donna processing facility--every border agent said the same thing. They said getting rid of the remain in Mexico policy, that one action alone opened up the floodgates to a surge, thousands of people a day crossing our border illegally.

Then you couple that with the deterioration of the Northern Triangle agreements. And, yes, it was President Trump who negotiated those agreements with Mexico, with Honduras, with El Salvador, with Guatemala. And maybe President Biden just doesn't like the fact that President Trump did something that was working well. Why doesn't he renegotiate those agreements and call them his own? But they were working.

Madam Speaker, now today, it is so out of control that we have, for example, at the Donna processing facility, a facility designed for about a 250-person capacity--when I was visiting that facility last Friday, there was over 4,000 people--young kids, primarily--crammed into that facility, in those holding cells like sardines.

In fact, yesterday, we had a committee hearing with Dr. Fauci and CDC Director Walensky. And I asked them specifically about what is going on down at our southern border; showed them some of the pictures that have been taken.

And if you look at the CDC guidance that is out there on how we, as American citizens, have to conduct ourselves--if you own a restaurant, for example, whether it is in Baltimore, New Orleans, or anywhere else, if there is a capacity limit, and if that limit was 250 people, if there were 4,000 people in that restaurant, it would be shut down today. And I asked both Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky: Would that facility be in violation of CDC guidelines? And both of them said, Yes, in testimony under oath.

And then I talked to them about what is happening at our southern border. And I asked them: Are these conditions in compliance with CDC guidance? Both Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky said: No, this is not.

We talked about the Donna detention facility and the inhumane treatment of these young children by the Biden administration in that facility. And I asked Dr. Fauci: Is that facility, the conditions in which they are treating those young kids by the Biden administration in compliance with the CDC guidance? And Dr. Fauci said: No. And Dr. Walensky, the CDC director, testified the exact same way, that: No, those are not in compliance. And in fact, as we know, they are coming across from Mexico.

Do you know that the CDC guidance designates Mexico as the most dangerous nation right now? Along with probably a few others, but they are the most dangerous in terms of COVID transmission.

So CDC guidance encourages American citizens not to go to Mexico, but they say if you do come back from Mexico, you are mandated by the CDC to show a COVID-negative test before you, as an American citizen, can come back into the United States.

Do you know that not one of these people are being tested for COVID when they come in illegally across the Rio Grande from Mexico? And then many of them are being put on airplanes, without ID, being paid for mostly by the taxpayers--put on airplanes to fly off into cities all across the country. Border patrol agents have told us at least 15 percent of these people that crossed illegally are COVID-positive.

So I asked Dr. Walensky and I asked Dr. Fauci: Does that process by the Biden administration violate CDC's guidance on travel from Mexico? And they both testified that, yes, in fact, it does. That if they are getting on an airplane, they should be testing negative for COVID. None of them are, and in fact, some of them are known to be COVID-positive, being put on airplanes, flying to cities all across this country.

It is going on right now. It was going on Friday. About half the plane that I was on when I flew from McAllen back home had people with folders that said: I do not speak English, and it had a city on it. And it was multiple cities.

But this is what the Biden administration is doing in violation of CDC guidance that you and I have to follow, that our constituents who are seeing their livelihoods crushed, their restaurants closed down-- many that won't open again ever--because they have to play by the rules that CDC and their States issue. And yet, the Biden administration is exempting themselves from this.

Madam Speaker, now we have legislation, I would like to bring up to the majority leader, that would fix this:

My colleague, Mrs. Miller-Meeks, requires that a COVID test be done before someone is released from CPB custody.

Ms. Herrell wants to prohibit DHS from ceasing title 42.

There is a bipartisan bill by Mr. Katko and Mr. Cuellar, which establishes a regular migration surge border response fund.

Madam Speaker, I would like to ask the gentleman if he would bring those bills to the floor to address this crisis at the border that is not only a humanitarian crisis and a national security crisis, but it is a Biden-created crisis that is violating the very CDC guidance, according to Dr. Fauci, that American citizens have to follow.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

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Mr. SCALISE. As we talk about asylum, let's be clear, America has laws on how someone can seek asylum. I haven't seen anybody suggest that those laws are just repealed, and you just take somebody's word that if they say they want to come to America to seek asylum, to come in today and jump ahead of everyone else.

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Mr. SCALISE. I think we ought to obey America's laws on immigration across the board. If you look at the asylum laws, there is a process to seek asylum.

In fact, every year, people are granted that asylum if they prove their case. That is where the law comes into play, which is being ignored right here.

What President Trump did when there was a surge in 2019, he confronted it, as a leader should do. He talked to people on the ground. He talked to our Border Patrol agents, who are the ones who have to deal with this crisis on a daily basis.

In fact, 40 percent of our Border Patrol agents tonight at midnight, like Thursday night at midnight last week, when I was with those Border Patrol agents, 40 percent of them were pulled off of guarding our border, where their primary mission is to stop drug cartels from smuggling fentanyl, cocaine, and heroin into our country, which they are doing now at much higher levels, killing Americans all across the country.

Forty percent of them pulled away because they are going to be changing diapers in the Donna detention facility tonight because that is what they are being tasked to do by the Biden administration. That is not their job. It is not why they signed up. Their morale is incredibly low.

Well over roughly 90 percent of people who say they are coming here to seek asylum, those cases are rejected by the courts. Rejected. In fact, it is kind of hard to make an asylum claim here when the parents of many of these kids you are seeing here paid thousands of dollars to the drug cartels to smuggle their kids and themselves into the United States. It is hard to claim economic asylum, which is the case many of them plead, when you paid $4,000 to try to come here illegally when there is a legal process to come here, not just the normal legal process where you can wait to come into America legally, where we let a million people into our country every year, the most generous nation in the world, America. But when they go around that system, that is where it overwhelms our system. That is what is going on right now.

President Trump confronted it, not by saying no one can come in, but by saying you have to follow our laws if you want to come here. If you want to seek asylum, you have to request it like everyone else. They allowed them to even come through South and Central American countries but stay in Mexico. Mexico agreed with this, and there was an orderly system. You got to hear your claim in a very expedient way.

Today, they are given a piece of paper when they come across the border illegally, saying: Come show up maybe 5 years from now.

Good luck with that. Then, they are given a free plane ticket, without an ID, to just be sent off to some other State. I saw manila envelopes, and once you got below the ``I do not speak English,'' Dallas was on one, Philadelphia was on one, New Jersey was on one.

I don't know what is going to happen to them when they land in New Jersey if they can't speak English. What school system are they going to be placed in? Who is then going to be responsible for this breakdown at our southern border, which was created by President Biden, which he could fix today?

I have urged President Biden to go down to the border and see this for himself, to see how inhumane he is treating kids, in violation of his own CDC guidelines, which Dr. Fauci verified yesterday.

If you read the child abuse and neglect laws of the State of Texas where this facility is, this is a violation of the child abuse and negligent laws at the President Biden-run facility.

Again, President Trump went and negotiated with Mexico, went and negotiated with those Northern Triangle countries to resolve the surge. This could be resolved as well, and you don't need to reinvent the wheel because there was a method for how to resolve it legally, using the legal system that America has.

Sure, I would agree it needs reforms, not an amnesty reform, where you send a magnet not only across South and Central America but around the world that America's borders are open, because that is the message today. As the gentleman knows, there are at least six people on the terrorist watch list who have come across America's southern border. I am not talking about from South and Central American countries, but from Middle Eastern countries, from Eastern European countries. Those are just the ones we know of that we have caught, and the Biden administration won't share that data with the media. The Biden administration wouldn't even let the press into this facility, which is a national disgrace.

I could imagine what the press would have said if the Trump administration was housing kids in a 33-person facility. There are over 400 crammed into a 33-person cell in the middle of a pandemic.

Again, Dr. Fauci said this violates every protocol there is when we are trying to get our economy reopened. Other countries have to control COVID, too, but in America, we are trying to control it.

Here is where the double standard and hypocrisy are driving people nuts. If any American citizen ran their business in America like this, they would be shut down by the Federal Government today. Yet, people can come here illegally, and the Biden administration is running this facility in violation of those very same guidances.

Do you know what happened to them? They are given a free airplane ticket, put on an airplane, possibly with COVID, and sent into some interior State of America. We don't even know where they are going. The Biden administration won't share that.

We have asked for a meeting, by the way. Our leadership team, Leader McCarthy and I, have asked for a meeting with President Biden to talk about this crisis, and he refuses to meet with us about it. Just ignoring a problem will not make it go away. If we are going to find a solution to this--again, I listed a number of bills, including some that are bipartisan, that would start solving this problem.

President Biden doesn't even want to go. He put Vice President Harris in charge of this mess, and she won't even go down to the border, maybe because she doesn't want to be associated with President Biden's debacle.

She was put in charge of it. She is the Vice President of the United States. She has a responsibility to go down there. She should have gone there weeks ago, but she still hasn't been.

Maybe if they saw that, if they looked into the eyes of these young kids--one of the first girls we ran into might have been 10 years old, a girl in one of these cells, and she was crying. We asked her: Why are you crying? And she said: I don't want to be here.

She is an orphan. The gentleman talked about orphans. All of these kids, there are no parents with them. They don't want to be here. Many were crying because they are jammed into these cells for 20 hours a day, at least 15 percent with COVID, 6 inches apart, not 6 feet apart. That is what the Biden administration is doing right now.

President Trump fixed this problem. Again, if President Biden just doesn't like President Trump, call it his own name. We don't care. The template, if he doesn't want to do what actually worked, then do something else that works. But just doing this, it is not only a national disgrace, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky said it is a violation of the CDC protocols that every American taxpayer has to follow. And they don't. Exempting themselves from a problem, but making everybody else comply with it, is no way to instill confidence in the American people.

I hope the President goes down there. I hope the President resolves this issue. He should meet with us. He said he wanted to unify the country. He said he wanted to work with everybody. It is time he starts following through on those promises.

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, these are children being thrown to the wolves, and it is not President Trump who is doing it. It could end, and I hope we can work together to solve this problem.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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