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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, 36 years ago, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate that separated East from West Berlin. He said to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

Only a few years after his historic speech, the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing in decades--decades--of freedom and prosperity in Eastern Europe and a welcome end to the Cold War.

Now there comes a man named ``Vladimir Putin'' who is clumsily and dangerously trying to regain that dystopian Soviet glory with a bloody war in Ukraine.

So I can only wonder what President Reagan would be thinking now, with so many of his Republican Party Members refusing to support critical military assistance to keep Ukraine from falling to Russian tyranny.

Yes, we have other legislative needs in Congress, but refusing to support the forces of freedom in Ukraine in a war against a resurgent evil empire in the name of partisanship is nothing short of reckless.

It is not hard to understand how we got here. Putin gambled and lost a botched attempt to quickly overthrow Ukraine. Now he has to juggle a formidable Ukrainian resistance, huge losses of Russian conscript, isolation on the global stage, a struggling economy, domestic opposition, and an upcoming election in Russia that he needs to rig again to stay in power. Meanwhile, he has been branded a war criminal and has to carefully choose the nations that he visits so he isn't arrested on the spot.

So, given his tenuous position, what is one of his greatest opportunities for clinging to power? It is hope that the partisan chaos in the U.S. Congress will stall or end support for Ukraine. And make no mistake--the President of Ukraine told us point-blank when he visited here several months ago, in a private meeting in the Old Senate Chamber, that if the United States cuts off military assistance to Ukraine, his country will lose the war with Vladimir Putin.

That is what is at stake. The White House was clear. We know that Putin is watching this activity by Congress; so is China and so is Iran.

The White House was clear in warning that the United States is ``out of money to support Ukraine in this fight.''

And President Zelenskyy told us the obvious: Ukraine will lose without American support.

So this is not an abstract political theater; what we do has consequences--global and historic consequences. As such, I implore my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, think long and hard about what President Reagan would say today about showing weakness to Vladimir Putin. Let's not flinch when it comes to standing up to such obvious threats to freedom.

It is time to pass President Biden's national security supplemental request. It is hard to imagine that we would actually let history record that we walked away from Ukraine at this moment. And it isn't over a debate of the merits of his defense of his country; it is over an unrelated issue: our border security.

It is obvious that we need to do something on our border. The number of people presenting themselves for refugee status is at a record high. The system that was designed 60 years ago to deal with refugees never envisioned the volume of demands that we are facing on the border every single day, week, and month.

This is not unique to the United States. Refugees all around the world are mushrooming in size for a variety of reasons: conflicts, the war in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, environmental changes. All of these have the world in flux. And many people are looking for safety, safety in countries like the United States.

I support the refugee system. I think it was designed at a time when we realized that turning away Jewish people in World War II was a stain on our reputation. We decided after World War II to enter into a pact with other countries around the world to accept refugees under certain circumstances, and we have lived by that ever since through Presidents--Republican and Democratic.

Now, we are being tested. We can meet that test. We can adjust our refugee system to the reality of today, and we can stop the abuse of the system that is taking place on the border. But we don't want to walk away from the very fundamental values of our country. It is trying to find that delicate balance between those values and the disorder that we face on the border that leads us to the point we are today.

I have been involved in immigration issues for as long as I have served in this Chamber, and I know how hard they are to negotiate. And to put this stark choice before the Senate of either finding a solution to a decades-old problem in a matter of days and hours or cutting off aid to Ukraine is a terrible choice.

It is a deadly choice for the people of Ukraine, and, sadly, it is a deadly choice for the dominance of the United States and shaping world opinion. I hope we find our senses and do it soon.

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