National Security Act, 2024

Floor Speech

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Ms. LUMMIS. Mr. President, I have such respect for the remarks of the gentleman who just completed his remarks. I know he feels very passionately. And I agree with him about what he said, especially about Israel and what they are going through.

The attacks on October 7 were unspeakable horrors imposed on the people of Israel, and I want to come to their defense. I want to come to their defense so badly that I have joined my colleagues repeatedly to pass stand-alone $14 billion funding for Israel multiple times since October 7.

By unanimous consent, we came to the floor multiple times and said: Let's send money to Israel. And who stopped it? The Democrats. The Democrats stopped money going to Israel.

Now we are here with a package of bundled things so we can roll enough stuff together so that we can get passage of a piece of legislation that is highly imperfect.

One of the main things that my constituents object to is that we are spending money for every country in this bill except our own. We will not defend our southern border. We will not spend money to protect our country from the invasion of terrorists and people whom we don't know, and we don't know why they are here.

The number of people who are coming into this country whom we don't know, we don't know why they are here, we are not identifying them, and we are turning them loose in this country is a crazy way to then turn around and say: We are not going to protect our borders. Y'all come, but we are going to send $95 billion to other countries to protect their borders.

That doesn't fly with my constituents.

But, interestingly, that is not even my biggest concern about this bill. Regarding this bill, I filed an amendment to ensure the $95 billion pricetag of this package is fully paid for by reducing the Fiscal Responsibility Act spending caps for fiscal year 2025 in both nondefense and defense areas.

In other words, this is yet another thing we are doing that is not paid for. If we are that passionate about helping our friends in Ukraine, in Taiwan, in Israel, then let's pay for it.

The American people are living paycheck to paycheck right now. They are going to the grocery store and paying twice as much for food, in some cases, than they were in 2020.

The price of gas is up. The price of food is up. The price of rent is up. More people right now are living paycheck to paycheck in this country than were in 2020. They can't afford health insurance, and they are cutting back on important things in their diets and for their families.

So we are going to let our people endure these kinds of insults that are brought on by us, and yet we want to send $95 billion to other countries that we are going to pay for with borrowed money?

We are $34 trillion in debt. In 22 months during COVID, the U.S. Government printed 80 percent of all the money that has ever been printed in the entire history of the United States. In 22 months during COVID, we printed 80 percent of all the money that the United States has ever printed in its history.

Now, when you print that much money and you put it in an economy, you get inflation. Why? Because you have too much money facing too few goods. That is kind of the definition of inflation.

We got ourselves into this. Between the Federal Reserve and Treasury, that printed money, with nothing behind it except the full faith and credit of the United States--which is not nothing--but when they did, they put us in a position where this year, we are going to owe more interest on the national debt than our entire defense budget and our entire budget for Medicare. And last year, we already passed legislation spending more on interest than the entire budget for Medicaid. We are spending money on interest because we refuse to pay for the things we think are critical.

I agree with the last gentleman who spoke. The world is in crisis, and I agree that we should help them. But we should pay for helping them, not run up debt, not put this burden on people in this country in the future.

This is wrong, and I am voting no. If we vote no, this bill is not the end of it. How many bills have we dealt with since October 7 dealing with funding for Ukraine or Taiwan or Israel or some combination of them?

Both parties have people who want to help Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. We understand the world risks that are posed by China if we sit on our hands, the risks that are posed by Russia if we sit on our hands and Iran and North Korea, and we are not going to sit on our hands. We are going to pass a bill. We are going to fund these things. But since we know we are going to do it, why don't we do it right? Why don't we pay for it?

You know, if we had only passed a budget a few weeks ago that was at fiscal year 2019 levels--we actually collect enough revenue in this country to pay for that--we could have had a year where we balanced our budget.

Now hearken back to 2019. Is there anything the government is doing now that they weren't doing in 2019 that is a total game changer in your life? I will bet the answer is no. So if we only would have gone back to the spending levels of 2019, I don't think it would have made a difference in anybody's lives, the way that they live their personal lives, and we would have balanced the budget. But we keep spending more and more money that is not paid for. Our national debt per citizen now exceeds $103,000. Debt per taxpayer is nearly $267,000.

Since I became a Senator in 2021, our national debt has increased $7.8 trillion. When I first entered Congress in 2008, our national debt was just over $10 trillion--$10 trillion. Now we are at $34 trillion. This is not sustainable. In just 15 years, our national debt has more than tripled. Our debt is the greatest threat our country faces today-- not China, not Russia.

The American people will continue to shoulder the burden of our unhinged spending. When we have changing priorities, we should be doing what we do in our own personal lives. If something is more important to me than something else, I don't do this; I do the thing that is more important to me.

We never have those discussions here. In fact, the way our committees work, they never talk to each other. The people on the committee that crafts the budget don't talk to the people who are spending the money. They don't talk to the committee that is collecting the taxes. Once the budget is set, the appropriators go to work. Are they talking to the committee that collects the taxes and oversees our Tax Code? No. They don't talk to each other. In fact, they are completely divorced of each other.

If you look at the charts around here that are spread around the Senate, it will show you how much we are spending on discretionary spending and mandatory spending and defense and nondefense, but where does it ever compare it to the revenues we are taking in? We don't talk to each other about it. We are $34 trillion in debt, and, by golly, we ought to start talking about it.

Now, in the last few weeks, we turned the Constitution on its head. The U.S. House sent over impeachment articles that they had worked hard on. Now, whether or not you thought that Alejandro Mayorkas was guilty of the crimes that were asserted and whether or not you felt that you would vote to impeach him doesn't matter. The Constitution set up a process where the House impeaches and the Senate sits as the jury.

For the first time in our history, we didn't have a trial. We didn't get a chance to say he is guilty or he is not guilty. And given the partisan politics of the day, we would have found him not guilty--you know. But people in this body didn't want to hear the evidence against him. People in this body don't want to know how many terrorists are coming across our border, how many people are coming across the border and we don't know whether they came from a Venezuelan prison. So the motion was tabled, and then we dismissed it. We pushed it under the rug.

Now, the same week, we had a bill come over from the House on section 702 of FISA. We were told that it was just an extension of the expiring provisions of section 702. It wasn't. It expanded 702. It expanded the opportunity for the government to tell communications providers: You will give us this information without a warrant. They expanded the warrantless searches in that bill. The Fourth Amendment was under attack, and there again, we just swept it under the rug.

Now we are passing a bill to spend $95 billion that is unpaid for.

You know, we have good reasons for making the decisions we do around here. My colleague Senator Graham just voiced very articulately why we should help Ukraine, why we should help Israel, why we should help Taiwan, that our enemies are watching. Well, let's fix this bill and make it better and then pass it. But we are not allowed to do that. We are not allowed to have a debate. We are not allowed to have amendments. We are not allowed to make it better. We have one choice: yes or no.

If you vote no, by golly, you must be an isolationist. Well, I am voting no. I am not an isolationist. I have previously voted many times to help Israel. I have helped bring motions to fund Israel specifically to the floor of this Senate as a stand-alone bill, and the Democrats shot us down. And the Democrats shot us down from having a trial that was required by the Constitution.

Further, we didn't get to amend the bill that came to us regarding section 702 of FISA. Now, that debate was bipartisan. There were a lot of Democrats and Republicans who wanted to join together and fix that bill, and the people who encouraged us to vote for that bill knew it was faulty. They knew it was faulty. They knew that language was too broad. They knew we should fix it.

They said: You know what, let's pass it now because the time is about to expire. It is 11:30 p.m. FISA 702 expires in half an hour, and we don't have time to fix it.

Yet we sat on our hands and fiddled around the whole day. We could have fixed that, but the proponents--on both sides of the aisle, by the way--said: No, no. Let's fix it later. We need to get this passed now. It is important to get it done before the clock expires, but we will work on it maybe when we get to the NDAA.

We put off the big decisions. We are trying to get things done, but we don't care if they are right. Let's just sweep this one under the rug. Let's let this one pass today and deal with it another time.

That is what we are doing with this bill. We are saying: Yeah, let's help Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan. We are not going to pay for it. Let's worry about that later.

But the American people expect more of us, and we should demand more of ourselves. What we are doing here is wrong. We have been wrong year after year by ignoring this debt.

You know, I rarely come to the floor and make this argument, especially when people want to go home. I mean, this is a week we were supposed to be out of session. We were supposed to be getting a week off, and it would have been richly deserved because what happened here last week had a lot of people ready for a cooling-off period. But we don't get a cooling-off period because it was decided by the leadership that we need to march forward with this. We can't amend it because then we would have to send it back to the House, and the House isn't in session.

You know, this is not the way this institution was designed to function. We shouldn't ram things down each other's throats. We shouldn't use the calendar as a weapon to force people to vote for things that could be fixed, that could be better.

I would like to vote for this bill, but I am not voting for something that is not paid for.

In 2008, after the financial crisis, we printed $3 trillion basically to bail out the banks, and we got addicted to easy money--to quantitative easing, it is called. Then, when COVID came around, we printed $5 trillion more. We are so addicted to easy money, to money where we just turn on the printing press and keep it going 24/7, that we are causing inflation and we are making it worse.

Last week, the International Monetary Fund said the United States faces ``significant risks'' from ``loose fiscal policy'' stemming from ``fundamental imbalances between spending and revenues.'' It is sad that the IMF has to point that out to us.

Additionally, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell remarked recently that ``the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path'' and that ``effectively, we are borrowing from future generations.'' These are quotes from the Chairman of the Fed.

I have been working on bipartisan legislation since I was elected to the Senate to address our addiction to spending. I introduced the bipartisan, bicameral Sustainable Budget Act in 2021 and 2023 to establish a fiscal Commission. There are so many proposals outside of that that we could address.

We ought to be listening to our fellow Senator Bill Cassidy, who is coming up with some great ideas that we can sustain and reform and nurture and keep the solvency of Social Security. Social Security is going to go broke in 2034. We are down to 10 years. The law says that when Social Security is drained of its excess funds, by law, the amount of money that comes in and is collected each year is the amount that can go out. We can't subsidize it in another way. If that happened, 70 million Americans would see their Social Security benefits cut by a quarter.

The highway trust fund goes broke in about 2028. We haven't fixed that. We are not talking about fixing that. Yet we know that EVs-- electric vehicles--don't pay fuel taxes, and the more EVs that are on the road, the less money we collect to maintain our roads. Our highway trust fund is going broke. It is going to be insolvent in about 4 years. We are not talking about fixing that.

Let's look at Medicare Part A. That is hospitalization. It goes insolvent in the 2030s. We are not talking about that.

We are talking about spending $95 billion more today so we can pat our chests and say we did something great for our colleagues around the world. In fact, we are doing something great for them, but we are doing something that is extremely harmful to ourselves because we will not address our own unsustainable fiscal path.

You know, I sit in my office and listen to my colleagues, and there are so many really worthy arguments, brilliant arguments, articulate people in this body. And I rarely come to the floor and have these conversations because I feel: I know this bill is going to pass tonight. I am going to vote no. The vast majority of people are voting yes. Nobody cares that we are spending this much money and it is unpaid for.

I am tired. I woke up at 2 a.m. in Wyoming this morning to try to get back here for these votes. I am tired. A lot of people want to go home tomorrow. A lot of people wish this debate was not occurring because the vote is a foregone conclusion. But, you know, I have been here now for 3\1/2\ years, and I have watched all of this happen, all this spending that we never pay for--we never pay for it. We don't talk about it. We pretend it is not a problem. We hear it is unsustainable. We hope the Nation doesn't go broke while we are here. Maybe people who are sitting in our chairs can deal with it when we are gone, but we are leaving them an unsustainable fiscal path and a big mess.

I would like to support this bill tonight. I would like to vote yes. But it is not paid for, and I will be voting no.

I encourage my colleagues to want to do better. We can do better. We can improve these bills. But we have to be allowed to amend them. We have to have these conversations before the tree is filled, as we say in the Senate, before amendment opportunities are lost.

This process is designed to cram the product down the throats of U.S. Senators and their constituents, without debate, meaning without the opportunity to amend and debate the amendments.

I know we can do better because I know the people in this room. There are so many smart, thoughtful, patriotic, caring Senators on both sides of the aisle. I know we can do better. But we have to want to.

We have to want to deal with the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is that we are $34 trillion in debt, and we will not talk about it. We will not address it. We will not try to fix it.

Every time, in the last year, that we have been talking about Ukraine funding, I have said: Let's go get our money that we have at the IMF and lend it, interest-free, for, heck, 30 years to Ukraine.

Nobody wants to talk about that. I don't know why. We just want to use taxpayer dollars to pay for things--taxpayer dollars, meaning printed money down at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. Just churn those printing presses, send money out the door, and export to other countries our inflation.

Other countries use our dollar because we are the world's reserve currency and because they are trying to do business with us and among other countries, in some common language, some common fiat currency, and the common fiat currency of the world is the U.S. dollar. Well, the more we print it and send out monopoly money, the more we export to other countries our inflation.

Every Senator in this room makes $174,000 a year. That is our salary. By the way, our salary is the exact same as it was when I arrived in Congress in 2009. Congressional salaries have been frozen since 2009. So $174,000 then is worth $122,000 today. That is how much inflation has eroded the paychecks of every Member of Congress. Yet we think we can live with frozen salaries since 2009. Why can't other people live with frozen dollars in Federal Agencies?

Do you know that our Federal Government is bigger than China's? This place has got to do some homework about its own spending, about its own fiscal situation, about what we are doing to the value of our dollar, about how we are threatening the dollar as the world's reserve currency because we are not nurturing and caring for and being good stewards of the U.S. fiat currency. It is time to face reality.

So this isn't the first time nor is it the last time that I will be discussing this on the floor of the Senate. And I wish that we could work together to have a more perfect Union. I know my colleagues and I can do it, but we have got to have the will, the gumption, the moral integrity, the virtue, the faith, and the freedom to do it.

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