live in. so, thank you to all of the cosponsors of this amendment. thank you to the president of the united states. and this is an important new chapter in how the united states provides military assistance around the world and how we conduct our foreign policy. i hope it will lead to a brighter chapter in the years e. the presiding officer: we are not in a quorum call. mr. tester: that's good. i'll just go. i want to thank you for the recognition, mr. president. i don't need to tell the people in this body or the other side of the capitol that the public view of washington, d.c., is not very good. our numbers and public opinion numbers oftentimes are in the single digits, and they're there for a good reason. they're there because oftentimes people only see politics here all the time. they see bodies and individuals that work for the parties.

they don't work for the good of america. in what we saw earlier this week just confirms that. where we had a bill that came out to address border security, particularly on the southern border, but it does good things for the northern border, too. but it addresses border security in this country. where we're seeing people coming across the border, the southern border in particular. we don't know who they are. and it's just flat a national security issue. when i go home to montana, i hear it from everybody. i hear it from families, from business owners, from policemen to mayors -- you name it. in montana -- and i don't think montana is different from any other state -- this is a big issue.

people understand the southern border is broken, and they want us, the folks that serve in washington, d.c., their representatives to the government, to do something about it. now, over the last many years, multiple administrations, we've seen people go to the border and talk about how things are really bad down there, they're about a bad -- they're bad because we've got undocumented folks coming across the border in record numbers. we've got fentanyl coming into the country ruining families and killing people. and then they go back and say how miserably bad it is on the southern border and how it needs to be fixed. they're right. unfortunately, this shouldn't be about press releases and e-mails and newsletters and interviews

at night. this should be about getting something done to fix the problem. so what transpired about four months ago is we had a bill on the floor then funding for ukraine. i believe there was funding for israel. i believe there was funding for the indo-pacific in it. and there were some in this body that said, this bill is going know where -- nowhere until we get something that addresses the problems at the southern border. i was standing right over there when one of the senators said, we get southern border -- republican -- democrats get ukraine funding. well, he was wrong. the truth is the united states gets southern border protection and the united states citizens get to help ukraine and support

democracy and make sure that putin isn't successful in taking over ukraine and ultimately the rest of europe. but nonetheless, there's three people that went out, were given the blessing to negotiate a bipartisan -- which is the way things should be done around here and are done around here -- a bipartisan southern border bill. the two people -- the republican and the democrat -- or the democrat and the republican, however you want to place it -- happen to be the chairman and ranking member of the homeland appropriations subcommittee. the other was a member who was an independent that lives in a state that borders the southern border, arizona. so these folks went down and they worked and worked and worked. i've been part of these

negotiations. quite frankly, they're never easy. nobody gets everything they want. there's compromise. there's negotiations. and in the end, you thread the needle and you come up up with a bill that actually secures the southern border, that, by the way, any one of those three negotiators would tell you they would not have written of themselves, but through the negotiating process, they came up with a bill -- and i'm going to he will it you -- and i'm going to tell you it was a pretty darn good bill. they rolled it out last sunday night for all of us to see, some 300-plus pages. i got to read that bill. but the interesting thing is before the bill was even rolled out, some of the folks that serve in this body said, i oppose it. before they even had a chance to look at it. they said, i oppose it. because they were told to oppose the bill. now, look, we're all elected by our citizens in our states to

come here. i would hope we all have a mind -- i would hope we all can think and i would hope we all can discern fact from fiction. but when somebody says vote against it and you just vote against it, after you've been in our state, you've heard what a big issue this is, and you've considered what can happen if we do nothing versus what could happen if we do something, and yet for political purposes -- not because it's bad policy but for political purposes a person says, don't fix it, and almost -- almost like a cult people here said, we're voting no. many have not read it t -- read it. it's unbelievable to me, and i've seen a lot of hypocrisy in this place, but it's

unbelievable to me the hypocrisy in that vote. as a condition of national security and folks in this body turn their back on fixing the problem. why? because they want to keep it a political issue, which is exactly why the people look at washington, d.c., and say, you know what? those folks don't represent us. they're in it for themselves. they just want everything to be an upheaval. it confirms that thought. so what's the bill do? what does this compromise bill do for america? it funds $20 billion in security for the southern border for manpower, for technology, and to attack the fentanyl crisis. which is a scourge on this country.

it includes the fentanyl act which puts serious harm to china's wallet for putting the precursor elements to fentanyl into mexico. it changes the asylum laws. it raises the bar exponentially and stops folks who come to the border illegal lay from gaming the system -- illegally from gaming the system. it requires -- it requires the president to shut down the border when they can't handle the people. look, don't take my word for it. the national border patrol council, some 18,000 border patrol agents have endorsed this bill. these are the folks that are charged, by the way, with keeping our border safe.

the acting director of customs border protection endorsed this bill and said it would provide the strongest set of tools that we've had in decades. the chief of the u.s. border patrol said on fox news, and i quote, this bill that would have added additional hundreds of border patrol agents to our rank and file, that would have given us more technology, would have given us more equipment infrastructure, of course i'm going to be supportive of that. and one of the senators that negotiated this bill -- a strong conservative, i might add -- republican senator james lankford from oklahoma, said that this would have stopped 800,000 entries in the past four months if it had already been signed into law. the hypocrisy is stunning. senators and house members who went back to their home states

and talked about how bad the southern border was and how we needed to act now have flip-flopped. these are politicians who claim to work bipartisanly, but they oppose bipartisan solutions. the same ones that have cried loudly for years that we need changes, policy changes on the border, but they're revealing in plain sight that it isn't about policy issues. it's about politics. and the disinformation campaign that's come along with this is rich. claims that 5,000 migrants would be allowed into this state, into this country every day is patently false. and if they had read the bill, they would have known it. there's those that say the congressional action isn't needed. that also is false. we control the purse strings, we

control the policy language. and only congress can fix our asylum laws. only congress can make sure we're giving the border patrol the resources that they need to secure the border. i wish this place worked, i really do. this is the greatest country in the world, not by accident, because our forefathers acted responsibly. and we didn't have campaign seasons that never end. that we actually could sit down and negotiate not as democrats and republicans, but as americans, to do what's right for this country. if we don't start acting like

adults in this place and start thinking and acting reasonably and listening to our constituents, not listening to one person but listen to the folks who sent you here. even when you disagree with them, you should be listening to them, to try to fix the problems, i fear for this country's future. and i don't say that lightly. there's plenty evidence out there that shows that china would love to replace us as the premier economy and the premier military in this world. that is not something that we should take lightly. that is something that we should take very, very seriously. and when congress doesn't do their job, when congress doesn't even debate a bill to deal with

a serious problem in this country, it does not speak well of us, and it only empowers our opponents out there, the countries that want our places in the world. i don't know what will transpire with this negotiated border agreement, but i do hope that we get another opportunity to vote on it, on the policy that was negotiated by lankford and sinema and murphy. they worked hard. at a bare minimum, they deserve -- they deserve, but more importantly the american people deserve to hear a debate on this bill and find out not what facebook or twitter or what the intert says about this bill, but find out exactly what's in this bill. because i can tell you montanans

are tired of d.c. political games, and, quite frankly, so am i. i.

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