Dem Lawmaker Slams GOP Colleagues For 'Obediently' Killing Border Deal After Trump Voiced Opposition

last year

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) spoke about the bipartisan border deal that was struck down by Republicans.

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Transcript

00:00 Senator Whitehouse.

00:02 Thank you, Chairman.

00:04 I'd like to return to the topic of the

00:10 hearing and just

00:13 tell a Rhode Island story, if I may,

00:15 about a woman named Mariella Lukasz, who came to the U.S. from

00:23 Albania

00:26 when she was four years old.

00:29 Four years old.

00:31 I don't know if

00:33 anybody has a lot of memories from before they were four years old,

00:36 but pretty much all of Mariella's memories are from growing up in Rhode Island.

00:42 Her parents opened a small business.

00:44 Mariella earned high honors in high school.

00:50 She attended Rhode Island Community College and

00:53 the University of Rhode Island,

00:56 where she studied

00:58 to become a nurse.

01:00 Not a police officer, but a nurse. Pretty good, right?

01:04 She then earned her master's in business administration from Northeastern University.

01:12 When she was in college, Mariella was

01:15 student government president,

01:18 and she served as the student representative on the Rhode Island Board of Education

01:24 for two years.

01:28 She also served as a board member on our Commission on Higher Education and Employability.

01:34 She spent five years working as a registered nurse at Rhode Island Hospital in the neurology inpatient unit.

01:42 At the onset of the COVID pandemic,

01:48 she became a crisis relief nurse,

01:51 working where she was most needed in

01:55 critical areas all around the country.

01:59 And as many of you will remember, in the early days of the COVID epidemic, it was not known

02:05 how dangerous that pandemic would be. It was not known

02:10 the extent of the risk that

02:13 practitioners, police officers, EMTs, nurses, and doctors

02:17 were

02:19 putting themselves at by going about their jobs and their duties.

02:24 They did.

02:26 And she did.

02:29 She now works as a quality performance analyst at

02:32 Athena Health, and

02:35 Rhode Island

02:37 Community College is proud enough of her

02:40 that they have asked her to serve on the board of trustees of the college, and she is now on the Rhode Island

02:47 Community College board.

02:50 Those are the kind of people we're talking about here, and I just want to make sure we're focusing on that.

02:56 This committee has been

03:01 the place where some very significant bipartisan immigration reforms began.

03:07 Chairman Durbin was instrumental, along with then-chairman Leahy and then-ranking member Graham, in

03:16 working on a very robust immigration reform that got 70-plus votes on the Senate floor.

03:21 I want to say 78, but it was it got a big bipartisan vote on the Senate floor.

03:25 It was sent over to the Republican-controlled House

03:29 where

03:31 nobody would give it a hearing,

03:34 nobody would give it a vote,

03:36 nobody would allow it in committee, nobody would allow it on the floor.

03:38 It was just squelched.

03:42 Even though there was such a significant bipartisan vote for it in the Senate.

03:47 So at the hands of the Republican speaker, all that good Senate work went to waste.

03:52 Recently, we've seen months of work take place on immigration reform.

03:58 We stopped supporting our ally in Ukraine while we tried to hash through that.

04:03 After all that work, after being presented with the most comprehensive immigration bill in 40 years, a bipartisan bill with the lead

04:10 negotiator on the Republican side, the

04:12 deeply

04:14 conservative James Lankford,

04:16 a bill that would have added resources to the border, added agents, added judges, added detention space,

04:24 that would have upped our fentanyl detection capability dramatically,

04:29 that would have tightened up standards in various programs, particularly the asylum

04:34 program that had the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, who don't exactly love

04:41 Democrat initiatives.

04:43 After all of that,

04:45 again, one Republican took it down. In this case, it wasn't the speaker refusing to take it up. It was the

04:52 soon-to-be nominee of the Republican Party, the leader of the Republican Party, who said, "Don't do this.

04:59 Don't do this. I want the issue.

05:04 I want a mess. I want to run on

05:09 this." And

05:11 obediently,

05:13 our colleagues took it down, wouldn't vote for it, pulled it apart, and that was the end of that. We're still ready to go.

05:19 And I hope that after those two unpleasant experiences, this committee is not

05:25 so disappointed that we can't go forward. I do know that

05:30 Chairman Durbin has

05:33 many, many years of extremely sincere and diligent pursuit of this.

05:38 Senator Graham has been involved in

05:40 bipartisan immigration efforts for a very long time. It may take a moment for

05:46 things to cool down and us to reboot, but this committee will be a good place for that, and I salute the chairman.

05:51 Thank you, Senator.

05:54 Your summary of the current.

Dem Lawmaker Slams GOP Colleagues For 'Obediently' Killing Border Deal After Trump Voiced Opposition

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