Cloture Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, almost exactly a year ago, President Obama addressed the Nation and declared his resolve to degrade and destroy ISIL.

I will speak more on that in just a moment, but there are two lines in that speech of particular relevance to the vote we are about to take.

This is what President Obama had to say:

As Commander-in-Chief, my highest priority is the security of the American people [and] our own safety, our own security, depends upon our willingness to do what it takes to defend this nation and uphold the values that we stand for.

He was certainly right. It does. And doing what it takes requires many things--everything from amphibious shipping, Joint Strike Fighters, and forward presence, to preserving our gains in Afghanistan and investing in the naval systems required to balance against Chinese expansion in Asia.

So when President Obama sent us a budget request asking for $612 billion in defense spending, we worked across the aisle to craft a bipartisan appropriations bill at that level. Democrats hailed the defense spending as a win-win and a victory for their States. They voted to pass it out of the Appropriations Committee. This is how the Defense appropriations bill came out of the Appropriations Committee: 27 to 3.

But then, as the Washington Post put it, Democrats ``decided to block all spending bills starting with the defense appropriations measure'' as part of some ``filibuster summer'' strategy designed to pump more taxpayer cash into Washington bureaucracies such as the IRS. The same President who had lectured the Nation about doing ``what it takes to defend this nation'' seemed content to have our military held hostage to the whims of the far left. The White House cheered as they voted repeatedly to block the bill that funds pay raises and medical care for our troops. It was outrageous then, and it is outrageous now.

China is deploying ships to the Bering Sea and to the coast of Alaska. Russia's military is positioning itself in Syria to attack anti-regime forces under the guise of a counterterrorism campaign. Refugees are pouring forth in the thousands, causing instability in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Europe. And 1 year after the President's speech, ISIL is consolidating its gains within Syria and Iraq as it demonstrates an agility and an operational flexibility that threaten our country and our national security interests.

The sad lesson of the last 7 years is that our global conventional drawdown and withdrawal from the Middle East emboldened Russia and China. Our ambitious train-and-equip and economy-of-force programs to train combat forces within Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq and our program to train an opposition to fight within Syria--all have failed to defeat the enemy. And Iran now appears free under the President's deal to inspect its own suspected nuclear site and to funnel more cash to Hezbollah.

If President Obama is committed to protecting the American people, he will convince his party to end its blockade of funding our military. We are going to give our Democratic friends that chance again in a few moments.

The goal of Democrats' ``filibuster summer'' was to force Congress back to the brink. They have succeeded in doing that. They think it is the only way to force America to accept their demands for more debt and more bureaucracy. But it is time Democrats started considering the needs of our country, not the wants of the far left or the IRS. Ending their blockade of funding for our military at a time of significant international threats would show they are ready to start putting Americans first.

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