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Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, news from this morning that 50 so-called battalion tactical groups have been sent to the Ukraine border by President Vladimir Putin--reports in American newspapers suggest that over the last several days there has been an increased amount of movement in Russian military assets to the Ukraine border.

This is a crisis that is deepening. There remains a diplomatic off- ramp, but that off-ramp only exists if Vladimir Putin sees the United States and its allies, especially those in Europe, united in our desire to support Ukraine in its time of need with the kind of assets they will need to defend themselves, but also with a commitment to levy unprecedented sanctions on Russia, long-lasting, deep sanctions, if they go forward with an incursion deeper into Ukraine than Russia already is.

But, right now, as we speak on the Senate floor, a small handful of Senate Republicans are blocking the key diplomatic personnel that would be able to unite U.S. policy with Europe around Russia's threatened invasion of Ukraine. And so I hear a lot of really strong-sounding press statements from many of my Republican colleagues, often the exact same Republican colleagues who are blocking these nominees, about how Joe Biden needs to stand strong for Ukraine, while, at the same time, they are down here on the floor denying President Biden the personnel that he needs in order to enact a policy that can save Ukraine from disaster--the Assistant Secretary for International Organizations, the U.S. Representative to the EU, the U.S. Representative to OECD, numerous Ambassadors to European countries, including our Ambassador to France, France being one of the key nations that will help orchestrate a policy of cohesion amongst European nations with respect to the crisis in Ukraine.

And so everybody sees what is going on here. Not all of my Republican colleagues, but a small handful of my Republican colleagues, are setting the President up, raising expectations about what he should be able to do to save Ukraine but then denying him the personnel to get it done.

And I understand that, you know, the refrain from my Republican colleagues is, well, you know, Senator Schumer should just file cloture. They know how this works. For cloture, because of our current rules, the whole process takes days. We have pages full of nominees that we have to do. We wouldn't be able to conduct any other business. The Senate has never run like this.

When the Senate has had qualified nominees like Jack Markell, Mark Gitenstein, Denise Bauer in front of it, it has never required days of debate, cloture motions, in order to get key personnel, especially at times of need right now.

I hope we get an agreement to move nominees, but, frankly, time is running short for Ukraine. Time is running short for the Ukrainian people, and my Republican colleagues--the handful that are blocking these nominees--better decide whether they are interested in scoring political points or whether they are interested in standing up for the security of the United States and the security of the Ukrainian people.

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