National Security Act, 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I feel fortunate, of course, to serve in the Senate and equally fortunate to represent the State of Illinois and the city of Chicago. What an amazing gathering place for America Chicago has been over the years--and still is to this day.

When we talk about issues here in Washington, many times I can relate them not just to neighborhoods but to people in Chicago who feel so intensely about the land of their birth or causes of other countries. I have gone through that same experience myself--my mother an immigrant from Lithuania. I was fortunate to witness the freedom struggle in Lithuania when they finally broke from the Soviet Union. If you go down Chicago Avenue west of Michigan Avenue, you go into an area known as Ukrainian Village. That nomenclature speaks for itself. There are churches and gathering places, schools, and families who are watching the war in Ukraine with personal intensity. To them, it is a land where their mothers and fathers were born and where many of them were born, and they have prayers and pleas to the politicians not to forget.

You can also step right outside of this Chamber, a few steps away, and find a group of Ukrainian Americans who have been demonstrating on behalf of the cause of Ukraine for as long as this war has gone on. I saw them this morning, and as we go by, the typical greeting in the Ukrainian Village is ``Slava Ukraini''--``Long Live Ukraine''--to which they reply that they agree with me. It is a great feeling to see these demonstrators peacefully demonstrating for a cause that means so much to them and to realize that, as a Senator, I am going to have a vote today or tomorrow that can make a real difference in whether Ukraine prevails against Vladimir Putin or whether it doesn't.

Last week, my Ukrainian Caucus cochair, Senator Roger Wicker--the Republican of Mississippi--and I hosted the Ukrainian Prime Minister. The Presiding Officer was there, and we were joined by several colleagues from both sides of the aisle. It was truly a bipartisan turnout.

The Prime Minister's point was simple: With continued U.S. and allied support, Ukraine can defeat Russia's brutal war and, in doing so, help defend greater security in Europe.

I agree. That is why the weekend vote in the House and the vote here this week in the Senate are so important.

We always have had an isolationist sentiment in the United States. If you are a student of history, you know that we had to overcome that sentiment in both World Wars; but in both cases and here today with Ukraine, in the larger national security supplemental bill which we are considering, it was not only in our interest to stop wars of aggression but also to help maintain the international world order that reflects our values and benefits here at home.

Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and its earlier seizure of land in Georgia and Moldova threaten decades of hard-won peace and stability in Europe. Make no mistake, China, Iran, and North Korea are watching to see if the United States and our allies allow Russia's aggression to stand. Doing so not only would embolden Putin to try for more European land, including from NATO allies like the Baltics and Poland, but it would also raise the risks faced by allies in the Indo- Pacific and the Middle East. That is why I am so pleased that this supplemental includes security assistance for our key allies in those regions of the world as well.

It also includes considerable humanitarian aid to help with the number of growing needs, including in Gaza, Sudan, and in drought- stricken areas of the world that are facing food insecurity.

Quite simply, what we do today has consequences--global historic consequences. NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg recently issued his blanket warning to us all.

He said:

If Vladimir Putin wins in Ukraine, there is a real risk that his aggression will not end there.

Putin will continue to wage his war beyond Ukraine, with grave consequences.

Stoltenberg went further to remind us:

Our support is not charity; it is an investment in our own security.

I want to remind my Republican colleagues that President Ronald Reagan understood this 37 years ago when he said at the Brandenburg Gate dividing East and West Berlin: ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' I was lucky enough to be in Berlin when the wall was coming down. The euphoria felt by the people of Berlin was palpable. I remember groups coming to the Brandenburg Gate, bringing little hammers with them to try to chip off a piece of the wall and save it for their children and grandchildren. It meant that much to them.

Only a few years after his historic speech, the Soviet Union collapsed, ushering in decades of freedom and prosperity in Eastern Europe and a welcomed end to the Cold War. Vladimir Putin called this historic wave of liberation from the shackles of Communism ``the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century''--a wave of freedom he clearly wants to reverse that continues to this day.

And my friend and former colleague John McCain, with whom I will never forget walking through the makeshift shrines to those killed fighting for democracy in Ukraine's Maidan Square, saw this battle of ideas and freedom so clearly.

Recently, House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Mike McCaul happily noted:

The eyes of the world are watching, and our adversaries are watching, and history is watching--and that's what I kept telling my colleagues: Do you want to be a Chamberlain or a Churchill?

So I urge a strong bipartisan vote this week to send a clear message to Putin that he cannot prevail in Ukraine; to ensure that other key allies and humanitarian crises will receive much needed aid; and to uphold basic international norms.

The Washington Post called the House's approval of the supplemental ``the vote heard around the world.'' Let's make sure our actions in the Senate this week are also heard around the world.

This package contains many elements beyond aid to Ukraine. The Indo- Pacific section provides $2 billion in weapons for Taiwan and $3.3 billion for a submarine base, and provisions relating to humanitarian aid to Gaza, Sudan, and other vulnerable populations around the world will make a difference between life and death.

We want to crack down on the fentanyl trafficking. I recently had Anne Milgram, who is the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, back to my office to give me a briefing on the fentanyl crisis in this country. It bears repeating what she said over and over again:

One pill can kill.

That message has to be communicated to our children and families all across the United States. We lost over 100,000 Americans last year to fentanyl. Some of them had no idea what they were ingesting. What they did, of course, was to take a fatal dose of fentanyl, which can be very small.

Yesterday, I was at O'Hare Airport in Chicago and was taken on a tour to show the efforts to intercept precursor drugs and pill pressers, tablet pressers, that are coming into this country and killing so many people. So many innocent people have no idea of the danger. A young person, a teenager in Chicago, felt that he was ordering a Percocet pill--a harmless Percocet pill--over the internet. It was laced with fentanyl, and he died on the spot. One pill can kill.

We take significant steps forward in the enforcement of laws against fentanyl and drug trafficking, as we should.

We also have new sanctions on Iran, Russia, and China. And, of course, there was a controversial issue, the sale of TikTok, which is included in this.

My greatest fear is that Netanyahu and his rightwing coalition, once they receive these American funds, will act irresponsibly. I am afraid that they will revert to their devastating tactics in Gaza. In the name of stopping Hamas, they will, unfortunately, revert to their devastating tactics, which kill many innocent people, mainly women and children--Palestinian women and children--who have no place to turn, no place to escape. These innocent people living in Gaza should not be victims of this war.

There are requirements for all civilized nations in wartime when it comes to protecting individuals and civilians, and they certainly should apply in this situation. There is no question--and it bears repeating every time we talk about this topic--that Israel has the right to exist; it has the right to defend itself; and it had the right to strike back at Hamas after the atrocities of October 7, but the humanitarian crisis which was unleashed in Gaza is unspeakable, indefensible, and we cannot be a party to it.

There are provisions in the law for those who receive aid from the United States, and that would include all of the countries that I have mentioned here--provisions in the law which require them to adhere to international standards when it comes to protecting the innocent and when it comes to facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid. We must hold Israel and all recipients of U.S. aid to those standards to make certain that they are doing everything in their power to protect the innocent.

This is an important vote, and as usual, in the Senate, we find that it is not a single issue that we will be voting on but, in fact, perhaps, a dozen key issues, any one of which could be a major bill debated at length on the floor of the Senate. But time is wasting. We passed this defense supplemental for the first time in February of this year, and here we are in April. It is time to get this done for the relief and the support of the people in Ukraine and for the good of American values all around the world.
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