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Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I am deeply grateful to Senator Sinema, Senator Lankford, Senator McConnell, Senator Schumer, and others who worked with us over the course of 4 months to craft this landmark, unprecedented, bipartisan border security bill that, if enacted, would take the biggest step that we have taken in decades to bring order to our southwest border. It would give a shot of confidence to our constituents that we can find agreement on even the toughest of issues.

I may be coming to a slightly different conclusion, though, on the reason that we are here today than my very good friend Senator Sinema and my great friend Senator Lankford.

I think one of the most important, enduring values in politics is the value of persistence. If you believe something is important, you don't give up the first time.

We worked very hard to achieve this compromise. It is a good-faith compromise. You will see that it is a compromise because there will be Democratic Members who will vote against it today.

We solved some big problems in this bill--reducing the amount of time it takes to process an asylum claim from 10 years down to a handful of weeks or months, giving the President new powers to shut down the border when crossings get too high, giving new legal rights to migrants, allowing for more visas so that folks can come to the United States in a planned way to work or to be reunited with families.

I think that compromise was so important that we shouldn't give up after failing once. I think the American people have told us that solving the problem at the border is so important that we shouldn't put away that compromise simply because the first time, politics won out.

Maybe I am naive, but I had some degree of hope, some degree of faith that maybe the second time we could come together and vote to proceed to a debate, because, remember, that is all this vote is--not a vote on final passage, a vote to bring this bill before the Senate, to litigate the outstanding issues that Republicans may have about the reforms in this bill.

So I deeply appreciate all of the work that Senator Lankford and Senator Sinema did that went into this bill. I just come to a slightly different conclusion. This does not make me less eager to engage in bipartisan compromise in the future. This doesn't dissuade me from trying to reach future compromises.

Frankly, I think our decision to not give up when we have reached this really important product--I think it may, frankly, put wind behind the wings of those in the future who decide to do something really important on something big and work across the aisle to get it done.

We have a chance right now to come together, to put politics and campaigns aside, to vote to proceed on this landmark bipartisan border security reform bill, and I hope my colleagues do it.

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