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Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I ask permission to speak up to 10 minutes.

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Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I oppose Kash Patel. I believe he is the dangerously wrong choice to serve as Director of the FBI.

We all have great admiration for the FBI. The men and women there serve our Nation, do hard work every day. For decades, they have served as the nonpolitical Agency that protects us and defends the rule of law.

I believe that Mr. Patel is on a mission to wreck the FBI. It is his own words. He wants to turn the FBI building into a monument or museum to the deep state. You know, I believe that this country and Congress is in the midst of a slow-moving but rapidly accelerating constitutional crisis. This is real, and we can ignore it or see it.

It began most visibly, of course, on January 6, 2021, when two norms of this Republic--the peaceful transfer of power and the renunciation of violence to affect the outcome of the vote count and certification-- were breached, and where many Members of the House and Senate also voted against certifying the election of the person chosen by the people in their own States.

The President continues to say that the election was stolen, and he has coached his nominees to embrace the big lie. The first month of the Trump administration has shown the contempt for the Constitution and the acceptance of lawlessness that is dangerous to the future of our Republic.

President Trump's election denialism was an early sign of his disregard for the norms and requirements of the Constitution. Now empowered in a second term by a Congress and a judiciary which refuse to assert their independence, Mr. Trump has enacted Executive order after Executive order to dismantle our institutions. He doesn't have the authority to do what he is doing: the Federal funding freeze, clearly an unconstitutional invasion of the article I power of the purse; shutting down Agencies created by Congress without authority; revoking birthright citizenship, a constitutional provision that he asserts that he can do by Executive order; removing leaders of independent Agencies created by Congress, clearly unlawful; firing inspectors general in violation of notice requirements created by Congress, unlawful; firing government employees who have civil service protections, clearly unlawful; and pushing really a quid pro quo order at the Department of Justice to drop charges against a corrupt mayor in New York so he will accede to whatever the wishes are of the Trump administration regarding local enforcement. That is only a short list.

We have reached a point where a Federal judge has found that the White House defied his order to release billions of dollars in Federal grants, marking the first time that a judge has expressed and declared that the Trump administration is disobeying a judicial mandate. That is troubling. The country is headed into a situation where in addition to acting without authority, the President and his enablers are--he will defy rulings from the third branch of our government.

Vice President Vance has made it very clear what his point of view is on judges: Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's ``legitimate powers,'' and if the courts don't like it, let them enforce it.

Of course, under our Constitution, since Marbury v. Madison, the court is--the court is the final arbiter of what is legitimate or what is not, and the executive branch must enforce the laws as interpreted by the coequal branch of government.

It is my view that this administration is showing maximum contempt for core constitutional values, including, most importantly, the separation of powers. This is not about what the President's agenda is. This is about his disregard about the limits that apply to each branch of government.

We have a dilemma. There are many in Congress that are fully in support of President Trump's policies. That is his right to pursue them, any Member's right to support them, but it has to be that we accept our unique responsibility, each of the 100 U.S. Senators, that we have to guarantee that in pursuit of those policies, it is done within constitutional boundaries.

That is the glue that has held this country together through thick and thin for nearly 250 years. You know, this is not just talk about civic aspiration. It is a recognition that the separation of powers, that the system of checks and balances--we are custodians of that, each of us here--that the concept of the Executive's ambition should be matched with the ambition of the legislature. That is what has held us together through the turmoil of our own history.

We have fierce debates about important public policy matters, but what allows us to resolve those, despite intense disagreements, is staying within the guardrails of the Constitution. That process is being threatened directly and aggressively. The President's attack on our Constitution on January 6 has continued to this day.

We have witnessed the renunciation of the decision the American people made in the 2020 election by President Trump's nominees. Many of them who came before us, including Mr. Patel, were unable to simply say who won the 2020 election. They continued the ``Stop the Steal'' narrative even 4 years later, and now we have President Trump in his first month in office acting in ways that continue to challenge the constitutional order.

I am voting against Mr. Patel, primarily but not exclusively, because he is clearly an instrument in that effort to continue eroding the precepts of the Constitution on separation of powers. I urge all my fellow Senators, Republican and Democrat, to embrace the responsibility we have to assert our responsibility and authority as a coequal branch.

This is a difficult time, particularly for many of my esteemed colleagues on the Republican side. You may support, as I mentioned, the policies of the President, but we have got to take a look at how he is going about trying to implement them. That really matters.

We are all custodians of the constitutional order. I am regarding what President Trump has been doing in his first month of office as an illegal rampage. It is a rampage of illegality. He is showing a contempt for Congress and a contempt for the U.S. judiciary.

Mr. Patel has signed on to that agenda. He isn't just someone who will be forced to participate in the President's campaign of retribution. He is an active participant. He has got his enemies list.

We know this because his own words said:

What was the FBI doing planning January 6th for a year?

No basis for that, other than to set up the attack on the good men and women of the FBI.

Mr. Patel is the one who created a list of deep state individuals. This is like Russia kind of stuff, half of whom are Republicans in the so-called deep state. Then he called them ``nothing more than a cabal of government gangsters and their allies.''

This is the Department he is going to be leading, really. He is the one who said ``thank you to President Trump for helping put so many government gangsters in their place.''

Mr. Patel is not the person to lead the FBI. My hope is that all of us should consider what Mr. Patel will do. He is going to use the power of the FBI to go after all those in government, those in the media, and those across the country that he doesn't agree with. He cannot serve as the next Director of the FBI.

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