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Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, the jury is in. At the end of 100 days, the major polling firms across the United States went out and asked the American people: So what do you think? What is your impression of this new President? What is your impression of the MAGA agenda?
The results that came back don't surprise me, but they might surprise some. Overwhelmingly, on every major issue that this administration has taken a position, the American people have said: We don't like it. We are not happy with what is happening in this country today.
After all the promises in the last political campaign about dealing with the cost of living for ordinary Americans, there is little or no progress to be shown for the 100 days of President Trump.
For 100 days, President Trump and his administration--mainly billionaire buddies like Elon Musk--have brought us chaos, wreaked havoc, and sowed division. President Trump has undermined the Constitution and our system of checks and balances and the rule of law. Through it all, I am sad to report that my Republican colleagues have remained silent.
I got a call several weeks ago, before the Easter break, from CEOs of major corporations, some in my State and some not. I had not heard from them before. Why they called me puzzled me a little bit. What it boiled down to was they were desperate for information about the policy decisions here in Washington. What did it mean that this President, Donald Trump, started a trade war and then announced he was going to put it on pause for 90 days? What were they supposed to do in terms of the future of their businesses? Were they to assume that the tariff tax war had begun, that in order to import key elements and parts to their production, they would have to pay tariffs of 10, 20, 30 percent? 100 percent? What did I know about it?
I couldn't answer because I didn't know the answer. I am not sure anyone knew the answer.
Somewhere in President Trump's mind is a theory of tariffs that he believes is going to make America stronger. These business leaders said just the opposite. Because of the uncertainty of these tariffs and the uncertainty of our trade relationships, they were going to hold back. They couldn't risk it. And that is the reality of what we face today.
When it comes to specific cases in this administration, it is hard to explain how we have reached this point.
When Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father who was living legally in the State of Maryland with his family, was sent to a terrorist prison in El Salvador because of what was said in court to be an ``administrative error,'' where was the outrage that this man was treated so unfairly, with no evidence except, perhaps, a tattoo that might be connected with a gang? There was no evidence that took this man out of the United States and put him in a prison in El Salvador.
Our colleague Senator Chris Van Hollen went down to see him and the conditions he is being held in and never came back with a satisfactory answer of why this man was being charged with a crime.
Now, you remember how many times Donald Trump gave speeches at rallies, and he said that we are being overrun by murderers and rapists and terrorists and mentally ill people who came to this country and shouldn't be here, and as a consequence, they were going to change things when he was elected President.
What they changed was to take this Mr. Garcia, living legally in Maryland with his family, and, through an administrative error, threw him into a hopeless prison in El Salvador. Is that what America is all about now? Because he had a surname like ``Garcia,'' we can ignore any reference to due process?
The President went so far as to suggest he would do the same thing to an American citizen. Now, of course, he says things which he later disavows, but it is outrageous to think a President of the United States would suggest that an American citizen, without due process, would be relegated to a terrorist prison in a foreign country. The American people don't care for that much, and neither do I, because it happens to offend this document: the Constitution of the United States.
Can you imagine an immigrant living here under a protected status torn from his home and family for no legally justifiable reason, and then the administration says it was an ``administrative error''?
While the Trump administration continues to avoid facilitating the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia as the Supreme Court has ordered him to do, Republicans have remained silent.
It was about 6 weeks ago. There were several key appointees by the Trump administration to positions in the Department of Justice. They included a Solicitor General and two other Deputy Attorneys General.
During the course of questioning, I asked these individuals a basic question: Do you believe that an executive official can defy a legally held court order? I thought the answer was clear: It is no, and it should be, whatever the President's party may be. Yet they struggled to come up with an answer that suggested maybe, in some cases, it was all right to defy a court order.
We have been through this in America. The case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was an effort to integrate schools across America for the first time--an extremely controversial decision, and several other decisions followed from it. But there was a legal court order for that to happen. In order to move forward, you have to start by obedience to the court order. You can criticize it within the realm of ethics, and you can even appeal it, but you can't ignore it. Yet these officials headed for the Trump Department of Justice wanted to equivocate on the answer.
Who came to my rescue on my argument? A Republican Senator from Louisiana, John Kennedy, who came in and addressed the three nominees and said: Let me make it clear to you--I paraphrase him I think accurately--your options with a legal court order are to be critical within the bounds of ethics and to appeal the decision if you disagree with it, but you have to obey that order or resign your official position.
That was as clear an explanation as I have ever heard. But under the Trump administration, they believe they are above the law. Some do.
Or take Donald Trump's ill-conceived, mindless tariff tax war, which I mentioned earlier. Global markets plunged when he came out with his proposals in the beginning of April. It wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth from the stock market and will cause Americans to suffer from higher prices and smaller export markets.
The advice which many people are giving to those who are worried about their IRAs and 401(k)s is: Don't look at it. Don't look at the balance. You are going to be too depressed when you see it.
And it is because of the chaos in the Trump White House when it comes to our trade policy and economics. While their constituents saw their retirement funds drain and grocery bills skyrocket, sadly, my Republican colleagues remained silent.
Rinse and repeat the cycle. Donald Trump threatens to withhold Federal funds from higher education institutions to coerce them to give up their constitutional rights. It is hard to imagine--we are talking about modern America--that a President of the United States who is unhappy with what is being taught at a college or a university threatens to remove all of their Federal funding.
For God's sake, this is a democracy. Freedom of speech is part of what we admire in this country so much and what is part of our future and our past. Yet, when it comes to President Trump, he has decided that if they want to teach something that he doesn't care for, whatever it may be, they are going to lose Federal funding. That is being tested in court.
The Secretary of Defense violates national security protocol and shares classified war plans in a Signal chat that mistakenly includes a journalist listening to the conversation. You would think that at least one hard-line Republican conservative, some hawk in their ranks, would stand up and say: That is wrong, regardless of who the President may be. But they didn't. The Republicans remain silent.
Unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE brothers gut the Federal Government, leading to cuts to lifesaving medical research, Americans unable to get their Social Security benefits, and threats to Medicaid. What was the response from the Republican side to these outrageous developments under the Trump administration? Silence.
When our Nation's Founders began the lofty task of building our democracy, they created a system of checks and balances to ensure a stable government and prevent the abuse of power.
In 1788, James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper 51:
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
But it seems the ambition of the Republican-controlled legislative branch is all but absent as Donald Trump's government goes out of control. Never in our Nation's history has a coequal branch of government so willfully rolled over and ceded their power. It is, in fact, the silence of the lambs.
The President is testing--and violating--the bounds of our Constitution, amassing power for himself as the economy tanks, violating the rights of Americans, and destroying our image abroad. My congressional Republican colleagues have the power to join us in a bipartisan effort to stop it.
Has it ever happened in history? It did, very graphically, in history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was upset with the Supreme Court and its rulings on New Deal programs. He went through a reelection cycle and was reelected by a large margin. He then came here to Washington and said: My first order of business is to increase the number of men-- all men then--serving on the Supreme Court so that I can finally get the rulings that I am looking for on my key elements of the New Deal.
What was the reaction of the Democratic Congress to the Democratic President, Franklin Roosevelt, who wanted to pack the Court? The reaction was fierce and it was bipartisan in opposition to FDR and he had to drop the plan. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress realized that if a President can control the composition of the Supreme Court and its rulings, that we have lost a valuable part of the protection of our Constitution.
My congressional Republicans have the power to join us in a historic stand on so many areas that this President has violated. They have majorities in both Chambers of Congress, and in private moments many of them express outrage and horror at Trump's dangerous abandonment of law, norms, and the will of the American people. But as their constituents suffer, out of fear of retaliation, Republicans remain silent.
When we are elected Members of Congress, we swear an oath to the Constitution, not to any politician or any President. It is time both parties remembered that and lived accordingly. So I am coming to the floor regularly to highlight the President's latest outrage and the GOP's inevitable silence in the face of it. Until they start using the voices they were elected to raise, we are going to continue to have a pending constitutional crisis in this country.
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