Speech #1140044569

I think that is what we are bringing up here. I cant let it pass. I talked about this before. and as a Member who believes that there are immigration issues that we need to address and as a member of the Judiciary Committeewhich. by the way. has held hearings dealing with this subjectin fact. just last week. the Secretary of DHS was in. I questioned him directly about this. and it is amazing. He has no real opinion about sanctuary cities as he told me in his testimony. I find that rather amazing in that he would say that there would be a problem not enforcing these laws. and when I asked about other laws that we want to enforceis it okay for cities to turn their back on those lawsthere is not an opinion there. We have talked about this. We have had immigration hearings. We have begun the process of marking up legislation to secure our communities. to secure our borders. and to do those things. but before we start throwing in the nature of saying there is all wrong with the Republican majority on something that we have not done. I just want to go back and remindI am still one who at the time was out there watching the proceedings from my home in the State of Georgia. where we were doing everything we could to balance the needs of our State and our economy during shutdown and during a depression. recessionwhatever you want to call itand we were trying to balance budgets. and we were watching this issue up here. but what I saw was that we are told today we are waiting for Republicans and the Republicans have all this bad agenda. At the same point. when this body was controlled by my friends across the aisle. when the other body across the waythe Senatewas controlled by my friends across the aisle. and when the administration was new and in their early stages of developing their strategy for solving all the worlds problems. what they chose to do was wreck health care and to work against community bankers. They chose that. They chose not to do comprehensive immigration reform. They chose to use it as a political issue and a political pawn. They chose not to bring this up.