President. I appreciate the majority leader allowing us to do this. To the present Presiding Officer, thank you very much for trying to
fix a difficult problem called immigration. I am going to start with what drives my train the most. I want to fix
a broken immigration system. There are 700,000, 800,000 DACA recipients
who are going to go into chaos on March 5 if we don't do something. As to the President, I think you were right to end this program and
to give Congress the chance to fix it through the legislative process. I thought President Obama overreached through Executive action. You
said March 5, we are going to replace DACA with legislation. The only
way that works, Mr. President, is for you to help us and lead us to the
right answer. The one thing I can tell you that drives my train the most is
rebuilding a broken military. We have an opportunity here to fix these
problems: help the men and women in the military who have suffered
mightily from sequestration, to get them more money at a time when they
need it; to provide certainty to 800,000 young people who have no other
country to call home than America; again, to repair a broken border,
start transforming a broken immigration system, and marching to
comprehensive reform in phase two. The reason I am here tonight is I see an opportunity to do something
we should have done years ago--increase defense spending consistent
with the threats we face. Here is what Defense Secretary Mattis said on June 12, 2017: ``No
enemy in the field has done more to harm the combat readiness of our
military than sequestration.'' Congress has shot down more planes and
sunk more ships by denying the military the assets they need to build
new equipment, to replace old equipment, to keep people in the field in
the fight, and other people trained and ready to go in the fight.
Keywords matched
immigration DACA