Thom Tillis

“Russia is attacking power plants and heating to freeze Ukrainian civilians this winter. We need to quickly send Ukraine the aid we already promised and enforce sanctions on Russia. If we do not stop Russia in Ukraine, it will attack other free countries next.”

“Mr. President, thanks again to my colleagues from Utah and Oklahoma. This graphic--by the way, the gentleman putting this graphic up is my staff--my MLA--Mike Leeman. It is his birthday today. I don’t know if that is allowed, to say that. I won’t sing ``Happy Birthday,’’ though, for the Parliamentarian’s sake. But Mike Leeman is one of the ones who coordinated the trip. You did a great job, Mike. Mike also prepared these stats for me because I want to give you an idea of what the winter is going to look like and what the Ukrainians are up against if last year is any indication. Between October 2525 and March of 2026, the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission documented at least 423 attacks on electricity generation, transmission, and distribution facilities; 74 strikes on combined heat and powerplants. Vladimir Putin is trying to freeze the Ukrainians to death. This is not targeting military facilities. It is targeting homes like people in the Gallery have here, hopefully, safely. It is targeting schools. It is targeting hospitals. In Kyiv, the attacks resulted in nearly 6,000 multistory buildings not having heat. That is what happened last year. Does anybody believe that Putin is going to do anything less this year? I could go through a long list of civilian targets, healthcare facilities, schools. Kids are meeting in subways now because they can’t safely go to school. That is the environment the Ukrainian people are living in year- round, but they have the unique threat of a harsh winter. And literally Putin’s strategy of terrorism is to freeze them to death in their homes. That is what we are up against. That is what he did last year. Many people died. What I am worried about--and what we need to do getting ready for this winter--is to change this trend. Our spending has dropped to almost nothing. Now, we are providing support and other forms beyond just the cash appropriations, but we need to do all of the above, ladies and gentlemen. With the proper execution of the sanctions that we have authorized the President to move forward with, with the proper resourcing--and they are not asking for a lot. This speech alone gives the Ukrainian people hope. They are a pro-American country, and the Ukrainian people need to know that the Americans are behind them, that Congress is behind them. And we need this administration to take a few steps to make it very clear that they are behind them too. And it starts with fast-tracking some of the funding that is available. I know it is complicated, but we have got to move quickly. And it also continues with the proper imposition of sanctions capabilities enabled in the bill that we passed in honor of Senator Lindsey Graham. So over the next 93 days that I have left in Congress, I am going to do everything I can to use every lever we can to convince the administration that we have got to make it a priority. We have to move quickly. The Ukrainian people are patient and still silently pro-American. I didn’t go anywhere without having people in bombed-out facilities thanking America for what we have done there. Well, I think in this winter America can do a little bit more and, if we do, Putin’s days are numbered. That is good for democracy, and that is great for the Western World. And that is our future--not a reemergence of the Russian Empire, not an opportunity to get success in Ukraine, move to Moldova, and try to Russify all of the free countries that the United States and the European nations liberated. That is the end goal, folks. It doesn’t stop with the occupied territory in Ukraine, unless America steps up, Europe continues to do its job, and we stop them in their tracks. And that, by the way, is not only good for Europe, but it is good for the Russian people who are suffering under his leadership. I am going to offer to my colleagues--we are going to be mindful of time. But if you would like to make a few closing comments, I want to thank you. I see at least one of the staff up in the audience. It was a trek. We were on planes, trains, and automobiles, but I can’t think of a more rewarding trip. I had the pleasure of traveling with you all and your staff, and I thank you. Senator Curtis, do you want to wind up, then Senator Armstrong?”

“Russia attacked Ukraine, but Russia is failing and losing tens of thousands of troops. I want the president to use the full power of our sanctions against Russia. I also want us and our European allies to keep sending Ukraine intelligence and military supplies so they can survive the winter.”

“Thank you, Senator Armstrong and Senator Curtis. I think what we all left with is an unambiguous view that Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is the victim. We all need to understand that when Russia was lying to us and saying they were just doing a training exercise and then turned it into a special military operation, our best intelligence estimates indicated to us--not publicly but in a private setting at the time--that Russia would likely have air superiority within about 3 or 4 days and total control of the ground within a week or two. Putin has failed. He never achieved anything resembling that. He has sent tens of thousands of Russians into a meat grinder. It is so bad now that he is talking about conscription beyond the forced conscription he has now. And get this--he is forcing young Ukrainians to kill Ukrainians because they are brainwashing these young people into thinking they are subhuman. He is not conscripting Russians yet. He is likely going to. But what he is doing is letting people out of prison and giving them U.S. dollars--$40,000 and $60,000 bonuses--to go on the battlefield. One of them was a prisoner of war. He was a sexual predator right out of prison. His family was given $60,000 to go fight. Now he has been captured, and he is going to be used to possibly trade to get a prisoner of war back to Ukraine. Right now, 30,000 Russians are dying every month. They are being plowed down, and they are making no ground. You heard Senator Curtis talk about a snail moving more quickly. That is mathematically true. If the snail started to get to where they are on the frontline right now, they would have beaten the Russians. So the last 10 minutes we have here before we have a UC coming up, I think, at 5:05 is to talk about what is next. What I think is next is asking the President, encouraging the President to use to the maximum extent possible the sanctions capabilities that Congress sent to him over the past couple of weeks to put the pressure on Russia, to not be the first President who equivocates against a Russian dictator, to continue the tradition of getting an opportunity. When you can win against communism, when you can win against totalitarianism, you do everything you can to win. And guess what. It will not require a single drop of American blood on the battlefield. All the Ukrainians want is support. All they want is intelligence. All they want is to make sure that the European nations continue to do what they are doing and the United States maybe do a little bit more, and that has as much to do with sanctions as it has to do with materiel support. I, for one, hope we can do both. If I have time remaining, I do want to talk about what I think is a dreadful trend in the last year and a half in terms of materiel support, but I would like to hear from Senator Curtis and Senator Armstrong about what we think we need to do to help Ukrainians before they go into the winter, which is when they are most vulnerable, because I firmly believe that if they make it through this winter, Putin’s days are numbered and rightly so. Senator Curtis.”

• Reasons given
  ?

  Speech in the House

  Reasoning 100 of 100

  This statement drew 3 conclusions and gave a reason for each one.

  See full analysis →

“I recently visited Ukraine and saw the damage from Russian attacks on civilian targets like schools and stores. Russia has murdered innocent people and committed terrible crimes there. This war is a fight between freedom and dictatorship, and good and evil. We must support Ukraine.”

“Mr. President, I have the privilege--I have been in the Senate for 12 years, and I have never led a codel, but I decided one last trip that I wanted to take before I left the Senate was to get back over to Ukraine to really understand what is going on, on the ground and maybe what message we should convey to our colleagues here in the Senate and to our--to the administration and to the American people. This is the second time I went to Ukraine. We also had a very, very productive visit with the government leaders in Poland before we traveled over to Kyiv and then to Kharkiv. We were actually the first delegation since the war began that has been able to get out to Kharkiv where the fighting is only about 10 or so miles away from the city’s center. But as we were going on the trip--well, first, when you are in Kyiv, which we spent the first 24 hours, it is an amazing sight to see a country that was illegally invaded that is being bombed on a daily basis still trying to have some semblance of normalcy--and this is in Kyiv. But then when you go to Kharkiv and you see, as you are riding out there, civilian targets: gas stations, convenience stores, schools, and buildings that have all been bombed by the indiscriminate bombing of Russia, it gives you a real sense of the devastation, the heartbreak, and all that is wrong with the decision that Vladimir Putin made to invade a sovereign nation. And I, for one, think that the war--I agree with the people of Ukraine. That invasion started in 2014. As a matter of fact, I remember vividly when I was campaigning in 2014 how critical I was of the Obama administration; in the face of an illegal invasion, the idea was to send them blankets, not to send them the support that they needed to repel a foreign invader. Now fast forward, they are invaded again, and they are doing the same things in the outer reaches of Ukraine that they have been doing in Crimea. They are trying to--they tell kids in Crimea in school that the leaders of Ukraine are Nazis; that they are there for the denazification of Ukraine. I find that rich since the President of Ukraine is Jewish, but that is what Vladimir Putin is telling his folks to tell these kids in school; that they are subhuman; that the people of Ukraine are. You can’t think of them as human beings; you think of them as life forms that they need to eliminate. But later on in the colloquy, I want to talk about what we need to do. But I also want to go back to a trip that I took a couple of years ago, my first time into Kyiv, and the devastation and the stories that I witnessed in an area called Bucha. I did a floor speech after that visit, and I really want the American people to understand what happened there in about the first month of the war shortly after they invaded that February 2022. Vladimir Putin directly allowed mercenaries and military officers to authorize their folks on the ground to indiscriminately kill innocent civilians. There are numerous reports of rape of a daughter, rape of a wife in the presence of the husband, then to have the husband murdered. This is not fake; this is well documented. As a matter of fact, I went to a memorial where I saw those victims’ names on a wall. That is what we are dealing with in Ukraine. That was 4 years ago, and they are continuing that systematic terror of this population. That is what we are dealing with here. We are not dealing with two adversaries or two countries that we have good relationships with and that we are trying to calm a dispute between the two. We are literally talking about, in my opinion--I will let my colleagues speak for themselves--a fight between good and evil, between communism and Western democracy, between freedom and totalitarianism. That is what we are confronted with in Ukraine. I could go on with a number of other examples, but rather than do that now, I would like to defer to my colleague from Utah, Senator Curtis. It was his first time in Ukraine, but some insights and takeaways from you, Senator Curtis, and then we will go to Senator Armstrong”

“The mental health data clearly shows our work has saved lives by stopping people from buying guns to harm themselves.”

“You take a look at the--I spend a lot of time and focus on behavioral health, Senator Cornyn, and the data is compelling. There is no question in my mind--just the sheer number here--there is no question in my mind that we saved the life of somebody who is buying a gun for that purpose. There is no doubt in my mind the numbers stipulate that.”

• Off topic
  ?

  Speech on a bill

  Relevance 0 of 100

  None of this speech addressed the bill under debate and what it would change.

  See full analysis →
• Vague
  ?

  Speech on a bill

  Clarity 10 of 100

  Much of this statement used imprecise wording, lacked details on timing or responsibility, or made broad claims without support.

  See full analysis →

“I support our bipartisan gun safety law. Critics said it would take away gun rights, but that is not true. It simply checks the records of buyers under 21 to keep guns away from young people with violent pasts. It is working and keeping people safe.”

“Senator Cornyn, I would describe as probably the ultimate statesman and gentleman here in the Senate. I am not. And so Senator Cornyn talked about all the merits of the bill, and we stand by them. I should also say he gets special credit for a lot of those provisions because they are in there because of his participation. I have long said that I don’t hold grudges, but I settle scores. And today is a good day to settle a score on another anniversary of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. We had a lot of people, actually organizations I have been a member of in the past, spread a lot of false information about this bill. They said it was going to be a red flag bill. Well, the fact of the matter is, there is funding in this bill for red flag, for States that have implemented red flag laws. Here is the little secret: not even Republican red flag States satisfy our rigorous standards for due process, which is why they haven’t applied for any funding. They wouldn’t qualify for it unless they changed their plans. So this didn’t cause a wave of red State laws to be implemented. Quite the contrary, it provided resources in behavioral health and veterans courts and drug courts and family courts to help people that may be in crisis ahead of them. Those same people who were saying: Send money now, support us because we are defending your Second Amendment right. I should mention as speaker of the house, we expanded concealed carry rights of North Carolina at levels that people couldn’t imagine. I am a concealed carry permittee. I have more than one gun, but I am a responsible gun owner who also finished the concealed carry class and also hunter safety. And I think we all need to be responsible gun owners. But at the end of the day, you have got to decide whether or not a kid going into a gun store on their 18th birthday, if that is their day to buy a gun. So let’s talk a little bit about what this bill really does versus what the mercenaries were trying to do to raise money and kill this bill. All we are saying--show of hands, do we have any pages that are 18 years old? OK. Younger or older? Younger, OK. So these kids right now, whatever--sorry, these young adults right now, whatever they are doing, if they have got a committal, a behavioral health committal, if they assaulted a police officer, shot at one, got prosecuted for it when they were 16\1/2\ years old or 17 years old, on their 18th birthday, it is like that device in--what was it--``Men in Black,’’ where you erase that. Can you imagine that? If you were 18 years old on your birthday and you had been convicted of a crime or had a serious legal entanglement, when you go to the NICS system, it was as if you were a day old. Does anybody think that really makes sense, that the crime you committed a couple of months, let’s say a month, 60 days, 90 days earlier, would have not been relevant? That is absurd. Of course if you are under 21, we need to have some insight into what your life looked like when you were 16 or 17 years old. That is what the enhanced background check was, and yet some of these gun advocacy organizations thought that was horrible. It was going to lead to a mass confiscation of guns. It was a backdoor, I think. It was a backdoor into just taking all of our guns away. It was going to devastate the Second Amendment protections of our Constitution. I heard them all saying it, saying some of it. Let me tell you what actually happened. All we did was say: If you are under 21, we are going to try and find out as much as we need to know about you for your safety and for the safety of your community. So all we did was say: We are going to go to local law enforcement. We are going to try and get information out there and encourage States to provide the information to our national center for clearing gun purchases in West Virginia sooner so that those who do not have a bad record can get their gun purchased sooner so that we can in a matter of 3 to 10 days get this done. All the people that were opposed to this bill said that we were not going to get any approvals done, that even the good law-abiding over 21s were going to get swept into this somehow. Well, let me tell you what has happened since June of this year. The NICS system is doing just fine. About 4,000 people who were going to be denied based on the law have been denied. So look at these numbers again. Talking about mass confiscation, how disruptive this was, how nobody was going to be able to get guns, right? That is what all the people said: Send money, we are defending your Second Amendment right here in Washington. Almost 551,000 transactions for purchasing guns have been processed as of June of this year. About 3,800 of them were denied for reasons that existed before we ever passed this law. What we have done though is found some 1,630 young people that that was not their day to buy a gun. That was--I could go through a long list. I could talk about people being convicted of assaulting a police officer. I could talk about people who had a long gun after they had been convicted of a crime in their car. I could talk about people who accidentally in North Carolina shot their girlfriend a year before and all of a sudden--at 17 and wanted to get a gun. Does anybody in their right mind think that is a good day for that kid to get a gun? I am not talking about a 38-year-old person going in. I am talking about an 18-year-old. I am talking about a 19-year-old. I am talking about a 20-year-old. All we did was say: Guys, let’s make sure that this is a safe decision for the child and for the community. That is what this bill did, and that is why this bill has withstood the test of time and not a single--not one scintilla--and I would defy anybody who was against this bill to find one of the things that they predicted and guaranteed would happen have actually occurred. What has happened is we may have saved 1,600 people who may have been buying that gun to hurt themselves, maybe to hurt their community-- maybe not. But what we know is that day was not the day that we should allow them to leave that gun store with a weapon for their safety and the safety of the community. This is Congress at its best. It is looking at the people that you generally support--and Senator Cornyn was first among them--and the gun rights community and saying: Guys, I can’t take the top-line arguments against this because you all know it is not really true. It is this black-and-white world that we live in here, and it requires the very seldom impactful language like, and legislation like, the Communities Act ever get done because people get afraid of the noise and they back into their corners. And I want to give Senator Cornyn an enormous amount of credit for stepping up and doing what he did to make Texas safer, make the country safer, and make these people and their loved ones and their neighbors in the community safer. The last thing I will leave you with is, to the States that do have red flag laws--including, I believe, the State of the Presiding Officer--let’s get those red flag laws consistent with due process and show respect to gun owners because I am not aware of any red flag law, even in red States, that come close to the sorts of protections that we also put into this bill. So let’s give them an incentive to get it right. Let’s make sure that every law-abiding citizen who wants to have a gun can--like me and like Senator Cornyn and like so many other people--but let’s be smart about it. And let’s make sure that we continue this trend of being sure that when a person applies for a weapon, that they can safely own it, they are going to be safe for themselves and their community, and stop this nonsense of fearing any sort of positive change because of political repercussions. This bill is one of the best bills that I had the privilege to work on. And the thing that is amazing about this bill is, it went from concept to implementation in fewer than 6 weeks. That is what happens when Congress gets together, they set aside their partisan differences, they refuse to listen to the false information trying to kill a bill, and they do something good for their State and their country. That is exactly--on this anniversary of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act-- what we accomplished. I want to thank Senator Cornyn for his partnership. It was not an easy bill. It was a lot of work, but we got it done. I thank Senator Murphy, and I should have mentioned Senator Gillibrand--or not Gillibrand--wrong Kirsten--Senator Sinema for working together. I mean, we had people across the political spectrum, folks. Chris Murphy, whom I consider a friend and colleague, about as liberal as anybody in this Chamber--and I think he would admit that. And we have got John Cornyn, who is one of the most conservative. And then you have got me and Sinema probably somewhere in the middle. We got together, and we got this done. And there are more people safe, and I believe there are people alive today that may not have been if this bill hadn’t passed. So, Senator Cornyn, I appreciate the work that you did on this bill. I believe we have got something that we should be proud of. And I also believe, Senator Cornyn, that the straw purchases, the gun trafficking, all the other things that we didn’t spend a lot of time on--we can come down here and do a colloquy and talk about more and more of the positive aspects of this bill. And I appreciate your leadership in moving it.”

• Off topic
  ?

  Speech on a bill

  Relevance 2 of 100

  Only 2% of this speech directly addressed the bill under debate.

  See full analysis →