[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 8 (Tuesday, January 23, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Page S306]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  EXTENDING THE CONTINUING RESOLUTION

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would propose one additional unanimous-
consent request and am constrained, I guess, not to offer the third. I 
felt that as long as we were offering unanimous consent requests, the 
most logical-unanimous consent request is to come here and say, well, 
let us at least now understand that Friday we have a CR that needs 
extension or we will have a shutdown.
  The shutdown, it seems to me, is an example of what we have been 
through a couple of times, of poking taxpayers in the eye by saying, 
``You pay for a couple hundred thousand people that will be prevented 
from coming to work, and we insist you pay for them,'' and then dangle 
Federal workers in front of this debate and say, ``By the way, you're 
the pawns we're going to use.''
  If we have not been cured of Government shutdowns and the chaos that 
comes by using CR's as some kind of a line in the sand here where 
everybody else pays but nobody else suffers, if we have not cured 
ourselves of that apparently there is no cure for what ails us.
  My urge is to offer a CR that says, let us extend the CR that expires 
on Friday at a minimum of 2 weeks, but I shall not do that. I will not 
do that in deference to the leadership. I think if one were to do this 
sort of thing, one would want to notify the leadership.
  So my urge is to want to do this, and maybe sometime I will, as long 
as someone else comes out wanting to offer unanimous-consent requests. 
But I will not do that in deference to the leadership today.

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