[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 132 (Monday, September 30, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7050-S7053]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CONTINUING APPROPRIATIONS
Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I wish to say a few words to try to
reflect what I think tens of millions of Americans are feeling at 11:25
tonight with the threat of a government shutdown in 35 minutes.
What I want to say is that this discussion is not about ObamaCare at
all. What this discussion, debate, and conflict is about is that our
Republican friends in the House are trying to annul the elections that
took place last November. Some of them were shocked that Obama won and
that he won by 5 million votes. They haven't gotten over it. They were
shocked they lost two seats in the Senate. They haven't gotten over
that. They were shocked they lost some seats in the House.
What they are saying to the American people tonight is: Maybe we lost
the Presidential election. Maybe we lost seats in the Senate and in the
House. It doesn't matter. We can now bring the government to a
shutdown, throw some 800,000 hard-working Americans out on the street,
and we are going to get our way no matter what.
I think that is a horrendous precedent to be established for this
body. Let's be clear. If we surrendered to that hostage-taking tonight,
without a shadow of a doubt these guys would be back 2 weeks from
today. At that point they would say to us: Here is our laundry list of
demands. If you don't give us what we want, we are going to bring down
the financial system of the United States of America, bring down the
world financial system, and if it leads to a worldwide recession, well,
that is the way it goes. But what is most important is we get our way
and we don't care about the repercussions.
Next year I can see these same guys coming to the floor of the House
and saying: You know what. We want to abolish Social Security. We think
Social Security is a bad idea, and if you don't allow us to do that, we
are going to stop the government again. And on and on it goes.
Ultimately, what we are dealing with tonight is an extraordinarily
antidemocratic act. Every Member of the Senate has strong feelings.
Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. But when they are in the
minority--they do not control the White House, they do not control the
Senate--they cannot force the American people to give them what they
want.
The irony is that because we have folks in the Republican Party in
the House who believe we should abolish Social Security, end Medicare
as we know it, privatize the VA, eliminate the Environmental Protection
Agency--they do not believe that the function of government is to
protect the interests of the vast majority of the people. So these guys
are sitting and saying: My God. The government may shut down. What a
great idea.
If you don't believe the EPA should protect us from pollution, then
isn't it a good idea that we not have an EPA starting tomorrow? If you
don't believe in veterans health care, isn't it a good idea that we
should slow down the processing of veterans' claims?
So for these guys who do not believe that in a democratic, civilized
society we should have a government which represents the people, then
from their point of view what is happening is, in fact, quite good.
What particularly angers me, and why the American people have such
contempt for what we are doing in Washington is as we speak--everybody
knows this--the middle class in this country is disappearing. The
Census Bureau study came out last week--if you can believe this--median
family income, that family right in the middle of American society, is
earning less money today than it earned 24 years ago. All of the
increases in technology and productivity doesn't mean anything.
Poverty is at 46.5 million, and that is highest on record. Youth
unemployment is 20 percent. Real unemployment is 14 percent. What do
the American people want us to be doing? Everybody knows what they want
us to do. Every poll gives us the answer.
They want us to start creating the millions of jobs this economy
desperately needs. They want us to raise the minimum wage because they
know millions of people in this country cannot make it on $8 or $9 an
hour. They
[[Page S7051]]
want us to improve our crumbling infrastructure, our roads, our
bridges, and our wastewater plants. They want us to bring about real
tax reform. One out of four major corporations today is not paying a
nickel in taxes, and they want us to change that as well.
In my view, for the future of this country, we cannot allow a handful
of rightwing extremists to hold this Nation hostage. The American
people have to stand tall and tell them that, yes, in a democratic
society, people have differences of opinion. Yes, we can make
improvements in ObamaCare. But we don't go forward by trying to destroy
or bring the U.S. Government to a halt.
I think it is important for the American people now to stand and
demand democracy here in Washington, and tell a handful of rightwing
extremists they cannot get their way by holding this government in a
hijacked manner.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, do I need to request a specific amount
of time in which to speak? Are we under any rules?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Senators are permitted to speak for up to 10
minutes each.
Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to express
my feelings this evening.
Quite frankly, I was one of the optimists in this body. Many of my
colleagues have been saying the determination to run our economy over a
cliff is so powerful, we are going to end up with a government
shutdown. I kept saying, I don't think so. I think in this Senate and
across the Capitol in the House there are reasonable folks who know
that this type of brinkmanship is doing intense damage to our Nation,
and I don't believe we will end up there. So here is my faith in the
common sense of a collection of 435 Members of the House and 100
Members of the Senate--my faith in their reasonableness. Apparently,
that faith has been misplaced, because we are now just 27 minutes away
from a government shutdown. And to what point?
We have just heard from the House leadership they want to have a
conference discussion over the budget. Well, certainly, so do we. Six
months ago, we passed a budget. The Senate passed a budget. We sought
to have a conference committee to resolve those two budgets as a common
foundation for a set of spending bills--our appropriations bills--and
our Republican colleagues blocked that budget conference committee.
They have come to this floor 18 times and blocked the dialogue
necessary to take the conversation forward over our budget and spending
plan. That is what led us here tonight. The obstruction didn't start a
week ago or 2 weeks ago; it started 6 months ago, in not allowing a
common conversation.
I am deeply disturbed about the profound dysfunction that now grips
this body. I first came to the Senate when I was 19 years old as an
intern for Senator Hatfield. When legislation was brought up, it would
be debated, there would be a simple majority vote; sometimes we won,
sometimes we lost. We then send a bill over to the House. Then we have
a conference committee and we get on with things. We make decisions. We
test ideas. Sometimes those ideas work well and we keep them and
sometimes they don't work so well, and we either amend them or throw
them out or the public says, the bums who brought us those ideas that
didn't work, we will throw them out. We had a completion of the
democratic circle.
We don't have that completion now because we can't have a simple
majority vote. Our colleagues have so abused the filibuster process;
the courtesy of letting everyone have their say is to never let us get
to a final up-or-down vote. So instead of 12 appropriations bills being
passed year after year after year, we have zero this year. We only had
one in 2011-2012, only one.
Citizens across the country are seeing this and saying, what is wrong
with the Senate and what is wrong with the House? The House has its own
form of supermajority: the Hastert rule. They are saying, We are not
going to put on the floor things we know will pass unless they belong
to the ideology of the far right, because we know that right now, if
the Speaker of the House wants to put on the floor of the House the
bill passed by the Senate--a clean, simple extension of a continuing
resolution--it would be adopted. The leadership does not believe in
allowing a vote in that Chamber, just as a minority of colleagues here
in this Chamber have blocked us from having a simple majority vote time
and time and time again.
We need to have a more substantial conversation about how to make
both Chambers work better. But in the near term we have to find a path
in which we stop careening from crisis to crisis.
Let's say, in the final 23 minutes now before midnight, that we were
able to find an answer to pass a continuing resolution. Let's say we
were able to do that. Is there no harm done? Well, I wish that were the
case, because there has been a lot of harm done; because what
businesses know across America is that this process of brinkmanship, of
hostage-taking, of threatening to throw the economy over the cliff is
happening time and time and time again. Already, Members on the House
side are saying, Well, let's not only make these arguments tonight,
let's make them in a couple of weeks over the debt ceiling. The debt
ceiling--the decision on whether to pay the bills we have already
incurred; the decision on whether to honor the good faith and credit of
the United States of America.
President Reagan spoke on this multiple times, telling folks, We
don't mess with the good faith and credit of the United States. His
team undoubtedly recognized that when we do so, we raise the interest
rates, we endanger the dollar as a reserve currency, we weaken our
purchasing power around the world, and we do deep damage. But that
reasonableness, that common sense that we don't take hostages and we
don't threaten to destroy the economy that is going to hurt the middle
class is gone.
I live in a working class community. Folks don't have a lot of
savings. They have been hit hard. They lost a lot of their savings in
the 2008 meltdown, a meltdown that came from deregulatory actions, that
allowed predatory mortgages and securities based on predatory
mortgages. They know that governance matters. They know we could create
a lot of jobs if we could pass those bills for low-interest loans, for
energy saving renovations that would put a huge amount of the
construction industry back to work. That bill passed here in the
Senate, but the House hasn't taken it up. They haven't passed it.
They know we would have a lot more jobs if we invested in
infrastructure. China is spending 10 percent of their GDP on
infrastructure. Europe is spending 5 percent of their GDP on
infrastructure. And what are we spending here in America? We are
spending 2 percent--not enough to repair the infrastructure that is
wearing out across America, that needs replacing, let alone
establishing infrastructure for the next generation. In a 10-year
period, 2 trips to China, I saw Beijing go from bicycles to a bullet
train. That is what happens when a society spends 10 percent of GDP on
infrastructure. We build the economy of tomorrow for the generation of
tomorrow that is going to thrive in that city.
When we underinvest, we imperil the future. When we underinvest in
education, we imperil the future of our kids, and we are certainly
underinvesting in education. But for each of these policy issues we
have to be taking on, we can't succeed if a small number in the Senate
and in the House can paralyze this process, can go to extraordinary
lengths to basically hold hostage and damage the United States of
America.
This process must end. The Senator from Vermont who spoke a few
moments ago said, If we yield to this hostage-taking now, we will see
it time and time and time again in the future. We will see the threat
to end Social Security, et cetera. Well, we are not going to go in that
direction.
The House has said they want a conference. Great. Let's not do so at
the same time we are taking down the economy. So put the Senate
resolution on the floor of the House right now, with 20 minutes left,
give it an up-or-down vote, pass that bill so that we have just these
few short weeks, from now until November 15, to hold that conference
and to work out a deal without taking the American economy down with
ObamaCare.
We wait for common sense and reasonableness to return to a dialogue
so
[[Page S7052]]
that we can have a legislative process the American people can believe
in, because we are tackling the big problems facing America. But as of
tonight, with now 18 minutes to go, we do not have that process, and
that must change.
Mr. LEVIN. Will the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. MERKLEY. Yes, absolutely.
Mr. LEVIN. The Senator just made a reference to the fact that the
Speaker of the House has refused to put the Senate resolution up for a
vote in the House of Representatives. It seems to me this has not been
adequately illuminated to the public. It is not just that we insist
that there be a clean CR--which we do, because we don't want every
other issue that people feel passionate about to be insisted upon as
the price of keeping the government going. Each one of us has issues we
feel very passionately about. But I don't know any of us--at least on
this side--who have said that unless we pass, for instance, an
infrastructure bill--unless we pass a bill that includes background
checks for people before they can buy an assault weapon--I feel very
passionately about that. But the idea that we or any of us on this side
of the aisle would say the government is going to close unless we get
our way on a particular issue that we feel passionate about is
absolutely anathema to us. Nonetheless, there are a few folks who are
willing to do that.
But when we say we insist we have a clean CR--in other words, that it
not be linked to some issue that some faction is insisting upon--what
we are really saying is something even deeper than that, more basic. We
simply want them to vote on a clean CR. We are very confident it will
pass if there is a vote, because it will have bipartisan support.
For some reason over in the House, bipartisan support for a bill is
now anathema. Apparently, it is called the Hastert rule. The Republican
leaders over there say they are not going to pass any bill that relies
upon any Democratic votes, which is the exact opposite of what
bipartisanship should be. Over here, we rely on votes from both sides
of the aisle for just about everything we pass. But over there they
have this policy now, which is the most partisan kind of policy one
could imagine. If someone could design a partisan policy, it would be,
We will not have any reliance on the other party for votes; only our
party can be relied upon for votes. We are not going to pass anything
which depends upon the other party. That, to me, reeks of partisanship.
Whenever I hear the Speaker or any of the Republicans in the House talk
about bipartisanship, the first thing they ought to do is get rid of
the Hastert rule, because the Hastert rule guarantees partisanship. It
bakes partisanship into the process over there.
But back to the narrow point I wish to ask the Senator about:
Tonight, as in previous nights, all we are saying is not just we insist
upon a clean CR, which is not linked to some faction's passion, which
in this case is getting rid of ObamaCare; what we are saying is vote on
the Senate CR. Just put it up for a vote. We are confident it will
pass. But does the Senator agree it is even something less than saying
it must be a clean CR that we are insisting upon? What we are saying
is, vote on a clean CR. We are very confident it will pass, but put it
up for a vote. Does the Senator agree with that?
Mr. MERKLEY. Absolutely. I appreciate the point the Senator is
accentuating. When the Senator says this has not gotten enough
attention, he is absolutely right. The House has refused to have a
budget resolution pursued--a continuing resolution that does not have
extraneous policy attached to it. They have absolutely said they will
not take the Senate version, which did not put on the things the
Senator and I might wish to attach, and did not put on the things my
colleagues from across the aisle might wish to attach. It said: Let's
keep the government open. Let's keep it operating, using, by the way,
the budget number proposed by our colleagues in the House.
So if our colleagues in the House say, wouldn't it be great if the
Senate would compromise with us, well, we went farther than a
compromise. We did not say: Let's split the difference between the
Senate number and the House number. We will take their number. And
let's get rid of these extraneous policy issues and then put it up for
a vote. I think it is a simple request to make.
Doesn't it make sense to give a bipartisan group the opportunity now,
with just 14 minutes left, to actually end this process of driving our
economy over a cliff?
Mr. LEVIN. At least vote as to whether to do it.
Mr. MERKLEY. At least have that vote.
Mr. LEVIN. Is it also not true that we have voted twice on the House
continuing resolution? We have rejected it, but we voted on it.
Mr. MERKLEY. My colleague is exactly right. They sent it to us and we
voted on it.
Mr. LEVIN. All right. They have not voted once on what we have sent
to them.
Mr. MERKLEY. The Senator is right.
Mr. LEVIN. That is not something you have to go to conference about.
That is something which is sort of kind of fundamental. We have voted
twice on your proposal. We have rejected it. You refused to vote on a
Senate proposal. Why? Because you are afraid it will pass with some
Democratic votes. That is anathema to the House of Representatives
Republican leadership now to pass legislation that depends upon
Democratic votes. And at the same time they talk about bipartisanship,
they have that fixed, rigid rule that they will not depend on
Democratic votes to get something passed in the House of
Representatives. The first step toward bipartisanship in the House
would be to end that approach.
But I thank my friend from Oregon. It is amazing to me that the
refusal of the House of Representatives to even vote on the Senate
proposal which we sent to them has had such little play in the media
because I think if the public understood that, they would then--without
any doubt--instead of it being 60 to 30 that it is the Republicans who
are bringing this government to the brink of closing down, it would be
80 to 10, when the public understands that it is the refusal of the
Republican leadership in the House of Representatives to allow a vote
on the Senate proposal.
Mr. MERKLEY. Yes.
Mr. LEVIN. I thank my good friend.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Madam President, we are at the verge of the midnight
hour here, and what is playing out is a challenge to the very essence
of our government, and it is a challenge both at home and abroad. I
will speak to that in a moment.
I was in the other body, in the House of Representatives, 17 years
ago when we had the last government shutdown, led at that time by the
Republican majority in the House of Representatives. I had thought they
learned the consequences to the Nation and to their party as a result
of such a shutdown. But it seems those memories have faded.
Now we are on the verge of a consequence that is consequential to the
lives of American families, consequential to the economy of the
country, consequential to the message we send across the globe.
What I cannot understand is the fixation that our Republican
colleagues have on the question of the Affordable Care Act, which they
derisively call ObamaCare. It is something that was passed by the
Congress, signed by the President, reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme
Court, which is the final voice of what is the law of the land, and
then reaffirmed by the American people in their reelection of the
President with a significant majority.
There were two candidates in that election. One was President Obama,
who said: I intend to fully implement the Affordable Care Act and
create millions of opportunities for those who have no insurance--to
control costs; to end preexisting conditions as a limitation; to
ultimately ensure that children could stay on their parents' insurance
to the age of 26; to be able to provide millions of dollars of relief
across the landscape of the country; to help senior citizens who often
chose between putting food on the table, keeping their home, or having
access to
[[Page S7053]]
lifesaving, life-enhancing drugs, by getting a doughnut hole--that gap
in coverage for seniors--to be ultimately eliminated. It has provided
tremendous relief for the seniors in our country not to have to make
those dynamic choices.
So what they could not achieve at the ballot box they are trying to
achieve by shutting down the Federal Government.
And then, at this late hour, after having tried a series of times to
undermine the Affordable Care Act--and believe me, when they talk about
a 1-year delay, which they seem to try to show that it is benign, it is
not benign. There is a purpose to their strategy. The reason that a 1-
year delay--in addition to the fact that the law should be able to move
forward for millions who have no insurance to be able to finally have
insurance--is because if you delay the mandate, that means 11 million
people will go uninsured who otherwise would get coverage. It means, as
the Congressional Budget Office estimated--the nonpartisan entity of
the Congress that scores everything we do: Is this going to cost money;
is this going to save money--they estimated that repealing that
individual mandate will increase premiums anywhere between 15 to 20
percent because fewer healthy people will enroll to balance out those
with higher medical needs. Insurance is about spreading the risk across
the spectrum.
In my home State of New Jersey, we tried to have insurance reform
that limited preexisting condition exclusions and different premium
band ratings without an individual requirement for coverage. The result
was skyrocketing premiums. So, in essence, delaying the mandate for a
year--which is the essence of what the House Republicans have sent here
various times as a condition of keeping the government open--is a
Trojan horse because Republicans know that, in doing such a delay, the
mandate will create higher premiums. And in creating those higher
premiums, they, in essence, create rate shock and they fulfill that
which they would like to see, which is the failure of the Affordable
Care Act.
They have a very particular strategy. It is not benign by any stretch
of the imagination. They are not concerned that the Affordable Care Act
will fail. They are concerned it will actually succeed. So what they
seek to do is to introduce poison pills to make it fail.
It is amazing to me that I keep hearing: Well, we will replace it.
With what? We have not heard with what. When we challenge our
colleagues, they say: Oh, yes, preexisting conditions, we are for that,
making sure that does not exist anymore. We are for the seniors getting
the rebates on prescription drugs. We are for making sure there are no
more lifetime caps on anybody's insurance, so if they have a
catastrophic illness, they will not come up against that cap. We are
for all of those things. The only problem is, to have all of those
benefits which Americans overwhelmingly want, it costs money. And the
only way to do that is, of course, to have everybody ultimately insured
in the country.
This is not a fight between Democrats and Republicans. This is a
battle for the very soul of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, they
are playing it out in a way that affects the Nation. This is a designed
strategy.
Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote a tremendous piece. I
recommend it to all of my colleagues. He basically described a meeting
that took place in January of this year. I am going to read from his
article for a moment: ``In January, demoralized House Republicans
retreated to Williamsburg, Virginia, to plot out their legislative
strategy for President Obama's second term. Conservatives were angry
that their leaders had been unable to stop a whole series of things,
including the Bush tax cuts on high incomes, and they wanted to make
sure their leaders would no longer have any further compromises. Not
only did they decide they would not have any further compromises, but,
in fact, they developed a legislative strategy.
Before I go into that, I am happy to yield to the majority leader who
I understand has an announcement.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. REID. Madam President, through you to my dear friend from New
Jersey, who does such a wonderful job in everything he does, especially
running the Foreign Relations Committee, I thank him for yielding to
me.
This is a very sad day for our country. The President has told the
head of the Office of Management and Budget, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, to
issue a shutdown statement, and she has done that. Here it is:
``MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES.''
This memorandum follows the September 17 memo and provides
an update on the potential lapse of appropriations.
No more potential. It is after midnight.
Appropriations provided under the Consolidated and Further
Continuing Appropriations Act expire at 11:59 pm tonight.
Unfortunately, we do not have a clear indication that
Congress will act in time for the President to sign the
continuing resolution before the end of the day tomorrow,
October, 2013. Therefore, agencies should now execute plans
for shutdown due to the absence of appropriations.
That is what she said. So the agencies of government are in the
process of closing down. It now appears that the House is not going to
do anything to keep the government from shutting down. They have some
jerry-rigged thing about going to conference. It is embarrassing that
these people who are elected to represent the country are representing
the tea party, the anarchists of the country, and a majority of the
Republicans in the House are following every step of the way.
This is an unnecessary blow to America, to the economy, the middle
class, everyone. The House has within their power the ability to avoid
a shutdown. They should simply pass the 6-week CR we sent them.
We are going to come in in the morning and see what they have done
sometime tonight. But I would hope they would understand that, within
their power, at any time, all they have to do is accept what we already
passed. All this stuff they keep sending over here--they are so fixated
on embarrassing our President, the President of the United States. They
think an election is coming this November. It happened last November.
He was elected by 5 million votes over what Romney got--5 million
votes. It was not close. So it is really too bad.
I am going to ask this unanimous consent. We are going to go out
tonight and come back at 9:30 in the morning. So the unanimous consent
is that we are going to recess until 9:30 tomorrow morning. I want the
Senators who are here on the floor to be able to talk for 5 minutes
each.
____________________