[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 132 (Monday, September 30, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7054-S7055]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       CONTINUING APPROPRIATIONS

  Mr. MENENDEZ. Madam President, I had hoped we would not get to this 
point. I believe that where I was headed is to embody why we have come 
to this moment today. It just did not happen. I was referring to this 
article by Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine that in January the 
House Republicans met, retreated to Williamsburg, VA, and came up with 
a strategy.
  What is that strategy? He goes on to say:

       The first element of that strategy is a kind of legislative 
     strike. House Republicans initially decided to boycott all 
     direct negotiations with President Obama, and then 
     subsequently extended that boycott to negotiations with the 
     Democratic Senate--

  Which only goes to prove why, despite having passed a budget 6 months 
ago or over 6 months ago, each of the 18 times that Senator Murray, the 
budget chair, has asked to go to a conference--which is a meeting of 
the House of Representatives and the Senate to work out their 
differences in their budget--there have been objections.

  So when I read this article and see that House Republicans decided to 
boycott all direct negotiations with President Obama and then 
subsequently extended that boycott to negotiations with the Democratic 
Senate--we are seeing the consequences of that strategy here today.
  This kind of refusal--he says in his article that ``to even enter 
negotiations is highly unusual.'' The way to make sense of it is that 
Republicans have planned since January to force Obama to accede to 
large chunks of the Republican agenda without Republicans having to 
offer any policy concessions of their own.
  It is pretty interesting. You know, for those who said: Well, both 
sides, the reality is that there is no moral equivalency to shutting 
down the government. If you are willing to use the tools of shutting 
down the government in order to elicit what you could not achieve by 
winning at the ballot box--i.e. getting a Republican President elected, 
both Houses of the Congress--then you could ultimately repeal a law 
with which you disagreed. But since you could not do it that way, to 
have a policy that ultimately says: No, we are willing to shut down the 
government in order to achieve what we could not do at the ballot box 
with the will of the American people, there is no moral equivalency. So 
it cannot be accepted that both sides are to blame when clearly only 
one side is willing to pursue their political goals by closing down the 
government and the consequences that flow from that.
  It is an interesting article. I ask unanimous consent that it be 
printed in the Record so that all of my colleagues might be able to 
read it.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                   (Jonathan writes for NY Magazine.)

       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 the 
     expiration of the Bush tax cuts on high incomes, and sought 
     assurances from their leaders that no further compromises 
     would be forthcoming. The agreement that followed, which 
     Republicans called ``The Williamsburg Accord,'' received 
     obsessive coverage in the conservative media but scant 
     attention in the mainstream press. (The phrase ``Williamsburg 
     Accord'' has appeared once in the Washington Post and not at 
     all in the New York Times.)
       But the decision House Republicans made in January has set 
     the party on the course it has followed since. If you want to 
     grasp why Republicans are careening toward a potential 
     federal government shutdown, and possibly toward provoking a 
     sovereign debt crisis after that, you need to understand that 
     this is the inevitable product of a conscious party strategy. 
     Just as Republicans responded to their 2008 defeat by moving 
     farther right, they responded to the 2012 defeat by moving 
     right yet again. Since they had begun from a position of 
     total opposition to the entire Obama agenda, the newer 
     rightward lurch took the form of trying to wrest concessions 
     from Obama by provoking a series of crises.
       The first element of the strategy is a kind of legislative 
     strike. Initially, House Republicans decided to boycott all 
     direct negotiations with President Obama, and then 
     subsequently extended that boycott to negotiations with the 
     Democratic Senate. (Senate Democrats have spent months 
     pleading with House Republicans to negotiate with them, to no 
     avail.) This kind of refusal to even enter negotiations is 
     highly unusual. The way to make sense of it is that 
     Republicans have planned since January to force Obama to 
     accede to large chunks of the Republican agenda, without 
     Republicans having to offer any policy concessions of their 
     own.
       Republicans have thrashed this way and that throughout the 
     year. Republicans have fallen out, often sharply, over which 
     hostages to ransom, with the most conservative ones favoring 
     a government shutdown threat and the more pragmatic wing, 
     oddly, endorsing a debt default threat. They have also 
     struggled to define the terms of their ransom. The 
     Williamsburg Accord initially envisioned forcing Obama to 
     sign spending cuts, or some form of the Paul Ryan budget. 
     During the summer, Republicans flirted with making Obama lock 
     in lower marginal tax rates. Recently, Republicans settled on 
     pressuring him to kill his health-care law. But the general 
     contours of the legislative strike, and the plan of obtaining 
     policy victories without offering any policy concessions, has 
     enjoyed general agreement within the party.
       The history is important because much of the news coverage 
     and centrist commentary has leaned heavily on the idea that 
     the crises in Washington have come about because of some 
     nebulous failure of bipartisanship. The Washington Post 
     editorial page implores both sides to compromise, without 
     explaining why only one party should have to offer policy 
     concessions to keep the government running. Mark Halperin 
     neatly implies that the two sides share the blame in equal 
     measure.
       The analytic error here is the assumption by professional 
     pox-on-both-housers that they can take an advocacy position 
     on the government shutdown without siding with one of the 
     parties. If you want to land on the conclusion that both 
     sides are to blame, you need to equivocate on the underlying 
     moral question of whether a shutdown is really a bad thing. 
     If, on the other hand, you want to take a stance against 
     crisis governance, you need to be honest about the fact that 
     one party is pursuing this as a conscious strategy.

  Mr. MENENDEZ. This is a battle within the Republican party itself 
about where they are headed. It is a battle that is totally unnecessary 
because I think there is a simple message to the Speaker: Allow the 
House of Representatives to have an up-or-down vote on what the Senate 
has sent it, which is basically a clean continuation of the government 
without any gimmicks, without any poison pills.
  If that vote were allowed by the Speaker of the House of 
Representatives on the floor of the House of Representatives, I believe 
it would pass and the government would stay open. Instead, a few within 
the Republican Party who hatched this concoction in January of this 
year when they lost the elections and retreated to figure out what was 
going to be their legislative strategy are bringing the Nation to its 
knees.
  That is simply unacceptable.
  I said at the beginning of these comments that it is not only 
consequential here at home--and it will be consequential--to many 
families, to those who are Federal employees, and their families, to 
those who seek the assistance of the Federal Government, whether that 
is a small business loan, whether it is somebody for the first time 
enrolling for Social Security payments or a veteran's disability or a 
whole host of other things; they will not be able to do it if the 
government is going to be shut down tomorrow--it is also a consequence 
in the world. I say that as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee. What message do we send to the world when, in fact, we 
cannot get our own budget done and one party is willing to hold the 
Nation hostage in order to get their political views pursued?
  We are trying to convince Iran not to pursue nuclear weapons. We tell 
Iran if you disarm totally and stop your nuclear weapons program, then 
sanctions to you can be lifted. I believe the Iranians are looking and 
saying is it possible that such an agreement could

[[Page S7055]]

ever be delivered by the Congress of the United States, if we do 
actually disarm, if we end all of our nuclear weapons program, if we do 
everything that the Security Council has asked of us. Would the United 
States lift the series of sanctions that they have ultimately passed 
upon us?
  This Congress cannot agree with the President. When I say this 
Congress, I speak of the Republican Congress and the House of 
Representatives.
  It is a dangerous message in the world. We tell other nations that we 
believe they have to abide by certain disciplines, and yet we cannot 
ultimately keep our own budget open and the Nation and this government 
functioning.
  I think this is the ultimate extortion. I believe that since this is 
by design, not by chance, it is going to have real consequences for our 
Nation. There is no doubt that if there is a prolonged shutdown, it 
will be consequential to our economy. It will be consequential to the 
gross domestic product.
  We saw that 17 years ago. It will be consequential to not only Wall 
Street but to Main Street in terms of their confidence as to how to 
move forward. This economy is in recovery. The last thing it needs is a 
body blow by its own government as it tries to continue to grow an 
economy in which more people can be employed.
  The consequence of Republicans doing this is more than a government 
shutdown, it is increasingly an economic shutdown. This is simply 
something that we should not accept.
  Finally, to send us a resolution after 6 months of trying to go to a 
conference, 18 different petitions and motions on this floor to go to a 
conference, to go to that simple meeting that might have reconciled 
these differences that were objected to by certain Republicans within 
this chairman--and now to say you are going to send us a motion to go 
to conference when you have shut down the government and, therefore, 
have a gun at our head in order to be able to try to negotiate the 
critical issues that might be negotiated--is simply unacceptable. They 
already have a legislative victory.
  We have accepted an amount in the temporary budget that is less than 
what we devised in the Senate budget, $80 billion less. Yet that is not 
satisfactory to them.
  This is not about the economics. This is about their drive to kill 
the Affordable Care Act in a way that undermines the health and quality 
of opportunity for millions of Americans who finally don't have to 
worry about preexisting conditions. They don't have to worry about 
lifetime caps, can keep their children on their insurance until the age 
of 26, and can get millions of dollars across the landscape of the 
country for seniors to reduce prescription drug costs, that finally 
controls costs in this Nation. Their fear is not that it won't work. 
Their fear is that it will succeed and in doing so will undermine the 
very essence of what they have been against all along.
  That is a hard way to pursue a political tactic as a consequence of 
the Nation's laws. This is what is going on here today.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. SCHUMER. We are in, as has been said by Leader Reid and my good 
friend from New Jersey, an unfortunate moment. There are millions of 
people who are innocent. They wake up in the morning, work hard, and 
hope to get a paycheck to help feed and clothe their families. They 
will not be getting a paycheck tomorrow morning.
  They might be Federal Government workers. I have heard some of my 
colleagues on the other side demonize the Federal Government. When I 
think of the Federal Government, I think of individual people who are 
working hard, who show up at work in the rain and the snow, who work 
hard, as do people in the private sector, people who work for State 
governments or such as the people who work for us. Why should they be 
punished?
  Then there are so many others, such as the veteran who needs a change 
in his or her disability formula and can't get it; the construction 
worker who is working on a federally funded highway, or somebody who 
works in a defense plant, as a civilian, all of these people now have 
been put at real risk.
  There is an answer, as I mentioned in my colloquy with the leader. 
The answer is for the House to pass the bill that passed here--the key 
vote had a majority of Democrats and Republicans, 25 Republicans--and 
keep the government running.
  They are busy working late at night on another little subterfuge, a 
little scheme. Have a conference.
  As the leader said, conferences are fine with us. We tried to do a 
budget conference 18 times. Don't do a conference as a charade while 
you are shutting the government down. That is what the other side is 
asking us to do.
  Let's modify what they are doing. Let them pass the bill that is now 
in the House that will keep the government running until November 15, 
and then we will have a conference on how to fund the government for 
another year.
  Make no mistake about it. Tomorrow morning their next gambit will be 
defeated in the Senate and then we will be back where we were, where we 
are now.
  There is a bill, a ready bill, in the House of Representatives that 
can keep the government funded and prevent these millions of innocent 
people and our national economy from being hurt and hurt significantly.
  This is a final plea, at 12:15 a.m., 15 minutes after the government 
has been officially closed. House Members, Speaker Boehner, let the 
bill come up for a vote. It will pass. It will save such trouble, and, 
even worse. For millions of innocent Americans it will save our economy 
from great risk. Then we can go back to debating the many issues that 
you and we wish to debate.
  With that, with a bit of a heavy heart because it didn't have to 
happen, that we have a small group of people who are so sure that they 
are right that they can hurt millions to pursue that righteousness, 
that self-righteousness, is a bad thing. I hope it doesn't happen 
again.
  I yield the floor.

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