[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 139 (Tuesday, October 8, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7275-S7277]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       CONTINUING APPROPRIATIONS

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, we are now entering the second week of a 
Republican government shutdown. The Speaker of the House of 
Representatives is still sitting on the one bill that can reopen the 
government. Speaker Boehner insists the Senate-passed bill to end the 
shutdown can't pass the House. Well, I am not the first to issue this 
challenge--it has been issued all weekend and yesterday--and that is, 
prove it. Bring it up for a vote. If the Speaker really believes the 
bill will not pass, he shouldn't be worried about bringing it up.
  The House, though, if we look at what has happened, has wasted weeks 
voting--and I have really lost track of the number of times, but I 
think it is 44 times--the House alone has acted to repeal ObamaCare 44 
times. What is the result every time they vote? The same. Truly what 
Einstein said: The real definition of ``insanity'' is someone who keeps 
doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If, 
in fact, Einstein is right, then that is insanity, what is going on 
over there--to vote more than 40 times on the same thing and lose every 
time. So let's talk about wasting time. Has that been a waste of time? 
Maybe after 5 or 6 times they should have maybe gotten the message, but 
how about 44 times? Talk about wasting time.
  Could it be that the Speaker is really worried that reasonable 
Republicans will join Democrats to pass legislation to open the 
government? Sensible Republicans have grown increasingly fed up with 
the shutdown, and they are looking for a way out. Just yesterday Peter 
King of New York, a Republican, said:

       Republicans should not have started this. Closing the 
     government down was the wrong thing to do.

  Republican Congressman King called Speaker Boehner's unreasonable 
strategy to shut down the government unless Democrats agree to defund 
or end ObamaCare--a law that will help 25 million uninsured Americans 
gain access to affordable care--doomed to failure. That is what Peter 
King said.
  Again quoting Congressman King:

       If we want to defund something, we should repeal it, and do 
     it the same way the President got it signed--elect 
     Republicans to both Houses of Congress, repeal it, and have a 
     Republican President sign it.

  Mr. President, it is pretty obvious what is going on. I have known it 
all the time. We have all known it all the time. When I say ``all the 
time,'' at least in these last many months. But it was made very clear 
to the world on Sunday in a front-page story in the New York Times. 
They worked a while on that story, but basically what the story said is 
that very rich people in America who don't believe in government have 
used ObamaCare as a conduit to shut down the government. That is what 
they wanted to do. That is what they have done, with huge amounts of 
money. We know this has been led by, according to the news article, a 
former Attorney General of the United States, Ed Meese, and the Koch 
brothers, who have been raising and spending hundreds of millions of 
dollars to get us where we are right now.
  But what Peter King suggested is that we follow the democratic 
process. That has been turned on its head. I know Republicans don't 
like ObamaCare, but the Affordable Care Act has been the law of the 
land for 4 years, been declared constitutional by the Supreme Court of 
the United States, and millions of Americans--multimillions of 
Americans--are already benefiting from this law.
  There are rumors floating around. One of my rich friends from Nevada 
called me on Friday. He said: Harry, I am down here in southern 
California getting a little cosmetic surgery. My anesthesiologist told 
me one of his friends, who is a general surgeon, took somebody's 
gallbladder out. Do you know how much money he got back for that?
  I don't know if it was a he or a she.
  I said: No, I don't know.
  He said: Fifty-eight dollars. That is what ObamaCare is all about.

[[Page S7276]]

  I said: That is not possible because ObamaCare, that aspect of it, 
doesn't kick in until January 1.
  He said: Are you sure you are right?
  I said: Yes. All this signing up for exchanges and all that will take 
3 months.
  These are the rumors floating around out there about ObamaCare.
  If Republicans want to propose a legislative way to make the law work 
better or more efficiently, Peter King is right. We are willing to do 
that and do it the way our democratic process provides.
  (Mr. MARKEY assumed the Chair.)
  I see the Senator from Massachusetts has taken the Chair, and he 
served many years with Peter King. I personally have watched his voting 
record. I don't like most of it, but at least he is speaking out, and I 
admire the man for doing that. By shutting down the government--and 
that is what has happened--we are satisfying the Koch brothers and Ed 
Meese, but millions of people in America are suffering.
  ObamaCare is not going to disappear. It is here. The senior Senator 
from Arizona gave a speech here within the last week or so, and he 
said: I don't like ObamaCare. I campaigned against ObamaCare when I ran 
for President. I campaigned against it when Obama ran the next time. 
But, he said, we lost. It passed. He is President. Elections have 
consequences.
  That is what the senior Senator from Arizona said, and he is right.
  ObamaCare is not going to magically disappear.
  Tom Friedman, a renowned journalist--his bipartisanship has been 
legendary. He is a brilliant writer. He was chief correspondent for the 
New York Times for many years in the Middle East. He has covered all 
parts of the world. He has won three Pulitzer prizes--maybe four--and 
he has had five or six best-selling books. But even Tom Friedman has 
given up trying to be bipartisan. He wrote in the New York Times, where 
he writes a column 3 days a week, that ObamaCare is not really at stake 
in this shutdown, it is democracy that is at stake.
  Here is exactly what he said:

       When extremists feel that insulated from playing by the 
     traditional rules of our system, if we do not defend those 
     rules--namely majority rule and the fact that if you don't 
     like a policy passed by Congress, signed by the president and 
     affirmed by the Supreme Court, then you have to go out and 
     win an election to overturn it; you can't just put a fiscal 
     gun to the country's head--then our democracy is imperiled.

  He went on to say more:

       President Obama is not defending health care. He's 
     defending the health of our democracy. Every American who 
     cherishes that should stand with him.

  Mr. President, that is as true as anything could be. We stand with 
our President. We stand with a President who is President of everyone 
in America.
  We believe deeply that ObamaCare is already saving lives and will 
save many more in the future, but we are willing to work with 
Republicans to change it if they think they can make it better. We want 
to do that.
  I wrote a letter 1 week ago today to the Speaker of the House of 
Representatives--and he knows this--where I said: You know, we are in 
this position because you asked me to put you in this position to do 
this.
  He said, going back as far as July and confirmed in the early part of 
September, I--the Speaker of the House of Representatives--want to have 
a clean CR, and the way we can do that is you agree to our number. He 
said this in July and early September.
  I said: I hate your number. It is unfair. We passed a budget here--
$70 billion more than that.
  He said: But we have to avoid problems here. We can't have a 
government shutdown. Work with me, take that number, and we will have a 
clean CR and go on to other things.
  I did that. It was hard. Senator Mikulski, chairman of the 
Appropriations Committee, hated it, and Senator Murray, chairman of the 
Budget Committee, hated it, but then they said: OK, we will go ahead 
and do it. We will work with you to help talk to the caucus.
  We did that based on the assurances of the Speaker of the House of 
Representatives that we would get this out of the way in order to fund 
the government for 1 year. Well, he didn't live up to what he committed 
to doing. In our business that is not good.
  In addition to that I said in the letter: OK, you have sent us a 
little piece of legislation over here saying you want to have a 
conference. We agree. We will talk to you about anything you want to 
talk about. You want to talk about discretionary spending, you want to 
talk about the farm bill, you want to talk about postal reform, you 
want to talk about health care, we will talk, but open the government 
and extend the debt ceiling.
  He read the letter. I called him 45 minutes later. He said: No, can't 
do that.
  He can't take yes for an answer on the number in the CR or what he 
wants to talk about. I don't know what else is left to talk about.
  All we are asking is that government be reopened. Stop threatening a 
catastrophic default on the Nation's bills. We have to pay our bills. 
What kind of a country do we want?
  As I do every 2 weeks, I met yesterday with someone who briefs me on 
what is going on around the world with our intelligence services. This 
person told me his counterpart from a relatively small European country 
is making fun of our country because of what is going on here. In 
today's press China is complaining. They are doing pretty well 
economically. They buy our securities and they need a place to invest 
their money that is secure. China is now complaining about the fiscal 
integrity of the United States of America because we are arriving at a 
point in a few days where we are not going to pay our bills.
  This is America. We are not asking the Speaker to do something that 
is unreasonable. We want him to pass a bill that has his number in it, 
not ours. Ours is $70 billion higher than that. We are also not asking 
him to do anything unreasonable. He asked us to go to conference. We 
say let's do it. All we want is the government open first, and we will 
agree to conference.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, would the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. REID. I would be happy to yield to my friend, the distinguished 
President pro tempore.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I was there, and I saw how hard the Senator 
worked to pass a continuing resolution--as a number of the Republican 
leadership of the House had asked and based on their assurances that we 
would use it.
  I would ask my friend, the majority leader, is that sort of a classic 
bait-and-switch operation? If it is, I can think of another one where 
they asked us to pass a budget. Senator Murray led us in passing one 
where we finished the last vote at 5:30 or 6:00 on a Saturday morning, 
having gone around the clock. Then we wanted to go to conference after 
the Republicans demanded we pass one, and they then refused to let us 
go to conference with the Republican-led House. Is this bait and 
switch?
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, through the Chair to my friend, the senior 
Senator from Vermont: We have a law in place. The Presiding Officer 
voted for it when he was a Member of the House of Representatives. We 
voted for it. There is a law that set spending levels for multiyear. We 
did that. It was part of a deal. It was a law that was passed. But in 
spite of us having passed a law that set the standards for 2 years, the 
Republicans kept coming to the floor many times saying Democrats need 
to pass a budget.
  We didn't need to pass a budget. We already had those numbers in 
place. But after this haranguing that went on for so long, we said, OK, 
we want to get along. We don't want any problems. So Senator Murray, 
the chairman of the Budget Committee, worked very hard to pass a 
budget, and we did that. Lo and behold, after the Republicans kept 
talking about regular order, we wanted to go to regular order, and they 
said: No, thanks. And she has been waiting 6 months. So the President 
pro tempore's description is absolutely true.
  Let me close by saying all we ask is for the Speaker to be 
reasonable. If he brings his bill, his resolution, to the floor, it 
will pass. And then everyone has my commitment: Open the government, 
raise the debt ceiling, and we will talk about anything you want to 
talk about. We are not afraid to go to conference. We are happy to go 
to conference. That is what we used to do

[[Page S7277]]

here all the time. But we have a little problem: The Republicans won't 
let us go to conference. Maybe they will in this instance because that 
is what he said he wants.
  So open the government and get back to the so-called conversation, as 
he talks about it. We will get back to the negotiating table and work 
out our budget disagreements. We can even start talking about ways to 
make the Affordable Care Act better--not worse, but better. We can get 
back to the business of legislating. That is what our job has always 
been and should be.
  I would ask the Chair to announce the business of the day.

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