[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 148 (Thursday, September 6, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6044-S6046]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
APPROPRIATIONS PROCESS
Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I come to the floor today to join the
vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee, who will be joining me
shortly, in urging our colleagues to avoid a completely unnecessary
crisis and work together with us to get out our spending bills and get
all of our spending bills signed into law.
We should be able to do this. I am very proud of the work we have
done so far. Under the leadership of the chairman and vice chairman of
the Appropriations Committee, we have been able to negotiate and pass
bills under regular order in a way we have been unable to do for years.
[[Page S6045]]
We did this by rejecting the awful and counterproductive budget ideas
from President Trump and his administration and by pushing aside poison
pill riders that would derail this process--such as attacks on
healthcare, higher education, public schools, patient protections,
workers' rights, and more.
I am particularly proud that we were able to work together and
negotiate and pass our LHHS bill through the full Senate, something
that has not been done in over a decade.
Our bill makes strong investments in families, patients, students,
workers, and the middle class, and it rejects poison pill riders. It
builds on the strong work we have done to increase access to childcare
and early learning and includes targeted funding to address the opioid
epidemic, especially in our underserved areas. It includes significant
new resources to address the truly alarming issues of maternal
mortality, to help us understand why so many women in our country are
dying as a result of childbirth and pregnancy and prevent this from
happening. The list goes on and on.
We still have some work to do, but we should be able to get this done
in the coming days. I am going to keep working until we do. However, I
am very concerned that President Trump continues to threaten to refuse
to sign these bills and shut down the government.
Just this week, we saw new reports that he is talking, once again,
about shutting down the government to try to get the money for his ill-
advised and wasteful border wall. President Trump told his voters that
Mexico was going to pay for his wall, so maybe he is talking about
shutting down the Mexican Government so that he can get money in
Mexican spending bills. But if he is talking about trying to get
American taxpayers to foot the bill, that is not going to happen.
I hope Republicans in Congress will continue to stand with us to stay
the course on these bipartisan bills. We have come far in this process
by putting families first and rejecting attempts to insert partisanship
and poison pill riders in all of our spending bills. We need to get
this done.
Thank you, Madam President.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, in the last few months, the Senate has
achieved record progress in going through our appropriations bills. As
we return from the Labor Day weekend, the Senate has already passed 9
of the 12 Appropriations bills by overwhelming bipartisan margins. The
Appropriations Committee has reported the remaining three bills, again,
with bipartisan support. The end of the fiscal year is only a few short
weeks away, but looking at the record pace of our work here in the
Senate, there is no reason we can't conference all of these bills with
the House and send all nine to the President's desk before October 1.
It would be quite an accomplishment. It would show the American
people that when it matters, Congress can come together and do the job
we were sent here to do. That includes passing responsible, thoughtful,
and well-considered appropriations bills on time and on budget.
When I became vice chairman of Appropriations, with Senator Shelby as
chairman of Appropriations, we pledged to each other and the Senate
that we would move these bills in a way they had not been moved in
years and that we would do it in a bipartisan way.
It is important that we conference all of the bills we have passed in
the Senate so far and then send them to the President's desk. We cannot
just pick and choose and say: We will do this one based on political
expediency but not this one. That would put us right back in the trap
in which we had been in past years. We have to show the American people
that the Senate actually knows how to do its work. The hard work has
been done. We know the issues we need to resolve, so now we ought to
take these bills across the finish line.
It may sound archaic, but let me talk about minibus No. 1, which
contains the Energy and Water Development appropriations bill, the
Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies
appropriations bill, and the Legislative Branch appropriations bill. It
provides much needed resources for the support and care of our Nation's
veterans and their family members, and it makes critical investments in
our country's water infrastructure and energy programs. Yesterday, we
held a public conference with the House of Representatives on the first
minibus, and I am pleased to report that we have made some significant
progress.
One of the reasons we are successful in moving bills in the Senate is
that we advance appropriations bills that are free of poison pill
policy riders from either the left or the right. In fact, my experience
and the experience of many others tell us that is the only path to
success in the Senate, where we rightfully need 60 votes to advance
legislation, and it is the only path to success for conferencing the
three minibus bills. I challenge the House Republicans to come to terms
with that reality. No one should mistake--and I want to emphasize
this--Democratic cooperation in the Senate for a sign that we will
support a conference report that contains poison pills. We will not.
Minibus No. 2 contains four appropriations bills--the Agriculture,
Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies
appropriations bill; the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies
appropriations bill; the Financial Services and General Government
appropriations bill; and the Transportation, Housing and Urban
Development appropriations bill. The House plans to appoint conferees
to this minibus later this afternoon, and I encourage the Senate to
follow soon thereafter. Let me take these one by one.
The Agriculture appropriations bill is a win for farmers, families,
and rural communities. Every State in this Nation has rural
communities--the Presiding Officer does; I do; every State does--and
farm economies that benefit from these important programs. From clean
water programs to investments in rural broadband and from rural housing
assistance to agricultural research, this bill touches millions of
Americans all across the country. In the wake of the uncertainty and
chaos that has been caused by trade wars and unnecessary tariffs, our
farmers and rural communities deserve better than inaction on
appropriations. Both the House and the Senate have passed their
versions of the bill. So let's just get to work and send the conference
bill to the President.
The same goes for the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development
appropriations bill, which makes critical infrastructure investments
across the Nation, and we desperately need them. Improving the Nation's
infrastructure was one of President Trump's key campaign promises, but
instead of proposing realistic solutions, he has criticized the very
budget deal that has made increases in infrastructure possible. Instead
of improving our infrastructure, he has proposed cutting--not
increasing--funding in his budget for infrastructure programs. Here we
have an opportunity to invest in our country and to start addressing
our crumbling bridges and roads. We cannot and should not kick the can
down the road. There is not a single Senator here who cannot point to
the needs of the bridges and roads in his or her State.
Then we have the Interior bill that makes critical investments in
programs that help to ensure we have clean water to drink and clean air
to breathe and that funds our national parks and other public lands.
The Financial Services bill funds regulatory agencies that U.S.
citizens rely on to protect them from unfair, unsafe, or fraudulent
business practices, like the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the
Federal Trade Commission.
Congress now stands poised to deliver to the American people, but we
have to get moving. Leaving these important agencies to limp along in a
continuing resolution is unwise and unnecessary. We have laid the
groundwork to finish these bills. Now we just need the will to do it.
[[Page S6046]]
This brings me to minibus No. 3, which contains the Defense
appropriations bill and the Labor, Health and Human Services, and
Education appropriations bill. It funds our national security and many
of our domestic priorities, and it demonstrates the importance of the
bipartisan budget agreement that was reached earlier this year. In this
combination of bills, we see the priorities that are outlined in that
agreement made into real policy to improve the lives of the American
people. It is not empty rhetoric but real policy, and that is why so
many Republicans and so many Democrats voted for it.
As a result of the bipartisan budget deal, the Senate's Defense
appropriations bill provides the men and women of our Armed Forces with
the resources they need to carry out their missions effectively and
safely. This is a goal that Republicans and Democrats share as
Americans, and I know that in working with our House counterparts, we
can produce a good bill for our troops and our Nation.
Then there is the Senate's Labor, HHS, and Education appropriations
bill. I think of the way Senator Patty Murray has worked so hard with
Republicans and Democrats--with all of us--to put together a bill that
reflects the interests of all of the country.
Look at the investments in healthcare and education. It increases
funding for the National Institutes of Health by $5 billion over fiscal
year 2017. The NIH, the National Institutes of Health, is one of the
treasures of America. It backs our commitment to increase access to
higher education by increasing college affordability spending by $2.3
billion over fiscal year 2017. My family came to Vermont in the mid-
1800s. I was the first Leahy to get a college degree--my sister, the
second. Then, when our children came along and our grandchildren, we
never doubted it; of course, they would go to college. Yet that is not
the same for an awful lot of people in this country, so we need this
bill. It also increases access to childcare by $3.2 billion over fiscal
year 2017, and it invests nearly $3 billion to combat the opioid crisis
that has plagued communities across this country.
The House did not follow the Senate's bipartisan efforts. The House
produced a partisan Labor-HHS bill that shortchanged programs for
working Americans and was loaded with poison pill riders that could
never pass in this body--from attacks on the Affordable Care Act to
restrictions on family planning.
My staff and Senator Shelby's staff--several of us--have been working
days and weeks and weekends, and we will continue to do that in order
to work out these differences. The differences are challenging but are
not insurmountable. The reason we have to have a compromise is we have
to get 60 votes in the Senate, and with this hodgepodge of poison pills
that the House has passed there are not 60 votes.
I have said many times that if we are to have a strong national
defense, we need to have a strong economy, an educated and healthy
citizenry, and an able workforce. The programs that are funded in the
Labor, HHS, and Education appropriations bill are critical to doing
that. The deep ties that run between defense and nondefense priorities
make it fitting that we have packaged these two bills together, but
they have to stay together if we are going to get them across the
finish line by October 1. If they are decoupled, it will destroy the
bipartisan process we have worked so hard to establish, and it will not
go through. It is possible that the CR will be included in this bill,
so it is essential that it be bipartisan and free of any controversial
matter.
Again, the reason we have been so successful in this Senate in moving
appropriations bills is that we have worked together. Chairman Shelby
as chairman and I as vice chairman have worked together. Republicans
and Democrats alike who are on the Appropriations Committee have worked
together. We have cooperated with each other. We have met over and over
again. Each side has shown restraint in pursuing issues we have felt
strongly about because to have done so would have imperiled the whole
process. There are certain things that I would have liked in this bill,
and there are certain things my Republican counterparts might have
liked in the bill, but we all know that the bill would not have gone
anywhere if we had done that. Instead, we have come together on those
things that can pass. Both sides have had to trust the other, as we
have done, so we could reach agreement to move these bills forward.
Let's finish what we have started in the way we started it--through
bipartisanship and cooperation. That means the Defense and Labor-HHS
bills must remain together in one package. We cannot drop one and
finish the other. That is a nonstarter. Everybody knows that. It also
means the Senate must stand together if the House insists on producing
partisan conference reports that contain poison pill riders. They
cannot pass. Finally, it means we have to remain committed to finishing
all three packages of bills and sending them to the President.
If House Republicans decide to delay minibus No. 2 until after the
election and drop the Labor, HHS, and Education bill from minibus No.
3, it will mean the $18 billion increase for Defense that is assumed in
the bipartisan budget agreement will be enacted while the $18 billion
increase of nondefense programs could be left in the dust--a clear
violation of the bipartisan budget agreement that was based on parity
between defense and nondefense programs agreed to by both Republicans
and Democrats. I predict it could not pass.
Funding the government is one of our most basic constitutional
responsibilities. Americans expect us to work together, as the U.S.
Senate did, and across the aisle to reach agreement on these bills. The
programs funded in these bills make a real difference in people's
lives, and they should not be held up due to partisan differences.
Let's do what we were sent here to do and pass these bills before the
start of the new fiscal year. We can do it, and we have shown how to do
it.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sasse). The Senator from Oregon.
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