[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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