[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 5 (Wednesday, January 10, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Page S54]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Government Funding

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, as Congress approaches the January 19 
funding deadline--less than 10 days away--both parties in both Chambers 
must work together quickly to ensure we avoid a government shutdown.
  Congressional leaders agree that a shutdown would be a terrible way 
to start the year. Speaker Johnson and I are on the same page on that. 
A shutdown will hurt the economy, halt a lot of work of Congress and 
government, and endanger services that millions of Americans rely on.
  If reasonable Members on both sides continue working together, we can 
ensure a shutdown is avoided. We took a big step last Sunday towards 
our goal when Speaker Johnson and I announced funding level top lines, 
and appropriators right now are hard at work drafting the 12 
appropriations bills. It is good news that all four of the 
appropriators, the four corners, want to do this--Senator Murray, 
Senator Collins, and Congressmembers Granger and DeLauro. I am hopeful 
that if we stay the course, we can avoid a shutdown even with the tight 
deadline.
  Now I want to return to a point I made yesterday about some of my 
colleagues in the House. As everyone knows, this is a period of divided 
government. Like it or not, it means that compromise is a necessity, 
and nobody is going to get everything they want in any negotiation. 
And, of course, the President is a Democrat, and the Senate has a 
Democratic majority. Anyone who wants to get anything done knows that 
there has to be a compromise between the Democratic President, the 
Democratic majority in the Senate, and the Republican majority in the 
House--of course taking into account our Republican colleagues in the 
Senate and Democratic colleagues in the House.
  But right now, there are 30 or so hard-right Republicans in the House 
who labor under the illusion that they can bully everyone else into 
submission to get their narrow, hard-right agenda enacted into law. 
That is what they are trying to do in the appropriations process. There 
is only one word to describe the hard right's tactics: Bullying. 
Bullying. They want to bully their own conference, bully the Speaker, 
bully the Congress, and bully the country into accepting their 
extremist views.
  It is easy to see why the hard right spends so much time trying to 
bully the rest of Congress: They have little leverage otherwise because 
their views are wildly out of the mainstream. These 30 or so Republican 
chaos agents do not represent the views of most Americans. They don't 
even represent the views of a great number of Republicans. They are 
MAGA radicals, extremists whose benchmark for success is paralysis, 
gridlock, chaos. They think a shutdown will help their party and help 
the country, but virtually no one else agrees. They are on an island.
  But here is the thing: This kind of bullying almost never works. The 
hard right's bullying didn't work when we avoided default, it didn't 
work when we avoided shutdowns last year, and it is not going to work 
here.
  Case in point: Where things stand right now in the appropriations 
process is little different than where we were after we passed the FRA 
last summer. The hard right wasted almost a year in the House by trying 
to bully their colleagues through the appropriations process. They 
wanted the Speaker to renege on the agreement codified in the FRA. Time 
and time again, they thwarted the House GOP's ability to even pass 
their own spending bills. They just wasted precious time. But for all 
their bluster, the hard right has nothing--nothing--to show for their 
bullying. The agreement we reached Sunday is practically the same 
number leadership shook hands on back in June.
  In a body comprised of 435 voting Members, it is lunacy for the MAGA 
hard right to think they can puff their chest and bully the majority of 
their colleagues into submission. Won't happen.
  This year, the American people are going to pay close attention to 
which party is capable of addressing their everyday needs and which is 
not. They will pay close attention to who is willing to reach across 
the aisle to get things done and who is openly calling for--almost 
excited about--a shutdown, which will hurt so many people. And the 
American people will note which is the party of chaos and which is the 
party of getting things done.
  Make no mistake, the American people will not stand for radical MAGA 
Republicans whose only strategy for governing is to bully the rest of 
the country into submission. It will not work.