[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 149 (Tuesday, September 24, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6339-S6340]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Government Funding

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, both parties in both Chambers continue 
the work of avoiding a shutdown. House Republican leadership needs to 
get the CR done quickly because we still need time in the Senate to 
move the bill through the floor. House Republicans should work with 
Democrats--House and Senate Democrats--to find the best path to getting 
the bill passed in a bipartisan way. The House Republicans have already 
wasted enough time as it is.
  Once the House acts, the Senate will move quickly to get the CR done. 
I encourage my colleagues on both sides to prioritize speedy passage of 
the CR. If both sides keep working together, if we stay away from 
poison pills and partisan spectacle, then the American people can rest 
assured there won't be a government shutdown. But we still have more 
work to do.
  Of course, nothing was inevitable about the tight deadline we face 
now. The bipartisan CR I negotiated with Speaker Johnson and Leaders 
McConnell and Jeffries is more or less the result people expected from 
the beginning--a short-term CR, one that does not last 6 months, that 
is free of poison pills, and which honors the bipartisan funding levels 
we agreed to earlier this year.
  But this feels like the third or fourth time this Congress that House 
Republicans have had to learn the same elementary lesson: In a narrowly 
divided government, partisan bully tactics and appealing to the extreme 
just does not work, plain and simple.
  I know a few on the hard right say: Oh, we can demand, bang our fists 
on the table, and force everyone to do what we want. That ain't 
happening. What they want to do is so destructive to America that the 
overwhelming number of Democrats and a large number of Republicans 
don't want to do it. But nonetheless this feels like the third or 
fourth time in this Congress that the House Republicans have had to 
learn the same elementary lesson--I say particularly the House hard-
right

[[Page S6340]]

Republicans and the Freedom Caucus. In a narrowly divided government, 
partisan bully tactics and appealing to the extreme simply does not 
work.
  I would have thought that would have been made clear a year ago, when 
Speaker McCarthy kept trying and trying and trying to appease the hard 
right with increasingly severe funding cuts, and it ended up being all 
for naught anyway. We ended up passing a bipartisan CR, and radicals 
turned on Speaker McCarthy.
  This time around, it was Donald Trump again telling the hard right to 
shut the government down if we didn't agree to their poison pill 
provisions--never mind that a shutdown would mean costs would go up, 
programs like Head Start would halt, and public safety here and at the 
border would suffer. To Donald Trump, these are all OK because they are 
just apparently the cost of feeding his ego. It is bewilderingly 
cynical to see Donald Trump push for a shutdown, knowing the pain it 
would cause the country. But thankfully we are still on track to avoid 
that kind of mess. Of course, we still have more work to do.
  I earnestly hope today brings good news in the House. We here in the 
Senate are ready to work to get this bill done quickly.