[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 14445-14446]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, yesterday I warned of the economic 
consequences if a few extremist Republicans force a government 
shutdown. Already, the stock market has slipped, and that is an 
understatement. Five days in a row--the longest continuous period since 
2012--the stock market has gone down, and they all say it is the result 
of the fear of the government shutting down. And why should the 
financial markets feel any differently? People are still speaking about 
closing the government.
  Now, the talk by a few Republicans over here has stopped the last 24 
hours, but they over there are taking up where the long talk over here 
ended: Close the government. The tea party is still insisting on a 
shutdown. It is hard to comprehend, but it is true.
  The dark consequences do not end just by saying that. If the Federal 
Government closes its doors, seniors applying for Social Security will 
not be able to apply. Veterans applying for disability will not be able 
to apply. They would be forced to wait until the Federal workers return 
to their posts. The FBI, because of sequestration and other anomalies 
we have around here, is talking about furloughing their employees, 
closing their offices 1 day a week. Across the country, mortgage loans 
and small business loans would be delayed. Members of the military will 
be forced to defend this country without even a paycheck as thanks. 
Billions of dollars will drain from the economy every day the 
government is closed for business.
  This is not hyperbole, not conjecture. It is the truth. If you look 
back at history, it pretty well determines where you are on a given 
day, and if you look back to when Newt Gingrich and the Republicans 
controlled Congress--the House of Representatives--they shut down the 
government in 1995 because President Clinton would not meet their every 
demand, and it cost the country tens of billions of dollars.
  So yesterday I urged Republicans to consider the impact of a shutdown 
on the recovery. But the economic price of shutting down the government 
should not be the only thing keeping the Republicans up at night; they 
should worry about the political consequence as well.
  Mr. President, we are all politicians, all 100 of us. A brandnew 
poll--CBS, a respected organization--says 80 percent of Americans--that 
is almost as much as favor background checks on guns--80 percent of 
Americans--you rarely get 80 percent of Americans to agree on anything, 
but they agree that those who want the government to be held hostage to 
extract these concessions are people they will not vote for. Seventy-
five percent of Republicans feel that way in this poll.
  So those of us who remember the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 
know the story did not end well for Republicans. Just ask Charles 
Krauthammer. There is no more respected conservative--really 
conservative--columnist than Charles Krauthammer. He has penned a 
conservative column for the Washington Post since the 1980s. Here is 
what he wrote just a week or two ago:

       Every fiscal showdown has redounded against the 
     Republicans. The first, in 1995, effectively marked the end 
     of the Gingrich revolution.

  That is a direct quote.
  As they did in the 1990s, today's radical Republicans have called for 
concessions they know we will never agree to. Senate Democrats will not 
agree and the President will not agree. The Senate will never pass, nor 
will President Obama sign, a bill that guts the Affordable Care Act and 
denies millions of Americans access to lifesaving health care.
  The statement made by John McCain yesterday said it all. He has some 
credentials to talk about that. He was the Republican nominee for 
President of the United States. He did not like what happened with 
health care, and he

[[Page 14446]]

talked about it here. He wished it had not passed, but it passed. He 
said it was a fair fight and he and the Republicans lost. Move on to 
something else is what he said.
  The Senate will never pass, as I have indicated before, a bill that 
guts the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare. Tea party Republicans have 
demanded the impossible and vowed to shut down the government unless 
they get it.
  Mr. Krauthammer and I do not agree all the time, but he aptly 
measured the fallout from the shutdowns of the mid-1990s and correctly 
predicted a similar result from a modern shutdown--a modern shutdown. 
He wrote what nearly two dozen mainstream Republican Senators have also 
said: ``This gambit is doomed to fail.''
  He also wrote:

       This is about tactics. If I thought this would work, I 
     would support it. But I don't fancy suicide. It has a 
     tendency to be fatal.

  That is an understatement.
  I commend Republican Senators who have spoken in favor of reason, and 
you cannot imagine how satisfied I am because that is how we used to 
get things done here. I can look back at John Breaux from Louisiana. If 
he thought we were not doing enough on this side of the aisle, he 
reached out to Republicans and worked something out.
  So what Republican Senators have said in the last few days is really 
important. They have spoken out for reason, calling the tea party's 
shutdown ultimatum a ``box canyon,'' a ``suicide note,'' and ``the 
dumbest idea ever.'' Although these reasonable Republicans dislike 
ObamaCare as much as their more radical colleagues, they also realize 
the futility and the danger of political hostage-taking. They know this 
country cannot be governed by one faction of one party on one side of 
the Capitol. Governing must be a cooperative effort that sets aside 
ideological or parochial concerns in favor of what is best for the 
Nation, for the economy, and for middle-class families.
  On November 14, 1995--the first day of the first government 
shutdown--President Clinton urged Republicans in Congress to govern 
with him instead of fighting against him. This is what he said:

       There is, after all, a simple solution to the problem. All 
     Congress has to do is to pass a straightforward bill to let 
     government perform its duties and pay its debts. Then we can 
     get back to work and resolve our differences . . . in an 
     open, honest, and straightforward manner.

  Mr. President, every Thursday when we are in session, I do a 
``Welcome to Washington.'' A lady from Boulder City, NV, came up to me. 
She said: I work for the Park Service, and we are so afraid. At the 
Park Service, we don't know what we are going to do. The last time 
there was a government shutdown, the parks closed. There is so much 
confusion. That is the way it is throughout government.
  So I offer today the same advice that President Clinton gave in 1995. 
Let government perform its duties. The way out of this predicament is 
as simple today as it was in 1995. So again I invite my Republican 
colleagues to return with me to the time when we worked to resolve our 
differences in an open, honest, and straightforward manner.
  Mr. President, I am going to take a few minutes. I apologize to my 
Republican counterpart, but we have to understand, the American people 
have to understand the seriousness of what is going on around here.
  Tom Friedman wrote yesterday in his op-ed piece--he is a renowned 
syndicated columnist. He has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He has had six 
or seven best-selling books. I am not going to read everything he 
wrote, but I want to read a little bit that he wrote yesterday.

       The Republican Party is being taken over by a Tea Party 
     faction that is not interested in governing on any of the big 
     issues--immigration, gun control, health care, debt and 
     taxes--where, with just minimal compromises between the two 
     parties, we'd amplify our strengths so much that we'd 
     separate ourselves from the rest of the world. Instead, this 
     group is threatening to shut down the government and 
     undermine America's vital credit rating if it doesn't get its 
     way.
       This kind of madness helped to produce the idiotic 
     sequester--the $1.2 trillion in automatic, arbitrary and 
     across-the-board budget cuts from 2013 to 2021--that is 
     already undermining one of our strongest assets.

  And here he goes:

       Ask Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National 
     Institutes of Health, the crown jewel of American biotech 
     innovation. In fiscal 2013, the sequester required the N.I.H. 
     to cut $1.55 billion across the board: 5 percent at each of 
     its 27 institutes and centers, irrespective of whether one 
     was on the cusp of a medical breakthrough and another was 
     not. ``There was still an ability within each institute to 
     make adjustments, but, as N.I.H. director, I could not decide 
     to emphasize cancer research and down modulate something 
     else,'' Collins explained.
       Because of the sequester and the fact that the N.I.H. 
     budget has been losing ground to inflation for 10 years, ``we 
     will not be able to fund 640 research grants that were scored 
     in the top 17 percent of the proposals we received,'' said 
     Collins.

  He goes on to say:

       ``They would have been funded without the sequester, but 
     now they won't. They include new ideas on cancer, diabetes, 
     autism and heart disease--all the things that we as a country 
     say are a high priority. I can't say which of those grants 
     would have led to the next breakthrough, or which 
     investigator would be a Nobel Prize winner 20 years from 
     now.''
       Of those 640 top research proposals, 150 were from 
     scientists financed in a previous budget cycle who had 
     returned to the N.I.H. to secure another three to five years 
     of funding--because they thought they were really on to 
     something and a peer review board agreed. ``Now we are 
     cutting them off,'' said Collins, ``so you damage the 
     previous investment as well as the future one.''
       In 2014, the N.I.H. was planning to offer new money to 
     stimulate research proposals in a dozen areas including how 
     to speed up the use of stem cells to cure Parkinson's and 
     other diseases, how to better manage pain in sickle-cell 
     disease, and how to improve early diagnosis of autism. All 
     were shelved because of the sequester, said Collins: Why ask 
     people to submit applications we would just have to turn 
     down.
       In addition, in 2013, the N.I.H. had to turn away from its 
     research hospital 750 patients who wanted to be part of a 
     clinical trial for disorders for which medicine currently has 
     no answers. America's biomedical ecosystem depends heavily on 
     N.I.H. doing basic research the private sector won't do.
       So we're cutting the medical research that has the 
     potential to prevent and cure the very diseases that are 
     driving health care costs upward.
       In short, we're cutting without a plan--the worst thing a 
     country or company can do--and we're doing it because one of 
     our two parties has been taken over by angry radicals and 
     barking fools and the old leadership is running scared. But 
     when the Republican Party goes this far off the rail, it 
     isn't even remotely challenging President Obama to challenge 
     his base on taxes and entitlements.
       And thus does a great country, with so much potential, 
     slowly become ungreat.

  Not only do we have sequestration, now they want to do even more and 
shut the government down and not extend the debt ceiling. This is a say 
bad time for America. I hope people come to their senses.

                          ____________________