[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15306-15321]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       CONTINUING APPROPRIATIONS

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, let me start off by acknowledging an 
article

[[Page 15307]]

which appeared in today's New York Times attributed to the Senate 
Chaplain, Dr. Barry Black, who led us in prayer to open the Senate's 
session. It is entitled ``Give Us This Day, Our Daily Senate 
Scolding,'' and it goes on to talk about the prayers which Dr. Black, 
our Senate Chaplain, has offered during the course of the last week 
during the government shutdown. They say in the article the morning 
invocation has turned into a daily conscience check for the 100 men and 
women of the Senate.
  The article points out that in the course of one of his prayers Dr. 
Black said:

       Remove from them that stubborn pride which imagines itself 
     to be above and beyond criticism. Forgive them the blunders 
     they have committed.

  I can't match his baritone voice and delivery when it comes to these 
prayers, but I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this 
article as a tribute to our Senate Chaplain who has been given the 
awesome responsibility to prove the power of prayer during the midst of 
a government shutdown.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Oct. 6, 2013]

              Give Us This Day, Our Daily Senate Scolding

                         (By Jeremy W. Peters)

       Washington.--The disapproval comes from angry constituents, 
     baffled party elders and colleagues on the other side of the 
     Capitol. But nowhere have senators found criticism more 
     personal or immediate than right inside their own chamber 
     every morning when the chaplain delivers the opening prayer.
       ``Save us from the madness,'' the chaplain, a Seventh-day 
     Adventist, former Navy rear admiral and collector of brightly 
     colored bow ties named Barry C. Black, said one day late last 
     week as he warmed up into what became an epic ministerial 
     scolding.
       ``We acknowledge our transgressions, our shortcomings, our 
     smugness, our selfishness and our pride,'' he went on, his 
     baritone voice filling the room. ``Deliver us from the 
     hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being 
     unreasonable.''
       So it has gone every day for the last week when Mr. Black, 
     who has been the Senate's official man of the cloth for 10 
     years, has taken one of the more rote rituals on Capitol 
     Hill--the morning invocation--and turned it into a daily 
     conscience check for the 100 men and women of the United 
     States Senate.
       Inside the tempestuous Senate chamber, where debate has 
     degenerated into daily name-calling--the Tea Party as a band 
     of nihilists and extortionists, and Democrats as socialists 
     who want to force their will on the American people--Mr. 
     Black's words manage to cut through as powerful and 
     persuasive.
       During his prayer on Friday, the day after officers from 
     the United States Capitol Police shot and killed a woman who 
     had used her car as a battering ram, Mr. Black noted that the 
     officers were not being paid because of the government 
     shutdown.
       Then he turned his attention back to the senators. ``Remove 
     from them that stubborn pride which imagines itself to be 
     above and beyond criticism,'' he said. ``Forgive them the 
     blunders they have committed.''
       Senator Harry Reid, the pugnacious majority leader who has 
     called his Republican adversaries anarchists, rumps and 
     hostage takers, took note. As Mr. Black spoke, Mr. Reid, 
     whose head was bowed low in prayer, broke his concentration 
     and looked straight up at the chaplain.
       ``Following the suggestion in the prayer of Admiral 
     Black,'' the majority leader said after the invocation, 
     seeming genuinely contrite, ``I think we've all here in the 
     Senate kind of lost the aura of Robert Byrd,'' one of the 
     historical giants of the Senate, who prized gentility and 
     compromise.
       In many ways, Mr. Black, 65, is like any other employee of 
     the federal government who is fed up with lawmakers' 
     inability to resolve the political crisis that has kept the 
     government closed for almost a week. He is not being paid. 
     His Bible study classes, which he holds for senators and 
     their staff members four times a week, have been canceled 
     until further notice.
       His is a nonpartisan position, one of just a few in the 
     Senate, and he prefers to leave his political leanings vague. 
     He was chosen in 2003 by Senator Bill Frist, a Tennessee 
     Republican who was the majority leader at the time, from a 
     group of finalists selected by a bipartisan committee. Before 
     that he ministered in the Navy for nearly 30 years.
       ``I use a biblical perspective to decide my beliefs about 
     various issues,'' Mr. Black said in an interview in his 
     office suite on the third floor of the Capitol. ``Let's just 
     say I'm liberal on some and conservative on others. But it's 
     obvious the Bible condemns some things in a very forceful and 
     overt way, and I would go along with that condemnation.''
       Last year, he participated in the Hoodies on the Hill rally 
     to draw attention to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. In 
     2007, after objections from groups that did not like the idea 
     of a Senate chaplain appearing alongside political figures, 
     he canceled a speech he was scheduled to give at an 
     evangelical event featuring, among others, Tony Perkins of 
     the conservative Focus on the Family and the columnist and 
     author Ann Coulter.
       Mr. Black, who is the first black Senate chaplain as well 
     as its first Seventh-day Adventist, grew up in public housing 
     in Baltimore, an experience he draws on in his sermons and 
     writings, including a 2006 autobiography, ``From the Hood to 
     the Hill.''
       In his role as chaplain, a position that has existed since 
     1789, he acts as a sounding board, spiritual adviser and 
     ethical counselor to members of the Senate. When he prays 
     each day, he said, he recites the names of all 100 senators 
     and their spouses, reading them from a laminated index card.
       It is not uncommon for him to have 125 people at his Bible 
     study gatherings or 20 to 30 senators at his weekly prayer 
     breakfast. He officiates weddings for Senate staff members. 
     He performs hospital visitations. And he has been at the side 
     of senators when they have died, most recently Daniel K. 
     Inouye of Hawaii in December.
       He tries to use his proximity to the senators--and the fact 
     that for at least one minute every morning, his is the only 
     voice they hear--to break through on issues that he feels are 
     especially urgent. Lately, he said, they seem to be paying 
     attention.
       ``I remember once talking about self-inflicted wounds--that 
     captured the imagination of some of our lawmakers,'' he said. 
     ``Remember, my prayer is the first thing they hear every day. 
     I have the opportunity, really, to frame the day in a special 
     way.''
       His words lately may be pointed, but his tone is always 
     steady and calm.
       ``May they remember that all that is necessary for 
     unintended catastrophic consequences is for good people to do 
     nothing,'' he said the day of the shutdown deadline.
       ``Unless you empower our lawmakers,'' he prayed another 
     day, ``they can comprehend their duty but not perform it.''
       The House, which has its own chaplain, liked what it heard 
     from Mr. Black so much that it invited him to give the 
     invocation on Friday.
       ``I see us playing a very dangerous game,'' Mr. Black said 
     as he sat in his office the other day. ``It's like the 
     showdown at the O.K. Corral. Who's going to blink first? So I 
     can't help but have some of this spill over into my prayer. 
     Because you're hoping that something will get through and 
     that cooler heads will prevail.

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I picked up the newspaper, at least went 
online to look at the newspapers from Illinois this morning, and two 
stories jumped right off the page. One was in the Bloomington 
Pantagraph. What a great story it is and makes me so proud to be from 
the Midwest and to represent people who are, by their very nature, 
pretty darned extraordinary. It is a story that comes out of Lexington, 
IL, about an event that happened yesterday, and I will quote just a bit 
of it.

       More than 60 area farmers, truckers and their families 
     gathered north of Lexington on Sunday morning to pay back a 
     friend who had helped them out at one time or another during 
     his 71-year lifetime. Some 16 combines harvested more than 
     300 acres of corn as friends of Dave Thomas brought in 
     Thomas' last harvest. Thomas died of a heart attack on July 
     22 and his wife Sharon and four sons decided to end the 
     family's farm operations.

  The article went on to say how it broke the family's heart to give up 
this family farm, but these neighbors pitched in. They wanted to 
harvest David Thomas' land and to make sure that last crop was brought 
in for his family. It is the kind of compassion and caring and family 
and community which we see in many States, but I see over and over in 
my home State of Illinois.
  This is not unique. It happens often, and every time it does it is 
worthy of note because it is such a special comment on the people of 
this great Nation and their caring for their neighbors.
  The area farmers in Chenoa, not too far from Lexington, are planning 
a similar harvest operation for another neighbor, David Harrison, this 
morning. Dave passed away last week.
  Time and again these farm families put aside their own physical 
comfort, their own daily schedules, their own lives to help one 
another. It is such a wonderful comment on this great Nation that we 
call home and the area I am so proud to represent.
  The second article that jumped off the page after I read this came 
out of Kansas--Wichita, KS--and it quotes Tim Peterson. He is a wheat 
farmer. I am not as familiar with wheat as I am

[[Page 15308]]

corn and soybeans, but he started talking about the problems he is 
running into. His problems are created by us because Tim doesn't have 
access to vital agricultural reports. They are casualties of the 
Federal Government shutdown. We stopped publishing this information, 
and farmers such as Tim Peterson and others are forced to make some 
very important family decisions, some important financial decisions 
without the necessary information.
  These reports can alert them to shortfalls in overseas markets or if 
there is a wide swing in acres planted, both of which might prompt U.S. 
growers to plant extra crops to meet demand or hang on to a harvest a 
little longer to get a better price.
  Here are these farmers across the Midwest who have worked hard to 
reach this point in the harvest where they can make enough money to 
live and to plant another year, to sustain their families and 
communities around them, and they have a problem. The problem is the 
politicians in Washington who want to shut down the government.
  What a contrast: farmers who rallied in Lexington, IL, for the family 
of a fallen farmer, to show they would stand by him through thick and 
thin and help him out--at least his family out through this adversity--
and then this article and story in Kansas, where the Congressmen and 
Senators sent to Washington to do their job and to provide the basic 
information for these farmers have failed and in failing have made it 
much more difficult for these farmers.
  Two articles in the morning papers from the central part of the 
United States of America, which brings home to me the graphic human 
side of this government shutdown. Something else brought it home 
personally. When Harry Reid, our majority leader, announced we weren't 
going to have votes on Saturday or Sunday, I took the opportunity to 
get out of town and I raced off to be with my grandkids.
  I have two twin grandchildren, 22 months old, and I just love them to 
pieces. I thought getting away with them is exactly what I need, to get 
out of this town and to get my mind straight after a tough political 
week. We had a ball. We did the normal things one would expect: going 
to the park and reading ``Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?'' 
and all the things that are fun for a grandfather.
  There were a couple moments, though--you see, they are almost 2 years 
old, and there were a couple moments during the weekend where one of 
them would lose it for just a little while and start crying and 
screaming uncontrollably and saying the word ``no'' over and over again 
and unable to express themselves because they just don't have the 
vocabulary to tell us what is on their minds. In those moments I felt 
as though I was back in Washington again.
  The terrible twos temper tantrums sounded like Congress--people 
shouting no, screaming uncontrollably, and unable to express what they 
are doing and why they are doing it, and that is where we find 
ourselves today.
  On the morning talk shows yesterday, on Sunday, a number of leaders 
came to speak, and of course everybody was focused on Speaker Boehner 
because he is the captain of the ship when it comes to the government 
shutdown, but it was interesting to me that what guided this government 
shutdown last week--ObamaCare, the health care reform bill--they were 
not talking about so much anymore. It has been launched, and 9 million 
people across America have visited the Web site because they are 
interested in finding health insurance maybe for the first time in 
their lives or health insurance they can afford--9 million.
  Because so many have come to these Web sites, the Republican leader 
is right, we have had trouble getting them moving forward. It will take 
a few days to adjust to this volume of people coming on board to find 
out whether this insurance exchange can help them, their family or the 
business. The good news for my colleague Senator McConnell, from 
Kentucky, is that his State has been a real success story, with 8,000 
people having already signed up in Kentucky for health insurance on the 
insurance exchange of ObamaCare.
  I hope Senator McConnell and Senator Rand Paul take some pride in the 
fact that now 8,000--at least 8,000--Kentuckians have health insurance 
they can afford and they can trust, some of them for the first time in 
their lives. When I hear this news, I wonder how these Senators from 
Kentucky and some other States can say we want to repeal this, we want 
to get rid of this.
  What are they going to tell those 8,000 families who finally have 
health insurance for the first time? Big mistake. Sorry. Go back to the 
marketplace where you have no health insurance protection. That is 
hardly the response Americans want to hear in Kentucky, Illinois, in 
Maine or any other State.
  What we are trying to do with ObamaCare, the health care reform act, 
is to open up an opportunity for 40 to 50 million Americans to have 
health insurance they can afford for the first time in their lives. 
What we have heard from the other side of the aisle is: Repeal it. 
Defund it. Delay it. Do anything you can to stop it. Stop it.
  You know why they want to stop it? Because they understand that once 
people's appetites are whetted for health care insurance they can 
afford and insurance where they can protect their families, there is no 
turning back. We are at a point in history, much as we were with the 
creation of Social Security and Medicare, where we are offering to 
families across America something they could not do by themselves and 
something they will value very much as part of their families and their 
future, and that is what is driving this fear on the other side of the 
aisle. That is what is driving the government shutdown.
  What is worse is October 17, the next deadline, and it is not that 
far away. In another 9 or 10 days we are going to face a debt ceiling 
expiration. The debt ceiling is basically America's mortgage. We have 
to extend our mortgage. We borrow money to manage our government, to 
fight wars, to pay our military, to do the most basic things. When we 
borrow that money, we have to have authorization from the government. 
That is the debt ceiling.
  Many of the same Senators and Congressmen who voted for this spending 
now will not vote to pay the bill. That is akin to eating the big meal 
at the restaurant and, when the waiter brings the check, saying: I 
ain't paying. How long would that last? That is what many are 
suggesting when they say we are not going to extend the debt ceiling. 
They have eaten the meal. They just don't want to pay the bill.
  It would be the first time in the history of the United States we 
would default on our national debt. The first time we would basically 
violate the full faith and credit of the United States of America. It 
has its consequences. The last time the tea party did this, America's 
credit rating suffered. What happens when our credit rating suffers? 
The interest rates we pay go up. Taxpayers are paying more to China and 
countries that loan us money than they are paying to educate children, 
to build roads or do medical research.
  Here we go again. Another threat by the Speaker that we are going to 
default on our national debt again. They threatened it 2 years ago, and 
they have come back again--the tea party. This is totally 
irresponsible.
  I read the newspapers from different countries and they look at the 
United States and shake their head and they wonder how this country, 
which many say--and I can certainly see the reason for it--is one of 
the leaders in the world, can find itself in this manufactured 
political crisis again and again and again. It is like the temper 
tantrums of the terrible twos when we hear this. We think it is totally 
unnecessary. We have to help these kids grow up and get through it. 
America has to grow up and stand and say to Congress: It is time for 
you to grow up and stand and do the right thing for the future of this 
country.

[[Page 15309]]

  I hope we can do this, and I hope we can do it together in a 
bipartisan fashion. This shutdown of the Federal Government should end 
today. The Speaker has before him a continuing resolution which he 
could pass, could pass in a heartbeat, and the government would be 
extended. The farmer out in Kansas would have the information he needs, 
the medical researcher would be back to work at the National Institutes 
of Health, and all of the agencies of the government would be 
functioning for the good of the American people. That is what we were 
sent to do. There are no excuses and no political reasons not to.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Georgia.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I wish to thank the distinguished Senator 
from Illinois, the distinguished majority whip, for bringing up 
Chaplain Barry Black's name and the article that appeared in the New 
York Times. I know Senator Durbin and I do a lot of things together. 
One of those things is just about every Wednesday morning we attend the 
Senate Prayer Breakfast. Replete through all of Barry's prayers at that 
breakfast is always one word, and that is ``humility.'' I think the 
message in that article in the New York Times and the message in the 
prayers in the last 7 or 8 days in the Senate and the message to all of 
us right now is that we need to grasp a little humility and find common 
ground among consternation and move this country forward.
  To that end, I want to make my suggestion, for what it is worth, and 
I want to make mine as an inspiration with Senator Collins, the other 
Senator from the State of Maine who last week made her proposal. If we 
can't find common ground with the arguments we have today, let's 
proffer a new proposal to give us a chance to solve our problem.
  Susan Collins made a great suggestion, to replace the medical device 
tax with other revenue so it doesn't cut the revenue and to get back to 
sequestration but only by cutting defense agencies, not by cutting 
across the board. That made a lot of sense. It provides a way to absorb 
those cuts but does so in a professional way.
  So I come to the floor in a Robert Frost moment. You know the poem:

       ``Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. . . . I took the one 
     less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.''

  We have been traveling down the wrong road for far too long. We are 
here today, in large measure, arguing over a CR we shouldn't have to be 
arguing over. Had we been doing our appropriations and doing our 
budgets over the last 4 years, the money would have been spent, the 
regular order would have been in place, the fiscal year moneys would 
have been appropriated, and there would be no need for a CR.
  There is bipartisan responsibility for not having done a budget or an 
appropriations act. The leadership, obviously, controls the floor, so 
they can bring the appropriations act forward and that is their 
responsibility. But we have also cried out on our side for a budget. 
Year after year, let's have a budget. Now we have a budget, one 
approved by the House and one approved by the Senate, but an inability 
to go to conference because we can't get agreement on preconditions. 
Once again, this is another situation of not negotiating over something 
that is important to the American people.
  So I have a suggestion, a suggestion that two-thirds of this Senate 
agreed to in the budget debate we had in March, a decision that 20 
States have exercised in our country that has made them better, a 
decision the State of Israel made 2 or 3 years ago when they got into 
such dire financial conditions and went to the World Bank for 
suggestions; that is, let's force our CR and add to it a simple 
resolution that changes our way of doing business to a biennial budget 
and appropriations act, where we force ourselves to appropriate over 2 
years and not 1, and make those appropriations in the odd-numbered 
years so that in the even-numbered years we do only oversight.
  It would make a lot of difference for the American people if we were 
arguing over not how much bacon we were bringing home but how much 
money we were saving through oversight, savings, and fiscal 
accountability. I have introduced that legislation, along with Senator 
Shaheen--a Democrat from New Hampshire and a Governor who ran a State 
under a biennial budget. It makes sense, it is humble, it is the right 
way to do business, and it ends this necessity of having continuing 
resolutions at the last minute because we didn't do our job.
  Let's face it. We are here today in the conundrum we are in because 
we did not do our job. We did not pass a budget and go to a conference 
committee, we didn't have appropriations acts, so we are doing a 
continuing resolution into a new fiscal year. That is no way to run the 
greatest country on the face of this Earth. Four years and running we 
have shirked our responsibility. It is time for a new day in the 
Senate. It is time for a biennial budget. It worked for Israel. If it 
worked for 20 States, it will work for us. It establishes priorities, 
it ends waste, fraud, and abuse, and it brings about good decisions.
  Last night on ``60 Minutes,'' Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma was 
featured, and the feature was about SSI disability and the fact that we 
now pay $135 billion a year in SSI disability payments--a trebling of 
those costs in just a few years--and fully 25 to 40 percent we know is 
fraudulent. Twenty-five to forty percent is $40 billion to $60 billion. 
You can do a lot with $40 billion to $60 billion. That is where 
transparency and oversight works.
  There is nobody better than the Senator from Oklahoma in terms of 
oversight and nobody more humble than the Senator from Oklahoma, but 
when he knows he is right, he is going to work hard to do what is 
right, and that is what all of us should be doing.
  Referring to the Senator from Oklahoma, I go back to the Workforce 
Investment Act, which Senator Murray and I are working very hard to 
bring to the floor. In that, Senator Coburn found forty-four 
duplicative job training programs in nine different agencies--over and 
over again. We are appropriating money forty-four different times to 
nine different agencies to do workforce training when we really only 
ought to be doing one. If we were budgeting on a 2-year basis and doing 
other oversight in even-numbered years, there would be no limit to the 
successes we could have, the transparency we could enforce, the 
agreements we could come to, and the lack of cliff management we are in 
today.
  The debt ceiling we face in about 10 days is a debt ceiling we face 
because we are having to borrow more money to run our government. We 
are having to borrow more money to run our government because we are 
not doing fiscal accountability, we are not doing appropriating, and we 
are going to continue for that to grow and grow.
  As a businessman and a saver, I know what the time value of money is. 
The time value of money means that if you put away a little bit of 
money every year and save for your kids' education, for your health 
care, or whatever it might be, when the time comes and you need it, you 
will have it. But I also know what the time cost of money is: when you 
are borrowing money to pay off borrowed money--and that is where we are 
in the United States of America today. So that is why this debt ceiling 
crisis is such a big issue.
  I would submit, and humbly, that the Shaheen-Isakson legislation that 
forces us to do our regular order of business of appropriating, forces 
us to budget, and forces us to do it every year puts us back to the 
kind of discipline and job responsibility we really need around this 
place. Instead of arguing about what we can't agree upon, we ought to 
find common ground and run our country's household the way American 
families run their households. If we had to do here in Washington what 
every American family has to do year in and year out, this place would 
be a whole lot different.
  It is time that we find humility, find common ground, do what 20 of 
the 50 States do, do what the State of Israel has done, and do what 67 
Senators said we ought to do in the budget debate

[[Page 15310]]

back in March; that is, pass a biennial and appropriations act, end 
this foolishness, and gain back some of the humility we richly deserve.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed 
2 extra minutes to pay tribute to a physician in my county.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  (The further remarks of Mr. Isakson are printed in today's Record 
under ``Morning Business.'')
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I yield back the remainder of my time.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia for his 
call on this place to get back to regular order and to bridge our 
differences. I think it is an important one and a noble and hopefully 
easy request for us to ultimately follow.
  I came down here this weekend to talk about a young woman in 
Bridgeport, CT, who is at the epicenter of the fallout of this 
shutdown, and I wanted to come back down on Monday to tell her story 
very briefly once again because the way a lot of trade papers cover 
this shutdown makes it seem as if this is just about politics. If you 
listen to some commentators and some members of the tea party crowd in 
the House of Representatives, they will tell you that what we are going 
to find in this shutdown is that everybody is going to learn that the 
government really doesn't do that much and it is not that big a deal if 
it goes away for a couple of months, a couple of weeks, a couple of 
days.
  What we are finding as we enter week 2 of this shutdown is we have 
now moved past the point where the collapse of the government is just 
an inconvenience. It is now ruining lives. I wish Melanie Rhodes was 
the exception, but she is increasingly becoming the rule across the 
country. The Presiding Officer heard me tell her story this weekend, 
but I am going to do it again.
  Melanie was homeless a couple years ago. She lives in the 
southwestern portion of Connecticut. She had hit really hard times, but 
she decided to pull her life together--not the least of the reasons 
being that she has a little boy. She has a son Malachi. Malachi was 
born about 2 months premature, so he was born with some developmental 
disabilities that luckily, because of a government program, were caught 
early on. The program is called Birth to Three. In Connecticut, it is 
our early intervention program. Most States have it. It is one of the 
programs that are going to run out of funds pretty soon if we don't 
start turning back on the faucet to State governments.
  But even more important to Melanie was that through that early 
intervention screening program that figured out Malachi needed a little 
bit of extra help, they got him into a Head Start Program. He wasn't 
even 1 year old when he started the Head Start Program. Today he is 3, 
and he is making incredible progress. He has some serious issues. He is 
just now learning how to communicate with some signs he has been 
taught. But he is doing better and doing better every single day.
  On Monday night of last week Melanie stayed up all night watching to 
see whether the government was still going to be operating because she 
knew the Bridgeport Head Start Program works on a fiscal year that 
matches ours. So if the government shut down on October 1, the check 
wouldn't come to Bridgeport Head Start and they would have to send 
1,000 kids home.
  But she also knew her life was starting to get brighter in other ways 
as well. She had been looking for a job for a long time and she had 
done everything we asked of her. She had applied to everybody she could 
think of, from Walmart to Walgreens to McDonald's, and hadn't found 
anything until a bus company decided to hire her as a driver. She had 
gone through her training; she was just waiting for her background 
check to come back. It was going to be OK and she was going to start 
work. But, of course, the only way she could start work was if she had 
care for her child. As she has said so eloquently over the past week, 
she can't just leave Malachi with anybody because he is a kid with 
substantial difficulties and his caregivers need to know how to take 
care of him. So if there is no Head Start, there is no school for 
Malachi, he regresses in terms of the progress he has made, and she 
can't start her job. Her family essentially collapses around her simply 
because this place can't pass a budget. That is what is happening to 
Melanie, and she says simply this: We need our government and our 
businesses open. Why should we suffer and be held hostage while 
government can't do what they need to do?
  Her story can be repeated thousands of times across Connecticut. I 
think I saw today that about 18,000 Head Start slots are going to be 
closed by the end of this week. Unfortunately, her story is not the 
exception; it is becoming the rule. This is what this shutdown means. 
It is not playacting. It is real.
  As I watched some of the shows over the weekend, I heard a familiar 
refrain from our Republican colleagues. They said: Yeah, we have this 
demand that we want the health care law delayed or repealed or defunded 
in order to get the government up and operating, but really it is the 
Democrats. It is Harry Reid, it is President Obama who won't sit down 
and negotiate. If they would just sit down and negotiate, then we could 
end this whole thing.
  I understand how some people might watch and think to themselves, why 
won't the Democrats just sit down and talk about this? So I would like 
to address this claim that the only thing stopping us from reopening 
the government is Democrats won't talk to Republicans. I want to 
address that in five simple ways.
  First, I would make the point that every single one of my colleagues 
has made: We have already talked. What we thought we were talking about 
was a continuing resolution, a temporary budget that would keep the 
government operating for about 6 weeks. A lot of Democratic critics 
actually would argue that we didn't really negotiate that well over 
that particular issue because in the end the Senate passed a budget 
with a particular number for the continuing resolution, the House 
passed a budget with a particular number for the continuing resolution, 
and the difference was pretty substantial, but in the end the Senate 
just decided to go with the House number. We didn't settle in between. 
We didn't settle closer to ours or closer to theirs. We just took the 
House number. So we kind of feel, on the subject at hand, which is the 
continuing resolution, that the negotiation has already happened and we 
gave the House everything they wanted. There is not much more to 
negotiate after you give them everything when it comes to the bottom-
line number in the continuing resolution.
  Second, it is kind of hard to have a negotiation when only one side 
is making demands. We don't have any demands in this negotiation. All 
we want is for the things that normally happen to continue to happen--
i.e., we want the government to stay open on the exact same terms the 
government was open last week and the week before. We want the country 
to pay our bills just as we have paid our bills for a generation. It is 
only Republicans--and, frankly, not all Republicans. Most Republicans 
in the Senate are not making these demands. It is mainly a small 
handful in the House and the Senate who say: In order to keep the 
government open, we want the health care law defunded or repealed or 
delayed.
  It is difficult to have a negotiation when all we want is the status 
quo.
  It is kind of like if two people lived in a house and one of them 
said: I am going to take the roof off the house if you don't do what I 
want. You wouldn't really negotiate that. That is an unreasonable 
demand. The roof just needs to be there. It is something that, for good 
reason, is normally not the subject of debate or negotiation. And you 
wouldn't settle for half. You wouldn't allow your roommate to take half 
the roof off. The roof just needs to be there, and if you are angry 
with me about something or you want to talk about something, let's do 
it while the roof is still on.

[[Page 15311]]

  We can't negotiate over the government just operating. We can't 
negotiate over whether or not we are going to pay our bills. We don't 
want anything. We just want things to happen as they have happened in 
the past.
  Third, this place just can't operate if in order to keep the 
government open for 6 weeks we have to satisfy everybody's personal 
political agenda.
  I also said this weekend I have things I believe in very strongly. I 
represent Sandy Hook, CT. I submit I feel just as strongly about 
background checks as the Senator from Texas does about the repeal of 
the health care bill. But it would be unreasonable for me to say I am 
not going to vote for a budget because I don't get my way on background 
checks or immigration reform or tax fairness or whatever it may be that 
I care about outside the confines of the continuing resolution. If all 
100 Senators had to get their particular nonbudgetary political points 
settled as a requirement of passing a continuing resolution, this place 
would absolutely collapse.
  Maybe that is what some people want. Maybe some people want 
government to collapse and the government to shut down. But when I hear 
people talk on this floor, I take them at face value, that that is not 
what they want. Ultimately we all cannot get what we need all the time.
  Fourth, you normally need to compromise when you do not have 
consensus, when you do not have agreement, when both the Senate and the 
House do not have the majority of their Members agreeing to the exact 
same thing. In that case you need to negotiate because clearly we do 
not have consensus, and so we have to get two sides together to find 
consensus.
  We have consensus. We have a bill the majority of Senators supports, 
the majority of House Members supports, the President is ready to sign 
the minute it gets to his desk. That is what is referred to as a clean 
continuing resolution, a bill that would keep the government operating 
for the next 6 weeks on the same terms it was operating beforehand. The 
only reason why that is not law today is because Speaker Boehner will 
not bring that up for a vote in the House of Representatives. But it 
reportedly enjoys the support of more than 216 Members of the House, 
which is what you need today to get that bill passed. It has already 
passed the Senate.
  Last, as Senator Durbin talked about, what Republicans are demanding 
as their condition to keep the government up and operating is no less 
than the repeal of the signature achievement of President Obama's first 
term, the most important bill I have ever worked on, the most important 
vote I have ever cast. That is the health care law which is today 
saving millions of dollars for senior citizens in their Medicare 
benefits and right now is providing a lifeline to millions of Americans 
who need cheaper insurance.
  It is why poll after poll tells you that although people are still 
split on whether they agree with the exact prescription for our health 
care economy laid out in the bill we passed, they sure as heck do not 
want us to repeal the law. By about a 2-to-1 margin people say don't 
repeal the law, let it go into effect, give it a shot. It is also why 
by a 3-to-1 margin people do not agree with shutting down the 
government over the repeal of the health care law. It is why 9 million 
people have gone onto the Federal health care reform Web site to see 
what their options are. It is why, as Senator Durbin said, even in 
States such as Kentucky, people are signing up by the thousands. In the 
first day of Connecticut's exchange we had more visits to the Web site 
than we had in the entire month previous. People are desperate for 
lower cost health care out there. Sick people and families with sick 
children have been waiting lifetimes to finally be able to get 
insurance for their loved ones.
  People need this health care reform law to go into effect. It is 
simply not true, as the Senator from Texas and others have said, that 
people do not want this law. They have shown us how badly and 
desperately they need it by the flood of interest in the exchanges over 
the first week, and in poll after poll the American people say loudly 
they do not want this repealed.
  It is hard to get major social change passed in this town. The 
Founding Fathers intentionally set up a process by which something such 
as health care reform seems nearly impossible. That is why it took 100 
years since Teddy Roosevelt first proposed that we guarantee access to 
our health care system for all Americans for it to happen.
  You have a lot of chances for that idea to crater. You need both 
Chambers to pass the exact same bill, you need a President willing to 
sign it, you need the courts to uphold it, and then you need the 
electorate to confirm it when everybody who voted for it stands for 
reelection again.
  The reason why we are implementing the health care law today and the 
reason why most Americans want it to go forward is we passed every 
single one of those tests. For the first time in a hundred years the 
exact same proposal to reform our health care system passed with a 
majority of both the House and the Senate and was signed by our 
President. The Supreme Court reviewed the law and stamped that it was 
constitutional. Then this President and every Member of the Senate who 
voted for the health care bill went out to stand for reelection in 
2012, based on the promise they would continue to implement the law. 
The President was reelected by a resounding margin and every Senator in 
this Chamber who voted for the health care law won reelection. The bill 
passed, the courts upheld it, voters confirmed their original choices. 
People want this law.
  We already compromised on the amount in the continuing resolution. It 
cannot be much of a negotiation when all we want is for the government 
to stay up and operating and for us to pay our bills. This place cannot 
work if, every time you negotiate a budget, everybody has to have their 
own political priorities taken care of.
  We do not need to negotiate because we already have a bill that 
enjoys the support of both Chambers and will be signed by the President 
if only the House of Representatives will call it for a vote. The idea 
that people do not want the health care law simply is not borne out 
either by the polls or by people's conduct on the exchanges over the 
last 2 weeks.
  Melanie Rhodes is waiting for an answer from us. Malachi needs to get 
back into preschool, ASAP. He is a little autistic boy who, every 
single day he sits home by himself, is marching a little bit more 
quickly backward off the progress gained through this program, funded 
not by government but by all of us, because we thought it was important 
that little boys with autism growing up in poor families with moms who 
used to be homeless should have a chance at success in life. Every day 
we continue to reverse our collective decision as a society that 
Malachi should get some help, he goes backward and backward. His mom, 
to whom we said: You know what. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, do 
the right thing for yourself and your child--she did it. She got him 
into Head Start, she found a job, and now because that program is shut 
down, she likely will not be able to start her job. He moves backward. 
She moves backward.
  It is not because Democrats will not negotiate.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Connecticut 
for those eloquent and very powerful remarks, and I will take advantage 
of his presence here to perhaps engage in a colloquy, if he agrees to 
doing so, asking him, because he spoke so wonderfully about that one 
family, whether he has seen, as I have seen, that story of deprivation 
and setback duplicated on a bigger scale throughout our State?
  Mr. MURPHY. I thank my colleague from Connecticut for the question. 
As he knows, there are a thousand different children in that one Head 
Start Program alone who have essentially lost access to childcare. This 
week I think the number is, as the Senator knows, about 18,000 kids 
across the country who will lose access to health

[[Page 15312]]

care. As we have seen, it has already had a big effect in our State 
because we have so many defense manufacturers. Some of the initial 
furloughs to civilians have caused a loss of work among families who 
could not afford it. We are seeing over and over how this shutdown 
trickles down.
  Frankly, it is affecting the very families who cannot afford to miss 
a paycheck, the very families who cannot make quick arrangements to 
find somebody else to take care of their autistic child. As the Senator 
has seen and knows, this is affecting, in our small State, thousands 
and thousands of residents who did not have a lot of wiggle room when 
it came to the support that was standing around them due to programs 
run by the Federal Government.
  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. In fact, I think statistics show more than a thousand 
children and their families are directly affected by this shutdown in 
Head Start alone. Seniors, in terms of nutritional assistance--I do not 
know whether my good friend and very distinguished colleague from 
Connecticut has seen that phenomenon as well in Bridgeport and 
throughout our State of Connecticut and would care to remark on it?
  Mr. MURPHY. I would say to the Senator, we have had this effort on 
behalf of Republicans to kind of pick and choose which parts of the 
government they are going to reopen. As I noted here on the floor in 
objecting to one of these piecemeal requests, that exact program my 
colleague referred to, the senior nutrition program which provides 
meals to very low-income and often very frail seniors who are getting 
them either at a senior center or delivered to them through the Meals 
On Wheels Program, was not initially one of the programs that 
Republicans chose to reopen.
  That is why we object to this piecemeal approach. It is bad policy to 
allow for a wing of this House or the other House to pick and choose 
which people they help, leaving on the outside, as the Senator 
mentioned, some who are very deserving, such as very frail and often 
very hungry senior citizens.
  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. What is needed, I think my colleague would agree, is 
an end to the shutdown, reopening government--not for the sake of 
reopening the government but to provide these vital services and 
assurance that the United States of America, the greatest Nation in the 
history of the world, is going to continue paying its debts. Then and 
only then have a conference and a compromise and collaboration on what 
our overall budget should be with smart spending cuts and increases in 
revenue that close some loopholes and subsidies. I think that was the 
thrust, was it not, of what my colleague from Connecticut had to say?
  Mr. MURPHY. I think the majority leader made it very clear he is 
willing to sit down to talk about everything and anything the 
Republicans want to discuss but not with a gun to our heads. Let's 
reopen the government. Then, as we as a Chamber have been willing to do 
over and over, let's sit down in a budget conference with everything 
part of that budget on the table.
  But this just cannot happen every time that one faction of one House 
does not get their way, they shut down the government until their 
particular demands are remediated.
  As I was saying, Senator Blumenthal and I care deeply about the issue 
of background checks. He worked his entire life on this issue. But 
given his life's work, he is still not coming to this Chamber and 
demanding until he gets his way on that issue, which is of such vital 
importance to his constituents and mine, that he will shut down the 
government.
  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. In fact, what is happening is a small fraction of one 
House of the Congress--in fact, in the House of Representatives, one 
small group of rightwing extremists, whatever they may characterize 
themselves as--is holding hostage the entire House of Representatives, 
the entire Congress, the entire government, even though it is only one 
branch and one part of a branch. I think Senator Murphy has explained 
well our view--and our constituents in Connecticut need to know it--we 
are willing to compromise and collaborate but not with hostage-taking 
tactics that in effect say to everyone else in the country: It is our 
way or the highway.
  I thank my colleague from Connecticut for speaking so clearly and 
persuasively on his topic, and for giving the impact of this government 
shutdown a human face and a human voice. The story he told from 
Bridgeport has indeed thousands of others just like it across the State 
of Connecticut, across the country, who are suffering the real hardship 
and harm of this shutdown.
  We can talk in the abstract here. Our rhetoric may carry a little bit 
beyond these four walls. But the real-life consequences belong to them. 
Both Senator Murphy and I have seen them in real life and that is why 
we are here to advocate and fight for those people of Connecticut, in 
Bridgeport, those families who depend on Head Start, those seniors who 
depend on nutritional assistance--he has told their story, and that of 
Sikorsky, so well today in this Chamber. These men and women, and their 
families, do great work for our Nation on their assembly lines.
  Black Hawk helicopters are the best-made helicopters in the Nation. 
They perform rescue operations for our troops in Afghanistan. They 
medevac our Nation's warriors to places where they can be saved. They 
provide resupply and provisions. They are literally lifesaving vehicles 
in our war to keep America safe.
  Those workers in Sikorsky were told late last week: You are done. You 
are furloughed. Do not report to work next week because 45 inspectors--
civilian employees of the U.S. Department of Defense--are going to be 
furloughed. The 45 inspectors and 1,500 or 2,000 or more workers at 
Sikorsky who work on the Black Hawk helicopter assembly line, and other 
product assembly as well, were told they were going to be furloughed.
  Senator Murphy and I, and other members of our delegation, spoke with 
officials of the Department of Defense. We made our interpretation of 
the recently passed law clear to them and told them that it applies to 
employees of the Defense Contract Management Agency whose services were 
vital to certify and inspect those helicopters. We needed to keep the 
assembly lines at Sikorsky open in order to make sure that Black Hawk 
helicopters were continuing to be available to our military men and 
women who depend on them so vitally.
  Those conversations--and I am sure others had them as well--with 
officials at the Department of Defense, along with the action of the 
House over the weekend, will make sure that all of the furloughed 
employees who work for the U.S. Government will eventually be paid.
  Secretary Hagel was persuaded to do the right thing. I commend and 
thank Secretary Hagel for bringing back those employees, such as the 45 
DCMA inspectors, who have to be there for the Department of Defense in 
order to take delivery of those helicopters, which, in turn, is 
necessary to keep the assembly line open and keep Sikorsky workers 
employed and on the job with the countless other hard-working men and 
women defense contractors across the United States.
  I thank Secretary Hagel, but at the same time we need to recognize 
that for every Sikorsky helicopter situation, for every Fortune 500 
corporation, and for every one of those big defense contractors, there 
are literally thousands of suppliers and small businesses that are 
continuing in uncertainty, and sometimes confusion, about what is 
happening here in Washington.
  There are thousands of other businesses that depend on those 
suppliers because they provide the raw materials for the parts for the 
Sikorsky helicopters. The ripple effect and the ramifications pervade 
our economy and our society. The uncertainty creates harm and hardship 
that is immeasurable and perhaps irreparable.
  The harm is not only to those workers who rightly have whiplash from 
being furloughed one day and being called back another and then being 
uncertain as to what impact this shutdown will ultimately have; there 
are

[[Page 15313]]

suppliers and the countless other small businesses that cannot plan, 
cannot look ahead, cannot hire for the future, and sometimes they have 
to tell their workers: You are going to be furloughed. You cannot plan 
to buy a car or a new home or even the most minor things such as school 
supplies--or make other plans, for that matter.
  Lives hang in the balance; lives are at stake. The real-life 
consequences are real and perhaps lasting for many Americans--not only 
the family who depends on Head Start or the senior nutrition assistance 
or the jobs in Sikorsky, but there are countless others whose lives 
also hang in the balance.
  There is a solution to this impasse. Calmer minds, cooler heads, and 
common sense are beginning to reach a consensus that the House should 
be given a chance to vote, and that the Speaker of the House of 
Representatives, John Boehner, should enable that vote. He should very 
simply provide an opportunity to Republicans and Democrats--not 
singling out one side or the other--to come together on a bipartisan 
basis.
  Who cares who is in the minority of that vote as long as it reopens 
the government and provides Head Start, nutritional assistance, and 
enables some certainty that permits our economy to move forward 
rationally and sensibly so we can recover from the great recession? We 
need to grow jobs and enable the economy to reach some measure of 
prosperity. We all have an interest in that outcome. We should all be 
pulling for America. We should all be assured that the greatest nation 
in the history of the world will leave no doubt that it will pay its 
bills on time and that it will fulfill its obligations on time, just as 
we have for every year in the history of this great Nation.
  There is a way to come together. I have heard from my colleagues on 
both sides of the aisle that the time has come to end this impasse. 
Simply let the House vote.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Vermont.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. 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. SANDERS. Mr. President, all over this country the American people 
are outraged by what is going on here in Washington. They have a hard 
time understanding why rightwing extremists in the Republican Party in 
the House are able to shut down the U.S. Government, while paychecks 
are being denied to millions of Federal employees and, at the same 
time, services--in some cases desperately needed services--are being 
threatened for tens of millions of Americans. People are hurting and 
they wonder what is going on.
  Let me say a few words regarding what, in my view, has, in fact, 
happened. From the beginning, some of my Republican colleagues are 
saying: We just need to talk. Let's compromise. A key point they 
neglect to make is that a major compromise has already taken place. The 
Democrats in the Senate--and I am an independent, as is the Presiding 
Officer, affiliated with the Democratic Caucus--decided to send a 
budget for a continuing resolution to the House, which, in my view, was 
a very, very weak budget, one that I am totally dissatisfied with, and 
I think most Members of the caucus are. It continues the budget at 
sequestration levels which will have a devastating impact on this 
country. It is a bad budget. But the reason the majority leader sent it 
over to the House was that he was of the understanding that the Speaker 
of the House had requested that type of budget, and that once that 
budget came over--once that CR came over--the House would agree to it. 
In fact, let me read from an article in the Washington Post today 
commenting on an ABC interview that Speaker Boehner did. The Washington 
Post says:

       In the ABC interview, Boehner tacitly acknowledged making a 
     deal with Senate Democrats to avoid using the threat of a 
     shutdown to attack ObamaCare in exchange for an agreement to 
     maintain the deep cuts known as the sequester through the 
     fall. He conceded that his rank and file forced him onto the 
     path to shutdown by insisting on waging the fight over 
     ObamaCare.

  That was the Washington Post today.
  What does that mean? It means that an agreement had been reached by 
the Speaker and the majority leader that if the Democrats accepted the 
very low budget number the Republicans wanted, there would be a clean 
continuing resolution. What this article points out--and what I think 
the Speaker has virtually acknowledged--is that despite his agreement 
with the majority leader here in the Senate, he couldn't carry it out 
because his extreme rightwing said: Thanks. You got us the budget we 
wanted, the CR we wanted. That is not enough. Now we want to end 
ObamaCare.
  That is where we are today.
  So anyone who comes forward and says: Why don't you talk? Why don't 
you compromise? The fact is--and I think the majority leader has made 
this point--he compromised far more than many of us felt comfortable 
with.
  A compromise has already been reached. The Democrats accepted, in my 
view, a very bad and weak Republican budget. But it was done with the 
hope and the understanding that there would be a clean continuing 
resolution and that the U.S. Government would not be shut down. That is 
point No. 1.
  Point No. 2 is that the other day the Speaker said on TV that there 
are not the votes to pass a clean CR. What I have been hearing here on 
the floor of the Senate and in the House is that we have Republicans 
who are not sympathetic to ObamaCare, they don't like ObamaCare, and 
they would like to defund ObamaCare. But they understand we don't shut 
down the U.S. Government. We don't threaten that for the first time in 
the history of the United States we may not pay our bills, be a 
deadbeat Nation, and drive our economy and our financial system, and 
perhaps the entire world's financial system, into a catastrophic area 
by not paying our bills. We believe that there are enough Republicans 
in the House to join with Democrats and pass a clean CR.
  The President and the majority leader have both made this point: Have 
the vote. Have the vote, Mr. Speaker. Maybe you are right or maybe you 
are not. But we don't know until you have the vote. I urge, as I have 
before, that the Speaker of the House function as the Speaker of the 
House of Representatives and not as the speaker of the Republican 
Party.
  The last point I wish to make touches on an article that appeared in 
yesterday's New York Times. It is a very important article because it 
really tells us who is behind this shutdown and what their motives are. 
If anybody thinks this government shutdown or the threats about not 
paying our bills and driving the world's economy into catastrophic 
areas are ideas that just occurred the other day, that a Senator just 
had this bright idea, they would be very mistaken. The fact is we have 
a growing rightwing movement in this country funded by some of the 
wealthiest people in America, including the Koch brothers, a family 
that has made their money in fossil fuels and are worth over $70 
billion--$70 billion is their worth. They are worth $70 billion, and 
they have access to the best health care in the world. They have access 
to the best housing in the world. Their family members can go to the 
best colleges and universities in the world. Yet they are obsessed 
with, among other things, making sure 25 million Americans have no 
health insurance at all.
  I am a strong supporter of a Medicare for all, a single-payer 
program. I don't think the Affordable Care Act went far enough. But to 
say the least, 20 million or 25 million Americans can finally have 
access to health insurance. They can go to the doctor when they need to 
go to the doctor. There are now no regulations that prevent them from 
getting care because of a preexisting condition. Can we imagine 
billionaires--billionaires--going to war against working people so they 
and their kids cannot get health insurance? I think that is just 
obscene. That is just obscene.

[[Page 15314]]

  Let me quote from The New York Times article of yesterday. It is 
important that people understand that the fight against the Affordable 
Care Act is just the tip of the iceberg. We have families and 
billionaires such as the Koch brothers who not only want to see that we 
don't expand health insurance in this country, but they have a long 
list of issues they are going after. In fact, they want to repeal 
virtually every major piece of legislation passed in the last 80 years 
that protects the middle class, working families, women, children, the 
elderly, the sick, and the poor. That is their agenda. So it is not a 
question of opposing the extension of health insurance through 
ObamaCare; that is not enough for them. What they want to do is end 
Medicare as we know it right now, and transform it into a voucher 
system, that gives an elderly person who is dealing with cancer $8,000 
and says: Good luck to you.
  They want to make massive cuts in Medicaid. They don't want to expand 
Medicaid. They want massive cuts. They are very clear about wanting to 
end Social Security. They don't believe the Federal Government should 
be involved in retirement issues and Social Security.
  One of the more amazing things these guys want to do--and many of our 
Republican colleagues apparently drank the lemonade on this issue--is 
to abolish the concept of the minimum wage. The Federal minimum wage 
now is $7.25 an hour. People can't live on that. But their idea is to 
get the Federal Government out of the minimum wage issue--no floor--so 
that if an employer in a hard-pressed area in Maine or in Vermont or in 
Michigan can pay people $4 an hour, they think that is freedom: People 
have the freedom to work for $4 an hour. We don't want a minimum wage.
  So, in other words, these rightwing extremists and the big money 
behind them have a major agenda, of which repealing ObamaCare is just 
one small part.
  Let me just quote, if I might, the New York Times article. I ask 
unanimous consent to have the entire New York Times article printed in 
the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Oct. 5, 2013]

             A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning

               (By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire)

       Washington.--Shortly after President Obama started his 
     second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists 
     led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in 
     the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. 
     Obama's health care law was going nowhere, and they 
     desperately needed a new plan.
       Out of that session, held one morning in a location the 
     members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed 
     ``blueprint to defunding Obamacare,'' signed by Mr. Meese and 
     leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
       It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy 
     that had long percolated in conservative circles: that 
     Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if 
     conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow 
     Republicans--including their cautious leaders--into cutting 
     off financing for the entire federal government.
       ``We felt very strongly at the start of this year that the 
     House needed to use the power of the purse,'' said one 
     coalition member, Michael A. Needham, who runs Heritage 
     Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage 
     Foundation. ``At least at Heritage Action, we felt very 
     strongly from the start that this was a fight that we were 
     going to pick.''
       Last week the country witnessed the fallout from that 
     strategy: a standoff that has shuttered much of the federal 
     bureaucracy and unsettled the nation.
       To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But 
     interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the 
     confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth 
     of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care 
     Act, since its passage in 2010--waged by a galaxy of 
     conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and 
     interconnections than is commonly known.
       With polls showing Americans deeply divided over the law, 
     conservatives believe that the public is behind them. 
     Although the law's opponents say that shutting down the 
     government was not their objective, the activists anticipated 
     that a shutdown could occur--and worked with members of the 
     Tea Party caucus in Congress who were excited about drawing a 
     red line against a law they despise.
       A defunding ``tool kit'' created in early September 
     included talking points for the question, ``What happens when 
     you shut down the government and you are blamed for it?'' The 
     suggested answer was the one House Republicans give today: 
     ``We are simply calling to fund the entire government except 
     for the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare.''
       The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest 
     development in a well-financed, broad-based assault on the 
     health law, Mr. Obama's signature legislative initiative. 
     Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and 
     FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for 
     Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like 
     Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both 
     aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, 
     too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of 
     its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.
       The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been 
     deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group 
     linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, 
     disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit 
     organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million 
     to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month 
     with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam 
     figure popping up between a woman's legs during a 
     gynecological exam.
       The groups have also sought to pressure vulnerable 
     Republican members of Congress with scorecards keeping track 
     of their health care votes; have burned faux ``Obamacare 
     cards'' on college campuses; and have distributed scripts for 
     phone calls to Congressional offices, sample letters to 
     editors and Twitter and Facebook offerings for followers to 
     present as their own.
       One sample Twitter offering--``Obamacare is a train 
     wreck''--is a common refrain for Speaker John A. Boehner.
       As the defunding movement picked up steam among outside 
     advocates, Republicans who sounded tepid became targets. The 
     Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee 
     dedicated to ``electing true conservatives,'' ran radio 
     advertisements against three Republican incumbents.
       Heritage Action ran critical Internet advertisements in the 
     districts of 100 Republican lawmakers who had failed to sign 
     a letter by a North Carolina freshman, Representative Mark 
     Meadows, urging Mr. Boehner to take up the defunding cause.
       ``They've been hugely influential,'' said David Wasserman, 
     who tracks House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political 
     Report. ``When else in our history has a freshman member of 
     Congress from North Carolina been able to round up a gang of 
     80 that's essentially ground the government to a halt?''
       On Capitol Hill, the advocates found willing partners in 
     Tea Party conservatives, who have repeatedly threatened to 
     shut down the government if they do not get their way on 
     spending issues. This time they said they were so alarmed by 
     the health law that they were willing to risk a shutdown over 
     it. (``This is exactly what the public wants,'' 
     Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, founder of the 
     House Tea Party Caucus, said on the eve of the shutdown.)
       Despite Mrs. Bachmann's comments, not all of the groups 
     have been on board with the defunding campaign. Some, like 
     the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity, which spent $5.5 
     million on health care television advertisements over the 
     past three months, are more focused on sowing public doubts 
     about the law. But all have a common goal, which is to 
     cripple a measure that Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican 
     and leader of the defunding effort, has likened to a horror 
     movie.
       ``We view this as a long-term effort,'' said Tim Phillips, 
     the president of Americans for Prosperity. He said his group 
     expected to spend ``tens of millions'' of dollars on a 
     ``multifront effort'' that includes working to prevent states 
     from expanding Medicaid under the law. The group's goal is 
     not to defund the law.
       ``We want to see this law repealed,'' Mr. Phillips said.


                           A Familiar Tactic

       The crowd was raucous at the Hilton Anatole, just north of 
     downtown Dallas, when Mr. Needham's group, Heritage Action, 
     arrived on a Tuesday in August for the second stop on a nine-
     city ``Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour.'' Nearly 1,000 people 
     turned out to hear two stars of the Tea Party movement: Mr. 
     Cruz, and Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina senator who 
     runs the Heritage Foundation.
       ``You're here because now is the single best time we have 
     to defund Obamacare,'' declared Mr. Cruz, who would go on to 
     rail against the law on the Senate floor in September with a 
     monologue that ran for 21 hours. ``This is a fight we can 
     win.''
       Although Mr. Cruz is new to the Senate, the tactic of 
     defunding in Washington is not. For years, Congress has 
     banned the use of certain federal money to pay for abortions, 
     except in the case of incest and rape, by attaching the so-
     called Hyde Amendment to spending bills.
       After the health law passed in 2010, Todd Tiahrt, then a 
     Republican congressman from

[[Page 15315]]

     Kansas, proposed defunding bits and pieces of it. He said he 
     spoke to Mr. Boehner's staff about the idea while the Supreme 
     Court, which upheld the central provision, was weighing the 
     law's constitutionality.
       ``There just wasn't the appetite for it at the time,'' Mr. 
     Tiahrt said in an interview. ``They thought, we don't need to 
     worry about it because the Supreme Court will strike it 
     down.''
       But the idea of using the appropriations process to defund 
     an entire federal program, particularly one as far-reaching 
     as the health care overhaul, raised the stakes considerably. 
     In an interview, Mr. DeMint, who left the Senate to join the 
     Heritage Foundation in January, said he had been thinking 
     about it since the law's passage, in part because Republican 
     leaders were not more aggressive.
       ``They've been through a series of C.R.s and debt limits,'' 
     Mr. DeMint said, referring to continuing resolutions on 
     spending, ``and all the time there was discussion of `O.K., 
     we're not going to fight the Obamacare fight, we'll do it 
     next time.' The conservatives who ran in 2010 promising to 
     repeal it kept hearing, `This is not the right time to fight 
     this battle.'''
       Mr. DeMint is hardly alone in his distaste for the health 
     law, or his willingness to do something about it. In the 
     three years since Mr. Obama signed the health measure, Tea 
     Party-inspired groups have mobilized, aided by a financing 
     network that continues to grow, both in its complexity and 
     the sheer amount of money that flows through it.
       A review of tax records, campaign finance reports and 
     corporate filings shows that hundreds of millions of dollars 
     have been raised and spent since 2012 by organizations, many 
     of them loosely connected, leading opposition to the measure.
       One of the biggest sources of conservative money is Freedom 
     Partners, a tax-exempt ``business league'' that claims more 
     than 200 members, each of whom pays at least $100,000 in 
     dues. The group's board is headed by a longtime executive of 
     Koch Industries, the conglomerate run by the Koch brothers, 
     who were among the original financiers of the Tea Party 
     movement. The Kochs declined to comment.
       While Freedom Partners has financed organizations that are 
     pushing to defund the law, like Heritage Action and Tea Party 
     Patriots, Freedom Partners has not advocated that. A 
     spokesman for the group, James Davis, said it was more 
     focused on ``educating Americans around the country on the 
     negative impacts of Obamacare.''
       The largest recipient of Freedom Partners cash--about $115 
     million--was the Center to Protect Patient Rights, according 
     to the groups' latest tax filings. Run by a political 
     consultant with ties to the Kochs and listing an Arizona post 
     office box for its address, the center appears to be little 
     more than a clearinghouse for donations to still more groups, 
     including American Commitment and the 60 Plus Association, 
     both ardent foes of the health care law.
       American Commitment and 60 Plus were among a handful of 
     groups calling themselves the ``Repeal Coalition'' that sent 
     a letter in August urging Republican leaders in the House and 
     the Senate to insist ``at a minimum'' in a one-year delay of 
     carrying out the health care law as part of any budget deal. 
     Another group, the Conservative 50 Plus Alliance, delivered a 
     defunding petition with 68,700 signatures to the Senate.
       In the fight to shape public opinion, conservatives face 
     well-organized liberal foes. Enroll America, a nonprofit 
     group allied with the Obama White House, is waging a campaign 
     to persuade millions of the uninsured to buy coverage. The 
     law's supporters are also getting huge assistance from the 
     insurance industry, which is expected to spend $1 billion on 
     advertising to help sell its plans on the exchanges.
       ``It is David versus Goliath,'' said Mr. Phillips of 
     Americans for Prosperity.
       But conservatives are finding that with relatively small 
     advertising buys, they can make a splash. Generation 
     Opportunity, the youth-oriented outfit behind the ``Creepy 
     Uncle Sam'' ads, is spending $750,000 on that effort, aimed 
     at dissuading young people--a cohort critical to the success 
     of the health care overhaul--from signing up for insurance 
     under the new law.
       The group receives substantial backing from Freedom 
     Partners and appears ready to expand. Recently, Generation 
     Opportunity moved into spacious new offices in Arlington, 
     Va., where exposed ductwork, Ikea chairs and a Ping-Pong 
     table give off the feel of a Silicon Valley start-up.
       Its executive director, Evan Feinberg, a 29-year-old former 
     Capitol Hill aide and onetime instructor for a leadership 
     institute founded by Charles Koch, said there would be more 
     Uncle Sam ads, coupled with college campus visits, this fall. 
     Two other groups, FreedomWorks, with its ``Burn Your 
     Obamacare Card'' protests, and Young Americans for Liberty, 
     are also running campus events.
       ``A lot of folks have asked us, `Are we trying to sabotage 
     the law?''' Mr. Feinberg said in an interview last week. His 
     answer echoes the Freedom Partners philosophy: ``Our goal is 
     to educate and empower young people.''


                            Critical Timing

       But many on the Republican right wanted to do more.
       Mr. Meese's low-profile coalition, the Conservative Action 
     Project, which seeks to find common ground among leaders of 
     an array of fiscally and socially conservative groups, was 
     looking ahead to last Tuesday, when the new online health 
     insurance marketplaces, called exchanges, were set to open. 
     If the law took full effect as planned, many conservatives 
     feared, it would be nearly impossible to repeal--even if a 
     Republican president were elected in 2016.
       ``I think people realized that with the imminent beginning 
     of Obamacare, that this was a critical time to make every 
     effort to stop something,'' Mr. Meese said in an interview. 
     (He has since stepped down as the coalition's chairman and 
     has been succeeded by David McIntosh, a former congressman 
     from Indiana.)
       The defunding idea, Mr. Meese said, was ``a logical 
     strategy.'' The idea drew broad support. Fiscal conservatives 
     like Chris Chocola, the president of the Club for Growth, 
     signed on to the blueprint. So did social and religious 
     conservatives, like the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional 
     Values Coalition.
       The document set a target date: March 27, when a continuing 
     resolution allowing the government to function was to expire. 
     Its message was direct: ``Conservatives should not approve a 
     C.R. unless it defunds Obamacare.''
       But the March date came and went without a defunding 
     struggle. In the Senate, Mr. Cruz and Senator Mike Lee, a 
     Utah Republican, talked up the defunding idea, but it went 
     nowhere in the Democratic-controlled chamber. In the House, 
     Mr. Boehner wanted to concentrate instead on locking in the 
     across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration, and Tea 
     Party lawmakers followed his lead. Outside advocates were 
     unhappy but held their fire.
       ``We didn't cause any trouble,'' Mr. Chocola said.
       Yet by summer, with an August recess looming and another 
     temporary spending bill expiring at the end of September, the 
     groups were done waiting.
       ``I remember talking to reporters at the end of July, and 
     they said, `This didn't go anywhere,''' Mr. Needham recalled. 
     ``What all of us felt at the time was, this was never going 
     to be a strategy that was going to win inside the Beltway. It 
     was going to be a strategy where, during August, people would 
     go home and hear from their constituents, saying: `You 
     pledged to do everything you could to stop Obamacare. Will 
     you defund it?'''
       Heritage Action, which has trained 6,000 people it calls 
     sentinels around the country, sent them to open meetings and 
     other events to confront their elected representatives. Its 
     ``Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour,'' which began in 
     Fayetteville, Ark., on Aug. 19 and ended 10 days later in 
     Wilmington, Del., drew hundreds at every stop.
       The Senate Conservatives Fund, led by Mr. DeMint when he 
     was in the Senate, put up a Web site in July called 
     dontfundobama
     care.com and ran television ads featuring Mr. Cruz and Mr. 
     Lee urging people to tell their representatives not to fund 
     the law.
       When Senator Richard M. Burr, a North Carolina Republican, 
     told a reporter that defunding the law was ``the dumbest idea 
     I've ever heard,'' the fund bought a radio ad to attack him. 
     Two other Republican senators up for re-election in 2014, 
     Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lindsey Graham of South 
     Carolina, were also targeted. Both face Tea Party 
     challengers.
       In Washington, Tea Party Patriots, which created the 
     defunding tool kit, set up a Web site, exemptamerica.com, to 
     promote a rally last month showcasing many of the Republicans 
     in Congress whom Democrats--and a number of fellow 
     Republicans--say are most responsible for the shutdown.
       While conservatives believe that the public will back them 
     on defunding, a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation 
     found that a majority--57 percent--disapproves of cutting off 
     funding as a way to stop the law.
       Last week, with the health care exchanges open for business 
     and a number of prominent Republicans complaining that the 
     ``Defund Obamacare'' strategy was politically damaging and 
     pointless, Mr. Needham of Heritage Action said he felt good 
     about what the groups had accomplished.
       ``It really was a groundswell,'' he said, ``that changed 
     Washington from the outside in.''

  Mr. SANDERS. I thank the Presiding Officer.
  Let me quote from the yesterday's New York Times:

       The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest 
     development in a well-financed, broadbased assault on the 
     health law, Mr. Obama's signature legislative initiative. 
     Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity, and 
     FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for 
     Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like 
     Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both 
     aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, 
     too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of 
     its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.

[[Page 15316]]

       The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been 
     deeply involved with financing the overall effort.

  Let me repeat that.

       The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been 
     deeply involved with financing the overall effort.

  Remember, these are the guys who are worth $70 billion, who want to 
essentially repeal every major piece of legislation protecting working 
families over the last 80 years.
  Let me go back to the article:

       A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of 
     Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year--

  $200 million last year.

     to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight.

  Et cetera, et cetera.
  Now I will go to another paragraph, which is really interesting and 
really important:

       The groups have also sought to pressure vulnerable 
     Republican members of Congress with scorecards keeping track 
     of their health care votes; have burned faux ``Obamacare 
     cards'' on college campuses; and have distributed scripts for 
     phone calls to Congressional offices, sample letters to 
     editors and Twitter and Facebook offerings for followers to 
     present as their own.

  What is going on here? What does that mean? This is what it means. As 
a result of the disastrous Supreme Court ruling called Citizens United, 
what billionaires such as the Koch brothers and others can do--and what 
they are doing today--is to say to Republicans in the House of 
Representatives: If you vote for a clean continuing resolution, if you 
vote to keep the government open, if you make it very clear that you 
will oppose any effort to see the U.S. default on its debts--if you do 
that, let me tell you what is going to happen to you, because we have 
the Koch brothers and people worth billions of dollars who are prepared 
to jump into your campaign, perhaps get a primary opponent to run 
against you, and to fund that opponent with as much money as he or she 
needs.
  So now, what democracy in the House--as a result of Citizens United--
is about is that a handful of billionaires can threaten any Member of 
the House with defeat by pouring in unlimited sums of money if they 
vote in a way that the Koch brothers do not like.
  If that is how people think American democracy is supposed to 
function, it would surprise me very much. But that is not what American 
democracy is supposed to be about. That tells me again why we have to 
do everything we can to overturn this disastrous Citizens United 
Supreme Court decision so that a handful of billionaires cannot dictate 
public policy here in the United States of America and in the Congress.
  Let me just conclude by saying this: The American people are angry 
and they are frustrated, and I think what they are seeing is that the 
middle class of this country is disappearing. In fact, in the last 24 
years median family income today is lower than it was. It has gone 
down. You have millions of people who are out there working for wages 
they just cannot raise a family on. You are seeing right now a growth 
in poverty among elderly people. In the midst of a disappearing middle 
class and the increase of poverty, you are seeing more income and 
wealth inequality in this country than we have seen since the 1920s. 
The gap between the very rich and everybody else grows wider. And now, 
as I mentioned a moment ago, what billionaires are doing with their 
money is continuing their war against the middle class by trying to 
repeal important pieces of legislation.
  What the American people are saying is: What about us? What about us? 
Who is worried that my kid who graduated from high school cannot find a 
job? Who is worried that my other kid who graduated college is leaving 
school deeply in debt? Who is worried that in our country we are not 
being aggressive in dealing with the issue of global warming?
  There are enormous issues facing the middle class in this country: 
the need to create millions of jobs, the need to raise the minimum 
wage, the need to make college affordable, the need to significantly 
improve childcare in this country and education in general.
  There is an enormous amount of work to be done. What this Congress 
should not be doing is telling 2 million workers that you are not 
getting paid, furloughing what was then 800,000, now 400,000 workers. 
That is not what we should be doing.
  I hope the American people stand and make it clear to our Republican 
friends that they cannot shut down the government because they are not 
getting their way. I hope the American people would do everything they 
can to demand that this Congress start doing its job, which is to 
represent working families.
  With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. 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. BROWN. Mr. President, I rise today with a pretty simple message 
for House leadership: You can end this Republican shutdown today. Just 
simply let the House vote.
  On issue after issue after issue, when the House has acted, the 
Senate has responded with a vote, either with a vote for or against a 
tabling motion or a vote for or against legislation, but we have taken 
a vote. We simply ask the House to do the same.
  By scheduling a vote on the Senate-passed plan--the continuing 
resolution--Speaker Boehner can ensure that more than 800,000 workers, 
including tens of thousands in my home State of Ohio, can get back to 
work.
  By scheduling a vote on the Senate-passed bill, he can reopen the 
government without rehashing old political fights; then get down to 
business--deal with the debt limit--then get down to business and make 
decisions about immigration, make decisions about jobs, make decisions 
about what we are going to do with the budget.
  I do not think we have ever, Mr. Speaker, seen one faction of one 
party of one chamber of one branch of government hold the entire 
country and economic recovery of our Nation hostage--a faction of one 
party of one house of one branch of government hold the country 
hostage.
  Do not take my word for it. A Cleveland Plain Dealer headline said: 
``Republicans need to quit the attack on Obamacare and agree to a clean 
continuing resolution.'' They called the actions of the far right 
attack on the 3-year-old health care law--the health care law that was 
passed overwhelmingly in both Houses, with 60 votes in the Senate and 
well over a majority in the House, affirmed in part by the Supreme 
Court--the Plain Dealer called the actions attacking the health care 
law ``bordering on the un-American.''
  The Toledo Blade called the actions of the far right in the House 
``GOP extortion,'' challenging Speaker Boehner to put America's economy 
over his own job, reminding him of his election night saying the 2012 
election ``changes that,'' making the health law ``the law of the 
land.''
  Finally, the Washington Post--no stranger to criticizing Democrats--
called out the ``House of Embarrassment'' and its ``heedlessness'' on 
the impact of its actions on ordinary Americans.
  I was home this weekend, and I spoke with all kinds of people. I 
spoke with Federal employees, some of whom have been furloughed, some 
of whom have not. I spoke with others in Avon Lake, OH, other places. I 
listened to what they had to say. People are frustrated. They cannot 
believe that, again, one group of radicals in one House of one branch 
of government can, for all intents and purposes, shut the country down 
and move us towards the precipice of what happens if the Congress does 
not pay the bills that we as a Congress ran up. These are real people 
facing a real and devastating impact.
  I did something else that I know the Acting President pro tempore, as 
a Senator from Maine, a former Governor, does also: get on the phone 
and just talk to people in your State about the impact this will have.
  I spoke to one of the leaders of an institution in Ohio that has a 
large R&D

[[Page 15317]]

presence in the State. He talked about the irreparable damage to our 
infrastructure, similar to what happens in Senator Nelson's State--who 
just joined me on the floor--what could happen at NASA in South 
Florida, what happens at NASA in Cleveland, what happens at Batelle in 
Columbus, what happens at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton.
  This leader at one of these institutions--I do not want to call him 
out by name--he talked about the irreparable damage to our 
infrastructure as a nation. This is not just highways and bridges. This 
is scientific researchers, this is engineers, this is people working on 
some of the most top secret issues in our country and our government.
  He went on to say it is asymmetric: building and killing a scientific 
endeavor. Think about that. Killing a scientific endeavor you can do in 
a week or you can do in a month simply by stopping the research by an 
interruption like this, where many of the top scientists, the top 
engineers, at some point just say: I do not want to go through this 
again. I am not going to continue to do this important work for my 
country and then see it shut down because somebody has a political ax 
to grind, because somebody, on a continuing resolution, or one 
political party, as we approach the debt ceiling, wants to attach their 
political platform to one of these important pieces of legislation just 
to make the government run.
  What is happening in places like that is some of these engineers say: 
I am not sure I want to work for NASA anymore. I am not sure I want to 
stay in the military. I am not sure I want to be at a major research 
institution like Batelle. I can go elsewhere where my work will not get 
interrupted and people will show their appreciation simply by 
continuing to fund my research.
  When you think about this building and killing a scientific endeavor, 
it is a little bit like one old politician said, that it takes a 
carpenter a long time to build a barn, but any--I am not sure he used 
the word ``mule''--but any mule can knock down that barn in a day or 
so.
  I remember I was in a car accident years ago. I broke my back. I was 
in the hospital for a week. For 3 days I stayed in bed. I remember the 
first time I tried to walk how my muscles had atrophied. It took 
several weeks before I was back to full strength and could rebuild that 
muscle.
  That is really the way it is with these research institutions in our 
country, which we have so many of, that are so important, whether it is 
NASA, whether it is Batelle, whether it is Wright-Patterson Air Force 
Base, whether it is the National Institutes of Health. We have 
assembled some of the greatest scientists and engineers and technicians 
in the world at these institutions, but building a scientific endeavor 
takes days and weeks and months and years; killing one is a matter of 
an interruption of 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 weeks.
  That is why this is so dangerous, this shut down. That is why going 
up against the debt ceiling is potentially catastrophic for our 
country. It makes no sense. It is not good for our economy. It is not 
good for our people. It is not good for our Federal workforce that 
really can do the right kinds of things for our country.
  Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I would be glad to yield to the Senator 
from Florida.
  Mr. NELSON. What the Senator said about NASA is so true. Would the 
Senator believe that 97 percent of the workforce at the National 
Aeronautics and Space Administration is on furlough? A few of us had to 
intercede. The Mars mission that is supposed to go in a narrow window 
between mid-November and early December--if they miss that window, it 
would be another 2 years before they could launch that Mars mission 
and, therefore, you would have all the expense of keeping the 
scientists on, and so forth. We finally got them to bring them back so 
they could continue processing the mission so it can launch in that 
narrow 3-week window. But the rest of the people are gone.
  Does that sound very intelligent to the Senator from Ohio?
  Mr. BROWN. I would add, it is interesting: Three of the great NASA 
facilities are represented on the floor now by Senator Cornyn from 
Texas, Senator Nelson, and me. It is not just NASA employees at NASA 
Glenn in Cleveland.
  Mr. NELSON. Correct.
  Mr. BROWN. It is another 1,300 contractors who are doing work paid by 
taxpayers. They are actually private companies, as the Senator knows. 
It is the same in Florida, the same in Texas. And their work is 
important too.
  I just think these kinds of interruptions are so senseless. What I 
heard more than anything from people when I was home was how senseless 
this is, how ludicrous this is.
  I spoke to hospital administrators all over my State today. I was on 
the phone with a number of them from Williams County in the northwest 
corner of the State, to Columbus, to Cleveland, to all over, and it is 
senseless to them that they are in the midst of maybe a hospital 
expansion or maybe just doing the day-to-day work of the hospital, and 
they do not know what to think.
  I have heard many of my colleagues here for years talk about the 
unpredictability of this economy and that it is partly because of 
Washington and ObamaCare or maybe Dodd-Frank: We do not know what is 
happening next.
  The worst kind of unpredictability is shutting the government down or 
leading us right up to the debt ceiling. That is why it is so important 
that the House vote and then we get serious about doing the debt 
ceiling vote and then we move on to issues such as immigration and 
others that matter for our country.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I agree with our colleagues that a 
government shutdown is not the best way to do business around here. We 
should get together--the President, the House, and the Senate--and we 
should work this out, both the continuing resolution and the debt 
ceiling, of which Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew has said he will 
basically run out of all of the extraordinary measures he can use to 
avoid us reaching the debt ceiling--which, colloquially speaking, I 
would say is the equivalent of maxing out your credit card, the Federal 
Government's credit card.
  But it is worth remembering that as James Baker, former Secretary of 
the Treasury, Secretary of State, with a distinguished record of public 
service going back many years--he recently noted in an article in the 
Wall Street Journal that since 1976 we have had 17 government shutdowns 
temporarily until differences between the parties, between the branches 
could be worked out. I hope we can do that sooner rather than later.
  The truth is that there was a way out with regard to the shutdown, 
particularly when the House passed a piece of legislation that would 
maintain the spending limits at $988 billion, which was the same level 
the Senate majority had chosen, but it also attached two other 
provisions to it, one of which would have eliminated the carve-out for 
Congress for ObamaCare--in other words, the carve-out that treats 
Congress differently than the rest of the country. Our Democratic 
friends unfortunately voted against that provision. All Republicans 
voted to eliminate that carve-out.
  The second was the delay in the penalties that would be applied to 
individuals who do not buy government-approved health insurance under 
ObamaCare. The President has unilaterally delayed for 1 year the 
penalties for employers who do not meet the requirements of ObamaCare. 
All we were asking is that the same consideration be given to hard-
working Americans. If our friends across the aisle--or at least enough 
of them--had joined with us to vote for both of those provisions that 
came over with the House bill, the government would not be shut down, 
it would be operating. But that was the decision they made. I think 
they made a mistake.
  But we know the government shutdown debate is now quickly becoming a

[[Page 15318]]

debate over the broader subject of what we do about spending and debt, 
particularly what we do with regard to the debt ceiling I mentioned 
earlier. We have reached almost the top of our credit limit on the 
Nation's credit card, and President Obama is asking for another 
trillion dollars in spending, in debt limit. But the President differs 
from many of us in that he thinks this debt ceiling cap ought to be 
lifted by another trillion dollars without anything else attached to 
it. He thinks it ought to be automatic, even though we believe it is 
entirely appropriate--and the majority of times in the past, the debt 
ceiling increase has been accompanied by other long-term policy 
reforms. The President himself has agreed to these kinds of reforms in 
the past. But apparently this time he has drawn a line in the sand.
  So now he believes, unlike the past, that Congress should act like a 
rubberstamp when it comes to raising the limit on America's credit 
card, our debt limit. Meanwhile, it seems our friends across the aisle 
also feel the House should be a rubberstamp for the Senate. All of this 
leads me to conclude that James Madison, the father of the 
Constitution, must be rolling over in his grave because he and others 
of the Founders were the geniuses who decided that it was the checks 
and balances from separated government--the executive and the 
legislative, the House and the Senate--that would best protect our 
freedoms and best prevent overreach by other branches.
  But in a way I can understand why the President and the majority 
leader are refusing to negotiate and are saying ``it is my way or the 
highway.'' After all, the last time we had these kinds of major fiscal 
talks in advance of a debt ceiling deadline, the result was the Budget 
Control Act. That was 2011. That law produced, by default, real 
spending cuts and real deficit reduction. If you recall, that was where 
the supercommittee was created to try to negotiate a grand bargain. The 
supercommittee was unsuccessful, and the default was the Budget Control 
Act and the sequester, which automatically cut discretionary spending. 
Our friends across the aisle clearly think that was a big mistake. The 
President and the majority leader now are refusing to negotiate at all 
on the debt ceiling. They believe it ought to be rubberstamped.
  Well, amidst all of the rhetoric and the finger-pointing, now 
Washington has erupted into something it does best, which is the blame 
game. I am afraid we have lost sight of our underlying debt problem.
  Despite the short-term deficit reduction we have witnessed since 2011 
due to the default position of the Budget Control Act, our long-term 
fiscal trajectory remains unsustainable. Last month the Congressional 
Budget Office projected that publicly held Federal debt is on course to 
exceed the size of our entire economy. By that point, again, under 
current law, the interest we have to pay to China and other foreign 
creditors that hold more than half of our debt will be 2\1/2\ times 
greater than the 40-year average. We know interest rates are 
extraordinarily and abnormally low because of the policies of the 
Federal Reserve. But can you imagine, for that $17 trillion in debt on 
which the U.S. Government would have to pay historic averages of 
interest to our creditors in order to get them to buy our debt, what 
impact that would have? Well, I will talk about that more in a moment.
  If we continue down this road without adopting real reforms for our 
long-term fiscal challenges, we will condemn our children and our 
grandchildren to fewer jobs, slower economic growth, worse opportunity, 
and a much greater risk of a full-blown fiscal crisis.
  In the event of a crisis, our safety net programs that we all care 
about for the most vulnerable in our country would be cut harshly and 
abruptly, as would our ability to fund national security and other 
priorities.
  Nobody wants that kind of a future. Nobody has to accept that kind of 
a future if we just do our job--not the President trying to go it alone 
again, not the Senate saying ``it is my way or the highway'' to the 
House, but by the House and the Senate and the White House working 
together to try to work our way through it.
  But if we continue to rack up debt--another trillion is what the 
President wants to raise the debt limit--and if we continue to postpone 
the hard choices and leave it to others, we will move closer and closer 
to an eventual disaster. By contrast, if we were to take the 
responsibility now to reform our safety net programs, we could reform 
them gradually so that people would barely feel it. That will make it 
much easier to protect the Americans who need these programs the most--
our seniors and the most vulnerable in our society.
  Of course, we cannot make any real progress as long as the President 
and the majority leader in the Senate refuse to negotiate. As I said 
earlier, Congress is not a rubberstamp. That is not the Constitution 
written by our Founders. The House of Representatives is not a 
rubberstamp for the Senate. We have been willing to compromise and 
negotiate. As a matter of fact, the House has sent over multiple bills. 
Every time a Member of the opposing party comes to the floor and talks 
about the National Institutes of Health's funding being cut off for 
children's cancer research, we have come down here and said: Well, 
let's pass the bill. Let's pass that appropriation.
  When someone has said: Well, what about the veterans' disability 
claims that are stacking up and are not being processed as a result of 
the shutdown, the House has passed legislation. We have come to the 
floor and offered legislation that would allow us to address that 
problem, but we have been told no time and time again.
  I ask unanimous consent for 4 additional minutes.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, we need to work together. That is the only 
way this is going to happen. We know it will happen. It is going to 
happen. The President cannot take the unsustainable position that ``it 
is my way or the highway and I will not negotiate,'' especially since 
he has done it before, especially since that is the only way our 
constitutional framework allows the resolution of problems. If we were 
to do--which we are not going to do--what the President and the 
majority leader have asked us to do, which is to raise the debt limit 
automatically without dealing with any of our long-term fiscal 
problems, we would simply be encouraging Congress and our policymakers 
to delay the tough choices and hard votes. We would be encouraging--
indeed, we would be enabling--this type of fiscal profligacy that has 
left us with a gross national debt of $17 trillion, which is about 
$53,000 for every man, woman, and child in America.
  More than $6 trillion of debt has been added since President Obama 
became President of the United States. Yet the President seems to show 
absolutely no sense of urgency in dealing with it. That is despite his 
own fiscal commission, the Simpson-Bowles Commission, coming back in 
December 2010--that was a bipartisan commission he himself appointed--
they came back with their own policy prescription to deal with this 
problem. Republicans, some of our most conservative Members, and some 
of the most liberal Members on the other side of the aisle came 
together and they voted for the Simpson-Bowles Commission report in 
December 2010, but the President simply walked away from it.
  Back in March, he told ABC News:

       We do not have an immediate crisis in terms of debt. In 
     fact, for the next 10 years, it is going to be in a 
     sustainable place.

  That is what the President of the United States said last March. But 
that is not what his own bipartisan fiscal commission said in December 
2010. That is not what the Congressional Budget Office says. As 
everybody around here knows, the Congressional Budget Office is the 
final authority on these matters. In their 2013 long-term budget 
outlook, on page 13, they have a couple of pages that I ask unanimous 
consent to have printed in the Record following my remarks.
  It is entitled ``Consequences of Large and Growing Federal Debt.'' 
They did

[[Page 15319]]

not say: We do not have an immediate crisis in terms of debt, and we 
are pretty much in a sustainable place for 10 years.
  They said:

       The high and rising amounts of Federal debt held by the 
     public that CBO projects for the coming decades under the 
     extended baseline would have significant negative 
     consequences for both the economy and the federal budget.

  What were those? They said there would be less national savings and 
less future income. They said there would be pressure for larger tax 
increases and spending cuts to deal with this, particularly the 
phenomena of high interest payments that I mentioned a moment ago.
  Again, because of the Federal Reserve's policies, it costs next to 
nothing for the Federal Government in terms of interest on our national 
debt, but when that goes back up to historic averages, to 4, 5 percent, 
it is going to cost trillions of dollars more for us to service the 
existing debt, not to mention the additional trillion the President 
wants to borrow.
  What is that going to do? Well, that is going to crowd out other 
priorities such as NASA, which my colleague from Florida and I both 
think is an important national priority. I heard the Senator from Ohio 
say the same. But higher interest payments as a result of not dealing 
with this high debt are going to crowd out other important national 
priorities.
  Finally, the Congressional Budget Office said there is a ``greater 
chance of a fiscal crisis.'' Specifically, what they are talking about 
is that as we pay more and more for interest on our national debt, we 
lose more and more control over our fiscal future. As we all know on a 
bipartisan basis, we have been told time and time again by the experts 
that when our creditors lose confidence in our ability to repay debt, 
there can come a breaking moment when all of a sudden we lose control 
and all of these things happen, which we can avoid if we deal 
responsibly today.
  In other words, the President seems content to let one of his 
successors deal with the problem of our rising national debt--that is 
only, I would add, if we get lucky enough to postpone the kinds of 
crises and problems CBO and Simpson-Bowles project that long. The 
President obviously has other priorities, but I want to remind him what 
his own former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mike Mullen, 
said when he was asked about the Nation's biggest threat to our 
national security.
  He said it was the national debt. The President himself has echoed 
those comments, but the President is still sitting on the sidelines and 
still takes the untenable position that he is unwilling to negotiate. 
At a time when the country needs genuine leadership, he is nowhere to 
be found.
  Until that changes, we are not going to get any closer to where we 
need to be sooner, rather than later, and that is a true bipartisan 
compromise.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article: 
``Consequences of Large and Growing Federal Debt.''
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

          [From the 2013 Long-Term Budget Outlook, Sept. 2013]

             Consequences of Large and Growing Federal Debt

       The high and rising amounts of federal debt held by the 
     public that CBO projects for coming decades under the 
     extended baseline would have significant negative 
     consequences for both the economy and the federal budget. 
     Those consequences include reducing the total amounts of 
     national saving and income; increasing the government's 
     interest payments, thereby putting more pressure on the rest 
     of the budget; limiting lawmakers' flexibility to respond to 
     unexpected events; and increasing the likelihood of a fiscal 
     crisis.


                 Less National Saving and Future Income

       Large federal budget deficits over the long term would 
     reduce investment, resulting in lower national income and 
     higher interest rates than would otherwise occur. The reason 
     is that increased government borrowing would cause a larger 
     share of the savings potentially available for investment to 
     be used for purchasing government securities, such as 
     Treasury bonds. Those purchases would ``crowd out'' 
     investment in capital goods, such as factories and computers, 
     which make workers more productive. Because wages are 
     determined mainly by workers' productivity, the reduction in 
     investment would also reduce wages, lessening people's 
     incentive to work. In addition, both private borrowers and 
     the government would have to pay higher interest rates to 
     compete for savings, and those higher rates would strengthen 
     people's incentive to save. However, the rise in private 
     saving would be a good deal smaller than the increase in 
     federal borrowing represented by the change in the deficit, 
     so national saving would decline, as would private 
     investment. (For a detailed analysis of those economic 
     effects, see Chapter 6.)
       In the short run, though, large federal budget deficits 
     would tend to boost demand, thus increasing output and 
     employment relative to what they would be with smaller 
     deficits. That is especially the case under conditions like 
     those now prevailing in the United States--with substantial 
     unemployment and underused factories, offices, and 
     equipment--which have led the Federal Reserve to push short-
     term interest rates down almost to zero. The effects of the 
     higher demand would be temporary because stabilizing forces 
     in the economy tend to move output back toward its potential 
     level. Those forces include the response of prices and 
     interest rates to higher demand, as well as (in normal times) 
     actions by the Federal Reserve.


    Pressure for Larger Tax Increases or Spending Cuts in the Future

       Large amounts of federal debt ordinarily require the 
     government to make large interest payments to its lenders, 
     and growth in the debt causes those interest payments to 
     increase. (Net interest payments are currently fairly small 
     relative to the size of the federal budget because interest 
     rates are exceptionally low, but CBO projects that those 
     payments will increase considerably as rates return to more 
     normal levels.)
       Higher interest payments would consume a larger portion of 
     federal revenues, resulting in a larger gap between the 
     remaining revenues and the amount that would be spent on 
     federal programs under current law. Hence, if lawmakers 
     wanted to maintain the benefits and services that the 
     government is scheduled to provide under current law, while 
     not allowing deficits to increase as interest payments grew, 
     revenues would have to rise as well. Additional revenues 
     could be raised in many different ways, but to the extent 
     that they were generated by boosting marginal tax rates (the 
     rates on an additional dollar of income), the higher tax 
     rates would discourage people from working and saving, 
     further reducing output and income. Alternatively, lawmakers 
     could choose to offset rising interest costs, at least in 
     part, by reducing benefits and services. Those reductions 
     could be made in many ways, but to the extent that they came 
     from cutting federal investments, future output and income 
     would also be reduced. As another option, lawmakers could 
     respond to higher interest payments by allowing deficits to 
     increase for some time, but that approach would require 
     greater deficit reduction later if lawmakers wanted to avoid 
     a long-term increase in debt relative to GDP.


   Reduced Ability to Respond to Domestic and International Problems

       Having a relatively small amount of outstanding debt gives 
     a government the ability to borrow funds to address 
     significant unexpected events, such as recessions, financial 
     crises, and wars. In contrast, having a large amount of debt 
     leaves a government with less flexibility to address 
     financial and economic crises, which in many countries have 
     been very costly. A large amount of debt could also harm a 
     country's national security by constraining military spending 
     in times of crisis or limiting the country's ability to 
     prepare for such a crisis.
       A few years ago, the size of the U.S. federal debt gave the 
     government the flexibility to respond to the financial crisis 
     and severe recession by increasing spending and cutting taxes 
     to stimulate economic activity, providing public funding to 
     stabilize the financial sector, and continuing to pay for 
     other programs even as tax revenues dropped sharply because 
     of the decline in output and income. If federal debt stayed 
     at its current percentage of GDP or grew further, the 
     government would find it more difficult to undertake similar 
     policies in the future. As a result, future recessions and 
     financial crises could have larger negative effects on the 
     economy and on people's well-being. Moreover, the reduced 
     financial flexibility and increased dependence on foreign 
     investors that would accompany a rise in debt could weaken 
     the United States' international leadership.


                   Greater Chance of a Fiscal Crisis

       A large and continually growing federal debt would have 
     another significant negative consequence: It would increase 
     the probability of a fiscal crisis for the United States. In 
     such a crisis, investors become unwilling to finance all of a 
     government's borrowing needs unless they are compensated with 
     very high interest rates; as a result, the interest rates on 
     government debt rise suddenly and sharply relative to rates 
     of return on other assets. That increase in interest rates 
     reduces the market value of outstanding government bonds, 
     causing losses

[[Page 15320]]

     for investors who hold them. Such a decline can precipitate a 
     broader financial crisis by creating losses for mutual funds, 
     pension funds, insurance companies, banks, and other holders 
     of government debt--losses that may be large enough to cause 
     some financial institutions to fail.
       Unfortunately, there is no way to predict with any 
     confidence whether or when such a fiscal crisis might occur 
     in the United States. In particular, there is no identifiable 
     tipping point of debt relative to GDP that indicates that a 
     crisis is likely or imminent. All else being equal, however, 
     the larger a government's debt, the greater the risk of a 
     fiscal crisis.
       The likelihood of such a crisis also depends on the 
     economic environment, both domestic and international. If 
     investors expect continued economic growth, they are 
     generally less concerned about debt burdens; conversely, high 
     debt can reinforce more general concern about an economy. In 
     many cases around the world, fiscal crises have begun during 
     recessions and, in turn, have exacerbated them. In some 
     instances, a crisis has been triggered by news that a 
     government would, for any number of reasons, need to borrow 
     an unexpectedly large amount of money. Then, as investors 
     lost confidence and interest rates spiked, borrowing became 
     more difficult and expensive for the government. That 
     development forced policymakers to either cut spending and 
     increase taxes immediately and substantially to reassure 
     investors, or renege on the terms of the country's existing 
     debt, or increase the supply of money and boost inflation. In 
     some cases, a fiscal crisis also made borrowing more 
     expensive for private-sector borrowers because uncertainty 
     about the government's response to the crisis reduced 
     confidence in the viability of private-sector enterprises. 
     Higher private-sector interest rates, combined with 
     reductions in government spending and increases in taxes, 
     have tended to worsen economic conditions in the short term.
       If a fiscal crisis occurred in the United States, 
     policymakers would have only limited--and unattractive--
     options for responding to it. In particular, the government 
     would need to undertake some combination of three approaches: 
     restructuring its debt (that is, seeking to modify the 
     contractual terms of its existing obligations), pursuing 
     inflationary monetary policy, and adopting an austerity 
     program of spending cuts and tax increases. Thus, such a 
     crisis would confront policymakers with extremely difficult 
     choices and probably have a very significant negative impact 
     on the country.

  Mr. CORNYN. I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Florida.
  Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, before the Chair is yielded, I wish to say 
it is almost like deja vu all over again. The great Senator from Maine 
was sitting in the chair only a few days ago when this Senator had a 
chance to make comments. Here we are again.
  I wish to say to the Senator from Texas, as he is leaving the 
Chamber, that I think the Senator is a good Senator who believes 
strongly in what he is saying, but if there is a will, there is a way. 
Reasonable people can come together and work through to a reasonable 
conclusion.
  I was going to say, with the Senator from Texas on the floor, the 
Senator had a chance to express his opinion. Indeed, the Senator did 
with his vote when we passed the appropriations bill, now called the 
continuing resolution, because we have not brought each of the 
appropriations bills to the floor.
  We accepted it at the House number. The senior Senator from Texas 
expressed his opinion by means of his ``no'' vote, but ``yes'' votes 
won, and we sent it to the other body to keep the government open. 
Indeed, the government is not open.
  I go back to 2 days ago when the Senator from Maine was the Presiding 
Officer and here we are again. If we would remember the Golden Rule put 
in the old English: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you 
or put into modern street language: Treat others as you want to be 
treated--in other words, recognize that the other fellow has a point of 
view and you have to respect his point of view--even though his point 
of view may be different from yours--the genius of American democracy 
is hammering out those differences and building consensus in a civil 
way and achieving a workable solution. What we have here is 
brinkmanship.
  We hammered it out, we passed appropriations, a continuing 
resolution. We sent it to the House of Representatives, and they will 
not put it up for a vote because they are only--and this is operative--
going to pass this with Republican votes.
  What does that do? This takes an outsized minority of the Republican 
caucus being the tail that is wagging the Republican dog in the House 
of Representatives. If they only pass it with Republican votes instead 
of the will of the whole House then, in fact, we will have what we have 
now, a small out-of-the-mainstream political philosophy extremist group 
dictating what they want and only what they want. It is their way or no 
way. That is not treating others as they wish to be treated. This is an 
attitude of saying: I know better than you and my way is going to be 
the only way. That is not how we govern this country. That is not how 
we honor and respect other people's points of view that may be 
different from ours.
  I do not wish to hold up the Senator from Maine, but I wanted to 
follow up on the conversation I had through the Chair 2 days ago. All 
of these high-minded, highfalutin ideas of all of us getting together 
and treating each other as we wish to be treated and hammering out this 
policy--lo and behold, maybe everything I am saying doesn't have a 
thing to do with this by virtue of an investigative piece having been 
done by the New York Times over the weekend. I wish to read the first 
three paragraphs of this investigative piece. It is entitled: ``A 
Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning'' by Sheryl Gay Stolberg 
and Mike McIntire.

       Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a 
     loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former 
     Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to 
     plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama's health care 
     law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new 
     plan.
       Out of that session, held one morning in a location the 
     members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed 
     ``blueprint to defunding Obamacare,'' signed by Mr. Meese and 
     leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
       It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy 
     that has long percolated in conservative circles: that 
     Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if 
     conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow 
     Republicans--including their cautious leaders--into cutting 
     off financing for the entire federal government.

  This is only the first three paragraphs. If that is true, then all of 
these high-minded ideas of the Golden Rule and treating each other with 
respect and working out your differences is all out the window.
  If that is true--and it looks as if it is by virtue of what we see 
going on down in the other end of this Capitol Building, a small group 
of people are not going to do anything to open the government unless 
they get their way to defund the Affordable Care Act, the health care 
reform act--I would suggest that if that is the case, then the people 
who are suffering should sit up and take notice of what is happening to 
their government.
  We have heard examples over and over. Senator Brown and I were just 
talking about the 97 percent of people who are laid off in NASA. Then 
what do we do with all of the civilian workforce in NASA? Think of what 
this is doing to all of the contractors who work for NASA.
  We have heard also the statistic out here that over 70 percent of the 
intelligence community has been furloughed. We have heard that Head 
Start, the federally funded program to get children ready to start the 
public schools, kindergarten and first grade, is shutting down.
  We know last week, when we were in the middle of this shutdown, there 
was a storm brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. Thank the good Lord it 
fizzled out, but at one point it was expected to turn into a Category 1 
hurricane hitting the gulf coast. Had that happened, FEMA had been laid 
off--although they reached back and started the National Guard, et 
cetera. Thank you to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel for finding an 
unintended consequence in the law that was passed to pay the U.S. 
military while the government is shut down because he found a little 
hook in there.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator has expired.
  Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 2 additional 
minutes.

[[Page 15321]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. NELSON. He found a hook in there so he could then extend that to 
most of the civilian workforce, including some of the National Guard, 
but we didn't know that.
  In my State of Florida, 156 employees were getting the notices just 
in the National Guard on Friday. There were already 1,000 military 
technicians that had been furloughed in the National Guard, and we had 
an inbound storm.
  What about the programs in our State to help veterans find jobs? If 
we are not done with this shutdown at the end of October, that is gone. 
What about the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, a 
part of the State government. Ten percent of their funds are Federal 
funds. What about the Florida Department of Agriculture? Over 6 percent 
of their workforce is federally funded.
  What about--and we have heard this in the Senate--Women, Infants, and 
Children? A society is supposed to take care of its very old and its 
very young. This is why we have programs for Women, Infants, and 
Children. Yet the supplemental nutrition program for women, for nursing 
mothers, for children up to the age of 5, for breast-feeding support, 
for nutrition education, and for health checkups is gone.
  I could go on and on. Others have said it more articulately than I. 
This is ridiculous. This shouldn't go on. As the drumbeat of the 
crescendo continues, it will grow louder as we march toward October 17, 
when the debt ceiling has to be raised so we don't go into default.
  It is a sad day.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kaine). The assistant majority leader.

                          ____________________