[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 132 (Monday, September 30, 2013)] [Senate] [Pages S7050-S7053] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] CONTINUING APPROPRIATIONS Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I wish to say a few words to try to reflect what I think tens of millions of Americans are feeling at 11:25 tonight with the threat of a government shutdown in 35 minutes. What I want to say is that this discussion is not about ObamaCare at all. What this discussion, debate, and conflict is about is that our Republican friends in the House are trying to annul the elections that took place last November. Some of them were shocked that Obama won and that he won by 5 million votes. They haven't gotten over it. They were shocked they lost two seats in the Senate. They haven't gotten over that. They were shocked they lost some seats in the House. What they are saying to the American people tonight is: Maybe we lost the Presidential election. Maybe we lost seats in the Senate and in the House. It doesn't matter. We can now bring the government to a shutdown, throw some 800,000 hard-working Americans out on the street, and we are going to get our way no matter what. I think that is a horrendous precedent to be established for this body. Let's be clear. If we surrendered to that hostage-taking tonight, without a shadow of a doubt these guys would be back 2 weeks from today. At that point they would say to us: Here is our laundry list of demands. If you don't give us what we want, we are going to bring down the financial system of the United States of America, bring down the world financial system, and if it leads to a worldwide recession, well, that is the way it goes. But what is most important is we get our way and we don't care about the repercussions. Next year I can see these same guys coming to the floor of the House and saying: You know what. We want to abolish Social Security. We think Social Security is a bad idea, and if you don't allow us to do that, we are going to stop the government again. And on and on it goes. Ultimately, what we are dealing with tonight is an extraordinarily antidemocratic act. Every Member of the Senate has strong feelings. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. But when they are in the minority--they do not control the White House, they do not control the Senate--they cannot force the American people to give them what they want. The irony is that because we have folks in the Republican Party in the House who believe we should abolish Social Security, end Medicare as we know it, privatize the VA, eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency--they do not believe that the function of government is to protect the interests of the vast majority of the people. So these guys are sitting and saying: My God. The government may shut down. What a great idea. If you don't believe the EPA should protect us from pollution, then isn't it a good idea that we not have an EPA starting tomorrow? If you don't believe in veterans health care, isn't it a good idea that we should slow down the processing of veterans' claims? So for these guys who do not believe that in a democratic, civilized society we should have a government which represents the people, then from their point of view what is happening is, in fact, quite good. What particularly angers me, and why the American people have such contempt for what we are doing in Washington is as we speak--everybody knows this--the middle class in this country is disappearing. The Census Bureau study came out last week--if you can believe this--median family income, that family right in the middle of American society, is earning less money today than it earned 24 years ago. All of the increases in technology and productivity doesn't mean anything. Poverty is at 46.5 million, and that is highest on record. Youth unemployment is 20 percent. Real unemployment is 14 percent. What do the American people want us to be doing? Everybody knows what they want us to do. Every poll gives us the answer. They want us to start creating the millions of jobs this economy desperately needs. They want us to raise the minimum wage because they know millions of people in this country cannot make it on $8 or $9 an hour. They [[Page S7051]] want us to improve our crumbling infrastructure, our roads, our bridges, and our wastewater plants. They want us to bring about real tax reform. One out of four major corporations today is not paying a nickel in taxes, and they want us to change that as well. In my view, for the future of this country, we cannot allow a handful of rightwing extremists to hold this Nation hostage. The American people have to stand tall and tell them that, yes, in a democratic society, people have differences of opinion. Yes, we can make improvements in ObamaCare. But we don't go forward by trying to destroy or bring the U.S. Government to a halt. I think it is important for the American people now to stand and demand democracy here in Washington, and tell a handful of rightwing extremists they cannot get their way by holding this government in a hijacked manner. With that, I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon. Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, do I need to request a specific amount of time in which to speak? Are we under any rules? The PRESIDING OFFICER. Senators are permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each. Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to express my feelings this evening. Quite frankly, I was one of the optimists in this body. Many of my colleagues have been saying the determination to run our economy over a cliff is so powerful, we are going to end up with a government shutdown. I kept saying, I don't think so. I think in this Senate and across the Capitol in the House there are reasonable folks who know that this type of brinkmanship is doing intense damage to our Nation, and I don't believe we will end up there. So here is my faith in the common sense of a collection of 435 Members of the House and 100 Members of the Senate--my faith in their reasonableness. Apparently, that faith has been misplaced, because we are now just 27 minutes away from a government shutdown. And to what point? We have just heard from the House leadership they want to have a conference discussion over the budget. Well, certainly, so do we. Six months ago, we passed a budget. The Senate passed a budget. We sought to have a conference committee to resolve those two budgets as a common foundation for a set of spending bills--our appropriations bills--and our Republican colleagues blocked that budget conference committee. They have come to this floor 18 times and blocked the dialogue necessary to take the conversation forward over our budget and spending plan. That is what led us here tonight. The obstruction didn't start a week ago or 2 weeks ago; it started 6 months ago, in not allowing a common conversation. I am deeply disturbed about the profound dysfunction that now grips this body. I first came to the Senate when I was 19 years old as an intern for Senator Hatfield. When legislation was brought up, it would be debated, there would be a simple majority vote; sometimes we won, sometimes we lost. We then send a bill over to the House. Then we have a conference committee and we get on with things. We make decisions. We test ideas. Sometimes those ideas work well and we keep them and sometimes they don't work so well, and we either amend them or throw them out or the public says, the bums who brought us those ideas that didn't work, we will throw them out. We had a completion of the democratic circle. We don't have that completion now because we can't have a simple majority vote. Our colleagues have so abused the filibuster process; the courtesy of letting everyone have their say is to never let us get to a final up-or-down vote. So instead of 12 appropriations bills being passed year after year after year, we have zero this year. We only had one in 2011-2012, only one. Citizens across the country are seeing this and saying, what is wrong with the Senate and what is wrong with the House? The House has its own form of supermajority: the Hastert rule. They are saying, We are not going to put on the floor things we know will pass unless they belong to the ideology of the far right, because we know that right now, if the Speaker of the House wants to put on the floor of the House the bill passed by the Senate--a clean, simple extension of a continuing resolution--it would be adopted. The leadership does not believe in allowing a vote in that Chamber, just as a minority of colleagues here in this Chamber have blocked us from having a simple majority vote time and time and time again. We need to have a more substantial conversation about how to make both Chambers work better. But in the near term we have to find a path in which we stop careening from crisis to crisis. Let's say, in the final 23 minutes now before midnight, that we were able to find an answer to pass a continuing resolution. Let's say we were able to do that. Is there no harm done? Well, I wish that were the case, because there has been a lot of harm done; because what businesses know across America is that this process of brinkmanship, of hostage-taking, of threatening to throw the economy over the cliff is happening time and time and time again. Already, Members on the House side are saying, Well, let's not only make these arguments tonight, let's make them in a couple of weeks over the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling--the decision on whether to pay the bills we have already incurred; the decision on whether to honor the good faith and credit of the United States of America. President Reagan spoke on this multiple times, telling folks, We don't mess with the good faith and credit of the United States. His team undoubtedly recognized that when we do so, we raise the interest rates, we endanger the dollar as a reserve currency, we weaken our purchasing power around the world, and we do deep damage. But that reasonableness, that common sense that we don't take hostages and we don't threaten to destroy the economy that is going to hurt the middle class is gone. I live in a working class community. Folks don't have a lot of savings. They have been hit hard. They lost a lot of their savings in the 2008 meltdown, a meltdown that came from deregulatory actions, that allowed predatory mortgages and securities based on predatory mortgages. They know that governance matters. They know we could create a lot of jobs if we could pass those bills for low-interest loans, for energy saving renovations that would put a huge amount of the construction industry back to work. That bill passed here in the Senate, but the House hasn't taken it up. They haven't passed it. They know we would have a lot more jobs if we invested in infrastructure. China is spending 10 percent of their GDP on infrastructure. Europe is spending 5 percent of their GDP on infrastructure. And what are we spending here in America? We are spending 2 percent--not enough to repair the infrastructure that is wearing out across America, that needs replacing, let alone establishing infrastructure for the next generation. In a 10-year period, 2 trips to China, I saw Beijing go from bicycles to a bullet train. That is what happens when a society spends 10 percent of GDP on infrastructure. We build the economy of tomorrow for the generation of tomorrow that is going to thrive in that city. When we underinvest, we imperil the future. When we underinvest in education, we imperil the future of our kids, and we are certainly underinvesting in education. But for each of these policy issues we have to be taking on, we can't succeed if a small number in the Senate and in the House can paralyze this process, can go to extraordinary lengths to basically hold hostage and damage the United States of America. This process must end. The Senator from Vermont who spoke a few moments ago said, If we yield to this hostage-taking now, we will see it time and time and time again in the future. We will see the threat to end Social Security, et cetera. Well, we are not going to go in that direction. The House has said they want a conference. Great. Let's not do so at the same time we are taking down the economy. So put the Senate resolution on the floor of the House right now, with 20 minutes left, give it an up-or-down vote, pass that bill so that we have just these few short weeks, from now until November 15, to hold that conference and to work out a deal without taking the American economy down with ObamaCare. We wait for common sense and reasonableness to return to a dialogue so [[Page S7052]] that we can have a legislative process the American people can believe in, because we are tackling the big problems facing America. But as of tonight, with now 18 minutes to go, we do not have that process, and that must change. Mr. LEVIN. Will the Senator yield for a question? Mr. MERKLEY. Yes, absolutely. Mr. LEVIN. The Senator just made a reference to the fact that the Speaker of the House has refused to put the Senate resolution up for a vote in the House of Representatives. It seems to me this has not been adequately illuminated to the public. It is not just that we insist that there be a clean CR--which we do, because we don't want every other issue that people feel passionate about to be insisted upon as the price of keeping the government going. Each one of us has issues we feel very passionately about. But I don't know any of us--at least on this side--who have said that unless we pass, for instance, an infrastructure bill--unless we pass a bill that includes background checks for people before they can buy an assault weapon--I feel very passionately about that. But the idea that we or any of us on this side of the aisle would say the government is going to close unless we get our way on a particular issue that we feel passionate about is absolutely anathema to us. Nonetheless, there are a few folks who are willing to do that. But when we say we insist we have a clean CR--in other words, that it not be linked to some issue that some faction is insisting upon--what we are really saying is something even deeper than that, more basic. We simply want them to vote on a clean CR. We are very confident it will pass if there is a vote, because it will have bipartisan support. For some reason over in the House, bipartisan support for a bill is now anathema. Apparently, it is called the Hastert rule. The Republican leaders over there say they are not going to pass any bill that relies upon any Democratic votes, which is the exact opposite of what bipartisanship should be. Over here, we rely on votes from both sides of the aisle for just about everything we pass. But over there they have this policy now, which is the most partisan kind of policy one could imagine. If someone could design a partisan policy, it would be, We will not have any reliance on the other party for votes; only our party can be relied upon for votes. We are not going to pass anything which depends upon the other party. That, to me, reeks of partisanship. Whenever I hear the Speaker or any of the Republicans in the House talk about bipartisanship, the first thing they ought to do is get rid of the Hastert rule, because the Hastert rule guarantees partisanship. It bakes partisanship into the process over there. But back to the narrow point I wish to ask the Senator about: Tonight, as in previous nights, all we are saying is not just we insist upon a clean CR, which is not linked to some faction's passion, which in this case is getting rid of ObamaCare; what we are saying is vote on the Senate CR. Just put it up for a vote. We are confident it will pass. But does the Senator agree it is even something less than saying it must be a clean CR that we are insisting upon? What we are saying is, vote on a clean CR. We are very confident it will pass, but put it up for a vote. Does the Senator agree with that? Mr. MERKLEY. Absolutely. I appreciate the point the Senator is accentuating. When the Senator says this has not gotten enough attention, he is absolutely right. The House has refused to have a budget resolution pursued--a continuing resolution that does not have extraneous policy attached to it. They have absolutely said they will not take the Senate version, which did not put on the things the Senator and I might wish to attach, and did not put on the things my colleagues from across the aisle might wish to attach. It said: Let's keep the government open. Let's keep it operating, using, by the way, the budget number proposed by our colleagues in the House. So if our colleagues in the House say, wouldn't it be great if the Senate would compromise with us, well, we went farther than a compromise. We did not say: Let's split the difference between the Senate number and the House number. We will take their number. And let's get rid of these extraneous policy issues and then put it up for a vote. I think it is a simple request to make. Doesn't it make sense to give a bipartisan group the opportunity now, with just 14 minutes left, to actually end this process of driving our economy over a cliff? Mr. LEVIN. At least vote as to whether to do it. Mr. MERKLEY. At least have that vote. Mr. LEVIN. Is it also not true that we have voted twice on the House continuing resolution? We have rejected it, but we voted on it. Mr. MERKLEY. My colleague is exactly right. They sent it to us and we voted on it. Mr. LEVIN. All right. They have not voted once on what we have sent to them. Mr. MERKLEY. The Senator is right. Mr. LEVIN. That is not something you have to go to conference about. That is something which is sort of kind of fundamental. We have voted twice on your proposal. We have rejected it. You refused to vote on a Senate proposal. Why? Because you are afraid it will pass with some Democratic votes. That is anathema to the House of Representatives Republican leadership now to pass legislation that depends upon Democratic votes. And at the same time they talk about bipartisanship, they have that fixed, rigid rule that they will not depend on Democratic votes to get something passed in the House of Representatives. The first step toward bipartisanship in the House would be to end that approach. But I thank my friend from Oregon. It is amazing to me that the refusal of the House of Representatives to even vote on the Senate proposal which we sent to them has had such little play in the media because I think if the public understood that, they would then--without any doubt--instead of it being 60 to 30 that it is the Republicans who are bringing this government to the brink of closing down, it would be 80 to 10, when the public understands that it is the refusal of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives to allow a vote on the Senate proposal. Mr. MERKLEY. Yes. Mr. LEVIN. I thank my good friend. I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. MENENDEZ. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. MENENDEZ. Madam President, we are at the verge of the midnight hour here, and what is playing out is a challenge to the very essence of our government, and it is a challenge both at home and abroad. I will speak to that in a moment. I was in the other body, in the House of Representatives, 17 years ago when we had the last government shutdown, led at that time by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. I had thought they learned the consequences to the Nation and to their party as a result of such a shutdown. But it seems those memories have faded. Now we are on the verge of a consequence that is consequential to the lives of American families, consequential to the economy of the country, consequential to the message we send across the globe. What I cannot understand is the fixation that our Republican colleagues have on the question of the Affordable Care Act, which they derisively call ObamaCare. It is something that was passed by the Congress, signed by the President, reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is the final voice of what is the law of the land, and then reaffirmed by the American people in their reelection of the President with a significant majority. There were two candidates in that election. One was President Obama, who said: I intend to fully implement the Affordable Care Act and create millions of opportunities for those who have no insurance--to control costs; to end preexisting conditions as a limitation; to ultimately ensure that children could stay on their parents' insurance to the age of 26; to be able to provide millions of dollars of relief across the landscape of the country; to help senior citizens who often chose between putting food on the table, keeping their home, or having access to [[Page S7053]] lifesaving, life-enhancing drugs, by getting a doughnut hole--that gap in coverage for seniors--to be ultimately eliminated. It has provided tremendous relief for the seniors in our country not to have to make those dynamic choices. So what they could not achieve at the ballot box they are trying to achieve by shutting down the Federal Government. And then, at this late hour, after having tried a series of times to undermine the Affordable Care Act--and believe me, when they talk about a 1-year delay, which they seem to try to show that it is benign, it is not benign. There is a purpose to their strategy. The reason that a 1- year delay--in addition to the fact that the law should be able to move forward for millions who have no insurance to be able to finally have insurance--is because if you delay the mandate, that means 11 million people will go uninsured who otherwise would get coverage. It means, as the Congressional Budget Office estimated--the nonpartisan entity of the Congress that scores everything we do: Is this going to cost money; is this going to save money--they estimated that repealing that individual mandate will increase premiums anywhere between 15 to 20 percent because fewer healthy people will enroll to balance out those with higher medical needs. Insurance is about spreading the risk across the spectrum. In my home State of New Jersey, we tried to have insurance reform that limited preexisting condition exclusions and different premium band ratings without an individual requirement for coverage. The result was skyrocketing premiums. So, in essence, delaying the mandate for a year--which is the essence of what the House Republicans have sent here various times as a condition of keeping the government open--is a Trojan horse because Republicans know that, in doing such a delay, the mandate will create higher premiums. And in creating those higher premiums, they, in essence, create rate shock and they fulfill that which they would like to see, which is the failure of the Affordable Care Act. They have a very particular strategy. It is not benign by any stretch of the imagination. They are not concerned that the Affordable Care Act will fail. They are concerned it will actually succeed. So what they seek to do is to introduce poison pills to make it fail. It is amazing to me that I keep hearing: Well, we will replace it. With what? We have not heard with what. When we challenge our colleagues, they say: Oh, yes, preexisting conditions, we are for that, making sure that does not exist anymore. We are for the seniors getting the rebates on prescription drugs. We are for making sure there are no more lifetime caps on anybody's insurance, so if they have a catastrophic illness, they will not come up against that cap. We are for all of those things. The only problem is, to have all of those benefits which Americans overwhelmingly want, it costs money. And the only way to do that is, of course, to have everybody ultimately insured in the country. This is not a fight between Democrats and Republicans. This is a battle for the very soul of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, they are playing it out in a way that affects the Nation. This is a designed strategy. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote a tremendous piece. I recommend it to all of my colleagues. He basically described a meeting that took place in January of this year. I am going to read from his article for a moment: ``In January, demoralized House Republicans retreated to Williamsburg, Virginia, to plot out their legislative strategy for President Obama's second term. Conservatives were angry that their leaders had been unable to stop a whole series of things, including the Bush tax cuts on high incomes, and they wanted to make sure their leaders would no longer have any further compromises. Not only did they decide they would not have any further compromises, but, in fact, they developed a legislative strategy. Before I go into that, I am happy to yield to the majority leader who I understand has an announcement. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader. Mr. REID. Madam President, through you to my dear friend from New Jersey, who does such a wonderful job in everything he does, especially running the Foreign Relations Committee, I thank him for yielding to me. This is a very sad day for our country. The President has told the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, to issue a shutdown statement, and she has done that. Here it is: ``MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES.'' This memorandum follows the September 17 memo and provides an update on the potential lapse of appropriations. No more potential. It is after midnight. Appropriations provided under the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act expire at 11:59 pm tonight. Unfortunately, we do not have a clear indication that Congress will act in time for the President to sign the continuing resolution before the end of the day tomorrow, October, 2013. Therefore, agencies should now execute plans for shutdown due to the absence of appropriations. That is what she said. So the agencies of government are in the process of closing down. It now appears that the House is not going to do anything to keep the government from shutting down. They have some jerry-rigged thing about going to conference. It is embarrassing that these people who are elected to represent the country are representing the tea party, the anarchists of the country, and a majority of the Republicans in the House are following every step of the way. This is an unnecessary blow to America, to the economy, the middle class, everyone. The House has within their power the ability to avoid a shutdown. They should simply pass the 6-week CR we sent them. We are going to come in in the morning and see what they have done sometime tonight. But I would hope they would understand that, within their power, at any time, all they have to do is accept what we already passed. All this stuff they keep sending over here--they are so fixated on embarrassing our President, the President of the United States. They think an election is coming this November. It happened last November. He was elected by 5 million votes over what Romney got--5 million votes. It was not close. So it is really too bad. I am going to ask this unanimous consent. We are going to go out tonight and come back at 9:30 in the morning. So the unanimous consent is that we are going to recess until 9:30 tomorrow morning. I want the Senators who are here on the floor to be able to talk for 5 minutes each. ____________________