Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016--Conference Report

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague from Florida for his leadership on this issue and the Senators from Nevada and Illinois for their great questions illuminating us.

I am just going to sum up here in a minute. If the Republican leader wants to get something done, instead of putting this bill on the floor again, he would go over to the House and tell them to vote for the bipartisan bill that he voted for and we all voted for of $1.1 billion. I say something else to my friend from Kentucky. When he was in the minority, he kept saying to us: Leadership means working together.

Well, he is in charge now. We have a crisis. Instead of working together, he is putting a bill on the floor that had no input from our side and that doesn't do the job and is loaded with poison pills. Is that leadership? Does that show that the Senate is working again? He is back to the old ways when we have a crisis. Again, if the majority leader of this body wanted to get something done about Zika, he would ask the House to pass our bipartisan bill.

Instead, he puts the same political document on the floor that shows no leadership, that shows no bipartisanship, and that will not pass. So there is no drama. There is no suspense. I don't even know why he is doing it again, but probably because he knows there is a crisis and he is unwilling, reluctant, afraid, to confront the House with their gamesmanship that was driven by 40 Freedom Caucus members who don't believe the government should spend money on anything.

The only way he could get the votes was to put in all these poison pills which he knew would kill the bill to begin with. So the bottom line is very simple. If the House would put our bipartisan bill on the floor of the House it would pass right now. We would get something done. Instead, the very bipartisanship that the majority leader is trying to make as a hallmark of his leadership is being made a joke of by his putting a partisan bill that has failed once on the floor once again in the closing days of this session.

I would urge the majority leader--it is really on his shoulders--to reconsider. I would urge him to make a good faith effort to get something done. I would urge him not to play the game of putting this bill, laden with poison pills, not doing the job, on the floor, and, instead, go call Speaker Ryan and say: We have to get something done. Let's do something in a bipartisan way.

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