Getting Our Work Done

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, there is an explanation for why we have worked the shortest number of days in the last 60 years. Everything must be fine. Everybody must be just great. Everybody must be working. Everybody must be able to afford college. The streets have to be safe. That would be a good reason not to work, if everything was just going great for the people of this country. But it is not. In poll after poll, people tell us that they are not happy with the direction of this country. Conversation after conversation we have with our constituents--as I did during our very, very long summer break-- educates us as to the simple reality that people are struggling more today than ever before. People, families, and businesses are hurting out there. There are massive problems in this country, as Senator Tester said, many of which have bipartisan solutions, and still we are not working. If everything were great, if there were no problems to be solved, then maybe that schedule would make sense. But that is not what people think in this country. They know the system is rigged against them. They know their lives can be better, and they are furious, as Senator McCaskill pointed out, when they see that we are not even trying, that we are not even attempting to solve their problems because Republicans would rather be home than be working here in Washington.

Ask the family of Stef'an Strawder if everything is OK. Stef'an was one of the best basketball players in the State of Florida. He was a star basketball player on his high school team. His coach said everybody wanted to be like Stef. His 19-year-old sister said no matter where he went, everyone invited him into their home as if he was their own. Everybody loved him.

Stef'an was killed this summer, while we were on break, in another mass shooting. This time it was in Florida at a teen party, when a bunch of kids left a teen party and kids from 12 years old to 17 years old were shot. Seventeen kids were shot. Stef'an lost his life.

How about the 13 people who were shot in Bridgeport, CT, at the end of August? You haven't even heard about this. Thirteen people were shot at a party. None of them were killed, but 13 people's lives are permanently altered because of that mass shooting.

How about what happened this summer in Chicago? Four hundred people were shot in Chicago in the month of August alone. Think about that. That is the worst month of shootings in Chicago's history in the last two decades. People lost their lives. People like Arshell Dennis, who was coming home to surprise his mom on her birthday before he went back to take up his junior year at St. John's University, where he was majoring in journalism. He was shot while he was sitting on his front porch with a friend. He was a member of Upward Bound, a college prep program. He spent the previous summer as an ambassador mentoring other students. He wanted to help kids, he said, because ``a lot of people where I'm from don't make it out.''

There were 4,000 people killed in this country by guns while we were gone for the longest break in recent memory. There were 400 killed in 1 month in Chicago.

Here is what makes me so mad. I get it that this year we are not going to pass a bill increasing background checks or stopping terrorists from getting guns. We seem to have hit an end point there, but I listen to my Republican colleagues tell me all the time that the real problem, when it comes to gun violence, is mental health. I don't actually agree that this is the panacea for what ails this country when it comes to gun violence, but if we want to work on mental health, then we can. We have a bipartisan, comprehensive mental health bill that, like the veterans bill that Senator Tester referenced, passed through the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee unanimously. Conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats supported it. It passed the House of Representatives and is sitting pending on the floor of the Senate. What we are told is that we can't do a mental health reform bill not because we don't have consensus but because we don't have time--bull. We have time. We had all of July and all of August. We can stay here through September and October to pass a mental health reform bill that would probably pass unanimously in the Chamber and would bring new mental health resources to millions of people all across the country.

I am not going to tell you that I think that is what will solve the epidemic of mass shootings in this country, but it is just one of many pieces of legislation that will make people's lives better, that has broad bipartisan consensus, and that we aren't doing simply because we aren't working.

I thank Senator McCaskill for putting the chart out, tweeting it out, and letting the American people know that, for all of the lecturing we got from Republicans when we were in charge about not passing a budget or not moving forward on legislation that they supported, nothing is getting done right now simply because Republicans have made a choice to stop doing their job.

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