Continuing Resolution

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, I am here to speak on another topic, actually, and that is what we are about to do with respect to appropriations.

This Congress was told by the majority leader that the Senate would return to the regular order, and I have no doubt he intended to make good on that promise. I know he is an appropriator. I know he is an institutionalist, and he really wanted to get back to the regular order. We were given assurances that keeping the government funded would be an orderly and bipartisan process, and it was true at the committee level, but that was then, and today we are far from that promise.

Today the Republican leadership, led by House leadership, has refused to complete funding bills for the current fiscal year. And what is so confounding for the folks who pay attention and who believe in the appropriations process, who believe in our constitutional prerogative, our constitutional obligation to hold the pursestrings and to use that authority to be a proper check on the executive branch, is that simply kicking the can down the road and passing another short-term CR doesn't result in anything conservative at all.

Many in this Chamber talk passionately about the need to eliminate government waste, fraud, and abuse, and yet a CR does exactly none of that. It does the opposite. It means programs that should be eliminated altogether will keep getting funded and programs that are working well and are critical but are in need of additional funding will remain underfunded. A CR puts the government on autopilot, stopping us from shifting investments to the most critical areas and decreasing funding for programs that are not working or are no longer needed.

For example, the CR does not support accelerated counter-ISIL operations in Iraq and Syria; it defers work on the Iron Dome, delaying protection for Israel from long-range Iranian missiles; it underfunds the DOD's basic operations and maintenance account by $12 billion; and it delays cyber security efforts led by the Department of Homeland Security. The CR also delays critical funding needed to address the opioid crisis-- something I know the Presiding Officer cares passionately about. Both House and Senate bills provide large increases to fund drug abuse prevention, but the funding will remain flat under the CR.

We are on autopilot. We are not doing our job. We are abdicating our oversight role in the appropriations process.

There are actually two problems here. One is that things that need to be funded are not funded and things that should be eliminated or funded less are still funded. I don't see what is conservative about that. But the other result in a lot of ways is more insidious from the perspective of the Constitution and from the perspective of this institution, and that is, to the extent and degree that members of the administration, regardless of party, listen to members of the legislative branch, it is because we hold the purse strings. It is because we hold the purse strings. And every time we fail to do an authorization, every time we fail to do an appropriation, we are just shifting authority and clout to the executive. There is nothing conservative about that.

There is a mistaken assumption that running up against our funding deadline will somehow pressure the Congress into doing its job. What is crazy to me is that we have now 5 or 6 or 7 years of proof that doesn't work--this idea that what we should do is take difficult decisions and have them coincide with other difficult decisions and coincide with an even bigger difficult decision and then wrap it all up in a bow and do it at once. There may have been a time in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s where we could create these omnibus solutions, where we could get to these grand bargains, but what we need to do now is to hit a few singles. We need to do a few rational things.

The idea that what we should do is take the debt ceiling and the expiration of the CR and put them together just doesn't make any sense.

It was proven wrong by the government shutdown of 16 days in the year 2013. The administration estimated that had up to a $6 billion impact on the economy. NIH studies were delayed, national parks were shuttered, transportation and energy projects were postponed, and FDA's routine food safety inspections were pushed back. This is not fiscal conservatism. This is not any kind of conservatism.

The idea of being a conservative, as I understand it--and I will grant you that I am a progressive, so it is not totally clear to me--is the idea that what you do may have unintended consequences and that whatever changes you make ought to be incremental and ought to respect the institutions that have gotten America this far.

This is not a conservative result, to kick the can into the next spring, when we have no idea whether we are going to be able to solve multiple problems at the same time. If we want government to work, piling up all these issues and leaving it to a new administration to deal with in the spring will likely not work. We should finish the work we were elected to do and complete the funding bills for this fiscal year.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source