Government Funding
Floor Speech
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, over the weekend, as you may have heard, our government set a new record. It wasn't for the number of roads being built or repaired in this country. It wasn't for higher math scores or graduation rates for kids in the United States of America. It wasn't for passing the most bills or investing the most dollars in our future. It wasn't for paying attention to the next generation of Americans. It was for the longest shutdown in the history of the United States--a selfish act taken by partisan politicians that is an embarrassment to our country and to our future.
It has been 24 days. We have Federal employees all over the State of Colorado and I am sure the State of Alaska, the Commonwealth of Virginia, as we heard before, who are out of work because of what Washington has done to them. It is nothing they have done. They have fulfilled their end of the bargain. But because we have a screw loose around here because we are the only modern, industrialized country in the world that shuts down its government for politics--our allies don't shut down their government for politics, and our foes don't shut down their government for politics. No local government shuts down its government for politics. No school district shuts down its government for politics. No State would ever think of doing it. No elected official at any level of those governments would show their face in the grocery store on the weekend after they shut down the government and said to the citizens of Alamosa or the citizens of Durango or the parents in Denver public schools: Sorry. Your kids can't come to school today because we are shutting down the government for politics.
It is ridiculous.
I met an air traffic controller today who got her check on Friday after she worked through the entire holiday. She had a kid. I don't know how old he was, but he was a baby who had to be carried. She worked the entire holiday, was separated from her family, got her check on Friday, and it was for 77 cents. The people in this body might as well be standing outside and lifting their middle finger at her and at the TSA workers who were there today at Denver International Airport making sure that we were safe, that the traveling public was safe, and who were not getting paid, unlike the people here during this shutdown.
By the way, that airport, which we are very proud of in Denver and in Colorado, the Denver International Airport, is the newest airport that has been built in the United States of America, and it was built almost a quarter of a century ago because we are not making the investments that anybody else in the world is making.
As I said, no other advanced country in the world shuts down its government for politics. I expect us to have disagreements. We should have disagreements, but we shouldn't shut down the government over this disagreement. It has been 24 days.
While we were shut down, other countries were actually investing in their future.
In the last 24 days, South Korea broke ground on an expanded bullet train outside their capitol of Seoul.
While we were shut down, Canada announced support for a new 5- megawatt geothermal plant--the first of its kind in that country.
India issued tenders to set up 7.5 gigawatts of new solar capacity.
New Zealand announced millions in new resources to improve the safety of rural highways.
You should see our rural highways. And it is not just this shutdown; it is a decade--a decade of fiscal fights made in the name of fiscal responsibility that have put us in the position for the first time since the Vietnam war and before the Vietnam war to see our unemployment rate falling and the deficit going up.
This same wrecking crew who called Barack Obama a Socialist and a Bolshevik and was incapable of bringing themselves to help at a moment when our unemployment rate was at 10 percent and we were at the depths of the worst recession since the Great Depression has now closed the government and given us a $1.5 to $2 trillion deficit while the unemployment rate is falling. And every one of them promised their constituents and my constituents that these tax cuts would pay for themselves.
God knows, when they add it up, what this shutdown is going to cost the American people. It is not saving them money.
Vietnam opened a new international airport near Halong Bay to attract tourists and boost the economy.
Singapore is preparing an Underground Master Plan to maximize its urban space by moving things like data centers, utilities, and water reservoirs below ground.
A new report shows that for the first time ever, Germany drew more energy from renewable sources than coal in 2018.
Ireland, in contrast to what I was just saying about the United States of America, ended the year with a budget surplus. Imagine the flexibility it gives legislators and policymakers there to think, what are we going to do with this surplus? How are we going to invest in the next generation? How are we going to shore up our equivalent of Social Security? Maybe we can have a real middle-class tax cut or lift some people out of poverty in our country. We can't ask those questions today because of our fiscal imbalance and because the Government of the United States is shut down.
While we were shut down, other countries moved forward with a trade partnership that excludes the United States. Once it is fully in place, it will represent a trading block of nearly half a billion consumers whom our manufacturers should be selling to and our small businesses should be exporting to.
Not surprisingly, China has been extremely busy over the last 24 days while we have been shut down. While we have been shut down, China landed a spacecraft on the dark side of the Moon. That has never happened before in human history. There was a time in our history--you will remember it--when the Russians launched Sputnik. That caught our imagination. John F. Kennedy said: We are going to put a man on the Moon within the decade. That is what he said. That is what we did. Now, because of the fecklessness of this Congress, did you know that America cannot send an astronaut into space without asking the Russians for permission to ride on one of their rockets?
A whole generation of Americans that I was part of was inspired by the space mission that NASA led. Unfortunately, in my case, it did not lead me to understand anything about mathematics or science, but it inspired us as Americans to have a big vision for what our country could do and for what our country could do in competition with our adversaries around the world.
Do you think the Chinese are not observing what we are doing while they are putting a rocket, a spaceship on the dark side of the Moon for the first time in human history--something they will always be able to claim; something we will never be able to claim? Do you think the Russians know that we can't put somebody up on the space station if we want to, that we have to wait for them to let us do it? Just after they put that spaceship on the other side of the moon, China announced that it is planning another mission to the moon by the end of the year and a mission to Mars by as early as 2020.
It announced that it is planning to invest in 4,200 miles of new railway lines this year, including almost 2,000 miles of high-speed rail. Do you know how many more that is than we have? About 2,000, and that says nothing about the investments that they have already made.
They have begun operating new high-speed rail lines in East China and Northern China with initial speeds of 155 miles per hour while our government is closed. That is another plan; that is another set of tracks. China has plans for a 6-gigawatt wind farm on the border with Mongolia that, once completed, would become the largest in the world. China continues its pursuit of a vast space-based communications network that will cover every inch of the Earth. If we are not careful--if we are not careful--they are going to deploy 5G a lot more quickly than we will. That is what the rest of the world is doing while we are shut down.
My view of this is that we don't need to wait for the President on this. That is what the majority leader keeps saying. He keeps saying: Well, I can't pass something the President will veto because it will not become law.
I don't understand the logic of that, speaking of math. We passed a bill in this Senate--this Republican-controlled Senate; I think it was virtually unanimously--to keep the government open. The House of Representatives passed a very similar bill to keep the government open, and in the middle of this, in the midst of all of this, President Trump said: I am not going to accept that because I am going to use this moment to extort Congress for $5 billion for my wall.
He said to the people he refers to as ``Chuck and Nancy'': Give me the $5 billion.
They said: Why don't you just open the government? The Senate has passed it almost unanimously, and the House has passed it.
His answer was ``because I will lose leverage,'' meaning: I will not have the misery I am creating for the Federal workforce. I will not have people who can't pay their mortgage, who can't pay for their early childhood education, who can't pay for their education. I will not have their misery to use to extort Members of Congress into giving me $5 billion for my wall.
This is notwithstanding the fact that he promised over and over and over again when he was running for President that Mexico would pay for the wall. That is not my talking point; that is not my coming out here and being unfair and trying to exploit a weakness or a misstatement. I think it is fair to say that almost all of his campaign was based on the idea that there was going to be a wall and that Mexico was going to pay for the wall. He could not have been clearer about that.
Now he's trying to shut down the government because he knows that Mexico will not pay for the wall. The rest of us knew the whole time he was telling America untruths about it. He has now turned, instead, to the American taxpayer to say: OK. I wasn't telling the truth about it then, but don't pay any attention to that. You now have to pay for the wall.
Our first response to that is: No, you haven't even spent the money that has been appropriated for the wall to date. He has not built an inch of the wall. Look it up.
The second problem is that anybody who has studied this question for any moment of time knows that his proposal is a waste of money for the United States. I am not going to be lectured by anybody on the other side about the need for border security. I was part of the Gang of 8 that negotiated the immigration bill in 2013. That was a bill that had not $5 billion of border security in it, not $2.3 billion of border security in it, but $46 billion of border security. It got 68 votes in the Senate, never went to the House, was never allowed to have a vote because of the tyranny of the so-called Hastert rule, which requires people not to vote their conscience but to vote only along party and partisan lines--another disgraceful chapter in modern American political history. That $46 billion in that bill doubled the number of security agents at our border. It built 350 miles of what the President now refers to as steel slats, as if he invented that idea. It made sure we could see every single inch of our border.
If the Chinese are going to be able to see every single inch of the world, the least we could do is see every inch of our border, and in that bill we were able to do that.
Meanwhile, he tells his base--and FOX News repeats it every single night--that Democrats are for open borders; Democrats are for terrorists pouring in over the southern border.
I have become convinced--and we spent years working on immigration, years working on border security, years working with my most cherished Republican colleagues on this issue in a bipartisan way--that the President doesn't want the wall. He wants the entertainment of the wall. He wants to rally his base around the wall. Meanwhile, he is taking the leading economy in the world, a country with the largest capacity for self-defense in human history, and he has shut down its government over a $5 billion, phony wall. It is a disgrace.
It is a disgrace for all hard-working Federal workers--and their families who depend on them--who are out of work, who are being furloughed, who aren't being paid. It is a disgrace for every person who works in State and local governments and in school districts all across this Nation, who would never think about shutting down their government but who understand what they possess as civil servants is a sacred trust to their community and to the next generation of Coloradans or of folks from New Hampshire or of Alaskans or of Americans.
We can't wait for the President--and I will finish with this--because he either doesn't want the wall or he doesn't have the capacity to get to a solution to it.
So we have to do our work as Senators. We have to vote to reopen the government. If that were put on the floor tomorrow, it would pass, and I will bet that it would pass with a veto-proof majority. Why? Because the constituents of everybody in this place would say: Are you out of your mind? Don't come back here and have another townhall and explain why you shut down the government over politics.
Instead, Democrats and Republicans should come together in this Chamber and set an example for the American people and say: All is not lost. This exercise in a democratic Republic is going to live to fight another day. We have come to our senses. We are not going to beat our own constituents to death for the purpose of empty partisan slogans or ideas that aren't going to advance the interests of the next generation of Americans.
I worry every night that I am here about what kind of history the next generation of Americans is going to write, about what we did when it was our responsibility to make sure that we fulfilled our commitment to them, the same ones that generation after generation after generation of Americans have fulfilled for people who came after them. That is what it means to be a citizen in a Republic like ours.
We are violating every norm of that approach to the work and allowing our competitors around the world to create advantages for themselves and potential liabilities for us. We shouldn't let this thing go into the 25th day or 26th day or 27th day. We should end it now.
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