No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I am honored to follow the Senator, our neighbor from across the country. We share a common interest and commitment to one of the great military services in this country, the U.S. Coast Guard.

Connecticut is proud to be the home of the Coast Guard Academy and numerous Active-Duty-serving Coast Guard men and women. Not only are we proud of them, but we are deeply mindful of the debt we owe them. It is a debt that is immeasurable in dollars and cents. It is a debt we owe them for the safety and security they provide this country and the blood they have shed in defense of the country.

Failing to pay them is a moral failure, and that is why I am proud to be joining the Senator from Washington as well as Senator Thune in a measure to provide payment for the Coast Guard, and I hope we will meet this obligation as soon as possible.

We also have an obligation to other Federal workers because they are suffering and sacrificing during this shutdown, now 26 days long.

One of them, among the workers I met just last Monday, is Adrian Pellot. He served in the Air Force. He has worked as a behavior detection officer for more than a decade. He is also one of the TSA workers at Bradley not receiving pay.

He said to me:

We have no income right now. We are bleeding money. Just day-to-day things. Food. I still have to pay the bills. The electric company, the cell phone company--they don't care. They are brutal. To feel like we are poker chips or leverage is very, very infuriating. We are people--we have lives--not just a number to throw around. I want the government to reopen.

Nothing I say here expresses more eloquently and powerfully the obligation we are failing to meet.

I will be proposing legislation to provide workers like Adrian unemployment benefit compensation. States like Connecticut now must seek approval from the Department of Labor of the United States to provide unemployment compensation for workers who are on the job but unpaid.

The workers who are furloughed and unpaid can receive that compensation. The folks showing up to work, keeping us safe in the skies, assuring that our security is met at the TSA lines, are unpaid, and they are uncompensated out of the State workers' compensation system, and they should be.

That is why I will propose legislation for fundamental fairness and necessary benefits for workers like Adrian and his partner, Sarah Small, who has been a TSA officer for over 11 years. She currently works part time at Bradley as a TSA officer, and she is in nursing school.

She said to me: ``It's more nerve-racking because of the fact that if this shutdown lasts any longer, one of us is going to have to find something.''

They are just two examples of thousands across the country. My colleagues, every one of you has an Adrian Pellot or a Sarah Small or a Coast Guard service man and woman or someone like them who are working without unemployment compensation, having to pay bills, mortgages, put food on the table. They are unable to do it because the government is shut down.

Let us reopen the government. Let us meet our obligation. Let us do our job, and the man down the street on Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House ought to be doing his job too.

In the meantime, let's help them meet their bills and save them from debts much as we do servicemembers with their relief fund; another legislative measure I will be advocating and advancing. We owe it to them. We owe it to the country.

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