Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, it has been 34 days since the President fulfilled his promise to shut down the government, and the American people are not happy about it.

Poll after poll shows that people are not OK with the way the President of the United States is handling his job, and it is getting worse by the day, because to any reasonable person, this shutdown has been stupid and useless and cruel.

There are so many failures to talk about, but I want to talk about four specific failures that, if it were any other President, if it were any other time in modern history, would bring a President and a Congress to its senses and end the shutdown.

The first failure is this. Federal workers are in food lines. Federal workers are in food lines. People with jobs are now in food lines. Hundreds of thousands of people who work for the government are either furloughed or working without pay, and, tomorrow, these American public servants will miss their second paycheck.

There is a big difference between missing the first paycheck and the second paycheck. Some people can absorb missing the first paycheck, but this second paycheck is going to be really, really challenging for tens of thousands of American public servants because the rent is due, the mortgage is due, the car registration is due, the insurance is due, and the utilities are due at the beginning of the month.

This brings the amount of money that American public servants are owed by their government for work already performed to $4.7 billion. Remember that about a third of all Federal workers are veterans.

It may be hard for billionaires in the Cabinet to understand, but for the middle class, missing two paychecks in a row is a total disaster.

I have met people working in airport security who can't concentrate. They can't sleep because they can't stop worrying about how they are going to pay their bills. I have met government workers in the midst of applying for food stamps and asking local charities for help. I met a single mom who spent her career working hard to build a life for her family, and she told me that without these paychecks, it is all going backward.

As one Washington Post columnist put it, under the Republican leadership, the United States is starting to look like the failed Soviet system, with middle-class workers literally waiting in bread lines.

I am grateful that for every story I have heard of someone suffering, there is also a story of people stepping up to help. In Hawaii, in particular, local utility companies, financial institutions, and others have decided that they will not penalize Federal workers hurt by the shutdown if they miss a payment. I want to thank our local banks for allowing unpaid Federal workers to make a late payment on their mortgage without a penalty, and I want to thank our credit unions for extending very cheap credit. I want to thank people who are organizing in local communities, not just in Hawaii but across the country, so that middle-class families can make it through this.

Federal workers want paychecks, not food banks. They want paychecks. They don't want charity. They want to be compensated for the work that they do. They shouldn't rely on pop-up kitchens for furloughed workers or online fundraising campaigns or the kindness of families, friends, and strangers--as great as all of that is. They should just get paid, and that starts with opening the government.

Here is the second failure that should end this shutdown right away, and that is that economic growth is already slowing. This week, a White House adviser said that the Nation's economic growth could be zero if the shutdown goes on. Economists and business leaders were already worried about the potential for a recession, and this shutdown is fanning those unfortunate flames.

Small businesses can't get loans. Companies can't go public. This administration has stopped some of the core functions of our market economy, but there is one thing that will not stop, and that is the corruption in this administration.

If you have money, this administration takes care of you, and if you don't, then they will not. Federal workers have been called back to the office to take care of oil and gas leases--to take care of oil and gas leases--and to help financial institutions. They are working unpaid so that special interests can keep making money.

This is the third failure. While people who are fortunate financially are protected, this shutdown leaves the people most vulnerable to fend for themselves.

Food pantries and health clinics that rely on Federal funds are out of supplies, which means that Americans are going to start to go hungry and without medicine for everything from diabetes to addiction.

Landlords who provide housing for 4 million people--mostly seniors and people with disabilities and kids--will soon stop receiving rent payments. They will have to decide how long they can hold out before being forced to evict these people or lose the properties themselves.

Housing authorities are delaying the release of section 8 vouchers.

Domestic violence shelters that rely on Federal funds are furloughing their own workers and cutting back services that save lives. So men, women, and children who need to get out of a dangerous situation at home have fewer options to get to safety.

That brings me to the fourth failure, which is that public safety is gravely at risk. This is a serious matter. This isn't about whether Donald Trump can save face or whether the Republicans can vanquish the Democrats or Nancy Pelosi makes Mitch McConnell look bad. It is none of that. Public safety is at risk.

Air traffic controllers and TSA workers are working without pay. They are stressed out, and they are becoming increasingly understaffed and undersupported, and there is no ability to train new employees, and they are sounding the alarm.

This isn't my rhetoric. I want you to listen to what the National Air Traffic Controllers Association said yesterday:

We cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break. It is unprecedented.

The National Transportation Safety Board is being forced to choose which crashes to investigate and which not to, leaving us with unanswered questions and risking lives in the future. As of this week, the NTSB has been unable to investigate 87 crashes, including some with fatalities.

This is a pattern. It is a pattern of recklessly endangering the safety of Americans. We are just 2 months out from a wildfire that destroyed 18,000 homes and buildings and killed 86 people. Yet the shutdown has stopped us from training firefighters. It has cancelled controlled burns. It has led to dead trees piling up in places that we know pose a fire risk. This is what happens when you shut down the government to try to get your way. You put real people at risk.

The safety of Americans abroad and at home is threatened by this shutdown. The State Department cancelled a border security summit. This fight is supposed to be about border security. Yet we are not paying TSA, we are not paying FBI agents, we are about to close some of our Federal courts, and the State Department itself just cancelled a border security summit. FBI agents are working without pay. Field offices are operating in fiscal uncertainty. That means investigations into street gangs and drug dealers are on hold, training on child abductions and counterterrorism has been cancelled, and communications with sources about gangs, such as MS-13, have stopped. As one agent put it, ``Our enemies know they can run freely.'' Our enemies know they can run freely.

I ask all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, why would we put public safety at risk? Why can't we reopen the government and negotiate our differences?

The truth is, as it relates to border security--I am in my seventh year in the Senate, and every year, we do a bipartisan bill that includes border security in the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee. We always do this.

By the way, every Republican and every Democrat will quietly say: We are not doing a cement wall from sea to shining sea. That makes no sense, and nobody at the Department of Homeland Security thinks that is a good idea.

So we quietly appropriate money--some for personnel, some for beds, some for courts so they can adjudicate some of these cases, and some for physical barriers where it is appropriate, to put up a wall where it makes sense. You don't put up a wall where it doesn't make sense. We do this all the time. So the idea that we are going to shut down the government and shut down portions of the Department of Homeland Security itself in order to get to a place where the President of the United States can save face is just absurd.

We have to be the grownups here, and that is going to require some Republicans to craft a border security package with Democrats, as we have over the last 6 or 7 years, and we have to do that after we open the government. The reason that is so essential is that this President--certainly this President especially, but no President, Democratic or Republican, now or 30 years from now, should ever inflict pain on the American people in order to generate leverage in a policy discussion. When somebody does that--and if it is one of my friends in the Senate and they do this 10 years from now, I want them to read this speech back to me. The answer to the offer, which is, ``I am going to hurt Americans unless you do X,'' should be ``You get nothing in exchange for not hurting Americans.'' That is not a cookie for us.

Barack Obama learned that lesson the hard way. Only when he finally said ``You guys want to screw with the American economy; you want to mess with the debt ceiling; you get nothing'' did they back off, and all that brinksmanship stopped.

Every time we reward hostage taking, we will get more hostage taking. As painful as all of this is, we have to stand firm. We are absolutely willing to negotiate a package related to border security, which will no doubt include some physical barrier, because we do that every year, actually, but I am not doing any of that until the government is opened. That is not just a political position; that is a matter of principle because we can't live like this as a country. We cannot function like this. If we do this, if we cut a deal now and we give $2 billion for the wall, the debt ceiling is coming up in March or April, and here we go again. The fiscal year expires in September, and here we go again. We will never govern. I know the Presiding Officer was a Governor. That is no way to run a country. Let this be the last shutdown.

I know the two leaders of the Senate are in what appear to be constructive conversations. I know there are plenty of adults who want to get us out of this. For the first time in several weeks, I have actually felt somewhat hopeful about the trajectory. I don't think we are going to fix this in the next hour or so, but at least we are talking, and at least there seems to be a desire to structure an off- ramp. But we have to do one simple thing first: We have to reopen the government. People are about to miss their paychecks for the second time tomorrow. It is our obligation to reopen the government.

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