Government Funding
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, last night, the country heard some good news. The members of the conference committee announced a tentative agreement to keep the government open past Friday as well as provide additional border security. It was welcome news.
All on the conference committee worked very hard and should be commended for their efforts. I talked to them regularly. Everyone wanted to get something done, and everyone wanted to avoid a government shutdown. While the details are still being hammered out, the tentative agreement represents a path forward for our country--away from another round of fraught negotiations up against a government funding cliff, away from a dreaded government shutdown.
Over the past few months, we have been lurching from one manufactured crisis to another. It would be a wonderful thing for this Congress to pass bills that settle the budget issues for the rest of this year and for the country to finally move past. Hopefully, that is what this agreement will portend. Hopefully, this agreement means that there will not be another government shutdown on Friday--sparing the country of another nightmare of furloughed Federal employees, snarled airports, and economic hardship. Hopefully, it means that we will pass not only the DHS appropriations bill but all six other appropriations bills-- done in a bipartisan way--that have been caught in the tangle of these negotiations since last year.
Each of these bills is a product of bipartisan consensus. Each contains more support for programs to help the American people-- additional funding for infrastructure, housing, money to combat the opioid crisis, and more. We should pass these appropriations bills alongside this agreement on DHS.
These months of shutdown politics must come to an end. We now have a bipartisan proposal to accomplish our goals, better secure the border, and avoid another senseless government shutdown. I don't know the details, but the parameters of this are good. So I thank the members of the conference committee.
I would make one more point. I urge President Trump to sign this agreement. We must not have a rerun of what happened a few months back, whereby legislators--Democratic and Republican, House and Senate-- agreed, and President Trump pulled the rug out from under the agreement and caused the shutdown. If he opposes this agreement, the same thing could happen again. We don't need it. So I strongly urge the President to sign this agreement. No one gets everything one wants in these agreements. The President must sign it and not cause another shutdown.
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