Further Extending Government Funding Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, I thank the chair of the Appropriations Committee for yielding me 1 minute.
I rise to say, of course, everybody is going to vote for this bill. I wish I believed that.
Madam Speaker, this bill is a demonstration of the failure of 535 adults elected by their fellow citizens to act responsibly. Obviously, of those 535, a number have acted responsibly, have worked to get the job done.
There are really only 12 bills that need to pass the Congress. There are many other bills that are important bills and should pass the Congress that I voted for and make life better for America.
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Mr. HOYER. How is that?
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Mr. HOYER. I thank the gentleman, who is my friend, and I thank him for that.
As I was saying, this is a failure. We knew that these 12 bills have to pass. Why? Because if they do not, government shuts down. It stops serving the American people. It stops maintaining security and health and welfare of our people. So we know these bills have to pass.
But notwithstanding that, year after year after year, we come to this point where we are adopting a CR. It is really a CI, congressional irresponsibility.
Now let me say that I generally speak of the Congress, but very frankly, Madam Speaker, we have exercised our responsibility in this House. We passed 9 of the 12 appropriation bills and sent them to the Senate.
The Senate, Madam Speaker, has not sent a single bill to the House, not passed a single appropriations bill through the United States Senate. They have passed through some in committee.
I heard my friend Tom Cole speaking earlier on the rule. He is my friend, and he is a Member I respect. He is a member of the Appropriations Committee and the Rules Committee. He is a Member who respects this institution. But I disagree with him very much about why we are at a CR. We passed overwhelmingly 75 percent of the appropriation bills before August 1 and sent them to the Senate. They have neither acted on those bills nor have they acted on their own bills and asked to go to conference.
So we find ourselves at the 11th hour, as we did on September 30-- although we passed the CR a little before September 30--without having funded the government.
The gentleman referred to the fact that we control both Houses. Frankly, nobody controls the United States Senate. We are in the majority by one. But, unfortunately, in the United States Senate, you need not a majority; you need a supermajority. So the minority can defeat the majority.
The minority can defeat the majority in the United States Senate. That is an appalling place for our democracy to be. I have written an op-ed in Time magazine on that issue, and it has been distributed to many Members.
Mr. Cole made an assessment about why the CR is coming to the floor today with just hours to go before it expires. His assessment was not correct. The reason we have not gotten, as the gentlewoman has pointed out, to even the opportunity to discuss a resolution of the differences between the House and the Senate on spending levels and the objects of that spending is because Senate Republicans have refused to negotiate and made as a condition precedent--as we lawyers say, something that has to happen before you do something else--that we resolve all the riders.
Now, for any of us who have been involved in the appropriation process for any period of time, the riders are almost always the last items to be resolved, invariably. I served as an active member of the Appropriations Committee for 23 years, and for the last 16 years, I have been very much involved in working with the Appropriations Committee to get these bills passed.
Because of the refusal to even sit down and determine how much money we will spend overall, which is called in our jargon 302(a) numbers, the chairman has been unable to get to a discussion of the differences so that they could be resolved. If you can't discuss, you can't resolve.
So for Mr. Cole, frankly, to have intimated that somehow it was the Democrats that couldn't do it, it takes two to tango, and frankly, one of the partners in the Senate doesn't want to tango until something happens that almost always happens at the end.
The timing for the consideration of this CR resulted not from the majority's focus on passing critical legislation to help the American people get ahead, the Build Back Better Act, the infrastructure bill which, by the way, only 13 Republicans voted for, but my speculation is at least half of them are going to take credit for what was done in that bill, maybe all of them. It is as a result, this failure, of the minority's determination to slow down the work of Congress so that such legislation is delayed.
As a matter of fact, the minority leader of the United States Senate said exactly that. He said that he would not consider negotiating on the CR until Build Back Better was done, which means he is prepared to shut down the government. I think that is probably not true. I don't think he wants to shut down the government. I hope he doesn't want to shut down the government.
He wants to gum up the works on Build Back Better. I get that. He is opposed to it. He doesn't like it. He thinks it is the wrong priorities. That is an honest position to take. I think it is incorrect, but it is honest. But don't do it by playing games with the appropriation process.
In my view, the Senate treats the appropriation process as a back- burner issue. When we get to it, we will get to it, but we have a lot of other things we want to do first. For the last 10, 11 months, that is what the case has been.
To dissemble and derail the legislative process using every tool available to them to prohibit Congress from doing exactly what the American people are looking for us to do is not responsible. How sad. How shameful that reality is.
I agree that it is unfortunate that we have to take up another stopgap measure this week to keep this government operating. If it were based upon whether this is the right thing to do in terms of substance, I would vote ``no.'' But it absolutely is the right thing to do in terms of process.
But the chair is absolutely right; we need to pass an omnibus. I would hope that every Republican after, hopefully, passing this piece of legislation today or tomorrow will then address how we are going to have an omnibus, how we are going to deal with the problems, how we are going to give the government agencies that which they need to meet new challenges that were not available to us a year ago and so they could not be addressed.
It is extremely disappointing that Senate Republicans are blocking progress toward full-year appropriations that will enable our government to serve the American people. I happen to believe that the ranking member, Senator Shelby, wants to see an omnibus passed. I believe that. But I believe the tactics of the Republican leadership in the Senate are not to do so until they get what they want.
That is dangerous for our country, and it is extraordinarily inefficient for the 2 million people who are waiting to see what we are doing. That is what they are focused on, not the job, not the priorities, not the dangers, but what is happening: Is the government going to fund us on Saturday? On Saturday, are we going to be able to operate?
There are few certainties in Washington, Madam Speaker, but one of them has now become that Congress will not complete the appropriation process by the start of the fiscal year. I have tried to make that happen every year that I have been majority leader. The chair of this committee, Rosa DeLauro, did everything she could to pass 12 appropriation bills by the August 1 deadline. If we had had any help on the Republican side, we would have done it--any help.
Now, we have only a four-vote margin over here, so on some of the bills that were more controversial for one reason or another, we needed some help. I will remind my friend--and I dearly thank him for yielding me the time. He knew it was going to be a somewhat extended discussion, but I thank him for that. It reflects back to how this institution used to operate, frankly, and I appreciate it. But he knows that when the Republican side was in the majority, and they could not get the majority of votes on fiscal issues, they looked to this side of the aisle. We always helped and made it happen; maybe not 100 percent of us, but a large enough amount so that the important fiscal issues would be dealt with and passed.
Only six times over the past 20 years has Congress come within 3 months of this deadline, the end of the fiscal year.
Now, I could go on for some period of time talking about Mr. Cole. He said the majority wasn't serious. We are very serious. We have been the ones that opened up government after it was shut down for some 35 days when we took over from the Republican leadership two Congresses ago. We can do better.
For Mr. Cole to say that we were spending time pandering to the American people by passing the Build Back Better Act or passing the bipartisan infrastructure act, I hope he reflects upon that statement and says, no, that was wrong. Yes, we focused on Build Back Better because we think it is important for the American people, but we had already passed the appropriation bills. They were already in the Senate ready to be acted upon, and we were ready to act in response.
Madam Speaker, this is the result of the inability of the Congress to work. The House worked. Republicans and Democrats, this House can work. Maybe sometimes I don't agree with what it does, and maybe sometimes my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't agree with what it does, but it works. It can pass legislation.
The Senate is not working, and it is hurting our country.
We should all resolve, however we vote on this CR, we should all resolve, hopefully, all of us--and I am a good friend of the ranking member, Ms. Granger. I think she wants to get this bill done. By ``this bill,'' I am talking about omnibus, all 12 appropriation bills. I think she wants to get that done. But I am not sure that she has been empowered by her leadership to do so.
We can have differences, and we have a way of resolving those differences. Ultimately, we vote. But if we keep putting it off, putting it off, putting it off, it undermines the credibility of the United States, the confidence that people have in our country, the confidence that our workers have in our stewardship of the leadership of this country, and the people's confidence. So we ought to resolve that we stop this.
The Republicans, through Mr. Cole, have talked about a motion to recommit. It mirrors the unserious nature of their opposition. Why do I say that? Because their motion to recommit has nothing to do with the funding of government. It has nothing to do with our responsibility to ensure that government continues to work on behalf of the American people. Rather, it would send this bill back to committee and would not possibly be able to act in a timely fashion that some 30 hours from now, I guess 31\1/2\ hours from now, government would shut down.
I would have understood perhaps a motion that would have said we are going to fund government at this level, or we are going to fund this objective and not that objective, but that is not what it did, totally irrelevant to the appropriations process bill. They may think it is an important issue. I get that. But it doesn't have anything to do with this issue.
Very frankly, that is exactly what the Senate has been doing on the Republican side, irrelevant issues, not the appropriations process. So we find ourselves now at a time when we must pass this CR.
I am not in love with this CR, but in a world of alternatives, there should be none for any of us. All of us should have the courage to be responsible. Madam Speaker, all of us should have the courage to say there is no alternative, and after we pass this bill and the Senate passes this bill, get down to the work between now and February 18.
I would hope we could pass an omnibus appropriation bill including the work of the gentleman from California, the gentlewoman from Connecticut, and all the rest of us on the priorities that we want to pursue as an American people and the investments that we want to make in achieving those objectives. I hope we do that.
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