Securing Growth and Robust Leadership in American Aviation Act--Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I appear in a very timely way to make clear that our military will be paid if the House Republicans do not shut our government down. But in the off chance that they do, because of Democrats, in the last shutdown we had, we got a bill passed that guaranteed that all of them will at least receive backpay. In earlier shutdowns, that was never a guarantee. So people were forced to come to work not knowing whether they would be paid.

But during the last shutdown, in early 2019, I forwarded a bill to the floor. I used a procedural objection to recess at the end of a week. And using that objection, we were able to get a guarantee in place that all Federal employees, including members of the military, will not be punished when ne'er-do-wells and malefactors in the GOP decide to shut the government down.

Why do I make it so partisan? It is because only the GOP ever threatens to shut government down. In 2013, 2018, 2019, right now--only the GOP threatens to default on the national debt. We in the Senate, with a little cooperation from our Republican colleagues, will pass an overwhelmingly bipartisan continuing resolution within the next couple of days. And if the House will only do their job and agree to be as bipartisan as the Senate is, nobody needs to worry about losing a paycheck. But at least we have put a guarantee in place that nobody serving our Nation, whether in uniform or otherwise, will be at risk of losing pay because of an unnecessary shutdown.

Just a few months ago, the Speaker and the President negotiated a deal to avoid a default, and they set the stage to fund government spending bills. Since then, bipartisan colleagues in the Senate Appropriations Committee have worked in an impressive way.

The Presiding Officer is part of that team, working impressively and in a bipartisan manner to pass 12 appropriations bills out of committee.

But now, Members of the House are backtracking on the agreement that we just made 4 months ago. We made an agreement on spending limits, and the Senate Appropriations Committee has written their bills to those numbers. And yet the House is using Federal shutdown as a bargaining chip to undo the deal they just voted for and to try to get more draconian cuts and unnecessary policies in this year-end deal.

I am a Senator from Virginia. Some of the hardest effects of shutdown will be seen in my State, and they are already starting. Even before we get to midnight on Saturday, September 30, my office has been flooded with more than 600 constituent comments expressing their concerns about government shutdown. And what I would like to do is just share some of the stories that I am hearing from Virginians.

April, from Orange County, writes:

My husband is a member of the Army Reserves and [he] is preparing for a deployment to Africa next year. His training has been delayed due to funding with the close of the fiscal year, and a shutdown will certainly delay [the] training [even further].

So what does that mean? Do you deploy without adequate training or does the deployment date change? Families have planned around this. Employers have planned around this. A government shutdown affects April and her family.

Jennifer from Norfolk writes:

My husband is a USMC veteran who utilizes [the] VA. . . . A government shutdown places an undue financial and emotional burden on [my] family.

Kelsey from Harrisonburg wrote:

My parents, along with two friends, are on a 7-week post- retirement [celebration] camping trip to visit National Parks. [The park] closure would significantly . . . [affect] this trip.

Katie from Fredericksburg, whose husband is a civilian DoD employee wrote:

I work directly with families through the Head Start program in Stafford County. A shutdown to include so many important social services will be devastating to so many families I see and serve every day.

It is interesting that Katie, whose own husband is a Federal employee, does not write about her own family but writes about other families relying on Head Start services.

Mary, who lives in Virginia, but whose husband is overseas in Foreign Service, writes:

It's a huge problem for my family to go without pay for an unknown period of time. I have a son with a chronic illness whose medications are very expensive. This could impact our ability to purchase his . . . medications. As a foreign service family, we spend every day representing our nation and making sacrifices on behalf of our nation. We hope that Congress will do the same and work hard to resolve the issue before the deadline later this week.

Lauren from Glen Allen, near where I live in Richmond, wrote and shared that government shutdowns are a reason she has lost faith in the system. In a letter to my office, she wrote:

My family and I purchased plane tickets to visit Utah about 6 months ago. Our entire itinerary is to visit National Parks . . . and it is heartbreaking to realize now that on the cusp of our trip--

They are supposed to leave on September 30-- we may not get to visit the locations and hike the trails that we have been looking forward to for [many] months now. It may seem like a trivial matter to you, but we saved money for over a year and [we] managed our own household budget in order to afford this trip. Now Congress is on the verge of ruining it.

Amber from Williamsburg wrote:

We recently PCSd--

That is the military phrase for moving to a new duty station-- and a shutdown could not only cost us my husband's paycheck, but it would also delay the reimbursement from our personally procured move. We could face missing payments on the [credit] card we used to pay for our move and my husband's student loan, taken out so he can pursue a degree he needed for [a] promotion. Not to mention that he will continue to work, doing the job of many more that will be furloughed until a resolution is agreed upon. We are a family that has served this country for generations, and we are still serving, but I am hesitant to encourage my son that dreams of enlisting to pursue a career for a country that is so quick to ignore the needs of its military families.

Cheryl from Centreville writes:

My husband's business will be affected, as he has several government contracts. He will be required by law to pay his employees, whether he receives government funding or not. I also have several friends who will be required to keep working without pay, just as they did last time--and the time before that. They have families to feed.

Tracy from Virginia Beach, who recently relocated to Virginia from California, is worried about how a shutdown will impact relocation and the ability to pay bills. She wrote:

My family . . . has experienced government shutdowns previously. My husband has been a federal employee since 2005. It always creates stress and worry and having to figure out how to pay basic expenses while he has to work without pay.

Lori from Falls Church writes:

As an active duty military family whose income depends on a government job, a shutdown will have a real and lasting impact on our family. The government shutdown affects our ability to pay our mortgage, to pay for groceries, medical expenses . . . the struggle is [very] real. . . . We have had some extra medical expenses from an illness my son has that Tricare won't cover. . . . This is just too much pressure on active duty families.

Yesterday, I met with the director of the Shenandoah National Park. He told me that there are many couples who have weddings planned for this weekend and the following weeks, during the most beautiful month of the year in the Shenandoah National Park. And they are ringing the phone off the hook at the Shenandoah National Park office. They asked what will happen if that park closes and their weddings can't go forward as planned.

This might seem like a minor one compared to people who have medical bills or in whose businesses they have to keep paying their employees when they are not getting paid. This is supposed to be the happiest day of your life. It is supposed to be the happiest day of your life. And because the House wants to backtrack on a spending deal they just reached a few months ago and they are unwilling to act in the same bipartisan manner that the Senate is acting in, these couples, who are going to pledge themselves to each other for the rest of their life, now, don't know whether their weddings will go forward.

Some politicians out there are saying shutdowns aren't that bad. I can assure you these 600 people--and they are writing in, more every day, and it will only get more intense--what they are saying tells you: Don't believe those who say a shutdown isn't a problem.

More than 100,000 Virginians would either be furloughed or forced to work without pay. And while I am proud of the fact that we worked together to get this backpay guarantee, in an extended shutdown, a backpay doesn't pay the grocery bills, doesn't pay the medical bills, doesn't pay the rent bills. You might be able to take the guarantee to a landlord or to a school that needs a tuition payment and get them to cut you a break. But in an extended shutdown, a backpay guarantee, though OK, is not the same as getting your paycheck.

A shutdown affects us in so many ways. The SBA has to stop approving or modifying small business loans. The FDA delays food inspections. That is not a good thing. Air traffic controllers and TSA agents are working without pay, which in the past has contributed to significant flight delays all across the country. Nutrition benefits are potentially at risk in an extended shutdown, programs that help food insecure Virginian kids put food on the table.

I mentioned my Shenandoah National Park example. October is the busiest month of the year for Virginia communities that surround our National Parks, especially the Shenandoah National Park and the Chincoteague National Seashore and National Wildlife Refuge. These small communities that surround these two beautiful natural assets have reoriented their economies around tourism, and October is the peak season, especially in Shenandoah. This is not just the park itself and weddings that would take place in the park. This is the outdoor outfitters and the hotels and the B&Bs and the restaurants and diners that are in these small communities that surround these National Parks. This is their busy season. They count on this month of October as being the way they will have a successful year or an unsuccessful year. And if you shut down--because we saw this in October 2013--we have seen this before. If you shut down right at this time of year, they lose business that they will never get back, because the people who want to go in the peak of leaf season to have a vacation with their family, when the park reopens, maybe in a couple of weeks or a month, they are not going to say: OK, the leaves are all brown in November, but let's go. No, they are not going to do it. And so these small businesses don't recoup the revenue they lost during their busiest time of the year.

So whether it is closed parks or people who can't have a wedding or whether it is military members or Foreign Service overseas or people stressing about medical bills, this affects every ZIP Code, every last crossroads in this country, and it affects hundreds of thousands of Americans who are living abroad, serving this Nation in other countries, whether they be serving in the military or in a civilian capacity.

And, most of all, it is completely unnecessary. The President and the Speaker came to a bipartisan, bicameral agreement. It was voted positively in the House. It was voted positively here.

The only reason we are here is that a small but loud minority of House GOP Members who didn't like the deal that we reached, who voted against it, are now trying to use the leverage of shutting down the government of the greatest Nation on Earth to try to get their way.

I don't know if you noticed one thing they did earlier today. The Members who were loudly in the House, fighting in many instances for shutdown, cast a vote to reduce the salary of the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, to $1. This is the complete lack of seriousness with which these Members are taking this issue. The head of the American military? I am on the Armed Services Committee. One of my kids is a marine reservist. Somebody overseeing the military of the most important nation on Earth, a nation that has, through leadership, inspired the democracies of the world to link arms and stand up against an illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia--the United States has forged a global coalition, and on the verge of a shutdown that would hurt our military members, what is the House doing? Are they even sending us legislation? They can't get their act together to do that. But in a voice vote earlier today, they could get their act together, in the middle of the biggest land war in Europe since World War II, to suggest that the salary of the Secretary of Defense should be reduced to $1 a year.

The biggest threats we face as a nation are not external to this Nation's borders. They are exemplified by the dysfunction that we are seeing with the House majority that refuses to abide by a deal they just voted on, who would put our military and all others--all other citizens--at risk.

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