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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, as Congress approaches the January 19 funding deadline--less than 10 days away--both parties in both Chambers must work together quickly to ensure we avoid a government shutdown.

Congressional leaders agree that a shutdown would be a terrible way to start the year. Speaker Johnson and I are on the same page on that. A shutdown will hurt the economy, halt a lot of work of Congress and government, and endanger services that millions of Americans rely on.

If reasonable Members on both sides continue working together, we can ensure a shutdown is avoided. We took a big step last Sunday towards our goal when Speaker Johnson and I announced funding level top lines, and appropriators right now are hard at work drafting the 12 appropriations bills. It is good news that all four of the appropriators, the four corners, want to do this--Senator Murray, Senator Collins, and Congressmembers Granger and DeLauro. I am hopeful that if we stay the course, we can avoid a shutdown even with the tight deadline.

Now I want to return to a point I made yesterday about some of my colleagues in the House. As everyone knows, this is a period of divided government. Like it or not, it means that compromise is a necessity, and nobody is going to get everything they want in any negotiation. And, of course, the President is a Democrat, and the Senate has a Democratic majority. Anyone who wants to get anything done knows that there has to be a compromise between the Democratic President, the Democratic majority in the Senate, and the Republican majority in the House--of course taking into account our Republican colleagues in the Senate and Democratic colleagues in the House.

But right now, there are 30 or so hard-right Republicans in the House who labor under the illusion that they can bully everyone else into submission to get their narrow, hard-right agenda enacted into law. That is what they are trying to do in the appropriations process. There is only one word to describe the hard right's tactics: Bullying. Bullying. They want to bully their own conference, bully the Speaker, bully the Congress, and bully the country into accepting their extremist views.

It is easy to see why the hard right spends so much time trying to bully the rest of Congress: They have little leverage otherwise because their views are wildly out of the mainstream. These 30 or so Republican chaos agents do not represent the views of most Americans. They don't even represent the views of a great number of Republicans. They are MAGA radicals, extremists whose benchmark for success is paralysis, gridlock, chaos. They think a shutdown will help their party and help the country, but virtually no one else agrees. They are on an island.

But here is the thing: This kind of bullying almost never works. The hard right's bullying didn't work when we avoided default, it didn't work when we avoided shutdowns last year, and it is not going to work here.

Case in point: Where things stand right now in the appropriations process is little different than where we were after we passed the FRA last summer. The hard right wasted almost a year in the House by trying to bully their colleagues through the appropriations process. They wanted the Speaker to renege on the agreement codified in the FRA. Time and time again, they thwarted the House GOP's ability to even pass their own spending bills. They just wasted precious time. But for all their bluster, the hard right has nothing--nothing--to show for their bullying. The agreement we reached Sunday is practically the same number leadership shook hands on back in June.

In a body comprised of 435 voting Members, it is lunacy for the MAGA hard right to think they can puff their chest and bully the majority of their colleagues into submission. Won't happen.

This year, the American people are going to pay close attention to which party is capable of addressing their everyday needs and which is not. They will pay close attention to who is willing to reach across the aisle to get things done and who is openly calling for--almost excited about--a shutdown, which will hurt so many people. And the American people will note which is the party of chaos and which is the party of getting things done.

Make no mistake, the American people will not stand for radical MAGA Republicans whose only strategy for governing is to bully the rest of the country into submission. It will not work.

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