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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, it is no secret that the Senate has a long to-do list this month. The National Defense Authorization bill, the farm bill, and all 12 appropriations bills should be signed into law before the end of this month, but with 9 working days left on the schedule, we all know that is likely not to happen. But these deadlines are not a surprise. We have known about them for a long, long time, and many of them, like government funding, come up every year as well as the NDAA, which we have done for 60-plus years in a row.

Despite that, we find ourselves staring down the barrel at the end of the fiscal year without a clear direction from Leader Schumer on how he intends to see that the government is funded. It is astounding that the monumental task of funding the government has lingered in purgatory on the Senate calendar as the Democratic leader chooses to spend this Chamber's time, limited time, on political show votes on a number of partisan nominees.

I would also like to remind this Chamber of what the Democratic leader has wasted the Senate's time voting on this year. We have voted on things like protecting access to contraception--not in dispute; IVF, in vitro fertilization--not in dispute; and neither of which is under any kind of threat, but we had to have show votes to try to gain political advantage in the run-up to the November 5 election even if the narrative supporting the vote outcome is a false narrative.

We also voted on sweeping tax policy and a bill that never went through a single committee in the Senate and received zero input on the Republican side. We voted again on a border bill that didn't address major contributors to the massive illegal immigration we have seen during this administration. The majority leader has scheduled these show votes to give his vulnerable incumbents a political lifeline, putting politics over doing the most basic things that the Senate should be doing.

We spent weeks voting on the Biden-Harris administration's controversial nominees, many of whom are unqualified to fill the jobs that they have been nominated to. This partisan gamesmanship, when so much important work remains to be done, is a waste of time, and it is an opportunity lost.

So let me just put this in greater context. It is not for the lack of effort on behalf of Senate committees. Both the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have done their work in a bipartisan manner. On appropriations, Chair Murray and Vice Chair Collins have made serious progress on the appropriations bills. Virtually all of them have passed out of the Appropriations Committee with either unanimous support or strong bipartisan support.

The majority leader could have put those bills on the floor last July, not 9 days before a government shutdown, but he chose not to do it. So he points the finger of blame at our colleagues in the House of Representatives, who are trying to figure this out, but this is a wholly man-made disaster in the making, and it could have been avoided. We could have been voting on funding bills months ago instead of days, weeks, and months creeping by without even an inch of progress. These are bills like the National Defense Authorization bill, for example, that pay our servicemembers and ensure that government operations, big and small, continue day-to-day.

I would say that the work done by our Senate committees on a bipartisan basis is not necessarily easy work. It takes a lot of time and consideration by our colleagues on the Appropriations and Armed Services Committees. But the majority leader has sabotaged this productive bipartisan work by imposing a part-time work schedule on the Senate. It doesn't give us much room to maneuver or much time to actually debate, vote on, and pass legislation. Of course, when the Senate is in recess, which we have just come off of for about 6 weeks, committees can't meet, and it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to solve the biggest problems facing our country, of which there are many.

There is also this newfound phenomenon under the majority leader's schedule called recess Mondays. This means the Senate doesn't even come back to Washington until Tuesday, and then we are gone Thursday afternoon. It is hard to get real work done working part time. How on Earth are members of the various committees and subcommittees supposed to debate, amend, and advance 12 funding bills when the Senate is only working 2\1/2\ days a week? With this type of schedule, there just simply are not enough hours for our colleagues to complete the mountain of work ahead of them.

Our current posture shows the folly of this approach. Including today, we are only scheduled to be in session 9 days before adjourning for October, the entire month of October, just after coming off of a 6- week break.

Again, Chairman Murray and Vice Chair Collins have both said repeatedly that they want us to return to the normal appropriations process, not this contrived narrative of an imminent government shutdown, with all that that would entail.

I want to say, I appreciate the good work that has been done by our colleagues on the Armed Services Committee and on the Appropriations Committee. Again, this is not easy. These are huge, important, and challenging issues that they have debated and voted on and produced bills that now await the majority leader scheduling them on the Senate floor. But because of the leader's inability or, rather, unwillingness to plan, we may end up kicking the can down the road in the form of a continuing resolution.

For those listening, a continuing resolution just means the status quo. It means just moving the deadline further down the road. We will still have to deal with these issues again--perhaps in December, perhaps in March, depending on how long the continuing resolution is.

But it is somewhat embarrassing to be a Member of the world's greatest deliberative body and to find ourselves in this situation once again. Again, this isn't a surprise. This isn't something that just popped up. We know what the deadline is, and we know we should have been doing our work a lot earlier.

There is no question that stopgap bills are better than a shutdown but just barely. It isn't a perfect solution, especially for critical missions like national defense.

As the Presiding Officer knows, during continuing resolutions, the Pentagon can't engage in any new starts, and basically they can't plan beyond the timeframe of the continuing resolution. Yet we know that there are wars raging in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and threats in the Indo-Pacific and in places like North Korea.

This is the most dangerous environment that our country has seen since World War II. Don't you think we would want to be able to fund the government on a timely basis so that the Pentagon can plan, so they don't have to worry about government shutdowns? Don't you think we would take up the National Defense Authorization bill that, again, passed out of committee months ago and has been available for floor action? This is the most basic function of the Senate when it comes to national defense, is passing the National Defense Authorization bill, but we are not going to do it because there simply isn't time.

I appreciate our colleagues in the House trying to figure out how to handle this under difficult circumstances--again, completely unnecessary--but I think we all understand that government shutdowns are not in anybody's best interest. We know that the problem that caused the shutdown is still going to be there staring us in the face when the government reopens, and the truth is, it is a whole lot more expensive and a whole lot more disruptive than it needs to be.

The bottom line is this: We have a duty and responsibility to pass full-year, on-time appropriations bills. That is the bare minimum of governing. Short-term funding bills don't allow for long-term planning or stability when it comes to important functions like national defense or any other aspect of the Federal Government.

It is unfortunate that we are in this situation because the majority leader, who is the only person who can schedule action on the floor, has given us so few session days in which to consider these critical bills.

Strengthening defense, funding the government, and safeguarding our supply of food and fiber--these are essential to the welfare of our Nation.

The way the Senate has been run under the current management is no way to treat its most basic responsibilities. I can only hope that come November, there will be a new management elected by the American people because they don't have to put up with the status quo; they can change it. That is one of the great things about democracy. Democracies are capable of course correction. When they don't like the direction you are heading in, they can change it, and they could do that at the ballot box starting on November 5.

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