Government Funding

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, now on the CR, legislators now have roughly 2 weeks to reach an agreement to keep the government open beyond the September 30 deadline. It is not really much time at all. In order to avoid a shutdown, the worst thing our colleagues in the House can do right now is waste time on proposals that don't have broad, bipartisan support. But that is what the Speaker and his Republican colleagues have been doing all month long, and it is already September 16.

Mr. Speaker Johnson, you know as well as everyone else that your plan is a no-go as currently written. A 6-month CR with poison pills is not going to fly in a narrowly divided government.

CRs are always meant to be a short-term extension funding to give appropriators more time to do their work. They are not meant to be a substitute for Congress doing its job.

And if the hard right thinks that we will willingly give them leverage to ram Project 2025 down the American people's throats early next year by agreeing to a 6-month CR, they are dreaming. MAGA radicals are hoping they can use the threat of a shutdown next spring to pass the very worst of Project 2025. They want to cut the Department of Education. They want to eliminate Head Start. They want to privatize Fannie and Freddie, raising mortgage rates, making it harder to buy a home. They want to monitor women's pregnancies--monitor them--and potentially cut VA funding and more. We cannot--we will not--let that happen.

But even before we get to all of that, pushing for a CR that lasts 6 months, as the Speaker wants, would also mean that a slew of critical programs would still be shortchanged. It would be awful for our military. You simply cannot run the military with a 6-month stopgap-- little surprise that even many House Republicans recognize the Speaker's current approach is the wrong one.

The answer to the Speaker's problem is not very complicated. The Speaker should drop his current proposal and work with both parties on an extension that prioritizes keeping the government open--open without pushing poison pills. We are happy to work with him.

Now, despite all its flaws, there are some bits of good news in the Speaker's proposal that I hope we can build on. I am very heartened that the Speaker's current proposal preserves the essence of the Schumer-Johnson agreement from early this year, the one that set top- line funding levels for fiscal year 2024.

This is a good sign because, last September, Speaker McCarthy wasted precious time trying to pass a CR that curried favor with the hard right through very deep, brutal funding cuts. In the end, that approach didn't work, and Speaker McCarthy was removed from the speakership anyway because of the radicals on his right flank.

For now, Speaker Johnson seems to be taking a different approach, and it is not pushing for across-the-board cuts as part of his CR. That is good news. It is a sign Speaker Johnson may be accepting the reality that any deal we reach will have to include the spending levels we agreed to earlier this year.

To be clear, there are still far too many omissions in his current proposal, and a 6-month timeline is not acceptable, but I hope we have a foundation on which to build upon. Make no mistake about it--the clock is ticking. We have until September 30 before the government shuts down.

If the government shuts down, it will be average Americans who suffer most. A government shutdown means seniors who rely on Social Security could be thrown into chaos as the Social Security Administration limits certain services, like benefit verifications or fixing errors in payments. Our veterans could see regional VA offices shut down and support services put on halt. Some of our military servicemembers could be forced to work without pay. Families who benefit from WIC and other nutrition programs could see benefits halted. And a shutdown would shake the confidence of our economic recovery--something we can't possibly afford at a time like this.

If a shutdown happens because of Republican poison pills, the American people are going to hold them responsible.

We don't need to go down this road. We still have a little time to reach a bipartisan agreement. So I hope the Speaker drops his current plan.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source