Recess
Floor Speech
RECESS -- (Senate - March 03, 2009)
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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I rise to oppose the amendment that has just been offered by the Senator from Nevada. I go home every weekend and I talk to families across my State. There is no doubt that people are hurting. Thousands of people have been laid off from their jobs, and thousands more are worried that this week they are the ones who are going to be laid off from their jobs.
Since we first came into session in January, we have been working as hard as I have ever seen to address these challenges that are facing millions of Americans today--losing their jobs, losing their homes, losing their retirement. We are trying to get this economy back on track and instill some confidence in this country so we can move forward. We passed a major economic recovery package just a few weeks ago. It is being implemented as we speak and will be implemented over the coming weeks and months.
Here we are today talking about a bill that basically is the responsibility of Congress, every single year, to fund the Government agencies that help make our country work. We should have had this bill passed 3, 4, 5 months ago. We did not. This bill was done. It was ready to go by the end of July. All of the appropriations committees had finished their work. They had passed them out of the Appropriations Committee, almost all of them on a unanimous vote, some of them with just a few negative votes in committee.
But the responsibility of the Senate and House and Congress every year is to pass our spending bills. We pass these bills in order to make our agencies work, whether it is the Food and Drug Administration that makes sure our food is safe, whether it is our air traffic controllers who manage the flights out of our airports, whether it is our health care agencies that do research and important work for this Nation's health, whether it is Government agencies that fund agriculture or any of the other agencies we have. These are people who go to work every day whose function it is to make our economy and our country work so that average citizens do not have to sit at home and worry about whether the drug they purchase is safe or whether the agriculture they buy at the market is safe or whether their schools are funded or whether we provide individuals the basic health care Americans know they need in order to keep their families secure.
It is too bad these bills didn't pass a few months ago. Why didn't they? Because we had an administration whose bottom line was to say no. The President at the time, President Bush, said: I will say no to these bills as they come to my desk.
But here in the Senate and in the House, we said: These bills are important, but if this President is going to veto them, we are going to wait a few months for the election.
That happened, we have a brandnew President, and, unfortunately a few months late because we were working on an economic stimulus package, we are here to pass these bills. I wish they were done a few months ago. I know all of us do. But we should not delay it any further. All of the people who worked with us to get these bills passed, everyone in the country, whether it is a YMCA that has a domestic violence center that is waiting for $100,000 that we marked up in committee and appropriated last year for them, or highway projects we marked up in this bill, or transit projects, across the board, whether it is law enforcement, whether it is consumer product safety, whether it is the numerous housing agencies that are funded in this--they have known for several months what they are going to get. They are waiting for us to finish our work this week, by this deadline, Friday, so we do not go back to a CR. It is our responsibility to pass these bills.
The Senate had a very strong vote just a few hours ago to say we are not going to work off a continuing resolution. We are going to do a responsible job of funding these agencies, as we said.
The amendment of the Senator from Nevada that now comes before us sends us into a tailspin. It says we are going to send these bills back to the Appropriations Committee to cut some $20 billion out of them and come back to us. First of all, just from a process point of view, this is not going to happen by this Friday, and if we do not get this bill passed by this Friday, the Government shuts down. I can talk about the consequences of that. I have been in this body before when the Government shut down. It is not pretty, and we do not want to be there for a million reasons that I am happy to talk about for some time, but we will leave that for another day.
The fact is, to send this bill back to the Appropriations Committee and tell them to cut $20 billion out of it, that will underfund critical initiatives this Senate and this House believe are important.
Let me talk for a minute about housing. We all know that one of the reasons our economy is in such trouble today is because of the housing crisis that has come before us. In this bill--if we do not pass it as it is written and before the Senate today, we have about 45,000 families who will lose their jobs on top of the thousands we have already seen. We cannot afford to put those families in jeopardy. Yet that is essentially what will happen if the amendment of the Senator from Nevada is agreed to.
We are working hard to make sure our families do not go into foreclosure. The amendment of the Senator puts all of those families at risk. Single-family guaranteed housing loans are at risk under the amendment of the Senator. Federal law enforcement efforts through the Department of Justice are at risk through the amendment of the Senator. Antiterrorist enforcement programs through the Department of Treasury are at risk under the amendment of the Senator. U.S. attorneys are at risk. Food and medical product safety--right at a time when we are all worried about peanut butter--is at risk. Consumer product safety--the risk goes on. All of these priorities that we worked through our committee on a bipartisan basis and said we need to move these initiatives forward are at risk under the amendment of the Senator.
I believe we have to all go back to our responsibilities. All of us wish the bill could have passed a few months ago. It didn't. It is in front of us now. We need to pass this bill, get it to the President's desk, and then we will have
an opportunity to look at a budget for 2010. Our Budget Committee will look at that budget hard, we will pass the budget out--it will have to pass in the Senate and House--and it will set the parameters for next year's appropriations bills. Those appropriations committees will then, in the next few months, begin to work on their bill. For anybody who has issues, small or large, that is the appropriate place to begin the debate and amendment process and hopefully in regular order to pass those bills and move forward. But we should not jeopardize this bill at this point. That is not responsible. That is not what any of us should be doing at this point.
Finally, let me talk about the debt issue we have been hearing so much about. None of us wants to operate this country in debt. All of us are fiscally responsible. I have heard every Member of the Senate come forward and talk about making sure we keep our house in order.
Who got us to where we are today? The Republicans who came into power under George Bush turned historic surpluses into historic deficits by not being honest about the costs in front of us--whether it was the Iraq war or whether it was other costs that were paid off-budget, emergencies across the country--not coming forward and being honest about the fact that we do need to fund health care research or education for our kids. Why have these bills not passed before the election? Because even Republicans didn't want to cut education or to cut health care, which would have been what we had to do to meet the President's budget level.
I take a backseat to no one when it comes to making sure our country moves forward in a fiscally responsible way and deals with the debt we have. But at the cost of laying off thousands of people because we are not being responsible and up-front about the job we have to do is irresponsible.
I hope our colleagues will defeat the amendment by Senator Ensign, move on, pass this bill this week, and then we can have all the debate we want about the budget that will come before this body shortly, about the appropriations moving forward.
Let me remind all of us that what we are talking about here is extremely important. No one wants to get a pink slip. No one wants to see their job lost. No one wants to see their health care at risk, their education at risk, or for that matter, within my appropriations bill, their flight from their airport at risk because we have not added air traffic controllers, which is in this bill. There are many other issues in this bill that are at risk under the proposal of the Senator, and I urge our colleagues to defeat this amendment and move forward, doing what we were sent here to do, and that is be responsible.
I yield the floor.
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