Budget Negotiations
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I came to the floor the other night to talk about what I had learned in 2 years of townhall meetings in Colorado regarding our deficit and regarding our debt. What I said the other night was that people in our State, whether in red parts of the State or blue parts of the State, have a commonsense way of approaching this, and they have a three-part test they want to apply.
The first test is they want to make sure we actually come up with something that materially addresses the problem we face. They are tired of gimmicks. They are tired of tricks. They want us to sort this out. They know it will not be fixed overnight, but they want us to get started on it.
The second test is that we are all in it together. They are tired of the us-against-them conversation that happens in Washington. They are tired of hearing that one person's ox is going to be gored or one group of people's ox is going to be gored and everyone else will be left alone. Everybody wants to contribute to solving this problem.
The third test is they want it to be bipartisan. Because, frankly, they do not have confidence in either party on this issue and they want to see us working together.
That is it. We should be working toward that as a Senate and as a House. We should be having a serious conversation about how not to leave our children stuck with a bill of $15 trillion in debt and a $1.5 trillion deficit. I feel that keenly, as the father of three little girls myself.
But I think it is very important for the American people to understand the debate we are having right now. The threat that we are going to shut the government down has nothing to do with the broader conversation about our deficit and our debt. In fact, shutting the government down is going to make matters worse.
I said the other night that there is not a superintendent of schools--I used to be one in Colorado--there is not a city council or a mayor in Colorado, from the largest city to the smallest town, who would dream--who would dream--of saying to their constituents: We can't work this out, so we are going to close the government next week. We can't work this out, so we are not going to plow your snow next week or pick up your trash next week or educate your kids next week, not one local official in our State. The Presiding Officer knows this. He was a mayor. He would never have gone to his constituents and said: Oh, by the way, we are closing next week because we have a disagreement.
It makes no sense. Nowhere on the planet would that make any sense. To say nothing of the fact we find ourselves at a moment in the country's history when we are engaged in wars all across the globe, when we are now involved in a multilateral effort in Libya, when we have thousands of people--government employees--trying to help the Japanese weather this unbelievable tragedy they are facing, when we have economic competitors all over the globe trying to seek an economic advantage against the United States in the 21st century. Yet we are saying: Well, we are going to take a time out because we can't agree. We are going to pause, take a rest, close the government. The American people must think, well, you guys must be very far apart. That is why I brought this chart. I don't know the exact details here. Nobody does. The reports on the news tonight were that several billion dollars separated the negotiators. I have heard it ranges from $5 billion to $10 billion, or somewhere in there, so I picked the number $7 billion, which is more than several. But that appears to be what divides the parties--$7 billion. Seven billion dollars.
That is a lot of money. It is a lot of money. But look at it in the context of our deficit and our operating budget. Here is this line. You can't even see it. This line is the $7 billion, right here. This is our deficit, and this is our operating budget--$1.5 trillion, $3.6 trillion.
I apologize, Mr. President, but I couldn't fit it on one chart so I had to have two made in order to show what the order of magnitude of difference is between what we are squabbling over here in Washington, and what our deficit looks like and what our operating budget looks like. That is it. That is it. That is it.
Do you know, this difference, if this were the city of Alamosa--and the former mayor is the Presiding Officer--and my State--which has roughly a $14 million operating budget in the San Luis Valley--if they were saying we were going to shut down our government based on this difference, that would be like Alamosa saying, we can't figure it out because $27,000 is what we are apart.
Mr. President, if you and I went to Applebee's tonight and we had their $20 dinner for two, and then we had a fight over the bill, we would be fighting over 4 cents. That is what would separate us--roughly .19 percent of our operating budget.
I could even understand if the parties were saying we disagree, we disagree, let's keep negotiating. But I can't for the life of me understand how on those terms anyone could threaten a government shutdown, especially when we confront the dangers we confront today.
And so the answer is, it is not about our budget. The time we have consumed here is taking time away from the conversations that the Presiding Officer and I have been part of, that people on the other side of the aisle have been part of, that the gang of six, a bipartisan group of Senators--three Democrats and three Republicans led by Mark Warner and Saxby Chambliss--have been working on. That is what we should be doing. We shouldn't be threatening to close the government. I don't think we should be threatening to close the government under any circumstances, but certainly not when the economics are as thin as that.
I know there are people--and it is not all Republicans--there are some people in the House who feel the social issues they have attached to this piece of budget legislation are somehow more important than keeping government open or that litigating those issues in the context of trying to keep the government open is the right thing to do. I disagree. I think they should have a hearing. I think we ought to have a floor discussion about what we want to do with women's reproductive health or the other issues that are there. I am glad to have that debate. But don't threaten to shut the government down based on that.
So I will say again, as I said the other night, I encourage the leaders of both parties in both Chambers, and our President, to find a way to settle this, to find a way to work it out, to find a way to keep this government open at this moment when we have troops deployed all over the globe, and to live up to the standard of every single local elected official in my State, whether they are Democrats or whether they are Republicans, who are making tough choices in this budget situation but managing to respond to their constituents' priorities.
This week, in Colorado, they reached a budget agreement. The Governor is a Democrat, the Senate is a majority Democratic, the House is Republican. The Speaker of the House, who is a Republican, said this is the first budget I have been able to vote for in years because of the leadership of John Hickenlooper, our Governor, and the leadership of the Democratic and Republican Party there.
That breeds confidence in people's work. I think if we can find a way to work together across the party lines in a bipartisan way and demonstrate that we can keep the government open, and much more important even than that, that we can create a path toward fiscal sanity in this country, I think the American people would cheer. Right now we have not given them very much to cheer about.
I see the Senator from Texas is here, and I yield the floor.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source