Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I wish to thank the Senator from California for coming out today to let everyone know how extreme this bill is and how important it is that we send the message that this bill is going to be what most Republicans know deep down already. The anti-choice bill that they passed yesterday--a bill the New York Times called ``the most restrictive abortion bill to come to a vote in either chamber in a decade''--is not going anywhere--is not going anywhere.

The bill they passed yesterday is a nonstarter in the Senate, and it is a nonstarter with the overwhelming majority of American women. It is an attack on women's rights under the Constitution, and it is an attack on a woman's ability to make her own health care decisions.

It is a bill that was motivated by politics, pure and simple, and it amounts to little more than a charade designed to appeal to a dwindling base. But it is a charade that will end in the Senate today.

Even more than reminding House Republicans this bill has no chance of moving forward, I am here to provide a reality check because, apparently, despite the one that millions of American women provided last November, House Republicans need another one.

Despite the fact in States across the country voters rejected one candidate after another who politicized rape and ran on restricting a woman's right to choose, House Republicans are now back at it again.

Despite the fact they had to bring in a paid pollster to tell the entire Republican House caucus to stop talking about rape, apparently the message has not sunk in.

For many Republicans it is like 2012 all over again, which is to say it is more like 1950 all over again--a time when an all-male House Republican Judiciary panel can join together--all male--just like they did last Wednesday, to pass a bill that clearly ignores Roe v. Wade; a time when the same panel could reject efforts to protect the life and health of the mother or even reject efforts to make exceptions for rape or incest; a time when one of those panel members, a Republican Representative from Arizona, can even trot out the idea that women are not likely to become pregnant if they are raped.

But it is not 1950, and that irresponsible and shameful claim has been debunked by doctors and experts of all stripes, time and again.

It has been 40 years since Roe v. Wade put the health care choices of women in the hands of women. We are not going back.

But just as House Republicans need a reality check that American women are not going to have the clock turned back on them, I also believe the American people need to know House Republicans--and those on the far right targeting women's health care--are not going away anytime soon either.

In fact, I wish I could say the new restrictions on women's health care choices that the House passed yesterday were a surprise or that I thought that after last fall, Republicans would magically see the light.

I wish I could say I bought the rhetoric from some Republicans who have criticized their own because they believe we should be focused on jobs and the economy at such a difficult time.

But the truth is, attacks on women's health care have not stopped and, apparently, they will not stop. That is because they are a core part of that party's philosophy. In fact, all we have to do is look back at the moment that Republicans in the House took power.

We all remember back to 2010, after campaigning, by the way, across the country on a platform of jobs and the economy, the first three bills they introduced were each direct attacks on women's health.

The very first bill they introduced, H.R. 1, would have totally eliminated title X funding for family planning and teen pregnancy prevention, and it included an amendment that would have completely defunded Planned Parenthood and would have cut off support for the millions of women who count on that.

Another one of their opening rounds of bills would have permanently codified the Hyde amendment and the DC abortion ban. The original version of their bill did not even include an exception for the health of the mother.

Finally, they introduced a bill right away that would have rolled back every single one of the gains we made for women in the health care reform bill.

That Republican bill would have removed the caps on out-of-pocket expenses that protect women from losing their homes or their life savings if they get sick. It would have ended the ban on lifetime limits on coverage. It would have allowed insurance companies to once again discriminate against women by charging them higher premiums, and it would have rolled back the guarantee that insurance companies cover contraceptives.

Those were just their first three bills.

Since that time, we have seen women targeted on everything from contraception to Violence Against Women Act protections, to stripping the new protections provided under the Affordable Care Act.

Through economic peril, budget crises, record unemployment, the attacks on women's health have remained constant. On Capitol Hill, in State houses across the country, and in courtrooms at all levels, the fight against women making their own decisions about their health rages on. Republicans have shown they will go to just about any length to limit access to care. They have put politics between women and their own health care, they have put employers between women and their health care, they have even threatened to shut down the government over this very issue.

They have shown that this is not about what is best for women and men and their own family planning decisions; instead, it is about political calculation. It is about appeasing the far right. It is about their continued efforts to do whatever it takes to push their extreme agenda. But as we have seen with this latest effort, the deck is stacked against them because the Constitution is not going anywhere. Also, because Senators such as myself and Senator Boxer are not going anywhere either, because women who believe Republicans should not be making their health care decisions are not going anywhere. Therefore, this bill is not going anywhere.

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Mrs. MURRAY. Let me respond this way: When I go home--and I go home every weekend--my constituents talk to me about this big word called sequestration and its impact on their lives. Whether they have been furloughed, and their paycheck is much smaller, or whether they are running a violence against women center and they are having to close down a facility, or whether they are sending their kids to preschool and teachers have been laid off, or whether their small pizza shop in Kitsap County is going to have to close because so many people have been furloughed and cut back because of sequestration, what they want us to do is to invest in our infrastructure, to invest in our education, to make our country strong for the future, and to quit governing by crisis, which is why I have come to the floor, as the Senator from California knows, constantly to say we passed our budget; the House has passed their budget; solve this and replace sequestration in a responsible and fair way. We need to get to conference.

But we are being blocked by a handful of Republicans here on the Senate floor. Over in the House, they are not appointing conferees. They do not want to go to conference apparently, because they want to take the floor time to attack women's health care. This is not what the country is telling us to do. They are telling us to do our job and get a budget done so they have certainty. They are telling us to do our job and make sure we invest in the WRDA bill Senator Boxer has worked so hard to do; that the Corps of Engineers projects, whether it is a dam or whatever project they have at home that provides jobs and provides the kind of economy they need is taken care of. They elected us to come back here and do the job of this country.

So, yes, it is frustrating to me to have to come to the floor one more time to talk about abortion when we should be talking about the investments that need to be made, when we should be passing a budget, we should be investing in our children and their future and providing people with jobs and job training and research that is so important at universities across this country so we can be a good place 30 years from now in this country and be competitive.

I would say to my colleague, yes, it appears to me the country has an agenda that is vastly different than the House Republicans on the far right.

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, Senate Democrats have come to the floor now 13 times and requested unanimous consent to move to bipartisan budget negotiations with the House. We are ready to get to work. We have been ready for 88 days now, which is how long it has been since the Senate passed a budget.

Back in March we assumed that once the two Chambers passed their budgets, Republicans would be eager to join us in a formal budget conference, since they have spent years talking about the need to return to regular order. Instead, we have seen delay after delay. Now that Republicans have gotten exactly what they wished for, they seem to be running as quickly as they can in the other direction, and they have offered excuse after excuse after excuse.

First, they said they wanted a framework before they would start a conference, even though a framework is exactly what a budget is. In other words, they wanted to negotiate behind closed doors when we should be negotiating in a conference.

Then they said they wouldn't allow us to go to conference unless we guaranteed the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations would be protected from paying a penny more in taxes.

Then many Republicans indicated they didn't want negotiations happening too early, to take away the leverage they think they have on the debt ceiling.

Then some of them called for a do-over of the budget debate, including another 50 hours of debate and a whole new round of unlimited amendments, even after they praised the open and thorough floor debate we had on the Senate budget.

Now, in what seems to be the latest delaying tactic, some Republicans are saying before we can work to solve short-term problems we first need to agree on the budget outlook 30 years down the road.

Enough is enough. The American people are sick and tired of the constant lurching from crisis to crisis. They are looking to their elected officials to come together, to compromise, to find common ground, and that is exactly what we would be doing in a conference.

It is not just Democrats saying so. Over the past few weeks, we have heard a number of Republicans step forward and agree with us that the tea party and Senate Republican leadership are wrong. Senator Coburn said blocking conference is ``not a good position to be in.'' Senator Boozman said he would ``very much like to see a conference.'' Senator Wicker said, weeks ago now, that ``by the end of next week, we probably should be ready to go to conference.'' Now, according to Politico, ``more Republicans appear to favor heading to conference than blocking it.''

As many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have said, it is certainly true there are big differences between the parties' budget values, and priorities, but that would give us all the more reason to sit down and try to find some common ground. The fact is we have a lot of work that needs to be done in the next few weeks. We have 11 days until the next State work period and then just 3 1/2 weeks before we all go back to our home States again for August. Because some Republicans want to continue the harmful austerity measures resulting from sequestration, we now have a $91 billion gap between the House and Senate spending bills for the next fiscal year.

If we don't reconcile those differences, we are going to find ourselves in a very tough, bad situation come September, and a lot of hard-working families and communities are going to feel the consequences. It does not have to be that way. I am confident, if both sides come together now in a conference committee and are ready to compromise, we can find a way to reach a fair and bipartisan and responsible agreement.

The American people shouldn't have to worry the government is going to lurch into another crisis that has been manufactured by this Congress. It doesn't have to happen. Instead of fighting over whether we should be engaging in bipartisan talks, we should be working together to get more Americans back to work, to protect our economic recovery, and lay the foundation for strong middle-class growth in the future. I think we can all agree on those important goals, and they are very urgent ones. But we cannot move forward on them if we are consumed with constant artificial crises.

I believe it is time for Senate Republican leaders to listen to the many Members of their own party who prefer commonsense bipartisanship over delay and disorder and allow the House and Senate to begin a bipartisan budget conference. I am here this afternoon to ask unanimous consent to do just that.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 33, H. Con. Res. 25; that the amendment which is at the desk, the text of S. Con. Res. 8, the budget resolution passed by the Senate, be inserted in lieu thereof; that H. Con. Res. 25, as amended, be agreed to; the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table; that the Senate insist on its amendment, request a conference with the House on the disagreeing votes of the two Houses; and the Chair be authorized to appoint conferees on the part of the Senate; that following the authorization, two motions to instruct conferees be in order from each side, a motion to instruct relative to the debt limit and a motion to instruct relative to taxes and revenue; that there be 2 hours of debate equally divided between the two leaders or their designees prior to votes in relation to the motions; further, that no amendments be in order to either of the motions prior to the votes; all of the above occurring with no intervening action or debate.

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I would like to point out to everyone that we had hours and hours of debate, with over 100 amendments offered, and no one offered an amendment on the debt ceiling limit. As part of the agreement in order to go to conference, we have offered to have a vote now on whether we should have motions to instruct. I would be willing, as chair, to abide by that vote once our unanimous consent is agreed to.

But I have to say, as a matter of principle, for a chair of any committee to say, once we have gone through hundreds of hours of debate and a lot of amendments, that then, before we go to conference, we have to agree to a principle that has not been voted on or offered in the Senate as part of that is not how we can proceed in this body. It would be the same as if I would come out and say: I am not going to allow us to go to conference on whatever bill because I have a small provision, and unless you absolutely agree it has to be in there, even though I don't have the votes, we are not going to conference. We would never get anything done.

The unanimous consent request I have offered allows my Republican friends to have a vote on this, even though they didn't ask for a vote in all those hours of debate and hundreds of hours we spent on this issue, before we move to conference. The principle is this: Our Republican colleagues wish to have an open debate, they say, but we are not having an open debate because of their insistence we don't go to conference.

So I object to the Senator's request and again renew my request as I stated before with the provision we have a motion to instruct and allow those Senators who have strong feelings about this to vote on it before we go to conference.

Finally, I would add, remember with whom I am going to conference: Republicans and Democrats from our side and Republicans and Democrats from the other body, a majority of whom are on their side of the aisle, with the chairman, Paul Ryan, a Republican conservative, chairing their side.

This is an issue that is going to have plenty of debate, plenty of open discussion, if it should come up, and we will all have an opportunity to vote on it.

I renew my unanimous consent request.

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