Energy Savings and Industrial Competitivness Act of 2013

Floor Speech

Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from California for accommodating all of us.

I wish to join my colleagues who have spoken on the floor and express my deepest condolences to the families of those who lost someone in Monday's tragic shooting. I know the thoughts and prayers of the Nation are with those who are still recovering.

I know I speak for my constituents in Washington State in thanking the law enforcement community here in Washington, DC. They put their lives on the line every day to protect our families and workers in the Nation's capital. We don't have all the answers to the many questions a tragedy such as this raises, but those questions will continue to be asked, and I am hopeful the answers will help our Nation heal and guide our continued work to prevent these kinds of tragedies in the future.

I am here today because, like many of my colleagues, I spent this past August traveling around my home State and meeting with my constituents. I heard from Washington State families about a wide range of issues facing our Nation, but the one sentiment I heard over and over from every part of my State was they were sick and tired of the constant lurching from crisis to crisis.

They told me how disappointed and disgusted they were that every time they turned on their televisions over the past few years they would see another story about Congress hurtling toward another official deadline, hurting our economy and causing more uncertainty for our businesses. They told me they want Congress to work together; they want us to focus on the economy; they want us to put our country and the families we represent before partisanship and political gains.

I couldn't agree more. Like them, I am frustrated that we seem to be once again headed toward another completely avoidable, completely unnecessary, self-inflicted crisis.

It has now been 179 days since this Senate and the House passed our budgets. When the Senate budget passed, I was optimistic that because both Republicans and Democrats said they wanted to return to regular order, we might be able to get back to a responsible process. At that time we had 192 days to reach a bipartisan budget agreement and I thought the next step would be a budget conference where the two sides would get in a room, hash out our differences, and work together toward a deal. But as we all know, some of our Republican colleagues had other ideas. They immediately seemed to regret their push for a Senate budget and started running away from a debate as quickly as they could.

I came to the Senate floor with my colleagues a total of 18 times to ask for consent to start a budget conference with the House, but every time we tried a member of the tea party here in the Senate, backed by Republican leaders, stood up and blocked us. Instead of using the months we had to work out a compromise, Republicans seemed to think it was in their best interest somehow to stall as long as possible under some misguided theory that a crisis would give them more leverage.

I had hoped my Republican colleagues spent their time back home talking to their constituents and would be ready to come back to DC so we could get to work on a balanced and bipartisan budget deal, but, sadly, the opposite has happened. While I believe the majority of Republicans are interested in working with us as Democrats to get to a fair budget deal, a few of my Republican colleagues spent the summer riling up the tea party and making them promises they could not keep.

Since Republican leaders know they need to find a way to avoid another crisis that would be blamed on them, a full-scale civil war has broken out within the Republican Party. They are in disarray. They are having trouble figuring out how to pull themselves out of the hole they have climbed into. And while we wait for Republicans to join us at the table, the tea party is pushing our country closer and closer to a government shutdown and closer to what would be a catastrophic default on our laws.

Why are they doing this? It is not because they are concerned about the budget, not because they are interested in jobs or economic growth. To them it seems it is all about ObamaCare. Everything they are doing now they are doing in order to cut off health care coverage for 25 million people, to end access to free preventive health care, to cause seniors to pay more for their prescriptions, to cut off young adults from their coverage, to bring back lifetime coverage caps and let patients with preexisting conditions be denied care, put the insurance companies back in charge of our health care system, and so much more.

These political games might play well with the tea party base, but here is the reality: ObamaCare is the law of the land. It passed through this Senate with a supermajority. It passed through the House. The President signed it into law. This Supreme Court upheld it. It is already helping millions of Americans stay healthy and financially secure, and it is on track to help millions more.

When I see some of my colleagues working so hard to defund ObamaCare, I have to wonder whether they have taken the time to meet some of their own constituents who are already benefiting from this law.

This last month I was home in Washington State, and I met an incredible woman named Nikki Mackey who lives in Seattle. On September 16 of 2010, Nikki was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of breast cancer. She was 36 years old and terrified of what this disease would do to her. To make matters worse, instead of focusing on her treatment, she had to worry about her coverage, and that is because a few months before her diagnosis, in the midst of the recession, Nikki had been laid off from her job. So there she was, with her coverage at risk and years of treatment ahead of her. But thanks to ObamaCare, a law some of my colleagues want to undermine at any cost, Nikki will never have to worry about reaching a lifetime cap. She will never have to worry about not getting coverage due to her now preexisting condition. That is why we have worked so hard to pass this law because it says now in America: You shouldn't go broke because you get sick, and you shouldn't be denied care simply because you cannot afford it.

Let's be clear about what is happening here and the political calculation some of my colleagues have made. They have decided they are willing to play politics with Americans' health care, they have decided it is better for them to sabotage this law rather than improve it, and they have decided that beyond all that, they are also willing to devastate our Nation's economy to kill this law. Well, we are not going to let that happen.

Nikki told me when she turns on her TV and sees Members of Congress using every trick in the book to kill this law, she feels her ``own well-being is under attack.''

I want to be clear: Democrats are not going to defund or delay health care reform. It is not going to happen. We should all be working together right now to make sure it is implemented in the best possible way for our families, our businesses, and our communities. We are certainly very interested in hearing from anyone, Democrat or Republican, who has good ideas about how the law could be improved. We are not going to allow the health care of Nikki or millions of other Americans to be used as a pawn in a political game. We are not going to let this law get sabotaged as it continues to benefit millions of families and small business owners. The sooner Republicans realize this, the sooner we can get to work diffusing this latest artificial crisis.

We know the families we represent don't support the Republicans' sabotage tactics. Recent polls show that fewer than 1 in 4 people supports efforts to make health care reform fail. A majority of people believe we in Congress should be trying to make the law work. It is also clear that Americans would rightly blame Republicans if the law shuts down--especially over an issue such as this--and a lot of Republicans know that.

My colleague Senator Johanns said these defunding and delaying efforts have ``zero chance of being successful.'' Senator Burr said ``the dumbest idea I've ever heard of.'' House Republicans know this too. That is why they introduced a bill last week that would allow a government funding bill to pass while giving House Republicans a vote to defund health care that has no chance of becoming law. As we now know, the tea party is not interested in that. They don't want a showboat, they want a shutdown, and they are going to keep fighting until they get it.

We now have less than 2 weeks before the end of this fiscal year and a potential government shutdown. It is a shame that we have gotten to this point, but we are here. We owe it to the American people to come together and find a solution and a path forward that is good for our economy and fair for our middle class.

My goal has been and will continue to be a long-term budget agreement that replaces sequestration, tackles our debt and deficit responsibly, and invests in our workers and our economy. But since it seems clear that the House won't be able to get its act together in the next few weeks, the least they should be able to do is send us a clean, short-term extension of the current budget levels so the government doesn't shut down while we continue to negotiate on this longer term budget deal.

I want to be clear: Democrats are not going to negotiate over whether Congress should allow the Federal Government to pay its bills. As Speaker Boehner said in the past, default would be ``a financial disaster, not just for us, but for the worldwide economy.'' Republicans need to take those words to heart and stop threatening the economic recovery with their saber rattling and brinkmanship.

We went through this earlier in the year. Back then--after spending months saying they wouldn't raise the debt limit unless they got dollar-for-dollar spending cuts, Republicans dropped their demands, dropped the so-called Boehner rule, and allowed the debt ceiling to be increased. Going back now to that reckless approach of 2011 and drumming up this uncertainty again is nothing but a huge and harmful waste of time.

It is ridiculous that we find ourselves on the brink of an artificial crisis again. We should be doing everything possible to support the economic recovery and help our workers get back on the job. We should be spending time finding common ground to tackle our long-term fiscal challenges responsibly, and we should be working together to build on the Affordable Care Act to continue improving our health care system for all of our families and small business owners.

As we know, we are now mired in the muck of perpetual partisanship and constant crises. The American people deserve better. Nikki and the millions of families such as hers deserve better.

I am hopeful that the Republican leadership stops focusing so much on their extreme party minority and comes to the table with us to work on a balanced and bipartisan deal the vast majority of Americans want. I hope they don't make us reach a crisis to get to that point.

I yield the floor.

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