Making Continuing Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Maryland for her tremendous leadership. She is absolutely correct--we are here in a manufactured crisis. This Senate and the House passed a budget last spring. For 6 months we have been trying to get those two budgets together to conference a deal to set our budget priorities for the next several years. We have been precluded from doing that by the same Republicans who now want to kill a continuing resolution that will simply keep our government open for a few short weeks so we can do the work we should have been doing for the last 6 months.

The answer to this is easy. Let's pass a clean resolution, keep the government open for a few short weeks, do the responsible thing, say to the Nation and to the world that we will pay our bills and raise the debt ceiling, and then do what we need to do, what every one of us knows we need to do, which is to work out the differences between the House and the Senate budgets.
But we are here in a manufactured crisis because the same Republicans who are now leading us to a shutdown are saying they don't want us to talk. I agree with the Senator from Maryland. Keep the clean resolution, send it to the House, keep government open, and do what we should do as leaders and adults and come to a budget agreement.

I also wish to speak today on and urge my colleagues to support the majority leader's motion that he will bring to us to waive the budget point of order against the continuing resolution we will vote on in a few hours.

My Republican colleagues who announced their intent to raise this point of order are concerned that the funding levels in both the House and Senate continuing resolutions violate the Budget Control Act. But, as we all remember, sequestration was never supposed to be in there. It was supposed to be so unthinkable that it would force a compromise, which is what we are going to have to do anyway. But since those automatic cuts took effect, we have now heard from families and communities across the country that sequestration is costing us jobs, it is slowing our growth, and it is harming our national security. That is exactly why the Senate and House budgets both require changes to the Budget Control Act.

It is true that we took very different approaches to altering the automatic cuts. The Senate budget on our side fully replaced the sequestration. We did it with an equal mix of spending cuts and new revenues that we raised by closing loopholes skewed toward the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations. The House budget on the other side replaced sequestration fully also, but they did it by fully funding defense programs and paying for that with very deep cuts to investments in families and jobs, all the while protecting the wealthiest Americans from participating in this at all and helping to pay for it.

We do have a lot of work to bridge that divide, but that alone shows how important it is that we pass a clean, temporary continuing resolution to keep the government operating while we have that space to negotiate a longer term budget agreement that works for our families and economy.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator has consumed 3 minutes.

Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask for 1 additional minute.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mrs. MURRAY. To do that, we have to be able to finish this bill, send it back to the House, and get our country back on the right course again.

So voting to sustain this point of order isn't voting against a funding level or a policy vote. Voting to sustain this point of order is voting for a government shutdown because if this bill that is in front of us today dies, it is very likely the government will not be open for business on Tuesday, and then our American families will have to deal with the disruption and all the uncertainty that will cause.

There is no reason to let the gridlock and dysfunction in Washington, DC, cause more harm to our families and businesses. A vote for this point of order is a vote to kill this bill and shut down the government, and we do not want that to happen. So I oppose it. I urge my colleagues to join me in waiving the point of order when we have that vote later today. Let's pass a clean continuing resolution, have the House pass a clean continuing resolution, and then do the job we were sent to do. Every one of us knows what needs to be done, which is to bridge the divide between the House and Senate budgets and get our country back on track again.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Maryland.

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Washington State for her comments because, as usual, they were clear, cogent, and compelling.

We need to get a job done today. Our job today--am I correct--is passing a continuing resolution, which means we keep the funding at fiscal 2013 in place until we resolve other budgetary issues with the House. Is that correct?

Mrs. MURRAY. I would say to the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, that is absolutely correct.

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