Continuing Appropriations

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. The statement made earlier by the majority leader is worthy of note. In less than an hour the government will close. That means agencies all across the United States will start notifying government employees: Go back home. Don't go to work. You may not be paid today. People who are reaching out to those agencies for services--SBA loans, student loans, advice on Social Security, veterans' benefits--they are going to find recordings instead of government workers there to help them. That is not good. It does not speak well for this great Nation that we have reached this point.

What we hear now from the House of Representatives is they want to talk some more. Now they want to sit down with the Senate to talk this over. But only after the government shuts down. That is the difference. They will only talk after the government shuts down. What the majority leader has said is a reasonable compromise. What he said is this: Pass the 6-week budget that we sent over to you, the CR, with no strings attached, no political gimmicks, so that the government continues functioning, so that America is open for business. Do that and during that time we will sit down and talk with you about future funding for the rest of the year.

Party to that conversation should be the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Murray. She worked hard to pass a budget resolution. She tried 18 times on the floor to get to a conference committee with the House. Every time a tea party Senator got up and objected.

We are prepared to sit down again. Chairman Murray is prepared to sit down, as is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Senator from Maryland. I have worked with her and for her in our effort to get the appropriations bills ready. The two of them, Senators Murray and Mikulski, can work together in the conference committee and really charter a way to finish this year in an orderly, thoughtful way.

But shutting down the government should not be the starting point. That is an admission of defeat. Those of us who were sent here to Washington to lead should be ashamed if it reaches that point. What the majority leader has proposed I hope the Speaker of the House of Representatives will take note of. Don't send us the idea of a conference committee after the government shuts down. What the majority leader has said is after we have agreed to keep the government functioning for 6 weeks, then we can sit down and work out the difficult issues that face us.

We have now entertained three different proposals from the House when it comes to funding this government, two today, and we are about to get a third this day. Each one of them has a fatal flaw. It either involves defunding, delaying ObamaCare--to which the President and the Democrats in the Senate would never agree--or in this circumstance they are sending up the idea of a conference committee after the shutdown.

I think what Senator Reid has offered now is reasonable, it is constructive, it gives us a chance to do our work. There are differences of opinion, for sure. But it is an orderly process that brings some respect back to Congress as an institution instead of the embarrassment of a shutdown of our important government. I hope the Speaker and staff are listening carefully. I hope they will accept this offer by the majority leader to move forward in a positive and constructive way, to keep the government open, to solve our problems in a bipartisan and constructive fashion.

I yield the floor.

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