Continuing Appropriations

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I sort of feel sorry for Speaker Boehner. He has this hard-right tea party group that is adamant about shutting the government down. Many of them talked about shutting the government down in their 2010 campaigns. There are clips where they go to the audience: We will shut the government down if we win back the House. And the audience of tea party faithful cheers.

Here we are. Speaker Boehner, who has not been able, not been strong enough, frankly, to stand up to the tea party, realizes he is in a real dilemma. They want to shut the government down and he knows that the American people do not want that. CNN came out with a poll today. What should we do, end ObamaCare or keep the government going? Sixty percent said, keep the government going. Only 30 percent--or 34 percent, I believe it was--said end ObamaCare. The closer we get to this fateful hour--and we are only an hour away from a government shutdown--the more people will understand what the Republicans have done.

There is only one answer, and that is for the House to pass the clean CR bill that we have sent them, that they have. They keep coming up with new diversions. They send us a message that says this. They send us a message that says that. Some of it is related to ObamaCare. Some of it is related to contraception. Now they say we want to go to conference. As the leader said, we want to resolve issues. We would like to get a nice omnibus for a whole year, for the remainder of the fiscal year. We realize we have to do that with both Houses. But not with a gun to everybody's head. Let's go to conference? While they shut down the government and hurt millions of innocent people? Speaker Boehner is not going to get away with this subterfuge, as he has not gotten away with the previous ones. People will see through it.

It is a way to take the focus off what they really are doing, shutting the government down and trying to get people to follow the diversion. This time it is let's go to conference. Again, there is nothing wrong with a conference, but not, absolutely not when they are shutting the government down in an hour. All the talking in conference will not help the Federal worker who is not getting a paycheck, the highway construction worker whose job uses Federal funds to build that highway, the veteran who is waiting for a disability claim. A conference is not going to solve that. There is one way to solve it: Pass the clean CR and then have a conference that talks about the issues for the whole year. Resolving funding makes sense but only after they pass our clean CR bill.

Speaker Boehner, no more games. We are in the final hours. Pass the clean CR. Don't send us another one of these little gizmos that is simply meant to take attention off the fact that you do not have the courage to keep the government funded. Pass the clean CR and then we can talk about conference.

I yield the floor.

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