Continuing Appropriations

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, the latest Republican proposal is a cynical one that pits important priorities against each other. People should not have to choose between health for our veterans and cancer research. We should not have to choose between keeping our highway projects going and cleaning up toxic waste areas. We should not have to choose between visiting our national parks and enrolling our kids in Head Start.

As we said a thousand times, we are happy to discuss how to fund the government but not with a gun to our head. Open up all of the government, and then we can have a fruitful discussion.

You know, it gets a little tiresome. It is game after game, gambit after gambit from the other side of the aisle. They keep trying new things, new tricks. Some of them have to do with ObamaCare, and some of them are unrelated to ObamaCare. They are trying as they might, Speaker Boehner, to wriggle out--Speaker Boehner is trying to wriggle out of the box in which he has put himself. On the one hand, he knows shutting down the government is highly unpopular and hurts America. On the other, he is so used to giving obeisance to the hard right that he is afraid not to. He is betwixt and between.

But I will tell you, today was a bad day for Speaker Boehner and those who want to shut the government down. Polling data is overwhelming. Americans 3 to 1 support opening the government even if it means keeping ObamaCare going.

Americans think that the Republican Party is being irresponsible and not living up to what it should be doing. Americans are telling Republicans in the House: Vote now. Open the government by putting a clean continuing resolution funding bill on the floor.

They will have new games, but we are not going to go for them. Sooner or later, they are going to have to say: OK, we will fund the government. Then we will discuss things, but--as has been said over and over--not with a gun to our heads.

Democratic unity is as strong as ever, from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to just about every Member of the House of Representatives and to all 54 Members of this united Democratic Caucus. This is great because it means that there is hope.

The bad news about today is, of course, that many innocent people were hurt. There are 800,000 Federal workers who depend on paychecks to feed their families and they were told they can't come in to work. They are dedicated to their jobs. They want to come in to work. They can't and, of course, they are not getting paid.

Millions more are affected as well. We had furloughs at the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station in Buffalo of defense employees, many of them civilian. We fought hard to keep that base open. Now we are telling the people: Go home, you can't work today--as important as that base is to the security of America.

Senator Feinstein was here earlier. Three-quarters of our intelligence people at the NSA are not working. That is an abstract concept, but it relates to every single one of us and our security.

The idea of shutting this government down may sound good to the hard right in the abstract, but even when their constituents learn of what specifically it means, they are going to run away from that concept.

To my colleagues, particularly from Texas, the junior Senator from Texas, who has evidently come up with this new plan, face it. The Senator is not going to get us to give in to extortion. The Senator is not going to take as hostage millions of innocent Americans and succeed in getting us to do something that he wants but we don't and they don't.

I saw in the Salt Lake City paper that the junior Senator from Utah said: Maybe we should forget about ObamaCare and look to spending cuts.

Well, good morning. That is what we have been saying all along. We may not like the spending cuts in certain areas that they proposed, but we are willing to discuss them. That is how a budget works, how appropriations works, and how our government is run. But to take an extraneous issue and to say unless we get rid of it, they are going to shut down the government, no way.

I wish to tell my colleagues if they think they are having a rough time here on shutting down the government in terms of the politics, in terms of where people are, and in terms of their base of support, wait until they try to shut down the debt ceiling.

Senator Cruz, Senator Lee, it is going to be 10 times worse. The dangers are even greater to America. The pressure on all of us will be even more severe, and that will not work either.

I have a simple suggestion. Let's in one fell swoop fund the government, allow the government to pay its bills, and begin debating the spending issues that we should justly debate instead of putting America through these paroxysms because they know, we know, and the American people know they will not succeed.

I yield the floor.

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