Unanimous Consent Request
Floor Speech
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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I would like to first say how much I appreciate the words of the Senator from Virginia and the words of the Senator from Montana. They are known to be commonsense people, to work in a bipartisan way day after day in this Congress, against all odds, to actually try to make something work around this place. So I thank them for their leadership and their comments this morning.
For 4 years I have come to this floor at about this time of the year and talked about how Washington has become the land of flickering lights where the standard of success is not how we are imagining the future and what we are doing for the next generation of Americans but that we are managing, after a little bit of aggravation and hostility, to keep the lights on for 1 more month or for 6 more months. Well, this time we are not the land of flickering lights. The lights are out in Washington. They have managed to shut down the government.
No mayor, no school superintendent, no city council in Colorado would threaten the shutdown of their government over politics. Whether they are a Democratic mayor or a Republican mayor or a tea party mayor, we wouldn't stand for it in Colorado. They certainly would never threaten the credit rating of their community over politics. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. We just had these terrible floods in our State, and people are struggling to do everything they can to keep their governments open to provide people who have been displaced by the flood, who have lost everything they own, the services they need.
This shutdown is already hurting the U.S. economy and Colorado's economy, and it is not surprising why. There is a lot of rhetoric around this place about uncertainty and the damage it does to our economy. Nothing could create more uncertainty than shutting this government down and threatening the credit rating of the United States by saying: We are not going to pay our bills. We have an ideology that is so far outside the mainstream of American political thought that we can't find a way to actually win elections that align with our ideology, so we are going to use these kinds of tactics to bring this government to its knees.
The AP reported that the U.S. and European stock markets fell yesterday as investors and world leaders worried about the threat to the global economy. According to the Denver Post, the shutdown may cost the United States at least $300 million a day in lost output during a 1-week shutdown. What good is that doing anybody? How is that helping any American? Economists have estimated that a 3-week closing would cut economic production by 1 percent. It would cut our GDP by 1 percent. How does this self-inflicted wound help anybody?
In Colorado, to be clear, just as in the other States we have heard about today, it is not just the families who rely on Federal programs or Federal workers who are suffering because of this shutdown. The Denver Post reported that in a neighborhood near the Denver Federal Center, Rick Koerner, who owns Stack Subs sandwich shop in Lakewood, estimates he has lost about 5 percent of his normal business since the shutdown began on Thursday. He says he can't afford to lose any customers because, in his words, ``it's a thin-margin business to begin with.'' How are we helping him? In the same story, Deborah Giovingo, who owns a restaurant called Paradise Cove on West Alameda Avenue, just east of the Federal Center, said she is also witnessing a loss. ``We're not getting our regular lunchers. I think they're really trying to conserve their money.'' Right now, how are we helping these people?
One city perhaps hardest hit in our State is Colorado Springs in El Paso County. According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, the furloughs at our military bases include more than 1,000 workers at the Air Force Academy, 400 workers at Schriever Air Force Base, 2,200 at Peterson Air Force Base, and 700 at U.S. Northern Command. At Fort Carson another 1,000 workers are off the job. Is our job more important than their job? Is the job they do to protect this country, to defend this country, less important than the job of these elected representatives in Washington who are still taking a salary? I don't think so. Are these jobs less important than the people who are actually in theater right now in Afghanistan? I don't think so.
After 1 week of shutdown, the WIC Program--the Women, Infants, and Children Program--will have no funds for clinical services, food benefits, and administrative costs. Roughly 100,000 women and children in Colorado participated in the WIC Program last year and will lose their benefits.
The shutdown will delay SBA loans for Colorado's small businesses. Last year SBA processed 1,300 applications, for a total of $559 million in loans, and they are on the ground right now, thank goodness, working with people who have suffered through these floods.
Our national parks, wildlife refuges, and recreational lands--major drivers of Colorado's economy--are closed. They are shut down. Approximately 13,000 people visiting national parks in Colorado will be turned away each day this government is closed. It will result in nearly $800,000 of revenue a day for our local communities, which are already suffering because of the floods. Estes Park is one of the towns that have been terribly affected, and this is one of their peak times of the year for tourism because of the changing leaves. They are losing that opportunity, and we are making it worse because the government is shut down.
Thousands of Federal employees are out of work during this economic recovery. There is a delay in Social Security services. There will be a delay in veterans' benefits by the end of October. Colorado is home to almost 400,000 veterans. That is almost 10 percent of our State's population.
At risk is the funding for Head Start agencies and the Export-Import Bank's support for small companies.
But what is just so insulting at this moment is that we are trying to recover from this flood. The recent flooding damaged at least 17,000 homes and other structures, several thousand of which were outright destroyed. Millions of dollars' worth of public infrastructure has literally been swept away. More than 200 miles of Colorado roads and at least 50 bridges have been damaged or destroyed. Nine Coloradans lost their lives in the floods. The floods consumed an area of Colorado that is twice the size of Rhode Island. The devastation defies belief. Houses have been leveled and reduced to piles of debris, and some of these communities lie in ruins.
FEMA has pledged to go to great lengths, and they are working very hard to ensure that crucial disaster response and recovery services are not interrupted. To be clear, so far, emergency funds are still flowing and emergency workers are still in place. They are doing a phenomenal job, and I want to say on this floor, on behalf of everybody in Colorado, how grateful we are for their work. FEMA is going to make sure this work gets done, but nevertheless a number of FEMA employees--both based in Washington and at the FEMA Region VIII office headquartered in Denver--are vulnerable to furloughs if this shutdown continues.
Our economy is recovering in Colorado, and we are being led by innovative businesses that have been growing jobs despite the dysfunction in Washington. This year I visited many of them--companies that, in the depths of the worst recession since the Great Depression, were actually creating jobs by inventing our future. That is what innovators do, and that is what Coloradans do. We are letting them down profoundly here by failing to exercise our most basic responsibilities as legislators, as people who receive a salary from the taxpayer. They do not send us here to shut it down, they send us here to improve it. They send us here to come to agreement and to compromise and to imagine a better future for our children and for our grandchildren. That is what we are here to do.
Instead, a very radical faction in the House and some of their colleagues here in the Senate have shut this government down in support of an ideology that, as I mentioned earlier, is far outside the mainstream of American political thought. They are entitled to their opinion. Everybody is entitled to their opinion. But they are not entitled to shut the government down if they don't get what they want, and that is where we find ourselves.
It has been a privilege for me to work in this place, and the moments I have enjoyed the most have been the ones where we have worked in a bipartisan way, with colleagues on the other side, to dramatically improve the way the Food and Drug Administration works so that new drugs could be approved more quickly and so that the 600 bioscience firms in Colorado that came to me and said they could no longer raise venture capital because it was all going to Europe and Asia because of uncertainty with the FDA and to please help them fix that--with Republican colleagues, we were able to get that done.
In working the immigration bill we passed, with the Gang of 8--four Democrats and four Republicans--we solved each other's political problems to bring a product to the floor that actually could pass with nearly 70 votes--a supermajority of the Senate--and we still need to pass that bill in the House.
That bill, in stark contrast to the government shutdown we are going through right now, actually will drive GDP growth. The Congressional Budget Office tells us that immigration bill adds 3 points of GDP growth in the first 10 years and 5 points in the second 10 years.
By the way, at a moment when these people are saying they are shutting the government down, mostly because of the health care bill but also because of their concern about a growing government and widening deficits, the immigration bill reduces the deficit by $900 billion over a 20-year period. That is real money even in Washington, DC. They could be passing that bill over there. Instead, the government is shut down, and it has been a catastrophic failure of leadership that has brought us to this place.
I have absolutely no doubt, from all the press reports I have read and what I hear from my Republican colleagues in the Senate, my friends in the Senate who are Republicans, that if Speaker Boehner put on the floor of the House the Senate version of the so-called continuing resolution, it would pass with a broad majority of Democrats and Republicans, and the American people would cheer because that is what they want. They want us working together. And the standard of success needs to be something greater than that we kept the lights on, which in this instance we haven't. We haven't even done that.
What is the signal we are trying to send to this complicated world in which we live by shutting this government down? Why is it that people here get away with things that no local elected official would ever get away with?
So we have to continue to fight to get this government open. We are going to have another fight to make sure that, for the first time in the United States, we don't fail to pay our bills and blow up the full faith and credit of the United States--which is one of our most important assets, right up there with the rule of law, right up there with our capitalist economy. From our founding, the full faith and credit of the United States has been a bulwark for us.
But once we get past that, what we need to fight for is the next generation of Americans. That is why we have been sent here. Whether we are Democrats or Republicans, that is why we are here. And they are waiting to see whether we are willing to be the first generation of American leadership to provide less opportunity--not more--to the people that are coming after us.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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