Continuing Appropriations
Floor Speech
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, let me thank my great friend from Louisiana for her remarks and for all the work she has done to stand up for her constituents, but also for small businesses. I think she makes a great point, that right now there are thousands of small businesses throughout my State, the northeast, throughout the Presiding Officer's State as well, that are waiting for loans from the SBA that cannot get them because right now the SBA is essentially out of business. That right now is having a detrimental effect on our economy.
I thank her for her great advocacy on behalf of the small businesses throughout Louisiana and across the country.
There is a lot of truth to the fact that there can be mutual blame thrown around this place very often when it comes to the reasons why we have not solved a lot of our most vexing problems as a nation. The deficit, for instance, did not get to be the size it is without both parties playing a role in the fact that we still sit back without the will to try to take on that enormous problem and burden we are leaving to our kids. That is due to both Republican and Democratic intransigence.
There are a lot of things that happen here in which you can very accurately and appropriately assess that both sides of the aisle have been part of the blame. This is not one of them. This is not one of them. When it comes to trying to figure out the reasons why our government is shut down, it is pretty simple to explain how we got here.
Yet I have heard a lot of my friends on the other side blame the majority leader and blame the President for the shutdown. I have even heard some newscasts try to suggest that it is just sort of good old-fashioned generic gridlock here in Washington that has led to this shutdown.
Mostly the American public gets it. I think mostly the American public understands that this is essentially a shutdown of the Federal Government caused by a small band of ideological conservatives in the House of Representatives called the tea party. I have sort of tried to struggle with how to explain this to the handful of people back in Connecticut who still do not understand what is going on, although there is no way to create an analogy that works.
I mean this shutdown is so ridiculous, it is so unique that there is no metaphor that works. I have tried this one. Imagine that there is a couple. They live in Boston, let's say. The wife loves living in Boston, but the husband has sort of been fed up with Boston for a little while. He wants to move to the west coast, let's say to San Francisco. But they have been living in Boston for a long time. They have this disagreement as to what to do next. They have been having it for a while. They have not sorted it out. But they chose to live in Boston, so that is where they continue to be.
Well, one day the husband comes home and says to his wife: You know what. I have had enough. I have had enough. I want to move to San Francisco. If you do not agree, I am going to call up some contractors and have them come over and take the roof off our house.
She says: What are you talking about? Take the roof off our house? I never talked about the roof coming off our house. The roof is important. It keeps us warm. It keeps us dry. You are kidding, right? You are not going to take the roof off the house.
He said: Listen, I am going to give you 3 days. If you do not agree to move to San Francisco, then I am going to call someone and take the roof off of our house.
She says: Well, of course, I am not going to do that. Of course I am not going to move to a place that I do not want to move to. We should talk about that. We should come up with a compromise. We should discuss this. Certainly I am not going to agree to move to San Francisco if you are threatening to take the roof off the house.
Three days go by. She goes to work. She comes home, and the roof is gone. He took it off. She cannot believe it. She cannot believe it. Rain is coming in. It is the middle of winter. It is freezing cold. It is miserable.
He shows up to work on the second day, and says to his coworkers: You cannot believe what my wife did. She took the roof off our house.
The coworkers say: Well, what do you mean?
I told her we had to move to San Francisco. And when she did not agree, I told her I was going to take the roof off the house. I did, but it was her decision. She would not move to where I wanted to move. So I had to go through with it. I had to take the roof off the house.
If you were that coworker and listened to that story, you would know exactly what was going on. You would know exactly who to blame. You would associate yourself with the decision the wife made and say: Forget it, I am not moving somewhere with that threat hanging over my head. You would back her up when she said: Put the roof back on the house before we start discussing about where we are going to live next.
That is essentially what has happened here. We had always assumed that the operation of the Federal Government was not something we negotiated over, just like the woman in my analogy assumed that the roof being on the house was not something that she had to worry about disappearing.
Yet here we are. The government is shut down simply because of the demands of a small group of tea party Republicans in the House of Representatives. Their demand in this case is they want the health care law repealed, despite the fact that it was passed by two legislative bodies, signed by the President, upheld by the Supreme Court, verified in an election in which a President who said he would implement it was reelected by a huge margin. Every single Senator in the Senate who supported it and ran for reelection was reelected.
That is their demand in this case. As the Senator from Louisiana said, we should react as we would expect that woman to react. We want the government back up and operating, and then we will talk. I want the roof back on my house before we discuss where we are going to live.
This isn't about politics any longer. This isn't about inconvenience.
We are now going into the second week of this shutdown. It has started to ruin lives, such as Melanie Rhodes' from Bridgeport, CT. A few years ago Melanie was homeless, living out on the streets. Things were very tough for Melanie. Melanie became pregnant and had a little boy, a wonderful little boy about 2 months premature, a wonderful little boy named Malachi. Malachi had some developmental issues right off the bat, but she knew her life had changed and she had to do everything possible for her little boy. She placed him into the Birth to Three System, our early screening program. They identified the problems he had. He was connected with a Head Start Program in which he was enrolled at about 9 months old.
Malachi is still behind his peers at 3 years old, but he is doing a lot better. He is beginning to finally communicate with a handful of signs. Every day he has been in that Head Start Program his life and her life have become better. Even though she has been struggling through the worst recession of her life, of my life, of most of our lives, she started to turn the corner very well. She applied everywhere over the last 3 years. She did everything we would have asked of her to try to find a job. She applied with Walmart, Walgreens, and McDonald's.
Finally, in the past few weeks she got a job as a busdriver. She had completed her training, was waiting for her background check to come through, and was to start her job in a matter of days. She stayed up all night last Monday night, past midnight, watching CNN, watching the news, to see if the government was going to be up and operating. She knew the Bridgeport Head Start Program runs on a budget that expired at the end of September. That was one of the handful of programs that would shut down immediately upon the shutdown of the government.
She woke up on Tuesday morning and hoped against all hope by calling Head Start to see if they were going to be up and operating, and they weren't. They had shut down. Bridgeport told 1,000 families across southwestern Connecticut that they couldn't show up for preschool that day. Their families had to scramble to find some kind of coverage for childcare.
For Melanie it was a double disaster because she has a child with developmental disabilities. She can't have just anybody take care of him, and she is having a hard time finding someone. She is now going to be faced with not only inappropriate care for her child, perhaps setting him back developmentally, but she also probably can't start that job she was waiting for.
If we take this situation and multiply it times 1,000 in only one city in Connecticut, then look at the fact that that problem could be multiplied 18,000 times over the course of next week as more Head Start Programs shut down, we see this shutdown is not about politics. It is not about inconvenience. It is about people's lives falling apart.
What about the 1,500 workers at Sikorsky Aircraft, the majority of whom are in Connecticut. They have 43 employees from the Federal Government who inspect the helicopters as they go down the assembly line. But because those helicopter assembly lines are making Black Hawk helicopters for the U.S. military and they move pretty fast, if they don't have those inspectors for a handful of days, they can't continue to move the assembly line.
On Friday, 1,500 workers were furloughed from Sikorsky Aircraft, let go until those inspectors are back on the job--43 inspectors equal 1,500 private sector layoffs.
When you are laid off from a job, sometimes if you can see it coming, you can try to make arrangements. If you are on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, where everything that comes in goes right back out again to pay your food bills, mortgage, student loans, whatever it may be--if you can see the layoff coming, then you might be able to scramble to find a part-time job or save a little bit more for the final few months of your employment. But when you get a notice in 2 days you are going to be laid off for an indeterminate amount of time, there is no way for the people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck to put their lives together.
As Senator Landrieu said, that results in mortgage payments being missed, in credit ratings going into the tank, and lives being ruined off of a purely political crisis caused by a handful of rightwing Republicans in the
House of Representatives.
I hear my friends on the other side of the aisle and Speaker Boehner say, yes, but if the Democrats would only negotiate, would compromise, we could get this thing done. Before I yield the floor to my friend from Rhode Island, I wish to say two things about that insistence from Republicans that the problem is not their demands that the health care law be repealed before we open the government but it is that Democrats will not sit down and negotiate.
I think the Senator from Louisiana said it best: It makes no sense to negotiate with a gun to our head. Open the government and we will sit down and talk about anything the other side wishes to talk about.
Let us also discuss what the positions of the two parties are. Republicans want the most important achievement of President Obama's first term repealed. We want the government to continue to be operational. Republicans want a law taken off the books that will ensure 30 million more people with health care. We want the government to continue to pay its bills.
What I am trying to say is that we don't actually have demands. All we want is what our constituents have always expected to happen to continue to happen. All we have asked for in this crisis created by tea party Republicans is for the government to be open and for the government to continue to pay its bills.
We could make a bunch of our own demands. I think it is ridiculous that we don't have background checks on the purchase of firearms in this country, but I am not saying I am going to shut down the government unless I get my way on background checks. All I want is the government to be open and for us to pay our bills.
Second, normally one negotiates when we don't have consensus. Normally, we sit down and compromise when 50 percent of the Senate and 50 percent of the House doesn't agree to the exact same thing. That is why we have to sit down and talk--because we do not have consensus.
We do. We have a bill, which is the clean continuing resolution--and otherwise just keep the government open and operating for another 6 weeks on the same rules it used to be operating under. We had, I think, 54 votes in the Senate. It is publicly supported by a majority of the House of Representatives.
Why would we negotiate when we already have a bill that is supported by the majority of the Senate and the majority of the House? The only thing that has to happen in order for the government to get back and on its feet is for Speaker Boehner to call a vote on that bill. It makes no sense that Speaker Boehner says sit down and negotiate, when there is already a proposal pending before the House that has the support of the majority of both bodies.
We don't have a lot to negotiate over because all we want is the government to open and for us to pay our bills. We don't need to negotiate because we already have a proposal that enjoys the support of the majority of this body and the majority of that body.
Tea party Republicans should stop holding this country hostage to their ideological demands. Speaker Boehner should call a vote on this bill tonight and this totally self-created crisis could come to an end today.
I yield the floor.
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