Continuing Appropriations

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia for his call on this place to get back to regular order and to bridge our differences. I think it is an important one and a noble and hopefully easy request for us to ultimately follow.

I came down here this weekend to talk about a young woman in Bridgeport, CT, who is at the epicenter of the fallout of this shutdown, and I wanted to come back down on Monday to tell her story very briefly once again because the way a lot of trade papers cover this shutdown makes it seem as if this is just about politics. If you listen to some commentators and some members of the tea party crowd in the House of Representatives, they will tell you that what we are going to find in this shutdown is that everybody is going to learn that the government really doesn't do that much and it is not that big a deal if it goes away for a couple of months, a couple of weeks, a couple of days.

What we are finding as we enter week 2 of this shutdown is we have now moved past the point where the collapse of the government is just an inconvenience. It is now ruining lives. I wish Melanie Rhodes was the exception, but she is increasingly becoming the rule across the country. The Presiding Officer heard me tell her story this weekend, but I am going to do it again.

Melanie was homeless a couple years ago. She lives in the southwestern portion of Connecticut. She had hit really hard times, but she decided to pull her life together--not the least of the reasons being that she has a little boy. She has a son Malachi. Malachi was born about 2 months premature, so he was born with some developmental disabilities that luckily, because of a government program, were caught early on. The program is called Birth to Three. In Connecticut, it is our early intervention program. Most States have it. It is one of the programs that are going to run out of funds pretty soon if we don't start turning back on the faucet to State governments.

But even more important to Melanie was that through that early intervention screening program that figured out Malachi needed a little bit of extra help, they got him into a Head Start Program. He wasn't even 1 year old when he started the Head Start Program. Today he is 3, and he is making incredible progress. He has some serious issues. He is just now learning how to communicate with some signs he has been taught. But he is doing better and doing better every single day.

On Monday night of last week Melanie stayed up all night watching to see whether the government was still going to be operating because she knew the Bridgeport Head Start Program works on a fiscal year that matches ours. So if the government shut down on October 1, the check wouldn't come to Bridgeport Head Start and they would have to send 1,000 kids home.

But she also knew her life was starting to get brighter in other ways as well. She had been looking for a job for a long time and she had done everything we asked of her. She had applied to everybody she could think of, from Walmart to Walgreens to McDonald's, and hadn't found anything until a bus company decided to hire her as a driver. She had gone through her training; she was just waiting for her background check to come back. It was going to be OK and she was going to start work. But, of course, the only way she could start work was if she had care for her child. As she has said so eloquently over the past week, she can't just leave Malachi with anybody because he is a kid with substantial difficulties and his caregivers need to know how to take care of him. So if there is no Head Start, there is no school for Malachi, he regresses in terms of the progress he has made, and she can't start her job. Her family essentially collapses around her simply because this place can't pass a budget. That is what is happening to Melanie, and she says simply this: We need our government and our businesses open. Why should we suffer and be held hostage while government can't do what they need to do?

Her story can be repeated thousands of times across Connecticut. I think I saw today that about 18,000 Head Start slots are going to be closed by the end of this week. Unfortunately, her story is not the exception; it is becoming the rule. This is what this shutdown means. It is not playacting. It is real.

As I watched some of the shows over the weekend, I heard a familiar refrain from our Republican colleagues. They said: Yeah, we have this demand that we want the health care law delayed or repealed or defunded in order to get the government up and operating, but really it is the Democrats. It is Harry Reid, it is President Obama who won't sit down and negotiate. If they would just sit down and negotiate, then we could end this whole thing.

I understand how some people might watch and think to themselves, why won't the Democrats just sit down and talk about this? So I would like to address this claim that the only thing stopping us from reopening the government is Democrats won't talk to Republicans. I want to address that in five simple ways.

First, I would make the point that every single one of my colleagues has made: We have already talked. What we thought we were talking about was a continuing resolution, a temporary budget that would keep the government operating for about 6 weeks. A lot of Democratic critics actually would argue that we didn't really negotiate that well over that particular issue because in the end the Senate passed a budget with a particular number for the continuing resolution, the House passed a budget with a particular number for the continuing resolution, and the difference was pretty substantial, but in the end the Senate just decided to go with the House number. We didn't settle in between. We didn't settle closer to ours or closer to theirs. We just took the House number. So we kind of feel, on the subject at hand, which is the continuing resolution, that the negotiation has already happened and we gave the House everything they wanted. There is not much more to negotiate after you give them everything when it comes to the bottom-line number in the continuing resolution.

Second, it is kind of hard to have a negotiation when only one side is making demands. We don't have any demands in this negotiation. All we want is for the things that normally happen to continue to happen--i.e., we want the government to stay open on the exact same terms the government was open last week and the week before. We want the country to pay our bills just as we have paid our bills for a generation. It is only Republicans--and, frankly, not all Republicans. Most Republicans in the Senate are not making these demands. It is mainly a small handful in the House and the Senate who say: In order to keep the government open, we want the health care law defunded or repealed or delayed.

It is difficult to have a negotiation when all we want is the status quo.

It is kind of like if two people lived in a house and one of them said: I am going to take the roof off the house if you don't do what I want. You wouldn't really negotiate that. That is an unreasonable demand. The roof just needs to be there. It is something that, for good reason, is normally not the subject of debate or negotiation. And you wouldn't settle for half. You wouldn't allow your roommate to take half the roof off. The roof just needs to be there, and if you are angry with me about something or you want to talk about something, let's do it while the roof is still on.

We can't negotiate over the government just operating. We can't negotiate over whether or not we are going to pay our bills. We don't want anything. We just want things to happen as they have happened in the past.

Third, this place just can't operate if in order to keep the government open for 6 weeks we have to satisfy everybody's personal political agenda.

I also said this weekend I have things I believe in very strongly. I represent Sandy Hook, CT. I submit I feel just as strongly about background checks as the Senator from Texas does about the repeal of the health care bill. But it would be unreasonable for me to say I am not going to vote for a budget because I don't get my way on background checks or immigration reform or tax fairness or whatever it may be that I care about outside the confines of the continuing resolution. If all 100 Senators had to get their particular nonbudgetary political points settled as a requirement of passing a continuing resolution, this place would absolutely collapse.

Maybe that is what some people want. Maybe some people want government to collapse and the government to shut down. But when I hear people talk on this floor, I take them at face value, that that is not what they want. Ultimately we all cannot get what we need all the time.

Fourth, you normally need to compromise when you do not have consensus, when you do not have agreement, when both the Senate and the House do not have the majority of their Members agreeing to the exact same thing. In that case you need to negotiate because clearly we do not have consensus, and so we have to get two sides together to find consensus.

We have consensus. We have a bill the majority of Senators supports, the majority of House Members supports, the President is ready to sign the minute it gets to his desk. That is what is referred to as a clean continuing resolution, a bill that would keep the government operating for the next 6 weeks on the same terms it was operating beforehand. The only reason why that is not law today is because Speaker Boehner will not bring that up for a vote in the House of Representatives. But it reportedly enjoys the support of more than 216 Members of the House, which is what you need today to get that bill passed. It has already passed the Senate.

Last, as Senator Durbin talked about, what Republicans are demanding as their condition to keep the government up and operating is no less than the repeal of the signature achievement of President Obama's first term, the most important bill I have ever worked on, the most important vote I have ever cast. That is the health care law which is today saving millions of dollars for senior citizens in their Medicare benefits and right now is providing a lifeline to millions of Americans who need cheaper insurance.

It is why poll after poll tells you that although people are still split on whether they agree with the exact prescription for our health care economy laid out in the bill we passed, they sure as heck do not want us to repeal the law. By about a 2-to-1 margin people say don't repeal the law, let it go into effect, give it a shot. It is also why by a 3-to-1 margin people do not agree with shutting down the government over the repeal of the health care law. It is why 9 million people have gone onto the Federal health care reform Web site to see what their options are. It is why, as Senator Durbin said, even in States such as Kentucky, people are signing up by the thousands. In the first day of Connecticut's exchange we had more visits to the Web site than we had in the entire month previous. People are desperate for lower cost health care out there. Sick people and families with sick children have been waiting lifetimes to finally be able to get insurance for their loved ones.

People need this health care reform law to go into effect. It is simply not true, as the Senator from Texas and others have said, that people do not want this law. They have shown us how badly and desperately they need it by the flood of interest in the exchanges over the first week, and in poll after poll the American people say loudly they do not want this repealed.

It is hard to get major social change passed in this town. The Founding Fathers intentionally set up a process by which something such as health care reform seems nearly impossible. That is why it took 100 years since Teddy Roosevelt first proposed that we guarantee access to our health care system for all Americans for it to happen.

You have a lot of chances for that idea to crater. You need both Chambers to pass the exact same bill, you need a President willing to sign it, you need the courts to uphold it, and then you need the electorate to confirm it when everybody who voted for it stands for reelection again.

The reason why we are implementing the health care law today and the reason why most Americans want it to go forward is we passed every single one of those tests. For the first time in a hundred years the exact same proposal to reform our health care system passed with a majority of both the House and the Senate and was signed by our President. The Supreme Court reviewed the law and stamped that it was constitutional. Then this President and every Member of the Senate who voted for the health care bill went out to stand for reelection in 2012, based on the promise they would continue to implement the law. The President was reelected by a resounding margin and every Senator in this Chamber who voted for the health care law won reelection. The bill passed, the courts upheld it, voters confirmed their original choices. People want this law.

We already compromised on the amount in the continuing resolution. It cannot be much of a negotiation when all we want is for the government to stay up and operating and for us to pay our bills. This place cannot work if, every time you negotiate a budget, everybody has to have their own political priorities taken care of.

We do not need to negotiate because we already have a bill that enjoys the support of both Chambers and will be signed by the President if only the House of Representatives will call it for a vote. The idea that people do not want the health care law simply is not borne out either by the polls or by people's conduct on the exchanges over the last 2 weeks.

Melanie Rhodes is waiting for an answer from us. Malachi needs to get back into preschool, ASAP. He is a little autistic boy who, every single day he sits home by himself, is marching a little bit more quickly backward off the progress gained through this program, funded not by government but by all of us, because we thought it was important that little boys with autism growing up in poor families with moms who used to be homeless should have a chance at success in life. Every day we continue to reverse our collective decision as a society that Malachi should get some help, he goes backward and backward. His mom, to whom we said: You know what. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, do the right thing for yourself and your child--she did it. She got him into Head Start, she found a job, and now because that program is shut down, she likely will not be able to start her job. He moves backward. She moves backward.

It is not because Democrats will not negotiate.

I yield the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.

Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Connecticut for those eloquent and very powerful remarks, and I will take advantage of his presence here to perhaps engage in a colloquy, if he agrees to doing so, asking him, because he spoke so wonderfully about that one family, whether he has seen, as I have seen, that story of deprivation and setback duplicated on a bigger scale throughout our State?

Mr. MURPHY. I thank my colleague from Connecticut for the question. As he knows, there are a thousand different children in that one Head Start Program alone who have essentially lost access to childcare. This week I think the number is, as the Senator knows, about 18,000 kids across the country who will lose access to health care. As we have seen, it has already had a big effect in our State because we have so many defense manufacturers. Some of the initial furloughs to civilians have caused a loss of work among families who could not afford it. We are seeing over and over how this shutdown trickles down.

Frankly, it is affecting the very families who cannot afford to miss a paycheck, the very families who cannot make quick arrangements to find somebody else to take care of their autistic child. As the Senator has seen and knows, this is affecting, in our small State, thousands and thousands of residents who did not have a lot of wiggle room when it came to the support that was standing around them due to programs run by the Federal Government.

Mr. BLUMENTHAL. In fact, I think statistics show more than a thousand children and their families are directly affected by this shutdown in Head Start alone. Seniors, in terms of nutritional assistance--I do not know whether my good friend and very distinguished colleague from Connecticut has seen that phenomenon as well in Bridgeport and throughout our State of Connecticut and would care to remark on it?

Mr. MURPHY. I would say to the Senator, we have had this effort on behalf of Republicans to kind of pick and choose which parts of the government they are going to reopen. As I noted here on the floor in objecting to one of these piecemeal requests, that exact program my colleague referred to, the senior nutrition program which provides meals to very low-income and often very frail seniors who are getting them either at a senior center or delivered to them through the Meals On Wheels Program, was not initially one of the programs that Republicans chose to reopen.

That is why we object to this piecemeal approach. It is bad policy to allow for a wing of this House or the other House to pick and choose which people they help, leaving on the outside, as the Senator mentioned, some who are very deserving, such as very frail and often very hungry senior citizens.

Mr. BLUMENTHAL. What is needed, I think my colleague would agree, is an end to the shutdown, reopening government--not for the sake of reopening the government but to provide these vital services and assurance that the United States of America, the greatest Nation in the history of the world, is going to continue paying its debts. Then and only then have a conference and a compromise and collaboration on what our overall budget should be with smart spending cuts and increases in revenue that close some loopholes and subsidies. I think that was the thrust, was it not, of what my colleague from Connecticut had to say?

Mr. MURPHY. I think the majority leader made it very clear he is willing to sit down to talk about everything and anything the Republicans want to discuss but not with a gun to our heads. Let's reopen the government. Then, as we as a Chamber have been willing to do over and over, let's sit down in a budget conference with everything part of that budget on the table.

But this just cannot happen every time that one faction of one House does not get their way, they shut down the government until their particular demands are remediated.

As I was saying, Senator Blumenthal and I care deeply about the issue of background checks. He worked his entire life on this issue. But given his life's work, he is still not coming to this Chamber and demanding until he gets his way on that issue, which is of such vital importance to his constituents and mine, that he will shut down the government.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source