Unanimous Consent Request - H.J. Res. 73

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Maryland for her very emotional response and her great statement. I hope all of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Capitol listen to what she just said to us. She represents a State that is probably impacted as much, if not more, than any other State because of the number of Federal employees who work at FDA and NIH and our other Federal agencies. But she did not come to the floor and say: Open all of the jobs in my State and make sure my State is taken care of. She came to say: Open the Federal Government so every American in every State in every part of our country is taken care of.

And she is right. I share her vision for the end of the day, not that we take a few here and a few there--whatever one individual decides is important here today--but that our entire country gets back to work. And I really share her vision that Speaker Boehner simply take up the bill that is at his desk. Allow it to pass. It has the votes. And at the end of the day, we can be proud our country is back to work. So I thank the Senator from Maryland for her very well-stated remarks.

I wanted to speak today about what is going on. Representative Marlin Stutzman said something that I think sums up the House Republican position perfectly. He said yesterday: We're not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this, and I don't know what that even is.

We have to get something out of this--the Republicans in the House. I think that statement makes it very clear. First of all, House Republicans have exactly one set of interests in their mind: Their own. And secondly, they couldn't be more removed from the impacts of the shutdown being felt across the country. Every day Speaker Boehner refuses to reopen the government is another day of inconvenience and stress and uncertainty for families and communities we all serve. And because House Republicans clearly aren't getting the message yet, today I want to describe some of what my constituents in Washington State--over 2,000 miles away from here--are saying about the effects of a shutdown.

The families I talk to in Washington State aren't interested in the partisan, political strategizing that goes on in Washington, DC. They have a lot more important issues on their minds right now. Every day they are reading about how the government shutdown is affecting their community. Many are feeling the impacts themselves.

There are about 50,000 Federal employees in Washington State. Thousands are being sent home without pay. The shutdown is going to put a serious burden on many of these workers' families, but the consequences reach even further. This week, the Seattle Times spoke to a deli owner, whose job happens to be in downtown Seattle. She gets about 30 percent of her sales from Federal workers in the building that is across the street from her.

Without their business now, they are all home. And without knowing how long this shutdown is going to last, she is concerned about how she is going to pay her rent and pay her employees. She says, "I don't think [Congress] is thinking of people like us.'' Well, it is hard to disagree with that. The shutdown is affecting so many. In fact, it is affecting other crucial parts of my home State of Washington. Our national parks are closed--campers and hikers have been asked to leave. And if the government doesn't open soon, participants in the Bering Sea king crab fishery--about which my colleague from Alaska spoke earlier this morning when I was on the floor--many of them are based in Washington State, and they are going to face significant economic losses. Why? Because NOAA employees are needed to process and issue their quotas. They have all been furloughed. There is no one to do the work they need to do their job.

I spoke to some of my constituents in the Washington State construction industry. They told me their business is slow because of all of the uncertainty about where our economy is going because of the shutdown and because of the looming guidelines. And there is so much more.

While our active duty military will continue to get paid, some of those who have heroically served our country are being affected. Furloughs in Washington State and across our country have forced our veterans to stay home and lose pay. As the shutdown continues, veterans are watching, and they are waiting, because if this government doesn't open soon, VA benefits--which many of our veterans rely on just to make ends meet--and support from the GI bill is going to stop.

Our veterans should not under any circumstances be burdened by partisan games. But unfortunately, the longer this shutdown goes on, the more they are having to sacrifice. And this shutdown is affecting the dedicated civilian employees who support our military. We have as many as 8,000 civilian employees at Joint Base Lewis-McChord who have been impacted. Some are going to work without pay and some have been sent home without pay, without any sense or idea of when they are going to be able to return. And, by the way, many of those workers are veterans--and many have already been victims of the gridlock and brinkmanship here in our Nation's capital.

A Washington State news station spoke with Joint Base Lewis-McChord employee Matthew Hines earlier this week, and he said his family already lost $1,300 because of the sequestration furloughs this summer. They are struggling to pay their bills and had to refinance their mortgage. This week, Matthew and his family were left wondering whether they would face more lost pay and more uncertainty.

The shutdown is creating uncertainty for struggling families as well those who depend on nutrition assistance programs. The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, WA, talked with Rosa Chavira, the mother of an 11-month-old girl. Rosa gets support--because she needs it right now--from the Women, Infants, and Children Program, WIC. It helps her to put food on the table. We are now hearing that the Washington State Department of Health is estimating that WIC funds would be threatened as early as next month if this continues. So next month, just a few weeks away, if we are still in a shutdown, Rosa might take her vouchers to the grocery store and be unable to buy any food for her family. As Rosa told the Spokesman-Review, that is a scary situation.

What I just talked about are a few of the examples we are seeing in my home State of Washington, but I know that families and communities across this country could tell a lot of similar stories. This is beyond frustrating for me. It is beyond frustrating for my fellow Democrats and many Republicans--including, by the way, at least 20 in the House of Representatives, so far, who see absolutely no reason why this shutdown has to continue. We may not agree on much, but there does seem to be bipartisan agreement that the shutdown has to end. And once it does, we should begin the negotiations that many of us, including myself, have been calling for on the floor since March and work toward a bipartisan agreement that ends the brinkmanship, ends the manufactured crises that are so harmful to our workers and to the economy.

I know Speaker Boehner and the tea party aren't on the same page as the rest of us about that yet. But as we continue to hear from thousands of Americans--from fishermen to small business owners to struggling moms--who are being hurt as this shutdown occurs, I hope they will at least stop standing in the way of those of us who are ready to get to work.

I will close by quoting Kirsten Watts from Tacoma, WA. She works with the Bonneville Power Administration in Seattle, and she told the Seattle Times:

It's just sad that the government is playing games with people's livelihoods.

Kirsten said that workers at her agency would still be coming in, but she is worried about the others who will not be. She was thinking about how this shutdown will impact others.

I think Speaker Boehner and the tea party--who, according to Representative Stutzman, are laser-focused on what is in it for them--could learn a lot from that approach.

So I say today to Speaker Boehner: Open the government. Let everybody go back to work. Stop hurting our economy.

All that it requires is bringing the Senate-passed continuing resolution up for a vote on the House floor so that the Democrats and Republicans who want the government to reopen can pass it. Once the government is open, we would be more than happy to sit down and work out our longer-term budget agreement. But we are not going to do it with our families, workers, and small businesses being held hostage.

This is not the time to talk about opening the government. It is time to actually do it. The entire country is watching and wondering how we got to this point. Let's do the right thing and show them we can work together and fulfill the basic responsibilities we were elected to do.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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