Continuing Appropriations

Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, we are now in day 8 of the government shutdown, and the pain has been felt by all across the country--by the cancer patients being denied access to new clinical trials at NIH, by the mom whose son has muscular dystrophy. His name is Jackson. She told me that every day those researchers aren't working on a cure for her son's disease is a day lost. She said every day counts. Small businesses can't get affordable loans through the SBA. Farmers write me about not being able to get their conservation loans.

I have here a letter I read on the floor on Saturday:

Please do whatever you can to stop the government shutdown. We have 14 acres of land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program. Our rental payment is made to us this first week of October. We depend on this money. It is not a small amount for our family.

Kathy, from Minnesota:

I am an employee of the Social Security Administration, Office of Disability ..... I have seen you intervene on matters for claimants who have disability hearings pending. I am furloughed as part of the government shutdown. If you want your constituents' hearings addressed, I need to be at work in my office.

Alicia, from Hastings, MN:

I am writing to express my extreme concern over the federal government shutdown. I am a teacher, a mother of three boys, and the wife of a furloughed veteran who works for the Minnesota Air National Guard. I have never before written a letter to my representatives, but feel so utterly helpless and frustrated at this time; I needed to voice my concern. ..... At this point in time, my husband, who is a veteran ..... is out of work because he is a federal employee not deemed essential. I am afraid that not only are the other 800,000 laid-off federal employees deemed non-essential, but the rest of the American citizens are non-essential as well.
She goes on to say:

Our struggles are real-life struggles; not a game, not philosophical, not in theory, not distant, and not imaginary. My hope is that these struggles and hardships matter to you ..... That is your duty. That is your charge. That is your enormous task. Shutting down the government is not one of those responsible actions.

That is what we are hearing from the people in my State, the people all over the country.

It is time to end the shutdown, and I will continue to urge my colleagues in the House to do the right thing and pass the straightforward bill the Senate passed on September 27 that would get the government back to work and get those employees back to their jobs.

It is great that the House passed a bill to pay them. That is a good thing. But now they are paying them to stay home. They are paying them to not do their job. They want to come back to work.

As you know, Madam President, we are now facing another critical deadline--the deadline for paying our bills or facing default. Next Thursday, on October 17, our country will hit its legal borrowing limit, and when that happens we will be asked to do what Congress has routinely done 70 times over the past 50 years; that is, pay our country's bills.

Let me be clear. This is about making good on commitments we have already made. This is about doing what regular Americans do every month when they pay their credit card bills. Yet lately we have heard voices from the other side from a number of people who seem to think this is just no big deal.

Just the other day Republican Congressman Joe Barton of Texas said:

Some bills have to be paid and some bills we can defer and only pay partially, but that doesn't mean that we have to pay every bill the day it comes in.

Then there was Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the conservative Cato Institute, who said:

There's no need to fret.

No need to fret? That is not what history teaches us.

As chair on the Senate side of the Joint Economic Committee, I had a hearing a few weeks ago about the cost of this brinkmanship, about what happens if we go over that cliff, if we let our bills go, if we don't pay them.

Let's turn back to 2011. We have a very clear lesson of what happens when the mere prospect of a default sent shock waves through our economy. I recently released a report examining the fallout of that brinkmanship. The results were ugly. The Dow Jones plummeted more than 2,000 points, our credit rating was downgraded, and $2.4 trillion in American household wealth was wiped away.

I think it is important for everyone to remember that in 2011 all of this happened before we averted default. The Treasury Secretary sent a letter to Congress about the looming debt ceiling starting on January 6, 2011. On May 2 he announced that the debt limit would be reached on August 2. That was the magic day. We now have people saying maybe it is not October 17. They were saying that back then. But do you know what happened in the lead-up to August 2? On July 14 Standard & Poor's warned that it may downgrade the U.S. credit rating. They followed through on that. They downgraded it after the magic day of August 2, but it was 2 weeks before that they warned they might do it. What happened then? Well, over late July and early August, leading up to the date, the Dow Jones dropped more than 2,000 points.

So the next time someone says there is no need to fret over playing games with the debt ceiling, tell them to talk to the families whose retirement plans took a hit.

Make no mistake. This brinkmanship has very real consequences for our economy. We can't afford to go down this path again because this time around the fall could be so much harder. Our Joint Economic Committee analysis indicates that rates could rise on everything from credit cards and home mortgages to borrowing costs for businesses. At a time when our economy is finally turning a corner, this would put a real strain on families and small business owners.

But don't take my word for it. Secretary Lew has said extraordinary measures will be exhausted by mid-October. Already our government is not matching the retirement fund that Federal workers put in. Already they are not issuing some of the municipal bonds. Already they are not making some of the typical investments they would normally make. The business community and my friends on the other side of the aisle know businesses are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of America not paying its bills, including key leaders such as Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, who said:

It is unthinkable that the US could default, and it would be the height of irresponsibility for a public official to consider such a course.

Our country cannot afford to keep lurching from crisis to crisis. It is time for both parties to focus on real solutions and get the government back to work in the short term so we can focus on responsibly reducing our deficit in the long term. I supported the work of the Gang of 6, the work of the Gang of 8, the work that was being done by the Domenici-Rivlin Commission, the work that was being done by the debt commission. I was one of 14 Senators who pushed for that work to be done, and I think it is a great basis. I don't agree with everything in it, but it is a good start for how we can negotiate a major deal. We cannot do that in the next few days. We need time to do it, and that is why the Senate proposal is 6 weeks--6 weeks to allow the government to open again so we can truly negotiate the kind of long-term debt reduction deal that we should.

We need to be forward-looking. We need to be forward-looking enough to recognize the decisions we make today go far beyond the next election cycle; they will be felt by generations to come. We have a responsibility to get things right. We can't allow our country to go over the brink. It is not the American way.

In a 1987 address to the American people when he was talking about the debt ceiling and the need to pay our country's bills, President Ronald Reagan said:

The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations. It means we have a well-earned reputation for reliability and credibility--two things that set us apart from much of the world.

I urge my colleagues to take these words seriously and to join me in ensuring that Congress acts responsibly and in the best interest of this country.

I yield the floor.

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