Default Prevention Act of 2013 - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. I wish to thank the majority leader for his statement.

We are hoping there will be positive developments today, and very quickly, relative to the impasse which we have reached. It is time to reopen this government, it is time to make certain we pay our bills, and then let us engage in honest debate on the issues that are before us, and there are many.

The forum for that debate is very obvious: It is the budget conference, the conference between the two budget committees. The Senate Budget Committee, chaired by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, passed the floor of the Senate 6 months ago. Senator Murray and others on our side have tried on 21 separate occasions to ask for unanimous consent to go to this budget conference committee to start debating the issues which we now see in the press every day. Twenty-one separate times the Republicans have objected to even meeting. This is unfortunate and it is one of the reasons we are here today.

It is hard to believe, if one is in the midst of this maelstrom, that not even 2 weeks have passed since we started this debate on the floor of the Senate, which has led to this terrible situation.

Two weeks ago our government was open. There was good thinking--or at least a good hope--that we were going to extend the debt ceiling of the United States. Now we are in a much different place. We are only 2 days away from the second week ending of a full government shutdown, a government shutdown which has furloughed some 800,000 employees. That is an unfortunate situation for these employees and their families and for the American people as well.

What the House Republicans have learned, and those Senate Republicans supporting them, is that this government shutdown has real-world consequences. I can remember taking my kids to Chuck E. Cheese's and watching this Whac-A-Mole game where something would pop up and you hit it with a hammer. This is what the House Republicans have been doing on a daily basis. If a story comes out that suggests people are being denied critical medical care at the National Institutes of Health, they say: We will open that part of the government. If a story comes out, tragic stories, that families who have lost a loved one in service to this country are not receiving benefits they are entitled to, they will pass am exception to the budget. It is the same thing with the VA and FEMA. It is no way to run a government, and it is unfair to the American people.

Their strategy, as convoluted as it is, is they will pass these bills one at a time to fund our government until it gets down to a handful of bills for agencies they don't care for. One of the agencies the rightwing spokespeople have identified they want to close down is the Environmental Protection Agency. They want to close down the Environmental Protection Agency. It is an outrageous statement.

They may disagree with the policy of that agency--I disagree with some myself--but when it comes down to its important mission to make sure we have safe drinking water and air that is not going to create public health hazards, I hope it is something that most people, regardless of their political background, would agree is an important government function.

This strategy of a piecemeal appropriation has resulted in an embarrassing predicament for our government. People laid off cannot go to work and basic services cannot be provided.

The other day a Republican Senator came to the floor and said: Let us at least agree that we should open FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Natural disasters do occur, and so he made a motion to open that agency. I asked him: Wouldn't you want to also open the weather service to make sure they are fully staffed to warn people before a disaster occurs? Wouldn't you also want to make sure the agencies that arrive on the scene of disasters, such as the Small Business Administration, that try to get businesses back in place, should also be reopened? Shouldn't the Coast Guard be fully funded to make sure if there is need for rescue, they are present?

He reflected on it and said: Yes, let's include all of those.

This is the problem with picking and choosing agencies, they are going to miss something critically important. That is what we face.

Secondly, on this debt ceiling, as awful as it is to face a shutdown in the government, for the United States to default on its debt for the first time in history would be catastrophic. That isn't my word. It is a word given to us by the Business Roundtable. The leaders of the major businesses in the United States have said if we default on our debt for the first time, it will be catastrophic.

October 17, Thursday, is the day. If we haven't taken action by then, we risk default.

Yesterday we tried to pass what we call a clean extension of the debt ceiling with no political strings attached--just extend it until the end of next year. All we asked our Republican colleagues to do was to allow us to bring the measure to the floor for debate, for amendment. Not one single Republican Senator, not one, would vote to allow us to even proceed to the bill so that we could start the debate and in a timely way to respond to this challenge of the expiration of our debt ceiling Wednesday night.

If we listen to the business leaders across America, they will tell you there is a lot at stake. This is not only another political issue.

Since World War II, the United States has worked, effectively worked, to make the United States dollar the soundest currency in the world. Think about that. That U.S. dollar is the investment of choice of governments all around the world. They believe the safest place to be is in U.S. Treasuries. Why? Because the United States always pays its debts, period.

Now House Republicans and other Republicans have said maybe we won't pay all our debts; maybe we will go into something called prioritization; pick and choose the debts you want to pay. Many of us tried that when we were young and in college. It catches up with you. After a while, we find out we just can't do that.

Now put yourself in the position of a great nation, a nation that has to make 50 million to 80 million decisions a month as to how to pay the debts that are owed by the U.S. Government. How do we prioritize that?

Republicans, many of them argue we will first start by paying our largest creditors. In other words, pay China first. How soon then will we pay Social Security recipients, those waiting for veterans checks, those in our military waiting for paychecks, those who are owed money from our government, and the transfers to States and localities that are critical for the ongoing operations of their own government and their own credit rating? It is a ridiculous idea.

It reminds me of Soviet revisionism when it comes to history. They talk about how simple it will be to prioritize and default on our debt. It will not. It will be disastrous. The flat-Earth economists who are preaching this don't have a leg to stand on. Economists and business leaders, many of whom are conservative Republicans, have warned the Republicans: Don't do this. This is something that will cause damage for a long time to come.

In the threat of default in 2012, interest rates on 4-week Treasury bills tripled. They are at the highest levels since 2008. Fidelity Investments, the largest U.S. money market mutual fund, liquidated all of their short-term Treasury bills just on the threat of default on our debt.

Is this default or is this debt ceiling extension something extraordinary? The honest answer is no.

We have done it so routinely that most people haven't noticed. Congress has increased the debt ceiling 78 times since 1960, 49 times under Republican Presidents and 29 times under Democrats. The debt was increased by 189 percent under President Ronald Reagan--a 189-percent increase in the debt--compared to a little over 40 percent under President Obama. Debt ceiling increases have often been paired with other issues, but only recently has the threat of default been used as a bargaining chip.

I know if we fail to extend this debt ceiling it will be catastrophic. A lot of people will suffer. I think about families, working families, with their savings accounts, perhaps their retirement accounts. Imagine, if you will, what it means to them to lose 5 or 10 percent of the value of their savings. They work hard, many of them barely scraping by, just getting by paycheck to paycheck, putting a little money away for the future. Now, because of political gamesmanship on Capitol Hill, their hard-earned savings are at stake.

That is the height of irresponsibility. That is the height of recklessness.

The fact that we couldn't get one Republican vote yesterday to go forward is as troubling as anything that has happened on the floor of the Senate that I can remember. This is something we should all agree on--to move forward. I am hopeful these discussions between Senator Reid, the Democratic majority leader, and Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, will bear fruit. I hope they can find a sensible common ground to spare us what we face. I hope we can end this government shutdown, pay our bills, and then engage in a meaningful, regular order and honest debate in our budget conference over the many other issues that challenge us as a Nation. That is what we were elected to do. That is what we must do.

There are those who are arguing we need to continue this confrontation and take it to a high-noon scenario. Frankly, that is not very courageous on their part. It is pretty easy to be politically courageous with other people's money, and that is what is happening with those Republicans who are arguing we should default on our national debt. They are playing with the savings of working families across America. That isn't fair to those families. We should stand by them, push for economic growth, for the creation of jobs, and not what this would do--damage this Nation's recovery.

I yield the floor.

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