Government Funding

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, the Senator from Illinois is absolutely right. The votes are there to pass these six bills. The majority leader, in effect, is acting as a buffer for the President. He is not serving this body because he knows that his own Members would vote for it and vote to reopen the government. That is because they are hearing the American people tell them, as they are telling us: Reopen the government.

That was the message that Senator Schumer delivered. It is simple, direct, and it is true. The American people want the government reopened. They know we have disagreements all the time. We disagree about policy and politics, proposals and legislation, but we don't shut down the government simply because we disagree. The government continues to do its work and serve the American people even as we have disagreements.

Our friends on the other side, the Republican leadership, are complicit in this shutdown by refusing to permit us to do our duty and our work, which is to consider and pass legislation that will keep the government serving the people of the United States. If the President vetoes those bills, there may well be enough votes here to override them. That is our job as well.

The reason the American people want us to reopen the government is that they know the crisis here is one that Donald Trump has made himself. It is a manufactured crisis involving dedicated public servants who are missing paychecks, taxpayers denied critical government services, economic hardship for small businesses, and low- income Americans. It is a crisis that is spreading.

It is not a crisis at the border in security that the President, supposedly, is witnessing as we speak here. There is a humanitarian crisis at the border, which is also of Donald Trump's making, but the broader crisis throughout this country will affect our economy, our education system, our transportation, and the real security of this country, which is our ability to help each other.

I have looked at those folks in the face, most recently the day before yesterday, at Foodshare, our food bank in Connecticut, which will soon be unable to meet the challenges and needs of the food insecure in Connecticut because the Commodities Distribution Program will be crippled. Their cost and transportation and storage will be overwhelming and unmet. Children and seniors will begin to go hungry because their reserves will be exhausted by the end of this month.

I have spoken to the Coast Guard members who will be unpaid. Alone among our military services--unfairly, unfortunately, unacceptably-- they will be unpaid. We know in Connecticut the value of our Coast Guard as a military branch of our government. We are home, proudly, to the Coast Guard Academy, with over 2,000 Active-Duty servicemembers, cadets, and civilian employees who are feeling the direct effect of this Trump shutdown.

In reality, it is a Trump lockout, not a shutdown. He is locking out so many dedicated workers of our Federal Government. But the Coast Guard is continuing to work. It is the only branch of the military that isn't guaranteed pay during this Trump shutdown because, by a quirk of history, it is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, not the Pentagon. These Active-Duty Coast Guard members based in New Haven and New London and across the country are continuing to protect our Nation's security, continuing to rescue Americans at sea, continuing to interdict drugs that threaten our Nation, and they are going unpaid.

That is why a bipartisan group of Senators--and I want to thank Senators Thune, Cantwell, and others--have introduced legislation to pay them during this Trump shutdown and any other shutdown going forward. I call on the Senate leadership to immediately approve this bill and allow it for a vote. Our military members in the Coast Guard deserve better, but so do all of the homeowners of this Nation who are seeking mortgages and must put those efforts on hold, so do the community development block grant projects that create jobs and economic growth, and so do law enforcement, essential to our security, who are going untrained.

Food safety inspections have been suspended. Housing safety inspections, like the ones at Barbour Garden in Connecticut and Infield apartments, have stalled.

Breweries, like many in Connecticut--and I am hoping to visit a number tomorrow--are unable to deliver their products to market and onto store shelves.

The National Parks have been left unsupervised.

Last week, the Hartford Courant highlighted the story of Bryan Krampovitis. He is a resident of West Haven and an air traffic controller at Bradley International Airport. A number of traffic controllers are here in Washington, DC, and they will be outside this building later today. He is continuing the work, but he told the Hartford Courant:

I'm a single father of my daughter, and she relies on me to be her sole provider. I have a home and mortgage. It's a hard time to be in. I'm forced to continue to go to work or face the possibility of losing my job.

If the Federal Government is still closed at the time of his next scheduled pay, he will receive ``a zero dollar paycheck.''

Like him, so many of these Federal workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and they will be without that paycheck. The effect, though, will be on Americans as a whole.

The President continues to divide us with rhetoric that is distorted and divisive, with misleading, malign mendacity. I am reminded of the sign I saw on TV: ``Stop truth decay.'' The President should stop truth decay as he visits the border today. He should recognize that there is no crisis, insecurity at the border; that it is manufactured by him. The idea that drugs are imported across the border is correct, but it is at the ports of entry. The idea that terrorists are coming across the border is factually absurd. In fact, the 3,700 figure the President broached has been completely debunked. The idea that the wall will be effective or practical has been abandoned by members of his own administration who have recognized that a wall from sea to shining sea is simply impossible and impractical.

So we are left with a vanity problem--an applause line in the President's campaign--that has become a wall to progress. It is a wall to progress only in the President's mind, as everybody in this body knows there is a path forward to reopen the government. That is what the American people want--to reopen the government, to adopt the bills that are necessary for these agencies to go back to work, and to reopen the Department of Homeland Security as well while we debate those disagreements we have and do our jobs.

The Congress must do its job and send to the President the bills that are necessary to reopen the government and save America from this manufactured, unnecessary, unacceptable crisis that has come to us and our country from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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