Government Shutdown
Floor Speech
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Mr. WELCH. Mr. Speaker, I want to read part of a letter from Charles from Vermont:
I am a Marine Corps veteran and have spent the last 15 years guarding the national borders as a CPB officer. The government shutdown is unacceptable. January in Vermont is pretty cold. As a furloughed government worker, I have to choose whether to pay for fuel oil to heat my home or to make child support payments to support my ex-wife and my children. And without work and without pay, I am unable to do that.
He is one of 1,300 Vermont employees of the Federal Government who is working without pay. These include 900 employees at the Department of Homeland Security, 300 employees at the Department of Agriculture, and 100 employees of the Interior Department.
Mr. Speaker, this Sunday, I went to the shift change at the Burlington International Airport and met with our TSA personnel. They asked me a question. They had missed a paycheck. They had been showing up for work every single day. They had been doing, in their professional and cheerful way, processing all of us through security, keeping us safe, and they are very proud of their work. But they asked me a question that I couldn't answer: Do you know of any other situation where an employer can require a person to work even when the employer has told that employee you are not getting paid?
That is what is happening. That happens nowhere. Where in your experience can an employer, whatever kind, tell the worker to show up, but we are not going to pay you?
That is what is going on, and it is having a ripple effect throughout our economy. It is the Federal workers, but it is also everyday citizens who depend on routine functioning of government in order to meet their obligations.
Let me read a letter from Karle, a small business owner from the Northeast Kingdom. He talks about how this government shutdown has affected his business.
As the owner of Kingdom Construction, we employ nearly 30 full-time, year-round construction workers.
They were recently awarded a $2 million construction contract, but they can't get the permits signed because the permit signers are on furlough. Those folks are not going to work. That is real and unacceptable and inevitable when we have this government shutdown.
Now, every one of us has these stories, whether it is somebody who has a microbrewery and can't get the FDA inspection, it is that construction company where they can't get the sign-off on the permit, or it is a closing that can't occur because the paperwork won't be signed. This is going on, costing our economy about a billion dollars a week, and it is all because we are having this dispute that is quite resolvable.
Now, Mr. Speaker, the issue of border security is incredibly important and we all know that, but at the eleventh hour, because we have a dispute about one element of it, is that a reason to shut down the government, when not only does it do collateral damage to lots of innocent people, but it makes it more difficult for us to resolve the underlying issue about border security?
Mr. Speaker, my suggestion is it is time for us to have a cooling-off period. Turn the lights back on in government. We can have a temporary, short-term extension of the Homeland Security bill, get people paid, and then convene all of the relevant parties to have a negotiation about border security and about all of our immigration policies, including the Dreamers, including undocumented workers, and including the challenge we have about legal immigration and having people who can come here vetted to our country and contribute to our economy.
There is a price that is paid by individual workers not getting a paycheck; there is a price that is paid by individuals who are not getting the functioning of government; but there is also a price that we are paying in the trust that is required to sustain a democracy.
We have to make off-limits the tactic of shutting down government in order to get your way. Our democracy depends on mutual trust; it depends on accepting certain norms that, as vigorous as we will be in advocating our point of view, we will not cause collateral damage to others to get our way.
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