Debt Ceiling

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, Rube Goldberg was an American sculptor, cartoonist, and inventor best known for his cartoons that created very complicated machines to do very simple tasks.

Today, we have heard from Mitch McConnell that he wants to emulate Rube Goldberg and put our entire national economy at risk by an extraordinarily complicated method to do a simple task, and the simple task was laid out so clearly in 2006. The minority leader said we are in exactly the same position now as we were then. Well, yes. The Republicans asked the Democrats to not filibuster so that they could raise the debt limit. The tables are turned. The simple same courtesy takes away the risk to our economy.

The risk is great for disaster relief, for Medicaid, for payments to our veterans, for payments to our currently serving forces; and there are broader risks, risks that Mark Zandi has laid out, in saying a recession could result in the loss of millions of jobs, that it could result in the loss of a half a billion dollars in family wealth, that it could be--or $15 trillion in household wealth--$15 trillion.

There are moments when the political games have to stop, when the partisan warfare has to stop. The Democrats did what the Republicans suggested in 2006. We also took an alternative method that Mitch McConnell suggested in the past, which was to let, in 2011, the President raise the debt ceiling subject to an override by Congress. We have twice worked with the Republicans, at their request, for a simple method. This is not the moment for a Rube Goldberg disaster with the wealth and health of Americans at risk.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

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