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Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, this Friday at midnight, the government will run out of funding. That leaves us with just a few options.

One, we could pass the massive, yet-to-be-drafted, Pelosi-Schumer omnibus spending package, leaving the outgoing Democratic House majority in charge of drafting the bill to fund the Federal Government for the balance of fiscal year 2023, despite the fact that voters sent a clear message this November disapproving of the fiscal direction of our Federal Government.

Two, we could, yet again, pass another short-term stopgap measure that just kicks the can down the road for one more week to allow more backroom negotiations to take place, in secret. To be clear, this accomplishes nothing. It is simply a way to whip up support for another inflated spending package.

So when I say it accomplishes nothing, that is not really true. It is very effective at doing some things.

It marshals very effectively the angst of hundreds of millions of Americans who don't want a government shutdown. A lot of these people depend on the Federal Government remaining open to process--whether it is the paychecks for soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, or others who have contract with the government or receive payments from the government of one sort or another or otherwise impacted by the Federal Government's inability to operate during a shutdown. They all have something to worry about. They all have reasons to fear a shutdown. And those anxieties end up being transferred onto their elected representatives in the House of Representatives and in the Senate who in turn fear a shutdown for the same reasons and feel the collective weight of those concerns bearing down on them.

But there is a dual threat that takes place here. You see, those who may be coming to the Senate floor in the next day or two to propose exactly this, option 2--that is, to just kick the can down the road for another week, for another 1-week spending measure--will be coming down here, predictably, foreseeably, in the name of avoiding a shutdown.

But make no mistake, when saying that they want to delay spending, they want to delay any shutdown by another week, they are not really saying we don't want the threat of a shutdown. They are saying we want to move the threat of a shutdown, the possibility of a shutdown, closer to Christmas.

Why Christmas? Well, that is when the anxiety of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress are at their maximum. That is where we all feel it the most. We all feel the pressure to get something done the most. And that is also where Members of Congress, being human, understandably, want to be able to get home in time for Christmas, to spend the Christmas holidays with their families.

And it is this dual threat that very often, year after year, is used to persuade Members of Congress to vote for a spending bill that spends too much money and that does so through a mechanism that they have had no part in; that they have been excluded from; that they would never vote for in the absence of this dual threat of a shutdown at Christmastime.

No, this isn't right. When we do that to the American people, what you are really doing is cutting them out of the process. When you cut the people's elected representatives in Congress who have been elected by the American people to take care of these things for them so that they don't have to worry about it and then you tell them we are not going to give those you elect any opportunity to have meaningful input into a spending bill which we are going to present to them at Christmastime in order to force a nonexistent consensus behind something they know they shouldn't vote for, that is wrong. It has gone on over and over again, and it has to stop. It must stop now. So that is option 2--suboptimal, to say the least.

Option 3. We could do the right thing, and we could pass a continuing resolution that keeps the government funded, maintaining current spending levels until after we have sworn in the new Congress, including the Republican House majority, early next year.

It is only this latter option--only the third option--that makes any sense at all. And it is only this third option that is fair to voters. You see, for the last 2 years, we have seen unprecedented inflation driven by reckless government spending, and we have seen that moving forward in a way that has crushed American families. Our national debt has grown during those 2 years by about $4 trillion, reaching an astronomical $31 trillion--a figure that we just reached within the last few days.

In Utah, inflation costs the average household a thousand dollars a month every single month, relative to the day that Joe Biden took office. They are not, for the most part, people who just have an extra thousand dollars to burn, nor is the extra thousand dollars a month going toward luxury items. No, it is just groceries, housing, gasoline, healthcare--the basic things that the American people need in order to live.

Simply put, the American people can't afford the policies of the last few years. They certainly can't afford the kinds of spending bills that get passed when we use this dual threat of the shutdown threatened at Christmastime under an artificially imposed deadline.

Unsurprisingly, American voters cast their votes and in so doing signaled that they want the government to go in a new direction. After listening to an exhaustive list of excuses from the Biden administration, blaming inflation on everything from the pandemic to Putin, the American people saw through the smoke and mirrors. They voted for accountability and made it clear that they expect their elected representatives to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars.

Unfortunately, if this body just goes right ahead and passes another omnibus spending bill, a bill that we know is coming, a bill that we know is going to be thousands of pages long, a bill that we know that we will receive, at the most, maybe a day or two before we are expected to vote on it, with no intervening committee debate or discussion or opportunity for amendment--this body, if it chooses to enact such legislation, will be ignoring those legitimate desires on the part of the voters.

We are witnessing a conspicuous recurring trend, whereby leaders use the threat of a government shutdown to pressure Members into voting for inflated spending provisions without even time to read the bill, much less without giving them any time to consult with those they represent about how they feel about that spending and those policies.

So does this tactic remind you of anything? Well, it should. How about Speaker Pelosi's now infamous statement about ObamaCare when she said: You know, we have to pass the bill in order to find out what is in it. We all know how that turned out--not well.

Like ObamaCare, the resulting omnibus legislation that results from that kind of attitude, that kind of dismissive approach--dismissive not just to individual Members but of those whom they represent--always contains ideologically driven provisions, utterly unrelated to the budget, many of which could never pass if they had to withstand the light of day if they had to be voted on of their own merit.

We cannot, we must not, we should never use the threat of a government shutdown to force through policy changes that could never survive a vote on their own merit.

I believe we should pass--we must pass--a clean continuing resolution, one that will take us into the next Congress. Failure to do so will lock the remainder of this fiscal year into a pattern in which liberal policies and an inflationary spending agenda, crammed through by unaccountable Members of Congress, many of whom have just lost reelection or didn't seek it--all those things will descend upon the American people in a most unfavorable and unwelcomed way. We can't let that happen. I don't want to be any part of that. I don't think most of our colleagues on either side of the aisle do.

Not only would it be poor form and unwise and inconsiderate and really unkind for Congress to pass a massive spending bill, but it would also be without precedent in modern U.S. history.

You know, since 1954, the party in control of the House of Representatives has shifted from one party to another a total of just five times since 1954. In exactly zero of those instances did Congress go back after that election and during a lameduck session enact sweeping, comprehensive spending legislation. Not one instance since 1954 has that happened. Not once has there been an instance where Congress did that before a newly elected House majority could be sworn in.

We can pass a continuing resolution that doesn't include any of the new partisan agenda items that either side has proposed. It would keep the government running until the new Congress can develop a full-year discretionary budget--one that is agreeable to both sides or at least has been adequately vetted on both sides and with our constituents, with input from Members of both political parties and both Chambers of Congress.

I urge my colleagues to support the passage of this short-term continuing resolution that maintains current spending levels until the new Congress takes office. Doing so will ensure that we listen to the people's voices and that the incoming House majority has the opportunity to make the spending decisions that are in the best interests of the American people. We owe them nothing less.

Mr. President, to that end, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 5244, which is at the desk; I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from Wisconsin.

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, in closing this discussion, I just want to respond to a couple of points made by my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Vermont.

Senator Leahy is someone I have really enjoyed working with throughout my 12 years in the Senate, and I will miss him when he is gone.

I respectfully but very strongly disagree with his decision to object to this commonsense approach toward avoiding a government shutdown, and I want to make clear just a few things.

No. 1, this continuing resolution is not preclusive of anything else he may want to do. It doesn't preclude anyone from still working to pass an omnibus. It, rather, provides a safety net so that Congress doesn't produce a government shutdown and, just as importantly, so that Members don't feel coerced into this dual threat of having to navigate between the Scylla of a threatened shutdown and the Charybdis of people having to cancel their holiday plans with their families. That is what we are trying to avoid. So it is a false choice to say that this doesn't allow for anything else. That is just not true.

Now, I disagree with him about his desire to pass an omnibus because that omnibus doesn't yet exist. There still isn't an agreement on it. The bill has yet to exist and has yet to see the light of day, not only to the public but to all but four Members of the United States Congress.

But make no mistake: What we are proposing today, what we are reasonably suggesting today, would not preclude a subsequent omnibus; it would just take away the shutdown threat--which is exactly my point, which is exactly my concern. When we do this sort of thing--without speaking to anyone's subjective motives; I can't read other people's minds, but I do know that this pattern has been used before. It is a tried-and-true process by which people convince their colleagues to vote for things they would never otherwise vote for because, typically, we don't like to vote on things that we haven't seen and spend trillions of dollars.

My colleague from Vermont also refers to the fact that he has had lengthy conversations with a number of colleagues coming to him with their concerns. That is great. I appreciate that. That is a very appropriate thing for any Senator to do, particularly the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. As great as that is, that isn't legislating. That doesn't substitute for actual floor debate, and it sure as heck doesn't substitute for transparency and accountability, allowing the American people to see what they are going to be spending their money on.

We are going to get, in a matter of days, probably in about a week-- usually, they don't give us more time than that--a bill. It will be 2,000 or 3,000 pages long, and it will spend probably 1.6 or $1.7 trillion.

And the American people understand that 2,000 or 3,000 pages of appropriations legislative text does not read like a fast-paced novel. Nobody is going to have a chance to review this, and that is the problem. So the fact that he is meeting with individual Members, hearing their concerns, and talking about possible tradeoffs--that is great, but it doesn't provide what the American people need.

Next, he appeals to the sense of the good things that will be in the bill, talking about the need to fund efforts to combat opioid abuse and addiction and the need to fund law enforcement--great things, great things--but we haven't seen the legislative text, and the fact that there may be good things in the bill funding good causes that would benefit good, deserving beneficiaries doesn't mean that the bill as a whole makes any sense.

He also says, with some defiance and indignation, that he is not going to settle for another short-term CR, that short-term CRs are a bad way of doing things, and he is not OK with a short-term CR.

It is a good point. I am not either. I don't like them. It is a default.

But we have been on a short-term CR since September 30. That is 2\1/ 2\ months. So I don't comprehend exactly where he would draw the line between a short-term CR that is acceptable and one that isn't. So 2\1/ 2\ months is just fine but a few more weeks isn't?

I suspect it is going to be fine when somebody comes to the floor and asks for a 1-week, short-term CR--a 1-week, short-term spending bill.

That is wrong. Why? Because it moves the threat of a shutdown that much closer to Christmas when Members most want to get out of town and when the American people and those they elect to represent them here are most concerned about a shutdown.

That is coercive. That isn't trying to avoid a shutdown. No. That is playing with fire. That is presenting as a feature, not a bug, the risk of a shutdown. It is wrong, and it has to stop.

Look, the objective today--I hope he will reconsider. This isn't right. We know it isn't right. Those who elected us, whether we are Republicans or Democrats deserve better. They don't deserve this.

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