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Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I want to commend my friend and colleague the Senator from Wisconsin for his outstanding work on this bill, the Shutdown Fairness Act.

Senator Johnson seized on something very important here. We are surrounded by people in this very building and throughout the United States and across the globe--people who are faithfully, valiantly working for the U.S. Government. Now, some of them are staffers in this very room who are not being paid. Some of them are the Capitol Police officers we greeted on our way in who are keeping the Capitol Complex safe. Some of these are soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, guardsmen all over the world who are serving the U.S. Government at risk of life and limb to keep us safe, and there are countless others in different occupations who are not being paid.

Why? Well, they are not being paid because our friends on the other side of the aisle are wanting to expand government yet again. They may think that this is the right message, that this is a winning message. It is not. It is not the right message. It is not a winning message even for them because it highlights something. It highlights the danger in putting too much trust, too many responsibilities, too many functions in the U.S. Government--so much so that when a crisis like this emerges, and the Schumer shutdown now drags well into its second month, they see that what the American people have previously regarded as a service performed by the government to them is now being held over them to extort even more money out of them under the threat of planes falling from the sky.

We are told by Democrat after Democrat on television interviews and elsewhere: Well, it is OK. It is OK because this is leverage. This is our leverage.

Well, what do they want to use that leverage for? They want to use it so as to paper over the failures--the abject failures--of ObamaCare, this law that has succeeded in doing exactly one thing: enriching large health insurance companies while making all Americans poorer. Premiums have skyrocketed. Coverage has diminished. Quality has completely tanked as a result. They know this. They understand this. They see premiums continuing to increase year after year after year.

So what do they want to do with it? Well, they want to spend a lot more money moving forward--money at a time when the U.S. Government is already $38 trillion in debt; money to hide, to conceal what it is that ObamaCare is doing to the American people, when, in fact, what ObamaCare has done is diminish the healthcare options that the American people have.

It used to be that you could negotiate with a health insurance company and buy a health insurance policy, but ObamaCare, in many ways, made what was once health insurance illegal.

We need to make health insurance legal again. We need to allow a willing customer to pay a willing insurer for a health insurance policy rather than an ObamaCare health plan, which very often, through its Byzantine labyrinth of Federal regulations, just adds to the cost and adds to the profit, the bottom line of these huge healthcare companies.

So, yes, they want to take this to extort the American people and their position of vulnerability at a time when we are told planes may start falling from the sky; at a time when people's airplane tickets are being rendered valueless because a lot of these flights are not going to be able to be made. And all kinds of other problems are happening while, at the same time, our Federal workforce is not being paid.

These are not the right people to punish for the failures of ObamaCare. Don't let them carry that burden. Don't make them do it. They didn't do this to the American people; ObamaCare did.

Let's fix ObamaCare. Let's make it legal again to have health insurance--actual health insurance, not that sort of bastardized form of health insurance that has emerged from ObamaCare's endless regulations that have resulted in diminished quality, lower coverage, and endlessly higher premiums.

This shutdown has gone on long enough. This shutdown should come to an end, and it should come to an end by the very generous offer made by Republicans time and time and time again to continue at spending levels that, until just months ago, were the Democrats' own spending levels. It is not enough for them.

We have got to end the madness and end the shutdown.

At the very least, even if we are not to end the shutdown, we should pass Senator Johnson's bill. We should do that tonight. We should do it right now because regardless of what you think we ought to do with ObamaCare or any other aspect of government, these workers who have now gone for some time without a paycheck should not be required to make this sacrifice, especially when you consider what it is for--hiding the true cost of ObamaCare. That is shameful.

Again, I thank and I commend Senator Johnson and his team for putting together this legislation. I am proud to support it, I wholeheartedly endorse it, and I plead with my colleagues to vote for it.

Let's get these workers paid. They deserve nothing else.

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