Budget Negotiations

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise to share my deep concern that we are careening toward a shutdown of the government. Just a little more than 24 hours from now--tomorrow night--our government will shut down if this Chamber and the House Chamber cannot come together and put a simple continuing resolution on the President's desk.

There is a lot that we should be proud of. One is to be a nation that has been a light for the world, presenting the ideals of democracy in action and advocating for and defending human rights. We should be deeply pleased that we have fought for fair working conditions and economic opportunity for Americans across this great land. We should be proud of the tradition of public education that gives children an opportunity to fulfill their full potential. We should be deeply pleased of our history, advocating for freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of liberty. All of these things are part of a legacy for our Nation, a part of what this Chamber has been about.

But we should not be pleased and we should not expect that this Chamber is now engaged not in those great and lofty ideals but in a very small argument over an extension of the budget for 6 months, and that we are so dysfunctional that we are risking shutting the American Government down for one of the few times in its history. That is not the model we wish to show to the world.

I am deeply frustrated by what has transpired since 2000. The first 11 years of this century--indeed, the first 11 years of this millenium--have not been kind ones for the United States of America. In 2000 we were running huge surpluses. I was back in Oregon as part of the legislature and very excited by the fact that we were paying down our national debt.

Economists were starting to debate whether we should pay it down in 3 years or 5 years; do we need to keep a substantial debt for some strange economic reason or should we pay the whole thing off. I was thinking, isn't that a great debate to have, because we are going to hand a debt-free nation to our children.

Mr. President, I think we all share the thought that there will be discussions tonight and we will not shut the government down. That is what this debate is about right now.

It goes back to the point that in 2000 we had a new President come in who decided that paying off the debt wasn't that important. No, President Bush said we should have bonus breaks, big giveaways to the wealthiest Americans, and he did so without paying for them in any other manner. Then we had a war launched in Afghanistan.

Instead of the President coming forward and saying we must sacrifice and pay for this war, it is important to our national security, he came forward and said: American citizens, please keep spending a lot of money in retail stores. That is the way you can participate in this. So the debt was greatly increased to pay for that war.

Then we had the President launch a war in Iraq--the same President, President Bush--and he proceeded to give away the Treasury to the wealthiest Americans. He decided not to pay for the war in Afghanistan. President Bush decided to launch a war in Iraq, on completely false premises, and to do so without paying for it.

Then we had Medicare Part D, which happened in that same 8-year period--a huge expansion of a government program that has and will indeed help many Americans, but it was not paid for.

Those four decisions doubled the debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion, but doubling it was not enough. Indeed, the Bush administration did something else; they created a house of cards out of the most important financial document for every American family, the home mortgage. By deregulating retail mortgages, they allowed liar loans, undocumented loans. They allowed teaser rates, 2-year really low rates that mortgage agents used to talk people into subprime loans when they qualified for prime loans--steering loans that were regarded as such for steering families from prime loans into subprime loans.

Then they took all of those faulty subprime mortgages and packaged them into securities and allowed a new, unregulated form of insurance to back up those securities. Those were called swaps or derivatives. A $50 trillion unregulated industry came upon the American scene, and those securities ended up in every financial institution around this Nation.

This great house of cards, which corrupted the fundamental value of primary wealth for most Americans, and the humble fully amortizing prime mortgage--subprime mortgage--was turned into an instrument of mass financial destruction.

That financial destruction that was brought down on our house in 2008 and 2009 added another $4 trillion to the debt. We went from $5 trillion to $14 trillion. That process continued this last December with a compromise that added another $500 billion to the debt, a compromise I could not support because it added $500 billion additional to the debt.

I had a lot of hope in January, 3 months ago, that we had a new group come in and we had a new Congress, the 112th Congress, and we were going to proceed to create jobs and do so by ending some of those frivolous giveaways, those massive oil and gas giveaways that line the bottom line of some of the deepest pockets in our Nation, those rules that prevent us from negotiating drug prices which results in our seniors on Medicare paying higher prices for drugs than seniors anywhere in the world, even though those drugs were invented right here, a potential savings of $6 billion per year; those bonus breaks for billionaires, on top of $100,000 per taxpayer, up to a million more for many taxpayers. Taking those bonus breaks away is a savings of $50 billion a year; ending duplicative Pentagon programs identified by the Secretary of Defense, a savings of $75 billion--all of these opportunities, and so many more, to bring our financial house into order.

But those hopes were soon dashed because the new team in the other House of the Congress did not decide to fight for jobs, did not decide to fight to get rid of frivolous programs. Instead they decided to lay out a plan that attacks the very communities that have been most hurt by the previous disasters because that meltdown, that mortgage meltdown that haunted us in 2008 and 2009, destroyed the wealth of basic Americans of their homes, homes lost enormous value, it proceeded to destroy jobs that those families counted on, huge job losses, it proceeded to wipe out their retirement savings. No wonder so many families today do not have confidence that their lives, the lives of their children will be better than their lives. For so many families--in fact, their current life is not better than their parents' life was because of these kinds of devastating decisions.

The new arrivals said: No, we are going to increase the harm. We are going to attack the community development grants that build community organizations. We are going to attack the heating programs that keep people from freezing. We are going to diminish the food programs that keep people from starving. We are going to attack women's health programs, programs that have nothing to do, by the way, with abortion, but preventive programs, screenings, Pap screenings, breast exams. We are going to wipe those out because of misguided ideological opinions. And now we find a bill that says we are going to dismantle Medicare. We find an attack on housing for veterans. These are not the things that will bring jobs to America. These are not the things that will rebuild America.

On top of all of these attacks on specific programs, my colleagues in the House decided to create a whole long list of ideological riders to add to the budget debate. I have a copy, 4 pages, of policy riders to H.R. 1. It goes on and on, everything one can imagine, from Job Corps centers to training for our unemployed Americans. It is a huge list. It defunds the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that will guard against the corruption of mortgages I was discussing earlier. It attacks the EPA's ability to enforce the Clean Air Act. And so on. It is an unbelievable list all Americans should see to see what the true agenda is on the other side of Capitol Hill.

Now is the time to set aside these games, these ideological riders. Now is the time to set aside these attacks on the core programs that strengthen our communities. We are past the time to have the ability to do a simple 6-month extension of our programs in the United States of America so we can go on to debate fiscal year 2012. But not everybody is ready for that serious debate.

We have been hearing a lot of chanting at rallies that they do want to shut down the government over these ideological riders. Indeed, on April 5, the Washington Post reported Republicans gave the Speaker--that is on the House side--an ovation when he informed them to begin preparations for a possible shutdown. They want the shutdown because they want this ideological fight.

After proceeding through devastating mistake after devastating mistake that increased our debt $5 trillion in 2000--remember, it was heading down toward zero--to nearly $15 trillion, we still cannot have a serious discussion. We have folks who want to shut down this government over these ideological riders.

We must return to understanding our role in the Senate and in the House in terms of the broad and challenging and important issues facing America--the issue of providing fundamental services, the issue of creating jobs, and the lofty goals of advancing democracy and human rights and civil rights around this planet.

Now is the time to set aside those shallow ideological games, focus on rebuilding our economy, and putting America back on track.

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