Making Continuing Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise today to address some of the challenges we face here on September 26. The significance of that date is it is only 4 days before September 30, the close of the financial year, and October 1, the following day, starts a new financial year. So it has been our responsibility as a Congress to prepare for October 1 by passing a budget, reconciling that budget with the House of Representatives, then using that budget to produce 12 appropriations bills, reconciling those 12 appropriations bills, and have a spending plan completely in place so that we smoothly begin the start of a new financial year. No crisis, just adults working out a spending plan for the next 12 months on time.

I would like to say that is where we are today. But instead, as I stand here on the floor of the Senate, we are only 5 days away from a shutdown of the U.S. Government, a shutdown because that spending plan has not been put together. For the many Americans who have been following the challenges of the last couple of years, this will sound a little like déja 2 vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra, because we have been here before. We have been through this crisis before.

Indeed, it was April 2011 when we had a near government shutdown, and that had a huge impact on job creation, and it had a big impact on the stock market. In other words, it wounded our economy at a time when Americans wanted us to build a strong foundation for a better economy, to create jobs for the middle class, to put people back to work, and to get momentum built up to put American families in a better place. Instead, we had this manufactured crisis in April 2011, courtesy of my colleagues, who felt more about exercising partisan warfare than caring about the success of our middle-class families. Quite simply, that is just wrong.

Then it was just months later, in July of 2011, when we had a debt ceiling crisis. This is quite interesting, because the debt ceiling is simply a term for paying the bills we have already incurred. President Reagan had something to say about this. President Reagan said: Don't mess with the good faith and credit of the United States of America. We pay our bills on time. And we have always paid our bills on time. We didn't manufacture crises to do damage to the economy because of extremely poisoned partisanship gripping this Chamber and the Chamber on the other side of Capitol Hill.

Not only did that combination of crises do significant damage, but in 2012 we faced the big fiscal cliff. This is where the tax structure developed under the Bush Presidency was set to expire, so a new set of policies had to be worked out. We were unable to have that adult, responsible conversation due to the extreme partisanship gripping this Chamber and gripping the other Chamber. So we had a crisis at the close of that year that, quite frankly, did damage as well. Suddenly businesses were seeing that not only did we have the great recession of 2008, as a result of out-of-control failures in regulation that allowed predatory mortgages and predatory securities--securities that melted down and took a large part of America's financial world with them--but we had this follow-on of not being able to have a reasonable, thoughtful, commonsense budget plan in place to take us forward.

So 2012 led to March of 2013--3 months later--and now we had the delayed implementation of the sequester. The sequester comes from the Budget Control Act--an Act I voted against because Members on both sides of the aisle described it as ``dumb and dumber,'' so dumb we will not let it happen. I thought it was so dumb it should never be written into law, so I voted against it. But I was on the losing side of that battle. So this diabolical financial plan exploded onto the American scene in March 2013, creating a significant problem for the American economy and doing significant damage to the American economy. And here we are, 6 months later, unable to complete our budget and our appropriations bills for the coming financial year.

This has become a pattern where we see ourselves lurching from crisis to crisis--manufactured crises--due to this poisoning partisanship, rather than working together to address the challenges of working families and the middle class. The American people are quite tired of it. That is why they rate the quality of work we are doing so low. That is why they rate Congress so low.

There was a time not so long ago when it was a very different story. When I was growing up, the story about Congress was that we had had this Great Depression but we came together as a Nation and recognized many of the problems that contributed to that. Those problems included allowing banks to stop doing loans and start gambling on risky ventures, and we stopped that when we put in Glass-Steagall. It included having mortgages that were balloon mortgages, and those could be called in at any time, which meant an individual had to return to the mortgage market to get a replacement loan. That created a crisis for a family if the loan was called and they couldn't actually get another loan. So we fixed that by creating full amortizing long-term mortgages with no balloon payments, and we got rid of that callable feature.

We also created the Securities and Exchange Commission to take on the predatory scams and practices of Wall Street so people would have faith in investing. Faith in investing meant you had the capital to fuel a strong comeback.

We created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation so people could trust putting their money in banks, knowing the bank wouldn't collapse and take their money with them.

We did all these things as a Congress, coming together to respond to great national problems. Sure, there was some partisanship, some disagreement between the parties, but there was a deeper understanding that we as Americans must work together as Americans, including on the floor of the House and the Senate, for the greater benefit of our American families.

Unfortunately, that has apparently been lost. It has been lost not just in these last few days but in these last few years.

When World War II was thrust upon us, in a short period of time, with congressional help, we transformed our economy into a war economy and played a big role in basically resolving a terrible worldwide crisis. After World War II we rebuilt, through our loan programs and our trade relationships, much of the world economy as well as our own economy, creating the largest middle class the world has ever known.

All of this is what we did in this Chamber and in the Chamber on the other side of Capitol Hill--decisions that were made together to put America back on track. But today we don't have legislators thinking about the health of America. They are thinking about the next election. They are thinking only about their own election. They are thinking about how to undermine our President. Yet he is our President. He is America's President. He is not the Democrats' President or the Republicans' President. He is our President, and he only gets to sign or veto bills that we send to him.

It is our responsibility in this Chamber to work together in a respectful, responsible fashion to do the basic work that is at the foundation of our ongoing expenditures--to get the budget in place and to get the spending bills in place.

The story of this year is really one that belongs in a fiction novel, because here we go: The U.S. Senate passed a budget, the U.S. House passed a budget. Immediately, the next day, the conference committee should begin. But, no, it didn't happen because Senators in this Chamber decided to filibuster that conference committee and stop any conversation from occurring between the House and Senate about getting a common budget.

This is really akin to burning down the house--blocking the House and the Senate. And by ``the house'' I mean a house that encompasses this whole legislative process. It is like lighting a bomb and letting it blow up. Don't let the budget process proceed; don't let there be a conference committee. ``Completely irresponsible'' should be the sign worn on every legislator who has blocked there being a conference committee on the budget. Without a budget we can't get common appropriations bills because they are based on different numbers.

Let us look at this appropriations process. There are essentially twelve spending bills, called appropriations bills. If we look at the period from 1988 through 2001--that 13-year period--we passed the vast bulk of appropriations bills every year through this Chamber before the next fiscal year started--the vast bulk of them. Some years we got every one done and some years most of them done, but the process worked.

Now let's come to the modern era: 2008, zero appropriations bills passed through here; 2009, we actually got half of them done, six; 2010, zero; 2011, one; 2012, zero; this year, 2013, zero. Any schoolchild in America grading the Senate on their success in getting the spending bills in place would give us an ``F'' for ``failure'' because we can't come together as responsible parties and have a debate on this floor, adopt amendments, and have an up-or-down vote.

This does enormous damage in multiple ways. The first source of damage is that we end up with late-night emergency continuing resolutions. And when you have a continuing resolution, it means you keep doing what you did before whether they made sense or not. So for every person who believes we should spend a dollar wisely--and I certainly do--we should take advantage of a year's worth of conversations and testimony about what is not working and we should end those programs, not keep continuing them. And when those hearings show that more money is needed in certain areas to make America work better, then we need to spend more in those areas, not continue spending less.

So this effort to blockade the budget process is a determination to continue government waste and inefficiency. I propose that Senators who are blocking the Budget Committee from even getting the numbers and blocking the spending bills should come to this floor and say: Yes, I am for government waste. Because that is what they are doing. They are wasting the taxpayers' dollars. They are investing in inefficiency.

Meanwhile, businesses across America are looking at these sets of crises--April 2011, July 2011, December 2012, March 2013, September 2013--and saying: We are not reinvesting in America until this Chamber and the other Chamber on Capitol Hill get their act together--so that we are not legislating from crisis to crisis, doing great damage to the economy. They know they can't sell their wares unless there is a middle class ready to buy them, and there can't be a middle class unless there are jobs, and there can't be jobs lurching from crisis to crisis.

The end is not in sight. We have colleagues in this Chamber right now planning to have another crisis over the next debt ceiling, the responsibility to pay the bills we have already incurred. We have Members who are not remembering that President Reagan said: Do not mess with the good faith and credit of the United States of America. They want to mess with the good faith and credit of the United States of America, which increases interest rates, which puts an essential tax on all Americans. So the fact that we don't have momentum of the amount we want in the economy is the result of this deliberative determination to force us to lurch from crisis to crisis.

Our middle-class families are worried about a lot. They are deeply concerned about the cost of college. They are deeply concerned about living-wage jobs. They are deeply concerned about funding for K-12. They are concerned about things that affect the real quality of life and the success of our families in every way. And they wonder why it is that we are lurching from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis rather than getting a spending plan in place and doing more of the things that make sense.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Heinrich). The Senator's time has expired.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for an additional minute.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. MERKLEY. I will wrap up. Anywhere you look in America, you see problems for public safety, for public education, for college education, for living-wage jobs. These are the pillars of success of the middle class. Let's focus on those problems and do right by the American people and quit the irresponsibility and self-manufactured damage that is happening here on Capitol Hill.

Mr. President, I look forward to the remarks of my colleague, Senator Baldwin.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source