Continuing Appropriations

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, there can be no doubt that no one wants to be here. Not one Member of this body wants to be in shutdown. We all may have different reasons, different explanations as to why we are here. We might differ with regard to our own beliefs as to how best we should get out of this. But not one of us wants to be here. Every one of us recognizes how awful it is to be in a shutdown posture.

I would like to take a few moments and explain my thoughts on both of those two points. I believe perhaps the single most important reason, single most undisputable reason why we are in a shutdown posture has to do with the fact that for a variety of reasons we have been operating on the basis of continuing resolutions for several years in a row. A continuing resolution, of course, is a bill, a legislative vehicle through which Congress may choose to keep government programs funded at current levels. It is kind of a reset button. It propels us forward on the basis of our current spending pattern, rather than on the basis of an independently, freshly negotiated set of priorities.

This is a different way of running government. Normally this is reserved for unusual circumstances. It usually does not last as long as we have been going this time around, for about 4 1/2 years this way. But this causes us to do things in a way that is different than one would otherwise choose to do them. It is certainly very different than the manner in which we would operate in any other aspect of our lives.

To use one familiar example, let's analogize Congress's spending pattern, its spending decisions, to a consumer going to the grocery store. Suppose you went to the grocery store having been informed by your spouse that you need to bring home bread, milk, and eggs. So you went to that grocery store, you put bread and milk and eggs in your basket. You go to the checkout counter. You place the bread, the milk, and the eggs on the counter. The cashier rings you up. The cashier at that point says: Okay, here is what you will owe us for these items, but we will not allow you to buy just bread, milk, and eggs. In order to buy these items at this store, we will also require you to purchase a half ton of iron ore, a bucket of nails, a book about cowboy poetry, and a Barry Manilow album.

Of course, anyone being told that would be a little surprised. Anyone being told that would be reluctant to shop at that same store in the future.

And if another store existed, another alternative, very few, if any, consumers would continue shopping at that institution.

Yet that in some ways is the way we are asked to spend money here in Congress when we are operating on the basis of back-to-back continuing resolutions, just pushing reset on our spending button, keeping a Federal Government that spends about $3.7 trillion a year operating sort of on economic autopilot.

It would actually be a little bit closer analogy if we changed the hypothetical to a circumstance in which the cashier said not just that you have to buy half a ton of iron ore, a bucket of nails, a book about cowboy poetry, and a Barry Manilow album, but you also have to buy one of every single item in the entire grocery store in order to buy anything--no bread, no milk, no eggs, nothing unless you buy one of everything in the entire store. That would bring us a little closer to the analogy we are dealing with here where we have to choose to fund everything or alternatively to fund nothing. Neither one of those, it seems to me, is a terribly good solution. Neither one of those fairly represents good decisionmaking practices.

We ought to be able to proceed, as past Congresses have historically, passing a dozen or so--sometimes more--appropriations bills and going through our Federal Government category by category debating and discussing each appropriations measure, discussing the contents of that measure to make sure there is sufficient agreement within this body and within the House of Representatives to continue funding the government function in question.

We have a new item in the store, so to speak, as we are shopping this year. This new item in the store is called ObamaCare, one that is about to take full effect on January 1, 2014. Yes, it is the law of the land, but we do have the final choice, the final option, the final authority to choose whether to fund that moving forward or, alternatively, to defund it. We can take that out of the grocery cart.

It is a new item that has caused a lot of people a lot of concern. A lot of people are fearing and experiencing job losses, cuts to their wages, having their hours slashed and losing their health care benefits as a result of this law, and they see more of these disturbing trends coming in the near future. So they are asking for Congress to help. They are asking for Congress to defund the implementation of this law.

A lot of people and many of my colleagues in this body have responded by saying: Yes, but it is the law. That is true. It was passed by Congress 3 1/2 years ago and signed into law by President Obama. It is important to remember two facts about this, however.

First of all, the President himself has announced that he is not following the law. He himself says the law is not ready to implement as it is written. He himself has refused to follow it as it is written.

Secondly, it is not unusual, it is not unheard of by any means to have a law that puts in place one standard, one program, and then have a subsequent appropriations decision made by Congress that results in the defunding of that very program. Let me cite one of many examples I could point to. Under Federal law, currently there is designated something known as the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. That is our official nuclear waste repository. Yet for many years it has been defunded by the Congress. That is Congress's prerogative. Congress holds the power of the purse. Congress may decide to do that.

It is also important to remember that this was by design that it would work this way. Our Founding Fathers understood and set up the system so that it would work this way, and they put the power of the purse in the hands of the House of Representatives, understanding the House of Representatives would act first when exercising the power of the purse.

James Madison acknowledged this fact in Federalist No. 58, and if I can quote from that in pertinent part, James Madison wrote:

The House of Representatives can not only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of Government. They, in a word, hold the purse; that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the People gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the Government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any Constitution can arm the immediate Representatives of the People, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.

So we find ourselves now in a position in which the House of Representatives is wanting to get the government funded again and is acting to keep the government funded on a step-by-step basis, starting with those areas as to which there is the most broad-based bipartisan support, those areas of government that have nothing to do with the implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare. Moving step by step in this fashion, we can get the government funded again. We should be getting the government funded again.

In many respects, what we have seen over the last week--the conduct of the Obama administration during the first week of this shutdown--may well serve as the single best argument against ObamaCare. What we have seen is a willingness of this President and his administration to utilize the already vast resources of the Federal Government to make it hurt--to hurt families, to hurt businesses, to hurt those who depend on their access to Federal lands, to national monuments, national parks, and other Federal installations. This itself is evidence of the fact that when we give government too much power, that power may, and ultimately will, be abused.

I want to be clear that this is not a problem that is distinctively Democratic. It is not something that belongs uniquely to liberals. This is equally a Republican problem. Republican and Democratic administrations in the past and in the future will have chosen at times to abuse power when it suits their interests in order to get their way politically. We need to not give yet another source of power to the Federal Government--a source of power that intrudes into one of the most personal aspects of human existence.

When we give the Federal Government control of our health care system, we give them control of aspects of our lives that are intensely personal, very intimate, and, frankly, not the business of the Federal Government. We don't want to give that power to a government that may one day be used against us for someone's partisan political gain. It is for that reason we are having this discussion. It is for that reason we need to keep the government funded.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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