Official Congressional Record
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. I want to begin by complimenting my good friend, the ranking member of the full Appropriations Committee. She has bargained with us throughout this process in good faith, and it has been a pleasure to work with her. I have often been quoted, and I will say it here on the House floor, you can trust Rosa DeLauro. When she gives you her word, she keeps her word. We have no complaint at all with our friends on the other side of the aisle in the House and certainly not with our distinguished ranking member. I will tell you, we have not seen that same sort of good faith from the Senate of the United States, particularly the Senate Democrats. Quite frankly, they came to a bill agreement last year when we were trying to get the first three bills out--which we succeeded working together in doing--that, gosh, let's just keep working. What we want is a clean continuing resolution and a short date. We gave them both those things. Instead, they then added new demands unrelated to the subject at hand, demands that, frankly, we did not agree with, did not accept. What did we get? We got a 79-day full shutdown, as my friend pointed out. We don't think that is acceptable. We want to continue the process. Second, we negotiated again earlier this year. Again, we thought we had an agreement. We made concessions to our friends on the other side, concessions which we thought really weren't concessions. They were helpful suggestions from the Democrats. Let's add more training for our men and women in ICE, you know, Department of Homeland Security. Let's have some additional training. Let's have some additional funding. Those were all things we agreed to, and then once again we got another shutdown. Frankly, we just want to make assurance. I have no doubt we can negotiate differences, including some of the concerns my friend raised today, in the time we have between now and September 30. What we don't want is a government shutdown used and perverted for political purposes 5 weeks before an election. We think that is a risk that we are running in dealing with the Senate. While we have worked productively, we have gotten bills out on both a partisan and a bipartisan basis, we haven't seen that in the Senate. Honestly, they haven't passed a single appropriations bill yet. They have refused to sit down and negotiate in good faith in the Senate. I would say our friends in the House have negotiated in good faith. We actually did backflips last year to give our friends in the House the measures that needed to get passed in the form that they asked to pass them. They kept their word. We passed all those bills. In the Senate, frankly, we did not get that kind of response. We gave them those things. Instead, we got a shutdown; a shutdown that, frankly, was inexplicable. We want to avoid that. We have presented here today a bill that should be noncontroversial. It simply extends funding through December 4. It does not have any poison pills in it. There is nothing in the bill that my friends object to. If they want to put additional things in the bill, fine, we can talk about that, but let's just assure that funding is going to go on no matter what. That is all this clean continuing resolution does. Look, I have been around here long enough to know that tensions rise as you move toward an election. I have been around here long enough to see Members on both sides of the aisle try to leverage a shutdown to extract additional concessions. We want to avoid that. We want to continue to both move bills across this floor. Obviously, we have moved ours out of committee. We want to give the Senate time to do the same thing. Count me as skeptical that they are going to do much before the election. We want to make sure between when we leave here on September 30 and that election, and sometime beyond that, December 4, that the government continues to function, and we are available to negotiate at any time. We, as my friends on the House side have done, have kept our word in those negotiations. They have been in good faith. All this does is make sure that we do not have a shutdown come September 30, nor do we have a wild effort by either individual Members or either party to demand things in exchange for keeping the government open. The government will be open until the election is over. I actually think that is a concession and a favor to everybody. It is a favor to the American people to make sure that they are not inconvenienced and endangered by a government shutdown. If we have to wait until after the election until our friends in the Senate want to sit down and work, then we will wait until after the election. We don't have to wait through a shutdown. We don't have to create the temptation for individual Members to exploit an artificial deadline of the end of the fiscal year. We just need to keep working, as we have, productively. That is all this bill does. There are no poison pills in it. There is no increase in funding. There is no other extraneous legislation attached to it. It is a clean, simple CR to avoid a shutdown before a scheduled election and to give us enough time after that election to sit down, either resolve our differences--which is what I hope we can do--or if we need additional time, we will look at that then. If there are other matters along the way, we are happy to sit down and talk about those. We just want to take the possibility of a government shutdown off the table. Some people may think that is being cautious. Those people would probably not be aware that we went through the longest full government shutdown in American history triggered by our friends in the United States Senate, the Democrats in the United States Senate. Some people might think that, you know, again, we run the risk of our borders. We had to resort to extraordinary measures to continue to fund the Border Patrol. Why anybody is mad at the Border Patrol, I will never know. All they have done is their job. We have had no known illegal entries in the United States in over a year. That is something to be proud of. Why the Border Patrol is mixed up in this, I will never know, but I am happy to talk to my friends about it on the other side. Let's do the prudent thing, as my friend, Mr. Womack, said. Let's take out an insurance policy. Let's remove the option of a government shutdown, and let's continue to work in good faith. We have done that in this House. That is why all 12 bills are out of committee. I commend my friends on the other side. They made their points. They made their arguments. They supported a couple of those bills, others they might not. The point is, they worked in good faith. That has not happened in the United States Senate. We have had two shutdowns triggered by people that historically condemn any shutdown. Their argument has always in the past been: Let's keep the government open while we negotiate. That is all this CR does. It ensures no artificial deadline, and it ensures we will get the election in the rearview mirror without shutting down the government as we move into an election. We think this is a prudent thing to do. I hope some of my friends on the other side will accept that view and vote accordingly. If not, we will try to do this on our own, but we would prefer to do it in cooperation with our friends. Again, that is all we are trying to do. I would urge, Mr. Speaker, that my colleagues support this bill, that we make sure there is no government shutdown come the end of the fiscal year, and that we make sure we can conduct our elections in November without the threat of a shutdown leading into those elections. Then we would prudently try to resolve our differences on the other side of the election. It is pretty simple stuff. Again, we are willing to talk about other matters that our friends want to bring up. We just want to take the option of a shutdown off the table. It is that simple. I urge my colleagues to support this bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Moran). All time for debate has expired. Pursuant to House Resolution 1438, the previous question is ordered on the bill. The question is on the engrossment and third reading of the bill. The bill was ordered to be engrossed and read a third time, and was read the third time.
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