Continuing Appropriations

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, after 5 years of being a parent, I have gotten used to temper tantrums. It is an unavoidable part of having kids. They demand something--they want a second dessert, they want another 10 minutes before bedtime--and if they don't get it, they storm out of the room. That aspect of early human nature--the inability to deal with defeat and the unwillingness to compromise--luckily goes away over time as we get older and wiser and more thoughtful--everywhere except for Washington, DC.

By now everybody gets what is going on. As Senator Durbin said, we are only a handful of hours away from a government shutdown--another manufactured, made-up, totally avoidable crisis. This one is just because we can't pass a 6-month continuing resolution. We are having a problem just keeping the government open under the exact same rules that it has been open because a small set of tea party Senators and Congressmen are basically throwing a temper tantrum because they haven't gotten their way.

It is not news to anybody that Republicans oppose the health care law. They opposed it back when it was passed by both Chambers and signed by the President. They opposed it when the Supreme Court upheld the legislation. Their Presidential candidate opposed it when he got roundly defeated in the 2012 election. My opponent and the opponent of every single Senator who stood for election who voted for the law opposed it as well, and every single time they lost.

Over and over Republicans have made it clear that they don't like the Affordable Care Act. They voted 40 times to repeal it or defund it or postpone it in the House of Representatives. This is despite the fact that today the Affordable Care Act is saving millions of seniors millions of dollars because they don't have to pay for drugs in the doughnut hole. This is despite the fact that starting in January it is going to save millions of people across the country from having to go into bankruptcy because they can't afford their health care. But Republicans are refusing to vote for a budget that will keep the government operating unless this health care bill is stopped.

For too many of those urging a government shutdown, government has just become an abstraction. They have sold themselves on the idea that government is so twisted and malignant that shutting it down just wouldn't really do anything. After all, if the goal is to starve the beast, then what better way than putting the beast into a coma for a couple of days or a week.

But that is not how this works. Government does real things for real people. It provides paychecks for 9,000 people in Connecticut. It pays Social Security benefits and processes claims for disabled veterans. It inspects our food. At the NIH, it comes up with cures for diseases. The markets watch whether the government operates because they actually know that the private sector works better when the public sector is working better. So that is why today the market once again has been falling through the floor, as it will if we move forward with this madness.

Just as we don't give in to our kids when they threaten us if we don't give them what they want, America cannot reward this ``my way or the highway'' approach from the tea party. I have strong beliefs, just as my tea party Republican friends do, but I also get that I am part of a majoritarian deliberative body. Senator McCaskill and Senator Durbin made the point, as did the Presiding Officer. We all would love to attach things to this continuing resolution. There are 20 grieving families in Newtown, CT, who do not understand why 90 percent of the American public wants background checks on weapons and we can't pass that in the Senate. I bet some of them would think it might make sense for us to condition our support of the continuing resolution on getting background checks on gun purchases. Ninety percent of the American public supports that. But we are not doing that. That is not how we govern--hold the entire Federal Government hostage to get what we want.

Ultimately, though, this just can't be how this place works. This is a 6-week continuing resolution. As the Presiding Officer said, it is just going to happen 6 weeks from now and 6 weeks after that.

I heard that a long time ago this place used to actually be involved in the business of running the country. It doesn't feel like that anymore. As I sat there on the dais a week ago now watching the middle act of Senator Cruz's long, long, long speech, it didn't feel a lot different than it has for most days that I have watched the tea party over the last several years. It felt as if I were a theater goer.

What is happening this week really isn't exceptional. It is just the latest and worst example of a long trendline away from legislating and toward playacting. With rare exceptions usually prompted only by deadlines and cliffs and fake crises, we don't do anything here any longer. We just dig trenches and we make arguments. We pass fake bills. We playact. Occasionally, when the stacks of all the things around us are about to come teetering down we stop and we push them back up again instead of thinking for a couple of seconds that if we just stopped, sat back, and actually restacked those sets of things so they didn't come crashing down, we would probably be better off. We just play parts.

There is nobody better at playing their part than the tea party Republicans. Their character is recalcitrant, uncompromising, and destructive, and we have seen all of that on display this week. If we get beyond this crisis, we will just see it once again. But there is no curtain call here in Congress after which we can pull back our masks and share a good laugh. We are still all going to be left on stage tasked with picking up the pieces.

I think I am past believing that these folks are just going to start playing a different role. It is time for the American public to start asking some questions about people before they send

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them here: Are you willing to compromise? Are you interested in actually running the government? Are you going to score your term based on whether you deliver for the American people rather than how many Twitter followers you have or how many times you showed up on the TV news that week?

If this government shuts down tonight, it is just because of a temper tantrum or, put another way, a really, really bad play, the third act of which has gone on way, way too long.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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