Transcripts For CSPAN2 U.S. Senate U.S. Senate 20180121 : vi

Quorum call a senator mr. President . The presiding officer the senator from hawaii. Ms. Hirono are we in a quorum call . The presiding officer we are in a quorum call. Ms. Hirono i i ask unanimous consent to vitiate the quorum call. The presiding officer without objection. Ms. Hirono mr. President , when donald trump was a private citizen during the last Government Shutdown, he said, and i quote, problems start from the to be, and they have to get solved from the top. And the president is the leader and hes got to get everybody in a room and hes got to lead. Thats what donald trump said when he was citizen trump. He is now the president. Now that hes the president , he has those shoes to wear, he refuses to step into them and step up. The only person to have actually said maybe we need a good shut downis President Trump. Although i have to say recently, the office of management and budget director Mick Mulvaney also said it was cool to shut down the government. Unbelievable, definitely not cool. This attitude may explain why the president keeps shooting down bipartisan efforts to prevent a shutdown. Republicans control the house and the senate. I dont know why we have to keep reminding republicans that they control the house and the senate. There is no reason for the majority leader and the speaker to enable this trump shutdown to continue. There is no reason to wait on the president to tell them to do whatever or tell them what he believes because donald trump is a changeling. He is unable of being consist sentst tent. I witnessed this weeks ago when i went to the white house to find a path forward to protect the dreamers. During the meeting in front of all of us and an national tv for over 50 minutes, donald trump promised to sign whatever bipartisan compromise that congress came up with. He said hed take the heat. We had barely driven back to the capitol before he went back on that promise. This pattern repeated on friday when the democratic leader discussed a broad bipartisan compromise with the president to keep the government open. And after agreeing to or appearing to agree on a framework, the president shortly thereafter said no once again. This is Donald Trumps shutdown. Its important to understand who is responsible for his shutdown. He himself said its the president whos supposed to be bringing everybody together. But frankly its more important to end the shutdown. Its time for congress to lead. Congress is a separate branch of government, and we should start acting like it. We can come to a broad bipartisan agreement on nearly every part of a deal to end this shutdown. We can reauthorize the Childrens Health Insurance Program that provides Health Insurance to 9 million children all across the country. We can Fund Community Health Centers that provide health care for hundreds literally hundreds of millions of people in our communities. We can protect the dreamers. We can fully fund the department of defense and provide funding parity for critical domestic programs. Congress shouldnt wait around for the president to make up his mind. Lets do our jobs. I support passing a very shortterm funding bill, somewhere between one and three days, which we have proposed, to sustain the urgency in getting this done in a shorter time in as short a time as possible. So a multiweek extension of government funding that allows the president , the majority leader and the speaker to kick the can down the road and pit one group against another is not the way to go. The republicans continue to pit the Childrens Health Insurance Program against dreamers. They pit funding for troops against dreamers. Pitting one group after another on and on. Are the republicans saying we can only take care of one group or the other . Do we cut off the right arm or the left arm . Weve seen this pitting one group against another strategy at work all week. Authorization for the Childrens Health Insurance Program expired september 30 months ago. But the majority leader waited until now to put it up for a vote because he hoped to use it as leverage to divide democrats and leave dreamers out in the cold, pitting one group against another. And just as a reminder, guess who spent months and months trying to take away health care from millions of americans and more months to provide the richest 1 of people and corporations in our country huge tax cuts all behind closed doors . The republicans, thats who. We could have and should have funded the Childrens Health Insurance Program months ago. We could have come to a compromise on dreamers months ago. The majority leader has come to the floor repeatedly to argue there is no urgency to protect the dreamers or the daca participantsment, that we have months to find a solution. Doesnt he know that more than 16,000 people have lost their daca protections since donald trump cruelly and cynically ended the program in september . And every single day 122 did a croix recipients lose their statistic Daca Recipients lose their status. These young dreamers are scared of being kicked out of the only country they know and love. That is the United States of america. Over the past few days, weve heard the president and the majority leader continuously disrespecting these inspiring young people by referring to them as illegals. Thats how you take away an individuals humanity, by categorizing them as one group or another, as illegals. Ive met many of these Daca Recipients. They are not illegals. They frankly are legally protected under the daca program to be in the United States. They want to make a contribution to the only country that they know. America. Dreamers like leonardo from oregon who came to my office in late december to share his immigrant story and why hes fighting to be able to stay in the United States. Leonardo came to our country with his siblings and his mom who was fleeing an abusive marriage. Growing up, leonardo hardly saw his mom, who took Public Transportation to work the nightshift and slept most of the day. He told me as hes gotten older and he had to work so hard to make ends meet, he truly appreciates the sacrifices his mom made to make sure he had food and clothes. Like Many High School students, he groomed he dreamed of going to college. He saw athletics as a path to pursue his dreams. Leonardo got a scholarship offer from a small school but at precisely the moment he thought his dreams came through, he learned the school was unable to full i will its promise because leonardo was undocumented. Put yourself in his shoes. His heart was broken. Leonardos life changed when he was able to sign for daca. He enrolled in Community College to study chemistry and those become a pharmacist one day. Leonardo told me that daca doesnt just allow him to access a better quality of life. He said it changed how he values himself as an individual and person, that he was more than his status. That he was a human being. Not an illegal, that he was a human being. When i asked him why he came all this way to share his story, he said i quote him, what were doing here really encompasses what it means to be an american. The idea that we have to fight for justice, that we have to fight for dignity, that equality surpasses any status, that our humanity surpasses any status. Thank you, leonardo. I agree. This is a Pivotal Moment for congress. Are we going to continue to bend to the whims of an unpredictable, mercurial and unreliable president . Or will we come together on a bipartisan basis, behave like the separate brage of government that we are separate branch of government that we are and reauthorize the Childrens Health Insurance Program, Fund Community Health Centers, protect dreamers, and provide parity for defense and domestic programs in a longterm budget deal . I respect my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. What i dont respect is holding up this process, knowing full well that we can come up with a bipartisan way in three, two days, even one day to end this shutdown. Mr. President , i yield the floor. The presiding officer the senator from missouri. Mr. Blunt mr. President , one of the unusual things about the moment we find ourselves in is that were debating an virtually all fronts on topics that 70 of the senators agree on. When you look at the appropria appropriating bill, at least 70 senators are for the Childrens Health Insurance Program, maybe 90, maybe more than that. It is a widely supported program. Nobody really believes that the obama taxes in obamacare on medical device taxes every made any sense or the socalled cadillac tax, where if youve worked hard and in many cases worked and negotiated an Insurance Coverage package, that now the government says is better than it should be, that you should pay taxes on that or that everybody should pay an individual tax on their health care. Nobody is for that. Surely everybody wants the governments doors to stay open. And so on that front, one of the major criticisms of stopping the continuing resolution from going on is that nobody is opposed to it. So using it totally as leverage on an issue that we all that we also almost all agree on. You know, these kids who came here as kids and i have met a mum of them, as you have, mr. President , and one of the first questions i often ask is well, how old were you when your parents brought you here . The answer is often 18 months, two, three, followed by something like, now i work at an Architectural Firm or us just graduated from college. But they clearly grew up in this country. We all get that. This is not a hard problem to solve, i dont believe. But leverage has somehow become the big issue here. First of all, we let the appropriations process collapse. Where only a few people have anything to say about how we spend our money. And then we decided were going to let the whole legislating process collapse. Way too much time being spent on confirming people that theres no opposition to. And then the very people, our friends on the other side, like the democratic leader, who insist on 30 hours of debate or 8 hours of debate where there is no debate and all you do is use up that time so nothing else can happen, says why cant we debate this issue . Well, we could debate this issue if we just hadnt spent an entire week confirming four district judges. These are not four Supreme Court judges and theyre not four circuit judges that appeal from the district court. We spent an entire week last week doing nothing but that. And these judges were all confirmed. We all knew they were going to be confirmed on monday when they were all confirmed by the end of the week. But we spent the whole week doing that. And then the same people that insisted on that wonder why we dont have time to debate the issues that wed all like to debate. Mr. President , i would have liked to have seen the Childrens Health insurance bill debated, but we ran out of time. Were now beyond the time when the bill expires. States are beginning to have stress on that. I would have loved to have seen a debate there and id love to see that debate exclude expanding excellence in Mental Health to a few more states. I would have loved to have seen that debate include the expansion we need in Community Health centers. But we didnt have time for that. We were spending needless time confirming people that were ultimately going to be confirmed. You remember, the rules on this, mr. President , 30 hours of debate on the floor. If anybody insists on it for a district judge or for a circuit judge, rather. 30 hours of debate. So there are only so many hours in a week. And we are wasting those hours. That rule has to change. And if we cant change it one way, my guess is that eventually the frustration will become so great we change it another. So we find ourselves here in a Government Shutdown with no disagreement on what were talking about. Just to treat, to show who is running the senate. Well, the majority at the end of the day is going to run the senate. Thats what always happens. And if our friends on the other side want to run the senate, they need to get in the majority. But this will not be the way they get there. My good friend, the senator from hawaii, she and i have a Common Health issue with kidney cancer, we both lost a kidney, and thats a pretty binding sort of thing. When i say i care about her a lot, i do. But she said how dare people talk about kids who were brought here illegally as people who came here illegally. I think a great disservice was done to the daca kids when the other side decided they wanted to make them a focal point on a debate that they have nothing to do about. And dont act surprised that other people are going to come to a conclusion of whats the weakest point in the argument for daca kids, the weakest point is every one of them came to the country illegally. Now they were brought illegally, but every one of them came to the country illegally. And we need them. They grew up here. They went to school here. We need that vital, strong population as part of a growing economy. 70 of the country if not 80 agrees with that. This is an issue that could be solved. But we see the further deterioration of how we spend our money. The appropriations process, for a decade now has been to where it comes down to one big bill at the end that almost nobody had anything to say about. Certainly has strengthened leadership on both sides. Its weakened membership on both sides. I dont think the leaders want the power that theyve gotten through this wrecked process. For 200 years we appropriated our money by bringing the bills to the floor. I imagine initially there may have been one bill. In recent years there have been a dozen. One or two at a time on the floor, and every member in the house and every member of the senate could propose any amendment they wanted to as long as it was about spending and it didnt add any money. We havent seen this enough time in recent years that people even hardly can remember the process in the senate. Though the house has rediscovered it where a bill comes to the floor and you say, no, i think we ought to spend 1 million here more than were spending. And id propose we do that by cutting this other category by 1 million. And then all the members vote. Were never going to have that debate this year, mr. Speaker mr. President. The speaker saw the debate on the other side, were never going to have that debate here because starting a decade ago roughly the leader of the senate, the democratic leader of the senate decided were not going to bring those bills to the floor unless theyre unamendable. And even four and five years ago when i think my math is right here barbara mikulski, great senator from maryland, an incredible legislator, had become the chairman of the Appropriations Committee for the only two years in her career, and she aggressively argued with the leadership on her side all the time, lets bring these bills to the floor and debate the bills. Lets not have one big bill at the end of the year. Or even worse, one big bill four, five, six months into the next year. We have to figure out how to recapture the process of our responsibility. This is, this works. It includes the members and the people they work for in a way that we are not now included. The debate of how we spend our money becomes public in ways that it is not now public. We cant bring a bill to the floor in the senate, an appropriations bill without 60 members being willing to debate the bill. Now one way we could do this is just figure out how to change to where an appropriations bill, maybe all bills dont take 60 members just to debate the bill. Because once im a believer that once you got these bills started and once you started debating them and once members got to see that their own amendment wasnt nearly as popular as they thought it might be, that we would then get to the final vote, wed pass a bill, maybe a package of a couple of bills, the house would do the same. Wed have a conference. It would go to the president s desk. Hed sign those bills and that part of the package is funded for the next year. For year after year where virtually nothing is funded on december 30 for the october 1 fiscal year. And here we are january 21 already still talking about work that should have been completed in september, it is unacceptable. If we cant see this moment where were debating two big issues that everybody agrees on the Component Parts of both of those big issues, if we cant see this as a moment where we need to fundamentally change how we get this work done, we may have lost the constitutional responsibility that the congress has to set our priorities based on how we spend our money. The one thing i know for sure, mr. President , is how we decide to spend our money is not the way were deciding the best way to do it is not the way were doing it now. And its now led to where its not even a late year fight about well, were defense and i think defense is the principal reason for the federal government to exist, the numberone priority of the federal government is to support the common defense. But weve gone beyond i want more money for defense, and before i do that id like to have more money id like to see us have more money for Something Else as well to its not even about the appropriations bill. Were not even going to give you a number to appropriate to on the appropriations bill. We dont fund the government now until we do something that has nothing to do wl funding the government. Maybe thats the logical conclusion of years of bad