Us to pass what was an unpaid for Prescription Drug benefit. My members, the caucus in the house felt this unpaid law was thrust upon us without due consideration and at that time when we shouldnt be racking up further debt. Many of us on my side of the aisle were literally reeling with anger after it passed. It also passed in ways with which we disagreed, in the middle of the night literally. The desk in the house was kept open for four hours in order to find those votes. I was angry, i voted against that Prescription Drug benefit. I was as angry as some of my colleagues were when the Affordable Care act passed over three years ago. So what i wha did i do . I what did i do . I took a deep breath. Listened to counsel of people i respect, listened to my own counsel. I decided to start town halls and listening sessions so i could help my constituents sign up for it. I knew it was the law of the land, like obamacare is today, and i wanted my constituents to be best served by its implementation. I went out and spread the word about the benefits, figured out what questions my constituents would have. I wanted them to sign up. I want to make it a success. I wanted them to have those benefits. So lets fast forward to today. Far from helping people, our friends and colleagues on the other side of the aisle have relentlessly spread uncertainty about obamacare. Attacked its implementation at every turn and now have closed down the federal government over their concerns about it. Were in the tenth day of a Government Shutdown. Our National Security is suffering. 70 of the Intelligence Community is furloughed. We dont have enough food inspectors on the job. Our veterans are not getting the services not only that they need, but theyve earned. Our National Parks are closed. I mentioned estes park. Estes park is the gateway to Rocky Mountain national park. Heestes park is going to recover from these devastated tphraog. Rocky from these devastating floods. Rocky mountain has to be open for business. This isnt the way we should be doing business. The Affordable Care act is far from perfect. No manmade law is. Was every law, it will undoubtedly need some improvements and some constructive changes during its implementation, and im committed to doing that, just like we did after president bush moved his Prescription Drug law to the finish line. In the past few days weve seen statements indicating that some republicans are starting to understand that this partisan focus on obamacare is futile. So as their next step, theyve seized on yet another destructive tactic manufacturing a new crisis, an even more serious, potentially devastating crisis in shutting down the government. What have they done . They are threatening the full faith and credit of the federal government to push their budget demands. Theyve threatened to force us pass the deadline, which is october 17. That is a week from today, when the United States will no longer are able to meet its financial obligations. Grand standing in front of the government is bad enough, madam president , but if we dont agree on a way forward to reopen the government but we also dont agree on a way to ensure that the Treasury Department doesnt default on our nations debt obligations, we will seriously damage Global Confidence in the United States. Make no mistake. There are some voices in this building who think that that wont happen. They are wrong. If we damage the Global Confidence of the United States we will hamper economic recovery, slow job creation, make borrowing more difficult for government and families alike. This is no way to win the Global Economic race in which we find ourselves. Coloradoans are telling me in kwraefr way they can that they expect a lot better than this. Ronald reagan used to joke in only the way that he could that he wasnt worried about the debt. Its big enough to take care of itself. But every american should worry if congress refuses to meet the obligations weve already made. Now i know Many Americans are worried about our debt and our capacity to pay the bills weve incurred. Ive been worried about this for a long time. And i think if youd ask anybody around here, theyd tell you that id vote in a minute for a sensible grand bargain. Its true. I worked across the aisle and built a record of efforts to reduce wasteful spending and set our budget or a more sustain able future. It should be one of our top priorities. It has to be one of our top priorities. Ive been a long time supporter of the lineitem veto. I supported the initial structure around which the simpsonbowles deficit reduction worked. I called for an end to earmarks. I worked with senator coburn from oklahoma on ending some wasteful public subsidies, including those for the Political Party conventions every four years. Its why i was the first democrat to champion a balanced Budget Amendment to the u. S. Constitution in many a year. Im not the only member as well, madam president , of my party thats been fighting for commonsense reforms. This is critically important work. I would love nothing more than to bring a serious deficitreduction plan to the floor and pass it along with raising our debt limit to avoid an american default. But let me be crystal clear. To default on our debt because a grand bargain eleads us would make eludes us would make our debt and deficit even worse and thrust us into an economic tailspin. It is irresponsible to even suggest forcing america into default as a legitimate negotiating position. Lets sit down and have a grownup discussion about these important issues, but not like this. Lets fund the government. Lets pay our bills and then lets sit down and negotiate again. Negotiation is good. Compromise is good. But we cannot have this important set of discussions with one party constantly threatening to shut down the government or throw our country into default, each of which makes our deficits and debt even worse. Weve got literally centuries of examples of congress collaborating and working together. And weve done that for over 200 years. We can debate. We can have contentious back and forth. But in the end, we need to compromise and agree. We need a comprehensive and balanced tk ubgs deficitreduction plan that can pass both chambers and be passed into law. Madam president , no party gets to threaten the American Economy and shut down the government when they dont get their way. No party gets to jeopardize middleclass families 401 k s or Senior CitizensRetirement Savings or set our economic recovery back just because their positions arent Strong Enough to prevail on their own. That just isnt the way to address our nations shared problems. And trust me, our debt and deficits are a shared problem. We can do better. Madam president , i want to begin to conclude by again referring to the coloradoans im so fortunate to represent, just like the presiding officer, i know, is honored to represent the good people of wisconsin. Coloradoans have shown the true strength of our state in the wake of this tragic flooding that literally has wiped communities off the map and destroyed thousands of homes. If we could have done anything to prevent that natural disaster, we would have. We now face a potential manmade disaster. Weve got to protect americans from a looming manmade disaster thats emerging right here. Weve got to bridge the partisan divide. We have to end this Government Shutdown. We have to stave off an american default. We have to pay our bills. We could do this today if Speaker Boehner would allow the house to vote on a clean funding resolution that weve already sent to the house, with the house numbers in it, by the way. So lets just see a vote in the house. The continuing resolution would pass the house today with republican and democratic votes. So lets just vote. Lets hold a vote. The presiding officer and i served in the house, and when we were eager to go to work, we would shout vote, vote, vote. Work, work, work. Its time for the house to go to work. Lets vote to end this debt ceiling crisis and make sure our nation pays the debts its already incurred. These are the basic functions of congress. If we fail to act, history will never forgive us, any of us. Madam president , i yield the floor. A senator madam president . Madam president . The presiding officer the senator from colorado. Mr. Udall i have four unanimous consent requests for committees to meet today during todays session of the senate. They have the approval of the majority and minority leaders. Id ask unanimous consent that these requests be agreed to and that these requests be printed in the record. The presiding officer without objection. Mr. Udall madam president , i yield the floor. A senator madam president . The presiding officer the senator from idaho. Mr. Crapo thank you, madam president. I rise today to discuss the multiple issues that have now presented themselves to us here in the senate and to the United States congress and, frankly, the American People. Ive been in several hearings this morning. The first was with secretary of treasury jack lew, where the finance committee discussed with him the pending expiration of our debt ceiling and what his understanding is of how that will impact the country. He raised a lot of serious concerns, very legitimate serious concerns that others are raising. We then followed that up with a hearing in the Banking Committee where we had representatives from a number of the various industries in the United States also discussing what is going to happen in the United States if the country does not increase the debt ceiling. And there are serious consequences that will happen if we dont do this. But what i tried to do in both of those hearings and ill refer to my conversation with secretary lew was to focus us back on the broader, bigger threat. Secretary lew basically said that we have a manufactured crisis here in the United States because of our unwillingness at this point to face the debt ceiling and simply extend the debt ceiling without any kinds of conditions or negotiations. And i reminded that i am the crisis we face is the the big crisis we face is the debt crisis. And its very real. And i guess in a sense it has been manufactured over the last 20 or 30 years by congresses and president s who have refused to control spending and have put us into tremendous debt. Our debt ceiling that we are negotiating about right now, or i think wishing we could negotiate about now is 16. 7 trillion. Its grown by trillions of dollars over the last five or six years. And what the president has asked us to do is to once again increase the debt ceiling by another 1 trillion or more with no reforms, no fiscal changes in our policies to deal with the mounting spending crisis that we face. The president s position is you give me this trillion dollars or more of new debt authority, and i will then talk to you about reforming our fiscal policy. The problem is that weve been trying to negotiate over fiscal policy now and trying to get reforms put into place for years. And we have not been able to get there. When i asked secretary lew about this, he basically said weve made progress on our overall debt crisis in the past few years, and i think that we can continue to work on those kinds of steps if you will simply pass this clean debt ceiling and do so in a way that involves no negotiations from the president in any way. I reminded him that a major part of the progress that we have made in the last couple of years was made when we met the debt ceiling two years ago, in 2011. And it wasu it was the budget control act that put into statute over 2 trillion of reductions in our spending path, and that was attached to the debt ceiling as we moved forward. And it was literally a debt ceiling negotiation that generated the only significant spending controls that this congress and that this country has seen for years and years. And yet the president refuses to take another step now that we have met the debt ceiling again and negotiate for further reforms. By the way, there is another reason that we have made some progress in the past few years, and that is that we have implemented massive new taxes on the American People. The obamacare legislation itself contains nearly a trillion dollars of new taxes, and they are now, although they were delayed for a few years, they are now beginning to fully hit the American People. And last january, the president was able to win his argument and succeed in getting the top income tax brackets raised. An impact on our tax code that i think was harmful rather than helpful and clearly was damaging to the creation of jobs and to businesses across the United States, but nevertheless another 500 billion to 600 billion of tax revenue was put into the mix there. So what woo very done . Weve made a plan to control Discretionary Spending over the next ten years and reduce it by about 2 trillion. If we stick to that, well get 2 trillion worth of spending reductions. We have raised taxes by at least 1. 6 trillion over the next ten years, all of which i believe has been harmful to our economy but has generated revenue to try to help reduce the debt cycle. But we have not addressed the two critical parts of reform that we must address in this country if we are ever to get control of our spending excesses and stop the outofcontrol spiral toward insolvency that we see, and that is reforming our entitlement system and reforming our broken tax code. What have we seen there . Virtually minimal, if any at all, reforms of entitlements. They seem to be off the table, yet they are the part of our spending problem that is the biggest and the most out of control. And on tax reform, weve seen no reform of the tax code. We have a tax code that is the most unfair, the most complicated, the most expensive to comply with and the most anticompetitive code we probably could have created if we did it on purpose, and yet we have no reforms of the code and instead what we have done is add to the code another 1. 6 trillion of new taxes on the American People. And what we are asking is whether we can move forward in trying to deal with our fiscal problems in this country by negotiating over entitlement reform and tax reform. And i frankly believe that we ought to be at the negotiating table talking about that, but what we have been told is no, as soon as you will raise the debt ceiling by the amount that we are hearing somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars, as soon as you will raise the debt ceiling, then we can talk further about other negotiations. Then we can get engaged on trying to deal with our debt crisis. I pointed out, as i said, to secretary lew that the last major progress we made on spending reform happened in negotiations relating to our debt ceiling. Why cant we negotiate now and make significant fiscal reform in addition to dealing with our debt ceiling . Its that debt crisis that is the biggest problem. I was on the simpsonbowles commission, the president s own commission that he put together some years back, two or three years now, and we spent a full year studying the impacts on our economy of americas fiscal excesses and what we needed to do, and the simpsonbowles commission came up with a plan. It was a proposal. We concluded that we needed to and this was two or three years back, but we needed to reduce our spending path, our debts path in the United States by at least 4 trillion. We concluded that we had to deal with that by reforming our entitlement system, and we had to deal with it by controlling Discretionary Spending, and we agreed to having some of that tax revenue that the president was demanding, and we also agreed that in the in the overall mix that we would have about a 31 ratio of revenue to spending excuse me, of spending cuts to revenue. The president did not accept that recommendation. And many of us tried for months and months and months afterward to get that recommendation to the floor for a vote, but it has not made it to the floor for a vote. My point is negotiations have been under way for years and years and significant plans have been developed that would help us move forward. We know what to do. We need to have the will to do it. And so far the only reforms that we have been able to get in the last few years as a result of the debt crisis that we face have come when we have met these pressure points dealing with our debt ceiling. Were not asking to shut down the government for the purposes of simply making a point. We are trying to get to negotiations. We want to see the government reopened. We are not seeking to have the debt ceiling expire. We want to have negotiations to be able to put together the kinds of fiscal reforms that should always accompany extensions of the debt ceiling. I believe the reason that congress put statutory debt ceilings in place in the first place was because they wanted to give america a gut check every so often about the spending problems that we have. We have put almost half of the entire spending system of the government on auto pilot, and we dont even have the opportunities to vote on it here in congress. Madam president , ultimately we have to deal with the debt ceiling and ultimately we have to deal with the funding to keep our government operational. Lets not just move forward and accomplish those objectives. Leaving in place the unrestrained fiscal crisis that we are dealing with in this country. Lets use this opportunity to put together the kinds of fiscal reforms that should accompany decisions to allow our country to increase its debt. And with that, madam president , i yield my time. M