Madam President, I rise today to speak about our current impasse over the progress of the federal budget. I have been a senator for just a little over two years. I have presided over this chamber a great deal, as have you. And I have listened to dozens of speeches from colleagues, in particular Republican colleagues, upset that this chamber, that the Budget Committee on which I serve, had not passed a budget in several years.
But this year, we passed a budget. Finally. We went through the long and grinding process known here in Washington as “vote-a-rama,” where we considered, debated, and disposed of 101 amendments, over hours and hours and hours of deliberation and debate and voting on this floor and we passed a budget.
It’s been 46 days since the Senate passed our budget, but we still need to reconcile it with the House of Representatives’ budget for it to become a forceful resolution — a budget resolution — that drives the decisions of the Congress. It is important that we do that because it has been 66 days since the sequester kicked in. “Sequester,” I know, is Washington speak, but all of us as senators are hearing from our home states the very real, very human impact of these across-the-board spending cuts that have begun to really bite.
Whether it’s potential furloughs of men and women who serve at Dover Air Force Base, whether it’s tens of thousands of children being kicked out of Head Start programs, whether it’s thousands of women not getting the breast cancer screenings they need or hundreds of thousands of children not getting the vaccines they’re supposed to get, the impacts of the sequester are becoming stronger and broader and more negative all across our country.
And the sequester exists because of a lack of political will to come together, to resolve a fundamentally different vision between the Senate and the House enacted in our respective budgets. This sequester exists because we haven’t come together, across the House and the Senate, in a way that for 200 years and more this Congress has done when we pass a bill and when the House passes a bill, it’s supposed to go to conference for reconciliation, resolution and ultimately passage.
Here’s our chance. Why would Republicans actively keep us from going to conference to finalize a budget, especially after years of coming to this floor and giving speeches, declaiming over and over how terrible it was that we would not pass a budget in the Senate?
Americans — Delawareans — are tired of this dysfunction. In my view, today, Republicans are manufacturing a crisis by preventing the Senate and House from coming together to reconcile our budgets in conference. As I said, Madam President, I’m a member of the Budget Committee, and I can say with some detailed knowledge, as can you, there are real differences between the budget adopted here in the Senate and that adopted in the House.
I believe the Democratic budget promotes growth and the Republican budget focuses on cuts. I believe ours prioritizes the middle class, whereas the other prioritizes more tax cuts for the wealthiest. Ours prioritizes balance. The other? Politics. I think our budget puts us on the path towards job creation while the other takes a path to austerity.
But we will never reconcile these two budgets, achieve a shared path forward and set aside this terrible sequester if we don’t go to conference. Reconciling these two budgets are the definition of what I’ve heard member after member come to the floor and call for, what we here in the Senate call “regular order” — the process set out by the founders of this nation and to which we should return.
These political games, in my view, are destroying this institution. I think it is no wonder that the opinion of the average American all across this country of this institution simply sinks lower and lower. The only thing standing in the way of our progress on this budget, at this point, is repeated Republican objections. It is my hope they will step aside and allow us to walk the corridor to the House, get to the conference table and resolve our budget differences.
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