Mr. President, if I might, I’d like to speak about three bills that I’m offering as amendments to the NDAA that all relate to a topic that I’ve spoken to many times here on the floor – to manufacturing and manufacturing jobs.
The first is the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, a bill I introduced last week with Illinois Senator Mark Kirk that enjoys the support of the Presiding Officer as well as Senators Blunt and Stabenow.
It has a simple but important objective: to require the creation of a national manufacturing strategy. We need to know our country’s direction, as we try to support the growth of manufacturing. We’ve grown more than half a million manufacturing jobs in the last three years – an encouraging sign, but one we need to strengthen and support with a coordinated strategy between the federal government, state governments, and private sector to align our investments in research and development, in new skills, and in new infrastructure to make sure they’re all heading in the right direction.
Our leading competitors all have successful and well-deployed national manufacturing strategies, whether Germany, China, India, South Africa, Russia, they’ve all got thoroughly developed, deeply researched, and prominently successful strategies, which we lack.
Our amendment would require that every four years the Secretary of Commerce, advised by a board of 15 different folks, pull together and think through research and then deliver a national manufacturing strategy.
This amendment is bipartisan, simple, does not cost the federal government a dime, and does not create a new program. Like the next two amendments I plan to speak about, it is a common sense measure I hope we adopt.
Second, I’d like to speak on the amendment I’m cosponsoring with Senator Blunt to ensure small businesses are not subject to conflicting guidance from federal agencies. In the 1970’s, Congress passed a measure for the Small Business Administration to ensure small businesses that get contracts from the federal government aren’t actually fronts for much larger companies. And last year we passed similar, but distinctly different rules for the Department of Defense.
Most of the time these two sets of rules can peaceably coexist, but in a few cases they conflict, creating compliance difficulties for real small businesses. This amendment would say that when both sets of rules apply to a small business contract, the SBA rules would apply, while the DoD rules would not.
This amendment is bipartisan, does not cost the federal government a dime, and helps small businesses focus on effectively delivering products and services without worrying about conflicting guidance.
Last, I’d like to speak on an amendment I’m cosponsoring with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey to ensure our defense and intelligence communities maintain their vital technological edge. This is an important measure that could create more opportunities to train America’s best talent and pave the way to new innovations.
Recently, the Commission on R&D in the U.S. Intelligence Committee reviewed our current and future R&D capacity to support our intelligence community’s vital work. Their unclassified report shows that in fact, we have insufficient funding and a critical deficiency of human capital – of skilled workers and the cutting-edge thinkers we need in this area. Specifically, it said we may not have the kind of people we really need to build next generation satellites, to gather and process the intelligence upon which our national security relies.
Now, there’s currently a program run by the Department of Defense designed to address one element of this problem. It’s called the Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation Scholarship Program, or SMART Scholarship Program. The amendment calls on the Secretary of Defense to report back to Congress on two things: whether the SMART Scholarship Program, or similar fellowship and scholarship programs, are in fact providing the necessary number of undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to meet the recommendations in the Commission’s report, and recommendations on how those promises can become concretely improved.
This amendment has already passed the House of Representatives by a voice vote and would be an important, if small, step toward paving the way for job creation and ensuring our national security now and into the future. I urge my colleagues to support these amendments and I’m grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate on these important issues.
I come to the floor today to speak on the tragedy, on the ongoing crisis of sexual assault in our armed forces and what I believe we must do. There are several options before us, each of which have been the subject of lengthy and passionate debate, a debate that I think is healthy, and needed, and welcome in this chamber.
I commend my many colleagues, Chairman Levin and Senator Inhofe, Senator McCaskill and Senator Ayotte, for the very real progress, the very significant steps taken both in the base bill, the NDAA and in the amendment offered by Senators McCaskill and Ayotte. Serious and important steps forward to protect victims, to ensure that commanders are held accountable and to criminalize retaliation.
A wide range of important and significant reforms that will make real progress towards addressing the ongoing decades-old scourge of sexual assault in the United States military.
As was said recently on the floor by another of my colleagues, this disagreement today is over one of more than a dozen important and needed reforms. But in the end, we have to decide, and I believe the measure offered by Senator Gillibrand of New York, of which I am a cosponsor, is the right additional path forward.
Because at the end, here’s the bottom line: sexual assault has been a disease, a corrosive and widespread and horribly negative influence on our military that has simply not been effectively treated. And I think this significant, this dramatic step is the needed driver for extensive reform. I understand that the chain of command is essential, that it is central to the proper functioning and order of the military, especially during wartime. In fact, the chain of command is nearly sacred. But ensuring that our spouses and our siblings and our children can serve with honor and not have to face another enemy within our ranks is sacred.
This is, in the end, a debate about justice. Justice within our own armed forces, justice so that we can fulfill that sacred duty of protecting men and women in uniform as well as they protect us. And despite many years of good-faith efforts by leaders in our armed forces to work within the parameters of our current system, literally tens of thousands of sexual assaults are still occurring annually within our armed forces.
That is, frankly, unacceptable and reflects a fundamental breakdown in order and discipline that we cannot tolerate anymore. This current system, in this important and vital way, is failing. I understand the intense desire our leaders feel to fix what was broken and for our military leaders to atone for taking their eyes off the ball, to paraphrase the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But once again this debate is not about them, their commitment, their strategy, or their determination. It is about justice, and justice should be blind. Whether someone receives it should not depend on whether or not he or she serves in the military rather than in other workplaces.
And we know the chilling facts, according to the Department of Defense’s own Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, 50 percent of female victims state they did not report the crime in the first place because they believed nothing would be done and a quarter, or 25 percent, who received unwanted sexual contact indicated the offender was in their chain of command.
In my view, we strengthen our military when victims of sexual assault have the confidence to come forward and to report crimes, and when we remove fear and stigma from the process. And we strengthen our military when we’re able to deliver fair and impartial justice on behalf of victims. When we know the military chain of command in this one area is failing, we should not continue to tolerate an exception we wouldn’t make in other settings.
Mr. President, I came to this decision with great reluctance. Recognizing, as many in my family have, that the importance of the chain of command, the importance of respecting the unique and different traditions and structure of the military, is something that we should only come to with great hesitation.
One of the responsibilities of serving in the Senate that I take seriously is my annual responsibility to review and approve candidates for the military academies who are selected by my independent military academy advisory board. And personally calling the top candidates to inform them that they will be the ones – of the dozens and dozens of highly qualified competitors – they will be the ones selected to go to the Merchant Marine Academy, the Air Force Academy, to Annapolis to the United States Naval Academy, or to the United States Military Academy at West Point. This was a moving experience each of the three years I’ve had the chance to do that.
But this past year, the three top candidates for West Point, for Annapolis, for the Air Force Academy were all women – impressive, compelling, determined to serve our nation – and meeting with them and their families, the nervous and proud parents and these confident cadet candidates is also a great thing to experience and it reminds me always of my responsibility to them.
I promise their parents that we will support and respect them and their service, and when we speak to the cadets and thank them for their willingness to serve, I’m reminded we have a responsibility to not send them into an institution where they’ll face threats that we can and should address. I believe I have a responsibility to send them into an institution I know is well equipped to respond strongly and swiftly to threats to their safety.
Yet today, I’m not able to uphold that responsibility because we have not protected our men and women in uniform from sexual assault.
I thought of my picks for the service academy when I heard another senator say to General Dempsey that that senator would not advise a parent to encourage his or her daughter to join the military.
What made this decision, this difficult decision for me to join Senator Gillibrand on this particular amendment was an unfortunate – it was a tragic case.
Last spring while I was trying to decide which path to follow in this bill my office received a gut wrenching call from the father of a young woman serving honorably in our military. He was calling against his daughter’s wishes and only as a desperate last resort. She had been the victim of sexual assault and, like so many others, reported it to her commanding officer up the chain of command. But like too many others, the case went nowhere. Her by the book reporting and patient waiting for results was met by delays, excuses, nonresponse, and ultimately during these repeated delays she was physically assaulted after she had warned leadership she feared for her safety.
We took action and ultimately, in this instance, justice was done.
But a chain of command like that isn’t strengthening unit cohesion and morale, it’s harming it.
And so after this particularly troubling case I made a decision to join Senator Gillibrand as a cosponsor, to say, Mr. President, to all of us, how can we accept this? How can this situation that’s gone on for years be tolerable? How can we justify the status quo?
I am grateful for the leadership of the many senators on the Armed Services Committee and throughout this body who have taken real steps to add significant improvements to the UCMJ and to the code that underlies our military and the requirements for leadership and service to take on and tackle these very real problems of sexual assault in the military.
In my view, taking decisions out of the chain of command should only be done in the most serious of circumstances, but that is exactly what we have here.
We wouldn’t find justice if this was the way that any other workplace in America operated. How can we argue that we have justice today for these thousands of victims in our military?
The men and women who dedicate themselves to keeping us safe and protecting our rights deserve equal dedication on our part to their safety and to those same rights.
Mr. President, I come to the floor again today to talk about jobs, about manufacturing jobs, about the high-quality, high-skill wage jobs America needs for today and for the future.
Today I have introduced a bill which shows that dealing with our ongoing challenges of supporting our manufacturing sector and growing jobs in our manufacturing sector can have bipartisan solutions. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois joined me in introducing the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, which has a simple but important objective: to require the creation of a national manufacturing strategy.
Today more than 12 million Americans are directly employed in manufacturing. As I have said on the floor before as part of our Manufacturing Jobs for America Initiative, manufacturing jobs are good jobs. They are high-skilled jobs, they are high-wage jobs, they are high-benefit jobs, and they have a terrific secondary benefit in terms of the other support and service sector jobs that come along with manufacturing jobs in a community.
We need to know the direction we are heading as a country as we try to support the growth of manufacturing. We have grown more than half a million manufacturing jobs in the last 3 years. That is an encouraging sign. We are one of the most productive in the output of our manufacturing sector of all the countries in the world.
What we have lacked is a very coordinated strategy between the Federal Government, State governments, and the private sector to align all of our investments–our investments in research and development, our investments in new skills, our investments in infrastructure–to make sure they are all heading in the right direction.
Do our competitors have national manufacturing strategies? Absolutely. Germany, China, India, South Africa, and Russia all have thoroughly developed, deeply researched, and prominently successful strategies for how to accelerate and sustain manufacturing as a key part of their economies.
This bill would amend the America COMPETES Act. It would require every 4 years that the Secretary of Commerce, advised by a board of 15 different folks, pull together and think through, research, and then deliver a national manufacturing strategy. This doesn’t require new programs. It doesn’t even necessarily require new funding or new Federal expenditures. It only requires that we coordinate all the different areas where the Federal Government is investing in supporting manufacturing and where State and local governments are working in partnership with the private sector. This may be a small but vital step toward giving the lift we need for our manufacturing sector to continue its sustained growth of the last few years.
Why is a manufacturing strategy essential? Because we have a couple of areas where, frankly, we are falling short–in infrastructure, in access to capital, and in skills. Having a highly skilled manufacturing workforce is one of the things we need to do if we are going to win the fight to regain our international prominence as the leading global manufacturing country.
The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte, a global consulting firm, have both independently concluded that there are as many as 600,000 manufacturing jobs in America today that are unfilled because of a lack of a workforce with the relevant skills. The Society of Manufacturing Engineers estimates that number could increased to 3 million by 2015.
So a focus through a national strategy and through some facilitating investments and legislation by this body and the House and by enactment by the President and investments across-the-board could deal with these important skill gaps.
Why are there skill gaps in manufacturing? Many Americans have a misconception about what manufacturing is like today. They have a picture in their heads of manufacturing from 10, 20, or 30 years ago when it required simple labor, when it required repeated routine tasks such as simply putting on a bolt or affixing a particular piece onto a vehicle, where there wasn’t any teamwork, there wasn’t any continuous improvement required, and there weren’t analytical skills required. That was the manufacturing line of the past, not of today and certainly not of the future. In fact, the skills required to be successful in modern advanced manufacturing are quite different from what they were 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Today one has to work as part of a team and be able to troubleshoot and problem-solve.
There are fewer people working on manufacturing lines, but they are higher in productivity because the analytical skills they are bringing to the job are greater than they have ever been before. That is also why manufacturing can be a more satisfying career, a more rewarding place to work than it was in the past, because it engages the whole human being. It engages the whole worker. It allows them to have ownership of the quality of the finished product.
One of the lessons American automobile manufacturing learned in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as it faced the threat of higher quality auto manufacturing elsewhere in the world was to not only retool the manufacturing line but to empower the individual worker to be engaged in quality control.
Those of us here in the Senate who worked in the manufacturing industry know what it meant to have gone through a process where we had to certify. You had to go through a searching auditing process to be able to demonstrate, if you were a component supplier or if you were part of a supply chain, that you were meeting world-class standards. In fact, the ISO 9000 system–the International Organization for Standardization–and its 9000 series audits that swept through the country over 20 years and ended up resulting in a higher quality of manufacturing was just the first of a number of steps toward requiring those who were working in manufacturing facilities to have a higher level of skills.
One of the ways in which we have an ongoing challenge is that manufacturers–medium and small manufacturers with whom I visited up and down the State of Delaware–don’t know the level of skills and the quality of skills of young people they wish to hire who may have just finished high school or might have taken a certificate course with a community college. We don’t have a transportable, translatable certificate for basic manufacturing skills.
One of the innovations of the IT industry was a whole series of skills certifications that allow someone to know, when they are hiring a young person to do office support for IT or when they are hiring someone to be a network administrator, whether they have the practical skills they need to do that job and do it well. They can’t guess that by where they went to high school or what courses they took at a college. We don’t have a similar sort of reliable, transportable, translatable, manufacturing skill certification process. That may be a part of this national manufacturing strategy.
We certainly have heard from manufacturers large and small–not only in Delaware but around the country–about what they need, what would put a floor beneath their growth and would allow them to be globally competitive. No. 1 would be a stronger, skilled workforce; No. 2 would be more access to capital; and No. 3 would be more and better access on a fair basis to a global market and a global economy.
We have had a great first couple of weeks with the Manufacturing Jobs for America Initiative. More than 25 Senators have contributed more than 40 bills. Many of these are broad or bold or bipartisan bills that contain the ideas that I think can sustain and grow manufacturing in the United States going forward. It is a growing menu of bills–bills that are bipartisan and that I believe not only need but deserve a vote on the floor later in this Congress.
I am grateful to Senator Kirk for partnering with me in introducing this bill today, the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, and I am hopeful it will pick up more bipartisan sponsors in the days and weeks ahead. I also hope, working in partnership with the Manufacturing Caucus, ably led by Senator Stabenow and Senator Graham, we will begin to hammer out the bipartisan bills that will deserve a vote on this floor and that will ultimately reach enactment through the Congress and by signature of our President. With that, we might well be able to deliver on what we hear most often from our constituents: Help us grow high-quality jobs in this country.
Mr. President, I come to the floor once again to talk about jobs and economic growth. We are continuing to see signs of a steadily improving economy, with more than 200,000 jobs created last month in the jobs report released just last Friday. Of those, 19,000 were new manufacturing jobs. We’ve had 43 straight months of private-sector job growth, but the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, and sadly, particularly for those who are long-term unemployed.
Earlier today, the budget conference committee met and we heard from Congressional Budget Office Director Dr. Elmendorf. He let us know that in his view, the uncertainty, the lack of clarity about the path forward for all of us here, for the solutions we need for the budget and for the deficit, is one of the greatest drags on job creation and on competitiveness for our country and our economy.
In our budget conference committee, we need to come together and reach a balanced budget deal that repeals sequester and allows the Appropriations Committee, ably led by Chairman Mikulski, to move forward with an omnibus appropriations bill for this fiscal year.
We cannot afford, in my view, another long-term continuing resolution at the current sequester levels. As we heard today from Dr. Elmendorf and as we’ve heard from other sources, the sequester will have killed 750,000 jobs by the end of the year, and next year these ongoing, steady, grinding cuts could kill another 800,000. These are jobs, these are investments by the federal government that could be helping the private sector create jobs and repairing our crumbling infrastructure.
In Delaware alone, we have 175 deficient bridges being neglected. These are jobs that help families to put food on the table. In Kent County, Delaware, where Dover Air Force Base is, sequester has hurt those who serve our nation, who operate the base, and who serve our country valiantly.
These are jobs that could be going to help research a cure for cancer. NIH supported more than 500 jobs in Delaware in 2011 and now cuts are costing those jobs and setting us back in the fight to find a cure for cancer and many other diseases. Sequester has been devastating to Delaware and the whole nation, and we need to replace it with a smarter, more balanced set of spending reforms that maintain investments that will allow our country to be competitive.
In particular, Mr. President, if I might, we need to refocus on jobs by investing in infrastructure and focusing on manufacturing. In my view, the 19,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector that we just learned were created in the last month were a promising development, but far from as many as we should be filling. Why? Because manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs. They pay more in wages and benefits. They help create secondary local service jobs. They contribute more to the local economy. And manufacturers invest more in private R&D than any other sector in our economy.
As you may know, Mr. President, before I came to serve here in the Senate, before my service in county government, I spent eight years working for a manufacturing company in Delaware. At one point, I was part of a large site location team that went around the country trying to decide where to build a new state-of-the-art semiconductor chip packaging manufacturing plant.
To make a long story short, in the end we decided on a location where there was a skilled and reliable workforce, a responsive government that invested in the local infrastructure, and certainly we considered other factors: tax rates and incentives offered by the state and local government. But really, the skill of the workforce and the quality of the infrastructure were absolutely essential to the decision we made – a surprising decision in terms of where we ultimately located. We invested, we were able to get up and running a state-of-the-art plant in a record amount of time and to contribute significantly to local employment and the local tax base.
This taught me a lot of about the importance of infrastructure and workforce skills. If I could mention just two things: the World Economic Forum ranked the United States 25th overall in infrastructure, a key drag on our competitiveness. The American Society of Civil Engineers says we’re falling behind by $250 billion a year in deferred maintenance in investments not made by federal, state, and local governments.
In my view, the case for infrastructure investment is a no-brainer. This is exactly the sort of thing that we should be doing, and that the sequester is preventing us from doing – making wise, timely, and needed investments in improving our infrastructure.
Another critical foundation for growth, as we saw, was a skilled and adaptable workforce. We can be the world’s manufacturing leader again, but not without investing in workforce skills and workforce training. There are many programs that can help make this possible. One I like to point to is the federal, state and local partnership called the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, that helps make it possible for university-based researchers to partner with local manufacturers to deliver skills training that keeps them at the cutting edge, that makes them more productive.
In today’s modern manufacturing workplace there are fewer people but they are more productive because of their skills. Back in August I visited a new facility, the ILC/Grayling plastics manufacturing plant in Seaford, Delaware, which is a great example of what it will take for America’s manufacturing resurgence to continue and to grow. This plant has already brought more than 100 jobs to Sussex County, Delaware.
These aren’t the manufacturing jobs of the past. The men and women who work on this line need to be able to collaborate and communicate, to do advanced math and quality control work, and to oversee high-tech machinery and have an intimate understanding of the process that they are working with. In the end, this company looks forward growing, to probably doubling the number of jobs at this facility in Sussex County. And to me, in an even more exciting development, these are jobs that had left the United States to go south to a lower-wage country and that have been brought back – brought back from Juarez, Mexico to Seaford, Delaware where there are Delawareans employed at this newly expanded manufacturing facility.
Let me conclude, if I might, Mr. President, by simply saying that here in Congress we have the opportunity, if we work together across the aisle, to find a pathway towards making these investments in the skills of our workforce, in the infrastructure of our country that will help grow our economy and help create good manufacturing jobs today and tomorrow.
One of the core challenges we face in the budget conference committee is to find a path forward that will respond to the call that I hear up and down the state of Delaware and I presume my colleagues hear from their home states. That we should make principled compromises that allow to us invest again, to replace the sequester with a more responsible and balanced package of revenue and cuts that allow us to return to investing in the skills and infrastructure necessary to grow our economy.
Mr. President, if I might, I wanted to simply comment to this body that something passed with little notice here yesterday. October 29th of 2013 was National Technological Innovation Day. This was recognizing the role that technological innovation plays in the United States economy.
We know that innovation is absolutely essential to developing new medicines and treatments and cures to help us live longer and healthier lives. Innovation is essential to strengthening the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy and making us more competitive. Innovation is essential to allow us to take advantage of new materials and new opportunities in the world, and to access to export markets overseas. Innovation, overall, is the thing that has brought all of what is best about modern life and the modern world.
So, yesterday, in a bipartisan way, we recognized the fact that on October 29th, many, many years ago, was the very first day that DARPANET was able to exchange communications from one computer to another. It was literally the dawning of the modern Internet age. This was made possible, in part, by federal investment in innovation.
I was grateful that Senators Moran and Isakson, and Heinrich and Kirk joined me in recognizing the unique and important role that technological innovation has played in America’s past, America’s present, and America’s future.
Thank you very much, Senator Brown, and thank you for your tireless and engaged leadership on manufacturing, on fighting for access to foreign markets on fair terms, for fighting for skills and increasing the skills of our manufacturing work force, and in this instance, in this strong bipartisan bill, in working with our colleague from Missouri on a national network of manufacturing innovation centers.
My own work, eight years in a manufacturing company in Delaware, in a materials-based science company that makes things, helped make it clear to me how important research and development, continuous innovation is for manufacturers at all levels. And I have seen this across the state of Delaware, and our presiding officer, long owner and leader in manufacturing a business in his home state of Indiana knows this better than any of us – that if you don’t innovate, if you don’t invest in research and development, in improving the skills of the workforce and improving the productivity and the operating efficiency of any manufacturing company, you can’t survive in the tough headwinds of the global marketplace today.
One of the programs that I championed here in the Senate, and that has bipartisan support, is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. It’s a long-established program that takes the latest cutting-edge research and development work at universities and moves it to the shop floor.
I have visited companies up and down Delaware, from F.M.C. in Newark and Speakman in New Castle, to Miller Metals in Bridgeville and Baltimore Aircoil in Milford, where they have taken those innovations from the university to the shop floor.
One of the things I’m grateful to Senator Blunt for is his leadership in taking that insight, that in order to have the most productive manufacturing work force in the world, in order to continue to complete globally, we have to find ways to continue to invest in demonstrating the power of innovation, and we have to find ways to do that in a bipartisan way.
So Senator Blunt, I just wanted to thank you for being willing to work with Senator Brown and with others here. This is exactly the sort of stuff that I hear from Delawareans they want us to be doing. There’s lots that divides us, this is something that unites us. Working together to strengthen our manufacturing sector, to make it more competitive, to bring jobs back to the United States, and to grow this sector.
We’ve grown half a million jobs in the last three years in the manufacturing sector. These are good jobs at high wages, high benefits, high skills, but we can and should do more pulling together to lift further this ongoing manufacturing revival. Senator Blunt, if you’d share more about this specific bill and about your experience in what else we can and should be doing together to strengthen manufacturing in Missouri, I’d be grateful.
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Thank you, Senator Blunt, for your work on this bill with Senator Brown. There are other bills that I hope this body will take up and discuss and debate and where I hope we can find ideas that are out there, progress that’s being made, policy innovation that’s being made, and that we can take them up, debate them, and find bipartisan sponsors who will carry them forward.
I absolutely agree with your point that we’re seeing a manufacturing revival in this country for a variety of reasons – one of them is less expensive energy. The shale gas revolution is reducing the feedstock costs of chemical manufacturing and reducing the energy costs broadly for manufacturing of all kinds. We’re also seeing that lots of American companies fear the loss of their inventions, their innovations, if they move offshore, and so some of the attractiveness of operating in other countries has dimmed a bit as they’ve recognized that the United States is one that has a rule of law that protects their inventions and innovations.
There’s also less of a wage gap as wages have come up in the developing world – in China the wage gap is less – so that combination gives us a window, a moment of opportunity.
We lost millions of manufacturing jobs in the first years of this century but in the last three we’ve been growing them steadily. If we can work in partnership across the aisle on manufacturing skills, on access to credit, on innovation, on a coordinated strategy, I can’t imagine a community in this country that wouldn’t rather have high quality manufacturing jobs.
Senator Blunt, as you were mentioning, for every manufacturing job that’s created, there’s 1.6 new support jobs created. For every dollar spent in manufacturing, there’s $1.34 spent in the local economy. It is the sector that has the most positive secondary impact in our communities at home.
I do think that there’s, broadly, in our country a sense that we’ve lost our leading edge in manufacturing because of the large-scale layoffs and the large plants closing, but in my state, and I presume in yours, and in Indiana, and in others, there are dozens and dozens of small and medium manufacturers who have seized this moment, who are growing, and who simply want us to help facilitate their access to the market, their access to innovation and new research, their access to a skilled workforce.
If we can pull together around this, I think we can do great things for the United States going forward. I did also before we close, Senator Blunt, want to thank you for being a cosponsor with me of the Start-up Innovation Tax Credit, something Senator Enzi and I, and many others, Senator Rubio and Senator Schumer, Senator Stabenow, as well as Senator Moran, have cosponsored and introduced and discussed over time. It would help with access to capital for early stage start-up manufacturers.
There are a lot of good ideas that we can and should discuss, on the floor, in hearings, and going forward, but for today I am grateful for your leadership with Senator Brown on this bill that would help strengthen the national network of manufacturing innovation centers. You are a strong leader for manufacturing in your home state of Missouri, and I’m grateful for a chance to spend some time with you on the floor today discussing that good bill and your good ideas.
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Thank you Senator Blunt for your enthusiasm for manufacturing and for your enthusiasm for working together with me on the Start-Up Innovation Credit bill as you referenced and with Senator Brown on the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation Centers as he spoke about. Manufacturing really is the center, the beating heart of the middle class of America. Manufacturing jobs are good jobs. We do need to get back to being a country where inventing things, growing things, making things in this country is an area of bipartisan, sustained, purposeful focus.
I know for the folks who watch at home and in this chamber, nothing could meet the demands and needs of our communities and our states more than for us to come together in a bipartisan, balanced and responsible way to advocate for a stronger manufacturing sector here in the United States. Thank you very much.
Mr. President, in just 3 days, barring some action by Congress, the Treasury Department of the United States will run out of options for preventing default on this Nation’s debts for the first time in our history, setting off a chain of economic events that will be felt around the world and by every family and business and State and community in our country.
We have heard a great deal on this floor the last few days about how we arrived at this point and who is to blame. There is a lot of concern and consternation about exactly who owns this and how we got here. I am not going to spend time today on that. I am going to skip the politics and the drama for now and just talk about the facts and the policy. I just want to talk to Delawareans about what would happen if we actually go over this impending cliff, if we do default, and which of the options for addressing this are viable.
First, let’s be clear about what we are talking about.
What is the debt ceiling? Defaulting on our debt by failing to raise the debt ceiling is not the same as cutting up America’s credit cards. It is not the same as denying the President the right to sign more checks into the future. Raising the debt ceiling does not give Congress or the President a blank check to spend more money. It allows the United States to borrow more money, yes, but only to pay bills for goods and services already incurred, to meet pledges already made.
We have had some kind of a national debt ceiling since 1917, when Congress allowed the Treasury Department to issue long-term Liberty bonds to pay for our engagement in the First World War. Over the course of the next two decades, caps were placed on other kinds of debt as well, and finally, in 1939, Congress decided to place a ceiling on the total amount of debt the country could have.
The last time Congress raised the debt ceiling, it was up to $16.99 trillion. Technically, we reached that limit a few months ago — actually on May 19 of this year. The Treasury Department has since been using what it calls “extraordinary measures” to keep paying our bills, but, as Secretary Lew has communicated to this Congress over and over in letter and in testimony, in just a few days the Treasury Department will no longer have enough money to keep up. These extraordinary measures will have run out, and in a week or two later we will have come up to zero.
What are the bills we need to raise the ceiling in order to pay? It is the salaries of all Federal employees, including our military; it is Social Security and Medicare payments; it is unemployment benefits, tax refunds, and interest on our sovereign debt. Raising the debt limit allows the Treasury to borrow the money it needs to pay these bills. That is it.
If on any particular day more bills come due than we have cash in our accounts to cover, then the United States of America will default on some or all of its obligations. That day is coming and coming quickly. Frankly, we cannot let it happen.
For decades investors have bought U.S. debt because it was seen as a sure thing, a safe investment. When people buy a Treasury bill, a T-bill, they do so because they know they are going to earn interest on one of the safest investments in the world. American debt is considered unimpeachable. That is what makes the dollar the reserve currency for much of the world, which is something that benefits every American company and community and family in ways that are hard to see but cumulatively powerful — the absolute certainty that we will repay our national debt.
Who are these investors? Who are the folks who buy these T-bills? Some are everyday Americans. A large number of retirees invest in our government bonds because they are such a safe bet. Pension funds and mutual funds invest in government bonds for the same reason. Some investors are the governments of other nations that look at the United States as such a good investment that they tie their financial stability to ours. So when it starts to look as if Congress will not live up to that standard, will not take the steps necessary to pay all of our bills on time and might actually default on some of our debts and transform us into a deadbeat nation, it makes investors really nervous.
Just the talk of defaulting on our debts sends a shockwave through our economy and through the markets. For proof we need only look back to August of 2001, when Congress last brought the Nation to the brink of default. Although we didn’t cross the line, just the talk of it, the mere possibility that we might for the first time default had an array of consequences.
First, it slowed job growth and led to an increase in part-time employment.
Second, consumer confidence in our economy fell. The Consumer Confidence Index — the index of consumer confidence — is a reliable indicator of Americans’ willingness to spend money and fuel our economic growth. We want consumers buying products at their local stores and keeping people employed, right? The index was already on the pessimistic side of the line when this last crisis began but has fallen substantially since the government shutdown. Instability and uncertainty reduces consumer confidence and takes money out of our economy.
Third, the yield of our Treasury bills had to increase in order to prop up demand. As U.S. debt becomes perceived as a riskier investment, we have to incentivize investors by increasing what we will pay them. That means taxpayers will have to pay more over time in order to compensate. The debate in 2011 will cost American taxpayers an additional $19 billion over the next decade. Again, just the debate as we ran up to the possibility of default in 2011 added $19 billion in debt service costs to the bonds that were issued in the days and months after.
Fourth, the credit rating agency Standard & Poors — one of the big three — lowered the credit rating of the United States, causing markets to drop more than 5 percent in a single day and 17 percent over the course of that crisis. It was one of the worst declines in the equities markets in history, and it was only because we talked about defaulting.
Just threatening to default is terrible for our economy in all these four different ways.
Financial analysts across the world have said Congress is already causing potentially lasting damage to the strength of the dollar just by repeatedly threatening to default. Said one:
“There is a negative confidence shock rippling through the economy, and foreign investors have taken fright at developments in Washington.”
Said another:
“A U.S. government default is not a zero-probability event now. Although it remains very unlikely, a low-probability high-impact event like this is naturally making investors cautious.”
So we simply cannot afford this talk. We cannot let our Nation default.
What happens if we do? What would actually happen if we get to the end of this week and have not resolved this crisis? I am encouraged by rumors of some resolution. I am encouraged that there are negotiations and conversations going on. But I think we need to look in a clear-eyed way at what would happen if default should happen to occur.
For starters, we don’t really know. The situation has never been this bad before this, and the United States has never defaulted on its debt.
Here is what the managing director of the International Monetary Fund said this weekend:
“If there is that degree of disruption, that lack of certainty, that lack of trust in the U.S. signature, it would mean massive disruption the world over, and we would be at risk of tipping yet again into global recession.”
We simply cannot afford that.
Let me share another quote from history, from President Ronald Reagan, who back in 1983 had this to say about the potential threat of default and its impact on our economy:
“The full consequences of a default — or even the serious prospect of a default–by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar.”
As it was true back in 1983, so it is true again today. The comments from the head of the IMF and from a whole array of economists and bankers this past week remind us of the simple and enduring truth that the modern era has been one where the dollar has been the reserve currency for the world, and the strength of the American market has been critical to the strength of the American nation, our communities, and our economy. Frankly, to put that at risk over short-term political differences is reckless indeed.
What we know is we will wake up this coming Friday with about $30 billion in the Federal Government’s account, according to Treasury Secretary Lew. What we don’t know is how long it will last. The moment we can’t pay one of our bills, we will default. That is what is known as X date. The government will still collect revenue, but it won’t be enough to keep pace with our daily bills.
Over the last year, the government collected $7.5 billion a day and spent an average of $9.7 billion a day. That means we come up about $2.2 billion short on our bills every day if we are not borrowing enough to make up the difference.
Analysts at the Bipartisan Policy Center suggest that we will run out of cash–hitting the X date — roughly on October 22. To be clear, part of why we don’t know exactly what date this would occur is because money flows into the Federal Treasury at uneven rates, and it flows out at uneven rates.
Let’s look at a few of the bills that are about to come due in the next few weeks. On October 23, $12 billion in Social Security benefits are due; on October 28, $3 billion in Federal salaries would go unpaid. On October 30, $2 billion in Medicaid payments are due; on October 31, $6 billion in interest payments on our sovereign debt are due; on November 1, $58 billion in Medicare, Social Security, and SSI payments, as well as veterans’ benefits and military pay.
Those are just the major bills. There are thousands, even millions, of smaller payments that are due from every agency and entity of the Federal Government that go up and down day in and day out and where our failure to pay in a timely fashion, while technically not defaulting on our sovereign debt, would put into question our ability and willingness as a government to pay our bills when due.
With what we have left, we will not be able to pay them all, and we will be in violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that the debt of the United States of America shall not be questioned.
If we have not raised the debt ceiling by this Thursday, we are likely to see disturbing losses in global markets. We have already started to see them as uncertainty takes over and volatility begins to spread. Investors are already pulling money out of our T-bills. If 2011 is an indication, stock prices will soon begin to drop in the absence of some progress toward a resolution.
Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s most prominent investment banks, predicted the S&P 500 index will fall by a staggering 45 percent if we default. We heard loudly and clearly when we met with the credit ratings agencies after the 2011 incident that they would almost certainly downgrade the credit rating of the United States, which would reduce demand for Treasuries, particularly among investment funds that are required to hold a large number of AAA-rated securities.
With the Nation pressed against its debt ceiling and future interest payments uncertain, investors will be hesitant to buy more T-bills. The toxicity of U.S. debt may spread to Treasury notes and bonds, and investors will almost certainly demand higher yields, which will cost our country significantly more over time. This is exactly what happened in 2011 when we flirted with default.
Right now, the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Instead of keeping their money in cash, other nations buy our debt in order to get interest without risk. America has been a great investment. A default would cause other nations to sell our debt and then sell our dollars, weakening our dollars against foreign currencies, and raising the costs on every single good imported into the United States.
If Treasury interest rates go up just 1 percentage point, it would add over $1 trillion in the next decade to our debt service cost. Anything we saved because of sequestration would be gone, and there is no reason to think that default would cause interest rates to go up by one single point. It could add $2 trillion or $3 trillion to our debt over the next decade. This affects everyone in our community and our country from large to small, from companies to communities to families. When Treasury interest rates go up, your interest rates go up. Mortgage rates, auto loans, student loans, business loans — they all go up, and they would go up fast. Default would make it harder for all of us to use credit responsibly. As consumers buy less, business profits would fall, GDP would fall, and the Nation once again would enter a recession. Defaulting on our debt would be an unimaginable drag on the economic health of our country, our community, and families. We cannot let it happen.
In conclusion, I will briefly touch on our options. We have all heard on this floor Senators suggest that default is really not that big a deal, that we are not really going to default, that there are other ways around this, and that we need not be scared into making some hurried deal. At the end of the day, several Senators have accused the President of fear-mongering and have accused my party of suggesting that default is a major threat to our country and our economy when, in fact, it is not.
Let me briefly touch on the options that have been discussed by other Senators and, frankly, to my surprise. First, some have suggested we can pay our bills not when they are due but when we have the money–sort of on a first-come, first-serve payment approach. Let’s say we ran out of money, as I suggested, on the 20th of this month and could not pay our bills on the 21st. By the 23rd we would have enough money so we would pay the bills from the 21st, late, but go delinquent on the bills for the 22nd and 23rd, and so on. This is crazy. Payments would be delinquent and the United States would fall behind on its debt.
This option would only make our situation worse. We would keep adding over $2 billion in debt every single day while going delinquent on our bills to Americans.
The second way forward. Some have suggested we prioritize certain bills but ignore others. The Treasury Department would continue to make payments on our sovereign debt so the Chinese would get paid, but they would avoid or default on lots and lots of other obligations. Which payments would we choose in this body not to make? Social Security? Medicare? Military salaries? Payments for cancer research? Veterans’ benefits? Food inspectors? Air traffic controllers? Who goes first and who would we possibly choose? These are the ludicrous choices that have been sent to us by the other Chamber as they have attempted to fund the government in piecemeal slices in the past week.
The Treasury Department makes 100 million individual payments per month, making this option a logistical nightmare. If we prioritize our payments, it is not a question of if we go into recession, it would be a question of when. We would be taking $2.2 billion out of the economy a day — 4 percent of our GDP out of our Nation’s economy on an annualized basis. This would push us back into recession, we would still be defaulting on our obligations, and the markets and the credit rating agencies would know it.
The other thing that has been suggested is to work around the debt ceiling. There are a whole lot of creative but legally questionable ideas: The minting of a $1 trillion coin, avoiding the 14th Amendment, a fire sale of U.S. assets, super-premium Treasuries. Each has pros and cons that I won’t go into, but they would face legal scrutiny and would radically increase uncertainty in the market.
There is no better option for us going forward than to reopen the government, pay our national debt on time, raise the debt ceiling, and honor our obligations as a country. That is the fourth and only good option: pay our bills, to prevent default, to put a floor under our economy, to stop these games, and to stop suggesting that there is any way out of this other than doing our jobs, preserving the AAA credit rating of this country, and making this country worthy of global respect again.
In conclusion, I can’t believe that Members in this Chamber, who had the chance to avoid default, on Saturday voted in a way that suggested they chose not to. Not only did it rattle me, it rattled the markets. The idea that a sovereign government would have the ability to pay its debts but actively chose not to is unprecedented.
We cannot allow that to happen. We cannot allow this country to become a bad investment. We will not become a deadbeat nation. We need to pay our bills, do the right thing, and avoid default. We need to stop playing games and do right by the American people.
Mr. President, I have heard a number of speeches from my colleagues on the floor today, both while presiding and in the last few moments, that call on President Obama for Presidential leadership to help us reopen the government, address our serious long-term fiscal issues, and move us forward.
I want to note for the folks who might be watching that the President is at this very moment sitting with the leadership of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. Tomorrow morning, I believe, he has invited the Republican Members of this body to the White House for conversation.
I think we agree. One of the core challenges we face as this Federal shutdown goes into, I believe, its 10th day is discerning exactly why the Federal Government is still shut down. When initially taken over the cliff into the shutdown, it was to prevent the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. That is what a number of Senators said on this floor was their purpose. Now, many days and many unintended and unexpected harmful consequences later, we are told what this was really all about was to force the President to negotiate.
I serve on the Budget Committee. We passed, more than 200 days ago, more than 6 months ago, a budget on this floor, and we have tried to go to conference on that budget now 21 times.
Yet each time it was blocked, objected to by a small number of Senators from the other party.
Frankly, my expectation, my hope is that we will return to a rational rules-following process here, reopen the government, not default on our national debt, and begin those serious negotiations, those Budget Committee negotiations that are long overdue to deal with the very real challenges that are facing our country.
I wanted to speak today about one of the consequences of shutting down our Federal Government. We see new ones every day, and we hear about them on the Senate floor. As the days drag on, we hear more and more about the impacts of the shutdown, sometimes with surprise, sometimes with regret, sometimes with outrage.
There is a lot on the line, and we have heard a lot about what the shutdown means for the various functions of the executive branch and of the legislative branch. I have heard colleagues come and speak about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, about the FDA, about its impact on higher education, its impact on families, and its impact on small businesses. I have heard many folks come to this floor and comment on how the executive branch and its functions that affect communities and families all over this country are affected by the shutdown.
We have heard from our constituents who are trying to reach Senators and are trying to seek our help with a variety of Federal services. They are frustrated that the legislative branch is largely shut down, but there is another branch to our three-branch coordinate government. Absent from this debate and discussion is how the shutdown is affecting the judicial branch of our government.
When the Federal Government shut down 10 days ago, the Federal court system was initially seemingly largely unaffected because they had enough funds in reserve to remain open for 10 business days–a period that will come to an end early next week.
On Tuesday the Federal judiciary of the United States will run out of the reserve funds it has been using to stay open. The big question is, What happens then?
The chief judge of the bankruptcy court for the District of Delaware, my home State, told me:
“We are really in an uncertain situation, particularly when it comes to employees. I am fearful for them and how they are going to be able to pay for rent and mortgages, and provide food and day-care for their families.”
This is uncharted territory for our Federal judiciary. When the money runs out, Federal, circuit, and district courts will each be on their own, much like each Senator who has to choose which of his employees or her employees are essential, deemed vital, and need to stay, and which should be furloughed and stay home, uncertain whether they will be paid. Each district court and circuit court will figure out on its own how to keep the lights and which employees will keep working without a salary.
As the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Bankruptcy and the Courts, I have heard from a number of Federal judges this week who are frustrated by the amount of time they are spending trying to figure out what the shutdown means for their courts and their employees rather than doing the job for which they were confirmed, which is to judge cases.
This is an enormous distraction, a profound waste of time. This is not advancing our core objective, which should be growing our economy, strengthening our country, confronting the fiscal challenges in front of us, and working together to achieve some principled compromises in the Congress of the United States. In my view, Federal judges should be deciding cases, not deciding how to keep their courthouses running during this Federal Government shutdown. This needs to end. It could end literally today in a matter of minutes if Speaker Boehner would bring to the floor and allow a vote on a bill sent over from this Senate more than 10 days ago that would allow the Federal Government to reopen.
The judicial branch is not another Federal agency. It is not a program that can be suspended or a benefit that can be delayed. It is a branch. The Federal court system was created in our Constitution as the third pillar of our democracy. It is an independent branch of government whose fundamental mission is being undermined by folks, some of whom claim to love and to rigidly interpret the Constitution. Yet the consequences for our constitutional order of this senseless shutdown, I am afraid, will soon become clear in the days ahead.
The Subcommittee has heard from a number of Federal judges and clerks this week. I must warn you there are a lot of unanswered questions there. The path forward is murky. The central question in the courts–as it was here in Congress and in the executive branch–is who is considered “essential.” Is it the people directly involved in the resolution of cases or are the staff who support that process also expected to work without pay?
Here is the type of question our judiciary was dealing with today instead of resolving disputes or working on long-term cost-saving measures. Evidence in our Federal courts these days is typically presented electronically to jurors rather than handing out photocopies, which is great as long as the technology is working in the courtroom. Case files are processed electronically these days as well. But what if there is a problem? What if the technology doesn’t work and a trial is disrupted? At what point does a technological glitch become a legitimate due process issue? If the courtroom technology can’t get an upgrade to fix a bug, will it result in a costly mistrial? The Constitution and the Sixth Amendment guarantee criminal defendants a right to a speedy trial. What happens when our courts can’t live up to that Sixth Amendment guarantee because of this ongoing Federal shutdown?
The problem is equally severe in civil and bankruptcy matters. With the DOJ’s Office of the U.S. Trustee in shutdown status, the number of trustee attorneys in Delaware has been cut from seven to two. This can dramatically slow the bankruptcy process and leave real jobs and real lives hanging in the balance as cases are unresolved and as resolutions don’t move forward.
This raises another fundamental question. At what point in this ongoing senseless shutdown does our civil justice system fail to live up to America’s promise as a free market economy grounded in the rule of law?
When an investor anywhere in the world looks to make a bet on a new company, a new idea, that investor will obtain certain rights in exchange. Those rights may include a share of equity or a priority right in the event of liquidation. What gives those rights meaning is ultimately a highly functioning, impartial, and reliable court system. That historically has been one of our great advantages competitively in the world economy. Our courts, even while plagued by persistent vacancies, lack of new authorized judgeships, and the sequester, continue to perform this vital function. Without these courts, these rights mean nothing. Without the reliable enforcement of these rights, there is no more new investment, no more new job creation, and no more new ideas successfully brought to market. We are not the only country in the world competing for investment capital and for ideas. When we undermine our civil courts, we are being hostile to those very investors who could help get our economy back on track.
The Federal shutdown is already slowing the resolution of civil cases involving the Federal Government. Clerks at district courts around the country have confirmed to my subcommittee that the Department of Justice is requesting continuances broadly and across-the-board and trying to juggle the demands of their caseloads with the constraints of this reckless shutdown. Think about it. Social Security appeals, civil forfeiture cases, business disputes, consumer protection cases, Medicare fraud cases, incidents of employment discrimination–they are all being pushed to the background. This shutdown is bringing new meaning to Dr. King’s famous words: “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
Only this morning I heard from the head of Delaware’s district court, Chief Judge Gregory Sleet. He said, in essence–no insult intended, but his observation was that Congress is letting our country down. The subcommittee also spoke with a district court clerk yesterday who said–and I thought this was particularly striking–he was glad he was nearing retirement so he could escape the dysfunction of the Federal Government and our ongoing, seemingly routine manufactured crises.
This shutdown is exacerbating what is a more profound problem–a disregard for the upkeep of our Federal judiciary. More than 90 Federal judgeships are vacant. There are 39 vacancies that are deemed “judicial emergencies.” We need to do more to support and sustain the staffing, quality, and future investment that is required to make our Federal courts work as well as they possibly can.
I wish to make a point or two in conclusion. First, one of the essential questions every district court and circuit court will face is which of its employees are essential. After all of the cuts of the sequester and all of the burdens and challenges facing our Federal Government, aren’t all the employees of our Federal judicial system, this separate branch, essential? The chief judge for the Third Judicial Circuit of the United States believes so, and I agree with him. This morning he announced that nearly “all functions, with few limited exceptions, are essential ….. .”
I join the chief judge of the Third Judicial Circuit and urge other circuits to follow suit and to recognize that this independent third branch of our constitutional order is essential.
Last, this shutdown has dragged morale in our courts and our court system to a new low. We in Congress are blessed with a record number of attorneys who serve in Congress. It is my hope that this body recognizes the unique value of our Federal court system.
Our democracy cannot afford to furlough justice. We cannot shut the doors to our courthouses. It is my hope that Speaker Boehner, following the conversation unfolding at the White House, will come back and put to the vote an action that will allow the courts and this country to get back to work.
Mr. President, I would like to start by reading a letter I received this week. So many of us in the Senate are operating with furloughed staff, and we are doing our best to read and respond to the letters we are getting from home, the calls that are coming into our offices. This one touched me in particular. It began:
My name is MSgt Corey P DiLuzio. I am an Air Reserve Technician at Dover AFB. I have served this great nation for 12 years without question or reservation. Every time I have been called upon, I have answered the call, left my family behind, and served proudly as maintainer for the C-17 aircraft. I know you understand the reach and the mission requirements for such an aircraft. I tell you this not for a thank you or any type of acknowledgement. I tell you this–
Master Sergeant DiLuzio writes–
because I am also a husband to a woman who has stood by my side in support for every deployment. I tell you this because I am the father of a three-year-old boy who doesn’t even question the answer Daddy’s at work. I understand a man in your position has made ….. sacrifices as well, however, today I had to tell my family I am unable to work. Not because of anything I have control of, but because of decisions made by individuals who will not miss a paycheck; individuals who will always know when the next check is coming. I write this understanding that it will fall on deaf ears, and I am usually one that remains quiet and follows the orders for those appointed above me, however, enough is enough. Please do your part in resolving this issue so I can get back to serving my country and my family.
Sincerely yours, MSgt Corey DiLuzio.
It pains me that the master sergeant thought his letter would fall on deaf ears, that no one here–that neither I nor any of my colleagues–would hear or care about the concerns of a man–his wife, his family–who has served this country and who stands ready to continue serving this country but whose family is being harmed by the mindless, purposeless shutdown of the government that is now in day 9–this first government shutdown in 17 years, and by all indications one that will continue into another week.
I start by saying to Master Sergeant DiLuzio: I am sorry. I am sorry for the needless pain and difficulty this shutdown is imposing on your family and so many other families across this country. Roughly 800,000 Federal employees have been furloughed at different times in the last 9 days, and while some may be returning to Active service, they will be getting IOUs rather than regular paychecks. All over this country, private contractors, as we have heard from other colleagues today, are also laying off people because they cannot get the permits or work permission or the site access they need to move forward.
This shutdown is continuing to harm our country, our reputation, our economy, our families. It is a needless, manufactured, self-imposed wound.
I wrestle with this because we are facing twin manufactured crises, as Senator Reed of Rhode Island just finished saying: hobbled government due to this shutdown on the one hand and the steadily increasing risk of default on the other–these twin manufactured crises seeking some purpose that is unclear from day-to-day. When this government shutdown started, it seemed to be aimed at what, repealing the Affordable Care Act, so-called ObamaCare, and then 1 day later it seemed to be aimed at delaying the Affordable Care Act, and then when that clearly was unsuccessful, it seemed to be aimed at seeking some partial repeal of the Affordable Care Act and now it is an ongoing crisis in search of a purpose. The menu of potential demands is growing, and the impact on our families and our communities is growing as well.
The House has been wasting its time on mini microappropriations bills in an attempt to give reporters and folks back home the sense that they are actually doing something, when it is just misdirection. They think all the activity will keep the American people from noticing that Speaker Boehner is not bringing up the one bill that could reopen this government in a matter of minutes–a so-called clean continuing resolution, a simple extension of current spending levels.
I know to all who watch–Master Sergeant DiLuzio and many others–we sometimes speak in language that is opaque, that is difficult to understand. We talk about sequester and continuing resolutions and so forth. So I am going to try and work through these issues in a way that is accessible and direct.
Let’s be clear. This government is shut down right now because the House would not pass a 6-week extension–an extension to November 15–of what is required to keep us open. Today that would be just over 4 weeks. We are literally fighting over a 4-week funding bill. How absurd is it that all of this is over a measure that would have only funded the government in the first case for another 4 weeks from now. There is, frankly, nothing about this situation that is not absurd.
Every day the House Republicans show up with a new strategy, a new press conference, a new message, and, as I said, all the while not explaining exactly why the government is shut down. Initially, it was shut down to prevent the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, but that is moving forward, as it was always going to be because it is an enacted program.
So what is the current message from the House? They say they are the only ones ready to negotiate, that they are alone at the table, sitting there with jackets off, in their bright, starched, white shirts, waiting for Senate Democrats to meet them at the table and negotiate. Another farce, another fantasy.
I am, frankly, tired and frustrated with the games that seem to be played here. I would like to highlight, if I could, a few of our real efforts to work collaboratively, to answer the question, why won’t you negotiate, by saying we have been negotiating.
Once the House votes to keep the lights on and to pay our bills, we will continue to negotiate. I have a simple question. Does the House want us to continue to be a closed-door nation, a nation where we have locked out hundreds of thousands of Federal workers? Does the House want to threaten that we will become a deadbeat nation, a nation that fails to meet its obligations built up over many administrations and many Congresses, Republican and Democratic, or are we going to reopen the government, become an open-door nation, and are we going to pay our bills and become a responsible nation, as we have been in the past?
How did we get here? As a member of the Budget Committee, let me first start, if I could, with the budget resolution. That is how our rules work. We are supposed to begin with a budget resolution that sets a framework for what we are going to spend in the next fiscal year.
For the last 3 years I have been serving here as a Senator, over and over on this floor the call was: Why won’t the Senate pass a budget? Well, this year this Senate passed a budget resolution with significant Republican input. Between this floor, where we ultimately passed it, and the committee on which I serve, the Senate adopted more than 40 amendments offered by my Republican colleagues.
We compromised. We worked toward a shared goal. Week after week, as I said, Republicans had asked in past years: When is the Senate going to pass a budget? Yet we did, more than 6 months ago–200 days ago, to be precise, we passed a budget in this Senate.
Our chair, Senator Murray of Washington, has tried to take our budget to conference with the House to do as the rules provide, to reconcile and to responsibly negotiate over our fiscal differences–18 times. She has tried over and over and over to take us to conference and responsibly open formal talks with the House to resolve our fiscal differences. Every time that motion has been blocked, denied, barred, all by a very small group of tea party Republicans in this Chamber who have refused to let us go ahead and negotiate as the rules say we should.
I also serve on the Appropriations Committee. Once the budget is framed, once the budget is resolved, we are then supposed to move to appropriations and set our spending levels. As a member of that committee, I have been a part of the process in which we have, in fact, passed 11 spending bills out of committee, 8 of them with bipartisan support.
In order to try to move that process forward, months after the budget was passed, we brought the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development bill to this floor. It passed out of committee by a vote of 22 to 8, with 6 Republican votes, a strong bipartisan bill to be passed out here on the floor.
What happened? It was blocked. Again, a small number of the other party came and objected and blocked the passage of that bill, a bill that would put Americans to work and strengthen our infrastructure and help support the housing recovery, a bill that would have moved us forward.
Despite every attempt to fund this government through what we call regular order, the budget process and the appropriations process, we, even after that, came to the table, ready to compromise on this continuing resolution.
The Senate budget calls for a top-line spending number of $1.058 trillion, a balanced approach that reduces Federal spending in some areas, raises revenue in others, and makes progress by replacing the sequester. That is the budget we passed in the Senate. It would call for spending $1.058 trillion. The House budget instead called for $988 billion. As you have heard our leader Senator Harry Reid say on the floor this week, he compromised. He agreed to a short-term funding bill at $988 billion, a $70 billion cut for this fiscal year, a major and painful concession for Democrats, particularly those of us on the Budget Committee who had not voted for a $988 billion number.
We have already slashed spending. People are already suffering through the sequester, another thing that was enacted due to comparable tactics the last time there was a near default in 2011. The sequester has resulted in across-the-board spending cuts. It has been dangerous and painful and which I have spoken about on this floor repeatedly, reading letters from Delawareans, such as the master sergeant, commenting on how it is not the smart way to make cuts, it is an across-the-board way, an irresponsible way to make cuts.
That same Air Force base, Dover Air Force Base, suffered furloughs for hundreds of airmen and their families because of the sequester cuts. We had worked out a budget that would have replaced it and would have avoided those sequester cuts in a balanced and responsible way. But instead, in order to compromise, our majority leader agreed to a $70 billion cut for this fiscal year. It was tough for a lot of Democrats to swallow. So, frankly, when I see House Republican leaders go on TV and say Democrats will not negotiate, Democrats will not compromise, I have to say: That is not the case. That is not the facts I have before me. We have compromised. We have negotiated. In fact, we have tried for months on this floor, more than 6 months, to get the compromise, to get the negotiation to move this forward. Instead, we find when we give an inch, they take a yard.
Today there are some, some in the other party, suggesting that if they are not granted a great big wish list, they will force us to default on our country’s sovereign debt. We keep hearing from the other side about the need to compromise and negotiate. I could not agree more. The whole way this body is supposed to work is by following the rules, following the process, going to conference, negotiating and achieving a responsible result.
We have repeatedly solicited Republican input, accepted Republican amendments, and made painful compromises. Now my message is simple: We should be following the rules. We should be following the process of this body. We should turn on the lights. We should pay our bills. I would be happy, honored to continue working with Republican colleagues to find real solutions to our fiscal problems, the way we are supposed to, in a conference negotiating over the budget that was passed here more than 6 months ago.
To the colleagues with whom I share this Chamber but with whom we have some differences over why this government is shut down today, I hope you will listen to Master Sergeant DiLuzio and his family and to the thousands and thousands of other Americans who are writing in and calling our offices. They deserve better. This country deserves better. We need to show we can be the model of democracy that achieves responsible principled compromise.
To my colleagues and my friends in the other party: Stop blocking progress. Let’s go to conference on the budget. Let’s negotiate. But, first, let’s get our folks back to work. Let’s get the government open. Let’s move forward in a way that honors the best of our traditions and our rules.
Mr. President, I come to the floor today to repeat a point that I think is worth repeating, which is that on this second day of the shutdown of our Federal Government, we need to focus more on manufacturing jobs than on manufacturing crises.
I have been here as a Senator now just 3 years. As the Presiding Officer knows, and many of my other colleagues know, the folks from home are calling us in record numbers to say they want us to listen to each other, to work together, and to try to help to get America back to work.
We all remember where we were 5 years ago at the depth of the fiscal crisis, our financial system in collapse and our economy on life support. Millions lost their jobs and millions more lost their savings. We have begun to recover and to heal. We have had 7 1/2 million jobs created over the last 42 months, jobless claims are now at a 5-year low, and we have had 9 consecutive quarters of economic growth. I think we need to find ways to work together to continue to sustain that forward movement. The shutdown of this government does not help in any way.
One thing I want to highlight is some good news we have had. We just learned the manufacturing sector grew last month at its fastest pace in more than 2 years. We need to invest in that success and invest in that growth.
In the first decade of this century, we lost 6 million manufacturing jobs in this country, good-paying jobs, high-skilled jobs, jobs that come with benefits, jobs you can raise a family on. In the last 3 years, we have gained back half a million manufacturing jobs, but we are still way short of where we were in 2000.
There are a few items we could focus on that would help us grow this sector: skills training, opening markets abroad, expanding access to capital, and creating a national manufacturing strategy. I hope to come back to the floor and speak to these in much more detail in the days ahead.
Let me close by saying something that I think is simple. A shutdown is not the answer to this ongoing economic recovery. Defaulting on our debt is not the answer to what the folks from our home States are calling and asking us to do. The answer is for the Speaker of the House to allow the House to vote on a bill passed in this Chamber that, if adopted, would reopen the Federal Government and allow us to work together to revitalize our economy.