Chuck Grassley: “once again, in the Chaplain's prayer, he brought up the issue before the U.S. Senate and presented it to the Lord about…”

“once again, in the Chaplain's prayer, he brought up the issue before the U.S. Senate and presented it to the Lord about the problems created by the shutdown of the government. Not only are the employees of the U.S. Senate not being paid and 750,000 civil servants are furloughed without pay, but we are also beginning to read in business pages of the newspapers about the impact on the economy. For the State of Iowa, the White House Office of Economic Policy said that, weekly, it was doing damage to the economy of my State of Iowa of $137 million. So we have to get the government back to work because it costs money to shut the government down, and it costs money to open the government up. The government is supposed to be a service to the American people, besides protecting the American people, and quite frankly, none of that can be done when it is shut down. United States Postal Service Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak about some information that I got from whistleblowers the first time on September 23 of last year. At that time, I spoke to my fellow Senators, making public very concerning whistleblower allegations. The whistleblower alleged to my office that the Postal Service, which is an independent government Agency, had hired registered sex offenders as mail carriers. So I investigated to find out how bad this problem was at that Agency. To date, the Postal Service has refused to provide a list of names of registered sex offenders.”