On the recordJanuary 10, 2019
I think we all know the Constitution of the United States, under article I, says the Senate and the House of the United States are separate and coequal branches of government with the executive branch. We are now seeing more and more Americans hurt every day by the government shutdown, Americans losing access to services. We just saw that the Food and Drug Administration has stopped routine food safety inspections of seafood. We just saw that the EPA has halted one of the Federal Government's most important health activities--the inspection of Federal factories, powerplants, oil refineries, water treatment plants. Eight hundred thousand Federal employees are not getting paid. Hundreds of thousands of them are going to work every day, including at our border, protecting our border, not getting paid. Hundreds of thousands more have been locked out of work. There is a Maryland mom who just had to go on the internet to set up a GoFundMe account to help pay her son's college tuition because they are on a monthly installment plan. I talked to the head of a community college in Maryland just the other day. I went to see her, asked how things are. The first thing she told me, her phone had been ringing off the hook all morning because the parents of students of the community college weren't going to be able to make their monthly installment payments.…
