On the recordSeptember 23, 2021
I appreciate my colleague from Texas being willing to turn over the floor so that I can give my remarks. Mr. President, I am here today to discuss my concerns about the ongoing partisan obstruction in the Senate. First, as everyone here knows, September 30 is the end of the current fiscal year, and without action by the Senate on a continuing resolution--the mechanism to continue to fund the government--our government is going to shut down at midnight on the 1st. So what happens if we don't pass that continuing resolution and the government shuts down? Well, critical operations will shutter. We have seen this picture before. Our national parks will close. We can tell our government researchers, including Nobel Prize-winning scientists, to leave their labs, and we would be doing this in the middle of the greatest health crisis of our lifetime. A government shutdown also means that we ask essential Federal workers to work without pay. FBI agents, Border Patrol agents, TSA workers, weather forecasters, and others would be forced to continue their essential work, and they would be doing it for IOUs. We would promise them we would pay them, but there is no guarantee. Now, it is puzzling to me because other countries don't do this to themselves. Government shutdowns put America behind. Look at the government shutdown that we had that went from December 2018 to January 2019, the longest government shutdown in our history.…
