Political Quotes

“Madam President, hundreds of thousands of Federal workers are, thank God, returning to work this week to tackle a backlog that has been building for over a month. Over that time, the U.S. economy suffered a loss of $11 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office--$11 billion for the President's temper tantrum, including $3 billion that can never be recovered. That is an expensive temper tantrum. The individual costs are even harder than the big numbers. Who knows how many Federal workers missed a doctor's appointment or fell behind on their payments because they weren't getting their paychecks. Federal contractors will not get backpay and may have lost health insurance entirely during the shutdown. Senator Smith is working on legislation to fix that problem. While even Federal employees and contractors are returning to work, they still might be digging out of the hole that the Trump shutdown put them in. I hope this serves as a lesson to President Trump and all of my Republican colleagues--no more shutdown. We cannot repeat this same nightmare scenario in 3 weeks when the CR expires. We Democrats will not shut down the government. We hope President Trump has learned his lesson. He touched a very hot stove. We hope our Republican colleagues will join us, as they did last Thursday, to make sure there is no shutdown. Thankfully, I have heard several of my colleagues say that.…”