Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rise today to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Greater New Britain Chamber of Commerce.

Founded in 1913, the Greater New Britain Chamber of Commerce has been the business voice of New Britain, CT, for 100 years. Throughout its existence, the Chamber has tirelessly encouraged the growth and success of the manufacturing, medical, and, more recently, high-tech sectors of the local economy. It has provided area businesses with numerous opportunities to market themselves, increase their customer base, network with prospective business partners, cut costs, and share best practices. As New Britain's population growth soared during the first half of the 20th century, the Chamber also actively embraced diversity, helping to ensure that immigrant entrepreneurs had the necessary support and resources to open countless new businesses throughout the city.

New Britain, CT, has had a long and storied industrial history. By 1913, New Britain manufacturers were producing more than 300 kinds of products, and the community had become known as the ``The Hardware City.'' For the past 100 years, the Greater New Britain Chamber of Commerce has helped to build upon that proud industrial legacy. As a result, in reflection of its century-long dedication to the businesses of New Britain and the region, I am proud to honor the 100-year anniversary of the Greater New Britain Chamber of Commerce, its commitment to serving its member companies, and the important role it has played advancing the welfare of the community at large.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I am very proud to be here today speaking in support of historic legislation that will move us one step closer to the day when who you love has absolutely nothing to do with the rights that you are afforded as a citizen of the greatest country in the world.

Frankly, the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is embarrassingly long overdue. In my State of Connecticut we have had antidiscrimination laws on the books for over 20 years. In 1991, Connecticut became the fourth State to formally protect LGBT workplace rights, and in 2011 we became the 15th State to offer similar protections to our transgender citizens.

So it is funny, because my constituents assume that all across this country it is already illegal to fire somebody for whom they love and for who they are. But, of course, as we know, that is just not the case across most of the country.

Right now, in some States, you can be fired from your job simply because of having a little photograph of your partner on your desk at work. While ENDA has been a commonly accepted civil rights protection in my State, you may hear some express opposition to this legislation on this floor by vaguely citing what are commonly referred to as the ``concerns of the business community.'' I am not sure what businesses they are referring to, because in my State we have some of the biggest and most successful multistate and multinational businesses in the world; and they know that nondiscrimination isn't just the right thing to do, it is also really good for business.

Companies such as United Technologies, General Electric, and Xerox want the best and the brightest people to work in an inclusive team environment--not having their employees hiding from each other who they really are. Companies such as BI Pharmaceuticals and Aetna haven't folded under the weight of having these State-based workplace protections. In fact, they are thriving in Connecticut, across the country, and all around the world.

So in speaking with companies from all over Connecticut, none, to me, has ever argued that equal protection in Connecticut is something that is holding their businesses back. They have been living under this law for decades now. And it is not just Connecticut's largest employers. Connecticut's law actually goes further than ENDA does in prohibiting discrimination even among businesses with fewer than 15 employees. Our small business community understands that, far from inhibiting commerce, nondiscrimination policies actually help make our companies-- big and small--stronger.

So even though a majority of American businesses oppose employment discrimination, some argue this legislation is going to harm businesses whose leaders have very strong religious beliefs. However, I think it is important to note the religious exemption in this legislation is even broader--remarkably broader, I would argue--than the exemption that is in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and it represents a compromise that doesn't go as far as some Members of this body, including myself, would like.

In an op-ed that was published this summer, the former head of the NAACP, Julian Bond, equated these religious concerns with the arguments he heard from opponents of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Here is what Bond wrote.

In response to the historic gains of the Civil Rights

movement in the 1960s, opponents argued that their religious

beliefs prohibited integration. To be true to their religious

beliefs, they argued they couldn't serve African-Americans in

their restaurants or accept interracial marriages.

It would be shocking to hear somebody make a similar argument today about the treatment of African-Americans in our society. Frankly, I think it will be just as shocking 40 or 50 years from now for people to read that this argument is being made today about the treatment of LGBT Americans. There are, in fact--interesting to point out--numerous Christian and Jewish organizations and denominations that have taken a strong stand in favor of this legislation because they understand that unequal treatment under the law is at odds with their faith.

Others on this floor have made the argument that passage of ENDA will lead to frivolous lawsuits from fired workers. So let me give my State's perspective on this. Again, we have been living under this law since 1991. We have had protections that we are debating today for two decades and we simply haven't seen frivolous lawsuits. And again, we have big companies that employ thousands of people across the State and across the Nation. Let me cite the statistics from 2009 to 2010, which is the most recent year for which we have data available.

Out of a total of 1,740 employment-based discrimination complaints that were filed in the State that year, only 53 were based on sexual orientation discrimination. Just as a means of comparison, 464 complaints were filed based on age discrimination. We went back a number of years, and in not a single year over the last half decade that we looked at were there more than about 40 or 50 complaints.

My State has been a test case for these protections for sexual orientation and gender identity. The parade of horrible consequences opponents of this bill say will happen just have not happened in Connecticut.

What we are doing here is pretty simple. We are not trampling on the First Amendment. We are not dictating morality. We are not harming the economy. We are not undermining the religious community. We are just saying that you can't discriminate against people in the workplace because of whom they choose to love or who they are inside.

The simplicity of this bill is why two-thirds of the American public support it, and it is why I believe that 50 years from now history is going to judge no less harshly those who vote against this act as it now judges those who voted against some of the civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s. Whom you love, who you are inside, and what you feel should never, ever be a reason for discrimination.

I was on the House floor 6 years ago when the House passed ENDA, and I still remember listening to Congressman Barney Frank's closing argument. He welled up as he was giving it, and there were a lot of tears shed on the floor as well. I just want to close by quoting what he said, and I won't try to do his accent. Barney Frank said:

I used to be someone subject to this prejudice. And through

luck and circumstance, I got to be a big shot. I am now above

that prejudice. But I feel an obligation to 15-year-olds

dreading to go to school because of the torment they endure,

to people who fear they will lose their job at a gas station

if somebody finds out whom they love. I feel an obligation to

use the status that I have been lucky enough to get to help

them. I make a personal appeal to my colleagues, please don't

turn your back on them.

We are all big shots here. We have been lucky enough to get elected to the greatest deliberative body in the world, and there is an obligation and a responsibility that comes with the job we have to stick up for people who are being discriminated against because of who they are. The greatest moments of this body have been when we have joined together, Republican and Democrat, to stand against that kind of discrimination.

Our ability to rise to Congressman Frank's challenge--``please, don't turn your back on them''--can be this week, another great chapter in the history of this great body.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, yesterday, I voted to confirm Alan Estevez to

be a Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense. In this important position, the second highest ranking acquisition official at DOD, Mr. Estevez will help oversee hundreds of billions of dollars in procurement during his tenure.

I am eager to work with Mr. Estevez on an issue important to my State and our overall security strategy. Like my colleagues Senators Blumenthal and Cornyn have discussed, it is unacceptable to me that the Department of Defense is continuing the procurement of Mi-17 helicopters from Rosoboron export, Russia's official arms export firm.

The reasons to stop this procurement are numerous, and, by contrast, the logic behind the continuation of this procurement is flawed.

Not only is Rosoboronexport at the heart of an industry that Russia's own chief military prosecutor publicly stated is corrupt, but this company is also supplying the Assad regime in Syria. We are handing money--tax dollars from my constituents in Connecticut--to a company that is propping up a regime that is committing atrocities against its own people.

I was outraged to learn that earlier this year that DOD awarded Rosoboronexport a $572 million contract for the procurement of 30 Mi-17 helicopters for the Afghan Special Mission Wing, completely ignoring the recommendation of the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, SIGAR, to halt this procurement.

Even if DOD thinks that this procurement should go forward in light of the SIGAR recommendation, there is no credible reason that these helicopters should not be made in America. My constituents are tired of our procurement dollars going to overseas firms, and this particular example is one of the most egregious.

We have spent over $100 billion on equipment from overseas manufacturers in the last several years. When I talk to manufacturers in Connecticut who are churning out the most reliable and rugged military equipment in the world, including helicopters, they just can not understand why we are paying a corrupt Russian arms dealer for equipment we already make at home.

I look forward to making my feelings known to Mr. Estevez and, as we did last year during the consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act, making it clear that this body does not approve of this Mi-17 procurement.

Mr. President, I wish to speak today about an effort long championed by my predecessors in the Senate, Senators Dodd and Lieberman, and to express my commitment to carry on their work. That important project, the National Liberty Memorial, will commemorate the patriotism of African American soldiers during the American Revolution.

From the very first days of the American Revolution, African Americans took part in the effort to establish a new nation and secure liberty's blessings. They did this despite the fact that the vast majority of their brothers and sisters remained slaves.

Many of these African American patriots were from Connecticut. In 1976, the town of Milford established a memorial to six black soldiers of the Revolutionary War. Nero Hawley, a slave who joined the Continental Army and served at Valley Forge, was later freed after the war. You can visit his grave today at Riverside Cemetery in Trumbull. Jupiter Mars lived an extraordinary life, serving in the Continental Army during the war. He now rests in peace in beautiful Norfolk, CT. Cato Meed enlisted in the Continental Army in Norwich in 1777, and served at Valley Forge with General Washington.

These soldiers fought in every battle of the Revolutionary War, from the

colonists' defeat at the Battle of Long Island to our final victory at Yorktown. At every point, African American men served bravely and with honor. In fact, one of the first men to die in America's struggle for independence was Crispus Attucks, who was shot by British troops during the Boston massacre. This dedication to the war effort continued right up to the last battle when Salem Poor, a freed slave, earned commendation recommendations from 14 officers for his bravery at Bunker Hill. In recounting Poor's performance at the battle, officers wrote there were too many heroic deeds to describe.

Committed to the cause of American independence, African American soldiers filled every role that the war required of them, whether they served on local militias, worked as cooks and carpenters in camps like Valley Forge, or served as crewmembers on America's first Navy ships. Many African Americans escaped the bondage of slavery to join the American Navy. Still others, like James Armistead, acted as spies for the Revolution by providing American patriots with vital information needed to win the war. Regardless of their roles, they served ably and with distinction.

After the war, the agreements negotiated between slaves and masters were largely honored and the patriots freed upon either enlistment or the end of the war. However, once they had put down the weapons used to win the Nation's independence, a few had to resort to legal means to enforce their claim to liberty. For one patriot--James Robinson, later of Detroit, MI, who also fought in the War of 1812--freedom did not come until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Many other African Americans remained trapped in bondage as the institution of slavery expanded in spite of lawsuits, petitions, and agitation.

Many of these African American soldiers would go on to organize early abolitionist and civil rights organizations. One such man was Samuel Harris, a soldier, Baptist minister, and early abolitionist who said, ``Liberty is dear to my heart. I cannot endure the thought that my countrymen live as slaves.'' Nevertheless, despite their valiant service to this country's founding, many African American soldiers were not treated with the dignity that their service demanded. While this country's founding documents stated that all men were created equal, the Nation still sought to hold many Americans as property.

It is estimated that the names of at least half of these brave soldiers would have been lost to history had it not been for the efforts of Plainville, CT native Lena Santos Ferguson. Five years ago, the Daughters of the American Revolution fulfilled a promise made to her in 1984 to identify as many African American Revolutionary War soldiers and patriots as possible. ``Forgotten Patriots,'' contains the names of over 5,000, as well as the communities where they once resided. Nearly 20 Connecticut towns have approved resolutions that honor them, and they have joined the ranks of those seeking construction of the National Liberty Memorial.

At the beginning of this year President Obama signed into law legislation that was passed by the Congress last year that once again affirmed our public commitment to memorialize these brave patriots through a new memorial in the Monumental Core of our capital city. Liberty Fund D.C., a nonprofit established to lead the effort to construct the memorial, is currently working with architects and Federal agencies to make that goal a reality.

I believe that we must do what we can to build this memorial. Further, I believe that a key feature of any such memorial is that it should be visually tied to the Washington Monument, the most prominent Revolutionary-era monument in the District. There should be a clear sightline from the memorial to the Washington Monument.

For good reason, constructing any new memorial in the Washington, DC area is a rigorous process, and there are a number of prerequisites to be met before construction can begin. I look forward to continuing to work with Liberty Fund D.C. to achieve the goals of this important legislation, to ensure that a monument to the African American patriots of the Revolutionary War be constructed in a prominent location in our Nation's capital.

I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Sometimes in the Senate we deal with numbers that are a little too big for constituents and even for us to fathom. One number we throw around in Connecticut is the number $50 billion. That is the amount of money we need over the next 20 years to make the necessary improvements along our rail line in order to keep it in a good state of repair, never mind to do the expansions we so badly need to get our economy back and running in Connecticut. It is only basically to do all of the repair work that we need to keep trains running safely from Boston to Washington, DC. We need $50 billion to get that done.

I give you that number because what we have learned today is that S&P estimates that the cost of this 2-week shutdown to the U.S. Government is $24 billion, half of what the northeastern States need to maintain in state of good repair the most important rail line to the Nation for the next decade.

In 2 weeks we lost $24 billion to this economy. This is the same amount of money that it took to do the Big Dig in Boston and half the money that we need to do important improvements along the longest, biggest, most important stretch of rail line in this country--for nothing, for absolutely nothing.

We are hopefully going to consent on a path forward shortly that will allow us to vote on a bill that essentially represents the same offer that has been on the table to both Republicans and Democrats for 2 weeks. This is to reopen the government and to operate until January of next year and to extend the debt ceiling until February of next year.

Of course, the cost is not only in the short-term, not only about all of that money we lost, but $2 billion of that was lost money to the Treasury of the United States. It is also what we lose every single day that we continue forward on this theory that it is somehow best to run this country by manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis.

As the chairman of the European Affairs Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, I have been able to hear on a daily and weekly basis European impressions of this country from the outside. They look at this Nation with envy because they see the demographic trends which allow this country to stay relatively young compared to the rest of the world. They see relative economic growth compared to countries in Europe and throughout the industrialized world. They see us on a pathway to energy independence, whereby we are not going to be reliant on oil from the Middle East. We will be able to produce, whether it will be gas or renewables, at home.

They look at our country with wonder because they see all of these trend lines running in favor of the United States, essentially leapfrogging, catapulting the rest of the world with respect to the global recovery. The only thing stopping us from that inevitability, that global economic rebirth for the United States, is government by crisis.

Mark Zandi came to the Joint Economic Committee. He is a bipartisan economist. He has advised Senator McCain and criticized both parties. He says the same thing. He says the only thing stopping a robust recovery in this Nation is the fact that we essentially write budgets and extend debt ceilings for 2, 3, 4 months at a time.

I come to the floor because my only hope, my only vision of a paper- thin silver lining to this fiasco over the past 2 weeks is that the American public has just said definitively that they don't want this to be the way the government runs any longer. If there is one message to this handful of conservatives, mostly in the House of Representatives but a few in the Senate that have caused this shutdown, the message is very simple. They are not going to be able to advance their ideological aims--in this case trying to end, repeal or delay the health care bill--by shutting down the government and threatening default on American debt.

President Obama and our majority leader had to draw a line. They had to draw a line because that is what the American public was demanding, that we put an end to this governance by crisis. If there is a silver lining, it is hopefully--even though we are only extending the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling for a matter of months--that we won't go through this catastrophe again because the American public has said enough is enough.

They know what we should know in the Senate. There is enormous room for compromise moving forward.

Today a group of Senators held a meeting on delivery system reform. There were 18 Senators who came to this meeting to hear a presentation by the Bipartisan Policy Center on a bipartisan proposal to save over $500 billion to the U.S. Treasury simply by reordering the rules of how we run Medicare, not by trimming benefits, not by requiring more in taxes, simply by reordering the way we pay for health care. It was a proposal backed by everyone from Bill Frist to Tom Daschle, and it suggests there is so much room for agreement between Republicans and Democrats if we just decide to set policy for years rather than for months.

I know we walk away from this with a sense of both outrage and hopefulness that we can maybe figure out a way to come together. Although this is my first year in the Senate, I have been in this place for 6 years, between the House and this body--but this feels like ``Groundhog Day'' in the sense that every time we find our way through one of these crises, we all say to each other: This is the last time. We all lock arms and say: Isn't it great that we found bipartisan agreement, and now we can use this momentum moving forward to avoid this kind of crisis in the

future. I have seen this play before. It seems within days or weeks we just fall back to our old habits of digging trenches and fighting each other more than we talk to each other and again governing by crisis.

I think this time is different, just because the depth of the dysfunction was different than ever before, the cries of the American public were greater than ever before. But we should remember, as this report from the Bipartisan Policy Center on delivery system reform tells us, there is still enormous room for the two parties to set out goals we agree on. If we push aside the most strident extremist voices that largely come from the tea party caucus of the House of Representatives, there is so much we can do.

As my European friends remind me on an almost daily basis, the only factor stopping the American economy from powering forward and becoming once again a giant of manufacturing, of global financial services, and of innovation--the only thing stopping us from that leapfrog forward-- is figuring out that governance by crisis holds us back.

We made the promise to each other before that when we get through one of these crises it will be our last. I commend our leaders--I commend Leader Reid and Senator Murray--for setting up a process for the rest of this year where we can come to some resolution on a budget that sets policy for years rather than for months. This time, though, the promise we have made to each other has to stick. It is the only way forward for this place, and it is the only way forward for an economy that is just waiting to be unshackled and to conquer the world again.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

We are now going into week three of a government shutdown, a totally unnecessary, totally avoidable, totally manufactured government shutdown that is now morphing together with a potential failure on behalf of the U.S. Government to pay its debts, the first time we have ever intentionally done that in our entire country's history.

This is not theoretical any longer. This is now right on top of us. On Thursday of this week we will no longer have enough money to pay all of the bills that come in to the government. We only have about 65 percent of the funds necessary to pay out all of the bills that come due to us, whether it is to our creditors or to the thousands of small businesses that rely on contracts with the Federal Government every week to pay their bills as well.

I appreciate all of my colleagues coming down here and talking about the real-world consequences of what this shutdown has meant and what a failure to pay our debts will mean. I come down and want to share a handful of stories from my State of Connecticut to tell you what is going on out there beyond the talking heads on the cable news networks. They are simple stories, but they are impactful because for hundreds of thousands of people in my State of Connecticut, there was no margin with which to operate when this shutdown hit and the consequential economic impact that has come to so many families. There was not any money stuffed under their mattress they could pull out and try to pay the bills they could not, now that their paycheck or their business had been lost.

This is a big deal to people in Connecticut, and in Hawaii, and to States all across our land because there was so much economic hurt that had already piled up for months and years that people had no wiggle room when the tea party decided to stick a knife into the backs of already hurting families.

That is why this makes no sense. It is not as though we had the cushion as an economy, it is not as though families had the ability to take on a little extra hurt when the tea party decided to shut down our government--not that it would make sense even if we were living in heady economic times. But today, right now, for families who are getting killed by an economy that has recovered for the top 5 or 10 percent of America but certainly has not recovered for the bottom 80 percent, this is no time to be playing around with people's lives.

Every single year at the start of the home heating season, I go to a nonprofit in Waterbury, CT, which dispenses home heating assistance to the thousands of families in the Greater Waterbury, CT, area who know that without a little bit of help from this agency they will literally not be able to heat their home, that their children will go cold that winter, because even though they are making money, they cannot keep up with the mounting bills.

Every single year, as I watch the sort of macroeconomic numbers get better for the economy, I keep on thinking that when I go to that agency in August or September or October, they are going to tell me: Guess what, Chris. Less people are coming in this year than last year to ask for home heating assistance.

We are in year five of this recession now. Every single year of those five, the number has gotten bigger--every single year. Even as unemployment goes down, demand for home heating assistance in Connecticut goes up. Why? Because the top echelon of our country has recovered but nobody else has. So that is why when this shutdown hit, it hurt so badly for someone such as Rich Martin in New London, CT. Rich did something heroic during this recession. He started a new business. Frankly, even more heroic, he started a bookstore and a record store in New London, CT called the Telegraph.

He said that business has been growing for the last 12 months. Every month he has been doing a little bit better. Then guess what. The shutdown. Rich wrote me and said: After growth in my business over the last 12 months, people have stopped coming in these last weeks. Because in New London, CT, where we make submarines for the U.S. Navy, where we have submariners at our base there, we have a whole lot of people who depend on the Federal Government or contracts from the Federal Government to be able to pay their employees. Nobody is coming into the Telegraph any more. His business is getting hurt. A business, a small businessman who did something great, is now wondering whether he can make it through the next couple of days and weeks.

Here is how the trickledown of this happens: Kathi Sanborn in Hartford is

paying the bills right now by babysitting. She is babysitting for a couple. But the husband is a defense contractor. Guess what. He has been furloughed, so he cannot pay her to babysit. Frankly, he is home anyway, so he can look after the kids. So she does not have her babysitting gig any longer. He is out of work and she is out of work. Guess what. That is not where it ends. Because now that Kathi does not have her babysitting job, she is going to stop buying what she used to buy. She is going to have her groceries. She is not going to go to the store down the street for a purchase for herself. It just keeps on going.

Don Spaeth in Putnam, small business owner, runs a little restaurant there. Small town, Putnam. He says his business has dried up the last couple of weeks. People are not coming in.

Rich from Fairfield has a severely autistic son. He is an adult, so he was on Social Security disability. But he had his disability benefits cut off because they wanted to review his eligibility. Well, guess what. The reviewer has been furloughed for 2 weeks. So his son, who was hoping to be able to have his benefits turned back on, or at least have resolution so the family would know what to do, now cannot get a resolution to his disability claim. His son cannot pay the bills to the provider who gives him housing. He is potentially going to be out on the streets because he does not have a reviewer in the Social Security office. That hurts economically, but that hurts psychologically as well.

Interfaith Volunteer Caregivers in New Haven gets Federal money to do something really simple: Provide frail seniors with rides to their doctors' appointments. They lost their Federal funding for 2 weeks, so they cannot give rides any longer. So seniors are sitting home not able to get to their doctors' appointments. Think about that. You have an 85-year-old widow who has to worry every day if she is going to get sick because she lost her ride to the doctor's office.

Then let me read you this quote from Michael in Hartford. I do not even have to embellish it:

I am an attorney and work for the IRS.

I have 3 children, a 16 year old girl and 8 year old twins.

My wife is pregnant with my fourth child. My 16 year old is

taking driver's education and wants her license. I cannot now

pay for the insurance necessary for her. She also wanted to

take a PSAT prep course, another $1,200 that I don't have.

She needs to start visiting college campuses. More money that

I don't have. One of my twins, Sofia, had some learning

disabilities and had private tutors and other professionals

to assist her in staying on grade level in reading and math.

I will soon run out of savings to pay for Sofia's support

system because November 1st means that there is a mortgage

payment, car payment, car insurance payments and the other

dozen or so monthly bills that keep our household up and

running. I do hope that the shutdown ends soon so that I can

get back to work.

These stories can be repeated, frankly, hundreds of thousands of times over all across this country. While to some people they may sound like small stories--a babysitter losing a job, the inability to get your disabled daughter a little bit of help for a couple months--they add up to $1.6 billion in economic activity coming out of our country every single week.

They add up to unemployment claims jumping to their highest level last week in 6 months. They add up to consumer confidence being the lowest in this country since the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008.

This doesn't happen in a vacuum. It is not as if we can tread water or move backwards economically while the rest of the world waits for us to resume our mantle of economic leadership.

China says they are looking to take their $1.3 trillion in U.S. Treasurys and find someplace else for it.

I ask unanimous consent for 5 more minutes.

Last month Japan announced its machinery sales were the best since 2008. The rest of the world is moving on.

If we are doing this much damage to the economy, why are we here? We are here mainly because tea party Republicans in the House see this misery as a bargaining chip. They couldn't get their way any other way. They couldn't win the legislative argument on the health care bill, a bill that passed the House and the Senate and was signed by the President. They couldn't win the judicial argument. It came before the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court upheld the health care law. It couldn't win the electoral argument.

The health care bill was on the ballot in 2012. The President who ran on it and signed it was reelected by a wide margin. Every single Senator in this Chamber who supported it was returned to their seat.

Tea party Republicans have lost the argument on health care in all three of the traditional forums by which one would get their way in the legislative process--the legislative forum, judicial forum, and the electoral forum.

Just as a criminal fleeing the scene of a crime, they have been confronted with a last desperate option, which is to grab hold of the economy, put a gun to its head, and hope then that Democrats and President Obama will relent simply because of our compassion for people like Rich in New London, Kathi in New Hartford, Don in Putnam, the seniors who rely on Interfaith Caregivers in New Haven, and the young IRS attorney with a disabled daughter. They hope it will be our passion for those people which will cause us to do something other than what the people sent us to do and repeal, delay, or displace the health care law.

The good news is cooler heads are prevailing, that people do see--in this Chamber at least--the need to let go of the hostage. Two weeks into the shutdown, the cumulative economic effects on the economy are real. Those stories I told from Connecticut can now be multiplied thousands of times, tens of thousands of times.

The House looks as if they are going to try to pass another partisan political bill loaded with add-ons as conditions to restart the government and pay our bills. The Senate is working on a different solution, a solution that could bring together Republicans and Democrats to at least temporarily end this crisis. On behalf of my constituents in Connecticut, we certainly hope that is the result.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia for his call on this place to get back to regular order and to bridge our differences. I think it is an important one and a noble and hopefully easy request for us to ultimately follow.

I came down here this weekend to talk about a young woman in Bridgeport, CT, who is at the epicenter of the fallout of this shutdown, and I wanted to come back down on Monday to tell her story very briefly once again because the way a lot of trade papers

cover this shutdown makes it seem as if this is just about politics. If you listen to some commentators and some members of the tea party crowd in the House of Representatives, they will tell you that what we are going to find in this shutdown is that everybody is going to learn that the government really doesn't do that much and it is not that big a deal if it goes away for a couple of months, a couple of weeks, a couple of days.

What we are finding as we enter week 2 of this shutdown is we have now moved past the point where the collapse of the government is just an inconvenience. It is now ruining lives. I wish Melanie Rhodes was the exception, but she is increasingly becoming the rule across the country. The Presiding Officer heard me tell her story this weekend, but I am going to do it again.

Melanie was homeless a couple years ago. She lives in the southwestern portion of Connecticut. She had hit really hard times, but she decided to pull her life together--not the least of the reasons being that she has a little boy. She has a son Malachi. Malachi was born about 2 months premature, so he was born with some developmental disabilities that luckily, because of a government program, were caught early on. The program is called Birth to Three. In Connecticut, it is our early intervention program. Most States have it. It is one of the programs that are going to run out of funds pretty soon if we don't start turning back on the faucet to State governments.

But even more important to Melanie was that through that early intervention screening program that figured out Malachi needed a little bit of extra help, they got him into a Head Start Program. He wasn't even 1 year old when he started the Head Start Program. Today he is 3, and he is making incredible progress. He has some serious issues. He is just now learning how to communicate with some signs he has been taught. But he is doing better and doing better every single day.

On Monday night of last week Melanie stayed up all night watching to see whether the government was still going to be operating because she knew the Bridgeport Head Start Program works on a fiscal year that matches ours. So if the government shut down on October 1, the check wouldn't come to Bridgeport Head Start and they would have to send 1,000 kids home.

But she also knew her life was starting to get brighter in other ways as well. She had been looking for a job for a long time and she had done everything we asked of her. She had applied to everybody she could think of, from Walmart to Walgreens to McDonald's, and hadn't found anything until a bus company decided to hire her as a driver. She had gone through her training; she was just waiting for her background check to come back. It was going to be OK and she was going to start work. But, of course, the only way she could start work was if she had care for her child. As she has said so eloquently over the past week, she can't just leave Malachi with anybody because he is a kid with substantial difficulties and his caregivers need to know how to take care of him. So if there is no Head Start, there is no school for Malachi, he regresses in terms of the progress he has made, and she can't start her job. Her family essentially collapses around her simply because this place can't pass a budget. That is what is happening to Melanie, and she says simply this: We need our government and our businesses open. Why should we suffer and be held hostage while government can't do what they need to do?

Her story can be repeated thousands of times across Connecticut. I think I saw today that about 18,000 Head Start slots are going to be closed by the end of this week. Unfortunately, her story is not the exception; it is becoming the rule. This is what this shutdown means. It is not playacting. It is real.

As I watched some of the shows over the weekend, I heard a familiar refrain from our Republican colleagues. They said: Yeah, we have this demand that we want the health care law delayed or repealed or defunded in order to get the government up and operating, but really it is the Democrats. It is Harry Reid, it is President Obama who won't sit down and negotiate. If they would just sit down and negotiate, then we could end this whole thing.

I understand how some people might watch and think to themselves, why won't the Democrats just sit down and talk about this? So I would like to address this claim that the only thing stopping us from reopening the government is Democrats won't talk to Republicans. I want to address that in five simple ways.

First, I would make the point that every single one of my colleagues has made: We have already talked. What we thought we were talking about was a continuing resolution, a temporary budget that would keep the government operating for about 6 weeks. A lot of Democratic critics actually would argue that we didn't really negotiate that well over that particular issue because in the end the Senate passed a budget with a particular number for the continuing resolution, the House passed a budget with a particular number for the continuing resolution, and the difference was pretty substantial, but in the end the Senate just decided to go with the House number. We didn't settle in between. We didn't settle closer to ours or closer to theirs. We just took the House number. So we kind of feel, on the subject at hand, which is the continuing resolution, that the negotiation has already happened and we gave the House everything they wanted. There is not much more to negotiate after you give them everything when it comes to the bottom- line number in the continuing resolution.

Second, it is kind of hard to have a negotiation when only one side is making demands. We don't have any demands in this negotiation. All we want is for the things that normally happen to continue to happen-- i.e., we want the government to stay open on the exact same terms the government was open last week and the week before. We want the country to pay our bills just as we have paid our bills for a generation. It is only Republicans--and, frankly, not all Republicans. Most Republicans in the Senate are not making these demands. It is mainly a small handful in the House and the Senate who say: In order to keep the government open, we want the health care law defunded or repealed or delayed.

It is difficult to have a negotiation when all we want is the status quo.

It is kind of like if two people lived in a house and one of them said: I am going to take the roof off the house if you don't do what I want. You wouldn't really negotiate that. That is an unreasonable demand. The roof just needs to be there. It is something that, for good reason, is normally not the subject of debate or negotiation. And you wouldn't settle for half. You wouldn't allow your roommate to take half the roof off. The roof just needs to be there, and if you are angry with me about something or you want to talk about something, let's do it while the roof is still on.

We can't negotiate over the government just operating. We can't negotiate over whether or not we are going to pay our bills. We don't want anything. We just want things to happen as they have happened in the past.

Third, this place just can't operate if in order to keep the government open for 6 weeks we have to satisfy everybody's personal political agenda.

I also said this weekend I have things I believe in very strongly. I represent Sandy Hook, CT. I submit I feel just as strongly about background checks as the Senator from Texas does about the repeal of the health care bill. But it would be unreasonable for me to say I am not going to vote for a budget because I don't get my way on background checks or immigration reform or tax fairness or whatever it may be that I care about outside the confines of the continuing resolution. If all 100 Senators had to get their particular nonbudgetary political points settled as a requirement of passing a continuing resolution, this place would absolutely collapse.

Maybe that is what some people want. Maybe some people want government to collapse and the government to shut down. But when I hear people talk on this floor, I take them at face value, that that is not what they want. Ultimately we all cannot get what we need all the time.

Fourth, you normally need to compromise when you do not have consensus, when you do not have agreement, when both the Senate and the House do not have the majority of

their Members agreeing to the exact same thing. In that case you need to negotiate because clearly we do not have consensus, and so we have to get two sides together to find consensus.

We have consensus. We have a bill the majority of Senators supports, the majority of House Members supports, the President is ready to sign the minute it gets to his desk. That is what is referred to as a clean continuing resolution, a bill that would keep the government operating for the next 6 weeks on the same terms it was operating beforehand. The only reason why that is not law today is because Speaker Boehner will not bring that up for a vote in the House of Representatives. But it reportedly enjoys the support of more than 216 Members of the House, which is what you need today to get that bill passed. It has already passed the Senate.

Last, as Senator Durbin talked about, what Republicans are demanding as their condition to keep the government up and operating is no less than the repeal of the signature achievement of President Obama's first term, the most important bill I have ever worked on, the most important vote I have ever cast. That is the health care law which is today saving millions of dollars for senior citizens in their Medicare benefits and right now is providing a lifeline to millions of Americans who need cheaper insurance.

It is why poll after poll tells you that although people are still split on whether they agree with the exact prescription for our health care economy laid out in the bill we passed, they sure as heck do not want us to repeal the law. By about a 2-to-1 margin people say don't repeal the law, let it go into effect, give it a shot. It is also why by a 3-to-1 margin people do not agree with shutting down the government over the repeal of the health care law. It is why 9 million people have gone onto the Federal health care reform Web site to see what their options are. It is why, as Senator Durbin said, even in States such as Kentucky, people are signing up by the thousands. In the first day of Connecticut's exchange we had more visits to the Web site than we had in the entire month previous. People are desperate for lower cost health care out there. Sick people and families with sick children have been waiting lifetimes to finally be able to get insurance for their loved ones.

People need this health care reform law to go into effect. It is simply not true, as the Senator from Texas and others have said, that people do not want this law. They have shown us how badly and desperately they need it by the flood of interest in the exchanges over the first week, and in poll after poll the American people say loudly they do not want this repealed.

It is hard to get major social change passed in this town. The Founding Fathers intentionally set up a process by which something such as health care reform seems nearly impossible. That is why it took 100 years since Teddy Roosevelt first proposed that we guarantee access to our health care system for all Americans for it to happen.

You have a lot of chances for that idea to crater. You need both Chambers to pass the exact same bill, you need a President willing to sign it, you need the courts to uphold it, and then you need the electorate to confirm it when everybody who voted for it stands for reelection again.

The reason why we are implementing the health care law today and the reason why most Americans want it to go forward is we passed every single one of those tests. For the first time in a hundred years the exact same proposal to reform our health care system passed with a majority of both the House and the Senate and was signed by our President. The Supreme Court reviewed the law and stamped that it was constitutional. Then this President and every Member of the Senate who voted for the health care bill went out to stand for reelection in 2012, based on the promise they would continue to implement the law. The President was reelected by a resounding margin and every Senator in this Chamber who voted for the health care law won reelection. The bill passed, the courts upheld it, voters confirmed their original choices. People want this law.

We already compromised on the amount in the continuing resolution. It cannot be much of a negotiation when all we want is for the government to stay up and operating and for us to pay our bills. This place cannot work if, every time you negotiate a budget, everybody has to have their own political priorities taken care of.

We do not need to negotiate because we already have a bill that enjoys the support of both Chambers and will be signed by the President if only the House of Representatives will call it for a vote. The idea that people do not want the health care law simply is not borne out either by the polls or by people's conduct on the exchanges over the last 2 weeks.

Melanie Rhodes is waiting for an answer from us. Malachi needs to get back into preschool, ASAP. He is a little autistic boy who, every single day he sits home by himself, is marching a little bit more quickly backward off the progress gained through this program, funded not by government but by all of us, because we thought it was important that little boys with autism growing up in poor families with moms who used to be homeless should have a chance at success in life. Every day we continue to reverse our collective decision as a society that Malachi should get some help, he goes backward and backward. His mom, to whom we said: You know what. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, do the right thing for yourself and your child--she did it. She got him into Head Start, she found a job, and now because that program is shut down, she likely will not be able to start her job. He moves backward. She moves backward.

It is not because Democrats will not negotiate.

I yield the floor.

I thank my colleague from Connecticut for the question. As he knows, there are a thousand different children in that one Head Start Program alone who have essentially lost access to childcare. This week I think the number is, as the Senator knows, about 18,000 kids across the country who will lose access to health care. As we have seen, it has already had a big effect in our State because we have so many defense manufacturers. Some of the initial furloughs to civilians have caused a loss of work among families who could not afford it. We are seeing over and over how this shutdown trickles down.

Frankly, it is affecting the very families who cannot afford to miss a paycheck, the very families who cannot make quick arrangements to find somebody else to take care of their autistic child. As the Senator has seen and knows, this is affecting, in our small State, thousands and thousands of residents who did not have a lot of wiggle room when it came to the support that was standing around them due to programs run by the Federal Government.

I would say to the Senator, we have had this effort on behalf of Republicans to kind of pick and choose which parts of the government they are going to reopen. As I noted here on the floor in objecting to one of these piecemeal requests, that exact program my colleague referred to, the senior nutrition program which provides meals to very low-income and often very frail seniors who are getting them either at a senior center or delivered to them through the Meals On Wheels Program, was not initially one of the programs that Republicans chose to reopen.

That is why we object to this piecemeal approach. It is bad policy to allow

for a wing of this House or the other House to pick and choose which people they help, leaving on the outside, as the Senator mentioned, some who are very deserving, such as very frail and often very hungry senior citizens.

I think the majority leader made it very clear he is willing to sit down to talk about everything and anything the Republicans want to discuss but not with a gun to our heads. Let's reopen the government. Then, as we as a Chamber have been willing to do over and over, let's sit down in a budget conference with everything part of that budget on the table.

But this just cannot happen every time that one faction of one House does not get their way, they shut down the government until their particular demands are remediated.

As I was saying, Senator Blumenthal and I care deeply about the issue of background checks. He worked his entire life on this issue. But given his life's work, he is still not coming to this Chamber and demanding until he gets his way on that issue, which is of such vital importance to his constituents and mine, that he will shut down the government.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the period of morning business be extended until 5 p.m. today, with all other provisions of the previous order remaining in effect.

Mr. President, let me thank my great friend from Louisiana for her remarks and for all the work she has done to stand up for her constituents, but also for small businesses. I think she makes a great point, that right now there are thousands of small businesses throughout my State, the northeast, throughout the Presiding Officer's State as well, that are waiting for loans from the SBA that cannot get them because right now the SBA is essentially out of business. That right now is having a detrimental effect on our economy.

I thank her for her great advocacy on behalf of the small businesses throughout Louisiana and across the country.

There is a lot of truth to the fact that there can be mutual blame thrown around this place very often when it comes to the reasons why we have not solved a lot of our most vexing problems as a nation. The deficit, for instance, did not get to be the size it is without both parties playing a role in the fact that we still sit back without the will to try to take on that enormous problem and burden we are leaving to our kids. That is due to both Republican and Democratic intransigence.

There are a lot of things that happen here in which you can very accurately and appropriately assess that both sides of the aisle have been part of the blame. This is not one of them. This is not one of them. When it comes to trying to figure out the reasons why our government is shut down, it is pretty simple to explain how we got here.

Yet I have heard a lot of my friends on the other side blame the majority leader and blame the President for the shutdown. I have even heard some newscasts try to suggest that it is just sort of good old- fashioned generic gridlock here in Washington that has led to this shutdown.

Mostly the American public gets it. I think mostly the American public understands that this is essentially a shutdown of the Federal Government caused by a small band of ideological conservatives in the House of Representatives called the tea party. I have sort of tried to struggle with how to explain this to the handful of people back in Connecticut who still do not understand what is going on, although there is no way to create an analogy that works.

I mean this shutdown is so ridiculous, it is so unique that there is no metaphor that works. I have tried this one. Imagine that there is a couple. They live in Boston, let's say. The wife loves living in Boston, but the husband has sort of been fed up with Boston for a little while. He wants to move to the west coast, let's say to San Francisco. But they have been living in Boston for a long time. They have this disagreement as to what to do next. They have been having it for a while. They have not sorted it out. But they chose to live in Boston, so that is where they continue to be.

Well, one day the husband comes home and says to his wife: You know what. I have had enough. I have had enough. I want to move to San Francisco. If you do not agree, I am going to call up some contractors and have them come over and take the roof off our house.

She says: What are you talking about? Take the roof off our house? I

never talked about the roof coming off our house. The roof is important. It keeps us warm. It keeps us dry. You are kidding, right? You are not going to take the roof off the house.

He said: Listen, I am going to give you 3 days. If you do not agree to move to San Francisco, then I am going to call someone and take the roof off of our house.

She says: Well, of course, I am not going to do that. Of course I am not going to move to a place that I do not want to move to. We should talk about that. We should come up with a compromise. We should discuss this. Certainly I am not going to agree to move to San Francisco if you are threatening to take the roof off the house.

Three days go by. She goes to work. She comes home, and the roof is gone. He took it off. She cannot believe it. She cannot believe it. Rain is coming in. It is the middle of winter. It is freezing cold. It is miserable.

He shows up to work on the second day, and says to his coworkers: You cannot believe what my wife did. She took the roof off our house.

The coworkers say: Well, what do you mean?

I told her we had to move to San Francisco. And when she did not agree, I told her I was going to take the roof off the house. I did, but it was her decision. She would not move to where I wanted to move. So I had to go through with it. I had to take the roof off the house.

If you were that coworker and listened to that story, you would know exactly what was going on. You would know exactly who to blame. You would associate yourself with the decision the wife made and say: Forget it, I am not moving somewhere with that threat hanging over my head. You would back her up when she said: Put the roof back on the house before we start discussing about where we are going to live next.

That is essentially what has happened here. We had always assumed that the operation of the Federal Government was not something we negotiated over, just like the woman in my analogy assumed that the roof being on the house was not something that she had to worry about disappearing.

Yet here we are. The government is shut down simply because of the demands of a small group of tea party Republicans in the House of Representatives. Their demand in this case is they want the health care law repealed, despite the fact that it was passed by two legislative bodies, signed by the President, upheld by the Supreme Court, verified in an election in which a President who said he would implement it was reelected by a huge margin. Every single Senator in the Senate who supported it and ran for reelection was reelected.

That is their demand in this case. As the Senator from Louisiana said, we should react as we would expect that woman to react. We want the government back up and operating, and then we will talk. I want the roof back on my house before we discuss where we are going to live.

This isn't about politics any longer. This isn't about inconvenience.

We are now going into the second week of this shutdown. It has started to ruin lives, such as Melanie Rhodes' from Bridgeport, CT. A few years ago Melanie was homeless, living out on the streets. Things were very tough for Melanie. Melanie became pregnant and had a little boy, a wonderful little boy about 2 months premature, a wonderful little boy named Malachi. Malachi had some developmental issues right off the bat, but she knew her life had changed and she had to do everything possible for her little boy. She placed him into the Birth to Three System, our early screening program. They identified the problems he had. He was connected with a Head Start Program in which he was enrolled at about 9 months old.

Malachi is still behind his peers at 3 years old, but he is doing a lot better. He is beginning to finally communicate with a handful of signs. Every day he has been in that Head Start Program his life and her life have become better. Even though she has been struggling through the worst recession of her life, of my life, of most of our lives, she started to turn the corner very well. She applied everywhere over the last 3 years. She did everything we would have asked of her to try to find a job. She applied with Walmart, Walgreens, and McDonald's.

Finally, in the past few weeks she got a job as a busdriver. She had completed her training, was waiting for her background check to come through, and was to start her job in a matter of days. She stayed up all night last Monday night, past midnight, watching CNN, watching the news, to see if the government was going to be up and operating. She knew the Bridgeport Head Start Program runs on a budget that expired at the end of September. That was one of the handful of programs that would shut down immediately upon the shutdown of the government.

She woke up on Tuesday morning and hoped against all hope by calling Head Start to see if they were going to be up and operating, and they weren't. They had shut down. Bridgeport told 1,000 families across southwestern Connecticut that they couldn't show up for preschool that day. Their families had to scramble to find some kind of coverage for childcare.

For Melanie it was a double disaster because she has a child with developmental disabilities. She can't have just anybody take care of him, and she is having a hard time finding someone. She is now going to be faced with not only inappropriate care for her child, perhaps setting him back developmentally, but she also probably can't start that job she was waiting for.

If we take this situation and multiply it times 1,000 in only one city in Connecticut, then look at the fact that that problem could be multiplied 18,000 times over the course of next week as more Head Start Programs shut down, we see this shutdown is not about politics. It is not about inconvenience. It is about people's lives falling apart.

What about the 1,500 workers at Sikorsky Aircraft, the majority of whom are in Connecticut. They have 43 employees from the Federal Government who inspect the helicopters as they go down the assembly line. But because those helicopter assembly lines are making Black Hawk helicopters for the U.S. military and they move pretty fast, if they don't have those inspectors for a handful of days, they can't continue to move the assembly line.

On Friday, 1,500 workers were furloughed from Sikorsky Aircraft, let go until those inspectors are back on the job--43 inspectors equal 1,500 private sector layoffs.

When you are laid off from a job, sometimes if you can see it coming, you can try to make arrangements. If you are on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, where everything that comes in goes right back out again to pay your food bills, mortgage, student loans, whatever it may be--if you can see the layoff coming, then you might be able to scramble to find a part-time job or save a little bit more for the final few months of your employment. But when you get a notice in 2 days you are going to be laid off for an indeterminate amount of time, there is no way for the people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck to put their lives together.

As Senator Landrieu said, that results in mortgage payments being missed, in credit ratings going into the tank, and lives being ruined off of a purely political crisis caused by a handful of rightwing Republicans in the House of Representatives.

I hear my friends on the other side of the aisle and Speaker Boehner say, yes, but if the Democrats would only negotiate, would compromise, we could get this thing done. Before I yield the floor to my friend from Rhode Island, I wish to say two things about that insistence from Republicans that the problem is not their demands that the health care law be repealed before we open the government but it is that Democrats will not sit down and negotiate.

I think the Senator from Louisiana said it best: It makes no sense to negotiate with a gun to our head. Open the government and we will sit down and talk about anything the other side wishes to talk about.

Let us also discuss what the positions of the two parties are. Republicans want the most important achievement of President Obama's first term repealed. We want the government to continue to be operational. Republicans want a law taken off the books that will ensure 30 million more people with health care. We want the government to continue to pay its bills.

What I am trying to say is that we don't actually have demands. All we

want is what our constituents have always expected to happen to continue to happen. All we have asked for in this crisis created by tea party Republicans is for the government to be open and for the government to continue to pay its bills.

We could make a bunch of our own demands. I think it is ridiculous that we don't have background checks on the purchase of firearms in this country, but I am not saying I am going to shut down the government unless I get my way on background checks. All I want is the government to be open and for us to pay our bills.

Second, normally one negotiates when we don't have consensus. Normally, we sit down and compromise when 50 percent of the Senate and 50 percent of the House doesn't agree to the exact same thing. That is why we have to sit down and talk--because we do not have consensus.

We do. We have a bill, which is the clean continuing resolution--and otherwise just keep the government open and operating for another 6 weeks on the same rules it used to be operating under. We had, I think, 54 votes in the Senate. It is publicly supported by a majority of the House of Representatives.

Why would we negotiate when we already have a bill that is supported by the majority of the Senate and the majority of the House? The only thing that has to happen in order for the government to get back and on its feet is for Speaker Boehner to call a vote on that bill. It makes no sense that Speaker Boehner says sit down and negotiate, when there is already a proposal pending before the House that has the support of the majority of both bodies.

We don't have a lot to negotiate over because all we want is the government to open and for us to pay our bills. We don't need to negotiate because we already have a proposal that enjoys the support of the majority of this body and the majority of that body.

Tea party Republicans should stop holding this country hostage to their ideological demands. Speaker Boehner should call a vote on this bill tonight and this totally self-created crisis could come to an end today.

I yield the floor.

Reserving the right to object, Madam President, my understanding is that the Senator is proposing to allow for appropriations to move forward for a portion of veterans funding. Let me just say a few things. It is clearly a hardship that the shutdown is going to result in a diminution of benefits to our veterans. I appreciate the Senator coming to the floor to try to address that today.

But as my colleague from Connecticut just mentioned, it is also an unacceptable hardship that there is about to be 4,000 workers at Sikorsky Aircraft who are going to be furloughed on Friday because of this shutdown. It is also an unacceptable hardship that thousands of Head Start children are going to show up to their preschool being closed. It is an unacceptable hardship to millions of frail elderly who are going to have their nutritional benefits compromised.

So I think we can all agree that the consequences of the shutdown are unacceptable to our veterans. They are unacceptable, though, to a panoply of other families and individuals across the country.

I would note also that I believe the resolution the Senator is offering and suggested be passed provides only partial funding for the VA. There is no funding here to operate the national cemeteries. There is no funding for the Board of Veterans' Appeals. There is no funding for constructing VA hospitals and their clinics. There is no funding, actually, to operate the IT system that the entire VA needs in order to continue going forward.

So I would actually offer and ask unanimous consent that the Senator's request be modified; that an amendment which is at the desk be agreed to, that the joint resolution, as amended, then be read a third time and passed, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

This amendment is the text that passed the Senate. It is a clean continuing resolution for the entire government and something that is already over in the House and reportedly has the majority support of the Members of the House of Representatives. This would solve the problems I am sure the Senator is going to talk about with respect to certain veterans but would also solve all of those other problems and would make sure we continue to have funding for the national cemeteries, continue to build hospitals that need to be built for veterans, continue to service the IT needs that underlay the foundation of our veterans systems, and also make sure Head Start kids do not get turned away from their classrooms, make sure Sikorsky Aircraft workers get to go back to work, make sure our food still gets inspected, we get meals to our frail elderly.

The CR is in front of the Senate. If the Senator would agree, I propose we move forward with this modification to his request.

Again, the Senator having rejected my offer to modify his consent--we have an opportunity to pass a continuing resolution which enjoys the support of the Senate, which reportedly enjoys the support of the majority of Members of the House of Representatives should the Speaker simply call it. We could solve the problems the Senator is about to talk about, as well as all of the other problems presented to the people being affected today by the shutdown, if we would just move forward with a clean continuing resolution with no political riders attached to it.

For that reason, I object.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the period of morning business for debate only be extended to 5 p.m., with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, the Founding Fathers set up a system of government which intentionally made social change in this country hard to achieve. They set up a pretty complicated legislative process with an innovative bicameral legislature in which you have to get the exact same bill with the exact same text passed through two different Chambers. They set up courts that could overturn those laws if they didn't abide by the Constitution. They set up an office down the street in the White House with a veto power that could cancel out actions of the majoritarian legislature. Then they built in pretty frequent elections so that if people didn't like what happened here, they could change the composition of the legislature to try to get something different to happen. So I imagine that is why it took 100 years since Teddy Roosevelt first proposed that this country make a commitment to universal health care that we actually got here. All the while, we watched as every other industrialized nation in the world decided that the compassionate thing to do was to make sure people didn't die because they didn't have enough money to get into the health care system, and they committed themselves to universal health care while the United States sat on the sideline.

What happened is a couple years ago when, after 100 years of debate and consternation and gridlock, we finally made a decision as a nation to move forward with a health care reform bill that finally puts us on the road to guaranteeing that everybody in this country at least gets some basic access to health care, no matter how much money you have in your wallet or pocketbook. What happened is the system was literally crashing down around us. We finally woke up to the reality that we were paying twice as much for health care as any other country in the world and getting so much less--not only in that there were tens of millions of people who were sitting on the sidelines, but also in that the outcomes we were getting weren't good enough for the amount of money we were paying.

Finally the American public sent Members of the House of Representatives to make a change. They elected Senators determined to make a change. They elected a President who campaigned on making a change. So in 2010, we overcame the barriers that had been set up by the Founding Fathers to major social change. Both Congresses passed that health care law. Two years later, it was upheld by the Supreme Court as constitutional. Later that year, in 2012, President Obama ran on his support of the law and his promise to implement it and was elected by a wide margin. I would note, every single Senator here who voted for it and stood for election got returned to the Senate.

But despite all of this--despite the fact that after 100 years of debate, the democratic process produced a health care reform bill that expands coverage to millions of Americans and lowers the cost of insurance for them, despite the fact that it withstood all of the challenges that can come to a major reform like that--including a constitutional challenge, including the question being put to the electorate again after the law was passed in 2010 and 2012--despite all that, Republicans have been coming to the floor of the Senate and the floor of the House saying we have got to shut down the government because the people don't want this health care law to be implemented.

And that is why they are doing this right now--because they know this is their last chance to try to get this law repealed. This law, which has already saved millions of seniors money, which right now as we speak is saving families thousands of dollars as they sign up for these exchanges, they know this is their last chance to get this bill repealed because it is about to go into effect, and all of their ridiculous arguments about how the sky is going to fall once this reform is implemented will be proven untrue. So Republicans come down here and say the American public wants this delayed.

First, let me make the point that my colleagues have been making all day: This is not the place to have that conversation. The people of this country do not support the government being shut down over Republicans' objection to the healthcare bill. There is no way this place can work if every single person adopts a ``my way or the highway'' approach, if it is a condition of running the government for just 6 weeks--which is essentially what we are arguing over here--that we have to get everybody's particular political points solved.

I get it the Republicans don't like the health care bill. But I come from Newtown, CT. I don't understand why we can't agree that before you buy a weapon, everybody should get a simple criminal background check. That is as important as anything in the world to me, coming from where I do. But I am not conditioning my support for the operation of the Federal Government upon Republicans agreeing to support me on background checks. And I bet I feel just as strongly about background checks, coming from a State which witnessed that kind of slaughter, as any Republican believes in the repeal of the health care law. But that is not how I am going to operate, nor is it how any other Democrat is operating.

When I listen to people say, well, neither side is willing to negotiate, we don't have anything to negotiate over,

because all we want is for the government to be operational. We are not attaching any conditions--no conditions, zero conditions--to the government coming back and operating. The only party attaching conditions to the operation of the Federal Government is Republicans. This isn't a negotiation. We just want the government to be back open for business, with no extras.

But I am OK to have a debate on what the people think about the health care law. I don't think it should be: Well, we have the government shut down. I don't think there should be a gun to our head involving the paychecks of thousands of both government and civilian employees as well as the safety of our Nation and of our food and of our water and of our air. But let's have that debate. Polls are going to tell you people are still kind of divided as to whether they like the particulars of the law that we passed to reform our health care system, but they do not want it repealed. In fact, one of the most recent polls I looked at, which has been consistent with most everything I have seen, said that only 33 percent of Americans, just 1 out of 3, want the law repealed or delayed or defunded. By a 2-to-1 margin, people want the health care law implemented because they get that the current system is totally broken and they want a chance to try to fix it.

Second, by absolutely astounding, overwhelming margins the American people oppose the tea party's attempt to shut down the government unless the health care bill is repealed. Those numbers are even bigger. It is not 2-to-1, it is more like 3-to-1 or 4-to-1. The most recent Quinnipiac University poll said the American public opposes Republican efforts to shut down the Government over the defunding of the health care law by a 72-to-22 margin. And of course the next hostage that Republicans are going to take is the full faith and credit of the American government because they are not going to raise the debt ceiling unless they get a whole other set of conditions agreed to, and guess what. The American public does not want that either. By a slightly smaller margin of 64-to-27 percent the American public says pay your bills. Don't put a bunch of conditions, a bunch of political riders on just paying your bills.

When Americans fill the gas tank, they put their credit card in and pay the bill. They don't fill the tank and drive away, which is essentially what we would be doing if we agreed to a budget and then refused to pay the bills we incurred.

Third, beyond the polling on the specific repeal or delay, beyond the polling on the shutdown tactics that Republicans are using, do you want to know what people think of this health care law? Then just look at what happened over the last 48 hours after these exchanges opened. The volume at healthcare.gov continues to be astronomical. Even today on I think the third day of implementation, 6.1 million unique visits in the first 24 hours; 190,000 calls into the HHS call center; 104,000 Web chats were requested.

I think the estimate is that about 15 million people are going to sign up for either the expanded Medicaid portion of the law or private insurance through the exchanges in the first year or so; 15 million are going to sign up over the entirety of the first year. On the first day, 6.1 million people went to check out whether they are going to get a better product. It is going to take a little while for all those people to sign up, but if 6 million people are just showing up on the Web site on day 1, admittedly shutting the thing down for a little while and making the Web site slow down significantly, that tells you people out there are desperate for cheaper insurance. And they are going to get it.

I saw someone who was quoted in the paper who looked at the rate they were going to get in the exchange versus what they were paying and they called it a ``pocketbook changer.'' This changes people's lives. Not only will they get insurance for the first time but to the extent that today people are paying 20, 30, 40 percent more than they may have to pay on the exchange, that helps them and helps our economy because that money goes right back out into Main Street.

Mr. President, 6.1 million people went on the site in the first 24 hours because all of these sick people or parents with sick kids who have been waiting their entire lives to be able to get health care finally get it, because on the exchanges insurance companies cannot tell you ``no'' just because you are sick. I hate to tell my friends on the other side of the aisle but there is an enormous amount of really sick people out there who have been getting sicker because they cannot afford to go to a doctor. Why are there 6 million people showing up on the Web site on day 1? It is because there are a lot of people in trouble, in dire straits, who want insurance.

The reason there is a flood of interest in these exchanges is because people want cheaper and better health care and they are sick and tired of waiting around for it. But what they are even more sick and more tired of is this place playing games with life and death, because that is what this is to people out there. If they get access to health care, then they have a chance at a quality life. If they do not, they are going to get sick and a lot of people are not going to make it.

We should fund the Government, get it back up and operating. Speaker Boehner has the votes to pass a clean continuing resolution in the House tonight, today. He should call it up for a vote. He can pass it. We can pass it. The government can get back up and operating and then we can have a debate about whether people in this country want the health care law implemented. It may be that people from a certain Senator's State or a certain congressional district may have different feelings. But the people of this country, both in the polling and in their response to the first 3 days of its implementation, have made it perfectly clear: They don't want this place to play games with the operation of the Federal Government. They do not support the tea party shutting down the Federal Government over their political beliefs and they want access--for the first time in many of their lives--to affordable health care.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the sessions of the Senate on October 3, 2013, at 9:30 a.m.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 3, 2013, at 10 a.m., to hold a hearing entitled, ``Reversing Iran's Nuclear Program.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 3, 2013, at 2:30 p.m., to hold a Western Hemisphere and Global Narcotics Affairs subcommittee nomination hearing.

Mr. President, I ask to speak in morning business for 10 minutes.

Mr. President, after 5 years of being a parent, I have gotten used to temper tantrums. It is an unavoidable part of having kids. They demand something--they want a second dessert, they want another 10 minutes before bedtime--and if they don't get it, they storm out of the room. That aspect of early human nature--the inability to deal with defeat and the unwillingness to compromise--luckily goes away over time as we get older and wiser and more thoughtful--everywhere except for Washington, DC.

By now everybody gets what is going on. As Senator Durbin said, we are only a handful of hours away from a government shutdown--another manufactured, made-up, totally avoidable crisis. This one is just because we can't pass a 6-month continuing resolution. We are having a problem just keeping the government open under the exact same rules that it has been open because a small set of tea party Senators and Congressmen are basically throwing a temper tantrum because they haven't gotten their way.

It is not news to anybody that Republicans oppose the health care law. They opposed it back when it was passed by both Chambers and signed by the President. They opposed it when the Supreme Court upheld the legislation. Their Presidential candidate opposed it when he got roundly defeated in the 2012 election. My opponent and the opponent of every single Senator who stood for election who voted for the law opposed it as well, and every single time they lost.

Over and over Republicans have made it clear that they don't like the Affordable Care Act. They voted 40 times to repeal it or defund it or postpone it in the House of Representatives. This is despite the fact that today the Affordable Care Act is saving millions of seniors millions of dollars because they don't have to pay for drugs in the doughnut hole. This is despite the fact that starting in January it is going to save millions of people across the country from having to go into bankruptcy because they can't afford their health care. But Republicans are refusing to vote for a budget that will keep the government operating unless this health care bill is stopped.

For too many of those urging a government shutdown, government has just become an abstraction. They have sold themselves on the idea that government is so twisted and malignant that shutting it down just wouldn't really do anything. After all, if the goal is to starve the beast, then what better way than putting the beast into a coma for a couple of days or a week.

But that is not how this works. Government does real things for real people. It provides paychecks for 9,000 people in Connecticut. It pays Social Security benefits and processes claims for disabled veterans. It inspects our food. At the NIH, it comes up with cures for diseases. The markets watch whether the government operates because they actually know that the private sector works better when the public sector is working better. So that is why today the market once again has been falling through the floor, as it will if we move forward with this madness.

Just as we don't give in to our kids when they threaten us if we don't give them what they want, America cannot reward this ``my way or the highway'' approach from the tea party. I have strong beliefs, just as my tea party Republican friends do, but I also get that I am part of a majoritarian deliberative body. Senator McCaskill and Senator Durbin made the point, as did the Presiding Officer. We all would love to attach things to this continuing resolution. There are 20 grieving families in Newtown, CT, who do not understand why 90 percent of the American public wants background checks on weapons and we can't pass that in the Senate. I bet some of them would think it might make sense for us to condition our support of the continuing resolution on getting background checks on gun purchases. Ninety percent of the American public supports that. But we are not doing that. That is not how we govern--hold the entire Federal Government hostage to get what we want.

Ultimately, though, this just can't be how this place works. This is a 6-week continuing resolution. As the Presiding Officer said, it is just going to happen 6 weeks from now and 6 weeks after that.

I heard that a long time ago this place used to actually be involved in the business of running the country. It doesn't feel like that anymore. As I sat there on the dais a week ago now watching the middle act of Senator Cruz's long, long, long speech, it didn't feel a lot different than it has for most days that I have watched the tea party over the last several years. It felt as if I were a theater goer.

What is happening this week really isn't exceptional. It is just the latest and worst example of a long trendline away from legislating and toward playacting. With rare exceptions usually prompted only by deadlines and cliffs and fake crises, we don't do anything here any longer. We just dig trenches and we make arguments. We pass fake bills. We playact. Occasionally, when the stacks of all the things around us are about to come teetering down we stop and we push them back up again instead of thinking for a couple of seconds that if we just stopped, sat back, and actually restacked those sets of things so they didn't come crashing down, we would probably be better off. We just play parts.

There is nobody better at playing their part than the tea party Republicans. Their character is recalcitrant, uncompromising, and destructive, and we have seen all of that on display this week. If we get beyond this crisis, we will just see it once again. But there is no curtain call here in Congress after which we can pull back our masks and share a good laugh. We are still all going to be left on stage tasked with picking up the pieces.

I think I am past believing that these folks are just going to start playing a different role. It is time for the American public to start asking some questions about people before they send

them here: Are you willing to compromise? Are you interested in actually running the government? Are you going to score your term based on whether you deliver for the American people rather than how many Twitter followers you have or how many times you showed up on the TV news that week?

If this government shuts down tonight, it is just because of a temper tantrum or, put another way, a really, really bad play, the third act of which has gone on way, way too long.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I rise today to engage my colleagues Senator Wyden, Senator Murkowski, and Senator Moran in a colloquy regarding legislation the Senate adopted yesterday for the modernization of the Federal helium reserve. I first would like to commend the leadership of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee for their commitment to this effort and to thank my friend from Kansas for his partnership in this process. I know how long and hard the Chairman and Ranking Member and their staffs have worked on this complex piece of legislation, and they deserve our appreciation.

I think it is important that we discuss one of the aspects of the proposed new auction program. The text before us today creates an auction and Section 6(b)(5)(A) allows the Secretary to auction less than the statutorily mandated amount if the Secretary determines the adjustment necessary to minimize market disruptions. The Secretary may make such adjustments only after only after submitting a written justification to the congressional committees of jurisdiction. I wish to ask Chairman Wyden whether he believes this provision will be exercised?

Mr. President, I again wish to thank the Chairman and the Ranking Member for their tireless efforts and their willingness to work with us on these important issues. I yield the Floor to the Senator from Kansas, Mr. Moran.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.