Protecting Military Pay

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I rise tonight--with the question of whether the House will allow government to continue or shut down--to actually talk for a few minutes about a simple concept but that is apparently difficult in this body, and that is compromise. I want to talk for a few minutes about compromise.

Based on the action that was taken by the Senate earlier today, the House has an opportunity to accept a compromise that the Senate has put before them. The CR bill the House drafted contained a budget number that was their number, not our number. We weren't wild about it, but we accepted it. And the question is: Will the House accept yes for an answer?

Over the weekend, I was traveling in Virginia--especially yesterday when the weather was great--to different events in central Virginia where there were big festivals, so people were gathering outside. As I traveled, I heard again and again: Don't shut down government and can't you find a compromise?

People are aware in Virginia, and in Hawaii I know they feel the same, that there can be severe consequences to a shutdown. I know the Senator from Maryland may have already offered a number of these thoughts. A great agency such as NASA that funds science and research will see furloughs of 97 percent of its employees. The Commerce Department, which is about commerce, our business and our economy, will see furloughs of 87 percent of its employees. The National Institutes of Health, dealing with research and other important health matters, will see furloughs of 73 percent of their employees. Even an agency such as Treasury--the core Treasury function, separate from the IRS--will see a reduction of their staff at 50 percent at a time when we need the Nation's fiscal system to be strong.

The consequences of shutdown are severe, and that is why the citizens of Virginia are saying: Don't shut the government down. Find compromise. It is not just employees either, and that is significant enough. It will affect tens of thousands of employees in Virginia and services people rely on. To pick one as an example, the number of VA employees who will be furloughed is actually fairly small as a percentage, but the people at the VA who will be furloughed are the folks who work at the VA Benefits' Administration, which is the organization within the VA that processes veterans' benefits claims.

If you are a veteran who has come home from Iraq or Afghanistan, and you have been part of a war that has now lasted for 12 or 13 years and you want to file for your benefits, which is something you are entitled to because you fought for the Nation--and we have heard the stories of the backlog in veterans' claims--you will be delayed even more because of the furlough. It is unfair to do this to our veterans. It is unfair to do this across government.

I said I wanted to talk about compromise because I think this is not even fundamentally a battle about the budget. It is not a battle about the Affordable Care Act. It is a battle about whether compromise is good or bad.

I don't know if anyone had a chance to read this, but there was a wonderful article in the Washington Post--an opinion article on Friday, September 27--that was authored by a columnist of the Post, Michael Gerson. Michael was the former speechwriter for President Bush 43, George W. Bush. He worked in the Bush administration and wrote an excellent piece that was published, and I want to read a bit of it. The title of the piece is ``A compromised reputation among the GOP.'' Again, it ran in The Washington Post last Friday. I will read a couple of quotes:

The real target--

Not the ACA, not the budget--

is the idea of compromise itself, along with all who deal, settle or blink.

In the middle of this unfolding Republican debate comes a timely National Affairs article by Jonathan Rauch. It is titled ``Rescuing Compromise,'' but it might as well have been called ``James Madison for Dummies.''

Rauch argues that Madison--

I have to mention a Virginian in my speech--

had two purposes in mind as he designed the Constitution. The first was to set faction against faction as a brake on change and ambition--a role that tea-party leaders have fully embraced. Madison's second purpose, however, was ``to build constant adjustment into the system itself, by requiring constant negotiation among shifting constellations of actors.''

Following the Articles of Confederation, America's founders wanted a more energetic government. But they made action contingent upon bargaining among branches of government and within them. ``Compromise, then, is not merely a necessary evil,'' argues Rauch, ``it is a positive good, a balance wheel that keeps government moving forward instead of toppling.''

Compromise, of course, can have good or bad outcomes. But an ideological opposition to the idea of compromise removes an essential cog in the machinery of constitutional order. ``At the end of the day,'' says Rauch, ``the Madisonian framework asks not that participants like compromising but that they do it--and, above all, that they recognize the legitimacy of a system that makes them do it.''

Finally from the Gerson article:

It is a revealing irony that the harshest critics of compromise should call themselves constitutional conservatives. The Constitution itself resulted from an extraordinary series of compromises. And it created the system of government that presupposes the same spirit. ``Compromise,'' says Rauch, ``is the most essential principle of our constitutional system. Those who hammer out painful deals perform the hardest and, often, highest work of politics; they deserve, in general, respect for their willingness to constructively advance their ideals, not condemnation for treachery.''

That is what this debate is about: Is compromise good or is it bad? We have to be willing to compromise.

I want to talk about what the Senate has been doing to advance the spirit of compromise. On the 23rd of March in this body--after a very late night--at 5 a.m. in the morning, the Senate passed the first Senate budget that we passed in 4 years. In that same week, the House passed a budget as well. We have talked about this often. Once that happens and the two budgets are passed, there is a budget conference to sit down and try to find compromise between these two different documents.

These budgets passed more than 6 months ago, but there has been no budget conference. There has been no effort to find compromise. Why not? Because the Republicans--a tiny handful in the Senate and the majority in the House--do not want to compromise.

Senate Democrats have made a motion 18 times since March 23 to begin a budget conference, and in every one of those instances, a handful of Republican--and when I use the word handful, I am quoting the Senator from Utah who objected to a budget compromise and said ``a handful of us object''--Members of this body, working together with House colleagues, have decided they do not want to put in motion the process for dialog and compromise.

The Senate Democrats were, are, and will be ready to sit down at a budget conference table to negotiate, listen, and compromise to find a budget going forward. We have tried 18 times. We will try it a 19th time. We will try it a 20th time. We will keep working to compromise.

We also compromised in the very matter of the bill that is pending before the body today. As the Presiding Officer knows, the continuing resolution bill was sent from the House over to the Senate last week. That is the way these bills start; they originate in the House. The bill had two components. The first component was ``defund ObamaCare,'' and the second was ``and then we will fund government.''

The House bill said they would fund the government at their proposed budgetary number, which is $986 billion in discretionary spending. That was their number; that was not our number. We had extensive discussions among Senators about what we thought of their proposal. Frankly, we thought the $986 billion number was too low. It includes all of the sequester cuts we disagree with. We think the right number to the budget compromise should be $1.05 trillion, not $986 billion.

The Senate has a different idea about the number, but guess what. The Senate was willing to accept the House's number. We accepted the House's budget number out of the spirit of compromise, and we stripped away the ``defund the Affordable Care Act'' provision and said: Let's put that into a budget negotiation. In a budget negotiation, we can talk about that or anything else they want, but we won't tie it up with the threat of a government shutdown.

So we sent the budget bill back to the House at their budget number and said to them: Can't you take yes for an answer? They have proposed funding at $986 billion. We do not agree with that number, but for purposes of the short-term CR, we will agree, out of the spirit of compromise: Can you take yes for an answer?

The Presiding Officer knows the answer. They would not take yes for an answer. They brought it back and added new provisions: the repeal of a tax that would increase the deficit, and a delay in the Affordable Care Act provisions that would provide maternity service to expecting mothers, that would protect adults from not getting insurance on the grounds of preexisting conditions, that would give a significant tax credit to small businesses to help them pay for insurance. They wanted to delay all of those provisions.

We have taken action again today. We have again made this bill what we call a clean spending bill. We have taken out anything other than what this bill was supposed to be: At what level should government be funded? We have gone back to the House and we said: We are accepting your proposal. We are accepting your number even though we have a different number we want to argue for, and we will save the other arguments for a budget conference if you will finally go to the table with us.

I want to conclude and say that James Madison was right, and not because he was a Virginian. He was just right to recognize that compromise is the essential element of our system. Think about it for a minute. If you set up a government, you have three different branches. The legislative branch has two Houses. You have to find compromise between the two Houses to move forward.

The Supreme Court in the judiciary has nine Justices. They have to work together and find a compromise, or a consensus, by a majority on any case.

Even the President's power, which is unilateral so it seems as though it is not a compromise branch because we put the executive powers in the President's hands. How do we choose the President? We choose the President through the fundamental constitutional compromise of the electoral college. So the choice of a President is based on compromise.

The entire constitutional system we have requires compromise. The Senate was willing to compromise and go to a budget resolution, and we have been blocked by the House. The Senate was willing to compromise and accept the House's budget number and they have not been willing to say yes even to their own budget number.

We stand here tonight at 5:27 p.m. ready to compromise, and we will be ready the next hour to compromise. We will be ready to compromise and find a deal to keep this government open every minute, every second, from now until we get this right. But we do feel very strongly that no one should threaten to shut down the government of the United States.

If a foreign enemy threatened to shut us down, we would unify, as we have so many times, to repel that threat. But we are allowing elected Members of Congress to threaten to shut down this body, the government of the greatest Nation on Earth? It is unfathomable to me. The only way I understand it is in exactly the terms Michael Gerson indicated in the Washington Post. This is not fundamentally about the Affordable Care Act or a debate about the budget. It is a fundamentally an attack by some upon the very notion of compromise that is at the core of our system of constitutional government.

I stand on behalf of Virginians--and I don't think Virginians are different from the rest of America--by saying we have to be willing to compromise to find the common good. It is my hope that the House, when they act tonight, will act in the spirit of compromise and the common good and allow this government to remain open.

I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

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