Protecting Military Pay

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I wish to concur with much of what my colleague from Vermont just said. Clearly, in our small State a government shutdown will be devastating--devastating for many thousands of Federal employees. If a shutdown continues, it will be devastating for families who have kids in Head Start. If a shutdown continues, it will be devastating for seniors who are on the Meals On Wheels Program and for pregnant women and young mothers and their kids who are on the WIC Program. This is going to hit Vermont hard, and it is going to hit America hard, and this is something that should not be taking place.

This debate is not about the Affordable Care Act. That is something which should be debated. I think it can be improved. What this debate is about is blackmail and hostage-taking.

What my Republican colleagues--especially the rightwing extremists in the House--are upset about is not so much ObamaCare; what they are upset about is that they lost the election in November. President Obama won by some 5 million votes. They lost seats. The Republicans lost seats in the Senate and they lost some seats in the House.

What they are upset about is that they cannot legislatively accomplish what they want to through the normal legislative process. What legislation is about is the House passes a bill, the Senate passes a bill, they both get together, work on something, compromise, and then the President signs it. They do not have the support to do that, so what they have now concluded is the only way they can go forward is to say: If we don't get our way, if we don't shut down the government or kill ObamaCare or delay ObamaCare--that is the only game in town. That is all we are going to do. We can't do it the normal way.

So what they are doing is holding the Congress and the American people hostage. That is unacceptable. It is unacceptable not only in terms of the Affordable Care Act, but let's be very clear: If we were to succumb and agree to this type of blackmail, does anybody not believe that 2 weeks from now, when the United States needs to pay its debts, we will be threatened and for the first time in the history of this country we will be in a situation where we may not be able to pay our debts, which economists tell us could lead not only to a major financial and economic crisis in this country, but it could impact the entire world.

So if we say: Hey, no problem, we are going to yield to your blackmail now, what do you think will happen in 2 weeks? They will be back then. And next year when we go through this process again, it may not be the Affordable Care Act, it may be Social Security. Many of our rightwing extremist Republicans want to end Social Security. If we go through this process and submit to this blackmail now, I certainly will not be surprised if a year from now this same group of people says: Hey, look, you are not going to have a budget unless we end Social Security or we end Medicare as we know it right now.

So I think submitting and allowing blackmail to take place is very bad public policy. If Republicans or anybody else wants to have a discussion about how we can improve the Affordable Care Act--and I certainly think we can because I think it is too complicated in many respects, I think it leaves many people still uninsured. We are the only country in the industrialized world that does not provide health care to all of our people as a right, and ObamaCare doesn't do that. So I want to see some improvements made in it, but let's do it in the normal legislative process, and let's not say that if we don't get our way, we are going to shut down the government; we are going to impact hundreds of thousands of Federal workers; we are going to impact many vulnerable people who are dependent on Federal programs.

Another point I wish to make is that we hear from some of our Republican colleagues that the world is about to come to an end because the Affordable Care Act will be implemented. But it is important to understand that many of these same arguments have been made in the past around the time or shortly after major pieces of legislation were passed which today are enormously popular.

Right now we have over 50 million people who benefit from Social Security. Social Security is an enormously important and popular program in this country. But let me take you back to April of 1935 when Social Security was just passed, and I will quote what some Republicans had to say about Social Security at that time.

April 19, 1935, Republican Congressman John Taber said this about Social Security:

Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for people.

Ask most working people in Hawaii and in Vermont whether Social Security is enslaving them. I think they would not understand what you are talking about because since its inception Social Security has been enormously successful in reducing the poverty rate among seniors.

But it was not only Congressman Taber in 1935. Here is what Republican Congressman James Wadsworth told the American people:

This bill opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.

The world was just about coming to an end in 1935 because they passed Social Security.

Republican Senator Daniel Hastings in 1935 called Social Security ``un-American'' and told the American people that Social Security would ``end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European.''

I am not sure what that means but looks pretty scary.

On May 6, 1935, former President Herbert Hoover said:

As a matter of economic security alone, we can find it in our jails. The slaves had it. Our people are not ready to be turned into a national zoo, our citizens classified, labeled and directed by a form of self-approved keepers.

That is a former President of the United States on Social Security.

It is not widely known, but in 1936 the Republicans campaigned to repeal Social Security. That year the Republican nominee for President said that Social Security is unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted, and wastefully financed. He called Social Security a fraud on the working man and a cruel hoax and said: We must repeal Social Security. The Republican Party has pledged to do this.

It has turned out not quite to be the case. It turned out that Social Security will probably go down in history as maybe the most important and successful program ever passed by the U.S. Congress, and it plays an enormous role in keeping seniors out of poverty, helps people with disabilities, helps widows and orphans. It has been enormously successful and enormously popular despite all of these cries about how it was going to destroy our Nation. Maybe we should learn something from these prophets of doom.

Furthermore, we have a similar situation regarding Medicare. In the fairly dysfunctional health care system we currently have today where so many people are uninsured, so many people have high copayments, so many people have high deductibles, and yet we end up spending almost twice as much per capita on health care as do the other industrialized nations with guaranteed health care to all of their people--in 1965 Congress passed Medicare. Today Medicare is a very popular program. Today nearly 50 million seniors are receiving guaranteed health care benefits through Medicare. But when Medicare legislation was being debated in 1965, this is what some of the Republicans from Washington had to say. Remember, today Medicare is quite a popular program, generally regarded as a successful health care program for seniors.

On April 8, 1965, Republican Congressman Durward Hall had this to say about Medicare:

We cannot stand idly by now as the nation is urged to embark on an ill-conceived adventure in government medicine, the end of which no one can see and from which the patient is certain to be the ultimate sufferer.

I don't know where Mr. Hall is today, but I think if he were to ask the seniors throughout this country whether they are suffering from Medicare or whether they approve of Medicare, I think most of them would say they approve of Medicare.

In terms of the Medicare debate we had on July 8, 1965, Republican Senator Milward Simpson said this about Medicare:

This program could destroy private initiative for our aged to protect themselves with insurance against the cost of illness. ..... Presently, over 60 percent of our older citizens purchase hospital and medical insurance without Government assistance. This private effort would cease if government efforts were given to all older citizens.

In 1965 Congressman Joel Broyhill wrote:

Medicare would initiate what would ultimately become a Federal monopoly in regard to the financing and rendering of health care with respect to our aged to the detriment of endeavors of the private sector; this would impair the quality of health care, retard the advancement of medical science, and displace private insurance.

In 1961 Ronald Reagan warned that ``Medicare will usher in Federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. If you don't speak out against Medicare, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what

it was like in America when men were free.''

On and on it goes.

So the point to be made is not that the Affordable Care Act does not have its share of problems--it does--and not that it will take some work to implement it--it will--but what we have heard from Republicans in the past whenever a major government initiative was introduced was constant doomsday discussion about how the world would collapse.

Let me conclude by getting back to my major point that, in fact, this debate really is not about the Affordable Care Act. We can argue about the Affordable Care Act. We can change the Affordable Care Act. All of that is certainly legitimate. What this debate is about is whether 20 or 30 extreme rightwing Members of the House of Representatives are able to hold our entire government hostage. Hundreds of thousands of Federal workers, many of whom are trying to bring up their families, are going to lose their paychecks, lose their jobs. People who are going to be applying for Social Security, for Medicare, for veterans benefits will have that process significantly slowed down. Depending on how long the shutdown continues, if it takes place--and I certainly hope it doesn't--it will mean that Head Start centers will be closing and other important programs will not be available to the people who need them.

Once again, this is not a discussion about the Affordable Care Act. What this is about is whether a small number of Members of the House are able to use their position to blackmail the American people and the President and the Senate and say: If you do not do what we could not accomplish--what they could not accomplish legislatively--we are going do render terrible harm to our country.

Furthermore, as bad as the government shutdown may be--and I certainly hope it does not take place--what we are looking at in 2 weeks is something that may be even worse. If some get their way, for the first time in the history of the United States of America, we, the largest economy on Earth, may not pay our bills. That will certainly cause a huge eruption not only in our country but throughout the world in terms of markets, rising interest rates, and all kinds of terrible things.

Once again, their understanding of government is, well, I guess it is too bad we lost the election for the White House, we lost seats in this Senate, and we lost seats in the House. That is too bad, but we are still going to do what we want to do regardless of what the election was about.

We cannot allow that to happen because if we do, it is not going to stop now. It will continue and continue.

So my hope is that Speaker Boehner will do something he should do. He is not the Speaker of the Republican Party; he is the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. I suspect very strongly that if he put the bill that we passed on the floor of the House, he would have virtually all Democrats and a number of Republicans voting for it, and a majority would say: We are not going to shut down the U.S. Government.

So my request to Speaker Boehner is let the people in his body--all of the people, not just Republicans--vote on what we passed here. If he does that, I suspect we will not see a government shutdown and we will have some common sense over there.

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

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