Excepted Employees' Pay Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. SERRANO. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let me start by saying that I wish we were here on the floor today in order to consider a bill that would reopen the entire Federal Government.

This bill would pay all excepted Federal employees across the Federal Government as they would normally be paid irrespective of the shutdown. This is the right thing to do for all of our excepted Federal employees who have continued to work during the shutdown.

While this bill will provide some certainty to those individuals, we all know that there is a much easier and better method of accomplishing this goal, and that is to consider and pass the clean Senate continuing resolution which would reopen our Federal Government immediately.

I'm still unclear as to why Republicans are refusing to allow a vote on the most basic solution to this reckless shutdown.

While this bill guarantees timely pay for our employees, it does not reopen the Federal Government. That means it does nothing to solve the many problems the American people are facing as a result of the Republican decision to shut down the government.

Within the subcommittee that I am the ranking member of, the Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee, the shutdown has required the Small Business Administration, for instance, to furlough almost two-thirds of its workforce. The agency has had to shutter almost all of its loan programs for our Nation's small businesses, including loan programs for veterans, women-owned small businesses, and small businesses located in underserved areas.

Within the Federal judiciary, the Federal defenders currently have enough funding to continue operations for a couple of weeks. However, once that time is up, they may be unable to fulfill their constitutional duty to uphold the Sixth Amendment rights of criminal defendants.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been cut from 540 employees to 22, making it near impossible for the agency to perform its duty of fully reviewing thousands of different kinds of products. This will clearly increase the risk to the public.

The IRS has been forced to furlough most of its workforce, preventing the agency from providing taxpayer assistance to those who have questions, to examine questionable tax returns, or even to accept paper tax filings.

The IRS brings in the vast majority of our Nation's revenue, and the Republican shutdown is harming our ability to pay our bills.

The American people need a full continuing resolution so that their government can perform the many duties that remain essential to American consumers, investors, taxpayers, and small businesses. A clean CR would do just that.

I realize that the majority wants to do this piecemeal, one at a time. I think I'm doing some math, and at this rate, the full government would be open by 2025, so I'm hoping we can do it before that.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SERRANO. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, we keep saying it, and the folks who keep watching us wonder why we keep saying it--or maybe they know why we keep saying it. Little by little, you are reopening the government, but it may take until 2025 to accomplish it at this level. So our hope would be that we just pass the resolution that was passed in the Senate and open the government.

Now, this one is an easy one. Everyone is going to vote for this bill. In fact, this bill should pass on a voice vote so that we can get folks and pay them properly for the services they're rendering, but there are other people who need to come to work. There are other people who need to service the American people. There are Americans who need to be serviced, and this is not the way for us to behave.

A little bit of history--and I know that some people in the last couple of days have either refused to mention it or gave up on it--and that is that this all started not because there were differences in economic reasoning or behavior. It started because a group of people on your side wanted to attach killing ObamaCare--the Affordable Care Act--and they were willing to do whatever they needed to do to accomplish that.

That's not going to happen. How many times do we have to say that bill was passed by the House, passed by the Senate, signed by the President, and upheld by the Supreme Court? I don't know how many laws you can say that about in this country that we don't go after, and yet some folks just won't give up.

The time is now for us to open up the government. The time is now for us to pass this bill, to respect our Federal workers, but also to respect the American people in general by making sure that the government is open.

Take up the resolution. It will pass in 2 seconds, I assure you. In fact, I predict that if you bring that resolution to the floor, you may be shocked to get a unanimous vote, because that's what we want to do--to open up the government and then move on to deal with the issues that we have to deal with.

So let's do it, and let's do it quickly.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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