Government Funding

Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I want to join my colleagues from Maryland and my friend, the Senator from Virginia, as well, to speak out on this manufactured crisis.

This President is holding 800,000 Federal workers hostage, folks who are going to work, some of them without pay, and others who are furloughed. As has been mentioned, this is not just affecting Federal workers. Senator Kaine and I have been talked to by a number of contractors, small business owners. A couple of them are closing their doors this week because they have now gone for weeks without being paid. You can't put a business back together after you have closed its doors. So there are 800,000 Federal employees, there are contractors, but there is a whole slew of other folks who are already immediately affected.

The complete lack of thought this administration had in this shutdown--they tried to say: We are not going to make it seem like a shutdown. We are going to leave the parks open. Now we see destruction going on in our parks. We see in our State that Shenandoah National Park has trash overfilling. We have the battlefields where people have engaged in inappropriate activities. We have seen as well a whole slew of businesses that depend upon a high volume of tourist travel during the holidays--none of that took place.

I also wonder whether Donald Trump, who says this is about security-- well, if it is about security, we ought to make sure our Coast Guard is paid. We ought to make sure our TSA agents are paid. We are seeing dramatic numbers of folks calling in sick, dramatically reducing the ability to maintain security at our airports, where, frankly, most of our vulnerability on the border actually takes place. That is going to get exponentially worse after Friday when these employees go without a paycheck.

The fact is, these workers don't work for Donald Trump; they work for America. Echoing what my colleague said, our first order of business ought to be making sure we get this government reopened.

The final point I want to make is this: The heartlessness of this President in his comments about our Federal workers that somehow they can manage through without a paycheck, that somehow they can negotiate with their landlord if they can't pay their rent--rather than Donald Trump putting on a political show tonight on TV and a political trip to the border tomorrow, I invite the President to come anywhere in Virginia, Maryland, or the District and sit down with Federal employees and explain this crisis and why they are not getting paid.

So my hope is that, echoing what our Senators from Maryland have said, the Senate shouldn't be complicit in this. We need to reopen the government. If we want to negotiate additional border security, I am all for it, but not holding hostage, literally, our Federal employees and countless others.

I yield to the Senator from Virginia.

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