Extension of Continuing Appropriations and Other Matters Act, 2024
Floor Speech
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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I am really glad that we have cleared consensus that no one wants to see a government shutdown and that preventing one now will require a very short CR so we can continue making good progress on our full-year funding bills.
I have been at the table for a long time now pushing to make progress every single day, and we are genuinely close. And if bipartisan cooperation prevails, I am very confident we can, at long last--at long last--wrap up our fiscal year 2024 bills.
And, as my colleagues are aware, we plan to release the first six bills in the coming days to give everyone time to review them before a vote next week, while we continue to lock up the last six bills.
I am confident we can get all of our funding bills done in the next few weeks, as long as partisan poison pills are taken off the table.
We are working in a divided government. That means, to get anything done, we have to work together in good faith to reach reasonable outcomes. That has been true from day one of these negotiations, and we will only reach the last day of these negotiations if that happens.
Again, we are close. We are moving in the right direction. It is full speed ahead. And we will keep working hard with our colleagues to get this wrapped up and take a shutdown completely off the table by passing the strongest bipartisan spending bills we can and, hopefully, soon.
I urge all of our colleagues to vote yes on this CR so we have the time to get these done.
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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, the House just voted overwhelmingly to send us this clean and very short CR to keep our government open while we work on passing final funding bills, which is exactly what we should all be focused on now.
But this particular motion wouldn't just prevent the Senate from averting a shutdown tomorrow; it would swap the clean, short-term CR for a full-year CR that means devastating across-the-board cuts and tie it to military aid for Israel to a yearlong CR.
We are not going to throw in the towel on our funding bills, and we are not going to do half of our job by sending aid to some of our allies while leaving others like Ukraine in the dust.
We have already on this floor passed a comprehensive national security package in an overwhelming bipartisan vote. Now the House just needs to pass that--and I am confident they will--as soon as the Speaker brings it up for a vote.
So, tonight, let's pass this CR, get our funding bills done, and keep working to get the comprehensive supplemental signed into law. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no.''
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Mrs. MURRAY. I yield it back.
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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, right now, our job is to avoid a government shutdown. The House has just sent us a very short, bipartisan CR to make sure that our Agencies and programs continue operating as we work together to pass the first six of our final funding bills next week. The House did its job. We need to do ours, and we need to keep pushing to complete our 2024 budget.
This motion would not prevent us from averting a shutdown. It would direct the Appropriations Committee to abandon weeks and weeks of very hard work and negotiations that reflect the input and interests of the Members of this body.
I urge a ``no'' vote.
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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, the clock is ticking. We face a partial shutdown of the government tomorrow night. We cannot let the threat of that government shutdown be used as leverage to set aside the bipartisan agreement on the CR before us in order to jam through deeply partisan immigration policy. We are not going to throw in the towel on our very carefully negotiated funding bills we have worked on in favor of a full-year CR that would impose devastating across-the-board cuts to defense and nondefense programs.
Vote no. Vote on Motion to Commit
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