Making Continuing Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. HARKIN. Well, here we are Mr. President. I guess this is like the movie

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``High Noon.'' The two sides are walking down the street. I just hope, like in the movie ``High Noon,'' the good guys win. In other words, I hope reason and judiciousness and a sense of responsibility to the people of this country prevails, and not some knee-jerk reaction to what a few people in the House of Representatives want to do to our government.

There seems to be a sense among some Members across the aisle here, and certainly among a block of Republicans in the House, that shutting down the Federal Government is no big deal. Well, I suppose if you are of an anarchist mind--which I think some of them may be--then you do not want government, you want to create chaos, you want to create confusion.

Someone might ask: Why would someone want to create chaos and confusion? I think if you read your history, you will find that most authoritarian governments and most authoritarian movements that are based upon a minority view or a minority support gain their power through confusion and chaos, by disrupting--disrupting--the public body. I do not care whether it is authoritarian movements of the left or the right, that is what they do. They know they cannot gain power through the normal channels, especially in a democratic government, so, therefore, they do everything they can to skew the way government operates.

First, you manipulate the district lines for how you elect Members of the House of Representatives so that you have a lot of safe districts for one party. I have to hand it to the Republicans, they were very keen on this for the last 10 years or so, and they focused on redrawing the district boundaries so they would have what we might call sinecures, a safe seat.

But if you look at the election results of the last election, more Americans voted for Democratic Members of the House than they voted for Republican Members of the House, but the Republicans are in charge of the House. That is because of the way the district lines were drawn after the last census was taken.

So that is one way you do it, you skew it that way. And then what happens is you bring in a minority block of tea party-type people to the House of Representatives, and they want to sow more confusion and more chaos because they know that is the only way their views are ever going to prevail. They will never prevail in the open marketplace of ideas and debate and discourse among the American people.

On what do I base that statement? Look at the last election. A lot of what the tea party is proposing and what they are now doing in terms of focusing on shutting down the government, much of that was proposed by their candidate for President--not all of it but a lot--and I think the American people soundly rejected that. So the tea party, being frustrated because they cannot get their way electorally or in the open marketplace of ideas and discourse and public debates, now sees their only way to do it is to create confusion and chaos.

One might say if they are doing that, certainly the public will turn against them. Well, I think to a certain degree that is happening. But for the vast majority of Americans out there--who go to work every day and work hard, who are raising their families, thinking about where the next paycheck is coming from or whether they are even going to have a job; young people getting out of school with mountains of debt, trying to get a job, to start a family, perhaps--they are not focusing on the everyday activities of what we do around here in Washington. They read the headlines and may see the news or see something on their laptops or on their iPads or whatever, and what they see is a Congress that is muddled and mixed up and cannot get anything done.

You read the polls, and the people blame all of us for this. I think the people in the tea party have seen that, and I think they believe that if they can create more confusion and chaos and disruption of government, both sides will be blamed, and out of that they believe somehow they can rise to the top of the heap and infuse the government with their minority views.

That is what is happening. It is a small group of willful men and women, who have a certain ideology about how our country should run and what we should do, who cannot get their way in the normal, as I say, discourse and debate and votes either here in the Congress or in the body politic at large. And since they cannot get their way, they are going to create this confusion and discourse and hope the public will be so mixed up on who is to blame for this that they will blame both sides, and perhaps they feel their minority--which is so imbued with this passion of theirs, this ideology, this rigidness of ideology of theirs--that they are the ones who will come out en masse and vote in the next election, other people will be so discouraged they will say: Oh, a pox on both your houses, I won't vote, and, therefore, that is the path they see to taking over government.

It is dangerous. It is very dangerous. I believe we are at one of the most dangerous points in our history right now--every bit as dangerous as the breakup of the Union before the Civil War. We are at a point where: Will this Congress allow a small group dedicated--I give them credit for working hard--but a small group of dedicated, ideologically driven individuals to dictate to the Senate and the House what our course of action is going to be? We cannot give in to that.

So I call upon my friends in the Republican Party who are moderates--and there a lot of them in my own State, around the country. They are conservative, but they are responsible conservatives. They may look at Democrats and say: You want to go too fast one way. We might want to go a little bit slower that way or maybe we want to go in a slightly different direction, so let's get together and work it out and see which way we go. That is being a responsible conservative or a responsible liberal too, I would say. I call upon them to disabuse themselves of this idea that somehow they have to march in lockstep with this small band of tea party--call them what you will--rightwing ideologs--you can use whatever adjectives you want--but they must disabuse themselves of the idea that they have to somehow march in lockstep with them.

I keep reading the papers that somehow the Speaker of the House is trying to find a way out of this. Well, I do not know John Boehner real personally, but he was on the Education and Labor Committee all the time I was on the committee here. We always went to conference. We worked things out in a reasonable manner.

There is a way forward--there is a way forward--and that is for the Speaker basically to take what we do here. What we are about to pass today is a stripped-down version of a continuing resolution that will keep the government running until November 15. But it knocks out all that other junk the House put in about defunding ObamaCare and all this other stuff they put in there. It is just a straightforward: Let's keep the government running until November 15.

The compromise we made on our part was to give up on our budget line. We had a certain level that we wanted to fund the government. The Republicans had a lower level. So we accepted the lower level. We accepted that lower level. In turn, we asked, rather than going until December 15, go to November 15 on this continuing resolution funding the government.

So we accepted the lower level--hard for some of us to swallow. I didn't believe in that lower level. I thought it should be higher so we could adequately fund things such as education, health care, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all of the things--transportation infrastructure. But it was a compromise. We took the lower level.

We said: Do it until November 15 so we can bring our appropriations bills out on the floor, hopefully between now and then, and we can work on an overall spending package for next year, one that is not just a continuing resolution that just keeps things going, but maybe we want to make some changes--and we do. I know in my committee we want to change some things, hopefully make them work better. So by doing that by November 15, then that gives us a month from November 15 until Christmas to get it all worked out and hopefully have this package passed by Christmas. If we go to December 15, we will not have time to do that. So that is what is before us today.

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Here is the Speaker's avenue to act responsibly and to let the American people know there are responsible Republicans. All he has to do is take the bill we pass here and bring it up in the House and encourage some of his more moderate Republicans to support it and get the Democrats to support it and pass it in a bipartisan fashion. However, if the Speaker wants to just cater to this small band of ideologs, well then he will take what we pass here, change it around, add this, add that--I hear they have a laundry list--and then send it back to us. That is totally irresponsible.

There is a path forward. It is the path of responsibility, of being responsible, being judicious, not giving in to a small band of ideologs who want to seed confusion and discord, a small band of ideologs who want to use the power of the minority to do what they can to disrupt government in order to get their way.

When we were kids, there was always some kid who was playing marbles with you--or whatever it was, playing games--who did not get his way. So they picked up and went home, threw a temper tantrum. Well, for kids who were out playing, as we did, in the fields in small communities, temper tantrums were something they lived with. They did not really do much harm. But that is not true here in the Congress. We cannot afford the temper tantrums of a few ideologs.

There is more I could say about what they want to do and how they want to nullify laws by doing this. We have the Affordable Care Act that we passed here. It is being implemented. There has been a lot written about the exchanges starting next week. It is the law of the land and has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Yet a small band, a small group, a few on this side--not everyone on the Republican side--and some in the House want to nullify that law not through votes, they want to nullify it by shutting down the government or by not paying our bills when the debt ceiling comes and defaulting on our debt. Nullification of a law through that type of action--that is sort of like picking up your marbles and going home. But when you are a kid, no one really gets hurt. But who gets hurt from this? The American people.

I think there are a lot of people who say that shutting down the government is no big deal. It is a big deal. OMB recently estimated that in 1996 when the government shut down, it cost in today's dollars $2.1 billion just because of a few days of a shutdown of government. So those who say they are fiscal conservatives have to think about that, what the cost would be to the American people of shutting it down.

I happen to be privileged to chair the appropriations committee that funds Head Start Programs, early childhood development programs, elementary education, Pell grants, student loans, and medical research. I can tell you that if the government shuts down, a lot of people are going to get hurt.

Twenty-two Head Start providers will be delayed. About 18,000 kids will be denied Head Start Programs. The National Institutes of Health will not be able to fund new biomedical research projects. Social Security offices will close. Every day in this country, 445,000 people will call their Social Security office. They have a missing check. They have something wrong. They need some help. With the government shut down, no one will be able to call the Social Security office and get that kind of help.

I could go on and on. This is not a game. This is not a game. Hopefully we are not children. Hopefully we are responsible adults. I believe what we are doing today is responsible, in passing a stripped-down continuing resolution to keep the government going until November 15. I understand we will have the votes to do that. I just hope the House of Representatives will be responsible and forget about kid's games like picking up your marbles and going home or throwing a temper tantrum or shutting down the government because you cannot get your way. This is a dangerous time. I just hope the Members of this body, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, in which I was privileged to serve for 10 years, will rise to the occasion and let the American people know we are going to act responsibly.

I yield the floor.

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