LIVE: Senate Democratic and Republican Leaderships Hold Weekly Press Conference (Sept. 19)

away, once again, from a government shutdown, all at the hands of this endless MAGA madness. The only way to avoid a shutdown is very simple, bipartisanship. We need a bipartisan bill in the House, we need a bipartisan bill in the Senate, and then we will be able to avoid a shutdown and keep the government funding. Yet, this week, House Republicans are trying everything but bipartisanship. Even though everyone knows their proposed CR is a total non-starter in the Senate, and it has no, no Democratic input. Instead of pretending to aim for bipartisanship, as I said, instead of aiming for bipartisanship, this bill had zero Democratic input. It calls for a crushing 8% cut to virtually all non-defense spending. Extreme Republicans are dead set against raising costs and lowering safety for American families. The American people need to know just how bad the House Republican extreme CR truly is. It is slapdash, it is reckless, it is cruel. It is a slapdash, reckless, cruel CR. This slapdash CR would decimate investments in life-saving research, hollowing out the National Institute of Health. Who in America wants to cut cancer research? Some of the House Republicans do. This reckless CR would lower public safety, cut back on drug and food inspection, weaken wildfire prevention, and eliminate law enforcement officers, weakening our battle against violent crime and the scourge of fentanyl. Who wants to do that? Some people in the House, some MAGA Republicans in the House. And this cruel CR would gut investments in K-12 education, slash resources for suicide support services, upend tribal investments, cut loans to small business and to rural communities which so much need them. And this isn't rhetoric. Here are the facts about how the CR's cuts would have on real impact. K-12, 110,000 children would lose access to Head Start. Social Security, people applying for disability benefits would wait two months longer. Law enforcement and police, 4,000 fewer FBI personnel, including agents who investigate crimes, 800 fewer Custom and Border Protection agents and officers. Nutrition assistance, hungry families and children, 60,000 seniors would be robbed of Meals on Wheels, 2.1 infants and children would be waitlisted for WIC, 300,000 households including 20,000 veterans, 90,000 seniors would lose housing choice vouchers, 250,000 Americans would be denied job training and employment services. And the list goes on and on and on. We'll be sure to get these facts to you as soon as we can. And Debbie Stabenow will have some of those as well from the DPCC. But we all need to be disciplined in repeating all of this. Now this week the Senate will also be welcoming President Zelensky as he makes his case for standing against Putin when the House Republicans say you're on your own and don't want to give him any help at all. Nothing would make Putin happier than to see us waver in our support for Ukraine. Providing aid is not just a matter of Ukrainian security, it's a matter of American security. Because a victorious Putin is an emboldened Putin, making the world less safe for democracy. Ukrainian aid could have been a great opportunity for bipartisanship in the House as it is in the Senate. But the hard right prevented that from happening too. So what's the word that describes what's going on in the Republican-controlled House? Chaos. But while the Republican House has chaos, here in the Senate we have shown that bipartisanship can work and can get things done. And tomorrow we'll get the chance to make sure that bipartisanship continues. Yesterday, Senator Murray, our great Chair, who's done an amazing job as Chair of the Approach Committee, moved to suspend Rule 16, file cloture on that motion, and plan to vote tomorrow on our bipartisan appropriation bills. Now our colleagues on the other side have asked for two things. That we do the appropriations bills, because they don't want to have an omnibus at the end, and that we do them in regular order. We are doing both. But one Senator from Wisconsin wants to block all that. And we plead with our Republican colleagues to not let him succeed. And not let the hard right tail wag the dog of the Republican Party in the Senate, and wag the whole Senate as well. Our Appropriation Committee leaders have asked to consider appropriation bills on the floor. It's with their cooperation that these three bills, Mill, Conag, and T-HUD, were brought to the floor for consideration. We want to work with our Republican colleagues and get this done, and we hope that vote will vindicate that hope. Tomorrow's vote will be a chance to ensure we keep the bipartisanship going. I thank my colleagues on the Appropriation Committee, three of whom are here today, and particularly Chair Murray and Vice Chair Collins for their great work. And even more important, I hope the House can find the wisdom to follow the Senate's bipartisan route. Senator Murray. Thank you. As you all know, I've been working with Senator Collins from the start of this year to make sure we have an open, bipartisan appropriations process. And just last week, 91 Senators voted to proceed to our first funding package. And every bill in that package passed our committee unanimously this past summer. That is because we are writing serious, bipartisan bills that can actually be signed into law. We stuck to the deal that President and Speaker shook hands on, that Congress passed. We kept out poison pills, and we asked for input from every one of our colleagues. Now we are working to move forward on that process, and it is no secret that last week we were blocked from voting on amendments and having a real debate on the Senate floor by one Senator. But I want you to know we are determined to make sure a handful of Senators don't overrule the vast majority of us who worked on this package and want to see it moved forward. We are still working hard in hopes of securing a UC agreement, but we've also filed for a procedural vote that we will take tomorrow to get things rolling if necessary. So here's my message to every Senator who's told me and Senator Collins that they want to get back to regular order. They want to get back to bipartisanship. They want to avoid that massive end-of-the-year omnibus. This is the chance to do that. They need to join us on this procedural vote so we can keep this process on track. Because if we aren't able to keep our bills moving on the floor, then an omnibus will be where we end up with. So Senators need to decide what they want. I personally do not want to let a few members cause chaos and stop other Senators, especially those who do not serve on the Appropriations Committee, from weighing in on these bills on the Senate floor. And I hope all of our colleagues agree. Now, looking ahead, I'll say it again, there is no need for chaos or shutdown, but I'm afraid to say that the proposal we have seen from the House Republicans is not a serious proposal to keep our government funded. If they pass it, it is a bill with no money for Ukraine, no money for disaster relief, none of the critical funding the President has made a serious and reasonable case for, and it would cut drastically domestic funding even further. Because let's not forget the deal the President and Speaker agreed to forced us already to work with some very, really tough-cut numbers, especially across the federal programs here at home that so many of our families count on. So they are talking about a CR that would severely undercut the work of the Social Security Administration. Those are the people whose job it is to make sure our seniors get the benefits they need. A CR that would gut the FAA at a time when I think all of us can agree we need to be hiring more air traffic controllers and doing more to make sure our air traffic is timely and safe. And just in time for the fall, House Republicans' CR would decimate LIHEAP, which is literally going to leave families in the cold and drive up their energy costs. And all of that is to say nothing of the extreme and partisan border policies they are insisting be attached to the bill. So listen, I hope you all get the point. I hope you understand what an unserious proposal the House Republicans are making, and I hope it is clear what a gut punch it would be to working families everywhere in this country. Now in contrast, I'm working hard here in the Senate to make sure we do put together a bipartisan CR that will deliver on the necessary funding for disaster relief, supporting Ukraine, paying our wildland firefighters, and more, because we need to show the American people that Congress can come together and help people and solve problems. That's exactly what we are focused on doing here in the Senate. I'm pleased to be joined today by two of my chairs for the subcommittees in the Appropriations, and I just want to give a shout out to all of our subcommittee chairs and ranking members in Appropriations. They've had to put together these 12 bills under very difficult, challenging circumstances, and they've done so successfully, and I appreciate the work of all of them. Well thank you very much, Senator Murray. Thank you for your leadership, along with Senator Collins. As you say, we worked hard to get the 12 Appropriations bills out of committee. I think for the first time, all 12 bills out of committee since 2018. I'm very pleased that the Commerce, Justice, and Science committee bill, the subcommittee that I chair with Jerry Moran from Kansas, passed out of our committee 28 to 1. I think, as Senator Murray said so well, people in the Senate want to see regular order. We want to see a process where we have a chance to weigh in on the budget. I don't want to see a massive, end-of-the-year, omnibus bill that only four people in Congress know what's really in it. I want to see a process that moves forward as we are moving forward. The fact that we saw the Senator from Wisconsin last week hold up progress on the appropriations process, I believe, was very deliberate. Make no mistake, this was an effort to help extremists in the House shut down the government. And the inadequate bill that we're seeing from the House, as Senators Murray and Schumer have said so eloquently, would be a disaster for people across this country. With 8% cut to the base bill. And this is really not about fiscal conservatism, because the last government shutdown cost $12 billion. This is about trying to make the point to the people of this country that government can't work. Well, we're here to say government can work. I don't want to see the impact that this House bill would have on the people of New Hampshire, where we will see delays in infrastructure projects, including housing construction, and New Hampshire has one of the tightest housing markets in the country. We would see an impact on seniors with Meals on Wheels, on payments coming to hospitals, on small business loans from the SBA. And I was up at the northern border in New Hampshire with Canada. Yes, New Hampshire does border Canada. And what I heard from law enforcement up there was the concerns they have about additional people coming across from Canada, the concern that that is having on the drug trade in northern New England, and the cuts to CBP would have a huge impact on us in northern New Hampshire. So this is also something that our adversaries are watching. You can believe that China and Russia, Xi and Putin, are watching with glee to see if the government shuts down, to see if we are going to pass – the House is going to pass a bill that's going to get opposed in the Senate and shut down the government. So I believe we should honor the funding agreement. The last I knew, when you're in politics, you should be as good as your word. If you agree to something, you should try and follow up on that. So let's keep this agreement. Let's get this done. Thank you. Senator Murphy. Thank you, Senator Schumer. Listen, I am so proud to be a member of the Appropriations Committee. To be able to do this work on behalf of the American people, Republicans and Democrats coming together in the Senate to confront big problems, this is how it's supposed to work. And so I listened to Speaker McCarthy complain about how hard it is for him to ram a CR through the House, given his narrow Republican majority. And I think to myself, doesn't he know there's a better way? Doesn't he know that he's not the Speaker of the Republican Conference, he's the Speaker of the House of Representatives? We have shown that you can get bipartisan agreement on appropriations bills, but Speaker McCarthy cares more about preserving his own power than he does about preserving the security of this country and the health of American families. And so once again, the House is in meltdown mode because Speaker McCarthy refuses to reach out and do what is available to him, find a bipartisan path to keep the government open and to fund the government through the rest of this year. I just want to quickly cover two aspects of this continuing resolution. Now, it may be that they never pass this draconian, slapdash, dangerous CR. It may be that they never have the votes for it. But if they do, we need to make sure the American people know how dangerous this bill is. Republicans say they care about protecting the border, and yet there are devastating cuts in their CR for border security. Their CR would likely require there to be 800 fewer Customs and Border Protection agents and officers. The result of that cut would be to allow 300 additional pounds of fentanyl into this country, 50,000 additional pounds of cocaine, 6,000 additional pounds of methamphetamine. This CR is devastating for the security of our border. Now, in addition to the CR, over the weekend, on the back of a napkin, Republicans wrote a new immigration policy for the country. But it was done so ham-handedly and so quickly that they are going to end up making an absolute disaster of the border. One provision of their immigration reform proposal is to deny the ability to transport immigrants in between ports of entry. That's most of the work that CBP does, is moving immigrants who have crossed in between the borders, bring them to the ports for processing, and then either allow them to claim asylum or send them back. The slapdash nature of this bill means that they are making mistake after mistake that is going to compromise our nation's security. And then lastly, just to talk about the House Republicans' abandonment of Ukraine. This is a critical moment for Ukraine. The counteroffensive has been slow, but it is making progress. This is the worst possible time for House Republicans to be signaling that they are contemplating turning their back on Ukraine and handing that country to Vladimir Putin. We are running dry of funding to keep ammunition flowing to the Ukraine army. We desperately need to continue our work to make sure that Ukraine has everything it needs. And at this critical inflection point in the fight for Ukraine's sovereignty, it is so irresponsible and so dangerous for the House Republicans to be showing the world the potential abandonment of this key ally. So there's a potential for us to come together to protect our border, to support Ukraine, to make sure the kids don't get kicked out of Head Start programs. But it requires Speaker McCarthy to do what Senator Murray did, reach out across the aisle and find a bipartisan path forward to save this country. Thank you, my three excellent members of the committee. Yes, look, the House bill leaves out disaster aid completely. We believe in disaster aid and we want to come together in the Senate on a bipartisan CR. Yes. Look, right now, House Democrats and Senate Democrats are the same. We are urging our Republican colleagues to pursue the only path out of avoiding a shutdown, which is a bipartisan bill. Yes. Is it then your intention to add Ukraine money and disaster money to the CR and how confident that you'll have the Republican votes you need to pass it here in the Senate? Well, look, we'd like to work on a bipartisan basis on the CR with the Republicans. We've gotten indications that they want to do that. We've done it very successfully on the appropriations process, and hopefully we can come together bipartisan here as well. Yes. I'm not going to speculate about how to package it other than to say we need a bipartisan process each way. Yes, ma'am. I haven't seen that yet, so I'm not commenting. At what point does the Senate decide to move first and try to pass the CR over here if the House can't get its job done? Look, our first job is to get the House to pass something. We'll see if they can. But we need a bipartisan bill in each body. Thank you, everybody. The policies that we have in place right now ends up being a border state. And, in fact, just over the weekend, there were 20,000 encounters with people trying to come across the border illegally. And I don't think the August numbers are out just yet. They're supposed to be out by now. I don't think they are, but we expect that to be the highest number in the month of August of this entire year, which is a record. So clearly, this administration and cities like New York and Chicago, which are sanctuary cities, are learning what it's like and what border communities have been dealing with for a really long time. This is a 50-state issue. It's not a one-state issue. And it is clearly preventable. The Biden administration canceled the wall, eliminated all the common-sense border policies that were working very effectively before they came to office, and the consequence is an open border where literally millions of people now, over 6 million people, have been encountered trying to come across the border illegally, not to mention another million and a half or so gotaways. This is a preventable crisis. One that the Biden administration has chosen by their policies not to do anything about. And the American people and the cities in this country, large and small, are now having to deal with the consequences. Joe Biden has surrendered our southern border to criminals, to gang members, to drug dealers. This past month, we're looking at close to a quarter million individuals, illegal immigrants, coming across the border. And what happens? They vanish. The cartels that are running this, it's a billion-dollar, sophisticated criminal enterprise which is flooding our border with illegal immigrants and drugs. And from a criminal standpoint, they're coming from all around the world, from China, from Africa, from the Middle East. Border towns used to be Arizona and in Texas, but when you see the city council in Chicago and the mayor of New York all claiming that the illegal immigrants are destroying their cities, remember, these are so-called sanctuary cities. Every state's been impacted. Certainly, my home state of Wyoming is no exception. The fentanyl coming in across from Mexico is now a major killer in every state in the country. And our incompetent president and the Democrats continue with their head in the sand. And now what do they want to do? They want to defund ICE, Immigration Custom Enforcement. They want to use the money to set up a welcome wagon of housing and benefits for illegal immigrants. The Republicans have the right idea to deal with the border. It's called Secure the Border Act of 2023. It involves technology, manpower, and a physical barrier to prevent illegal immigration. That's the way to provide security and safety to our communities and actually secure the border. The butcher of Tehran is on U.S. soil right now. Despite being sanctioned, Iran's president flew into New York City with a Biden-approved visa. Now he's at the U.N. peddling his propaganda. All of us can remember 9-11. It was the day that our nation suffered our greatest terrorist attack on our soil. And yet on this 9-11, President Biden took $6 billion, put that $6 billion into the hands of the world's number one state sponsor of terrorism. Biden is putting more Americans at risk by greenlighting Iran's violent activities and increasing its nuclear capabilities. This is a direct result of Biden's failed appeasement strategy. And I'm going to call Biden's bluff on this, folks. The world knows that Iran has already called Biden's bluff on this. His administration has to stop the pursuit of this flawed Iranian nuclear deal. The West Virginia National Guard, at the request of the governor, joined in with the Texas National Guard at Operation Lone Star along the border along Eagle Pass. Our guard members that went volunteered to go. And after talking with them just last week, I did talk with them. Over the course of 40 days, they encountered 10,000 illegal immigrants coming across. This is not at the ports of entry. This is aside from the ports of entry. To which one of the guard members, a young man, said the whole experience was shocking at what he saw. He saw children that were dehydrated, young babies that were not in good health conditions crossing with their families being used as ways to get in. We also, one of the guard members from West Virginia was a medical professional. She went down and administered medical help at the southern border to the Texas Guard and also the West Virginia Guard. And also any of the immigrants that needed it as they were coming in, the illegals. And they had not had health care down there at that portion of the border for the last six months. And she said she worked 24-7. And again, was shocked at what she was seeing. This is an utter failure by this administration. The interior border policy enforcement is not there. You've heard my colleagues talk about it. It is a 50-state problem. I'm proud of our state. I'm proud of our National Guard to go down and assist. But this issue, when we get these numbers from August, are going to be shocking as well. Not just to our National Guard, but to the rest of the country. Twenty-six years ago, in 1997, is when Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese by the UK. It's when the Titanic was a hit movie. It's also the last time that Congress passed all the appropriation bills before the end of the fiscal year. As we stand here today, we are now swimming in $33 trillion of debt. Deficits projected to be close to $2 trillion going forward. And this institution still can't get appropriations passed by the beginning of the next fiscal year. We were in this same position last year. We've been in this same position the last 25 years. And I guarantee you, unless something changes, we'll be right back here a year from now. We'll be right back here in 25, in 26, in 27, in 28. As we have now seen this occur over and over again, we'll be the 26th consecutive year. It's no ifs, ands, or buts. The budgeting process in Washington is severely broken. We need to do two things. We need to stop the government shutdowns, pass the prevent the government shutdown bill that Senator Langford and Senator Hassan have, this passed committee, and put the pain back on Congress, not on the American people, if Congress is unable to do its job of getting the appropriations bills passed before the beginning of the next fiscal year. Without proper reforms and holding members of Congress accountable, we're on a runaway truck with no off ramp. Do you have a reaction to Leader Schumer loosening the Senate dress code, and if Senate Republicans are back in the majority, would you require Senators to wear business attire on the Senate floor? Yeah, look, I think I'm pretty safe in saying most, if not all, Republican Senators think we ought to dress up to go to work. And so I can't imagine that we're going to be wearing jeans on the Senate floor any time soon. At what point is it proper for the Senate to get involved in this spending issue? I know they dealt with the bill last week, 91 to 7, but is the Senate past its point? Did the Senate lose time deferring so long to the House because it takes longer to process things over here, and is that going to cause a shutdown? There's so many variables in your question, Chad, that I can't predict in advance how this is going to unfold. What I do think is critically important to the American people is for the government not to shut down, not to shut down. That's job one. With regard to the appropriations process, it had been my hope that we'd be able to pass a series of minibuses, and I think the Speaker's hope that he'd be able to pass all 12. That still might happen, but it still might happen, but I can't predict exactly how this ends. We'll see what the House does and act accordingly. Senator McConnell, do you support Speaker McCarthy's continuing resolution at Britain? Well, obviously I support what the Speaker's trying to accomplish, because he's trying to avoid a government shutdown, and he's trying to help with an appropriations process so that we have something close to a normal process, which Steve just indicated we haven't had since 1997. So we're pulling for the Speaker and hoping we can move forward.