Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Senate’s Bipartisan Work To Fund The Government As House MAGA Republicans Push Toward A Reckless Government Shutdown

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor Speaker McCarthy caving to the far-right as they push toward a government shutdown. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks:

We now stand at the precipice of an unnecessary, reckless, and entirely Republican-manufactured shutdown.

In less than forty-eight hours, funding that pays the salaries of our troops, for border enforcement, for TSA operations and nutrition programs, all will come to a halt.

As I have said for months, Congress has only one option to avoid a shutdown: bipartisanship. We needed bipartisanship yesterday, we need it today, we will need it tomorrow. It’s true, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

But in the House, sadly, unlike the Senate, we have not seen bipartisanship. We have only seen chaos. We have only seen paralysis. A few hours ago, Speaker McCarthy held a vote on a truly radical CR proposal everyone knew never stood a chance of passing the Senate.

And now, the House Republicans’ CR has failed to even pass the House by an unexpectedly large and decisive margin: thirty four votes, much more than most expected.

The Speaker has spent weeks catering to the hard right, and now, he finds himself in the exact same position he’s been in since the beginning – no plan forward, no closer to passing something that avoids a shutdown.  

The Speaker needs to abandon his doomed mission of trying to please MAGA extremists and instead he needs to work across the aisle to keep the government open. Things seem to be getting worse for the Speaker rather than better, and it’s time for him to try bipartisanship.

Here in the Senate, bipartisanship is precisely what we are pursuing by working on our CR. Just yesterday, I’m proud to say, seventy-six Senators voted in favor of proceeding to the CR. I salute not only Chairman Murray, but Vice Chair Collins and Leader McConnell, and the so many others on the other side of the aisle who joined us in moving forward.

We will continue working on the CR over the course of today, and see if we can find some agreement to pass it quickly. And I note that these seventy-six Senators voted in favor of proceeding to the CR. That is what bipartisanship means: not that we agree on everything, but the disagreements do not paralyze the process.

And when the Senate finishes its work, it is imperative the House move on a Senate-passed, bipartisan CR.

It will be our last chance to ensure that a shutdown is avoided. Any more time the Speaker spends trying to cobble together hard-right wish lists that can’t even pass the House would be a grievous mistake.

So to Speaker McCarthy, let me be clear: if you don’t want our troops to go without pay, work in a bipartisan way.

If you don’t want to see border funding endangered, work in a bipartisan way.

If you don’t want to see seniors lose access to meals on wheels, or cuts to nutrition for women, infants and children, or holds on small business loans, work in a bipartisan way.

At the end of the day, these MAGA extremists, who are the ones responsible for bringing us to the brink, fundamentally do not care about funding the government. Some of them are actually gleeful about a shutdown. Coddling the hard right is as futile as trying to nail jello to a wall and the harder the Speaker tries, the bigger mess he makes.

And that mess is going to hurt the American people most.

I hope the Speaker snaps out of the vice grip he’s put himself in, and stops succumbing to the thirty or so extremists who are running the show in the House. Mr. Speaker, time has almost run out.  

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