Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On Yesterday’s White House Meeting And Avoiding A Harmful Government Shutdown

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor on yesterday’s meeting at the White House between the President and Congressional leadership and on working to avoid a harmful and unnecessary government shutdown. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Negotiators in both chambers continue working to ensure the government will not shut down at the end of the week. We continue to make very good progress on an agreement, and we are very close to getting it done.

I met yesterday with President Biden, with Speaker Johnson, with Leader McConnell and Leader Jeffries, and we all agree – a shutdown is a loser for the American people. In a shutdown, costs would go up, safety would go down, and the American people would pay the price.

I am hopeful that the four leaders can reach this agreement very soon, so we can not only avoid a shutdown on Friday, but get closer to finishing the appropriations process altogether.

If our House Republican colleagues of good will want to avert a shutdown – if they want to govern responsibly as they say they do – then they must resist the centrifugal pull of the extreme hard-right who want to burn everything down, who openly use the threat of a shutdown to push their extreme agenda. They're brazen about it. They are brazen.

We know what the hard-right has been pushing: they want to restrict women’s reproductive freedoms – we saw the case in Alabama. They want to rip apart gun safety laws, and reward corporate polluters – or else they say they want a shutdown. This is no way to govern.

If our House Republican colleagues of good will want to do the right thing, they must accept a fundamental truth about divided government: Republicans cannot pass a bill without Democratic support. It takes both sides working together – and ignoring the extremes of the hard-right – to get anything done.

I’ve said this over and over again, directly to the Speaker, even in my first conversation with him: the only way we will get things done is by bipartisanship. And I'm proud in our chamber – not just on the supplemental but in bill after bill after bill – we are working in a bipartisan way. I'm proud of that record. The Speaker should understand that.

So, I am hopeful that soon we will have an agreement for keeping the government open beyond Friday’s deadline. We’ll keep working very diligently today, and I ask my colleagues to stay flexible and ready to act quickly when the time comes.

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