Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On Reaching A Bipartisan Agreement To Avoid A Government Shutdown
Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor after Congressional leaders reached a bipartisan, bicameral funding agreement, and urged his colleagues to reject partisan demands and continue working in good faith to avoid a government shutdown. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:
Yesterday afternoon, we announced that Congressional leaders reached a bipartisan agreement to avoid a government shutdown on September 30th.
This agreement will keep the government open at current funding levels until December 20th.
This agreement, thankfully, is free of any partisan poison pills and was negotiated in good faith.
I thank the Speaker for working with my team to put this package together over the weekend. Our teams were up early and stayed up late into evening to get it done. I also wish to thank the House Democratic Leader, the Senate Republican Leader, and all the appropriators, particularly Senators Murray and Collins, for helping us get to this point.
The matter is now very straightforward: we now have less than a week to pass a funding bill through the House, through the Senate, and on to the president’s desk.
Both sides will have to act celeritously and with continued bipartisan good faith to meet the funding deadline. Any delay or last minute poison pill can still push us into a shutdown. I hope – and I trust – that this will not happen.
Of course, as we proceed, it’s important to remember that negotiations didn’t have to wait until the last minute. This agreement could have very easily been reached weeks ago, but Speaker Johnson and House Republicans chose to listen to Donald Trump’s partisan demands instead of working with us from the start to reach a bicameral, bipartisan agreement.
Remember: Donald Trump has spent the entire month urging House Republicans to shut the government down if his poison pills weren’t passed. That is outlandishly cynical: Donald Trump knows perfectly well that a shutdown would mean chaos, pain, needless heartache for the American people. But as usual, he just doesn’t seem to care.
It’s astounding that anyone seeking the presidency would think a shutdown is a good thing, but that’s who Donald Trump is at his core: cynical and ill-intentioned. He should have learned his lesson years ago when he told Speaker Pelosi and I to shut the government down and said “I’ll take the blame.” Well, that didn’t work out too well for him, did it?
I am glad his efforts in this instance are on track to fail. We aren’t out of the woods yet, but now that we’ve reached a bipartisan agreement I hope we’re on track to avoid a shutdown. I believe we will avoid that shutdown.
With a few more days of bipartisanship and speed and good faith, we can get the job done, certainly before the deadline of government shutdown.
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