Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Need To Act In A Bipartisan Way To Avoid A Government Shutdown

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor on the need for bipartisan action to avoid a government shutdown. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Both parties in both chambers continue the work to avoiding a shutdown.

House Republican Leadership needs to get the CR done quickly, because we still need time in the Senate to move the bill through the floor.

House Republicans should work with Democrats — House and Senate Democrats— to find the best path to getting the bill passed in a bipartisan way. The House Republicans have already wasted enough time as it is.

Once the House acts, the Senate will move quickly to get the CR done. I encourage my colleagues on both sides to prioritize speedy passage of the CR.

If both sides keep working together, if we stay away from poison pills and partisan spectacle, then the American people can rest assured there won’t be a government shutdown. But we still have more work to do.

Of course, nothing was inevitable about the tight deadline we face now. The bipartisan CR I negotiated with Speaker Johnson and Leaders McConnell and Jeffries is more or less the result people expected from the beginning: a short term CR, one that does not last six months, that is free of poison pills and which honors the bipartisan funding levels we agreed to earlier this year.

But this feels like the third or fourth time this Congress that House Republicans have had to learn the same elementary lesson: in a narrowly divided government, partisan bully tactics and appealing to the extreme just does not work, plain and simple.

I know a few on the hard-right say, oh, we can demand, bang our fists on the table and force everyone to do what we want. That ain't happening. What they want to do is so destructive to America that the overwhelming number of Democrats and a large number of Republicans don't want to do it. But nonetheless, this feels like the third or fourth time in this Congress that the House Republicans have had to learn the same elementary lesson, and I say particularly the House hard-right Republicans in the Freedom Caucus.

In a narrowly divided government, partisan bully tactics and appealing to the extreme simply does not work.

I would have thought that would have been made clear a year ago when Speaker McCarthy kept trying and trying and trying to appease the hard-right with increasingly severe funding cuts – and it ended up being all for naught anyway. We ended up passing a bipartisan CR and radicals turned on Speaker McCarthy.

This time around, it was Donald Trump again telling the hard-right to shut the government down if we didn’t agree to their poison pill provisions. Never mind that a shutdown would mean costs go up, programs like Head Start would halt, and public safety, here and at the border, would suffer. To Donald Trump, these are all okay because they are just apparently the cost of feeding his ego.

It is bewilderingly cynical to see Donald Trump push for a shutdown knowing the pain it would cause the country.

But thankfully we are still on track to avoid that kind of mess. Of course, we still have more work to do. I earnestly hope today brings good news in the House.

We here in the Senate are ready to get to work to get this bill done quickly.

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