Ted Cruz: …only thing that is necessary to pass a clean bill paying the salaries of every man and woman in the coast guard is for the democratic senators to withdraw their objections is that correct?
Michael Bennet: Madam President
Woman: Senator from Colorado
Michael Bennet: Madam President I seldom, as you know, rise on this floor to contradict somebody on the other side. I’ve worked very hard over the years to work in a bipartisan way with the presiding officer with my republican colleagues but these crocodile tears that the senator from Texas is crying for first responders are too hard for me to take. They’re too hard for me to take. Because when the senator from Texas shut this government down in 2013, my state was flooded! It was under water! People were killed! People’s houses were destroyed! Their small businesses were ruined forever! And because of the senator from Texas this government was shut down for politics that he served to a second place finish in the Iowa caucuses, but were of no help to the first responders to the teachers to the students whose schools were closed with the federal government that was shut down because of the junior senator from Texas.
Now it’s his business not my business why he supports a president who wants to erect a medieval barrier on the border of Texas; who wants to use eminent domain to build that wall; who wants to declare an unconstitutional emergency to build that wall. That’s the business of the senator from Texas. I can assure you that in Colorado if a president said he was going to use eminent domain to erect a barrier across the state of Colorado; across the Rocky Mountains of Colorado; he was going to steal the property of our farmers and ranchers to build his medieval wall there wouldn’t be an elected leader from our state that would support that idea.
Which goes to my final point: how ludicrous it is that this government is shut down over a promise that the president of the United States couldn’t keep and that America isn’t interested in having him keep. This idea that he was going to build a medieval wall across the southern border of Texas, take it from the farmers and ranchers that were there and have the Mexicans pay for it isn’t true. That’s why we’re here because he’s now saying the taxpayers have to pay for it. That’s not what he said during his campaign over and over and over and over again. He said mexico would pay for the wall over and over again.
That was at—I was going to talk about what he said about the junior senators father but I’m going to let that alone. It was after that.
And now we’re here with the government shutdown over his broken promise while the Chinese are landing spacecraft on the dark side of the moon. That’s what they’re doing. Not to mention what they’re doing in Latin America with their one belt one road initiative in…in…in Asia. That’s what they’re doing while we’re shut down. Over a promise he never thought he could—he would never keep and didn’t keep.
And finally this idea that—I’m sorry to say my colleague from Texas and I respect him and he’s obviously a very intelligent person—but this idea that democrats are for open borders is gibberish! And it is proven by what the senator from Louisiana said which is that time after time we have supported real border security. Not a ‘wall’ that Mexico pays for, that gets you attentions at campaign rallies from some people in America and it gets talked about on Fox News at night. In 2013 the senator from Texas didn’t support it; I did. In 2013 we passed a bill here in a bipartisan way. It got 68 votes. It had 46 billion dollars in border security in it. Forty-Six! Not five billion for his wrinky-dink wall he’s talking about building. Forty-Six billion dollars of border security. It had, to be precise about it, 350 miles of what the president now refers to as ‘steel slats’—by the way America do you hear him not calling it a wall anymore. Now it’s steel slats; now it’s a border barrier. Three hundred and fifty miles of so called steel slats was in that bill.
And you know what else was in that bill—I think Madam President I believe you voted for that bill. I’ll tell you was else was in that bill: we doubled the number of border security agents on that border. They could practically hold hands on the border there were so many border security agents in that bill.
We had billions of dollars of drone technology so that we could learn from what we’ve learned in Afghanistan and other places and see every single inch of that border. Every inch! We had internal security in that bill so that small businesses and farmers and ranchers don’t have to be the immigration police. So that finally in America we could actually know who came here legally on a visa but overstayed their visa because 40 percent of the people in this country who are undocumented are here—who came here legally and overstayed.
We still can’t do that in America because that bill passed the senate but it couldn’t get a vote in the house because of the stupidest rule ever created called the Hastert rule. Named after somebody who’s in prison! That has allowed a minority of tyrants in congress to bring a Democratic president low; President Obama who they didn’t let do anything; and to ruin the speakership of John Boehner; and to allow Paul Ryan to almost accomplish nothing while he was speaker except leaving this place in a government shutdown. This so called ‘Freedom Caucus’. And the so called freedom caucus has had a veto around this place for ten years, Madam President. Completely distorted the republican party here, if I do say so myself. That may sound presumptuous but I know a lot of republicans in Colorado who don’t agree with almost anything—or anything that the freedom caucus has stood for. Yet they have had a veto on good bipartisan legislation passed the United States senate.
So I’m not going to stand here and take it from somebody who shut the government down while my state was flooded. Or from a president who’s saying he wants five billion dollars to build some antiquated medieval wall that he said Mexico would pay for. When I helped write and voted for a bill that actually would have secured the border of the United States of America. It would have secured our internal defenses as well. This is a joke! And the fact that it consumes, you know, the cable networks all night every night and all the rest of it. This government should be open! We can debate whatever it is that we want to debate.
Do you think that the Chinese don’t know that we can’t land a spaceship on the dark side of the moon? Do you think the Russians don’t know that for the first time since John Glenn was sent up to orbit this planet America cannot put a person into space without asking the Russians to do it. Do you think the rest of the world doesn’t know that we’re not investing in our infrastructure? That we’re not investing in the young generation of Americans. That we’re willing to lose the race for artificial intelligence to the Chinese? That we’re going to break all of our longstanding alliances since wwii at a moment when china is rising? That the Chinese GDP has quadrupled since 2001, tripled since 2003, doubled since 2009. Do we think no one in the rest of the world knows all that about us?
We should reopen this government, Madam President, today. We should open it today. And then what I hope much more than that it that we actually come together to figure out how we’re going to govern this country again. And stop playing petty partisan politics that are going to do nothing to educate the next generation of Americans; that are going to do nothing to fix the fiscal condition of this country.
For ten years, Madam President, I’ve heard the junior senator from Texas, I’ve heard the freedom caucus in the house of representatives talk about how important it is to get the fiscal condition of our government fixed. In fact that’s been the pretext for shutdowns and for fiscal cliffs and for all this stuff that does nothing but denigrate our democratic republic. And now, Madam President, for the first time almost in history—it happened once before during the Vietnam War. For the first time almost in history we are actually having our deficit shooting through the roof while unemployment is falling. Never happened before.
And these are the people who called Barack Obama a Bolshevik and a socialist and at the depths of the recession when we had a ten percent unemployment rate, didn’t lift a finger to do anything. They have now given us a fiscal condition where our deficit is going up while our unemployment rate is falling. Do you know how hard, Madam President, it is to accomplish that? Do you know how irresponsible you would have to be to accomplish that? Yet that’s what’s been accomplished.
When I was first here, it was actually a little after I was first here, I used to walk through Denver International Airport, which we’re very proud of in Colorado. By the way it is the most recent airport that’s been constructed in America. While we’ve been closed other airports around the world, new airports, have been opened, just while we’ve been closed. So Denver international airport is the most recent airport in the country to be opened and it was opened 25 years ago, a quarter of a century ago. And during moments like when the senator from Texas shut the government down while Colorado was underneath floods and people had lost all the things that I talked about earlier—their houses, their jobs and their lives—I used to want to walk through that airport with a paper bag over my head because I was so embarrassed to be a part of this.
And I often wondered, Madam President, why anyone would, in their right mind, want to work in a place that has a 9 percent approval rate. In fact I brought out a chart, two charts, one day to the floor. One that showed that we hadn’t always had the nine percent approval rating, to remind people how far we had fallen in the public’s estimation over the time that the senator from Texas and I have been here. And then I brought another chart out that looked at who else had a nine percent approval rate. I can’t remember all it’s sort of been lost in the mist of time but I do remember that the IRS had a 40 percent approval rating. There was an actress who had a 13 percent approval rating. More people wanted America to be a communist country, 11 percent, than approved of this country. And Fidel Castro had a 5 percent approval rating, which was lower than our 9 percent approval rating. He was the only one who had a lower rating than that.
And so my question often was, why would anybody want to work at a place that has such a low approval rating, and why would they want to behave in a way that only made matters worse? And I’m sorry to say this madam president but there is an answer: If you think you have been sent here to dismantle the federal government—which I have lots of problems with, this federal government. I think it does a lot of things very well and as a westerner I certainly believe we need to not be in the business of defending bad government, we need to be improving the government—but if you think your job is to dismantle it, as the freedom caucus does in my view, then a 9 percent approval rating suits you just fine because you get to go home and ‘say see how terrible all those guys are. See what idiots all those guys are’? While you’re taking your pay while the federal workers are not getting paid. While you’re keeping your job while they’re losing their job.
And there has been an effort not just to dismantle the federal government, but to separate it from the American people. To claim that it’s someone else’s. Or that because it’s corrupt—and in many ways I think it is. I believe it is, I believe this place is one of the most corrupt parts of this whole thing—but because it’s corrupt or because it can’t get its act together or because it’s too far away from the people or because I think—I would say it’s populated buy a bunch of self-interested politicians who don’t care about the priorities of the American people. But whatever the reason is, it’s not separate. It is not separate. And the reason that’s important is because we live in a democratic republic.
And the founders of this country who did two things that had never happened in human history. They led a successful armed insurrection against a colonial power in one generation, and they formed a democratic republic whose constitution was ratified by the people who would live under it. And what they knew, because they were enlightened figures—or I should say not what they knew, what they believed because they had only bad examples from which to draw when they sat there in Philadelphia writing that constitution. But what they knew was in a republic we would have disagreements.
That was their expectation, and their belief was out of those disagreements we would—and buy the way they knew we would have disagreements because they had disagreements. And they failed on some very important things it has to be said. They perpetuated human slavery because they couldn’t come to an agreement about of that. And other people who I think of founders just as important just as significant as those founders ended the enslavement of human beings in America and did other important thinks like make sure my daughters had the right to vote. Those people are also founders. But what they believed at their core was that through our disagreements we would forge more imaginative and more durable solutions than any king or tyrant could come up with on their own. That was their belief. That was their expectation.
And I would say our country in many ways has eclipsed any expectation they ever had of what America would become. For the moment we’re the richest country in the world. We have the greatest capacity for self-defense of any human population in the history of the world. We are far more democratic and far more free with all of our imperfections than they would have ever imagined and probably than most of them would have ever wanted. We are the longest lived democracy in human history.
But for some reason there is a generation of politicians in America today who don’t think it’s necessary to live up to the standard that they set and the standard that lots of other people have set from the founding of our country 230 years ago until today.
I don’t even know what day it is anymore of this record long shutdown but the pretext for it is an invention. It’s a creation of something in the president’s mind. It was something we learned from reading the press that was a pneumonic device used during the campaign to remind him to talk about immigration in an effort to divide Americans from one another instead of an effort to bring us together. In an effort to turn what just three years ago was a bipartisan issue in the senate, securing our southern border with 46 billion dollars, into a cudgel to be wielded at campaign rallies.
And in any case the least we can do while we have these shabby disagreements that aren’t worthy of our predecessors, are not worthy of the state I represent which is a third democratic a third republican and a third independent, are threatening to make our generation the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity not more to the people coming after us. A generation of politicians who are openly suggesting that America’s role in the world should be diminished. The least we could do is reopen our government and stop pursuing this self-inflicted harm that it creates to have hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of work and not being paid, not able to support their families while we continue to stand on this floor having mindless arguments that are going to do nothing to advance the future of our country. We shouldn’t shut the government down as it has been in this case for a campaign promise the president I’m sure knew he could never keep. With that madam president I yield the floor
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