Ted Cruz: âŚonly 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. Iâve 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. Theyâre 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! Peopleâs 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 itâs 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. Thatâs 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 wouldnât 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 couldnât keep and that America isnât 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 isnât true. Thatâs why weâre here because heâs now saying the taxpayers have to pay for it. Thatâs 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 atâI was going to talk about what he said about the junior senators father but Iâm going to let that alone. It was after that.
And now weâre here with the government shutdown over his broken promise while the Chinese are landing spacecraft on the dark side of the moon. Thatâs what theyâre doing. Not to mention what theyâre doing in Latin America with their one belt one road initiative inâŚinâŚin Asia. Thatâs what theyâre doing while weâre shut down. Over a promise he never thought he couldâhe would never keep and didnât keep.
And finally this idea thatâIâm sorry to say my colleague from Texas and I respect him and heâs obviously a very intelligent personâbut 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 âwallâ 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 didnât 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 heâs 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 âsteel slatsââby the way America do you hear him not calling it a wall anymore. Now itâs steel slats; now itâs 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 billâI think Madam President I believe you voted for that bill. Iâll 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 weâve 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 donât 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 hereâwho came here legally and overstayed.
We still canât do that in America because that bill passed the senate but it couldnât get a vote in the house because of the stupidest rule ever created called the Hastert rule. Named after somebody whoâs in prison! That has allowed a minority of tyrants in congress to bring a Democratic president low; President Obama who they didnât 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 âFreedom Caucusâ. 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 donât agree with almost anythingâor anything that the freedom caucus has stood for. Yet they have had a veto on good bipartisan legislation passed the United States senate.
So Iâm not going to stand here and take it from somebody who shut the government down while my state was flooded. Or from a president whoâs 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 donât know that we canât land a spaceship on the dark side of the moon? Do you think  the Russians donât 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 doesnât know that weâre not investing in our infrastructure? That weâre not investing in the young generation of Americans. That weâre willing to lose the race for artificial intelligence to the Chinese? That weâre 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 weâre 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, Iâve heard the junior senator from Texas, Iâve 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 thatâs 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 historyâit 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, didnât 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 thatâs whatâs 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 weâre very proud of in Colorado. By the way it is the most recent airport thatâs been constructed in America. While weâve been closed other airports around the world, new airports, have been opened, just while weâve 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 earlierâtheir houses, their jobs and their livesâI 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 hadnât always had the nine percent approval rating, to remind people how far we had fallen in the publicâs 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 canât remember all itâs 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 Iâm sorry to say this madam president but there is an answer: If you think you have been sent here to dismantle the federal governmentâwhich 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 governmentâbut 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 âsay see how terrible all those guys are. See what idiots all those guys areâ? While youâre taking your pay while the federal workers are not getting paid. While youâre keeping your job while theyâre 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 itâs someone elseâs. Or that because itâs corruptâand 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 thingâbut because itâs corrupt or because it canât get its act together or because itâs too far away from the people or because I thinkâI would say itâs populated buy a bunch of self-interested politicians who donât care about the priorities of the American people. But whatever the reason is, itâs not separate. It is not separate. And the reason thatâs 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 figuresâor 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 wouldâand 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 couldnât 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 weâre 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. Â We are the longest lived democracy in human history.
But for some reason there is a generation of politicians in America today who donât think itâs 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 donât even know what day it is anymore of this record long shutdown but the pretext for it is an invention. Itâs a creation of something in the presidentâs 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 arenât 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 Americaâs 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 shouldnât shut the government down as it has been in this case for a campaign promise the president Iâm sure knew he could never keep. With that madam president I yield the floor