Washington, D.C. – Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet took to the Senate floor today to call on his colleagues to reopen the government immediately. He spoke in response to remarks made by U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
Following his remarks, Bennet voted for a clean bill to reopen the government, but the measure failed.
A full video of Bennet’s remarks is available HERE.
Below are highlights from Bennet’s remarks:
“We should reopen this government today. We should open it today. And then, what I hope much more than that, is 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.”
“I seldom rise on this floor to contradict somebody on the other side. I have 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. 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.”
“I’m not going to stand here and take it from somebody who has shut the government down while my state was flooded, or from a President who is saying he wants $5 billion 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.”
“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 and 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 that the President I’m sure knew he could never keep.”