Washington D.C.- Today, 27 House Armed Services Committee Democrats urged Speaker Boehner to bring a clean continuing resolution to the House floor. In a letter to the Speaker, the HASC Democrats explained how the shutdown is endangering our national security and must end. The House should have an opportunity to vote to end the terrible impacts of the current shutdown and to reinsure our national security.
Link to Letter (here)
Full Text of the letter:
October 4, 2013
The Honorable John A. Boehner
Speaker
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Mr. Speaker:
We urge you to bring a clean continuing resolution to the floor of the House. We believe the current government shutdown is endangering our national security and that it must come to an end.
Media reports are full of examples in which the current closure has shut down or severely hampered operations of the government that are critical to our national defense. The closure of the Treasury office charged with implementing sanctions on Iran was only the latest in the series. Military officer and senior enlisted training has slowed and, in many cases, simply stopped while civilian professors were furloughed. Reset of equipment being brought back from Afghanistan -- equipment that is critical to future operations of the United States military -- has slowed or stopped.
The ongoing shutdown also harms those dedicated public- and private-sector employees who support our men and women in uniform. Many of these employees already were forced to endure six days of unpaid furlough because of sequestration. Sending them home again without pay, for an indefinite period, because of a government shutdown makes it even harder for them to feed their families and to pay their bills. This wholly unnecessary treatment is unfair to those who support our national security. Even defense contractors have begun to feel the full effects of this intolerable situation; United Technologies Corporation, for example, recently announced that the shutdown may force the company to furlough as many as 5,000 employees, beginning next week.
To date, you have attempted to alleviate some of the symptoms of a shutdown by passing piecemeal bills. This strategy is a failure. As we saw with the “Pay our Military Act,” these bills leave out many groups of employees and contractors who perform critical governmental functions. A disparate collection of bills also confuses the situation, as every agency the bills would try to “fix” would be forced to determine which of their employees and activities would be covered by each vague piece of legislation.
The House deserves a vote on a clean continuing resolution. The Senate has sent us a clean and comprehensive bill, and we think it is likely that it would pass if brought to the floor of the House. At the very least, we believe members of the House deserve the opportunity to vote to end the terrible impacts of the current shutdown and to reinsure our national security.
Thank you for your kind attention to this matter.
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