{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/2023/10/icymi-sen-johnson-makes-his-case-to-end-government-shutdowns-once-and-for-all", "ICYMI: Sen. Johnson Makes His Case to End Government Shutdowns Once and for All", "2023-10-03", "2023", "2023-10", "Republican", "Senate", "WI", "Ron Johnson", "J000293", "www.ronjohnson.senate.gov", "ronjohnson", "https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/press-releases", "scraper", "WASHINGTON \u2013 On Friday, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) took to the Senate floor in an attempt to circumvent a government shutdown with the passage of a one-time 14-day Continuing Resolution (C.R.) to fund government at the previous year\u2019s appropriation levels. When speaking, the senator continued his support for the bipartisan Prevent Government Shutdowns Act of 2023 which would effectively end government shutdowns altogether by enacting rolling 14-day C.R.s until Congress passes all 12 appropriations bills.\n\nSenate Democrats blocked the common-sense solution, illustrating the dysfunction in Washington which the senator discussed in-depth Sunday on Fox News\u2019 Life, Liberty, and Levin.\n\nListen to his full speech here.\n\nOn Washington\u2019s broken appropriations process\n\n\u201cBy the time I arrived in 2011, Congresses\u2019 appropriations process was completely broken, it still is. The U.S. has since, this is again as of September 2019, the U.S. has since had three government shutdowns, passed 34 Continuing Resolutions to avoid shutdowns, raised or suspended the debt ceiling nine times, and again, this was just four years ago, increased the federal debt $8.5 trillion. So here we are, a couple days before the end of the fiscal year, four years later: our debt by the way has more than doubled, stands at $33 trillion now, and we\u2019re facing a shutdown. Isn\u2019t this ridiculous? There\u2019s no reason for this.\u201d\n\nOn the plan to halt future shutdowns\n\n\u201cThe Hassan-Lankford bill did what we do in Wisconsin. You don\u2019t shut the agency down, you don\u2019t shut the government down, you just keep spending at last year\u2019s level until the legislature can get its act together and appropriate the funds. So that bill that I chose, that we passed by the way, on a bipartisan basis, I believe every Democratic senator on the committee voted for it because Senator Hassan and Senator Lankford did a good job of coming together in a bipartisan fashion. They put some disciplines in there, but what it does, it just creates rolling 14-day C.R.s, with those disciplines, members can\u2019t travel back on the government dime, you only have a 24 hour shutdown I believe, there are other disciplines there that put pressure on the process. To get our act together and start appropriating bills. If you don\u2019t get it done in the first 14 days, you have another 14-day C.R., and another 14-day C.R. until we create the appropriations process.\u201d\n\nOn mortgaging our children\u2019s future\n\n\u201cAs dysfunctional as Washington, D.C. is and it is grotesquely dysfunctional, I come from the private sector. This would not happen in the private sector. You wouldn't take 72-73% of what you spend in your private sector budget and say that's on automatic pilot. We're never going to look at that. We're really going to look at 27% of the budget and try and control that. And that's what we're doing here with discretionary spending. This year, 27%. We'll focus on that and we'll ignore 73% and let it grow out-of-control. But again, this is a well-honed process. It\u2019s dysfunctional, but the process is in place, and it's a well-honed process to mortgage our children's future.\u201d\n\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-08T00:49:26Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/2023/10/icymi-sen-johnson-makes-his-case-to-end-government-shutdowns-once-and-for-all"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9427980985492468, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}