WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) spoke on the Senate floor on Tuesday to emphasize that Congress must do its job and pass important measures before recessing for the holidays.

Click here to view video of Murphy’s remarks.

“We need to think about the crisis that many families are in today and will be in over the holiday season if we don't choose to do some basic things here attached to our responsibility as United States Senators,” said Murphy. “If we really do believe that our role as United States Senators is to try to lift people up around us, then we need to understand that the debates around health center funding, or the Children's Health Insurance Program, or the status of children who were brought here by their parents at a very young age from another country isn't about politics. And so by the end of this week, we have to protect these Dreamers. We have to provide a permanent extension for health center funding. We have to provide a permanent extension for children's health care insurance funding because it's our job. The holidays are about our commitment to one another and we can re-up on that commitment this week by doing the right thing.

The full text of Murphy’s remarks is below: 

Thank you very much, Mr. President.

When you are the father of a 9-year-old and a 6-year-old during the holiday season, you spend an awful lot of time reading holiday stories. You spend an awful lot of time watching Christmas specials and Christmas movies on TV, and it's wonderful. I love it. Getting to relive my childhood through the eyes of my kids. And if you remember all of these stories and specials, there's a familiar theme that runs through them. And it's a really nice theme for kids to hear.

The basic idea in many of these stories is that Christmas, Hanukkah, the holidays that we celebrate today, aren't about pageantry and they aren't about pomp and circumstance or the presents or material things. That it's really about celebrating each other. It's about sort of understanding what's important to us and who's important to us, and using this little break that we get at the end of the year to spend time with each other.

And my youngest’s favorite of all of these stories and specials is the iconic Dr. Seuss poem about the Grinch. It ends like this. He says:

“He hadn't stopped Christmas from coming. It came. Somehow or other it came just the same. And the Grinch, with his Grinch feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling. ‘How could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.’ He puzzled three hours till his puzzler was store. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

It's maybe the most famous of all of the passages from Christmas stories explaining that premise, that this time of the year is a time in which we think about each other. And I hope that we do that in the Senate and in the House over the coming days before we wrap up for the year. Because as we approach the Christmas season and as creatures of good fortune, those of us who get to serve in the United States Senate, as we begin to prepare to go home and share time with our family and our loved ones, we need to think about the crisis that many families are in today and will be in over the holiday season if we don't choose to do some basic things here attached to our responsibility as United States Senators. We need to think about the position that we are going to put people in because of our inability to act and to pass legislation that prior to this holiday season seemed relatively noncontroversial.

Christmas is about celebrating our love for one another. And if we really do believe in brotherhood, if we really do believe that our role as United States Senators is to try to lift people up around us, then we need to understand that the debates around health center funding, or the Children's Health Insurance Program, or the status of children who were brought here by their parents at a very young age from another country, isn't about politics. It's not about scoring political points. It's about people and what we will do to people as we head into the holiday season.

Adrianna Bigard is a single mom from Hamden, Connecticut. And for her, the CHIP program has been a life saver. She's doing everything that we would ask a young woman to do. She received her master's degree in public relations from Quinnipiac University. She is now working as a public relations specialist. But she has a young son, a 6-year-old, Carter. And she's a single mom. And she gets a paycheck every week, but it goes out as quickly as it comes in. She is one of the millions of Americans who is working, who is playing by the rules, but is living paycheck to paycheck.

And she gets insurance through her employer, but when she was told how much it would cost to add her son to her coverage, she simply could not afford it. She literally did not have the money in her monthly paycheck to be able to pay for gas and for groceries, for rent and for coverage for her son. And so the CHIP program is a life saver for her.

Her son now is enrolled in what we call HUSKY B in Connecticut. That's the name we use for our CHIP program. And without it, she says, things would dramatically change. “If HUSKY B goes away, if CHIP goes away, once all benefits, taxes, et cetera, are paid, I will not have enough money left in my paycheck to pay my rent.” And that's what is consuming her this holiday season because she just got a notice from the state of Connecticut telling her that on January 31, her son, Carter, will lose health care insurance. Meaning on January 31, Adrianna will not have enough money to pay her rent or she will have to leave her son uninsured. That will be her choice come Jan 31. That's a pretty terrible, awful way for her to spend her holiday season. 

In northeastern Connecticut, I heard from a woman who works in homelessness services, and she was telling the inspiring story of a gentleman who had been living the last three months in a tent and suffering deeply from severe joint pain, fevers, weakness with no access to health care until he was connected with the local community health center. That local community health center was able to get him in for care, to stabilize him and potentially save his life. That community health center – it’s called Generations, serves thousands of people in northeastern Connecticut – will lose 70% of its funding next year. Many health centers in Connecticut on January 1 will lose more than half of their funding and they will shut their doors to thousands and thousands of people like this man who couldn't receive health care but for community health centers. 

In rural America, the slashing of community health center funding will be absolutely devastating because sometimes these community health centers are the only way for some people to get care, particularly mental health care and addiction care. So community health center patients are spending the holiday season trying to digest the news that they may be shut out from their psychiatrist. They may no longer able to see their child's primary care doctor come January 1. A 70% cut is not something you can manage with efficiencies. It means an elimination of services.

Or think about Faye from Norwalk, Connecticut. She came to this country when she was 11. She now has DACA status. And she, like so many other Dreamers, have done everything that we asked. Faye went out and went to school. She got an advanced degree, she's now holding down two jobs, one of them as a radiology scheduler, working in our health care system. She's working two jobs because she wants to have access to the American dream of homeownership and she is saving and saving and saving so she can buy a house. Now she is facing possible deportation to a country that she doesn't recognize. She's been in the United States for 19 years and lived in Connecticut for 16 years, and she's spending her holiday season, as are the other 800,000 DACA recipients, fearing that their life as they know it will end at the beginning of next year.

Christmas and the holiday season is not about presents, it's not about those Christmas specials. It's about people. It's about recommitting ourselves to the uniquely American notion that we are all in this together and that we are weaker as a whole if individuals who live amongst us are in a crisis, especially individuals who have done everything that we have asked, who have played by the rules. That's Adrianna, that's Faye, people who are going to have something taken away from them and their loved ones and will be put into crisis because we won't do our job.

And so by the end of this week we have to protect these Dreamers. We have to provide a permanent extension for health center funding. We have to provide a permanent extension for children's health care insurance funding because it's our job, but also because it is just cruel to send all of these millions of families into the holidays with that kind of anxiety while we all sit around our holiday tables safe and sound. 

My kids remind me over and over again about what they learned from the Christmas specials. Christmas isn’t about the presents, it's not about the trees, it's not about the decorations. The holidays are about our commitment to one another and we can re-up on that commitment this week by doing the right thing. 

I yield the floor.

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