Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. AMODEI. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman and ranking member.

As I sit here listening, I hear the words appropriately appropriate, poison pill riders, real losers American people, veto threats from the President, accept reality, and I ask myself: Who do I work for? I don't want to speak for any of my 434 other colleagues. I don't work for the President. I work for the 700,000 people that sent me here, just like other people work for people from different States. So the fact that I may disagree with the administration on something isn't news to anybody in a congressional context.

But I sit here and look at this and I am thinking: My God, we are interfering with women's health directives. And I hear about the Affordable Care Act and the IRS cuts, and it is like I didn't get a great grade in civics, but I got a good enough one.

Part of this role is oversight. That is the key of appropriations. So we are conducting that because there are differences of opinion. While one side advocates what they think is the right policy, the other side does the exact same thing.

So to feign offense when somebody is doing what they think is right, I am not impugning the motives of anybody, but I have got to tell you, when I hear about interfering with women's health decisions and I think about the ACA and they are mentioned in the same sentence, I am like: Wow, I missed something there. Dodd-Frank, CFPB, it is like oversight. Not that we don't need it. We need some watchdogs on Wall Street, we need some watchdogs on those financial things.

Quite frankly, when I hear about poison pill riders, how about poison injection regulations? With all due respect, ideologically driven riders, how about ideologically driven regulations? We need to say what we think is appropriate for the people who sent us here.

No disrespect to this administration, although I wonder what foot the shoe would have been on 8 years ago, but I wasn't here then because I am too young to remember that. I must say, it is like: Listen, we are going to disagree on policy.

But to suggest somehow that because the Congress thought of something in the majority of this House that it is a poison pill rider and pretend like everything that comes out of regulations, whether it is in financial services, health care, running the IRS, 501(c)(3)s, all those problems, it is like: You are darn right we better be doing our oversight thing.

And by the way, in the C I got in civics, the power of the purse is the biggest stick in oversight, and it should be used.

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