Government Shutdown

Floor Speech

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Mr. BEYER. Madam Speaker, I received an email Friday night from a young lawyer I know in northern Virginia. I met him last year when he had just hung out his shingle for a solo practice.

He was desperate. His one big client is a Federal Government contractor who told him he would not be paid for December or for January because of the government shutdown.

He wrote me because he had just received an eviction notice from his landlord: come up with the rent for January by Wednesday, noon, or face immediate eviction.

I connected him with our local government office on emergency assistance. He got some meaningful help. He reached out to a few nonprofits and got some more. He was only $800 short yesterday, and the landlord agreed to wait another month.

Yes, the shutdown has left 800,000 Federal employees without the money for life's necessities, but it is also harming American citizens far and wide, cruelly and unnecessarily, victims of the inevitable multiplier effects of a Federal Government failing its fiscal responsibility.

This should be the last ever Federal shutdown. We must never again give a President the power to hold the most powerful and best managed government hostage to his whims, obsessions, and political knavery.

Mr. President, let our people go.

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