Partisan Chaos

Floor Speech

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Ms. CLARK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, here we are once again. My Republican colleagues have decided to end the 118th Congress the same way they started it; not with a serious budget but with partisan chaos.

Let's look at the last 2 years. First, the GOP manufactured a debt ceiling crisis and took our economy hostage. Despite that, we came together as Democrats and negotiated in good faith. We struck a bipartisan deal, and we signed it into law, but the Republicans tore it up. They have ignored it ever since.

They have driven us to the edge of a government shutdown four times, all to take money out of the pockets of hardworking families and stuff the pockets of billionaires.

It is the same plan every single time: manufacture a crisis then make working people pay the price, cut their healthcare, delay their retirement, lay off the teachers.

Well, this week, they have decided to run this same play for a fifth time. They have brought another extreme partisan bill to the floor.

Speaker Johnson said yesterday: `` . . . it's the right thing to do.'' The right thing to do?

Today is 9/11, the 23rd commemoration of the horrors that were befallen upon us on that day, and I, too, was at the ceremony honoring those heroes that we lost in Afghanistan.

So coming up $12 billion short for our veterans' healthcare and endangering their disability checks, that is the right thing to do?

Compromising our national security, cutting Social Security's ability to meet the needs of our seniors, and even defunding election security?

That is the right thing to do?

Come on. They know this is the wrong thing to do.

So why are we doing it?

Why this reckless 6-month CR?

It is for one reason: Donald Trump's Project 2025.

The GOP wants to delay this fight past the election into next year all in the hopes that they have a better chance at enacting Trump's extreme agenda.

What is that agenda?

Ending Social Security and Medicare as we know them, auctioning off the VA to for-profit corporations, cutting our school budgets in half, eliminating the Department of Education, eliminating Head Start, raising the cost of childcare, imposing a national sales tax, rationing healthcare for working families, and enacting a nationwide abortion ban.

The Republicans have shown us their plans for a second Trump term. They have told us it will be even worse than his first. We should believe them.

The American people reject this extremism, and so should the GOP. Let's pass a bipartisan funding agreement that fulfills our duty to our country, to our veterans, to our seniors, and to our children.

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