Complaints Department Is Not Good Enough

Floor Speech

COMPLAINTS DEPARTMENT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH -- (House of Representatives - June 14, 2007)

(Ms. FOXX asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I love my colleague from Missouri, appreciate his leading our prayer breakfast during the week; but he is wrong. This is not a delaying tactic. We have been bringing things out into the open with this bill, with our discussions of the Homeland Security bill, and he knows and we know that the bill does not have to be approved until September because it doesn't go into effect until October so we are not delaying any fence building.

The discussions we have been having on the floor have been tremendously enlightening, as the Republicans have fought literally through the night to restore openness to our government. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have raised these complaints that we are distracting from the real issue.

The debate on making earmarks public before we vote on the bill is the real issue. I can think of nothing more important than defending the rights of Members of this House to contest potentially wasteful spending requests. But as we have highlighted for the past couple of days, the majority wants to kill that right and instead replace it with a complaints department and massive slush funds. A complaints department is not good enough. My constituents, and every American, deserve to know what will be in this bill before we vote on it and telling us to write a letter to the committee when to contest an egregious earmark once they are announced merely amounts to wallpapering over the core issue here.

We need openness. And the more my colleagues in the majority fight to keep earmarks secret, the more Americans will see them as the party of hypocrisy.

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