Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2008

Floor Speech

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 -- (House of Representatives - June 13, 2007)

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

My friend who just spoke and those on the other side of the aisle are fond often of quoting our Founding Fathers. I'm not a student of James Madison or some of his brethren, but I would think that they would be turning in their graves if they watched how this House worked for the last 12 years.

I come here as a freshman Member and I am speaking from what I saw from the outside. I am sure this analogy has been used here on the House floor over the course of the last 10 hours, but listening to folks on the other side of the aisle, my Republican friends, complain about the issues of fiscal responsibility and transparency has got to conjure up the image of the bull in the china shop. If you let a bull into a china shop for 12 years and then he just tears down everything off the walls, he knocks over every case, he breaks every single glass in there. And then in this case, he runs out of the china shop and says, Well, why don't you go in there and clean that up? Why doesn't somebody go clean up the mess that we just made?

That's what happened in this House from those of us who watched it from afar on the issues of transparency and on fiscal responsibility.

You know, it's interesting. I sat here last night being called back and forth to the floor for, I guess, eight different motions to shut down this House and to stop the Homeland Security bill from going forward, and I wondered why hadn't that happened in the last 12 years. Why wasn't there a night while we were wasting billions of dollars on this floor in Iraq, $9 billion that we found out are totally unaccounted for? Why didn't we shut down the House one night to talk about that?

As thousands of FEMA trailers were stranded on open lots in the southeastern United States, why didn't we shut down this House for one night to talk about that over the last 12 years? While $70 billion in corporate giveaways were handed out through the Medicare bill, why didn't we shut down this House to talk about that?

Millions of dollars in no-bid contracts. Record deficits year after year. Why on earth wasn't this House shut down like it was last night over the last 12 years?

The American people are probably asking that same question, and there is probably one answer: This House changed hands. There is a different party in charge. And so now there is a very different standard that applies here. The questions that should have been asked for 12 years, well, now in a political context they are being asked today.

I also don't shy away, Mr. Chairman, from the fact that as a new Member, I'm also one of the younger Members here. So I kind of feel that I have an obligation to talk for the millions of my generation that have just become utterly turned off to politics. And when they look at a House being shut down overnight into today, who knows how many more days, to prevent a fairly nonpartisan Homeland Security bill that will protect them, that will protect their parents, their neighbors, that will make their communities a safer place, they know this is about politics, not policy.

And so I think about all of those people who, as they watch this process unfold, are losing their faith in this institution. As angry as I am about the double standard that's applied, about the hypocrisy that's exercised on this House, this House thick with irony over the past several days, I think also about what people think when they see members of the Republican Party playing politics with the issue of homeland security.

Now, we hear claims that this isn't obstruction. We don't have a problem
with slowing down the House to talk about this. Well, I would say this. I think that my friends on the Republican side of the aisle, they vastly underestimate the gullibility of the American people. They also vastly overestimate the amount of patience that the American public has left for the games that are being played here on the House floor.

We have an obligation to do all the things that we were sent here to do, to fund homeland security, to protect this Nation. We also have an obligation to live up to the expectations that people had of this Congress when it changed hands, to take the politics out of this House and to start doing the right thing for the American people, not the right thing for either political party.

I would ask we don't go through tonight what we did last night, that we start doing what's right for the American people on policy rather than what's right for the Republican minority on politics.

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