Motion to Go to Conference on H.R. 1, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Floor Speech

Motion to Go to Conference on H.R. 1, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 -- (House of Representatives - February 10, 2009)

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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak against going to conference on the stimulus bill, H.R. 1. However, I'm also rising in support of keeping the conference open.

The time has come to expose this legislation for what it is, a grab bag of special interest projects that will do little in the way of stimulating the economy and will significantly increase our deficit, literally risking our bond rating and triggering future tax increases.

Never in the history of our country has so much money been spent in so little time with, frankly, so little oversight.

As a new member of the Appropriations Committee, a gentleman asked me, well, what's it like? I said, I don't know. I showed up to one meeting. We spent $358 billion in about 3 hours. It was an open process. There was full debate, but there hadn't been subcommittee meetings, and there wasn't time for genuine discussion and give-and-take, in my view.

This train is moving so fast down the tracks, it's hard to determine, frankly, what's in the legislative package from day-to-day, and unfortunately, in my opinion, the package has not been bipartisan in nature. It's not been developed through negotiation and discussion.

Madam Speaker, I trust the President when he says that this should be a bipartisan package, and frankly, I wish the Democratic leadership in the House had seen fit to make it so. But a bipartisan package generally requires the two sides to sit down and negotiate, and frankly, genuinely bipartisan legislation usually requires that some Members on each side vote ``no.''

What we have today is a package that's going to be rammed through on a largely partisan vote where, frankly, the minority feels like it hasn't had an opportunity to participate. Again, I have no problem with that because that's the legislative process. As our friends like to say, they won the election.

Of course, so did we. Everybody that's in this body won an election. Everybody has a point of view, and if you want to have genuine bipartisan legislation, then you have to involve the other side.

The route we're taking will end up, again, in virtually universal support by Democrats and universal opposition by Republicans. It doesn't have to be that way. We could have either debated the Republican alternative or done something else and found common ground.

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