Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Madam Chair, the amendment before us is a start. Eighteen million dollars out of $720 billion is a start. You might take it one step forward and let's end the war in Afghanistan where we're spending $120 billion and another $30 billion or so in Iraq. Now we've got some real money to talk about.

Because this is a start, I find that it's an unworthy start, and, therefore, I oppose the amendment. However, the real issue before America is not how we can slash and burn in foolish ways that actually lose tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, indeed a million jobs in the next 7 months, which is the proposal before us with this continuing resolution that the Republican Caucus has put on the floor. It seems to me that if we wanted to create jobs, we certainly wouldn't, as a first step, lose a million jobs in virtually every sector of the economy:

Teachers that are providing services for the early childhood education programs, Head Start, they'll lose their jobs.

Firefighters; 2,400 or more of them will lose their job across the Nation. The COPS program, which has provided jobs for police in our cities, they'll lose their jobs, some 1,300. They just had men and women from my own district come in and say, Why would they want to do that? Why would they want to take cops off the street? I told them, I don't know. I don't understand.

I don't understand this CR. It is the most foolish, nonsensical slash-and-burn I have ever seen. I was in the Department of the Interior in the mid nineties when we actually reduced in a thoughtful way over a 4-year period of time the number of employees by some 12,000--from 90,000 down to the 70,000 range. We did it. And [Page: H837]we continued to do the services. But you don't slash and burn. You don't just in a wholesale manner carry out a political promise of $100 billion and foist it upon the American public in this way where we lose a million jobs, where we lose critical services.

California has been in a water war for generations. We rely upon the Bureau of Reclamation. We rely upon recycling. We rely upon these programs. And yet you slash those, and those are real jobs and real programs to deal with the water problems in the West. Why would you do that? What's the point of that? Why would you go into programs where we need to educate?

My daughter is a second grade teacher. She now has 32 kids in her elementary program; an almost impossible situation. And your cuts that you're proposing will make that situation worse. She cried out to me this week, Why are they doing that, Dad? I said, for some political promise made in a campaign without any thinking about the impact that it has on real human beings, real students, who are trying to get an education.

My final point is this. There are five things that lead to true economic growth. The best education system in the world, and so this CR cuts education. The best research in the world, and so this CR cuts research programs in science, in energy, in health care. The best infrastructure, and this CR cuts infrastructure expenditures. Manufacturing matters; we have to make it in America. You cut out those programs that assist manufacturing. And, finally, we know that we have to have an energy policy and you destroy the beginnings of a green energy, self-sustaining energy program in this Nation.

Why would you do so many foolish things? I don't get it. Perhaps it's because your real agenda is the no-jobs agenda.

Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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