Providing For Consideration of H.R. 1255, Government Shutdown Prevention Act of 2011
Floor Speech
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Mr. WELCH. I thank the gentlelady.
The House passed H.R. 1 with the Republican majority. It can't get it through the Senate. They're frustrated. Their responsibility is to be direct with the people who supported their passage of H.R. 1, and being direct with those folks is telling them they have a problem in the Senate. The reason they have a problem in the Senate is because the Senate has a problem with the bill.
Coming into this House of Representatives as a political gambit to pass a ``let's pretend'' bill: let's pretend if the House passes it, it becomes law, without Senate action; let's pretend that if the House passes it, it becomes law without the Senate or the President signing it. That is misleading and not being straight with the folks who supported H.R. 1. Tell them the truth. They have a problem with the Senate.
Now, there's a reason they have a problem with the Senate. H.R. 1 is a bill designed to fail. It will not address the deficit. It will reduce spending in some areas. If you're low income and getting heating assistance, you will lose some money. If you're an oil company that's making $55 billion in tax breaks from people, you will continue to receive it. If you have the practice of putting our two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, on the credit card, that will continue. What H.R. 1 did was target low-income folks, middle class folks, and it left all the other aspects of the budget off the table that have to be on the table if we're going to get the fiscal balance.
Number two, H.R. 1 was loaded with political hand grenades that were designed to make this thing blow up. And that's what's happening in the Senate: things like ending National Public Radio or Planned Parenthood; getting into a debate about choice and abortion. All of those are issues that are vitally important and legitimate to be debated. But why put them on a bill where the objective of the bill is to help bring us into fiscal balance? That's a self-conscious decision, it's a willful decision, and a decision that has implications. And you're seeing it played out in the United States Senate.
H.R. 1 will not succeed in the challenge we face getting us the fiscal balance. And that is the problem that the majority in the House is having with that bill. Coming in here with a bill that's flatly, explicitly unconstitutional by its own language, not what the sponsors say the bill does, but what the bill says it does. Allowing the House by its unilateral action to pass legislation is unconstitutional, it has no merit, and it is simply a way of trying to avoid responsibility.
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