Providing for Consideration of Senate Amendments to H.R. 3630, Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2011; Providing For Consideration of House Resolution 501, Sense of House Regarding Any Final Measure to Extend Certain Expiring Provisions
Floor Speech
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Ms. DeGETTE. Mr. Speaker, I'm mad, too. I'm mad at the Senate. I'm mad this is a short-term extension. I'm mad that this allows this pipeline that I object to to be built, and I, too, am mad at the way it's paid for.
But then, Mr. Speaker, I think about the six constituents that I met with a couple of weeks ago in Denver. All six of them are unemployed and have been for over 2 years. Every morning these six folks wake up with hope. They send out resumes. They make phone calls. They visit offices. They do everything they can think of to get a job. By the end of the day, they're dispirited.
By the end of the week, on Sunday, now we want to remove all hope that they will have to subsist in any way. This is going to happen in 12 days. There's almost 36,000 people like this in my district. There's 2.2 million of them around the country.
Or I think about the hundreds of thousands of families who do have jobs. Now, these folks, as of January 1, are all going to lose $1,000 in their paychecks in 12 days. These people have planned their Christmas budgets around that money. Now, either they'll have to charge it on their credit cards, racking up more debt, or maybe they just won't buy those toys to put under the tree because of Congress. Merry Christmas.
Don't fool yourselves. I've been in Congress 15 years now. The Senate is not coming back. There won't be a conference committee. This motion effectively kills the bill. Let's stop arguing about process. Let's stop arguing about what we want to see. Let's stop demagoguing this issue. Let's start talking, for once, about the people that we represent and who will lose hope this holiday season because of us.
Let's defeat this motion. Let's adopt the bipartisan Senate bill. Let's come back in January and work together in a bipartisan and a bicameral way to actually fix this bill.
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