Letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner - Congress Should Remain in Session and Go to Conference on the Budget

Letter

Today Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, sent the following letter to Speaker John Boehner, urging him to keep Congress is session to begin work on a final budget.

August 1, 2013

The Honorable John Boehner
Speaker
United States House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Speaker Boehner:

I write to urge you to keep Congress in session to continue the work that the American people sent us here to do -- chief among those tasks being to pass a final budget, pay our nation's bills, and help put more people back to work.

Replacing the sequester is one immediate step Congress can take to boost economic growth and create jobs. As the recent Congressional Budget Office report indicated, the sequester is a jobs killer. Their new projections show that the sequester's deep, immediate cuts will likely cost us almost a million jobs by the end of fiscal year 2014. This is on top of damage that is already happening -- seniors losing meals on wheels, kids being kicked off of Head Start, and military readiness being undermined. House Democrats have offered a plan to replace the sequester seven times this year, but each time we were denied a vote on the House floor.

House Democrats are focused on replacing the sequester with a balanced approach to deficit reduction that protects the progress our economy has made. The House bill I have introduced, HR 2060, would do just that. There is no excuse for further delaying a vote. We cannot slash our way to prosperity -- we should make smart, targeted investments in our kids' education, roads and bridges that are in desperate need of repair, research and development that will help keep America on the cutting edge, and small businesses that are powering our economic recovery. We can do that while reducing the deficit over the long-term in a way that does no harm now.

I also urge you to immediately appoint conferees and begin a conference to adopt a reasonable budget plan, which Democrats have been urging for months. The Senate passed a budget 131 days ago and has asked for unanimous consent to begin negotiations 17 times, yet we remain at a standstill. The failure to bring the Transportation-Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill up for a vote and the inability of the Appropriations Committee to mark up a Labor-HHS-Education bill show that even House Republicans cannot proceed with their own austere budget.

Yet the GOP continues to push us to the brink, threatening a government shutdown and default on the government's obligations. House Republicans are sending Congress home for five weeks -- leaving us with only nine days in session before funding for the federal government expires. I urge you to reconsider this irresponsible decision and keep Congress here to do our work on this critical issue. American families are depending on us.

Best regards,

Chris Van Hollen
Ranking Democrat

cc: Chairman Paul Ryan

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