10th Amendment of the Constitution

Floor Speech

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I know that the American people are watching what is happening in Washington these days with a little more than a passing interest. I am sure they wonder sometimes about where is the truth because they hear folks on one side of the aisle saying one thing and folks on the other side of the aisle saying another thing.

When I talk to people at home, I do my best to explain the situation in Washington right now. I try to point out the fact that we have deep philosophical differences in this body and in the Senate. We do have two parts of our legislative branch of government--the House and the Senate. The philosophical differences are pretty strong in both bodies.

They really stem from the beginning of the country. Our Founders felt very strongly--the majority of them, though--that the Federal Government should be weak. We, obviously, had just come off of getting our independence from Britain and we wanted to not have a king and we wanted not to have a strong central Government.

I think the Founders were right. The Founders in the Constitution outlined the duties of our respective branches of government. They enumerated them. People will talk about enumerated powers. They made those powers very few for the Federal Government. They emphasized that with the 10th Amendment. It said: If we didn't tell the Federal Government to do this in the Constitution, then we don't want the Federal Government to do it. We leave those responsibilities to the States and to the individuals. We have gotten along very well, we did get along very well, following the Constitution for a long time in this country.

Then we came about in the 1930s with an era of great involvement by the Federal Government--in my opinion and in the opinion of many of my colleagues--overstepping its bounds by getting involved in things that are not mentioned in the Constitution.

Bring us forward to the 1960s, a period of great activism in this country when many more programs were begun, but in the opinion of many of us, again, had absolutely no place in the Federal Government. We should not be doing things like running the education of this country out of the Federal Government or running health care out of the Federal Government.

So what we have here is the result of these deep philosophical differences, and I want to say that that's what is playing out here. Those of us who are opposed to the Federal Government's running health care in this country do so not out of pettiness, not out of meanness, not out of a lack of concern for our fellow citizens, but because we want to diminish the role of the Federal Government in our lives. We believe that, once you turn health care over to the Federal Government, you've basically turned the lives of citizens over to the Federal Government, and that is not a good place to be.

Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle also act as though no act of Congress has ever been repealed. My goodness, we spend a good part of our days here repealing bad legislation that somehow or another got passed before. So what we are doing and what we have been doing for the last few days is making every effort we can to repeal or to delay what is called the Affordable Health Care Act, which we are finding out is absolutely not affordable. That's what we have been doing, but we have been unsuccessful. So we are trying to keep the government open. We have passed bill after bill after bill out of the House to keep the Federal Government open. We have failed in doing that in a large way, so we are working at doing it in minor ways, by passing individual bills. That's what we are here to do today.

I just came out of the Rules Committee. We had these bills on the floor yesterday--three of the five that we are going to vote on today. Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle voted against paying our National Guard even though the President sort of quietly, Saturday night, signed a bill to continue to pay our troops. That was a bill the President said he'd never sign and that he wouldn't compromise, that he wouldn't negotiate. Yet, he did that. Now we want to keep our national parks open; we want to pay our National Guard and Reserve people; we want to provide local funding for the District of Columbia; and we want to keep our promises to America's veterans.

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