Government Shutdown
Floor Speech
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, one would think after all of the hours and hours of discussions that have taken place on this floor that perhaps enough has been said. That may be true, but so much of what was said seems not to be clarifying and providing a clear understanding of what has actually happened here.
We want to take a few minutes here, probably maybe as much as an hour, possibly less than that, and try to gain some clarity as to how we got to this point with a government shutdown, how we can get out of it, and what the impact is on Americans. There are good days and there are bad days and then there are really, really bad days.
About 12:30 last night, as we were finishing the votes here on the floor, it became very apparent that the government had, indeed, shut down and that there wasn't any hope of resurrecting it in the final hours of last night. So today, all across America, government offices are shut down. You just heard a description of the World War II Memorial. And that is but an example.
Now, how did we get here? How did this happen? We have been over the last 3 years now dealing with one manufactured crisis after another. They came to be known as ``cliffs'': ``fiscal cliff,'' ``debt limit cliff,'' on and on. Each time we would come up to some deadline, and it was made into a crisis. Our Republican friends were usually the--well, they were always the instigators of this, at least since the 2010 election.
What has happened is they have used these deadlines, which come and go every year, as an opportunity to leverage in one or another policy changes. That has been going on. I think one of the most noteworthy of these deadlines was the fiscal cliff that occurred in the summer of 2011 in which the United States came up against its debt limit and it was just a moment away from that default.
Fortunately, there were negotiations underway, and it did lead to a settlement. The settlement, of course, was the infamous sequester. It wasn't supposed to happen. Nobody liked it. It was in the bill. It did happen, and now we are living with it. As time went on, we have had even more of these moments of crisis, and yesterday was yet one more. It occurs on a regular basis. Every October 1, we start a new fiscal year, and that's an opportunity for us to look at all of the expenditures of the Federal Government and to make decisions about what should be or should not be funded and at what level it should be funded.
So we had a crisis last night, and the result is the Federal Government is largely unfunded, and monuments across the Nation--national parks, Veterans Administration offices, Social Security offices, and the rest--are in the process of being shut down, and some are shut down. This is not a good thing. It's a very bad thing. It is bad for this Nation. I was there in 1995 as Deputy Secretary at the Department of the Interior when the Department of the Interior was shut down--national parks, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey. Studies underway about the nature of everything from earthquakes to hurricanes and the like were just put aside for 26 days. We are back in that today. It could have been avoided--it should have been avoided--and had we followed through on the normal process of establishing a budget for the United States, it would have been, or most likely would have been, avoided.
Why didn't that happen?
The House of Representatives passed a budget in March. The Senate passed a budget at about the same time, and the Senate requested a conference committee. From April to this moment, no conference committee on the Budget has been established.
Now, the budget gives the framework in which the appropriations for all of the Federal offices--the Department of Defense, parks and so forth--are funded. It is within that framework of the budget. So, without a framework, we were literally wandering in the dark, and some very, very bad things happened. What happened was we came up against a deadline. The continuing resolution, which continues to fund the government--the first issue was for 2 months, until December 15, and then it eventually came down to November 15. That continuing resolution--sometimes called a ``CR''--actually provided less money than did the Senate's version of the budget. It was $986 billion, which is the sequestration amount that would continue forward.
While virtually every person in this entire House--435 of us--said sequestration was bad and that we will never vote for sequestration again, we were, in fact, presented with a sequestration appropriation, a continuing resolution, that would go for 2 months. The sequestration was, in fact, built into that. Now, the Democrats, in looking at this, said, We don't want a shutdown. We will compromise for 2 months and accept the lower funding level.
So, when people go back and forth here and say there was no effort to compromise, that's not true. The fact of the matter is the Democrats said, to avoid the shutdown of government, we will accept the sequestration level of government, which was, I think, over $50 billion less than what we would have liked to have spent to keep the programs going.
Along the way, our Republican colleagues decided that they would use this moment to terminate the Affordable Health Care Act. We are going to spend some time on that this evening. The termination of the Affordable Health Care Act would affect every American in many, many ways, and we will spend some time talking about all of those ways.
So, by combining the CR, which the Democrats accepted--and had it passed the House and the Senate, there would be no government shutdown--and by joining to that the desire, particularly of the Tea Party Republican caucus members, we wound up with a stalemate. We need to understand exactly what was in the CR and exactly what was the impact of the--what shall we say? There were three different versions of this. One version was to repeal, in other words, just wipe out the entire law--the Affordable Health Care Act, or ObamaCare. Another was to delay all of it. Then yet a third was to delay just a piece of it. So there have been different iterations, but each one would dramatically affect the people of America.
I would like to now turn to my colleague from Texas, Sheila Jackson Lee, who will pick up with this issue.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Ms. Sheila Jackson Lee, thank you so very much.
There is no doubt that this House has the ability at any moment to vote on the continuing resolution that the Senate has sent back here. If that were to happen, the President would immediately have that law on his desk. He could sign it, and government would at that moment reopen. Keep in mind that that CR was not one that we thought was the best. It, actually, is significantly below the level of funding that the Democrats wanted, and it does continue, at least for another month and a half, the sequestration, which we do not like.
I would like now to turn to Ms. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, who spoke here on the floor a few moments ago.
Ms. Kaptur, please share with us your thoughts on the current crisis in America.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you very much, Ms. Kaptur. We should have pointed out in the introduction that you are the ranking member of one of the Appropriation Committees--transportation, the energy programs, all of the research that goes on, and a lot of the projects of, I believe, NASA, also. I know you worked long and hard on that, and I sense a sadness, from your remarks, that all of the good things that are done by those Departments are simply in abeyance now; and given the level of funding that is in the CR with the sequestration, much will not be done.
Let me now turn to my colleague from California (Mr. Honda), who has been serving for a while here representing the Silicon Valley and much of what we were just talking about, the research and the development of the economy. I know you've had a great deal to do with that over the years, really helping to create one of the engines of economic growth in the United States. Mr. Honda.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Honda, thank you so very much, and thank you for your lifetime of service, your early years in the Peace Corps in El Salvador, the work that you did there, and, as you said, bringing it home and continuing to serve right up through this day and beyond as you continue to represent the great Silicon Valley of California. So thank you very much for all that you have done over these many years.
You mentioned something that I'm going to turn to very quickly. I was the insurance commissioner, and one of the things that we wanted to do in California, but we couldn't get the legislature to pass, was the Patients' Bill of Rights. Some of this we tried to do with regulations, but the Patients' Bill of Rights is now the law of the land.
When our Republican colleagues came forward with a continuing resolution that was actually a sequestration and a low level of funding and added to it the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, I'm going: Wait a minute. You want to repeal the Patients' Bill of Rights?
I'm going to run through this very quickly.
Children with preexisting conditions, young children at birth or in the early years that have developed some serious medical condition before the Patients' Bill of Rights which now is in effect this day, children cannot be denied coverage, period. There are thousands upon thousands of children across this Nation that find themselves in this situation.
Young adults at the age of 18, prior to the Patients' Bill of Rights--and this has been in effect for more than a year now--at the age of 18, they were off of their parents' coverage and they were out there on their own, often unable, particularly if they were a woman, to be able to get insurance. But the Patients' Bill of Rights allows them to stay on their parents' insurance until they are 26; and there are more than 6.6 million young Americans 18 to 26 that are now on their parents' health coverage as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
Women have the right to health care coverage without discrimination for all kinds of things--breast cancer, pregnancy, and other kinds of illnesses that women might get. Prior to the Patients' Bills of Rights and the Affordable Care Act, there was heavy-duty discrimination against women. They couldn't get insurance. If they could, they would pay substantially more. We're talking that half of the population of America, at one time or another, women--actually, more than half--were facing this discrimination, but no longer with the Patients' Bill of Rights.
Seniors have a right to affordable medication and also to an annual wellness visit, which actually has dramatically reduced the ongoing inflation rate in Medicare, bending the curve.
And then finally, this one down here, every American has the right to health care coverage without a limitation on the annual amount that you could spend. A family with a cancer case would blow right through the limitation. They'd be on their own. And this is what led to the enormous number of personal bankruptcies, more than 50 percent of which were caused by health care problems.
So the Patients' Bill of Rights was, according to our Republican colleagues, to be repealed along with all of the Affordable Health Care Act. Needless to say, those of us on the Democratic side said, This is wrong. This is not good for America. It's not good for Americans, individuals, children, or adults. And we fought the fight.
We're not finished with this yet. Although as of today, it appears as though our Republican colleagues have dropped the issue of defunding, delaying, or repealing the Affordable Health Care Act as far as the continuing resolution is concerned.
I will come back. I will cover some of these things again. I would like now to turn to our new colleague from San Antonio, Texas, Joaquin Castro. Please join us. You have a great background in that city. And you come with an extraordinary reputation, well earned, as a scholar and as a great citizen of San Antonio.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Castro, thank you so very, very much. You spoke of your Senator, Senator Cruz. I suspect in 5 years, you're going to replace him, and I would like that.
Mr. CASTRO of Texas. I'm happy to hear that.
Mr. GARAMENDI. It's time for us to go back to our East-West Show, which we have done here many, many nights. My colleague from the State of New York, Paul Tonko, who has represented for 5 years now the area where the Industrial Revolution began, along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers.
Right now we're in a fix here in Washington. The government is shut down. All of the things you've talked about over these many years, about building the American economy, manufacturing, the research that you were responsible for for the State of New York--and it's all shut down.
Mr. TONKO. Right.
Mr. GARAMENDI. Share with us your thoughts if you would, please.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Tonko, thank you so very much for joining me once again.
I'm going to wrap this up with a note of sadness. The American Government is shut down. It is shut down because of the conflict that has developed between the Democrats and the Republicans here in the House and on the Senate side.
It's a conflict that didn't have to happen. We could have worked this out in a conference committee, had Speaker Boehner chosen to appoint conferees. It didn't take place.
A continuing resolution--the Democrats compromised seriously and accepted a continuing resolution at the sequestration level, far less money than we think is necessary, but we wanted to keep the government running.
We refuse to abandon the Affordable Care Act and the millions upon millions of Americans that have benefited from that and are benefiting today as the exchanges are going into place.
California's had an enormous success, and it will work. And as it works, I think we'll find that those Americans, some 40 million that do not have health insurance, will, in the next months ahead, get their health insurance at an affordable cost. And this is already bending the cost curve for American health care. It's a good thing.
But it's also a very sad day. There is absolutely no reason that this government was shut down, except for the intransigence of our Republican colleagues demanding the repeal of things like the Patients' Bill of Rights, demanding that we go back on a promise that America has tried to have for some 60 years now, providing health insurance to all Americans. We're moving towards that with the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare.
It's a sad day, but it's also a hopeful day. It's a hopeful day because the exchanges are working. There will be computer glitches, and there will be some error in the mathematics; but across this Nation, the exchanges are working.
And the American public that is uninsured, not the insured, but the uninsured, they're going to the exchanges and they're saying, let me shop; let me shop in a rational market where I can compare prices and quality and providers. They're doing that in California, in New York, and in Texas, all across this Nation.
So it's hopeful. It's a hopeful moment, even though we have spent the last week battling out the fundamental question, Is America going to move forward and stay in business, or is the government going to shut down?
Republicans chose to shut down the government.
Are Americans going to get health care?
The Republicans said no, the Affordable Care Act must be repealed.
The Democrats said no way, no how.
It's in place, folks. The Affordable Care Act is in place, and the exchanges are working, and millions of Americans will find an opportunity to buy insurance in a competitive market, free market, not a government market, but a market structured by government so that the private sector can display its insurance policies, what their price is, what their quality is, which doctors they can go to.
It's a sad day, but it's also a hopeful day.
Mr. Speaker, with our 54 minutes, we thank you for the opportunity to explain this, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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