Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROGERS of Kentucky. I thank the chairman for yielding me the time.

Mr. Speaker, this is a bipartisan bill, and I hope every Member in this House will be happy to support it.

I'm glad to see that, at the very least, the Senate has plans to take up this bill. Stop the presses. The Senate's going to take up a bill, even if they won't consider most of our other bills.

And as we wait for the Senate to come to the negotiating table on shutting the shutdown down, our Federal workforce should not wait to find out whether or not they'll be paid. This bill will provide backpay for those workers who have been furloughed in a fair, full, and timely manner after the shutdown ends. The House has made great strides toward this end. And in fact, as of yesterday, the House has approved 15 different options to fund the government. We have sent them over to the Senate. Sadly, the only response has been a loud snore.

I hope this bill, which I know is a priority for my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, will encourage this Congress to find that spirit of bipartisanship that seems to have evaporated over the last few weeks. It will demonstrate that we are able to let level heads prevail and that we can unite in our responsibility to care for the hundreds of thousands of people who serve this Nation day in, day out.

I want to thank the gentlemen from Virginia, Messrs. Wolf and Moran, two very fine members of our Appropriations Committee, for bringing this bill to the floor, and I salute them. I urge my colleagues to provide our workforce with some certainty for their futures and pass this bill.

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