Government Shutdown in the Golden State

Floor Speech

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Mr. TAKANO. Mr. Speaker, today, I will be hosting a number of Members from my home State of California, a State in which the population is so diverse and in which the culture is so rich that it is often described as a microcosm of America.

Every language, every nationality, every ethnicity is represented in the Golden State--a State that is the 12th-largest economy in the world. California's economy is so big that its GDP rivals that of some full-blown, industrialized nations, including those of Australia, Spain, Mexico, and South Korea. The economy in California is crucial to the national economy.

I am here tonight with my colleagues to speak against the government shutdown that has been manufactured and orchestrated by the House Republicans--a shutdown that is harming the national economy, a shutdown that is harming the California economy and a shutdown that is harming the very communities that we represent.

In my district, the 41st District, which represents Riverside, Moreno Valley, Perris, the largest employer is March Air Reserve Base, with 8,500 people working at the base in some capacity. When the shutdown hit, 500 of these workers were affected by the furloughs. While Congress passed legislation allowing these employees to go back to work, roughly 1,000 National Guardsmen at the base still will not be able to drill this month and will not receive pay.

It is not just our servicemembers who are hurt by this reckless shutdown. Low-income children in my district are suffering, too. The Riverside County Office of Education receives Federal funding through the Head Start program in order to provide childhood development services and to promote school readiness for children under the age of 5. Because of this shutdown, the county is not able to draw down their grant money, jeopardizing these vital services for nearly 3,500 young children in my county.

About an hour east of my district is Joshua Tree National Park, where 92 park employees were given furlough notices. When the shutdown happened, park rangers were forced to notify campers that they had to vacate the park within 48 hours. There are 7,000 people a day who visit Joshua Tree National Park, and this shutdown is estimated to cost nearly $8,000 a day.

Not just the park and its employees are going to suffer; local businesses will suffer as well. A cafe next to the park normally has a line out the door. The other day, the manager reported that the cafe made only $39. This is a small business, Mr. Speaker.

We have to end this shutdown, not just for the furloughed public employees but for small businesses like that cafe.

I am very pleased to be joined by several of my California colleagues, the first of whom is from southern California, the distinguished gentleman, Alan Lowenthal. He represents the cities of Long Beach, Garden Grove and Cypress. He sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Committee on Natural Resources.

I am happy to yield to the gentleman from California's 47th District.

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Mr. TAKANO. Thank you, Mr. Lowenthal. I appreciate it. I know you have to run on to a committee, and good luck.

Next, I now yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Huffman), my friend and colleague from the Second District, a great leader in the environment, somebody who, in the California Legislature, authored some landmark bills that have improved the environment. He is also among one of the most progressive Members of this body. I sit with him in the Progressive Caucus. Representative Jared Huffman of California's Second District, which includes the cities of Crescent City, Fort Bragg, San Rafael, and other cities. He sits on the Budget Committee as well as the Committee on Natural Resources.

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Mr. TAKANO. Thank you, Mr. Huffman. If you want to--care to stay just a few minutes to have a little back-and-forth.

Mr. HUFFMAN. I would.

Mr. TAKANO. We come from different parts of our great State of California. I know we both share a deep love for our State. I have been to your district, to Sonoma and the great forests that you have in your district. It is a terrible thing to see, just as California is coming out of this recession--I don't know about you, but I visited a number of these businesses during the congressional break, during the work period, during August and early September, and there were so many hopeful stories about people saying, We have gotten through this hump, we have gotten through the worst of the 2008, 2009, and 2010 recession. There was even talk that real estate in my area of the State, which was hit hard, was coming back. I told all these folks I am so glad to hear these wonderful stories.

I just hope that we don't, in Washington, end up, through any unnecessary actions, irresponsible and reckless actions, set back the gains that we have made. I don't know about you, but in my district, certainly, I can see how shutting down the government and threatening to not raise the debt ceiling would have just tremendous adverse consequences on the twelfth largest economy in the world.

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Mr. TAKANO. Thank you so much for coming down to speak about how this shutdown, this GOP-imposed shutdown, manufactured shutdown, and how this threat to not raise the debt limit is jeopardizing our entire Nation. But we in California are a tremendous engine behind the whole big picture of the economic mind of our country. An economy which represents 12 percent of the global economy is nothing to be cavalier about.

Mr. HUFFMAN. Absolutely. As we talk about this incredible economic damage and risk that politicians are taking with our economy, what I am hearing from my district is how incredulous people are because there is such an obvious and simple solution and way forward.

Let's have an up-or-down vote on whether we should continue this government shutdown or end it, and even end it, at least temporarily, on Republican budget numbers. That seems so eminently reasonable and sensible. In fact, it was the deal that one House struck and advanced out of that House with bipartisan action. Yet here we are in the House of Representatives with a small faction rejecting that deal, holding the entire country's economy potentially hostage for political reasons. It is just something my constituents can't understand.

Mr. TAKANO. I thank the gentleman.

Now, I would like to recognize the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Negrete McLeod), a Representative from a neighboring district, California's 35th District. I have known Congresswoman Gloria Negrete McLeod, gosh, more than 20 years, when we both began our careers as community college trustees. It is such a great honor to serve alongside her and sit in this Chamber sometimes when we are voting. She sits on the Committee on Agriculture and the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, on which I also sit. We are both committed to the huge veterans population that we have in the inland empire of the region of California that we both represent in inland southern California.

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Mr. TAKANO. Thank you, Congressman Honda.

I know that before you became a Member of Congress, you had experience as a county supervisor, and I know that counties are often the fiscal agents for major programs, like our nutrition programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition programs. I understand that the stimulus funds that we are supplementing, some of these assistance programs--let me try to translate this into ordinary everyday language.

We are talking about food stamps. We are talking about people being able to buy food in order to have the basic necessity of eating. I don't know about your district, but in my district, I know that during the height of the recession, we saw people who were middle class families for the first time having to access these programs. As I say, we are still not fully out of this recession. It is a fragile recovery.

The other effect that these assistance programs had is that they serve as a kind of stimulus to the local economy. People on these assistance programs have to spend the money locally, at local supermarkets. It injects some stimulus effect on the local economies. My understanding is that, come November 1, we are going to see a significant reduction in those programs because we have not been attending to reauthorizing the legislation that funds these programs. We have grave doubt as to what is going to happen to the 47 million people who rely on SNAP.

Mr. HONDA. That is true.

Mr. Takano, as you know, I represent a majority of the area that is commonly called ``Silicon Valley.'' We were doing relatively well with the shutdown; however, government contracts, entrepreneurship are going to be affected, and that trickles down throughout the system, including what we call the ``supply chains,'' where other companies throughout this country, in other parts of the State are affected also. This is almost like an arithmetic kind of extension of this impact when--I guess Warren Buffett said it best, that it is a nuclear bomb, because it just continues to spread its impact throughout our country and our economy.

Mr. TAKANO. Isn't it true in Silicon Valley--let's kind of talk about that for a moment--there has been a resurgence of investment, that we are seeing our California budget sort of recovering with additional revenues because your area of the State is helping to lead the recovery?

There are two different subject matters here: the government shutdown, and also this issue of the debt ceiling being raised. We have seen on the Hong Kong markets the short-term debt or the premium that they are charging for this uncertainty about our debt ceiling being raised. In other words, interest rates are likely to raise. Raising capital is going to be a problem.

Do you have any thoughts on what that is going to be doing to our Silicon Valley entrepreneurs?

Mr. HONDA. It is a dampening effect. I think people are less likely to invest, even though there is a great faith in the kinds of activities we have in Silicon Valley. I think those who have the resources to make the investments, they are going to be looking at it twice before they can move forward. I think that they are very concerned about the government's behavior in terms of how we manufacture crisis around the debt limit, how we manufacture crisis about the CR or the budget. All we need is what we proposed a few months ago, and that is a good, balanced budget that would drive this country forward economically and logically.

No family functions without a good budget. What we are doing is we have created a budgetary crisis that guarantees--they have already done it--closure of the government or the dysfunction of a family. When you do that, all hell breaks loose. This is what is happening to our elders, our children, our preschools. There is not a system that has not been affected. The military, our veterans, they are all being affected. So we have to really make sure that the public understands what it is that is happening.

Mr. TAKANO. Well, I don't think we want to normalize or make routine a mode of governing where either party threatens to shut down the government because of a political end they want to achieve or either party decides that they want to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States and threaten the establishment of the American dollar as the world reserve currency because they want to achieve some sort of political end.

We need to give the American people--every business, every family, investors, whether they are domestic or whether they are international investors who want to invest in our economy, including in Silicon Valley, the certainty that we have a responsible government in the United States.

Whoever would have thought we would come to a place where within a year and a half, the last time that this issue came about was--I remember seeing you on August 1 of 2011 when the Budget Control Act of 2011 was passed. But it was linked, I think, unfortunately, to the debt ceiling raise. And the idea that we would normalize this practice, to me, is something that we don't want to see our Nation continue to do.

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Mr. TAKANO. I thank the gentleman.

Let me just go into my final remarks for this Special Order hour. And I want to remind the American people that the Democrats did offer a point of compromise when we accepted funding for the continuing resolution, which is actually below the Paul Ryan budget figure. It is a number that the President agreed to, the Senate agreed to, and the House Democrats are willing to agree to. And we know that there was a deal that was brokered by the Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader related to it, and we thought that the result would be a clean CR.

But what we cannot afford to do, what I cannot unconscionably do as the Representative for the 41st District, is to bargain away the Affordable Care Act. Twenty-four percent of my population of Riverside County is uninsured. My constituents need the Affordable Care Act to help them get the quality health care that they deserve.

The law includes important consumer protections that prevent insurance companies from denying coverage for people with preexisting conditions. It eliminates annual and lifetime caps on care and allows young people to stay on their parents' plans longer. In addition, the law requires insurance plans to cover free preventative health services, and it lowers prescription drug costs for seniors by closing the Medicare part D doughnut hole.

So, America, my community's seniors have a lot at stake. The California State marketplace, Covered California, has already received 1 million unique site visits, more than 16,000 applications have been completed, and another 27,000 are partially completed. That is more than 43,000 Californians who have taken the step to get covered in just 10 days.

Well, Mr. Speaker, this is all very simple. Congress has a handful of basic functions. Two of them are to keep the government open and to pay our bills on time. These things Congress should be doing already.

The situation we are in reminds me of when my brothers and I thought our parents should pay us an allowance for making our beds. My parents argued that making our beds was something that my brothers and I should be doing anyway, that an everyday responsibility like making our beds wasn't something that was done for a payoff.

What should I get for brushing my teeth? That is obviously a personal responsibility that I shouldn't get anything for. Refusing to fulfill a responsibility should not be leverage for getting something that you want.

The House Republicans are expecting to get something out of this. They are expecting to get something out of refusing to fulfill their basic responsibilities. They are expecting to get something out of refusing to fund the government and refusing to be faithful stewards of the full faith and credit of the United States. They are willing to threaten the American dollar and its status as the world's reserve currency.

There are several Members of this body who do not believe the chaos that would be created by not paying our bills on time. One Member said he believed it would ``bring stability to the markets.'' Others have said that it is a ``scare tactic'' being used by the administration and Democrats. They say this despite every credible economist stating that America defaulting on its debts would be catastrophic.

Imagine, Mr. Speaker, imagine if Democrats were this cavalier about an issue as serious as the debt ceiling. We would be run out of town, and for good reason.

I thank my colleagues for joining me today. Let's end this shutdown. Let's end this shutdown, Mr. Speaker. Let's make sure we pay our bills and pay them on time. And let's give the American people the certainty that they need and that they deserve.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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