[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 24 (Thursday, February 14, 2013)]
[House]
[Page H506]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                REPUBLICANS APPROVE OF HARMFUL SEQUESTER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOYER. The gentleman who preceded me is new to the Congress of 
the United States. I've been here for a little longer than that, some 
32 years. This is the least confidence-building Congress, last Congress 
and this Congress, in which I have ever served. It is taking us from 
fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis. It is creating cliffs where no cliffs 
ought to exist, and they undermine the confidence of business, America, 
Americans, and indeed, the rest of the world that needs a stable and 
secure America to ensure that we keep the kind of stability that 
Americans want here at home and around the world.
  We will be dealing with a bill today and tomorrow that could be 
considered in an hour. We're going to take two days to consider it. And 
while we consider that, while we fiddle, while the sequester threatens 
to burn our economy, jobs, and confidence, we do nothing. We have not 
done anything to avoid the sequester for the last 7 weeks of this year, 
and nothing in this Congress. As a matter of fact, other than 
completing the work of making sure the folks who were damaged by Sandy 
were assisted, which should have been done in the last Congress, we've 
done nothing here of real substance in 7 weeks, but we are about to 
confront the sequester.
  I want every American to know, I want every person who relies on the 
Federal Government--and that is mainly all of us--that if Democrats 
were in charge of this House the sequester would not go into effect. 
Why? Because we would adopt an alternative policy that would cut 
spending so that we could move towards deficit and debt reduction, 
which we need to do as a country, and we would make a balanced proposal 
that the Senate Democrats will offer this day, and that we wanted to 
offer and Chris Van Hollen offered last night in the Budget Committee, 
but which as not made in order.

                              {time}  1010

  In his State of the Union speech, the President talked about the 
American people deserve a vote. He's right. The American people deserve 
to know how Members are going to vote on issues of consequence to them, 
their families, their lives, their jobs, and their country. But we were 
denied a vote last week on this issue, which was a substitute for the 
sequester, and we are again denied this week a substitute for the 
sequester.
  Some of my Republican friends try to say, Oh, it's the President who 
wanted the sequester. That is dead flat wrong. Rob Nabors did mention 
the sequester after the Republicans passed the sequester in this House 
in July of 2011. They call it the Cut, Cap, and Balance Legislation. 
Its fallback position was ``sequester.'' It was a policy that all, I 
think, but two Republicans voted for when it passed this House. It was 
a policy that they promoted and supported. It is a bad policy. It's an 
irrational policy. It is a policy that will have great adverse 
consequences.
  At a town meeting, I said the sequester works like this: if you have 
a food budget and a movie budget and somebody loses their job, the 
sequester says you cut food by 10 percent and movies by 10 percent. No 
rational American family would do that. They'd say this month we're not 
going to the movies or this 6 months we're not going to the movies, but 
we're going to make sure we put food on our table. Sequester says, No, 
we cut food by 10 percent and movies by 10 percent.
  Sequester is an irrational response to our failure as a Congress, 
correct, to get our finances on a sustainable path. We need to do that. 
And Democrats are suggesting a balanced way to do it. By the way, every 
bipartisan commission that has dealt with this issue has recommended a 
balanced process to get from where we are to where we need to be.
  We're going to go on break next week as if we've done our job. We 
haven't. We ought to be spending time today, tomorrow, next week, and 
the week thereafter in avoiding the irrationality of the sequester 
process, but I have a list of Republicans here, all of whom say, Bring 
it on. The sequester is okay. Well, if we do the sequester, we're going 
to find out it's not okay.
  Mr. Speaker, I urge the majority leader and I urge the Speaker to 
bring forth substantive legislation that is balanced and which will 
avoid the sequester taking place. It's bad for our people; it's bad for 
our country. It's bad policy.

                          ____________________