[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 135 (Thursday, October 3, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H6178-H6179]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH HAS OFFENDED WORLD WAR II VETERANS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Florida (Mr. Mica) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, I am pleased to hear the 
gentleman from California from the other side of the aisle who just 
spoke and his willingness to work together. I think that's the kind of 
cooperation that the American people are looking for and that Congress 
needs to adhere to in coming together and resolving this.

[[Page H6179]]

  No one wants a shutdown. No one wants to see vital and essential 
government programs eliminated or withheld from the public. Sometimes 
in these situations that are most difficult, you actually become 
concerned about basic common sense or, again, the attempts of certain 
people to try to embarrass each side.
  I think one of the worst things I've seen in my service was the 
closedown of some of our memorials. This probably won't show up for my 
colleagues very well, but this is the Martin Luther King Memorial. You 
just walk up and look at it. But to deploy Interior and park personnel 
to put out barriers to constrain the public from even walking is an 
absolutely senseless and mindless bureaucratic move.
  Many people saw also the construction. And this, again, is not a very 
good photo, but this is Park personnel that were deployed putting 
fences up in front of the Lincoln Memorial and then, most offensively, 
to put barriers to block, in an open-air park memorial, our World War 
II veterans' memorial. This is senseless.
  I have talked to Mr. Issa and the Oversight subcommittee that I 
chair--Mr. Issa chairs the whole Oversight Committee of Congress. I 
know Mr. Hastings is going to look into this, his Natural Resources 
Committee. But this is a senseless offense to the American people and 
particularly our veterans and others, there is no reason for this. So 
some common sense has to prevail in all of this.
  We will get beyond this. People will be made whole. It is unfortunate 
that sometimes government, whether it was back in Washington's days or 
throughout our history, does work on a brinksmanship basis and does not 
get to a resolution, particularly when you come to difficult times.
  My colleagues, we are at one of the most difficult times in history. 
Within the next 2 weeks, the United States of America will be at our 
debt limit. We'll be $17 trillion in debt. They're going to come and 
ask for another trillion dollars for a year to keep us from being a 
deadbeat Nation.
  How did we get here? That's part of the question that has to be 
resolved here. You had an era of unprecedented spending, 4 years in 
which the other side--and these are facts--took control. They spent 
$1.5 trillion more than they took in the first year in office--1.4 
trillion, 1.3 trillion, and so on and so on, until we've gone from $9 
trillion in debt to 17, reaching 18, almost double in 5 or 6 years. 
That's unsustainable. So that's what this is about.
  It's also about a health care program. I come from a family that at 
times didn't have health care. And many Americans need health care, and 
we should be able to provide them, but people didn't ask for a 
bureaucracy. People didn't ask for thousands of bureaucrats here to 
manage a government program. They didn't ask for IRS enforcers. They 
didn't ask for many of the mandates that are in this bill that can and 
need to be revised.
  The President has already revised the law. The President said he 
didn't need the Congress, as you will recall, some time ago, and 
obviously he hasn't. He changed some of the terms, given exemptions to 
employers, put that off for a year, which was part of the law. We've 
asked--and, again, some of us wanted it repealed. Some of us didn't 
like it, but we now have it. We need to revise it, and we need to make 
certain that Americans have good health care and access to affordable 
care, but not with bureaucracy.
  We've offered at least three alternatives and some changes, the last 
one pretty simple, to delay for a while the individual mandate, like 
we've done for others. So we can do this and we must do this. We must 
succeed for the American people.

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