[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 147 (Wednesday, October 16, 2013)]
[House]
[Page H6608]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                REPUBLICAN SHUTDOWN HAS BEEN A DISASTER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, the Republican government shutdown has 
been a disaster. A lot of people all across this country have been 
hurt. Hopefully, the press reports that I am reading this morning are 
true and that, by the end of the day, this House of Representatives 
will support a Senate compromise that will reopen our government and 
will avoid our defaulting on our debt. So, I hope that in a bipartisan 
way, before this day is out, we can come together and do that.
  This shutdown and this threat of default has made this Chamber look 
ridiculous. People of every political persuasion are disappointed in 
the behavior, especially of some elements of this House that have 
driven us to this shutdown and threatened a default of our Nation for 
the first time in history.


                             End Hunger Now

  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I just want to take a few minutes here to 
speak about another aspect of this shutdown and, indeed, some of the 
policies that we have approved of here in this House of 
Representatives, policies that have adversely impacted most, especially 
the poor and the hungry and the vulnerable.
  We have 50 million people in the United States of America who are 
hungry; 17 million are children. This shutdown and this sequester and 
the farm bill that this House of Representatives approved goes after 
the very programs that provide so many of our needy people in this 
country food. That is it, nothing else but food.
  We have a hunger problem in the United States of America, and we all 
should be ashamed of that. This shutdown, coupled with the sequester, 
has threatened programs like WIC--the Women, Infants, and Children 
program. It has gone after the SNAP program, which used to be known as 
food stamps, threatening the amount that people get to be able to put 
food on their tables. It has threatened funding for food banks. We have 
had food banks all across this country that have shut down because of 
the sequester and also because of what this shutdown has done.
  We are a much better country than that. I know that the majority of 
people in this Chamber, deep down, care about the most vulnerable, but 
we haven't acted that way. There is a pattern in this House of 
Representatives and this Republican-led Congress that has diminished 
the plight of poor people, that has trivialized the need for people to 
be able to put food on their tables for their families and for their 
children.
  We passed a farm bill in the Congress here that cuts food stamps by 
$40 billion. That would mean 3.8 million people who currently rely on 
this benefit would be thrown off the program. We would literally be 
taking food away from families who need it. It would throw hundreds of 
thousands of children off the free breakfast and lunch program at 
school. That cut would result in over 170,000 veterans being thrown off 
that program. Veterans--men and women who have served our country 
overseas in battle, who are having trouble finding a job, getting 
stability in their lives, who need this program to be able to put food 
on their tables for themselves and their families--we are going to 
throw them off the program. That is just not right. That is just not 
right.
  The farm bill is going to go to conference, and my hope is that we 
can come to some sort of a bipartisan agreement to reverse kind of the 
negative aspects of what the House has done. We can do much better. We 
can do much better. We need to do much better.
  Mr. Speaker, it is not fashionable in this House of Representatives 
to worry about the poor, I guess maybe because they don't have super 
PACs; they don't donate to our campaigns; they don't have big lobbies 
here in Washington. But if government stands for anything, we need to 
stand for those people. Donald Trump doesn't need us, doesn't need 
government; but some returning veteran who cannot find a job, or some 
single mother who is trying to raise her kids and doesn't have enough 
to put food on the table, or some unemployed man who has worked all of 
his life and all of a sudden because of this lousy economy has found 
himself without a job and is trying to support his family, they need 
us, and we need to be there for them. That should not be a 
controversial or radical idea; yet, in this House of Representatives, 
it has been. So, from the shutdown to the sequester to the farm bill, 
over and over and over again, we have targeted the most vulnerable.
  Mr. Speaker, we need to reverse this trend. When this is all over 
with, I hope we can come together in a bipartisan way and actually talk 
about hunger; and I hope that the White House will come forward and 
embrace a White House conference on food and nutrition so we can have 
some leadership at the national level to come up with a plan to end 
hunger and to end poverty in this country.

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