[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 17]
[House]
[Page 24294]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



      SOCIAL SECURITY PENSION AND VETERANS' ADMINISTRATION CHECKS

  (Mr. HILL of Montana asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. HILL of Montana. Mr. Speaker, last week we passed a continuing 
resolution for 1 week. The purpose of that continuing resolution was to 
keep the Government going for another week while we negotiated some 
thorny issues over how much we are going to spend and what tax relief 
was going to be for the American people. But that resolution had a very 
important provision because it authorized the Clinton administration to 
prepare the November 1 Social Security pension checks and the Veterans' 
Administration checks.

                              {time}  1030

  It is very important for those seniors and those people who are 
reliant on those checks to know that they are going to be there on 
November 1. What is important is that the majority of the Democrats, 
and virtually all of the Democrat leadership, came to this floor and 
voted against the resolution to keep those checks going. What that 
means is that the Democrats want to make Social Security a political 
issue, and it is the Republicans who are saying we are going to make 
sure that the people who are dependent on those checks have the 
security they are intended to provide.
  Mr. Speaker, today we will vote again on a continuing resolution. It 
will be interesting to see whether the Democrats really care about 
security, or they are after a political issue. I ask my colleagues to 
support this continuing resolution.

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