[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 5664]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          STOP THE CHILDISH GAMES; KEEP THE GOVERNMENT RUNNING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Woolsey) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, 14 hours from now it appears the doors of 
the Federal Government will shut. And it will happen for one reason and 
one reason alone--because of the Republican majority's inflexibility, 
callousness, and political gamesmanship.
  For 3 months, they have been in charge of the people's House, but 
they haven't done one thing that the people want.

                              {time}  1010

  They haven't lifted a finger to create the jobs Americans so 
desperately need. One Republican Member, in fact, said on the House 
floor last week that we should stop talking about the jobs. Stop 
talking about the jobs? They don't want to talk about jobs because they 
don't have a plan to create any. They've offered nothing but deep, 
painful, unnecessary job-killing spending cuts, and they have refused 
to budge an inch.
  I want to cut government spending, Mr. Speaker. But I don't want to 
take the money from children who need early childhood education. I 
don't want to take the money from families that need help paying for 
colleges. And I don't want to take the money from seniors who need 
medical care.
  I want to cut the gobs and gobs of money, nearly $7 billion every 
single month, we're spending to occupy a foreign nation and have our 
servicemen killed and maimed by insurgents.
  You want to eliminate wasteful government spending? I say the war in 
Afghanistan could be number one on our list. Ten years after we started 
sending our troops there we continue to be stuck in a hopeless quagmire 
that doesn't doing anything to eliminate the terrorist threat or 
accomplish our national security goals.
  But, of course, the Republican leadership won't consider cutting more 
spending. Instead they want to go after middle class working families 
who need a government that's on their side, particularly now because of 
how dire the economy has become.
  I hope my Republican colleagues will give up this childish refusal to 
compromise. The American people deserve better than to have their 
government held hostage by an extreme ideological agenda.
  Let's keep the doors of the Federal Government open. And as we look 
to next year's budget, instead of making seniors and schoolchildren 
bear the sacrifice, and instead of dismantling Medicare and cutting 
education, instead of threatening women's health, why don't we restore 
fiscal sanity by finally bringing our troops home.

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