[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 9]
[House]
[Page 12023]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         A COMPREHENSIVE, BALANCED SOLUTION TO SAVE THE ECONOMY

  (Mr. COURTNEY asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  Mr. COURTNEY. Last night, Speaker Boehner addressed the American 
people and said that if the President would just simply sign his debt 
ceiling bill, the crisis, in his words, would disappear.
  Actually, the opposite is true. An hour or two before his speech, the 
Standard & Poor's rating agency issued a report, saying that, if the 
Boehner plan passed, the American bonds would be downgraded from its 
AAA status. A downgrade is as bad as a default in terms of driving up 
lending costs and damaging a fragile economy that today needs all of us 
to work together to strengthen job creation to solve our problems. The 
Boehner plan calls for three separate votes over the next 15 months for 
a debt ceiling increase, exactly the kind of political instability that 
rating agencies are not looking for.
  It is time for a comprehensive, balanced solution, which the 
President has said he will work with the Congress to pass in order to 
get this economy moving again and to create jobs.

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