[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 14955]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   10TH AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I know that the American people are watching 
what is happening in Washington these days with a little more than a 
passing interest. I am sure they wonder sometimes about where is the 
truth because they hear folks on one side of the aisle saying one thing 
and folks on the other side of the aisle saying another thing.
  When I talk to people at home, I do my best to explain the situation 
in Washington right now. I try to point out the fact that we have deep 
philosophical differences in this body and in the Senate. We do have 
two parts of our legislative branch of government--the House and the 
Senate. The philosophical differences are pretty strong in both bodies.
  They really stem from the beginning of the country. Our Founders felt 
very strongly--the majority of them, though--that the Federal 
Government should be weak. We, obviously, had just come off of getting 
our independence from Britain and we wanted to not have a king and we 
wanted not to have a strong central Government.
  I think the Founders were right. The Founders in the Constitution 
outlined the duties of our respective branches of government. They 
enumerated them. People will talk about enumerated powers. They made 
those powers very few for the Federal Government. They emphasized that 
with the 10th Amendment. It said: If we didn't tell the Federal 
Government to do this in the Constitution, then we don't want the 
Federal Government to do it. We leave those responsibilities to the 
States and to the individuals. We have gotten along very well, we did 
get along very well, following the Constitution for a long time in this 
country.
  Then we came about in the 1930s with an era of great involvement by 
the Federal Government--in my opinion and in the opinion of many of my 
colleagues--overstepping its bounds by getting involved in things that 
are not mentioned in the Constitution.
  Bring us forward to the 1960s, a period of great activism in this 
country when many more programs were begun, but in the opinion of many 
of us, again, had absolutely no place in the Federal Government. We 
should not be doing things like running the education of this country 
out of the Federal Government or running health care out of the Federal 
Government.

                              {time}  1115

  So what we have here is the result of these deep philosophical 
differences, and I want to say that that's what is playing out here. 
Those of us who are opposed to the Federal Government's running health 
care in this country do so not out of pettiness, not out of meanness, 
not out of a lack of concern for our fellow citizens, but because we 
want to diminish the role of the Federal Government in our lives. We 
believe that, once you turn health care over to the Federal Government, 
you've basically turned the lives of citizens over to the Federal 
Government, and that is not a good place to be.
  Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle also act as though no 
act of Congress has ever been repealed. My goodness, we spend a good 
part of our days here repealing bad legislation that somehow or another 
got passed before. So what we are doing and what we have been doing for 
the last few days is making every effort we can to repeal or to delay 
what is called the Affordable Health Care Act, which we are finding out 
is absolutely not affordable. That's what we have been doing, but we 
have been unsuccessful. So we are trying to keep the government open. 
We have passed bill after bill after bill out of the House to keep the 
Federal Government open. We have failed in doing that in a large way, 
so we are working at doing it in minor ways, by passing individual 
bills. That's what we are here to do today.
  I just came out of the Rules Committee. We had these bills on the 
floor yesterday--three of the five that we are going to vote on today. 
Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle voted against paying our 
National Guard even though the President sort of quietly, Saturday 
night, signed a bill to continue to pay our troops. That was a bill the 
President said he'd never sign and that he wouldn't compromise, that he 
wouldn't negotiate. Yet, he did that. Now we want to keep our national 
parks open; we want to pay our National Guard and Reserve people; we 
want to provide local funding for the District of Columbia; and we want 
to keep our promises to America's veterans.

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