[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 14958]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Indiana (Mr. Stutzman) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. STUTZMAN. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor today to share what I 
believe is a lack of cooperation in Washington, D.C.
  I come from Indiana as a farmer who served in the Indiana Legislature 
at times where we had divided government. My belief is that the only 
way you're going to solve a problem when you have issues is to talk. 
When you have one party who's at the table and is willing to discuss 
the problems that we face and you have another party who refuses to 
come to the table, we're not going to get anything done.
  The gentleman from New York asked a little bit ago: Who is in charge 
in the Republican conference, is the Speaker of the House or the Tea 
Party faction? I'll tell you who I believe is in charge, and that is 
our Speaker with the authority from the American people who elected 
each of us to come to Washington to represent them and to fight for 
them and to fight against an overaggressive Federal Government, $17 
trillion of debt, and to fight a health care law that only intrudes 
more and more on American lives.
  As I think about history, we have been in a government shutdown 
before. Under those circumstances, we had President Ronald Reagan, who 
was a Republican, and we had Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill. Speaker 
of the House Tip O'Neill shut down government seven different times 
during President Reagan's time in office, but President Reagan didn't 
just sit at the White House and refuse to talk. He didn't go out 
traveling around the country pointing the finger back at Congress. He 
invited Tip O'Neill down to the White House and sat down over a cup of 
coffee and talked the problems out. That's what leadership does. 
Leadership brings people to the table and finds a way to get the 
problems resolved.

                              {time}  1145

  Here in the Western Hemisphere, we work--whether it's in business, 
whether it's in our family budgets, whether it's in our family 
problems, we try to find a way for both sides to win because that's how 
we're going to walk away from the table feeling like we were successful 
and that we didn't break the principles that we believe in, that we're 
going to find a way to work together and it's going to be a win-win for 
both parties.
  But right now, we're seeing that it's going to be a win-lose 
situation, where President Obama and Senator Harry Reid are going to 
say: We're going to win and Republicans are going to lose. Because we 
have sent over four different compromises, four different proposals to 
the Senate, and what does the Senate do with them? They table them. 
They put them on the table and say: We're not going to even negotiate. 
We're not even going to talk.
  Now, is that what Tip O'Neill did? Is that what President Ronald 
Reagan did? Even after seven times, the government was shut down 
because what were they fighting over? Speaker Tip O'Neill was actually 
fighting for the Fairness Doctrine. It wasn't over bigger government 
spending or more government spending or $17 trillion of debt or a 
massive, much larger health care program. It was over an ideology. So 
if we can't even come to the table to talk about the problems that we 
face today, Washington is going to continue to be broken for a long 
time.
  I hear the frustration from my colleagues about the furloughs, and I 
sympathize with that because I have constituents in the Third District 
of Indiana who are furloughed. But at the same time, there have been 
many Americans who have been furloughed without pay, who don't have 
work because of the uncertainty that ObamaCare has placed on this 
economy. And I believe that it's time that we stand up for the American 
people rather than for the American Federal Government and start 
looking out for the people in this country and say: We're with you.

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