[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 15065-15066]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Kildee) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. KILDEE. Mr. Speaker, I was sitting and listening to some of the 
previous speakers, and I heard more than one, but one in particular, 
make the point really forcefully that nobody wants this government 
shutdown, that universally we oppose, as Members of Congress, keeping 
our government closed. I just wish that were true.
  I have been doing a lot of reading on this and looked back at some of 
the reports from months ago. There was a really interesting story in a 
magazine recently that described a strategy to not adopt the budget and 
to force an argument over the continuing resolution and to force the 
debate over the

[[Page 15066]]

Affordable Care Act into the debate about the continuing resolution 
with the idea that if we don't, here in Congress, capitulate on a 
previously enacted law that the House and the Senate agreed to, that 
the President signed and the Supreme Court upheld, if we don't 
capitulate, that there will be a shutdown of the government. So I only 
wish it were true that not everybody in this body wanted to avoid this 
shutdown that is crippling our economy and hurting the American people.
  There is something that we can do, however, to get out of this, and 
it would be simply to allow for a dose of democracy in the House of 
Representatives; because we know, and I have talked to many Members on 
both sides of the aisle, particularly Members on the other side, and it 
is not just the 17 that have already declared their willingness to buck 
the Tea Party leadership--and essentially the leader of the group in 
the House is the Senator from Texas. More than 17 are willing to vote 
for a clean bill to reopen government so that we can get back to the 
business of legislating. I think it is a big number. I suspect it might 
even be a majority of the other side. The Senate would approve it. It 
already has. The President said he would sign it, and a majority of 
this House, probably a majority of both parties, would approve a clean 
resolution to reopen government so that we can get on with the fights 
on things that we don't agree on. That's the way this democracy was 
designed.
  I'm new here. I've only been here 9 months, but I've been following 
government, been a part of it for a long, long time. I'm a citizen who 
understands how our democracy is supposed to work; and I always 
believed that if a majority of both bodies agree on a particular 
position and the President agrees, that we can put a law through, sign 
it, and get on with the business.
  The other side talks a lot about negotiating, having a conference 
committee. It is so interesting to me that back in April after both 
bodies, the House and the Senate, had adopted budget resolutions, that 
it was the Republican leadership that not only failed to, but refused 
to negotiate a budget resolution that could have avoided this whole 
thing in the first place. I had to wonder then--I was scratching my 
head--Why?
  The charade of the last week or so has made it clear to me why: This 
was the intent all along, to shut down government and use that--the 
kindest term I can use, I suppose, is ``leverage''; I've heard others 
use other terms--but to use that leverage to try to extract from the 
government that which the other side couldn't win legislatively, 
couldn't win at the ballot box, but will use every tool, including the 
closing of the Federal Government and now the threat to default on our 
Federal obligations, and wreck the economy in doing so.
  The President agrees, the Senate agrees, a majority of the House 
agrees we should continue to operate government. We should adopt the 
continuing resolution at the number that the Republican leadership has 
supported all along and get back to providing the services that our 
country needs and provide stability back into our economy.

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