[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 15209]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        THE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

  (Mr. LANGEVIN asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. LANGEVIN. Madam Speaker, we are now in the fourth day of a 
manufactured government shutdown; and despite repeated calls to end 
this manufactured crisis, House Republicans have yet to allow a simple 
majority vote on a Senate-passed bill that would pass this House on a 
bipartisan basis and that the President could sign today to bring 
operations back on line. Instead, Republican leaders have begun cherry-
picking services to fund during the shutdown to mitigate the political 
fallout from the untenable position in which they have put our country.
  Don't you think the American people see through that?
  It's nice to see my Republican colleagues finally acknowledge that 
the government does, in fact, provide many critical services worthy of 
our support. These piecemeal bills are not serious attempts to reopen 
our government. They would not help the 800,000 dedicated public 
servants who have been involuntarily furloughed; they would not help my 
constituents applying for Social Security disability benefits; they 
will do nothing for small business owners who are cut off from SBA-
backed loans; and they certainly don't address the women depending on 
rape crisis or domestic violence centers, which will lose their funding 
after today.
  What these bills would do is merely prolong a disastrous, 
manufactured situation. I urge my colleagues to bring up a 
straightforward funding measure to get our constituents, our economy, 
and this Congress back to work.

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