[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 15455]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 A LONG JOURNEY STARTS WITH SMALL STEPS

  (Mr. KINGSTON asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, over my years in Congress, I've had the 
honor of chairing several conference committees. Conference committees 
are set up when there's a disagreement between a House-passed bill and 
a Senate-passed bill. You sit down with your list of differences and 
you start sawing away at them, if you will.
  That's, in fact, what the House has been doing the past 2 weeks in 
the midst of this shutdown. We've been finding some things, such as 
military pay, science, civilian furlough issues, and health-related 
issues--things that are less controversial and on which we can agree--
so we can get some momentum to come up with a big agreement.
  Indeed, the gap is large. We have disagreement on ObamaCare because 
it's one-sixth of the American economy. It's very big.
  Secondly, we have a disagreement on the debt ceiling. Do we continue 
along the path of spending that we are on or do we make corrections?
  Thirdly, we have a $90 billion gap between our spending level between 
the House and the Senate.
  These are bigs issues. Sometimes, a long journey starts with small 
steps. That's why I urge our friends in the Senate to pass the 
legislation which the House has sent over to them, and then we can 
start focusing on the larger issues.

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