[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15488-15489]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  THE PRESIDENT'S REFUSAL TO NEGOTIATE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Utah 
(Mr. Stewart) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. STEWART. Mr. Speaker, politics is full of irony, and I believe 
that that is a vast understatement compared to what is exhibited on 
this floor almost every day. Sometimes that irony bleeds over into the 
absurd, and that's what we are facing today when it comes to our 
President, who absolutely refuses to even sit down and negotiate over 
the debt ceiling limit or over the implementation of ObamaCare or over 
the continuing resolution or, frankly, over anything else.
  Think about that.
  The President of the United States is unwilling to even sit down to 
have any negotiations--to have even a conversation--with the Speaker of 
the House.
  The President likes to say, I won the election, and he likes to 
remind us that elections have consequences; but I would remind the 
President that I won my election as well and so did 233 other House 
Republicans. I represent more than 700,000 people. Those 233 House 
Republicans represent more than 150 million people. They expect certain 
things of us. They expect us to represent them. They expect us to fight 
for those values that we promised that we would. I can't abandon those 
values. I owe it to my constituents. I owe it to my family. I owe it to 
my Nation. I owe it to myself to continue to fight for those values 
that, I think, help to make this Nation the great Nation that it is.
  The President is the President of the United States. He is not just 
the President of the Democratic Party. He is not just the President of 
those States in which he won. He is the President of the United States, 
and he owes it to the Americans to be willing to sit down and to try to 
negotiate when we come into a conflict such as we have now.
  Yes, we've got great challenges before us, but we can work through 
these. We always have before. We can find a way to work together. 
Republicans and Democrats have been working through their differences 
for generations, but we can only do that if we are willing to sit down 
and talk with each other. We can only do that if we are willing to be 
respectful of the deeply held positions that each of us holds. We can 
only do that if we are willing to work together for the betterment of 
this Nation, which brings me to the debt limit.
  It is like a dark, looming cloud that hangs over us now. We can't 
ignore it. We can't pretend that it doesn't matter. We can't pretend 
that it's not important. So, like others, I would like to quote from 
one who is considered to be a great political leader of this century:

       Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and 
     internationally. ``Leadership'' means that the buck stops 
     here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of

[[Page 15489]]

     bad choices today onto the backs of our children and our 
     grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of 
     leadership. Americans deserve better.

  Mr. Speaker, of course I'm not quoting Ted Cruz or Mitch McConnell or 
the Speaker of the House. I am quoting a young freshman Senator who is 
now the President of the United States, who at least at one point in 
his career recognized the serious and the longstanding threat to this 
Nation that our rising debt is.
  We have the opportunity to work together now to fix this problem; and 
if we can't fix it, at least we can take a meaningful step forward. I 
hope the President will work with us to address what he used to believe 
was a serious problem, but I believe it starts with one thing: sitting 
down together and talking in order to work it out.
  The American citizens--all of us--deserve a President who is willing 
to lead. The American people deserve a President who is willing to 
talk. Yes, we live in a day in which there are policy and political 
differences, but that has always been the case. From the birth of our 
Nation, it has always been such. We are a Nation in which ideas and 
principles sometimes conflict, but the American people deserve a 
President who understands that negotiating is part of the process.
  I pray that the President will sit down and talk with us now.

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