[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 15614]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               VOTE FOR A CLEAN CR AND DEBT CEILING BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Wisconsin (Ms. Moore) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. MOORE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge you to turn away from 
this destructive path of threatening the full faith and credit of the 
United States Government as a means to extort political concessions and 
to subvert the democratic principle of majority rule. I urge you, Mr. 
Speaker, to become the Speaker of the House and not spokesperson for a 
fringe cult within the GOP caucus.
  The Affordable Care Act is settled law. In fact, the negotiation for 
any change to the Affordable Care Act is possible and perhaps even 
desirable under so-called regular order, and that goes for the other 
ransom demands that the GOP has made.
  Now, of course, the reason for this crisis, this shutdown of the 
government and the debt crisis, has now shifted from repealing or 
delaying ObamaCare to vague demands for negotiations. We have seen a 
laundry list, Mr. Speaker, of other so-called demands: approval of the 
Keystone pipeline; concessions on payments to Social Security, Medicare 
and Medicaid; tort reform; repeal of job-killing regulations, that is, 
protections for clean air and clean water.
  The latest demand is Republicans passed a bill to create a 
superdupercommittee that includes instructions that the committee can 
only resolve our budget crisis by considering spending cuts and 
entitlement cuts, but no new revenue. In other words, Mr. Speaker, you 
don't really want to negotiate. It is just obvious from your words and 
deeds, Mr. Speaker, since you, Mr. Speaker, have blocked negotiations 
18 times over the past year.
  Mr. Speaker, you are putting the country through this ``shut-er-
down'' theater that you called for in the last Republican campaign, in 
the last cycle. ``A nuclear weapon'' is how Warren Buffett 
characterized failure to raise the debt ceiling.
  Let me say that again. The world's most respected financial markets 
expert compared this now familiar Republican tactic as a weapon of mass 
destruction, a weapon that is ``too horrible to use.''
  Let me quote Yalman Onaran in Bloomberg:

       Failure by the world's largest borrower to pay its debt, 
     unprecedented in modern history, will devastate stock markets 
     from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism 
     for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs 
     for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and 
     throw U.S. and world economies into a recession that would 
     likely become a depression. Money managers, economists, 
     bankers and former government officials interviewed for this 
     story, few view default as anything but a financial 
     apocalypse.

  Yet, Mr. Speaker, you continue to take default off the table. 
Meanwhile, even the discussion of default is driving up borrowing costs 
for the U.S. as investors demand higher yields to buy short-term U.S. 
Treasury bonds. Short-term borrowing costs have doubled and now are at 
the highest levels since late 2008. Heaven help us if you, Mr. Speaker, 
actually drive the U.S. into default.
  Think about this: the $12 trillion of outstanding government debt is 
23 times--23 times--the $517 billion Lehman owed when its bankruptcy 
sparked the 2008 financial crisis. The full faith and credit of the 
U.S. debt is the collateral for banks, financial contracts, and 
repurchase markets throughout the world, the collateral that stands 
behind global finance and investment. It is why we are the world's 
reserve currency. Any default by the U.S. will have very real and 
extremely serious consequences and trigger a self-inflicted global 
financial crisis.
  In my mind, Mr. Speaker, the full faith and credit of the United 
States is not open for negotiation. I urge my colleagues to cease using 
the debt ceiling and economic calamity as a political tool and vote for 
a clean CR and debt limit bill.

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