[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 15926]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    TIME TO DEAL WITH BUDGET MATTERS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, now, after 16 days, one remembers the 
gleeful Republicans pouring out of the House Chamber on the early 
morning of October 1 so excited that they got the shutdown, the tool 
they would use to end the Affordable Care Act. Well, it has now 
collapsed in disarray on the eve of a far more serious deadline: 
flirting with the default on our national debt.
  I am embarrassed for my Republican colleagues who cannot figure out 
what they want as they tie themselves into knots, refusing to put a 
simple, clean continuing resolution on the floor that would end this 
madness, I guess because they fear all the Democrats and many 
Republicans would approve it, ending this sad chapter.
  It is fascinating what a destructive minority and rudderless 
Republican House leadership can do, inflicting damage in so many ways. 
This all would have been unimaginable in normal times. I tried to 
explain it on the air yesterday to a BBC reporter. I felt foolish and 
embarrassed. It is inexplicable.
  It is time to stop negotiating the terms of the release of the 
American people and their economy. There is a simple answer, and it is 
not necessarily calling the Republican bluff on the shutdown and debt 
ceiling. The answer is to encourage the Republicans to try and pass 
their own spending bills. Don't insulate them any longer from the 
specifics.
  With the Ryan budget, Republicans are on a glide path to 1962 
spending levels; but for an America half a century later, with 150 
million more people and three times the number of senior citizens, the 
math doesn't work for most of us, and it appears that it doesn't work 
for the Republicans either. Why else would they have stopped the 
consideration of their own spending bills not even halfway through the 
process? Remember, we still have pending the Transportation-HUD 
spending bill that was abruptly halted more than 2 months ago, last 
summer. It is still pending. It could be brought to the floor at any 
time.
  Let us stop tolerating wildly unrealistic political antics, and dive 
into budget mechanics. Let them try and pass the Interior spending 
bill, which they were afraid to even take to the full committee, let 
alone pass the Health and Human Services bill. Let us get into 
specifics and stop the hostage-taking. No one should be allowed to 
weaponize the process of governance, especially people unwilling or 
unable to do their own job.
  The President should use his bully pulpit to spotlight their refusal 
to act and his alternatives. By all means, let us look at the looming 
Social Security cut that is going to occur 20 years from now. How much 
do we want to cut of future benefits for people who are increasingly 
struggling in retirement and who already get less than most other rich 
countries?
  Let us deal with the long-term costs of our military, with hugely 
expensive, outdated, unnecessary surplus nuclear weapons. Let us help 
the military deal with health and pension costs that greatly concern 
the military leadership because they know they are not sustainable.
  My Republican colleagues cannot have it both ways: attacking the 
President for including the chained CPI in his own budget proposal as 
an assault on senior citizens, as alleged by my friend and colleague 
Greg Walden, the head of the Republican Campaign Committee in the 
House, when that is actually what many of my Republican friends want; 
attacking the President and Democrats for having obtained $700 billion 
in Medicare savings without cutting payments to seniors and then making 
that into a campaign issue in 2012, and then claiming the President and 
Democrats don't want to deal with entitlements. How hypocritical.
  Let us stop the hostage-taking and deal with specifics. We can 
resolve these matters in, actually, a matter of months if the American 
public and the Congress are forced to confront the realities of fantasy 
budgets and political slogans. The American people deserve better. Now 
it is time to give that to them.

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