[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5247-5248]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           PROTECTING AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. JACKSON LEE. Mr. Speaker, I rise to reflect again on yesterday's 
tragic and obviously painful events. I think it's important for our 
colleagues, and certainly for those we represent across America, to 
recognize that our attention on those issues are equal to the pain and 
the devastation that they represent. It is important to again offer 
sympathy to those who lost their loved ones, to those who still are 
under the care of the medical team in Boston, to the city of Boston, 
the State of Massachusetts, the mayor and Governor, my colleagues from 
the State of Massachusetts, and certainly the people there. You have 
our prayers and, again, our commitment to never cease until the 
perpetrator or perpetrators are brought to justice.
  In saying that, I believe it is important that we proceed in a 
discussion that will also move this country forward, and that is to 
finally get to a point of passing a budget that eliminates, takes away, 
never to be seen again, this horrific sequester that the American 
people do not deserve.
  Let me congratulate the President on having a humane budget, a budget 
that considers the needs of Americans. It is outstanding that he has 
offered a universal pre-K, having seen the tears of grown men when the 
sequester came through and their child was eliminated from Head Start, 
grown men, parents crying at the Head Start center. And everywhere I go 
in my district, people who are in charge of Head Start literally in 
pain about those that they have to eliminate from those positions 
because those families don't have the resources for private child care.
  So I congratulate the President on his astuteness in recognizing the 
importance of that and recognizing to not stray away from the 
necessities of job creation and putting in place major transportation 
jobs and infrastructure jobs: passenger rail, which I am so passionate 
about; surface transportation; and a most important one, rebuilding 
your neighborhoods and communities and cities where jobs are in short 
demand and where the infrastructure and the city is crumbling.
  I want to congratulate the President for his saving of Medicaid and 
ensuring that seniors who are in nursing homes will be protected. But, 
more importantly, that those without health insurance will have the 
ability under the Affordable Care Act to ensure that they will have 
that.
  But I serve as well on the Homeland Security Committee, and I think 
it is important to say and be honest that the sequester is devastating 
to America's homeland security. It is good to have a budget that 
respects those needs, but it is important to tell the truth. We are 
desperate when it comes to recognizing the needs of our Border Patrol 
agents and the numbers, even at 21,000, that we may need to increase, 
that there are Border Patrol agents being removed from the front lines 
in order to process those individuals who have come across the border. 
When they do that, they remove the coverage from the front lines on the 
border dealing with those who are in those detention centers.
  We have to recognize that transportation security, as much as one 
might say how many officers they have, in the sequester, we will be 
standing in long lines, and it is about to come. That is the front 
lines of securing this Nation, along with the Coast Guard and many, 
many other facets of the Department of Homeland Security.
  We are asked a question about the securing of the homeland. We are 
feeling the pain along with our colleagues of the tragedies that have 
occurred, the attempted Times Square bombing, the successful bombing in 
Boston. We cannot take this anymore, and I believe it is time, with the 
President's budget,

[[Page 5248]]

the Senate's budget, the House budget, that the Speaker of the House 
needs to immediately appoint budget conferees to move us forward to 
conference and to get rid of the sequester, which is not the fault of 
the American people.
  Our deficit is going down. We need to determine what revenue we can 
increase in order to pay our bills and provide for the basic 
necessities of this Nation. Not only is the tragedy in Boston one of 
human life, but it is a disaster that requires Federal Emergency 
Management aid, just as our continued friends in the Southeast and 
Northeast are still suffering from Hurricane Sandy and the atrocity of 
this House not providing them with resources for 65 days.
  So I believe it is time for the American people to know that we do 
care. In order to care, you need to have budget conferees go through 
the budget process and begin to pass elements of the President's budget 
that speaks to the heart and mind of the needs of the American people.
  I conclude by offering my deepest sympathy and my promise to those 
who suffer that America and its Congress must stand up to respond to 
your needs. I'm ready to do so, as my colleagues are, and we should do 
it now.

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