[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 301-305]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                ISSUES OF CONCERN TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bishop of Michigan). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 6, 2015, the gentlewoman from North 
Carolina (Ms. Foxx) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the 
majority leader.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate it very much. Like my colleague 
before me, I am grateful for the opportunity to be here on the floor to 
speak about issues that are of concern to the American people.
  My colleague from California (Mr. LaMalfa) is joining me for a short 
period of time, and I would like to give him the opportunity to speak 
for a few minutes. I believe that he has some important things to say, 
and I would like him to share those.
  I now yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa).
  Mr. LaMALFA. I appreciate it. Thank you to my colleague from North 
Carolina. You are very gracious in yielding to me, and it has been a 
pleasure to work with you.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank those assembled here tonight. I just want to 
talk a little bit about some of the issues we have going on in the 
West, in northern California.
  First of all, the excitement we have of coming in--it is a new 
Congress, it is a new direction for our country, I think. We have a 
stronger majority in the House of Representatives, of the Republican 
House. As well, it is a different majority over in the Senate. A lot of 
people aren't too concerned with what party it is or what partisan 
issues are; they want to see results. That is what I am looking for as 
well.
  Many bills were sent out of the House last session and languished on 
a desk over on the Senate side, and I think we will now see action on 
those commonsense measures that are going to help jobs in America, help 
our economy rebound, and help people get out from under the grip of 
government power and government regulation that is just killing their 
hopes and killing their ideals.
  We are looking for that in this new session, and we expect we will be 
held accountable to make that happen. It is not going to be a miracle. 
We are not going to get all the results we hoped for, but at least 
there are going to be things on the Record now that have gone through 
this House and have gone to the Senate that will be showing the 
American people what our agenda is and what it has been about.
  Bringing it back home to California, I represent the First District 
in the northeast portion of the State. It is a beautiful district. I am 
very proud to have been elected for a second time to represent the 
First District. It is an area that has a lot of great resources that 
benefit our whole State, even our whole country.
  To be able to have my family here with me in Washington attending the 
festivities, the honor of being sworn in and getting started, getting a 
fast start, going to work here in this new 114th has just been a real 
delight.
  What we need to be happening in California is a better and wiser use 
of our resources. You may have seen, at the end of the last session, we 
were working towards better management of our water supply. Now, we 
have a deluge of rain once in a while, even when we are suffering 
drought for the last few years in California.
  The water seems to all come at once. If it isn't being saved in 
snowpack, it

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will come quickly via rain through our streams, and that is an 
opportunity for us that we should be retaining that behind the dam, so 
that we have as well the water that gets down the Feather River and the 
Sacramento River and can be transferred and put somewhere to be used 
later.
  We have the ability to have the water allocated as needed for fish, 
for habitat, but there is excess water that needs to be stored. I don't 
know why that isn't the automatic protocol, but Congress--a bill I 
cosponsored with many of my other colleagues put forward reminding the 
Bureau of Reclamation and others that they need to retain this extra 
water.
  It isn't needed for fish, and it isn't needed for the normal runs, so 
we will have more stored later.

                              {time}  1730

  That is what we will continue to work for. But I still go back to the 
vision that people before us had that have given us Shasta Dam, Lake 
Oroville, and the whole State water project and the Central Valley 
project that we have in our State that we have benefited from for so 
many years, that everybody benefits from, whether you are an 
environmentalist, a farmer, a person who lives in a city, or if you 
just have a tap in the country. If you are not on a well, you are 
probably benefiting from these projects because we had the vision in 
the past to build them and we didn't have nearly the roadblocks.
  Now, of course, we have great environmental concerns and 
environmental awareness to do things better than we did in the 1850s or 
the 1880s or what have you. We know how to do these things. But it 
doesn't mean that, because of a handful of people who don't want to see 
things happen, we stop the progress for all the rest of us.
  So that is what we will be pushing for in this new Congress, to build 
more water storage. We can do that in northern California. Sites 
Reservoir, and there are other projects that can be enhanced to retain 
more water, and there are smarter ways to keep the water that we do 
have to make the water go further because it is necessary. The way 
California is suffering from droughts, agricultural land is going to be 
the first thing to go. Any time an emergency can be declared to switch 
whatever water does get to agriculture to meet other needs around the 
State, we have to take care of people first and we have to take care of 
cities, but when we see so much being run out through the Golden Gate 
that could be saved, or for questionable tactics on fish that really 
haven't been proven for that kind of habitat, then we are missing the 
mark.
  So we will be working very hard to add to our water storage and to be 
smarter with the water we have available to us because we can't count 
on a record rainfall this year. We are very thankful and we have been 
blessed with good rainfall in November and the early part of December, 
but it has tailed off lately. We will need record rainfall the rest of 
the season up through the spring to have the kind of water we need to 
get through a good crop year. In the meantime, we should be doing 
everything possible in government to enhance, to retain, to be smarter 
with the water we have.
  When we hear ideas of removing dams in the north part of the State, 
part of my district, that produce hydroelectric power because of 
dubious studies that might benefit fish, we are hurting our region of 
the State. We are hurting our grid by taking enough renewable 
electricity off the grid that would somehow need to be replaced with 
other green power to manage 70,000 homes in the State because of 
dubious lack of science. We need to battle through this and have 
smarter use of our resources.
  Another thing that we are very rich in in our part of the State is 
timber. Each summer we see the crisis of nonmanagement of our timber 
and what that looks like. It is in the air. It is in our brown skies. 
We get to breathe that. The people within those communities are 
wondering why their mills are shut down and why their storefronts are 
boarded up and why they don't have jobs and why they have things like 
domestic violence increasing because people don't have work in those 
communities sometimes because their industry has been taken away from 
them.
  I sit on the Natural Resources Committee to get after both of these 
and other issues--our water, our timber use, and other resources--that 
are so necessary to the rural part of the State, the rural West that 
has been languishing for many years, ever since the Endangered Species 
Act was passed in 1973, for good reason at the time, to save the bald 
eagle. We have bald eagles in our rice fields where I live at home. But 
we have gone so far beyond that rural America is suffering from this 
type of regulation that it isn't even proven to help recover a single 
species. Indeed, somewhere around 1 percent, at best, of species have 
been recovered after 40-plus years of the Endangered Species Act. That 
is pretty deplorable for what the cost has been to the people, to the 
jobs, and for the communities and their values.
  But I am still optimistic that America is turning the corner and 
seeing things a little bit differently and that the job needs to come 
back home. And the jobs at home need to be revived once again. As a 
grower of grain myself, we look at our alternatives. Do we want to be 
in a situation where in the past we were dependent on oil from people 
who don't like us much? Do we want to be in a position to have our 
grain crops, the breadbasket of our Nation, do we want to become more 
dependent on that from people who maybe aren't always a reliable ally 
overseas? Wheat from Russia and rice from China, do we want to rely on 
that, or do we want to do the best we can?
  My fellow farmers across the country and in my area, they are good 
stewards of the land. Many have been there for many, many generations. 
Some of the ranchers I know, their families have been farming and 
ranching for 160 years in northern California, my own family 80-plus 
years. We know how to take care of the land. We know what needs to be 
done. It is sustainable, to use that buzz word that goes around a lot 
these days. If it wasn't sustainable, the land wouldn't still produce.
  So this is the type of thing we are fighting for. If we don't have a 
breadbasket in this country, what will America rely on to keep us fed? 
With the unrest we have in the world, ultimately, if we can't fuel our 
own Armies if it becomes necessary, what kind of position will we be in 
to defend ourselves or our allies, like in Europe, like in Israel, like 
in Japan, or others we have great relations and great trade with? We 
are in great peril right now if we keep our head in the sand on these 
issues. We need to look at the resources we have.
  As I look at the young people in the audience tonight, one of the 
first things that I am reminded of is that we are running an $18 
trillion national debt. We have lived for the future in the present on 
someone else's money. And so every dollar we have, every dollar that 
comes in, we have to be good stewards of, much better than in the past. 
So every dollar has to go for the type of infrastructure that will 
improve our transportation system, our water system, our flood control 
system, and keep our communities safe, and not on frivolous things.
  I am reminded in California, instead of this water infrastructure 
that we so desperately need, we have had several years of drought to 
remind us, they are still pursuing a high-speed rail system in 
California. As a former State legislator, we were right in the middle 
of that as it was coming to a head. What will the rail cost? Voters 
were told then $33 billion to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles at 
220 miles per hour. It isn't even close to being that project anymore, 
and the price has tripled, at least. It has gone from $33 billion to at 
least $98 billion by the admission of the rail authority in a hearing 
we had in the State legislature back then. They are still chasing this 
dream. Now they have tried to downsize it to be a $68 billion project. 
To this day, right now, they have still only identified $13 billion--
$10 billion from the State bond and $3 billion from the Federal 
Government via the Stimulus Act of 2009. So $13 billion of a

[[Page 303]]

needed and downsized $68 billion project. They are $55 billion short, 
and they still think today they are going to go find that money. From 
the private sector, they are staying away in droves.
  There is no way that it is going to be built anywhere near on time, 
anywhere near on any kind of budget, or that the riders they would have 
will ever be able to afford to ride it. Why don't we take a fraction of 
that money, of the $13 billion or the $68 billion, or whatever number 
it is, and put it towards the water storage we need?
  We could build two really nice dams with $68 billion, especially with 
private sector money that wants to come in and be a partner on this. 
Let's get it done, because this is the infrastructure that will help 
our State and help the people and help bring jobs back to rural 
California and rural America.
  I am looking for help from my other colleagues from other States, 
especially other Western States that have water infrastructure needs 
they are looking at themselves. Let's work together on this. That is 
what made us great back in the day.
  We have had these huge projects that have made so much hydroelectric 
power. We like green power. We like renewable power. When it rains 
behind a dam, you have renewable power and it is reliable. And it is 
low cost, much more so than windmills and solar panels that require 
government assistance to put them in and keep them going. Let's do the 
right thing here and allow these things to happen, all that private 
sector to happen.
  I am optimistic in this Congress that we can make that case and put 
it in front of the American people. I ask the President to join with us 
and help on that, whether it is that or the further development of 
energy that we need in this country to stay ahead of the curve. We are 
seeing prices coming down, amazingly. Hydraulic fracturing has played a 
big part in us seeing the price of fuel in some areas--not in 
California, but other States going below $2 a gallon. In California, we 
are still taxing ourselves and thinking up cap-and-trade measures to 
drive the cost up so we will be our own island of high costs. But the 
other 49 States, God bless you, you have it pretty good.
  The vision that we have had to do these things is what we need 
desperately going forward in 2015 because when we are productive, like 
what we can produce in northern California with agriculture, with 
timber, with our mine resources, all of the other things that come from 
the land, that sets the table for everything else across our district 
and across our State and across the whole country. That puts us back to 
work again.
  We have trillions of dollars offshore that would love to be 
repatriated back to this country if we had any kind of constant as to 
what the tax burden would be for those dollars, for those businesses 
and investment that needs to be here, any kind of consistency for what 
our regulatory burden would be so they could predict. If they are to 
put 30-year loans and 30-year infrastructure in place, will they be 
able to do business 5 years from now? We would be bringing American 
jobs back if we could repatriate that money back here. So let's get it 
done.
  We don't come here in Congress--at least I haven't--because it is 
nice to wear a suit and tie. We come here to get results. To be results 
oriented, we need to use real facts, real figures, real budgets, real 
numbers to get to the core of what we are supposed to be doing as to 
what the Founders had set for our government. The government is doing a 
lot more things it has no business doing and it can't do well. Let's 
make sure that we are doing and we have the economy, we have the 
engineering to generate so we have a functioning school system, it has 
the funding it needs at fair and proper levels; for our law 
enforcement, so they are not left wanting for the equipment and backup 
they need; and for the folks deployed overseas defending our borders as 
well as helping our allies. We shouldn't leave them wanting while they 
are deployed; and certainly with the mess that the VA system is, when 
they come back home, the promises made to them are broken and the shame 
that we should all feel when our veterans, so many are left homeless or 
simply begging to have their claims processed.
  I am confident in this new Congress that the House and the Senate can 
work together and put these ideas forward. We can put them out in front 
of the American people, have the accountability, have the oversight 
that our job demands. We will get there.
  So whether it is now or 2 years from now, I challenge the President 
to look at these things from a commonsense way of thinking. Think about 
America first. That is what we will be doing in this House and over in 
the Senate.
  So from northern California to the rest of the country, help us all 
to be productive and to live the lives we choose to give our kids a 
chance to live at home, to find jobs and opportunities in their own 
communities--farming, ranching, mining, whatever it is, or related 
industries in those small towns that so many are boarded up now. Let 
them have that chance to live at home, not have to go someplace else, 
go to a big city somewhere, a different State, or even overseas to try 
to find good employment so they would have the dream they see fit and 
the one that their parents would like to pass along to them.
  My colleague from North Carolina, I appreciate the time tonight and 
the opportunity to talk about my district and the things we need to do 
there, as well as what we need to do for our country. I bid you a good 
evening, and thank you.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, Mr. LaMalfa from 
California. I have heard him often speak on the floor. I have invited 
him several times to speak and do 1-minute speeches because I am the 
person in charge of getting people to the floor. I am very grateful to 
have had the opportunity to hear him speak in a little longer time 
because I found out how much we agree on issues.

                              {time}  1745

  I am particularly keen about the water issue that he spent some time 
talking about. I grew up in a house with no electricity and no running 
water. I grew up carrying water. Water has always been a precious, 
precious commodity to me.
  We are the most fortunate people in the world in the United States 
that we have the greatest resources available to us. Many times I think 
we don't appreciate the scarcity of some of those resources or the need 
to husband those resources in a way that protects them not only for 
ourselves but for future generations.
  I have always felt that people who are farmers are among the most 
eloquent speakers for our environment. As Mr. LaMalfa said--and I 
completely agree with him and said it many times myself--farmers are 
the best stewards of our land. They believe in sustainability. They 
believed in sustainability long before sustainability became a 
catchword in the community because if they didn't keep the land 
sustainable, then they wouldn't have the land in order for their own 
livelihood.
  I am a person who also grew up farming, sometimes on a very small 
scale. My husband and I still have a garden every year. We certainly 
understand the importance of taking care of all of our resources, but 
particularly our natural resources. I think so often Republicans don't 
get the credit that they deserve for being good stewards and for 
looking after our land and all of our resources.
  I also am very keen on the fact that we have a diversity of people 
serving in Congress. Again, I think it is very important that we have 
people from all walks of life serving in here because it is the 
diversity of experiences that are so important to us in terms of having 
the different points of view as we consider legislation, so that there 
are people who grew up in cities who have no idea what it is like to 
farm, have no idea where food comes from exactly, and it is important 
for us to get the different points of view. We need farmers, we need 
educators, we do need some lawyers, but we need people who have had all 
kinds of experiences. We need people who have driven trains,

[[Page 304]]

train engineers. But every kind of diversity that is at all possible 
here. I think it is very important, though, that we have particularly a 
large share of farmers. Our numbers of farmers have gone down over the 
years, obviously, as we have left the farm and as farmers have become 
so incredibly productive in this country. They provide so much more 
than they have in the past. So I really appreciate the eloquence of my 
colleague from California in presenting the issues that he has 
presented.
  I want to talk a little bit about some of the other things that he 
talked about. He talked about our need for jobs and for, again, 
maintaining what we can in this country, improving the economy. I want 
to talk about the three focuses that we in the majority have in this 
session of Congress, the three initiatives that we are going to be 
working on: energy, jobs and the economy, and regulatory reform.
  This week already we have already passed two bills that we think will 
help us with the creation of jobs and the economy. On our first day 
here on Tuesday, it got very little attention, but we passed a bill, 
the Jobs for Heroes Act. The idea for it came from a constituent of one 
of our colleagues from Illinois. The constituent said: Look, I was a 
veteran, couldn't get a job because the employer was concerned about 
going over the 50 limit, or hitting the limit of 50, which then his 
company would be subject to ObamaCare, and companies are avoiding being 
subject to ObamaCare.
  So we passed a bill introduced by Congressman Rodney Davis that said 
veterans don't have to be included in the 50 persons in a business 
requirement and then be forced to go into ObamaCare; that if they are 
covered by TRICARE then they don't have to do that. That is a positive 
bill to help create jobs.
  Today, we passed another bill that we think will help with employment 
in this country. As many people know, ObamaCare has told employers if 
people are working 30 hours or more then you have to cover them with 
ObamaCare. So we changed the definition of full-time employment from 30 
hours to restore the traditional 40-hour workweek. As I have said in 
other comments that I have made, from adjunct professors to hourly 
workers, I have heard from constituents all across North Carolina's 
Fifth District who have one thing in common: their work hours are being 
reduced. ObamaCare has placed an undue burden on employers and their 
employees by undermining the traditional 40-hour workweek, which has 
long been the standard for full-time work.
  This legislation will help protect the estimated 2.6 million 
Americans at risk for lost hours and wages at work under this 
destructive rule. The employer mandate in ObamaCare defines a full-time 
employee as someone who works an average of at least 30 hours a week. 
But H.R. 30, the Save American Workers Act, which passed the House 
today by a vote of 252-172, changes that definition, and that is a good 
thing for American workers.
  As I said, we have three big initiatives: energy, jobs and the 
economy, and regulatory reform. So the American people are going to see 
us passing bills all this year and next year focused on these three 
issues, in addition to the other things that we work on. We work on a 
plethora of subjects here.
  But I introduced a bill on the first day which will help us deal with 
regulatory reform. It is a bill I am proud to say has passed the House 
before with bipartisan support. I am very proud to say that when I 
introduced the bill on Tuesday, it had bipartisan original cosponsors. 
I am very pleased that Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, from Mr. 
LaMalfa's State of California, joined me in introducing legislation to 
shed light on how Federal policies impact the budgets of State and 
local governments and private sector employers.
  The bill is called the Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency 
Act--H.R. 50--and it would fix loopholes within the bipartisan 
regulatory reform act, known as UMRA, which passed in 1995. I 
introduced this legislation in the past four Congresses, and it has 
successfully passed the House with bipartisan support on three separate 
occasions.
  Every year, Washington imposes thousands of rules on local 
governments and small businesses. Hidden in those rules are costly 
mandates that stretch State and city budgets and make it harder for 
North Carolina businesses to hire. While Congress cannot create 
prosperity, we can work to ensure entrepreneurs and employers aren't 
crushed under costly regulations. This legislation will help restore 
transparency and hold Washington bureaucrats accountable for the true 
cost in dollars and in jobs that Federal dictates pose to the economy. 
Americans are better served when regulators are required to measure and 
consider the cost of rules they create.
  The bill ``increases transparency in the regulatory process and 
protects State and local governments from the burden of unfunded and 
often unnecessary mandates that waste time and money,'' is what my 
colleague Loretta Sanchez said. H.R. 50 would increase transparency 
about the cost imposed by unfunded mandates and holds the Federal 
Government accountable for considering those costs before passing them 
on to local governments and small businesses. The legislation would 
make it easier for people to determine how much these regulations are 
going to cost and make sure that we are not imposing unnecessary rules 
and regulations on both State and local governments and the private 
sector. So I am very pleased that that bill has passed. It is going to 
be a part of the regulatory reform package that passes this House.
  I encourage people watching this to contact your Member of Congress 
if you are aware of unnecessary rules and regulations that are out 
there that we could do something about. Obviously, we need rules and 
regulations. We want to make sure that we have safe food, that the 
airlines are flying correctly and safely, we want to make sure the 
railroads are operating safely, we want to make sure our cars are safe 
to drive in.
  But as we all know, often bureaucrats in Washington, and sometimes at 
the State and local level, look for ways to create jobs for themselves, 
create a reason for their being, and pass along rules and regulations 
that are simply unnecessary for the health and safety of the people in 
this country.
  So what we want to do is reduce those rules and regulations. That 
reduces cost, that helps with our emphasis on jobs and the economy. I 
believe that is going to be very important to us in getting our economy 
going again.
  As I mentioned, we are going to be working hard on our third 
initiative: energy. We will be passing another version of the Keystone 
XL pipeline. We will do that tomorrow. That bill will then go to the 
Senate. The Senate is already holding hearings on the bill, but the 
Senate does work a little bit slower than we do here in the House. We 
hope very much that the President will work with us in a bipartisan 
fashion and sign that bill.
  We are all very happy about the cost of gasoline having gone down in 
our country in the past few months. It, of course, doubled under 
President Obama, and now it is coming back down. It is because in many 
cases we have been able in the private sector to create more energy 
supply, and that's been helping bring down the cost. We know that the 
economies in Europe and Asia have slowed down considerably so there is 
less demand. We are all very grateful for the price of gasoline going 
down. I am very grateful for it. Every Member of Congress is very 
grateful.
  So what we hope is to help that cause even further by passing the 
Keystone XL pipeline and have more energy available in this country. We 
want to do everything we possibly can. Republicans have always believed 
in all of the above. As Mr. LaMalfa said, we want solar, wind, and all 
those other things, but they are primarily operating now because of 
giant government subsidies. What we would like to see is renewable and 
sustainable energy that doesn't require government subsidies, and we 
believe Keystone XL pipeline will help us along those lines.

[[Page 305]]



                              {time}  1800

  I am looking forward very much to our passing that legislation, the 
Senate passing that legislation, and our being able to send that bill 
to the President for his signature. I am hoping that he will sign it.
  I oftentimes get people quoting the Constitution to me and talking 
about what the Constitution says. Particularly, I hear from people a 
lot about the role of the House of Representatives. I want to talk a 
little bit about that in terms of our work in appropriations.
  In particularly the last few weeks, many people have expressed 
genuine concerns to me about the appropriations bill that passed 
Congress in December. Unfortunately, many Washington-based special 
interest groups are confusing the matter of what happened in December 
with the omnibus bill that we passed with incomplete and sometimes, 
frankly, false messages aimed more at fundraising for themselves than 
uniting behind our shared goal of stopping President Obama's executive 
overreach on immigration.
  One of the most misleading and commonly circulated suggestions is 
that the Constitution grants the House of Representatives alone the 
``power of the purse,'' or giving the House exclusive authority to 
withhold funding for targeted initiatives.
  I am going to be reading a part of the Constitution in a moment that 
relates to this, but I want to read another part of the Constitution 
that I think often gets misquoted to prove this example.
  We often hear the quote from the First Amendment, ``Congress shall 
make no law respecting an establishment of religion.''
  This comes oftentimes from groups who protest Ten Commandments being 
placed in public buildings or creches being placed on public land. They 
often quote that, but they usually forget to quote the second part of 
that sentence, which says ``or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.''
  Congress has a dual responsibility there. It is the same when people, 
I believe, are attempting to quote the Constitution when it comes to 
their version of what they call the power of the purse.
  As I said, they are, I believe, misconstruing a part of the 
Constitution. Specifically, it is article I, section 7, clause 1, of 
the Constitution which states, ``All bills for raising revenue shall 
originate in the House of Representatives.''
  I believe many well-meaning people believe that that means the House 
of Representatives has total control over what happens with 
appropriations, but they have forgotten that there is another phrase 
there, and it is ``but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments 
as on other bills.''
  While the House may pass an appropriations bill, it still has to go 
to the Senate for the Senate to pass. As we all learned in civics, the 
bill has to pass the House and pass the Senate in exactly the same form 
and be signed by the President in exactly the same form.
  There is another clause that people are often thinking about also. 
Article I, section 9, clause 7 states, ``No money shall be drawn from 
the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.''
  Those two are often talked about as power of the purse, meaning that 
is what people are talking about when they talk about power of the 
purse. As I said, all bills, including the appropriations bills that 
pass the House, must also pass the Senate and be signed by the 
President in the exact same form.
  What happened, particularly last year, is the Democrat-controlled 
Senate could reject a House-passed bill. It could pass liberal 
amendments and return it to the House, forcing the House either to 
accept a worsened product or risk a Federal Government shutdown, which 
would still not stop the President's executive overreach.
  What we did last December was pass a bill that would fund the rest of 
the government, except for the Department of Homeland Security, in a 
negotiation with the Senate because we needed to not shut down the 
government. Most of what was in that bill had already been passed by 
the House.
  We passed seven appropriations bills and sent them to the Senate, but 
the Senate had refused to act. We had also passed four more 
appropriations bills out of committee, but hadn't taken them up on the 
floor because they take so many hours to pass, and once the Senate made 
it clear they wouldn't take any of our appropriations bills, we thought 
we shouldn't waste additional time.
  While H.R. 83 was not a perfect bill, we are all faced here with 
making decisions on what is presented to us rather than what we would 
like to be presented. We did have a lot of conservative victories in 
H.R. 83. It continued our track record of cutting wasteful 
discretionary spending by $165 billion since FY 2010, but it is no 
small achievement that the Republican-led House has been able to 
implement overall spending cuts to save taxpayers more than $2 trillion 
over the next 10 years since taking the majority 4 years ago. 
Certainly, we want to do more, but we shouldn't let the perfect be the 
enemy of the good.
  We cut back spending to the Internal Revenue Service to pre-2008 
funding levels. We blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from 
regulating farm ponds and ditches. There was no new funding for 
ObamaCare, and a host of pro-life and conservative, pro-gun policy 
``riders'' were protected in that bill also.
  House Republicans have worked extremely hard in the past 4 years to 
stop President Obama and the Senate Democrats from furthering the 
damage they did to this country when they and Nancy Pelosi were in 
control.
  In fact, Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren both stridently opposed 
that legislation. However, unfortunately, when people focus on the 
perfect instead of the good, they don't give credit to us, and we were 
criticized by the liberal media and the conservative media.
  Despite the short time we have had, the obstacles we faced, and the 
enormity of our task, House Republicans have still managed a number of 
conservative victories. Last summer, a bill I authored was passed. It 
streamlined the Federal workforce development system, including the 
elimination of 15 duplicative programs.
  I would have liked to have eliminated more than that, but again, we 
take the victories that we can get. It is like being on a football 
team. You get the ball, and you look down field, and you think, ``Gosh, 
I can't score a touchdown,'' so I just sit down because I can't score a 
touchdown.
  No, that is not what the receiver does. The receiver says, ``If I can 
make a few yards, if I can make a yard, I'm moving in the right 
direction.'' That is what Republicans have been doing for the past 4 
years, moving us in the right direction.
  Occasionally, we are going to score a touchdown, but if we are moving 
in the right direction totally, then we are going to win this game, and 
that is what we are doing. We wish we could have done more, but we are 
going to have greater opportunities over the next 2 years with the 
Republican-led House and Senate.
  This 114th Congress offers us new chances to pass legislation that 
will lead our country down a road of economic recovery. We are going to 
work to reduce the size and scope of the Federal Government, protect 
against executive overreach, reform Federal spending, and keep America 
strong.
  This is America's Congress, and we are going to be addressing the 
American people's greatest priority in the 114th Congress. We are going 
to work hard to build a better future for American families. I believe 
we will accomplish that.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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