Justice for Former American Hostages in Iran Act of 2013

Mr. Speaker, I thank the House leadership for allowing me to utilize this hour to talk about some of the coming effects of the Affordable Care Act.

The Boston Tragedy

First, I do want to take a moment and join with so many of my colleagues who have just spoken on the floor in acknowledging the sacrifices that were made by first responders, people who ran toward the sound of the destruction this afternoon in Boston; and I certainly would recognize that even now, at this late hour, doctors and nurses are working in the emergency rooms in Boston to try to provide comfort to the afflicted and save life and limb for those who were damaged this afternoon, an act so astonishing in its cruelty, it is difficult to comprehend.

Mr. Speaker, in 5\1/2\ short months from right now, October 1, 2013, the full effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are going to start to be felt around the country. It's important that we take a few moments this evening and think about the road ahead, think about the things that are supposed to come online on October 1, and think about the contingencies if those things are not able to be accomplished.

It was just a few weeks ago in this town when speaking to the American

Health Insurance group, one of the information technologists from Health and Human Services talked about this informational hub that is supposed to be developed by the Department of Health and Human Services, this informational hub that will allow people to go online to sign up for their benefits under the Affordable Care Act. The comments of this individual were quite revealing. Speaking to an AHIP group earlier this year, he said:

The time for debating about the size of the text on the

screen or the color or whether it's a world-class user

experience, that's what we used to talk about 2 years ago.

Now let's just make sure it's not a Third World experience.

That's a pretty sobering admission from someone who is charged with providing the information hub, the information technology, the computer architecture that is supposed to be the underpinnings of the Affordable Care Act.

Bear in mind, it was 3 years ago, March of 2010, that the Affordable Care Act was signed into law. So 3 years later, billions of dollars spent in the implementation phase, and they're not sure if they can get this computer system up and running by October 1, which, by law, is when it is supposed to kick in.

That is a pretty significant admission from the information architect at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Now, when Barry Cohen, who is the head of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight in the Department of Health and Human Services, was addressing the same group in response to a question, he was a little bit unclear as to whether or not they would be, in fact, ready on that October 1 deadline.

He said:

We'll have to wait. Then we'll be in a position to know

which contingency plans we actually have to implement.

In other words, we can't plan for the contingency until we get there and see that a contingency plan is necessary. But, after all, what are contingency plans but those plans that are put in place because something unexpected may happen?

Last week, on the other side of the Capitol, in the other body, the Senator from West Virginia said:

ObamaCare is so complicated, and if it isn't done right the

first time, it will just simply get worse.

That's a pretty startling pronouncement from someone who was, in fact, a pretty big cheerleader for the Affordable Care Act when it went through the Senate.

He went on to say:

I believe that the Affordable Care Act is probably the most

complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States

Congress. Tax reform has obviously been huge, too, but up to

this point, this--the Affordable Care Act--is just beyond

comprehension.

Now, what does the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services have to say about all of this? She maintains that the Affordable Care Act will lower the cost of premiums for everyone; but in fact, in the past couple of weeks, she has admitted:

These folks will be moving into a really fully insured

product for the first time, and so there may be a higher cost

associated with getting into that market.

Translation: you're going to be paying more.

She goes on to say:

Some men and some younger customers could see their rates

increase. Women and older customers could see their rates

drop.

So, Mr. Speaker, I would submit that the coming rate shock is something for which people are actually unprepared. They have been told for 3 years that, after all, this is the Affordable Care Act, and it's going to make health care more affordable for all Americans; but the reality is somewhat different from the truth that is espoused by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Let's think about some of these things for just a minute, because they are important. Remember when the Affordable Care Act was debated? Remember the President's discussing the Affordable Care Act? Everyone wanted to talk about patients with preexisting conditions: patients with preexisting conditions are frozen out of the system; patients with preexisting conditions can't get care. Well, they meant couldn't get insurance, because people can get care. Nevertheless, this was proposed as an enormous problem. The Affordable Care Act was going to fix it.

How did the Affordable Care Act fix it?

Next year, when the exchanges are up and running or when Medicaid is expanded, people, indeed, may be incorporated into that system. Until that day arrives, they were to be taken care of through what is known as the Preexisting Condition Insurance Program, or PCIP, which is the Federal preexisting risk pool that was set up for the first time under the Affordable Care Act. Five billion dollars was put forward to help people with preexisting conditions with their premiums. Now, there was a little bit of a barrier to entry. You had to be uninsured for 6 months' time before you would be eligible for coverage under the preexisting condition program.

I've got to tell you, Mr. Speaker, I thought the Supreme Court was going to knock this thing out of the water. I thought there was no way in the world the highest court of the land could look at this thing and agree that it is constitutional under the Commerce Clause; that is, you can compel commerce in order to regulate it. I just knew that that day when the Supreme Court ruled that they would agree with me. In fact, they did; but then they went on to say that, in fact, since it's all a tax, Congress has the power to tax, and for that reason, it's not unconstitutional, and the law was allowed to stand.

Leading up to that day that the Supreme Court made that pronouncement, I was so convinced that we as Members of Congress had an obligation to our constituents--to people who were, in fact, thinking that they were covered under the Affordable Care Act--to provide a contingency plan, particularly for those people who were covered under this new Federal preexisting condition insurance plan. Well, it turns out I wasn't right, and the law was constitutional.

But what would have happened last June 30 if the Supreme Court had said that it was unconstitutional, and the whole thing was struck down? As a consequence, people who were in the preexisting condition program would have found themselves without insurance, and that would have been a pretty significant event to have occurred. I felt that we needed to have a contingency plan to cover those individuals.

Now here we are some 6, 8 months later; and what happened in January of this year? The PCIP program ran out of money. It ran out of money at the end of January, and they said, We're not taking any more people into this program.

We had a hearing a couple of weeks ago in the Committee on Energy and Commerce and heard from a patient who had thought she was in the queue, in that waiting period, to get into the Federal preexisting condition program except that they suspended enrollment at the end of January. You've got to believe that there were a lot of people who were in that 6-month waiting period who were waiting for their time to come up so that they could, in fact, enroll in this preexisting condition program; but as of the end of January, they were shut out. So the committee wrote a letter to the President that said, We'd like to help you here. There are probably other moneys in the Affordable Care Act that can be moved around and can continue to cover these individuals until January 1 of 2014 when the exchanges and the Medicaid expansion and all of the goodies prescribed in the Affordable Care Act can come on line.

One of the things that we were told in leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act is that there were millions of people who fell into this preexisting condition trap. In fact, on the floor of the House, you heard people quote figures of 8 to 12 million people. The Speaker of the House at that time, Speaker Pelosi, said 125 million people had preexisting conditions. In fact, that was a little bit of a misnomer because, when you look at the people who are covered by insurance in this country, the vast majority is covered under what's called a ``large group plan,'' or what we know as ``employer-sponsored insurance.'' A preexisting condition exclusion can occur in that environment, but it's much, much rarer, and there are typically open enrollment periods in which a person can

get taken on to his employer's insurance. Now, for 65 percent of the population, that's not the issue. Certainly, for people in the small group market and in the individual market, in the small group market and in the individual market, there was a problem.

On the numbers that people quoted prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act--8 million, 10 million, 12 million people--how many people were in the Federal preexisting condition program at the end of June when I worried that the Supreme Court was going to strike the whole thing down?

There were 65,000 people and certainly every one of those individuals with a compelling story--and not a small population but a manageable population. If we are just talking about trying to correct a problem for 65,000 people in a country of 310 million, I would submit that we can do that without destroying the existing program, the employer- sponsored insurance, that people said they liked and wanted to keep.

Remember, if you like what you have, you can keep it?

Instead of taking care of a problem for a relatively finite but compelling population, the administration and, at the time, the congressional Democrats pushed through a bill of ``we just want to control everything about your health care.'' They got their wish, but now we had probably 100,000 people in January who were in the Federal preexisting condition program, and now no new people can sign up for it because it is going to run out of money.

Mr. Speaker, I would submit that there is other money available in things like, we call them, ``slush funds'' that were built into the Affordable Care Act; things like the Medicare Modernization Act; things like the fund that is to allow for other activities in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. So, by just shifting some money around, these people who have preexisting conditions, in fact, could be taken care of, and we have the ability to do that. Really, it would be a relatively easy lift at this point, and perhaps next week we'll see legislation on the floor.

Can you imagine if this had been a Republican President who had taken people off the Federal preexisting condition program? You would have heard about it from every newspaper in the country, and every television outlet in the country would have talked about it. How much did you hear? Well, you're probably hearing about it tonight for the first time. You'll hear about it a little bit more next week. People don't want to talk about the failures embedded in the Affordable Care Act, but it is important that we do so.

Now, when this bill was passed into law, March of 2010, the then- Speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, claimed that the Affordable Care Act would create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately. Well, that hasn't turned out to be exactly true, either.

The Federal Reserve reported that employers are citing the uncertainty embedded in the Affordable Care Act as reasons for layoffs in companies and the reluctance to hire new employees.

The application that was proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services for people to fill out to get coverage in the exchanges next year actually asks an applicant if their job is no longer offering health coverage in the next year. Clearly embedded in the Affordable Care Act was a risk to job creation in this country, and we're now seeing that actually come into being.

The law does not treat everyone the same. It creates essentially a new underclass. It promises universal coverage, but it leaves some workers' families without coverage. Now, one of the most significant embedded problems in the Affordable Care Act is if an individual is working and their employer is providing them employer-sponsored insurance, that employer is required to do that; or if that employee looks for coverage in the exchange, that employer may be fined. But if the employer provides that employer-sponsored insurance, great. But he doesn't have to apply it, he doesn't have to provide that insurance to their family. This is a significant problem because that family, which right now may be covered, next year may not.

But here's the other part of that. That family would not be eligible for a subsidy in the insurance exchange because the employer is providing the benefit to the employee, but there was nothing in the law that said they had to continue family coverage. So who is going to be affected, primarily women and children. A headline in the Fort Worth Star Telegram a few weeks ago, and the Fort Worth Star Telegram is generally supportive of the administration and generally supportive of the Affordable Care Act, but under their headline was, ``500,000 Children to Lose Health Benefits Under the Affordable Care Act.''

This was actually not through something that was revealed in the Department of Health and Human Services, but rather a rule that was proposed by the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service. It turns out that children who lose insurance because the primary employee will be covered but the family will not, those children who lose insurance will not be fined by the IRS for not complying with the insurance mandate; but that is scant consolation for the fact that now they have no insurance and they have no reasonable way of achieving that because, after all, the cost for insurance is going to significantly increase under the Affordable Care Act.

There is a 21-page application for Americans who feel that they should be covered under the Medicaid expansion. A 21-page application is pretty significant. It does ask some questions that you have to ask yourself, are they germane to someone who is applying for health insurance. But nevertheless, the application is out there. It's in the public domain, albeit it's a draft at this point. My hope is that the Department of Health and Human Services will refine that, but most of the 27- to 35-year-olds that I know are not going to spend a lot of time filling out a 21-page application.

We were told in the run-up to the passage of this law that it would, in fact, pay down the deficit. It was $142 billion over 10 years, but it was supposed to reduce the deficit. Does anybody really believe that anymore? Of course not. And now the further evaluation of the costs and the expansive costs that are going to occur under the Affordable Care Act, probably an additional $1.5 trillion, at a conservative estimate, as to what this will add to the deficit over the next 10 years, and this is just for the subsidies and the exchanges and for the Medicaid expansion alone.

Now, why does that matter? Mr. Speaker, it matters because in just a few short weeks, the statutory borrowing authority of the United States will be met or exceeded. And this Congress, this House, will once again be involved in another discussion about raising the debt limit. In July of 2011, we had this discussion. It was pretty acrimonious and attracted a lot of attention and a lot of publicity, none of it good. We're going to have that same fight occur again.

A lot of people are concerned about the sequester. They say, we wish the sequester had never happened. But remember, the sequester was what the President proposed in order to get the expansion of the debt limit to a point where he would not have to deal with it again until after election day 2012. So the President got his wish. He said the sequester was good; it will allow us to get past this point and to move on. But now people are dealing with the aftermath.

I would just ask you, what is the sequester going to look like in the summer of 2013, because the debt limit will not be just expanded to cover the obligations. There is going to have to be some spending discipline that goes along with that. I don't know what that will be. I'm not privy to those discussions, but will all the money that is promised to be there for the Medicaid expansion, for the subsidies in the exchange, will it in fact be there, or will that be exposed to some type of sequester-type device? I don't know the answer to that question, but those are questions in which this House will have to deal in literally a few short weeks' time.

There has been significant tax policy that has gone into effect since the Affordable Care Act was passed. Just this year, five new taxes-- significant taxes--have occurred, as a result of the Affordable Care Act. There's a payroll tax that has increased almost 1 percent, 0.9 percent.

A payroll tax for people who earn over $200,000 a year, joint filers of $250,000 a year, some people look at that and say we knew that Medicare was getting into trouble. Maybe that is a good thing that that payroll tax for Medicare has gone up. Well, it might be except the money doesn't stay in the Medicare trust fund. It's collected, and then it immediately goes into the general revenue in order to pay for or offset the cost of the subsidies that are going to exist in the insurance exchange.

One of the more onerous taxes that was begun on January 1 was a 2.4 percent gross receipts tax on medical devices. Class II and class III medical devices as defined by the Food and Drug Administration are now subject to a 2.4 percent gross receipts tax. That's not a tax on profits; that's a tax on gross sales. It is significant. Sure, there are some big companies that will make due; but really it's the small entrepreneur who is developing medical devices, and this is happening all the time. Those individuals are the ones who are going to be particularly hard hit. And, as you can imagine, it may reduce some of that entrepreneurial activity or send it overseas.

We already have a Food and Drug Administration that's sometimes difficult to deal with as far as getting things approved. Europe and Central Asia are not so difficult to deal with. And, hey, by the way, there's not that gross receipts tax. Perhaps we ought to move our manufacturing somewhere else. And, of course, the jobs go with the manufacturing.

There's been a change in what are called flexible spending accounts. Flexible spending accounts are that money which you are able to designate at the beginning of every calendar year, and you can have pretax dollars that can be spent for recurrent medical expenses.

This now has been capped at $2,500 a year. The amount was much higher previously; but under the Affordable Care Act, in order to offset some of the additional costs of the Affordable Care Act, they said we're going to cap those flexible spending account contributions to $2,500. That started this year.

So if you've got a recurring medical expense that occurs every year, and think about someone with a family member who has a chronic medical condition or a family with a special needs child where they wanted to be able to set some dollars aside at the beginning of the year, not have them taxed so that they could pay for whatever it was that was going to be required, they are now capped at $2,500. People are going to very quickly find that amount is exceeded, and that they have been caught in this so-called FSA trap, or flexible spending account trap.

For people who deduct medical expenses from their income tax, and as you know, currently for the last tax year for which we all just prepared our taxes and filed them this evening, there was a 7.5 percent exclusion from your adjusted gross income, that is, until your medical expenses equaled 7.5 percent of your adjusted gross income, you didn't get to deduct medical expenses from your tax. That amount has actually increased to 10 percent for next year. So people who were accustomed, people with a lot of medical expenses who were accustomed to keeping up with those receipts and then being able to deduct those medical expenses as they exceeded 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income, they're now not going to be able to deduct those expenses until after 10 percent of their adjusted gross income.

So who have we punished here?

We have punished the families with special needs children. We have punished people with chronic medical conditions. We've basically gone after the sickest Americans to say you're going to pay a little bit more for what everyone else is going to receive in the Affordable Care Act.

There is going to be a tax on insurance companies--I'm sorry--a tax on insurance policies that people will have to pay. This will go into a couple of different accounts, a couple of different funds, but the bottom line is it costs more every year to buy your insurance.

And then, beginning in 2018, the so-called tax on Cadillac insurance plans kicks in. And who's this going to affect?

Well, yes, it will affect higher-income earners who get a generous insurance policy. But it also affects union members whose insurance policies were part of their collective bargaining agreements over time, and those policies which now are going to be judged to be Cadillac plans will actually be taxed at a much higher rate starting in 2018.

There was supposed to be an exchange set up for small business. It was called the SHOP Exchange, small business health policies. Twenty- nine times there were deadlines that were missed in setting up the SHOP exchanges. And now, just in the past couple of weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services said, it's pretty tough, pretty complicated. We don't know if we can do it or not, but we're giving ourselves another year. This won't happen until 2015.

I think this is one of the things that really caused some of the consternation over in the Senate because in the other body this was one of the deals that they made in order to get the Affordable Care Act passed, in order to get it to the floor of the Senate in the fall of 2009.

It is instructive for people to remember how this thing came to be in the first place. Now, in the summer of 2009, the committees of jurisdiction here in the House--Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, Education and Labor--all debated a version of the House health care reform bill.

Now, make no mistake about it. I think it was a crummy bill. H.R. 3200 was the number. It did go through the committee process. It was amended several times in the various House committees. From there it went to the Speaker's desk, where it was all kind of consolidated; all three committee products were kind of melded into one, and then it came to the floor of the House, doubled in size, during that 2- or 3-month hiatus, and was passed by the House of Representatives in the fall, in November of 2009.

Not a single--well, one Republican vote, and the rest carried by Democrats. Thirty-five Democrats voted against it because of some of the problems contained within that legislation.

But the important thing is, as bad as I think it is, it did go through the regular House process. We may have been curtailed in the number of amendments we could offer in committee. Our time for debate in committee may have been limited but, nevertheless, it did come through the committee process.

Not so in the Senate. H.R. 3200 has never been seen or heard from again. It passed the House, went over to the Senate to await activity, and there it went, up into the ether somewhere. No one really knows what happened to it.

But, wait a minute. There's a health care law that was signed by the President in March of 2010. How did the health care law come into being?

Well, the House had passed another bill in July of 2009. It was H.R. 3590, dealt with housing. I think it passed the House with very few negative votes. But it was a housing bill.

It went over to the Senate to await further activity, and that's the bill that was picked up by Senate leadership that was brought to the floor of the Senate and amended. The amendment read ``strike all after the enacting clause and insert,'' striking, of course, the language for the housing bill, which was the base bill, and inserting health care language, and that was the bill that the Senate passed late on Christmas Eve in 2009, right ahead of a big snowstorm that was coming to town.

All the Senators wanted to get out so they passed this bill. Sixty votes. Not a single Republican vote. Passed with entirely Democratic votes.

Now, under normal circumstances, H.R. 3590, which was now the Senate health care bill, and H.R. 3200, which was the House bill, would have gone to a conference committee. They would have worked rough edges out. They would have worked the differences out between the two bills, and a conference report would have come back to both Houses of Congress, the House and the Senate, and that would have been voted on, up or down.

The problem was that, remember, it took 60 votes to pass it on the Senate side. Shortly after H.R. 3590 passed on the Senate side, a Democratic seat was lost. Scott Brown was elected from Massachusetts and, as a consequence, that 60th vote was no longer available to the Democratic leadership in the Senate.

So what are they going to do?

Well, they said that the House will just simply have to pass H.R. 3590. After all, it was a House bill that was passed already by the House in July of 2009, amended by the Senate, to become a health care bill. All that is required for it to become law is for the House to take a vote; will the House now concur with the Senate amendment to H.R. 3590. So many as in favor, say aye.

If that is a simple majority, 218 votes here in the House of Representatives, if that is a simple majority, then that's the end of the discussion. The bill goes down the street to the White House for a signing ceremony, and that's exactly what happened.

Now, it took 3 months to accomplish that, because no one here in the House thought H.R. 3590 was a very good legislative product.

In fact, let's be honest, Mr. Speaker. It was a rough draft that had been produced by the Senate Finance Committee, the staff of the Senate Finance Committee, as a vehicle to get the Senate to conference with the House. They never expected for this thing to be signed into law. It was a vehicle to get to a conference to then sit down with the House, and let's work out these differences between the two of us, and then we'll get a conference committee product to come to the floor. But it didn't work out.

As a consequence, the bill that was signed into law was one that was never intended to become law. It was a product produced by the staff of the Senate Finance Committee as a vehicle to get them out of town before Christmas Eve so that they could then get to the conference committee where the real work, the real work of writing this health care law would occur.

The American people were cheated by this process, Mr. Speaker. And now, we're left to deal with the consequences.

And what are the consequences?

500,000 children, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, being taken off their parents' employer-sponsored insurance. People in the preexisting program who had been waiting patiently for their turn are now told, we're sorry, it's full up. No more space. You can't come in.

It didn't have to be this way. There were good ideas on both sides that could have been taken into account.

One of the fundamental questions I think we have to ask ourselves over and over again is where were the country's Governors when this bill was actually written. Well, of course it was written by the Senate Finance Committee staff, so the Governors were nowhere in the room. A lot of deals that were struck between some of the special interest groups and the White House were all done down at the White House in July of 2009. The Nation's governors weren't involved in that.

Why were the Nation's governors so reluctant to accept the exchanges, the Medicaid expansion?

Well, the answer, Mr. Speaker, is because they were dealt out of the process. And then, the rulemaking that started happening after the law was signed began to scare them, but a lot of the rules were held until after Election Day.

The rule governing essential health benefits--what Governor in their right mind is going to sign on to an exchange program where they don't even know what they're going to be required to cover? They don't know how much money it is going to cost them?

Well, it's no surprise that 26 States said no dice to the exchange. An additional six States said maybe we'll do a partnership, but you go ahead and set the program up through the Federal level first.

And as consequence, the Office of Personnel Management is now required to set up exchanges for 26 States, plus six that might want partnership, and that's a tall order, which is why Gary Cohen said, I'm not sure we're going to need a contingency plan, but we can't know what contingency we have until we actually get there.

I will submit there is going to be a need for a contingency plan. The sooner that the agencies admit that to the appropriate committees in the House and Senate, the sooner they can begin to work on a solution for a problem.

Because, Mr. Speaker, let's face it. January 1 of 2014, there's going to be an emergency room, there's going to be an operating room, there's going to be a delivery room where a patient and doctor are going to come in contact with each other, and they don't need the uncertainty of what this legislation has dealt them.

I thank the Speaker for the time this evening, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 48 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

For the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to my friend from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

Mr. Speaker, we're here today, as you heard from the Clerk, on House Resolution 48, which provides a structured rule for consideration of H.R. 444, which is the Require a PLAN Act. This is a resolution that will require that the President, if he doesn't submit a budget that ultimately comes to balance, submit then a supplementary budget that shows how he would bring the budget to balance.

As you know, Mr. Speaker, we've been grappling with serious budget challenges throughout this President's administration. We go back to FY 2009, the very first year of the administration; the deficit tripled the previous record-high deficit in this country to $1.4 trillion. It was $1.3 trillion in FY 2010, $1.3 trillion in FY 2011, $1.2 trillion in FY 2012. And, Mr. Speaker, there's no plan that the administration has produced to get us from where we are--fiscal irresponsibility--to a point in the future of fiscal responsibility.

Mr. Speaker, we've been doing our part here in the House. We've been proud to work together across the aisle in order to pass budgets that tackle

those hard challenges that are ahead of us. If you read the President's comments, Mr. Speaker, you will see that he recognizes the challenges are hard. The question is: Are we going to deal with those or not?

I hold here, Mr. Speaker, a speech that the President made to the Democratic National Convention on September 6, 2012, where he said this:

I will use the money that we're no longer spending on war

to pay down our debt and put more people back to work.

And my notes here said that it was followed by extended cheers and applause. I expect my friend from Massachusetts supports that spirit wholeheartedly, that, ``I will use the money we're no longer spending on war to pay down our debt and put more people back to work.''

But, Mr. Speaker, I also hold in my hand a transcript from the Budget Committee, on which I have the pleasure of sitting, when we had the President's Treasury Secretary come before the Budget Committee to explain the budget, and I said this:

Can you tell me just in simple terms--in true or false

terms, this budget never, ever, ever reduces the debt, is

that right?

Treasury Secretary Geithner:

Uh, that is correct. It does not go far enough to bring

down the debt, not just as a share of the economy, but

overall. You're right.

I then said this:

It doesn't bring down the debt at all.

Mr. Speaker, that's the conflict that we face here as a people, as a country. Not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as a people. On the one hand, what our politicians are saying is we're going to use the money to pay down our debt. But what the reality is is that proposals are coming out today that never, ever, ever pay down a penny of debt.

Now, Mr. Speaker, if you want to see that for yourself, you can look. The President's budgets each year are posted online on the OMB Web site. In fact, the very first one he submitted--I hold the cover page here--it was called ``A New Era of Responsibility.'' ``A New Era of Responsibility'' is the first budget that the President ever submitted. But as I go through that budget, Mr. Speaker, what I see is projections for 2020, for 2030, for 2040, for 2060, and for 2080.

Mr. Speaker, hear that. You have got young children--2020, 2030, 2040, 2060, and 2080--and in each one of those years, according to the President's budget, not only does the budget never balance under his plan, but it continues to get worse. 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050, 2060, 2080--the President's budget. And I think that comes as news to so many of us, Mr. Speaker, I confess, because I've listened to the speeches, just as my friend from Massachusetts has, where we talk about getting the deficit under control, where we talk about paying down the debt. Only when you get into the plan, do you see that we never pay down one penny.

So this rule today, Mr. Speaker, would allow us to take up a bill that would require the President for the very first time to submit a balanced budget. It doesn't have to balance the way I would balance it. It doesn't have to balance the way you would balance it. But to submit a balanced budget. And as you know, Mr. Speaker, the statute actually required the President submit his budget yesterday. He's going to miss that deadline, but I'm expecting it soon and I'm looking forward to reading it soon. It's so that we actually give the American people a plan.

I want to say--because we heard it in the Rules Committee last night, and I believe my friend from Massachusetts brought it up and he was absolutely right--the history of debt and deficits in this country, Mr. Speaker, is not a mark of shame on the Democratic Party and it is not a mark of shame on the Republican Party; it is a mark of shame on all of us collectively.

Candidly, you and I here, Mr. Speaker, in the big freshman class of 2010, I'm less interested in finding out who to blame and I'm more interested in finding out who has a solution to solve the problem. This House passed a solution to solve the problem. I'd like to see the Senate create a solution. I'd like to see the President create a solution. I'd like to see us discuss that solution as the American people, Mr. Speaker.

There were 14 amendments submitted to this piece of legislation, Mr. Speaker. We heard testimony on that in the Rules Committee yesterday. Unfortunately, six of those 14 amendments were nongermane; we were not able to make those in order. But we did make in order three Republican amendments, one Democratic amendment, and one bipartisan amendment. In fact, all the Members who came to the Rules Committee yesterday to testify on behalf of their amendments, we were able to make those amendments in order.

Mr. Speaker, all this bill does, should it become law, is require that if the President doesn't submit a balanced budget--it's certainly my great hope that he will, but if he doesn't, he share with the American people--again, not in 5 years, not in 10 years--whatever number he believes is the right way to set priorities, tell the American people what steps he will take to get us back on track.

Candidly, Mr. Speaker, it's unconscionable that we can look at projections going out to 2080 and have folks never, ever, ever pay down one penny of debt. Contrast that with what we did here in the House of Representatives, where with a budget that passed this House, the bipartisan vote that passed that budget, passed the only budget that passed anywhere in this town, not only would we have balanced the budget in that time frame, Mr. Speaker, we would have paid back every penny of our $16.4 trillion Federal debt.

That's no small conversation. It's a conversation that's long overdue on this House floor. It's a conversation that has been too long ignored by both Democrats and Republicans, and I'm pleased to be here today to take that up with my friend from Massachusetts, and then later on, the underlying bill.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

I thank my friend from Massachusetts because he's highlighting exactly what our challenges are and exactly why it's so important that we pass both the rule and H.R. 444 today. He went through item after item after item that have absolutely tied our economy up in knots. Short-term problems and short-term solutions are trumping the discussion of long-term problems and long-term solutions.

The sequester that he mentioned, Mr. Speaker, do you know that it was the month of May last year that this House first passed a replacement to the sequester? Now, as you know and as history has recorded, the Senate never acted on any replacement of a sequester, and now we talk about what happened on January 1 as if it was something that was created by this House, as if that fiscal cliff was something that this House invented. In fact, we have a very proud history, bipartisan history, of looking further down the road to try to find the best answers and the best solutions to very serious problems. But we can't do it alone, Mr. Speaker.

One of the great successes we've had just early in this year--and by ``we,'' I mean this entire House, the people's House--is that we appear to have persuaded the Senate to pass a budget for the first time in 4 years. All indication is that this year, unlike last year and the year before that and the year before that, this year they're going to pass a budget to lay out their plan.

But what does it say, Mr. Speaker, about this House, about this process, about the future of this country that it's controversial whether or not the President of the United States should introduce a budget that balances ever? That's the debate today, Mr. Speaker. That's how out of touch Washington has become. That's how confused the speeches have been written. We're debating whether or not the President should introduce a budget that ever balances. I'm advocating, yes, he should. Others are advocating, no, that shouldn't be a requirement; when you take the oath to fully execute the laws of the land, when you take the oath to faithfully protect and defend the United States of America, it shouldn't be a requirement that you balance budgets. In fact, you should be free, not just for 10 years, not just for 20 years, not just for 40 years, not just for 80 years, but forever to deficit spend, to borrow from a generation of children and a generation of grandchildren to pay for our wants today, taking away from their needs tomorrow.

This rule debate is going to come to a close in 40 minutes and we're going to vote. Then if the rule passes, we're going to go into a vote on the underlying bill. There are going to be ``no'' votes on the board that say, no, the President should never have to explain to the American people how we're going to make our fiscal tomorrow better than our fiscal today.

I would like to change his mind, Mr. Speaker, but for now I'm going to focus on changing the minds right here in this Chamber. Because if there is anything that unites us in this body, rather than divides us, it is a true love of this country. And I challenge anyone, Mr. Speaker, to define their love of our freedoms and of our country in a way that allows us to continue borrowing from the next generation forever.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I just want to say to my friend from New York, for whom I do have tremendous respect and value her counsel, to call this a stupid piece of legislation I think really misses the point about what we're doing here.

I would encourage you to ask your constituents in New York, and, Mr. Speaker, I would encourage you to ask your constituents back home, do folks realize, because I didn't, that in the four years that the President has been President of the United States, the budgets that he has introduced come to balance never?

My friends on the other side are making a persuasive case, Mr. Speaker, for why it is they would support doing things with different priorities than I would support doing things. And that's absolutely going to be true. When we debate the budget resolution, we're going to have different approaches for getting to balance. But the President's budgets never get there. If we give him every spending cut he asks for, if we give him every tax increase he asks for, if we do absolutely everything that the budget that he is required by law to submit requests, we will begin to pay down the first penny of debt never.

In fact, if we do absolutely everything that the budget he is required by law to submit to us asks, the debt will continue to grow forever.

I agree with so much of what my friends on the other side are saying about the sequester, about the fiscal cliff. That's why we acted in May in this body. That's why we acted in August in this body on this tax bill. That's why we passed another sequester replacement in August. That's why we passed another one in December. I agree. But can't we also agree that if you're going to be Commander in Chief of America, if you're going to be the President of the United States, if you're going to uphold and defend the Constitution--and we have our former Joint Chief of Staff Chairman telling us that our greatest national security threat is our growing debt--shouldn't it be fair to ask the President to tell us when, if ever, he plans to begin paying back the first penny?

Mr. Speaker, it's not a stupid piece of legislation that we're dealing with today. What's almost laughably ridiculous is that it's controversial.

I believe the gentleman has much more time. I will be happy to reserve the balance of my time, though, and allow my friend to control.

Mr. Speaker, there's a reason that we're spending so much time talking about things other than the underlying bill, other than the rule. The reason is because the rule is a good rule, and the bill is a good bill. We can use this time for the political theater that my friend from Massachusetts appears to disdain, but I would say he's got a talent for it and he should not disdain it so rapidly.

Mr. Speaker, we handled the sequester in May. I hope whenever my friend from Massachusetts refers to his friends on the other side, he means the other side of the Chamber, not the other side of this House, because we, you and I, acted, Mr. Speaker, to solve those issues.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Reclaiming my time, my friend is exactly right. Of all of the multiple efforts that we did last year that were all rejected by the other side, we have not recreated those efforts again this year. He's exactly right.

What we have done, however, is created a pathway that's going to produce the first budget on the Senate side, the first opportunity for the bodies to come together in conference.

My friend from New York tells us about, I'm just a bill and what schoolchildren are learning all over America. Mr. Speaker, they're going to have to learn on TV because they have not seen it in this town. We can't. We can't go to conference on a budget unless the Senate passes one. And this year, Mr. Speaker, as governed by the rule book, the United States Constitution that I have right here in my hand, we're going to be able to get that done. That's the kind of work this House is doing. That's the groundwork that we're laying.

My friend from New York is exactly right, Mr. Speaker, when she says that this body, led by Chairman Ryan on the Budget Committee, is going to produce a budget so serious and so responsible, it's going to come to balance, the balance the American people are demanding, faster than any other budget we have seen in this President's administration.

All we're asking, Mr. Speaker: Doesn't it seem reasonable to let the President submit any budget he wants to? We don't want to change the budget he's submitting at all, but just to share with the American people because they don't know when they come to balance.

Who knew, Mr. Speaker, when the budget was entitled a ``New Era of Responsibility,'' that it wasn't going to come to balance in 80 years? Who knew? I didn't. There are people in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker, who did not know that in 4 years of his Presidency, this President has never, ever--assuming a world where he gets everything that he wants-- crafted a plan that begins to pay back the very first penny of our debt. That's dangerous, Mr. Speaker.

This bill can put a stop to that process. That is why I know it's going to get support here in the House.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds just to say to my friends that I haven't actually mentioned that the President's budget was late. You're exactly right. He did miss the statutory deadline. He's not going to make it on time. In fact, the story is that it's not going to get here until March. In the years that I've had a voting card, he has never submitted a budget on time. I'm not asking him to get it here on time. I am only asking him, when it gets here, would he tell us when it's going to balance.

With that, I would like to yield 4 minutes to a colleague on the Rules Committee, the gentleman from Texas, Dr. Burgess.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds to say to my colleague that I share her great passion for America's children and protecting America's children. And I would say to my friend that I don't believe we can continue to operate under budgets that borrow from those children, not just this year, not just next year, but forever, and candidly say that we're protecting them. We're putting our most vulnerable at risk with these deficits, and we have to make the tough decisions.

I'd be happy to yield.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume to read from the President's inaugural address. It took place just outside our backdoor here. He said:

We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health

care and the size of our deficit.

He didn't say we should make the easy choices, because there aren't any easy choices left to make. Every single one of them is hard. And I have such great respect for Members of this body who have taken the hard votes and made those hard decisions.

All this bill says is: Mr. President, put your budget where your speeches are. Make the hard choices, any of the choices you want to make to balance, anytime you want to balance, but we can't begin to pay down the debt until we stop running up the debt. And we have yet to see a budget from this President that puts us on that path.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 60 seconds to say to my friend that I know his commitment to Social Security is heartfelt, and it's one that I share. I hope it gives him comfort to know that there is absolutely nothing in this legislation that changes any of those commitments that he read there on the House floor. In fact, I would say the opposite is true. As someone who's going to retire after Social Security is projected to have gone bankrupt, I think it is critically important that every budget we look at looks at how it is we're going to pay back all of those government bonds that this Congress has swapped the cash in the Social Security trust fund for. Without paying back those bonds, there is no Social Security check to go out the door.

The reason we talk about balanced budgets is because numbers are important. We talk about balanced budgets because commitments are important. And we cannot, we cannot meet our Medicare commitments. We cannot meet our Social Security commitments, and everyone in this body knows it.

Every budget the President produces shows it. But we can do better; and working together, we will do better, Mr. Speaker.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I'd say to my friend, I'm prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of the time to thank my friend from Massachusetts for being down here with me today to get this rule to a place where we can vote on it. I always look to my friend from Massachusetts to find those things that we agree on, and we certainly agree that Congress has an awfully low approval rating.

I would disagree with my friend though, Mr. Speaker, and say it's a low approval rating because we don't deal with important issues like this. It's a low approval rating because folks will say Republicans want to privatize Social Security, even though our budget did no such thing.

It's a low approval rating because folks will say our budget destroys Medicare forever, even though our budget did no such thing. It's a low approval rating because folks say they want to grapple with the tough challenges of the country, and yet they continue to borrow and spend as they always have.

But I'm an optimist, Mr. Speaker. I really do believe that we've come to a place--not just in this country, not just in this House--I think we've come to a place in each individual in this country, where folks are prepared to do those things that must be done to ensure that our children's tomorrow is better than their today.

Mr. Speaker, when my colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk about their deep love and affection for the next generation and how they want to ensure that the most vulnerable are taken care of, they mean it from the heart. They mean it from the heart.

But when the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tells us that our biggest national security concern is our growing debt and deficits, how much love can you show to the next generation, Mr. Speaker, when you continue to dig into their pockets instead of your own?

It's not incumbent upon us to decide how our children set their priorities. It's incumbent upon us to set our priorities so that they don't have to make those tough decisions.

Mr. Speaker, if we went out in the street in front of this Capitol and asked every man and woman who brought their family here to visit the Nation's Capitol how many of them knew that in not one budget, and for not 1 year does the President ever propose that we come to balance, that would be shocking, shocking news. And yet it's the truth.

Mr. Speaker, title 31 lays out in intricate detail congressional requirements for the President's budget. Congressional requirements for the President's budget. H.R. 444 would incorporate those requirements and add one more and, that is, that in this time of economic challenge, you be honest with the American people about the tough choices that we're all facing.

Mr. Speaker, if it was easy, they'd have done it before you and I got here. It's hard, and it's getting worse every single day any one of us fails to deal with it.

We can deal with it today, Mr. Speaker. I know our Budget Committee is committed to dealing with it. I know this House is committed to deal with it. Let's make the President a partner in that today.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I urge strong support for the resolution. I urge strong support for the underlying bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 413 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, House Resolution 413 provides for consideration of H.R. 3350, the Keep Your Plan Act of 2013. The rule provides for 1 hour of debate controlled by the Committee on Energy and Commerce, equally divided between the majority and the minority. Because the bill addresses a targeted emergency situation caused by the lack of foresight in the Affordable Care Act, namely, the cancellation of millions of existing health insurance plans despite repeated promises to the contrary, because of that, the rule makes no amendments in order. However, the minority is afforded the customary opportunity to offer one motion to recommit, should they so choose.

This is a fair rule to allow us to give some relief to Americans who actually want to keep their health insurance plan but are being told that because of the Affordable Care Act, they may not.

We are now 6 weeks into the disastrous launch of the President's signature health care law, and more and more problems are uncovered with each succeeding day. It seems that the President has quickly forgotten all of the promises made over the past 4 years to the American people about this law.

In 2009, in a speech before the American Medical Association, President Obama stated:

We will keep this promise to the American people: if you

like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor,

period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to

keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away,

no matter what.

At the end of September, the President said:

The first thing you need to know is this: if you already

have health care, you don't have to do anything.

Americans from across the country, from across the ideological spectrum agree that President Obama has broken his fundamental promise. And now his attempts to reconcile this broken promise only serve to bring further confusion and chaos.

Today, H.R. 3350 offers a real solution. The bill would allow plans available on the individual market today to be offered in calendar year 2014. It would provide millions of Americans the opportunity to keep their health care plan in 2014. The bill would also ensure that Americans keeping their plans would not face a penalty under ObamaCare's individual mandate.

Mr. Speaker, I have heard from constituents about the problems that they have faced because of the President's law. A Texan from Flower Mound, Texas, recently wrote me about how her insurance has doubled in recent years because of the Affordable Care Act. In short, she wrote me that ``I miss 2009 when our family health care was affordable.'' Millions of Americans, just like this Texan, are losing their health care coverage. They are facing massive increases in their premiums and losing access to their doctor under the Affordable Care Act.

The Associated Press has reported that over 3.5 million people on the individual insurance market have had their insurance canceled. Let me restate that: the Associated Press has reported that over 3.5 million people on the individual insurance market have had their health care plans canceled. We learned just this week the number of people who successfully signed up on the President's Web site for the Affordable Care Act, under 27,000--3.5 million lose their insurance; 27,000 sign up. It doesn't sound like a fair trade-off.

This is not the first time that the President has realized that his signature law is significantly flawed. Since the law was passed, the President has signed seven bills into law that have repealed portions of the Affordable Care Act. Those were laws passed by the House, passed by the Senate, and sent down to the White House for signature, the way it is supposed to happen in a constitutional Republic.

But in addition to these statutory changes that were passed by the Congress and sent down to the President

for his signature, the President has taken it upon himself to issue a multitude of administrative fixes to the law. And now this same President wants to, once again, fix his own law? Can we really trust the administration that wrote this disastrous missive in the first place and so mishandled the implementation? Do we trust them to now fix it? Do we trust them not to change their minds in 2 or 3 weeks' time when perhaps winds are blowing from a different direction?

The White House is saying that it will use its administrative authority to allow health plans that it deemed illegal to now still be able to be sold, but this bill that the House is considering today provides a fix that is both constitutional and follows the legal process.

H.R. 3350 offers a legislative solution to help Americans get a lifeboat, a life raft up from under the crushing weight of this law. The bill would grandfather in all existing health care plans so that no American will lose their coverage as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

President Obama is shifting the blame. He is saying it is up to States and the State insurance commissioners to fix the massive problem that his signature law has created for millions of Americans who are losing their health insurance.

His attempt at another ``fix'' is quickly coming to a halt. Just hours after the President's announcement, the Washington State insurance commissioner announced that he will not allow insurance companies to continue offering the canceled plans:

We will not be allowing insurance companies to extend their

policies. I believe this is in the best interest of the

health insurance market in Washington.

It is clear that H.R. 3350 offers the only feasible lifeline to millions of Americans who are crying out for our help. They want to keep their health care plan. It is our job, it is the job of the Congress, to protect the American people from the excesses of this administration. And I urge my colleagues to pass this rule so Americans will have the opportunity to keep their health care plan.

Let's be very clear here: this bill today cannot fix the Affordable Care Act. What has been visited upon the American people in the Affordable Care Act will not be resolved by this action today. It is merely to stop the bleeding. It is an effort to triage, to stabilize the patient. Maybe then we can get the same patient to the operating room to actually fix the problem that bedevils it.

The bill we are voting on today serves to stop that hemorrhaging, and the hemorrhaging that is occurring is a consequence of the ill- conceived government takeover of the American health care industry. Any good triage doctor knows before they can fully treat or cure the patient they have to deal with the immediate problems. In this case, they have to stop the hemorrhage of people losing their private health insurance because of the Affordable Care Act. That is what the House of Representatives will do today. That is what House Republicans will be voting in favor of. I hope that our colleagues across the aisle will see the wisdom in this and join us.

I encourage everyone in this House to vote ``yes'' on the rule and ``yes'' on the underlying bill. Let's stand with millions of Americans who are visited daily by cancelation notices in their mailboxes. Despite the promises made to them, they are losing their insurance because of this disastrous law.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

First off, I do need to point out that yesterday, the President of the United States thought that this situation represented an emergency that required his immediate attention, and he rushed a press conference at high noon yesterday to announce his resolution for the problem.

As far as the issue of hearings, I will submit a list of eight hearings that were held in the Energy and Commerce Committee over calendar year 2013 on the issue of grandfathering health care plans.

But the most important thing I wish to point out, for those of you who were here in 2009, we will remember, H.R. 3200 was the Democratic health care reform bill. That bill is now lost forever in the vapor, in the ether. No one knows what became of it. H.R. 3590 passed the House of Representatives in July of 2009. It passed as a housing bill. It went over to the Senate to await further action. The further action was an amendment by Harry Reid late in December of 2009 ``to strike all after the enacting clause and insert.'' All the housing language was taken out, all of the health care language was inserted.

I yield myself an additional 30 seconds.

As a consequence, this bill came over to the House and we just simply had to pass it. We had to pass it before we found out what was in it. We didn't have a hearing on H.R. 3590. We didn't have a markup in any committee that I sat on in 2010 on H.R. 3590. This was a bill that was visited upon the American people without the due caution and exercise of the United States House of Representatives.

CBO Analysis: CBO analysis is not currently available.

Committee Action: The Energy and Commerce Committee has

held the following ACA-related hearings:

Full Committee:

August 1, 2013: PPACA Pulse Check

October 24, 2013: PPACA Implementation Failures: Didn't

Know or Didn't Disclose?

October 30, 2013: PPACA Implementation Failures: Answers

from HHS

Subcommittee on Health:

February 14, 2013: SGR: Data, Measures and Models; Building

a Future Medicare Physician Payment System

February 27, 2013: Fostering Innovation to Fight Waste,

Fraud and Abuse in Health Care

March 13, 2013: Obamacare's Impact on Jobs

March 15, 2013: Unaffordable: Impact of Obamacare on

Americans' Health Insurance Premiums

March 18, 2013: Saving Seniors and Our Most Vulnerable

Citizens from an Entitlement Crisis

March 20, 2013: Health Information Technologies: How

Innovation Benefits Patients

April 3, 2013: Protecting America's Sick and Chronically

Ill

April 18, 2013: A Financial Review of the Department of

Health and Human Services and Its FY 2014 Budget

September 10, 2013: PPACA Pulse Check: Part 2

Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations:

March 21, 2013: Health Information Technologies:

Administration Perspectives on Innovation and Regulation

April 24, 2013: The Center for Consumer Information and

Insurance Oversight and the Implementation of the Patient

Protection and Affordable Care Act

July 18, 2013: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

Implementation in the Wake of Administrative Delay

September 19, 2013: Two Weeks Until Enrollment: Questions

for CCIIO

Subcommittee on Communications and Technology:

March 19, 2013: Health Information Technologies: Harnessing

Wireless Innovation

Administration Position: A Statement of Administration

Policy is currently not available.

Rule Request: Chairman Upton (R-MI) sent a letter to

Chairman Sessions requesting ``that the Committee on Rules

hold a hearing and grant a closed rule to govern

consideration of H.R. 3350 by the House.''

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Kline), the chairman of the Education and Labor Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Speaker, that evening in March of 2010 when the Senate bill was finally going to be considered by the House, there was a meeting of the Rules Committee that night. Democrats were in charge. I presented myself to that meeting with 18 amendments to H.R. 3590 that had been passed by the Senate. Every one of those was summarily rejected.

The problem the Democrats had that day was, should we change a single word in H.R. 3590 as passed by the Senate, the bill would have to go back to the Senate and concur with the House amendment to H.R. 3590. The Majority Leader in the Senate, having lost his 60th vote in a special election in Massachusetts that year, felt that he could not pass anything. He could not achieve cloture with only 59 Democrats to vote in favor of that motion for cloture. That is the reason why not one word was changed between Christmas Eve of 2009 and the time this bill was actually passed.

But after H.R. 3590 came back from the Senate, came to the Rules Committee, did it come to the House under an open rule? No, it did not. It was a closed rule. We were kept out of the process.

I yield myself an additional 30 seconds.

It is hard to feel too sad for the gentleman from Massachusetts when a bill of this magnitude came with so little debate, so little input from the minority. We have got a 1-page bill before the House today. This was a 2,700-page bill that affected every man, woman, and child in this country, not just today, not just tomorrow, but for the next three decades they will be living under this. And it came under a closed rule.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes.

We have talked about the votes in this House to delay or to modify portions of the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, the House has passed seven of those, and they have been signed by the President.

What really doesn't ever get much attention are the multiple times that the administration--the President, himself--has changed parts of the Affordable Care Act. If you want to talk about something that was done without any hearings, if you want to talk about something that was done in a non-transparent fashion, if you want to talk about something that was done without the ability to amend or debate on the floor of the House, then let's go through a few of these.

Number one: A congressional opt-out. The administration gave Members of Congress and their staffs the option of exempting themselves from the ObamaCare exchanges that were created by the Affordable Care Act, which is contrary to the language of the law.

Exchange enrollment: The administration extended by 6 weeks--from February 14 to March 31, 2014--the period in which people can enroll for coverage in order to avoid the individual mandate tax penalty.

The employer delay: By an administrative action, which is also contrary to statutory language in the Affordable Care Act, the reporting requirements for employers were delayed by 1 year.

Self-attestation: Because of the difficulty of verifying income after the employer reporting requirement was delayed, the administration decided it would allow the self-attestation of income by applicants for health insurance exchanges.

Small businesses on hold: The administration said that the Federal exchanges for small businesses would not be ready by the 2014 statutory deadline. Instead, officials delayed until 2015 the implementation of the Federal shop exchanges.

Closing the high-risk pools: This one was, I thought, particularly egregious. Mr. Speaker, I, frankly, do not understand why this was not covered by the Nation's press. The administration decided to halt the enrollment in Federal high-risk pools, blocking coverage for an estimated 40,000 new applicants, and it decided, rather than using the money from a fund under Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius' control to extend coverage for Americans with preexisting conditions, that it would, instead, use this money to pay for advertising for the Affordable Care Act.

Remember, the Affordable Care Act was sold to the American people because--remember the quotes?--there were 8 to 12 million people with preexisting conditions. Yet the President's own preexisting pool, which was started in this law when it was signed in March of 2010, was closed on February 1 of 2013, barely 2\1/2\ years into its lifespan. Why have we not heard more about that? This was an administrative action to restrict people from access to the risk pools that they were told they were going to get as a consequence of

the President's health care law. Many of these people probably voted for the President in November of 2012 because, after all, he was going to provide them their risk pool insurance for another year--until it didn't happen.

Is it any wonder why there is no faith in what the administration says it will do by administrative edict? Why there is no faith in what has come out of the White House? Why congressional action is not just constitutionally required but is required for the people of this country to continue to have faith in their government?

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute for the purposes of response.

Talk about changing the rules in the middle of the game. What in the world was that Presidential press conference 24 hours ago all about? It was about changing the rules by executive fiat. Again, I just went through a list of many of the 27 times that the President has changed the rules in the middle of the game.

What about the times the administration has been engaged in ``hide the ball'' from the American people, from the Nation's Governors, from the Nation's insured? What about the fact that the rule for the essential health benefit was held up until 2 days after Election Day last year? Then the Governors had to make a decision as to whether or not to participate in the exchanges in their States a week later. Is it any wonder they could not make a decision of that amount of import in a week's time? Sure, they were given another month's extension, but eventually, 26 Governors said, I can't do it based on the information provided. Another six Governors said, Okay, but the Federal Government is going to have to set up the exchanges. That is why you have 32 States for which the Federal Government is having to set up the Federal fallback exchange.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes for purposes of a response.

The rate shock issue is one about which every Member of this House should be concerned.

Let me read to you from a letter I received from a constituent who lives in The Colony, Texas, a city within my congressional district. They are complaining about the cost and lack of transparency on the healthcare.gov Web site:

The prices the ObamaCare Web site say we can expect based

on our ages are $372 to $600. But when I go to actually

purchase, those prices automatically become $870. We don't

qualify for subsidies so that was not part of any of the

calculations.

The constituent goes on to say:

It is bad enough the President has lied to us on multiple

points--$2,500 a year savings, keep your plan, keep your

doctor--but also the Web site is designed to mislead us about

the price as well. What is the reason that the ObamaCare site

and health carrier sites don't agree? I just saw a North

Carolina couple on the news who had the same experience and

the insurance carrier told them that the prices on the

carrier sites are correct and those prices on healthcare.gov

are incorrect.

There is rate shock going on in the country right now. That is what part of this debate is about today. But let me just caution my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that the true rate shock experience is likely to hit in September of 2014, about 6 weeks before election day on November 14. What is the reason for that rate shock? Well, we all know that the healthcare.gov Web site was, so far, the abysmal failure.

The administration is counting on a certain demographic to flood that Web site and sign up for their wonderful new Elysian Fields of ObamaCare. It is hard, so they are not going to do it.

But people who are older, perhaps have multiple chronic conditions, who are actually fearful about losing their health care coverage, they are going to keep at it. Bless their hearts. They will keep going. They will keep coming back day after day after day until they can finally get through and sign up for the insurance policy. Yeah, it is more expensive than I want, it doesn't cover as much as I want, but, by golly, I will have something at the start of the year. The problem is the demographic that the administration counted on to sign up is not going to sign up.

Beginning about April of next year, the insurance companies are going to begin to price risk. That is what they do. That is what they do well. So they are going to post risk and they will post their prices somewhere along the lines of July 1 to September 30. Those prices for the renewal of health insurance are going to be staggeringly high; they will be astonishingly high.

The rate shock that is fixing to happen, you ain't seen nothing yet. It is coming in the fall, and it will be unbelievable compared to anything you have seen to date.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman, my friend from Texas, the chairman of the Rules Committee, for yielding me the customary 30 minutes. And I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, this is a martial law rule that will allow for consideration of a yet-to-be-seen continuing resolution and a yet-to- be-seen debt ceiling bill. This martial law rule also adds to the farm bill the dreadful and hurtful cuts to food stamps that the Republicans approved last week, a cut that will throw 3.8 million people off the program, including 170,000 unemployed veterans.

This was a truly awful piece of legislation; and the way the Republicans continue to diminish the plight of poor people, the way they continue to beat up on programs that benefit them stuns me. It takes my breath away.

Mr. Speaker, once again, the Republican majority is back on the House floor, trampling upon regular order and eliminating any possibility of a fair and transparent legislative process.

When the majority assumed control of this Chamber in 2011, they promised to adhere to regular order. On March 10, 2010, National Journal reporter Major Garrett asked Speaker John Boehner:

If you are Speaker, will you ever bring a bill to the floor

that hasn't been true to the 3-day rule?

Speaker Boehner replied with one word, ``No.''

In the same interview, Congressman Boehner said:

We need to stop writing bills in the Speaker's Office and

let Members of Congress be legislators again. We have nothing

to fear from the battle of ideas.

Those promises seem a million miles away today.

Sadly, since that time, the Republican majority has repeatedly violated their own promises of openness and transparency; 33 times, the majority has violated its own 3-day promise and rushed legislation to the House floor. They have avoided the committee process and brought legislation straight to the House floor 48 times. And despite promising to let the House ``work its will,'' the majority has approved 157 closed or structured rules and just 31 open or modified rules. In short, the majority has shut out the Democrats and shut out many Republicans and shut down the democratic process.

Why have they done this? Not because they are letting the House work its will. They have abandoned regular order because an extreme faction of the Republican Party is so uncompromising that they are willing to shut down our government or implode our economy unless they get their way.

As a potential government shutdown looms just a couple of days from now, we still do not know what the Republican majority is planning to do. What we do know is that whatever they propose will have been written behind closed doors in an attempt to appease the most extreme elements of the Republican Conference.

Mr. Speaker, time is running out. Now more than ever, the American people deserve a fair and transparent legislative process so that we can keep our government open and our economy on track. Implementing martial law, as this rule would do, would be a step in the wrong direction. And I urge my colleagues to reject today's rule and protect our democratic process.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, I would strongly urge my Republican friends not to shut this government down. Now, we've heard rumors that behind closed doors, Republicans are gathering and are trying to figure out what to do. And I know that you have to check with Ted Cruz before you bring anything to the House floor. But the rumors that we are hearing is that what you are proposing is even more right-wing than what the Senate has already rejected, in other words, a nonstarter.

I would urge my friends, do not put the American people through yet another manufactured crisis that will do great damage to our economy. Stop the drama. This has become theater of the absurd.

I am praying that there are some grownups in the Republican Conference who will take charge and avoid an unnecessary shutdown by passing a clean CR and also by passing a clean debt ceiling bill that isn't porked up with Tea Party sweeteners. Time is running out. The American people are frustrated. It's time to get real. This isn't a game. People will be hurt by your intransigence. Do the right thing. Do your job.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to insert into the Record an article entitled, ``Why a Government Shutdown Could Be a Pricey Proposition,'' talking about the cost to the taxpayers if the Republicans move ahead with the shutdown.

Why a Government Shutdown Could be Pricey Proposition

(By Carrie Dann)

[From NBC News, Sep 28, 2013]

If past is prologue, a looming government shutdown could

actually cost U.S. taxpayers money. A lot of money.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, the two

shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 cost taxpayers $1.4 billion

combined. Adjust for inflation and you've got $2 billion in

today's dollars.

Those two shutdowns lasted a total of 27 days, but there's

no telling how long the government could be shuttered this

time around if Congress fails to act by Monday at midnight.

Even shorter shutdowns have proven successful at draining

government funds.

In the immediate aftermath of the first government shutdown

in 1981, the most conservative estimate--conducted by the

General Accounting Office (now called the Government

Accountability Office)--put the cost of shutting the

government down for a single day at $8.2 million, or almost

$21 million in today's dollars. A House panel later concluded

that the day-long furlough cost taxpayers 10 times more than

that.

``Past shutdowns have disrupted the economy, and this

shutdown would as well,'' President Barack Obama said at an

address at the White House on Friday. ``It would throw a

wrench into the gears of our economy at a time when those

gears have gained some traction.''

It may seem counter-intuitive that pressing the pause

button on the federal government's operations could come with

such a hefty price tag . . . so why does it take so much cash

to keep the government's lights off? And why do estimates

vary so widely?

First, there's the actual mechanics of preparing for a

shutdown, like alerting staff of procedures and preparing to

secure files and facilities. For example, during the first

five day shutdown in 1995, the Labor Department alone spent

almost $12,000 on postage, printing and paper for furlough

notices. The Treasury Department calculated the cost of

developing contingency shutdown plans at just over $400,000.

That process--and some of the costs associated with it--is

already underway days or even weeks before a shutdown

deadline, whether the crisis is averted or not.

``Those costs begin to be incurred now, when the debate is

still going on,'' said Bruce Yandle, a professor of economics

at Clemson University who served as the executive director of

the Federal Trade Commission during the Reagan

Administration. ``It's what employees are already discussing

around the water cooler. It's already affecting decisions

being made by management.''

The impact of a brief shutdown--or even just the threat of

one--for government contractors can also mean higher costs

for federal agencies in the future, although it's almost

impossible to assign a dollar amount, says Roy Meyers, a

political science professor at the University of Maryland

Baltimore County and a former CBO analyst.

``It can reduce the profits of the contractors,'' says

Meyers. ``And the next time they consider working with the

federal government, they count that as a risk, and they

charge more.''

That impact could be felt acutely in the Washington, D.C.,

area, where many contractors are based. And that could be

compounded by the impact on tourism in the District as

federally-funded museums and monuments are shuttered. The

shutdowns of the 1990s cost the District of Columbia an

estimated $50 million in lost business and cancellations,

officials said at the time.

There's also the issue of back-pay for furloughed workers.

While only those workers deemed ``non-essential'' would stay

home during a shutdown--about 40 percent of the federal

workforce during the mid-1990s--there's a precedent for

lawmakers granting those individuals their pay once the

government is back up and running, even though they weren't

producing any work.

Cost estimates must also factor in delays in the collection

of fines and fees typically gathered by federal agencies.

OMB said after the twin shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 that

$2.2 billion worth of licenses for U.S. exports were delayed

and that some $60 million in environmental fines and

settlements were not collected or negotiated.

Most of those fees eventually get collected, says Yandle,

but the delays and the inconvenience to businesses and

consumers can end up having resonance that won't show up in

cost estimates at all.

``Those costs that cannot be estimated are often much more

important than those that can,'' he said.

Meyers argues that a shutdown's cost to the budget or the

effects on the overall economy estimates--flawed as they may

be--pale in comparison the societal cost of a government that

seems bent on playing political chicken rather than focusing

on solving problems.

``The real costs are really not in terms of consumer

confidence or any of the standard measures in macroeconomics

or even the federal budget,'' he said. ``The real costs are

in trust in government and belief that government officials

are paying attention to the real issues of the country.''

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let me just say, before I yield to the gentlelady from New York, the Republican talking points we just heard are absolutely wrong, absolutely wrong.

To suggest that somehow senior citizens will get less care is just false. The fact of the matter is we see expanding care for senior citizens. We see preventative care being covered without copays. We see the doughnut hole in the Medicare prescription drug bill that the Republicans passed, where seniors are asked to pay huge out-of-pocket expenses, closing down.

We are seeing young people being able to stay on their parents' insurance until they are 26. It is no longer considered to be a preexisting condition if you are a woman in this country because of the Affordable Care Act. And I could go down the list of all the things that have been accomplished.

Now, let me just say to my Republican friends, you lost the last election. You lost big. President Obama won reelection. Your whole election was about the Affordable Care Act. He won reelection by 5 million votes. Democrats picked up seats in the Senate. We even picked up seats in the House. And by the way, in terms of the congressional races, Democrats received 1 million more votes than Republicans did. You lost the last election.

Now, if you don't like the Affordable Care Act, there's a way you can deal with it: you can go out and try to win some more seats. And then you can come to the floor, introduce bills, bring them through committee, you know, have the Senate do the same thing, conference them, and then send them to the President's desk. And by the way, you can try to win the Presidency. That's the normal way to do legislative business.

What you are doing here is you have distorted the legislative process. This is making a mockery of the legislative process. You have turned this House of Representatives into a laughingstock. And the bottom line is, what the American people want us to do right now is to keep the government moving ahead, keep it running--not shut it down-- deal with the debt ceiling without holding that hostage to all the Tea Party sweeteners, and do our job.

Democrats are willing to work with Republicans to get things done. But instead, you are all huddled in this secret meeting somewhere in the Capitol, where there's no transparency, where we have absolutely no say, where we're going to be told, Here it is; take it or leave it. That's not the way this process should work. This process has become a disgrace.

So I say to my colleagues that the notion that somehow your health care

benefits have been decreased because of the Affordable Care Act is just so far from the truth, it's comical.

At this point, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter), the distinguished ranking member of the Rules Committee.

I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentlelady.

Mr. Speaker, oh, my goodness.

First of all, I would say to the gentleman from Texas who just went on this kind of diatribe trashing the President of the United States and the Affordable Care Act, rather than doing that, maybe he can enlighten us about what's going on in that secret meeting downstairs? What has the right wing decided to do in terms of bringing a CR to the floor or debt ceiling? I'd be happy to yield 10 seconds to him to tell us what's coming to the floor.

I was referring to the other gentleman from Texas, but if this gentleman from Texas can inform us what, in fact, is coming.

I yield the gentleman 10 seconds.

That's not particularly enlightening; but, let me ask the gentleman: Are we going to have any hearings on what is being decided in the back room somewhere in the Capitol here? Will Members be able to offer amendments? Or are we just going to be given something and told to take it or leave it?

I yield 10 seconds to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, in other words, none of the committees of jurisdiction that oversee a lot of the issues in the CR will be having any hearings or there will be any markups on that.

I would also say to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) who kind of went on about no hearings, there were lots of hearings on the Affordable Care Act. Maybe he didn't go to them, but there were lots of them, number one.

I would like to ask him: How many hearings were there on the bill that the Republicans brought up last week to cut the food stamp program by $40 billion, throwing 3.8 million low-income people off the program, throwing 170,000 veterans off the program? How many hearings on that? None. Zero.

This is becoming a habit in this House where the committees of jurisdiction don't even have a say. The Agriculture Committee didn't have a chance to hold a hearing or even a markup on that bill. This is the way this House is being run.

I would just again remind the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) again, look, you may not like the Affordable Care Act--I get it--but it passed with a majority of votes in the House and a majority of votes in the Senate. The President signed it into law. That's the way we do things here. That's the way laws are passed. And you didn't like it and you went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court upheld it. I'm sorry you don't like it, but the majority voted for it, and I think a majority of people in this country, once they understand that all the falsehoods and distortions that are being told here are nothing more than Republican talking points, I think they'll appreciate the fact that health care will be a right in this country and not a privilege.

I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

I yield the gentlewoman an additional 1 minute.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Maybe the gentleman from Texas can enlighten us as to what's going on in the secret meeting downstairs with the Republicans because we have no idea what's going to come to the floor. We have no idea about what's going to be in this continuing resolution or whether we're going to have a debt ceiling bill or anything. We're in the dark here. We'd like to know. I think the American people would like to know what's in this bill.

Can you enlighten us about what's happening in this secret meeting? Is Ted Cruz in the meeting? What's going on?

I yield to the gentleman from Texas for 5 seconds.

Reclaiming my time, I would say to the other gentleman from Texas that we're all elected, too. We respect and appreciate and value the Constitution every bit as much as he does, and there is a constitutional way to run the government, which we are all supporting here.

It seems what the gentleman wants to do is just trash all that. He wants to say that what happens in the House and the Senate doesn't matter; the President signs it, it doesn't matter; the Supreme Court rules, it doesn't matter. I don't know where he's coming from.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

(Ms. JACKSON LEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, it's pretty clear what's going on here today. My Republican friends didn't get their way so now they're throwing a tantrum.

I see many more Members on the floor today as these speeches have gone on. I'm just curious: Can anybody enlighten us on what in fact happened in your secret conference, what we're going to vote on? I think the American people would like to know.

I yield to anybody if they can tell me one fact that has been decided.

I guess nobody wants to tell us.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison).

Mr. Speaker, I would just say to the gentleman, if it's not a secret meeting, can someone tell us what happened in it, or is just for Republicans only? I think we ought to know what we're voting on before we vote on it. Maybe that's a radical idea in this Republican-controlled House, but I think it's a reasonable request.

At this time I'd like to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Al Green).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, we are voting on a martial law rule that will allow us to bring up either a continuing resolution or a debt ceiling bill this very day, and nobody has seen anything. Nobody has seen any language.

There has been a secret meeting with Republicans to talk about what they can pass, but none of that information has been shared with us. There have been no hearings. There's been nothing. What a lousy way to run a government. This is not the way it should be done, And it doesn't have to be done this way.

Mr. Speaker, the stakes are very high. You know, come Monday at midnight, if we don't do the right thing, the government is going to shut down. And as I said earlier in the debate, that is going to cost the American taxpayers a great deal of money. Shutdowns aren't free.

Part of the problem here is that my Republican friends can't get over the

fact that they lost the Presidential election. The right wing is holding the economy hostage based on a fixation on this view that everybody in this country doesn't deserve health care, when I think the majority of Americans believe that everybody should have access to good, quality health care in this country.

I know you don't like the Affordable Care Act, but it passed. It passed the House and the Senate, signed by the President. The Supreme Court even upheld it. If you want to work with us to make it better, we're willing to do that. But the idea that you want to hold this economy hostage to repeal this is just ridiculous.

I would urge my colleagues, in closing, to listen to your constituents. The majority of people in this country do not want you to shut this government down. The majority of people do not want you to defund the Affordable Care Act. Listen to your constituents--and not some guy in the other body, who one of his own colleagues referred to a ``whacko bird.''

The bottom line is: do the right thing. Do the right thing. Keep this government open. Do not shut the government down. I appeal to the grownups in the Republican Conference to come together. Let's have a compromise that we can pass and that we can send to the President and keep this government going and also address our debt ceiling issue. But let's stop the theatrics.

Let's do the right thing. Let's vote on a clean CR and send it over to the Senate, and then let's get on with our other business.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

I want to thank the gentleman from Georgia, my good friend, for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

(Mr. McGOVERN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this restrictive rule and to vote ``no'' on the underlying bill.

The process here is awful. The bill before us was not even considered by the Budget Committee. They didn't hold a single hearing, no markup, and on a party-line vote last night the Rules Committee denied Mr. Van Hollen, the ranking member of the Budget Committee, the opportunity to offer a meaningful substitute. The Rules Committee also, on a party line, voted against an open rule. To all of the Republican freshmen and sophomores who campaigned on the need for openness and transparency, by voting for this rule, you are officially part of the problem.

This bill before us isn't a meaningful attempt to address the budget; it's a gimmick wrapped in talking points inside a press release.

Two weeks ago, this House passed the so-called ``No Budget, No Pay Act,'' then they went on another recess. There wasn't a holiday, mind you. I guess it was the Super Bowl recess. Now they're back with today's bill. It calls on the President to tell Congress when his budget will come into balance. If his budget doesn't say when it will come into balance, then he must submit a supplemental statement telling Congress when it will come into balance.

Why are we doing this? Because the President is late submitting his budget for the next fiscal year. Okay, fine. The President should submit a budget on time, and I support that. But lost in all of this Republican budget Kabuki theater is the truth: the reason the administration is late with their budget is because they just spent months trying to avert the disaster that was the fiscal cliff.

As the Speaker was trying in vain to corral House Republicans into doing the right thing, we had Plan B and Plan C and Plan--who knows what. Finally, we reached a deal on January 1, technically after we went over the cliff. In the meantime, back in the real world, we are less than 24 calendar days away from the disastrous sequester taking effect--less than 24 calendar days from massive, arbitrary, and devastating cuts to defense and nondefense

discretionary programs, cuts to jobs programs and medical research and education, cuts to military personnel and law enforcement, cuts that will cost jobs and do real harm to the American economy as it struggles to recover.

And the reality is that we don't even have that much time. We only have 9 legislative days left in February to address the issue, 9 days to negotiate a trillion-dollar deal with the Senate and the President. And instead of a meaningful plan to address the crisis that we need to avert, we have this nonsense before us today. This is no way to govern.

The disturbing truth is that many Republicans seem downright giddy when it comes to the sequester cuts. There is news story after news story about how the Republicans are going to allow the sequester to take effect. In the Rules Committee last night, the author of this bill, the gentleman from Georgia, Dr. Price, couldn't support these cuts fast enough. I was shocked.

Mr. Speaker, it was only last week that the economic numbers for the fourth quarter of 2012 were released. Unexpectedly, we saw a contraction in those numbers, a contraction fueled by a massive reduction in defense spending. What do you know: huge cuts in government spending during a fragile economic recovery damage economic growth. The Republican response is to double down on this stupid.

These Republican games of Russian roulette with the American economy must come to an end. It is time to replace short-term partisan political interests with the greater good.

The President today is asking us to consider a thoughtful, balanced plan to stop the sequester. I urge the Republican leadership to bring that plan to the floor of the House for a vote as soon as possible. That's what the American people want and that's what they deserve: a real plan. The bill before us today isn't it, and I urge my colleagues to reject it.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would like to submit for the Record a letter sent to the Honorable Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, from the Executive Office of the President in the Office of Management and Budget which explains why the President's budget for this year is delayed--because of the theatrics that my friends on the other side forced us to go through to avoid going over a fiscal cliff. So I think it's understandable why the budget may be a little late.

And I would say to the gentleman, submitting a budget is not controversial. What is controversial to me is the fact that so many of my friends on the other side want to go over this sequester cliff in which millions of jobs will be lost. That to me is controversial. We should be about protecting jobs and creating jobs.

My friends have budgetary plans that would throw people out of work, and I find that unconscionable. I find that unconscionable. We should be about lifting this country up, not trying to put people down.

And the plans that have been proposed by my friends on the other side, including this kind of giddiness about the prospect of going over the sequestration cliff, would cost millions of people in this country jobs. It would hurt our economy.

That's not the way we want to govern. That's what is controversial on our side. We don't want people to lose their jobs. We want people to keep their jobs, and we want to create an economy that creates more jobs.

Executive Office of the President, Office of Management

and Budget,

Washington, DC, January 11, 2013.

Hon. Paul Ryan,

Chairman, Committee on the Budget, U.S. House of

Representatives, Washington, DC.

Dear Chairman Ryan: Thank you for your letter dated January

9, 2013, requesting information on when the Administration

will submit the President's fiscal year (FY) 2014 Budget.

For over a year and a half, the Administration has been

working with Congress to forge agreement on a plan that would

both grow our economy and significantly reduce the deficit.

The Administration continues to seek a balanced approach to

further deficit reduction that cuts spending in a responsible

way while also raising revenues.

As you know, the protracted ``fiscal cliff' negotiations

that led to enactment of H.R. 8, the American Taxpayer Relief

Act of 2012, created considerable uncertainty about revenue

and spending for 2013 and beyond. The Act resolved a

significant portion of this uncertainty by making permanent

the temporary rates on taxable income at or below $400,000

for individual filers and $450,000 for married individuals

filing jointly; permanently indexing the Alternative Minimum

Tax exemption to the Consumer Price Index; extending

emergency unemployment benefits and Federal finding for

extended benefits for unemployed workers for one year;

continuing current Medicare payment rates for physicians'

services through December 31, 2013; extending farm bill

policies and programs through September 30, 2013; and

providing a postponement of the Budget Control Act's

sequestration for two months. However, because these issues

were not resolved until the American Taxpayer Relief Act was

enacted on January 2, 2013, the Administration was forced to

delay some of its FY 2014 Budget preparations, which in turn

will delay the Budget's submission to Congress.

The Administration is working diligently on our budget

request. We will submit it to Congress as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey D. Zients,

Deputy Director for Management.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I would like to yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York, the ranking member of the Rules Committee, Ms. Slaughter.

I yield the gentlelady an additional 2 minutes.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentlelady from New York (Ms. Slaughter).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The issue is not whether the President should submit a budget. He should. And he would have submitted a budget by now, but because of the theatrics that my friends on the other side put us through dealing with the fiscal cliff, which was just solved on January 1, things are a little bit delayed. The issue is why is the House wasting time on this while the sword of the sequester hangs over the American people?

The President can submit any budget he wants. That's what the President has the right to do, just like George Bush submitted whatever budget he wanted to do.

We have a job here in this House, and that is to address this looming fiscal crisis called the sequester. What we're doing here today is doing nothing at all to move that ball forward.

In less than a month, arbitrary cuts are going to go into effect, people are going to lose their jobs, and this economy is going to go into a deeper slump. For the life of me, I can't understand why there's not more urgency. We shouldn't be taking vacations. We actually should be working here and trying to resolve this. This is stupid legislation because it is not addressing the crisis. It is doing nothing to advance the cause of trying to get to a solution. This is just a press release. This is yet another gimmick.

I think the reason why Congress and especially the House of Representatives is held in such low regard is because we spend so much time on trivial matters debating passionately, and we skip over debating the important things. We ought to be doing something important here today. We ought to be trying to avert this sequestration. We ought to be trying to keep people in their jobs. And we ought to be trying to create an economy that will create more jobs, not this theater.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Will the gentleman yield?

This is the 113th Congress. We haven't done one thing to solve this fiscal crisis that's looming on March 1st. This is the 113th.

Under the Constitution, when a new Congress begins, we have to start all over again. Okay?

Mr. Speaker, this bill does nothing. It does absolutely nothing. It's a press release.

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to ensure that the House votes on Mr. Van Hollen's replacement for the sequester, which was blocked yesterday in the Rules Committee.

My friend from Georgia talks about this being a good rule and a good process. This bill was not even considered by the Budget Committee, which is the committee of jurisdiction. It had no hearing. It had no markup. It mysteriously appeared at the Rules Committee. We wanted an open rule, and we were denied an open rule. Mr. Van Hollen actually had a substantive amendment to replace the sequester. That was denied.

So I want to yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland, the ranking member of the Budget Committee, Mr. Van Hollen, to discuss his amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let me just respond to the gentleman from Texas by saying he's wrong. He's on the Energy and Commerce Committee. The Affordable Care Act had hearings in the Energy and Commerce Committee--and markups. There were multiple hearings on that bill. I'm not sure what he's talking about.

Then to the gentleman from Georgia who says that he didn't mention the fact that the President missed the deadline, I thought he did, but the bill that he's touting here mentions it in these very political, inspired findings. Read your own bill. It's three pages long. I know that may be too much, but we're all told to read the bill.

Look, rather than being here and telling the President what to do-- he's going to submit a budget--we've got to do our job. Our job is to avoid this sequestration because, if we don't, there are millions of people in this country who will be without work. There are

programs that will be arbitrarily cut, and this economy will be hurt. Now, if you want sequestration, then you can continue to take your recesses and do this kind of trivial stuff on the House floor, but we ought to be finding a way to avoid going over this sequestration cliff.

At this point, Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

I yield the gentlelady 10 seconds.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

We all want to make sure that our children are protected, but embracing a sequester that cuts things like Head Start, that's no way to protect our children.

At this point, I'd like to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Courtney).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Deutch).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire of the gentleman from Georgia how many more speakers he has.

I'm prepared to close as well, Mr. Speaker. I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, this is a very frustrating debate, in large part because it's much ado about nothing. What we're doing here today is a press release. It's doing nothing at all to avoid this prospect of sequestration in which arbitrary cuts will go into play. This is just more talk and talk and talk and talk.

Again, that's one of the reasons why the American people are so frustrated with this place. They want less talk and more work. We should be working. We should be coming to some sort of agreement to avoid the catastrophe of sequestration; but, instead, we're doing this.

Mr. Speaker, I want to put some things in perspective. The Center for American Progress reported that since the start of fiscal year 2011, President Obama has signed into law approximately $2.4 trillion of deficit reduction for the years 2013 through 2022. Nearly three- quarters of that deficit reduction is in the form of spending cuts, while the remaining one-quarter comes from revenue increases. Congress and the President have cut about $1.5 trillion in programmatic spending, raised about $630 billion in new revenue, and generated about $300 billion in interest savings, for a combined total of more than $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction. That's a quote from the Center for American Progress.

So three-fourths of the deficit reduction we've achieved so far was from spending cuts. But my friends on the other side have the nerve to continue to claim that Democrats are ``loathe'' to agree to spending cuts. I mean, give me a break, Mr. Speaker. Give me a break.

The CBO projects the Federal deficit to be about $845 billion, which I think is very high; but it's the first time the nonpartisan office forecast a deficit below $1 trillion. So we are going in the right direction, and the President wants to continue to move in that right direction in a fair and balanced way.

Now, here's the deal. My friends keep on referring to what they did last year which, again, was last year. We have to get them to think about this year because they have to act now; it's a new Congress.

But last year the proposals they came up with to try to bring our budget into balance were all about lowering the quality of life for our citizens. Their budget proposal ended Medicare as we know it. Ended Medicare. It's gone.

My friend from Florida talked about Social Security. Their plan for Social Security is to privatize it. And deep reductions and cuts that provide support for people who are most vulnerable. That's their plan.

And now, we see, because we're not trying to address this latest fiscal cliff, I think they really do want the sequestration to go into effect. I think that is outrageous. I think it's going to be dangerous to our economy. But their plan, by allowing sequestration to go into effect, is basically to try to balance the budget by making more people unemployed.

You know, we will lose jobs. In the defense sector that's already happening. But then we're going to see losses in jobs in other areas. There'll be cuts in education. Police grants are cut. Payments to Medicare providers are cut. And The New York Times reports that even the aid just approved for victims of Hurricane Sandy will fall under the sequester's axe.

I mean, this is how we're going to solve our budgetary problems?

Yes, we do have a big debt. A lot of it has to do with these unpaid- for wars, with these tax cuts that weren't paid for; and it's going to take us a while to get out of it. But as we get out of it, we can't destroy our country. We need a balanced approach. We need to cut where we can cut, we need to raise revenues where we need to raise revenues, but we also need to invest.

Cutting the National Institutes of Health, which will happen if sequestration goes into effect, will not only cost jobs, but it will prolong human suffering. If we could find a cure to Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease, not only will we prevent a lot of human suffering, you would end up solving the budgetary challenges of Medicare and Medicaid. There's a value in investing in these things, not arbitrarily cutting them.

Now, last night in the Rules Committee, we tried to bring some substance to this debate. Mr. Van Hollen had his amendment, which was blocked. The one substantive thing that we could have done here today to avoid sequestration was blocked.

So, Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to ensure that the House votes on Mr. Van Hollen's replacement for the sequester which was, again, blocked last night in the Rules Committee.

I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment in the Record, along with extraneous materials immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, again, I would urge my colleagues to reject this rule which, again, is illustrative of how closed this process has become in this House. We ought to reject the rule because it is not open. The Budget Committee never even considered this bill.

But we ought to also reject the underlying bill because this is nonsense at a time when we should be doing something real to avoid a real catastrophe in this country, to avoid something that will have an adverse impact on our economy. Instead, you know, we're all fiddling while Rome is burning.

This is outrageous. We can do so much better. We ought to work. You know, you're passing resolutions asking the President to do X, Y, and Z. We ought to pass a resolution to instruct us to do our job, and that's what we ought to do. That's what the American people expect.

So, Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question. I urge a ``no'' vote on the rule.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.