Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, after two weeks of anguish, the American people can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Thanks to bipartisan efforts in the Senate, my Democratic colleagues and I stand ready to support the responsible legislation before us and bring this self-inflicted crisis to an end.

From the efforts of the Minority Leader Pelosi to the work of the minority on the Rules Committee, House Democrats have been committed to finding a responsible resolution to the GOP's crisis.

When it was apparent that Democrats would not be able to stop the House Majority from shutting down the government, the Minority Leader and House Democrats began making extraordinary efforts to achieve a swift and responsible end to the Majority's shameful example of legislative malfeasance.

For example, during Rules Debates on both October 2nd and October 4th, I came to the floor and proposed a way to bring an immediate end to the government shutdown. Each time not a single member of the Majority voted for the proposal. In addition, House Democrats launched a discharge petition to force a vote on the clean Senate Continuing Resolution--an effort that the Majority also refused to support.

Fortunately, House Democrats were not alone in seeking a responsible and bipartisan solution to the crisis. With the proposal being offered today, the leadership in the Senate--both the Majority and the Minority leaders--have demonstrated how to legislate for the American People.

We also owe a debt of gratitude to the talented and intelligent women from both sides of the aisle who have shown us that when the going gets tough, you can always count on women to come together and get to work.

Madam Speaker, we have a lot to do in the days and months ahead. As we speak, there is an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella that is threatening public health. Unfortunately, this outbreak of antibiotic-resistant bacteria surely won't be the last. There is a bill, H.R. 1150, that deserves an immediate vote in Congress so that we can stop the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture and address the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant disease.

Furthermore, there is an urgent need in our country to rebuild our infrastructure, create millions of jobs and fix our schools so that our nation remains a global superpower in the century to come.

We must not fool ourselves. The self-inflicted wound that the GOP inflicted upon this nation has done real damage to millions of Americans and to our role in the world.

Just last night, the Chinese government declared that it was time for the world to ``de-Americanise,'' and governments around the world have taken note of the shameful display that has occurred in this chamber over the last two weeks.

It is my sincere hope that this has been the last time our economy and our democracy will be subjected to such reckless and irresponsible governing. It is imperative that in the days to come the Majority finally allows bipartisanship and responsible governance to take hold in the House of Representatives. It is time to sit down together and start solving the most urgent issues of our time.

I thank my friend for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, it is really getting more and more difficult for us to get out here and act as though we're really having a serious debate about something, and I just want to start off by saying that I don't want anybody in the country to forget--as they're trying to do things with a Federal Government that's shut down as the VA service centers did, and their phones are now inoperative as we've all learned to our great dismay--the deceased soldiers and their families have not been able to be compensated in any way to make it possible for them to pay for funerals or even go to them. I'm sure that will be something we're going to come up and deal with as they're doing with this part-time ``let's build ourselves a new government.''

Don't forget that this was about health care. That's all there is to it. Service people can't get the benefits that they need. Nobody can get anything from the government. Mortgages are on hold because Republicans didn't like health care.

If you would have asked them why in the world do you object to 30 million Americans who have not been able to afford health insurance having an opportunity to get it, they don't give you any answer. It's more obfuscation. If we talk about negotiations, let me tell you the negotiation that is really critical that is not taking place at all, and we're doing an example of that right now.

There is no negotiation in the committee process. The only committee that has been putting anything up to the floor of the House has been the Rules Committee. Somebody writes a bill in the afternoon, and either that evening or early the next day, the Rules Committee goes in, and it goes right to the floor. There is no amendment chance, there's no discussion chance, and we don't know what they're doing. The discussion and the amendments and the negotiation, yes, that's supposed to go on between the two parties in the committees, and it is nowhere to be seen and hasn't been for ages.

We've been down this road before, again with the supercommittee idea, which was such a glaring disaster and only ended up in sequestration, and the whole idea of sequestration was so, with all of that, none of us ever thought we'd get there, but now we're pretending that's what it is. Now it's, Let's have another supercommittee. I will tell you that was so awful, and it set us back so much in this country not only with scientific research and national security and public safety being compromised, but now they want to do it again.

I think it's just another delaying tactic because I'm persuaded today, as I stand here, that the Republican Party in this House does not want to open the government. The opportunities they've had over and over again have been absolutely quashed. There's a lot of talk in the media about, Oh, if only I had a chance to vote for a clean resolution, I would do it in just a moment. Well, let me tell you that it has been turned down twice before in the House of Representatives on the rule when we got to the part about the previous question. We always say just vote ``no'' and you will then have your opportunity to vote on the clean bill from the Senate, which already passed there, and would go directly to the President. We never got a single Republican vote. Draw your own conclusions about the 25 Republicans who stated if only they were given that opportunity.

Now the sequestration, as my colleague has pointed out, we accepted as part of a deal on our behalf between Speaker Boehner and Senator Reid. As awful as it is--and most of us did not like that--nonetheless, for the short-term CR, we were willing to take it, but now the majority, again, refuses to let us vote on a CR which was agreed on.

This irresponsible governance has continued in the days since the majority shut the government down; and over this last week--or last several weeks, actually--the majority has abandoned any semblance of regular order and just turned the Rules Committee, as I've said, into the committee of jurisdiction.

Now, where does all this come from? I think most Americans were surprised. Let me express my concern.

I recall that, just after Senator Obama was elected President in 2008, we all heard about the great dinner that took place on inaugural night, declaring, among Republican elected officials, that they would not allow Senator Obama--now President Obama--to get anything done. Well, we thought after 4 years, maybe that was over with, and we did get the health care bill passed.

Now we learned on Sunday morning that that is taking place again, which again says, you know, I'm not sure that this party could put the government back into business or not because they would have to get the permission, apparently, from the Heritage Foundation's Heritage Action for America, former Attorney General Edwin Meese, and David Koch, because they wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and they engineered this whole thing. That appeared on Sunday. This is Tuesday. Not a single refutation has taken place.

So it's time for this game to come to an end, but it won't because it's not part of the plan. I am really tired, on behalf of the American people, of watching them being fooled; and I think that we are more than disgusted and tired with the process by which this legislation comes to us. The four of us on the Rules Committee are calling for you to open up this process so that the other members of our party--as well as yours who, I am confident, know nothing more about these bills than we do--have an opportunity to really do our jobs as we were sent here to do.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend for yielding me the time, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Unless the silent Members of the majority speak up, today's debate is a fait accompli.

For the last 2 days, Members of the majority have said publicly that they wish this government shutdown would end. In fact, a coalition of more than 218 Democrats and Republicans has publicly declared that it is ready to vote on the clean Senate CR. This 218 would be the majority, and we would pass it; and that's why the powerful minority, who has taken the government hostage, is doing all it can again today to prevent the Senate CR from coming to the House floor. It doesn't make any sense. Not only doesn't it make any sense; but, actually, were we to do that, we wouldn't have to be here today, trying to do these piecemeal pieces.

Last night, the Rules Committee proposed a rule for these 11 piecemeal funding bills before us today. They didn't go through a single meeting of a committee. At least, in the committee process, the subcommittees and committees would have given both Republicans and Democrats an opportunity to weigh in on these measures. Remember that half the population of the United States is represented by Democrats and that, in the last election, Democrat candidates for Congress achieved a million more votes than our Republican friends, but we are shut out of the process. Indeed, these bills were written yesterday afternoon and were brought straight to the Rules Committee, as so many are lately, in order to be rushed to the floor.

During our hearing, a colleague promised that the reckless approach would continue, even suggesting that we could see 150 more of these piecemeal bills before the majority agrees to end the government shutdown. That should take us to, maybe, October of next year. Yet, while they're willing to take 150 votes on bills the President would veto--and everybody knows the President would veto them--and the Senate would reject, they haven't allowed a single vote on the cure to the problem: bring up the CR, and put the government back to work.

Fortunately for the American people, no minority--no matter how powerful--can stop the will of the House if we exercise it. Unlike the Senate, a majority in the House can only be held back for so long. Thanks to the democratic spirit baked into our Chamber's rules, the majority will always succeed. For the more than 218 Members--a majority who has expressed a desire to vote on the clean CR--our most powerful tool is voting down the previous question and bringing the clean Senate CR to the floor to vote on.

Now, earlier this week, my Democrat colleagues and I urged the Chamber to vote ``no'' on the previous question so that we could bring the Senate bill to the floor. Not a single Republican joined our cause. Today, we are going to give you another chance. Following the debate on the rule, we will have a chance to vote down the previous question. While that may simply be legislative language to most people, what that will do is give us an opportunity--those of us who very strongly believe this government should work--to bring the CR, bring the shutdown to a close and put everybody back to work. I want to see by the end of this day that we can accomplish that, because words are no longer enough. Those Members of the majority who claim that they want to end the government shutdown get the opportunity today to stand up and vote. As I said the other day when we had the same opportunity, I would like them to put their voting cards where their mouths are.

Over the next hour, I encourage every Member of this Chamber to reflect on the damage that has already been wrought on our Nation because of the shutdown and on the damage that will ensue if we wait another day. The shutdown is costing the Nation $300 million a day, and more than 800,000 workers are furloughed without pay. Today, we are going to vote--and, I think, almost unanimously--to pay them when the shutdown ends. A logical person would say, Why don't you bring them back to work? If they're going to be paid anyway, let them work. There is no answer for that. There must be some reason here that is available to only a few people as to why the majority wants to keep the government shut down.

We have to also end this because our State Department and intelligence employees need to go back on the job. A hurricane is bearing down right now on the State of Louisiana while 80 percent of the FEMA workers are furloughed. NASA had to turn off the Mars Rover, which was giving us so much information about the universe--stopping all the space exploration in its tracks.

I think one of the best things I've read to describe what we are doing in this House was said by a Republican. Because there is no plan here--there is no end game here--he is saying that what they are doing is laying the track ahead of the speeding train as it bears down on them.

The majority started the shutdown because they were dead set on repealing the Affordable Care Act; and I think, by doing this piecemeal, they think they can still do that. Throughout the process, they have issued dire predictions about the health care law and have warned that the law would hurt American workers. It is absolutely turning out not to be true.

In the last week, two of our Nation's biggest companies have responded to the Affordable Care Act by giving tens of thousands of their part-time employees full-time jobs. Guess who they are? One is the largest employer in the United States--Walmart. They are raising 35,000 of their part-time employees to become full-time employees in order to make them eligible for health insurance. Walt Disney announced that 427 employees at Disney World who have been hired as full-time employees will be given access to the health insurance plan. We also hear all the time--and I've really got to research this--that Delta Air Lines has said, they tell me, that the affordable care plan would cost them $100 million a year. I surely would like to know how that's possible unless they plan to hire 70 million new employees, which would certainly be good for employment, but I see no earthly reason for them to do that. We need to know whether that's true or not since all of the rest of the dire predictions have turned out not to be.

The Affordable Care Act is working; but because of the majority, the government is not, and it's time for the majority to give up this losing game. I strongly urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the rule and on the underlying legislation; and, so importantly, I urge a ``no'' vote on the previous question. Then, Mr. Speaker, we can bring the clean Senate CR to the House floor, as we should have done weeks ago, and end this government shutdown today.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I'm so pleased to yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), our incredible member of the Committee on Rules.

Mr. Speaker, I'm delighted to yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the Democratic whip.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 45 seconds.

My colleagues have confused the fact that they have gone around saying how, indeed, throughout August and all the rest of this time, that they don't want to shut down the House, in some hope, I guess, that nobody would understand that when they shut down the House, that they had actually done it.

Now what my colleague is talking about from the Democrat side, what they are saying, let's do what we agree with, they are taking their word for it that you didn't want to shut down the House. So let's not do it. You cannot superimpose that notion onto the idea of setting up this government by dribs and drabs. None of us are for that. The Senate won't do it. You know this is an exercise in futility. But pretty soon, the previous question is coming up. You are going to have a chance to do what you said you didn't want to do, shut down the House. But I understand from what you have said that because of health care, because of health care and what you think it has done to people in your district, you are holding this country hostage.

I don't have the time. My time has been given out.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I am feeling quite badly. I didn't know how much time I had remaining.

I am happy to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica), if he would like.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Danny K. Davis) a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to say that regular order has not been the order of business in this House for a long time.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Farr), ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture.

Mr. Speaker, I believe I've only got one more speaker in the room, so I wanted to inform my colleague that, after Mr. Andrews, I may be prepared to close.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews).

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

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

I am absolutely going to vote to retroactively fund the Federal employees because that's the best I can do, on that one issue. It is a matter of basic fairness, but it is not good enough.

The fact is that the Federal employees will not get paid their retroactive money until after all this charade is over. We have no idea when that's going to be.

Let me reiterate again what all my colleagues have said: we can do it right now, put them back to work and let them get their paycheck.

I'm embarrassed every time I pass the Capitol Police at what's happening to them. It bothers me terribly to hear my friends at the State Department say that they're working on fumes.

We cannot run the Government of the United States, which is the beacon of democracy, has been the pattern for countries all over the world, by saying we're going to fund this piece over there and that piece over there, and we don't care what happens to the rest of it. That's not what we are here for.

Certainly, we will fund that one piece; but I can tell you right now, the Democrats are not going to do any of the rest of it because the Senate is not going to take it up and the President is not going to sign it.

We are simply wasting time, and we're taking up valuable time, and we are worrying the country half to death.

For heaven's sake, when we do this previous question, let us do the right thing. Vote ``no'' and get all these folks back to work.

Does it literally make sense to anybody who either manages a household or their own business that we would say to everybody, go home and rest around here or there; we'll pay you later when we decide you can come back, for not being here. That makes absolutely no sense.

Let them go back to work. We're going to pay them. Pay them now for the work they're doing. Pay concurrently with work.

Doesn't that make more sense?

Does it really make any sense at all that we're saying to them, we have no idea what the end game is here. You may be sitting around for a very long time, while the country pays $300 million a day of the cost of the shutdown.

For heaven's sake, I would say once again that we have to do this previous question today. We have to stop this nonsense. It is humiliating us. We cannot go on with this another week.

We're only here today to try to make it look like we're doing something because the government's shut down, and we know it. Those bills that we're voting on today had no committee action, nothing. The Senate has made perfectly clear they're not going to take them up. They will not become law, as every school child knows.

Now, those who vote ``no'' on ordering the previous question will be giving this Chamber what the leadership of the majority has not, and that will be the real chance to vote this down so that we can put the CR on the calendar and stop the shutdown now, today.

It doesn't have to go back to the Senate. The President's waiting for it.

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

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues, I beg my colleagues, I do implore my colleagues, for goodness sakes, come to the floor, defeat the previous question. Vote ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, good day to you. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I think if Edmund Burke were alive today he would say that what we're really doing is so very little it's shameful, when we could do so much.

I want to say this, and I want to say it about every chance I get. We could stop this today.

We have just come from a 3-hour Rules meeting and hearing people on the floor and a lot of my colleagues, I have the sense that they don't have any idea what a government shutdown was. All of a sudden it's starting to hurt. Let's pick this piece over here, that one over there, and we can fix that.

800,000 people who work for the United States Government are being used as pawns. We are hurting all of the citizens of the United States who need the services that those 800,000 people provide.

We have one thing to do, Mr. Speaker, one thing: we can take from this desk and concur with the Senate CR. That's it. It doesn't have to go back to the Senate. It can go directly to the President of the United States, maybe even before the big meeting today. Sign it and it's over with. But no, we're not going to do that.

Now, don't believe that this bill was written today because there is a particularly sympathy for patients at NIH or the visitors to the national parks or the citizens of the District of Columbia. These proposals are cynical attempts to make these things pinch just a little bit less.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that 30 sick children, most with cancer, were turned away from NIH clinical trials because of the government shutdown. Should they be pawns in this political, cynical game to hurt the health care bill?

This morning, the majority proposes to reopen NIH, or part of it. Yesterday, the TV cameras were dispatched around the country to capture the footage of museums and monuments closed. This morning the majority proposes they're going to open those sites.

The majority's making itself clear: anytime they see a bad headline, they're going to bring a bill to the floor to make it go away. At this rate, it could be a year from now before we ever finally come to some conclusion thereon, because nobody has said anything about what the end game is here.

How long are you going to hold the government, the country hostage?

Surely it doesn't have anything to do with health care anymore, after yesterday.

Now, if the majority really cared, we'd reopen the entire government, all of NIH, national parks right here, right now on this floor in this action we're taking today.

If the majority held a simple vote on a clean version of the Senate CR, the government shutdown would be closed upon the President's signature.

This afternoon I will give every Member of this Chamber a chance to do just that, as I did just in the Rules Committee. I want you to know that the opportunity to vote for the CR, end the government shutdown, failed 9-4 on a party-line vote. That tells us something about why we're here today and what the purpose is for all of this.

Let me be clear. This amendment is the only chance that this Chamber may ever have to end the government shutdown. If this Chamber supports my amendment, we will pass a clean CR this afternoon.

Now, if the majority really cared about helping those cancer patients' access to health care or letting the World War II veterans visit the monuments and reopening the doors of the Nation's parks and museums, they will vote for my amendment.

The VA, by the way, has announced today that they are running out of money. Furthermore, passing a clean CR would actually do more to help the Nation's veterans than the majority's proposal to fund the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Under the majority's proposal, the VA would receive $6 billion less than if we simply passed the CR which, in other words, has $6 billion more for the veterans than what you're proposing today.

So for all the cries of concern, the majority's desire to shortchange the veterans by $6 billion tells you all that you need to know. And the veterans understand that. They know that they're being used as a pawn in this cynical, political game, and they resent it.

Far from honest policy, today's proposals are more cynical politics. For almost a week, the majority has found itself in a legislative box, or at least I thought so until a little while ago, and the Rules Committee vote, and when they voted 9-4 not to open up the government, I realized that that was the aim all along.

Now, because the Senate voted for cloture on a clean funding bill, a simple majority of Senators have been able to put an end to the repeated attempts to dismantle the Affordable Health Care Bill.

Now, under these circumstances, the majority knows they can't keep proposing ransom demands, so they've broken cloture and returned to a 60-vote threshold in the Senate. The need to break cloture is why they tried to go to conference 15 minutes before the government shutdown, and that's why they are continuing to avoid a clean vote on the Senate CR today.

Mr. Speaker, two paragraphs in The Washington Post this morning sum up what this fight always has been and continues to be about: defunding the Affordable Care Act and taking health care away from 300 million Americans who have no insurance.

Referring to yesterday's events, Ezra Klein of The Washington Post wrote:

The top story all day was that Republicans had shut down

the Federal Government because President Obama would not

defund or delay the Affordable Care Act. The other major

story was that the government servers were crashing because

so many people were trying to see if they could get the

insurance through ObamaCare. On the one hand, Washington was

shut down because Republicans don't want citizens to have

ObamaCare. On the other hand, ObamaCare was shut down because

so many Americans did want that insurance.

Yesterday was, indeed, a historic day for our Nation and for every American who's ever been denied access to health care. In my home State of New York, there were more than 2 million visits to our online exchange in less than 90 minutes.

And by later in the day, the last number that I have, just for yesterday, 10 million people had visited the Web site at the end of the day. That is about 12 percent of the entire population of the State of New York, yesterday.

Meanwhile, 4.7 million people visited healthcare.gov yesterday-- that's the national database--while almost 100,000 more visited online exchanges in Illinois, in Colorado. Most importantly, in States from Kentucky to California, in red States and blue States, thousands of Americans went to sleep last night having purchased health insurance through the newly launched exchanges.

Now, while these Americans went to bed realizing their long-awaited dream, the majority woke up this morning realizing that their worst nightmare had come true. Despite their best efforts, the American people were finally given access to safe and affordable health care.

Now, the only question that remains is if the majority will finally acknowledge reality, or if they will keep the government closed while they continue their quest to take American's health care away.

I'm extremely grateful to the chairman of my committee this morning, when he said, when we called for a vote on funding the government today, he said, and I quote, ``I would say on behalf of the majority, what we think we are doing here today is probably some straight-line Republican viewpoints.''

I strongly urge my colleagues to reject the majority's latest gimmicks by voting ``no'' on the rule and the underlying legislation, and vote ``no'' on the PQ so that we can put our amendment on the floor.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds to say that it would be the best of common sense for us to end this charade today. But I understand now, because I've heard it twice, that the intent really is to wait and whittle down the government. As Grover Norquist, I believe, famously said, he would like to shrink it down to drown it in the bathtub.

I think we're in the process of doing that today by funding it a little piece here, a little piece there, and the devil take the hindmost.

I am happy to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Butterfield).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds to say that the three bills that everybody is so proud of that they've put out to try to re-fund the Government have a dagger at the heart of the health care bill and would have destroyed it.

I am pleased to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), a member of the Committee on Rules.

Mr. Speaker, just 10 seconds to say let's not do the least we can do. This is the day we can open up the government and serve our people.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Connolly).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. McNerney).

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.)

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gene Green).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Farr), ranking member on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews).

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff), a member of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran), the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire if the gentleman from Georgia has any more speakers. If not, I am prepared to close.

I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I am going to offer an amendment to the rule that would allow the House to vote on the clean Senate continuing resolution so that we can send it to the President for his signature today. I don't want that to be lost on anybody. This will probably be the only chance in this House that you will get to vote on what everyone has been asking for.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment into the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, we found out already this morning in the Rules Committee, admittedly by the chair, that they don't intend to open the government back up. I brought this very same motion today to the Rules Committee. It was defeated 9-4 on a party-line vote.

My hope today lies in all of the people from the other side, my good friends, who have said that, if they had an opportunity, they'd open up the government again. They would put people back to work and stop the terrible pain that we are simply laying on our Federal workers. What we have done is simply punish them. What we have done to medical science cannot be turned off and on like a faucet, as well as what we have done to our security and what we are doing to our intelligence--all of it, Mr. Speaker. We cannot do this multiple choice of what we will save today, and maybe we will do something else next week if we get a bad headline.

This is terribly important, this opportunity. I want to give notice to all of my friends on the other side to stand up for what you said. Today, please put your voting cards where your mouths have been. Vote because you know it is the right thing to do--to get this government back to work.

I will remind everybody that the Senate has not been holding us up here. The Senate sent a clean CR over early. We have simply ignored it, and everything that we have sent back to them has had nothing to do with the running of the government, but has had everything to do with trying to kill health care.

Today, let's get ourselves back on track and get this magnificent government working again. This country of which we are so proud is looking pretty bedraggled right now because we don't know, with this lurch from crisis to crisis, what is going to happen from one day to the next. This is the day, Mr. Speaker. This is the time. This is the opportunity. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question. At that point, we will have our opportunity to vote on the clean CR that does nothing but continues the spending and allows the government to reopen.

I urge a ``no'' vote on the rule, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, so less than 12 hours from where we were last night--maybe a little longer than that--you've discovered that shutting down the government is not as funny as you thought it was when you came from the meeting in the basement. Everybody laughing and talking about how giddy you were about it.

Let me tell you that since all of this has been about trying to kill the health care bill, I simply wanted to put on the record that this morning, in the first 2 hours of the exchange opening in the State of New York, 2 million people logged onto the Web site. I don't have the figures for the rest of the day, but we are off to a smashing start. So I think you guys are going to have some explaining to do.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Texas (Mr. Sessions) for yielding me the time, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is certainly right: we have been here time after time after time on this issue. But we are standing on the brink of the worst government shutdown in modern history. Unlike 1994, the pending government shutdown would reach across the entire Federal Government. In 1994, half of the congressional appropriations bills had been signed into law by the President; and as a result, those Federal agencies were able to operate through the shutdown.

But this year, because of the draconian budget levels included in the misguided sequester, the majority was unable to pass a single appropriations bill into law. In fact, they ran out of money about halfway--well, certainly after we got through the Defense budget and, for the first time since I have been in Congress, were unable to pass the Transportation bill. And because of that, again, we find ourselves in this terrible position. Now as a result, should the government shut down, it is going to be more harmful and more widespread than the last one.

Mr. Speaker, these are very real and very serious consequences that we face, and it is in the face of these consequences that the majority has chosen to continue what can only be described as dangerous partisan games. We have, indeed, been here before. The first time, the majority wanted to defund the Affordable Care Act, and second, they decided to just delay it. But then on that bill, they threw in a chance to do away with the medical device tax, which will create a trillion-dollar deficit increase over the next 10 years and will hit women's reproductive rights next time.

Just today, we saw the first lady of Texas, Ms. Anita Perry, who said in an interview that abortion should be a woman's right and that she believed that women should have the right to choose; and we thank her for that and couldn't agree with her more.

But now what are we coming up with today? Well, we are not going to back away from anything. We are just going to try to kill the health care bill, which we know we can't do. It's taking effect tomorrow morning.

What we are going to do now, they say, is to delay the mandate, which is a large part of the funding for the bill; and in addition to that, they have decided that Members of Congress and our staff will not be able to get the government copay that most people get. In fact, most people who have health care in America get it from their employer. And we aren't going to be denied from being able to do that because the gentleman from Iowa, Senator Grassley, who claimed that he made a mistake, inserted that into the bill when he said just this week that he did not mean for us not to be a part of the government health care system, but that somebody had misinterpreted his idea and wrote it wrong. So that's where we are with that today.

But the majority's proposal before us today is going to do that, and they are going to say to all these young people who come to Washington with such promise and such energy and such verve, really, to try to do something good for their country and who look forward so much to being able to have the great privilege of working in the Capitol of the United States that they're not going to have help with their health insurance, driving many of those, I think, to leave and to find other work and others to really not be able to get the health care that they need.

So why did we do that? Heaven only knows. But, frankly, I would be embarrassed--and I have mentioned this in the Rules Committee--to look around the room at the staff that we praise all the time for their ingenuity, for their faithfulness, for their willingness to stay, as we did Sunday morning until 12:30, without ever making a complaint at all and punishing them through health care.

As offensive as this proposal is, it's a fitting example of the vision for America that the majority has. It's a vision of an America where insurance companies are put back in charge of the health care system, where price-gauging and price discrimination go unchecked, where the most vulnerable among us, including cancer patients, the victims of domestic violence and children born with preexisting conditions, could be denied access to health care.

The New York Times did some wonderful pieces on that in The Sunday Times yesterday, talking about people who have been burdened so much that they are literally bankrupt from the cost of health care. This bill takes every step to avoid that in the future.

I'm not sure that people understand that what happens is that we have turned around what used to be the yearly cap that insurance companies would charge their clients and now say that if you are a single person with health insurance, that once you have paid out of pocket $6,400 for medical procedures and medicine, the insurance company then for the rest of the year will pay your costs. What's not to like about that? If you are a family, $12,000 is the cost.

After seeing what we saw yesterday and reading in The Times that people with cancer many times were unable at all to try to even get the care and that we know--and I know from the work that we have done with cancer patients--that many of them go untreated. If there's anything worse than getting cancer, being diagnosed with cancer, it has to be being unable to pay for treatment.

These are the things that the majority wants to do away with. I've never seen so much work in all my life to try to prevent 30 million Americans--our brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, everybody--from being able to have health insurance, many of them for the first time in their lives.

I met a woman in the last campaign who told me that she was so excited because she had just signed up for Medicare. The woman was born with cerebral palsy; and under the present insurance laws, she was not at all insurable. So she went through her whole life, bringing up children, running a household, driving a car, all the things that could cause the kinds of accidents that leave you permanently impaired without a dime's worth of health insurance.

She was not alone in that. Children who had head injuries or other members of the family could often use up their lifetime limit of about $1 million in less than a year, and they were never insurable again in the United States. We're not going to go back to that.

So there's something we can do here today. What we can do is vote this down, go back to the Rules Committee, take up the Senate's clean bill, which is over here at the desk, pass that bill in the House and the Rules, bring it here, pass it in the House in a bipartisan way--by the way, that wouldn't hurt. And then lo and behold, that bill is ready to go to the President's desk, and we could get that signed. A shutdown would be averted. Health care would be available to people who desperately need it and desperately want it.

We should not continue to be the only industrialized country on the face of the Earth that does not provide health care for its people. I strongly urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this rule and the underlying legislation and demand that we pass the Senate bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I'm pleased to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), a member of the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Polis), a member of the Committee on Rules.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen), the distinguished ranking member of the Committee on the Budget.

I yield the gentleman an additional 1 minute.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Danny K. Davis).

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews).

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

I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Jeffries).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Nolan).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlelady from New York (Mrs. Maloney).

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the Democrat leader.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Farr), a member of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. Speaker, I have one further speaker. I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Lynch).

Mr. Speaker, if my colleague has no further requests for time, I am prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Today is a truly shameful day in the distinguished history of this House. Far from the noble mission that some from the other side may claim, what is before us is an extreme--and extremely cynical--attempt to extract a ransom from the American people. They have issued their demands knowing full well they will not be met. Yet they are taking another step towards a government shutdown in order to deny 30 million uninsured Americans health care.

Time has run out. We are down to our last chance. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on today's rule and the underlying legislation, and ask once more that we be given the opportunity to vote on the Senate bill, a clean bill, that can go directly to the President.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let me be clear: the proposal before us is nothing but another way to run out the clock. I think while we're speaking here, in just a little while we will find in 20 minutes--21 minutes, because I think we will go 1 minute after midnight--that this government will shut down.

This amazing government that we are supposed to be overseeing-- America, the United States--can't manage its business and shows that to the rest of the world over the fact of trying to stop the bill you hate that is the law of the land, that has already been verified by the Supreme Court as to its constitutionality and where our President won election handily when this was the main idea.

I don't believe anymore that this is the product of a few people with strange ideas. This is the Republican Party. I think people who watch the news, jaded--I do; every idle moment I have to be finding out what's going on in the world--were quite stunned to watch a Republican conference over, and the Members coming out absolutely gleeful, many of them expressing glee--one of them said that he was almost giddy with joy about closing down the House.

Earlier this evening, I saw after the 2010 elections some new Members who were saying on the news that their intention was to shut down the House. Well, they've done it.

At any time we could have taken up a clean bill for the Senate. All we had to do was vote for that Senate amendment resolution and pass that here, which could have been done easily with bipartisan votes. It would then have gone to the President of the United States. Government workers could sleep easier tonight if we had done that. They wouldn't have to worry about paying the rent, or being able to buy groceries, or being able to pay the tuition for their child in college.

What we are doing to the psyche of America--not ``we.'' I'm not going to say that again, the universal ``we.'' What Republicans are doing to the psyche of America will be a long time in healing.

I think the absurdity knows no bounds. We want to say again that if anybody has any mistaken notions that the Democrats were involved in it, there are no Democrats' fingerprints on any of these bills. I'll say that again: Democrats had no input at all at any time on what any of these bills were going to say in the greatest matter before the House of Representatives to keep the government going, to meet our obligation to fund the government.

In fact, by cutting out the people's Representatives on my side of the House, almost half of the people in the United States' voices were stilled throughout this whole process. The only time we got to talk was when we were up here, and we were trying to run and catch up to see what was going on. We had no idea what this was about, that this was coming tonight. We were able to pick up bits and pieces maybe off the floor, and people passing around some things that maybe they heard. But the whole Democrat side has been shut out--not just on this measure, but on everything in the world that we have done in this term and last term as well. Now, I don't want anybody to forget that because everybody is going to yell if something goes wrong here, they're going to try to blame it on us. It's not on us. I have never seen anything like this.

In addition, for well over 6 months this Democratic side has begged, cajoled, done everything they could to try to get this House to appoint conferees and to go to conference with the Senate of the United States on bills that each Chamber had already passed. We couldn't do the farm bill--couldn't do much of anything. And I said earlier today one of the reasons is sequestration. So we had only gotten two appropriations bill. They've run out of money, and there was no way in God's Earth we could have ever done the 12 that we needed to do.

But even that hasn't caused any idea of changing what we're doing. And we want to be a part of that. We would like to take the 6 weeks-- imagine, on one hand, we are appointing conferees for a 6-week measure when we wouldn't do it for the budget of the Federal Government.

Now we would like to be as much a part of it as we can while we're trying to deal with the debt limit and certainly to do away with sequestration that even my friend, Mr. Rogers, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, said was far too draconian and that the government would be seriously underfunded.

But tonight, here we are, tragically here. Let me see now, it's 15 minutes

away from time where it will be useless; so I am not going to say anything more about we could take up another bill, we could pass it, it would go to the President, he would sign it, and we could avoid it. It's simply too late. How could you, with any common sense at all, think that, as we have moved to this point without changing from the left to the right with moving ahead, throwing up every kind of thing on a clean CR that would kill it when it arrived at the Senate.

We are hearing--and I hope it's not true--that when we get to the debt limit in about 2 weeks, that the Christmas list that they want to pass--everything that they wanted all their lives and couldn't get-- again, holding the country hostage, is what we have ahead of us.

Now, given a clear choice between serving our country and serving ideology within these ranks, the majority has chosen to stand against the country and shut the government down. Make no mistake about it, there is going to be a lot of hurt.

At this point, all I can do is urge everyone on our side of the House to vote ``no'' for no other reason than because of the rules in the House being broken and regular order being so far from reality. The rules of the House say that any Member can call for a vote on the Senate bill, but this rule takes that away from everybody but the majority leader. Only the majority leader can call for that vote.

Very little is left on our side except to vote ``no'' and to express our great displeasure and hope to goodness that when this is over and all that pain is out there, that we can move as quickly as possible to try to right this dreadful wrong that is about to land on the American people.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Polis), a member of the Committee on Rules.

Mr. Speaker, it is midnight, and the great Government of the United States is now closed.

I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), a member of the Committee on Rules.

Mr. Speaker, I am compelled to say that, if the Members of Congress are going to be treated like everybody else in the country, we would be the only group that's forced not to take our employer's health insurance.

I now yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen), the distinguished ranking member of the Committee on the Budget, who has tried valiantly to do away with sequestration.

I yield the gentleman another 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, although what we're doing here is an exercise in futility, I'm pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey), the distinguished ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, who has been doing a wonderful job.

Mr. Speaker, I'm pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fattah), the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science.

Mr. Speaker, I'm pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews).

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

I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), our side of the Texans.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Kildee).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Israel).

Let me advise my colleague, Mr. Speaker, that I have one further request for time, and then I am prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Larson).

Mr. Speaker, I'll tell you, I feel such a combination of both sadness and anger that it makes it really difficult for me to express it. On the one hand, the chaos and the lurching from crisis to crisis that this Congress has continually gone through leaves me not just perplexed but absolutely bewildered.

At the same time, I think what overrides everything for me tonight is a sense of terrible sadness that all of us here who have sworn to protect and defend the United States of America have completely given up on that idea. Because the majority has moved so assiduously towards this moment, this is on them. This government shutdown belongs to them for the rest of their lives.

And now, Mr. Speaker, let me tell you that the great country of the United States, the beacon of light for almost everybody in the world, the defender of all the people in the world is out of a government now. The most important institution of government anywhere ever devised is now closed.

And I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Thank you very much. I appreciate my colleague for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman from Massachusetts did a very good job of refuting what we heard in the talking points, but let me add just one or two things to it.

We've always known that if people say an untruth often enough, loud enough, that they begin to believe it themselves. But we still hope that the country out there at large will not.

Let me just put it this way as succinctly as I can. The same group that's fighting today also fought the Social Security law and the Medicare law. They hated it all. They didn't want any of that done, and I don't believe that the American people now are feeling very good about giving up either one of those.

Their fear right now is that when this bill goes into effect--not until January--all the awful things you have heard about are not even in effect yet because this bill is not in effect--that it is going to be a success, and they are going to have a lot of explaining to do.

Now, a report just released that I heard about yesterday showed that only 1 percent of businesses in the United States of America have made any changes at all. And, indeed, small business gets great benefits providing health care in tax rebates.

Now, the most important thing I want to say--because the contrast to what we're doing here today is so glaring. When we did the health care bill--and every President since Teddy Roosevelt has tried to--when we did it, it went through the committee process in both Houses, and everybody had a chance. Every committee in the House and in the Senate contains both Republicans and Democrats who proposed amendments. Some of them were accepted. In fact, one of the ones we are working with now is to try to make some sense out of the one that was added by Senator Grassley over in the Senate, a Republican.

The idea that we rammed this thing through in the middle of the night and nobody had ever seen it is absurd.

Everybody knew about it. The whole thing was transparent. The committee meetings were all open, and everybody had a chance.

Never in the world have we ever seen people fight so hard to do away with a piece of legislation that is a legitimate law. And what do they do with the rest of it? They have dropped the entire process of governing the House of Representatives. We have, over this year, seen not a piece of work get down. Appropriations bills in the House and Senate, none. Absolutely none. So we are having to do a continuing resolution because we have no budget. A budget was passed in the House; a budget was passed in the Senate. The Republicans in the House of Representatives have refused what is normal process, to sit down and confer over that budget and give us a budget.

Since January of 2011, 42 votes have been held here to defund or to undermine the historic law. They have repeatedly failed to complete the most basic of congressional functions, which is passing the appropriations legislation to keep the government open. In fact, what their mantra is: Do we need to create jobs in America? Well, let's repeal ObamaCare. Do we need to balance our budget? Well, let's repeal ObamaCare. We need to keep the government open; oh, my goodness, let's repeal ObamaCare--the answer to everything and the cure for absolutely nothing.

And now their legislative malpractice--and I don't know of anything else that you can call it--has led us to the brink of a major crisis. Reading just this morning from Frank Keating, the former Republican Governor of Oklahoma: What in the world is going on here? What in the world do we think we're doing?

As they begin to see the consequences of their action, they're doubling down, putting forth a list of demands that even the greediest child on Christmas morning would be put to shame. In exchange for averting government shutdown and a global economic crisis, the House majority considers making the following demands:

A 1-year delay of the individual mandate, which would gut the health care law; the implementation of Congressman Ryan's tax reform plan, which does away with Medicare, by the way, despite the fact that voters, as my colleague said, rejected his draconian vision as he ran for Vice President last year; and the repeal of Dodd-Frank.

The repeal of Dodd-Frank so that we can go back to an era of unregulated Wall Street banks; and they want to construct the Keystone pipeline.

None of this has anything in the world to do with what is facing us today. They want to do away with all of the environmental regulations. The list goes on and on.

It is time for this temper tantrum to end and for cooler heads to prevail. There must be some cooler heads here on the other side. With time running out, the majority has to act to keep this government open and try to get this economy on track. The American people must be spared from the consequences of a majority that cannot find the will or the ability to legislate.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague and gentleman for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

What we have before us today is not a solution; it's another attempt to undermine the Affordable Care Act. As written, this dangerous proposal has no chance of becoming law. It is not only a political nonstarter but a bad Federal policy. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a repeal of the medical device tax alone would add $30 billion to the Federal deficit.

However, finding a solution to the crisis before us may not be the majority's top priority. Based upon news reports from earlier in the day, it seems that far from responsible governing, the majority is concerned with simply keeping their political house of cards from falling down.

According to POLITICO, Majority Leader Eric Cantor said:

We've had enough disunity in our party. The headlines are

Republicans fighting Republicans. This will unite us.

By now, the majority's inability to find consensus within its own ranks is well known. It started almost as soon as they assumed power, as extremists within their own party refused to provide relief aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy for more than 3 months. Divisions within the majority also led to the first ever expiration of the Violence Against Women Act in over 20 years; most recently, a failure on the House floor to pass a bipartisan farm bill, which had never happened before. The bill had been 5 years in the making, and they couldn't get it done.

Unable to find consensus on even the most noncontroversial bills, the majority has held more than 41 votes on the one issue that unites them. If we are to believe the majority leader, the one issue that unites them is to try to kill the health care bill for Americans.

Now, polls have shown that the American people want action on everything from strengthening gun laws to passing immigration reform. Yet, instead of addressing any of these issues, the majority has tried any way they can to repeal, defund, undermine, delay, whatever, the historic health care law. And remember that Presidents--most of them since the time of Teddy Roosevelt--have tried to achieve health care.

Frustration has reached a boiling point within the majority's ranks. Republican Senator John McCain has declared parts of his own party ``whacko birds'' and said:

Many in this group didn't come to power to get things done.

They came to power to keep things from getting done.

Well said, Senator.

By now, the majority is well aware that a 1-year delay in the Affordable Care Act threatens access to secure and affordable health care for millions of Americans and that my Democrat colleagues and I refuse to take away health care for American families just because the majority is unable and unwilling to find common ground.

And oh, by the way, we've done nothing about the business of the House. We're doing this resolution, in the first place, because the appropriations bills were not dealt with.

In fact, the whole process has changed here. What used to be the committee process and then go to Rules and then go to the floor has changed; you just go directly to Rules. I would sure like to see the old days come back.

The fact of the matter is this bill will be dead on arrival once it's sent to the Senate. Senator Reid has made that abundantly clear all day long. For the majority to continue to bring it forward shows that today's proposal is nothing more than an attempt to seek political cover as Republicans shut the government down.

Today, Senator Harry Reid said:

The American people will not be extorted by Tea Party

anarchists. To be absolutely clear, the Senate will reject

both the 1-year delay of the Affordable Care Act and the

repeal of the medical device tax. After weeks of futile

political games from Republicans, we are still at square one.

As if this weren't enough, the process that has led us here has trampled upon the majority's promises of an open and transparent House. Unlike the process that led to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, today's legislation was written behind closed doors, leaving out almost half of the Members of the House of Representatives, the Democrat Party. There was absolutely no input at all from members of the minority, and that is definitely unlike the health care act, which went through the full committee process.

This afternoon, the majority met in the basement of the Capitol. After a secretive, closed-door meeting, they emerged with this partisan legislation in hand and told us to take it or leave it.

Mr. Speaker, every single one of us was elected by our fellow citizens and told to do our part in building a more prosperous country. With the closed, secretive, and partisan process that the majority has repeatedly pursued, they are shutting out half the Chamber and half of our country from participating in a democratic process.

In closing, the majority has every right to pursue their legislative priorities, no matter how misguided we may feel they are, but they do not have the right to take the Nation hostage nor threaten the full faith and credit of the United States in order to get their way.

Let me be clear: a vote for this rule and a vote for this bill are affirmative votes for a government shutdown, because everyone here knows there will be no adequate time for any more ping-ponging. I strongly urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the rule and the underlying legislation.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), my distinguished colleague on the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings), my distinguished colleague on the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Polis), a most distinguished colleague on the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentlelady from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentlelady from Florida (Ms. Castor).

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Maryland (Ms. Edwards).

I understand that the gentleman is prepared to close.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Welch).

Mr. Speaker, in closing, I want to urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this rule and ``no'' on this bill because--no question about it--a ``yes'' vote on either one of them is a vote for the shutdown in the House. The Senate will not take this up--we are absolutely certain of it--and we are on the road to a shutdown. The Republican Party insists on doing that. Do not help them. Vote ``no.''

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

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

I thank the gentleman for yielding me the customary 30 minutes.

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

Mr. Speaker, if the House of Representatives fails to act, the government will shut down on October 1.

A government shutdown would result in the furlough of hundreds of thousands of government employees, stop the flow of Social Security checks, and hold up Medicare benefits for our seniors. In short, there are very real and very significant consequences to what we do here today.

Given the stakes, one could reasonably expect the majority to avoid extremism and partisanship and allow this Chamber to keep the government open. But this bill doesn't do that. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening here today.

Unable to pass 8 of 12 annual appropriations bill, the majority has been forced to resort to a continuing resolution--and this CR should have been clean, as the CR is in the Senate. But today's proposal includes a self-executing amendment to defund the Affordable Care Act and put medical decisions back into the hands of the insurance companies. And that will not go through the Senate. So we will, once again, go to the very brink of disaster, hoping that we can pull out of it while letting most Americans hang by their thumbs, wondering what we're going to do.

As the newspaper The Hill wrote this morning, today's proposal makes ``shutdowns more likely'' because the Affordable Care Act will never be repealed as long as President Obama is in office and the Democrats control the Senate.

The fact of the matter is the Affordable Care Act is already delivering on its promise of lower health care costs and more secure health care. States are just 11 days away from opening online health care exchanges, where individuals will be able to compare health plans and purchase an insurance plan that fits their needs. In many cases, these exchanges will allow individuals to purchase health insurance cheaper than ever before.

In my home State of New York, premiums for some insurance plans have already dropped by 50 percent. This week, Secretary Sebelius announced that many monthly premiums will be less than $100.

Perhaps most importantly--not something I'm sure everybody knows--the Affordable Care Act flips the script and takes the power out of insurance companies' hands. Instead of having lifetime and annual caps on what the insurance company will spend on your health care, the Affordable Care Act enforces limits on what you will have to pay out- of-pocket for your health care.

Does everybody know that? Because when your constituents find it out, they're going to be bummed out at you for trying to kill it.

For example, in 2015, those covered under a group health insurance plan will not have to pay more than $6,350 out of their pocket for medical procedures and medicine. That is such a gift. People will no longer have to go bankrupt to pay health bills. That is going to be covered from that point on. Once you've reached that limit, your insurer is going to pick the rest of it up. My constituents don't want to lose that. It's a landmark change and just one of many reasons why the majority's attempt at repeal will never become law.

Today's legislation falls short when it comes to ending the devastating cuts within what we call the sequester. The sequester has been one of the most devastating policies ever implemented in the history of the United States. Just today, the head of the FBI said that the idea of having to get rid of 300 employees and putting all of his employees on 10-day furlough makes it almost impossible for him to run the FBI.

Because of the sequester, tens of thousands of cancer screenings have been canceled at public health clinics right now, more than $1.6 billion has been cut from the National Institutes of Health, and more than 70,000 children have been kicked out of Head Start. And over the next 12 months the CBO estimates that 1.6 million jobs will be lost because of the economic drag caused by the sequester.

Last night, the Budget Committee ranking member, Chris Van Hollen, came to the Rules Committee and requested to have a vote on the House floor in order to end the sequester. That was the eighth time that his request has been denied by the Rules Committee. Given the chance for bipartisan cooperation and to rid ourselves of this plague that is so worrying and causing such devastation, the majority simply walked away.

Finally, today's legislation also includes a proposal to protect some bondholders, including China, from any economic fallout that would occur if the majority refuses to lift the Nation's debt. This legislation has no place in a continuing resolution. Furthermore, it should never have been considered, for the faith and credit of the United States should never be in doubt.

Mr. Speaker, every Member of this House is sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States and to ``promote the general welfare.'' And that's a far cry from what we're doing here today, not only in this bill but in the one that preceded this, where we're cutting $40 billion out of food that will affect, as you heard before, veterans, the elderly, Meals on Wheels, and school nutrition. It's not what we are and not what we do.

Everybody knows, though, that what is happening here today is what every mother knows. When a child has a tantrum--and a tantrum is being had here over health care--you slap a pacifier in the mouth. That's exactly what trying to redo the health care bill is--it's a temporary tantrum retarder so that we can get by today. There is no real plan. It's just how will we get by today.

After the majority passes this bill, the Senate will take the legislation. With a pure majority, they can remove the partisan attacks within it and they will send us back a clean CR if they can get 60 votes, which we will have to pass or chaos will ensue. By the time we get around to all this--which we could be doing today--we're on the edge of a cliff.

In the meantime, the majority's refusal to work on a balanced plan to create jobs, grow the economy, and to invest in our future, which is such an important thing that's been neglected, and stop the brain drain being caused by the sequester is hurting our economy and threatens a government shutdown.

With time running out, the decision to play politics has dire consequences. Think about it for just a moment. We've gotten reports about substandard bridges and roads and the neglect of the railway. We could put all those people to work that would be needed just to rebuild those, and spend some money on ourselves, instead of $2 billion a week on the wars, as we did in Iraq for 10 years.

So I urge my colleagues to vote against today's rule and the underlying legislation so we can consider bipartisan solutions instead of games. I can promise you that our side stands ready and willing. We have nothing to do with any of this today. No Democrats were involved. We want to be a part of it as well.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey), the distinguished ranking member of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro), the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor-HHS.

I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Connecticut.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds just to say that, while I did not make a Federal case out of it here, I deeply regret that my colleague has disparaged the President of the United States.

I now yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer)--I wish I could give him an hour and 40 minutes to counter what we have heard, but unfortunately I can only give him 3--the Democratic whip.

I yield an additional 2 minutes to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Rob Andrews.

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

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to finally let the House vote on Mr. Van Hollen's proposal to replace the sequester with a sort of balanced deficit reduction plan that bipartisan panels of experts have all recommended.

To discuss this bill, I am pleased to yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen), the ranking member of the House Committee on the Budget.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire if my colleague has more speakers. If not, I am ready to close.

Thank you, Mr. Cole.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, as my Democrat colleagues and I have stated, instead of proposing a clean and noncontroversial continuing resolution, today the majority wishes to bring a proposal to the floor that would defund ObamaCare--their favorite--and prioritize bond payments to China in the event of financial default.

This type of legislative maneuver unnecessarily injects partisanship and politics where it does not belong. With time running out on the fiscal year, we have to put politics aside and come together to keep the government open and serving the American people.

To that end, I want to state to all of my colleagues in their offices--or wherever they may be--who are preparing to come over and vote: this vote on this previous question may be one of the most important votes that you have ever taken.

All of us, while we were at home during our district work period, heard over and over and over again from businesspeople, from hospitals, from schools--from everybody--that the sequester was ruining them. We have visited this plague upon them, and we can take it away. We can do it now.

I will remind you that this CR continues the sequester. Let's take this opportunity we have now with this previous question, and everybody vote ``no'' on it on both sides, please. The simple thing that will happen here is we can vote on Mr. Van Hollen's proposal, which he just explained. It not only replaces the money that the sequester would cut, but we get more deficit reduction from Mr. Van Hollen's proposal than we get from the sequester.

Every one of us who fails to vote ``no'' so that we can do that, which is the least of our responsibilities here, ought to have to explain it every single day to our constituents as to why we did not want to remove that awful burden which we inflicted. I am sure that every one of us--I'm certainly guilty of it myself--told our constituents back home that the House would never do that, that it was too dumb to be believed. But no. Now that we've done it, we like it-- but you don't see the consequences.

Dr. Francis Collins, who is the head of the NIH, says that we are losing our scientists and that we are losing our research edge as we know we are falling further and further behind in education, in jobs, in the future of this country. We've failed to invest anything in our future. We are living with crumbling roads, crumbling infrastructure-- everything around us--but the uncertainty overrides it all: What next? What does this mean for me? Will I get to keep my job? Am I going to have to lay off all of those employees? How can I run the FBI when people are out on furlough?

Why in the world would we put our people through this disgraceful charade here simply because we made a mistake?

We have an opportunity now by voting ``no'' on the previous question, which would simply allow Mr. Van Hollen to get a vote on his measure. For heaven's sakes, please do that.

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

Mr. Speaker, with all of my heart, I urge everybody to vote ``no.''

I want you to vote ``no,'' too, Mr. Speaker.

I urge a ``no'' vote on this rule. The underlying bill is not as important to me as getting this sequester out of the way. Vote ``no'' on this at least, whatever you do.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, the Code of Conduct for United States Judges is a set of ethical guidelines, created in the wake of judicial scandals, to protect public confidence in the judiciary. Yet shockingly, the Code of Conduct applies to all federal judges except those on the Supreme Court, our nation's most important legal institution.

In just the last four years, Supreme Court Justices have been engaged in ethically dubious conduct at least eight times--conduct that is explicitly forbidden among all other federal justices. Yet, because the Supreme Court does not adhere to the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, they have granted themselves immunity from the standards of behavior that apply to every other justice in the land.

The guidelines contained in the Code exist to ensure that the public has faith that judicial decision-making is based on the facts and the law, not politics and outside interests. Their intent is to uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary by demonstrating that those meting out justice are scrupulous in staying free of even the appearance of outside influence or bias. Public confidence in the judiciary suffers when our nation's highest court appears not to be governed by the same clear ethics rules that apply to all other judges.

The Supreme Court's greatest assets are its integrity and the public trust, yet the Court continues to operate without a binding code of ethics. It is troubling that the highest court in the land does not follow the same standards as the other federal courts, and it is long past time to address this shortcoming.

To that end, today I am introducing the Supreme Court Ethics Act of 2013, legislation to apply the Code of Conduct for United States Judges to justices of the Supreme Court. Formal adoption of the Code of Conduct by the Court would begin to restore the public's faith in our judicial system and help ensure the integrity of our country's highest court. Many of the Supreme Court justices were required to follow these basic rules when they were district or court of appeals judges. Accordingly, adoption of an identical Code by the members of the Supreme Court should not unduly burden members of that Court and certainly would not serve as any impediment to their complete and robust service on the Court.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation that will help protect the public's confidence in the integrity of our nation's judiciary.

I thank my colleague for yielding me the 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, this is the final week that the House will be in session before we begin our recess. I don't like to call it recess since we work as hard at home, but this is probably the last time we'll get together until we come back in the fall. As the clock runs out on another legislative session, we are voting for the 40th time to repeal or to undermine the Affordable Care Act.

By now, we all know how today's debate will end. The majority will pass the bill, the Senate will refuse to take it up, and we will have wasted, again, the public's time and their patience. And then they will adjourn for August recess, only to return in September with issues like jobs, immigration reform, and sequestration left unsolved, as they are today.

The other night, I was watching comedian Stephen Colbert on his program. He was talking about the number of times we've voted to try to repeal health care. He had a good idea for the Republicans. He said, Obviously, you're not going to be able to do it if you say you're going to repeal health care, so he suggested that a bill be written that is titled, ``This is Not Another Repeal of ObamaCare, We Swear, But Don't Look Inside It, Just Sign It Act.'' If you put that act out, maybe you would get somewhere with it.

Some speculated the GOP is desperate to get rid of this law because they know it is working and will work better as it gets fully implemented and they know they have firmly planted their feet on the wrong side of history once again. I can't comment on their motivation, but it's clear that millions of Americans are using this law because of the incredible benefits that it provides.

I was really stunned by the last speaker on the 1-minutes this morning talking about Maryland, because we just got the statistics from Maryland. The health plans are better than ever. Just last week, Maryland announced their rates are going to be among the lowest in the country, and not, as he said, a 20 percent increase.

Nevada announced a young adult will be able to purchase a catastrophic health insurance plan for less than $100.

And I said last week, when we had the other vote to get rid of health care, New York had just come out with wonderful news on the exchanges. Seventeen insurers had applied to provide insurance in the State of New York, and it would cause those premiums to fall by more than 50 percent. And we join 11

other States with the same kind of news. It's happening all over America.

For those States that decided not to do an exchange and are going to let the government do it, fine. I think they'll do okay there. Maybe we'll move closer to single-payer, which is what we should be doing.

Sixty-two days from now, those new exchanges will open their doors and they're going to provide millions of Americans with secure and affordable health care. For the very first time, insurers are going to be barred from denying coverage because of a preexisting condition and barred from placing lifetime and yearly limits on an individual's health care. They are sending checks back to customers all over the country, because the new law requires them to spend 80 percent of the premium dollar on health care. And since far less than 80 percent is spent, many companies are doing rebates, and people are getting those checks.

I really can't go on much further without talking about what it is we are doing here today. I think it's somewhat historical, but it may not be the first time. It's probably not. I have not had the pleasure before of doing a rule which consists of five bills with very little in common being stuffed into one because the House, basically, imploded yesterday. I've done all of the rules on health care repeal. If I had a machine, I could just press ``repeat'' and walk out of the room and do the same speech over and over again.

The other day I asked Dr. McDermott, who's a psychiatrist, ``What do you call someone or one group that does the same thing over and over and over again, anticipating a different result?'' and he gave me the psychiatric definition for that.

We all know that today's vote is not a single thing except another cynical attempt to score political points. As we go to our districts this August, the question is whether or not the majority will double down on their failed agendas in September and continue the irresponsible attempts to repeal the health care law. If they do, they will be escalating their brinksmanship to a new level and risking a government shutdown simply because they don't want to compromise.

Already, as you know, Members of the majority are threatening to shut down the government if the Affordable Care Act is not repealed. That does show kind of an act of desperation, doesn't it? In fact, a dozen Republican Senators have signed a letter vowing to vote against a continuing resolution--that we have to have because nobody got their work done--that funds the Affordable Care Act, and more than 60 House Republicans have called on the majority's leadership to defund the Affordable Care Act in any continuing resolution that comes before the House.

Instead, I want the majority to make a change here. My fellow Kentuckian, Hal Rogers, who is the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, yesterday made it plain to everybody that this is all a hoax. He talked about sequestration and the impossibility of bringing a transportation bill that scarcely has enough money to maintain what roads we have, and it imploded on the floor when nobody would vote for it. While we're out on recess, please think about this, and think about what sequestration is doing in the United States.

I hope you read former Senator Byron Dorgan's article in The New York Times talking about the devastation on the Indian reservations because of the money that we owe them by treaty, which is being lost through sequestration; the people who are doing health research at the National Institutes of Health, where they tell me in the human genome project that they are very close to finding a cure for cancer, but now they have to stop it. As a scientist, I can promise you, you do not turn research off and on like a faucet. And think of all the people who can't get their treatment because of sequestration. Think of all the people who live in this area and work for this government and keep this government working, many of them two members of the family on the Federal payroll, who have suffered as much in that family as a 40 percent pay cut.

And the bills that are in here today, again, saying to the Federal employees: We don't value you for anything. We've already passed legislation in here that hurts their pensions. They haven't had a raise in 4 years. What we're saying now, if this bill passes today, is that they can be fired without cause and that their phones will be tapped by any citizen in the United States. I really am concerned about what's going on here.

We talk about too much regulation. I want to close with something I mentioned last night at the Rules Committee because I realize most Americans don't know it. But let me talk about under-regulation.

In the food market, chickens are inspected 100 at a time--100 a minute going through the conveyor belt. They're covered with barnyard debris and feces and whatever else. One person is inspecting them as 100 of them go by. So what's going to happen now they have decided to regulate? They will have to do 140 chickens a minute.

Recently, The Washington Post had a front-page story that stunned me to the core. It said that a young food inspector, working for the government, his lungs bled out and he died from the chemicals that he inhaled from his chicken inspection days. Now, after the chicken goes through a conveyor belt, it goes into a bath of cool water and Clorox. Then it's ready to be packaged and all plastic-ed up and have it for dinner. Is that overregulation? For heaven's sakes, give me more regulation than that.

But I want to urge my colleagues today to vote ``no'' on this rule, the underlying legislation, and quit this farce in the House of Representatives.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, let me take just a second to say another case of un-regulation is the fertilizer plant blowing up in West, Texas, that had not been inspected in over 20 years.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the Democratic whip.

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

I yield an additional 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from Maryland.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman), the distinguished ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

I yield an additional minute to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Nolan).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to a member of the Committee on Rules, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Ms. Michelle Lujan Grisham), a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Titus), a member of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Duckworth), a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, we will offer on our side an amendment to the rule that allows the House to consider the SAFE Bridges Act, which funds emergency repairs and creates countless American jobs. We are about to go into a 5-week break; and so far, the Congress has done nothing to end sequestration or to create jobs for the country. My amendment will prevent the House from going home until we have done the job we were sent here to do.

To discuss our proposal, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington State (Mr. Larsen), a member of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

May I inquire if my colleague has more speakers?

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

As we speak, sequestration is hitting very hard in communities all across the country. Federal employees are furloughed; important investments in science, technology, public health, and defense are being curtailed; children are being shut out of Head Start. Meanwhile, the majority has repeatedly refused to repeal the sequester and have failed to pass a single job bill creation into law.

The American people need us to stop these political games and get down to work creating jobs and rebuilding this economy. Now is not the time to adjourn Congress, and we should not leave here until we have produced real results for the American families that are truly struggling to get by.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment into the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

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

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

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