Floor Statements

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

Madam Speaker, I hope what I am getting ready to say, it turns out to be redundant, that we are going to hear it in the closings of both the gentlewoman from Florida and the gentleman from Texas.

We talk about this preexisting conditions' bill today as if it is going to help with preexisting conditions. As we have discussed already, it is not.

But the preexisting conditions issue is a very real issue. It is a very real issue for families all across the country, and it has been for a long time.

And undeniably, elections were won and lost this past cycle over a preexisting conditions issue based on the misinformation around it.

I don't know how we are advantaged as a community by continuing to perpetuate the misinformation. When we first tackled preexisting conditions in a serious way, we did it together in this institution.

I know, because it was a gentleman from my State, Madam Speaker, Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was sitting in that chair at the time.

It was 1996. Bill Clinton was sitting in the White House. Newt Gingrich was sitting here leading the United States House, and we came together, Republicans and Democrats, we passed the Health Insurance Affordability and Accountability Act that abolished preexisting condition worries for every single family with an ERISA-based plan. Those are the plans that the Federal Government controls.

So what I mean, Madam Speaker, is that for every single plan the Federal Government had dominion over, we eliminated preexisting conditions.

Medicare, no preexisting conditions.

Medicaid, no preexisting conditions.

ERISA plans, no preexisting conditions.

Collectively, that is about 250 million Americans.

What we didn't do was go into the area where the Federal Government had no dominion, which were State-regulated plans, and we said States should have the ability to regulate their own plans.

Now President Obama said, no, States had been moving too slow to help their constituency.

He ran on the platform of taking those plans away from State control; he won that debate. The Affordable Care Act implemented those conditions. And the bill today says, if states have an idea about how to protect families from preexisting conditions that is better than the one in the Affordable Care Act, we don't want to hear it.

There is one solution for preexisting conditions and it is the one that President Obama has implemented, no other. I think that is wrong.

Dr. Burgess knows more about medicine than I will ever hope to know. He knows more about serving patients than I will ever hope to know.

Ms. Shalala, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, knows more about healthcare than I will ever hope to know. I trust these folks to find solutions differently in Florida, and differently in Texas than we do in Georgia.

This bill does one thing and one thing only. It continues the debate from 1996, not about whether to help people with preexisting conditions, but about whether States have anything to add to the discussion. I am certain the State of Georgia does. I believe the State of Florida does. I know the State of Texas does.

If we defeat this rule and defeat this bill, it will allow those very best ideas to come out and not ideas about how to keep people down, Madam Speaker, but ideas about how to lift families up.

We have come together on those issues before, Madam Speaker, and we can do it again.

Mr. Speaker, you have heard in the last round of 60- second comments a sense of urgency around healthcare. I share that sense of urgency, as I know everybody on my side of the aisle does.

But for the next 1 hour, Mr. Speaker, we are going to be talking about what purports to be the House budget, the budget that would tell us what our Medicaid priorities are, the budget that would tell us how we are going to save Medicare, the budget that would tell us how we are going to protect Social Security, and the budget that would tell us what our values are as a nation. That is what the law requires: that we bring such a document to the floor and that we do it by April 15.

But for the next hour, Mr. Speaker, what you are going to hear is that the House is producing no such budget, that the House is silent on protecting Medicaid, silent on protecting Medicare, and silent on protecting Social Security.

We can do better, as my colleagues have challenged us to do. It is going to take a partnership, though, not empty accusations.

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

I thank my friend from New York for yielding me the customary 30 minutes. And, at the risk of opening this debate like I opened so many others in 2019: Mr. Speaker, we have taken an opportunity to do something very productive and very bipartisan and we have turned it into something that is going to be very partisan and wholly unproductive.

Neither of the bills we are considering in this rule today are going to be moving through the Senate. Neither of the bills we are considering today are going to be signed by the President. But the good foundation in both of those bills could have been, and we have missed yet another opportunity.

Let me start with H.R. 1644, Mr. Speaker, the so-called Save the Internet Act. I can't speak for everyone else's internet, but my internet is still thriving. I haven't seen any nefarious internet shortages or blockages in recent days.

For the millions and millions of Americans trying to livestream C- SPAN right now, they are having no problems whatsoever. It is going right through the pipes the way it always has, Mr. Speaker. And, if it is in need of saving, it is certainly not in need of saving from this institution.

I understand, Mr. Speaker, that my friends on the other side of the aisle are upset with the Trump administration's FCC.

You will recall that the Obama administration and its FCC took the regulations that had governed the internet from its inception through its explosion of productivity and innovation, all the way through 2015, and threw all those rules out entirely, replacing it with a command- and-control government structure.

In its wisdom and with my great support, the Trump administration and the FCC threw those new rules out, taking us back to those rules that provided the foundation for the internet and all of the productivity that it has provided.

It is unfortunate, Mr. Speaker, that so many folks are afraid of internet freedom that we need to try to find a way to clamp down on internet freedom and bend the internet to the will of the government.

I would argue that the Wild West innovation style that has driven the internet and tech companies from day one shouldn't be boxed in by the government and certainly shouldn't be replaced with a 1930s-era, Ma Bell telephone regulatory scheme.

That is what we are talking about here today with this bill, Mr. Speaker, is turning over regulation of the internet to title II of the Communications Act.

If you have not looked at title II recently, Mr. Speaker, it is almost 100 years old. It was created to govern that wonderful emerging technology called the landline telephone and the monopolistic telephone companies that existed at that time.

I don't know how many of your staffers still have landline telephones, Mr. Speaker. I know your grandchildren probably don't even know how to operate one these days.

We certainly should not be relying on those regulations to bring us forward with innovation. The heavy hand of government regulation always takes us backwards.

The good news, Mr. Speaker, is that, if you see legitimate challenges out there, we do have some bipartisan solutions to help address those: Former Chairman Walden's H.R. 1101, one such bill that could have been on the floor today; Mr. Latta's H.R. 1006, another bill that could have been on the floor today; Mrs. McMorris Rodgers' H.R. 1096 could have been on the floor today, just to name a few.

But none of those bipartisan options were seriously considered. Instead, we are left with a single option, in true government, monopolistic fashion, and that option is to support the Obama administration's failed government takeover of the internet.

Mr. Speaker, I oppose that. I oppose the legislation. I hope my other colleagues will as well.

It did not have to be this way. This could have been a productive partnership discussion about how to take what is obviously a productive and innovative tool fueling, not just urban America, not just suburban America, but rural America, and we could have talked about how to grow it together. But we chose a different path, digging partisan ditches even deeper early in 2019.

If that is not disappointing enough, Mr. Speaker, there is a second bill that this rule makes in order. That is H.R. 2021. That bill comes out of another committee that Mr. Morelle and I serve on, the House Budget Committee.

I love serving on the House Budget Committee, I have to tell you, Mr. Speaker. It is a wonderful committee on which to serve. Mr. Morelle and I are both lucky to be on it, and we have two fabulous leaders on that committee: Mr. Yarmuth of Kentucky leading the Democratic side of the aisle and Mr. Womack of Arkansas leading the Republican side of the aisle.

If you were going to task two leaders in this institution with crafting the kind of budget that I talked about from the well earlier, Mr. Speaker, a budget that would protect Social Security, protect Medicare, protect Medicaid, a budget that would lay out priorities for America, talk about where it is that we want to see our children and our grandchildren go in the 21st century, those are the two leaders who could have brought us together for the first time in a long time around a unified vision.

But, instead, the order came down from on high, Mr. Speaker. There was to be no budget. I assume that is true. We have considered absolutely no budget in the so-called Budget Committee. We have had no budget markup in the Budget Committee. We have had no discussions of budget in the Budget Committee.

Instead, what we have before us today is a bill that is sometimes referred to as a caps deal. You have heard ``caps deal'' before, Mr. Speaker.

It is those times in years past where we have taken what are those discretionary caps, those limits on how much Federal money we can spend, and we have adjusted those so that we can invest in some shared priorities on the one hand while reducing spending in some other, lower priority places.

We have done that in a bipartisan way not once, not twice, but three times. We could have been here today, Mr. Speaker, for a fourth time.

If we are not going to actually do a budget, we still could have been here on a caps deal. But this is not a caps deal. This is not a caps bill that had input from Republicans in the House. This is not a caps deal that had consultation with the Senate. This is not a caps deal that has been done in bipartisanship with the White House.

This is a caps deal that is just a deal among warring factions of a divided Democratic Caucus, and that bill has come to the floor today-- again, a bill that will not be considered in the Senate and a bill that will not be signed by the President.

We can normalize partisan failure in this institution, Mr. Speaker. We can. We can also normalize bipartisan cooperation.

I don't fault the other side for the struggles that are, inevitably, going to happen when a new majority takes over in the U.S. House of Representatives. Leading is a very difficult, difficult thing to do.

But, at the end of the day, the majority is tasked with doing exactly that--leading. The Budget Committee should produce a budget. The United States of America should have a budget.

It is not easy to do. It is not easy to pass this House floor. It is not easy to pass through a committee. But it is what the law requires us to do; it is what we have the right leaders on the Budget Committee to do; and it is what every single Member in this institution knows in their heart that we should do.

Mr. Speaker, I urge defeat of this rule, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to respond to my friend from New York, but I just have too many speakers who have come down to the House floor today to speak about this.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Cole), a member of the Rules Committee, our ranking member on the Rules Committee, a member of the Appropriations Committee, and one of the most thoughtful Members of the Republican Conference.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds just to say that my friend's criticisms of the Trump budget are perfectly legitimate. What he failed to mention, though, is the reason he can make those criticisms is because the law required the administration to offer a budget, and it did. The law also requires this House to offer a budget, and we have not.

We are better than that. This is not an Article II responsibility. This is an Article I responsibility, and we will rue the day that we decided that we would rather talk about what Article II was doing instead of doing the work ourselves here at Article I.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Meuser), a new Member of this institution and a member of the Budget Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Rules Committee.

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

My friend from New York is right: They did make a number of amendments in order, but not enough amendments to solve some underlying problems.

One amendment they didn't make in order was an amendment to provide disaster funding to so many of our communities that have been waiting on disaster funding--not for a day, not for a week, not for a month, but, now, into the new year.

If we defeat the previous question today, we can correct that injustice, and I will bring up an amendment to the rule to make this disaster funding possible. It is critically important.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Austin Scott) to talk about that, one of the greatest advocates for that language here in the House.

Mr. Speaker, as we have heard so often on the House floor, hopeful wishes are not enough for our constituents. We need to deliver results.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Dunn), who has been working hard in that direction.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time, and I would say to my friend from New York, we do not have any further speakers remaining, so if he would like to get this show on the road, I am prepared to close if he is.

Mr. Speaker, I have great respect for my friend from New York on the Rules Committee, and I really do enjoy serving with him on the Budget Committee.

It is neat to be on the Budget Committee as a freshman because you are working with the biggest issues that we have in this country. We all care about healthcare and how it gets implemented, but we can't implement it if we can't pay for it, so the Budget Committee grapples with those issues.

We all want our seniors to be protected. They have been paying into Medicare and Social Security their entire lives, but we know those programs are headed toward bankruptcy. We can't solve those problems except in the overarching look of a Federal budget process. It is what the law requires.

We get to talk about those big ideas. We get to think those big thoughts. We get to come together to make big and, yes, Mr. Speaker, difficult decisions.

President Trump, in his budget, made difficult decisions. I dare say I could go Member to Member in this Chamber and find 435 people out of 435 who would find at least one flaw in the President's budget. I bet I could.

It is hard to write a budget for the United States of America, but the law requires that we do it. More importantly, even if the law didn't require that we do it, Mr. Speaker, we know that we should. We know the Constitution lays out that responsibility, the power of the purse, for the House. We have constituted an entire committee called the Budget Committee.

I don't want to wow you, Mr. Speaker, with my eloquence, but do you know what the responsibility of the Budget Committee is? It only has one: write the budget.

For years, there was a time when the Senate was not taking up budgets in its Budget Committee. I wondered why they didn't disband the Budget Committee because the only job the Budget Committee has is to write the budget.

We know we need to do that together. We know we do, but we are not.

The second bill this rule makes in order is the government takeover of the internet bill. Again, if you think the internet is broken and the benevolent hand of government can fix it, this is the bill for you. If you think the internet is not broken and perhaps government ought to stay where government is, and the freedom of the internet should continue, this is not the bill for you.

We need to defeat both of these bills, and we need to defeat the rule.

I do want to point out, for the Rules Committee, we were working just beyond those doors last night, Mr. Speaker, and I think the Rules Committee did the best it could with the material that it had to work with. I see the staff director of the Rules Committee sitting over there. He has a tough job.

I think the chairman did the best he could. You cannot solve the problem of a flawed, partisan committee process with the inclusion of amendments in the Rules Committee. You just can't do it. But they tried as hard as they possibly could, making in order as many amendments as they could to try to satisfy as many concerns as they could.

The problem is not the Rules Committee, Mr. Speaker. That is not why we need to defeat the rules today. The problem is the leadership decision that has been made to bring up these two flawed products that were created in a partisan way when we could have brought to the floor two positive products created in a collaborative way.

We have to make a decision in this Chamber. Either we are in the business of making a point or we are in the business of making a difference. So far, the first 4 months of this year, we have been great at making a point, but we have been struggling to make a difference.

Like it or not, we have a Senate that has to pass this legislation and a President who has to sign it if we are to make it the law of the land. The two products today fail that test.

Let's not waste another moment on them, Mr. Speaker, not another moment. Let's reject this rule. Let's not bring these two pieces of legislation to the floor. Let's go back to the drawing board collaboratively, as we know we can. Lock any bipartisan group of Members into a room together, Mr. Speaker, and they will craft a better solution. We have the right leaders in this Chamber for this time. We just need to free them up to lead.

Defeat this rule. Defeat the previous question.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I took my colleague by surprise here. We just came down from a Rules Committee meeting, and I appreciate her yielding me the time.

Mr. Speaker, if you didn't have the pleasure of serving with Louise on the Rules Committee, it looks kind of strange to have the Louise and Bob Slaughter Post Office.

I have been here only 8 years, but I can't recall us doing that after a couple out here. Perhaps it is done regularly, but to serve with Louise--you know, the Rules Committee, Mr. Speaker, goes into the wee hours of the morning; 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m., the Rules Committee is working, and it is truly Louise and Bob Slaughter.

Since my first day on the Rules Committee back in 2011, Louise took me under her wing. Yes, I was a young conservative Republican. Yes, she was an older--we can say, I think, honestly--liberal Democrat. She began building those partnerships with the young members of the Rules Committee with each and every committee meeting that took place.

I don't know if she was the first one who said it to me, but she was certainly one of them. She said: You know, Rob, of your colleagues on the other side of the aisle, folks sometimes think that we are upset with each other and we are bad people.

She said: I always tell folks, it is not that the people on the other side of the aisle are bad people. They are really good people. They just have some bad ideas.

She would share that with me from time to time, that my ideas were amongst those bad ideas. Her picture hangs right across from my seat there today.

There are so many men and women in America, Mr. Speaker, who are worthy of celebration, and it seems like we always make time to talk about those things that tear us apart, and we just don't make enough time to talk about those things that bring us together.

Louise was a strident, a fighter for her beliefs, as is any man or woman in this institution, but she never missed a moment to try to bring people together instead of pushing people further apart.

This is a wonderful gesture that the committee is moving forward today.

I hope that all of my colleagues will find, amongst their very busy Tuesday, time to sit back and reflect that they have an opportunity to be a uniter or to be a divider. It doesn't mean you trade away one iota of who you are and what you believe. It is just how do you tell that story, and how do you go about persuading your colleagues that it is true.

Louise gave us a wonderful example every single day of her decade upon decade of service in this institution, and I am honored to have sat across the aisle from her there in the Rules Committee.

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

Mr. Speaker, when I see someone of your stature come to the chair, I think: We must be down here to debate some serious American public policy. We must be down here to change the law in ways that can only happen once in a generation when people come together to make things happen.

I don't know what they told you when you came to the chair this morning, but let me be the first to tell you that is not at all why we are here today. What we are here to say today is important, that the American people have a vested interest in confidence in our democracy. That is a value shared from the furthest side of the left to the furthest side of the right. But the resolution we have here before us today is just a restatement of current law.

Sometimes I think, Mr. Speaker, that we undermine faith in the democracy when we try to pretend that division exists where division does not, where we try to pretend that we are doing great things when, in fact, we are not.

This is an opportunity today to speak with a voice in Congress that says the special counsel should release the report. But let me be clear, because we sometimes do more harm than good, that is going to be the headline: ``House Votes for Special Counsel to Release Report.'' That is not actually what the resolution says, and I want to guide you.

If you have a copy, Mr. Speaker, you can go back through it. It is not going to be on page 1. It is not going to be on pages 2, 3, 4, or 5. The real substance of the resolution is back on the bottom of page 5, early on page 6. It says, ``to the extent permitted by law.''

As you know from your legal background, Mr. Speaker, the law does not allow the special counsel to release so many things. Grand jury testimony, for example, nowhere in the country is grand jury testimony disclosed. Those facts are gathered, but that is never disclosed. Intelligence sources and methods, that is never disclosed, nor would anybody on the other side of the aisle suggest that it should be.

That is why, in the resolution drafted by the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, it says specifically that these things need not be released because it is prohibited by law. I only make that point, Mr. Speaker, because sometimes the headlines are all we read when they come through on our Twitter feed. Sometimes we believe the headline tells the whole story.

I want to make it clear that there is unanimity in this Chamber that transparency is valuable in our Republic. But it is also true that this is a nation of laws. The reason the special counsel exists is because we are a nation of laws, and the substance of the special counsel's report is going to be governed by those laws. To the extent allowable by law, our Attorney General has already said he wants to make the entire thing available.

I don't know how you want to characterize the resolution today, Mr. Speaker, whether you want to characterize it as an insistence of the House on how the administration should behave or just a big attaboy to our new Attorney General to say: You are doing a great job, and we are behind you 100 percent in what you have already promised the American people you were going to do.

However you characterize that resolution--we heard it in the Rules Committee, as my friend from California suggested--it is coming to the floor today under a closed rule. So if anybody has any additional changes they want to make, those changes will not be permitted. This is a take-it-or-leave-it resolution from the Rules Committee today.

But as a restatement of current law, it is quite clear. Again, you have to go all the way to the back of the resolution to find those 10 lines of substance. But when you get there, you will find these are already things the Attorney General has agreed to, and all Americans should be pleased about that outcome.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 7 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), a senior member on the Rules Committee and a subcommittee ranking member on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to ask my friend from Rhode Island before he leaves the floor: The bill that he introduced, was that also a House resolution or was that an H.R. to insist on the revealing?

I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Rhode Island introducing the bill.

And I think that is an important distinction, Mr. Speaker, and that is what you have heard, largely. You heard it in the Rules Committee; you have heard it down here on the floor, that: Listen, there are lots of things that we could be doing here, and if we wanted to pass a law that insisted that the entire report was released--those parts that are prohibited from being released under current law and those parts that are intended to be released under current law--we could do that. That is just not what we are doing.

What we are doing is saying: Hey, do you know what current law is? Follow current law. Follow current law. We, the House of Representatives, have thought about it, and in our deliberative wisdom, we are prepared to announce that we believe current law should be followed--Signed, U.S. House of Representatives.

There are those who would have you believe this is something more than that. It is not. There is nothing wrong with what we are doing today except that it is not a particularly valuable use of time.

When I opened, Mr. Speaker, you were not in the chair, but I mentioned that I think we do great damage to trust in our Republic when we seek division instead of highlighting our unity. To suggest that we are down here doing something to protect our Republic from its inevitable demise is just ridiculous. No such thing is happening here on the floor today. All that is happening on the floor today is saying that we, the duly-elected Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, believe U.S. law should be followed.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I am looking for something to disagree with my friend from Vermont about. I don't disagree with him about anything at all. I thought that was a very thoughtful presentation.

The only thing I would point out is the reason that he doesn't know what is in the Mueller report and the American people don't know what is in the Mueller report, is because as of today, there is no Mueller report. That is the only reason we don't know what is in it. It hasn't been released yet.

I don't mean released to the public. I mean, Mueller hasn't written it and handed it to the Attorney General yet, and so we don't know. When that happens, let me tell you what the Attorney General has said, Mr. Speaker. The Attorney General has committed to being transparent with Congress and the public consistent with the rules and the law. I don't think we would ask anything different of him.

The Attorney General has committed to providing as much information as he can consistent with current regulations. I don't think we would ask anything different of him than that, and, certainly, this resolution does not ask anything different of him other than that.

He says that his objective and goal is to get as much information as he can to the public. That is exactly what this resolution asks for; exactly what he has already committed to. And he says, ``I feel like I'm in a position in life where I can do the right thing and not really care about the consequences. I can be truly independent.''

Well, that doesn't just mean truly independent from pressure put on him from the White House. It also means truly independent from statements of opinion sent to him by the U.S. House. He is going to do the right thing, as allowed by the law and resolutions. If he doesn't, this House can act and try to push a different outcome.

Just understand that that is not what this resolution does today. It is simply a statement of fact. To my friend from California, there are those Members of Congress that sometimes they speak and you just want to get out your sharp stick, Mr. Speaker, and poke them a little bit harder. They don't calm you down. They rile you up. My friend from California is one of those folks whose thoughtful words always recenter me and remind me what we have together.

He is right about the hyperbole, and I don't want to mischaracterize this resolution. It does do one thing that is not available in current law today, and that is, that it makes the official position of the United States House known. I have always presumed that the Attorney General would follow the law. This resolution says we expect the Attorney General to follow the law.

It is not that it does nothing. It is just that it does something so very little, perhaps our time would be better spent elsewhere, but I support the underlying premise.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I tell my friend, I do not have any speakers remaining at this point, so I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I hope folks pay attention to some of those things that have brought folks together today, and I hope folks pay attention to some of those things that haven't brought us together today.

We have talked about whether there has been overstatement and hyperbole, whether it comes from that end of Pennsylvania Avenue or this end of Pennsylvania Avenue. None of us are advantaged by that. It breeds more distrust in the American public, and breeds more distrust in this institution.

We have talked about who is to blame within the administration. Of course, there is news today of Paul Manafort's sentence, not for anything related to the election, but for things related to his private business practices. There will be efforts to conflate those two investigations. Those are two different investigations, and I think the American people are disadvantaged if they are led to believe that those sentences are related to the election of the President of the United States.

But what you have heard is a lot of unanimity, as you would expect, that we are a Nation of laws and the rule of law should be followed, and transparency should be our touchstone, and the American People, the boss of each and every one of us, whether we work on that end of Pennsylvania Avenue or this end of Pennsylvania Avenue, have a right to know what their tax dollars have paid for and what their government is up to.

I find that very encouraging that we have that sense of agreement here today, Mr. Speaker. What is noticeably absent in this resolution is the dramatic overreach that I think has characterized most of the work we have done so far in 2019. Things that could have been partnership issues have been pushed further and further out to the edge of the political continuum that they became partisan issues.

This resolution does not make those mistakes of the past, and to my friend from California's point, these things are done incrementally. Trust is built incrementally; relationships grow incrementally; and success happens incrementally.

It is my great hope, Mr. Speaker, that those things that unite us, transparency, rule of law, trust in and of the American people will begin today to flourish in ways, perhaps, those common themes have not thus far. And both parties play a role in that disappointing outcome. But success has to begin on one day, Mr. Speaker. Perhaps success begins today.

I serve on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. There is no such thing as a Republican road or a Democratic bridge. There is no such thing as sitting in traffic on a Democratic highway or missing your child's soccer game because of malfunctions on a Republican road. We are all in this together.

I do not plan to offer a previous question today, Mr. Speaker, because this isn't one of those issues that dramatically divides us. My friend suggested in the Rules Committee we passed this out in, I think, our first voice vote of the year out of the Rules Committee, and I intend to do exactly that today.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend from California for yielding the time and leading the debate today, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Chairman, I thank my friend from Georgia for yielding me the time.

It is tough to get up and speak after the Federalist Papers have been referenced because they do go to the core of who we are. So does election integrity.

I look around, and I see my friends from the other side of the aisle, along with friends on my side of the aisle, and election integrity is a shared value. So you would think that the solution to election integrity challenges would be a shared solution.

But if I go to my friends on the Republican side of the House Administration Committee, the only one of the 10 committees this bill was referred to that marked it up, I will find that not one Republican was consulted on the drafting of this language.

Mr. Chairman, you have heard my colleagues talk about the wholesale changes to election law--State election law--across this country. You would think, Mr. Chairman, that we would have talked to all 50 secretaries of state. That wouldn't be true.

Maybe you would think we would have consulted with 25 secretaries of state. It wouldn't be true. What would be true is, in the one committee that had the one markup on this bill, we consulted with one State election official.

Mr. Chairman, this is an opportunity for us to do something together. We can either take advantage of that opportunity or we can poison the well. How in the world can we promise the American people election integrity when one side is writing the rules?

It should be instructive to us all the way this bill has come to the floor, and it is yet another, Mr. Chairman, in a string of missed opportunities that we have had. I will give you just one example.

I made a motion last night in the Rules Committee to only bring this bill to the floor as it was marked up in committee. We have talked about a bill that is going to guarantee voter transparency. We don't even have legislative transparency on this bill. We couldn't get the bill brought to the floor from the one of the 10 committees that marked it up. We had manager's amendments added. We had the bill not as reported.

I offered another amendment last night. If it is so important that we legislate for the first time in American history that tax returns be released by elected officials--this bill includes let's release them at the Presidential level and let's release them at the Vice Presidential level--I offered an amendment to the rule to allow a vote on whether or not they should be considered at your level, Mr. Chairman. That amendment was denied on a partisan line.

Let's not make this a partisan issue; it is an American issue.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want you to know it flatters both me and the gentlewoman from California that you have made it your habit to be down here during Rules Committee time. It is good to know that you respect what we do upstairs as much as the members of the committee do.

I always enjoy coming down for the Rules Committee debate, because it is the only debate on all of Capitol Hill where the Reading Clerk reads every single word of the bill that we are about to consider. Ordinarily, we waive that, but the rules don't let you waive it. You have to read the rule so folks will understand what is happening today.

I happened to time the Reading Clerk today. I didn't put him up to anything special. He read as he always does. It took him 1 minute and 6 seconds to read the resolution that is before us.

I heard my friend from California talk about the important constitutional questions that are here before us today. I heard my friend from California equate our President to discredited despots around the globe and how we must stand up to prevent that behavior here in America. I heard my colleagues who took to the floor this morning for 1 minutes be sanctioned by the Chair and advised to cease engaging in arguments of personality and attacks against our President.

One minute and 6 seconds it took to read the resolution before us today, Mr. Speaker, and that is 1 minute and 6 seconds longer than this resolution has been considered in total in every committee throughout this Capitol.

I want to say that again. You heard my colleague talk about how critically important this resolution of disapproval is as it relates to our constitutional powers. You heard it described as a power grab equivalent to those of discredited despots. And we haven't talked about it at all in this Chamber. In committees, not one witness has testified.

One minute and 6 seconds is how much we have invested in these nationally important matters.

I listened, Mr. Speaker, as you cautioned Member after Member to cease engaging in personal attacks on the President during their 1 minutes this morning. Mr. Speaker, I am concerned that that is exactly what we are doing here today.

If you want to have a debate about Article I and Article II powers and how we ought to retrieve the power that has slid down Pennsylvania Avenue through administration after administration after administration, I am not just your willing partner, I am your enthusiastic partner and passionate advocate. But that is not the bill we have before us today. It is not the debate we are going to have today.

This is another in a long string of measures that have been brought to the floor of this House that could have been brought in a bipartisan way. I don't mean one Republican; I don't mean two Republicans; I mean the majority of Democrats and the majority of Republicans standing together to speak with one voice on behalf of the American people. But time and time again, we are missing that opportunity.

This isn't a constitutional issue today, Mr. Speaker, though you would not know that, because we have not had any witnesses testify. This is a legislative issue before us today.

There is, in fact, a National Emergencies Act that allows the President to do extraordinary things if he or she decides there is a national emergency. That is not unconstitutional. Congress passed the National Emergencies Act; the President signed the National Emergencies Act. Perhaps the Supreme Court one day will decide that was an unconstitutional delegation of power by the Congress, but the Congress delegated that power in the National Emergencies Act.

The way we talk about this issue, Mr. Speaker, you would think this is the first time you and I have seen this in the few years we have been in Congress. Of course, you and I know that is nonsense.

There are 31 other national emergency declarations in effect today-- 31 other national emergency declarations. National emergency declarations from the Obama administration are still active today.

If we are so concerned about Article I and Article II power grabs, perhaps these emergency declarations that have been on the books since the last administration, Congress should deal with those affirmatively here on the floor.

There are national emergency declarations still in effect from the Bush administration. There are national emergencies still in effect from the Clinton administration. Mr. Speaker, there are national emergencies still in effect from the Carter administration. This House has made not a single effort to draw back that power from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Those are legitimate questions. Those are important questions. Those are things that bring us together as the people's representatives in this House, not bills designed just to poke a stick at a President who has real passion and real conviction about issues of real importance.

Do you know what is in this resolution today, Mr. Speaker, what is in this disapproval resolution today, that will make a difference on the border in terms of ending human trafficking? Not one thing.

Do you know what is in this resolution today that, if we come together to pass, will make a difference in terms of drug trafficking on the border? Not one thing.

What about if we come together to pass this resolution today for the very serious issue of weapons trafficking across our border? Do you know what we will do today to fix that? Not one thing.

Victims of sexual assault as they are being trafficked into this country, do you know what we are going to do to fix that today? Not one thing.

Do you know how many Dreamers are going to have their hopes realized today with a pathway to permanency here in the United States of America? Not one.

Man, we are good at bringing issues that are designed to poke each other in the eye. We are so good at bringing issues designed to try to embarrass one and boost another. But I have to tell you, Mr. Speaker, we are not so great with actually solving real problems.

For the first time in my congressional career just last Congress, Mr. Speaker, we brought a bill to the floor that would have provided permanency

for our Dreamers and that would have provided solutions on our border for human trafficking, for weapons trafficking, and for drug trafficking. You know how many Democratic votes we got on that bill, Mr. Speaker? Not one.

Now, to be fair, it wasn't one bill; it was two bills. Folks said, hey, if this one is not the right one, let's bring another one. Maybe this is going to bring people together.

Do you know how many votes we got on the second bill, Mr. Speaker, from the other side of the aisle? Not one. The only bills that have come to the floor to provide a pathway for Dreamers in my 8 years in Congress, and we got not one vote from the other side the aisle.

Is that because the other side of the aisle doesn't believe in those solutions? No, that is not why. It is because the other side of the aisle, in its wisdom, deemed that to be a resolution not designed to support the Dreamers, but designed to divide. I disagree with that conclusion, but that is the conclusion that was made. Thus, the only opportunity in a decade we have had to support Dreamers, not one Democrat stood up and said yes.

I call that a failed opportunity, and I am not interested in figuring out who is to blame for that failed opportunity.

This is a failed opportunity today, too, Mr. Speaker. Sadly, it is another in a series of failed opportunities here in 2019.

I believe my colleagues are going to see through the divisiveness of this resolution, through the charade of constitutionalism right down to the very core of partisanism that underlies this resolution.

But just remember, 1 minute and 6 seconds, Mr. Speaker. Before I took to the microphone today, 1 minute and 6 seconds from the Reading Clerk is all the time this new Congress has dedicated to an issue that you are going to hear from my colleagues again and again is one of critical national importance, international importance, constitutional importance. How can those things be true?

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

Mr. Speaker, it is my great pleasure to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Brooks).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), a member of the Rules Committee.

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

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up the text of H.R. 962, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

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

Mr. Speaker, if we pass the resolution, as my friends on the other side of the aisle have presented it, we will save not one single life. If we defeat the previous question and move on to H.R. 962, we will, in fact, save lives.

Mr. Speaker, to speak to that issue, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Missouri (Mrs. Wagner), my friend and a great leader in our conference.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Cole), an appropriator and ranking member of the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Reed), a member of the class of 2010.

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

Mr. Speaker, you just heard an impassioned plea from my friends on the other side of the aisle about the important constitutional questions that are before us today, about how the President's emergency declaration violated those sacred constitutional principles.

Candidly, I don't know if my colleagues are right or not because we have not had one legal expert come to talk about the National Emergencies Act. Most of us were not in Congress when it passed several decades ago, but it is a delegation of authority from Congress to the executive.

You just heard my friend from New York come to the well and say, listen, we have been working in a bipartisan way to offer a bill to rein in those authorities. I think that is important work. I think that is work that we ought to all be able to agree on. We should be doing that work first.

I told you earlier, Mr. Speaker, the sum total of all of the time this institution has spent working on these important constitutional questions is the 1 minute and 6 seconds our Reading Clerk Josef spent reading us the resolution today.

We will vote on this rule today. We will vote on the underlying disapproval today, having never had the committees of jurisdiction hold even a single hearing.

Now, lest you think there is just no time in the calendar, this resolution is referred to the Transportation Committee on which I sit. In fact, I had to leave a Transportation Committee hearing in order to come up here to do the rule today.

We are working on the Green New Deal in the Transportation Committee today. We are working on electric vehicles and how to reduce carbon emissions across the country. Now, I am not saying that is not important work, but I have not heard one of my colleagues talk about the dearth of electric vehicles and how that is threatening the future of our land.

I have heard my colleagues talk about this important constitutional question that this disapproval brings before us, and, yet, there was not one hearing on it.

Now, lest you think, Mr. Speaker, that if we deal with this today, we won't deal with it again. No. We are going to have some hearings on this resolution. When? Later in the week after it passes.

Now, I don't know if that is a pattern that we are going to get into. I hope that it is not. Having had no hearings and no witnesses testify on this issue, we are going to have an Appropriation Subcommittee hearing later this week to talk about exactly these issues, where the money is coming from, what the impact of that is, and whether or not it is wise.

We are going to have a hearing later this week in the Judiciary Committee talking about the National Emergencies Act, and whether or not it permits this kind of activity, and what kind of changes ought to be made.

This resolution will have already been considered. This vote will have already been taken, but we will eventually get around to having thoughtful conversation about this.

Mr. Speaker, I close where I began. There is more that unites us as Americans than divides us. And even in politics, there is more that unites this institution than divides us. Making sure that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue only is exercising those authorities delegated to it by either the Constitution or this Congress, is a shared value.

But if you listen to the debate here on the floor, from the Speaker's chair, you had to caution our colleagues against engaging in attacks of personality against the President. We heard debate, not of thoughtful constitutional principles, but of hateful administration policies.

Mr. Speaker, I will tell my friends, I don't believe those words, those actions, or those efforts are going to bring us one bit closer to the shared values that we have in this institution.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to reject the rule today and vote against the previous question so that we can bring up a bill that will save lives. This bill will save not one life; will prevent not one drug trafficker from coming into the country; will protect not one migrant family. It will do nothing, Mr. Speaker, to solve real problems that face this country.

If we defeat the previous question, we can at least take a commonsense step toward doing exactly that. Vote ``no'' on this rule, vote ``no'' on the previous question, and let's commit ourselves to finding a way to come together.

If you believe there is more that divides us than unites us, these first 45 days of this session have been just perfect for you. But if you believe, as I do, that we can do better, let today be the end of the partisan attacks. Let today be the end of bringing bills to the floor designed to make a point instead of make a difference, and let's make tomorrow better.

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.

Madam Speaker, I don't know if you have ever tuned in the Rules Committee when my chairman and my ranking member up there are having a conversation. You get a very different look at what goes on in Congress then, because it is not everybody poking each other with sharp sticks. It is thoughtful, deliberate public servants who are really very close to finding a common way forward that is going to make all Americans proud.

That is my frustration with this resolution today and why I hope my colleagues will reject it.

My friend from Massachusetts, the chairman of the Rules Committee, is working very hard to open up the Rules Committee, add more voices, bring more of a constructive process to the House of Representatives. I admire him for it. I appreciate his effort, and I support him every step of the way.

But we are in some bad habits here on the floor of the House, and we are in the habit of finding ways to make important distinctions instead of making important agreements.

My friend from Massachusetts said just a few moments ago that not to do this resolution is to do nothing, and that is a false choice. There is unanimity on the floor of this House that we must stand up for Article I, that we must stand up against an overreaching Article II executive branch, that we must speak with one voice on issues of international affairs.

Instead of bringing a bill to the floor that would have brought us together so that we do speak with one voice on behalf of 330 million Americans, we are bringing a bill to the floor that is going to pass on a largely party-line vote. We have done that time and time again in these first 45 days.

We did that with veteran housing last week. We took a bill that passed unanimously in the last Congress to both provide childcare for our veterans and pay for that childcare and, instead, this year, we brought it back where we are going to have to cut some veteran accounts in order to fund that childcare going forward. It made that motion to recommit a party-line vote.

We did that with recognition of Federal employees, Madam Speaker, where we are trying to recognize their service and their sacrifice. Instead of bringing a bill that we would have agreed on unanimously, we brought a bill that divided this institution and made us speak with two voices.

This is another missed opportunity today. My friend from Massachusetts doesn't have control over this entire institution. He can't work his will on this entire institution. He is doing what he can on the House Rules Committee to open up the process and lead to a better product.

Flawed processes produce flawed products. Divided bills on the floor of this House do nothing to unify a divided nation.

We have opportunities. There are plenty of things on which we disagree. When we have things like this on which we agree, I think we need to work harder, Madam Speaker, to bring ourselves together, put our divisions behind us, rather than highlight those divisions in the name of political gain.

This could have been a unifying moment, not just for this Congress, but for the global political entirety as they see America speak with one voice to say, when troops are in harm's way, the United States Congress, not Article II, controls that destiny. I hope we will get to that point sooner rather than later. We only get so many chances, and each time we waste one, it becomes harder.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and I want to thank my friend from New York for yielding me the customary 30 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I am not going to have the opportunity very often, so I want to make sure I do it while the gentleman and I are together today to tell him I agree with absolutely everything Mr. Morelle had to say. It doesn't happen very often on the Rules Committee.

If you are ever having a good day and you need to bring some discord into your life, I want you to head upstairs to the third floor, where there is a 9-to-4 majority-minority distribution, and you can find discord up there every day of the week. It doesn't matter whether it is Republicans leading the institution or Democrats leading the institution.

Last night, we had a chance to come together and talk about something that unites us all; but I oppose the rule today, Mr. Speaker, because this is a bill that passed the Congress last year, and when we passed it last year, we passed it unanimously through the Veterans' Affairs Committee. All the Republicans and all the Democrats voted ``yes.'' Then we brought it to the House floor, and we passed it unanimously here on a voice vote.

But the difference between the bill we have before us today and the bill we had before us last year is that, when we made new promises to our veterans for much-needed benefits last year, we went and we found ways to pay for those promises--not controversial ways, not divisive ways, but ways that we agreed to unanimously at the committee and the full House level. When the bill reappeared this year, those pay-fors were miraculously absent.

I am concerned about that for two reasons, Mr. Speaker, and I think this body should reject this rule and give us a chance to improve this bill. We tried to improve it with an amendment last night, and the amendment was nongermane.

For folks who are new to the institution, understand that, if the committee that sends the bill to the House floor decides they are not going to pay for it, then any effort to try to pay for it is nongermane. So, once a committee sends a bill that is flawed to the Rules Committee, unless there is a waiver of the House rules to allow a pay-for amendment, pay-for amendments are not in order.

So what happens is we are making a new commitment of about $120 million to our veterans, a wonderful commitment.

Again, I agree with absolutely everything the gentleman from New York had to say. His heart for veterans is pure, and his words were true.

But that $120 million commitment we are making, Mr. Speaker, gets folded into the Veterans' Affairs budget that we don't increase by one penny, which means we now have to go cut $120 million worth of other veterans' benefits in order to pay for this veterans' benefit.

That is not what anybody on this floor wants to do. In the Budget Committee today, we were talking about the caps, talking about how to deal with caps. Nobody wants to dip into the already promised benefits that we have made to American veterans.

But the mystery to me is that, in this Chamber that America perceives as being so divided, in this town that America perceives as being so broken, we came together last year, unanimously, to do it the right way; and with new House leadership this year, Mr. Speaker, we have instead chosen to do it the easy way.

I think our veterans deserve better, but, more importantly, I know the Members of this institution can do better. We have, and we can again.

I hope my friends will reject this rule and give us a chance to go back, pay for this, make sure there are not unintended consequences of cutting other veterans' benefits that every man and woman in this Chamber supports.

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

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

It is not like me to correct the Chair because he serves the entire House, but, I will tell you, it is entirely possible that Mr. Morelle and I could yield each other time back and forth today. That is the nature of this institution's support for veterans.

And, I have to tell you, that is what hurts me the most about the way this bill has come to the floor. My friend is exactly right, Mr. Speaker, when he says that the CBO says this: There is no direct spending in this bill at all.

I just want you to think through that with me. We are promising veterans new benefits that cost money, and the scorekeeping institution of the United States House of Representatives says this bill will cost nothing.

Now, why is that true? It is true because there are other laws on the books, the budget caps that are on the books that say: If you add one penny of veterans funding in this category, you have got to cut a penny from this category.

When we did this bill last year, we all recognized that. I am not telling anybody anything they don't already know, and it pains me to see the defense of this bill as ``we didn't have to,'' ``they didn't make us,'' ``it is not required.'' All of those arguments were true last year, too. They didn't make us. We don't have to. It is not required.

It is just the right thing to do. And we came together, and we did it.

You have a different vantage point of this Chamber, Mr. Speaker, than I do. From your chair, it may look like that bipartisanship breaks out across this Chamber in mass quantities every day of the week, but, from my position behind this podium, we don't find that many things that both spend money and save money, those things that make new promises while revising old promises that weren't working as well, those things that make promises today but pay for them today instead of passing the bill on to our children and grandchildren.

And we did that together last year. We did it together. How can folks forget? Yes, we have lots of new freshmen in this Chamber, but we came together last year, unanimously, to do this bill right, to tell veterans: We do want to serve you better; we are going to create a new benefit; and we are not going to force cuts to other benefits as a result.

I am not going to give up on bipartisanship breaking out in this Chamber again and again and again, and I am certainly not going to give up on the bipartisan commitment that we have to serving our veterans. There are only so many days in a year. There are only so many weeks in a Congress. We cannot waste them doing a halfway job when we could have done the job right.

In this case, it is not as if we don't have a roadmap of how to do the job right. We did it. It is not as if we thought about doing it; we voted unanimously together to do it.

Yet, in this new day, we have chosen a different path, an inferior path. I just challenge my colleagues, as Paul Ryan used to say: Raise your gaze. This is a good idea. This is a good programmatic policy. But we need to pay for it, not cut veterans' benefits in order to squeeze it in.

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

Mr. Speaker, I would welcome my friend to close, but, in the spirit of bipartisanship, I will be happy to begin that process.

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

It is a different job in the minority. The power that Mr. Morelle has to open this debate and close this debate, it lends credence to his words. As I stipulated at the beginning, everything he said was true. It is what he didn't say that we can do better on.

I will say this one more time because, again, for new Members of this Chamber, you may not understand how the Rules Committee works. If a committee does not pay for legislation, if a committee just makes promises and does not find a way to pay for it, it is not appropriate, under House rules, to then try to add a pay-for. It requires a waiver from the Rules Committee of House rules in order to include a pay-for in a bill that is not already paid for. We offered that amendment last night. It was rejected on a party-line vote in the Rules Committee. Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question today, we will offer a solution.

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

Mr. Speaker, the amendment that we will offer if the previous question is defeated would add the language that, by collecting fees on housing loans that would pay for this new childcare benefit so that we don't have to go deep into the Veterans' Affairs budget, cutting other benefits in order to pay for this, so we don't have to violate budget caps and borrow from our children and from our grandchildren, so that we can make promises to men and women who deserve and need this benefit and know that we have come together and done the heavy lifting to pay for it today.

I hope my friends will unite, as we did last year, in approving this funding language, unite in defeating the previous question, so that I can bring this amendment up and we can do this in the same honorable, bipartisan, collaborative way that we unanimously passed this very same language just a few short months ago.

I urge my friends: Know that we can do better.

Mr. Speaker, while I contemplated yielding back, I am going to reserve my time just in case there are any more speakers who have been affected by my words and want to come and join this effort that we have today. I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, it is troubling to me that we have those things that divide us, that permeate these conversations that could be uniting. Again, I don't think we have that many opportunities where we are able to come together as an entire institution unanimously to support legislation, so I deeply regret we have missed that opportunity.

I want to encourage my friends on the other side of the aisle not to fall under the same trap that I think Republicans fell into just 8 short years ago. Every single conversation we have now in the Rules Committee, the tax cuts come into it.

The fact that so many of my Democratic friends didn't want tax cuts for the American people isn't a mystery to me. I got not one Democratic vote on the entire bill. I get it. One team thought it was a good idea, one team didn't, but we cannot use that disagreement as an excuse not to do the very best that we can on each and every bill going forward.

I will give you that example from the Republicans experience. I was categorically opposed to the Federal takeover of healthcare that was the Affordable Care Act. I was categorically opposed to the way that small businesses lost options. And my friends that were promised they could keep their doctor and they could keep their plan, those promises were broken.

But I still came together with my Democratic friends on the floor to find additional dollars for veterans healthcare and plus-up those accounts, to find additional ways to serve veterans who had not been served through healthcare and plus-up those accounts. The fact that we disagree on really big important issues does not mean we cannot come together and do the very best that we can.

And with that in mind, I want to give credit where credit is due. I have talked a lot about how we unanimously passed this bill last Congress. It is true. We unanimously passed it out of committee, and we unanimously passed it on the floor of the House. But what that means is, it came to the floor of the House on the suspension calendar, which meant no amendments were made in order.

The way that my friends on the other side of the aisle have brought the bill up, amendments are made in order, and the Rules Committee made 21 different amendments in order. We passed the bill unanimously under our leadership, but there was not an opportunity to improve it.

My friends on the other side have chosen a different path that does allow an opportunity to improve it, but doesn't allow the opportunities that I am seeking to pay for it.

I don't have to demean my friends or their intentions because their intentions are pure, and they are thoughtful, honorable Members of this institution. The fact that we disagree about policy does not mean we have to disagree about the motives of one another. And when we have these opportunities to do not just good but better; not just good, but good in a way that we don't pass the bill on to our children and our grandchildren, we take care of that bill today.

I will close with this, Mr. Speaker. Again, I can't disagree with any of the words my friend from New York tells because the half of the story that he tells is absolutely true. This is an authorizing bill where we make a new promise to veterans.

If this bill passes the floor of the House today, it then goes to the Appropriations Committee to fulfill this promise that we all celebrate today, and the Appropriations Committee will have not one new penny to pay for this new promise.

We have all been in this business long enough to know what happens to promises that folks don't put any money behind and what happens to promises that don't get paid for. The law prevents the Appropriations Committee from funding this new promise, unless they cut dollars from existing veterans promises today.

This bill is doing all the right things for all the right reasons. Let's not make another veteran have to pay in a cut for what we are promising to one of his brothers or sisters in a new benefit.

Defeat the previous question; allow us to pay for this bill; and let's put our money where our hearts and our mouths are.

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland for yielding. I would like to pick up where my friend from Maryland left off. They don't deserve to be deified, but they don't deserve to be demonized either. That doesn't just apply to our Federal workforce. That applies to so many elements of our conversation today.

I hope you have a chance, Mr. Speaker, to go watch the Rules Committee debate last night on this rule. You might have thought that, with a simple two-page resolution such as this one, we might have been up and out in about 10 minutes, making three amendments in order.

But, no, we spent the better part of almost 3 hours there talking with the committee experts on the issue, Mr. Connolly from Virginia and Mr. Meadows from North Carolina. You would be affected by the amount of agreement that those two gentlemen had.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I don't want to say you would be surprised, because you might know those two gentlemen as I do, you might know this issue as I do, and you might know its bipartisan roots and its bipartisan future as I do.

But if you don't watch that hearing, if you don't know the issue, if all you do is see a bill that was dropped in the hopper just a couple of days ago, has had no markup in committee, has had no hearings, has had no witnesses, and has had no dialogue whatsoever on it, but happened to be dropped in the middle of the week where some of the more cynical among us expected us to still be in a government shutdown before the President brought us out of it, this might just look like a messaging statement to folks who view it through that lens.

It is so frustrating and disappointing to me because this is an issue on which we agree. My friend from Oklahoma, an appropriator, happens to be the ranking member up on the Rules Committee. In testimony last night, we are talking about not an insignificant amount of money in this bill; we are talking about not millions with an M, we are talking about billions with a B of dollars going out the door.

The question is: Where do the dollars come from?

The answer is: They are just going to come from other accounts these agencies already have.

I don't know what other account that is, and I think that is worth having a conversation about.

If you read through this language, Mr. Speaker, you will see no effort whatsoever to do what every single one of us knows needs to be done, and that is to find those Federal employees who make us proud at agencies every single day, reward that service, protect that service, encourage that service, and make sure retention plans are in place for those employees. There is not a line in here to target those high performers.

Equally, look through this legislation, Mr. Speaker, to find those folks whom I know--because I hear it from my veterans in my district every day, and I hear it from the leadership in the VA every day--find those folks who just do not want to show up and serve. Somehow they got involved in Federal service. They are the exception, not the rule. They bring their colleagues in Federal service down instead of lifting them up. They bring the folks they are intended to serve down instead of lifting them up. There is no effort to identify those folks and no effort to reward the high performers while trying to train up the low performers. In true government fashion, it says that the definition of success is to treat absolutely everybody the same.

Mr. Speaker, there is no one else doing this work other than us. The problem in the civil service system isn't that we protect employees. That is laud worthy. That is a laudable goal. What the problem is in civil service is we are the only ones who do the oversight. There is no other board of directors. It is us.

Yet we bring a bill to the floor that we claim raises our Federal employees up and praises our Federal employees. We didn't even give it the dignity of a hearing or a markup. We can do better

than that, and candidly, I think we will.

We will never know what would have happened had we not gotten started on the foot we got started on in January as we did. I particularly regret that for our freshmen who are trying to figure out what the tone and tenor is of this place. This isn't it. Apparently, Republicans got us in bad habits in the last session of just dropping bills in the hopper and bringing them to the floor the next day, no hearings, no markup. It was wrong then, and it is not wise now either.

We have a lot of choices to make going forward, Mr. Speaker.

Are we poisoning the well, or are we protecting it?

Are we tilling the fields, or are we spreading salt in them?

We don't need to deify our ideological opponents, but we don't need to demonize them either. There is more that unites this country than divides this country, Mr. Speaker. Our Federal employees do deserve our trust, our appreciation, and, yes, a paycheck at the end of the week for the work they have done on our behalf.

They also deserve a way to be recognized when they go above and beyond. They also deserve to know that folks on their team who are not up to the task today are either going to be trained up or moved out.

We can do those things together. For reasons that are not clear to me, we have not chosen to try. This could have been a bipartisan effort. This could have been part of a larger package, and it wasn't. I regret that.

I will tell my friend from Maryland I did not bring any additional speakers with me who would have shared that very same message, so when he is prepared to close as am I.

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

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

I am always affected by the words of the gentlewoman from Texas, but my answer is clear: No, everybody doesn't

deserve a pay raise all the time; it is true on my staff, it is true in my life, it is true in every private-sector company in the country, and it is true in the Federal Government too.

Now we won't be able to have that conversation because there was no hearing on this bill. We won't be able to improve that circumstance because this bill doesn't try to expand itself to that scope.

We are in a new age. I won't be able to close this debate, Mr. Speaker. My friend from Maryland will be able to close as is the privilege of the majority.

The other privilege of the majority is titling the bills as they are coming to the floor. This is the Federal Civilian Workforce Pay Raise Fairness Act, and the definition of fairness in this case is that civilian workers be treated the same as military workers as it relates to a cost-of-living increase. That is worthy of debate.

I know many of my friends who represent the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area that have so many civilian Federal workers believe in that equity issue deeply and passionately and have worked to protect it over a long number of years. In the State of Georgia, we have many DOD employees, folks whose tempo changes regularly, folks who are called on with increasing frequency, folks who ask: Where shall I go when you send me?

That is qualitatively different service.

Should it be treated differently? Again, this is not the right place for that conversation. This is a debate on a rule about whether or not we will bring up a bill that the folks on the other side of the aisle absolutely have the votes to pass if they want to pass it.

In fact, it is language in the bill that we could absolutely move in a bipartisan way if we had it in the conversations. It is language that could have absolutely been part of the negotiations to end the government shutdown since this was a decision that the President made back in December of last year not to institute the 2.1. If folks had gone to the negotiating table, if folks had negotiated in good faith, if folks had said that this is what we need, and this is what we think is important, then we could have solved this long before now.

But this bill was dropped just days ago, again, with no hearing and no markups, and here it is before us.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment in the Record, as well as add any extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I intend to bring up a very simple amendment that would address just one of the questions that we would have addressed if we considered this issue important enough to have the committee of jurisdiction actually gather and hold a hearing on it; and that is the question of those who are delinquent in their taxes: those folks who have an outstanding tax bill, who have not tried to enter into a negotiated settlement, those who are not in a payment plan, but those who simply are not paying their Federal taxes, that they not be a part of this pay increase.

My constituents work hard every day of the week. They expect us to be doing the oversight. They expect us to be doing performance reviews. They expect us to be looking at who is showing up and who is going the extra mile, rewarding those folks who are going the extra mile, training those folks up who are not, and not rewarding those folks who are falling well below the standards that each and every one of us expect as taxpayers and, candidly, even more so, each and every Federal employee expects of his or her colleagues.

I want good work to be recognized with good pay, Mr. Speaker, but what would be better than this bill is a comprehensive plan from the Committee on Oversight and Reform to reform the civil service system so that that is not an aspirational goal but an absolute certainty that the American people can count on.

The best thing we can do to respect our fellow employees, Mr. Speaker, is not to have a messaging bill come to the House of Representatives. The best thing we can do for our Federal employees is to make sure that the reputation that travels across the land is not one of underperformance but is one of overperformance.

We are the only ones who can deal with the issues of bad apples spoiling an entire barrel. We are the only ones who can do it. We owe it to every agency in this land to be their partner in getting that done. By defeating the previous question and including this amendment, we will take a small step in that direction.

Mr. Speaker, unless my friend is prepared to close, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, you have the benefit of being there in the chair where I used to get to stand from time to time to preside over these proceedings, and you know that feeling. You may be a partisan on the weekends when you are at a Democratic rally, but when you stand in that chair, you don't stand there as a Democrat. I didn't stand there as a Republican. You stand there as the representative of the entire U.S. House of Representatives to make sure we have a full, fair, and free debate. In fact, you have got a wonderful team there in the Parliamentarian's and the Clerk's Office to make sure that all goes unaffected from one leadership to the next.

In fact, we go back hundreds of years in terms of trying to honor the precedence and the practices that this Chamber has brought together. We do that because, when you govern this institution with that mantra of fair play, we get better results in the end: we spend less time arguing about the process; we spend more time working together on progress; and we get to where it is each and every one of our constituents wants us to go.

My friend from Maryland and I, we are in a tough trap here in January. Of all the things I thought we would be talking about down here as it affects a Federal employee pay increase, the President's conversations about his tax forms in a campaign 3 years ago wasn't one of them.

But somehow, because of the nature of discourse today, if you have a sharp stick with the President's name on it, you just kind of have to work that in whenever the debate gives you an opportunity. It never once brings us closer to solutions, but it apparently makes folks feel better from time to time, makes their constituents feel better from time to time.

We are going to have to ask ourselves sometime soon: Did we get elected to make a point or did we get elected to make a difference? I know what that answer is for me, and I want this, Mr. Speaker, to go down as a missed opportunity.

This could have been a bill that we spent our time on the floor talking through together, as Mr. Connolly and Mr. Meadows did just last night in the Rules Committee as representatives of the committee of jurisdiction on this issue, of all the things we have in common from coast to coast, from north to south, as it relates to honoring our Federal workforce and improving our Federal workforce.

And, for whatever reason, the leadership decision was made that we wouldn't do this in a partnership way, we wouldn't do this in a bipartisan way, we wouldn't do this in a full-throated legislative process way, but we would just craft this bill, drop it on the floor, and force a vote.

We can miss a couple of opportunities, Mr. Speaker, to come together. We have already missed a few in January. We can miss a few more. But I know my friend from Maryland shares my concern.

There is going to come a time--and it happened to Republicans, too-- where you miss one too many opportunities to work together and you poison that partnership well for weeks or months or, in worst case scenarios, even years to come.

America can't afford that, Mr. Speaker, and each and every one of us is better than that. We haven't found our stride yet. If we defeat this rule today, perhaps that will be a step in finding our stride. If we defeat the previous question and consider my amendment, that might be a step in finding our stride. Even in the absence of those eventualities, we still must commit ourselves to one another to find that stride moving forward.

It is to the disadvantage of every Federal employee in the Nation to make this conversation about the importance of the work they do look like an ``us'' against ``them.'' When it comes to folks who wear a flag on their shoulder, when it comes to folks who show up in service of their fellow man, there is no ``us'' and ``them''; there is just an ``us.'' Any opportunity we use to either distort that understanding or fail to recognize that understanding does violence to us all.

Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``no'' vote on this rule, a ``no'' vote on the previous question, 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.

Madam Speaker, I remember standing in your chair over these last couple of Congresses reading out that very same card at the end. Whether the Obama administration or the Trump administration, folks come down to the floor, they get caught up in the passions of the moment, and we do have opportunities to come together.

I had not planned on coming down. I was actually in the Cloakroom making some telephone calls, and I heard my colleague speaking. I heard her with sincerity implore the President to come to his senses, come to the negotiating table, and end this shutdown. Then I heard her with sincerity implore the leaders of the Senate to come to the negotiating table, to come to their senses, and to end this shutdown. Then in about an hour and a half, I will be down here leading the debate on the rule for the minority, and we will bring yet another of the exact same bills we have brought to the floor that have gone absolutely nowhere in an effort to reopen the government.

I would say to my friends that the secret to finding common ground isn't to ask everybody else to come to where you are standing. That is the new definition of compromise in this town. I have seen that, that gravitate in the five terms that I have been here.

The definition of compromise is: Well, why don't you agree with me?

The truth is the only movement I have seen in this debate over these last 32 days is the President this past weekend when he said: Do you know what? We have called on every single Member in every single Chamber to find a solution to the young men and women trapped in a DACA status, those families who come here with temporary protective status, and they are uncertain about their future--folks on both sides of the aisle have called for that--he said: Do you know what? Maybe we can broaden this debate, Madam Speaker. Maybe we can broaden the definition of what success looks like, and maybe we can break this logjam.

Madam Speaker, I would just say to my colleagues: I will come back down to the House floor as often as you all want me to come back down to the House floor, and we can do exactly the same thing every single day knowing we are going to get exactly the same result from the White House and the Senate. Or, we can try to do something different.

Candidly, my constituents didn't send me here to do the same thing over and over and over again with the same failed result. They sent me here to get success. They don't care if I win. They care if I succeed on their behalf. They don't care about Republican and Democratic priorities. They care about their family priorities.

And I have to believe--though I don't know all of my freshman colleagues as well as I would like--I have to believe that even with all the new Members in this institution there is still more that unites us than divides us in this country. I love that about this institution. I love that about the men and women who are here.

So, Madam Speaker, I ask this: Let's try to do a little more listening and a little less talking. Here in the rank and file, golly, I have to believe if I could pick out a few colleagues here, I am pretty sure that we could sit down at the table and solve this. I confess it is beyond our reach as we sit here today. This is a White House decision. This is a Mitch McConnell decision. And this is a Nancy Pelosi decision. We ought to all as rank-and-file Members be outraged when it does rise to that level because we lose control. Our constituents lose their voice.

I am encouraging my leadership to be as open and honest and to be as flexible and creative as they possibly can in finding a solution. Every single one of us bears responsibility in this Chamber of what is going on.

If Senate Democrats had let these appropriations bills move last fall, then we wouldn't be in this mess. If Republicans had passed a continuing resolution in December, we wouldn't be in this mess. There are 1,000 different decisionmaking points where we could have done things differently. We cannot change those, but we can change what is happening here today.

I tell my constituents back home: If you want to understand what is happening in Congress, listen to the 5 minutes in the morning, listen to the 1 minutes at noon, and find out if the folks who are coming to the floor are celebrating opportunities for success or simply condemning their colleagues for not being invested in solutions.

I believe in the men and women of this Chamber. I believe in the U.S. House of Representatives. I believe in self-governance in this Nation. Failing the American people, Madam Speaker, undermines that confidence. We have an opportunity to succeed, and I hope we will say yes to that opportunity.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend from Massachusetts for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I appreciated the first 60 seconds of his comments where he went through that kind of policy work and that kind of procedural work, the work that we do.

We are on opposite sides of this issue. The Rules Committee is the single most partisan committee on Capitol Hill, and, yet, we always find a way to come together and share the debate to move forward. But after that first 60 seconds of process, we went into 4 minutes of the President and accusations, one after another after another.

Now, I have only been in this institution for five terms, Mr. Speaker, but that is long enough to understand that there is only one way to turn a bill into a law, and that is if Congress proposes it, Congress passes it, and the President signs it. Now, my good friend from Massachusetts knows as well as I do the President has not vetoed one single spending bill that the Congress has sent to him. The government is not shut down because the President is rejecting bills that Congress has passed. The government is shut down because Congress hasn't passed a bill.

Mr. Speaker, if you would just listen to that opening statement, your blood pressure probably gets as high as mine does: failure after failure after failure, disappointment after disappointment after disappointment, embarrassing event after embarrassing event. I will remind my colleagues that we are where we are because we came together and passed more spending bills on time before the end of the fiscal year than any other Congress in 22 years.

Now, we could have gotten them all done. My Democratic friends in the Senate didn't want to move those along. They had perfectly legitimate policy reasons for doing that. I am not going to question their motives; I will question their wisdom.

We have got more done together than we ever have before, and we could build on that, I tell my friend. We could build on that or we could go into our corners, we could put on our jerseys, and we can throw accusations out as fast as we can invent them in our head. That is where we are.

It is the month of January, Mr. Speaker, the very first month of this new Congress. We have new leadership. It has been more than a decade since I have seen a face like yours in the Speaker's chair. We have spent 338 hours in this Chamber--338 hours in this Chamber--this month working on appropriations bills. Not one has gone to the President's desk for his consideration.

My friend from Massachusetts is right when he talks about pain in American families. My friend from Massachusetts is right when he talks about the expectations folks have of Congress and how we should do better. My friend from Massachusetts is right when he says that this is not what any one of us was sent here to do. We were sent here to solve problems.

I promise you, unless your family is different from mine, Mr. Speaker, unless your relationships are different from mine, I have never solved a problem in my family by telling my loved ones how much it is their fault, how much they need to change, how much they are on the wrong side of an issue and we are not going to do anything until they come around to my way of thinking. It hasn't been a particularly successful method for me.

Now, I look back over these last 33 days. The President sent the Vice President to Capitol Hill. He came with the OMB director, Mick Mulvaney.

He said: I told you what I needed to pass the bill. I told you what I needed and what I thought was important for America and for national security. But I will tell you what; I don't have to have exactly that. I can come off that. I can negotiate down from that. I can move away from that. Let's talk about what the other options may be.

No response.

The President this past weekend: I want to break this impasse; I want to find a way we can move forward; it is not about who wins. We all need to win as Americans. We all want to do better as Americans. I am going to offer to do something that no President has been able to do. I am going to offer to put into statute protection for the young men and women in the DACA program. I am going to offer to put into statute protections for those men and women in temporary protected status that has since expired. I am going to put that into statute for the first time.

As the press release is dated, Mr. Speaker, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi rejected that offer 7 minutes before it was made.

I am not saying that that is the right answer. I am not saying that that is the best we can do. I am not saying that is where the conversation ends. I am asking my friends: When does the conversation begin?

More than 300 hours we have spent talking amongst ourselves and produced nothing to go to the President's desk. Sadly, I know that this issue has elevated beyond where my friend from Massachusetts, even as chairman of the powerful Rules Committee--and it is the powerful Rules Committee, it can move absolutely any measure through this House, and the Rules Committee has been incredibly successful. The House is moving appropriations bills like nobody's business, Mr. Speaker, because when you are in the majority you can do that. You can do my way or the highway.

That is the way my friend described President Trump's attitude. I will just remind my friend that is actually what we have today in this bill. My ranking member asked if we could consider some amendments to this bill, and he was told no. My friend didn't say: Let's just come down here and have amendments willy-nilly. We will have a preprinting requirement, we will do what we call a modified open rule, just so some of our new Members can have their voices heard, their constituents' voices heard in some way.

The answer was no; straight party-line vote. All the Democrats said: no, we are not going to allow any other voices to be heard; and all the Republicans said: yes.

I don't fault my friend for that. That is not a personal slight of any kind, Mr. Speaker. The Rules Committee is the Speaker's committee. It does the work of the Speaker. As powerful and talented as my friend from Massachusetts is, it is his job to implement the Speaker's will. Now, to his credit, he has been very bold in terms of trying to open that committee up. He has been very bold in trying to make sure more voices have been heard. But we find ourselves trapped in this appropriations cycle. We haven't actually gotten to where my friend is going to be able to do his very best work. We are still trapped in trying to do the business of last year.

But my friend's pointing out that the President's my way or the highway--which is inaccurate--is not helpful. My pointing out that this bill is Speaker Pelosi's way or the highway may be accurate, but it still isn't helpful. We have got to have a conversation with one another. I can go down the list of the ways that the President has said he is willing to come to the table, but he is sitting at the table alone.

I am a vote counter, Mr. Speaker. I know how to count votes in this Chamber. I have no doubt that the rule that my friend from Massachusetts is proposing is going to pass this floor today. I have no doubt that the underlying appropriations bill is going to pass this floor. This rule includes something called martial law, Mr. Speaker, which means they can bring up anything they want to any time they want to, no preprinting, and no opportunity to review it, none of those activities that we would say bring out the very best in transparency here. If any of those bills come up, they are going to pass.

There is no confusion in this Chamber about who has the votes to win. The confusion in this Chamber is how it is we get from where we are to where our constituents want us to be and doing the same thing over and over and over again isn't going to get it done.

It is my first time carrying a rule in the minority, Mr. Speaker. I knew when I walked down here this morning my job was to lose. I don't mind losing.

But I do mind when the American people lose, and the American people are losing right now. There are no winners right now.

I know the men and women of this Chamber. There are some talented orators here. We can absolutely trade insults and accusations until the sun goes down. But there are some talented policymakers here, too. There are some talented negotiators here, too. As long as the President is sitting at that negotiating table alone, we are not going to get to a solution. But he doesn't have to be there alone. I appreciate his making the invitation, and I hope, as my friend from Massachusetts said, we will learn to take yes for an answer.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and I appreciate that admonition from the Chair.

I was looking aggressively at all the words my friend had to say for what that thing was that was going to break this logjam, what that thing was that was going to bring people together, what that olive branch was that he was extending to succeed where others had failed.

I heard that if we only come together and do it his way, that we could all just get along, and I have no doubt that that is true. That is not what a negotiation is. That is not the way this Chamber works.

We have got to send a bill to the President's desk. When the President starts vetoing bills, then start accusing the President of being the grit in the cog in this legislative wheel. We don't have agreement amongst ourselves.

We were up in the Rules Committee last night, Mr. Speaker, and one of my appropriator friends was celebrating the bills that were coming to the floor today and celebrating how pleased she was that so many of the pro-life provisions had been stripped out, celebrating that so many of the dollars that we would be sending overseas would no longer be encumbered by pro-life provisions, that folks would be able to use them in any way that they wanted.

Well, I have no doubt that she was pleased by those things, but we are not all pleased by those things, Mr. Speaker. This doesn't represent the compromise solution that everybody is on board with, as my friend would have you believe.

The financial services language in this bill, that never made it through conference. We couldn't agree, not amongst ourselves in the House and the Senate, not in a bicameral way.

My friend who is the ranking member of the Financial Services and General

Government Appropriations Subcommittee, Mr. Speaker, shared last night that there were 20 different pieces of bipartisan legislation that were in the original bill, 6 pieces of bipartisan legislation that had been signed off on by the then-ranking member and, now, chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee that we could have moved forward, that we could have made a difference--again, stripped out for reasons beyond my understanding.

This isn't complicated if folks are sincere about coming together around the table. It is impossible if folks would rather trade insults than solutions.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Mitchell), a friend who has been dedicated entirely to solutions in his short time in the House.

Mr. Speaker, I yield the gentleman from Michigan an additional 2 minutes.

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

Mr. Speaker, I wasn't kidding when I said I was looking for the olive branch in what my friend had to say. I genuinely believe, if you lock me and the gentleman from Massachusetts in a room together for 24, 48, maybe 72 or 96 hours, we could come to a solution and get us out of this box. But it does take sitting down with people that you trust to get a hard negotiation done.

I shared in the Rules Committee the other night, Mr. Speaker, and I will share with you today, the story of one of my constituents. His name is Doug Jenkins, and this is his story:

Jeanette Jenkins, age 76, of Lawrenceville, Georgia, passed away on Saturday, April 28, 2018. Jeanette was a member of Hebron Baptist Church for over 25 years and currently a member of First Baptist Church of Atlanta. Jeanette had a passion for serving in many capacities of the ministry, as a Sunday school teacher and volunteering in various activities. She was an avid reader and enjoyed sewing. She is survived by her loving husband of 57 years, Doug.

Jeanette didn't die of natural causes on April 28, Mr. Speaker. She was just running out to pick up some drugs at the drugstore. Her husband stayed at home. She was leaving the subdivision, waited for the light to turn green, and pulled out, when a van full of gentlemen who should not have been in this country, who were not in this country legally, ran that red light and killed her. She never recovered consciousness; died in the hospital later on that evening.

We can describe the President of the United States and his commitment to border security as a temper tantrum, but it is not true. We can describe the President of the United States and his commitment to border security as some sort of political fixation, but it is not true.

The stories that my friends tell about Federal employees missing paychecks, those are painful, those are hard, and we can do better. But the stories that each and every one of us have about members in our community who have lost loved ones, not for a week, not for 2 weeks, but forever, because we didn't do our job protecting American borders-- I want to do better.

I was pleased to see the President talk about agricultural visas and how he wanted to expand those programs. It is important to us in Georgia. I am excited about EB visas, trying to get more investment in this country. We need more. I come from a community of immigrants. America's history is founded in immigration, and our future is founded there, too.

But nobody else could have protected Jeanette Jenkins. Nobody. My local law enforcement can't do it. My governor can't do it. That responsibility falls to the national government and the national government alone. The President campaigned on it; the President was elected on it; and we have an opportunity to come together and do it.

I don't want to kick the can down the road for another year. I don't want to kick the can down the road for another decade. I don't want to have another Jenkins family come into my office and say: Rob, where were you? What did you do when you had an opportunity to make a difference?

I regret that we are in the box that we are in. It is a box of our own making. But we can get out of it, and we can make America better as a result of it. It doesn't have to be a lose-lose. It can be a win-win.

Nobody is winning today. Nobody has benefited by the shutdown today. I cannot negotiate by myself. The President cannot negotiate by himself. We need folks to say ``yes'' to the invitation. Take the gentleman from Michigan's advice: Ask your leadership, as we have asked ours, to lock yourself in that room together and don't come out until you have an answer.

My friend from Massachusetts says he has no preexisting stipulations about what the package has to look like. I hope that is true. It has not been my experience--stripping out all the pro-life provisions, for example. That was something that your conference wanted. Not working on the CFPB provisions that the Financial Services Committee had done, not including those 20 bipartisan bills, there are conditions that folks have, as they should, because they were elected to this House, and they are obligated to serve their constituents.

We can get this done, Mr. Speaker, but I commit to you, we are not going to get it done by pointing the finger of blame at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We are going to get it done by coming together right here and doing our job, the task the Constitution assigns to us, and, that is, agreeing on a provision amongst ourselves and sending it to the President for him to accept or to reject.

I believe in what we can do together, Mr. Speaker, and I hope my colleagues will again take ``yes'' to an invitation to the negotiating table as an answer.

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

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.