Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, Louise Slaughter was a scientist, and she approached her work in this House with scientific precision. She found that special formula for success: mix an extraordinary work ethic with a deep intellect and love of her community, and the result was thirty- one years of excellence serving New Yorkers in Congress. I was deeply saddened to learn of her passing last month, and I will look back fondly on the three decades we served together in this House.

As the daughter of a coal mine blacksmith, Louise grew up around hardship and challenge. Later, as a microbiologist and an elected official, she made public health and economic opportunity her focus. In Congress, she fought for funding for women's health, to keep our troops safer in combat, and to crack down on domestic violence. As Chairwoman of the Rules Committee, she played a key role in advancing to the Floor major legislation, including the Recovery Act, Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform, and the Don't Ask Don't Tell Repeal Act.

None of us who served with her ever doubted her tenacity or resolve. Louise never forgot her roots or the constituents who sent her back to Congress year after year. Her loss is a great loss for this House, for the people of upstate New York, and for our country. I join in offering my condolences to her daughters Megan, Amy, and Emily and their families.

Mr. Speaker, I rise for the purpose of inquiring of the majority leader the schedule for the week to come, and I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. McCarthy).

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for that information. I am constrained to observe that, from my perspective, it will be the last year that we will not start creating extraordinarily more debt for our country. But that aside, let me ask the gentleman a couple of questions.

First of all, there has been discussion in the press, certainly, and some discussion in the Congress about a possibility of a rescission package. As the gentleman knows, both he and I, the Speaker, Leader Pelosi, Mr. McConnell, and the White House, worked very, very hard on reaching an agreement so that we could pass an omnibus some weeks ago. That omnibus was the result of some very hard bargaining and negotiations and trade-offs, and certainly, not--I don't think anybody was pleased with everything that was in that bill, or, frankly, that wasn't in that bill.

I am, therefore, very concerned that I now hear talk about we are going to, in effect, go back on the agreement that we reached. It was clear that there were some things in there that I didn't like and others didn't like, and I am sure that was the case with yourself as well, Mr. Leader. But it was an agreement. It was an agreement reached after hard discussions, over months, and it was a very late agreement at that, funding 2018 finally until September 30, not until last month.

So I am very concerned about the possibility that we are going to try to, in effect, relitigate that issue.

Can the majority leader give me some insight as to whether or not, in fact, we will be facing a rescission

package at some point in time? And if so, can the majority leader advise us as to what may be in that package?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend, the majority leader.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.

The issue is, of course, not oversight. We believe that there ought to be oversight.

The gentleman is correct, I voted ``no.'' The gentleman voted ``yes.'' Many of his colleagues voted ``no'' with me. Many of his colleagues are wringing their hands now and saying too much money was spent.

But this was an agreement that was brought to the floor by the majority. This was an agreement that was negotiated by the majority. We didn't have the authority to put the bill on the floor or not put the bill on the floor.

And it was an agreement. As I say, Mr. Speaker, it was a tough agreement. I didn't particularly like the agreement, but it was an agreement, and that is why I voted ``no.''

But the fact of the matter is that the majority of this House voted ``yes,'' and the majority of the Senate voted ``yes,'' and they voted ``yes'' as the result of an agreement.

And, yes, of course, there have been rescissions in the past; and although I don't know what the rescissions are, there may well be a rescission that I might support. The gentleman is correct. I wouldn't irrationally oppose a rescission which said we have had money lying in an account that has not been spent for 1, 2, 3 years. We shouldn't just have it sitting in that account. The gentleman is absolutely correct.

But very frankly, in my view, Mr. Speaker, this is to, in effect, negate an agreement that was reached and to, in effect, say, no, we really don't want to spend that money. That may be correct, but the majority of the Republicans in this House voted for it.

Nobody said: We are going to vote for it, but days later we are going to come back and say we don't want this, we don't want that, and we don't want the other.

And we think it is a little bit like what we did yesterday, where the majority has offered a tax bill which cuts $1.8 trillion in revenue. I made the point yesterday that it was a little bit like a businessman that has a product to sell. The product costs him $10 to produce, and he charges $7 when he sells it. That businessman does not stay in business very long.

But the Republicans do it the opposite way. They cut the revenues, they create debt, and they vote for more spending. And their constituents seem to be upset about that. I don't blame them.

Therefore, we had a balanced budget amendment offered yesterday, which, of course, did not comport at all with what our Republican friends, Mr. Speaker, have done over the last year, and, very frankly, in my view, over the last decades when they were in power to do so, which is why we have this extraordinary debt and why CBO has just come down and said, as a result of those bills, we are going to create $14 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, which my kids and your kids and our grandchildren are going to have to pay.

I want to make it very clear that I think we need a serious, disciplined discussion on getting a handle on this deficit. Part of that discussion needs to be revenues.

Very frankly, Mr. Speaker, I believe, on their side of the aisle, they want to spend a lot of money. They want to spend it on defense. We increased defense by over 10, 12 percent this year.

Now, very frankly, what was being spent on defense was as a result of Republican budgets over the last number of years, so that it is hard for me to believe that they would vote for budgets and appropriation bills that they thought were undermining defense.

But, in any event, we increased that substantially. And, yes, we increased spending on education, on healthcare--opioids, in particular--other items on emergency relief. The leader and I visited Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Texas, Florida. They needed assistance, and we passed that as well. But, very frankly, we didn't pay for any of it.

We hear about spending. Whatever the spending level is, we ought to pay for it. That would be my position. And if we want to spend the money, we ought to pay for it.

Now, however, I hope these rescissions do not set a precedent whereby future negotiations will be put at great risk, because at least one party will not trust that the negotiations are real.

When Ryan-Murray was agreed to by Speaker Ryan and by Senator Murray, shortly after that agreement was reached as to what spending levels would be, some of my Republican colleagues came back and said: Oh, well, they are ceilings.

It is like my bargaining to buy a house for $100,000, and then I come back at the settlement table and say: Well, I am really going to pay $75,000. $100,000 was just a ceiling on what I was going to pay for that house.

That doesn't make any sense, and nobody would think it makes any sense.

So I will tell my friend, the majority leader, I hope that the rescissions are based upon the sort of example that he gave, and, therefore, it may receive some support. But if they are simply to reverse hard-bargained results, then I

think that will put at risk any kind of bipartisan negotiations that might occur in the future.

Very frankly, the budget--and I am going to ask the gentleman about the budget now--is supposed to come down pretty soon. As a matter of fact, it is supposed to be reported out of the Budget Committee by now. It is supposed to be passed by the Congress by April 15 or 17, depending upon which date you use, but sometime this month.

Does the majority leader have any reason to believe that we are going to pass, over the next 2 weeks, a budget--and send it to the Senate-- that is balanced?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend.

Did the majority leader hear me say that is a reasonable thing to do?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend.

I have heard that argument, Mr. Speaker. I heard it in 1981.

We passed a massive tax cut. The debt increased over the next 7 years 187 percent. That was Ronald Reagan's tax cut. And, frankly, Bob Dole helped raise some revenues to offset that, which is why it was only a 187 percent increase in the debt during the Ronald Reagan years.

I heard that argument in 2001 and 2003: We are going to grow the economy. We are going to have extraordinary growth, creation of jobs, and revenues that will come to the Federal Government as a result of cutting taxes.

And what happened? Six years later, we had the deepest recession we have had since Herbert Hoover. Nobody in this House is over 90 and, therefore, didn't experience the depth of that recession. The recession that we experienced in December of 2007, when you thought those tax cuts that the gentleman talked about would have grown the economy, just as he talked about, he has got a problem in that CBO says it doesn't grow the economy. In fact, it creates $14 trillion of new debt. That is what CBO says, not Steny Hoyer, not the Democrats. That is $14 trillion--with a T, Mr. Speaker--in new debt that our children and grandchildren will be confronted with.

So what do the Republicans do? They had to say, let's balance the budget. Now, balancing the budget means you pay for what you buy. Yes, I am for that.

Very frankly, if you buy an aircraft carrier, I think you can amortize that over 40 years. Why? Like a house, you will use it for 40 years and my grandchildren will get use of that aircraft carrier to defend themselves and our country.

As I am sure the majority leader knows, there are few Members of this Congress who have been any more consistently supportive of the Armed Forces than this Member. I supported much of Ronald Reagan's follow-on to what Jimmy Carter started, and that was building up our military strength so the country would be secure.

And I continue to be a strong supporter of the military. We need to keep America strong. The gentleman's party, of course, contrary to the almost unanimous--I think unanimous, but I will say almost unanimous-- desire that we repeal the sequester over the last 8 years, your party, I tell the majority leader, Mr. Speaker, wanted to keep the sequester, and did keep the sequester, and we could have done away with the sequester, except they crossed their fingers. They crossed their fingers and said: We will keep the sequester, but Speaker Ryan will make a deal with Senator Murray so that we don't have to live its effects. And we passed those Ryan-Murray deals. And there was not an attempt to reverse that course.

So the sequester argument, Mr. Speaker, is an argument of constraint imposed by the majority party; not by us. We had urged that the sequester be rescinded. And, in fact, we supported the Ryan-Murray agreement. As a matter of fact, I didn't support the first Ryan-Murray agreement. I didn't support it because I thought it was a facade, and it turned out to be, I think, pretty meaningless in terms of what the agreement was.

So we haven't grown the economy. As a matter of fact, we had the worst economy any of us have seen under the Bush fiscal policy supported by my Republican friends. I didn't support that.

CBO says this bill will not grow the economy, but this bill will create substantial debt. I asked the gentleman a question that I want to go back to. And that is: Does the gentleman expect us to have a budget this month?

Before I do that, let me say, the gentleman says--and it was a good strategy--that they passed 12 appropriations bills. They packaged them in two packages. They didn't consider them individually, but two packages. They sent them to the Senate, and they were partisan bills.

Mr. McConnell, the majority leader, did not bring them to the floor. Now, he may say he didn't bring them to the floor because the minority wouldn't agree with them, but he could have brought them to the floor. He didn't want to subject them to amendments and discussion.

Or, they would have had a vote and our people wouldn't have voted to bring them to the floor and he could have pointed to that vote.

So I ask my friend one more time: Do we expect to have a budget here in April when it is due or soon thereafter? And if so, will that budget be balanced? I yield to my friend.

I did.

I did.

Reclaiming my time. I said I had voted for balanced budget amendments in the past when I spoke on the floor, and I said that I rose not to oppose the constitutional amendment, but to deride it. It was such a politically patently dishonest effort to pretend that you are for a balanced budget. And guess who said that? Mr. Massie, a member of your caucus; Mr. Meadows, the chairman of your Freedom Caucus; and Senator Corker from Tennessee. They all said that, that it was not a real item, yet we spent all of yesterday working on a document that you knew, Republicans knew, everybody knew was not a real effort and would not pass.

We spent all day doing that. That is what I said. Yes, I have, in the `90s, supported a budget amendment which would restrain us from acting without paying for what we buy.

Your side of the aisle, in my opinion, does not like to pay for what you buy, but you want to buy things because you spend as much money in your budgets as we spend--maybe on different things.

But this side, I want to tell the majority leader, do not run out that canard--Mr. Speaker, I say to the majority leader--that Democrats do not support national security. We do, and the votes prove it.

You had 90 of your Members vote against the agreement. I voted against it as well. I voted against it because we did not reach an agreement, and I am going to get to that issue in just a second. The gentleman knows I feel very strongly about it. I talked to him about it, and it should have been in that bill, and it wasn't. That is why I voted ``no.'' But 90 of your Members voted against it.

Does the majority leader say to me that those 90 people--including when we established the level of spending, the chairman of your Armed Services Committee who voted ``no''--are you telling me they were not for protecting our military, protecting our men and women in the Armed Forces, protecting the training that we give to our

men and women in the Armed Forces? Are you telling me those 90 Republicans weren't supporting that? Is that what you are saying? Yes or no? I yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time. Mr. Leader, I am not sure. I want to understand. They upheld their word. Ninety people voted against the bill you are saying supported the military, 90 of your people voted against that. The majority of Democrats voted for it. Are you telling me those 90 Republicans who voted against it were against the military? That is my question to you.

Would the gentleman yield?

But the gentleman says that I shut down the government. Can you tell him that the Senate didn't adopt the budget? With all due respect, I don't vote in the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend.

Mr. Speaker, the Budget Act is not the problem. The problem is a lack of discipline, not the Budget Act. I said yesterday on the constitutional amendment, if you want to balance the budget, do it. Do it. Offer a balanced budget.

You had that opportunity to do it. You won't do it. I guarantee you that you won't do it. You can say whatever you want.

Mr. Speaker, they won't do it. They haven't done it. There will not be a balanced budget on this floor from either side because we have dug such a deep hole. To balance the budget tomorrow or 2 years from now would decimate Social Security and Medicare. Now, maybe that is what is in store. Maybe that is what is contemplated.

But when I hear, Mr. Speaker, the majority leader talking about the Budget Act, first of all, the American public does not know what the Budget Act is. They do know who we are, and they sent us here to be responsible and have discipline and have the courage of our convictions.

The reason I say pay for it is because the constraint we have abandoned, and we have pretended that we could cut taxes and magically things would be paid for. They have not been, and what we buy today we are expecting our children to pay for it tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

I suggest that is an intellectually bankrupt policy, and it is also an immoral policy. And to pretend that somehow we can fix that either by an amendment--which, by the way, could be waived--or by amending the Budget Act--is the Budget Act perfect? Could it be perfected? I am sure it could be. But that is not the problem.

The problem is the pretense that somehow we are going to grow ourselves magically without discipline and without paying for what we buy, whether that is defense or nondefense.

Now, Mr. Speaker, we need to get on to some other issues, and I want to explain to the majority leader why I didn't vote for the bill.

The President of the United States did something I think was bad judgment and put millions of people at risk. It is called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Eighty-six percent of the American people think that we ought to protect those children who came here not of their own volition but as children.

The majority leader, myself, the minority leader, and the Speaker of the House met with leaders of the Hispanic community, leaders of the African-American community, and leaders of the Asian Pacific Islander community. When I say leaders, the three chairs of those caucuses. We talked in late September about a week and a half after the President had withdrawn DACA protections and said we need to solve this.

Now, Mr. Speaker, let me quote the Speaker of the House, Mr. Ryan: My commitment to working together on an immigration measure that we can make law is a sincere commitment.

Let me repeat: My commitment to working together on an immigration measure that we can make law is a sincere commitment. We will solve this DACA problem, said the Speaker, once we get this budget agreement done.

This was not the omnibus. This was the precursor to the omnibus which set the level of spending.

He said: We will solve this DACA problem, and we will get this done no matter how long it takes us to stay here. We will focus on bringing the debate to this floor and finding a solution.

I voted ``no'' on the omnibus because they did not follow through on that commitment, so everybody understands. However, I am the whip. I count votes, and I certainly think the majority leader has had enough evidence and has enough respect for my ability that if we had worked to defeat that bill, we would have defeated it with the 90 Republicans who voted ``no'' on the bill the Republicans brought to the floor, which was an agreed.

But that bill needed to pass. But, yes, I voted ``no'' because from September--and the Speaker told me: Oh, March 5 is coming, we have got time to fix it. We have got time to take care of these 700, 800,000 young people that 86 percent of the American people think ought not to be sent to a country that is not their home, they don't know, and they have not been there for the overwhelming majority of their lives.

So, yes, I voted ``no'' because, on their behalf, I was concerned that that commitment that the Speaker enunciated in February, approximately a

month before DACA was to terminate, had not been met.

It is now a month after March 5, Mr. Speaker, and that commitment has not been met to this day, notwithstanding the fact that Speaker Ryan urged the President not to do what he did, and the President turned around and said: Fix it by legislation. And the Speaker committed in that meeting to which I referred just weeks after the President acted as saying: We will get that done.

Now, Mr. Speaker, there is a rule that has been filed by a Republican Member of this House. It now has, I think, 44 Republicans on it. If it doesn't have yet, it will have 190-plus Democrats on it, which will mean that 230 Members of this House will have signed on to a document that says: Let's fix DACA now.

Yes, I voted ``no.'' I voted ``no'' in protest and in dismay that we had not addressed this issue. I hope I have explained to the majority leader why I voted ``no'' but at the same time why a majority of my party, including the leader of my party, Ms. Pelosi, voted ``aye.'' They voted ``aye'' because they knew we had made an agreement. They knew it was an agreement reached by both sides. They didn't like everything in it any more than Republicans liked everything in it, but it was an agreement, and so it passed handily.

I will tell my friend I hope he does not doubt--perhaps he does--that that would have happened without a perception and belief on this side that we had an agreement and it ought to pass, and it did pass with 90 Republicans voting ``no'' and the overwhelming majority of my party voting ``yes.''

I hope the leader will tell me, Mr. Speaker, whether or not the commitment that was made in September, the commitment that was articulated by the Speaker of the House in February when he was urging us and his own Members to support the legislation which sets the level of spending on which the omnibus was based, I hope he can assure me that, before the end of this month, that we will have the opportunity to do what we think is extraordinarily fair to do.

Mr. Goodlatte of the Judiciary has a bill. I don't like the bill, but it is a bill that came out of the majority committee. There is another bill called the Dreamer bill. That is a bipartisan bill sponsored by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida, and Lucille Roybal- Allard, a Democrat from California. Bring that bill to the floor.

Then there is a third bill, Mr. Speaker, sponsored by Mr. Hurd from Texas, a Republican, and Mr. Aguilar, a Democrat from California, that I believe has the support of over 218 Members of this House. I have asked the majority leader and we have asked the Speaker: Bring those three bills to the floor. Bring those three bills to the floor and let the House work its will.

The Speaker is leaving, but the Speaker has on numerous occasions said: We will not duck the tough issues. That is a direct quote, Mr. Speaker. We will take them head-on. We should not hide our disagreements. We should embrace them. We have nothing to fear from honest disagreements honestly stated.

Bring those three bills to the floor, Mr. Speaker, I implore the majority leader. Let the House work its will. Face the tough issues.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, will the majority leader tell me when I voted to shut down the government? Does he have a cite there?

I yield to my friend.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, the majority leader and I serve in a coequal branch of government. We don't serve at the pleasure of the President, nor should we go hand in hand to the President of the United States and say: Can we do this?

The majority leader, of course, did not answer my question. He wants to continue to talk about who voted for or against the omnibus as opposed to responding to are we going to have a balanced budget on the floor. We can have amendments on the floor; that sounds good. We can articulate that we are going to grow ourselves out. But doing it, just do it.

Yes, temporarily, the courts have said the President didn't do the right thing in the right way, so there has been a stay. And the gentleman is correct that the DACA students are not at risk as of March 5. I say ``students.'' Some of them are students; some are not.

Words do, in fact, mean something. The leader says that all he wants is border security. Well, border security, and he wants to restrict the ability to unify moms and dads and their children in the United States of America.

I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, is the gentleman saying that, when we had discussions in your office and you wanted to eliminate the option to sponsor mothers and fathers by their children, was not that not part of the offer that you discussed in your office, Mr. Leader?

I yield to the gentleman from California.

I'll be glad to hear the explanation.

Currently.

Currently.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, we go round and round on that.

Obviously, when we talked about family reunification, you had an offer that you said you were making on behalf of the President that clearly undermined the ability to sponsor, by some, their mothers and fathers. We can go round and round on that. That was my perception of it. We will get the record, and I think that is pretty accurate, Mr. Leader.

Mr. Speaker, the answer to the question, though, has not come, and that is: Will the majority leader bring to the floor three bills and let them be voted on by this House and express the will of the American people?

One of those bills is a Republican bill. One is probably perceived by the Republicans as a Democratic bill, although Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is a cosponsor of that bill. And one, clearly, is a bipartisan bill, negotiated by Mr. Hurd, a Republican from Texas, and Mr. Aguilar, a Democrat from California, that has at least 44 Republicans who have signed on to a rule to bring that particular bill to the floor. All 193 Democrats will be for that bill, to bring it to the floor, which is over 230 Members of this House.

I am asking the leader: Will he bring those three bills to the floor? Because what the President said--and the leader says words matter. What the President said on TV for all of America to see: We will solve the DACA issue. You send me a bill, and I will sign it.

That is what he said, Mr. Speaker. But what happened? The Senate had four bills. Unlike the House, Mr. McConnell brought those four bills to the floor so the Senate could work its will. And there were some 25 Senators, Republicans and Democrats, had come together and put a commonsense bill on the floor, contrary to what the President of the United States said in that meeting on television--not my words. Just go back to the video. Replay it: I will sign a bill.

And then he said, beating--he didn't beat his chest literally: I will take the heat.

What did he do when the commonsense bill came to the floor? He said: I will veto it if it is sent down here.

It had $25 billion in authorization for the President's wall and border security, and he said: I will veto it.

As a result, it only got 54 votes. It needed 60 votes. Had he not said he would veto it, it would have passed. I am absolutely convinced of that.

That was four bills. Why, Mr. Speaker? This is the people's House. The Speaker said: We will take the tough issues head-on. We will not shrink from that responsibility.

All we are asking is to bring those bills to the floor.

Recisions, we can argue about the recisions. And when they come down here substantively, the leader mentions frequently about money that is not going to be spent anyway. None of us are going to oppose that if that is, in fact, what it does. That is an obfuscation of the issue that we are talking about.

We had an agreement. We think that agreement upset a lot of the majority leader's party, and that is why this is happening. They are going to try to correct that political problem they have, just like the balanced budget amendment is trying to correct a political problem.

So I would hope, Mr. Speaker, that the leader would assure me at some point in time that they will do what they said they will do from September to now: address solving the DACA issue. And then what the President said, Mr. Speaker, was then we will go to comprehensive immigration reform.

We ought to do that. The Senate passed a bill some 5 years ago. We asked and have asked over the last 5 years: Bring that bill to the floor.

Now, that bill doesn't exist now because, in the Congress in which it was sent to us, it wasn't brought to the floor. The Republicans were in charge, and they didn't bring it to the floor. We asked for it over and over and over again so we could solve what everybody knows is a broken immigration system.

But, at least in the ambit of these three bills, there is a solution to one small part of that that the President, on national TV, said he wanted to solve and would sign the bill--right up until the time he said he would veto the bill.

The President is a very flexible individual, as we have all seen. I hope he would sign any one of these bills.

And I think the Senate would pass the Aguilar-Hurd bill. If it were brought to the floor, I am convinced it would pass. I think it would pass the Senate, and I would hope the President would sign it and solve a problem that the President of the United States, when he rescinded the protections, asked us to legislate on and send him a bill. I would hope he would do that. I hope the majority leader would do that.

I yield to my friend.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I will look at those references.

I did vote to shut down, certainly, I think in--I am not sure of the January date. When we had the majority, won that vote, the majority leader came back to the floor within a few hours. We had a vote. We voted to open up the government. Almost every Democrat voted for that. The government opened, and then we got a deal.

So the issue that I asked the majority leader about he still has not responded to, notwithstanding our meeting in September, notwithstanding the representations made by the President of the United States, notwithstanding the fact that the court has said what was done was done incorrectly, and notwithstanding the President's request to solve this issue and send him a bill and he would sign it and take the heat for it.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and I rise today not so much to oppose this legislation, as to deride it as a sham, as a fraud, as a pretense of fiscal responsibility. If you want to balance the budget, just do it.

I have served here for years and years and years when my Republican colleagues have controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. Just do it. Don't talk about it.

Now, I come here as someone who has voted for balanced budget amendments in the past, but I have become extraordinarily cynical at people who vote to cut the cost of their product way below the price of producing it. That is a formula for bankruptcy in any business any place in the world.

For Republicans to bring a balanced budget amendment to the floor just weeks after adding $1.8 trillion to deficits and tax breaks for the wealthiest is the epitome of hypocrisy. Nobody--nobody believes anymore that Republicans care about deficit reduction or balancing the budget, let alone their own members.

Now, ladies and gentlemen on the Republican side of the aisle, let me call to your attention the chair's remarks of your Freedom Caucus. Hear me. I am going to quote Mark Meadows. The Freedom Caucus, the most conservative element, supposedly, of Congress, Mark Meadows says this: ``There is no one on Capitol Hill and certainly no one on Main Street who takes this vote seriously.'' Mark Meadows.

Conservative Republican Tom Massie, a Republican, a very conservative Republican, says this: ``Audacity, noun: Voting on a constitutional balanced budget amendment only 4 legislative days after ramming through massive deficit spending because you believe this stunt''--Massie's word, not mine--``this stunt will convince constituents that you care about balancing the budget.''

Not my words. Two of the most conservative Republicans in this House.

And Republican Senator Bob Corker said this: ``Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. If we were serious''--this is the Republican Senator saying--``If we were serious about balancing the budget, we would do it.''

We know what it takes to balance budgets, Mr. Speaker. We did it during the Clinton administration 4 years in a row. Now, my Republican colleagues may jump to their feet and say: Yes, but we were in charge of Congress.

That is correct. And President Clinton would not let them cut the price of our product because to do so would have led to bankruptcy. So what did we do? We balanced the budget 4 years in a row--the only time that has been done in the lifetime of any listener to these words.

But what happened? Our Republican colleagues took office, they took the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, and they cut the price of the product, but they didn't cut the cost of the product. And what do we have? We increase the debt by 87 percent in the Bush 8 years.

Democrats instituted paygo rules to pay for what we buy, and they worked, and we balanced the budget. Republicans came into the majority and scrapped those rules. Now we are mired in growing deficits.

The CBO baseline--Congressional Budget Office, nonpartisan--released on Monday shows that accounting for Republican policies passed since President Trump took office just a few months ago, the deficit will reach, this year----

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has

expired.

Mr. Speaker, since President Trump took office, this year, fiscal year 2018, $980 billion in deficits; next year, $1 trillion. Every year thereafter, during the Trump administration, another $1 trillion of debt. It will total some $14 trillion.

After Republicans passed their tax law, they knew they would be on the hook for its enormous deficit price tag, so immediately they said they wanted to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and other safety net programs to do it.

This amendment would essentially write those cuts into the Constitution. Hear me. Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, write those cuts into the Constitution. This is a backdoor effort to gut the programs that help working Americans get ahead.

I said I rose to deride this amendment. It is a fraud, a sham, a pretense, but it is also bad for our country, bad for our people. I urge my colleagues to defeat this silly waste of time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the 155 inventors who will soon be inducted as the 2017 Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). To be named as Fellows, these men and women were nominated by their peers and underwent the scrutiny of the NAI Selection Committee, having had their innovations deemed as making a significant impact on quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society. Their induction ceremony here in the nation's capital will feature a keynote address by U.S. Commissioner for Patents, Andrew Hirshfeld.

Collectively, this elite group holds nearly 6,000 patents. The individuals making up this year's class of Fellows include individuals from 124 research universities and non-prof it research institutes spanning the United States and the world. The group of Fellows, now 912 in total, is composed of more than 100 presidents and senior leaders of research universities and non-prof it research institutes, 439 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; twenty-eight inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, fifty- two recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation and U.S. National Medal of Science; twenty-nine Nobel Laureates; 261 AAAS Fellows; 168 IEEE Fellows; and 142 Fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, among other awards and distinctions. The NAI was founded in 2010 to recognize and encourage inventors with patents issued from the U.S. Patent and Trademark of fice, enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation, encourage the disclosure of intellectual

property, educate and mentor innovative students, and translate the inventions of its members to benefit society.

All Americans are greatly indebted to innovators such as these for contributions to our country and the world through their work. I commend these individuals, as well as the organizations and taxpayers that make their work possible, for all they do to revolutionize the world in which we live. I hope attention brought to this round of inductions will encourage future generations to strive to meet this high honor and continue the spirit of discovery and innovation.

The 2017 NAI Fellows include:

Samuel I. Achilefu, Washington University in St. Louis; Dereje Agonafer, The University of Texas at Arlington; Mark G. Allen, University of Pennsylvania; James P. Allison, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; Hiroshi Amano, Nagoya University; Richard R. Anderson, Massachusetts General Hospital; Leif Andersson, Texas A&M University and Uppsala University; J. Roger P. Angel, The University of Arizona; Diran Apelian, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Plamen B. Atanassov, The University of New Mexico; Craig H. Benson, University of Virginia; Cory J. Berkland, The University of Kansas; Vijayakumar Bhagavatula, Carnegie Mellon University; David J. Bishop, Boston University; Donald L. Bitzer, North Carolina State University; Randy D. Blakely, Florida Atlantic University; Helen M. Blau, Stanford University; Timothy M. Block, Baruch S. Blumberg Institute; Daniel J. Blumenthal, University of California, Santa Barbara; Susmita Bose, Washington State University; Steven T. Boyce, University of Cincinnati; Edward S. Boyden, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Anthony B. Brennan, University of Florida; Carrie L. Byington, Texas A&M University; Marvin H. Caruthers, University of Colorado Boulder; Dennis S. Charney, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Yang-Tse Cheng, University of Kentucky; Yet Ming Chiang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Joanne Chory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies; Mooi Choo Chuah, Lehigh University; David E. Clemmer, Indiana University; Geof frey W. Coates, Cornell University; Stanley N. Cohen, Stanford University; James E. Crowe Jr., Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Pieter Cullis, The University of British Columbia; Mari Dezawa, Tohoku University; William L. Ditto, North Carolina State University; Prabir K. Dutta, The Ohio State University; Jack A. Elias, Brown University; Zhigang Z. Fang, The University of Utah; Tim A. Fischell, Michigan State University and Western Michigan University; Paul B. Fisher, Virginia Commonwealth University; Edward P. Furlani, University at Buffalo, SUNY; Guangping Gao, University of Massachusetts Medical School; Suresh V. Garimella, Purdue University; Bruce E. Gnade, Southern Methodist University; Lawrence Gold, University of Colorado Boulder; Sheila A. Grant, University of Missouri, Columbia; Mark A. Griswold, Case Western Reserve University; Horng-Jyh Harn, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital; Robert W. Heath, Jr., The University of Texas at Austin; Walter Brown Herbst, Northwestern University; Mark C. Hersam, Northwestern University; David M. Holtzman, Washington University in St. Louis; Ming Hsieh, University of Southern California; Ian W. Hunter, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mikko Hupa, Abo Akademi University; Oliver C. Ibe, University of Massachusetts, Lowell; Eric D. Isaacs, The University of Chicago; Subramanian S. Iyer, University of California, Los Angeles; Joseph A. Izatt, Duke University; William R. Jacobs Jr., Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Rakesh K. Jain, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University; Stephen Albert Johnston, Arizona State University; Ranu Jung, Florida International University; Brian L. Justus, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory; Alexander V. Kabanov, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Aravinda Kar, University of Central Florida; Kazunori Kataoka, The University of Tokyo; Howard E. Katz, Johns Hopkins University; Arie E. Kaufman, Stony Brook University, SUNY; Donald B. Keck, University of South Florida; Jeffery W. Kelly, The Scripps Research Institute; David V. Kerns Jr., Olin College of Engineering; Robert S. Keynton, University of Louisville; Dennis K. Killinger, University of South Florida; Kwang J. Kim, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Wayne H. Knox, University of Rochester; Philip T. Kortum, Rice University; Philip T. Krein, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; John J. La Scala, U.S. Army Research Laboratory; Jonathan J. Langberg, Emory University; Sang Yup Lee, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Fred C. Lee, Virginia Tech; Eric C. Leuthardt, Washington University in St. Louis; Nathan S. Lewis, California Institute of Technology; Tsu-Jae King Liu, University of California, Berkeley; Chih-Yuan Lu, National Taiwan University; Zhenqiang Ma, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Michele Marcolongo, Drexel University; Laura Marcu, University of California, Davis; R. Kenneth Marcus, Clemson University; Gary S. Margules, Nova Southeastern University; Mary Helen McCay, Florida Institute of Technology; Kishor C. Mehta, Texas Tech University; Deirdre R. Meldrum, Arizona State University; Bhubaneswar Mishra, New York University; Gregory Moller, University of Idaho; Clayton Daniel Mote, Jr., University of Maryland; Shouleh Nikzad, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; John R. Nottingham, Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic; Mariappan P. Paranthaman, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Christopher R. Parish, The Australian National University; Peter L.T. Pirolli, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition; Daniel A. Portnoy, University of California, Berkeley; Dennis W. Prather, University of Delaware; Paul R. Prucnal, Princeton University; Nirmala Ramanujam, Duke University; Jennifer L. Rexford, Princeton University; Kenner C. Rice, National Institutes of Health; Camillo Ricordi, University of Miami; Gabriel Alfonso Rincon-Mora, Georgia Institute of Technology; Bruce R. Rosen, Massachusetts General Hospital; Barbara O. Rothbaum, Emory University; Jonathan M. Rothberg, Yale University; Max F. Rothschild, Iowa State University; Clinton T. Rubin, Stony Brook University, SUNY; Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, The University of Texas at Austin; Henry Samueli, University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Irvine; Ulrich S. Schubert, Friedrich- Schiller-University Jena; Paul A. Seib, Kansas State University; Terrence J. Sejnowski, Salk Institute for Biological Studies; Mohammad Shahidehpour, Illinois Institute of Technology; Yun-Qing Shi, New Jersey Institute of Technology; Subhash L. Shinde, University of Notre Dame; Richard W. Siegel, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Krishna P. Singh, University of Pennsylvania; Hyongsok T. Soh, Stanford University; Steven L. Stice, University of Georgia; Steven L. Suib, University of Connecticut; Russell H. Taylor, Johns Hopkins University; Jeffrey A. Toretsky, Georgetown University; Rocky S. Tuan, University of Pittsburgh and The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Robert Vince, University of Minnesota; Andrew J. Viterbi, University of Southern California; Tuan Vo-Dinh, Duke University; Scott A. Waldman, Thomas Jefferson University; Thomas A. Waldmann, National Cancer Institute; Peter Walter, University of California, San Francisco; Fei Wang, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Scott C. Weaver, The University of Texas Medical Branch; Thomas J. Webster, Northeastern University; Chin- Long Wey, National Chiao Tung University; Lorne Whitehead, The University of British Columbia; Cheryl L. Willman, The University of New Mexico; Alan N. Willson, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles; Teresa K. Woodruff, Northwestern University; Amy E. Wright, Florida Atlantic University; Eli Yablonovitch, University of California, Berkeley; Paul Yager, University of Washington; Jackie Y. Ying, Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology; Bin Yu, SUNY Polytechnic Institute; Mona E. Zaghloul, The George Washington University; Zeev Zalevsky, Bar-Ilan University; Lynn Zechiedrich, Baylor College of Medicine.

I hope my colleagues will join me in congratulating these new NAI Fellows.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to Scott Fleming, a former House staffer and longtime public servant who is retiring in May after seventeen years working for Georgetown University. Over the years, I've had the opportunity to get to know Scott well, both through his work on Capitol Hill and in the Clinton Administration as well as later during his long tenure as a liaison between Georgetown University, my law school alma mater, and Congress.

Scott's association with Georgetown goes back more than four decades. He graduated from Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in 1972 with a bachelor's degree. Already, though, he was working for Sen. Stuart Symington, from his home state of Missouri, as a Staff Assistant. After obtaining his master's degree in public policy from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin, Scott went to work for Rep. Dan Glickman from Kansas, serving from 1975 to 1988 in the roles of Legislative Assistant, Legislative Staff Director, and Chief of Staff. When Rep. Nita Lowey was elected, she hired Scott in 1989 as her first Chief of Staff and to oversee the opening of her Congressional office.

Leaving the House in 1995 with a wealth of legislative experience and institutional knowledge, Scott joined the Clinton Administration's Department of Education as Deputy Assistant Secretary and Director of Congressional Affairs. Later, he served as Assistant Secretary for Legislation and Congressional Affairs. When President Clinton left office in 2001, Scott left government service but didn't venture too far. He returned to his alma mater to serve as Georgetown's Associate Vice President of Federal Relations. While doing so,

Scott has also served on the boards of the National Association of Independent College and Universities and of NAFSA: Association of International Educators Public Policy Advisory Committee.

During his tenure, Scott worked tirelessly to secure federal funding for key educational initiatives benefitting students at Georgetown and at institutions of higher education across the country. He's won accolades for his work to shape the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill and related legislation to increase benefits available to veterans seeking to attend college and graduate school. In recent years, Scott has been at the forefront of efforts by Georgetown and other universities to prevent the deportation of DREAMers studying in this country, which they've called home from a young age, and wishing to be a part of building its future. Throughout his time at Georgetown, he's been a fervent promoter of public service careers, taking time to bring students to Capitol Hill and teaching classes at Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy.

Scott has been an advisor, friend, and--in my opinion--the embodiment of the Jesuit principles that make up the `Spirit of Georgetown' throughout his career. I wish my fellow Hoya all the best in retirement and thank him for his service to the Congress, in the executive branch furthering educational opportunities in our country, and to Georgetown University and institutions of higher learning throughout America.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland's Fifth District. On April 1, 1943, the Navy formally commissioned the installation, marking the start of Pax River's long and storied contribution to the defense of our nation in times of both war and peace.

Over the past three quarters of a century, history has been made at Pax River again and again. The XP59-A, America's first all-jet aircraft, was first tested at Pax River in 1944. The flight test program launched in the late 1940's and expanded in the 1950's trained many of our nation's top military flight test pilots, including the members of NASA's Mercury 7 program. In the 1960's, several key developments in helicopter technology, surface-to-air missile systems, navigational equipment, and ordinance came out of Pax River and its innovative workforce specialized in development and testing. In 1983, Lt. Colleen Nevius became the first woman to graduate from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, making history at Pax River once again. The Naval Air Systems Command moved to Pax River in 1998,

making the installation the center of naval aviation.

Today, Pax River continues to play an outsized role in our defense and in the development and testing of new naval air systems. With the advent of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology and the emergence of Southern Maryland as a UAV development hub, Pax River will surely continue to lead the way into the future of naval aviation. I've been proud to support these efforts in Congress in recent years.

Pax River has been so successful throughout its history not only because of the men and women who have served there but because of the strong support for the installation in the local community. All of Southern Maryland is proud of the work being done at Pax River, and St. Mary's County residents tell me all the time how honored they are to host it. The local alliances that have sprung up over the years to bring military, business, and local community leaders together have enriched life both on and off the base.

I hope my colleagues in this House will join me in paying tribute to all who have made the Patuxent River Naval Air Station a success for seventy-five years, and I join in celebrating this milestone anniversary.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts for yielding.

I have been here long enough to see my Republican colleagues bring to the floor these bills and plop them down heavily on the table.

I have been here long enough to have citizens assault me in a town meeting and ask: ``Have you read the bill?''

I have been here long enough to hear the demagoguery about: ``What's in the bill? Do you know what's in the bill? Have you read the bill? How can you do this?''

I have heard demagoguery about the 3-day rule. I call it the 24-hour- and-2-second rule. That is the last second of the first day, 24 hours of the second day, and the first second of the third day. We are not even going to make that. This was filed at 8 o'clock last night.

I ask any Member in this House to join me in the well if you have read this bill. Join me if you have read this bill.

No one is joining me.

These are earmarks. They call them authorizing legislation, but they are earmarks. They are pieces of legislation in this bill that are against the rules, of course, but we will waive those rules. They are things that were gone through in the dark of night, at 8 o'clock last night.

These are the appropriations bills, the only piece of this legislation that were done properly.

When the Speaker became the Speaker, he said: ``We will advance major legislation one issue at a time.''

How can any self-respecting Member of this House, how can any self- respecting Republican who made that representation to my Tea Party friends, vote for this rule?

I have no idea.

This is an abomination of the legislative process. You have had 6 months to get it right. Six weeks ago, the Speaker promised that an issue of great importance to us, DACA, would be solved. It hasn't been addressed, much less solved.

But the real problem is that nobody knows what is in this legislation. With all due respect to the chairman of the Rules Committee, he hasn't read this bill.

Mr. McGovern hasn't read the bill. I have not read the bill. It was 8 o'clock last night. The only person that could read this bill is the supercomputers. None of us even claim to be supercomputers.

This rule ought to go down. Very frankly, there are a lot of things in here I know that I like and I know that everybody else likes, but if we defeat the rule, we ought to go back to a process that we can respect, that you argued you were going to follow, that you pledged to the American people you were going to follow, and that Mr. Cantor and Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Ryan wrote a book about and said they were going to change this institution and do it right.

This is wrong. Vote ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, not a single person has read this bill. It was filed at 8 o'clock last night. If we had put this on the floor, not a single one of those on the other side of the aisle would have voted for it. Not one.

They have demagogued for years about reading the bills. This doesn't come close to their 3-day layover rule. Not close. It is being rushed through because some have fundraisers, perhaps, this weekend, or have flights or codels they want to go on. We have wasted 6 months in passing the appropriations bills, which, supposedly, should have been passed by September 30 of last year.

No one can be proud of this process. The Speaker said, when we set the caps, that he would bring a bill to the floor. He promised the 73 of us that made it possible to set these caps--because you don't have the votes on your side--that he would bring to this floor a fix for the Dreamers who are at risk of being kicked out of the country. I know there is a case, but it is short-term, not permanent. The Speaker did not keep that promise. It has not been on the floor.

What we now have on the floor is an appropriations bill. I think most of us know what is in this appropriations bill. These are earmarks. You don't call them earmarks. You call them authorizing language. They are bills that

nobody in the Appropriations Committee has read. If you have, stand up and correct me. As I said, nobody has read that either.

This is report language. Come to the well if you have read this language.

None of you--none of you--would support this process if we had offered it.

Now, the good news is that what the Appropriations Committee has done is quality work; and I congratulate Mrs. Lowey, Mr. Frelinghuysen, the subcommittee chairs, and the ranking members. It is worthy of support. But I am waiting for all the Tea Party people who harangued me and others on my side about reading the bills, giving us sufficient time to consider them. The Speaker of the House said, when he became Speaker: We will take issues one at a time.

Is there no shame?

Is there no realization of the hypocrisy that is being displayed?

Mr. Speaker, the product is a good one. And I say that about the appropriations bill. I have no idea what all the report language says.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the Speaker, and I thank Mrs. Lowey.

Mr. Speaker, we brought this country from the brink of depression to a growing, robust economy with a stock market that has almost tripled by passing the National Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Not a single Republican voted for that, Mr. Speaker. Not one. I wonder how many will vote for this bill after they have said time after time, after time, after time: Read the bill; have 3 days' layover.

Actually, your 3-day rule is a 24-hour-and-2-second rule: the last second of the first day, 24 hours of the second day, and the first second of the third day. You put everybody in a quandary because this is a good product that the Appropriations Committee has delivered. It does good things for our country, both in terms of national security and in terms of domestic investment.

What a sad state of affairs. How dysfunctional this body has become. How marginalized has the Appropriations Committee, on which I was so proud to serve, has become. Rushing it through in just a matter of minutes. It is a sad day, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I am saddened and angered that the high school in my district, Great Mills High School, in St. Mary's County, was the site of the most recent school shooting, of which there have been 17 just since the beginning of this year.

Two students were injured, and the gunman, also a student, was killed. And an entire community of parents, students, teachers, and faculty has been shaken by this violence.

If it had not been for the courage and quick action of the school resource officer, Blaine Gaskill, and local law enforcement, the casualties might have been far, far greater.

Blaine Gaskill is a hero, as are the teachers, students, and other school personnel.

Tim Cameron, the sheriff of St. Mary's County, and the sheriff's office, of which Blaine Gaskill was a member, responded exactly as they had practiced: efficient, effective, and caring.

Kathy O'Brien, who heads up a place called Walden in our county and in southern Maryland, was on site within an hour, dealing with the crisis and the mental health challenges it caused.

Principal Jake Heibel made sure the school responded effectively. The superintendent of schools, Dr. James Smith, had made sure that the school would act in a way that was appropriate.

We thank all of them.

But, Mr. Speaker, our Nation is suffering from a crisis of gun violence. It has affected schools, places of worship, entertainment venues, city streets, and other places where a lot of people congregate.

No other industrialized society or nation faces such a crisis, and that is because, in America, our laws allow almost anybody to access dangerous firearms, almost no questions asked.

Furthermore, we allow the sale of assault rifles of the kind used by soldiers in the battlefield, designed to kill a lot of people quickly.

In this instance, it was a handgun, a Glock. I do not know the capacity of the magazine that was used, but it was not an assault rifle.

This Republican-led Congress, Mr. Speaker, has chosen to follow the lead of the NRA and do nothing of substance.

We did pass a bill the other day that gave schools some help, some grant money, to ensure the safety of their schools. That was appropriate to do. But they could do that now on their own. We will help, that is good, but it does not address the real problem. Perhaps that was the point.

And America's students, however, Mr. Speaker, won't have it. I had the opportunity last Wednesday to stand with thousands of students who walked out of their schools, walked into democracy, and marched to the Capitol to call for action against gun violence.

These young people, Mr. Speaker, displayed the best of America, using their voices and their actions, to promote a just cause and a worthy effort to make our Union more perfect.

The other Members and I who joined these young Americans could see that they do not take this and other national challenges lightly. Indeed, they had much to say about the future they want for our country and for the role they want to play to shape it.

One of the students, Mr. Speaker, from Maryland, Matt Post, spoke extraordinarily eloquently.

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record his remarks.

My name is Matt Post. I'm a twelfth-grader, the Student

Member of the Board for Montgomery County, and, I think, as

students we need to make a few things clear.

To start, we will not sit in classrooms with armed

teachers. We refuse to learn in fear. We reject turning our

schools into prisons.

We will accept nothing less than stricter gun control. If

it's what it takes, we are going to shame our national

policymakers into protecting us, not just in schools but in

churches, movie theaters, on the streets, and for the

communities of color who are disproportionately devastated by

the sickness of gun violence.

The lawmakers who fail to support us, those who look for

every answer to our nation's gun problem but the guns

themselves, are complicit in every single death that comes

after. To every politician sitting in the Capitol behind us,

you get to decide who lives.

And so, this is not a partisan issue for us. There's

nothing cosmetic about life or death. This is about our basic

morality as a country.

When the commander-in-chief's solution to this gun epidemic

is more guns, you know we have a moral problem in the White

House.

When national policymakers value the blood money of the NRA

over the lives of children, you know we have a moral problem

in the Halls in Congress.

And when this is doomed to happen again--when, in the

coming weeks and months, more of my peers will be slaughtered

in their own classrooms, when their deaths will be dismissed

as collateral--you know we have a moral problem in this

country.

So let's make one last thing clear: their right to own an

assault rifle does not outweigh our right to live.

The adults have failed us. This is in our hands now. And if

any elected official gets in our way, we will vote them out

and replace them ourselves.

`Enough is Enough!'

Mr. Speaker, I am not going to read the remarks in their entirety, but I do want to highlight one thing Matt had to say, which I thought was so profound.

He concluded his remarks by saying: `` . . . their right to own an assault rifle does not outweigh our right to live.''

His right to live is guaranteed by the Constitution as well.

There were many others like Matt, Mr. Speaker, other student leaders from our area, who stood up and spoke out and roused their peers to be engaged.

Along with Matt, I want to recognize Brenna Levitan; Eri Shay; Emily Dohler Rodas; Michael Solomon; Nate Tinbite; Christian Crawford; and a student from American University, who helped them organize, Aaron Thorp.

These student leaders, and their many peers who marched with them last week, deserve to be heard in the Halls of Congress.

Mr. Speaker, we must not fail them.

Like the young leaders of generations ago, of centuries ago, a millennia ago, these young leaders are calling to our conscience to take action, and we must not fail them.

We must not fail the students and teachers and parents of Great Mills High School in St. Mary's County; or Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; or Marshall County High School in Kentucky; or Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon; or Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut; or Virginia Tech; or Columbine; or any other school that has witnessed the carnage of a school shooting.

Mr. Speaker, we must take real action--action to make our schools and our communities safer from gun violence.

I am proud to stand with the young Americans who walked out--and I thank them for their passion and their advocacy--and who say they do not want to go to school and be afraid.

One young woman said the first thing she does when she goes to school now is to look for a place to hide.

Mr. Speaker, we must do better than that. I will continue to work closely with the community in Great Mills in the days and weeks ahead, as we try to heal and move forward.

But, Mr. Speaker, in order to do that, this body, the people's body, who raise our hand and swear an oath to the Constitution and the laws of our country, designed to create a more perfect Union, a Union in which the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is protected by the people's House, Mr. Speaker, let us act.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to congratulate my friend and colleague Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio on becoming the longest- serving woman in the history of the House. On Sunday, March 18, she will surpass the late Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, who held the previous record of thirty-five years, two months, and fourteen days. But more than her longevity, Representative Kaptur has brought to the House her tireless work ethic, her intellect, and her devotion to serving the people of lakeshore Ohio.

A Toledo native and the first in her family to attend college, Representative Kaptur began her public service career as a member of the Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commission and later as a domestic policy advisor to President Jimmy Carter. When she defeated an incumbent Representative in a stunning upset election in 1982, Representative Kaptur came to Congress and hit the ground running. She has been a leader in the fight for higher wages, workers' rights, and ensuring access to affordable health care. It was Representative Kaptur who first proposed the idea in Congress of creating a National World War II Memorial, and she wrote the legislation that eventually authorized its construction on the National Mall. As a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, Representative Kaptur has been at the forefront of efforts to invest in both our national security and in domestic priorities that help working families access opportunities to achieve economic security and get ahead in Ohio and across America.

I have very great respect for Representative Kaptur's intellect and her passion for working people and the pain she feels whenever they feel pain. No Member is more committed to drawing attention to and addressing the difficult challenges so many working people experience-- not only in her native Ohio, but throughout the middle of our country.

I've been honored to serve alongside Representative Kaptur, both on the Appropriations Committee and on the Floor of the House, for the past thirty-five years. I look forward to continue working closely with her as Democrats carry forward the fight for economic opportunity, equal justice, and stronger communities.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. McCarthy), my friend, for the purpose of inquiring of the majority leader the schedule for the week to come.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the majority leader for that information.

Mr. Speaker, throughout the last year, we have continually run up against deadlines on how we were going to keep the government of the United States operating properly.

The omnibus is currently being discussed. The negotiations for the omnibus were made possible by the fact that a significant number of Democrats voted for it, while a significant number of Republicans voted against it. It was a bipartisan statement proceeding.

That omnibus needs to be passed by March 23. We are not scheduled to be here, Mr. Speaker, on March 23. That does not mean that we might not go over, but it means that it needs to pass the House and the Senate and be sent to the President prior to or on March 22.

Negotiations are, unfortunately, not proceeding as effectively as I would hope they would. I am hopeful that there will be a clean bill from either

side without any riders that would lead either side to oppose that bill.

Mr. Speaker, let me talk about an issue. First of all, let me say that the leader has announced a number of bills for consideration next week. I venture to say that an extraordinarily infinitesimal amount of the American people have any ideas what those bills do or are urging those bills to be passed. I do not mean that they are without substance. I mean that they are not the issues on the mind of the American people. This is the people's House.

Mr. Speaker, the Speaker appeared on television at a townhall on CNN some 14 months ago. He made a promise at a CNN townhall to a Dreamer that asked him a question.

House Speaker Paul Ryan strongly suggested to that young woman that ``revocation on protection for the Dreamers brought here as children will not be carried out.''

Notwithstanding that, the President of the United States put that Dreamer and hundreds of thousands of other Dreamers--indeed, close to 2 million Dreamers--at risk by withdrawing their protections, which Speaker Ryan indicated would not happen: ``Will not be carried out.''

That was some 6 months ago, Mr. Speaker. Not the CNN; that was 14 months ago.

I have talked to the Speaker, I have brought it up continuously on this floor, and I have been told by the Republican leadership: Don't worry, we have got until March 5 to do something.

I was told that in October, I was told that in November, I was told that in December, I was told that in January, and I was told that in February: Don't worry, we have got until March 5.

March 5 came and went. No action. None.

That Dreamer to whom the Speaker spoke is still at risk, still worried, and still twisting in the wind. Eighty-six percent of the American public, Mr. Speaker, say that that young woman should not be kicked out of the country that she knows: brought here as a child, went to elementary school, middle school, high school; some to college, some practicing medicine, some practicing law, some being social workers, many being teachers.

I was told: Don't worry. They were told: Don't worry, March 5 is a long way away.

It has come and gone.

And we are told this week that we will consider H.R. 1116, the TAILOR Act. I am not sure that any of my constituents have talked to me about the TAILOR Act.

H.R. 4263, the Regulation A+ Improvement Act, I doubt that a single one of my constituents has talked to me about that act.

They are fillers, Mr. Speaker. They are fillers while we fiddle, while Rome burns.

I have asked, Leader Pelosi has asked, frankly, and leaders of the Catholic Church and other denominations have asked to put the Dreamer bill on the floor in the people's House.

The Speaker of this House, when he became the Speaker, said: We will not duck the tough issues. We will take them head-on. Don't worry, we have got until March 5.

March 5 is behind us, and we consider these bills, which I think are filler bills, and controversial bills at that.

We have asked, Mr. Speaker, that the majority party put on the floor three bills on an issue of vital importance to the American people, that every American knows about, that the people's House ought to have the right to speak on, and express the views of the American people and establish policy they support--86 percent of them.

So I will, again, ask the majority leader, Mr. Speaker, to put the Dream Act on the floor; to put Mr. Goodlatte's bill on the floor; to put the bipartisan bill, sponsored by Mr. Hurd from Texas and Mr. Aguilar from California; put them on the floor.

Take the issues. I know they are tough. The Speaker said he wants to take the issues head-on, Mr. Speaker, not duck. Show some political courage. And not only that, respect this institution and every Member in it who wants to express their opinion on this legislation of critical importance to at least 1.8 million Americans, vital to their future, to their life.

And 86 percent of Americans believe they ought to be protected, just as Speaker Ryan pledged they would be 14 months ago when he said revocation of protection for the Dreamers brought here as children will not be carried out. Mr. Speaker, that bill ought to be brought to the floor to carry out that representation and that assurance.

I have been patient. I have talked. I have worked. I have come to meetings. I met with the President of the United States, Mr. Speaker, with my colleague and friend, the majority leader, and Mr. Durbin and others, 25 of us sitting around the Cabinet table, Mr. Speaker, when the President said we will take care of DACA, and he said: You send me a bill; I will sign it, and I will take the heat.

He was not telling the truth, Mr. Speaker, because we had a bill, called the commonsense crowd, about 25 United States Senators brought a bill to the floor. It took care of a couple of the things the President wanted to take care of, but it wasn't good enough for him, notwithstanding the fact he said: You send me a bill. You decide, i.e., the Congress, the coequal branch of government that now stands suppliant in the face of saying we will pass something only if the President will sign it.

That is not what the framers meant, Mr. Speaker. We are a coequal branch, not a subservient branch of the government of the United States.

Mr. Speaker, if we brought those three bills to the floor that I just referred to--the Dream Act, cosponsored by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican, and Lucille Roybal-Allard, a Democrat; and the Goodlatte bill, sponsored by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee; and a bipartisan bill sponsored by many Republicans and many Democrats, Mr. Hurd, a Republican from Texas, and Mr. Aguilar, a Democrat from California--if we brought those bills to the floor, the problem is they know the Hurd-Aguilar bill would pass, which would reflect the views of 86 percent of the American people.

No, Mr. Speaker, notwithstanding the fact that the American people are overwhelmingly for that, we are going to be considering H.R. 1116, H.R. 4545, H.R. 4263, ignoring that 1.8 million people, ignoring that promise that the Speaker made to that young woman that she would be protected.

The Speaker has told me over and over again: Oh, I want to do this. I want to do that. I am going to have some task force. I am going to do this, that, and the other.

March 5 has come and gone. Nothing has happened.

I used to be the majority leader. I could bring a bill to the floor. If I said something was going to happen, I tried to make sure it happened.

If I sound angry, it is because I am angry. If I sound frustrated, it is because I am frustrated. The people's House ought to be given the opportunity to express the will of the American people on this issue.

There is another issue, and we do have a bill, the so-called Rutherford bill that we are bringing to the floor on suspension. We are probably all going to vote for the Rutherford bill.

But we are going to ignore a bill, as we have been ignoring for years under Republican leadership, a bill that is supported even more than the DACA, Dreamer bills, and that is comprehensive background checks, which clearly will save lives, which will close the loopholes, which will make sure that those with criminal records don't get guns, will make sure that those with mental health issues don't get guns, will make sure that terrorists who can't fly on airplanes can't get guns.

Mr. Speaker, we have been urging and pleading for that bill to be brought to the floor over and over and over again. The National Rifle Association is not for that bill. I can't understand why. Rather, we bring a bill to the floor that will help schools--I think that is positive--do what they can do right now.

Should we help them? Of course. But we ought not to pretend that we are doing something to make our children safer in their schools, to make concertgoers safer at their concerts, to make churchgoers safer in their church, to make people who go to a nightclub safer in that nightclub, to make people who go to shopping centers safer in those shopping centers. We ought not to pretend the Rutherford bill is going to do that.

Will comprehensive background checks do it all? It will not. There are other things I think ought to be done. But at a minimum, the American people think that we ought to make sure that everybody who purchases a weapon has a background check to make sure that they are not a criminal, somebody with a substantial mental health problem that makes them unsafe to own a gun, spousal abusers.

Mr. Speaker, the bills we are going to consider next week I am sure have some merit from some perception, from somebody's perception, but the two bills that I have just discussed are on the minds of the American people, and millions are at risk if we do not pass legislation dealing with that issue.

I do not criticize the Rutherford bill, but it will not solve the problem, and everybody knows it will not solve the problem; nor, frankly, will universal background checks in and of itself solve the problem, but experts say it will save thousands of lives over time. It would have saved lives in Charleston, South Carolina, the nine people killed in Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Mr. Speaker, I like to work in a bipartisan way, but that requires respecting one another. My Republican friends wrote a book in which they were very critical of the way we ran the House because it wasn't open and transparent. I would ask them to reread that book. I have read it.

My friend is smiling.

In that book, they really wanted to change the way this House runs, make it open and transparent, take the tough issues head-on. That is what the Speaker said.

Mr. Speaker, they are not taking the tough issues head-on. They are hiding from the NRA. They are hiding from some of their hardline people who want to kick people out of America, who want to take that lamp that the Statue of Liberty holds high and bring it down.

Yes, I am disappointed. Yes, I am angry. Yes, I am frustrated. I came to this body to express my opinion on the important issues confronting my country and to try to make it better.

Mr. Speaker, I would plead with the majority leader to perhaps delay those four bills. Rutherford's could be on suspension. It won't take much time. Delay those three bills that a miniscule amount of Americans, there may be 100, there may be 200 Americans who would be concerned those bills aren't brought forward, and put on the floor the three bills I referred to--the Dream Act, the Goodlatte bill, and the Hurd-Aguilar bill--and let the people's House express its opinion. That is not an unfair request.

And let the background check, universal background check bill come to the floor, and let the House vote. I know that there are some Republicans who don't want to vote on that bill because the public is so overwhelmingly for it and they may upset the NRA. That is what this business is about, Mr. Speaker, expressing openly and clearly what we think the policies of our country ought to be to make our public better, to make our country safer.

Mr. Speaker, I would end on those two issues, and I yield to my friend, the majority leader.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time to just make a correction.

I said a significant number of Democrats voted for it and a significant number of Republicans voted against it.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, the majority leader talked about a lot of issues, one of which was NICS. What he didn't say was they put a poison pill in the Fix NICS bill, which is why so many of us voted against it on concealed carry. There is a disagreement in this House on that. We disagree, for the most part, on that provision. We don't think that makes America safer. There are differences of opinion on that.

My suggestion to the majority leader is, the Rutherford bill is on the floor. By unanimous consent, let's put the Fix NICS bill in the Rutherford bill without the poison pill in it.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman to see if he will be agreeable to doing that.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, my question was, will you agree--you talked a lot about NICS and where it is failing, and we can fix it. We agree with that.

So what I am asking you--you put the Rutherford bill on. I think most of us are going to vote for the Rutherford bill. Maybe all of us will vote for the Rutherford bill, which says let's help schools make themselves more safe.

Why should anybody be opposed to that?

What I say to you is: you just spent a significant amount of time talking about how we could make the NICS process work better, but that many of us voted against it and it hasn't moved in the Senate.

I guarantee you--I don't know that I can guarantee you, but my thinking is: if you do the Rutherford bill, and if you add in the Fix NICS bill--not with concealed carry, but the Fix NICS bill that you talk about in the Rutherford bill--

I will work with you to get that passed in the United States Senate, and I think we will be successful.

My question to the majority leader: Will you agree to a unanimous consent request to add the Fix NICS bill into the Rutherford bill on the suspension calendar?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

The answer is no, Mr. Speaker. The answer is no, because we want to continue to have that on which we agree defeated by that on which we do not agree. That is the pattern. And when the gentleman says all those bipartisan bills, there were some, obviously, Democrat votes on many of those bills, I am sure.

Mr. Speaker, I didn't hear a word about a bill that has the majority's support on the floor of the House of Representatives that I spoke about, and that is Hurd-Aguilar. Mr. Goodlatte, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee said if Goodlatte was put on the floor, it will lose 50, 60, 70 Republicans. Mr. Goodlatte said that, and that was passed out of the Judiciary Committee. It hasn't been brought to the floor because it would fail.

Hurd-Aguilar, which has not been considered by the committee, but which has the majority of votes on this floor, that bill has not been brought up; just as the bill that passed the United States Senate 5 years ago, to deal with so many of the problems that immigration confronts us with, including security at the border, 5 years, has not been brought up. March 5, nothing happened. Come and gone.

The majority leader spent a lot of time, Mr. Speaker, talking about things that are important but were not on the subject because he doesn't want to deal with the subject. Apparently the Republicans don't want to deal with the subject and they won't put it on the floor. They are obstructing the will of the American people and they are putting thousands and thousands and thousands of people at risk.

The majority leader, with all due respect, is wrong. All of the DACA recipients are not protected, and many of them are not signing up again because they are afraid their government will come after them. They feel they were flim-flammed.

I disagree with the majority leader, Mr. Speaker. Many of us believe what the President did is absolutely legal. It is consistent with what Ronald Reagan did, with what George H.W. Bush did, with what Bill Clinton did, and what George W. Bush did.

Every President, since I have been serving here, has modified immigration consistent with their executive authority. There was nothing mentioned about the quote of the Speaker that was clearly directed at this young woman to say that revocation of protections for the Dreamers brought here as children will not be carried out.

Nobody can sign up for DACA protection now under the court order-- nobody. You can re-up, but you can't sign up--1.8 million. The President of the United States, Mr. Speaker, sent a message down here, or maybe he tweeted it, they would agree to 1.8 million and a pathway to citizenship, parenthesis, if you agree with this, if you agree with that, if you agree with the other.

That is not what was said at the White House, Mr. Speaker. I agree with the majority leader. He brought up some other points, said we need to agree to discuss those. I agreed to discuss them. I didn't agree to agree to them, nor did anybody else in that room. And the President of the United States, 25 Members of the House and Senate sitting around the Cabinet table, said: Are we agreed that we are going to solve the DACA issue first?

Not a single Member demurred. Not a single Member said no--not a single one, Mr. Speaker, yet we can't get that bill to the floor. And the majority leader says: Oh, well, we are bringing up a bill that will create jobs.

I am for doing that. And, frankly, if we do that the week after or the week after that--frankly, I don't know the bills well enough to be speaking about them with much depth of information as to how they were voted on in committee, but my inkling is that the majority Democrats--I don't know what is in there, in these bills--may well have voted against them. Most of those bills coming out of committee are pretty partisan.

We didn't discuss the three bills that I brought up. The majority leader didn't mention them. They have bipartisan support on two; and one, the chairman of the committee admits, does not have the votes on this floor. He would get no Democratic votes, and he would lose a substantial number of Republican votes, and the majority leader knows that, Mr. Speaker.

And we talk about NICS. I want to fix NICS. I don't want concealed carry to be part of that. And I regret that the majority leader would not agree to let's fix NICS and put the Rutherford bill through. That would pass the Senate, but he has got a bill over there he knows won't pass the Senate but maybe it makes a good talking point.

Mr. Speaker, I don't know what we have to do. We have been waiting a long time, not just the 6 months since September, waiting for March 5 to come and go. We have been waiting for a long time to have bills on the floor with an open amendment process so we can, in fact, do the people's will on immigration and on protecting our students and our families and our citizens from the irresponsible use of guns.

We are not against the responsible use of guns. We believe the Second Amendment protects people on owning handguns and hunting guns; but the Supreme Court, in the Heller decision, said there are things that the community could do. There are things that the government can do to protect its people and to make sure that gun use, within the framework of the Second Amendment, is responsible.

I don't know what we have to do, Mr. Speaker. I don't think anybody doubts that the Hurd-Aguilar bill has the majority votes in this House. I would urge people to, if they believe in this issue, sign a discharge petition. They refused to bring the Export-Import Bank bill to the floor for 1\1/2\ or 2 years. Some of the leadership weren't for it. As a matter of fact, the two highest weren't for it. But 127 Republicans to 117 Republicans, they were for it, and over 300 votes were for it, and they would not bring it to the floor short of a discharge petition.

That is not transparency; that is not openness; that is not taking the tough issues head on. That is obfuscating. That is undermining democracy in the people's House. If the gentleman wants to respond, I will yield to him. If not, I will yield back the balance of my time.

I did not.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time. With all due respect, Mr. Speaker, I indicated to the leader what I said, and I knew what I said, and I know what the facts are. The Republicans could not pass that bill on their own. There were over 60 Republicans who voted ``no'' on that bill, and they got 167. You may have given me--or 170.

That is, Mr. Speaker, almost 50 short of passage. Mr. Speaker, I will tell you, when I was majority leader, we didn't get much help from the other side, and we always had 218 to pass what we wanted to pass on our side. Seventy-three of our Democrats voted for it, which is why it passed. Not the majority, because the majority of us were so frustrated.

Again, the majority leader has not spoken to the bills. He has spoken about what we have passed. And the CHIP bill, by the way, was brought up weeks after its authority expired. Weeks after it expired.

He says it was because of our committee. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, we can't stop anything in committee. They have a majority on every committee and can bring a bill up tomorrow--the next hour if they decide to do so.

No, after.

It expired on September 30. You didn't bring it up until weeks after that.

I have consulted with the staff person for whom you have great respect and affection, and she says that I am right. Now, she is my staffer, so maybe she is somewhat biased, but I will tell you that we believe we are right on that.

But that is not the point, Mr. Speaker. The point is not what we have done in the past--particularly what we have done. And we all are for CHIP. That is not the point. The point is we have two critical pieces of legislation this House must address and that the overwhelming majority of the American people think we ought to address and think we ought to pass and are for. And I don't mean 51 percent or 52 percent of them. I mean 86 percent of the people or more. It is not a close question.

And rather than talking about, well, we did this, we passed 5,950 bills, I am not talking about those bills. I am talking about bills we haven't brought to the floor, Mr. Speaker, that we haven't allowed the House to consider; that we have hundreds of thousands of kids, young people who we respect and who are teachers, are doctors, are workers in our factories making a difference, working in restaurants and hotels.

I was with the Chamber of Commerce in Maryland just the other day, and three different CEOs came up to me and said: We have got DACA people working for us and doing an excellent job, and they are worried that they are going to be kicked out of the only country they know.

But we talk about NICS, and we talk about this, that, and the other. Bring those bills to the floor. That is what we are asking for. We want that respect. We want that respect for this institution.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to yield to the majority leader again. It is those two bills that we believe would pass with significant majorities in this House--the three bills, and we can choose between them. We have offered the queen of the hill, with the explanation for those who may be watching and not bored stiff. One of those three bills that I have mentioned, one a Republican bill, the other two bipartisan bills, Ros- Lehtinen-Roybal-Allard bill and the Hurd-Aguilar bill, both of those bills are bipartisan. Certainly one of those will get a significant majority of this House, and I am not denigrating the bills.

I may or may not be for them that are on the schedule, but there are no issues that the country feels are more important right now than background checks, and there is no issue more timely than fixing--as the Speaker pledged to do 14 months ago, putting at risk that young woman and hundreds of thousands of other individuals in our country similarly situated. That is what we ought to be doing.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend.

Mr. Speaker, the leader spoke in a very calm and reasoned way. I will do the same.

As an aside, I will tell you the CHIP bill passed on November 3, over a month after its authorization expired.

Mr. Speaker, the majority leader talks about coming to compromise. I went down to the White House. Mr. Durbin and I talked about whether we would go to the White House. We went to the White House out of respect for the Presidency, out of a hope that the discussions that we had at the White House would lead to resolution of a serious issue threatening hundreds of thousands, indeed, close to 2 million individuals who know America as their country and who 86 percent of Americans think ought to stay here in America.

In that meeting, Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States said--and he said it on television. You don't have to take my word. There is a video record of what the President said. What he said is we would take care of the DACA issue, consistent, Mr. Speaker, with what Speaker Ryan said to that young woman when he said that the revocation of protections for Dreamers brought here as children will not be carried out.

There was no parenthetical addition, if we do X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, W. There was no parenthetical phrase. He said: We will not put you at risk, young woman, and those similarly situated.

We have a bipartisan coalition on this floor, but the leader speaks about going into a room--if you want to have a pejorative, a back room, privately--to try to resolve issues not directly related to the DACA protectees.

They are here. The President said they ought to stay here. And the President made a representation, Mr. Speaker, that if we passed a bill, he would sign it. But as the Senate considered a compromise piece of legislation, agreed to by Republican Senators and Democratic Senators, just a few hours before it was brought to the floor, the President said he would veto it. That was not what he said on television in the White House. He said that he would take the heat, if heat there is, and sign the bill that we sent down.

Now we have a Speaker of the House and a majority leader of the Senate who say we won't send something down to the President unless he agrees to sign it, meaning that the House and Senate will not act independently of the President's imprimatur. How sad a position it is that the people's House and the United States Senate have subjugated themselves to the President of the United States.

I presume, Mr. Speaker, that prolonging this discussion apparently will make no difference. But, Mr. Speaker, our side of the aisle represents just short of 50 percent, maybe 48 percent, of the American people. Mr. Speaker, we are saying let us consider. Let us have on this floor--not in a back room, not in somebody's office, not somewhere privately--on the House floor, the people's floor, let us vote.

Let the American people see who raises their hand ``aye'' and ``nay'' on propositions that have been worked on in committee, the Goodlatte bill, and for months between Republicans and Democrats, bipartisan bills. Let the people speak through their Representatives. Don't bottle it up in somebody's office. Let the people's House work its will. Have the courage to pursue that which you said you would do and take the tough issues head-on, not duck them.

Mr. Speaker, I would hope, on behalf of that 86 percent of the American people who support the Dreamers, and even more who support comprehensive background checks, that we have the ability to consider those bills and consider them next week.

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

Mr. Speaker, on Friday I attended the funeral of a hero. Prince George's County lost a dedicated Corporal last Wednesday, who was shot and killed while off duty but still doing his duty. Corporal Mujahid Ramzziddin, a fourteen-year veteran of the force, stepped in to protect a neighbor from an abusive spouse. As Chief Hank Stawinski said: `He saved her life by giving his own.' He is the thirtieth Prince George's County police officer to die in the line of duty. Corporal Ramzziddin's courage is an example of the kind of devotion to duty that our law enforcement officers in Prince George's County and across Maryland and the United States demonstrate each day they serve.

At the funeral in Lanham, I joined state and county officials in comforting Corporal Ramzziddin's wife Tammi and his four children as they paid their final tributes to him and laid him to rest according to traditional Muslim rites. I was honored to present Tammi with a flag flown over the U.S. Capitol in memory of her husband, and I was deeply moved by the outpouring of support and love from the community to the Ramzziddin family. They are in my thoughts at this difficult time, as is Corporal Ramzziddin' s heroic example.

Corporal Ramzziddin was not only a dedicated law enforcement officer; he was also a volunteer in the community. He served in several ways with the Nation's Mosque, including as a leader for its Boy Scout Troop 1517, on its safety and security committee, and with the men's group that engaged in neighborhood litter removal projects. Corporal Ramzziddin was a man of faith and service, a patriot and a hero to his community. It surprised no one who knew him that he gave his life while trying to protect someone else.

I hope all of my colleagues in this House will join me in paying tribute to Corporal Mujahid Ramzziddin for his life of service and his ultimate sacrifice protecting the people of Prince George's County, Maryland.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to this legislation.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush declared a long overdue ``independence day'' for people with disabilities as he signed the historic Americans with Disabilities Act into law. As the House sponsor of the ADA, I shared the President's optimism and hope that every man, woman, and child with a disability can now pass through once-closed doors into a bright new era of equality, independence, and freedom.

I was proud to work across the aisle on the ADA and on the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, the only time the ADA has ever been amended. We brought together outside groups from a broad range of affiliations to create a framework for policy that would vastly improve accessibility and be agreeable to all.

Unfortunately, people with disabilities still face stubborn barriers to full inclusion. In the last year, people with differing abilities have had to fight for access to healthcare and the services they need to live independently and with dignity.

Now we have on the floor a bill that would undermine the central tenet of the ADA: the right of victims of discrimination to seek redress for exclusion. Requiring victims of discrimination to provide notice of a violation before bringing a lawsuit is an improper shift of the burden of compliance onto victims, one not required of any other group by any other civil rights law. Not a single civil rights law gives this kind of provision.

As the Paralyzed Veterans of America wrote in its letter of opposition: ``Veterans with disabilities who honorably served their country should not bear the burden of ensuring that businesses in their communities are meeting their ADA obligations. Instead, it is the responsibility of businessowners and their associations to educate themselves about the law's requirements.''

Now, this law was passed some 27 years ago. There is no excuse for not knowing the obligations. Our laws do not require such notice for women, African Americans, Latinos, religious minorities, or any other groups protected against discrimination.

I acknowledge that there are issues in States that have added compensatory damages to their State laws. There are no damages in this national ADA law, which was a compromise. A problem with State law, however, should be fixed at the State level and not with a retreat in the Federal law. Lawyers who file vexatious suits may well be in violation of their ethical obligations.

Sadly, we are seeing that almost 28 years after its passage and decades of notice as to what is required, tax credits so that you can make changes necessary to make your place accessible, there are still those who have barriers to full accommodation for Americans with differing abilities, contrary to law. In fact, when we adopted the law, we didn't have it go into effect for 24 months--2 years--so that people could educate themselves on their responsibilities.

People with differing abilities still have to fight day in and day out for the access and inclusion to which they should already be entitled under the law as businesses continue to dismiss their obligations.

We have a colleague, Senator Tammy Duckworth. She was a helicopter pilot. Her legs were shot off. She now serves in the United States Senate. She is a disabled veteran and an American hero. She wrote the following in The Washington Post about this bill: ``This offensive legislation would segregate the disability community, making it the only protected class under civil rights law that must rely on `education'--rather than strong enforcement--to guarantee access to public spaces.''

I will be voting ``no'' on this legislation in the name of upholding the bedrock principles of civil rights law in this country and the integrity of the ADA that many of us worked together to enact on a bipartisan basis, an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, 400 votes-plus, for this legislation. Let us not retreat this day. Let us not say to those with disabilities: You have got to wait 180 days.

What if we said: If you are an African American and you try to go into a place of public accommodations and they wouldn't admit you, and you said, ``Well, I have got a complaint,'' and you had to wait 180 days to have that right redressed, that is not right.

Let us not treat those with disabilities as second-rate citizens. Defeat this bill.

Madam Speaker, we have 4 legislative days before those protected by DACA will be at risk. The Speaker has said he was going to address this issue. He has not at this point in time.

The Speaker said on 9/23/2010: We will advance major legislation one issue at a time.

He said: We will not duck the tough issues. We will take them head- on.

In that light, I urge the Speaker to put on the floor the three bills that are pending in this House: a clean Dream Act; the USA Act, sponsored by Representatives Aguilar and Hurd, a bipartisan bill; and a Republican bill, the Securing America's Future Act, sponsored by Representative Goodlatte.

Madam Speaker, let the people's House speak. Let them vote. Put these three bills on the floor, and let the majority rule. That is democracy. Let democracy prevail in this House.

Mr. Speaker, it is important for us to understand why we are here. We are here because the Republican majority in the House and the Senate and the President of the United States have not funded the government.

Secondly, we also are here because there are a number of issues on which I think there is agreement in both Houses that have not been brought to the floor irrespective of the majority's will.

It appears, from what the Senate leader has said, that there is an agreement in the Senate, and, perhaps--and I think probably--we will move forward today to open up the government.

But I hope my Republican colleagues do not misinterpret what is happening because the issues will not go away. Between now and February 8, if that is the date, we must resolve how we are going to fund the government--that is what has held us up--and we must bring to this floor a bill to protect people whom the President of the United States said we ought to protect.

Let's do it. Let's do our work.