America's Right To Know Month

Floor Speech

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Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, I propose that we make August America Right to Know month. That means Americans have a right to know what this Congress is doing in proposals that change their lives, and what I'm talking about is the health care legislation.

Just a couple of days ago, we marked up this legislation in the Ways and Means Committee, about a thousand pages, and it came to us 3 minutes before midnight the day prior to us marking it up.

We had an amendment in the committee that said, If we're going to impose this new health care system on the American people, Members of Congress, themselves, should be put into this system. What happened to that amendment? It went down by a party-line vote. Republicans said ``yes''; Democrats, except for Mr. Davis of Alabama, said ``no.''

We also said let's recognize the fact that we're taxing people, a lot of taxes on people earning less than $250,000. That violates the pledge people believed they had in the last election. What was the vote? The Republicans said, no, let's not tax people earning less than $250,000; the Democrats said, yes, we will continue to tax those people, violating this pledge, this promise the American people thought that they had on Election Day.

August ought to be the month where America gets to know what's going on.

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