Further Continuing Appropriations, Fiscal Year 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, this legislation is one page long. It does only one thing: It changes the date so we can keep the government running from this Friday, December 3 to Saturday, December 18. Otherwise, the government would shut down. For the 2 weeks we are extending the current CR, it will provide us and the Senate time to consider the full year CR and the nominees that the administration should be sending us today.

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

Mr. Speaker, I made a mistake here today. I assumed that because the election was over that we would have at least a temporary suspension of election-year rhetoric. But evidently I was wrong. It's not the first time, but nonetheless I had hoped it would be otherwise today.

Let me simply say that I will take a lot of lectures from a lot of people on a lot of subjects, because I have made more than my share of mistakes in the years that I have served in this place. But the one thing that I will not take is lectures from the other side about fiscal responsibility. I mean, these are the folks who managed to turn $6 trillion in expected surpluses when Bill Clinton left office into a $1 trillion deficit. These are the same folks who insisted on passing two tax cuts primarily targeted at the wealthiest people in this country, all paid for with borrowed money.

These are the same folks that have insisted that we fight two wars on borrowed money rather than paying the bills. And these are the same folks who attacked President Obama for the so-called bailouts when, in fact, the mother of all bailouts, TARP, was brought to this Congress by the previous Republican administration.

While I don't like the way they implemented that bailout, I happen to think that that administration did what was necessary under the circumstances, circumstances created in large part by previous policies that were pursued by the folks running Washington, D.C. I don't want to go any further than that. I didn't intend to get into the political side of the debate, but neither am I going to sit by and have these comments go unanswered.

With that, I would simply say this, again, is a very simple proposition. It extends the budget for 2 weeks at existing levels so that the Congress can make an attempt to finish its work so that we do not do what was done to us 4 years ago, because when we took over 4 years ago, we had to clean up all of the last year's fiscal mess before we could turn to next year's problems.

I would think that it is worth trying to finish action on our budget this year so that our friends, as they assume majority status in January, can start with a clean slate and be looking forward rather than backwards, and this resolution is an attempt to facilitate that. I urge passage of it.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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