Personal Responsibility

Floor Speech

Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Speaker, my colleagues from across the aisle like to talk a lot about personal responsibility, but their decision to adjourn Congress for nearly 2 months shows how little they actually understand the concept.

Congress is facing serious deadlines right now, and we should be dealing with the problems the American people sent us here to solve. Instead, Republican leadership has decided that we should go home without doing any of it and taking with us one of the worst report cards in American history.

For more than a year now, Republicans have ignored a plan to create 2.6 million new jobs and protect another 1.6 million existing jobs. They won't even bring it to the floor for a vote. Right now we could bring to the floor and send to the President's desk a bill that would protect tax cuts for 98 percent of the American people and 97 percent of small businesses, but instead we're going home.

Republicans seem content to take our country off the fiscal cliff, which will hobble our economy, raise taxes on millions of working families, and once again shift the responsibility of our deficit to those who can least afford it.

Mr. Speaker, Republicans can't preach personal responsibility if they're not willing to accept it themselves.

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