TSA Office of Inspection Accountability Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I am disappointed in this bill. We are faced with this continuing resolution in order to avert a government shutdown. This is no way to govern. America deserves better than a month-to-month government, forever on the brink of a shutdown and held back by needless budget constraints.

Those who call this a clean continuing resolution are mistaken. In fact, it puts in place yet more indiscriminate cuts. It cuts .2 percent across the board for most discretionary programs. Apparently, we have not learned our lesson about mindless austerity.

Instead of fighting over women's health care, we should use the next month to negotiate a budget agreement that addresses the single biggest economic issue that we face in this country. Today working men and women in the United States are in jobs that don't pay them enough money. Real wages have been stagnant for 30 years.

We need to stop spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on tax loopholes for the wealthy and for big corporations. We need to invest once more in education and job training and health and all the other priorities that American families hold dear.

Right now we cannot meet their needs. Poor children are struggling. Their vocabularies are, on average, one-third those of their middle income peers. But since 2010, we have cut over $1 billion in real terms from education.

Workers need help learning the right skills, finding work in a tough economy, so that they can support their families, but we have cut more than $1 billion from job training programs.

Millions of Americans depend upon lifesaving medical research to cure disease and to improve the quality of life. I stand here as a survivor of ovarian cancer. I am here because of the grace of God and biomedical research. Yet, we will continue to cut biomedical research. We have cut more than $3.5 billion from the National Institutes of Health.

The list of failures goes on and on. We are failing our workers. We are failing working families. We are failing students and medical researchers and first responders and veterans and families and millions of others.

Our job in this body is to provide opportunity for people. During this economic struggle that we have, we ought to be focused like a laser on the issues that work to better the economic situation of working families in this country.

What we do here is to continue to hold a cap on what we need to move forward, and, more importantly than that, what we do from the other side of the aisle is to threaten the government shutdown over the issue of women's health.

Who are we? What are we about? Where are the great values of this Nation that helped to provide an opportunity so that families could join the middle class of this country and continue to make it strong?

That is what our job is today to do, not to be involved in these mindless exercises that the other side of the aisle continues to move forward on.

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