Waiving Requirement Of Clause 6(a) Of Rule XIII With Respect To Consideration Of Certain Resolutions
WAIVING REQUIREMENT OF CLAUSE 6(a) OF RULE XIII WITH RESPECT TO CONSIDERATION OF CERTAIN RESOLUTIONS -- (House of Representatives - September 28, 2006)
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, I want to interject myself in the spirit of debate that we are having here, and want to thank both sides for making this a bit more fun than normal. But we heard a couple of words here today, one of them was ``bitterness,'' one of them was ``market forces,'' and one was ``business.''
If you look at the Republican-controlled Congress and you look at running the government like a business, I think you fail on all accounts. I think when you talk about losing $9 billion in Iraq, and no one knows where it is, that is not running government like a business. When you look at all of the waste, this government is being run like it is 1950 with misleading information. Now we are moving into a new economy, knowledged-based and information-based, and the government has not changed at all.
All of the guys who came in here with Newt Gingrich in 1994, you may remember the big Republican revolution, we are going to balance the budget, we are going to run this thing like a business, we are going to have a smaller government, you are talking about a trillion dollar Medicare drug program, and you have to go back to your conservative base and you have to tell them that you passed it without any ability to negotiate down the drug prices. Good luck in the next 5 weeks.
You have to go back to them and say we are for free markets. But when we ask to get reimportation into this country from Canada and some of the G-7 countries to drive the prices down, you all were against it. That is not worshiping the free market like you normally do.
There are a lot of contradictions going on here, and I think we need to point this out to the American people.
Another thing that I think is even more important, as you guys move away from what your rhetoric is, is that this President and this Congress has borrowed more money from foreign interests than every single President in Congress before you. That is not conservative Republicanism. That is not running your government like a business.
If we don't get past all this rhetoric and doing something else, we are not going to be able to move the country forward. All of these games, we are now competing with 1.3 billion citizens in China and 1 billion citizens in India; hard-core brutal competition, and we are not investing back into the American people. We cannot even give them a slight pay raise. When you guys have given this Congress $30,000 in pay raises, you can't even raise the minimum wage.
We have to invest in these people. You can't compete with 300 million people against the whole globe and say just a small fraction of our society is going to be able to compete. If you can afford to go to a good private university, if you can afford the tuition, then you are going to be just fine. If you are a trust fund baby, you are going to be just fine.
Let us invest in the American people. We need everybody on the field playing for us. And I think Mr. Obey's frustrations is that day in and day out you guys go to great lengths to walk the planks for your political donors. That's the bottom line. You can't argue away from negotiating down drug prices.
And thank God in your case for Wal-Mart. They saved you with Katrina bringing water down and making sure it got in. Thank God for Wal-Mart. If it was not for them, we would really be in a trick. Their $4 prescriptions are going to be helpful, and down in Katrina they were the ones getting the water in when FEMA was like a three-ring circus.
That is not running government like a business. So get your actions to match your rhetoric, and we will all be able to get along a lot better.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Just to clarify to the gentleman from Texas, our frustration is as the gas prices were high, you all were putting $12-15 billion in corporate subsidies to the oil companies while they were having record profits. That's the frustration.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. GINGREY. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I appreciate the gentleman yielding.
You are talking about letting the free market work. You shut down. You have a closed market with pharmaceuticals. We wanted to allow reimportation in from Canada; you wouldn't allow that. And if the free market was working, just like Wal-Mart, I am sure they are buying in bulk and using the negotiating power of Wal-Mart, just like they do on everything else to keep the prices down. You are not allowing the free market to work.
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