Providing for Consideration of H.R. 890, Preserving the Welfare Work Requirement and TANF Extension Act of 2013
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. Van Hollen has, on four different occasions, tried to avoid sequester with a very balanced approach, and it would save 750,000 jobs. If there's anything that's urgent in this Chamber, it should be to preserve and protect the 750,000 jobs that will be lost because of these sequester cuts.
I would finally say that the United States Senate, far from a perfect branch of government in my opinion, but nonetheless, the Senate Majority Leader had an alternative to sequester that got 51 votes. That's a majority. But, unfortunately, under the Senate rules and with Republican insistence that they needed 60 votes, it didn't make it. But 51 Senators voted for an alternative.
So there are alternatives out there; and the notion that we should kind of sit back, lay back, and maybe something will emerge miraculously to deal with this issue I don't think is the proper role of the House of Representatives. We ought to be deliberating and debating and finding ways to protect those 750,000 jobs.
We talk about welfare to work here. And again, the irony is we're trying to prevent the administration from being able to have the flexibility to be able to work with States who want to get better results, to get more people off of welfare to work. But when you talk about getting people to work, we ought to also be talking about preserving the 750,000 jobs that will be lost because of our inaction on sequester.
Mr. Speaker, at this point I'd like to yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett), the ranking member of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. Van Hollen of Maryland had an alternative that four times he's brought to the Rules Committee. Four times the leadership here has said, no, you can't bring it to the floor, you can't debate it, you can't deliberate on it.
And my friends on the other side of the aisle in this Congress have offered zero. They're totally content to let the sequester go into play--750,000 jobs at stake.
I think that's what we should be doing here, Mr. Speaker.
As I yield back the balance of my time, I would urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to suspend politics for just a little while so we can get a few major things done. We can do the politics next year when it's campaign time, but now's the time to achieve results.
We can come together on a lot of these issues. I hope that that happens; but if this is any indication of how we're going to proceed, it makes me less hopeful.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source