Let's Talk

Floor Speech

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Mr. BRIDENSTINE. I just wanted to take a moment because there's a lot of information out there, Madam Speaker, about what's going on in our country right now--and a lot of misinformation. I thought it would be appropriate just to set the record straight.

A little over a week ago we sent a bill to the Senate. That bill funded the entire government. It kept the government open and it defunded ObamaCare in its entirety. Senator Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats stripped from that bill the defunding mechanism and they sent it back to the House. So we looked at it and we said, What can we do that they might agree to?

Well, the President has already unilaterally delayed major provisions of ObamaCare, including the employer mandate. He did that because he saw the jobs report. People were being forced from full-time work to part-time work. Many of them were being forced out of a job. In my district, I talked to an employer that has 57 employees; they're trying to get down to 49. And guess what they did. This is happening across our country. So the President unilaterally decided he's going to delay the employer mandate.

So we said, okay, if he wants to delay that for 1 year, let's give him an opportunity to delay the entire ObamaCare for 1 year. So we passed a bill that funded the government, kept the government open, and we sent it to the United States Senate with a 1-year delay of ObamaCare. We did that at about 1 o'clock in the morning.

Interestingly, the next day, the Senate Democrats took the day off, and the day after that they didn't even show up until 2 in the afternoon. This was my first indication--as somebody who's new to Congress, I've seen a lot of crazy things--it was my first indication that maybe they wanted a government shutdown. Astonishingly, they just didn't show up. When they did show up, they tabled it.

So then we said, okay, well, what if we just delay the individual mandate? He has already given multibillion-dollar corporations a 1-year reprieve. He's given Members of Congress a subsidy. It's not written in the law; in fact, it's illegal. He had a meeting with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, and the next thing you know Members of Congress get a subsidy.

So we said, look, if Members of Congress are going to get a subsidy and multibillion-dollar corporations are going to get a break, why don't we give hardworking Americans a 1-year reprieve? So we passed a bill that funded the government, kept the government open, and delayed the individual mandate for only 1 year. Of course Harry Reid took that bill and he immediately moved to table it.

So then at about 1 o'clock in the morning we decided, okay, let's just ask for a conference so that we can have some people from our side and some people from their side get together and work this out. Astonishingly, they didn't even want that. If you can imagine that, they didn't want to sit down and talk to Members of Congress.

Interestingly, the President called on the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, to go to the White House, and he went and he talked to the President. Guess what the President told him? The President said, We're not going to negotiate. He said, We're not going to negotiate on the continuing resolution to fund the government, nor are we going to negotiate on the debt ceiling.

This is not how it's supposed to work in our constitutional Republic in split government, but that's where we are. This is indicative of the fact that this is Harry Reid's shutdown. This is President Barack Obama's shutdown. This is not the Republican shutdown. We have done everything we could to keep this government open, and Harry Reid and President Barack Obama have shut it down.

But here's the good thing. Here's what we have done: We passed a bill, and that bill said we're going to fund the troops. We passed it unanimously in the House of Representatives. We passed it unanimously in the Senate. The President signed it into law. That's a good thing.

Then we had another bill. We thought we could pass it under suspension, so it would require a two-thirds vote. That bill was to fund the veterans of the United States, the Veterans Administration. Interestingly, Members of this body on the other side of the aisle killed it, if you can imagine that. It is every bit as indefensible to kill funding our veterans as it is to not fund our troops, every bit as indefensible.

Then, after that occurred, we wanted a bill that would fund our National Guard and our Reserve. I'm a reservist. I've been on Active Duty. I've been a reservist. I can tell you firsthand that reservists serve this country every bit as honorably as those on the Active Duty side. So we wanted to fund them. And guess what? We brought up a bill. We passed it under a rule so it only required a simple majority, and we passed it. We sent it to the Senate, and they haven't done anything with it.

This is where we are. Harry Reid and Barack Obama are holding our veterans hostage and they're holding the National Guard and our reservists hostage to ObamaCare. It's that simple.

And, by the way, it's not just to ObamaCare. It's one very simple provision that is only a 1-year delay of the individual mandate. When you think about it, it's really they're holding it hostage to having a meeting. At the end, we just said, Okay, let's have a meeting. They said, No, we're not going to have a meeting, and, oh, by the way, we're shutting down the government.

That's where we are.

So I just wanted to clarify that for my constituents back home. We are opening the government one bill at a time, and we're being blocked by the Senate. Certainly it's in nobody's best interest in this country to have a government shutdown. It's nothing any of us wanted. Yet Harry Reid and Barack Obama gave it to us.

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