Ranking Member DeLauro’s Floor Remarks on Republicans’ Step Toward a Shutdown
WASHINGTON — Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03), Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, delivered the following remarks on the House Floor in opposition to Republicans’ partisan continuing resolution:
Thank you. Again, Republicans have chosen a partisan route. In essence, this was the negotiation around the continuing resolution. It was a consensus that it should have been a bipartisan negotiation. That consensus was abrogated.
So again, Republicans choose a partisan route. They would rather shut down the government than sit down and talk about lowering costs for millions of Americans, preventing people from getting kicked off their health care, and stopping President Trump and Budget Director Russ Vought from stealing from our communities and from our constituents.
Democrats will not support the partisan Republican spending bill because it continues to gut health care of the American people.
We are now nine months into this Administration, and the cost-of-living crisis has only gotten worse. Americans are struggling with rising costs for everyday necessities. They live paycheck to paycheck.
And, instead of lowering prices, President Trump and Republicans passed a bill to strip health care coverage from more than 15 million people, threaten Medicare benefits owed to America’s seniors, and slash nutrition benefits for working families, which will cause an additional 1 million kids to go hungry.
They did this to pass trillions of dollars in tax cuts for big corporations and for billionaires. And they add four trillion dollars to the national debt over the next ten years.
Republicans’ funding bills are cut from the same cloth: they help billionaires and big corporations grow their power, raise prices on the backs of the middle class and the working class.
But what is coming out of the White House is even worse. President Trump’s Administration, led by Russ Vought, is unlawfully stealing funds that Democrats and Republicans passed into law. Yes, the agreement that we have reached over the years, Democrats, Republicans, House, and Senate, have said yes. They have been signed into law, and now, an unelected official, Russ Vought, is stealing that money and using it for what purposes? We don’t even know.
This Administration continues to freeze, to terminate, and cancel $410 billion in commitments to families, to farmers, to children, to small businesses, and communities in every part of our country.
Billions of these commitments will soon be lost forever if Congress refuses to rein in this Administration’s illegal actions. As much as $5 billion for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be wasted. Money promised to help farmers and ranchers drive advancements in agriculture is at risk. Over $1 billion in Nonprofit Security Grants and Homeland Security Grants that keep our communities safe may disappear. And hundreds of millions of dollars in resources to help Americans deal with the increasing cost of housing will evaporate.
Put simply, this White House seeks to undo any agreement made by Congress. Russ Vought wants a shutdown, and House Republican leadership is handing it to him on a silver platter. He wants the confusion so he can keep stealing from our communities without accountability.
These are not normal times. We are not considering this funding during normal circumstances.
A vote for this bill is a vote for the status quo. But now is the time to stand up to the theft and the disregard for the middle class, the working class, and vulnerable Americans.
Now is the time to prevent the health care crisis and to lower costs. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle would say that health care costs are not germane to this bill. Well, take a look at your continuing resolution. Sixty-seven of the ninety-one pages of that resolution deal with health care issues, whether they are health care extenders or whether they are health care for veterans.
So, it is absolutely appropriate that we that we talk about how the administration has gutted health care, caused a health care crisis, increasing costs for people.
Now is the time to put an end to the Trump administration’s corruption that hard working Americans are paying for.
Democrats want to lower costs and deliver critical services to all Americans, and that can be achieved through the continuing resolution that Senator Patty Murray and I introduced yesterday. It cannot be achieved through a Republican shutdown.
This partisan bill reflects a broken political system: Democrats want to protect the millions of working Americans who will be forced to choose between paying for food or their healthcare or the cancer patients and people struggling with chronic disease who will have to choose between having health care coverage at all or keeping a roof over their family’s head, but the Republican majority ignores the democratically elected representatives for half the country to appease their leader.
Let us hope the majority does not drive us straight to a Republican shutdown.
But if they do shut down the government, I have no doubt the American people will know who is to blame.
Vote no on this bill that fails to address the needs of Americans. Join Democrats at the table. Thank you. I reserve the balance of my time.
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