I differ a little bit with Congressman Labrador.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to the draconian budget proposal released by House Republicans yesterday. In Las Vegas and across the country, Americans have made it clear that our budget should bolster a strong middle class…

I wonder what it would be like if we could just join in together to address those issues.

If there are things to be fixed, why not come together and try to fix them?

Do you have an individual mandate requirement in Massachusetts that preceded ObamaCare?

You know, I wish, on this subject, we could sort of move beyond the partisan talking points.

The individual mandate that we have in RomneyCare and ObamaCare, do you know where it came from intellectually?

It came out of the Heritage Foundation. It was a conservative Republican idea.

For one thought of a way to do this without tremendous expense would just be to take expired textbooks here in the United States that are effective texts, ship them back in some of the empty shipping containers that you and I have talked…

To what extent does the promise of education get dashed on the shoals of other cultural barriers?

If you are going to have education you got to have opportunity that goes with it.

So I think we have to understand a certain risk will be inherent in these activities.

The title of this hearing is 'Women's Education: Promoting Development, Countering Radicalization.'

I think moving into the 21st century by empowering women and giving them more space--more public space to express themselves and to be educated, to get jobs, to be involved in politics, we are going to push some of those social cultural…

We don't want to have a whole bunch of Ph.D.s with nothing to do.

One thing I have been advocating on this committee for a long time is that we put our development and foreign aid dollars into printing textbooks.

So we must ensure that promoting education for girls and women abroad remains a priority for the U.S.

I think it is really important, as we just heard in this hearing, education is transformative. It is the key to changing the status of women.