Mark Takano: “I'd like to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for yielding some time to me this evening. Mr. Speaker, there seems to be…”

“I'd like to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for yielding some time to me this evening. Mr. Speaker, there seems to be a lot of talk from my friends on the other side of the aisle about whose idea the sequester was, instead of actually working to stop this from happening. Make no mistake. If the House Republican leadership really wanted to stop the sequester from taking effect, they could do so. It's the House Republican leadership that is sitting back and letting the sequester go through. My friends on the other side of the aisle seem to forget how we arrived here. In 2011, it was the Democrats who wanted a clean raise of the debt ceiling, which had been the process for decades, under Republican and Democratic Presidents. But the extreme wing of the Republican Conference demanded cuts, and chose to hold the American economy hostage. What we got was the Budget Control Act of 2011, which Speaker Boehner said was 98 percent of what he wanted. And here we are, a year and a half later, Mr. Speaker, up to the eleventh hour again, dealing with another manufactured crisis instead of talking about jobs and how to improve the economy. But again, we must deal with the soap opera that is the House of Representatives. Every time the House of Representatives wants to pass some meaningful legislation, we're forced to go through this pattern where our citizens are put through weeks of drama on pins and needles wondering what will happen.…”