On the recordOctober 10, 2013
I thank Congressman Price for yielding. I was sitting in my office listening to this, and I realized that what our sessions are about are telling the American people some of the truth some of the time. The truth of the matter is that this is all about the fact that an extreme division of the Republican Party doesn't like the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law 3\1/2\ years ago, and so they are using the appropriations process to shut down Congress. We keep saying you don't need to do this. It has been a law for 3\1/ 2\ years; and guess what, in those 3\1/2\ years we have passed 17 CRs; 17 CRs have been passed since the Affordable Care Act was enacted. And guess what, Republicans voted for almost every one of them. So what is the difference now? This is just craziness. Our whole country is being put at risk because they won't do what we have done every year because they don't like the Affordable Care Act. Now if you don't like something, use a law-making process called an authorization. When you don't like something, you take a different bill and fix it. You can say, well, we don't like it; we don't even want to fix it. I use the argument that the Democrats didn't like Medicare part D because of the way it was being done. We voted against it, but we never shut down government. We got around to saying, yes, it is the law; let's fix it. When you pass a big law, there are always some things you need to fix.…
Source
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