Tony Cárdenas

Human trafficking is an issue that really hits home for us in Los Angeles.

This bill is part of the solution to the bigger issue of human trafficking.

Are we looking at possibly in the near future where people get in their car and they push a button...

I can envision if we are going to be appropriate as a Government, and maybe in the future what we have is a speed limit technology...

We need more assistance from the state and Federal Government at the local level to be able to do this.

Last year my colleague on this committee Ben Ray Lujan and I introduced the Promoting Life-Saving New Therapies for Neonates Act.

So that people can do the right thing, corporations or individuals can do the right thing, and at the same time they can get some help in actually doing the right thing?

And something such as a year of that revamping to just restore back to where it was, doesn't that cause a compounding effect potentially when it comes to the actual work being done going forward not only within the department but in the…

Do our job legislatively by the September '17 deadline.

Are many of the people that would be let go, per se, if we legislatively failed to do our job here, would that--you are talking about jobs, people who are specialists, or what kind of jobs are they?

Is it fair to say that getting so close to September 2017 creates kind of a little bit of nervousness amongst people who are trying to get their work done in such an environment?

What I hope that we can prevent as Members of Congress, as legislators, as responsible elected officials, that we not go back to those days.

We have had nearly 8 years of talk about replace, but we have come up with nothing better in that time.

Why are we spending time analyzing a half-finished bill that doesn't take care of all the issues that were promised...

The big picture is the more than 74 million Americans today that have a life of dignity because they are using Medicaid and Medicare.

We are tired of not having an answer for our constituents when they ask us what we have done to cut down on the number of mass shootings or to make the process for buying a gun safer.

Medicare beneficiaries in California have saved more than 1.2 billion on prescription drugs because of the Affordable Care Act.

the Affordable Care Act has improved millions of lives in my state.

we have been able to expand Medicaid with over three million Californians having gained access to Medicaid or CHIP since 2013.

the expansion of preventive services with no deductible or copay under the Affordable Care Act allowed more than 3.6 million Californians with the Medicare to access preventive care services in 2014 alone.

If we had a hearing in 10 legislative days and for some odd reason there was little to no factual information that we could deliberate, then that would be a perfect example of us perhaps speaking to the issues of maybe the inadequacies of…

Think what it must be like now that every time your children leave the school, your spouse leaves for work, you leave the house to go to the grocery store, whatever you do, or to your work, that you might not come back home.

My resolution here would not preclude us from having moments of silence.

But this resolution alone won't solve the epidemic, but it is a way to start the kind of conversation and examination of gun violence that has been so sadly lacking under this leadership.

I am embarrassed for the institution that on an issue like this where thousands and thousands of people are dying each year we can't even find the time to talk about it.