On the recordMay 31, 2011
I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, the last thing that we need right now is for our Republican colleagues to play Russian roulette with a recovering economy by threatening to default on America's bills and triggering an escalation of interest rates and mortgage rates that will have repercussions on every single American family, and certainly on every sector of our economy. Yet that's what we have today. Republicans have presented a bill that they've said they're going to vote against. So this whole charade, which is costing taxpayers money because we have to pay for the lights, for the printing, for all the Members of Congress and our staffs who are working, we have to pay for this so we can simply send a message that we're going to vote ``no.'' {time} 1710 The New York Times further tells us today that Republican leaders have ``privately assured Wall Street executives that this [vote] is a show.'' Furthermore, they cite that an executive from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce tells us that ``Wall Street is in on the joke.'' The reality is that what our colleagues on the Republican side are trying to do is furiously try to deflect the public's attention from what they recklessly tried to do to Medicare by ending it, because that is in their proposal in their budget.…
