On the recordNovember 30, 2010
Madam Speaker, I would remind the body that we're here to discuss Cobell v. Salazar, Pigford v. Glickman, plus the settlement of a number of water right cases. But even having said that, I would like to respond to my friend from North Carolina that not even the Republican Congress that set forth these tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires thought they would go on forever. They set them so that they would expire at the end of this year so that this Nation would have the revenue that it needs to pay its bills. But the Republicans who have now taken this House want to continue those tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires so that this country can't pay its bills as it's supposed to. So the tax cuts, prosecuting two wars without paying for them, allowing the bottom to fall out of Wall Street without any regulation sent this country into a huge deficit which has to stop, and it has to stop now. Now, we've seen, since we've passed the Recovery Act, growth in the economy, not that loss of 6 percent as we saw in the final quarter of the Bush administration. But we've seen five consecutive quarters of growth. We've seen increased employment from the private sector. We have a long way to go, and tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires are not the way to do it. With that, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to my friend from Texas, Congresswoman Jackson Lee.
