Christopher Shays

Mr. Speaker, there are a large number of Republicans who believe that the minimum wage is destructive and that an increase would be harmful to our country. There are a number of Republicans who take a different view. My purpose for…

I just wanted to come personally and thank my colleague for the extraordinary job he has done as the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, the chairman who has actually had to make cuts in budgets. We slowed the growth of Medicare…

Mr. Speaker, I want to pay my solemn and deep respects for Mr. Brown, who was an outstanding chairman of a major political party, the Democrat Party, and an outstanding Secretary of Commerce. He was someone who was extraordinarily…

I definitely want to be a part of this tribute and join with my colleagues from both sides of the aisle who are here to express their love and admiration for a truly great American, a truly fine, outstanding Secretary of the Cabinet, the…

Mr. Speaker, a number of years ago the President came in with major reform of health care. It was wide reaching, it was well beyond what anyone in this House wanted to do, and now we have a bill that in my judgment is very sensible. It is…

Mr. Speaker, Americans have the constitutional right to bear arms and the Government has the constitutional responsibility to regulate that right. Repeal of the assault weapons ban was not and is not part of the Contract With America. It…

There will be no money for any department, and any grant and any program for those departments according to Senator Kerrey.

the bottom line to our Medicare plan is we do not increase copayments, we do not increase deductibles, we allow the premium to stay at 31.5 percent, we provide choice. It is true, we ask the wealthiest of wealthy to pay a higher part for…

If we can end with Mr. Rabin's quote that, ``The politician is elected by the adults to represent the children.''

Mr. Speaker, I said earlier in part of a special order that former Prime Minister Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, had said that politicians are elected by adults to represent the children. I am struck by the power of that statement…

We actually have 10 programs we can choose and then variations within those programs, so we have lots of choice and we want seniors to have that same choice.

One reason I like my community meetings, I call it my community test, if I have got to go to my community in a community meeting, I have got to tell them what we are doing, and if it does not pass, you know, if I cannot pass it through my…

That is a great illustration of why it did not happen. There is no way a family of four would have tolerated paying $76,000.

I just would like to thank both of you. You claimed the time, and I thank the gentleman from Maine for doing that and just say that we do live in the greatest country in the world, and we are going to save it. I mean, we are not going to…

In other words, a 50-percent increase. I think we would all like it, especially if we could get away with calling it a cut. I am not proud that there are certain parts of the Government that are going up. I would like to be able to get a…

Really what the gentleman is describing, if the gentleman will yield, he is describing a situation where people think we have a revenue problem, and we know that we have a spending problem. Revenue keeps going up every year. It is just…

Before the gentleman yields to my colleague, I just want to make sure that we cover this, because we do not want any senior to think that they have to participate in choice. They can keep their traditional fee-for-service, their 1960 Blue…

The bottom line to this issue, though, is that revenues are increasing significantly, and the challenge is that expenses are increasing even at a greater amount. We need to start to slow the growth of spending. I am seeing where the…

Up until now, with the balanced budget, for the first time, this is the Congress that is willing to take on the heavy lifting of controlling 50 percent of the budget that is basically on automatic pilot. We voted on a third, as the…

But to respond to your question, the GAO report makes it very clear that the farmers are being paid double the world price. They are being paid over $600 per ton, whereas the world price is closer to $350.

First off, the peanut farmers make a killing in this program at the expense of the consumer. If they do not want to be part of the program and make that payment, there is nothing that requires them to do it.

the way this started, we are talking about a baseline, and we figured in inflation. Then we said last year, even though we spend more, it is not an increase in spending. I remember when I was first elected in 1987, I would go back home and…

I voted for it because I was willing to even vote for a tax increase where there was a slight tax increase to balance the budget. But I used those numbers that were done not by the Congressional Budget Office, but by the Office of…

I would start by saying a lot of good people are leaving Congress, a lot of people I have tremendous respect for. One of their comments is they are leaving because it is not a fun place anymore; that there is some animosity between parties…

whatever the numbers ultimately that have come through the addition of negotiations in the budget agreements that happened since, the bottom line is that we were spending hundreds of millions of dollars more each year and to get up to $6.8…