Elijah Lewis: “Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, whenever we pass this legislation, we have to ask ourselves, what is broke? What are we…”

“Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, whenever we pass this legislation, we have to ask ourselves, what is broke? What are we trying to fix? The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott) has very clearly said any religious organization can accept money. In the present situation, this bill is not needed. Catholic Charities gets 62 percent. That equates to $1.4 billion a year from the Federal Government. The Salvation Army gets $400 million a year. United Jewish Communities, their nursing homes get 76 percent of their money from the Federal Government. Lutheran Services gets 30 percent of their $6.9 billion from the Federal Government. That is $2.6 billion. Mr. Speaker, my colleagues tell me that faith-based organizations need this bill to get this money. That is clearly not what we are doing here. We are skirting around the court case we heard about. We want to give the ability of religious organizations to break laws that are here today and mix church and State. The other thing that we are doing, and everybody forgets the past, the other side of the aisle took money from the Community Development Block Grant for social services 2 years ago and put it into the transportation budget. Now these agencies are coming and saying, we do not have enough money. So the other side of the aisle's answer is, well, we will just ask people to contribute more. We will put this really good incentive out there.”