John Rice Carter: “Reclaiming my time. Let me point out, as Mr. Gohmert said, those of us who sat in a courtroom for years, in my case…”

“Reclaiming my time. Let me point out, as Mr. Gohmert said, those of us who sat in a courtroom for years, in my case almost 21 years, you want to look at the evidence to see what the evidence shows. And just very quickly, the evidence shows first: How do we get to a shutdown for failing to fund the government? Well, you start with last year when the Democrats were in charge of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. They passed no budget and not one single appropriations bill, although I'm on the Appropriations Committee. They certainly could have. They just chose not to. They chose not to. They chose the date that they would have a CR go into the next term of Congress when it had already lost and knew how many of these wonderful people were going to be here replacing them the next time they showed up in the House, so they put this thing all the way to March, which they knew was going to put us under a tremendous amount of pressure to get something to do to fund the government. And we made diligent attempts to fund the government. And it didn't even last long enough for Harry Reid to say ``dead on arrival'' when it got to the Senate. So let's see. They didn't do their job. They didn't do their budget. They set up the CR deadline. We met the CR deadline with a way to fund the government for the rest of the year for all departments. They rejected it out of hand without even coming back with any alternative of any substance.…”