John Rice Carter: “Thank you, Mr. Speaker. These are interesting times we live in, and as we sit here this evening, we have a lot of things…”

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. These are interesting times we live in, and as we sit here this evening, we have a lot of things that are kind of up in the air about what's going to happen to our country and about what's going to happen to our ability to fund the government for the rest of our time. Unfortunately, we don't have answers to that question. I wish we did, but we don't. Yet there are some things that are happening that we ought to talk about because the American people are concerned about what's going on. In some ways, they're confused. As we sit here today, we are looking at the possibility on Friday night, at midnight, of there being no more appropriated funds for the operation of the government. Some people call that shutting down the government, but that's the real term. We have no appropriated funds that are available for the operation of the government. There's already the blame game going on up here. This blame game is confusing to most Americans, so I think it's kind of important that we start off by trying to explain what's going on up here. I'm going to give you a quick synopsis of what I think has gone on recently. Let's start off with the fact that the Republicans fully funded the troops and the rest of the Federal Government through FY 2011, which would be the 1st of October of this year, with H.R. 1 in March. The Democrats refused that submission.…”