John Yarmuth: “This Congress has not only taken on a lot of new initiatives and has tried to deal with substantial problems that face…”

“This Congress has not only taken on a lot of new initiatives and has tried to deal with substantial problems that face this country and our people, but it has also made up for a lot of lost ground and a lot of inactivity in prior Congresses. And we hate to sound partisan around here, and I know the American people don't want us to be partisan, they want us to work together, and I think we have tried to work together and to reach out, but the fact remains that over the last 6 years the Congress did not do a lot of the things that it was supposed to do. We've seen the impact in a lot of ways. We've seen the impact on our budget, where we have increased the Federal debt, the national debt by $3 trillion, 50 percent over the last 6 years. That's because the previous Congresses were not doing their fiscal accounting the right way. We've seen time after time, program after program, you mentioned veterans. We also had situations with education. We've had situations with health care where basic research that we were supposed to be funding has been cut. A lot of human services have been cut or zeroed out in past budgets.”