Katherine Clark: “Here we are once again. My Republican colleagues have decided to end the 118th Congress the same way they started it…”

“Here we are once again. My Republican colleagues have decided to end the 118th Congress the same way they started it; not with a serious budget but with partisan chaos. Let's look at the last 2 years. First, the GOP manufactured a debt ceiling crisis and took our economy hostage. Despite that, we came together as Democrats and negotiated in good faith. We struck a bipartisan deal, and we signed it into law, but the Republicans tore it up. They have ignored it ever since. They have driven us to the edge of a government shutdown four times, all to take money out of the pockets of hardworking families and stuff the pockets of billionaires. It is the same plan every single time: manufacture a crisis then make working people pay the price, cut their healthcare, delay their retirement, lay off the teachers. Well, this week, they have decided to run this same play for a fifth time. They have brought another extreme partisan bill to the floor. Speaker Johnson said yesterday: `` . . . it's the right thing to do.'' The right thing to do? Today is 9/11, the 23rd commemoration of the horrors that were befallen upon us on that day, and I, too, was at the ceremony honoring those heroes that we lost in Afghanistan. {time} 1015 So coming up $12 billion short for our veterans' healthcare and endangering their disability checks, that is the right thing to do?…”