Chris Van Hollen: “This illustrates the point exactly. As I said, Madam Speaker, we have been denied that opportunity by the Republican…”

“This illustrates the point exactly. As I said, Madam Speaker, we have been denied that opportunity by the Republican leadership, so I want to just be clear. We were denied the opportunity today to have an up-or-down vote on freezing congressional pay. That's what we should do, and the refusal to allow us to do that demonstrates that what we're really seeing is an effort to use congressional pay as a political weapon to punish all Federal employees: to prevent any COLAs--cost-of-living adjustments-- for Federal employees. Otherwise we would be able to bring up that bill separately. Now, what we're seeing again is an effort to single out Federal employees as scapegoats for the economic problems that they had nothing to do with--they had nothing to do with the meltdown on Wall Street; they had nothing to do with the policies of the previous administration that helped bring our economy to this position. Yet what we're seeing today is what we're seeing in States, where we have Governors in Wisconsin, where we have Governors in Ohio, where we have other, mostly Republican, Governors scapegoating public servants in their States and singling them out as if they were the problem. The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.”