Lois Capps: “I yield myself 5 minutes. I rise today to offer a straightforward motion to provide certainty to American families and…”

“I yield myself 5 minutes. I rise today to offer a straightforward motion to provide certainty to American families and businesses. As we all know, late last month, after a lot of drawn-out drama, we enacted a short-term extension of the payroll tax cut, of unemployment insurance, and the so-called doc fix. All of these provisions were set to expire at the end of last year. Payroll taxes would have gone up on 160 million American workers. Millions of unemployed people would have had their benefits cut off even though they still can't find work, and doctors would have faced huge cuts in their reimbursement from Medicare, making it harder for seniors to see a doctor. The 2-month extension was not ideal, but differences could not be resolved before the clock ran out. Now, with this short-term extension set to expire in just a few weeks, we must find a way to bridge our differences and enact a full- year extension of these provisions, and we need to do it as soon as possible, and that's what this motion is about. It simply directs the conferees to finish their work by February 17 so both the House and Senate will have time to vote on the final package before the clock runs out on the 29th; just a date certain to ensure that we get our work done without yet another last-minute scramble. We have a habit in this Congress of leaving our work to the last minute, something we should have learned when we were kids when our parents warned us about this long ago.…”