David Price: “the audacity of the House Republican leadership in blocking the entire Federal budget in order to spare the President…”

“the audacity of the House Republican leadership in blocking the entire Federal budget in order to spare the President embarrassment and to cater to their most extreme right-wing members goes beyond anything I have ever seen or experienced in this body. I was amazed in July when the House leadership caved in to the Conservative Action Team, putting the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill in jeopardy. I wondered, how are Republican leaders going to pass this bill within the President's inadequate numbers? How would we get past this bill to the rest of the appropriations agenda before the new fiscal year began? But, Mr. Speaker, it never occurred to me that Republican leaders would simply disregard the start of the new fiscal year and let the entire budget come crashing down, all to appease the most right-wing members of their caucus. It is equally amazing that the President and his OMB Director are complicit in this strategy, apparently, or perhaps it is a lack of strategy, for in fact this is irresponsibility and dereliction of duty on a monumental scale. What I never dreamed would happen has indeed happened, and the continuing resolution we are voting on today, covering not one bill or two, but the entire discretionary budget, is a monument to an extraordinary failure of leadership and responsibility. This institutional breakdown is fraught with real consequences for real people.”