Melvin Watt: “I had made some effort to stay out of this dispute to the extent that I could in terms of the debate, but several of my…”

“I had made some effort to stay out of this dispute to the extent that I could in terms of the debate, but several of my constituents have called and expressed severe concern about the direction that we are headed and concern that I had not been as vocal on this issue as they expected me to be as their Representative. The people who called me are real citizens of this country. They are constituents of mine in my congressional district. They are a Federal prison guard who is continuing to work because he has a critical position in the prison system, and despite the fact that he continues to work, he is not now being paid on a timely basis. Although he acknowledges that he may be paid in the future, he asked me, ``What should I tell my creditors in the meantime?'' And I had no answer for him. They are VA hospital employees who care for our veterans, and live in my congressional district and work at a VA hospital located in my congressional district, who continue to provide services to their patients at veterans hospitals but are not currently being paid. They are people who had a real estate closing scheduled to close so that they could avoid a foreclosure on their house, and when they got ready to close, they were advised that the FHA had closed its doors and they could not close their loan.”