Rob Andrews: “I thank my friend for yielding. The President of the United States has spent weeks of his term negotiating with the…”

“I thank my friend for yielding. The President of the United States has spent weeks of his term negotiating with the Republican Party. What he has been confronted with each time is a demand to either shut the government down or default on the country's debt. I want to put this in another frame of reference as I rise in support of this bill. On eight occasions when President George W. Bush was President, we had the majority on our side and we agreed to a continuing resolution, a clean continuing resolution. We had our many differences with President Bush over the Iraq war, over issues of health care, over issues of the budget, but on eight occasions President Bush came to the Democratic majority and asked to continue to run the government, and we said yes. {time} 0930 The principle at stake here is whether ``negotiation'' means you have to have everything you want all the time and shut the government down if you don't. That's not the way we do business. That's why three- quarters of the American people agree that shutting the government down over the health care law is the wrong thing to do.”