James Norton: “by failing to do our baseline work, the minimum work we have to do, we are doing great harm to our country moving…”

“by failing to do our baseline work, the minimum work we have to do, we are doing great harm to our country moving forward now with the CR. We see that in the content, or lack thereof, of this appropriation and certainly by the delay in getting this basic work done. This House deliberately underfunded each and every appropriation in order to fund a tax cut as they went to their convention. But the quintessential example of the harm done by Government by CR is what they are doing to the capital of the United States. They require the local budget of a city to come here so that those of them who have nothing to do with raising the funds while they deny me the right to vote on my own budget, pick over that budget's local funds, own funds, budget surplus, balanced budget here in this House where it does not belong and then they say to the City, to a living, breathing city, they cannot spend their money because they are not through with Federal business that has nothing to do with them. They say to a living, breathing city, spend on a daily basis 1/365 of their money. Try doing that, I say to my colleagues, in their city and their State. How does a city with dozens of vital finances parse out the amount they require it to spend when we are talking about dozens of vital functions, some of them life-and-death functions? How do we pick up garbage that way. How do we run a school system that way?”