Tom Rice

I'm running out of time, but let me ask you this: Eight million people in 2014 paid a penalty for not signing up for Obamacare. How many were enrolled?

I don't know if you heard, but the United States has $18 trillion in debt and both the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, they don't agree on many things, but they agree we're on an unsustainable path.

Yesterday two terrorists murdered 14 people in a gun-free zone in San Bernardino, California, and my heart certainly goes out to the residents of San Bernardino, all of California, and all of this country. The President's response today…

I cannot tell you how in favor of debarments and fines and penalties, I am, because when you hit people where it hurts the most, that is an actual deterrent.

Even though it is the law?

But if you are a small 7-Eleven or a small convenience store and the bank takes your money and says it is your fault.

I understand from my old law school commercial paper about banks' liability for checks and they are supposed to recognize the signature and credit cards.

You don't know if--you said that there are some surviving companies from this Gold King Mine.

I want to avoid this problem happening again.

So if there is a mine on private property that is going to produce some toxic material, there is no Federal permitting requirement for that?

If there are viable parties still existing that mine this ore, don't they bear the ultimate financial responsibility for this?

Have they been paying for the maintenance of the mine?

Was anybody disciplined?

Was anybody fired over this 3-million-gallon spill of toxic chemicals into this river?

This gold mine was closed, right?

This is a horrifying statistic, and it bodes very poorly for our children and our grandchildren.

I think that this law is going to be one more nail in the coffin.

It seems that the Obama Administration is just on a direct course to let us force everybody in the country to part-time jobs.

So to say that a 'one-size-fits-all' across the country is something that is justifiable is absolutely absurd and ludicrous, and by any standard it is ridiculous.

We are drowning these businesses in regulation.

This regulation, this new regulation from what I read in this memo here will affect 1.8 million people.

Barack Obama has added 120,000 new regulations on small businesses in six years.

And now we are going to pile more regulation on these businesses, and we are going to smother that very opportunity.

The result of that is that household incomes are stagnant. They have actually dropped 8.7 percent since 2007.

My time is up. Thank you very much. It has been certainly educational.