On the recordSeptember 27, 2023
Mr. Chair, I am prepared to close, and we have no further speakers. Mr. Chair and to my good colleague, Mr. Joyce, we are apart right now. I know we are going to get together, but I do want to remind some of our colleagues that we had an opportunity under the current bill that we have right now. We added in the last couple years $2.4 billion. That is a 15 percent increase for border patrol agents, pay increases, add more Border Patrol agents, ICE, CBP, the other folks in. We had the moneys to do that, but at the end of the day--and I will just take one example--we gave money to Homeland, a 15 percent increase, yet there are only two Members--when we all voted--on the Republican side that actually supported the appropriations bill, Homeland. So if we care so much about Homeland, why did we vote ``no'' on the final appropriations bill? I know some of us are going to vote ``no,'' and I am voting ``no'' on this one, but on the final one, I will support the final appropriations bill. The other thing is as the Democratic leader, Mr. Jeffries, said, we have 3 days to work this out, and by passing this bill to the Senate it is not going to get there. I would just like to remind Members that we ought to be working on preventing the shutdown. If you look at the shutdowns that we have had since the 1990s, in 1995 it was a Republican House that had a 5-day shutdown. That was November 13, 1995. On December 15, 1995, there was another Republican- led House with 21 days of a shutdown.…





