The Press Needs to Wake Up
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I will address some of the votes that took place on the floor last week, in particular the vote regarding a continuing resolution designed to keep the government open that was taken here last Friday.
The effort to keep the government open failed 232-198. Every Democrat voted against that resolution to close the government. What I am going to address is the fact that 21 Republicans voted against keeping the government open at that time. The press, particularly The New York Times, probably other organizations as well, referred to those 21 people as hardcore conservatives.
As our country goes under, some people are going to blame the executive, some people will blame Congress, some people will blame the courts, but a lot of it has to fall on the utterly incompetent press corps of this country. Hard-line conservatives?
Let's look at the bill that we wanted to have to keep the government open last Friday. First of all, a continuing resolution is primarily about spending, and that spending bill cut spending, discretionary spending, on all but veterans, the border, and defense, by 30 percent. In other words, across-the-board, you put everything else together, discretionary spending on the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior, the State Department, energy, the legislature itself, a 30 percent reduction in spending.
How in the world can you say the people who voted for the 30 percent reduction in spending are not conservative? How in the world can the press corps refer to the people who voted against a 30 percent reduction in spending as the hard-line conservatives?
We all know part of that bill was not just focused on government spending. Probably the biggest crisis facing America today is the massive group of people coming across the southern border, over 200,000 a month. In addition to that, we have all the unaccompanied minors, 8,000 to 10,000 children, coming across the southern border with no adult accompanying them at all.
In that bill, we also tried to add 22,000 new border agents, end catch and release, so people showing up at the southern border would be kept in Mexico, and the policy of inviting unaccompanied minors into our country. In other words, we were dealing with the immigration crisis.
We had two parts of the bill: A 30 percent reduction in discretionary spending on so much of the budget and, in essence, closing down the border to prevent all of these people coming here illegally, as well as to prevent the drugs coming across that kill over 100,000 Americans a year. The press corps in this country has the nerve to say that the people who sided with the Democrats to kill this bill are hard-line conservatives.
I call upon the slumbering press to wake up and pay attention to what is in these bills and tell us exactly what you mean by hardcore conservatives if they vote against the bill.
There may be a variety of motivations to vote against a bill. There may be personalities. Maybe you want to fancy yourself a hardcore conservative and you count on utter incompetence in the news media.
I beg the press corps in the future to pay attention to what is in these bills and only use the phrase ``hardcore conservative'' to describe people who are voting for hardcore conservative bills.
The next thing that I think we should point out here today and the importance of having that large reduction in spending--and I don't mean to bore you with numbers--is the degree to which, on a daily basis, our country gets in worse and worse shape. That is because the interest rates go up. That is no vote that we take here in Congress. I mean, we fight trench warfare here on a variety of bills. Sometimes the bills are just minor bills that have a few million dollars in them. In the last 2 days, because of an increase in interest rates, the amount of money we are going to have to spend on interest, just interest in the next year, went up $12 billion.
Since April, when interest rates were like 3\1/2\ percent, the cost in interest has gone up over $100 billion. We have serious problems here, and the costs in interest should also be reported by the press.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source