Sfc Shawn McCloskey Post Office
Floor Speech
Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 8919. Shawn McCloskey was a member of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group, as an engineer sergeant in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
While serving as an intelligence sergeant, Army Sergeant First Class McCloskey made the ultimate sacrifice on September 16, 2009, when he was killed by enemy forces on his third deployment to Afghanistan.
I urge passage of this legislation, which would honor his legacy and the sacrifice of Sergeant McCloskey and his family by naming a post office after him.
If I could add, Mr. Speaker, I just want to say something about the process by which we adopt post office namings because I am not sure that the whole Congress, much less the public, understands what we do.
This has been, for decades, a bipartisan process where a Member who is seeking to get a post office named after someone in his or her district will go and get the support of every member of that delegation, whether it is the Kentucky delegation, as in the case of the distinguished chairman, or the Maryland delegation in my case, and so on.
Once all the members of that delegation on a bipartisan basis, if it is bipartisan, have signed off, then it comes to our committee. We package them together and bring them to the floor precisely because we don't want it to be a matter of controversy. It should be a unifying thing for us when the beautiful thing occurs of naming a post office after someone.
Alas, we have a problem, and I am hoping that our experienced and talented chairman will help us resolve it. Apparently, in the Texas delegation, there are people who are refusing to sign on to bills on a bipartisan basis, and that is causing a lot of rancor. It is causing a lot of division, and we don't want this whole thing to blow up. We don't want it to be said that this is the first Congress in decades that can't even name a post office after someone.
I would just urge the chairman to work with us to help our colleagues in Texas get to yes and to return to what has been protocol, policy, and custom in the Oversight Committee for the last several decades.
Mr. Speaker, I restate our strong support for the post office being named after Mr. McCloskey in honor of his service and his sacrifice and in recognition of the sacrifice of his whole family.
I am sorry to intrude on Mr. McCloskey's time here by just returning to the general problem we are having.
I thank the chairman for his remarks, and I thank him also for helping us to pair together a post office favored by a Member of the minority with a post office favored by a Member of the majority, both of whom did not get the complete support of their delegations. We paired them together and we have decided to proceed in a bipartisan way to make that happen.
I am just addressing the general problem that seems to be spinning out of control a little bit where there are Members who are deliberately blocking unanimous consensus within their State, and that is going to create real problems. We don't want it to be a tit-for-tat situation where we have legislative sharpshooters trying to bring down post office namings in someone else's district or someone else's State.
I hope we can sit together and have a meeting and brainstorm about this for the next session because this is, obviously, at the very lowest level of Maslow's hierarchy of legislative need. However, if we can't even get together to do the postal namings as we have done for decades, it doesn't hold a lot of promise for bigger things like the budget, climate change, and so on.
I do hope the chairman will work with us in trying to address both the specific State eruptions that have occurred, and let's hope that we can keep them from spilling outward. That is not any kind of finger- pointing. We have had the problem on both sides, as the chairman knows. Let's just see what we can do to restore what I think has been a very good tradition, custom, and policy for several decades.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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