Food and Drug Administration Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2014
Floor Speech
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I thank my friend from California.
Mr. Speaker, I have the privilege of representing the congressional district that is home to the Food and Drug Administration. Those individuals do great work for our country; and I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, nobody--and I mean nobody--is being fooled by this ridiculous stunt that the Republicans in this House are pulling, trying to cherry-pick little pieces of government to fund when they know they're not going anywhere, when the American people know that this House is in possession of a piece of legislation that, if we were allowed to vote on it, would go to the President's desk tonight; he would sign it; and we would open up all of government immediately--FDA, NIH, the VA, everything.
The position Republicans are taking is made even more ridiculous by what we did on Saturday. On Saturday, we said, We're going to pay all Federal employees--not
just employees at FDA, not just at NIH--all Federal Government employees. That was the right thing to do.
Now you're saying you only want to keep some of those agencies open, not all of them open. So what our Republican colleagues are telling the American people is, we want to pay all the employees in the Federal Government; but we don't want to allow a lot of them to go to work. We want to pay for everybody in the Federal Government, but we don't want to allow everybody to go to work. What kind of policy is that?
Now, Mr. Speaker, just this weekend, the Speaker of this House admitted on national television that he had reached an agreement with the Democratic leader in the United States Senate, Senator Harry Reid, where Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats said, We will agree on a temporary basis to the lower funding levels in the sequester in exchange for making sure we have a clean continuing resolution, that we keep the government open. That's what the Speaker agreed to.
But then he came back to this House, and he couldn't hold his caucus. Why? Because Senator Cruz and a radical reckless faction said, No, we can't do that. We have to close the government unless we shut down the Affordable Care Act. And that position hasn't changed. That's why today we can't open the government, because our Republican colleagues want to continue to shut down the Affordable Care Act.
Let's vote today to open the whole government. Let's have a vote, Mr. Speaker, on the bill that's in our possession.
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