Sam Farr

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. I yield the gentleman from California an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Chris Van Hollen, our distinguished leader.

Mr. FARR. I yield to the distinguished Congressman from Arizona, Ron Barber, for a unanimous consent request.

Mr. FARR. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this piecemeal bill to nowhere that continues to delay and shut down government when we could be passing a bill right now that would keep government open, and it would open it up tomorrow morning; but the Speaker refuses to allow that legislation to come to the floor. He tells the press there aren't the votes. Let's try it. I dare you. I dare you. Bring it to the floor. Let's see if there are enough votes. I think there are because I think the majority of this body wants to keep the government open and not play these games. These are games. Never done before. Never done before. Congress has never shut down the government. Yes, it was shut down under Clinton, but it was by a veto. It wasn't for a failure to get them a bill. They're saying, Well, the President has to negotiate. He doesn't have to negotiate. Under President Bush, we passed 56 CRs with no negotiation. Under President Obama, so far, 19. Almost every Member here voted for those. So you've been voting for CRs continuously for years and years without rancor. What's the difference now? You don't like a bill that passed 3 years ago, and you have to come and break the rules here by getting a waiver so you can bring up these issues on the appropriations bill because you don't want to do it in regular order? This is just insane. This is insane. We've never done it like this. And the country is wondering what the heck is going on. Well, what's going on is we've just become children in this fight. This is nuts. This is not the way to run a government. By God, let's get government open. We can do it tonight. Let's bring the bill to the floor and vote on it. Vote against this bill to nowhere. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

Mr. FARR. I am opposed.

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, this is the eighth time we've made this motion to bring the clean CR to the floor. And what could be simpler than a clean appropriations bill? No riders, no earmarks, no policy changes. I know it's something that my friends on the other side of the aisle have done over and over and over again. In this case, it's even with no increase in spending. It's clean; it's simple; it's the right thing to do. So why are we here today, day after day, tinkering at the margins? Today we fund one agency; tomorrow it's something else; last Friday it was several others. This isn't any way to run a government, and no one who votes for this bill should think that it is. All this bill does is play favorites, pitting one agency against another for meager government funding. So I offer this motion to recommit with the hope that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle will join me in funding, not part of government, not piecemeal government, all of government. Why? Because all Americans deserve a complete government at their service, a full- time government, not a partial government or a sometimes government. This motion will allow us to pass the Senate version, which is a clean, what we call, continuing resolution, and it would reopen government within 24 hours. Very simple. Just bring it to the floor. Let the vote be what it is. We've had, as I said earlier, 111 CRs since President Clinton was elected to office. In fact, I have the breakdown right here. We had 36 CRs, continuing resolutions, passed without this kind of conditionality, without the government shutting down--36. Under President Bush, we had 56 CRs passed without shutting down the government. With President Obama, in the years that he has been here, we've already passed 19 CRs without shutting down the government, without rancor, without conditions. So why are we doing it now? It doesn't make any sense. Nobody can explain this. All Americans want all of their government back, and we can do that. Voting on this motion to recommit, we can get government open. So I ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this motion to recommit. Support our ability to get government back, working for all the people for all the time, not part-time. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. Point of Order

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, I request to be heard on the point of order.

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, doesn't this bill before us fund a portion of the Federal Government? My motion to recommit would open the entire Federal Government so that all the consumer protections that our Nation provides are guaranteed. We need to open up not just food safety, but we also need to open up the Centers for Disease Control. We need to open up consumer hotlines. Can the Chair explain why it is not germane to open up all the Nation's consumer protections?

Mr. FARR. Last Saturday, we agreed to pay our workers furloughed during the shutdown. I supported that bill. But what sense does it make to have workers paid to sit at home and not be able to do their jobs? What kind of strange House is this that would force this situation on our fellow workers? You've got to sit at home, but don't worry, you'll get paid? Mr. Speaker, if you rule this motion out of order, does that mean we will not have a chance to keep the entire Federal Government open today? Can the Chair please explain why we can't keep the entire Federal Government open tonight, now?

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, I appeal the ruling of the Chair.

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Thank you, Ms. Slaughter, for yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, I am a member of the Appropriations Committee. This process is about appropriations. That's how we keep government open. Unfortunately, we've never been able to get any of the appropriation bills to the floor because the Republicans won't appoint conferees to the joint committees, so we're doing a continuing resolution. The continuing resolution is not new in this Congress. It's been done every year. The shocking thing is it's never been used as a weapon of destruction until now. We were here last year, same argument. The health care bill is not the issue here. That's been law in this country for 3\1/2\ years. So for 3\1/2\ years, we've been appropriating money to keep government open. What's the difference now? The difference now is a new attitude, new breed, very mean, very conservative, very anti-government; and they're willing to bring their internal kind of power within their caucus to shut down the whole country, if not the whole world. It's totally irresponsible. They argue, well, we can do this if we could change the health care. If the health care bill needs changing, bring it up in a bill. That's how we change things. So I'm opposing this rule because this rule says, okay, let's bring up 10 parts of government. Let's bring up 10 parts. Let's just have multiple choice. Let's have a triage. Which parts of government do you like? I'd like to compliment my colleague, Mr. Cole, because in it we can't be against all health care because we keep open, in one of these bills, H.J. Res. 80, the Indian Health Services, so obviously we're going to provide health services for some low-income people; but we're against any other system that might provide assistance for other kinds of low- income people. So this is government by multiple choice. It's not working. That's why we oppose it. Let's bring the whole family, the whole Nation together. Reject this rule. Defeat the previous question and defeat the rule, and get on with a CR that is in this House and can be voted on right now.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Thank you for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I'm an appropriator, like a lot of the speakers here today; and every time we have to deal with the CR, we're embarrassed. That's not our work. Our work is in appropriations bills, which we spend all year putting together. And we've been doing that. We were in the same situation last year, everything being the same. The Obama health care bill was in the law, Members of Congress had their insurance, and whatever issue was being brought up--we can't approve the CR because--those were the same issues last year. And guess what? We moved the CR without rancor and without partisan politics. So what's the difference here? I feel very sorry for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to now have to defend appropriations by choice. Ronald Reagan used to be fond of saying, Here we go again. And today, it's open choice. It's pick your government. We've got 10 items on the menu. Mr. Speaker, I want the whole menu, not just the Tea Party special. What an irony that we are bringing up the first of these menus, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Shut down the whole government, but we want to keep those emergency employees. I was a firefighter. I was a first responder. I was part of a team like the team that was lost in Arizona--the Hot Shot crew--when I was in college. They're not a part of FEMA. They're not a first responder. So firefighters are out. All of the cleanup that has to be done from the Colorado fire and the Rim fire in California, those people aren't part of the first responders. They're not in this. This bill is a process of just selection, of chaos, and of a menu-- pick off what you can support, take the popular things and pass those. But guess what? These first responders have children. They have no access to the school lunch program. These responders have spouses. There's all kinds of programs for families that they have no response for. This first responder bill doesn't go to school cops, Centers for Disease Control, food safety officers, or any of the others. Please defeat it.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise in opposition to this piecemeal approach of funding our government. I am the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies. The bill dealing with all of those issues is on the House floor. We did our job, as the chairman so eloquently spoke about. The committee fulfilled its commitment to review the whole budget. We passed H.R. 2410 out of committee and even adopted a rule to bring it to the floor in June, but we didn't move the bill because the timing with the now- expired farm bill wanted to hold everything off. I'm just wondering, Madam Speaker, when is the House going to announce its conferees on the farm bill? The Senate has done it not once, but twice. If we had a conference, we could be bringing up the full bill and not just this piecemeal--let's take a little bit of this that we like and that that we like and do what I call this menu of choice, which, if you're not on that menu, everything is out. Nobody can challenge my support on WIC. I mean, I am a returning Peace Corps volunteer. If there's anybody that got training on the need for feeding women, infants, and children in this Congress, it's my experience in living in a poor barrio in South America. But this does nothing for the 48 million people who currently need food stamps, what we call the SNAP program. This does nothing for the rest of the kids and the family who may be hungry, going to school and can't get access to school lunch. This does nothing to open the door for Federal workers who help people in rural agriculture to produce the food. This bill does nothing to provide a remedy for rural areas like Colorado and California, who were just ravaged by floods and fires, to do the post-op cleanup and restoration to prevent floods from coming this winter. This does nothing for the farm service agency loan borrowers to help those that are needing loans to put their livestock or their grain or other commodities into the program that is going to be feeding the women, infants, and children. So just one little piece that they carve out and suggest that: Oh, Congress, do this. I want you all to listen to this. Since I've been here since 1993, we've passed 111 CRs. Not one of them had this battle, had this conditionality, had this shutdown of government--none of them. Why now? What's different? You want to take away the President's health care bill. That was enacted 3\1/2\ years ago. You passed a CR the year it was adopted. You passed a CR after it was adopted. You passed a CR after that. What is it? Let's stop being so mean and so broken about the ability to keep our government open. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. Madam Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from New York, Mrs. Nita Lowey, the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee.

Mr. FARR. I yield the gentlewoman from New York an additional 20 seconds.

Mr. FARR. Madam Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the congressman from California (Mr. George Miller), ranking member of the Education & the Workforce Committee. (Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. FARR. I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro), the former ranking member of the Ag Appropriations Committee and now the ranking member of the Health and Human Services Subcommittee.

Mr. FARR. Madam Speaker, we've passed 111 CRs without any of this rancor. There are no excuses. They have all been clean. I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Roybal- Allard), a member of the Appropriations Committee.

Mr. FARR. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Berkley, California (Ms. Lee).

Mr. FARR. I yield the gentlewoman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. FARR. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), a great Rules Committee member.

Mr. FARR. Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to yield 2 minutes to the distinguished doctor from Seattle, Washington (Mr. McDermott) of the Ways and Means Committee. (Mr. McDERMOTT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)