On October 15, 2013 Rep. Jared Huffman from California asked for permission to address the United States House of Representatives for a few minutes regarding the government shutdown and debt limit default.
What he said was absolutely shocking when you consider all that is at stake in not raising the debt limit!
“Why have they shut down the government? Why have they put us in this position? Well, we heard for months that it was their obsession with the Affordable Care Act, with repealing, delaying, defunding ObamaCare. Yet all of a sudden, 3 weeks into this crisis, the goalposts are moving. It is not so much about ObamaCare. Sometimes it is in, and sometimes it is out on their list of demands. What about the deficit and the debt? Sometimes that is part of the stated reason for this manufactured crisis.”
“Back to ObamaCare. There is no question about it that the CBO says that moving forward with the Affordable Care Act will actually improve our deficit, will actually help us better manage our long-term debt. We know that there are all sorts of things that we could do together if reducing the deficit and managing our debt was the goal. For example, we could pass bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform, which again the CBO tells us would lower our deficits, lower our national debt, but that doesn’t seem to really be what this Republican-manufactured crisis is all about”, said Rep. Huffman (source: Congressional Record http://thomas.loc.gov).
Huffman is a member of two rather powerful Committees in Congress.
The first is the Committee on Natural Resources and the second is the House Budget Committee.
It should be noted that he hold great influence on both Committees and is generally well respected by members of both political parties in Congress…