An Insult to the American People

Floor Speech

Ms. JACKSON LEE of Texas. I want to follow my friend from Missouri and add my appreciation to the troops who have come home and to their families, and I thank my colleagues for joining in wearing a yellow ribbon in honor of them. I hope they will go home and do the same and will encourage their communities to do so.

But I am standing here to confront the hypocrisy and the joke of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in suggesting that the conferees are meeting when they full well know that no conferees are meeting, because no one has been appointed except the one-sided conferees.

Frankly, they want us to be Americans first, not Tea Partiers, not lovers of the special interests. The other body put forward a very thoughtful initiative to keep us going so that the lights will not be turned off in some poor mother's home and so that some senior citizen can still go to his doctor. They wanted to make sure 2.3 million and 134,000 people in Texas would have their unemployment. I'm saddened by this crisis. I'm here to work. I'm going home for an emergency, and I'll be back.

The lady who went off the floor should not have been confronted that way. She spoke. She's ready to work. What about the empty chairs on the other side? They are not ready to work. It's all about a joke. This is an insult to the American people.

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