History is Much Different

Floor Speech

Mr. LABRADOR. Mr. Speaker, over the last few days we keep hearing about how Republicans are terrorists, Republicans have guns to everybody's head. And it's been, actually, really sad to hear the other side talk about these things.

At this point in Ronald Reagan's second term, for example, the government had already shut down the government six times, according to The Washington Post and according to many other articles. And this happened under the leadership of Democratic leader Tip O'Neill, precisely the opposite of the political dynamic that exists today.

Former O'Neill staffer and MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews has written an entire book extolling the era as a time when politics actually worked. You can probably guess how he feels today about this.

But the problem is that, during Tip O'Neill's career, there were seven different shutdowns with the Democrats. The final shutdown of O'Neill's career, according to Andrew Stiles of the National Review, happened in October of 1986. House Democrats had picked a fight with Reagan on a number of issues, including labor, energy, and welfare policy.

Today, Democrats insist that this has never happened in history, and the reality is that the history is much different.

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