“This is a self-inflicted crisis, made up by the Republicans. It is dangerous, it is the height of irresponsibility, and it’s unnecessary.”
-Barbara Boxer, February 24, 2015 (regarding the GOP threat of a Department of Homeland Security shutdown.)
I love this speech, I love this lawmaker. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) minced no words on Tuesday in talking to and about Republicans. I tried to choose only a few excerpts, but there were too many jewels (and still more in the video). Tell me, if you don’t agree.
In the beginning of her speech, Boxer states:
We all know Republicans won in huge numbers in the 2014 election, and they took over the United States Senate and they run it. They run it. Or at least they’re trying to run it. And let’s be clear, less than eight weeks after they took over the Senate, we are facing a shutdown; a shutdown of the very agency that protects the health, the safety, the lives, of the American people – the Department of Homeland Security.
They’re shutting down the program that funds our police officers back home, our firefighters, our first responders. Any way you look at it, this is a national disgrace. And think about what our friends abroad, and those who are not our friends, are thinking about this.
Republicans say, ‘Oh, we’re in danger, we have to go to go to war, put combat troops on the ground!’ But they’re wiling to shut down the department that protects Americans here in the homeland, from a terrorist attack.
How does it make sense, at a time when we’re facing serious threats to our national security, to furlough 30,000, thirty thousand, department of homeland security workers, and to force more than 100,000 frontline homeland security personnel to work without pay?
Why don’t theses senators go without their pay?
Give up your pay! Give up your healthcare, give up your benefits, if this is so important to you. Oh, no, they’ll collect their pay!
Senator Boxer reminds Congress that this shutdown is in retaliation to President Obama’s recent plan for immigration. Boxer talks about those at risk of being deported. She talks about children who were born to American immigrants (as she was) who would be torn away from each other if the GOP had their way.
“I thought they were the party of ‘family values.’ Show me where that’s true? Ripping families apart?…Continue reading