WASHINGTON, DC  – Rep. Beth Van Duyne (TX-24) gave the following opening statement during today’s House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Markup criticizing Democrats for hastily pursing budget reconciliation and forgoing any and all efforts to even reach a bipartisan agreement.

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Remarks as prepared

Thank you, Chairman DeFazio and Ranking Member Graves.

Three weeks. It has been exactly three weeks since President Biden went before Congress and the American people and declared he would be ‘a president for all Americans’ with a focus on ‘uniting the American people and uniting our nation.’

In good faith, 16 of my freshman Republican colleagues and I wrote a letter to President Biden on Inauguration Day expressing our desire to put aside the partisan rhetoric and work across the aisle with this President to solve the most critical issues facing the American people. 

But here we are today – exactly three weeks since the President pledged to pursue unity – hastily pursing budget reconciliation and forgoing any and all efforts to even reach a bipartisan agreement.

Instead, Democrats are recklessly abandoning bipartisanship in order to ram through a partisan relief package while billions of dollars from previous stimulus packages remain unused. 

Our job is to ensure the money we authorize goes to the most necessary causes, but we can't do that when we don't even know how well the last round of stimulus worked.

Let's be clear: what we are doing here today is an irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars. This reconciliation package is not targeted, nor is it meaningful. It won’t relieve many of the issues everyday Americans are currently facing. Instead, the bill before us is nothing more than a partisan wish list pushed through the legislative process – without input from the minority – to please special interests and a base representing only a fraction of the American people. This is the very opposite of unity.

I still hold out hope that we can work together both during this markup and moving forward to solve the pressing issues our constituents sent us here to handle.

I yield back.

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