Mr. Speaker, 14 hours from now it appears the doors of the Federal Government will shut. And it will happen for one reason and one reason alone--because of the Republican majority's inflexibility, callousness, and political gamesmanship.

For 3 months, they have been in charge of the people's House, but they haven't done one thing that the people want.

They haven't lifted a finger to create the jobs Americans so desperately need. One Republican Member, in fact, said on the House floor last week that we should stop talking about the jobs. Stop talking about the jobs? They don't want to talk about jobs because they don't have a plan to create any. They've offered nothing but deep, painful, unnecessary job-killing spending cuts, and they have refused to budge an inch.

I want to cut government spending, Mr. Speaker. But I don't want to take the money from children who need early childhood education. I don't want to take the money from families that need help paying for colleges. And I don't want to take the money from seniors who need medical care.

I want to cut the gobs and gobs of money, nearly $7 billion every single month, we're spending to occupy a foreign nation and have our servicemen killed and maimed by insurgents.

You want to eliminate wasteful government spending? I say the war in Afghanistan could be number one on our list. Ten years after we started sending our troops there we continue to be stuck in a hopeless quagmire that doesn't doing anything to eliminate the terrorist threat or accomplish our national security goals.

But, of course, the Republican leadership won't consider cutting more spending. Instead they want to go after middle class working families who need a government that's on their side, particularly now because of how dire the economy has become.

I hope my Republican colleagues will give up this childish refusal to compromise. The American people deserve better than to have their government held hostage by an extreme ideological agenda.

Let's keep the doors of the Federal Government open. And as we look to next year's budget, instead of making seniors and schoolchildren bear the sacrifice, and instead of dismantling Medicare and cutting education, instead of threatening women's health, why don't we restore fiscal sanity by finally bringing our troops home.