This week was the very first week of the new Congress, and I was honored to be sworn in for a second time to continue fighting to make our community safer, healthier, and stronger.

Unfortunately, instead of working on a real solution to get the government back open, Congressional leadership went right back to political games, wasting time voting on a dead on arrival bill that provided only one month of temporary funding for homeland security. And then, on top of it, they rammed through a bill to make it easier to send American taxpayer dollars overseas and increase taxes.

The bottom line is that we cannot continue to govern from crisis to crisis. We need real progress, not another temporary stop-gap solution. And definitely not a policy of increasing taxes to pay for more money being sent overseas while our own border security continues to fail.

It is time for Congress to come together, across party lines, to reach an agreement that secures our border, provides our border patrol agents with adequate resources, and puts an end to the government shutdown.