the comments of congressman chris smith, republican of new jersey and his democratic colleague frank pallonement ago. the house of representatives paying tribute, and they are doing so at this hour, live on c-span television, tributes to congressman payne. at the moment representative clark from the brooklyn, new york, area is on the floor of the house. you can watch it live. it's also streamed on our website at c-span.org. >>> well congressman payne is a former teacher. he'd also a former executive from the prudential insurance company, a local city council member before serving eleven terms in the house of representatives. while in the house, he was known as an advocate as you heard just a moment ago for his constituents. the star ledger in new jersey saying he was a champion of education, and the de facto ambassador to africa. at the end of today's news conference, the president had this to say. >> i want to publicly express condolences to the family of donald payne. congressman from new jersey. a wonderful man, did great work both domestically and internationally. he was a friend o

so he said to the ministers, he said, you know, this guy, frank pallone is going to represent you, but he's down at the shore and most of the time he spends talking about crabs and the fish and the things at the shore. i don't know if he can relate to this urban area now that he is going to represent where you all know me. but he said i'm going to tell you the story. you often see congressman pallone picking up crabs and he picks up the crab and talks about how the crab was injured and it was important to help the crab and the crab needed some help and needed to be fixed, needed some health care so it could become a whole crab again and lead a good life. and everybody was laughing at this point, but it was his way of getting across in a humorous way that it was ok to have frank pallone represent you, that he was going to relate to you. he could relate to a crab, so he could obviously relate to you. i don't know if i'm saying this properly, but this is how don was. he just was able to use humor to get a point across, a very serious point in a very effective way. and i will miss him so m

the leadership hour this evening and quite honestly, the opportunity to respond to my colleague, frank pallone, representative pallone, who is a colleague on the energy and commerce committee, in fact, the ranking member of the health subcommittee, as he talks about the benefits, mr. speaker, of the affordable care act. patient protection and affordable care act. he spent the last 35, 40 minutes talking about what a great piece of legislation that was. all the wonderful things it's done. i'm going to take my leadership time, mr. speaker, to give the other side of this viewpoint. and to suggest that this is not a good bill. that this is not helpful. certainly my colleagues on the democratic side when they were in the majority and two years ago this coming friday passed into law the affordable care act, obamacare, they felt like that this was the best thing since sliced bread. this was the solution to all our problems. and yet, we spent two years cramming that bill, literally cramming that piece of legislation all 2,811 pages of it down the throats of the american people. when our unemployment r