Hi, this is Congressman ████████████. It's an honor to represent you in the US House of Representatives. I'm calling to invite you to my telephone town hall to discuss the ongoing government shutdown and other issues that matter to you. The event will begin in just a few moments. If you would like to participate, please stay on the line and you will automatically be connected. If you have any further questions after the event, please call my office at ████████████. To be added to the Do Not Call list, please press 9. Thank you. Please hold while we connect you to your Access Live event. The Access Live event is currently in Music hold and will start momentarily. If you would like to ask a question, press ████ Good afternoon, My name is ███████ and I will be your moderator today. I want to thank everyone for joining our telephone town hall. In a few moments I will turn it over to Congressman ███████ for his opening remarks. But first, a few housekeeping items. At any time you may dial ██████████ to be placed in the queue to ask the Congressman a question. Again, dial ██████████ at any time to ask a question. You can also dial Star 6 to sign up for our E newsletter. Again that is Star 6. Additionally, we will have several poll questions throughout the next hour, so please have your keypads ready. Thank you. To everyone who pre submitted a question. I will ask a few of those throughout the duration of the call. For those asking a live question, I ask that you keep it short and concise so we can get to as many people as we can. If we do not get to one of your questions, you can always contact the office afterwards to voice any concerns or send an email through our website █████████████████ with that I will turn it over to the Congressman for his opening remarks. Thank you ███████ and good afternoon everyone and thanks for joining me today for a teletown hall meeting. I'm speaking to you today from my office in our nation's capital here in ███████████████ and it's an honor to serve you as well as our neighbors throughout the second Congressional District here in the ███████████████████████████. As many of you know, Our district covers ██ counties across our state and this forum gives us the opportunity to speak with as many ████████ residents as possible from the comfort of your own home without the need for lengthy and unnecessary travel. I welcome your questions about my work, the current government shutdown, my legislation to help our farmers and our veterans, as well as my efforts to ensure the United States remains competitive with the Chinese Communist Party. I encourage you to Press Star three to be connected with an operator to submit your questions. We're currently being joined by thousands of ████████ residents, so we will do all we can to address as many of your questions as possible. Before we begin the question and answer period, I'd like to update you on on my work here in ██████████, as well as on the government shutdown. As you may know, a government shutdown began on ███████████ at ████████. This was a completely avoidable situation. On ██████████████, the house passed a clean continuing resolution with my support that would have kept the government open. This legislation passed with bipartisan support. It included no partisan demands from Republicans and no gimmicks. It would simply extend funding for the government through ███████████ to give Congress more time to go through the normal appropriations process, which by its nature includes bipartisan negotiations. Republicans chose this path because it's uncontroversial.