Jeff Flake: “I think the gentlelady may want to check the Record with regard to an energy bill. I'm not familiar with any that I…”

“I think the gentlelady may want to check the Record with regard to an energy bill. I'm not familiar with any that I voted for because they are hugely corporate subsidies. And let me just say one thing. Charlie brought up, well, you're from Arizona. The Central Arizona Project, the big Federal project, or the Glen Canyon Dam in the 1950s was built largely with Federal funds, as if these were some earmark slipped into a conference report 3 days before the bill came to the floor. Not at all. I mean, no projects were debated more. Nothing went through more authorization, appropriation and now oversight than those projects. I may have voted differently if I were around in the 1950s, but I wasn't. What we're debating here is whether we should spend $150,000 in Federal funds for a local aquarium in Chicago that in 2004 had $215 million in net assets, $50 million in total revenue, and $13 million in excess revenue. That is the question before us. We can talk about Enron. We can talk about the war. We can talk about anything, but this is what's relevant here, whether the taxpayer should be spending $150,000 for an aquarium, a local aquarium that had $50 million in revenue in 1 year alone. It simply doesn't seem right. With that, Madam Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.”