Dana Rohrabacher: “Let me congratulate and thank Congressman Frank. Barney has been very fair. He backed my ability to have an amendment on…”

“Let me congratulate and thank Congressman Frank. Barney has been very fair. He backed my ability to have an amendment on the floor, and I will talk about that amendment next. But let me note when he stated that our goal is debt relief for these countries that are trying to do right for their people, I think that in the manager's amendment, and the Congressman did reach out to try to find language that was agreeable, but I don't think that we have reached that language. I think there is still wiggle room in the language of the manager's amendment that would permit countries that are governed by authoritarian people who are claiming that they are going to have democratic elections is still there. Our State Department quite often supports those governments and would like to claim they are heading in that direction, like the government of Ethiopia, which in their last election threw everybody who won the elections in jail. But now they are our greatest ally in Africa. The State Department would love to have debt relief to a country like that. We shouldn't be doing that.”