Gary Condit: “no matter what the outcome of this is today, I come from California. And I think it is the responsible thing for us to…”

“no matter what the outcome of this is today, I come from California. And I think it is the responsible thing for us to do, is to vote to give funds for relief to California and the victims of the earthquake. I think that is the responsible position, and the four of us who coauthored this amendment today intend to do just that. There is really no good choice here today. There is no perfect solution to this. But what we are proposing here today is a responsible solution, and the solution that we are proposing simply means that we pay as we go. We have heard a lot of discussion today about, we are going to take programs away from other States or we are going to eliminate certain amounts of money from a program and other people are going to get hurt from other areas. Well, the choice we have is to either do the responsible thing by making the cut in the Federal budget or deferring to the national debt, putting that off to a later date. And we have done that plenty around here. It is sort of "out of sight, out of mind," just add it to the debt. We believe what we are proposing today is a responsible approach to disaster relief funds.”