David Skaggs: “I wanted to follow the good lead of my colleague from Illinois in addressing this side of the House in the spirit of the…”

“I wanted to follow the good lead of my colleague from Illinois in addressing this side of the House in the spirit of the weekend just concluded, where we had a remarkable event occur: almost half of this body, with many spouses and children, spending some time together, doing the fundamental business of any institution, which is getting to know each other, developing some minimum level of trust and respect so that we can conduct our business here on the basis of policy, not on the basis of going after each other personally. We realized something very important over this weekend, which is that we are in charge here and we have the power, if we wish to exercise it, to change a bit the culture of the House. Many terrific ideas came out of the weekend, very practical, very much able to be implemented with the goodwill and support of the leadership on both sides which happily were in attendance for the weekend. We will be meeting again, the organizing committee and the coleader teams tomorrow, to start to work on keeping the momentum going forward in the effort that was begun this weekend.”