Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, we had the opportunity to have a clean rule around a bill that I had the opportunity to work on, along with the gentlelady from North Carolina and with our ranking member and chair, with regards to taking what we can agree on in education, which is reauthorizing the Federal Charter School Program. We had similar language in both the Republican ESEA reauthorization, as well as in the Democratic substitute. Most Republicans voted for the version that they had, and almost every Democrat, except for two, voted for the Democratic version. We were able to then work out the very small differences between the two pieces of language with regard to charter schools, present it before the entire House under a reasonable rule that allows for a broad variety of amendments--12 amendments--from both sides of the aisle, many of which improve the bill and some of which I oppose, but which are, by no means, fatal to the bill. The process fundamentally works. Unfortunately, in this rule, we have now had to alter the way that we are dealing with another unrelated, unpaid-for effort, namely, a bill that could add $155.5 billion to our deficit because of the extension of the R&D tax credit. Essentially, under the initial effort, the Republicans failed to waive their statutory PAYGO rules.…”