Patricia Schroeder: “I must say, as I listen to this debate, I hear people accusing this side of the aisle of being political, and it would…”

“I must say, as I listen to this debate, I hear people accusing this side of the aisle of being political, and it would be much easier for us to say, ``Oh, let us just go along; let us just vote yes, let us take up this new idea of government by windsock or government by the slogan of the day.'' Clearly we would be more popular. But it seems to me that when you deal with the Constitution, we are not talking about popularity, and our forefathers and foremothers in the past restrained themselves and did not just throw everything they could think of into this Constitution. I must say, as the ranking member on the subcommittee that dealt with this amendment, I have been shocked by the whole process. As we saw today in the rule, they had to waive points of order because of some of the violations that went on during the markup, improper notice, the problems we had of not having, or of having very short hearings. We had less time to mark this bill up than it takes me to make a costume for my children for Halloween. You know, I always thought of a constitutional amendment as being real serious. Yet it was like, ``No, no, no, we have got to have it out here, we have got to have it now because it is on our slogan, and there was some ad or something in a TV journal and we have got to have it now.''”