I have a substitute amendment at the desk. The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Clerk will designate the amendment. The text of the amendment is as follows: Strike all after the enacting clause and insert the following: SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE…

First of all, I have to correct the gentleman from California. The District charter school bill was created by Speaker Gingrich in partnership with me. He came to me and proposed a voucher bill. I asked him, since the District had a local…

No one ever said that everybody in the District of Columbia or even every public official was against vouchers.

Look, the majority has chosen to run the government, the Federal Government, from CR to CR. But the majority has no right to inflict this operational outrage on the local funds of a local jurisdiction, the District of Columbia. The…

Far from scapegoating, it seems to me we ought to stand up and salute Federal employees for what they're doing for this country now.

I thank the gentlelady, and I hope she will remain with us, because the gentlelady is pointing out distinctions that the public is largely unaware of. Some of these job categories that my friend from Maryland points to ought to be…

I want to thank the gentlelady for coming down. You make a very important point about the stagnation of the American standard of living. It correlates with the stagnation of the American labor movement. The stagnation of the American labor…

This is such an important point. I would say to my friend from Maryland because, remember in Wisconsin, the public employees said, look, we will do our share. Yet the Governor insisted upon going at collective bargaining. Anyone who thinks…

That's such an important point about translating them. Unlike what the Federal Government is required to do, the people who have been throwing around the comparisons don't do what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does. Now, this is very…

The Federal workforce, now with many baby boomers, is eligible to retire, and there is absolute panic about whether or not we will ever see a workforce as good as the workforce we got in the post-Kennedy period. These were people who came…

Half of the Federal workforce, I learned, work in the nine highest paying occupation groups: judges, engineers, scientists, nuclear plant inspectors. That's half of the Federal workers. Less than a third of private sector workers work in…

If the gentlewoman would yield, I think it's very interesting that we have on the floor Members from, perhaps, the most dense part of the Federal workforce, all the way to Hawaii. Eighty-five percent of Federal workers does not work in the…