Wendy Sherman: “we all remember when this President came before our House and, in a burst of excessive honesty, told us perceptively…”

“we all remember when this President came before our House and, in a burst of excessive honesty, told us perceptively that we faced an axis of evil: three nations posed a great threat to the United States. His phraseology deliberately harkened back to the 1940s when we also faced a tripartite axis of evil. But what if President Roosevelt had led us in an invasion of Italy, forced Mussolini into hiding, and pretty much left it at that--ignoring what was going on in Berlin and Tokyo? It is easier to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than it is to find a policy toward Iran here in Washington. So I went to the Committee on Rules with two amendments. One I identified as an important amendment with 18 co-sponsors, including the gentleman from New Jersey who just spoke, including our ranking member, including senior Republicans and Democrats on the Committee on International Relations. This amendment would deprive the tyrants in Tehran of money and would provide money for those fighting for democracy. Then I put forward a second amendment which I clearly identified as unimportant, something that could be ignored by the Committee on Rules if they chose, a mere resolution. What did the Committee on Rules do? They killed the important amendment. They killed a chance to really discuss our policy toward Iran. And then they took the sense of Congress amendment, stripped out a little part of it, and put it before this House. They did nothing to save the House's time.…”