Jim Nussle: “First of all I would say to the very distinguished minority leader that the gentleman from South Carolina is a lot of…”

“First of all I would say to the very distinguished minority leader that the gentleman from South Carolina is a lot of things. He is a professional. She has hit the nail on the head. I would just quarrel with one comment she made and that is that he is nonpartisan. He is a very effective partisan, I would just say. We get along very well. He does it in a spirit that may appear to be nonpartisan at times, but he is a very effective Democrat and I would never take that away from him. He is a very effective spokesman for their philosophy, for their priorities and while we sometimes disagree, it is okay that he can do it in a partisan way and not a mean way at all, or a disagreeable way. There are a couple of things I would just like to point out. First of all, the reason we came to balance in 1999 was, as the minority leader said, because we had a plan. That was a plan that was passed by this Congress, this Republican Congress. Second, she said that there were some jobs being created. Well, yes, some 1.4 million jobs since last August alone. If you want to create more of them or if you want to make sure that they get paid better salaries or if you want to make sure that they have more job security, I would just suggest to you that appropriating more money than we have in these huge increases for education, that is not going to increase their salaries.”