Mark Souder: “I attempted to offer an amendment to transfer funds from Goals 2000 over to breast cancer and we found out, much to all…”

“I attempted to offer an amendment to transfer funds from Goals 2000 over to breast cancer and we found out, much to all of our surprise to some degree, that the National Cancer Institute is not authorized. We went through a debate on what was going to be called Whole School Reform, because there it was authorized, but authorized under a previous Congress by sticking it in a bill that was moving through for authorization without a single hearing, without a single subcommittee process, without a single full committee vote, and, by the way, happened when Congress was under control of a different party. Yet that moved through with the appropriators. We will always be at a disadvantage to the Senate and always at a disadvantage in this process. Mr. Chairman, informally if we do not allow amendments on the floor that are not authorized, and informally I think it is a good rule to say that if the committee chairman of the authorizing committee asks the Committee on Appropriations to carry it, that they do. But the point is that we do not have a hard and fast rule on how to do this.”