Mark Souder: “what the gentleman has pointed out is absolutely correct. You have devastated our hardest argument to make, which is…”

“what the gentleman has pointed out is absolutely correct. You have devastated our hardest argument to make, which is that math even is politicized in this day and age, and can be ineffective if consolidated with power in the hands of the wrong people. I want to hasten to point out, for those who say, but if the Federal Government makes a mistake, they can change it, this national testing is moving forward. Inside the Department of Education, as they prepared the tests without any authorization from Congress, without any appropriations from Congress, in fact with over two-thirds of this House of Representatives going on record against national testing, it still is moving forward. If they passed a bad test and we wanted to try to amend that test, even in most cases, if we could get two-thirds in the House to override, the Senate would block us and certainly the President would veto it and we would have a filibuster in the Senate. In other words, once it is bad, it will probably not get corrected. Now, the problem here is that there is a history, so to speak, with this. Lynne Cheney, who we have quoted a number of times tonight, actually was in the humanities art department of the Federal Government and now admits that she made the mistake of granting the first funds for the history exams. She says, ``I was wrong.'' She watched the bias that crept into the history.…”