Mark Souder: “it would be really helpful if we did not attack each others motives. I do not consider myself a mean person. I consider…”

“it would be really helpful if we did not attack each others motives. I do not consider myself a mean person. I consider myself like other Members of this body on both sides, deeply committed to the issues we believe in, and we confuse the American people because they do not understand what is going on right now. They look at this and say this looks a lot like the NBA strike lockout where we have people on both sides with strong differences of opinions. But they are adults; why can they not sit down? Obviously we both care about education. We differ how to do it. We obviously both care about health care. We disagree how to do it. We obviously both want to see a form of government; in this case some of us are more local than state-oriented and some are more federal, but it is not that we are not trying to do a good government. In 1995, actually right after the 1994 elections, we had a historic point in American history. For 40 years we had had a Democratic Congress, and all of a sudden we had a conservative Republican Congress and a liberal Democratic President, and we had those passions on both sides tested, and we went through this before. This is now our fourth time. There is no reason that we cannot come to an agreement unless there is another political reason, unless there is a wag-the-dog problem going on right now where the President is trying to distract attention. We know he feels passionately, we feel passionately. Let us be adults and get it resolved.”