Mark Souder: “once again it is important to point out why we are here. We have a Democratic President and a Republican Congress with…”

“once again it is important to point out why we are here. We have a Democratic President and a Republican Congress with disagreements. We have disagreements that are deep and heartfelt. However, we have known these disagreements since at least January 1, probably for the last 4 years since. Every year at this time we come down to the same disagreements. It is over protection of human life. It is over national testing, over the census. It is whether to and how to spend the budget surplus. It is over tax cuts, over IMF and U.N. funding. This list is no surprise. We have known it all year long. So where have the negotiators been? Why can we not sit down, or is there something else going on? Is there something that maybe perhaps the President of the United States would like to take attention away from and try to relive 1995, where we can try to say the Republicans are trying to do a shutdown. It is pretty clear that we have surrendered almost everything in this appropriations bill and that there is an election going on and those of us who are in the House have to run this year. We are not the ones holding up the process right now. We have been trying to negotiate. We have been trying to work through. Later on today in a special order I want to point out something that I have been going through, this new book on the tapes of Richard Nixon, which were released for the first time.…”