Mark Souder: “first I want to say thanks to the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, who is in the unenviable position of…”

“first I want to say thanks to the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, who is in the unenviable position of getting battered by everybody all of the time. I appreciate that of the cardinals and our appropriators. On the one hand, some of us most right wing elements of the Republican Party, as I and others are sometimes called, criticize the Committee on Appropriations for spending too much. Then others say they are not spending enough. The fact is that every year when we get to the final appropriations bills, I have supported the Committee on Appropriations because they have tried to work within a budget, and we understand that it is a system in which the Senate is probably going to come up with a higher number. We come in. We like to have a budget. We would like to work it out and probably the numbers are going to be higher than our initial numbers and lower than their numbers. I know it is very frustrating for the appropriators because often inside the majority will of our conference may be different than their particular goals. They see all the requests that all of us put into the Committee on Appropriations, and at the same time try to balance what are the long-term goals. We have had extraordinary increases in the amount in education. We have just heard basically 65 percent over the last 5 years. All of the sudden we are facing a deficit in this country. We do not want interest rates to go up. We do not want inflation to go up.”