Mark Souder: “first off I want to congratulate the gentleman from New York [Mr. Walsh] and the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Davis]…”

“first off I want to congratulate the gentleman from New York [Mr. Walsh] and the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Davis] also in the authorizing committee, for their hard work. Washington, DC, is our national Capital. It is seen across this country as a symbol of our Nation, it is seen throughout the world as a symbol of our Nation, and its efforts to try to improve the situation there and to shepherd it are to be commended, and as my colleagues well know, as we go through this amendment process, these amendments are not aimed at any particular committee or any particular approach. I also serve on the authorizing committee, the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, and as my colleagues know, authorizing numbers are a cap, they are not the actual amount. That is up to the appropriating committee what they spend, and when we got our authorizing cap, we did not realize that the budget was going to have a bump up in the second year. That came later in the whole negotiating process, and some of the appropriating numbers got bumped up in dealing with the President and with the Senate, and we did not come to Congress to watch the deficit go up our second year here. We made a commitment to the American people that that deficit was going to go down. And we did better than expected last year. Now we have a challenge to meet.…”