Mark Souder: “I sat here and listened to the last special order. It was the longest extensions of remarks devoted to how to increase…”

“I sat here and listened to the last special order. It was the longest extensions of remarks devoted to how to increase taxes in America that I have heard. It is one thing for the other party to criticize us in spending and then vote against every attempt to control the budget. They can criticize us simultaneously as they did in the last hour for not spending enough in education and then not controlling the budget. There was such inconsistency. We are clearly in the season of partisanship, but the harshness and tone and the misrepresentation has been very uncomfortable. And I hope that as we go through this year we can have reasonable debate over very, very difficult questions on international trade, on how we manage our deficit, on how we manage our tax code, on how we manage our spending without the tremendously aggressive tone of partisanship that is increasingly happening in America. I want to talk about a subject that will hopefully be relatively bipartisan as we move through. It certainly has been in part. And there is a broader issue that has come up, and that is related to the issue of Colombia. Colombia, most of us think of, if I ask you what do you think of, probably the first thing you think of historically would be coffee. Colombian coffee. Juan Valdez and Colombian coffee. I know in Indiana and at least me from Indiana and many other people would think Colombia is spelled like the District of Columbia. But it is not.…”