Mark Souder: “first, I do not want to be appearing to be joining the minority whining session. I certainly have a legitimate complaint…”

“first, I do not want to be appearing to be joining the minority whining session. I certainly have a legitimate complaint in the bill because mine was actually a technical correction. The technical corrections bill is supposed to be mostly grammatical and things that were misunderstood. And the things that are being debated on the floor right now are supposed to come up under separate legislation when we do a higher ed bill. To quote the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Mrs. Mink) when I was trying to do what was actually a technical correction, she wrote, ``Our understanding was that this technical correction bill would not include any item that was controversial or which would be objected to by a significant number of Members.'' What we have been debating here is a higher ed bill or individual bills. My technical correction is very simple. The Clinton administration, either through deliberate, malicious intent, or incompetence, and I believe incompetence, ruled that students who are receiving a loan who got convicted of a drug offense applied to people 20 years back. A 14-year-old who had committed three offenses could not get a student loan. Our debate was clear. An exchange the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) and I had made it clear we were talking about students who were convicted while they were getting a college loan. They applied and denied thousands of students because of a laughable interpretation of the law.”