Timothy Roemer: “Mr. Speaker, I think it was the poet Shelly that said that children need to believe in belief. And I think what that…”

“Mr. Speaker, I think it was the poet Shelly that said that children need to believe in belief. And I think what that means is that our children in America need to be able to believe in their dreams. They need to be able to believe in childhood. They need to be able to believe in that elf that whispers in their ear and talks about Santa Claus, or the beauty of being what ever you want to be when you grow up. It is too often times in the America of today that we see here in Washington, DC, where young people are shooting each other in the streets, and now in the schools, that our children do not have this opportunity to dream. They do not have the opportunity to believe in belief, and they never are children. I went before the Committee on Rules yesterday to propose what I thought was a reasonable amendment to the budget, because the budget is the appropriate place to do this. And my amendment would have done two things: It would have cut the intelligence budget by 5 percent over 5 years, and eliminated the D5 Trident missile program, accumulating to about $11.8 billion in cuts, and taken that $11.8 billion and put it into a Children's Initiative for America, another CIA.”