John Yarmuth: “I thank my colleague and want to yield again to Mr. Hall from New York. But before I do, I just wanted to add that…”

“I thank my colleague and want to yield again to Mr. Hall from New York. But before I do, I just wanted to add that, again, sitting and listening to the State of the Union address and talking about the honesty that we need to have when we have this discussion, and all of a sudden the President for the first time in this State of the Union address takes on the question of earmarks. And all of a sudden he's critical of the Democratic Congress because we had 11,000 or something earmarks. But he never said a word for 6 years while the earmarks expanded to somewhere in the realm of 16,000. Now we can have debates over earmarks. I happen to think, as my colleagues mentioned, that there are some very valid reasons to have earmarks. And I think they have been demonized probably unreasonably. But all of a sudden the President finds fiscal religion this year under a Democratic-controlled Congress when he was silent for 6 years. And the same is true of his passion now for balanced budgets when over the first 6 years of his administration with the Republican-controlled Congress, he never issued a veto, never threatened a veto of any spending bill as we accrued $3.7 or so trillion more in debt, and he was silent. All of a sudden now you have to suspect that the only reason is partisanship. That's what we're trying to get away from in this country, and that's what we are trying to get away from as we discuss the priorities of the country.”