Edward Livingston: “I thought this was going to be a congenial, easygoing debate. Anyone who knows anything about the legislative process…”

“I thought this was going to be a congenial, easygoing debate. Anyone who knows anything about the legislative process knows that, Mr. Clinton is not a Member of Congress. I concede that. He is not a Member of the House. He is not a Member of the Senate. But, he occupies the Presidency now. I happen to recall that, under the Constitution, that we must pass our bills and they must go down to the President for his signature or his veto. Mr. Speaker, I turn on the television in the last few days, and I hear the President saying, that he is not going to accept anything less than everything. He is making the demands now at the end of the process, conveniently 3 weeks before the election, and he really was not interested at all in the process over the last 8 months since his State of the Union speech. Since July, our Committee on Appropriations members have been pleading with the administration to give us their budget offsets, which meant that if they asked us for more than the budget caps allowed to us in the budget agreement from last year, how could we pay for it? They said, We will give them to you. We will give them to you next week, next month, and then the next month. The fact is that, until this morning, we did not get their budget offsets. We asked for them last Friday. We asked for them Saturday. We asked for them Sunday while we were all here. I was with the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey). I got tired of looking at him, too.…”