Barney Frank: “I am enlightened here. Apparently I now understand the nature of the emergency. We forgot. This is a very handy thing.…”

“I am enlightened here. Apparently I now understand the nature of the emergency. We forgot. This is a very handy thing. From now on whenever we are supposed to have done something and we do not do it, we do not say I forgot, we say, I am sorry, it is an emergency. Because the gentleman said the problem is that in 1997, when some of my colleagues voted for what I think was a pretty stupid agreement, they forgot there was going to be a census. Now, I do not know who withheld this information from those individuals, but now we have an explanation of an emergency. They forgot. I plan to use this. When they say to me, where is that thing the gentleman is supposed to have, I will say, I am sorry, it is an emergency. If they ask somebody on their staff if they wrote the memo that they wanted them to write, they can say, no, it is an emergency. So we now have invented the handiest excuse in human history.”