John W. Olver: “I again oppose this amendment. This is just a continuation of the effort to strangle Amtrak. In this instance I think…”

“I again oppose this amendment. This is just a continuation of the effort to strangle Amtrak. In this instance I think that what I'd like to do is to just try to review with the, whoever is still listening at this hour of the night what the President's budgets have looked like over the last several years. I may be slightly wrong, because I maybe have 1 year misplaced as to what happened, but I have been the ranking member for 2 years, the last 2 years, in the 2006 and 2007 budgets. My recollection is that the 2006 budget that the President provided no money, and we had to fill the hole completely to keep whatever was functional functioning in the case of Amtrak. And then in the 2007 budget, that year we ended up providing between, by the time the conference process was complete, $1.3 billion for a mixture of operating subsidies and capital programs.”