John W. Olver: “today the President, President Clinton, vetoed a bill which he had said very clearly that he was going to veto. Very…”

“today the President, President Clinton, vetoed a bill which he had said very clearly that he was going to veto. Very clearly he had indicated that that veto was coming because of a series of extraneous riders to an otherwise emergency bill. And so we have a situation that I have really in 30 years of legislative life that I have gone through both in Massachusetts, my home State, and here 6 years in the Congress, I think that I have never seen an emergency bill managed more cavalierly, more carelessly by the legislative body and the majority than this one has been managed this year. It was back in March, the 19th of March, that the President had asked for this legislation totaling about $7.1 billion, part of it to deal with the very serious natural disasters in the Ohio Valley, the flooding in northern California, the Red River Valley, and the Dakotas, and in Minnesota in order to help put back the lives of hundreds of thousands of devastated families, farms and businesses, people whose lives had really been deeply hurt by that and also, by the way, to carry out $1.8 billion that was to provide our peacekeepers in Bosnia, those people, men and women, who wear the American uniform and are doing a dirty and a tough job, but a necessary job, the resources that they need in order to do that.”