John W. Olver: “I commend the gentleman who has just spoken. I think he has taken a very responsible, very serious approach to budgeting…”

“I commend the gentleman who has just spoken. I think he has taken a very responsible, very serious approach to budgeting over the last several sessions, and I appreciate that sort of thing very much. But I would say that here we are in this instance with an amendment that takes an approach not quite across-the-board, but gives the total responsibility off to the President of the United States to decide where to make any cuts he wishes to make, which, I repeat, is an abrogation of our responsibility under the Constitution that we take an oath to. I would say that also this is a bad approach because after 40 amendments, each of which has been defeated, and 40 amendments which have had so little merit to them that they have been defeated, many of them by roll call votes, by roll call votes, and the sum total of all those amendments was considerably more than the $276 million, to now throw up your hands and try to do it in a different way, in that kind of a meat-ax approach, to use those words, is not a good thing to do. It is not an appropriate budgeting thing to do.”