Steny Hoyer: “We are placed in an extraordinarily difficult position. We labored long and hard, and I was then a member of the…”

“We are placed in an extraordinarily difficult position. We labored long and hard, and I was then a member of the Appropriations Committee, on our bills. We considered them here on the floor. There was debate. There were amendments offered. They passed. Frankly, the ideal, as you well know, would have been to have them pass, go to conference and pass them through both Houses. But we are now confronted with a lot of work product over a year on all of these bills out of the Appropriations Committee now sitting, frankly, in limbo with a deadline of February 15 to have a short-term CR, which we are not for. We want to complete this business. So we have a challenge that I think is relatively unique, given all of this work product, of just not having a simple CR which says we do '06 levels, because all that work product would be, A, down the drain, and B, was responding to needs that the administration wants, that our military wants, that our veterans want, that others need.”