Debbie Dingell: “I want to pay my respects and my compliments to my dear friends, the gentleman from Virginia and the gentleman from…”

“I want to pay my respects and my compliments to my dear friends, the gentleman from Virginia and the gentleman from Florida. They have tried hard to work with us on a fair and a decent bill. I believe that it had in that effort a real seed of careful and good legislative work. But between the time that Mr. Bliley and Mr. Bilirakis... and I agreed with regard to the substance of the bill, something peculiar happened. All of a sudden, we have found that the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure... has done so again. So we do not bring Members a bill which is going to make safe the waters only. We bring here a bill which... came to contain 375 million dollars' worth of pork. My staff informs me that perhaps a couple of the projects which are in this area of pork have some merit. Most of them are, quite frankly, nothing more or less than shameless raids by the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Not only are they quite shameless raids, but they are for projects which are quite lacking in merit.”