Lynn N. Rivers: “I wanted to make two comments to my friend from Arizona, the first one being relative to the argument that the President…”

“I wanted to make two comments to my friend from Arizona, the first one being relative to the argument that the President has already spent $2 billion of Social Security money. My recollection is that that came through the House here as a bill that actually was passed by this House. I know a significant number of Democrats did not vote for it, which suggests to me that a significant number of Republicans did therefore join the President in the decision to do that. So I think that when we talk about that particular issue, we should be talking about the fact that a bipartisan group, the President and a bipartisan group of Members of the House and the Senate decided to make that decision. It clearly was not a unilateral decision made on the part of the President. Secondly, my friend from Arizona pointed out that he would invite people to join him on educational issues and it was said in such a way to suggest that perhaps I was being disingenuous in my concern. The issue that I raised was that in the Committee on the Budget, several people had talked about the desire to have the greatest impact on local education by fully funding the Federal portion of special education.”