Gilbert Gutknecht: “Mr. Chairman, earlier today we heard a powerful speech from the new prime minister from Israel, Mr. Netanyahu. In it he…”

“Mr. Chairman, earlier today we heard a powerful speech from the new prime minister from Israel, Mr. Netanyahu. In it he said that real democracy allows dissent and honest debate, and we are here today to offer some dissent and honest debate. A few months ago, when we were adopting, in fact about a month ago when we were adopting, the budget resolution, we were rightly criticized by Members and leadership on the other side of the aisle for allowing the deficit to go up, and as one of the freshmen who came here promising to do what we could to balance this budget, to balance the people's budget, I was one who really felt we made a terrible mistake by allowing spending to go up more this year than we had agreed we would do just last year, and so, as a result, I and some of my freshmen colleagues sat down and said, well, what can we do? It is not enough just to vote no. We ought to have a constructive plan to help recover that fumble.”