Harold Volkmer: “the gentleman is alluding to the amendment of the gentleman from Maryland, and it is a Republican amendment. I hope…”

“the gentleman is alluding to the amendment of the gentleman from Maryland, and it is a Republican amendment. I hope everybody will support it. Mr. Chairman, I have been here 18\1/2\ years. This is the weirdest debate that I have ever participated in. For an hour and a half, for an hour and a half, we have been talking about whether we can use volunteers or not. How much money are we saving, here? We are not saving a whole bunch of money, we are not spending a whole bunch of money, we are just asking the right, the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Gilchrest] is, the right of people, taxpayers, the people that Members are supposed to be so proud of, and these are people that are out there working day and night, and they are taking their time off to go out and get information, information. Are Members scared of information? That is what it sounds to me like, that the radical right is scared to death that they might find something out that they do not want to know about, so we put it away, do not find out about it. It is only volunteers. What my former President, my President, your President, Reagan pushed so hard for was voluntarism. Now we are saying no to voluntarism. There might be something under that rock that we do not want to know about, or something in that water, ``Oh, oh, we do not want to know about it''; or something in the sky, what is it? No, it is not Superman. It might be a bird. We do not know, we do not want to know. Weird, weird.…”