Steven Holt: “To follow on the remarks of my good friend from Virginia, I must say, this is almost incomprehensible. The Smithsonian…”

“To follow on the remarks of my good friend from Virginia, I must say, this is almost incomprehensible. The Smithsonian as a collection of museums and zoological park and so forth that my colleague talked about is half the picture, and, indeed, if any of those facilities are closed, there will be a lot of unhappy families from Georgia and Tennessee and Montana and all the 50 States. But it's a lot more than that. The Smithsonian is a collection of research centers that goes far beyond biplanes and folk art and portraits and jewelry and pandas: The Smithsonian astronomical observatory, one of the finest collections of research scientists in the world for understanding the workings of our universe. Barro Colorado Island in Panama, in the middle of the Panama Canal, probably the principal research center for understanding the workings of our biological world. Oh, yes, there would be a lot of unhappy families if this amendment were to go through, but among those 600 positions that would be lost no doubt would be some of the finest scientists in the United States, in fact, in the world, and there would be a lot of unhappy scientists around the world who would wonder, what in the world were they thinking of? What in the world were they thinking in Washington, D.C., when they cut back on these research efforts? I yield back the balance of my time.”