Roy Cooper: “Sadly, Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is exactly correct. In the little time we have remaining, let me make sure we finish…”

“Sadly, Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is exactly correct. In the little time we have remaining, let me make sure we finish the remaining Blue Dog points here. We have to admit that Congress likes to spend money on its own pet projects. It is called earmark spending. We do not ban that, but we require a written justification for every project, so that things like Senator Charles Grassley's $50 million indoor rain forest in Iowa would no longer happen without written justification. The Wall Street Journal reported ``it would be cheaper to fly everyone in Iowa to a real rain forest rather than build a fake one somewhere in Iowa.'' Another key element of the Blue Dog reform plan is to give us the 3 days that we have under House rules to read these bills so that we have a chance to know what is going on; so we have a chance to share with our constituents back home what is in these bills so we can get their ideas. That is the best way to represent them, instead of ramming things through here, like our budget 3 weeks ago in 2 hours, or other legislation they rammed through in 1 day under what they call the martial law rule. That is not a pejorative; that is what they call it, a martial law rule for running our democracy. Another key element of the Blue Dog reform plan is let us get an honest cost estimate for every bill. I mentioned earlier let us have a recorded vote for the larger bills, but we need to know what each bill costs so we have some idea what we are spending.…”