Frank Pallone: “let me tell my colleague, when it comes to the procedures around here, I mean we could talk on. You are absolutely…”

“let me tell my colleague, when it comes to the procedures around here, I mean we could talk on. You are absolutely right. Everything is orchestrated from the White House, and any notion that any legislation that the President wants would not come up for a vote or that the President does not want, it is all orchestrated and you gave an example before of where we were talking about the Medicare bill. One of the things that was so amazing to me was how that vote was orchestrated. One of the criticisms that I mentioned when I started out this evening is how the Medicare administrator Tom Scully orchestrated this whole vote in the House, and when his own actuary Foster said to him that the cost of this bill was going to be significantly more than what the Bush administration had told the Congress and what the congressional Republicans had suggested, the administrator told the actuary that if he revealed that information to Congress he would be fired. As a consequence, the Congress never got the information about the actual cost of the Medicare bill. My colleague knows that there were many on the Republican side of the aisle that did not want to vote on that bill because they thought it was going to be too costly, and they did not like, for whatever reason, the cost, and now we know the GAO came out with a report last week that said that Scully's action was illegal, it was illegal for him to deny that information to Congress.”