Brandon Williams: “Mr. Chairman, the charts and graphs and the square root of last year's budget are all interesting, but I think they miss…”

“Mr. Chairman, the charts and graphs and the square root of last year's budget are all interesting, but I think they miss an essential point. That is, that traditionally and without exception, appropriate funding and aggressive support for education has been a bipartisan effort in this Congress. It was, after all, a Democratic President that proposed the GI bill and a Republican Congress that said yes. It was a Republican President that supported the great National Defense Education Act and a Democratic Congress that said yes. Together we have supported such things as drug-free schools and Head Start. The list is glorious and it was bipartisan until this Gingrich Congress. Until this Congress, for 50 years, both Democrats and Republicans joined hands as the American people wanted us to in appropriately funding education and now it has changed. Our Republican colleagues cut $1.1 billion out of the schools and the children of this country in the last Congress and now they propose to cut almost a half a billion more. The Obey amendment attempts to restore bipartisanship to education, to what it has traditionally been.”