David Thomas: “I hope we can come to a little more of a cooperative understanding of what our agenda should be in the next 2 weeks.…”

“I hope we can come to a little more of a cooperative understanding of what our agenda should be in the next 2 weeks. What are the things that are most important? What are the things we ought to have as our priorities? Obviously, we have to finish the appropriations, and we have only sent about half of those to the White House. So that is something we must do. Obviously, there is difficulty in trying to complete the work on the Defense appropriations. It seems to me it is also important that we have a stimulus package. However, having been on the Finance Committee and sat through all the talk about it, we expanded it far beyond where anyone would suggest these were stimulus programs. I suppose you could expect that to happen. We are at the end of a session. We are at a time when, because of the terrorist attacks, emergencies have arisen that must be addressed. But now we find that everyone who has ever had a thought about where we ought to be spending more money wants to do it.”