Louise Slaughter: “I rise today to reluctantly oppose the Interior appropriations bill we will be voting on today because it contains no…”

“I rise today to reluctantly oppose the Interior appropriations bill we will be voting on today because it contains no funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. The rule did not allow us to have a vote, an up-or-down vote, on NEA on the grounds that the NEA was not authorized. However, later today we will be voting on an appropriations bill that has at least 40 unauthorized and protected measures in it. I believe if we had had an up-or-down vote on the NEA, that it would have been fully funded for the next year. The Federal support for the arts is an incredibly worthwhile investment, and as many of our Members know, students with 4 years of arts study score 59 points higher on their verbal scores and 45 points higher on the math portion of their SAT's than students with no arts classes. Recent studies about the development of the human brain show the importance of arts for early childhood development. At the University of California at Irvine, researchers found that music training is far superior to computer instruction in dramatically enhancing children's abstract reasoning skills.”