Tim Ryan: “I just hope our friends who are opposing this bill to cover children's health care because of the cost of it, which we…”

“I just hope our friends who are opposing this bill to cover children's health care because of the cost of it, which we are paying for, will scrutinize the Iraq spending as it starts to come up over the next few weeks and few months. As we went over already, one day in Iraq, $330 million would cover 270,000 kids for a year for this program. That is one day. And if you go through 1 week, $2.3 billion would cover 1.8 million kids. And less than 40 days in Iraq would cover all of these kids that we want to cover, 10 million kids, for 1 year. Forty days in Iraq. And all we are saying is our priority is this. Now, I just want to take a minute here to just go over what has happened over the past 8 or 9 or 10 months here in Congress, what we have done, how we have shifted the priorities. We have the same Members who are voting against this bill who voted against the minimum wage increase. We have the same Members who are going to vote against the children's health care bill are the same members who voted against us increasing the Pell Grant and cutting the interest rates for college loans in half, the same group of folks. When we wanted to invest all this money in alternative energy research, we took it from the oil companies, corporate welfare, put it into alternative energy research. The same group of folks that voted against this SCHIP bill, children's health care bill, voted against that, too. And all of these issues come up.…”