Political Quotes

“we have talked about a number of individual items that we have found questionable in past omnibus bills, including, in particular, a tropical rain forest that, by the way, was not in the district of the Committee on the Budget chairman. One of the points that I want to make about the beauties of this particular amendment is that often, this is going to be shocking to people listening to this debate, but often we have an appropriation bill, especially when it is an omnibus appropriation bill, that can be thousands and thousands of pages long, and who knows how many tens of thousands of lines in this. And sometimes we have had all of several hours to go through every single line in these thousands and thousands of pages. The stack is usually here somewhere, set up here. If one can get here and they are the first person there, then they can get it and they can look through and they can discover the $4 million for fruit flies in France or whatever else it might be. And they could raise their objection and deal with that. But sometimes you might not get the opportunity to go through this whole thing. In fact, as a practical matter, none of us do. We discover later on what all has been inserted in this bill.”