Joe Cunningham: “every substantive issue in the bill before us today has been voted on by the House or the Senate. I would say to my…”

“every substantive issue in the bill before us today has been voted on by the House or the Senate. I would say to my colleagues on the other side that even in welfare, many of them, no matter what we did, they would vote against it, both for political reasons and issue reasons. In California over two-thirds of the children born in our hospitals are to illegal aliens. Members should take that into effect when they are talking about helping the poor and American citizens and taking away funds from Medicaid. We have over 400,000 children K through 12. At $5,000 each to educate a child, that is over $2 billion. They should try to take that out of their State for education. Some 70 percent of the environment is done at the State level. Members should think about $3 billion taken out of their States. They could not afford that. This bill does not help all of those things. Prop 187, that the Gallegly amendment was in, passed by two-thirds in California. It has been taken out of this. There are some things in here that I do not like as well, but I would ask my colleagues on the other side to think about how they could afford it in their States, and I think it would be very difficult.”