John Spratt: “Mr. Speaker, this is another rule that was passed late at night to bring to the floor a conference report that, in all…”

“Mr. Speaker, this is another rule that was passed late at night to bring to the floor a conference report that, in all due respect, does not deserve the name. It is hard to call this a conference report when nobody has conferred. We have had no consultation. There is no mutuality in the process, so it is not hard to believe that there will be no mutuality, no common ground, in the final result. I am not just saying this because I am miffed at being left out of the process. If you cannot take rejection, you better not be in politics. But we set a model 3 years ago for how to do this. We sat down and tried to negotiate a common agreement, given the fact that we have a divided government, and, when we got to the end, it was a pretty good product. We called it the Balanced Budget Agreement of 1997. We have not had such mutuality, such collegiality, since, and certainly not in this result here. As I said, I am not miffed, but we have meritorious arguments to make.”