John Spratt: “Rule number two has arrived; and just to show you how much bipartisanship there is, my amendment which deals with an…”

“Rule number two has arrived; and just to show you how much bipartisanship there is, my amendment which deals with an important project, cooperative threat reduction, destroying weapons of mass destruction in Russia, the former Soviet Union, the Dingell-Rahall amendment which would correct outrageous grants of authority over environmental laws granted to the Department of Defense under this bill, the Cooper-Davis-Van Hollen amendment which goes to the most radical revision of the civil service in the last hundred years with respect to the Department of Defense, all of those substantive amendments are not made in order. So what we will have here is a sterile, almost pro forma, debate because what is left in contention, really challengeable, is not what is really at fault in this bill at all. We cannot have that debate. We see that substantive alternatives which we are offering, not controversial, not partisan gotcha bills, substantive alternatives simply cannot be brought up here. What the Republican majority is doing is using procedural devices which they control with a thin majority to deny us fair consideration on substantive issues of the utmost gravity.”