John Spratt: “Mr. Speaker, this is not just a railroad. This is a high-speed train. This is one of those bullet trains. In France they…”

“Mr. Speaker, this is not just a railroad. This is a high-speed train. This is one of those bullet trains. In France they call it the TGV. Yesterday, at 6 o'clock, we had our first conference meeting, if we want to call it that. It was really a photo-op session, cameo session. We were handed a document with two columns, Democratic position, Republican position, points and places where these two resolutions differ. There was no third column, the resolution by the conferees, just the House position and the Senate position. There was no debate, no discussion, no motions, no amendments, nothing. They handed us this document. Not even the conference report itself. Not even the latest draft of it. Though I am sure everyone knows the procedure here. It was in the word processor. Not even the latest rough draft of the conference report, even though only a few issues remained in contention between the Senate Republicans and the House Republicans at that point. At 1:30 last night, I stayed here until about 10:30 or 11:00, at 1:30 the House Committee on Rules reported this resolution under the cloak of darkness. When I came to the floor this morning for this debate and asked for a copy of the conference report, it was not to be had. Our staff have been able to get a copy, and they are working on it right now trying to get a bullet analysis of it so that we can hand it out to our Members. We are talking about $1.8 trillion.…”