Joe Barton: “what we have today is a classic case of a Washington, DC, nonintersecting conversation. Since the President vetoed this…”

“what we have today is a classic case of a Washington, DC, nonintersecting conversation. Since the President vetoed this bill several weeks ago, my friends on the majority side have spent 2 weeks encouraging outside groups and perhaps their political arm, I am not sure about that, to spend millions of dollars in television and radio ads bombarding targeted Republicans to get them to change their vote. Now, that is only the sixth time in history that we know of that a veto has not been brought to the floor immediately on the President's veto. The result is going to be that when we get to the vote in the next hour or so, the next 30 minutes or so, the President's veto will be sustained. Then, hopefully, we will have the real bipartisan negotiations that should have started 6 or 7 months ago. It is interesting to me that we are still having a misunderstanding about the basic facts. And the reason is, we have never had a legislative hearing in either the Ways and Means Committee or the Energy and Commerce Committee. We have not had a subcommittee markup in either of the jurisdictional committees. And we really didn't have a markup at full committee, because the original bill for SCHIP was a 500-page mammoth bill that we got at midnight the day before it was supposed to be marked up in the case of the Energy and Commerce Committee. But once we do sustain the President's veto, we are going to have these negotiations I hope.…”