Joe Barton: “before I close, since we have painted Charlie Norwood to be such a saint today, I have got to kind of get a little bit…”

“before I close, since we have painted Charlie Norwood to be such a saint today, I have got to kind of get a little bit truer picture of him. In the Energy Policy Act debate of 2005, there was a provision in the bill that was not controversial in the overall part of the bill, but it was very controversial in certain areas of the country. One of those areas was in Charlie's area of the southeast. I had been working with him all through the debate to try to get him to help me forge a compromise on this particular issue, and he agreed that the compromise was the best public policy, but it wasn't the policy that his region supported. So he was in a difficult position of agreeing with me, the chairman, on what the good public policy was, but knowing that that was not a vote that he would be supported in taking for his region. I went round and round with him about how to convince him to support this particular item in the bill, and he just flat couldn't do it. But I finally got him to agree that, at the critical moment, he would not be there to vote against it. In other words, he would be absent, meeting a constituent or something, and he just couldn't be there. He and I agreed on this, and our staffs had worked it out so that when the time came to vote, Mr. Norwood would not vote "no," which would make me happy, but he wouldn't vote "yes" either, which would have made me even happier. He just wouldn't vote.…”