Louie Gohmert: “I appreciate so much my friend, Mr. Perry from Pennsylvania, bringing this whole issue forward. There are a number of…”

“I appreciate so much my friend, Mr. Perry from Pennsylvania, bringing this whole issue forward. There are a number of more votes that we did take. We took up the Head Start for Low-Income Children Act, providing official education funding to support Head Start programs across the country, and 168 of the Democrats across the aisle voted against that. Harry Reid is refusing to take that up. My friends across the aisle wanted a vote. So we voted for the Deficit Reduction and Economic Growth Working Group Act. It seemed like if Harry Reid would not appoint negotiators before the shutdown really had a chance to take hold, I wasn't sure this was really necessary, but there's a Chinese proverb having to do with allowing your opponent a graceful way out. {time} 2145 So this bill was proposed as a graceful way out so that Harry Reid could come back and say, Okay, well, now we will, under this new bill, we'll go ahead and appoint negotiators and act like it was some new bill when the truth is it's just us trying to have a bicameral discussion. Yet we had 197 Democrats vote against--well, there were 197 that voted against the bill, basically Democrats, saying we don't want to sit down and work this out with negotiators. I thought about voting against it because it seemed pretty needless since we already voted to appoint negotiators, conferees. Harry Reid wouldn't do that. But I was persuaded, look, this is a way for Harry Reid to get out gracefully, go ahead and appoint negotiators.…”