Political Quotes

“I thank the chairman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I must confess, today I was astonished to read an article in one of the online magazines that House Democratic leadership had asked their Members to vote against this stopgap funding bill because of the stalemate over the funding of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. We just heard the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee detail the work that has already been done on this bill. Let me assure this Congress, there are probably people in here saying: What do you mean? We voted on this bill. We voted this bill out of the House weeks ago. It was offset. Everything that the Senate asked for, they were delivered: the 5-year timeframe, the funding levels the Senate asked for. They got everything they wanted. Yes, it was offset in a responsible fashion, but now we are told House Democratic leadership says vote ``no'' on this continuing resolution because we don't like the stopgap funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program. What in the devil do they want to happen? We did our work. We did our work. We had our legislative hearings on this bill in the summertime. We did delay things, unfortunately, 1 day. There was a shooting at a House baseball game--you may remember that--that caused us some delay, but we came back 2 weeks later. We got our work done. We had a responsible bill. It was reflective of everything that was requested by the Senate.…”