Peter H. Bell: “this gives us a great opportunity to talk about what has transpired in Austin, Texas, and Ardmore, Oklahoma, over the…”

“this gives us a great opportunity to talk about what has transpired in Austin, Texas, and Ardmore, Oklahoma, over the course of this week and what really has transpired throughout the Nation and to set the record straight. I appreciate having this opportunity. During the course of the debate which has taken place this week, there have been some very large misstatements of fact. This gives us a chance to correct the record on some of those issues. There has been a lot of finger-wagging by the majority leader, Mr. DeLay, along with the Speaker of the Texas House, Mr. Craddick, acting as if they were terribly surprised by the Democrats' reaction to this redistricting bill that was going to be jammed down their throats. Mr. Speaker, we can look back to editorials in almost every major Texas newspaper dating back to January of this year where almost every major newspaper took an editorial position that because of the problems facing the State of Texas, because of the challenges that the Texas legislature would be facing because they only meet every 2 years and they have a very limited amount of time to address those challenges, every major newspaper editorialized that redistricting should be stayed away from. Redistricting had already been accomplished by the courts just 2 years ago. There was absolutely no reason to take an absolutely unprecedented course of action and take up redistricting in what was obviously nonsense this year.”