Ralph Hall: “I move to strike what I really hope deep down and pray might be one of the last words. Mr. Chairman, I just want to be…”

“I move to strike what I really hope deep down and pray might be one of the last words. Mr. Chairman, I just want to be practical about this. You know, I sat this morning in the ranking position as a Republican with Bart as chairman over there, and we listened to the First Lady. She came before us, everybody was gracious to her, she made a good speech. One of our Members used his rights under the rules to ask her some questions. She graciously answered them. Then we came on over here. I came on over here hoping that this would be about an hour and a half or maybe 2 hours. I served as ranking member under Bart today, and I was ranking as a Democrat under Boehlert and Sensenbrenner, and the only airplane I would like to be thinking about was the one I wanted to be on at 12:30 today heading for Texas. But really and truly, I don't call anybody silly or anybody's speech that they want to make here, they need to be heard and express themselves. That is just what a lot of people call the music of democracy. But we started out, I thought, talking about a bill that would direct the EPA, the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology to initiate an R&D program to make biofuels more compatible with present-day infrastructure and to direct agencies to do so and so, to provide low-cost, affordable and accurate measurements and do all that; and it is going to cost $10 million to carry this act out.…”