Burgess Owens: “Thank you very much. I appreciate your leadership on this. When you talk about rural, I represent rural. Fourteen…”

“Thank you very much. I appreciate your leadership on this. When you talk about rural, I represent rural. Fourteen thousand square miles make up my district, a thousand miles around the perimeter. I live in a very rural place, and public broadcasting is extraordinarily important to each and every one of my constituents. I have to do a bit of a disclaimer first. My wife works for our local television station. She's the education director. I volunteered at the station for 3rac{1}{2} years, and I was the host of a television program. And I was also the lawyer for that station for about 25 years. So this is a real family affair for me. I'm most disturbed because I see what's going on in this situation is really a slash-and-burn tactic that is primarily focused on public broadcasting. It is an attempt to take the continuing resolution and make it into a piece of ideology. That's not what our constituents are asking of us. They want us to make an economic decision and do an economic analysis of where we are and where we're going. I think it's extraordinarily important that we focus on the economics of the debt and the deficit and not on ideology; we have an opportunity to act rationally and in a bipartisan fashion, as we did in the last lame duck session of Congress. Our friends and neighbors at home demand no less. I can agree to cut $100 billion dollars, which is actually about 3 percent of this year's budget, if we do it by sharing the pain.”