David Obey: “Mr. Speaker, we all come here individually as politicians, and as we are assigned committees, as we develop expertise on…”

“Mr. Speaker, we all come here individually as politicians, and as we are assigned committees, as we develop expertise on substance, we become legislators, rather than mere politicians. On the Committee on Appropriations, I think it is safe to say that we can take people with the most extreme ideological differences, and if we send them out in the field to examine a problem, when they come back to this Chamber, 8 times out of 10 they will probably have the same ideas about how to deal with the problem. That is what happens in a legislative body when we have the normal course of give-and-take and the normal willingness to compromise. That is not just true of the Committee on Appropriations; it is supposed to happen on every other committee in the Congress. That is what is supposed to turn us into what we have been called when we have been called 'the greatest legislative, deliberative body in the world.' But we have fallen a far, far pace from that on this bill.”