David Obey: “Mr. Speaker, we have no choice but to vote for this CR, as the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) indicates. Before we…”

“Mr. Speaker, we have no choice but to vote for this CR, as the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) indicates. Before we do, I think we need to simply take note of the fact that these continuing resolutions are supposed to enable us to get our work done so that we can finish the budget for the coming year. I had the impression that what we were supposed to be doing during this time was to be resolving our differences so that in fact the time that we were spending would be spent in ways which would get us all home so that we could get on the campaign trail and occasionally introduce ourselves to our constituents. That would be nice. The problem is that when we go through a day like we have gone through today, we simply wasted an entire day. If the idea is to go home as soon as possible, then today is a perfect example of how not to do that, because the State-Justice-Commerce appropriations bill which is about to come to the floor and the tax bill which has just left the floor are two examples of how we are farther apart from each other than we were when the day began. All I would say is that there is no point in dragging this out. I would hope that the majority party would recognize that rather than sending bills up to the President to veto, it would be better to actually resolve the differences between us.”