David Obey: “since last Friday, this House has been in a virtual stall on appropriations, and a lot of Members in both parties are…”

“since last Friday, this House has been in a virtual stall on appropriations, and a lot of Members in both parties are asking why. I want to take this opportunity to try to explain why I think that is happening. On the Committee on Appropriations on each of these bills except one, we have worked out a very effective bipartisan working relationship where we may have had very strong differences of opinion on all of those bills, but with the exception of the legislative appropriation bill, we have had tremendous bipartisan cooperation and goodwill. The problem is that when those bills have moved out of the Committee on Appropriations, they have then gone to the Committee on Rules, and the Committee on Rules has imposed a partisan straightjacket on the debate for those bills, and it has in the process turned those bipartisan products into partisan war zones. Now I greatly regret that, but what has happened is that, first of all, the Committee on Rules has systematically attached nongermane amendments to be offered by Republican Members of the House, and at the same time they have systematically then denied alternatives to those amendments when the request was made to put those amendments in order by the Democratic managers of each of those bills.”