David Obey: “I do not care how Members vote on this amendment. This amendment is a big nothing. It does not do anything for anybody…”

“I do not care how Members vote on this amendment. This amendment is a big nothing. It does not do anything for anybody, does not do anything to anybody. It simply takes money which is in the Treasury and puts it in the Treasury. That is all it does. So Members should vote however they want. I would simply observe that last year $124 billion was devoted to debt reduction without benefit of this amendment, and this year we will see a lot more than that devoted to deficit reduction, with or without the benefit of this amendment. I think the problem is that debate has been so trivialized in this House on budget issues, and the budget process itself has become so trivialized that we see immense amounts of time spent by many people in this chamber simply trying to invent procedural gimmicks so that they have a rollcall to take home to taxpayers who are too busy to make a living to understand the intricacies of the budget process. I think that does not serve this institution well. It certainly does not serve our own taxpayers well. I would simply say this. If colleagues want to take a real action as opposed to an ethereal action, if colleagues want to take a real action that will save money today, they should vote against this entire bill and have it come back in a stripped-down version, the way it ought to come back.”