David Obey: “the amendment before us is not even a serious legislative effort. It is very clear what is going on here is simply…”

“the amendment before us is not even a serious legislative effort. It is very clear what is going on here is simply ``Operation Cover Your Tail.'' We have had a lot of people in this House who promised to vote for funding the arts, but yesterday they chose to assassinate the arts behind the cover of the Ehlers amendment. Mr. Chairman, this is a smokescreen amendment, and I think the comments of the Chair of the Committee on Education and the Workforce indicate just how unreal this proposal is as an alternative. What he really indicated by his remarks is that this is just a time filler. It is a device by which to kill the National Endowment for the Arts, and then they figure out later how they are going to explain it to the folks back home and come up with some other scheme to cover what they have done. What he said in response to the comments of the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Yates] is, ``Well, if this amendment passes, then what we'll do is, we'll pull our committee together and we will really then figure out what it is we really want to do, and then we will send it on to the conferees.'' When he was asked would he do that same thing if the Ehlers amendment is not adopted, he said no. That indicates that this Ehlers amendment is nothing but a device by which you accomplish the assassination of the National Endowment for the Arts. That is all it is, and it just seems to me that that is not what a majority of Members in both parties in this House want to do.”