David Obey: “let me simply say that in the wake of the last speech, I was not aware that we were supposed to be cheerleaders at what…”

“let me simply say that in the wake of the last speech, I was not aware that we were supposed to be cheerleaders at what sounds like a high school football game. Keep going. It is in character. Mr. Speaker, I hope this does not come out of my time, but I hope you would educate Members of the House that they have an obligation to not speak unless they are in the well or at the microphone. Mr. Speaker, this is a serious problem, and we ought to discuss it in a rational way. Members may not like what I said when I spoke earlier, but I think if they review the text of what I said, that I was exceedingly fair to the leadership of the Committee on Appropriations on that side of the aisle. I tried to analyze what the problems were as they existed now. I am not really interested in debating what happened yesterday. I do not think the America public is very much interested in that. But I will simply take 1 minute to note that in spite of everything said by the gentleman from Louisiana, in 19 of the past 20 years, that terrible Democratic controlled Congress appropriated less dollars than we were asked to appropriate by Presidents of either party; we spent some $20 billion less than the Presidents asked us to; we never had a deficit larger than $74 billion until the Reagan budget passed in 1981, then it exploded to over $300 billion.”