David Obey: “I am going to vote against this rule. I had not intended to. Yes, when we were in discussions with the Committee on…”

“I am going to vote against this rule. I had not intended to. Yes, when we were in discussions with the Committee on Rules and the committee leadership, I had the feeling that with the promises that we had been given that we were going to see a new day in this House with more bipartisan cooperation in the way legislation is brought to the floor and that those promises were, in fact, going to be kept. Then, after a series of conversations, apparently people behind the scenes decided that that rule was going to be shaped quite differently. Among the things that were done is that the committee put time limits-- under what is supposedly an open rule, the committee still put time limits of 40 minutes--on the major amendment that we are going to be debating on this bill. That amendment is very complicated; yet each side will only have 20 minutes to debate it. The amendment is complicated enough it will take 10 minutes to explain it, which will leave only 10 minutes to discuss the merits. That is not the way to debate questions of war or, for that matter, some of the other serious issues that are in this bill.”