David Obey: “I thank the gentleman, but I think I have said enough. I just would hope that this House would reconsider what they have…”

“I thank the gentleman, but I think I have said enough. I just would hope that this House would reconsider what they have done this week and use this incident to recognize that that budget resolution is simply insufficient to meet the needs of our military, the needs of our school children and a number of other seriously competing needs. I would hope, and in fact I fully expect, that the Senate will not pass the budget resolution that has caused this problem. The irony is that the Republican majority in this House had to pass a let-us-pretend resolution yesterday, which said we are going to move ahead with appropriation bills on the assumption that the full Congress had passed the budget resolution, which it has not done, because Republican moderates in the Senate recognize that the budget resolution that is being enforced on the majority side in this House is too extreme for their taste in the Senate. {time} 1315 Senators such as Senator Specter have already made that quite clear. So it is ironic that a budget that hasn't even passed the Congress is being used to enforce these kinds of trade-offs. I don't think the American people are going to be very pleased. I thank the gentleman.”