David Obey: “Mr. Speaker, I do not intend to take 30 minutes. Let me simply say that the gentleman from Florida is right. We have to…”

“Mr. Speaker, I do not intend to take 30 minutes. Let me simply say that the gentleman from Florida is right. We have to approve this resolution again to keep the government open. I am concerned about two developments. Number one, early yesterday it appeared, in fact we were told, that the conference needed to be wrapped up by the end of the day yesterday so that we could have a bill on the floor immediately when we came back to the House on Monday or Tuesday. It will take about 2 days to go through all of the technicalities to do what is called a readout so that everybody's staff is sure of what every item is in that bill, so that at least somebody understands what each item is. So we were told that we should have all the work done Friday. Then, after the meeting reconvened, we were given another schedule, which indicated, for instance, that we would not even be able to resolve the issue with respect to school construction until after the fate of the tax bill is resolved on Tuesday or so. That means that there is a high potential that we will be stuck here not just Tuesday, but Wednesday or Thursday, because if we are not going to be making those decisions until Tuesday, and if we have to go through the usual readout requirement, we could have a real problem.”