David Obey: “Mr. Chairman, evidently the Congress is into the business of naming things after people who have nothing whatsoever to…”

“Mr. Chairman, evidently the Congress is into the business of naming things after people who have nothing whatsoever to do with the facilities that are being named after them. I would say that while I had great personal affection for President Reagan and served with him, I would say that he had about as much to do with Washington National Airport as I have to do with an airport in Tibet. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that if we are going to name something after somebody, we ought to give the name to something with which that person is intimately associated. So I would simply have a question. Would it not be more appropriate, for instance, to name the Bureau of Public Debt the Ronald Reagan Bureau of Public Debt? The act of this Congress that has made me more angry than any act since I have been here is the action that this Congress supinely took in 1981 when it whooped through here, with people in both parties voting for it, the Reagan budgets, which took the deficit, which had never been higher than $74 billion, up to well over $200 billion. It has taken us almost 20 years to dig out from under that, with strong efforts on the part of people in both parties to accomplish that fact.”