David Obey: “A fair amount has been written about how the responsibility for this mistake lies with congressional staff. I want to…”

“A fair amount has been written about how the responsibility for this mistake lies with congressional staff. I want to simply make the point that the staff was ordered to produce an appropriation bill by a certain deadline. And so they performed in an astoundingly enervating way in trying to meet the deadlines that they were ordered to meet and they worked to the point of exhaustion. And when people do that, there are going to be mistakes made. The reason we have rules is because it enables not just the minority but the majority as well to catch mistakes and correct them before they embarrass the institution and do damage to our system. The way to avoid mistakes like this is to prevent hundreds of pages of appropriations from coming to the floor without ever having been considered in both bodies. The way to avoid problems like this in the future is to see to it that the necessary political compromises are made at the beginning of the process in the budget resolution so that you do not have such an unrealistic set of marching orders to the Appropriations Committee that the leadership is forced to conclude that they cannot get the votes from their own troops in the other body until after they are safely past the election.”