David Obey: “Let me say, Mr. Speaker, I am not going to vote for this bill, and I am not going to vote for it for two reasons. Number…”

“Let me say, Mr. Speaker, I am not going to vote for this bill, and I am not going to vote for it for two reasons. Number one, we have the continued saga of that ridiculous hole out in front of the Capitol, the Capitol Visitors Center. You remember back in the good old days when we had a budget surplus, and then we were told by the Republican majority that we could pass $6 trillion in tax cuts and still have money left over? Now we have dug ourselves into a huge deficit hole again, the biggest deficit in the history of the country. That hole in front of the Capitol, created for the construction of the so-called visitors center, really, in my view, is a symbol of what we have done to the Nation as a whole. We have dug a huge hole for the Nation. In this case, in the case of the visitors center, you have an addition to the Capitol which started out to cost about a quarter of a billion dollars; it is now up to half a billion dollars. And the completion date, I would bet you, before it is over, will slip to sometime in 2007. I just continue to think it is a ridiculous, overblown use of taxpayers money.”