David Obey: “Madam Speaker, let me say that in the handling of this supplemental appropriation, the Republican majority in this House…”

“Madam Speaker, let me say that in the handling of this supplemental appropriation, the Republican majority in this House has given us a case study in how not to proceed. It seems that virtually every time we have an emergency which this Congress is asked to fund, we are being asked by the majority caucus to do one of two things: either to do nothing, or to blow up agreements which had just been reached in the previous year's budget bill by finding offsets to pay for emergency items designated by the administration. Madam Speaker, I would simply observe that if the provisions of the previous year's budget were so easy to reformat, it would not have taken the majority party 2 months into the new fiscal year before they got their work done last year. The decisions that were arrived at in the budget last year were extremely hard to reach. When the administration first provided its request to this Congress to respond to the emergency events in Central America with the greatest natural disaster we had in this century, and when they asked us to deal with what is an emerging emergency in farm country, at first the Committee on Appropriations, under the chairmanship of the gentleman from Florida, produced a proposal which would have had the bipartisan support of this House. It was an honest, practical, sensible way to proceed. We thought we had a bipartisan agreement.…”