David Obey: “it is hard for me to tell today whether I am participating in a session of the House of Representatives or a national…”

“it is hard for me to tell today whether I am participating in a session of the House of Representatives or a national seance. I mean this bill is going absolutely nowhere. It reminds me of the fellow who was so unlucky that he ran into accidents that started out to happen to somebody else. We do not even have a bill here. The committee produced a bill; the Committee on Rules then ripped out the guts of it, which is the foreign aid authorization. It contains the unilateral partisan description of the administration's agreement on State Department reorganization, and then it also contains what I regard as an historically arrogant action on the part of the Congress and the West in expanding NATO the way it is expanding. This bill is going absolutely nowhere, and so I am going to ask Members to vote against the previous question on the rule in hopes that if that previous question goes down, we will be able to add a third bill for consideration by the House. That bill would be simply to see to it that we can take up the contents of the conference report which has been agreed to so far relating to the emergency supplemental items now before the Congress, stripping that conference product of the three extraneous partisan riders which are going to assure that that conference report will go to the same place that this bill is going to go: nowhere.”