Mark Neumann: “I rise for a variety of issues today I would like to talk about. First, I would like to talk about a major change that…”

“I rise for a variety of issues today I would like to talk about. First, I would like to talk about a major change that has occurred that probably will not make sense to a lot of viewers in America, but has a lot of meaning out here in Washington, D.C., because the Republican Party in the change that has taken place since 1995, was being severely tested during this past week. We heard we were going to propose a supplemental spending bill. A supplemental spending bill means we are going to spend money that was not otherwise planned during our budgetary process, spend money on things like Bosnia that had not been budgeted for; the Iraqi problem that had not been budgeted for; things like the ice storm in the Northeast, and some of the other catastrophic happenings around, emergency spending type situations around the country. They had decided they were going to spend money on these areas that had not been included in the budget. Since 1995, every time this kind of a proposal had been made, the Republicans have gone elsewhere in the budget process, found lesser important items, and offset the new spending by eliminating items that were of lesser import. But during this past week, for the first time since 1995, for the first time they started talking about just spending this new money, without going and eliminating spending elsewhere of lesser important items.”