Jay Rockefeller: “I strongly agree with what Senator Dorgan of North Dakota has said. I expect that, if the Presiding Officer were in a…”

“I strongly agree with what Senator Dorgan of North Dakota has said. I expect that, if the Presiding Officer were in a position to take the floor, he might say something not that dissimilar. There is an enormous amount of anger among those of us who worry about rural America, that for the first time in its history --hopefully for the last time in its history--the universal service fund is literally being raided for the purpose of a gimmick. The Senator from New Mexico is correct, I think, in the way he describes the process of what will happen. He is incorrect in one small matter, which doesn't really make that much difference but happens to make some difference to me as a Democrat, and that is that the idea came first from the Congressional Budget Office, not from the White House. It came from the Congressional Budget Office, this so-called gimmick fix. Then it was upheld by, so to speak, the Office of Management and Budget, which is something that I am very angry about, as a Democrat, because that happened on the President's watch. I think the problem with this is that universal service is sacred.”