The Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2008
THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE, FOREIGN OPERATIONS AND RELATED PROGRAMS APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 (CONSOLIDATED APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008) -- (House of Representatives - December 17, 2007)
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Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
First, I'd like to associate myself with the chairman's comments in recognizing Frank Cushing and his accomplishments and wishing him well in his retirement.
Mr. Speaker, this is a bill that's 3,565 pages. Yes, I'm seeing that it was printed on one side, but this is the bill that was handed to us by the majority staff in the Rules Committee. It's their bill. They printed it for us, 34.4 pounds.
This bill has, we think, 9,200 earmarks in it. We believe hundreds of these earmarks were air-dropped, never seen before in the House, never seen before in the Senate, brand new, just delivered right here on this House floor. We received this bill today. We'll be voting on this bill in about 10 minutes.
This bill takes $10 million from border security to commit $10 million of taxpayer funds to hire defense attorneys for illegal immigrants. We don't know exactly how they do that, but that's in here.
The point is, Mr. Speaker, this is a bad day for this House. This is a bad day for the fiscal policy of this country. We are about to vote on a bill that commits about $515 billion in spending, 3,500 pages long, 9,200 earmarks, many we've never seen before; and we're
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going to vote on this in about 10 minutes, and we'll have had less than 1-hour debate on the entire measure.
This is no way to run a railroad, Mr. Speaker, and sadly, it has been run like this in the past. The new day we were promised with the new majority, in fact, is not a new day. Unfortunately, it's like days of old.
I'm very pleased that the number did not go up to where the majority wanted it to go, an extra $23 billion, which would have brought another $196 billion of deficit spending into the budget. Thankfully we're at that lower number; but when you look at this process, when you look at what's in this bill, as we are just getting through this bill, this bill should be defeated; and I urge a ``no'' vote on this legislation.
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