[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9723-9724]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS PROCESS

  (Mr. KINGSTON asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. KINGSTON. Madam Speaker, I wanted to call attention that the 
House Appropriations Committee, working on a bipartisan basis, is ahead 
of schedule for this year. And although that is what we should be 
doing, it does seem that sometimes in Washington things break down, and 
there is no progress that is being made.
  Unfortunately, a lot of that is happening in the other body. And then 
the House doesn't get credit for it. We have had some very good debate 
on the appropriations bills. We will have them under budget and on 
time. We are having a lot of push-back from some of our Members about, 
well, you need to cut this item out of it because there is pork here; 
there is pork there.
  And I can say this, that in a $2-trillion-plus budget, you can always 
find lots to criticize about it. I think we should always be on the 
lookout for more things to cut. But just to take an example, the 
agriculture bill, we cut 35 different programs out of it, we reduced 
spending, and we did it on a bipartisan basis.
  So often as Members get up to grandstand over one or two particular 
things, they totally forget the bigger picture that the committee has 
done a

[[Page 9724]]

lot of work already. I want to just say to the House, Democrats and 
Republicans, I think we are moving in the right direction on 
appropriations bills. We are going to continue to do so and work 
together on it.

                          ____________________