mr. chairman , i yield myself such time as i may consume to just respond and say it is fascinating .  it is fascinating how we got into this situation .  and if you heard the gentleman who just spoke , if you wondered whether or not he maybe had been reading the newspaper and may be forgetting all of the things that have been happening to our country over the last going on 4 years , you might wonder if anyone has been paying attention , because he is correct .  on september 10 , 2001 , we were running a surplus .  there is no question that that was a good thing , something was very positive about that .  but , unfortunately , we learned the very next morning that we had a homeland security deficit , that we had a national defense deficit .  our economy was already in a recession , and we found out we had an economic growth deficit .  so even though there was more cash in the federal treasury than we were using , and you can call that a surplus , that did not mean we were meeting the needs of our country .  there were many other challenges that we had to meet , and that next morning we found out .  and all of the votes , all of the spending votes , i will go back to the record , all of the spending votes that the gentleman was just talking about under our management , the gentleman from illinois voted for ; voting for our troops , voting for homeland security , voting for education .  i will go back to each one of those appropriations bills and the gentleman from illinois voted for each one of those .  the only one he does not like , if you take away all of the clutter , is he wants to increase taxes .  he did not like that part .  but all of the spending he voted for .  so , let us just boil it down : there are people who want to increase taxes , and that is fine , and there are people who want to control spending , and that is also fine .  but it is not all of this mismanagement .  people say republicans did all of this mismanagement .  i think osama bin laden had a lot more to do with where we are today with the deficit than anybody else , than anybody else .  mr. chairman , the purpose of me taking this time was just to remind everybody that it was not just republicans that were here voting for those things , and there were probably a lot of reasons why we got into this situation that had nothing to do with jim nussle or the gentleman from illinois ( mr. emanuel )  .  it probably had more to do with osama bin laden than just about anybody else .  