Larry Craig: “let me also--although I very much disagree with the Senator from Kansas--recognize without question her integrity as a…”

“let me also--although I very much disagree with the Senator from Kansas--recognize without question her integrity as a Senator and as a legislator and her commitment to the service to her State in the last good number of years. I would have hoped she would have spoken differently and as passionately about bringing an end to a process that is accumulating in our country at such an accelerated rate that I think today we are amiss if we fail to recognize what has occurred during my tenure in the U.S. Congress, which is considerably less than the tenure of the Senator from Kansas. When I came to the House in 1981 and the deficit was somewhere in the $40 or $50 billion range, and the Federal debt was $1.2 trillion, within about 12 months of service in the Congress it became very obvious to me that the appetite to spend here was so great that if we did not change the environment in which the budgeting process went forward, in which special interest groups preyed against us, or to us, or on us, as to expending the public Treasury for their benefits and their interests' benefits, that we some day would get into trouble in this country of a kind that we could not just summarily pass by.”