Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I thank Senator Perdue for his leadership on this important colloquy. As some of us have seen down here, as Senator Rounds mentioned, there are a lot of Members of the Senate who are very concerned. But what we are seeing here are a lot of the new Members--12 new Republican freshmen. It is good to see the Presiding Officer, who is one of them. We are very concerned about this. We were concerned because a lot of us ran for office--a lot of us for the first time--because we saw what was going on with this budget process. With all due respect to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, they didn't even attempt to pass a budget for a number of years. They didn't even try. Think about that. You are back home, in a State government such as Senator Rounds was talking about or in a household or a business, and you are not even going to try to pass a budget. That was what was going on in the Senate--remarkable. So what we are trying to do is to fix that. The first thing we did--and Senator Enzi was on the floor a little bit ago--is we came here and we passed a budget. It hadn't happened in years. We passed a budget resolution. That was an important start. Then we started to pass appropriations bills. As a matter of fact, this year, to the majority leader's credit, we started working on appropriations bills at an earlier time than at any time in decades. We got 12 appropriations bills passed out of the Appropriations Committee. Then what happened?…”