Political Quotes

“Mr. President, from what I heard from those who have just spoken prior to me, it sounds as if we ought to be able to get something done. We listened to the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, with her commitment to advancing issues through the budget process. I think we too need to go to conference and get that moving. We are sitting here in a kind of a rarefied world in the Senate Chamber. Some would suggest we live in a little bit of a bubble. Let me tell everyone about the folks who are not living in a bubble: the furloughed Federal employees and those who have been shut out of whatever it is that they had hoped they were going to be doing this past week and those in my State, for instance, who are looking to fill the family freezer. It is moose season in my State, but now they were told they cannot access any of the refuge lands because Fish and Wildlife has said they cannot access the land regardless of what ANILCA provides and regardless of the full public access to these Federal lands. Those folks who are feeling the real impact of a government shutdown are not living in a bubble. We just heard the chairman of the Finance Committee talk about the looming threat we are facing as we approach the debt limit, and he refers to a fiscal cliff. In fact, as a nation, we could lose our financial footing. We could go over that fiscal cliff. For a lot of folks, they are already looking at their own fiscal cliff.…”