Political Quotes

“I thank and congratulate my colleague from Tennessee. Senator Frist has put his finger on the real problem in this budget. The President, in his budget, has glowing words, as several of my colleagues on the other side have, about the priorities that they think are important. The President has said that we must invest in education and training, the environment, science and technology, law enforcement, and other priorities. But, as I pointed out earlier today, when it comes to making these sets of numbers balance out, they have a meat ax, a paint-by-numbers meat ax that whacks 10 percent out of all of those budgets in 2001, and 18 percent in 2002. Now, are you for the priorities? If so, this is an opportunity to vote for some honesty in budgeting. The President has claimed he gets to balance. I think most of the people in this body say we want to get to balance. But do we really want to get to balance by taking the drastic cuts that my colleague from Tennessee has just talked about? I talked earlier this morning about the cuts in NIH, National Institutes of Health, FDA. Yesterday, I talked about the serious cuts that would happen to the Environmental Protection Agency if you apply this meat ax arbitrarily in 2001 and 2002, because the President's numbers do not add up, unless you have the meat ax.”