Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in a few minutes, we are going to be voting on the continuing resolution which our House colleagues are voting on literally as we speak. I wish to address that briefly, but I must comment on one of the things my colleague from Pennsylvania said. He is critical of the Ryan budget but does not appear to have read the Ryan budget because I know he would not deliberately mischaracterize it. He is wrong in several respects, and I will cite one example. He said the Ryan budget will end Medicare as we know it and that millions of seniors will be directly affected. That is simply not true, unless we count someone as a senior who is 53 or 54 years old. The Ryan budget does not affect anyone above the age of 54 with respect to Medicare. It says, if you have Medicare and you are 55 or older, nothing changes for you. All we do is provide premium support for those age 54 and below. It is simply incorrect to say millions of seniors would be directly affected by the Ryan budget with respect to their Medicare coverage. Let me go back to the point of our discussion right now. As I said, we will be voting very soon on the continuing resolution. This is the final continuing resolution, we can finally say, for the fiscal year 2011, that funds the government for the rest of this fiscal year. It does mark the end of a long and hard-fought process. I am pleased we have been able to cut billions of dollars from the Federal Government and avoid a government shutdown.…”