Political Quotes

“Let us just sum it up this way, because there are a whole list of programs that are the subject of the rescission in the amendment of the Senator from Kansas, the distinguished majority leader. The majority leader's amendment--what we will be voting on tomorrow-- is to add some rescissions, some additional reductions in spending to programs like AmeriCorps, as we pointed out, foreign operations, the foreign aid program that the Senator from Missouri talked about, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that the Senator from Pennsylvania has talked about, the Internal Revenue Service--there are a whole variety of them. My colleague from Arizona, John McCain, had suggested about $337 million in cuts that the President himself requested and that this body has not seen fit to include in its rescissions package. Let me conclude with this. It is not as if we are trying to do something rather odd here in suggesting a little more in the way of rescissions. On the AmeriCorps Program that we were talking about, what was the vote in the House of Representatives for rescinding twice as much as the Senate is proposing to rescind? Was that a partisan vote? Democrat and Republican? The vote was on March 15, 382 to 23. This is a bipartisan understanding of what we need to do to get our budget deficit under control here. So, by a vote of 382 to 23, the House of Representatives voted to rescind about $416 million from AmeriCorps. It seems to me that the Senate could do just as well.”