Jon Kyl: “I will find it interesting to see whether those who are so concerned about the Federal budget deficit will back up their…”

“I will find it interesting to see whether those who are so concerned about the Federal budget deficit will back up their words with actions by voting against runaway spending. Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve, says the biggest problem is that Congress cannot restrain its bad spending habits. So for colleagues such as the Senator from Illinois--will they vote against the $30 billion in subsidies in the energy bill? Will they vote against twice that much in unpaid for highway funding--that is to say, unpaid for in the highway trust fund? It will be interesting to see how those who complain about the deficits actually vote when it comes to adding to the deficit. Remember that last year, when we had a whole series of votes, when the Republican majority finally got a budget passed, we had to defeat a whole series of amendments by our Democratic colleagues--we usually got 51 or 52 votes--because almost all of the members of the Democratic Caucus voted in favor of spending more money in these amendments. We defeated something like $88 billion in spending amendments offered by our Democratic colleagues. Thank goodness we did. That amounted to over a trillion dollars in savings over the 10-year period of the budget.”