On the recordApril 8, 2011
I came over here at this very precarious moment, hours away from a possible shutdown, to basically say there is absolutely no reason to shut this government down, absolutely no reason. Why? Because both sides agree that we need to cut the budget. Both sides agree that we need to reduce the deficit. When the debate got started, the Republicans put out a number and, guess what. We came to their number. We came all the way to their number. Then they said, whoops, no, we don't like that, we are going to go to a bigger number. We said we are worried because, as my friend from North Dakota said, we care about job creation, and Mark Zandi, the key economic adviser to John McCain's campaign, said if you do what the Republicans want to do, that is the Republicans in the House on H.R. 1, that will cost 700,000 jobs. Can you believe that? After we are finally coming out of this recession--thank the Lord God we had a quarter of a million new jobs last month--and here they are going to take a meat axe to this budget and according to outside experts going to destroy the economic recovery and set us right back into a recession. So we said hold off here, we believe we need to be wise about this. We went to your number that you originally put out there. Why do you keep moving the goal posts? They said: Well, that is the way it is. We moved the goal posts. Take it or leave it.…
