Political Quotes

“Thank you so much for bringing our attention to the way in which the balanced budget amendment would fundamentally alter the very nature of our government. Earlier I talked about the majority vote versus the minority rule that is in this amendment. And now you bring to our attention the percentage that is in the amendment. Those percentages have real meaning beyond the issue of just a very, very important issue, the very nature of our government, and the reason why we have representative government, why we have the Senate, why we have a Congress. But there's something else to it and that is, the percentage that they have chosen would force the government expenditures to go back to the 1965 level where there was no Medicaid and no Medicare program in America. So, once again, there are different ways of assaulting and terminating Medicare. One was the direct way that was in the Republican budget that passed this House earlier in which they explicitly said that for all Americans who are not yet 55, there would be no Medicare. They would be given a voucher, and they would have to go buy insurance from the private insurance market, which all of us understand is a very difficult place to get a fair deal. The other way of doing it is in a constitutional amendment, as was proposed yesterday, that would make it impossible to fund Medicare and similarly impossible to fund things like natural disasters.…”