Political Quotes

“I agree with that. We can interpret history, but we cannot change it. Part of the history of this body is that if we put the onus on future Congresses to do something instead of doing it ourselves, it is unlikely to get done. We pass legislation here--see, I remember in 1980--that says, 'Congress will balance the budget.' I think it became law. We did not. It was in the law, the law that we obligated ourselves to comply with. We took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the laws created pursuant thereto. I asked the Senator from Illinois these questions. How would the monitoring of the flow of receipts and outlays be done to determine whether the budget for any fiscal year is on the track of being balanced? Would this require implementing legislation? There would have to be monitoring, and future legislation would have to take care of the implementation of that monitoring.”