Political Quotes

“the trouble with this sense-of-the-Senate language is that it delegates the legislative responsibility to the Congressional Budget Office. This is what the Senator from Ohio was alerting us to in his last couple of minutes. The Congressional Budget Office, if we are lucky, is going to be able to make an estimate of what the cost will be to 87,000 State and local governments for some period, which could last forever, the way the bill is currently worded. But it is going to be decades into the future. These are, at best, going to be guesstimates. We have example after example that they have told us where they cannot make a good estimate. These are not scientific statements of costs; these are guesstimates that are going to be coming out of the CBO. We cannot take that guesstimate and say that it is the sense of the Senate that the agency should ensure that a regulation complies with that guesstimate instead of law.”