Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to join my colleagues in extending condolences to the family of Senator Warren Rudman, and add my voice to those saluting a distinguished, effective and principled member of this body. It has been hard in the last few months, for those of us who knew and served with him, not to think of Warren Rudman. More than 2 decades ago, our circumstances were strikingly similar to the situation in which we find ourselves today. Rising Federal budget deficits were the cause of alarm. Almost everyone agreed that we needed to bring them down. The difficulty was how. Meeting the widely differing priorities among members of Congress--and the American people we represented-- seemed impossible. Senator Rudman, along with Senator Ernest Hollings and Senator Phil Gramm, crafted a solution. It is fair to say no one liked it very much. None of us here at the time, including me, voted for it with great enthusiasm. That was its genius. By establishing a mechanism for automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that would take place in the absence of a more tailored program of deficit reduction, they sought to force all of us to make the difficult choices required to reduce the deficit. The arrangement Senators Rudman, Gramm and Hollings concocted was disagreeable to everybody, and so we looked for ways to avoid it.…”