Pete Stark: “I am confused by this. It does tend to imbalance things. I am not so sure that if they had a two-thirds majority to cut…”

“I am confused by this. It does tend to imbalance things. I am not so sure that if they had a two-thirds majority to cut taxes along with the two-thirds majority to raise it that I would not go along with them. I am not so sure that if they had a two-thirds majority to increase defense spending, I would not go along with them. I am not so sure if they had a two-thirds majority to cut payments to children, to cut Medicare, to cut benefits for the poor and the disabled that I would not go along with them. Because those right-wing, radical Republicans, with their majority, have been doing just that. They have been cutting money for education. They have been cutting money for health care. They have been cutting money for the impoverished. And all they want to do is give a big tax cut to the 2 or 3 percent richest people in the country for which they do not have the votes. And so they are stacking the deck. It is wrong. It is a way, in the case of Medicare, to see that we disband Medicare, to let it wither on the vine, as their former Speaker, a couple of iterations ago, decided to do. So what they cannot do within their own party with a simple majority they are trying to do by obfuscation and indirection and misuses of the Constitution, create an unbalanced situation where a small radical group of right-wing reactionaries can begin to control the spending in this country to disadvantage the majority.”