Political Quotes

“Many of us that have spoken here are appropriators. Our job is to bring 12 bills to this floor, 12 conference reports. We've done none. We've totally failed. We're not the first Congress to do that. We've had to pass 111 CRs in the 20 years that I've been here in Congress. None of them had these prerequisites that we've got to meet with the President, we've got to repeal something, we've got to defund something, we don't like this, we don't like that. In fact, as appropriators we know that the rules of this House don't allow us to legislate on appropriations bills. So even these requests that everybody is making of what we ought to do have to take a waiver by the Rules Committee--waiver to our own House rules--to bring all this stuff up. And in the meantime, we've done nothing, and so the government shuts down because we haven't been responsible for that oath of office that we took here. It didn't say just fund a part of government. Today, we have a choice out of 10 parts of government. It's your popular parts, your menu, your special. Well, I didn't come here for any Tea Party special. I came here for the whole government--the hundreds of thousands of parts that put together this incredible, wonderful government that we have the privilege of serving. But I can't go and tell my colleagues to go vote for this, vote for that on conditionality of this and that.…”