Tom Tancredo: “there are opportunities sometimes provided for bipartisanship in this House and one looks for them because frankly they…”

“there are opportunities sometimes provided for bipartisanship in this House and one looks for them because frankly they do not happen all that often it seems like. And so I looked at the Blue Dog budget with the hope that in fact there would be that opportunity to do something in a bipartisan way here that I could support it, and quite frankly there were things that I liked when I looked into it. I liked the fact that it assumes permanent estate tax relief for families with farms and small businesses, a good idea. I liked the PAYGO provision, a good idea. Establishing a point of order against legislation with costs that begin outside the budget window, a great idea. I went through it thinking this is going to be good, I can support this piece of legislation. But then, of course, you come to those parts that make all of this simply unsupportable and that is the fact that you get to the part where you see it raises taxes. It raises taxes that were enacted in 2001; it eliminates those tax cuts until 2010. It applies significant hurdles that could prevent us from making the current tax cuts permanent. This could cripple our economy and our economic recovery. It establishes various slush funds in order to increase government spending in education programs, in law enforcement, in health insurance; and it is presented as a truthful budget. But there is no reference to these slush funds that exist in this budget. That is not being truthful with the American public.…”