Political Quotes

“I just want to commend again the Senator from South Carolina for this proposal. Again, I will emphasize what I said the other day. This is a radical idea that the Senator from South Carolina is suggesting, the radical idea that we might try to lay out for our constituents and taxpayers how we are going to achieve this "straitjacket" as it has been called. Frankly, I never thought of the Constitution of the United States as becoming a straitjacket, particularly when it comes to the economy of the country. But to suggest somehow that this is a dreadful notion to try to spell out, not in the details the Senator from New Mexico has described, but at least in some broad picture--I will take any numbers you can give me. Give me some general idea here so that my elderly, my young people, my defense contractors, my businesses will have some notion of how we are going to achieve the Holy Grail of a balanced budget when they look at the bridges that have to be crossed, the gaps that have to be breached. How do you get there? And the fact that we are just saying lay that out for us in some detail here for us, and again not for us so much as it is for the people we represent, I do not think is asking too much. Frankly, until we do that, I think this amendment proposal is going to be in serious question. I say to my friend from Illinois, the Constitution should never be a straitjacket. That is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.”