Political Quotes

“It just came over the newswire a few minutes ago that on Friday morning, March 1, there will be a meeting at the White House involving President Obama, the leadership of the House, Speaker Boehner, and the leadership of the Senate, Senate Majority Leader Reid to begin a process of talking about resolving the issue that we're obviously confronting as a Nation a few hours away, which is an automatic mechanism put into effect by the Budget Control Act of 2011 to cut discretionary spending across the board. I begin with that point because, in fact, that really should have been happening months ago. In fact, that was the intent of sequestration, which is a mechanism that was created in 1985 by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation that set up the formula for sequestration that cut across defense and non-defense programs. And as Senator Phil Gramm, who was the inventor of sequestration, said in a speech a couple of years ago: It was never the objective of Gramm- Rudman to trigger sequester. The objective of Gramm-Rudman was to have the threat of sequester force compromise and action. In other words, this was a mechanism that was designed to hurt. It was designed to create so much pain politically that the two sides, which again were in a similar point of gridlock in 1985, would begin the process of negotiation to deal with a structural deficit.…”