Political Quotes

“I thank the Presiding Officer for liberating me from the chair so I may now speak in my capacity as a Senator from the State of Connecticut. First, I would like to thank my friend from Maine, Senator Collins, for what I thought was a very convincing, insightful description and really a critique of the CBO estimate of the financial impact of this bill. This is tough to follow. The two of us, Senator Collins and I, and others on the committee have been deeply saturated in this for probably too long. But the fact is, when the CBO estimate of the bill came out saying it was going to cost more than we were saving, I was shocked. As I read over it, part of it is because they are not simply considering the Postal Service budget, which we are out to save; that is, to cut a lot of money from it so it can be saved, and as Senator Collins said, the Postal Service is off-budget. It does not spend taxpayers' money except for those two little matters of paying for ballots for military personnel and others overseas, and I think the other is for blind people in this country, but the rest of it is all paid by the ratepayers. So as you go over, one by one, as Senator Collins did, the elements of the ``costs''--and I put quotations around them--they are just not real. This is form over substance. This is a kind of ``Alice in Wonderland'' accounting that does not relate to the reality of the Postal Service's budget or the Federal budget.…”