Political Quotes

“Madam President, you have only been in the chair for a couple of minutes. I was going to ask you what is going on today, but I think I have a pretty good idea. You and I have spent a fair amount of time discussing and thinking through what we ought to do in light of these big deficits. We had the privilege of serving together as Governors for a number of years. We had a requirement to submit balanced budgets and to balance the outflows and revenues in an ongoing basis. In some cases we had pretty good fiscal controls in place to help us. The rules were in place to help us, whether constitutional or statutory. In some cases not. Your State and, I think, my State have a reputation for being fiscally sound operations. I was elected State treasurer and became State treasurer. In 1976 to 1977--as the Presiding Officer has heard me say before--we had the worst credit rating in the country, and we managed to climb from there until the time when I finished my last term as Governor to have a AAA credit rating. I am very proud of that. I am relieved, if you will, that today it looks as though we have in place a course that will enable us to preserve the AAA credit rating for our country and, hopefully, for our States around the United States. One of our members of our caucus said something the other day that really struck a chord with me with respect to deficits and the debt ceiling. He said: We need a solution, not a deal. That is what he said.…”