Political Quotes

“Madam President, I am going to talk about the fifth annual celebration of Congress Week, sponsored by the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress. It is a national commemoration which coincides with the week in which Congress achieved its first quorums in the year 1789. Before I do so, let me make a couple of observations on other items of business in front of the Senate. First of all, we are about to embark on the annual process of adopting a budget. This Senator had the privilege as a young Congressman in my first year in the House of being assigned to the House Budget Committee. That was not long after the whole apparatus of the Budget Committees were set up requiring Congress to adopt an annual budget. The original reason for requiring it, and requiring a process called reconciliation, was so a majority vote--instead of what used to be the Senate cutting off debate at two-thirds, now it is 60 votes to cut off debate--would be required to pass a budget because of the tough decisions that needed to be made in lowering a deficit by cutting spending and raising tax revenue. But along come the administrations in the early part of the last decade, and they reversed the process, using reconciliation not to require the hard votes for Senators and House Members in raising tax revenue but to do exactly the opposite with a majority vote, instead of having to reach the 60-vote threshold to cut off debate in the Senate.…”