Bill Nelson: “I will conclude by saying I love this Senate, and I love these Senators. I love the Senators on this side of the aisle…”

“I will conclude by saying I love this Senate, and I love these Senators. I love the Senators on this side of the aisle, and I love the Senators on that side of the aisle. The only disappointment I have had is when this place gets too partisan so it cannot work out a solution, and when this place gets too ideologically rigid so that you cannot find a consensus in the commonsense middle ground, and that is what is happening to us in this budget debate. Someday we will learn because we will have to make Government function in the way that the people all across America want it to function. I would venture that every single Member of Congress, on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Capitol, can agree on one thing: We need to get the economy moving again. Every priority that we speak about up here--whether it's health care, retirement security, national defense, battling terrorism or even cutting taxes--every one of our priorities is easier to achieve when the economy is booming. The fundamental disagreement is on how we get the economy going again. When talking about the economy, I tend to trust economists. But these tax cuts that are the centerprice of the administration's economic growth package, don't have a lot of fans among the Nation's economists.”