Political Quotes

“I think I have caught the signal, too. The signal is for $33 trillion in debt, facing $2.2 trillion annual deficits. Our fellow Americans may be watching and wondering, how does that happen? How does the greatest country in the world have a process so broken that it would be laughed out of the rooms in the halls of the State legislatures where many of us come from? {time} 1530 Here is how it works. The law says we are supposed to have the very single-subject spending bills that my colleague referenced in the summer; that we are supposed to have that and move it. But there is a dirty little secret in this town, and that is, if you delay, if you hold the bills, if you make multiple contradictory promises--as Speaker McCarthy has done--and you back everybody up against shutdown politics, well, nobody wants to shut the government down. No one cheers for a shutdown and, of course, when people are backed up against shutdown politics, the decision calculus changes. So year after year, decade after decade, we break the law, and we do the same thing. We pass a continuing resolution, then we pass another continuing resolution, and then it is either another continuing resolution or an omnibus bill or a series of minibuses that lump these disparate things together. The American people want all of us to take votes on single-subject matters. They don't want to see these things all mushed together and logrolled.…”