Austin Scott: “I cannot begin to tell my Republican friends how disappointed I am, and I want to speak to why you are seeing so much…”

“I cannot begin to tell my Republican friends how disappointed I am, and I want to speak to why you are seeing so much passion on this floor tonight from Democrats, and especially from Blue Dog Democrats, of which I am a proud member. I am going into my fourth year here, and every year it has been the Blue Dog Democrats, not the Republicans, who have been at the forefront of trying to rein in deficit spending. It has been Blue Dogs who have been at the forefront to put forward pay-as-you-go. You say we do not have a plan. We have a 12-point plan. We have tried to institute pay-as-you-go principles from day one. We have begged, we have pleaded with the President of the United States to meet with us to make sure that we rein in the deficit. So when you see Blue Dogs coming down here mad as hell, you have to understand that the reason we are mad is because we are not going to stand idly by and see the hypocrisy of a party that squandered billions and billions of dollars in surplus in the last 4 years and then come down here and say you are leading the fight to cut deficits, when you have done more than any President, any party in modern times to add to the deficit. And then the worst thing you want to do is to squeeze in a tax cut of $70 billion and then to do it on the backs of those that can least afford it.”