Jack Kingston: “Let me thank my friend from Maryland for answering this, because I do think it's important for the Democrats to be given…”

“Let me thank my friend from Maryland for answering this, because I do think it's important for the Democrats to be given an opportunity to offer an alternative budget, and I'm glad that you will be, and there will be five such budgets. And I'm hoping even if your budgets don't pass, that we can still pick and choose some parts of those, and there will be some parts of our budget that you like and want to support as well. But I want to emphasize over and over again that the President, who yesterday tried to reclaim some territory because he did not take on the recommendations of his own deficit reduction commission, he was not offering a budget yesterday. What he did was give a speech. Now, the President is kind of becoming the Spectator in Chief or the Speaker in Chief. He's the guy who offers a budget, and then yesterday decides to give a speech. Well, the time has come and gone for speeches. What our budget does is take on some serious changes in our spending habit. It does tackle the difficult choices that we have on Medicaid and Medicare. It does not create a voucher system; it is a supplemental system which will give seniors more choices. And it doesn't affect anybody 55 years or older, which is very important. But we will hear from the liberals in this community the cage rattling of senior citizens over and over again, and that's why we can't make progress in this town, because we always reduce policy to politics. The time to put policy first is now.…”