Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I appreciate the recognition, and I ask unanimous consent--I was going to ask that Senator Shaheen be allowed to follow me. She is on the floor now and so she will. I am pleased to stand and talk about amendment No. 138, sponsored by Senator Shaheen of New Hampshire and myself. It is a solution to a problem we have in this country and we have in this body. The problem is we have not been able to appropriate; we have not been able to budget. Our debts and deficits have grown, and it has turned into a situation where we do not function as well as we should over the most important responsibility of government; that is, spending money. For one second I wish to talk about my side. Then I will defer to a lady who has been there and done that, because the State of New Hampshire is a biennial budgeting State. We have a process problem. We budget every year, we spend money every year, but we never do oversight, we never look for cost-benefit savings, and we never look at analysis. This biennial budgeting amendment does the following things: No. 1, it amends the Budget Act to require the Congress to do a 2- year budget, not a 1-year budget; No. 2, and followed by that, it requires them to do 2-year appropriations bills, not 1-year appropriations. The appropriations bills and the budget are passed in the first year of a Congress, which means the odd-number year.…”