Political Quotes

“I thank the distinguished Senator from Rhode Island for his hard work. I rise to talk for 1 minute about this lameduck session today. We are in the second day of a lameduck session following the elections of a week and a half ago. We face an impending fiscal cliff. We face the end of the year. We face a day of calling, a day of reckoning. I think I have an obligation as one Member of the Senate, and I think everybody has the same obligation, to come to this floor and talk about the solutions and resolutions, not problems and what we can and cannot do. We are in a very dangerous position. I have been in this body one other time when we faced a fiscal cliff. It was in September of 2008. I will never forget it. The markets had been collapsing. The subprime securities had been collapsing. The world was in difficult financial times. The President of the United States, at that time a Republican, brought forward a plan to solve that problem or at least to forestall the collapse of the markets and give us a chance to come back over time. The House of Representatives rejected it and then the markets went down over 800 points in 1 day. Two days later, the Senate came back and adopted a plan to move us forward. The markets stabilized, but they were already at the bottom. They had fallen by 50 percent. Now here we are almost 5 years later, still recovering from the depths of the drop of the market at that particular period of time.…”