Political Quotes

“I came down to the floor today to talk about the fiscal crisis that we're having in America. There are those when I open the front page of the paper, Mr. Speaker, and I read the headline, it talks about having a debt limit vote crisis in this country. I went back, I looked, and apparently we've raised the debt limit over 70 times with a vote right here in this body. Apparently having a vote isn't particularly a complicated thing to do. What we're having is a debt crisis. I think that's an important distinction. I was talking to a freshman colleague of mine yesterday about that. Understand that we can have the vote, Mr. Speaker. It's within the House's authority to bring a vote to raise the debt limit tomorrow. In fact, we brought that vote to the House already: Should we raise the debt ceiling or should we not? Mr. Speaker, we defeated it. We defeated it by a wide margin here in this body. What we have is a debt crisis. Now, Mr. Speaker, if it were just existing debt, perhaps we could work out a way to finance that, but it's not. It's continued borrowing each and every day to the tune of 42 cents of every dollar that we spend. In other words, if we paid for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the national debt, those other mandatory spending programs, just those, Mr. Speaker, we've already spent every nickel in Federal revenue.…”