Political Quotes

“Again, I am honored to be the gentleman's co-chair, and I thank the gentleman for adding to our debate today. Madam Speaker, I want to make one other point before I close on this subject. I want to emphasize one of the points made by my colleague from Utah. He talked about restoring the budget and appropriations process. This starts to be real inside baseball. Congress goes through a process establishing a budget, which is the overall outline of Federal spending for the next year--because we do everything on a yearly basis, for the most part--and then passing appropriations bills that are consistent with that budget. In other words, we make the big picture decision upfront in a budget, and then we have our appropriations bills that must match that budget. In what we refer to here as regular order, what we would do is first have a budget resolution that passes the House, passes the Senate, and is agreed to by both the House and the Senate so that we know what our roadmap is. Then, we would take each of the areas of government that needs appropriations every year. The way we do it is, there are 12 separate appropriations bills, and we would individually pass each of those bills consistent with the budget. We would do all of that by October 1, which is when our fiscal year starts. We would call that regular order. That would be quite regular order for any business and any personal budget. The last time we followed regular order was 1995.…”