On the recordMarch 21, 2013
I wish to thank Senator Warner for leading this colloquy, and I am glad to join him and my friend Senator Kaine in talking about the effects of sequester and how we need to come up with an alternative to the sequester. Senator Warner used the word ``stupid'' to describe sequester, and I think that is apt, because what family, in trying to get a handle on their budget, would just make an across-the-board cut to everything in their family's budget. The Senator raised the analogy that no business would do an across-the-board cut, but let's talk about families in our country. No family would cut across the board their food budget, their rent budget. That would not happen. So why are we doing this? As one of the people who testified before the Armed Services Committee said, sequester was the result of political dysfunction. That is very true because it was never supposed to happen. As Senator Kaine said, I am very surprised to listen to our friends on the other side of the aisle talk about sequester--something that was never supposed to happen, and both Republicans and Democrats had agreed this was not going to happen--now take the position that we are where we are and we need to live by the boundaries of sequester. What sequester does is it interjects huge uncertainty into our economy, huge uncertainty, at a time when we are still digging out from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.…
