Tom Harkin: “just listening to my good friend from Utah speaking--and he is a good friend of mine--and others who have been speaking…”

“just listening to my good friend from Utah speaking--and he is a good friend of mine--and others who have been speaking for the last half hour, memories are short, very short--I mean very short. Forget about the attention span. Memories are very short. How soon we forget that at the end of the Clinton years, after we had worked with President Clinton to pass measures that brought in more revenues that kept our spending under control, we had 4 years of balanced budgets--4 years--not only of balanced budgets but budget surpluses. When President Clinton left office, he left George W. Bush the biggest surplus ever in our history. CBO said if we just continued on with the policies we had, we would have paid off the national debt by 2010. But what did the Republicans do? They came riding into town in 2001. They got the White House. They got the Senate. They got the House. What did they do? They took that surplus we had and said: Hey, we have to give this to the wealthy. We have to have tax cuts for the wealthiest in our society. That is what they did. How did they do it? They snuck it through on something called reconciliation--a budget measure which means we cannot filibuster it, and it only takes 50 votes. That is what the Republicans did. They squandered it--squandered it--to give more to the wealthiest in our society. Look what has happened since then. Then we had two unpaid-for wars. George Bush got us in those wars.…”