Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I came to talk about a very critical issue, and I want to thank the Committee on Rules for making this in order, the lockbox amendment. We have been fighting now for close to 2 years to make one of the most important reforms in our budget process that we will address in this Congress. That is the lockbox. I can still remember as a freshman in this Congress when I found that after we had fought on bill after bill, motion after motion, to reduce spending here and to pare spending down there and to try to bring control to our budget, all we had been doing was eliminating various programs or projects; but the money was still getting spent. Why? Because we were just cutting the programs or projects, and what was happening to the money is it was simply unallocated. When it went into the conference committee, those in the conference committee sat down, pulled out special projects of their own interest or concern, put them back into the bill and used the unallocated money on those projects.”