Dick Durbin: “That is true. I concede the overall spending is moving up, but they are slicing it back as part of the 1-percent…”

“That is true. I concede the overall spending is moving up, but they are slicing it back as part of the 1-percent, across-the-board cut. As we learned from the Congressional Budget Office yesterday, if the Republican leadership is to keep their hands out of the Social Security trust fund to accomplish this, 1 percent won't be enough. They will need to cut back 5.8 percent, which means less money for medical research than otherwise would have been there. By failing to make the necessary, tough, hard choices about where to spend money and where not to respond, they have tried to spread this. And by doing so, they have hit areas such as medical research.”