Political Quotes

“That is correct. And in fairness to the negotiators who participated on behalf of the White House, the fact is that they did negotiate, we have a package, and I do hope that the President will sign that package. I have every reason to believe that he will. Had they been more obstinate, I suppose it might have been impossible to reach an agreement. But I am delighted an agreement has been reached. And one thing I will say, from the very beginning, we never deviated from the ground rules. The Committee on the Budget gave us our instructions: Stay within your budget allocations, make sure that you save the American people that $23 billion. If you have to raise money for the President on some programs, take it out of that discretionary pot and make sure that you cut other programs. And that is what we did. We took the chairman's admonition to stay within our budget caps. We stayed within them, and the American people are $23 billion richer in that they have not spent another $23 billion that they would have spent had we not done what we set out to do.”