Political Quotes

“just to assure the Members that the sky is not falling, I just want to make a few points. First of all, if it is confrontation that we have opposing views on how to treat the supplemental appropriations bill, then yes, it is confrontation. But I think it is not angry confrontation, it is simply a matter of differing philosophies. For the last 60 years of this century, the now minority party, which used to be the majority party, guided the affairs of the country with the idea that we continue to spend and never worry about whether the money was there. All we are saying on the supplementals is that, sure, we can continue to spend, but it has to be within the budget. For the last 4 years, we have in effect said that we will pay for the supplemental spending. We are coming up with $2.29 billion in extra spending for defense. We are coming up with $575 million for disaster relief. But we are going to offset. That is all we are saying. The Senate has not said that, and we are going to meet them head on. But for our purposes in the House, we are going to offset this extra spending. I dare say we have succeeded. We have got all these cries that the cuts in other existing unobligated funds are going to cause a disaster and the people are going to go homeless. The fact is that is not going to happen. These are unobligated funds, and they are not needed this year, this fiscal year. If they are needed later on, we will address that.”