Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, the gentleman and I need to and, hopefully, will work closely together--not isolated, but together--over the weekend to come up with a bill to solve this problem, recognizing that the Senate is going to, hopefully, move their own bill that, while flawed, does address the basic needs, so that those children can be taken care of and the employees can be paid, and we can come together and get a bill done by the end of next week. The urgency of getting it done by the end of next week can't be understated because, after that, they have made it very clear they do run out of money. It is not a new issue. It is not something that is thrown at us at the midnight hour. For more than a month this has been identified. So, I appreciate that we are going to work to get it done. Let's make sure we do work to get it done. I know there are a lot of other issues we can talk about: the appropriations process, the need to come together on an agreement on what the proper levels of spending are and should be, that the President would also agree with us on, so that we can be writing appropriations bills that would actually have the chance to get signed into law and prevent a shutdown, that kind of impasse, by the end of September. This is the emergency, immediate need. There are other things that we need to keep working on, and I look forward to working with the gentleman in the coming days and weeks to address those problems as well.…”