Political Quotes

“we do have a dispute, not about whether to balance the budget but how and by what specifics. But what the Republican Party has decided to do is to punish the American people because they do not like the way the President wants to balance the budget. The problem is that the American people in fact do not like what they are doing. So we get one more ludicrous version of an effort to get themselves out of the hole they dug. Basically this is a resolution that says stop me before I shut the Government down again. Except, Mr. Speaker, they do it incompetently. We had expected, many of us, a certain degree of fanaticism from the new Republican majority. I had not expected to see a somewhat new phenomenon, incompetent fanaticism, dysfunctional extremism. They want to do drastic things, but they do not know how to make it work, and the proof of that is that what they have come forward with is so repugnant that their own majority would not support it except under coercion.”