Political Quotes

“Preliminarily, I'm here to discuss today's very encouraging jobs report. I am struck. The previous speaker said he would never engage in expenditures on a credit card when we were already deeply in debt on behalf of his family. I note that he was not a Member of the Congress when this Congress voted to go to war in Iraq, for example, and also in Afghanistan. I voted for the war in Afghanistan. I thought the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake and still do. All of us who voted to go to war in Afghanistan were voting to go into further debt. War is very expensive. We don't want to send our young people into battle--and some of our middle-aged people--without the best possible equipment. So I thought we had to go to war in Afghanistan in self-defense. I thought the war in Iraq was a terrible error. The majority of my colleagues, including virtually every Republican, voted to do that. So this principle that you don't vote to spend money when you don't have it is apparently, for some, a fairly flexible one. In fact, not only did the majority at that time under President Bush vote to go into two wars, they did it while voting for several large tax cuts. So they were exacerbating that very difficulty. As I said, I voted to go to war in Afghanistan. I was prepared to vote for some revenues to pay for it. Mostly, though, I want to talk today about the very encouraging report we got today about the economy. We are in the early stages of recovery.…”