John Kerry: “last night the Budget Committee, in the wee hours, passed the budget resolution for the U.S. Senate on which we will…”

“last night the Budget Committee, in the wee hours, passed the budget resolution for the U.S. Senate on which we will shortly go to work. There are many, many questionable choices within that resolution. There will be a time, a very fixed time obviously, a minimum number of hours that we have to debate it here on the floor, with a finality for that debate, and it is predetermined. But I would like to just talk for a moment, if I can, about a couple of aspects of that budget as we frame the debate about where we are going in this country. First, I would like to call the attention of my colleagues to one provision that is in this budget that this Senator finds profoundly disturbing, and that I hope other colleagues will think hard about before we ratify it in the course of the budget process. A lot of things are being proposed in America today under the banner of deficit reduction. I think there is a unanimity here that we obviously have to reduce the deficit. We are going to be bankrupt if we do not. We cannot continue down the road that we are going on. But there also ought to be an application of common sense to the choices that we make as we do that. Reducing the deficit does not predicate that we simply come in with a machete or a pickax and chop away at things that make sense, while simultaneously leaving out there the things that do not make sense.”