Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. The gentleman is absolutely correct. There is a shot clock. It is September 30 at midnight. That is the shot clock. That is when government no longer is funded if we do not take some additional action. I said to somebody this morning, there are 535 of us. Presumably we are all adults, presumably we are all rational people. Neither side would agree that everybody is that. But the fact of the matter is, we don't do what we know we have to do. You may want to do a lot of things, and we passed from our perspective very good legislation through this Congress, but the only thing you have to do is pass the 12 appropriations bills so you can fund the operations of government or make a decision that you are not going to fund a department, a program, an activity, whatever. But we don't do that. We have, unfortunately, the sense that the delay is an acceptable process, as the gentleman points out. Then you get to the last minute, a crisis, and then you get a big bill we call the omnibus bill, that really it is so large and so few people have been participating in the formulation of that bill that it is unfair to the Members of Congress, and it is unfair to the American people. I couldn't agree with the gentleman more that the appropriation process should be done, my own view is each bill should be considered individually. The Republicans started the practice, we followed the same practice of bundling them so we could save time.…”