Political Quotes

“I thank the chairman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, this is our debt. It is America's debt. Now, I agree with the chairman of the Rules Committee that some of this debt clearly accumulates from tax cuts, cutting our revenue before we cut our spending. And some of it relates to greater spending promoted by both sides of the aisle. For any one of us to get up and say it is your debt--it is America's debt, and America pays its bills. Mr. Speaker, as a Member of Congress, I have faced this question of raising or suspending the debt limit 49 times. This will be the 50th time since I was first asked to vote on this question when Ronald Reagan was President of the United States. Now, the gentlewoman is talking, Mr. Speaker, to her staff, but I want to say that the argument that she offered with references to why it is our debt is specious, and I emphatically deny that assertion. It is our debt. We have different priorities, different perspectives, different mandates. But every time we cut revenues or we approve spending, we raise the debt limit. And by the way, the gentlewoman was not here in the last Congress, but we accumulated $5.4 trillion in debt. And the gentlewoman may be reminded that they were passed in a bipartisan way to meet a crisis that we thought justified those expenditures. Mr. Speaker, my Republican friends across the aisle have been asked to take this same vote many times as well, and they have voted ``yes'' on some of those occasions and ``no'' on others.…”