Political Quotes

“Madam President, of course my friend and colleague from Colorado is exactly right, and I want to thank him for his leadership on this issue and for working with me to develop a bipartisan, commonsense plan that would help to mitigate the harmful effects of the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration that took effect on March 1. I want to emphasize that under our proposal, budget targets would still have to be met. We understand the need to confront our enormous Federal debt, which is approaching $17 trillion. But our plan does so in a sensible way. It recognizes that rather than imposing meat-ax cuts, we should be setting priorities. Our bill would give the heads of Federal agencies and departments affected by sequestration the flexibility to implement the required cuts in a much more thoughtful way by preserving vital programs and reducing or eliminating lower priority programs. Our bill also ensures appropriate congressional oversight of these decisions by requiring the agency heads to submit their spending plans to both the House and Senate appropriations committees 5 days before implementing these decisions. These committees and their subcommittees know the budgets of these agencies inside and out and will be able to effectively monitor their spending decisions, just as the committees now oversee reprogramming requests.…”