Political Quotes

“I thank my dear friend from Massachusetts. As I begin, I express my great affection and respect for my colleague from Texas, who is my dear friend. Mr. Speaker, I think we are here to be ashamed of ourselves. We're wasting the taxpayers' time, the taxpayers' money, and we're wasting the business and the time of the House. We are taking up a bill to require that Members of Congress sit down and talk about deficit reduction and raising the debt limit. The last time I checked, we didn't need a law to do that. It's already our job. We have a conference that we can call at any time between the House and the Senate, which would enable us then to get to the serious business in handling this matter under the regular order. We don't do it. I don't know why. The President says he is not going to negotiate with a gun at his head. Frankly, I wouldn't either, and I don't think anybody else in this place would. Beyond that, he also is not going to negotiate the full faith and credit of the United States, which is one of the questions at issue. So one of the problems we seem to have with our Republican friends is that their Tea Party fringe is so ideologically hell-bent in getting their way that they're finding that they're too extreme to get it. Now, we Democrats have shown a willingness to cooperate and to compromise. In fact, as the minority leader observed, we have asked Speaker Boehner to convene a budget conference all year, but to no avail.…”