Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I come to the floor today to voice my opposition to this budget. Since being elected to the Senate, I have always stressed the importance of responsibly addressing our country's fiscal challenges. We have had bipartisan agreements before when we faced fiscal challenges. At the end of 2013, we passed the bipartisan Murray-Ryan budget agreement which then led to the passage of the omnibus spending bill. I was part of the group of 14 during the shutdown who came together with an idea for a fix that allowed us to get to the budget--seven Democrats and seven Republicans. We also saw some major bipartisan work on the farm bill, the Water Resources Development Act, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, and we reauthorized the Child Care and Development Block Grant Program and, as well as we know, recently, the Medicare sustainable growth rate. But today that is not what this budget is about. That is one of my major focuses today. I would say, by the way, as a result of some of the bipartisan work that has been done in the past, since 2009 we have seen the deficit as a percent of GDP drop from nearly 10 percent--9.8 percent, exactly--to under 3 percent. In this economic recovery, we have seen 61 straight months of private sector job growth and added over 12 million private sector jobs. Unemployment is at 5.5 percent nationally and 3.7 percent in my home State of Minnesota. The unemployment rate went down faster in 2014 than it has in any year since 1984.…”