Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we come to the end of what I think has been a very productive conference. I am not happy, as most of us aren't, with an ending that doesn't allow us to get all of the principal work of the Congress done, which is to decide how we are going to fund the government, how we are going to spend money. We did--this year for the first time in a long time-- get 75 percent of that job done before the beginning of the fiscal year. There is nowhere else in America where that would be a bragging point, but we hadn't done that in 20 years, and so it is a pretty significant accomplishment. What we need to figure out is what we did and how we can replicate that in the future. We have to get to this work. We have to have the kind of floor debates we had this year. We don't need to let it drag into the end of the year as too many of the bills did this time. The worst possible thing to do, in my view, in terms of funding the government, is to shut down the government. The next worst possible thing to do is a long-term CR, where you just say: We couldn't decide how to spend the money this year, so we are going to spend it like we spent it last year. The next option is the one we are following, which appears to be a short-term CR to, unfortunately, come back and begin next year's work with the obligation to finish this year's work. That is clearly a mistake, and it is a mistake that ends a Congress that otherwise was pretty successful. All kinds of regulatory reform occurred.…”