Jim Bunning: “It seems to me people have not been listening, particularly the Senator from Illinois. He has been through two of these…”

“It seems to me people have not been listening, particularly the Senator from Illinois. He has been through two of these with the leader. He heard the arguments on both sides. Unfortunately, he has a one-side-only view of this situation. I have offered the same COBRA, flood insurance, unemployment insurance, Satellite Home Viewing Act, highway funding, SBA loans, small business provisions--I have offered to do the same thing for the same amount of time. The only difference I have, and some of my good friends from the other side of the aisle, is that I believe we should pay for it. There is a right over the last 3 years of the Democratically controlled Congress. We have run up $5 trillion in debt. There has to be a time to stop that. We just passed, last week, pay-as-you-go. The first bill up--and I have said this before earlier--was the small business bill that just passed. Now, $5 billion out of that bill was paid for; $10 billion was not. This is the second request after we passed the small business bill that the leader proposed. This also adds $10 billion to the deficit. That is $20 billion in two small bills. What I have proposed is that we pay for it. My gosh, we have over $400 billion in unspent stimulus money. I also worked, or tried to work, with the leader and his staff. I know he was busy at the White House, but I tried very hard to work with his staff to get other pay-fors and cut the time down to 2 weeks to make sure these people were taken care of.”