Judd Gregg: “I join in the desire of the Senator from North Dakota to move forward in a bipartisan way. We could start by approving…”

“I join in the desire of the Senator from North Dakota to move forward in a bipartisan way. We could start by approving this budget in a bipartisan way. But independent of that, I agree, we--and we have talked about this; actually I think we are the only two people talking about this, but we have talked about trying to develop a framework where we could actually address this issue. But that is a global settlement. I would like to see it done. It is going to have to address Medicare. It is going to have to address Medicaid. It is going to have to address Social Security. It is going to have to address revenues. And it needs to be done sooner rather than later. But it is such a large idea that it is not going to occur this week. This week, what is going to occur, hopefully, is a step forward in the exercise of disciplining ourselves through budget processing, setting out a blueprint which defines where the Federal Government is going to spend money, how it is going to spend money, and constrains the Federal Government, especially on the discretionary side of the ledger. I would like to have constrained the Federal Government a little bit in its rate of growth on the entitlement side of the ledger, but that is not possible, primarily because I get no votes from the other side of the aisle.…”