Pete Domenici: “the lack of interest in a budget resolution this year, it is fair to say, indicates that not very much is happening. I…”

“the lack of interest in a budget resolution this year, it is fair to say, indicates that not very much is happening. I can assure my colleagues, the media was not very interested in the markup during the 2 days we were in session. Also, there is not a great deal of interest on the part of our fellow Senators because essentially the budget does nothing this year. In fact, it does precisely what we said it would do last year. I assume that, if this mode is continued, next year it will do exactly what it was told to do in the Budget Enforcement Act, passed in August of last year. I would like to take a few minutes today and discuss why that is not good enough. In the meantime, in my own way, let me describe some of the very, very difficult situations we face in terms of the people understanding what we are doing. Rather than proceed to talk about why we are doing nothing and why doing nothing is very, very frightening to this Senator in terms of our children and the legacy of debt we are going to leave them, let me talk a minute about the idea of who is fiscally responsible and who is not, who is willing to vote for hard cuts and who is not.”