Byron Dorgan: “I did not come to speak about trade, but I wanted to say something about what I saw this weekend--the Speaker of the…”

“I did not come to speak about trade, but I wanted to say something about what I saw this weekend--the Speaker of the House, the majority leader of the Senate, and now today I see the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the other body, all talking about Medicare. It was interesting to me. I was thinking about these old movies I used to see when I was a kid, when all these cowboys would whistle when they go into a box canyon and then when the trouble would start, they would start jumping off their horses, trying to find a place to hide. This is kind of a box canyon we have created in the last couple of months, just riding in, whistling all the way, with the Contract With America, saying: Do you know what we can do? We can balance the Federal budget easily. We can do it before lunch. We will not even break a sweat. We will just change the U.S. Constitution and use $1.3 trillion in the Social Security trust funds to offset against other revenues. We will balance the budget. Plus we will do more than that. We will promise you American people we will not only balance the budget, we will give you a tax cut. In fact, we will call it a middle-class tax cut. We will do all of that, and we will tame this Medicare and Medicaid problem. We will cut money out of Medicare and Medicaid and we will solve that problem. Then what happened?…”