J. Exon: “we are on the final leg of this Republican budget's journey, and it is a fruitless one. It does not lead our Nation to…”

“we are on the final leg of this Republican budget's journey, and it is a fruitless one. It does not lead our Nation to any new horizons. It blazes no new paths. It offers no compromise to break the budget deadlock. This Republican budget makes a beeline, it pains me to say, to another dead end. Dead ends are becoming an all-too-familiar haunt for my Republican colleagues if they want to move ahead to something that is workable. Thanks to their intransigence and their extremist budget, that is where we spent most of last year. And it looks as though we will waste another session of Congress trying to back out of yet another dead end. The majority has held the Senate hostage for almost 2 years with basically the same budget. Perhaps they are hoping that the Stockholm syndrome will set in and Democrats will start identifying with their captors. They are wrong. Our will and our vision are strong. The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee did his best to repair the damage from last year's budget debacle. I compliment him for the fine job he did. In the hopes of attracting some unsuspecting buyers, the 1997 Republican budget has been spruced up in places. But if this budget were a house, it would still be condemned as unfit. It is still out of touch with mainstream America and I suggest that it should be rejected. All of the efforts of the Republican majority to portray their budget as a moderate one are in vain.”