Political Quotes

“I wish to give those within the sound of my voice a very brief tutorial on how serious the Republicans are about balancing the budget. I led a trip to South America. We had 10 or 12 Senators, equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. It was a wonderful trip. I chose purposely Kent Conrad, who was the No. 1 person on the Democratic side of the aisle at the time on numbers, and I also decided to see if Judd Gregg, who was the Republican's No. 1 person on numbers, could go. These two good men sat together that whole trip, hour after hour. They had their yellow tablets, and they were doing what they loved to do-- play around with numbers. When the trip ended, they had an idea. They were both experienced legislators. They had been here when we did something that hadn't been done before. We had military bases in America going back to World War I that should have been closed, but we couldn't do it because of the politics of the Senate. But we decided long ago to try something different. We appointed a commission, they would report back to the Senate and the House, and they would make a decision as to which bases should be closed--no filibuster, no tricky procedural rules; yes or no on what they recommended. We did two rounds of base closings and we closed scores of bases, saving the country billions of dollars. Conrad and Judd decided to do the same thing with this deficit we have.…”