Political Quotes

“with some urgency and concern, I spoke yesterday to this Chamber about the balanced budget amendment. That urgency and concern have only increased. I believe a specter haunts this body, Madam President. Gaunt lined and hollow eyed as death it leers down at us with malicious glee. It is the ghost of lost chances; the shade of missed opportunities; the phantom of wrong turns in the paths to which the Senate has turned this Nation's feet over these 200 years past. In the fire of its eyes one may read of the rejection of the League of Nations and of Smoot Hawley. Around its shoulders are draped the shades of isolationism and it proudly wears the ribbon of McCarthyism. Heaped at its feet are the meaningless failed economic theories upon which this Chamber and our Nation have pinned their past economic hopes. It counts them with glee as a miser counts coins; glorying in every program and every promise that the budget would be balanced by 1933, by 1964, by 1991. That specter is laughing now, Madam President, and clapping its bony hands, for once again this body is engaging for its entertainment in a sham and a charade. The Simon bill will fail, Madam President. Its supporters have conceded as much. My amendment, my substitute, has enough support; that taken together with Simon, it would finally result in passage of a constitutional amendment to the States.…”