Political Quotes

“I will comment generally on the issue before the Senate, the issue of supplemental emergency spending. Obviously, these last number of years we have had some emergency activities. Whether they be the war on terror or Katrina, they are unusual expenditures. From time to time, everyone experiences that, whether in your personal life or in business. After unusual expenditures, we have to make some effort to make up for that special spending so we can get back within our budget, we can get back to holding down the deficit to do something about the financial situation caused by the unusual expenditures. That is tough. Nevertheless, it seems to me that is a principle which is very important. I will react a little bit to what seems to be the case in the Senate. We are talking about emergency spending. The bill we are debating today is expected to be about emergency spending. It is important we give a little thought to what that means and not be inclined to use this opportunity to make expenditures that would be very hard to entitle ``emergency spending.'' By definition, emergency spending is a supplement that breaks the caps and authorizes spending we did not account for or do not account for in the budget. Some expenditures are hard to justify. We have the ``emergency'' regarding the war on terror; however, we have been in this for 4 years. We have known about it for some time. It did not happen instantly. Hurricane recovery ended almost 5 months ago.…”