On the recordFebruary 11, 2016
I have three children. I hate it when they come to me on Sunday night and say: Dad, I have a paper due tomorrow, can you help me out with it? In many respects that is how I feel my Republican colleagues are treating government today. They are like children that need to be forced to do their homework, forced to do their job, and they are doing it always at the last minute. In many respects, some of the amendments we are talking about today are memorializing the notion of running government from deadline to deadline. We really shouldn't be doing that. You don't make good judgments. I dare say that my children's papers aren't as good when they wait until the last minute to do them, and I suspect that maybe we don't run government when we go from deadline to deadline. We shouldn't run our government this way. Democrats have taken the action to lower the deficit and restore the economy. Democrats don't want to default. I believe we should get our deficit under control now and not the moment of default. I know I may sound a little bit like the gentleman running for President, Mr. Rubio, because I am going to be repeating myself a little bit here, but I think some of the facts bear repeating. That is where the President again has proposed $3 trillion in deficit reduction on top of the $4 trillion in deficit reduction that has already been enacted into law. Again, this President cut the $1 trillion Bush deficits by more than half in just 4\1/2\ years.…
