Political Quotes

“We find ourselves here in Washington with the government shutdown in place and a debt limit approaching, and I read this morning in the newspaper that a senior White House official has said with regard to the shutdown, ``We are winning . . . It doesn't really matter to us'' how long it lasts. That is not the right attitude. Today I call upon the White House to stop the political posturing, to come to the table so we can find common ground and end this government shutdown and negotiate something sensible on the debt limit. This notion that a senior White House official would say, ``We are winning . . . It doesn't really matter to us'' how long it lasts, shows that it is politics, not substance that matters. It may not matter to the White House how long it lasts, by the way, but it does matter to the American people because they expect us to fulfill our constitutional duties, to get our work done, and not to take America to the brink. They expect us to do the job that we were sent here to do. It matters, by the way, to a lot of Americans because they are being affected by it. There are 8,700 civilian employees at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside of Dayton, OH, who are being affected. It matters to the roughly 1,800 Ohio National Guardsmen across the State of Ohio who have been furloughed. We can stand here and point fingers at each other as to how we got here. The truth is that how we got here is we didn't do our work.…”