Political Quotes

“Madam President, when I was in college, I remember watching a State of the Union speech by President Reagan in which he took a 43-pound stack of papers and set them on the podium. As he was giving his State of the Union Address, he said: This is the budget bill that has been given to me--43 pounds of it, all stacked up. It was a famous moment when the President said: Do not send this to me again. Republicans and Democrats alike stood and cheered. They said: That is a terrible way to do government. For 5 of the next 6 years there were no more Omnibus appropriations bills, but that did not last. Since 1986, there have been 22 Omnibus appropriations bills. People may ask, what is that? By law, Congress is to do 12 appropriations bills. Each part of that has a section of the budget, and each one of those is passed as a stand-alone. First, they go through subcommittee, then committee, then to the full floor, and then they pass. But 17 times since 1998 and 22 times since 1986, all of those bills were just looped together to make one giant document--the 43-pound document that President Reagan dropped in 1988. What is going wrong? We have another one of those omnibus bills next week, in which all of the appropriations bills have been looped together to try to simplify the process, but this actually provides even less transparency. What do we do with this? How did we get here?…”