Political Quotes

“I thank the Chair. I want to say I enjoyed very much Senator Kaufman's words, and I agree with him. I think what he talked about and what we are doing for our military in this bill is appropriate. It is something that has to be done. The only difference I would have with him is it is not an emergency. We all know it is not an emergency. The reason it is being classified as an emergency is because we do not want to make the hard choices of getting rid of something else to pay for it, and we do not want to have another violation of pay-go, so what we do is we classify it as an emergency. The only thing in this bill that is an emergency is the FEMA money. That is the only thing that meets the definition of our own rules for an emergency: unforeseen, unpredictable, and unanticipated. Everything else in this bill is predictable, foreseen, and anticipated. So we are actually violating our own integrity when we bring a bill to the floor and call it an emergency when everybody knows it is not. Why are we doing that? We are doing that because we do not want to have to live with the rule we set for ourselves called pay-go. I did not vote for pay-go. I do not believe in pay-go because pay-go is exactly what I said it would be when we had the vote. The American taxpayer, you go pay, and we will go spend, and we will not diminish any of our spending, our profligate spending, because of this rule.…”