Political Quotes

“Well, to my colleague, through the Chair, I would answer, What is our obligation? Is our obligation to win the next election or is our obligation to solve the problems in front of our country? It is not even a matter of having votes. We can't even get bills on the floor for the Members that actually would save some money right now. Let me give an example. We had the small business bill up--the only thing we have done of significance since we have been back in this session. It took 2 weeks to get a bipartisan amendment that would save $5 billion out of the duplication that was reported by the Government Accountability Office--hundreds of billions of dollars. It took 2 weeks to finally get a vote on that. My colleague from Virginia and I cosponsored that. It won. That is one of the reasons we didn't finish the bill, is because they don't want to do that. They don't want to make the hard choices. So it is an abrogation of our responsibility to not do the hard part that comes with the job. The job comes with a whole lot of rasping on your skin. You are going to get criticized. But the ultimate fatal criticism is to make a choice not to get--put yourself in a position to be criticized. So what we are saying is we are going to do nothing. We are not going to do what we are constitutionally supposed to do by April 15 every year; that is, have a budget. We are not going to debate the issues. We are not going to cast our votes because somebody may affect somebody's election outcome.…”