Political Quotes

“I know that Bob Woodward is a widely read author. I can look at the book sales that he racks up and know that there's a lot of people in this town that read what he has to say. But evidently my friends on the other side have never read what he had to say. Let's be clear: sequester was the President's idea and proposal. Now, where I agree with the President is that I think we need to save money in the Federal budget. Sequester was supposed to be a trigger to force that negotiation. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I was not a member of the supercommittee; but I think all of them worked hard and in good faith, and I cast no aspersion, but they didn't get there. So sequester, the President's recommended method, happened. We would still like to sit down with the President and our friends on the other side and renegotiate where those cuts occur. Sequester is about $85 billion on an annual basis in a $3.5 trillion budget that is roughly $700 billion out of balance as it is. So the idea that we can't find 2.5 percent if we negotiated over the entire budget I think is probably, frankly, not a very sustainable proposition. We could do that without some of the distortions we are going through now. We would be more than happy to do that with my friends on the other side, and certainly with the President of the United States.”