Political Quotes

“For the purpose of response. First, I appreciate my good friend, whom I have worked with on a number of things, most recently the Violence Against Women Act, where she certainly ably represented the bill in the Rules Committee and on the floor, and I appreciate that very much. I'm going to gently correct in return. When we talk about cuts that were previously agreed to, with all due respect to my friends, most of those cuts still haven't even taken place. If you look at them, they are far in the future, in the 10-year window. These were not cuts, by the way, that the two sides found contentious. This was the easy stuff that they all agreed to right up front. It wasn't as if there was some concession. The real discussion was in the next round of cuts, where the supercommittee wasn't able to come to an agreement. Even there, there were $600 or $700 million in agreed-upon ``cuts'' that both sides acknowledge. There just wasn't agreement about revenue, and so the cuts didn't occur. Well, we're here today, and just as the tax increases were written into law effectively when the Bush tax cuts sunsetted in January, these cuts are also written into law. {time} 1100 Again, since they're written into law, they're going to occur. Now, we're willing, again, to sit down with our friends and redistribute where they come from. We think that would be the prudent thing to do. We tried to do it twice last year. It didn't work out.…”