Political Quotes

“I thank my good friend from Colorado (Mr. Perlmutter) for yielding, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, we are here today to pass an appropriations package that should complete our work and fully fund the government for fiscal year 2019. As Members of this body know, this has been a long road, perhaps much longer than we expected at the beginning. As we saw at the start of this Congress, the difficulties this body can sometimes face in coming to an agreement can translate into difficulty and hardship for the American people. I think I can speak for all of us here in this body when I say that government shutdowns are bad for the American people, bad for government, and bad policy, and we should all strive to never let them happen again. Now, of course, we have a little bit different view of how that shutdown came about. It is worth noting for the record that the House actually did vote to fund the government and produced a bill in December that the President said he would sign and a majority of the United States Senate actually favored. But the Senate gets to set its own rules. They could reach a number of 60, but the Democratic minority chose not to do that. So, given that, that is what shut down the government, and we have all been dealing with the consequences of it ever since.…”