Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. Every now and then, Mr. Speaker, you need to just step back and look at the record and put the rhetoric aside. When this majority showed up in January of this last year, we found a situation where our friends on the other side had failed to write a budget for this year, had failed to pass any appropriations bills and had just sort of gone home. We had a President who had appointed a debt reduction commission but yet failed to embrace any of their actions at all--not one. Then we heard the President come and address us in this Chamber in a state of the Union message, but for 35 minutes, he didn't bother to mention the looming debt crisis--35 minutes. The first serious proposal we got from that President, our President, was for a $400 billion reduction over 10 years that was so laughable that, when it was brought up in the United States Senate, which is controlled by his party, it failed 97-0. Then the President wanted to have a free vote on raising the debt ceiling. Let's just raise it. Go ahead and see what happens. We obviously don't support that as we think there ought to be some spending reductions, but we said, sure, you've got the vote. Fewer than 100 of my friends on the other side supported their own President when he asked for that vote. They clearly weren't sufficiently motivated to do that. Now we've reached a point where, last week, we actually did raise the debt ceiling by $2.7 trillion.…”