On the recordFebruary 8, 2012
Wait a minute. I've got a couple of other things I was going to share with you first. So that's what the House passed; right? What we got back from the Senate was the 2-month short-term that we're all upset about. Because I agree with you. Having been a small business owner, there were a couple of things that were bad about that 2-month extension, which we actually, in the end, tweaked and fixed. One is just doing the payroll--trying to get the formulas, the calculations, the software in your payroll system. All that had to be changed for employers, and we actually got that fixed at the end, which is a good thing. Going forward, we need long-term predictability and certainty, and that's what Republicans thought and Speaker Boehner thought in the beginning, which was, why don't we stop kicking these cans down the road on short-terms and get away from these problems that were such an issue last year that riled the markets, as one of our colleagues said earlier. Why were we forced into this mess with short-term continuing resolutions that time and again we came right up to the brink on? Why? Because, under Speaker Pelosi, my friends on the other side of the aisle did not produce a budget nor did they fund the agencies for the full fiscal year.
