Political Quotes

“I appreciate the opportunity to express my feelings this evening. Quite frankly, I was one of the optimists in this body. Many of my colleagues have been saying the determination to run our economy over a cliff is so powerful, we are going to end up with a government shutdown. I kept saying, I don't think so. I think in this Senate and across the Capitol in the House there are reasonable folks who know that this type of brinkmanship is doing intense damage to our Nation, and I don't believe we will end up there. So here is my faith in the common sense of a collection of 435 Members of the House and 100 Members of the Senate--my faith in their reasonableness. Apparently, that faith has been misplaced, because we are now just 27 minutes away from a government shutdown. And to what point? We have just heard from the House leadership they want to have a conference discussion over the budget. Well, certainly, so do we. Six months ago, we passed a budget. The Senate passed a budget. We sought to have a conference committee to resolve those two budgets as a common foundation for a set of spending bills--our appropriations bills--and our Republican colleagues blocked that budget conference committee. They have come to this floor 18 times and blocked the dialogue necessary to take the conversation forward over our budget and spending plan. That is what led us here tonight.…”