Political Quotes

“I commend the words of our chairman, the senior Senator from Iowa, for his warnings about the impact of sequestration and the across-the-board indiscriminate cuts. We are grateful for that because we need to be thinking about what happens down the road when we have a budget agreement. I want to start today with a brief comment on what happened earlier. At about noontime we had a vote, which is a procedural vote which I was hoping would go in a certain direction, but it didn't. It was a vote to move forward on the question of how we are going to avoid default. I don't think it is the last word on this issue for the next few days, but I was hoping that the Republicans would at least allow a debate on how we can avoid default. So far that hasn't happened, but we are confident that in the next couple of days we will resolve this. But I do think it is important we lay a foundation for why we need to avoid default, because we have talked a lot about the consequences and the impact of a government shutdown--and that remains what might be called a clear and present danger to the middle class and to our economy--but we have to talk at the same time about the consequences of default because we are only days away from the deadline. Maybe the best way to start is not with numbers but with part of a letter I received from a constituent this week.…”