Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I thank my good friend from that other Commonwealth, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for yielding. We are 9 days away--9 days and maybe call it 14 hours--from a government shutdown. It is completely unnecessary. In this Chamber just 3 months ago, we had a vote. We voted to raise the debt ceiling, and we also voted to set the parameters and the figures for what next year's budget would be. That vote was overwhelmingly bipartisan. Eighty percent of House Democrats and almost two-thirds of House Republicans voted for it. There was a similarly large bipartisan vote in the Senate, and it was then signed into law by the President. I thought at that point: Well, this is good news. Not only are we ensuring we didn't go over the cliff in terms of the debt ceiling, but it looks like we won't have another Republican-forced government shutdown. Yet, here we are. Why? Because the Speaker of the House reneged on that deal even though two-thirds of their side of the aisle joined 80 percent of us in voting for it. Honor the agreement that we had and that you voted for. This is completely unnecessary. Yesterday in the Budget Committee, we marked up a completely partisan, one-sided budget resolution in an all- day markup--$16 trillion worth of cuts, completely unrealistic. The Congressional Budget Office itself labeled it a cuts-only approach.…”