Political Quotes

“if we were to take a poll of the American people on the question, should the Government of the United States ever be allowed to shut down, everyone knows that the overwhelming answer would be no, of course not. Perhaps a 98-percent return on such a poll would indicate that response. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and George Washington and James Madison and their colleagues in Philadelphia in 1789 established a nation which they conceived to be one that would last for all time, never to be shut down, not even for 5 minutes. Yet, since I have been a Member of the Congress, and it has happened many times before that, but since I have been here, the Government of the United States has shut down eight separate times and the budget of the United States has not been completed on 53 occasions. This alarmed me when I first came to the Congress, so I began to introduce legislation some 8 years ago that would prevent a Government shutdown; that would say that if we have not, as a Congress, completed the business of the day and formulated a budget by September 30, the end of the fiscal year, if we have failed to do that, then the next day there should be an automatic replay, an instant replay, of last year's budget just to keep the Government going that would prevent a shutdown while allowing the Congress to proceed to negotiate to complete the budget that it has deemed necessary to accomplish.”