Political Quotes

“When I came to the Congress in 1983, I learned very quickly that this Congress, the Congress of the United States, then and now, is very faulty in meeting its budgetary deadlines. September 30 comes and the next fiscal year begins the next day, on October 1. Yet, on almost every occasion since I came to Congress, we have failed to meet that deadline. What does that result? One thing that happens almost universally is that we enter into a period of temporary appropriations to keep the Government going pending the final budgetary result, and so those continuing resolutions, the temporary funding, takes us to our next step, another deadline, and then we fail to meet that one and we go into more temporary funding and the full budget is put off sometimes for a period of a year. That is bad fiscal management under laws which we, the Congress, have passed to govern ourselves in the business of good government. What happened then is that we actually shut down the Government eight times since I have been a Member of Congress.”