Political Quotes

“I have dealt with budgets all my life. For 26 years I operated a business and I had a budget. In the family I had a budget. For 19 years I was in State government and we passed a budget every year. For 10 years I was a State appropriator; so I was very involved in the State budget. It had taken me a while since my 6 years in Washington to figure out our process because it is a lot more complicated, and I have often wondered why it was so complicated. But we all know the basic principles, that the House has to pass a budget and the Senate has to pass a budget, and we have to bring that together. And the process that I have learned to understand is the budget first is the framework of how much money we should spend. The Senate figures out how much money, and then we reconcile that figure and then we are all working off of the same spending plan. We only argue about how we spend it. This is the first time that process has fallen apart.”