Political Quotes

“Madam President, before I begin, I want to thank Chairwoman Mikulski. She has demonstrated both leadership and resolve in her new role and in assembling this bill under very challenging circumstances. Overall, this bill provides a total of $1.043 trillion for discretionary spending, and it reflects a number of reductions that the Appropriations Committee had to make in order to accommodate the $4 billion cut to the discretionary spending caps mandated by the January agreement on the so-called ``fiscal cliff.'' In addition, because of a point of order raised by Senator Toomey last year, the emergency designation was removed for $3.5 billion in disaster and mitigation funding in the Superstorm Sandy appropriations bill. I opposed this point of order because I believe disaster funding should be treated as an emergency, as it has been in disasters past. Because we fell three votes shy of the 60 needed to waive the point of order, we must now absorb $3.5 billion in cuts in this bill. That will have real impacts on critical programs. Moreover, I am deeply disappointed we have not been able to come up with a commonsense and balanced solution to turn off sequestration. These crippling across-the-board spending cuts 7.8 percent for defense programs and 5 percent for domestic discretionary programs will be applied to virtually every discretionary program in this bill.…”