Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, we absolutely need to address the crisis of our Federal debt. And we do it by coming together in a bipartisan way, having the adult conversation, the difficult conversation, addressing both revenue and spending. This is not rocket science. A balanced budget amendment would be worthy of consideration if properly crafted to provide flexibility in times of war, recession, or national emergency. In fact, I have cosponsored such a resolution. However, this rigid amendment fails to anticipate these unfortunate but inevitable contingencies. Instead, this resolution is a cynical attempt to pay for all the enormous costs of the Republican tax bill, the one that we recently passed and the one that was passed under George W. Bush, enacted to the benefit of special interests and the wealthy--overwhelmingly in their favor--and to clear the way for wholesale cuts to critical programs for children and seniors like Medicare and Medicaid. Mr. Speaker, Congress has all the legislative tools that it needs to fix the deficit, as we saw during the Clinton years, when they had the adult conversation, when they did the tough work addressing revenue and spending in a bipartisan way. Then the Federal Government ran budget surpluses as far as the eye could see when President Clinton left office.…”