Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I have had the pleasure of working with my chairman on the Budget Committee on budget reform initiatives, and I want to take this occasion to thank him for the wonderful way in which he worked with me on those issues and for all of his support. I want to make a pledge to him as well. The effort began with a lot of hearings in the Budget Committee to sort out how we could reform what we were doing. At the moment, the Budget Committee is, probably, the most dysfunctional piece of this dysfunctional institution, and Chairman Enzi was determined to remedy that. A lot of work went in at the committee level. Then a bicameral committee was created to look at budget reform, primarily out of the House, and I had the opportunity to serve on that bicameral committee. That was an opportunity that I owe to Chairman Enzi. He both advocated for me to his leader that I should be on that committee, and he gave up a spot on that committee to make sure there was a spot for me there. I hope and believe that I conducted myself in due accord with Chairman Enzi's wishes and principles in the course of that. We had the ability to use that bicameral committee process to do a test run of our budget reform, and I am pleased to report that, although the end product was never adopted between the two bodies, the product that came out of the committee included our budget reform as it was then constituted.…”