Joe Cunningham: “I would say again, many of my colleagues on the other side, especially the Blue Dog budgets most of us on this side…”

“I would say again, many of my colleagues on the other side, especially the Blue Dog budgets most of us on this side could adopt, but we could not go along with the liberal leadership from the gentleman's party or the White House. As a matter of fact, most of the gentleman's people could not vote for them when they were brought forward on the House floor by Republicans. The President, as I mentioned, in 1997 signed the balanced budget agreement, but each one of those budgets following they increased taxes, they took money out of the social security trust fund, and they increased the debt by using false assumptions. I would be the first one to say that there were many of the assumptions in the Republican budgets that we disagreed with. That is the way it worked.”