Political Quotes

“it has been a great debate to listen to. It has kind of brought me down here, kind of got my blood stirring. One thing that was talked about a lot is the two-thirds supermajority vote requirement to raise taxes. And it has been very well articulated why you need that. One observation I would like to make, if you took 435 people at random, any town in America, any district in the Union, and you asked them to vote on this particular measure, the only group I know of that would have less than a two-thirds agreement is here in Congress. You could take 435 people in any town in my district and ask a simple question, should there be a wall between you and the politician to get in your pocket a little higher than the one that exists, they would have jumped on it a lot more than two-thirds vote. It would have probably been unanimous. Unfortunately, because it was a constitutional amendment, we needed a two-thirds vote. We were about 30 votes short. The idea is alive and well and the good thing about this Congress, it has been an historic Congress. We have not spent much time talking about what we have accomplished because we have been so busy doing it and ducking rocks being thrown at us for having done it. The line-item veto by itself is probably the biggest change in the last 200 years. The line-item veto allows the President to look over our shoulder for the first time and look at how we spend money.”