Political Quotes

“I rise today to state my opposition to the Barton amendment. Mr. Chairman, if you actually read the bill rather than read the title, you will find that the amendment does not require a balanced budget. It only requires a three-fifths vote to pass an unbalanced budget. It requires nothing before the year 2002. So since there is no plan and since the sponsors propose no plan to get to a balanced budget, we can assume, based on the testimony, that unless you are going to cut Social Security, you are not going to have a balanced budget. If we use our past experience to guide us, we can find that Congress is unwilling to make the tough, necessary cuts to bring the deficit down, but we have been very willing to add pork to a budget to get the extra votes needed to pass it. Mr. Chairman, if we actually look at that history, we will see that the three-fifths vote may make it more difficult to pass an unbalanced budget, but it is also going to make it more difficult to pass a budget with a lower deficit, so either you are faced with no budget at all or a budget with a higher deficit. Therefore, Mr. Chairman, this should be called the pork protection plan rather than the balanced budget amendment. Simply put, it will allow a minority of Members in either the House or the Senate to hold out for the spending projects in their district. The way you reduce the deficit, Mr. Chairman, is the tough decisions.…”