Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of the Senator from Vermont. I think what Senator Lee and I were talking about is, you know, as opposed to the way it used to be, when we got here in 2011, the appropriations process was completely broken, and it is still broken. And it has been a bipartisan failure. I arrived in 2011 under Democratic leadership. Now we are in a Republican leadership. It is broken. The good news is the Preventing Government Shutdown Act is a bipartisan solution. It passed 12-to-2 out of my committee. It is cosponsored, largely, by Senator Lankford and Senator Hassan. The concerns that the Senator from Vermont expressed about an automatic CR and passage of this bill is addressed in the bill. The bill has the disciplines to force us to only work on appropriations bills. We can leave town but not on the Federal dime, not on campaign money. We will have to pay for that ourselves. And I don't know what we are going to pay for it with because we are not going to get paid until we actually pass the appropriations bill. So the discipline is already set in here. That is what is so beautiful about this bill, what is so elegant about it. As I said, in Wisconsin, once they enforced this discipline, the most we have ever had is a 4-month CR. We are 71 days into this CR, and we are going to pass it for another week. This process is broken.…”