John Thune: “I rise in support of the McCain amendment. Before I speak a little bit to the amendment itself, I want to remind my…”

“I rise in support of the McCain amendment. Before I speak a little bit to the amendment itself, I want to remind my colleagues why this debate is so important and why the McCain amendment is so important to this debate. Again, we are talking about a $1 trillion bill--$800 billion, up now into $900 billion. When you add in interest, it is $1.2 trillion and change. It seems as if every amendment that has been offered--we have had a lot of Republican amendments that have attempted to cut out some of the wasteful spending, eliminate some of what I think is probably most egregious about the bill, none of which has been accepted, ironically. Ironically, the only amendments that have been accepted so far have not decreased the size of the bill. They have added to the size of the bill. This bill has gotten bigger. I remind my colleagues--and I think it is important for the American people to tune in because we throw numbers around here in Washington in an abstract way: millions, billions, trillions of dollars--exactly what the dimensions are of what we are talking about. A trillion dollars: If you took one-hundred-dollar bills and lined them end to end, you could literally go around the Equator almost 39 times; 969,000 miles of one-hundred-dollar bills lined end to end, going around the entire Earth right at the Equator almost 39 times. That is what we are talking about when we talk about the dimensions of $1 trillion.”