Political Quotes

“I think the Budget Control Act, which passed last summer, created this process, and led us to sequestration, which is where we are today. This is a function and a clear outcome of having not passed a budget. It is ironic in many respects because, as the Senator from New Hampshire has pointed out, the first fundamental responsibility we have as Members of Congress is to tell the American people--the taxpayers who pay the bills for this government--how we are going to spend their money. This is now the third year in a row that the Senate has failed to do that. Again, I might simply add that the House of Representatives did do a budget, has been passing appropriation bills, has been following the law in accordance with what has been the practice around here up until the last 3 years of actually working on a budget. When we are borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar we spend, it would strike me that it would be important we go through an exercise and figure out how we are going to start whittling away at the deficit and get the debt at a more manageable level and how we are going to spend the American taxpayers' dollars. As the Senator from New Hampshire pointed out--again, I don't think we can emphasize this enough. Last summer we already called for $1/2 trillion in defense cuts, and that was half of the amount of reductions that were made last summer. It was about $1 trillion, a little over that, overall in spending cuts last summer.…”