Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in just a moment, I want to talk a little bit about the situation in Afghanistan. But before I do that, I just wanted to speak to something that the majority leader said earlier regarding some of the upcoming business that we have to deal with this fall. We have a whole series of deadlines in front of us. The fiscal year ends on September 30, meaning that we have to at some point fund the government, which presumably would be in the form of a continuing resolution. We are told that the House of Representatives, when they move that and send it over here, will include a debt-limit increase. The debt limit does run out, and we will hit that at some point. There are varying estimates of when exactly that would be--some say as early as mid-October; some say perhaps mid-November--but inevitably that will be upon us. There has been a discussion here about how that ought to be lifted and who ought to deliver the votes to get that done. I just want to make the point that the majority leader, as he was down here making his remarks earlier, indicated that this was all debt that was accumulated during the previous administration. Certainly there was some debt because, obviously, during the coronavirus pandemic, all of us responded in a very bipartisan way. Most of the debt was at that point in time. It was the votes that we made in March of 2020 and subsequently to that.…”