Political Quotes

“Madam President, the need has never been greater for us to avoid gimmicks. Gimmickry in this context can have very high stakes and can prove most detrimental to our economy and to the ability of our government to function. We have to look out for those gimmicks that would say we are going to make a few cuts now, but most of the cuts we are going to propose in return for our ability to raise the debt limit will involve sacrifices by future Congresses, not the 112th Congress. We will just make a few. But we will say that the 113th and the 114th and successive Congresses after will make the difficult necessary sacrifices. We can't do that. Nothing allows us to bind a future Congress. That is why we need something that is gimmick free. That is why we need to amend our laws of laws, our U.S. Constitution, to place important, meaningful, permanent restrictions on the ability of Congress to engage in perpetual reckless deficit spending of the sort that has produced a national debt now fast approaching $15 trillion, to a degree that is escalating now at a rate in excess of $1.5 trillion every single year. In order to rid the problem, we have to change the root causes. We have to change the ability of the Congress to exercise its authority that it has so severely abused in recent decades under clause 2 of article I, section 8 to engage in deficit spending.…”