Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I had the opportunity to speak with you in the last several moments, and you had a couple questions about the CAP Act that I was just discussing on the floor. The Presiding Officer had some great questions about what it takes to overcome the CAP Act, in the event we were able to pass it. It is just a 10-page bill. It is very eloquent. It doesn't have a lot of ``whereases.'' It is just a business document that takes us from where we are to where we need to be. But, in essence, to override it, it would take a two-thirds vote. It would take two-thirds of the House and the Senate to actually override or get out of the straitjacket, if you will. There were previous bills, such as Gramm-Rudman and other types of bills that tried to keep Washington fiscally focused, and those bills required 60 votes. So this would be a higher threshold. So, yes, if there was some type of national emergency and we needed to move beyond this straitjacket for 1 year or 6 months or something like that, a two-thirds vote could do that. I mean, 67 votes is a pretty tough threshold, and hopefully it is the kind of threshold necessary to keep the kind of discipline in place that we need. So it is a 10-page bill. Again, it is very eloquent. I think it lays out a solution for us that hopefully will be a part of anything we do over the next several months.…”